Conservatives on campus (if there are any) are the last minority it is legitimate to denigrate and belittle.
In the post immediately below I quoted Stanley Fish dissing the idea of “diversity” as nothing more than empty prattle. “Diversity,” Fish claims, “is a political rather than a substantive rallying cry” that you demand only when “your enemies dominate the playing field.”
At present Fish and friends dominate the playing fields of academia, and as I argue below they regard any effort to displace them as an assault on their academic freedom, even though they don’t believe in academic freedom. Listen to Fish’s response (not quoted below) to the argument that the diversity principle (if it is a principle) should demand a greater representation of conservatives on faculties:
And as for the assertion that “faculties skew overwhelmingly to the left,” I would say first, that it is a supply-side problem — if conservatives really want to spend their lives teaching modern poetry and Byzantine art, they should stop whining and do the dissertations and write the books, and they’ll get the jobs — and second, that it’s not a problem.
Imagine the outcry if a powerful dean at a major state university, responding to criticism that faculties were too white, replied in Fish’s exact words except for substituting “minorities” for “conservatives.”
What’s more, the diversity brigades are busy encouraging faculties to define their searches (and thus the future course offerings) by the research and teaching interests represented by diverse candidates rather than currently perceived needs.