One of the most entertaining little sideshows to the ‘08 election was the one about Bill Ayers writing Barack Obama’s memoir Dreams from My Father. All the shouting about how Barack Hussein is really a Muslim was (and is) revolting and stupid and the birth certificate business was (and is) unimaginably tedious, and of course stupid as well. At least with Ayers and Obama there’s a real story. Plus I lived in Hyde Park in the early 90s and I like to imagine that I was just a few blocks away while past terrorist and future president were busy palling around.

Jack Cashill is the man behind the theory. In the last few weeks of the campaign he produced a steady stream of articles about it for WorldNetDaily.com (there’s a handy list on his website — it seems to be growing, too). Each one is written in perky little paragraphs, many of them nearly identical to the perky little paragraphs in an earlier post, but there’s usually something new, too. Cashill is quite the salesman — his pitch has the mesmerizing feel of an infomercial, and almost as much depth.

As he reaches out to the media and to experts who might help build his case, the literary quest — a diligent search for Ayers’ fingerprints in Obama’s book — becomes a story within a story. There’s a turning point on Oct. 23 and you, dear reader, are practically a co-conspirator. Cashill “despaired of breaking this story beyond the Internet and talk radio” but then “a seriously can-do congressman intervened,” and suddenly “we are running sophisticated data-driven tests at two separate sites.” Maybe there’s a real chance to “somehow penetrate the battlements the mainstream media have built around Obama.”

Cashill returns time and again to his correspondence with Patrick Juola, an expert in literary forensics. What he learned from Juola was that no “data-driven computer analysis” would give him a definitive result, and so his best hope was to persevere with the “good old-fashioned literary detective work.” There is, as Scott Eric Kaufman points out, a rich tradition there — thanks to just that sort of sleuthing we know that “the plays of William Shakespeare were written by Roger Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, William Stanley, Walter Raleigh, Edmund Spenser, or Edward de Vere.” (Kaufman has had a great time with this story. If you want a good laugh you should read his posts — this one links to most of the other ones).

Ultimately, though, Cashill decided the old-fashioned detective work wasn’t going to do the trick: “there was a general feeling among people interested in this story that the public would need the confirmation of science, and not just from one source.” And of course what he found, as the title of the post says, is that “Science points to Ayers authorship of Obama’s ‘Dreams’”. This is what science sounds like:

“Using the chi-square statistic,” observes one professor, “Obama’s and Ayers’s books were indistinguishable, while Obama’s book was easily distinguishable from books by other authors.”

[…]

“Under the Q-value statistic,” argues one university-based analyst who tested “Dreams” against Ayers’ 2001 memoir, “Fugitive Days,” “segments of ‘Dreams’ consistently compared as well with ‘Fugitive’ segments as it did with other segments of ‘Dreams’ itself. In contrast, ‘Dreams’ compared poorly with other documents.”

Like Mark Twain said, there are “three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

As if the work of the “systems engineer,” the “professor,” and the “university-based analyst” weren’t enough, Cashill mentions “a fifth stylometric analysis, soon to be released, this one from a British scholar of international repute…,” and that’s where the story starts to get really interesting. With the election approaching and the Obama juggernaut still cruising out front, a man named Bob Fox with $10k in hand approached Peter Millican, a Fellow in Philosophy at Oxford University. Negotiations fell through when Millican and Oxford University Consulting insisted that the results be made public no matter how they came out. A couple of days before the election, Millican told his side of the story in The Sunday Times. He pronounced Cashill’s “science” to be extremely unimpressive and added that “[he] was left with the impression that payment for propaganda was fine; but payment for objective research was quite a different matter.”

As he went down in flames, Cashill shook his fist and shouted, in so many words, “Curse you, Oxford don!” It was about 2500 words, actually — half of them blustering through his version of the Millican-Fox transaction (“No, bro, you have dissed too many of my homies to get away that easily”) and the other half regurgitating the “literary” pitch one more time. Like they say, there’s no such thing as bad publicity.

Besides the bad taste in his mouth, Millican got the results of the analyses that had already been done. He’s set up a page on his web site to go over the details. At the beginning and the end he considers some of Cashill’s literary and impressionistic observations, dismissing each one in an understated, donnish way. Near the end he takes up Cashill’s offer to “bet my house against Millican’s mailbox that the gifted writer Ayers wrote” two passages in Dreams he singled out. Millican responds, “I hereby accept the bet. Let him put up, or shut up.” I don’t know if Cashill ever put up, but he certainly hasn’t shut up.

The really good stuff is in the middle of Millican’s exposé, when he looks into the “science.” There are all sorts of obvious and fatal flaws, but the most blatant problem is the controls — the things that Cashill breezily refers to as “books by other authors” and “other documents.” The specifics are a whole lot less impressive:

Second stylometric analysis.
Claim: “The Ayers-Obama matching shows a measurable and substantial effect. It is easily and objectively distinguishable from comparison to a third document. … the initial data presented is highly suggestive that these two documents share large portions of authorship.” (that’s Cashill via Millican)
Control: Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, published in 1885.
Millican’s bottom line: “[T]he word-length frequency correlations are not remotely close enough to be ‘highly suggestive’ of co-authorship…. Nor does the ‘easy and objective distinguishability’ from Grant’s Memoirs count for anything: it isn’t the least bit surprising that two memoirs written at the end of the 20th century have more in common than one written over a century before.”

Third stylometric analysis.
Claim: Comparisons of word frequencies on a small and a large set of words, using software written by Millican, shows that Dreams is more like Fugitive Days that like the control.
Control: Free Air, by Sinclair Lewis, published in 1919.
Millican’s bottom line: “These analysts found that Dreams was more like Fugitive Days than Free Air in some respects, but that of course isn’t surprising at all (given the difference in genre and vintage). If we add more realistic controls, then the apparent similarity — which isn’t even impressive to start with — entirely disappears, as shown by the following “Principal Component Analysis” graph….” (the graph is about 2/3 of the way through Millican’s web page). “Again there is nothing to link Obama with Ayers. And all the evidence so far examined if anything points against there being any close link between them.”

So, thanks to science you can rest assured that Obama’s book is more like Ayer’s book than it is like a novel written in 1919 or the 1885 memoir by the man supposedly buried in Grant’s tomb. In his Sunday Times piece, Millican notes that the Sinclair Lewis novel was used as a “‘random control’” because it “just happened to be easily available on the web.” He also describes Bob Fox as “sincerely interested in getting to the truth” — I don’t think he’d have gone to Millican if he wasn’t. I suspect that for many of the people involved, the project wasn’t cynical and calculating as much as it was starry-eyed and inept. As far as Cashill himself is concerned, I don’t know.

