Stanford Crackdown on Hoover

There’s only one thing that a politically correct university hates more than hosting a conservative think tank on its campus and that is when the guest scholar accumulates more prestige than the host institution.

Then the institution of higher learning might make a hamfisted attempt to regulate the wayward scholars, applying discipline it would never dream of inflicting on its own faculty. Such a situation may be transpiring at Stanford.

“You may have heard that former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was offered a one-year visiting fellowship at the Hoover Institution to serve on a terrorism task force,” Jason Dunkel of The Stanford Review writes in a letter to subscribers. “Prominent faculty members like Professor Philip Zimbardo immediately attacked the appointment.”

“Zimbardo’s latest book, The Lucifer Effect, focuses on the rare bad behavior of our military personnel and blames it on the ‘evil’ influence of leaders like Secretary Rumsfeld and President Bush.” Dunkel is the business manager for The Stanford Review.

Zimbardo’s ratemyprofessor.com ratings do not contradict Dunkel’s assessment: “kind of full of himself, but hell he’s the ****,” one reviewer wrote and “funny, interesting, likes to talk about himself a lot,” wrote another. Moreover, those were his favorable ratings.

As we pointed out a few years ago, in head-to-head comparisons of Stanford’s best and brightest and Hoover’s, the latter easily outclass the former. Naturally, Stanford celebrates its own, no matter how dubious their achievements. Thus, Stanford lionizes Paul Ehrlich, who specializes in forecasting apocalypses that never materialize.

By way of comparison, Hoover’s Thomas Sowell, whose economic assessments have proven to be consistently on the money, is nowhere near the hometown hero that Biology Boy is.

Back to Rumsfeld. “In retaliation for Rumsfeld’s appointment, the Faculty Senate is trying to assert more control over Hoover’s operations,” Dunkel reports. “Left-wing students are planning to harass Rumsfeld with mock war crimes trials, while the undergraduate senate nearly passed a resolution condemning Mr. Rumsfeld’s appointment.”

“The left is ascendant at Stanford University and this lunacy is how it uses its power.”

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.