Look Like America

Last Monday (10/25), the WSJ carried Harvard Prof. Ruth Wisse's op-ed, "John Kerry U". Here is the jist:

"Last spring, I was surprised by a call from the Harvard Crimson asking me to comment on my contribution to the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign. His inquiry was prompted by the disparity he'd discovered in donations by Harvard faculty of about $150,000 for Kerry to about $8,000 for Bush. (The figures have since chnaged but not the percentages.) I could have filled the whole issue of the paper with reasons for supporting Bush over Kerry, but as we both knew, the real story was the 'herd of independent minds' -- the image is Harold Rosenberg's -- charging through the academy.

"The Federal Elections Committee couild not have foreseen that when it required employment information on political donations over $200, it would expose the scandalous uniformity in a university community that advertises its diversity. The Sacramento Bee reported that the University of California system gave more to the Kerry campaign than any other single employee group, and that Harvard was second with only 15,000 employees to the UC's 160,000. Campus bloggers computed the percentages of Kerry contributions over Bush: Cornell 93%, Dartmouth 97%, Yale 93%, Brown 89%."

Other sources have noted that adding Greens and such to the Democrat total while adding Libertarians to the Republicans leaves the ratios unchanged.

One of the mantras of the left, of course, is that admissions and hiring ought to create groups that "look like America."

When it's convenient.