Whether it’s the number-crunching or the old-fashioned detecting, a lot of Cashill’s sleight of hand is a matter of context, or the lack of it. For instance, he makes a big deal about the way both Ayers and Obama riff on the difference between “education” and “training.” If you can’t think of any similar passages from another writer, well, it’s hard to say why it’s not significant. So maybe it is, and if you really want to be convinced, the door is wide open. On the other hand, if you did a search and found all sorts of other writers making a similar point in similar terms, the Ayers-Obama parallel would quickly lose its charm. But who’s going to take the trouble to do that? (Kaufman, of course, though not on this particular point) Cashill sure as hell isn’t — he needs to keep your head in a little fishbowl with just the incriminating texts, where all sorts of things are plausible. In the stylometric analyses, the control is the context. It’s a reference point, and the trick is to put it outside the fishbowl — way, way outside, so from there the bowl is just a dot on the horizon, and boy is it hard to see any difference between those fish!

More than that, the essential trick — the secret to Cashill’s success, such as it is — is to write for people who really, really, really want to believe. If you’re in the target audience, keep in mind that the analysis by Chris Yavelow is quite a bit different from the others. Millican finds nothing impressive about it, but he does allow that it’s “the only one of the four that stands any chance of providing any basis for a more substantial case.” So keep the faith!

In fact, I know what you need to do. Head on out to Highway 61, where I’m sure you can be very easily done. Look for Mack the Finger or Louis the King, over by the “forty red white and blue shoe strings/And a thousand telephones that don’t ring.”

Kaufman’s first piece about the Cashill hypothesis generated one of the oddest flame wars I’ve ever seen (keep in mind, though, that I mostly live under a rock). In it he mocked Jeff Goldstein, prime mover of Protein Wisdom, for taking up Cashill’s hypothesis and running with it. Goldstein’s vehement response is so strange and embarrassing that I can’t resist picking it apart. Here’s a quick recap:

1. Goldstein muses over the implications of the Cashill hypothesis. He notes first off that “[t]he charge of having one’s memoir molded into literary shape by an unrepentant domestic terrorist… is a serious one — and I do not wish to present the accusation lightly.” And he doesn’t. He writes “disinterested observations that flow from an exploration of language, the narrative process, and the differences in gradation between the author as historical figure, the author as author, and the author as ‘author.’” It’s like some late-night undergraduate effusion of fermented carbohydrate wisdom — very, very heavy:

   For if Bill Ayers has indeed ghostwritten at least portions of Barack Obama’s memoirs, as some are alleging, then it is fair to say that the “Barack Obama” of those memoirs is more even than a construct: he is at least partially a fictional character, given that it is “his” words that ostensibly create “him” — making it follow that, if the words creating him are not his own, then “he” is really a kind of living literary portmanteau, a blend of influences, an ontological hybrid insofar as he exists publicly.

   […]

   If the charges are true, and Obama’s memoirs were in fact written by Bill Ayers, at least in part, than it is clear that at least in part, Barack Obama is a creation of Bill Ayers….

   On that meta level, “Obama,” as we’ve come to know him through his memoirs, is more Ayers than he is Obama.

2. A few days later, while he was having some fun at Cashill’s expense, Kaufman took a quick swipe at someone else. If you follow the link, you find that the someone is Goldstein:

   If, however, you only use Cashill’s juvenile musings as a hypothetical which, if true, suggests all the unsavory things you already believe about Obama, then you’ve fully embraced the Cashill Doctrine.

3. Fun ensues when Kaufman’s post is picked up by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Goldstein is affronted that he has to “deal[] with readers of the online Atlantic” — these are people who clearly don’t appreciate his “rather academic exhortation on the various beings of agency” as a weighty work of pure literary criticism, and not only that, they have the gall to doubt the sincerity of phrases like “as some are alleging” and “if the charges are true.”

   Worse, though, is that thanks to Kaufman he was getting “unsolicited, uninformed letters” like this one, from “someone calling himself George.” Here’s the first third of George’s letter:

   He can’t be shook bitches…keep it coming. Behind closed doors he is laughing at all you pathetic needle dick motherfuckers. In your eyes he couldn’t possibly be smart enough to write his book. However, there is no denying that he is still slowly squeezing the life out of that grimy, decrepit, fish belly white, warmonger. What’s next—Obama did not graduate from Columbia, or Harvard Law. Obama was not president of the Harvard Law Review. It’s all a sham Harvard and is lying on his behalf. He is not really running for president. It’s really some white dude in black face.

It’s presumptuous of George to finger Goldstein as a person who wants to turn Obama into “some white dude in black face.” The ghostwritten-by-a-terrorist story would surely be just as attractive as a political land mine and, for Goldstein, as an opportunity to crank out some scare-quoted profundity, even if the “author” was white. And the politician as a figurehead controlled from behind the scenes is an old plot line that doesn’t need any racial subtext.

But Goldstein’s gripe isn’t really with George, it’s with Kaufman, who wrote that Goldstein “fully embraced” something when really all he’d done was to flirt ostentatiously with it. In particular, he hadn’t said anything about the evidence, except in the comments on his first post, where he was skeptical about one point. It’s a legitimate complaint that’s hard to pick out of the turgid rhetoric — I didn’t really get it until I scrolled way down to where Goldstein explains it to an especially conciliatory commenter.

Whatever the reason, Goldstein goes to extraordinary lengths to foist onto Kaufman the full responsibility for George’s email and any other ignorance inflicted on him by Atlantic readers. To do that he has to make assumptions that are wilder and more insulting than any of George’s (SEK = Scott Eric Kaufmann).

I also noted that SEK, rather than excerpting any of the post in which I purportedly suggest “all the unsavory things” I “already believe about Obama,” merely provided the link and his inaccurate and dishonest description, knowing, as he must by now, that those predisposed to read his political hackery are similarly predisposed to avoid confronting primary texts, especially those from villainous “right wingers” who, by the Atlantic’s lights, are the kinds of “low-info voters” who have no business pretending to engage in literary criticism. On my preparedness to do so I’ll let my record stand — while noting that I don’t miss the irony of those who have long been in favor of “democratizing” interpretation and sounding the death knell of authorial control in favor of an ascendancy of “interpretive communities” suddenly pretending that one needs some kind of special political sensibility in order to properly engage in textual pursuits.

