Redstate

I have mirrored the article George Will referenced in his op-ed, written by Mark Bauerlein, entitled "Liberal Groupthink Is Anti-Intellectual."  Bauerlein is a professor of English at Emory University and director of research at the National Endowment for the Arts.  It was published in the November 12, 2004 issue of The Chronicle Of Higher Education and you can read it here.

After media bias, campus bias is the last standing obstacle to true national debate on issues.  With Fox News, the internet, and other new sources of information, the effect of media bias is fading.  However, campus bias has been growing to make up for the loss of power in media.

Personally, I think fighting campus bias should be a big non-election year issue for online activists, including RedState.  Many of us are younger with ties to Universities and we should be able to attract more university-age readers.  Being a sounding board for campus activism from pro-free speech court battles to pointing out campus bias are attainable goals for this website and the online community.  I would like to see the term campus bias as widespread as media bias has become.  Then even when schools don't change their practices (which will take longer), they are not seen as neutral.

Here are some sources for those interested in groups fighting campus bias:

FIRE - FIRE's core mission is to protect the unprotected and to educate the public and communities of concerned Americans about the threats to these rights on our campuses and about the means to preserve them.

ISI - To accomplish this goal, ISI seeks to enhance the rising generation's knowledge of our nation's founding principles -- limited government, individual liberty, personal responsibility, the rule of law, market economy, and moral norms.

A National Campus Presence

Through its integrated program of lectures, conferences, publications, and fellowships, the Institute annually works with hundreds of thousands of students and faculty from coast to coast. An array of free publications and other resources is available to students and teachers.

Students for Academic Freedom - The Students for Academic Freedom Information Center is a clearing house and communications center for a national coalition of student organizations whose goal is to end the political abuse of the university and to restore integrity to the academic mission as a disinterested pursuit of knowledge.

If one is feeling the post-election activist drought, here is an opportunity to write a letter to the editor.  The WaPo's top editorial in Monday's paper is Diversity Stymied which I was hoping addressed the lack of ideological diversity.  Alas, it pointed out the disturbing trend of lower number of African-American students at major 4-year universities, specifically the University of Michigan.

The Letter to the Editor email address is Letters@washpost.com.  

Basic Outline could be:

I. I was excited by the title Diversity Stymied on the heels of George Will's wonderful piece on Sunday.  I thought the Post had chosen to point out the saddening state of ideological diversity on campuses.

II.  Sadly, the Post continues to put racial diversity on a higher platform than ideological diversity as far as university goals go.  While the drop in African-American applicants is regretable, the silence of the Post's editorial board on the issue of campus bias is still worse.

III.  I hope to see the Post's editorial board address the scourge of campus bias with the same zeal it focuses on racial bias.  At the least, please title appropriately, using "Racial Diversity Stymied" and thus not giving other campus minorities the false hope that you noticed their plight.

Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives.

-- John Stuart Mill

Hence, academics are going to skew left in proportion to their skewing non-stupid.

If your best hope is the triple threat of George Will, a columnist with a serious intellectual inferiority complex -- how many interns does he have looking up all those inapt pseudo-erudite quotes he so liberally sprinkles through his columns?; Rush Limbaugh, an intellectual lightweight, serial liar and hypocrite ("we should lock up all drug addicts and throw away the key"); and finally David Horowitz the former ultra-leftist opportunist firebrand turned right-wing opportunist firebrand, you are way behind the curve. Who are your conservative academic champions? Where are your serious-minded conservative thought leaders?

Best of luck with the witchhunt.

Your comments are predatory in nature and do not really take any stance on an issue.  Maybe this is the New New Left's approach to politics, but it makes it hard to have a conversation.  I believe diversity and tolerance are important parts of living in a heterogeneous society.  I believe ideological diversity is the single most important type in a university setting.  The institutional bias against conservatism would be considered a human rights violation if it were based on race or sex, but because liberals feel no sympathy it is written off.

As for your allegation of stupidity, check your exit polls.  The majority of college graduates and students who went to "some college" voted Republican.  The majority who did not finish high school and who held a postgraduate degree voted Democrat.  The most well edcuated and least well educated are Democratic voters.  As more people go to and finish college, Democrats base of uneducated voters (who outnumber postgraduates by several orders of magnitude) is shrinking.

The existence of think tanks (Heritage and CATO specifically) is partially due to the lockout of conservatives in academia.  On a policy front this has worked.  However, students are not being presented with conservative viewpoints and thus learn to see conservatives as stupid, myopic, self-interested, socially unjust, and bigoted.  It harms the tolerance that liberals used to believe in.  Conservatives deserve a more equal footing in academia.

Ideological diversity = witchhunt?  There's some fine logical and intellectual thought for you.

You have every right to your opinion about George Will, but I could just as easily point out a number of other, more liberal columnists who have a more precarious grasp on facts and logic than Will does, despite their majority status at newspapers like the Washington Post and the New York Times.  I was merely tipping my hat to him for writing a short editorial about a subject that I care about, not adopting him as my savior.  As  for Limbaugh, if you'd read my post as carefully as liberals are reputed to read everything else they comment upon (remember - deconstruction is what liberals DO according to Michelle Cottle of The New Republic) you'd notice that I wasn't complimenting him as much as I was backhanding him for being a bombast who, in this instance at least, managed to understate the case!

And your ad hominem attack on David Horowitz is, sad to say, essentially the same insipid characterization of him that I've heard from dozens of former friends.  Most of them have read neither anything he's written as a conservative nor anything he wrote before he abandoned the Left, but they nevertheless take  cold comfort in dismissing him as an "opportunist" (of the W.C. Fields variety, perhaps?) or even more hilariously, as a "fascist" (!!) -- which is what one of my graduate student neighbors called him when I mentioned his name during a hallway conversation she overheard.  Of course, she's never read any of his work either, but was nevertheless confident enough to sneer derisively at me on November 1 and say: "You're gonna be cryin tomorrow!"

Most people go to college because it is a required ticket punch to get a job. 99% can't tell you the courses they attended a year after graduation much less whether or not the professor was as Marxist. This is not a bad thing.

If you are pursuing a career in academia, one would hope you have enough critical reasoning skills to divine the professor's politics and decide for yourself whether or not you agree with them.

Personally, I can't think of why anyone would want to work in such an intellectually stultifying instituion as a university where what you think and how you think it is required to fit into a cookie cutter that wins the approval of a department chairman or some vague committee. Even moreso if your politics are conservative.

As Mill himself points out, ValuesVoter, not all conservatives are stupid, but it seems an article of liberal faith that they are.  Two nonstupid conservatives, I'd hope you'd grant, are Nobel Prize winning economists Milton Friedman and Fredrick Hayek.  Of course, in the biased academy, students are unlikely to hear of these thinkers or their acknowledged brilliance.  By the way, nothing makes even bright people stupid like isolation within the "smelly little orthodoxies" that pass these days for liberal thought and, such as it is, liberal intelligence.

replacing one set of biases for another does not result in a net gain.  What Fox News and other conservative outlets provide is a conservative slant to the news.  Nothing wrong with that, but let's not kid ourselves into thinking that merely providing a point of view that is biased in the opposite direction is equivalent to a fair and balanced (no pun intended) debate on the issues.

This country needs more academics and media outlets that are dedicated to presenting the facts in as unbiased a fashion as possible.  

Personally, I can barely turn on any of the news outlets anymore because the biases (on both sides) are so glaringly obvious.