Posted on 10/15/2007 9:54:48 AM PDT by Interesting Times
It’s not the score of a Hawkeye football game. It’s the number of Democrats versus the number of Republicans in the University of Iowa history department, and it has Iowans in an uproar. So, too, do charges published by Mark Bauerlein that left-wing bias has influenced the department’s hiring process. In response to the revelations, department chair Colin Gordon announced that the department had committed no wrongdoing, and neither he nor the university has expressed any concern about the total absence of intellectual diversity. Rarely have the hypocrisy and mendacity of academia been so thoroughly exposed as in the history department’s damage-control campaign.
Professor Gordon contended that the history department cannot discriminate against Republican or conservative job applicants because it does not know the political ideology of applicants. But the University’s own hiring manual states that search committees must “assess ways the applicants will bring rich experiences, diverse backgrounds, and ideology to the university community.” So they are obligated to understand applicants’ ideology, and to make sure not to overlook people with differing ideologies.
Determining a historian’s ideological inclinations is actually very easy in most cases. When I applied to the University of Iowa history department for a professorship in the United States and world affairs, my résumé listed membership in the National Organization of Scholars, which is an organization that everyone in academia knows to be ideologically to the right of the average academic organization. A quick search on Google or Amazon, moreover, reveals that my two books on the Vietnam War have widely been characterized as conservative.
Contrary to his recent protestations, Professor Gordon understands very well the ideological associations of my research on Vietnam. In the leftist publication New Internationalist, he wrote that interpretations of Vietnam similar to mine were part of a “shallow, cynical, and selective” effort by American conservatives who wish to justify global military domination in the spirit of “the aggressive imperialist Teddy Roosevelt.” Similarly well-informed is Professor Stephen Vlastos, the chair of the search committee, who wrote an entire book chapter denouncing historians who interpret Vietnam as I do.
The assertion that ideology doesn’t matter in the history department is discredited further by the support given by Professor Gordon and nine other department professors to the organization Historians Against the War. This organization recently convinced the American Historical Association to ratify a resolution calling on association members to “do whatever they can to bring the Iraq war to a speedy conclusion.” Thus, Professor Gordon and at least nine others believe that a historian’s ideology should not only be a matter of interest to other historians, but should conform to the ideology of other historians.
After learning that I was not among the eight applicants to advance past the screening of résumés, I submitted a freedom of information request asking how the search committee had assessed the ways I would “bring rich experiences and diverse backgrounds and ideology to the university community.” The history department replied that it had not assessed my candidacy in this manner. That fact, combined with the 27-0 imbalance in the department and a university policy prohibiting discrimination on the basis of “creed” and “associational preference,” led me to file a complaint with the university’s Office of Equal and Opportunity and Diversity.
Unfortunately, the Office of Equal Opportunity and Diversity proved unwilling to enforce the university’s policies on either equal opportunity or diversity. The office defended the history department’s failure to assess my “diverse backgrounds and ideology” by explaining that “The University does not expect hiring departments to make this type of assessment of every candidate.” Only a select group of finalists must be assessed in this manner, the office claimed. But the university’s hiring manual makes no such qualification, and it is not a general practice of “equal opportunity” hiring to ignore diversity until a few finalists have been extracted from the applicant pool.
In any case, I should not have needed bonus points for diversity to receive an interview. Professor Gordon accused Professor Bauerlein of characterizing other applicants as less qualified than me without knowing their qualifications, but in fact Professor Bauerlein did know their qualifications, which are posted on the internet. The department offered the job to someone who lacked the type of accomplishments most cherished by history departments at research universities like the University of Iowa: this person had not received degrees from top-tier universities and had been out of graduate school for eight years without publishing a book.
In its communications with the Office of Equal Opportunity and Diversity, the search committee did make a feeble attempt to justify rejection of my application. Search committee members stated that they had read my book Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965 and that it “did not consider any Vietnamese sources.” Triumph Forsaken actually contains over two hundred citations of Vietnamese-language sources.
The Office of Equal Opportunity and Diversity cast further doubt on its integrity by dismissing as “not relevant” a series of articles I had presented as evidence of “associational preference” and “creed” discrimination on campus. An Associated Press article on the University of Iowa, for example, stated,
Some conservative students said they cloak their political leanings to appeal to professors.... Conservatives say the abundance of Democratic professors affects course offerings, reading selections and class discussions, shaping impressionable minds.... Some conservative students complain their political views are not just absent, but criticized when professors show political cartoons mocking President Bush or allow Republican bashing.
Students, parents, alumni, taxpayers, and politicians should pressure the University of Iowa’s administration to enforce the university’s non-discrimination policies, and to create new faculty positions for conservatives beyond the reach of other professors’ tentacles, as other schools have started doing. They should demand that the university use its lecture series to bring in conservative speakers, not just liberals and radicals. In the meantime, students must realize that the university is not a free market of ideas, but a one-party state that strives to convert the impressionable and unwary by hiding half of the political spectrum.
