“Without broader hiring reforms, proto right-wing employees will continue to control big business. Several states are trying to dictate what conservative executives should and shouldn’t instruct employees about, but these efforts similarly don’t reach the core of big business’s sickness – the commercial monopoly of right-wing thought that guarantees its continued malignancy.” It’s bothersome, isn’t it? Members of the left trying to force their viewpoints into private businesses.
Except that a left winger didn’t write the above. No doubt they have, but what you just read is a rewording of the 2nd paragraph of an opinion piece penned by conservative professor emeritus (UC Santa Cruz) John Ellis. Ellis’s was titled “The Public Needs Campus Viewpoint Diversity.” Here’s what he wrote:
“Without broader staffing reforms, radical left-wing professors will still control higher education. Several states are trying to dictate what professors should and shouldn’t teach, but these efforts similarly don’t reach the core of academia’s sickness—the political monopoly that guarantees its continued malignancy.”
To read Ellis is to see the unfortunate road conservatives are traveling on to allegedly fix university education. For the longest time those same conservatives correctly pushed back against quotas of any kind. How things have changed. It’s conservatives allowing their obsessive desire to alter the ideological mix on college campuses to turn them into the left wingers they long abhorred. It won’t work.
The simple, rather bullish truth that conservatives refuse to acknowledge amid their relentless push to nail left-wing universities is that they’re that way largely because it’s left-wingers who tend to migrate toward academia. Conversely, a right that’s reverent of private enterprise tends to migrate toward private enterprise.
Think Jeff Bezos. The founder of Amazon attended Princeton, naturally he couldn’t major in the industry he invented, but eventually he took his talents from the hedge fund world to Seattle where he started Amazon. Bezos is a known free thinker (see his letter about looming changes to the editorial page lean at the Washington Post), at which point let’s ask a simple question: would conservatives have preferred that he had gone the academic route after college to equalize the ideological balance at elite colleges allegedly defined by “rot”? Hopefully the question answers itself.
It’s a long way of saying that even if college and universities pursue the affirmative action for conservatives that conservatives increasingly want, they’ll likely come up short in their pursuit. Which means universities will have to lower their standards to attract and hire people who would never have rated a look under normal circumstances. Consider the optics of this.
Furthermore, this need to pursue “viewpoint diversity” (if that doesn’t scream left wing, it’s hard to know what does) isn’t necessary. Evidence supporting this claim can be found in the annual rush among the best of the best of domestic and international businesses to hire the graduates of the very elite U.S. universities that conservatives claim are controlled by “radical left-wing professors.” Which is a comment that either conservatives are well overstating the lack of viewpoint diversity on campus, students aren’t being indoctrinated in the way conservatives imagine, students in search of post-collegiate work are too busy to be indoctrinated, or perhaps all three.
Whatever the answer, conservative efforts to fix U.S. institutions of higher learning are left-wing solutions in search of a problem. Rather than rely on government coercion to fix what bothers them, they would be better off allowing the markets they properly revere to correct the problem, assuming of course there’s a problem.
