Horowitz 1, Goodman 0

Liberal columnist Ellen Goodman published another dozy this weekend mocking efforts of conservatives, especially David Horowitz, to promote ideological diversity among college professors. Goodman's article follows several recent surveys showing that liberals overwhelmingly dominate the faculty, with the imbalance likely increasing.

I've always rated Goodman the worst opinion writer in America. To her credit, however, she doesn't dispute the statistics showing the left is in charge on campus. Instead, she:

1. intimates liberal control of academia is a fair trade for conservative control of American's government and business--"many of us assume the right is busily targeting the highest court as their last unoccupied power base. . . .If the faculty clubs are blue, corporate management offices are red."


2. professes astonishment that the right would co-opt the language and tactics of the left--"What is fascinating, however, is to see how the campus watchers have usurped the language of liberalism for their own."


3. suggests that diversity in academia isn't important--"let us not forget that campuses are still lacking in the old-fashioned kind of diversity."

I wish Goodman were correct that conservatives were in charge at the Supreme Court and elsewhere in the Federal government. In fact, however, compasses of the Judiciary still point left, as does the Executive Branch bureaucracy (as shown by the CIA's war on the Bush Administration). And Goodman's surprise when assault by syllogisms of the left shows she hasn't considered the full consequences of her diversity rhetoric. It's also straight from the pages of Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon:

"I strenuously object to being labeled and pigeonholed and stereotyped as a technocrat," Randy said, deliberately using oppressed-person's language, maybe in an attempt to turn their weapons against them. . . Some of them, out of habit, looked at him soberly; etiquette dictated that you give all sympathy to the oppressed. (Mass market paperback ed. at 84.)

Worse still, Goodman's column utterly fails to support the liberal case. As is well known, yet ignored by Ms. Goodman, the Supreme Court just locked-in racial preferences in college admissions. The Court found that promoting "diversity" among students was a sufficiently important governmental interest to overcome the 14th Amendment's prohibition on racial discrimination. But if diversity among students is educational, surely diversity among teachers is even better. Yet Goodman's column doesn't even mention affirmative action, and thus elides Horowitz's central point: No matter how diverse the student body, college education today is mono-chromatic. Today's leftist facility knows, and teaches, only blue-state values.

I don't doubt Ellen Goodman's enjoys capturing the college campus. But her column never supplies a plausible policy rationale nor defends limiting diversity to students, not teachers. Why? Simple: it's indefensible.