NYT's Liberal Kristof Disturbed at Liberal Intolerance of Conservatives in Academia

May 30th, 2016 8:48 AM

New York Times veteran liberal columnist Nicholas Kristof is usually good for one or two iconoclastic columns a year that make his usual fans petulant and his conservative critics grin. This year the two are on the same subject: Liberal intolerance in academe.

His latest column in the Sunday Review is a follow-up to his May 8 surprise, which drew outrage from liberals aghast at the idea that conservative should have a voice in academia, in the name of diversity of thought: “A Confession of Liberal Intolerance: We’re big on diversity, but not when it comes to conservatives in academia.” On Sunday Kristof confirmed that liberals were prey to the same "cocky...narrow-mindedness" they accuse their conservative opponents of.

My colleague Tim Graham accurately predicted that “Kristof will no doubt receive a wheelbarrow or more of grief from people who agree with the notion that you add nothing by adding ‘troglodytes’ to academe.”

This Sunday Kristof followed up with “The Liberal Blind Spot,” the text box of which confirmed that the liberal avalanche of obloquy had indeed arrived: “My progressive readers think I’m crazy to want conservatives on campus.” Kristof doubled down:

In a column a few weeks ago, I offered “a confession of liberal intolerance,” criticizing my fellow progressives for promoting all kinds of diversity on campuses -- except ideological. I argued that universities risk becoming liberal echo chambers and hostile environments for conservatives, and especially for evangelical Christians.

As I see it, we are hypocritical: We welcome people who don’t look like us, as long as they think like us.

It’s rare for a column to inspire widespread agreement, but that one led to a consensus: Almost every liberal agreed that I was dead wrong.

“You don’t diversify with idiots,” asserted the reader comment on The Times’s website that was most recommended by readers (1,099 of them). Another: Conservatives “are narrow-minded and are sure they have the right answers.”

....

On campuses at this point, illiberalism is led by liberals. The knee-jerk impulse to protest campus speakers from the right has grown so much that even Democrats like Madeleine Albright, the first female secretary of state, have been targeted.

Obviously, the challenges faced by conservatives are not the same as those faced by blacks, reflecting centuries of discrimination that continues today. I’ve often written about unconscious bias and about how many “whites just don’t get it.” But liberals claim to be champions of inclusiveness -- so why, in the academic turf that we control, aren’t we ourselves more inclusive? If we are alert to bias in other domains, why don’t we tackle our own liberal blind spot?

Frankly, the torrent of scorn for conservative closed-mindedness confirmed my view that we on the left can be pretty closed-minded ourselves.

Kristof turned cherished leftist tropes onto his leftist colleagues, like “bigotry” and “microaggressions," and didn't just take liberal excuses at face value:

When a survey finds that more than half of academics in some fields would discriminate against a job seeker who they learned was an evangelical, that feels to me like bigotry.

....

I’ve had scores of earnest conversations with scholars on these issues. Many make the point that there simply aren’t many conservative social scientists available to hire. That’s true. The self-selection is also understandable: If I were on the right, I’d be wary of pursuing an academic career (conservatives repeatedly described to me being belittled on campuses and suffering what in other contexts are called microaggressions).

....

There are no quick solutions to the ideological homogeneity on campuses, but shouldn’t we at least acknowledge that this is a shortcoming, rather than celebrate our sameness?

Can’t we be a bit more self-aware when we dismiss conservatives as so cocky and narrow-minded that they should be excluded from large swaths of higher education?

Cocky? Narrow-minded? I suggest that we look in the mirror.