Higher education has a problem with prejudice. It’s not the usual racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia and xenophobia that colleges are always denouncing. It’s prejudice — sometimes expressed in an ugly and open fashion — against Republicans, conservatives and libertarians.Conservative academics, which the DrsC were, do a lot of self-censorship to survive and prosper. Meanwhile their progressive colleagues freely expose their leftward biases and are rewarded with "right on" and "attaboy."
One argument for racial diversity has been that taxpayers won’t support a higher education system that doesn’t look like them. That’s an argument for ideological diversity, too. As McArdle writes: “The impregnability of the ivory tower is an illusion, because it depends more than ever on a steady flow of government money. If academia defines itself too explicitly as the enemy of the folks controlling that money, the spigot will turn, and the garden inside will rapidly begin to dry up.”
Thirty years of being an outlier bites; retirement was a nice change. My experience: the least attractive part of a life in academia was, with a few notable exceptions, my colleagues.
