Grievance School

[Valin]

National Review:

Steven F. Hayward

February 26, 2015

 

Of all the college towns fixed in the American mind as bastions of elite leftism, a Big Four stand out: Cambridge, Madison, Berkeley, and Boulder. It was no wonder, then, that the University of Colorado at Boulder received national attention, and raised many eyebrows, when it announced a couple of years back that it wanted to hire an identified conservative as a visiting faculty member — the beginning of a privately funded pilot program to bring conservative perspectives to its storied campus. I ended up being the guinea pig for this unorthodox experiment.

 

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Boulder is a magnet for the vegan-hippie/affluent-leftist demographic, a place where the city council debates whether we should call our dogs and cats “animal companions” rather than “pets,” and a special “climate change” levy appears on electricity bills. It was not unusual to encounter clouds of pot smoke during my early-morning jogs through the downtown Pearl Street mall, even before Colorado legalized the recreational use of marijuana in a referendum. The town has more bicycles than cars, and there were street protests against the opening of a Walmart. Boulder has a rigidly protected greenbelt surrounding it, pushed by anti-growth, “quality of life” environmentalists back in the 1970s, and I loved to tell liberal audiences that conservatives wholly approve of the Boulder greenbelt because it makes the quarantine so much easier to enforce: Liberals trying to escape can be more readily rounded up by the tea-party pickets on the perimeter and sent back downtown with a fresh package of fair-trade organic kale.

 

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Woe unto any department that doesn’t satisfy or genuflect fully to the braying mob. The special target at Boulder last year was the philosophy department, which leans predominantly to the left or far left, but which had only four women among its 25-member faculty. This is typical of philosophy departments everywhere; as with physics and mathematics, women constitute only about 25 percent of current philosophy graduate students. (Larry Summers was unavailable for comment.) It didn’t help that one or two male professors in the department had a genuine problem with sexual harassment and deserved dismissal. This became a wedge for the American Philosophical Association’s Committee on the Status of Women to file a report with the Boulder administration condemning the entire department for creating a “hostile environment” — after a “site visit” to the campus that lasted only 18 hours. It was a shoddy report that the university’s administration should have returned to the APA as unacceptable. Instead, the administration, facing a Colorado Open Records Act query, released the report and publicly endorsed it.

 

That was when the fun really started. The administration had told the philosophy faculty to refrain from public comment about the matter, so I decided to defend the department in an article in the Daily Camera, Boulder’s town paper, and on a Colorado Public Radio broadcast. Why go in for micro-aggression when you can offer full-tilt-boogie macro-aggression? “Inviting outside review by the American Philosophical Association’s (APA) Committee on the Status of Women,” I wrote, “was guaranteed to produce a finding as predictable as the Salem Committee to Investigate Witchcraft in 1691. . . . Barring more transparency, I think the presumption should be reversed: The Philosophy Department is the victim of the increasingly Star-Chamber atmosphere of campus political correctness.”

 

In other words, I was spoiling for a fight. And I didn’t have to wait long.

 

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