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March 04, 2005

The Wrong Approach To Ward

Insta links to a column in the Rocky Mountain News by Mike Rosen which to my reading strikes several wrong notes on the scandal. While I fully agree that campus speech codes and the like need to be abolished, what we don't need is to set up hiring quotas for conservative professors or set up anti-liberal universities. That's just as bad as what is done now. What needs to happen is for universities and faculty to admit their bias and base hiring and decisions upon teaching ability and scholarship and to develop minimum standards of accountability for tenured faculty and enforce them. Teach a class occasionally? Check. Advise some undergraduates occasionally? Check. That sort of stuff. A segregated university system is in no one's interest.

(yes, yes another Ward post)

Posted by Mr. Bingley at March 4, 2005 01:02 PM

Comments

I agree that quotas are not the way to go, but the problem is that university departments hire people with whom they are comfortable. Hiring isn't done through the administration, but through the faculty. If you are openly conservative, you won't be hired because none of your interviewers will like you. In so many cases, scholarship now means politics by other means; the quality of your scholarship equals the ideology of your scholarship. It's not like business, where effectiveness matters more than ideology.

Posted by: NJ Sue at March 4, 2005 10:40 PM