Balancing opinions across educators within our nation's colleges and universities is a good idea, a Right idea, if you will, whose time hopefully has, or will eventually come. But going about it the way John Fund at least appears to advocate in this piece is a bad tactic, at best.
Meanwhile, Yale faces a new challenge. In the next few days the university may hire Juan Cole, a history professor at the University of Michigan, to fill a new spot as a professor of contemporary Middle East studies.
Mr. Cole's appointment would be problematic on several fronts. First, his scholarship is largely on the 19th-century Middle East, not on contemporary issues. "He has since abandoned scholarship in favor of blog commentary," says Michael Rubin, a Yale graduate and editor of the Middle East Quarterly. Mr. Cole's postings at his blog, Informed Comment, appear to be a far cry from scholarship. They feature highly polemical writing and dubious conspiracy theories.
While Ed at CQ, and others have lined up with Fund:
It appears that Yale has a new quota system in place -- one that requires a certain level of Zionist-conspiracy theorists to be on campus at any one time. Instead of relying on its students and the admissions department, Yale's executives seem to want to address it through its faculty.
I'd strongly disagree. Advocating balance is one thing, bringing it to the level the Senate has brought court nominations - where individuals are attacked for potential ideological alignment as sort of a litmus test for appointment isn't about balance, so much as it is about launching personal attacks against those with whom we strongly disagree.
From what I have read of Cole, and admittedly, that's very little, I can do without his uninformed by balance, and reasonableness, commentary. But it isn't for me to tell Yale they can do without it, perhaps because I see it as extreme. That's especially so if I want to advocate the addition of more Conservative scholarship at Yale those on the Left might see, rightly or wrongly, as equally extreme.
I think it's important to keep the argument over the role of scholarship in academe about inclusion of other views, not exclusion of ones for which we don't care.
James Joyner at OTB has it right.
If we are going to argue that distinguished academics whose political views we do not like are unfit for hire, conservatives will have little ground to stand on when they find their own attacked. That’s a very dangerous precedent.
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