You may remember a College Insurrection report from February about the University of Colorado at Boulder which was looking to hire a conservative professor. He recently spoke at a school event.

Spencer Case of The College Fix reports.

Conservative Professor’s Talk Prompts Mixed Results

On the evening of Aug. 28, about 150 Coloradoans descended on the University of Colorado Old Main building to hear Steven Hayward speak about the dearth of conservatives in academia, and why it matters.

Hayward recently began his stint as the Visiting Scholar in Conservative Thought and Policy at the University of Colorado at Boulder, well-known for its left-leaning tendencies.

Hayward’s talk received fair-to-positive coverage in both the Boulder Daily Camera and the left-wing outlet, Colorado Independent. Still, when the question and answer session was over and the attendees shuffled through the double doors, grumblings of discontent could be heard. The dissatisfaction stemmed from the speaker’s fumbling of requests to define “conservatism.”

As a CU Boulder philosophy Ph.D. student and a conservative, I held high hopes for the talk. I was, and remain, strongly sympathetic to the Hayward’s message about the need for more ideological diversity on campus, and hoped he would bring others to my point of view.

I speak as someone who twice applied for graduate programs using personal statements with sentences like, “I am also interested in conservatism and the thought of Edmund Burke, especially his idea of the social repository.” Both times advisors at two different institutions warned me to delete this bit, lest I undermine my credibility.

That such advice would be given by competent advisors suggests that the left-leaning tendencies of academia can sometimes translate into close-mindedness to conservative ideas.

I can understand the view that diversity of sex, sexual orientation and race matter to quality of education, and I can understand the view that diversity of any kind is irrelevant for quality of education. What flummoxes me is the apparently orthodox view that diversity of these things matters a great deal, while diversity along the left-right spectrum matters not one whit.