The best part of that is the irony he doesn’t miss, which sounds like the answer to a final exam question in a freshman survey class. Goldstein, in a fit of really highfalutin’ foolishness, is confusing Kaufman with a whole school of thought, one that’s betrayed its own bomb-throwing manifestos. Further along in the post we learn that this insufferable pedant is Goldstein’s inner “literary critic.”

But because leftists like George are driven by outrage, emotion, and a decided lack of intellect — and are steered in a certain way by betters like SEK, who, after the revolution, will assume the role of the elect — I am in fact confronted by such idiocy and self-righteousness, which, were I to allow the literary critic in me to come out once again, is suggestive, I’d argue, of a kind of hamfisted paternalism and projection, much as one might expect from those who pretend to champion the Other (the unspoken acknowledgment being that the poor dears can’t be expected to champion themselves!) while not even fit to wipe their own asses.

Goldstein had already described “the likes of George” as “people who haven’t the capacity to read and understand on their own, but who rather rely on ‘specialists’ like the folks at the Atlantic, or SEK, to do their misreading for them.” So he may not be convinced that Obama is the creation of Ayers, but he’s definitely convinced that the likes of George are the creation of the likes of Kaufman.

In the post Goldstein mostly writes around both George and his obnoxious email — perhaps Goldstein figured his readers already knew what to think. There are a few comments that are a little more direct, and they take up a theme that’s near and dear to the hearts of culture-war conservatives: their brave defiance of the PC lynch mob. Goldstein pops up to say, “I’m as guilty as George for pointing out George’s guilt. WAIT FOR IT!” Protein Wisdom deputy blogger Darlene Click seconds: “Criticizing him makes you a racist/sexist/genderist/yadda yadda yadda.” I don’t think she read very carefully, though. It’s true that George sounds kinda black, but Goldstein criticizes him as a leftist, which is not a race, sex or gender. Does Click really think that Goldstein is so hypocritical that he’d write George off as “some white dude in black face,” an idiot being led around by the nose by his betters?

Goldstein does seem to want to prove that he doesn’t take a backseat to anybody when it comes to genital references. After all, “Needle dick motherfuckers” is so conventional. He’s got something much more original, and while he’s at it he throws in a racial stereotype that’s as bizarre as it is gratuitous. Check out this PC-mob-defying bravery:

“GEORGE DOES NOT REPRESENT US! HOW DARE YOU USE HIM AS AN EXAMPLE!” — SEK, forthcoming.

preemptive answer: he represents one part of “you”. And you, as the intellectual vagina to his Asian gal’s ping pong ball, represent another. Deal.

I’m sure it’s just because I’m being too literal, but my mind boggles at the metaphor of a male vagina giving birth to part of himself. You have to admire the double-layered insult, though — Kaufman is not only a feminine body part, he’s a pathetic one. No doubt a real manly intellectual, when he becomes a metaphorical vagina, can pass an Aryan broad’s bowling ball.

Anyway, no abuse from the PC police was forthcoming, or at least it’s not in the comments. And there was no “HOW DARE YOU” from Kaufman, though he dropped in several times for some textual slicing and dicing.

In the end Goldstein does a fine job of making George look like a class act. Both of them indulge freely in mindless generalizations about the opposition, but George is at least forthright about it. He’s gleeful but not particularly vindictive and his insults are generic, though I guess you’re always free to take it personally if you want. He’s fairly specific about who he’s talking about, too — “Talk Radio, Fox News, … your right wing blogosphere and … your professional liars like Bill Kristol [and] Glenn Beck….” The usual suspects, in other words. For Goldstein there’s just “the likes of George” and their “betters.” The idiots like George also “seem to think themselves entitled to hurl their venomous, imbecilic rants at any who displease them.” When it comes to venomous, imbecilic rants, though, Goldstein is peerless.

In one sentence the ACLU’s demands that unsavory techniques be banned from questioning suspected terrorists. In another, the ACLU urges putting the feet of the President of the United States into a flame to force him—torture him, if necessary—to do what they want.

Interesting, huh!?

This came to my attention because of President-elect Obama’s interview with George Stephanopoulos yesterday. In one section, George asked about that pledge—the one the ACLU is willing to betray its core civil libertarian values to make him live up to—to close Guantánamo. [my emphasis]

So, if the ACLU turns up the heat—maybe they’ll target Obama with another searing ad in the New York Times, but there’s no telling what extremes they’ll go to—it’ll be (yet more) proof that the ACLU is a quivering mass of hypocrisy, perfectly comfortable with torture when it suits their purposes. Don’t worry about Obama, though. He’ll already have his nose to the grindstone (the way the shit’s gonna hit the fan, it might be a blessing in disguise). I doubt he’ll even notice the hot feet.

According to his biographical blurb, “Rich Galen has been described as ‘what you get when you cross a political hack with a philosopher.’” I don’t know about philosopher, but he’s a hack, for sure. A hack with a self-deprecating sense of humor—the piece I just quoted starts with a personal anecdote that’s amusing enough. But if that nonsense about feet to the fire is meant as a joke I can’t find the wink.

I’m stumped as to why Galen would make such an inane claim. I don’t actually believe that the explanation is that he’s stupid, though he may think that his readers are. His editorials also run on Townhall.com, and the general feeling in the comment thread there is that it’s not possible to overstate the perfidy and ignorance of the ACLU. Within that worldview, one commenter manages to turn Galen’s point into something that sounds vaguely rational:

“Feet to the fire” is obviously a figure of speech but its not an idle threat when it comes to the lengths the ACLU will be willing to go to get what they want.

Right after the election I listed a few of the wacky paranoid theories that were circulating in what what Michael Bérubé recently dubbed (“politely”) the “low-information conservative constituency.” Here’s one I hadn’t seen before, from Galen’s comment thread. Scotch Indian “would not be shocked to see [Obama] pass an amendment so he can run for more than two terms.” Not so fast, replies wbheff—“he might not even bother to ‘pass an amendment’.”

Barack Hussein Obama, President for Life. Those folks have really got his number. Once he’s sworn in on Lincoln’s Koran, just hours from now, all bets are off.

Some of my favorite bloggers have found a new font of conservative self-parody—Big Hollywood. I might as well bandwagon along for a minute. There’s a choice post over there written by Evan Sayet, “simply the best political comedian working in America today,” according to FrontPage entertainment critic David Horowitz. Sayet doesn’t waste any humor on his “unified field theory” of a comic-book menace called “Modern Liberalism,” though. He’s not just a stand-up guy, he’s a Thinker, and he starts his think-piece on Bruce Springsteen with some intellectual heavy hitters.

