I would be amazed at how much energy defenders of the academic status quo pour into arguing that academe is not highly politicized, if I weren't so exhausted by them. They do not have a case, and those who temporize by saying the equivalent of, "Well, maybe there are some issues with politicization, but those aren't the main issues, and the main issues are issues of professionalism, and we should really focus on those so that we can have a properly nuanced account of it all that allows us to sidestep the more immediate issue of doctrinaire scholarship and teaching and defer dealing with the problems in perpetuity because I am not about to do more than poke holes in others' arguments and I am not interested myself in proposing a solution," well, those people drive me nuts. So do the people who dismiss the issue by saying that critics of academe "overstate" the case. You'd think intellectuals could tell when their own bad faith is on display. And maybe they can. But they certainly don't think others can, which is a snobbery that, I suppose, is to be expected of people who think of themselves as intellectuals.

Here's a little piece from Inside Higher Ed today, about how Americanists are getting together to figure out how to push their politics harder in the policy arena. Note the automatic assumptions about what those politics are:

Nicholas Bromell started off his presentation at the American Studies Association meeting on Friday by asking a packed room of participants if they knew the names of any conservative think tanks that are powerful in Washington. Groups like the Heritage Foundation were quickly named by the professors. Bromell, a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, then asked if they could name any liberal groups, and the audience was stumped.

Of course there are such organizations, but the audience reaction (and this was not an audience of Heritage fans) illustrated his point. "Conservatives have been very effective at bringing professors and scholars together to talk to their policy people," he said. Liberals less so.

Amy Kaplan, an English professor at the University of Pennsylvania, said that the session was designed to encourage more professors on the left to reach out to Washington and to think about the policy implications of their work. It’s not just getting the attention of policy makers, she said, but a question of "how we can listen" so as to shape ideas that can be executed.

Mark Moyar has a piece in today's NRO that gets at one of the more hidden parts of this particular shell game: the academic hiring process:

It's not the score of a Hawkeye football game. It's the number of Democrats versus the number of Republicans in the University of Iowa history department, and it has Iowans in an uproar. So, too, do charges published by Mark Bauerlein that left-wing bias has influenced the department's hiring process. In response to the revelations, department chair Colin Gordon announced that the department had committed no wrongdoing, and neither he nor the university has expressed any concern about the total absence of intellectual diversity. Rarely have the hypocrisy and mendacity of academia been so thoroughly exposed as in the history department's damage-control campaign.

Professor Gordon contended that the history department cannot discriminate against Republican or conservative job applicants because it does not know the political ideology of applicants. But the University's own hiring manual states that search committees must "assess ways the applicants will bring rich experiences, diverse backgrounds, and ideology to the university community." So they are obligated to understand applicants' ideology, and to make sure not to overlook people with differing ideologies.

Determining a historian's ideological inclinations is actually very easy in most cases. When I applied to the University of Iowa history department for a professorship in the United States and world affairs, my resume listed membership in the National Organization of Scholars, which is an organization that everyone in academia knows to be ideologically to the right of the average academic organization. A quick search on Google or Amazon, moreover, reveals that my two books on the Vietnam War have widely been characterized as conservative.

Contrary to his recent protestations, Professor Gordon understands very well the ideological associations of my research on Vietnam. In the leftist publication New Internationalist, he wrote that interpretations of Vietnam similar to mine were part of a "shallow, cynical, and selective" effort by American conservatives who wish to justify global military domination in the spirit of "the aggressive imperialist Teddy Roosevelt." Similarly well-informed is Professor Stephen Vlastos, the chair of the search committee, who wrote an entire book chapter denouncing historians who interpret Vietnam as I do.

UPDATE: Peter Wood has similar thoughts on the American Studies meeting.