Conservative vandals are on the march again, this time hoping to do to “liberal” academia what they’ve been so successful in doing to the “liberal” mainstream media – destroy the entire institution by planting seeds of conservative antipathy within. The president of Colorado University has announced a new nine million dollar endowment for a Visiting Chair of Conservative Thought and Policy (upward of $200K/yr.) to “add diversity of thought and scholarship,” according to a CU spokesman.

CONSERVATIVE THOUGHT! Hahahahah, that's a good one. If thought is an activity based on logic, using commonly agreed upon methods such as those taught in universities, stressing fact over wishful thinking and intellectual rigor over name-calling, then I'm afraid there's nothing to teach about conservative thought, it never happens.

Conservatives see it as a problem with the institutions of education and journalism that so many teachers and journalists are "liberal."  Indeed, of 825 professors at CU, only 23 are registered Republicans. Teachers and journalists tend to be liberal because the values and practices of teaching and journalism accord well with the values of liberalism. To wit: love of ideas, commitment to principles of academic rigor and objective truth, compassion for fellow human beings of all stripes, and willingness to sacrifice for the common good (that's what teachers do in this country). These are all principles that are toxic to the conservative world view.

And conservatives are so insecure about this unfair imbalance that they would rather destroy the institutions (as they already have the news media, and now seek to do to academe) than look into the mirror and see their own anti-intellectual, anti-humanist, self-aggrandizing qualities, the very qualities that make them so rare in academia and journalism.

Perhaps saddest of all, conservatives are suspicious of academia. To begin with, for mysterious reasons, well-educated people tend to be liberal. In addition, conservatives believe that (liberal) educators are secretly trying to indoctrinate students against the conservative creed, just as they believe that liberal journalists write the news to suit their political ends. But ultimately conservatives don't believe in professional education (or journalism) because they themselves are not willing to submit to its tenets. It’s not liberal ideology but the simple practice of rigorous thought and commitment to truth that keeps conservatives out of the loop. And now they're trying to buy their way in with a well-funded department of conservative thought.

The paucity of conservatives at CU and other liberal arts programs is not due to a liberal bias among teachers against conservatives, but because of conservatives themselves. Conservatives just don’t like academia and its rules. They want their views to be taken seriously, but they really aren’t too interested in thought. Maybe instead of trying to infiltrate existing schools, they should branch out and start an entirely conservative approach to education. They could call it indoctrination. And mixed with a little religious dogma, it’d be unstoppable.