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Ellen Belcher is the Dayton Daily News opinion pages editor. She writes about state government, education, the environment, higher education and all things Dayton.
Martin Gottlieb is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News opinion pages. He focuses on the political process itself and does such national issues as war, the economy, taxes and Social Security, as well as a hodge-podge of local and state issues.Home > Blogs > A Matter of Opinion > Archives > 2011 > January > 18 > Entry
Guest column: Conservatives unwelcome at WSU?
This commentary was written by William B. Irvine, professor of philosophy at Wright State University.
You might remember that the Rev. Jeremiah Wright was President Barack Obama’s pastor before the relationship became politically inconvenient.
Although I disagree with many of Wright’s views, I welcome him to our campus. Universities should be a marketplaces of ideas.
My colleagues, I think, share this belief. And, yet, in the last decade, Wright State has been curiously one-sided in the speakers it brings to campus.
Liberal speakers are routinely invited. We also invite speakers who can be characterized as ultra-liberal, including Wright, and, two years ago, Angela Davis.
But politically conservative speakers are scarce. It is true that John McCain and Sarah Palin appeared at Nutter Center, but they paid us for the privilege of using our facilities. In contrast, we pay people like Wright and Davis to come to our campus, and speakers of this caliber can command a five-figure fee.
On exploring this “speaker gap” with my colleagues, I was surprised by their response to my suggestion that Wright State should invite conservative speakers. “You mean someone like Glenn Beck?” they would reply.
Another reaction was that although they have nothing against inviting conservatives, they wouldn’t want any Holocaust deniers appearing on campus, the suggestion being that I would have a hard time finding a conservative who accepted the Holocaust as fact.
Many of my colleagues, I soon discovered, see no reason to expose the campus community to the political debate between conservatives and liberals. They are confident that the debate is over, with liberals having trounced conservatives.
My other discovery is that many of my colleagues assume that those who favor conservative viewpoints typically do so because they are stupid and quite possibly evil.
When I explained that I was suggesting that we bring to campus not Glenn Beck or a Holocaust denier, but articulate, intelligent conservative speakers, they sometimes chuckled in response, “Good luck with that!”
When I asked what they thought of individuals such as Thomas Sowell (a black conservative) or Andrew Sullivan (a gay conservative), it was clear that they are unacquainted with the writings of such individuals.
I was puzzled that my colleagues were not troubled by the dearth of conservative speakers — that on our campus we are unwilling or even unable to conduct a debate that for centuries has occupied some of the finest minds in Western civilization.
Then I hit on a theory: It is now possible, in American universities, to go through an entire education, right up through a doctorate, without ever encountering a flesh-and-blood conservative professor.
What you instead encounter are liberal professors galore, who will be happy to tell you what they imagine the conservative viewpoint on various issues must be and why these viewpoints are wrongheaded.
This is a pale substitute for a genuine political debate, but it is, on many campuses, what students have to settle for.
It is entirely understandable why someone, exposed to years of this sort of thing, would form the impression that the political debate had been won by liberals.
It also explains why so many academics are seemingly oblivious to the existence of conservatives who are neither stupid nor evil.
To be an effective marketplace of ideas, universities should supplement their ongoing diversity programs with an intellectual diversity program.
Any university that views itself as a marketplace of ideas will want, besides having faculty who look different, professors who think differently.
As part of this intellectual diversity program, they could hire at least a few conservative professors.
Until universities take such steps, though, there is a stop-gap measure they can take: They can devote a portion of their speaking-program budgets to speakers who will challenge the world views of members of the campus community.
So welcome to Dayton, Rev. Wright. And I hope that before this decade is over, Wright State will invite someone to campus to present the other side of the debate.
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