Jesse Walker takes on the Academic Bill of Rights at Reason Online. I've been trying to sort through this issue for the last couple of weeks - no easy task with even mainstream media outlets resorting to over the top rhetoric when discussing the issue:
...the plan is to force the hiring of more conservative faculty members at the state universities through encouragement, mandate or extortion.
Sure it is. Walker's analysis is a little more, ah, reasonable.
Here's what I know: Certain academic fields are populated with a preponderance of leftists. This annoys many right-wingers. The Colorado legislature, controlled by Republicans, would like to get more conservatives into college faculties, and have proposed putting the 'Academic Bill of Rights' into law.
ABOR doesn't call for ideological quotas for faculties, which is the charge leftists have levelled. But obviously the Republicans in the lege think it will have some effect, why else would they propose it?
I'm imagining what ideology quotas would look like. Conservative pundits have suggested looking at voter registrations when surveying faculty members. I could see a bunch of leftist professors registering as Republicans to circumvent the quotas. So that won't work.
What they'll need are loyalty pledges to identify real conservatives. Here's a possible oath for conservative profs:
"I hereby swear I'm conservative. I watch Fox News. I own a gun. I have never driven a Volvo, except as an undergrad. I always knew Al Franken was a little 'off.' I believe life begins at conception, and ends somewhere around the Boulder city limits.
So help me Reagan."
Maybe we can get quotas for Libertarians. There's an idea!
You'll have to write your own oath for that.
I don't know where the supposed liberal dominance is... my last semester at Metro State was taught by an English professor who believes that women shouldn't have the right to an education, and a sociology professor who believes Hitler was a model statesman. I personally don't believe it matters one iota what the political persuasion is of the mathematics professor or the computer science professor.