Dickinson College philosophy professor Crispin Sartwell writes about academic groupthink in the L. A. Times:

I teach political philosophy. And like most professors I know, I bend over backward to sympathetically teach texts I hate; I try to show my students why people have found Plato and Karl Marx -- both of whom I regard as totalitarians -- compelling. But when I get to the end of "The Communist Manifesto," I'm usually asking things like this: "Marx says that all means of communication should be centralized in the hands of the state. Anyone see any problems with that?"

I don't deceive myself into thinking that I teach these texts as well as, or in the same way as, a professor who found them plausible. And that's fine. What I'm trying to point out is that even as I try to be neutral (well, even if I did try to be neutral), my personal opinions affect every aspect of what I do, and I think that is generally true.

But it can be horrendously true in academia, where everything is affected by the real opinions of real professors, from the configuration of departments to the courses on offer to the texts taught. And because there's a consensus, there is precious little self-examination; a slant that we all share becomes invisible.

Academic consensus is a particularly irritating variety of groupthink. First of all, the fact that everyone agrees and everyone has a doctorate leads to the occasionally explicit idea that all intelligent people think the same thing -- that no one could disagree with, say, Obama-ism, without being an idiot. This attitude is continually expressed, for example, in attacks on presidents Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush, not for their political positions but for their grades and IQs.

That the American professoriate is near-unanimous for Barack Obama is a problem on many levels, but certainly pedagogically. Ideological uniformity does a disservice to students and makes a mockery of the pious commitment of these professors simply to convey knowledge. Also, the claims of the professoriate to intellectual independence and academic freedom, supposedly nurtured by tenure, are thrown into question by the unanimity. Professors are as herd-like in their opinions as other groups that demographers like to identify -- "working-class white men," for example. Indeed, surely more so.

That's partly just a result of the charming human tendency to nod along with whomever is sitting next to you. But it's also the predictable result of the fact that a professor has been educated, often for a decade or more, by the very institutions that harbor this unanimity. Every new generation of professors has been steeped in an atmosphere in which the authorities all agree and in which they associate agreement with intelligence -- and with degrees, jobs, tenure and so on. If you've been taught that conservatives are evil idiots, then conservatism itself justifies a decision not to hire or tenure one. Every new leftist minted by graduate programs is an act of self-praise, a confirmation of the intelligence of the professors.

That this smog of consensus is incompatible with the supposedly high-minded educational mission of colleges and universities is obvious. Yet higher education is at least as dedicated to the reproduction of Obama-ism as it is to conveying information. But academics are massively self-deceived about this, which makes it all the more disgusting and effective.

The occasion for Sartwell's op-ed is University of Colorado chancellor Bud Peterson's effort to raise $9 million for an endowed chair of conservative thought and policy. Sartwell thinks this is a good idea, citing the official political imbalance of the Colorado faculty, as evidenced in voter registration figures: of the 800 faculty there, ony 32 are registered republicans. But, to carry on his smog imagery, as much as I admire Sartwell's eloquent evocation of how intellectual homogeneity pollutes the academic environment, I think his reasoning here is a bit foggy.

Let's set aside the equation of political party affiliation with intellectual vantage point--that's an old, well-travelled subject with old, well-rehearsed arguments for both sides, and it's not what I wish to take up here. Let's just concentrate on the question of who exactly would fill this chair. Colorado has been troublingly imprecise on this front--and while they have paid lip service to the idea that anyone could be hired for it, and that the person who occupies it need not be a conservative, they also cite a list of potential occupants of the chair that indicates something else entirely. Everyone mentioned is a prominent political conservative--Condoleezza Rice, Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, columnist George Will, and 9/11 commissioner Philip Zelikow are among them--a fact that strongly suggests that whatever this chair is in theory, in practice it is envisioned as an opportunity for tokenistic affirmative action for conservatives, so much so that the actual academic qualifications of the candidate appear to be beside the point.

This is exactly the wrong way to approach the very real problem of ideological and intellectual one-sidedness on campus, for the simple reason that you don't solve a problem by reproducing the logic that creates the problem. Identity politics, and the double standards that go along with them, have no place within a truly self-respecting intellectual environment. The only thing that should count is merit.

If the conservative chair were clearly marked out as a strictly intellectual property--because the history and philosophy of conservative thought is every bit as legitimate an area of study as as Victorian literature, or African history, or Marxist theory--then it might mark the beginning of an important process of legitimation for a subject that has gotten short shrift within the academy in recent years. But as it stands, Colorado seems to be trying to have things both ways. And that's just as smoggy as the consensus the chair is ostensibly intended to clean up.