I like John Tierney. I like that he showed up – not wearing a wig and dark glasses – at the NR 50th anniversary gala. But have you noticed how many of his columns are attempts to explain to liberals ideas and trends that conservatives have for years taken for granted?
His column today explores liberal bias on the campus. It’s a good column but it’s stuff readers of the Corner already know and, like most of you, I’m put off by the Times new fee-for-reading. (But since I run a little think tank we subscribe to the DT version of the major papers and so get on-line privileges as well.)
Best bits:
“The filtering out of conservatives in the job pipeline rarely works by outright blackballing,” said Mark Bauerlein, a conservative who is an English professor at Emory. “It doesn’t have to. The intellectual focus of the disciplines does that by itself. …
“Social scientists call it the false consensus effect: a group’s conviction that its opinions are the norm. Liberals on campus have become so used to hearing their opinions reinforced that they have a hard time imagining there are intelligent people with different views, either on campus or in politics. …
“Conservatives complain about this imbalance in academia, but in some ways they’ve benefited from being outcasts. They’ve been toughened by confronting skeptics on campus and working at think tanks in Washington involved in the political fray. They’ve come up with ideas – welfare reform, school vouchers, all kinds of privatization schemes – that have been adopted around the country and the world .…
“But how many big ideas from liberal academics are on anyone’s agenda? Democratic politicians are desperately trying to find something newer than the New Deal to run on next year. They’re glad to take campaign contributions from professors, but they’re leery of ideas from intellectuals who’ve have been talking to themselves for so long.”
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