STEP ONE: Spit on hands. STEP TWO: Hoist black flag. STEP THREE: ...

KC Johnson's old article on left-wing bias in higher education is getting some replay in the wake of a scandal over the apparently misquoted statement of a Duke department head. (What he didn't say: “No. We don’t hire Republicans because they are stupid and we are not. Why should we knowingly hire stupid professors?” What he did say: "If, as John Stuart Mill said, stupid people are generally conservative, then there are lots of conservatives we will never hire. Mill’s analysis may go some way towards explaining the power of the Republican party in our society and the relative scarcity of Republicans in academia. Players in the NBA tend to be taller than average. There is a good reason for this. Members of academia tend to be a bit smarter than average. There is a good reason for this too.”)

Johnson has his own thoughts and they are worth reading, but here's a list of the quotes he pulls:

“Many conservatives,” the Pitt professors mused, “may deliberately choose not to seek employment at top-tier research universities because they object, on philosophical grounds, to one of the fundamental tenets undergirding such institutions: the scientific method.”

. . . As SUNY-Albany’s Ron McClamrock reasoned, “Lefties are overrepresented in academia because on average, we’re just f-ing smarter.”

. . . In a slightly different vein, UCLA professor John McCumber informed The New York Times that “a successful career in academia, after all, requires willingness to be critical of yourself and to learn from experience,” qualities “antithetical to Republicanism as it has recently come to be.”

. . . In another Times article, Berkeley professor George Lakoff asserted that Leftists predominate in the academy because, “unlike conservatives, they believe in working for the public good and social justice, as well as knowledge and art for their own sake."

. . . According to Montclair State’s Grover Furr, “colleges and universities do not need a single additional ‘conservative’ .... What they do need, and would much benefit from, is more Marxists, radicals, leftists — all terms conventionally applied to those who fight against exploitation, racism, sexism, and capitalism. We can never have too many of these, just as we can never have too few ‘conservatives.’”

Nice to have all of these collected in one place, especially after the NYT piece on the decline of leftism in the Ivory Tower. As Paul Gottfried puts it, "It may be the case that those of my generation who identify themselves as leftists have been more honest than the younger 'moderates' who are taking their place. The only likely difference between Goldrick-Rab and the person she is about to replace may be one of self-perception. Olneck never hid his leftist opinions. By contrast, Goldrick-Rab may assume that her left-liberal opinions are the only ones that decent people would hold."