Conservative Academics Need Affirmative Action

Lefty professors at American colleges and universities are shocked, (shocked!) to discover that under the new rules promulgated by the Trump administration they are obliged, for the first time in their careers, to watch their Ps and Qs or else face serious and negative consequences.

Academics from Florida are leading the parade with their complaints since it is Governor Ron DeSantis, the point man for President Trump in this educational counter-revolution, who first instituted reforms aligned with the new policy.

The bitter grievance of these campus whiners is that they are now being heavily penalized for using the wrong words. Their favorite courses are being canceled. Entire departments are being scrutinized to see if there is even a vestige of intellectual diversity, and when those looking fail to find any, there are consequences. They are under the gun.

This is nothing less than poetic justice. These professors are finding that they do not much like it now that the shoe is on the other foot. They do not have a smidgen of appreciation for the age-old rule that turnabout is fair play. Now that they are subjected to the same sort of stultifying oversight they have long imposed upon the rare conservative or libertarian professor allowed on campus, the outcry is deafening.

Professors like me have little sympathy. We have been subjected to sensitivity training—re-education camps, in effect—for supposedly misusing pronouns, and for using words like “Oriental,” “cotton,” “slavery,” and “freedom.” There was even a professor excoriated for correctly pronouncing a Chinese phrase in class that sounded like the N word (nèi ge, literally meaning “that one,” and used as a filler word like the English “uh” or “um.”). As for “niggardly,” let us not go there.

Nevertheless, I think that Trump, DeSantis, and many other Republican politicians, bless them, are barking up the wrong tree. Their hearts are indeed in the right place, the exact right place, but their policies leave something to be desired.

Why do I say this?

If every last black “studies” department, feminist “studies” department, queer “studies” department, every last one of them were canceled, the virus would still remain in the academic patient’s body. The tenured Marxist professors who taught them would merely move over to humanities and social science departments. The administrators who run these dens of iniquity would still be in charge of the campus zoo.

Even if they were prevented from using words and phrases like “intersectionality,” “white fragility,” “labor theory of value,” and precluded from attacking anything that is actually “color-blind,” they would still exude wokeism, DEI (“Didn’t Earn It”) and all the rest. They can eschew the words, courses, and programs, and still do quite well for themselves cramming their garbage down the throats of hapless students in departments of history, political science, sociology, and economics. We can compel music departments to once again study and play dead white males like Bach and Mozart. We can mandate that literature departments once again put the dead white male, Shakespeare, back on the reading list. But it will still be the same sort of commies perverting the youth of the nation.

Nor should we be content by merely ensuring that outside speakers are not brutalized by campus hooligans, including, disgracefully, professors.

What, then, can be done, if we want ideological and intellectual diversity on campus? If we do not care whether the campus “looks like America”; if we want to ensure that at least some academics charged with educating the youth think like at least half of America?

Simple. Create affirmative action (I apologize for using curse words in a family periodical) for conservative and libertarian professors. Hire them, and only them for tenure track jobs. Do not offer tenure to any but them, until full parity is reached. Ditto for administrators. No more pinko provosts, etc. Then, for the first time in a long time, there will be true intellectual diversity on campus.

How did we get into this pickle in the first place? Why are our campuses presently overrun with parlor pinks, commies, Marxists, and all the rest?

Milton Friedman offered a plausible explanation: the Vietnam War and draft dodging for staying in school. Young men of a conservative bent went over there, 10,000 miles way, to fight and die in this war. Young lefties, instead, pursued graduate degrees in droves. Then, they became assistant professors, associate professors, full professors, deans, provosts and university presidents. They now infest our campuses and have trained the generation that will replace them.

But the way ahead is clear. Stop bugging campus “progressives.” Instead, replace them.


Originally published here.


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