Campus Colors And how to change them.Jun 19, 2003
Lesson Learned
This space often has pointed out that higher education's devotion to diversity is only skin-deep: Schools want faculty and students to look different but think alike. Recently Smith College reinforced that lesson for an assistant professor who has been denied tenure - in apparent part because he leans to the right.
In the past couple of years James Miller has, in his words, come "out of the closet as a conservative" by writing for National Review Online. His views irked at least one faculty member who voted against Miller. Wrote she:
I would also refer the committee to a piece included in Jim's "Journalistic Articles" packet: the Guest Comment on NRO entitled "Campus Colors," in which Jim says, among other things, that "professors are mostly left-wing," that "the large number of non-U.S. citizens in American colleges necessarily makes these schools less patriotic," and that "practically the only way for a women's-studies professor to get a lifetime college appointment is for her to contribute to the literature on why America is racist, sexist, and homophobic." I find it extremely disturbingly [sic] that this could be Jim's image of academia.
A Smith senior endorses some of Miller's views when he says, "It's hard to point to a single professor besides Jim Miller [who] is an active conservative voice in the economics department." Evidently some on the tenure committee think that view is mistaken, and want to prove it by purging an uncloseted moderate. A grievance committee at the school agreed Miller had been wronged. Still, any other Smith faculty conservatives want to say there aren't enough faculty conservatives?
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