ON FRIDAY, the Collegiate Network issued its CampusOutrage Awards, given out each year for the most ridiculous instances of political correctness at colleges and universities across the country. The competition for these awards is always stiff, as campus leftists routinely push the outer limits of hysteria and self-parody. But aside from their bitterly amusing entertainment value, these episodes demonstrate how myopia and intolerance can flourish all too easily at ideologically homogenous academic institutions.
A week ago today, The Washington Post ran a news story about the lack of intellectual diversity in higher education. The first sentence read: "College faculties, long assumed to be a liberal bastion, lean further to the left than even the most conspiratorial conservatives might have imagined, a new study says."
The study found 72 percent of professors identified themselves as liberals, compared with 15 percent who called themselves conservative. At elite universities, the disparity widens to an 87-13 split.
Many observers worry that this imbalance might be caused by an unfair pattern of discrimination against conservative ideas and individuals in academia. Anecdotally, the Campus Outrage Awards lend support to this concern, and they identify some of the forms that such discrimination can take.
Take the first-place outrage award, for instance, in which LeMoyne College expelled graduate student Scott McConnell from their education school after he turned in a paper criticizing multiculturalism and stressing the importance of strict discipline. Initially, McConnell received an A- on the paper and an A for the course. He had a GPA of 3.78 at the time. But after review, administrators told him that there was an unacceptable "mismatch" between his personal beliefs and the institutional goals of the school. Simply put, they felt that they had an important political purpose in awarding degrees only to those with a favored ideological disposition. They let their politics trump the principles of academic freedom and the unfettered pursuit of the truth.
The same pattern holds true in the case of the second-place outrage award, given to the University of Nevada Las Vegas for unfairly disciplining economics professor Hans Hoppe. Hoppe was punished for the contents of one of his lectures, in which he put forward the empirically verifiable claim that homosexuals tend to engage in less-than-average long-term financial planning, partly because they typically don't have children. Regardless of the truth of what Hoppe said, administrators deemed his remarks to be unacceptably "offensive" to gays.
And then, of course, there is the now infamous case of Harvard University President Larry Summers. In a national embarrassment for Harvard, Summers was recently censured and all but excommunicated from the conclave of Cambridge on account of a few public remarks he made which his critics have condemned as sexist and incredibly offensive to women.
In considering various reasons for why there are more men than women in university science departments, Summers suggested the scientific hypothesis that maybe some inherent structural differences between the brains of men and women might account for some part of this discrepancy. He didn't say that all men are better than all women at science, much less that women should be discriminated against in hiring decisions. But he did violate what has become a cardinal rule for many in the academic orthodoxy today: Sometimes, open discussion and the honest pursuit of truth must take a backseat to sensitivity and the pursuit of social justice.
Yet to the casual observer it might seem strange that college administrators are not more concerned about their schools' blatant dearth of conservative scholars. After all, the main legal argument which colleges use to justify racial preferences in admissions and hiring is the argument for diversity. Individuals of different skin color, they say, have different perspectives and experiences to share, and so it is important to make sure that different racial groups are proportionally represented on campus.
But if this argument is to be taken seriously -- and not just as a cover-up for the true (and truly unconstitutional) remedial rationale for racial preferences -- then surely it must apply in the realm of political beliefs. Mightn't there be some educational benefit in having professors who not only look differently but also think differently? If nothing else, maybe a few more conservative intellectuals on campuses could help keep the politically correct legions of the academy from going so embarrassingly over the edge so often.
Anthony Dick's column appears Tuesdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at adick@cavalierdaily.com.
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