Ideological quotas in academia are wrong

There's no getting around the fact that liberals dominate the academy. The question is what to do about it. Some conservatives have called for what would essentially be ideological affirmative action in academic hiring. But Michael Munger, a political science professor here at Duke, has what I think is exactly the right take on the issue (Quicktime video):

You asking me "what are my political views" belongs outside the classroom. Now there are plenty of people on the left who don't do that. They're bad teachers. That's not an issue of political repression. They're bad teachers, and I would say the same thing about someone on the right who did that. The last thing that I want is a university or department of equal numbers of people on the left and right who impose their views on students.

So the solution is not to hire more people on the right. The solution is to take politics out of the classroom, to develop a norm of pedagogy that says "I challenge students to try to get them to think."

[Note: Mike is on my dissertation committee. He's also a blogger and a Libertarian gubernatorial candidate.]

Comments

[Lettuce]

And he believes you can "take politics out of the classroom."

Charming

[Seth]

I would try to avoid describing things like this in terms of "right" and "wrong". It tends to paint things in a Bush-like fundamentalist tone (a la either you're with us, or you're against us).