Campus diversity scares the left

We read in today’s WSJ’s Review & Outlook:

The left-leaning faction that dominates American higher education doesn't take kindly to strangers--particularly those who challenge the prevailing academic orthodoxies. Just ask Harvard's Larry Summers.

Or consider the escalating governance controversy at Dartmouth College. A few reformers have achieved a bit of influence, and now the New Hampshire school's insular establishment is doing everything it can to run them out of Hanover.

Since 1891, Dartmouth has been among the handful of colleges and universities that allows alumni to elect leaders directly. At present, eight of the 18 members of the governing Board of Trustees are chosen by the popular vote of some 66,500 graduates, from a slate nominated by a small, mostly unelected committee. (The remaining seats, reserved for major donors, are filled by appointment.)

In practice, the Trustees have been largely ornamental overseers, rubber-stamping the management decisions of the "progressive" college administration and faculty. The passivity of the Trustees owes, in part, to the fact that many official alumni representatives operate as a de facto wing of the establishment, pushing candidates who won't make trouble.

In 2004 and 2005, however, Dartmouth alumni were finally offered genuine choices. Over three successive Trustee contests, independent candidates bypassed the official channels and got onto the ballot by collecting alumni signatures. Each of the petition candidates--T.J. Rodgers, a Silicon Valley CEO; Peter Robinson, a former Reagan speechwriter and current Hoover Institution fellow; and Todd Zywicki, a law professor--ran on explicit platforms emphasizing academic standards, free speech and Dartmouth's acute leadership crisis.

All three were unexpectedly elected by wide margins despite intense institutional opposition.

Not only did [their elections] give expression to the general alumni discontent over how Dartmouth is being run (a rare thing in academia), but a critical mass was also building for more muscular stewardship, and, with it, fundamental change.

Dartmouth's inner circles, quite naturally, loathe all of this. And so the Alumni Council--the representative body of sorts for the whole--decided there was nothing to be done but change the rules.

Change the rules?

We can all understand that, can’t we? If elections don’t go the way the left likes, what else can the left do but change the rules?

The left can’t let people show up at university trustee meetings who don’t subscribe to its orthodoxy that's dominant on most American campuses.

If you let people critical of the leftist orthodoxy attend trustee meetings, there’s no telling what they'd do. Question speech codes, perhaps. Or wonder why so many faculty in the humanities and social sciences are leftist.

Things could get out of control. The next thing you know, somebody will ask why the university won’t allow the military to recruit on campus the kind of people who bear arms and sometimes give their lives defending the faculty members’ right to tear at America while telling students they need to “understand the plight” of people who want to kill us.

What leftist wants genuine intellectual and political diversity on campus?

Folks, we need to keep pressing for more intellectual and political diversity on our campuses.

The rest of the WSJ article is here.