ANTI-CONSERVATIVE BIAS
Well, so far at least, no luck getting the attention of Daniel Drezner. But John Lemon has generated quite a buzz at Kevin Drum‘s place, debating the claim that conservatives are regularly denied tenure and promotion in universities.
Clarifications:
1) John Lemon did not start this. In fact, his first comment on the whole debate came about about comment #90.
2) While I had mentioned that I personally was told that GOP’ers would not get tenure in MY department, I never made the claim that they were regularly denied tenure. I would say that they are ostracized and that many avoid certain fields, but I never talked about a vast tenure-denial conspiracy.
3) Sigh. And I was moving my blog towards more goofy, off-kilter and inane postings (with a rare political insight).
4) And I give up on Drezner. The guy skydives. Anybody who jumps out of perfectly good planes probably has no interest in me, who likes to stay in them and see them land safely.
James–
We missed your sage words of wisdom on this one…
Chicken?? LOL
P
Hmmmmmm… sage chicken.
What have I been saying all of these months about the Calpundit comment section…
Mr. Lemon, why are you wasting ANY time with those barking moon-bats?
The preponderance of comments in that thread was absolutely beyond the pale and in my opinion only strengthened your reasons for remaining anonymous.
In one post they call you a liar (because liberals could never discriminate for political reasons) and in almost the next post “Matt Davis” states: “I happen to believe that Republicans don’t deserve tenure, but I’ve never been on a departmental committee.” while managing to work in a nice comparison to Nazis.
Like Rachel Lucas says: Imagine no liberals. 🙂
Jimbo,
An interesting exercise, to be sure. I figured the 130-odd comments there were enough that I didn’t have anything to add. There is clearly a view in some academic circles that if you’re conservative, especially religious and conservative, you must not be very smart. So I do think there’s bias and a chilling factor. I don’t think there’s a systematic conspiracy to deny tenure to Republicans–and neither does “John”–but Republicans are less likely to feel unconstrained in offering a passionate view of their beliefs than are Democrats.
Moon-bats, eh?
But I thought conservatives were hard thinkers, and liberals were mushy feelers.
Yes, Moon-Bats I say! 🙂
James, there doesn’t HAVE to be an actual conspiracy to deny opportunities to anyone that has less that liberal leanings. When you look at the totality and the outcome from acting on those beliefs, you still get the same result as if there is an actual conspiracy.
I have been up way to long to continue, I will try back later on this evening.