Conservatives Are Too Stupid For Duke University

The Collegiate Network ^ | 4/12/04

[dukeman]

On February 9, the Duke Conservative Union (DCU) www.dukeconservativeunion.org published an advertisement in the campus newspaper, The Chronicle, that included two quotations from Duke President Nan Keohane:

"My message is straightforward: Diversity is an important value that must be nurtured and used in higher education."
-Nan Keohane, November 1997

"...people learn better when they are challenged by things that they don't expect, when they do not have all their prejudices and assumptions confirmed, but instead have some of their ideas shaken up as part of an education."
-Nan Keohane, February 2003

The DCU then proceeded to list the party affiliation statistics of Duke's deans and eight University departments, which revealed an approximate Democrat-Republican ratio of 17-1. Then they asked a simple question: "Is this diversity?"

In a stunning response to the DCU advertisement, Professor Robert Brandon, Chair of the Philosophy Department, is quoted in The Chronicle on February 10 as saying,

"We try to hire the best, smartest people available. If, as John Stuart Mill said, stupid people are generally conservative, then there are lots of conservatives we will never hire. Mill's analysis may go some way towards explaining the power of the Republican party in our society and the relative scarcity of Republicans in academia. Players in the NBA tend to be taller than average. There is a good reason for this. Members of academia tend to be a bit smarter than average. There is a good reason for this too."

The sentiment itself is shocking coming from the chair of any academic department, but also shocking is the fact that the chairman of the philosophy department at Duke is misquoting John Stuart Mill. What Mill wrote, in a footnote discussing Disraeli in Considerations on Representative Government, was that the Conservative Party in England was “the stupidest party.”

Additional Information:

Durham, We Have a Problem: http://www.newsensemagazine.org/article.php?aid=32

[dukeman]

I would have said that the good professor's sentiment was dismaying, not shocking. "Shock" connotes a degree of surprise. I am not surprised by liberal narrow-mindedness.

[nmh]

Liberals are intolerant and simply can not handle being challenged. It makes em go ballistic, so they seek their own out.

[2banana]

Change the word "conservative" to "Black" or "Jew" to really understand whom you are dealing with...

[NotQuiteCricket]

"Conservative Party in England was “the stupidest party.”"

And I thought England's politics were all ass backwards to the US's? Meaning that conservative there would be liberal here? Or am I just completely confused?

[ModelBreaker]

I would have said that the good professor's sentiment was dismaying, not shocking. "Shock" connotes a degree of surprise. I am not surprised by liberal narrow-mindedness.

I asked my social studies teacher in about 7th grade this same question. 'Why are teachers all socialists?' She gave me the same lame answer. Didn't buy it then. Don't buy it now.

[Gorjus]

Members of academia tend to be a bit smarter than average.

Yeah, right. That's why teachers tend to be in the lowest third (or worse) of college grads - despite dumbed-down courses in all colleges of 'Education.'

Besides, the issue of the article was not 'intelligence' but diversity. And the question remains valid: Is a 17:1 ratio an indication of diversity? Of course, the self-declared geniuses were either not smart enough or not intellectually honest enough to answer the question.

[MrB]

leftist "diversity"

A bunch of people (though no whites, Asians, or heterosexuals, or Europeans)
who define themselves by where they prefer to rub their genitals

all with the same opinion.

[Hillarys Gate Cult]

So according to Keohane, all student must play the game show "Who wants to be a liberal?" and pay allot of money for the privilege.

[wordsofearnest]

"Those who can, do"
"Those who can't, teach"
"Those who can't teach, Administrate"

Fits the Duke people to a tee.

[RipSawyer]

After nearly sixty years of this life, I have become experienced enough to realize that the truly intelligent do not brag about being smarter than others, those who do brag in this way usually turn out to be lacking in any meaningful measure of intelligence.

[wordsofearnest]

Those who can't, teach= Those who can't do, teach

[NotQuiteCricket]

http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/22/mar04/notes.htm

bwahahaha This is a good read.

[alex]

Guys, there is a silver lining there: US pinkos are busy building their academic careers in well insulated institutional settings instead of being busy building bombs in US cities.

