I had a debate with a colleague on an online scholarly list some time back. I suggested that promoting his own political agenda through off-topic posts, which were entirely irrelevant to the subject of the list, was inappropriate since it assumed (or at least the way he was doing it assumed) that list members were in agreement with his views, meaning left-leaning. He argued that he, as a liberal, was in the political minority not only in the U.S. in general but in Academia. Since he was as an openly gay man and a queer theorist, I could give him the benefit of the doubt on those grounds for America in general. But, as a gay academic? Or, as a liberal academic?

Now there, I drew the line. I told him that was utterly ridiculous. As a sometimes left and sometimes right leaning independent academic (depending on the issue), I could make a good case for the exclusion of the right as well as the assumptions of the left holding sway. In fact, it's the last that bothers me most.

I expect thinkers to interrogate their value assumptions, especially trained doctors of philosophy. That's not too much to ask of the profession -- or so I would have thought.

I don't say that all academics are failing or fallen in this regard. The better scholars are flexible and discerning. But, there are plenty who disappoint, and not a few of them are the star players in the Humanities.

To this end, I reproduce portions of George Will's recent column in the Washington Post on the left in higher education, which is, of course, a significant influence on college students as well as US intellectual production:

Academia, Stuck To the Left

[...]

One study of 1,000 professors finds that Democrats outnumber Republicans at least seven to one in the humanities and social sciences. That imbalance, more than double what it was three decades ago, is intensifying because younger professors are more uniformly liberal than the older cohort that is retiring.

Another study, of voter registration records, including those of professors in engineering and the hard sciences, found nine Democrats for every Republican at Berkeley and Stanford. Among younger professors, there were 183 Democrats, six Republicans.

But we essentially knew this even before the American Enterprise magazine reported in 2002 on examinations of voting records in various college communities. Some findings about professors registered with the two major parties or with liberal or conservative minor parties:

Cornell: 166 liberals, 6 conservatives.

Stanford: 151 liberals, 17 conservatives.

Colorado: 116 liberals, 5 conservatives.

UCLA: 141 liberals, 9 conservatives.

The nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics reports that in 2004, of the top five institutions in terms of employee per capita contributions to presidential candidates, the third, fourth and fifth were Time Warner, Goldman Sachs and Microsoft. The top two were the University of California system and Harvard, both of which gave about 19 times more money to John Kerry than to George W. Bush.

But George Lakoff, a linguistics professor at Berkeley, denies that academic institutions are biased against conservatives. The disparity in hiring, he explains, occurs because conservatives are not as interested as liberals in academic careers. Why does he think liberals are like that? "Unlike conservatives, they believe in working for the public good and social justice." That clears that up.

A filtering process, from graduate school admissions through tenure decisions, tends to exclude conservatives from what Mark Bauerlein calls academia's "sheltered habitat." In a dazzling essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Bauerlein, professor of English at Emory University and director of research and analysis at the National Endowment for the Arts, notes that the "first protocol" of academic society is the "common assumption" -- that, at professional gatherings, all the strangers in the room are liberals.

It is a reasonable assumption, given that in order to enter the profession, your work must be deemed, by the criteria of the prevailing culture, "relevant." Bauerlein says that various academic fields now have regnant premises that embed political orientations in their very definitions of scholarship:

"Schools of education, for instance, take constructivist theories of learning as definitive, excluding realists (in matters of knowledge) on principle, while the quasi-Marxist outlook of cultural studies rules out those who espouse capitalism. If you disapprove of affirmative action, forget pursuing a degree in African-American studies. If you think that the nuclear family proves the best unit of social well-being, stay away from women's studies."

This gives rise to what Bauerlein calls the "false consensus effect," which occurs when, because of institutional provincialism, "people think that the collective opinion of their own group matches that of the larger population." There also is what Cass Sunstein, professor of political science and jurisprudence at the University of Chicago, calls "the law of group polarization." Bauerlein explains: "When like-minded people deliberate as an organized group, the general opinion shifts toward extreme versions of their common beliefs." They become tone-deaf to the way they sound to others outside their closed circle of belief.

[...]

Many campuses are intellectual versions of one-party nations -- except such nations usually have the merit, such as it is, of candor about their ideological monopolies. In contrast, American campuses have more insistently proclaimed their commitment to diversity as they have become more intellectually monochrome.

They do indeed cultivate diversity -- in race, skin color, ethnicity, sexual preference. In everything but thought.

Amen, Brother George. Ain't it the truth.