Are Conservative Historians Excluded from Search Committees?

Shortly after 9/11, I was at an eastern university. The kids'll take me out to a local diner before the speech, and the faculty advisor will often be there. And here he was, and he was a white-haired – all of the conservative professors are white-haired – a white-haired professor in the History Department, Senior Professor of History. And I said to him, "How does it work?" And he said, "Well, they haven't allowed me on a Search Committee since 1985." He said, "In that year I chaired the Search Committee and of course we hired a Marxist. And I said, "Of course." Because conservatives believe in process and educational values; you should be exposed to diverse viewpoints.

The left, as John Diggins once said – John Diggins is a kind of Johnson liberal, or Hubert Humphrey liberal, who were liberals when liberals were actually liberal. I was at a American Studies Association meeting with him, in a room full of academic leftists, and he said, "You know, we liberals let you in, and you came in, and you closed the door behind you."

So this Senior Professor said, "They hired a Marxist." Then, he said, "This year we had an opening for a Professor of Asian History, and I saw that the most qualified candidate was from Stanford. And he didn't get the job. So I asked the Chair of the Search Committee what happened? And he said, 'Well, you're absolutely right, he was the best qualified for the job, and we had a terrific interview. But then we all went out to lunch, and he let on that he was for school vouchers.'" Did you get that? If you have the wrong position on school vouchers, you must be politically incorrect about the Ming Dynasty.

I wish that that was all it was, but what it really is, is power. The idea of academic leftists is, "We cannot afford to let somebody in who is not with the program, because they might let another one in, and another, and we would lose control.

There were 150 campus demonstrations against America defending herself within 2 or 3 weeks after 9/11. This is reflection of the dominance of the left on America's campuses.

At Brown, when I did my Reparations campaign, the leader, the faculty leader of the left, is somone who publishes in the Communist Party's "theoretical journal." He's a specialist in "black philosophy." The Brown Daily Herald printed my ad; my ad was about why reparations was a bad idea. The left attacked the Brown Daily Herald as a racist paper. You have to understand these kids, the editors, had debated the big debate six months before – this was the spring of 2001 – was whether to endorse Ralph Nader or Al Gore; that's who these kids are. They were attacked as racist. The entire issue of the Brown Daily Herald was stolen and destroyed by the left. The President of the university made a very mild statement saying that we shouldn't be destroying newspapers at Brown. Sixty – sixty – members of the Brown faculty signed a statement attacking the President and defending the theft of the papers. That's the situation at Brown.

I think there were four professors who actually came out and defended me, which was four times as many as came out at any other university. Two in the medical school and one botanist, who had written a book on Darwin and design theory. And one music professor whose career and life had been ruined for many years by a false accusation from the feminists – he looked at somebody the wrong way or something. Those were the four who defended me.

This translates into the fact that what students are regularly taught in universities, to put it bluntly, is to be ashamed of their country; to look on America as a racist, sexist, imperialist monster. In other words, the Great Satan, which is why you have so much sympathy on college campuses for our enemies.