RIGHTIES IN ACADEME

Conservatives are displeased with our colleges and universities because they hire so many more liberals than conservatives in teaching positions. They try to make out that liberal profs are brainwashing their students or punishing them for having right-wing views. (This is unlikely, but all such allegations should be looked into conscientiously.)

And that's not all. They want more conservatives hired for balance. Can you imagine the nerve? Having opposed affirmative action for those who were wrongfully discriminated against, they now demand it for themselves!

Sorry, folks. An educational institution is precisely the kind of meritocracy you say you believe in. If you aren't competitive for professorships, the economy that your kind wrecked will enable you to compete for jobs at Wal-Mart.

But there are conservatives who do get places, even to the top, in our big schools. There was the president of a university at which I once worked as a peon. Him I will not forget.

This man served on commissions, etc. in a couple of Repub national administrations while making his mark in academic life. That was one indicator of his views. But there were others.

I was a (very small) part of the unsuccessful unionization drive among the university's white collar employees; the blue collar workers had succeeded in their drive and were affiliated with the UAW. The white collar types apparently considered themselves above something so plebeian, however much they were getting screwed over by the school. There were downright unsafe working conditions in some places on campus, but that didn't matter to the outcome.

The university president, meanwhile, was professing neutrality on the unionization issue until shortly before the balloting. Then he suddenly denounced unions as unsuited to academic venues and told us we should not second-guess his administration, which had our best interests at heart. (Someone commented that his upper-class British accent was an unfortunate accompaniment to this paternalistic message.)

In the meantime his administration had long since hired a union-busting law firm to frighten workers with propaganda and innuendo. So much for appealing to educated, rational decision-making by employees.

Education, as I understand it, is about enhancing our capacity for taking responsibility - for ourselves individually and in all that we are involved with. So when the head of a university tells me that I need not stand up for myself or join with others to insist on fairness and accountability because he will take care of us, I bristle; all the more so when he isn't taking care of us.

It is not unions but people like him that don't belong in higher education.

What he exhibited was what is typical of conservatism: the view that some of us count and the rest of us don't. The white collar workers did themselves dirt by identifying with this elitist notion instead of with one another and the blue collar workers. That was attitude over actuality.

It was the custom at that university to have its president alone be the speaker at its graduation exercises. So he would discourse on moral responsibility and good citizenship and the democratic humanitarian mission of our institutions, etc. And the students and faculty who knew what this man was and what hypocrisy he was capable of could have the privilege of listening to him, and not to someone outstanding from the greater world.

A little more liberalism wouldn't have hurt that school one bit.