my pro-conservative-studies piece is in the latimes this morning. ungratefully, i'm going to express my dissatisfaction with the edit. to start with, i am aware that you don't endow a professor, but a professorship or a chair. incomprehensibly, they lost the strongest paragraph:

    Professors yap more than most people; they are more opinionated than most people; but they are less intellectually independent than most people.

anyway, if anyone cares, they can compare it with the submitted text.

For Conservative Studies
By Crispin Sartwell

That the University of Colorado would establish a Chair of Conservative Studies is rather delicious in its ironies. It certainly smacks of affirmative action, and casts conservativism in the syntax of whole departments decried by conservatives for decades: women's studies, African-American studies, and so on.
    Furthermore, the idea of affirmative action for conservatives seems gratuitous. Women may be oppressed, sort of, but conservatives run whole wars, black site prisons, sprawling multi-national corporations. In fact, if women are oppressed, they're oppressed by conservatives, which may render faculty meetings a bit tense.
    But as an academic who is neither a liberal nor a conservative (anarchism has its privileges), let me tell you why I think it's not such a bad idea. Within the academy, conservatives really are an oppressed minority. On a faculty of 825, the University of Colorado apparently has 23 registered Republicans. This strikes me as high, and I assume they all teach business or phys ed.
    The professoriate is unanimous for Obama. I say that's a problem. It's a problem in a variety of ways, but it's certainly a problem pedagogically: ideological uniformity does a disservice to students, and makes a mockery of the pious commitment of these professors simply to convey knowledge.
    I teach political philosophy. And like most professors I know, I bend over backwards to teach texts I hate sympathetically; I try to show my students why people have found Plato and Marx - both of whom I regard as totalitarians - compelling.
   But I don't deceive myself into thinking that I teach these texts as well as or in the same way as would a professor who found them plausible. On the other hand, with Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience," I've immersed myself in the text for years. I've struggled to parse every sentence. I've put it into the context of all Thoreau's work, and that of his friends and contemporaries.
    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 - I can't - teach Marx the same way a Marxist would. I think that's fine, but what I'm saying is that even as I try to be neutral (well, even if did try to be neutral) my real opinions affect every aspect of what I do, and I think that is generally true.
    It's horrendously true in a situation in which academia produces a consensus. Here everything is affected by the real opinions of real professors, from the configuration of departments to the courses on offer within those departments to the texts taught within those courses to the ways those texts are taught. And because there's a consensus, there is precious little self-examination; a slant that we all share becomes invisible.
    Indeed, the academic consensus is of a particularly irritating variety. First of all, the fact that everyone agrees and everyone has a Ph.D. leads to the occasionally explicit idea that all intelligent people think the same thing: that no one could disagree with Obamanism without being an idiot. This has been expressed by the continual attack not on the positions of Reagan and Bush, for example, but on their grades and IQs.
  That is, the self-image of the professoriate results in a non-stop ad hominem attack. Furthermore, the claims of the professoriate to independence of mind, actual 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 - or indeed far more so.
    That's partially just a result of the charming human tendency to nod along with whoever's sitting next to you. But it's also partially a result of the fact that a professor has been processed, often for a decade or more, by the institutions that harbor this unanimity. The predictable result of "educating" professors for many years in unanimous institutions is that each cohort is a bit more unanimous than the one before.
     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 think conservatives are evil idiots, then conservatism itself richly justifies a decision not to hire or tenure a Ph.D. Every new leftist minted by graduate programs is an act of self-praise, a confirmation of the intelligence of the professors.
    Professors yap more than most people; they are more opinionated than most people; but they are less intellectually independent than most people.
   That this smog of consensus is incompatible with the supposedly high-minded educational mission of these institutions is obvious. Higher education is at least as dedicated to the reproduction of Obamanism as it is to conveying information. But it is massively self-deceived about this, which makes it all the more disgusting and effective.
     So as my liberal old professor Richard Rorty said, referring to Allan Bloom, conservative Platonist: "Let a thousand Blooms flower." And if they flower in endowed chairs of conservative studies, that's at least pretty funny.

Crispin Sartwell teaches philosophy at Dickinson College In Carlisle, PA. His book Against the State: An Introduction to Anarchist Political Theory has just been published.