Affirmative action for conservatives?

When so many profs lean left, how exactly do we get ideological diversity?

I got a call this morning from an old friend who had watched my interview with Ira Stoll, in which Ira and I discussed his attack on Harvard’s hiring two non-Zionists for Jewish studies positions. If you watched the interview, you know that I came across as flipping the tables on the conservative Stoll: I was the one arguing for merit-based hiring (insofar as the professors he was discussing were clearly super-qualified), and I was accusing him, the right-winger, of endorsing identity-based hiring (insofar as he wanted Harvard to look for scholars with certain politics, rather than “the best” scholars).

My friend wanted to call bullshit on me. What he said to me boiled down to this: “Really, Mark? Really? We have had so many conversations in which you have bemoaned the ideological drift of faculties, and in which you have said pretty explicitly that there needs to be some rebalancing. So do you really mean to say that if you were on a hiring committee, in a humanities field, going out to fill new positions, that you wouldn’t try to favor candidates who were a bit more conservative, or at least not left-wing?” In other words, didn’t I basically agree with Ira that hiring non-Zionists (or anti-Zionists), in the current climate, only serves to perpetuate the left-ward tilt that I think has gone too far?

And I have to admit: Yeah, he was kind of right about me. I do think that faculties need to be more ideologically and politically balanced.

And yet, I also think that scholars should be hired based on merit.

And given that most of the best humanities scholars (as well as most of the worst) are pretty ideologically homogeneous, that puts me in a bit of a pickle.

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