I don’t know how practical his idea is, but you’ve got to admire Del. Steve Landes, R-Augusta, for his moxie. Reports Hugh Lessig with the Daily Press:
[Landes] wanted higher education institutions to report back on policies that would ensure academic freedom in support of intellectual diversity. The reports were optional, and Landes said he wanted to tread carefully because the issue was controversial.
Committee members voted to table the bill after considering it for nearly an hour, hearing from a list of supporters and critics.
It’s a litany of political conservatives that U.S. colleges and universities are dominated by liberals and leftists. Political opinion polls of college professors tend to confirm the stereotype. (As a one-time graduate student in history at the Johns Hopkins University, I lived the bias — that’s why I bailed out with a Master’s Degree instead of Ph.D.)
It wouldn’t surprise me to find that professors in public Virginia colleges lean left as well. But it’s my impression that there is more intellectual diversity in our college campuses than in other public systems. Conservatives and free-marketeers may be a minority, but they’re not an endangered species. Conservative students can find intellectual mentors if they seek them out.
As for the history profs I was closest to at the University of Virginia, two were avowed Marxists and two were mainstream liberal. But they were superb teachers who instilled a love of learning and taught me how to think logically and rigorously for myself. Not much of their politics rubbed off, but their teaching did.
Update: This issue is of more than “academic” interest. To quote from today’s Petersburg Progress-Index:
Last week, Dr. Jean R. Cobbs, a former sociology professor, received a $600,000 settlement from the university. Cobbs, who filed a complaint in U.S. District Court in 2005, claimed she was discriminated against due to her conservative political beliefs. Cobbs has open relations with the Republican Party. In a report from the American Association of University Professors, Cobbs began reporting “repeated acts of ‘professional, political and personal harassment’” in the early 1990s.
