“Without broader hiring reforms, proto right-wing employees will continue to control big business. Several states are trying to dictate what conservative executives should and shouldn’t instruct employees about, but these efforts similarly don’t reach the core of big business’s sickness – the commercial monopoly of right-wing thought that guarantees its continued malignancy.” It’s bothersome, isn’t it? Members of the left trying to force their viewpoints into private businesses.
Except that a left winger didn’t write the above. No doubt they have, but what you just read is a rewording of the 2nd paragraph of an opinion piece penned by conservative professor emeritus (UC Santa Cruz) John Ellis. Ellis’s was titled “The Public Needs Campus Viewpoint Diversity.” Here’s what he wrote:
“Without broader staffing reforms, radical left-wing professors will still control higher education. Several states are trying to dictate what professors should and shouldn’t teach, but these efforts similarly don’t reach the core of academia’s sickness—the political monopoly that guarantees its continued malignancy.”
To read Ellis is to see the unfortunate road conservatives are traveling on to allegedly fix university education. For the longest time those same conservatives correctly pushed back against quotas of any kind. How things have changed. It’s conservatives allowing their obsessive desire to alter the ideological mix on college campuses to turn them into the left wingers they long abhorred. It won’t work.
The simple, rather bullish truth that conservatives refuse to acknowledge amid their relentless push to nail left-wing universities is that they’re that way largely because it’s left-wingers who tend to migrate toward academia. Conversely, a right that’s reverent of private enterprise tends to migrate toward private enterprise.
Think Jeff Bezos. The founder of Amazon attended Princeton, naturally he couldn’t major in the industry he invented, but eventually he took his talents from the hedge fund world to Seattle where he started Amazon. Bezos is a known free thinker (see his letter about looming changes to the editorial page lean at the Washington Post), at which point let’s ask a simple question: would conservatives have preferred that he had gone the academic route after college to equalize the ideological balance at elite colleges allegedly defined by “rot”? Hopefully the question answers itself.
Hellbound and Down 