— Comment #96304 by Jason Arvak and replies
Of Pots and Kettles and Krugman
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1. Posted by Jason Arvak ›

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   Jason Arvak Buckeye, the "scholar with a strong background in conservative ideas" would not exist in your hypothetical situation because it is generally not possible to build such a background in graduate school in the first place. When I inquired in my political theory core seminar as to why the syllabus contained literally dozens of left-leaning works (including multiple readings by Marx and Gramsci) and exactly zero elements from conservative thinkers (unless Plato suddenly counts as a conservative), I was met with stunned silence and a belatedly lame, "well, I guess I might consider a Hayek piece next year". And even that paltry concession was considered intolerable by the overwhelming majority. In addition, I have directly seen suspicions of conservatism discussed as a potential reason to reject a candidate for an academic position. Leftist bias is so pervasive and accountability so absent that ideological bigots sometimes don't even feel the need to hide it beneath neutral-sounding cover stories about scholarship (and because the review process for journal and book publications is so opaque, ideological bias can even be used to CREATE a deficit in scholarly quality). And if a conservative scholar did somehow manage to make it through the leftist grad school process and the hiring process minefield where s/he could be rejected for any reason -- including ideologically arbitrary reasons -- without ANY recourse, s/he certainly would not be allowed to create 100% conservative syllabi without being utterly destroyed in the peer teaching review and tenure review processes. The best s/he would be able to achieve would be a relative balance which, when combined with the 100% leftist content that characterizes the rest of academia in the humanities AND the social sciences, would result in effectively the same kind of marginalization and Balkanization of conservatives that characterizes the status quo. There are many tools for reinforcing the liberal ideological bias of academia, and they are used shamelessly. Whether it is ideologically convenient for Kast to talk about or not (and there is a pretty consistent ideological pattern to the issues he considers unworthy of consideration and/or intolerable for discussion), the fact is that the liberal hegemony in academia is not a result of factors that are either purely accidental or purely meritorious. Whether you want to call them "cheating" or not, the behavior is definitely a betrayal of any genuinely liberal or soundly pedagogical principles.