F-ing conservative whiners
August 27, 2005A year or so back, I wrote a little rant here (Why academia tends to be liberal) about conservatives whining over the apparent overrepresentation of liberals in academia. Same old crap — they try to make it seem like there’s some targeted discrimination against conservatives, and that this is just like the discrimination that’s been faced by women and minorities. Anyway, I said what I wanted to then about this bullshit. And I ended the post with the remark “Lefties are overrepresented in academia because on average, we’re just f-ing smarter. There. I said it. That’s right: I’m the left-wing atheistic professor that your parents warned you about.”
But my post got cited and linked more than is usual for my little blog — sometimes angrily, sometimes with a chorus of “Right on!”. And yesterday, somebody from the former camp got a little op-ed/letter piece in “Inside Higher Education” which cited my comment as an example of the lefties “Proving the Critics’ Case“. (I don’t usually read IHE, but I got a handful of emails from people pointing me to the piece.) Personally, I think it’s a pretty lame piece, and just rehashes the same “It’s like racism!” crap we’ve heard before.
But what’s interesting from a personal perspective (and after all, this is a personal blog) is that something I said in a personal forum, not even linked from my academic page, gets cited as a comment from my academic self — almost as if I’d said it in a research paper or something. It’s not that I mind — shit, I’m quoted along with Berkeley’s George Lakoff and Pitt’s Robert Brandom, who are two people whose work I quite admire. And I still believe what I said. But the idea that a throwaway line from the net’s equivalent of mouthing off over beers (a personal blog) gets quoted in this context seems pretty strange.
Lucky for me, I’m a liberal protected by the vast left-wing conspiracy of tenured academic positions.
