Big universities are prone to bouts of craziness and one that’s particularly susceptible is the University of Virginia. The campus has been in an uproar one year after the alt-right vs. Antifa riot last summer. The turmoil was triggered by a horrible, provocative move by a center located at the university — it hired someone who worked in the Trump administration!
Charlottesville native and frequent Martin Center contributor John Rosenberg writes about the resulting affray in this essay.
Marc Short, who served as Trump’s legislative director, was recently hired by the Miller Center, which focuses on politics and the presidency. But hiring anyone who ever had anything to do with Trump is now verboten — at least in the minds of woke faculty members.
Said another prof at the Center, “Short’s hiring is an institutional and moral crisis” because “the Trump presidency does not represent American democracy and has upended the political order.”
Rosenberg’s comment on the ranting over Short’s hiring: “The unrecognized irony here, of course, is that there is a name for the intolerance of universities and other institutions refusing to hire anyone defending illiberalism: McCarthyism.”
Two Miller Center faculty members resigned rather than work under the same roof as Short. He’s being treated like a leper just for having been part of the Trump team.
Rosenberg concludes,
Ironically, the most likely results of the Trump denouncers’ efforts to bar the university door to Short will probably be confirming the distrust many have of higher education’s professed commitment to diversity and its coddling of faculty and student snowflakes, and thus the creation of more Trump voters.