This feels like a bad horror movie

You know those movies where the villain never dies. He gets good and killed and then they leave the corpse alone for seven seconds and, oops, he's gone...stay tuned for sequel number eight.

Of course, with the conservatives and radical religious folks it's more like The Blob. The more they ingest, the more hungry they are.

The Economist features a gem of a story about the poor outnumbered conservatives in academia:

Yet the current situation makes a mockery of the very legal opinion that underpins the diversity fad. In 1978, Justice Lewis Powell argued that diversity is vital to a university's educational mission, to promote the atmosphere of “speculation, experiment and creation” that is essential to their identities. The more diverse the body, the more robust the exchange of ideas. Why apply that argument so rigorously to, say, sexual orientation, where you have campus groups that proudly call themselves GLBTQ (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered and questioning), but ignore it when it comes to political beliefs?

...

Bias in universities is hard to correct because it is usually not overt: it has to do with prejudice about which topics are worth studying and what values are worth holding. Stephen Balch, the president of the conservative National Association of Scholars, argues that university faculties suffer from the same political problems as the “small republics” described in Federalist 10: a motivated majority within the faculty finds it easy to monopolise decision-making and squeeze out minorities.

Ivy-clad propaganda

The question is what to do about it. The most radical solution comes from David Horowitz, a conservative provocateur: force universities to endorse an Academic Bill of Rights, guaranteeing conservatives a fairer deal. Bills modelled on this idea are working their way through Republican state legislatures, most notably Colorado's. But even some conservatives are nervous about politicians interfering in self-governing institutions.

Mr Balch prefers an appropriately Madisonian solution to his Madisonian problem: a voluntary system of checks and balances to preserve the influence of minorities and promote intellectual competition. This might include a system of proportional voting that would give dissenters on a faculty more power, or the establishment of special programmes to promote views that are under-represented by the faculties.

There's more, but you get the idea. I really fucking hate these people. They want some sort of affirmative action program for right wingers. For fuck's sake; the reason there are more liberals in academe, if indeed that's true, is because it's a job that's all about teaching people to think critically and most of the people doing it could make far more money doing something else. If you want more conservatives there, change your party's fucking values.

George Will also weighed in on the tragedy of the liberal bias this week. He talks about the tacit assumption within the ivory tower that all colleagues are liberal. And so the conservatives are "unsheltered" by the university environment. (I'm sorry, but cry me a fucking river. I've just spent a week proving the fact that everyone in America seems to have a tacit assumption that any random stranger is a war-supporting conservative.) In any case, this of course, affects the quality of scholarship as well:

"Schools of education, for instance, take constructivist theories of learning as definitive, excluding realists (in matters of knowledge) on principle, while the quasi-Marxist outlook of cultural studies rules out those who espouse capitalism. If you disapprove of affirmative action, forget pursuing a degree in African-American studies. If you think that the nuclear family proves the best unit of social well-being, stay away from women's studies."

This gives rise to what Bauerlein calls the "false consensus effect," which occurs when, because of institutional provincialism, "people think that the collective opinion of their own group matches that of the larger population." There also is what Cass Sunstein, professor of political science and jurisprudence at the University of Chicago, calls "the law of group polarization." Bauerlein explains: "When like-minded people deliberate as an organized group, the general opinion shifts toward extreme versions of their common beliefs." They become tone-deaf to the way they sound to others outside their closed circle of belief.

Unless academics have stopped reading newspapers and are not speaking to anyone when they step off the quad, I find it impossible to believe they are suffering from the misconception that their ideas reflect that of the larger majority. And of course you should stay away from women's studies if you are stuck in an Ozzy and Harriet vision of social stability. Why the fuck would you want a women's studies degree? God I just want to bite some right winger in the leg right now.