Yesterday, Candace linked to a Jerusalem Post story by Temple University professor emeritus Edward Glick. It made the following allegation:

The chairman of one of [Duke’s] major departments was once asked in a radio interview if his department hired Republicans. He answered: “No. We don’t hire Republicans because they are stupid and we are not. Why should we knowingly hire stupid professors?”

A similar piece of Glick’s ran in American Thinker, identified the department as psychology, and used a slightly different version of the quote (which in this case he noted was paraphrased “from memory”).

When Candace alerted me to some speculation the quote was wrong or fabricated, I e-mailed Timothy Strauman (current psych chair at Duke), as well as both publications (asking them to put me in touch with Glick, as I’ve been unable to find his contact info).

Strauman replied:

The quote is not from me. Rather, it is a misquote of a comment made by someone in another department a few years ago.

Keith Lawrence, Duke’s director of media relations, sent some more info:

This appears to be a reference to a Feb. 10, 2004 article in the student newspaper, the Duke Chronicle, in which a Duke philosophy professor is quoted as saying: “We try to hire the best, smartest people available. If, as John Stuart Mill said, stupid people are generally conservative, then there are lots of conservatives we will never hire.”
The professor is also quoted in the same Duke Chronicle story as saying, “I don’t know the political affiliation of all of my colleagues in philosophy, nor do I care. Our last hire was in the history of modern philosophy. We hired an expert in Kant and Newton. Politics never came up in the interview.”

The Mill-quoting philosophy prof later said his comment was meant as a joke.

Assuming Lawrence is right that Glick was talking about the Duke Chronicle quote, this is remarkably sloppy: A paraphrase when the quote is widely available, attributed to a professor of the wrong department, purportedly heard on the radio when it was actually in print.

I’m still waiting to hear back from the publications, or Glick.

UPDATE: American Thinker has corrected its article.

UPDATE II: AT editor Thomas Lifson e-mails, noting the correction and writing, “The quote was not made up, but may have been altered by memory.”