Highlighting the hypocrisy of the educrats by using their standards against them, as Dr. Moyar proposes here, might be a very effective way to crack open some of the intolerant bastions of leftist thought in academia...
Educational intolerance ping...
The Democrats only embrace ‘diversity’ if it doesn’t include people with different views than their own. If you try to bring some Republicans into the mix to break up the pure Democrat majority and thus ‘diversify’ the politial philosphies, they’ll have your head.
It's just a coincidence that all the rejects did not make the list of finalists.
Yeah, that's it.
Check out History News Network if you need something to get your day started. Some of the responses are right leaning, but the authors are almost all moonbats.
Liberals are fond of discovering "numerical discrimination." We've all read the stories about adjusting college enrollments based on statistical distributions by race, rather than by merit. The same applies to the workplace; Jesse & Co. love to find companies whose personnel roster does not reflect some mythical racial balance. It's all about the numbers, and ability be damned.
Yet when confronted with irrefutable evidence of their own statistical bias, liberals shrug it off as meaningless, and deploy the same arguments they roundly reject when the other side presents them in opposition to racial quotas.
Once again, Liberalism = Hypocrisy. No amount of spin or tap-dancing is going to change that.
“It’s the number of Democrats versus the number of Republicans in the University of Iowa history department”
The reason is because they’re safe in their little, bubble wrapped world of academia. Many of them wouldn’t be able to survive in the private sector.
All true. Good to hear from you, by the way...
Those that sought to avoid the draft during the Vietnam war remained in school and got graduate degrees. They were probably more likely to be ideologically opposed to the war as well. These same PhDs, having no other skills for working in the real world, ended up as the university professors we are saddled with today. Desiring to propagate their own kind they either flunked out conservative students or purposely refused to hire those conservative students that did manage to get through graduate programs.
I’m surprised they didn’t say that of COURSE there are no republican teachers. “EVERYONE they know” says that only stupid people are republicans.
You nailed it!
BTTT
Interesting. Ping!
Thanks. You too.
I had a high school friend that was a staunch conservative... till he went to the U of Iowa... in less than a year, he was wearing a PLO kaffiyeh and spouting about the “revolution”...
Not to mention the possibilty that all history students might have to receive additional vaccinations after having come in contact with a conservative professor!
One of the difficulties of liberal (in the classical sense) politics is that it requires that a thorough approach to intellectual life includes the consideration of opinions that are distasteful or in opposition to those of the individual involved or common to the institution. It is for that reason that Voltaire spoke up and that the ACLU defended the right of Nazis to march in Skokie. It is for that reason we have a First Amendment to the Constitution. This is so ingrained by now that most people on FR consider it a bedrock conservative position, which by now it in fact has become.
The trap is this - in an effort to see that certain minority positions are not suppressed other minority positions are so quite ruthlessly, and one function of the Left in power is to get to choose who are the anointed and who the damned. This is why this approach to "diversity" always trends toward the monolithic. The excuse is that the suppressed opinions are in reality those of the majority and hence not subject to the same protections. Simply proclaiming a position (say, a distaste for abortion or an insufficient deference to feminism) to be the "establishment" one invalidates it within this schema.
The result is plain to see - a self-selecting and self-perpetuating population whose makeup is anything but diverse but whose tendency to defend that makeup is predicated on the very principles that that defense crushes in practice. It is a contradiction (the Left is fond of "internal contradictions") and a trap, and its upshot is narrowness, brittleness, and intellectual poverty. Proud and defiant poverty, a poverty that calls itself virtue. It is poverty nonetheless. A university should be an intellectual smorgasbord, not a diet plate of celery and tapwater however virtuous the latter may be said to be. And the student is certainly paying smorgasbord prices.
I live 60 miles from Iowa City. The whole place is overrun with liberal vermin, not just the University. It’s like stepping into a midwestern version of San Francisco or Ithaca.
(( ping ))
Not really. They see everything through the prism of historical dialecticism. Everything has an "X" component and a "Not-X" component. Where society favors X, they will align with Not-X in an attempt to force a tension into the discourse. Race is only one example. Gender is another. Wealth another. Sexual orientation, religiosity, conventionality ... all are "issues" that can be exploited to promote dissent, to drive a wedge into a society that will eventually split it and allow the Saviors to mold it anew.
Colleges are better stalinists than Stalin was.
Where is the evidence that Iowans are in an uproar? Links?
Nothing will change until they are sued into submission.
Of course, your theory is supported by another personal anecdote. I lost out on an industry job to a female. There were a half-dozen finalists, all white, five of six were males. I know I was better than the person who job the job. But gender trumped everything on that one.
