Affirmative Action For Republicans

19May08

Here’s a WSJ article about the University of Colorado-Boulder’s plan to create an endowed Chair for Conservative Thought and Policy .

The campus hot-dog stand sells tofu wieners. A recent pro-marijuana rally drew a crowd of 10,000, roughly a third the size of the student body. And according to one professor’s analysis of voter registration, the 800-strong faculty includes just 32 Republicans.

Chancellor G.P. “Bud” Peterson surveys this landscape with unease. A college that champions diversity, he believes, must think beyond courses in gay literature, Chicano studies and feminist theory. “We should also talk about intellectual diversity,” he says. So over the next year, Mr. Peterson plans to raise $9 million to create an endowed chair for what is thought to be the nation’s first Professor of Conservative Thought and Policy.

I’ve long thought that the single stupidest thing conservatives do is appropriate liberal ideas that they once opposed towards their own ends. Most commonly this means throwing on a false cloak of victimhood and asking, sometimes seriously, sometimes rhetorically, for special privileges.

You get Tucker Carlson quoting Martin Luther King to argue against Affirmative Action, you get Pat Buchanan saying white Christians need Affirmative Action to get in Princeton because of Jews and Asians, and this kind of half baked scheme to divert a school’s money to subsidizing Conservatism in the name of diversity. I remember some high school kids in Montgomery county writing an essay saying their should be a white pride month back in the 90s. Nowhere do conservative claim to be more victimized then in academia, so expect more plans like this keep coming up.

My primary objection to this is the idea that somehow Conservatism is something Liberals are unaware. You might not meet a lot of conservative professors at some Colleges and Universities, but it’s hard to conceive that you could really be unaware of conservative thought. For example I went to a Liberal College and there were only a few Conservatives Professors. And those Conservative Professors could shut up being Conservative literally spent hours every single complaining to their students and this, that, or some other thing. Same situation with 30% of the student body that was conservative, they were all the “only” Conservative on Campus and many of them would spend lots of time talking about it. I used to walk around Liberal neighborhoods asking for money for PIRG, and pretty much everyday I get some guy that would say mention how he was the lone conservative in this neighborhood. In fact I seriously doubt there is a single Liberal community of any kind that doesn’t have two people like that.

My secondary object is that I think that the conservative critique of victimhood is fairly compelling. Affirmative Action is a highly imperfect solution, and it does risk creating a ’soft bigotry of low expectations.’ When Conservatives start asking for special treatment, they turn themselves into a mockery of serious debate, instead of principled social critics.

P.S.
To their credit the article quotes a few Conservative big wigs that don’t support the idea, however if paying people $200,000 for being Conservative catches on in academia then I think they might change their tune.

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Tags: Chair of Conservative Thought, G.P. "Bud" Peterson, Unversity of Colorado Boulder