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Colleges Are Diversifying? Not Exactly

Colleges Are Diversifying? Not Exactly
4/5/2016
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Susan Dutca-Lovell

Colleges and universities have started to increase diversity amongst their student body and now, even their faculty. Or so they claim. There may be an increase in female and minority faculty, but according to one professor, there's one political group that "just doesn't make the cut".

The Higher Education Research Institute reports that only 12 percent of university faculty are right-leaning in their political views and identification. Most of these outliers are in engineering and similar professional schools. Only 5 percent of professors in the humanities and social sciences are right-of-center. In his article "The One Kind of Diversity Colleges Avoid" for the Wall Street Journal, Georgetown University Professor John Hasnas recounts seeing committees blatantly deny libertarian candidates, changing the description of the job position "when the best resumes appeared to be coming from applicants with right-of-center viewpoints," or even "dismissing candidates because of their association with conservative or libertarian institutions." While higher education institutions are reporting increased diversity, candidates who do not identify with the left-leaning majority are dismissed in a process that employs a political discrimination with which they are apparently more than comfortable.

Hasnas poses an important question: why limit diversity increase initiatives to genetic, cultural, or ethnic backgrounds? Sure, recruiting female and minority professors great in itself, but it can "perpetuate the left-wing stranglehold on the academy" when it belittles conservative and libertarian scholarship and only finds merit "with positions that are consistent with theirs."

Why might your professors' political ideologies matter? For one, a "diverse academic environment better prepares students for an increasingly diverse workforce," so why not include political diversity? Secondly, your education is coming from only one political perspective - how are you supposed to "pursue intellectual excellence," then? Dr. Lee Jussim, one of the founding members of Heterodox Academy touches on the many ways in which "leftwing politics distorts scholarship in the social sciences and humanities. From issues such as poverty in Africa to ISIS, "professors preach their anti-American judgements to students as 'final truths'... [they] represent their views and ideologies in ways that make it seemingly impossible for any reasonable person to disagree with. Essentially, if you don’t agree with "left-liberal thought" you're considered "ignorant, intolerant, and uneducated."

Do you think there should be a more equal ratio of liberal to conservative professors? Regardless of your personal political ideas, we have scholarships regardless of the direction to which you lean, and also for political science and education majors. Don't be LEFT out, do the RIGHT thing and do your financial homework today.

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