Have you ever noticed that when conservatives are always against “special rights,” or affirmative action, except when they feel discriminated against? Take two issues traveling through cyberspace and the blogosphere right now: the dearth of women and minority opinion makers in newspapers and on talk shows, on the one hand, and the lack of appropriately conservative professors on the other.
"These diversity grievances follow the usual logic: Victim-group X is not proportionally represented in some field; therefore the field's gatekeepers are discriminating against X's members," wrote Heather MacDonald in the conservative National Review Online. "The argument presumes that there are large numbers of qualified Xs out there who, absent discrimination, would be proportionally represented in the challenged field."
Heather was writing on the topic of the pundits. Ironic isn’t it? This is the same group who sponsored the survey of college professors and found out too many of them were liberal democrats, and then announced that conservative candidates for professor jobs must be discriminated against. While decrying “victimhood” the conservatives are the first ones to cry “victim” at the least suggestion that they are not getting (more than) their fair share. They built their whole PR apparatus on the idea that they don’t get a fair deal in the liberal dominated media.
Have they ever stopped to wonder if just perhaps, the open-ended inquiry in academics does not suit those of a conservative ideological temperament? Or the under-paid jobs in Academia do not attract the brightest conservative hopefuls who would rather work on K street?
With Tom DeLay’s efforts to control the K street pipeline, and make sure that his conservative friends are all hired to lobby him and his friends, there just are not that many high paying jobs for liberals. Rape and pillage corporate lawyer? Nah. Anderson accountant? Wouldn’t work. That could explain their wholesale retreat to academia. For the most part, the nature of academia is just not conducive to the satisfaction of a free enterprise republican. Except one of my (un) favorite conservative/libertarian economics professors in Fairbanks who screamed loudly about the hand-out economy and how we should all support free enterprise and private property. Too bad the feds got his airplane when they busted him for smuggling alcohol and pot into dry villages.
Just another typical libertarian moralistic hypocrite.


In Punditland, a Little Imagination Could Yield Needed Diversity (washingtonpost.com): "'These diversity grievances follow the usual logic: Victim-group X is not proportionally represented in some field; therefore the field's gatekeepers are discriminating against X's members,' wrote Heather MacDonald in the conservative National Review Online. 'The argument presumes that there are large numbers of qualified Xs out there who, absent discrimination, would be proportionally represented in the challenged field.'
Conservative columnist and blogger Michelle Malkin told me that the whole debate was silly, and that what was more important was ideological diversity.
'It's ideological diversity that's the huge problem,' Malkin said. 'And when it comes to conservative women on the op-ed pages, these liberal women don't consider them diverse -- they treat us as if we are men. The insults that I have gotten over the years from a lot of liberal women . . . . You know a lot of conservative women politicians get the same kind of thing, so I don't really give it much chuck.' "