National Review Takes on the Academy!

Mark Bauerlein explains why there are so few American Tobacco Institute Professors of Epidemiology, so few ExxonMobil Professors of Atmospheric Physics, so few Dinosaurs-Were-too-Big-to-Fit-in-the-Ark Professors of Biology, and so few Supply-Side Jesus Professors of Theology:

Phi Beta Cons on National Review Online: As the intellectual-diversity movement unfolds in state legislatures and in the media, a pattern of resistance has developed.... The inquiry was set up to focus on specific events and actions: Have professors punished conservative students at grading time? Have partisan incidents spread through classrooms? Are there intimidated professors and harassed students lurking underground? In these cases, the attention fell on individual teachers and episodes. It was the personal contact that counted.

For an inquiry into bias in an institution the size and complexity of the university, this is a dead end. Academia is a subculture, an insider's universe.... A set of mores, protocols, attitudes, and norms develops. In its better forms, it goes by the name of professionalism. But how easily do those attitudes and norms slide into cliquish, parochial, or ideological behavior, especially when professionals talk only to themselves. Bias, then, operates more systematically, less overtly than in a rant against George Bush in the classroom, less individualistically than in one person's exercise of power...

Sounds like some New Leftist from 1968: the universities' professors don't have my ideological slant on the world, therefore the whole institution must be biased. And someone should clue Mark in. There has been a shift in the right-wing party line: ranting against George W. Bush is not a sign of ideological bias, but of attachment to reality:

• Al Neuharth's right-wing credentials are impeccable: yet he rants about how "the 37% who have switched from pro-Bush to anti-Bush... finally realized they were suckered by Bush and his buddies."
• White Fox House News Press Correspondent Secretary Tony Snow's right-wing credential are impeccable: yet he rants about how Bush is an "embarrassment [who]... doesn't seem to mean what he says... didn't have the drive and work ethic [for the presidency]."
• David Ignatius's right-wing credentials are impeccable: yet he rants "You would have thought it was impossible to make our intelligence problems even worse, but the Bush administration has accomplished that."
• Peggy Noonan's right-wing credentials are impeccable: yet she has a special message for George W. Bush: "Just because they call you a jackass doesn't mean you're Lincoln."

And I haven't even mentioned the likes of Bruce Bartlett and Andrew Sullivan. As the New Republic's Ryan Lizza put it:

The Bush-haters are at it again. This one complains about "the sad state of the Bush administration." This one here burbles, "I think this Administration is the most politically and substantively inept that the nation has had in over a quarter of a century." And those are just the guys at National Review...

Say that rants against George W. Bush are a sign of left-wing bias, and you do nothing but demonstrate your utter cluelessness to the world in which you live.