Wednesday, January 24, 2007
Editorial: When 'diversity' means something else
One Virginia delegate would shackle intellectual freedom on college campuses.
From the RoundTable blog
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There's a guerilla insurgency in the culture wars. Conservatives have donned their opponents' uniforms in an attempt to force their political views onto college campuses. Now they hope the General Assembly will aid their subterfuge.
Del. Steven Landes' House Bill 1643 sounds innocuous enough. It advocates "intellectual diversity and the free exchange of ideas." Everyone should support those.
Landes, however, is only camouflaging himself with the language of inclusion. The Augusta County Republican's agenda has nothing to do with diversity and a free exchange of ideas.
His bill would require Virginia's colleges and universities to report annually what they are doing to promote ideological balance. Schools, for example, would be expected to have a balanced roster of guest speakers and faculty.
Call it affirmative action for conservatives.
Highly educated members of academia tend to skew toward the left. State monitoring would pressure schools to favor conservatives in hiring lest the annual report not meet Landes' expectations.
Landes' ideological monitors almost certainly would not be watching for Marxists who don't get equal treatment.
Landes would also "eliminate any speech codes that restrict the freedom of speech." Again, it sounds good, but it's code for ending bans on hate speech and other particularly odious statements legally curtailed in order to foster an open, diverse campus environment.
Landes' proposal does not address any actual problem, and he concedes as much. Rather, it plays to a rabid base that assails the "ivory tower" and believes professors are indoctrinating students into their liberal cabal.
While the left might be winning the campus front of the culture war -- programs such as women's studies and schools of thought that question conventional orthodoxy flourish -- the right has been winning the public relations front by transforming its image into that of a beset-upon minority.
We hope lawmakers -- Landes aside -- are not so gullible and will allow universities to continue educating without ideological litmus tests.