The “culture war” that we hear so much about is, to borrow Thomas Sowell’s phrase, a “conflict of visions.” Visions, Sowell explains, go deeper than mere policy—in fact they are the font of where we stand on the issues—and they are founded on some of the most basic and fundamental beliefs the individual holds about the nature of man and, in turn, the role and purpose of government, family, religion and all other influential forces that society has evolved. Sowell called the conflicting visions the “Constrained” and the “Unconstrained” and offered Jean Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith as primary examples of the visions in conflict. More contemporary examples are John Lennon and Bruce Springsteen, the former holding the “unconstrained” vision (which I call here the Neo-Liberal view), the latter the “constrained,” or, in my term, Conservative take. Just to be clear, yes, I’m saying that, while Springsteen the multimillionaire, rock star with the mansion in Beverly Hills may be a Liberal, Bruce Springsteen the poet is one-hundred percent Republican.

Sowell recognizes that, at its most basic level, this conflict of visions revolves around what one believes to be man’s innate nature. Is it, as the Neo-Liberal believes, that man is born good and then corrupted by the institutions of society or, do the Conservatives have it right and man is born with a dual and conflicting nature—capable of good and evil and everything in between—requiring cultural forces to help him tamp down the darker side and cultivate the good within?

I think it’s safe to say that Sayet is a Springsteen fan, though he never says so outright. He admires Springsteen’s lyrics for what looks to him like a conservative vision of humanity, but that vision seems to be at odds with Springsteen’s “Neo-Liberal” politics. So far so good—some very fine criticism has started with that sort of realization. But the disconnect could be Springsteen’s doing, or it could be a sign that Sayet hasn’t got the “Modern Liberal” thing as totally figured out as he thinks. Is his one-dimensional test really such a foolproof way to sort the “Conservatives” from the “Neo-Liberals”? Is Springsteen’s all-American working-class liberal mindset really captured by a second-hand cliché from 18th-century France? Those are two obvious questions he might have asked, and I’d say the answers are no and no. But if Sayet knows anything, he knows right from wrong. The only way to solve the puzzle is to split Springsteen down the middle. His right half—the one with all the poetic vision—is one-hundred percent Republican. His left side—the Beverly Hills liberal poser—is clueless about what the other half is doing. That’s not the same as a half-and-half blend of “Conservative” and “Neo-Liberal.” That would be like a cross between an elephant and a donkey, and what could come out of such an encounter but a bloody mess?

Maybe Sayet meticulously questioned all his assumptions before he settled on his Dr-Jekyll-and-Mr-Hyde theory of the Boss. I doubt it, though. There are no signs in the article of a reflective, self-critical mind at work. He spends most of the piece cherry-picking the conservative message from songs like “Thunder Road” and “Long Walk Home.” The lyrics never stood a chance. Sayet’s interpretive efforts got the full treatment from performance critic Scott Eric Kaufman. As usual, the show is entertaining and educational.

Speaking of Thomas Sowell and cherry picking, I noticed when I was on Townhall.com that, like Galen, Sowell is a regular columnist there. Now I can see why he appeals to Evan Sayet. The piece of Sowell’s that caught my eye is titled “‘Intellectuals’”. As you can probably guess from the scare quotes, the word is used scornfully throughout. You might think that’s an odd thing for Sowell to do—with a PhD in Economics from Chicago, a raft of books authored, and a high-profile position at a major think tank, what is Sowell if not an intellectual? But in this little piece of mindless pandering he earns his share of the scorn that he pours indiscriminately on his class. I guess that counts as practicing what he preaches.

“‘Intellectuals’” is a reaction to a New York Times column—Nicholas Kristoff wondering if Obama’s success is a “step away from the anti-intellectualism that has long been a strain in American life.” Sowell found it “hard to know whether to laugh or cry” about what he seems to have read as a rose-colored paean to intellectuals and intellectualism in politics (that’s not what it is, but never mind). To put Kristoff in his place, Sowell leans unimaginatively on the old trope about how superior common sense is to book learnin’. I think what he has in mind, really, is left-wing book learnin’. He jumps from a few specific cases of leftist intellectuals getting things hopelessly wrong—they’re not hard to find—to this gross generalization:

It would be no feat to fill a big book with all the things on which intellectuals were grossly mistaken, just in the 20th century—far more so than ordinary people.

RIght after that passage he paraphrases William F. Buckley’s far more incisive way of making more or less the same point—Buckley famously said that he’d rather be governed by some regular folks from the Boston phone book (“the first two thousand names,” according to Wikiquote) than by the Harvard faculty. I wouldn’t want to be governed by the Harvard faculty either, so I guess Buckley had a point. Whether those “regular” folks who have gone through life getting called first for everything would be better, I’m not sure. The choice that Buckley offers doesn’t bear close examination, but the message is clear and memorable, and that counts for a lot. On the other hand, Sowell’s book (The Complete Idiot’s Feel-Good Guide to Dangerously Misguided Intellectuals and the Ordinary People Who Could Have Set Them Straight) could be written and written and written again. Playing a game of mix-and-match with “intellectuals,” “ordinary people” (whoever they are), and “things,” you could tell just about any story you wanted to. (Back in September, Roger Kimball explained Buckley’s zinger in multisyllabic and historic detail and then patted himself on the back for his slavish devotion to the caricature and his Buckleyesque enthusiasm for Sarah Palin, the “cruise missile aimed from Middle America” at the intelligentsia. Roger Kimball, there’s Buckley’s true heir. Screw the low-life son.)

Just for fun, let’s look at how intellectuals and ordinary people have scored on some recent controversial things. I’ll starting with Barack Obama. We don’t actually know how things will turn out with him, so I can’t score anyone. What I can say is that it will be hard to score. Some ordinary people seem to think he can walk on water. Others figure he’ll trample the constitution and make it impossible to buy an American flag. I checked in with some of that latter group earlier in this post, by way of a Townhall.com comment thread. They are much more likely Sowell readers than the Obama enthusiasts, and in “‘Intellectuals’,” Sowell effectively blesses their petty anti-intellectual prejudice. It’s not the most contemptible performance like that I’ve seen, but it’s nothing to brag about.

