First, the University of Colorado hired Republican rainmaker Bruce Benson as president. Now, it’s considering hiring a conservative faculty member.
What’s next? Ralphie the mascot at a John McCain rally? The William F. Buckley School of Journalism?
Rest assured, CU’s Boulder campus is still a hotbed of liberalism. But it really could use a little ideological diversity to go alongside those courses on gay literature, Chicano studies and feminist theory.
Chancellor Bud Peterson calls it “intellectual diversity” and plans to raise $9 million to create an endowed chair for the nation’s first professor of Conservative Thought and Policy.
The idea, which has been hanging around for a decade, is to bring someone of high stature (such as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice) to campus and pay him or her $200,000 to lecture about conservative thought and ideals. That person would then draw other prestigious personalities to the school as guest speakers for lively debates.
But is seeking out a conservative — as if he or she is some exotic zoo animal to behold — the right course to diversifying a campus?
“Like Margaret Mead among the Samoans, they’re planning to study conservatives. That’s hilarious,” columnist George Will told The Wall Street Journal last week. His name also was floated as the type of person CU might try to bring in.
The idea, on its face, doesn’t sound right at all. It reeks of tokenism. Affirmative action for conservatives, if you will.
But, hey, it’s a start.
Universities are supposed to be places where students are exposed to a rainbow of different people and ideas in order to challenge them and help them grow and further develop their thought processes.
And where else will the kids learn about conservatives if not in school? After all, Buckley is dead, and President Bush and most congressional Republicans sold out years ago.
CU, a school so worried about diversity that it bent over backwards to give a man of dubious American-Indian descent a tenure-track position, should worry about intellectual diversity. Of the 800-some faculty members, only 23 are Republicans, according to one professor’s survey quoted in last week’s Journal story.
To be fair, many liberal professors do expose students to other ways of thinking. But in an ideal setting, ideological diversity would be treated much the same way as we’ve come to treat ethnic or gender diversity. It would be more mainstreamed, and sprinkled equitably across campus. Milton Friedman would be taught in an economics class, for example, without all of the eye rolling and heavy sighs.
Peterson’s idea may be difficult to pull off. Just whose brand of conservatism is he hoping to peddle? There’s an ongoing struggle on the right between social conservatives, neoconservatives and free-market conservatives about what actually constitutes true conservatism.
Peterson came close to nailing down the perfect job description last week: “It’s not about flag burning or abortion,” he told The Post’s Allison Sherry. “We want scholars grounded in the writings of John Locke, Thomas Hobbes and Alexander Hamilton . . . people who can talk about those early works that formed a basis for the country.”
So why not try it, as long as the university stays true to its original intent? Peterson was quoted as saying that it’s not even imperative that the new professor of Conservative Thought and Policy be an actual conservative.
Because if CU hires a liberal to teach conservative theory, what’s the point? Then, it really would be like peering into that exotic animal’s cage.
Dan Haley can be reached at dhaley@denverpost.com.
