Great piece in the LA Daily News today by Leonard Adleman. The ostensible crux of the article is to give reason why Rush Limbaugh should have received an honorary doctorate (an idea I am not necessarily super-keen on), but the subtle (and, I think, real) point behind the story is a little lower in the article….
But there is a bigger reason why I support giving him an honorary degree: Because I value intellectual diversity . . . intellectual diversity has all but vanished from America’s campuses. We are failing in our duty to provide our students with a broad spectrum of ideas from which to choose. Honoring Limbaugh, or someone like him, would help to make the academy more intellectually diverse.
The great liberal ideas that swept through our universities when I was a student at Berkeley in the 1960s have long ago been digested and largely embraced in academia. Liberalism has triumphed. But a troubling legacy of that triumph is a nation whose professorate is almost entirely liberal.
In the 29 years I have been a professor, I do not recall encountering a single colleague who expressed conservative ideas [Adleman is a professor of computer science]. The left-wing accusations of Ward Churchill (Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters, Alfred University, 1992) are not the problem — the problem is the scarcity of professors who are inclined to rebut them. It is time for the nation’s universities to address this disturbing situation.
The lack of intellectual diversity in academia has been documented, much less myopic fields like my own. There is going to be a big turnover in academia in the next few years (well, in psychology/education, anyway), one can only hope that some of this functional diversity seeps through the cracks.
Posted by A. Beaujean at 09:27 PM