A recent Chronicle of Higher Education essay explores the question, “Why Are There So Few Conservative Professors?” (July 1st online)
Well, it’s not for lack of trying.
Middlebury College, for example, held its first “Bring a Conservative Friend to Campus Day” this past April. The goal was to demonstrate that a small liberal arts college could offer a welcoming environment to those on the political right.
The event turned out to be less than a success when most of the Middlebury faculty realized that they had no conservative friends, and another subgroup discovered that they had no friends at all.
“We had so much food left over at lunch, it was embarrassing,” says Middlebury President Laurie Patton. “On that day, our town’s local barber, 67-year-old Marv Gaffney, was the most popular man in Vermont. He had voted for Romney in 2012, and just about every male faculty member at Middlebury invited him to campus. Marv had a wonderful time, but he has no intention of returning to school for a Ph.D. at this stage of his life. You can find him back in his shop, Mondays through Saturdays from 10 to 5.
“We’ll try something new next year.”
Not surprisingly, the California Institute of Technology took a different approach. According to President Thomas Rosenbaum, “we sedated a random sample of our professors and surgically removed the portion of their brain that’s responsible for critical thinking, hoping it would make them conservative. What a disaster! The professors are still liberal, but now they are just stupidly liberal. They’ve organized a group of feral cats on campus to protest the scarcity of tuna fish in dumpsters outside of our dining halls. Hell, I’m being burned in effigy on the campus quad at this very moment. Never again will I take advice from those dipwads in the Department of Neuroscience on how to solve personnel problems.”
Finally, there’s the cautionary tale of the College of William and Mary, which attempted to recruit conservative faculty directly from fundamentalist Bible colleges across the South.
“What in the hell were we thinking?” laments President Katherine Rowe. “Do you have any idea how difficult it is to recruit a world-class physicist from Burning Bush Divinity School in Biloxi, Mississippi? The school offers one science course, in which the sole required text is the Classics Illustrated Book of Genesis.”
Stop whining. Nobody said this was going to be easy.