Intellectual diversity on campus – it’s not just left versus right
Jonathan Imber, writing at Minding The Campus, writes that intellectual diversity on campus is not just about left versus right:
When critics of higher education complain about a lack of “intellectual diversity,” mostly what they deplore is the shortage of conservative professors. But there is much more at stake than that.
Consider climate change ….
It turns out the wholesale secular embrace of science insinuates its own range of pious beliefs. Climate theory pretends both to the throne of reason and to public policies dictated as if they were royal decrees. To question a royal decree in this case is construed as treason again reason. But how did reason come to rely more on a consensus of belief than skepticism about such grand causal claims?
Unlike creation science, the advocates of social engineering who believe that science is equivalent to policy intimidate all doubters. The absence of intellectual diversity is detrimental to public policy debate, not to mention how the stranglehold of environmentalism in colleges and universities also steers any debate toward predetermined conclusions. Here the challenge becomes disentangling the science of climate change from the policies that should follow from that science….
When some conservatives argue that the solution to the problem of a lack of intellectual diversity in the academy can be solved by hiring more conservative faculty, my simple and respectful response is that who you hire presumably has a mind, and people, we know from experience, change their minds. Hiring based on conviction is just as dangerous on the right as it is on the left….
What must be considered is how more faculty, other than a few who speak up, can impress on administrators and colleagues why real intellectual debate will keep away whatever version of barbarians at the gate they dread.
Point well taken, but isn’t balancing left versus right at least a starting point and an improvement?
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[…] INTELLECTUAL DIVERSITY ON CAMPUS: It’s Not Just Left vs. Right. […]
“What must be considered is how more faculty, …can impress on administrators and colleagues why real intellectual debate will keep away whatever version of barbarians at the gate they dread.”
You are assuming those who are in power have intelligence and skill for “real intellectual debate”. For instance, a famous Harvard law professor most likely clinched the post by claiming a non-existence minority status. Do you believe these intellectual pygmies dare engage in real intellectual debates?
That climate change thing. They shouted down skeptics, falsified data, to impose their beliefs on the public. Do you believe these frauds dare engage in intellectual debates?
Better to follow the money. How they refused fundings to those who questioned their conclusions, how a rail engineer who knows squat about the climate ascended to his lucrative post as head of the UN climate panel, how they claimed a known mistake to be proof that the mountains were de-icing.
Yeah, right, these people are enthusiastic about “real intellectual debates”.
The global warming scare most certainly IS a right vs. left issue. The very same people authored the previous global-cooling scare, also blamed it on fossil fuel burning, and demanded the exact same solutions: higher energy prices and less economic growth. (Stephen Schneider was THE ringleader of both. He was the original theorist for the global cooling scare, and was Vice President Gore’s main man for setting up the climate funding apparatus that for almost 2-decades has been directing research money exclusively to global warming loyalists.)
Schneider was best buds with Paul Ehrlich and with Obama’s science director John Holdren, all radical leftists from way back who used green ideology as a pretext to attack capitalism. Economic growth had to be curtailed because it was gobbling up the natural world. What they were really doing was not science at all but really really bad economics, embracing the Malthusian arguments that Malthus himself abandoned. In fact, nothing is better for the natural world than economic growth, which proceeds primarily through technological advance, allowing us to do more with less. The more rapidly we advance, the lighter we tread on the planet. The issue is PURE right-vs-left.
In contrast, the issue the quoted author offers as a conservative position, creationism, is not conservative at all. Maybe there is a Coleridgian conservatism to it in the sense of holding to traditional views until the evidence against them is overwhelming, but there is nothing conservative about it in scientific terms, which judges by evidence alone. (Not that there is no evidence for intelligent design, but creationism is specifically a religious term, indicating that the Bible is to be regarded as evidence, which is emphatically NOT scientific.)
So I would say the title claim of the post is a fail. The intellectual diversity problem on campus is very much a left-right issue, and if it isn’t JUST a left-right issue, the quoted author provides no evidence for it.
[…] Here is an interesting post from College Insurrection (hat tip GayPatriot commenter heliotrope) that deals with the absence of intellectual diversity on university campuses. This was the most interesting statement to me (it is from a quote): It turns out the wholesale secular embrace of science insinuates its own range of pious beliefs. Climate theory pretends both to the throne of reason and to public policies dictated as if they were royal decrees. To question a royal decree in this case is construed as treason again reason. […]