“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
“Modern universities and colleges are the biggest fraud on the planet.” — David Allen White.
No surprise there or in most universities/colleges.
The next question is how many of those professors are active homosexuals or bisexuals and proud of it?
I think you’re spot on. Unfortunately although academic circles may be the worst, other workplaces are similarly afflicted. I found it very frustrating to see the lack of cognitive diversity in my chemical industry workplace. There was a lot of group-think going on which I attributed in part to the “feel-good” ethos of our time. It definitely hampered innovation. There was a great deal of emphasis on numerical representation of various ethnic groups and, to a lesser extent, gender. There was little tolerance for anyone who brought new ideas into the fold. Too scary; might make someone uncomfortable.
Thanks, Lancey. A few years ago, in collaboration with the Republican clubs at Ithaca College and Wells College, we carried out a similar analysis of their faculties, with similar results.
When a local newspaper asked the chair of the Politics Dept. at Ithaca about the fact there were no Republicans in her department, she actually said “we have a diversity of progressive views in our department”!
That kind of ossified thinking is anathema to innovation. America simply cannot remain competitive if we're content to be prairie dogs who only stick our heads up out of our burrows when we think it's safe. We've gone from a nation of pioneers and risk-takers to a nation of patsies, hand-wringers, and consensus-building nodders.
liberals can’t get real jobs
I can tell you that a bias exists at the University of Iowa, and the professors in the history department are by and large liberals. It was quite an experience being there and having to pick my battles carefully. I usually took opportunities to ask questions that might provoke thought in the other students, to let them inquire about the larger picture.
For example, when I was in my women’s history class and we were discussing the damaging effects of free trade in Central America (off topic?), I had to stop the instructor and propose this question: If there weren't any of these factories down in Central America, or any U.S. driven industry, what would these poor native peoples be doing? Answer: Jack squat. They would be poor, living in the jungle, disease ridden, doing nothing. So the question becomes, do you want some development, or no development? I think that got some of the people in the class to think about the benefits of free trade, and the development of the 3rd world. Others I'm sure felt that those Native people should be left alone, to live the simple way they have for centuries (much like they themselves would like to live in their fantasy communist world).
Another great example was in my History of the Modern Middle East course. The instructor was pro-palestinian, and generally anti-western on most issues. When discussing how the evil imperial America had supplied all of those chemical weapons to Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980’s I just had to chime in and ask, “How many weapons did the Soviet Union sell to Iraq during that war, or for that matter the Iranians?” Her response: “*Blank stare* Well, I uhh.. I uh, I dont know.”
But all my stories aside, the one thing that did exist, despite the bias, was the free exchange of ideas. While I did feel out numbered in a class, and usually going against the ideas of the professors, you were still allowed to be heard. I think thats almost as important as having a balanced professor, or an impartial professor. When a professor can create an environment in which people can feel free to express their ideas and opinions, then they have accomplished a great thing. Liberal nuttiness aside I think the professors in the history department did a great job at that (with a few exceptions). I have so many stories to tell, as I'm sure a lot of us do, but ill save them for later.
First post on Free Republic, Ive been a lurker for months now, but felt the need to sign up and say something in this thread because I'm an alumni.
Thanks for the ping!
Welcome aboard! It’s always fun posting after lurking for a while!
This has been an area of concern for me since the 70s, when I had to put up with a political science professor who actually advocated the armed overthrow of California’s governor, because he wasn’t a leftist. And this was in Glendale, Californa, at the time a solid lock conservative community.
It’s obvious that diversity is good for everyone, except those who advocate for it the most.
Thanks for posting this. It shows — again — how leftists conspire to take over and dominate institutions.
I strongly suspect that anywhere else the EEOC would consider 27-0 prima facie proof of illegal discrimination.
Oh, c’mon ! There has to be some diversity amongst the 27 Democrats. You have some Marxist ones and you have some Stalinist ones. Ain’t diversity great ?
That is pretty much what she meant — no joke.
And they claim to be champions of diversity, free thought and expression. When actually they are nothing but the worst kind of fascists, totalitarians and phonies.
They’re also liars, which is true of all leftists.
Glad you posted your reply....it’s always good to hear first hand news from the front.
Diversity is important only when they are being diverse from the truth, the white race, the constitution, and the Gospel of Jesus Christ. All other diversity is “non-progressive.”
Really? How many persons are you?
(Welcome aboard!)
Welcome to the USSA, comrade. You must learn to love Big Brother.
Thanks for the ping I.T.
.
Good thread
This should be a good topic for Mark Levin
Unreal how it has come about that University officials and the Professors they hire are predominantly liberal. And now they perpetuate it through their teaching.
Wonder just now it began.
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