Friday, December 03, 2004

These hallowed halls?

The following quote comes from a thought provoking article featured in this week's Economist (linked above):

"Academia is simultaneously both the part of America that is most obsessed with diversity, and the least diverse part of the country. On the one hand, colleges bend over backwards to hire minority professors and recruit minority students, aided by an ever-burgeoning bureaucracy of “diversity officers”. Yet, when it comes to politics, they are not just indifferent to diversity, but downright allergic to it."

As someone who recently graduated from a prestigious, and reflexively socialist, university, this type of analysis smacks of the obvious. But it might not be as clear to many of my culturally enlightened illuminati (new word for this ad hoc intellectual posse that seems to have developed), even though many of us left college much more liberal than we entered it. It's as difficult to be conservative in an agressively liberal institution as it is to be an evangelical in an atheistic one (perhaps more difficult, especially if you happen to be a conservative evangelical instead of a liberal one, as is the unlikely norm among Christians in these places).

It's hard to explain if you're not used to seeing it. A quick read of the article might give you a glimpse. I imagine that it's a varient of good ol' fashioned prejudice. And prejudice of any stripe is concerning.

I realize, of course, that it's bizarre to consider myself an "oppressed minority" as a "conservative Christian white male." But in reality, that definition puts me on par with the likes of Satan, Karl Rove, and Hitler as far as most Yalies are concerned. Even Stalin gets a better rap. Think about it...
Grace & Peace

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