Academia has become an "intellectual monoculture . . . prone to groupthink," writes Megan McArdle in the Washington Post. With the rise of Trump, universities are dumping mandatory diversity statements and turning DEI into GOB (Goodness, Opportunity, Belonging) at a rapid pace. But it will be very hard to restore any semblance of balance.
"In most disciplines there aren’t enough conservative PhDs to staff ideologically balanced campuses, or even provide otherwise left-leaning campuses a vibrant conservative counterweight," writes McArdle. That won't change quickly.
To rebuild the pipeline, potential graduate students with right-of-center views would have to be persuaded that their qualifications and publications would be judged fairly by progressives, she writes. They'd have to believe they wouldn't have to "run an ideological gauntlet" to advance or be excluded by colleagues if they ever got a job.
McArdle imagines affirmative action for conservative students and professors. "Training left-wing faculty on conservative thought, so they won't accidentally say something offense, a campus center for conservatives to relax and bond, pro-life and MAGA scholarships and a "plus factor" for conservative applicants could help restore balance.
A brochure or website photo showing "three laughing young men striding across campus, copies of Free to Choose and The Conservative Mind tucked under their arms" could help in outreach to homeschoolers and small religious schools, she writes.
"Universities should want to 'look like America' — ideologically, economically and, yes, racially," McArdle concludes. "Building that kind of community from a country of 340 million wildly different people takes a lot more work than formally announcing you won’t discriminate."
Novelist Boris Fishman is a "lifelong liberal" teaching at what many think is a "conservative" university, he writes in The Free Press. He teaches literature and creative writing at the brand-new University of Austin (UATX), where "the founding mission declares that any idea is welcome, and will rise and fall on its merits."
He left the Ivy League: There "was no further opportunity for me because the university wanted to advance those with a different identity," Fishman writes. He advised "a talented student there who was deemed ineligible for a writing prize because, as a white person, it was not his 'place' to write about the indigenous communities he was portraying (with great interest and sensitivity)."
"I relish that the students are politically diverse, more so than the school’s reputation, and socioeconomically diverse — because class is at least the division that race is in this country," he writes. "But I relish their intellectual diversity most of all. While I don’t hide my views, and we find time to debate the issues — premarital sex, gender pronouns — most of the time, we just focus on books."
Colleges are essentially churches of radical leftism nowadays, which is why they produce nothing but problem children who hinder productivity.
Come back in 2070 or so. Universities change very slowly as you have to replace the tenured faculty over 40 years or so. This assumes they aren't hiring their acolytes.
See this comment from Joseph Epstein and Andrew Ferguson discussing the problem with colleges back in 2013.
Keep in mind, Oxford and Cambridge were intellectual backwater finishing schools from the Reformation to around 1870 when they found the cash from the Industrial Revolution to much to ignore. Harvard and Yale were both founded to inculcate the children of the elite in the religious ideology of their class.
The elite status universities may be captured for centuries as the real geniuses move to alternate academies or learn from the knowledge that…
I agree that more conservatives should be hired in academia. However I hate the idea of more "affirmative action" and "safe spaces" for anyone!
Outside of Liberty and BYU, would any university really want to hire a professor who opposes same sex marriage, opposes homosexuals being teachers, opposes women getting college educations, or believes that trans individuals are mentally ill. That would be too close to hiring a neo-nazi who believes that blacks should have to attend their own universities.