How about the global financial meltdown? I think that’s still pretty fresh in everyone’s memory. It seems to have caught most of the experts with their pants down. Are experts the same as intellectuals? Some of them must be, and almost all “experts” are “intellectuals.” As to ordinary people, thank goodness they knew enough to avoid dodgy mortgages they couldn’t afford or a whole lot of them would be up shit creek now without paddles (but with lots of intellectuals, and in a pinch, you know… it just might work). And not so long ago, the U.S. invasion of Iraq was another thing. Some of the neocons around Rumsfeld, guys like Wolfowitz, had intellectual pretensions and advanced degrees, and true to form, they had it figured woefully, criminally wrong. Now the liberal intelligentsia kept saying “Don’t do it! Don’t do it!”, but like they say, even a stopped clock is right twice a day. As for ordinary people…

(photo: Shawn Duffy)

It so happens that Tenured Radical just put up something about Obama and “The Return of Educated People.” so there’s another favorite blogger to add to the mix. She even included a YouTube clip of Bruce Springsteen and Pete Seeger singing “This Land is Your Land.” Unfortunately “the video has been removed by the user.” I found another clip of the same performances.

You know that it’s only a matter of time before we’re all singing “Kum bah yah” like pod people. Maybe the least we can do for the other side is to chip in for liquor and anti-depressants.

I was in Seattle for Reagan’s re-election, and had moved to Chicago a few months before the 1988 race that gave us our first four Bush years. For most of the time in between I was studying music at CalArts, the avant-guarde school that Disney built at the northern edge of LA’s sprawl, where it was slowly surrounded by the clean-cut and conservative cul-de-sacs of Valencia. The land of fruits and nuts, as a friend of mine used to say. It was a Reagan-era kind of place.

Chicago—Hyde Park, in fact—was a huge change. There’s no getting away from politics in Chicago. It’d been a year since Harold Washington’s sudden death, but the city was still battling through the aftermath. I was still there four years later, and that time I finally got to vote for the winner. What I remember most clearly from ‘92 isn’t Clinton, it’s Carol Mosley Braun’s run for the senate. People I knew in the neighborhood were involved in her campaign, I think. We were all thrilled that she won—too bad things didn’t go as well once she got to Washington. I guess by that time, Barack Obama was circulating in the neighborhood and teaching at the U of C, not that I had a clue.

I was in Boston for Clinton’s re-election, and down here in North Carolina for the Bush v. Gore debacle. God was that depressing! And in many ways the 2004 election was even worse. How could such a bungling idiot get re-elected? Canada never looked better, but I consoled myself that if Kerry had won, it’s likely he’d have been a weak president who’d have to absorb Bush’s catastrophic mistakes and would likely absorb a lot of the blame as well. Better, maybe, for Bush to keep stewing in it, and it seemed pretty clear that he’d thoroughly discredit himself if he had four more years. He did just that. Too bad all the rest of us are stuck in the hole, too.

After Bush won in 2000 I felt like I understood what the people who loathed the Clintons had gone through for 8 years. Just the sound of that Texas drawl on the radio and I can’t turn the thing off fast enough. It’s a gut reaction, and I’m sure Bill Clinton’s voice can do the same thing to a lot of Republicans. And for many people I know, and to some extent for me, too, there was an apocalyptic feel to the Reagan victory, and even more to Bush II. It was a show of political force from hordes of people who apparently wanted to bulldoze life as we knew it, and it wasn’t clear what was going to stop them. Fortunately the complicated business of running a country slows down even anti-government administrations.

Anyway, I have some sympathy for the people who are feeling alienated and anxious in the face of all this whooping and hollering and talk of change. When you’re stuck on a ship, it’s not a good feeling when someone you don’t like or trust takes over the wheel. It’ll be tough having to listen to President Obama holding forth from the bully pulpit, and having to listen to all the ridiculous and obnoxious stuff his supporters and fans will come up with. One consolation, if you voted for Bush, is that your guy is leaving a huge mess, and it’s hard to see how Obama will have the time or money to enslave the white race, or whatever. So no need to let your imagination run away with you. If it’s already run away, and you’re convinced that Obama is Muslim, that he wasn’t born in the US, that he didn’t write his own book, that he’s a Marxist, that you better stock up on American flags because pretty soon you won’t be able to buy one, etc., etc., here’s what I’d suggest:

Grow up, folks! Get a grip! There’s lots of real problems—go find one!

In the mean time, I’ll be enjoying myself. It was nice to be able to vote for the winner back in ‘92 and ‘96, but this time it’s a whole lot sweeter. Even though I had a feeling from the beginning that Obama would pull this off, it’s still hard to believe it actually happened. An articulate president who’s seen the world from many angles, from the ground up, and reacts with curiosity and intelligence? A president who’s as gifted a politician as Bill Clinton and has self-control to boot? A president who’s broken through the most symbolic of racial barriers with the grace and confidence of a man who has nothing to prove about how black he is or about how black he isn’t? A president who projects the best qualities of the two countries that have shaped my life, America and Kenya?

It’s too much.

Here’s a timely message from Sam, the American Eagle. (hat tip)

…the rise of what I call “postmodern conservatism”—how an almost poststructuralist embrace of diversity and criticism of universal values informs the wars against “objectivity” and the mainstream media, the dominance of evolution and the call to teach intelligent design (ID) in public schools, and David Horowitz’s struggle for a student bill of rights in higher education.

The idea of “intellectual diversity” is a classic of postmodern conservatism (for those who don’t like their conservatism quite so postmodernized, it’s “intellectual pluralism”). It’s a slippery concept that’s inspired plenty of heated and arcane debates—to get a feel for them, go Fish. Based on what I’ve seen—a fairly haphazard sample—“intellectual diversity” is mostly used as a pretentious euphemism for “political diversity,” something that’s a lot like cultural diversity. If smart, educated, and decent people can come from a wide range of races and cultures, then it seems reasonable to say they can come from the different political persuasions as well. I’m not sure how many people really believe that, in their heart of hearts, and the relativism is sure ironic coming from the conservative side. But there’s some merit in the idea, I think. Cloistered orthodoxy and petty intolerance are endemic to academia, and the tendencies are only encouraged by too much homogeneity. A while back I pointed out a couple of professors whose contributions are tied to the way they stand out as conservatives against a background that’s largely liberal.

Positive examples are especially illuminating because intellectual diversity is usually promoted by highlighting the negatives its supposed to fix—the outrages of liberal bias and political correctness. In fact, it seems to me that one of the better arguments against intellectual diversity as a reform agenda is the poor quality of the polemics launched by some of its promoters and fans. When high-minded ideals are coupled with low-minded rhetoric and feeble, agenda-driven reasoning, it’s the practice that reveals the intentions and integrity of the critic far more than the preaching. David Thompson is a peripheral example, KC Johnson a more central one. What the practice suggests is that an ideologically balanced campus would be like one of those TV shows where liberal and conservative pundits try to shout each other down. It’s a mindset that offers nothing of value to academia’s pool of intellectual diversity.

