Why Academia Shuns Republicans

From the LA Times courtesy of Eschaton:

In recent years, and especially under George W. Bush, Republicans have cultivated anti-intellectualism. Remember how Bush in 2000 ridiculed Al Gore for using all them big numbers?

That's not just a campaign ploy. It's how Republicans govern these days. Last summer, my colleague Frank Foer wrote a cover story in the New Republic detailing the way the Bush administration had disdained the advice of experts. And not liberal experts, either. These were Republican-appointed wonks whose know-how on topics such as global warming, the national debt and occupying Iraq were systematically ignored. Bush prefers to follow his gut.

In the world of academia, that's about the nastiest thing you can say about somebody. Bush's supporters consider it a compliment. "Republicans, from Reagan to Bush, admire leaders who are straight-talking men of faith. The Republican leader doesn't have to be book smart," wrote conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks a week before the election. "Democrats, on the other hand, are more apt to emphasize … being knowledgeable and thoughtful. They value leaders who see complexities, who possess the virtues of the well-educated."

Click here for the rest.

Not content to control business, the military, all three branches of the federal government, and numerous state governments, conservatives are hell-bent on cleaning out the last institutional bastion of liberalism left in the United States, the universities. Conservatives are seemingly so desperate to utterly eradicate liberalism, that they've stooped to some pretty absurd positions, twisting the language of civil rights, claiming that the reason institutions higher learning are so liberal is because they discriminate against right-wingers. Whatever. The real reason that conservatives are rarely found working at colleges and universities is that conservatism tends to be anti-intellectual, in short, anti-learning. This is not to say that conservativism and intellectualism are mutually exclusive--indeed, there are more than a few deep-thinking conservatives out there. However, the very essence of conservatism, a desire to stick with tradition, suggests a certain level of narrow mindedness that is simply incompatible with the kind of continual questioning of virtually everything, which is necessary for higher learning (actually, I'd go so far as to say learning in general, but that's another story).

If the conservatives ever get what they want on this, changing the political outlook of colleges and universities to a more politically correct point of view, we're all in big trouble: Western Civilization will be dead in America.

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