My college did a similar thing a couple of years ago using a book by Barbara Ehrenreich about low wage workers. Naturally, there was no conservative book to counter what old Babs wrote.
I had a discussion about this with the assoc. dean of the faculty and he suggested that any discussion of the Ehrenreich book would be balanced. I asked him: "Are you suggesting that 50% of the faculty voted for George W. Bush in the last election?" His response: Silence.
I think it exceedingly ironic that many liberal arts institutions around the nation are kept alive by very generous donations from many conservative folks.
Too often faculty members forget that the college exists for the students - not for them. No students, no college.
"The most fundamental fact about the ideas of the political left is that they do not work. Therefore we should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive." --Thomas Sowell
An Inconvenient Truth is part of my daughter's required reading for her freshman year in college. I'm going to have some fun with that one by rebutting those "truths" which are in fact not supported by the evidence.
Actually, the college should exist for the people who are actually paying for it, and that is overwhelmingly NOT the students, but rather a combination of parents and taxpayers. Most of the idiocy in academia has arisen because the faculty and administration ARE letting clueless 17-21 year olds call the shots.
Since a huge percentage of students are getting federally subsidized loans and grants, and many parents who are paying all or part of the cost don't have the guts to take charge of the decision as to where to spend tuition money, colleges market themselves to 17 year old high school students, few of whom have earned any significant portion of the money that THEY will decide where to spend on college education. As a result, we have dorms for "gender-neutral" students, endless student-directed indoctrination sessions at freshman orientation, majors in "Queer Studies", and a faculty whose hiring and tenure is largely guided by undergraduates and who accordingly teach stuff that undergraduates find entertaining.