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<p>Excuse me? What’s the Duke situation got to do with religious tolerance or intolerance? You’re just trying to change the subject here, hawkette. A pretty sleazy rhetorical tactic.</p>
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<p>To the extent the phenomenon you describe is real, it’s not academics doing the shouting. It’s students. And it happens across the political spectrum. It’s a function of teenage group-think. Among left-leaning student bodies, there’s intolerance for conservative viewpoints. Among right-leaning student-bodies, there is every bit as much intolerance of left-leaning viewpoints. True, more students these days lean left than right, by a wide margin. It’s a convenient fiction for conservatives to blame that on the pernicious influence of left-leaning faculty, but that’s just pure, unadulterated b.s. Students think for themselves, but they tend to do so in groups. Thus is it now, as it always has been. Conservative viewpoints are generally waning among students. Live with it.</p>
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<p>Ummm . . . that would seem to leave 40% as “moderates.” So 55% “liberal”, 45% “moderate” or “conservative.” Is that so unbalanced? And does it actually matter? If I think back to my own college days, I really have no idea what were the political leanings of my French instructors. Or the professor who taught the Homeric epics. Or the classicist who taught Greek mythology. Or the enthnomusicologist who exposed me to the rich variety of American popular music idioms. Or the cultural anthropologist who taught us about the indigenous peoples of New Guinea among whom he had lived for four years. Or, for that matter, the historian who taught 19th and 20th century Russian history; it was clear he had no love for the Bolsheviks, but beyond that, I really have no idea whether he voted straight D or straight R or split his ticket, and it really didn’t figure into how he taught the course. Or the philosophers of science, philosophers of language, philosophers of mind. Politics just didn’t enter the classroom very much; too trivial and tawdry, perhaps, but mainly just not relevant to the subject matter at hand. Perhaps because I went to schools where academic excellence and single-minded pursuit of knowledge wherever it led trumped ideology and partisan political leanings every time. But my impression, having been there not only as an undergraduate at a leading public but as a graduate student at two Ivies, and subsequently as a faculty member at several major universities, is that’s the norm in American academia, not the exception. A few disgruntled conservatives may whine that theirs is not the majority viewpoint. But if so, it’s not because of pervasive political or ideological bias. That’s just simply a canard, a loser’s excuse. In the vast majority of academic disciplines, ideology and political affiliation are simply irrelevant. And I have never, not once in all my years in academia, seen anything remotely resembling an effort to enforce political correctness or to use ideology as a litmus test in faculty hiring or promotion—except in a handful of instances when conservatives have insisted on a kind of ideological affirmative action, arguing the institution was under an obligation in the name of “diversity” to hire more self-identified conservatives regardless of academic merit. </p>
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<p>I know this is a popular Sean Hannity talking point, but I think it’s pure b.s. I have yet to see one documented case where a conservative academic has been silenced or denied tenure or promotion on account of his or her political views. That’s not to say such silencing or career disabling doesn’t happen, but in our nation’s history, including recent history up to the present, it’s happened far more often when the unorthodox views were of the left, not of the right.</p>
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