Passing the litmus test

An unpopular truth

[Reprinted from Issues & Views December 3, 2001]

Increasingly, ideological litmus tests are applied to the hiring of professors. Candidates for faculty positions report being asked openly ideological questions. One young scholar who has published very careful and important research that reached politically incorrect conclusions reports being treated with calculated discourtesy and boorishness during job interviews. It was not enough for the cultural commissars to turn him down, they had to try to humiliate him.

This particular scholar has now been hired by a conservative think tank on the east coast. But the real harm that has been done has been done to students who will never learn that there is a factual and reasoned alternative to the one-sided propaganda they will hear in their classrooms.

Incidentally, there is a reason why most of the top-rated think tanks in the world are conservative. When a liberal think tank wants to hire a top scholar in some field, they have to compete with Ivy League universities, Berkeley, Duke, and the like. But conservative think tanks don't have that problem, because the ideological litmus tests in academia bar many conservative scholars from an academic career. Conservative think tanks have little competition when hiring people like the outstanding young man who was dissed at job interviews in places where he was, if anything, over-qualified.

What is remarkable--and appalling--is that so many businessmen keep writing donation checks, some in the millions of dollars, for places where businessmen are demonized by academics who know nothing about business, and where the very possibility that a student applicant might become a businessman is enough reason to blackball him, despite his academic achievements.

Recently, a college student wrote to me that a professor was shocked to see a book of mine accidentally fall out of his book bag. However, the prof was visibly relieved when the student said that it was just a book that he bought for himself. What this ideological academic had feared was that this book was assigned reading in some course. In other words, four years of steady indoctrination with the left viewpoint might be jeopardized by one little book of essays.

-- Thomas Sowell is an economist and author of many books, including Preferential Policies: An International Perspective (Morrow), Inside American Education: The Decline, The Deception, The Dogmas (Free Press/Macmillan) and Migrations and Cultures: A World View (Basic Books).

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