CU SEARCHES FOR CONSERVATIVE COUNTERPOINT
We got the long-awaited news last week that CU has formed a search committee to help select the university’s first visiting scholar in conservative thought and policy.
Considering that the Boulder campus leans left, to put it mildly, we must invoke the image of a conservative in captivity, Democrats circling his or her cage, gazing at the strange creature curiously. To quote conservative journalist George Will, “Like Margaret Mead among the Samoans, they’re planning to study conservatives. That’s hilarious.”
So we thought we’d help out with the screening process. Here are some questions that committee members like right-wing talk show host Mike Rosen can use to test candidates’ Republican mettle.
1. You don’t believe in climate change or global warming, do you?
2. Tell us how you could help us work to eliminate ethnic studies and other useless departments.
3. How would you bolster real disciplines, like Western civilization and U.S. civics?
4. How would you work to expose the fact that faculty don’t spend enough hours in the classroom, teaching?
5. What would you do to prevent the hiring of any more Ward Churchills?
And in a related question, how would you quash any undesirable faculty research that questions, say, U.S. foreign policy?
6. How would you become defensive and closed off when questioned by the media about problems in the university?
7. How would you give lip service to true ethnic diversity while playing up the idea of political, er, intellectual, diversity?
8. What would you do to help ensure the continuation of the current trend of hiring old, non-academic Republican white guys as CU president?
9. How would you foster secret back-room deals with corporations that pledge to give CU money in exchange for having control over the curriculum?
10. Will you recruit members of your church to pray that our football team becomes decent this year? (Or: Will you talk nice to those meanies in the PAC-12 so they don’t beat up on us so badly this year?)
11. How will you recruit decent, collared-shirt wearing, football-loving students who want MBAs and careers that make their parents proud and will stop all that damn partying and burning couches on the Hill?
12. What will you do to continue to confuse our students about basic rights, like free speech and freedom of assembly, by quashing all their efforts to exercise those rights on a college campus? (Or: What will you do to ensure that, rather than fostering the debate of our nation’s laws in the effort to contest those our students may see as unjust, we encourage future police state-like events on campus? What other methods for destroying free expression of ideas can you contribute?) Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com