[Agnes Heep]

One unalterable tenet is that “everything is political”: that the traditional academic ideals of objectivity and disinterestedness are pernicious fictions and therefore that all academic pursuits can be, indeed must be, evaluated in political terms.

Here's a quote from Solzhenitsyn (The Gulag Archipelago) regarding life as a teacher in the Soviet Union:

Or rather, you had to be more of a hypocrite than before, had to tell the children many more lies--because the lies had had time to mature, and to permeate the syllabus in versions painstakingly elaborated by experts on teaching technique and by school inspectors. In every lesson, whether it was pertinent or not, whether you were studying the anatomy of worms or the use of conjunctions in complex sentences, you were required to take a kick at God (even if you yourself believed in Him); you could not omit singing the praises of our boundless freedom (even if you had lain awake expecting a knock in the night); whether you were reading Turgenev to the class or tracing the course of the Dnieper with your ruler, you had to anathematize the poverty-stricken past and hymn our present plenty (though long before the war you and the children had watched whole villages dying of hunger, and in the towns a child's ration had been 300 grams). ... None of this was considered a sin against the truth, against the soul of the child, or against the Holy Ghost.

[Redbob]

"Those who can't teach, Administrate"

Make that last word "administer," a verb, and I'm with you 100%!

[Cicero]

In my experience, what happened in academia over the past 40 years was that whenever conservatives ran a department, they hired the best people regardless of their politics, but whenever leftists ran a department they hired only leftists, regardless of their competence.

As a result, most departments are now dominated by leftists, and they refuse to hire anyone but more leftist clones of themselves.

The same thing tends to be true of homosexuals or lesbians. They hire their own.

It's similar to what you see in national politics. The Republicans foolishly try to be fair. The Democrats go all out for their own interests above anything else. What you get is a stacked deck.

[Travis McGee]

bttt

[wingster]

"Liberals are intolerant and simply can not handle being challenged. It makes em go ballistic, so they seek their own out."

YUP!

Suppressing freedom of speech is one of their main tools. Any opinion that someone holds outside of their own is "bigoted", or "racist", or "sexist", or "...phobic."

It is a laugh riot tho. I wonder what would happen if every conservative student transferred after this spring?

Just one more reason why homeschooling and self education post H.S. seem to be more and more beneficial than "education" (read indoctrination) at the "establishment" schools.

Ironic, isn't it; that these people, the hippies, the '60s free-everything generation, the "anti-establishmentarians", are now that same "establishment" that they once despised. LOL

"Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools..."

"Answer a fool according to his folly, or he will be wise in his own eyes."

[cpdiii]

If his premise is true about conservatives being stupid why are the following graduates more Republican than Democrat.

1. Medicine
2. Pharmacy
3. Engineering
4. Chemistry
5. Physics
6. Geology
7. Mathematics
8. Aviation

The above majors do not spend a lot of time contemplating their naval, taking basket weaving, courses in self esteem, ethnic history, art appreciation, or espousing the wisdom of Karl Marx. They go to class, take their tests, and then start studying for the next test. At the end of 4 or 12 years depending on their major that are rewarded with significantly higher wages for their hard earned skills.

I do believe that the lunatics are running the asylum>

[BlueNgold]

Academics tend to collect in small circles, and they continually convince each other that they are smarter than the rest.

I recently had a teacher who graduated from the local state college lamenting how dumb conservatives are: GWB, Newt, even knocking Frist.

I asked them if they knew that Newt was a highly respected historian and professor - shock, no.

I asked if they really considered Sen Frist, an M.D. with impeccable credentials 'stupid'? Himm and Haww, no of course not.

And The President, our first President to hold an MBA, and a Harvard MBA at that, can you think of anyone else you would dare to call stupid with Yale/Harvard credentials? No of course not.

They finally admitted it was entirely personal and that they considered conservatives in general to be stupid simply based on political differences.

Note: One of the toughest colleges to get into in the nation remains The United States Naval Academy at Annapolis. My entering year the acceptance rate was less than 5% of applicants, and we had a higher avg exam score than even MIT. Lots of really smart people, and generally conservative as well. The two do in fact mix.