Wednesday, December 01, 2004
"Academic diversity, in everything but thought"
(Picture from The Economist)
In his book "Arrogance" (Warner Books, 2003) Bernard Goldberg describes Columbia University's School of Journalism as the "Taj Mahal" of American journalism schools, and castigates it for bias.
He tells of the 2001 lecture at Columbia by ABC News president David Westin, just 6 weeks after 9/11, where one of the students asked Westin the appallingly offensive: "Do you believe the Pentagon was a legitimate military target, even if (using a hijacked jetliner) was not?"
Westin answered: "Actually, I don't have an opinion on that", thus in Goldberg's view distinguishing himself from the majority of Americans, who would have had little trouble in providing a clear-cut answer, but ingratiating himself with journalistic colleagues and students, many of whom would agree with Westin's astounding explanation, when pressed on the subject later, that it would be journalistically improper to take a position on whether the Pentagon attack "was right or wrong".
Not that many in journalistic or other academia have much difficulty on taking a position on a host of other subjects Goldberg talks about, like beating a gay person to death, Taliban non-education of women, or white bigots dragging a black man behind a pick-up truck.
Liberal staff far outnumber conservatives at elite universities. American Enterprise magazine reported in 2002 on the breakdown as follows:
Cornell: 166 liberals, 6 conservatives.
Stanford: 151 liberals, 17 conservatives.
Colorado: 116 liberals, 5 conservatives.
UCLA: 141 liberals, 9 conservatives.
In 2004, according to the Center for Responsive Politics,
"(O)f the top five institutions in terms of employee per capita contributions to presidential candidates, the third, fourth and fifth were Time Warner, Goldman Sachs and Microsoft. The top two were the University of California system and Harvard, both of which gave about 19 times more money to John Kerry than to George W. Bush."
George Will presented these statistics in his column a couple of weeks ago, and then acidly commented on this self-serving justification for the disparity procured from a liberal academic:
"... (According to) George Lakoff, a linguistics professor at Berkeley, ... (t)he disparity in hiring, ..., occurs because conservatives are not as interested as liberals in academic careers. Why does he think liberals are like that? 'Unlike conservatives, they believe in working for the public good and social justice.' That clears that up."
Will procures a better explanation for the "monochrome" pseudo-intellectual provincialism of academic campuses from Mark Bauerlein, who says a "false consensus effect" occurs when, "people think that the collective opinion of their own group matches that of the larger population ... When like-minded people deliberate as an organized group, the general opinion shifts toward extreme versions of their common beliefs."
They become tone-deaf, says Will, to the way they sound to others outside their closed circle of belief.
Often they go beyond being merely tone-deaf though, as exemplified in this flagrant example of harrassment of an Israeli student by a professor at (where else?) Columbia, related by Daniel Pipes.
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Meanwhile, as blogged in Solomonia, a cult-of-death style Islamic preacher has been invited to speak at MIT this coming Saturday night. No interference or trouble is expected.
But scroll further down the page and see the report about a pro-Israel group that wants to display the remains of a Jerusalem bus (blown up in a murder lemming attack) at UC Berkeley.
The City of Berkeley people are furiously resisting the idea, ostensibly because of concerns that anti-Israel and "anti-war" groups will rampage and go nuts!
You couldn't make this stuff up.
New survey shows bias at top 50 US universities
