Jean Yarbrough on the NAS Bowdoin Report

Don’t miss this. It is the best essay I have read on the liberal dominance of higher education in a long time . Nothing fancy, just the situation.

Yarbrough, a professor of political science at Bowdoin, and the author of excellent books on TR and TJ , responded to her school newspaper’s request for her judgment of the new NAS report on Bowdoin.  That report, as we have discussed here, has received some just criticism, including from conservatives, as Yarbrough acknowledges.  But her overall judgment is positive:

. . . This said, much of what the NAS report describes is, I am sorry to say, spot on. First, the report traces the steady retreat from the core texts of Western civilization and their replacement with a much more ideological and multicultural curriculum.

Another taste:

. . . As a recent chair of the government department, I have seen the lengths to which the administration is willing to go to identify and recruit such candidates. Every faculty search must now include a member of the Diversity Committee, whose main purpose is to ensure that the members of the department give every consideration to diversity hires. These committee members, being drawn from other disciplines, usually have no knowledge of the field, though that does not deter them from weighing in during the selection process, sometimes quite vociferously.

At many colleges, this is a huge and under-reported problem. The public would be scandalized to learn just how many times departments working in good-faith to overcome their various ideological, turf, and personal divisions to finally agree upon a candidate, or a slate of them, are then essentially told by some clueless administrator to pick the woman or the person of color over who they have selected, if any such is marginally plausible/available, or, to scuttle the search process and start over. Many departments do not cave to such ham-handed pressure, but the scandal is how regularly it is brought to bear.

Anyhow, back to Yarbrough. Let’s finish with her wise words about the need for more conservatives in academe:

. . . I am not suggesting that there needs to be proportional representation of opposing views, but in a country where political opinion is nearly evenly divided, the current political imbalance of the faculty does our students no favor.