I wrote a short letter to the Chronicle of Higher Education in response to Jason Stanley’s “Fascism and the University” that can be found here. An excerpt:

The case for addressing conservative under-representation in higher education is stronger than Stanley indicates. My worries begin with his treatment of free speech concerns. He says, “One typical method [of undermining the credibility of the university] is to level accusations of hypocrisy. Right now, a contemporary right-wing campaign is charging universities with hypocrisy on the issue of free speech. Universities, it says, claim to hold free speech in the highest regard but suppress any voices that don’t lean left.”

In reply, Stanley writes: “Some will argue that a university must have representatives of all positions […] The general principle, upon reflection, is not particularly plausible. No one thinks that the demands of free inquiry require adding researchers to university faculties who seek to demonstrate that the earth is flat. Similarly, I can safely and justifiably reject ISIS ideology without having to confront its advocates in the classroom or faculty lounge. I do not need to have a colleague who defends the view that Jewish people are genetically predisposed to greed in order to justifiably reject such anti-Semitic nonsense.”

Stanley is surely correct here, but I’m unclear on what he takes this argument to show. Is he claiming that conservative viewpoints are, for instance, as manifestly evil as ISIS? As deeply as I disagree with the politics of the GOP, this comparison would be, in a word, uncharitable.

Alternatively, if Stanley is not equating them, then why is the under-representation of ISIS advocacy in the academy relevant to the under-representation of conservatives? It’s true that academia should not include representatives of all positions, but it could still be the case that it should increase the representatives of some positions. By analogy, if atheists were dramatically underrepresented on faculty nationwide, it wouldn’t do to shrug off this finding because members of UFO cults aren’t well-represented either.