The Cultural Revolution: Instant Replay

Ever casually wonder why, statistically, there is no such thing as a conservative college professor. John Tierney has the answer:

I am in debt to liberal scholars across America. After I wrote about the leftward tilt on campus, they sent me treatises explaining that the shortage of conservatives on faculties is not a result of bias. Professors helpfully offered other theories why conservatives do not grace the halls of academe:

1 Conservatives do not value knowledge for its own sake.
2 Conservatives do not care about the social good.
3 Conservatives are too greedy to work for professors' wages.
4 Conservatives are too dumb to get tenure.

I've studied these theories as best I could (for a conservative), but somehow I can't shake the notion that there just might be some bias on campus.

Yep, there is. Wonker knows this to be true from personal experience, although other varieties of academic skulduggery also don't help in the selection process.

Tierney goes on:

Social scientists call it the false consensus effect: a group's conviction that its opinions are the norm. Liberals on campus have become so used to hearing their opinions reinforced that they have a hard time imagining there are intelligent people with different views, either on campus or in politics.

Yep, false consensus rules on college campuses today. Tierney gets into how and why this is, explaining how non-PC dissertation topics and the path to publication can get blackballed if they're not sufficiently left of center, aka, the norm.

It's accountability time, we think, on college campuses. And academia a really good place to begin carrying out HazZzmat's prime directive--de-funding the institutional left. Non-mainstream, collectivist wing-nuts have hung on so hard and for so long in their academic enclaves corrupting the minds of our kids because they have become adept at funding themselves with large quantities of taxpayer dollars whose disposition is rarely questioned. It's not difficult to fund what is really an unpopular and destructive movement if all you have to do is quietly have your friends in government insert a tap into the US and state treasuries for you. The academic and artistic left, aided by their friends in the left-wing media, would have disappeared long ago had we not been unknowingly providing them with limitless funding. But now we know. So why are we still funding them?

Maybe Mao had the right idea during his own "Cultural Revolution" when he sent the academics out to the rice paddies to do an honest day's work.