I was hopeful that the new blogging service provided by the WSO would provide all sorts of interesting material to link to. Alas, it seems to mostly serve as a miniture e(ph)Bay. I suspect that part of the reason for this is that the latest blog entries appear at the bottom of the main WSO page, making this a natural method for trying to sell things.

Of course, it could be the case that all the serious student bloggers use other means for blogging. The most impressive blog by a current student that I have come across belongs to Mike Needham, a senior and the editor-in-chief of the Record. For the most part, Mike comments on current events. His style is not dissimialr to that of Daniel Drezner, the most famour Eph blogger that I know of.

But Mike also touches on Williams-specific issues occasionally. On the topic of conservatives in academia, he writes:

To use the lingo of Williams, academia currently has a “pipeline” problem with conservatives. In order to become a tenured professor at Williams as a conservative, for example, one first has to make it through undergraduate school where you are undoubtedly exposed to idiocy such as the claim by my PSCI 201 professor (no relation to LBJ as far as I know) who insisted that Hillary’s Health Care proposal of the early 1990s was free market approach to health care. After making it through undergrad, assuming your head is still screwed on straight and you aren’t utterly exhausted from the lunacy of some of the stuff that goes on in higher ed, you have to find a grad school and once there a dissertation adviser. Of course, dissertation advisers only choose students who are studying something that interests them so there is automatically an advantage given to neo-Marxists, for example, over, say, Straussians. A conservative in the Harvard philosophy department, for example, has no one to turn to except Robert Nozick, who is no longer alive. After finding an adviser one has to get a departmental hiring committee to choose you over other candidates who parrot the decision makers world views perfectly by saying stuff like “Good thing there were all those think tanks and magazines ready to pay [conservatives] nice salaries, huh? Because we all know that the discrimination faced by, say, blacks or Latinos or political scientists who use qualitative methodologies or single mothers always ends up in the hell of think tanks and political journalism.” Then, after getting hired, you have to be recommended for tenure by the Committee on Appointments and Promotions, which this year boasts the editor of The Queer Issue: New Visions of America’s Lesbian and Gay Past, who you might be surprised to learn has a reputation as being hostile to conservatives.

Of course, Aardvark [another blogger] argues that all of this is an assertion made by talking to a few tenured conservatives and conservative newspapers (we don’t have any of the latter at Williams). To this end, I will be happy to publically debate Aardvark at Williams College on the issue of whether conservatives are fairly represented on the Williams faculty. I will even agree to pay all of his expenses to get to campus. That there are easily less than 10 conservative professors at Williams, with a faculty over 250, seems to be problematic. Insofar as the Republican-Democrat split can be used as an (imperfect) indicator of political beliefs, that the Center for Study of Popular Culture found Republicans outnumbered by Democrats by 30-1 at Brown, 23-1 at Bowdoin, 21-1 at Swarthmore, 18-1 at Amherst, or 14-1 at Columbia and Yale seems to indicate a problem. In the entire Ivy League, they found only 3 Republican administrators.

The real point, however, is Aardvark should be clamoring for more intellectual diversity in academia as well. Isn’t the whole idea of an education to be constantly challenged by competing points of view? Wouldn’t it make all of our educations better to have the best conservative minds want to come clash heads with the best liberal minds in our Ivory Towers? Aardvark claims that going to a Washington think tank is a pretty high-class problem to have — granted. Yet has Aardvark chosen to spend his professional career at a Washington think tank? Presumably, there are good reasons why highly-intelligent people like he would want to come into academia and not think tanks. Wouldn’t it be better if that option were equally open to conservatives?

What is the liberal establishment in Higher Education so afraid of?

What indeed.