Fostering academic diversity

It’s a tough job, especially since those who hold tolerance and diversity in highest esteem also hold a lot of power. They’re secular progressives who want to control the language and the jobs that use it to communicate thought. And they don’t want competing ideas given any attention.

Fr. Richard John Neuhaus has this good piece on the problem.

Here’s the best snip from it:

Leftist domination of the academy is by now a very old story. It has been told so many times that maybe it is beginning to crack the wall—better, the fortress—of denial. The other day, the University of Colorado at Boulder announced that it is establishing a chair in conservative thought. Given the ideological uniformity at Boulder, this is a little like Wheaton College establishing a chair in atheistic thought. Of course there were protests from the left, but also from David Horowitz, who for years has been campaigning for a modicum of intellectual diversity in American higher education. A designated conservative at Boulder, he opined, is a little like a zoo boasting about having a rare animal on display. One is reminded of the New York Times several years ago announcing that it was assigning a reporter to cover conservatism in America. That would presumably balance the five hundred or so reporters covering the real world of social and political liberalism.