It has long been said that leftists in academia love all kinds of diversity, except for diversity of thought.
It's not a secret that most colleges and universities in America are liberal strongholds, with almost no conservatives, statistically speaking, present to give students an alternate viewpoint to the message of hating and undermining America that comes from the left.
Some areas of the country, such as Florida and Texas, are working to break up the ideological monopoly in higher education by promoting the hiring of more conservatives or building new universities.
And this has the left terrified.
Yesterday, Joyce Carol Oates (last seen trying to defend Bill De Blasio's killing of a groundhog and claiming that the Bible is 'fiction'), posted a link to an article in The New York Times claiming that hiring or admitting conservatives at colleges would backfire ... on conservatives.
Why Hiring Professors With Conservative Views Could Backfire on Conservatives https://t.co/v10yatYcjg
— Joyce Carol Oates (@JoyceCarolOates) July 10, 2025
The article is, of course, written by a 'progressive,' Jennifer Morton, who teaches philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. Here is some of the pretzel logic she uses to make her case:
But a policy of hiring professors and admitting students because they have conservative views would actually endanger the open-minded intellectual environment that proponents of viewpoint diversity say they want. By creating incentives for professors and students to have and maintain certain political positions, such a policy would discourage curiosity and reward narrowness of thought ...
... Admitting students for viewpoint diversity would turn the holding of conservative ideas into a quasi-identity, subject to some of the same concerns. Students admitted to help restore ideological balance would likely feel a responsibility to defend certain views, regardless of the force of opposing arguments they might encounter.
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It's almost impossible to believe that she could miss the point so completely. Except it's also not hard to believe at all.
No one is demanding that colleges have 'quotas' of conservative students and professors. But it's natural to think that someone indoctrinated in the DEI mindset would think that way. All conservatives are asking is to stop discriminating against them in academia.
Norton also claims that she can't be ideologically captured because she makes her students read a book written by a libertarian.
LOL.
But then Oates had to pile on the warning against conservative professors with a follow-up tweet filled with some of the most backward-thinking, bigoted, and completely clueless caricatures of conservatives that we have seen in some time.
most universities & colleges surely have faculty members who are contrarians? liberals & progressives are always quarreling with one another; "the left eats its own"; hiring conservatives per se will result in very lop-sided resumés especially in the sciences. really, research… https://t.co/61GEK35e3c
— Joyce Carol Oates (@JoyceCarolOates) July 10, 2025
... really, research universities should hire physicists who disbelieve in modern physics? anthropologists who believe that "Aryans" are the master race? poets who believe in Rhyming? philosophers who are staunch Thomists, or believe in the Creation? historians who don't acknowledge slavery in the US?
what a clown show, a sort of campus "Book of Mormon."
Is the shift key malfunctioning on her keyboard? What's with all of the weird non-capitalization and capitalization?
More to the point, this is how Oates believes that all conservatives think. Because she doesn't know any and would never deign to speak with one.
It helps to read your tweets like they are from someone who was cyrogenically frozen in the 1940s and was just warmed up this morning.
— Write Girl Problems (@WriteGrlProbs) July 10, 2025
Conservative professors are teaching 'the master race' and that slavery didn't or doesn't exist?
What country does Oates think she's living in?
I'm not sure you've ever actually met a person with conservative views. The idea is so alien to you that you can conceive how such a person could possibly function or contribute inside your bubble. Quite pathetic and revealing.
— Fusilli Spock (@awstar11) July 10, 2025
It reads almost like a parody, except this is what Oates truly believes.
Wow, I didn’t realize Joyce Carol Oates was this stupid. https://t.co/SPipiCEXhF
— Ilya Shapiro (@ishapiro) July 10, 2025
Ahh, but you should have realized it. Never forget that she was an outspoken critic of hunting dinosaurs.
I’ll just leave this here pic.twitter.com/MpeHChDeh6
— Enguerrand VII de Coucy (@ingelramdecoucy) July 10, 2025
HAHAHAHAHAHA.
Before you ask, yes, that is a real tweet. No, she was not joking. And no, she has not deleted it.
Joyce Carol Oates thinks men become women by putting on a dress. "Stupid" doesn't do her justice.
— Elizabeth Austin (@lazarusatgate) July 10, 2025
Well, there's that too.
And does anyone actually believe that 'the left eats its own,' as she claims? No, they only criticize each other for not being more woke.
I’m not sure liberal professors telling other liberal professors they’re not liberal ENOUGH is really the winning argument here.
— Silence Dogood (@lordthx1139) July 10, 2025
Not even close.
This may be the single dumbest thing I have ever seen tweeted. A near perfect example of how a bad education can be worse than no education at all. We should all be scandalized by a major American writer displaying such ignorance of poetry and philosophy. https://t.co/db7WgK929E
— Benjamin Myers (@BenMyersPoet) July 10, 2025
While mocking the idea that there should be more conservatives in universities, Joyce perfectly enacts the reflexive, ignorant prejudice that is part of what keeps them out: she places conservatives (& Thomist philosophers!) on par with Nazis & those who deny US slavery existed. https://t.co/pU53vpFwmB pic.twitter.com/f6tHJ4no1t
— David Decosimo (@DavidDecosimo) July 10, 2025
We'd almost make an allowance for her ignorant thinking because of her advanced age, but Oates has been this dumb for decades.
https://t.co/rwlNVtFma3 pic.twitter.com/FAOjZOqPC4
— Edward Feser (@FeserEdward) July 10, 2025
Yes, Oates did equate Thomism with Naziism.
Because God forbid that students learn anything about faith and reason from one of history's greatest Christian philosophers, St. Thomas Aquinas.
One of the strongest pieces of evidence for hiring conservative faculty is, ironically, the number of highly educated people who have no idea what conservatism is. https://t.co/fPn0wY6g8q
— Brandon Warmke (@BrandonWarmke) July 10, 2025
Lord knows, both Morton at UPenn and Oates could learn a lot by sitting down with, say, Victor Davis Hanson.
“The three saddest words in the English language,” said Gore Vidal, “are 'Joyce Carol Oates'” https://t.co/eKLQLNMVxj
— Mark Hemingway (@Heminator) July 10, 2025
LOL.
That quip from Vidal is evergreen for as long as Oates is still with us.
Her post was so bad, even Jonah Goldberg buried his face in his palm.
This is a great way of telling anyone and everyone to the right of an MSNBC green room not to take you seriously. I mean talk about being incapable of passing a rudimentary ideological Turing test. This is embarrassingly ignorant, outrageously dishonest, or the cringiest failed… https://t.co/8n18rI0TJH
— Jonah Goldberg (@JonahDispatch) July 10, 2025
And that's from the guy who has made Liberal Fascism his playbook.
This tweet made me laugh out loud. But actually, it's quite sad and deeply alarming how uninformed your bigotry is.
— Mollie (@MZHemingway) July 10, 2025
While we believe Oates was trying to be funny, we don't think she intended people to be laughing AT her.
Which way, Western man? https://t.co/QuT9xMVRB3 pic.twitter.com/8VWZ7E65CU
— Michael Knowles (@michaeljknowles) July 10, 2025
If the choice is between Oates' secular religion of unmitigated narcissism and St. Thomas Aquinas, well, that might be one of the easiest choices we've ever had to make.
But Joyce Carol Oates can probably rest easy. Conservatives aren't exactly about to take over Ivy League campuses anytime soon. She'll be safe in her bubble for a while longer.
We'll all just be outside that bubble, building better educational models and systems, while pointing and laughing at her.
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