In his column in the Cornell Daily Sun, Gabriel Arana criticises conservatives on his campus for dwelling on denounciation and symbolic resistance to what they see as the dominant culture instead of offering intellectually engaged alternatives. (hat tip)

In this sense The Cornell Review and the conservative discourse it represents owe more to Ann Coulter than William F. Buckley; the discourse is polemical, a tired repetition of conservative mantras attacking a liberal campus culture. If the Veritas grant does anything, I hope it will be to invigorate conservative discourse that has—at least during my time here—failed to really engage the intellectual community here, to bring to light new opinions that do not simply recapitulate conservative pundits’ talking points. Perhaps it can start by refraining from attacking our faculty and students and propose something to talk about.

The editorial was in response to the announcement of a $50k grant from the Veritas Fund for Higher Education to help launch Cornell’s new Program on Freedom and Free Societies. Arana’s objections aren’t with the program, they’re with the rhetoric coming from the Fund’s executive director, David DeRosiers. And he isn’t alone—even the Program’s point man on campus, Prof. Barry Strauss, distanced himself from DeRosiers’ rhetoric (“…I wish they had consulted me about their summer update. I would have told them that I respectfully disagree with much of what they say.”). Here’s a sample:

Veritas identified Cornell as one such university that prides itself on diversity, but lacks the intellectual kind, stating in its update, “most new courses of the last several decades have focused entirely on race, gender, or postmodernism.” Cornell, over the last forty years, has neglected traditional learning offerings such as Western society, thought and economics, according to the statement.

“The idea behind what we’re doing is to bring back triumphalism to moderate the excesses of gender and [diversity courses],” said DeRosiers. “To teach courses that have gone out of style. They have had a focus on race, gender, class—and in doing so, students have been given a partial view of reality with America as the force of many evils. It’s more to the fact that they’re only receiving a diet of such things—they’re being malnourished.”

According to Arana, the sweeping claims about the curriculum are easily rebutted by Cornell’s course catalog. That’s small potatoes, though, compared to the apparent determination to fight excess with excess by “bring[ing] back triumphalism.” Triumphalism? I can’t imagine a self-respecting humanities professor promoting the idea—maybe that just shows how deep the grooves of liberal bias are in my brain. But if triumphalism is seriously part of the program, it seems like a shame to put the West back in it’s rightful position at the apex of history and just stop there. Might as well put mankind back in his rightful place at the apex of creation, too—“intelligent design” is ready and waiting. And with science out the window, why not go whole hog and bring back geocentrism, too? That would be some potent triumphalism—America at the center of God’s universe. With a little of that in the curriculum you might just moderate all those America-hating zealots of oppression studies right out of existence.

• js mill conservatives stupid critique
• john stuart mill quote conservative stupid
• john stuart mill i didn’t mean to say that conservatives are stupid people
• i did not intend to suggest that all conservative people are stupid but i did intend to suggest that all stupid people are conservative.

There’s another cluster that doesn’t seem to be as historically informed:

• stupid conservatives
• why are conservatives stupid?
• conservatives are stupid jokes
• stupid things conservatives say
• every stupid person i know is a conservative

Like Obama said to Letterman, it’s silly season in American politics—it seems like we’re really outdoing ourselves this time. I’m guessing that’s the spirit behind most of those searches (I’m not sure what the spirit behind the search on “lawn guys are stupid” was, though). Nothing spreads election-season cheer like a discussion of the innate stupidity of the other side, especially when the theory is endorsed by a certified Great Thinker.

The long-winded googler was definitely wrong about what Mill intended to suggest, dumbing it down by exaggerating the relationship (and I’d be willing to bet the query didn’t come from a conservative). This quote, apparently from a letter Mill wrote to a Conservative MP, seems to be what the searcher had in mind (emphasis added):

What I stated was, that the Conservative Party was, by the law of its constitution, necessarily the stupidest party. Now, I do not retract that assertion; but I did not mean to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative.

Mill was commenting on a tendency he observed in a political party in mid-19th-century England—capital-C Conservatives, who he considered not inevitably but generally stupid.

One objection I found to the philosophy professor’s wisecrack is that those Conservatives of yore were not conservative in the current sense of the word. And I found other suggestions, reading over that controversy, about what Mill probably didn’t mean to say. A recent New Yorker had an article by Adam Gopnik about Mill, and it has a fine paragraph about what Mill did mean to say (hat tip):

After Harriet’s death, Mill entered Parliament, in 1865, as a liberal backbencher, and did about as well as intellectuals usually do there. He was often hooted, and became notorious for having once described the Conservatives as “necessarily the stupidest party.” What he meant wasn’t that Conservatives were stupid; Disraeli, who was running the Tory Party then, was probably the cleverest man ever to run a political party, and Mill’s own influences from the right were immense and varied. He meant that, since true conservatism is a complicated position, demanding a good deal of restraint when action is what seems to be wanted, and a long view of history when an immediate call to arms is about, it tends to break down into tribal nationalism, which is stupidity incarnate. For Mill, intelligence is defined by sufficient detachment from one’s own case to consider it as one of many; a child becomes humanly intelligent the moment it realizes that there are other minds just like its own, working in the same way on the material available to them. The tribal nationalist is stupid because he fails to recognize that, given a slight change of location and accident of birth, he would have embraced the position of his adversary. Put him in another’s shoes and he would turn them into Army boots as well.

Applying that to the present is no trouble at all, which might mean that it’s not really Mill but Mill remixed according to Gopnik’s modern sensibility. Either way, our supposedly conservative president has just pushed through a massive public bailout of the banking system. Calling it “capitalism on the way up and socialism on the way down,” Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Tx) sounds like the one demanding from his party some “restraint when action is what seems to be wanted.” And, turning from economic catastrophe to political farce, the nomination of a stunningly insular 44-year-old to be vice president—that looks like the problem of having “a long view of history [or anything else] when an immediate call to arms [or the pressing need to get elected] is about.”

And then there’s “tribal nationalism.” It’s not something that comes up in any of the passages I’ve read about Conservatives from Mill’s writings. But in Subjection of Women, he has this to say about stupidity and tribalism:

Stupidity is much the same the world over. A stupid person’s notions and feelings may confidently be inferred from those which prevail in the circle by which the person is surrounded. Not so those whose opinions and feelings are emanations from their own nature and faculties.

