Liberal Obsolescence

By James Bowman
The American Spectator

On the same day that my review of George Stade's academic novel Sex and Violence appeared in the Wall Street Journal, John Tierney in the New York Times took up that old favorite question of why university professors are so liberal. Mr. Stade, who teaches English at Columbia, has lived for so long among people who think exactly as he does that he does not even think it in bad taste -- let alone wrong and deplorable -- to have his narrator and alter ego toss off the observation that Rush Limbaugh deserves to die. That hardly even counts as a controversial observation, I'm guessing, in the Columbia faculty lounge. But the profs do read the New York Times, so they were glad to write in to Mr. Tierney suggesting some possible explanations for the lack of conservatives in the academy. In his column he shared them with us. They are as follows:

1. Conservatives do not value knowledge for its own sake.
2. Conservatives do not care about the social good.
3. Conservatives are too greedy to work for professors' wages.
4. Conservatives are too dumb to get tenure.