Not Necessarily News, but Still Interesting

Campaign donations by Brown University faculty are running 10 to 1 in favor of Barack Obama, according to this admirably professional piece of reporting by The Brown Daily Herald, and higher than that if you count the donations of the school's non-faculty employees.

That's slightly higher than the national average of 8 to 1, but both numbers confirm what most of us already understand about the troubling conformity of thought in American universities, despite the mocking hosannas their faculty members sing to "diversity," "academic freedom" and "free inquiry."

Explanations for the lopsided support are predictably self-congratulatory: Academics are drawn to Obama, according to the story, because he's perceived as an intellectual, meaning he'll "reason through" his decisions, rather than "shoot from the hip," as academics fear with McCain. Whether Obama's alleged propensity for socialism (or worse) adds to his appeal wasn't mentioned in the story, oddly. But does anyone doubt it?

Without any apparent awareness of the ironies, a Brown prof told the reporter that Obama was popular "because he broadens the 'kind of diversity and inclusiveness' encouraged in university settings to society at large."

Inclusiveness? Diversity? In university settings? Stories like this one prove otherwise.

Will Eco-U educate or indoctrinate?

"The University of Washington’s Board of Regents on Thursday voted unanimously to create a new College of the Environment,” the Seattle Times reports, though it is nothing at this point but a “shell” and the concept has encountered resistance from “some state legislators and faculty.” The source of that reluctance is not well explained in the story: news:seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2004474555_uwregents13m0.html. One regent seems to write it all off as mere institutional rigidity and resistance to change.

But perhaps some of the more serious, objective scientists on campus don’t want to be associated with an institution that could quickly become the College of Environmentalism, rather than the College of the Environment, polluting pure science with public policy-making. Perhaps some fear that green ideology and sensationalized science will in time come to taint everything the department does.

Scientists should be scientists. Missionaries should be missionaries. But in the name of “saving the planet,” some radicals seem determined to co-opt science and conflate the two. Fear of this might help explain why “faculty in four out of the six schools and departments that would form the new college, including the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences and the Department of Earth and Space Sciences, have rejected the idea in advisory votes," according to the Times. “Some are concerned part of their research wouldn't fit within the mandate of the new college.”

A college with a “mandate”? That alone should give one pause.