Swarthmore professor Timothy Burke has written about this subject at length, and I recommend his essay to you. What stands out in this dispute is that conservatives and liberals have reversed their usual stances on discrimination. Liberals are usually more apt than conservatives to hold that group homogeneity and subtle signals of group identity constitute pervasive discrimination; conservatives usually hold that the market and other impersonal forces will act to end discrimination. If the conservative position in this debate is correct, then the business and political worlds really are rotten with racism; and if the liberals are right about the academy, then the lily-whiteness of most suburbs is not evidence of economic and social barriers.

I hate reducing such a complicated topic to another they-said, they-said dispute, especially because the conservatives who tend to complain about discrimination are, to my knowledge, not exactly poster children for scholarly objectivity, or even academic quality. And yet when there are "peace studies" courses but (ROTC excepted) "war studies" courses, then there does seem to be some sort of evidence that the university has gotten isolated from the public and (I would argue) reality.

But isolation of opinion is not evidence of wrongness. I am likely in the utter minority of ITA readers and contributors in this opinion, but I am a staunch defender of Alfred Kinsey and the Kinsey Institute. No matter how "immoral" his research conclusions appear to be to the Judith Reismans of the world, the argument that sex research in toto should be ended is a grotesquerie.

Arguments similar to those used against Kinsey and his successors and colleagues are normally the only ones that are advanced to prove why "liberal" domination of the universities are harmful. This seeming "liberality" of opinion, though, is in most cases only novelty or sophistication married to an opposition to existing power structures within society. The self-importance of academics has led them to conclude that what they do is more critical to social change than it really is, but subjecting the truth-claims of the powerful to scrutiny is important.

Finally, we can come to an analysis of why conservatives feel threatened by what they perceive as the liberal monopoly over higher education. Academics are not always right in their critiques. But the very act of challenging received wisdom threatens all of us who believe that past practices should be presumed to work until convincingly proved unjust. And sometimes those practices are proved unjust, and the irritation of dealing with peace studies professors when they're in full-on dove mode is worth it when we fight racism, sexism, or xenophobia.

Social scientists--and it is really social scientists and humanities professors who are the target of these criticisms; what do I care who my accounting instructor voted for?--do nothing but come up with interpretations of society, and in most cases those theories are going to conflict with our received opinions, simply because scrutinizing a belief normally yields a conclusion at odds with that belief. This is unpleasant for all involved, as Socrates can testify.

My fear is that conservatives are making themselves into the enemies of truth and the tormentors of Socrates by seeking to reserve a quota of professorships for people who believe, with no other qualification, that affirmative action is bad and homosexuality is a sin. Those may be valid opinions, but they're not exactly going to stimulate further debate. (On the other hand, the smug assumption by many professors that their students will laugh at jokes about Ronald Reagan shooting homeless people for sport is offensive, and professors who continue in that practice should be forced to listen to Rush for an hour or two a day until they repent.)