The Daily Texan has reported that a conservative student group at
An earlier version of the Watch List that appeared in Spring 2007 cast a wider net and placed professors on the list without any hard evidence of abuse of students. This time, the project focuses on tyrannical behavior. As of two weeks ago, the head of the local chapter stated he had received “eight or nine names” but that he wouldn’t release them, perhaps because he hadn’t reviewed the validity of the claims. The group is careful not to cite any professors who openly espouse a political position but allow opposition.
The Huffington Post picked up the story a few days ago and hosted a forum on the issue, but it’s hard to find any other notice of the case. Searches of “University of Texas Watch List” at the Chronicle of Higher Education and www.insidehighered.com produced no stories, and on the Texas campus there isn’t any evidence of subsequent discussions or events.
Compare this to the vehement criticism David Horowitz faced ten years ago when he initiated concrete proposals to root out liberal bias. Back then, critics hurled denunciation and indignation at Horowitz in many different fora. This time, however, the effort to monitor misbehaving instructors doesn’t even raise the quick and easy charge of McCarthyism.
Most professors realize that the liberal-bias movement doesn’t threaten them at all. In fact, many colleges have learned how to benefit from their right-wing students. Numerous campuses, such as Brown, UCLA, and Princeton, have allowed of the formation conservative or libertarian centers. As a result, development offices are finding that conservative alumni are more willing to donate. They will grant space to alternative viewpoints in order to let the dominant system proceed as before. There’s no doubt the centers have benefited the students. But conservative faculty groups and conservative student activists barely touch left-leaning faculty and administrators.
In other words, the liberal-bias movement succeeded and it failed. It succeeded in overcoming the reflexive condemnation of biased professors, earning conservative and libertarian ideas some legitimacy in the academic square. No longer can a faculty speak of conservative/libertarian thinkers and ideas as prima facie stupid. But it failed to dent the prevailing left-liberal ideology of identity politics, diversity, and statism. The worst tendencies continue, but in the administrative offices rather than the classroom. If the liberal-bias movement had really succeeded, the diversiphile network on campus would have shrunk, not expanded.
One wonders if the cannier left-liberals among the faculty and administration welcome scattered attacks on the professors for bias, as it gives them another reason to pay lip service to “academic freedom.” Meanwhile, the real work of liberal-bias spreads in the bureaucracy, where students can’t see it happening.
