“A good campus is always trying to find ways to add diversity of thought and scholarship,” Hilliard said. “It’s not designed to be a thumb in the eye to anyone’s progressive politics.”
Names initially tossed around as potential candidates included Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, conservative columnist George Will and neoconservative pundit William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard. Will, however, was among the many who criticized the proposal. “Like Margaret Mead among the Samoans, they’re planning to study conservatives. That’s hilarious,” he told the Wall Street Journal.
That same article quoted writer and activist David Horowitz, who it called “a conservative agitator” and whose book, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America,” includes two CU-Boulder professors. Horowitz said that while he approved of efforts to bolster a conservative presence on campus, he fears that setting up token right-winger will brand the person as a curiosity “like an animal in the zoo.” However, arts and sciences dean Todd Gleason retorted, “We fully expect this person to be integrated into the fabric of life on campus.”
CU political science chair Ken Bickers said that while he supports the concept of intellectual diversity, he has reservations about the university’s strategy. He worries students will get the impression that the “conservative thought” professor speaks for all conservatives. And he resents the implication that ordinary professors don’t air conservative ideas in class.
Jack Roldan, international affairs senior, who’s vice chair of the College Republicans on campus, said he’s felt the lopsided politics keenly during his years at CU, according to the Wall Street Journal. Other students don’t have much sympathy, and may probably love Boulder for its liberal leaning.
Adding to the controversy was emeritus political science professor Edward Rozek, who bought an ad in the Boulder Camera in which he reported a tally of voter registration records of faculty and administrators. His finding: of 825 faculty members in arts and sciences, business, education, journalism and law, he found only 23 registered Republicans. This he used as justification of his long-held assertion about the liberality of CU-Boulder.
In response to all the furor, CU Chancellor Bud Peterson wrote to the Journal, saying, “Our effort at the University of Colorado at Boulder to endow a Visiting Chair in Conservative Thought and Policy isn’t an attempt to hire a ‘conservative scholar’ but rather to hire a ’scholar of conservative thought’ with expertise in the role and historic significance of conservatism in western civilization and American culture. We aren’t hiring one person to teach the ‘conservative line’ but rather an individual whose field of scholarship is based in conservative thought, beginning with the writings of Locke, Hobbes, Adam Smith, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and extending to the present.
“This idea isn’t a substitute for our continuing efforts to encourage intellectual diversity in all quarters of the university, a goal to which I believe the vast majority of our faculty are strongly committed.”
Click here for the original Wall Street Journal article.
Chancellor Peterson’s letter is no longer online at the Journal.