OPINION: Students balk at diversity
Far left liberals comprise the majority of faculty at our state's flagship university, the University of Colorado-Boulder. Throughout the country, anyone familiar with the country's largest universities knows they lean far to the left and CU leans farther than most. This has never been in serious dispute. A short visit to the campus will suffice in making this fact perfectly clear. For decades, conservative students who have dared speak their minds at CU have reported harassment and even violent resistance. Though surveys aren't needed to reveal the leftist nature of CU-Boulder, surveys have been done. One showed that 94 percent of the faculty were registered Democrats. At the much smaller Denver campus, 98 percent were Democrats. The remaining 4 percent and 2 percent were comprised of Independents, Greens, Republicans and others.
Needless to say, one could easily get through four years at CU without much, if any, introduction to conservative philosophy. That's not good. We all live in a world in which conservative philosophy has been and will remain a force in the culture. As late as 1988 the country had a conservative president. Failure by a liberal to understand conservative thought is failure to know the opposition.
Wisely, Boulder Chancellor G.P. "Bud" Peterson has been trying to raise money to hire an endowed chair of conservative studies, as a nod toward intellectual diversity. He plans to create a $9 million endowment for a Visiting Chair in Conservative Thought and Policy, and perhaps a few other visiting scholars and speakers. And what good liberal should balk at this? After all, it's the left that has been extolling for decades the virtues of affirmative action, in which money is used to even the playing field for minorities.
Conservatives are such a minority at the University of Colorado that Peterson wants to hire one for liberals to observe like a zoo animal. It's all kind of funny, if one thinks about it much.
The presence of one high-profile conservative scholar would put CU in some excellent company. Stanford, Cornell, UCLA and Brandeis have all had the privilege to employ Professor Thomas Sowell, a world-renowned conservative economist. Harvard has government professor Harvey Mansfield. Yale has history professor Donald Kagan.
Princeton has law professor Robert George. All are nationally prominent conservatives.
"Most good universities have at least one conservative professor on campus," wrote David Brooks for the New York Times, in a 2003 article titled "Lonely Campus Voices."
Hear that? "Good" universities have at least one conservative professor.
It's apparent that one organized group of campus liberals has no interest in making the campus more like Yale, Princeton, Harvard or Stanford. Though only $575,000 has been raised to fund a conservative lab rat, the Boulder Daily Camera reported this week that CU College Democrats are wasting no time waging a campaign against Peterson's laudable uphill goal.
CU spokesman Bronson Hilliard tried to comfort liberals by explaining how the prospective professor of conservative philosophy wouldn't necessarily be a conservative - no more than a French teacher must be French. But the liberals still feel threatened by what he or she might teach.
"The entire concept of a Visiting Chair in Conservative Thought and Policy politicizes academics in a way that is contrary to the university's mission," said the president of the College Democrats, as quoted in the Camera.
The mission is liberal indoctrination, apparently. What politicizes academics at CU is the longstanding and systematic hiring of far-left professors and instructors, who mostly want students in lockstep with a militant leftist ideology. Adding one professor, as a token of balance, won't kill the buzz.
