“Cultural conservatives, who are in turn racist and intolerant and ‘stupid’ by definition.” This bit of invective comes from an academic identified only as “Quidditas,” who posted it as part of his comment on my Chronicle of Higher Education article about Neil Gross’s new study looking at possible bias against conservative grad school applicants. It is nice now and then when a leftist academic, relaxing behind a veil of anonymity, blurts out the prejudice against conservatives that animates so many of his kind.
My twice-weekly posts on the Chronicle website since October have opened a new window for me on this sort of thing. The Chronicle audience is heavily skewed to left-of-center academics. Some reacted to my first several posts (dealing with matters such as the failure of academic historians to pay attention to the archival sources tapped by Stanley Kurtz in Radical-in-Chief) by expressing outrage that the Chronicle was granting me space to say such things. I am treasuring up some of these comments, including a recent one whose author, “Bill Jones,” calls me a “bigot who, thankfully, is likely over 50 with limited time left to poison future generations.”
Liberal tolerance for dissenting opinions isn’t what it used to be. While I can smile at these angry gesticulations, I worry about students who find themselves subject to the authority of professors who hold views like this.