Whether it’s true to Mill or not, Gopnik’s line about the absurd significance given to an accident of birth captures my feelings about flag-waving, love-it-or-leave-it patriotism and a few other conservative staples. These days “stupid” is a vague and childish word, though—it’s a playground insult. If it’s replaced with “ignorant,” the ideas rings truer. And “tribal nationalism,” for the present, is as sensitive to internal red state/blue state borders as it is to international ones. With those caveats, I think the charge that “Barak Hussein Obama” is a closet muslim and that he pals around with terrorists—appeals to ignorance and fear as well as stupidity—are fine examples of the modern-day degeneration of conservatism into tribalism. It seems that it’s gotten so hot that it’s even burning McCain, and while he didn’t set all the fires, his campaign hasn’t shied away from fanning the flames—that’s what Palin is there for.

I have to admit that I get some satisfaction watching McCain struggle to tamp down the ugliness that he had apparently hoped to mobilize and then channel. But my side is quite capable of getting into the same kind of trouble—every so often the sans-culottes get riled up and want to chop off some Establishment heads. In the Duke lacrosse case—a pretty good microcosm of American culture-war politics—the strident, intolerant tone was set by zealots from the left, who went for a different part of Establishment anatomy (and if that doesn’t count as a stroke of sheer stupidity, I don’t know what would). Timothy Burke’s latest post, about how demoralizing he finds the “infinitely escalating spiral of spew from hardcore opponents of Obama,” drew a comment from a San Franciscan who keeps quiet about his support of McCain for fear of vandalism and ostracism. I wish I could think of a good reason to doubt him, but I can’t. The real problem, I’m afraid, isn’t conservatives, it’s people.

“We try to hire the best, smartest people available,” Brandon said of his philosophy hires. “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.”

From the comments posted after the article you can get a pretty good sense of how that went over, or google “Robert Brandon” Duke stupid for a broader sample. Reflecting on the remark after “two days of venomous, hate filled e-mails from self-described ‘conservatives,’” Brandon said, “In my response to The Chronicle reporter I gave a quote from John Stuart Mill that I thought was quite funny. I now see that the humor is not much appreciated in this context.” In writing, at least, the remark strikes me as arrogant and not very funny, and I’m not sure that even sympathetic readers picked up much humor. But as a smoking gun in the crime of liberal bias the remark was very much appreciated—the Google search above calls up a little feeding frenzy of critics who were, on the whole, remarkably uncritical and opportunistic in their approach to such a useful quote. Recently it’s cropped up again as part of a minor farce.

[Here’s more about Mill’s theory of conservatives.]

It seems pretty obvious (to me, at least) that Brandon’s comment is just a pretentious version of the kind of reflexive, snarky put-down that each side of the political spectrum is constant throwing at the other. It takes a pretty shallow or self-serving perspective to assume that it’s deeply revealing of how he approaches decisions or interactions involving conservative students or faculty. That’s the sort of spin you’d expect from a partisan rag, and sure enough Rachel Zabarkes Friedman, writing for the National Review, put Brandon’s remark on her list of “five of the most outrageous campus incidents of the last academic year.” Her paragraph about it ends with a little idle speculation: “So why aren’t there more Republicans in academia? Maybe it’s because even the capable ones have been kept out, by the likes of Robert Brandon.” Unless she did a whole lot more investigating than it seems, she’s in no position to make generalizations about “the likes of Robert Brandon.” She has an uppity liberal-professor sock puppet who can mouth the words, though, and that suits the National Review just fine. But here’s one from a professor, Erin O’Connor, and she doesn’t do much better: “It says something about a department—if not the university as a whole—when its leader will come right out and say that the reason there aren’t more conservatives teaching college is that conservatives are stupid.” The claim about his department is especially empty. Other than the emphasis on philosophy of biology it looks like a pretty traditional philosophy department. It’s not clear how you’d find out if the chair’s comment about stupid conservatives really says something about them. It would definitely take some work, so why not just say it?

It’s a tedious and often disingenuous habit to treat attempts at humor, even those that bomb, as revelations of the real beliefs that the joker would otherwise deny or keep under wraps. All the conservative tut-tutting about Brandon’s remarks suggests that feminists aren’t the only ones who can’t take a joke (I’ll hand that off to the fabulous Nellie McKay at the end of the post). Joke or not, a quote relayed by a reporter is not the same as a first-person written statement. If Brandon had written the bit about Mill and stupid conservatives in an op-ed, presumably he would have made sure that his meaning came across in print, and it would make sense to treat it as a serious opinion. He may well be arrogantly clubby about the predominance of liberals in the humanities faculty, or he may be inclined to bullshit when he gets a question that he hasn’t thought much about, or he may have been blowing off steam after reading the ravings of some fringe professor pushing “Intelligent Design” as science. There are plenty more possibilities—I don’t know Prof. Brandon so I’m not suggesting any particular interpretation. My point is that the quote got the play that it did because it was useful—it’s actual significance is uncertain but was probably vastly overstated by his critics. It doesn’t say much for the seriousness of the cause of “intellectual diversity” that a glib remark to a campus newspaper has to be overinterpreted and oversold to make the case for it.

When it comes to using quotes for impact, with little regard for either their significance or their context, KC Johnson is hard to beat. About a year and a half after Brandon made his infamous comment, Johnson used it in an editorial for the Chronicle of Higher Education, a critical look at the explanations and justifications given by the “academic Establishment” for its leftwards imbalance. In retrospect it reads like a warmup for the anti-academic crusade he piggybacked on the lacrosse case—the narrowly-framed issues and boilerplate rhetoric were ready and waiting for the “listening” statement to come along. The editorial is a mix-and-match of quotes framed as evidence of bias but otherwise largely unanalyzed—The Cigarette Smoking Blog (!) has a handy list of some of them. I haven’t checked to see whether there’s any of the misrepresentation that he indulged in while writing about the lacrosse case. But even without digging through his sources it’s clear that he makes no meaningful distinction between George Lakoff speaking to the New York Times, Brandon joking to a student reporter, and some random professor blogging about who’s “f-ing smarter.” They’re treated as equally significant and representative—a fair sign, I think, that Johnson’s main interest is in what sounds good and makes points for his side.

Brandon’s quip about conservatives being stupid is circulating again because of a little farce that Inside Higher Ed recounts in a recent article—“In Culture Wars or Duke-Bashing, Do Facts Matter?” They didn’t to Edward Bernard Glick, an emeritus professor of political science at Temple University, when he wrote an editorial that ran in the Jerusalem Post and, with a somewhat different ending, on the website American Thinker. It’s an especially cranky and slapdash version of the formulaic rant about how everything’s going to hell (aka the academic declensionist narrative). Evil Bender goes into the gory details of Glick’s “logical fallacies, lack of evidence, lack of proper attribution, and… burning desire to pin all of society’s ills on the academy.” What I find interesting is that what drives the reasoning (such as it is) is assumptions about the people responsible for the decline.

