Affirmative Action for Conservatives

Does it bother most students at the University of Colorado-Boulder, that their school is known as a den of left-wing lunacy?

Probably not.

In fact, “sophomore Marissa Malouff” views her campus as a sort of re-education camp,” said the Wall Street Journal. Although “sheltered rich kids from out-of-state might come for the snow-boarding, . . .while they’re here they get dunked in a simmering pot of left-wing idealism. And that, in her view, is how it should be.”

But “Bud Peterson,” the school’s Republican Chancellor, thinks that campus diversity should mean more than just loading up the curriculum with courses like Chicano studies and transgender literature.

He plans to spice up the school’s liberal menu by raising $9 million for an endowed chair in Conservative Political Thought –the first of its kind in the country.

The announcement has already raised eyebrows on this campus—the former home of ethnic studies prof Ward Churchill—where tofu hot dogs are all the rage, where a recent pro-marijuana rally attracted 10,000 people—and where “the 800-strong faculty includes just 32 Republicans,” according to the Wall Street Journal.

Peterson’s plan to set up a rotating roster of conservative scholars, and others like Condoleezza Rice and George Will could definitely shake up U.C. Boulder’s ideological landscape.

As John Leo reported in a recent column:

(1.) “Conservatives are prone to mysterious outbursts of unaccountable mirth. This can occur at any time, for instance immediately after someone suggests attending a convention of the Modern Language Association, or when a professor points out that studying Madonna is just as good as studying Shakespeare.

(2.) “Conservatives often go months without using the word ‘marginalized,’ which clearly puts a damper on faculty conversation.

(3.) “Though they speak fairly well, conservatives are notoriously weak in diversity-speak and postmodern expression. . . As Judith Butler once quipped, inducing a burst of appreciative laughter from her audience, ‘right wingers lack libidinal multiplicity and melancholic structure, very likely because they are so sadly saddled by the binary frame and univocal signification.’ Indeed, who among us can disagree?”

Leo sums up the dilemma by wondering what would happen if the “generous allowance of a token” conservative on campus would suddenly erupt into an “pen-borders policy” that could eventually change the culture of academia?

Stay tuned.

Deborah Lambert writes the Squeaky Chalk column for Accuracy in Academia.