32-to-0, 11-to-0, 9-…

32-to-0, 11-to-0, 9-to-0 and 18-to-1. Sports scores? Nope, they are the ratios of Democrats to Republicans in 4 departments at Duke University. The Duke Conservative Union wanted to discuss this situation, but it’s gone way beyond that. In response to the stats cited by the DCU, Robert Brandon, philosophy chairman, gave this insightful pronouncement:

We try to hire the best, smartest people available. 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.

As James Taranto is wont to say, if he were a Republican, that would be hate speech.

The good news is that some folks are waking up and taking notice.

Robert Munger, chairman of the political science department, said he was impressed by Duke’s intellectual diversity, which he called “relatively healthy” compared to other universities.

Still, Munger recalled a recent meeting in which he heard a fellow department chairman say it was Duke’s job to confront conservative students with their hypocrisies and that they didn’t need to say much to liberal students because they already understood the world.

“There was no big protest [at the meeting], and that was wrong,” Munger said.

Munger said the history department’s political makeup surprised him, however.

“Thirty-five Democrats and no Republicans? If you flip a coin 35 times, and it ends up heads every time, that’s not a fair coin,” he said.

The people who say, ‘I don’t think ideology is appropriate in hiring would have to look at the process that provides such a skewed outcome,” he said.

And what of other types of diversity?

“Basically, it’s sheer hypocrisy that on one hand racial diversity is important in education, but intellectual diversity isn’t,” Duke senior and DCU member Madison Kitchens said Thursday.

Precisely. Once again, “diversity”, in the dictionary of the liberal, goes only skin deep.

Here’s hoping that the arrogance of those like Robert Brandon will give way to some common sense.

UPDATE: Via Instapundit we get Brandon’s full response, and a devastating fisking of it by Carey Gage. The Payoff Paragraphs(tm):

I don’t doubt that Brandon denied the charge of hiring bias, but despite that denial, his Mills quote establishes beyond any doubt the contempt in which he holds conservatives, thus making the denial completely meaningless. Think of his statement as applied to minority candidates, instead of conservatives:

We try to hire the best, smartest people available. If, as the Grand Wizard of the KKK said, stupid people are generally black, then there are lots of blacks we will never hire.

Would you believe someone who said that and followed it by denying that there was no racial discrimination in his hiring policies? I wouldn’t.

Skin deep, like I said. When you try to apply their liberal bias to race, their much-hyped dedication to “diversity” melts away in the torrent of hypocrisy.

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