He brings the anonymous bad guys on stage as protesters at the ‘68 Democratic national convention in Chicago. “[W]hat did these Marxist demonstrators and their cohorts elsewhere do next? They stayed in college. They sought out the easiest professors and the easiest courses.” Safe from the draft, they whiled away the Vietnam war lowering academic standards, and when the war was over they had nothing better to do than get tenure and transform the university into “the most postmodernist, know-nothing, anti-American, anti-military, anti-capitalist, Marxist institution in our society.”

Thanks to this takeover by ignorants, college graduates these days are “well trained, but badly educated”—they’ve been trained “to feel sad, angry or guilty about their country and its past” in an intolerant atmosphere in which “politically-correct feelings are now more important than knowledge,… logic, and critical thinking.” When it comes to Darfur, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, “Muslim hatred,” gas prices and the energy supply, they have everything completely wrong. The professors responsible for all this miseducating don’t make much money but they get “huge psychological incomes in the form of power.” They “shape the minds of their students” and control hiring, promotion, tenure, etc., so naturally they pack the faculty with like-minded comrades. (Facetiously, I think, John K. Wilson flips the point about income on its head—it’s the liberals who are stupid for going into such a low-paying profession).

Duke University is a case in point. Some time ago, a department chairman* was asked in an interview on NPR if his department hired Republicans. He answered (I paraphrase from memory): “No. We don’t knowingly hire them because they are stupid and we are not.”


If I were a in his field, Duke would never hire me, for I am a Republican, and a Jewish one at that. Moreover, when I was an active academic during and after the Vietnam War, I audaciously taught politically-incorrect courses: civil-military relations and the politics of national defense.


*Correction: The author initially identified the speaker as the chairman of Duke’s psychology department. This was an error of memory. The author and American Thinker apologize to the chairman in question and to readers for this error.

That’s the end of the article, and he really outdoes himself—not only casually misremembering Brandon’s remark but also slipping in a gratuitous suggestion of anti-semitism, a pat on his own back for bravely carrying the torch for some very conventional subjects, and a wonderfully inadequate correction. If that’s any indication of the quality of his work, it wouldn’t be his politics that kept Duke from hiring him.

[July 18: I pulled the above quote about a week ago—between July 11 and 14, I’m guessing. As of a day or two ago, American Thinker had lopped off the ending and expanded the correction. Today it’s reverted to what I quoted. Gotta wonder what’s up with that.]

Glick’s editorial reads like a feeble parody of Alan Kors’ much more articulate meditation “On the sadness of higher education” from a couple of months ago. Kors gives an especially eloquent account of the academic values he first encountered as an undergraduate, while Glick honors what’s been lost only in strident negatives. But both of them pin the decline on a bunch of ideologues who apparently have nothing to say for themselves that’s worth listening to. For Glick, it’s wild-eyed, wooly-headed “Marxists.” For Kors, it’s “careerist” administrators who have “given over the humanities, the soft social sciences and the entire university in loco parentis to the zealots of oppression studies and coercive identity politics.” In both cases it’s an intellectual cop-out—dismissive characterization in place of an argument. Johnson has given himself the space to take a more creative approach—misrepresenting, exaggerating, and “perfecting” the “race/class/gender extremists” on the Duke faculty to suit his self-righteous crusade. It’s as if, after playing the same video game for two years, he’s still perfectly content on level one, where he can effortlessly mow down the gangs of slow-moving evildoers.

I don’t dismiss concerns about intellectual diversity on campus (“ideological diversity” would be a more accurate term, though). The self-appointed conservative advocates of it—the ones I’ve been coming across—seem to be much more intent on discrediting and denouncing the left/liberal Establishment than on making a case that they represent valuable diversity. They suggest the opposite, in fact, with their willingness to cut corners intellectually. But I know of two professors who, by example, make good cases for the conservative contribution to intellectual diversity. The first is Michael Gustafson, an engineering professor at Duke who, during the lacrosse scandal, managed to be a voice of moderation while also speaking up for the lacrosse players and questioning the judgment of some of his colleagues. He seems to have been among the first to notice Glick’s sloppiness, and there’s a series of posts on his blog that traces his investigation. When he calls it “another unfortunate case of distortion being touted as fact in order to oversell a point…,” I’m guessing he’s looking back to the self-serving distortions that have been a staple of lacrosse-case debate (it’s all too easy to find the same thing elsewhere, of course).

Farther from home, there’s Matthew Woessner, an assistant professor of public policy at Penn State and the subject, along with his wife and professional collaborator, April Kelly-Woessner, of an engaging profile published in The Chronicle of Higher Education early this year. With respect to the debates about intellectual diversity, what sets both conservative husband and liberal wife apart is their committed empiricism—they don’t just debate their disagreements, they go out and do a study. One of their studies documented an effect, generally negative, of professors’ overt politics on students’ engagement and appreciation. Another found that differences in interests and personal values seemed to go a long ways towards explaining why liberals are more likely to pursue PhD studies than conservatives. That doesn’t settle the issue, but it’s a refreshing change from dogma and tribalistic rhetoric.

Woessner also defies the conventional wisdom from the Right that surfaces, for instance, in most any comment thread where academic political bias is in play. For instance: “I was a university faculty member for 14 years and I can absolutely confirm what happens to faculty when they have a difference of opinion with the prevailing groupthink.” I don’t doubt that some people are effectively drummed out of academia for not toeing the liberal line. It’s sure not Woessner’s experience, though—he says “he never confronted intolerance in the classroom. Even some of his most liberal professors went out of their way to solicit his views.” That may not be typical or even common—I really don’t know. I do know that some of us are thrilled to have students who are willing and able to articulate a perspective that contrasts or conflicts with our own.

Gustafson and Woessner show in practice how valuable conservative voices can be to a left-leaning university faculty. But what they bring to the table is more than a party affiliation. There’s a willingness to engage with and respect the other side, and a real commitment to honest, constructive debate. To some extent it probably comes down to personality, and I don’t want to suggest that the only good conservative academics are the ones who make nice. Looking at the opposite extreme, though, Glick’s article is neither constructive nor very honest. If that’s what conservatives have to offer—more right-wing noise trying to drown out the prevailing left-wing noise—it’s not much use as diversity (I should note that it’s not an issue Glick takes up). It seems to me that many of the advocates of intellectual diversity are much closer to Glick than Gustafson, too ready to engage in all-out rhetorical warfare, letting the ends justify the means. A little more leading by example might be nice.

Speaking of people who can’t take a joke, Nellie McKay has something to say…