Monday’s N & O was really cooking. Another letter, by Dale Knickerbocker, a professor of Hispanic Studies at ECU, took the Pope Center to task not only for having commissioned the paper critical of Women’s Studies, but also for supposedly favoring quotas for faculty members.
Here are selections from the letter:
“Regarding your articles on a study concerning the percentage of university faculty who consider themselves liberal, state Sen. Andrew Brock’s bill to “counter liberalism” and the conservative Pope Center’s negative report on women’s studies programs, I doubt the timing of these three events is coincidental. It seems part of a well-organized Republican attack on academia, to which I would like to respond from the perspective of an academic.”
Well, they are coincidental and not part of a “Republican attack on academia.”
“The majority of university faculty are liberal for a logical reason. A true academic is driven by the spirit of inquiry to question everything. We do not blindly accept what authorities tell us, whether the authority is the Bible or a president who declares Iraq has WMDs.”
As soon as I read that paragraph, I knew its origin, an April 5 New York Times column by Paul Krugman entitled “An Academic Question.” (Sorry, it’s a registration site.) Krugman, taking off from an offhand comment by a politician that Republicans are becoming a “party of theocracy,” rushed in to opine that the reason why there are few Republicans in academia is that they don’t want to do research, but want truth to be revealed to them. Knickerbocker is playing his own variation on that theme.
Krugman’s notion was utterly demolished by Bill Anderson. Savor the demolition here.
“Being an academic is a way of looking at the world around us: analytically and critically. This world view coexists more comfortably with liberal politics. And true academics do not teach students what to think, but how to think, inciting them to question all points of view — including liberalism.”
First, there are plenty of non-liberals who look at the world analytically and critically; second, there are plenty of liberals who don’t incite students to question all points of view. Professors of Women’s Studies, for example, as the Vickers paper demonstrated.
“Are Republicans suggesting a political “quota” for faculty? How ironic. And whatever happened to getting government off our backs?”
Nobody is suggesting a hiring quota for non-leftists. It’s crying “wolf!” to suggest that the Academic Bill of Rights would impose one because it does not. Why, though, should liberals oppose an ideological quota in academia when they favor all other sorts of quotas?
