Brett Mock (Dec. 13) played word games with some leaders of the Peace Center at BSU. I'm going to limit my comments to David Horowitz, who had previously made it crystal clear that all "250 peace studies programs in America ... teach students to identify with America's terrorist enemies and to identify America as a Great Satan oppressing the world's poor and causing them to go hungry." It's not the question of whether Horowitz "called anyone in the (BSU) group a terrorist," it is the fact that Horowitz has inferred that all members of the BSU peace group are guilty by association.
The question is not whether Brett Mock or Amanda Carpenter are victims of BSU liberalism. The question is: Do one-party faculties color the classroom blue? (Assuming that a disproportionate number of professors are Democrats.) Does it prove that students are being wooed leftward? Of course not!
Let's assume that BSU's economics department is 100 percent red, and its political science department is 100 percent blue. Does that prove that students are being wooed rightward and leftward, respectively? No. Is it possible to have racial, ethnic and gender pluralism along with intellectual uniformity? Of course! Is it possible that conservative "Ph. D.'s might rather work in the free market than teach the free market" (Ellen Goodman)? Of course!
After reading about the two surveys that George Mill says show that there is a disproportionate number of Democratic profs on certain campuses, I have a privacy question that I recently asked Larry Shores, the long-time editor and new editorial page editor of the Muncie Star Press: Is it possible to conduct research on the political affiliation of professors without violating their privacy rights? Shores said, "Good question. I don't know."
Since BSU profs who register to vote do not reveal their academic department, is it possible to obtain such information without violating their privacy rights?
What's next? Quotas for Republican psychologists?
It appears that right-wing activists such as Carpenter and Mock are claiming to be victims of discrimination rather than personal choice.
Campus liberalism can be summed up nicely by saying that liberal students have marched against child labor or the war, while conservative students organized against campus liberalism.
Regardless of their own differences, conservative thinkers from widely differing points of view agree that liberalism is the summum malum to be combated with a single-mindedness that seems to border on paranoia. That's why campus politics is so vicious, not to mention that "there's an extramural furor over politics itself" (Goodman).
Finally, some right-wingers simply cannot control their insuppressible reflex to look down their upturned noses (look at Carpenter's picture by Kyle Evens in the Muncie Star Press, Sept. 27) at campus liberals. Nevertheless, Mock seems to believe that the liberal Peach Worker leaders are viciously ignorant, not to mention that they are liars. The truth is simple: Republican one-party rule in Washington, D.C. has resulted in such power arrogance "when a majority can no longer see its own vices" (Gloria Borger).
B.J. Paschal, Ph. D.
Professor Emeritus of Psychology
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