The Yale Daily News has found that Yale professors give $45 to Democratic candidates for every $1 they give to Republicans. What a surprise. The capture of faculties by former ’60s radicals and their younger tie-dye acolytes has been well documented.
The 45-to1 ration seems about right at Duke too, if the Duke lacrosse case reaction is any guide. Last night, blogger KC Johnson spoke at Page Auditorium at Duke and called for an investigation into the faculty’s response to the case. The infamous Group of 88, the left-wing mostly social science and African-American studies professors, would be the target of the probe.
As for the ratio at Duke, the penultimate paragraph in the N&O story on Johnson’s appearance says it all (my emphasis):
He [Johnson] singled out several professors for standing up for the players, and he praised one administrator for urging faculty not to rush to judgment. For the record, that one administrator was Provost Peter Lange, who lectured the potbangers on the U.S. Constitution and who also responded magnificently to then-Duke professor Houston Baker’s race-baiting.
CLARIFICATION: As I read this after my second cup of coffee I see that I may have implied that professors who supported due process for the accused lacrosse players were necessarily Republicans. While it is true that Duke’s Democratic faculty outnumber Republican faculty by far more than a 45-to-1 ratio, party affiliation wasn’t necessarily the predictor of sanity in their approach to the lacrosse case. For instance, from having Lange as a professor many years ago I would be surprised if he were not still a Democrat and a liberal. What he has always been, though, is reasonable. The split in the lacrosse case was between reasonable liberals like Lange and others (who may have been Republicans and Democrats) and the loony left represented by the Group of 88 who certainly are not Republicans.
