In his NYT Book Review piece on Michael Bérubé’s What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts?, Alan Wolfe makes the following claim:
[Bérubé convinces me that [David] Horowitz is as unpleasant as he is ungracious. But he does not persuade me that Horowitz is wrong. I’ve taught in at least two universities known for their leftism, and I know full well that those who teach at them strenuously opppose hiring conservatives and treat students who venerate the military, for example, as misguided. Were Horowitz not in fact intent on replacing left-wing thought police with their right-wing equivalent, I would applaud his efforts.
Blogger Scott Esposito at Conversational Reading reposts a portion of the review that contains this passage with the intro line “I can’t believe Tanenbaum [sic; should be Tanenhaus] prints this crap”; the title of the post is “Ridiculous.” He offers no other commentary. A clear and succinct expression of an attitude, I suppose, but one that’s clearly not intended to convince anyone who doesn’t already share Esposito’s views.
A commenter on the site, David Milofsky, remarks:
The fundamental fallacy in all this is the idea that because liberal arts faculties may be predominantly liberal, conservatives are discriminated against in hiring, tenure decision and so forth. In thirty years of college teaching at four different universities, I’ve served on more than two dozen search and tenure committees. In al that time in all those places, I have never once heard a candidate’s politics even alluded to as a reason to hire or tenure him/her.
Seems pretty clearly a case of two people, both of whom are in a position to know, making directly contradictory assertions. I wondered if perhaps the difference in perception had something to do with differences between academic disciplines, or perhaps between types of postsecondary universities. So I googled Prof. Wilofsky, and came up with these student course reviews.
Merely by providing that link, I’ve done my share to stir up controversy. So I’ll say no more.
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