Affirmative Action for Conservatives, Cont'd.
Cathy Young
waves the flag for "intellectual diversity" on campuses in the
Globe today. She decries the "leftward tilt of the American professoriat"—wait till she checks out the French professoriat!—and faults its intellectual arrogance. Just look at the reaction to Larry Summers' remarks on women in science, Young writes.
What's striking is how, in proposing ways to address the "problem," Young adopts the language of affirmative action. She speaks of a "perhaps unconscious" bias and suggests that "on a subtler level, there is on many campuses a climate in which a ''normal" person is presumed to be liberal."
Young writes: "Some conservatives want a political solution: legislation that would not only protect the rights of dissenting students but penalize professors who use the classroom to push a political agenda. Many professors are appalled, understandably, by the idea of legislative intervention in the classroom. The best way to avoid such intervention is for the academy to make a good-faith effort to recognize and correct its intellectual diversity problem."
This is such an ideological mish-mash that it's hard to deconstruct. But essentially Young's saying that the federal government should let colleges fix the alleged problem their own way, which is pretty much what Lee Bollinger, Larry Summers and others said in the context of affirmative action.
I think this particular cause is a bit nuts. But whether conservatives are advocating federal intervention or affirmative action on the issue, they're abandoning their own principles of up-by-your-bootstraps federalism. Is it possible that they're conceding that sometimes, when you don't have the power, laissez-faire capitalism isn't enough?
Maybe lamenting the lack of ideological diversity will make them more sympathetic to the question of ethnic and economic diversity on campus. But somehow I doubt it.
