Suppressing Dissent

Diversity is important, any modern progressive academic will tell you, and every university should aim to have a faculty that has a mix of genders, ethnicities, and sexual orientations. It's important to liberals to expose themselves and others to a wide variety of different perspectives, at least it is unless the variety of perspectives includes unacceptable religious or political views. At that point lines need to be drawn.

A university will bend over backward to ensure they have all genders and races, gays, transvestites, transsexuals, vegans and pagans on their faculty, but if a highly qualified candidate for employment is manifestly Christian and/or conservative, well, diversity must not be carried too far. At least, that's the lesson this female law professor has learned:

Teresa Wagner, who works as an associate director of writing at the University of Iowa College of Law, is suing former dean Carolyn Jones for employment discrimination, claiming she was not hired for a professor position because Jones and other law faculty disapproved of her conservative views and activism.

Wagner, who graduated with honors from the law school in 1993, has taught at the George Mason University School of Law. She has also worked for the National Right to Life Committee, which opposes abortion, and the conservative Family Research Council.

In 2006, Wagner applied for a full-time instructor position with the law school and was denied. She was also rejected for an adjunct or full-time position in four subsequent attempts, according to her attorney, Stephen T. Fieweger.

Fieweger said Wagner's candidacy was dismissed because of her conservative views, and he cited a 2007 email from Associate Dean Jonathan C. Carlson to Jones in which Carlson wrote: "Frankly, one thing that worries me is that some people may be opposed to Teresa serving in any role, in part at least because they so despise her politics (and especially her activism about it)."

There's more on the story at the link. It's astonishing that liberals are so concerned about diversity in matters of race, gender, and sexual orientation, but diversity of thought and opinion they despise. They're very concerned about justice, but their concern extends only to justice for people who think like themselves. Justice for conservatives is not high on their list of priorities, at least not at Iowa University College of Law.

It's a very small-minded frame of mind, but it shows itself so often where liberals are in positions of power that it seems that it's more than just ideological blindness. Dissent in liberal precincts is considered good and noble only when it is liberals who are dissenting from traditional pieties and orthodoxies. When conservatives assail the dogmas of liberalism the unfortunate deviants can expect to be cast out into outer darkness, and the irony is that the people doing the casting out fancy themselves to be enlightened champions of free speech and free thought.