Comment by MisterTea

> I don't think there is surprise that higher learning is associated with progressivism.

This is such a wildly elitist take. There's nothing intrinsically progressive about education, and to just declare so as fact is an excellent example of the exact kind of hostility that keeps non-progressives from being at home in higher education.

> I think the surprise is that someone believes its indicative of a giant conspiracy to exile conservative professors.

Is it really surprising that people who disagree with someone's politics would let that bleed over into their assessment of that person's professional abilities?

We literally see this everywhere! People use a person's politics to discredit other aspects of their being all the time.

Conservative professors are a rare breed in academia because non-conservatives in academia make it a very hostile workplace environment.

Or even that the categories are shifting. People who hold perfectly reasonable classical Conservative viewpoints are now excluded from the Republican party. An institution failing to shift more right doesn't make it biased.

And it's more than the self selection force of conseratives being too frightened that college will change their worldview. Take a liberal and a conservative with equivalent postgraduate degrees. Now offer them their choice of a faculty position or a C-suite career track. Based on the values that define their respective ideologies, is it a coin toss for which path either chooses?

Just like there are many reasons why the climate is getting warmer, not just humans.

See how easy hand waving is?

> That doesn't show they were purged. There are many reasons their numbers declined.

Fun fact, what you're arguing is actually one of the reasons Charlie was murdered.

He notoriously said that the Civil Rights Act was a mistake. He specifically referred to Title VII which states even a neutral policy can be racism if it produces disparate impact[1] in practice. That is, if a neutral policy results in fewer black people being hired, that's evidence of racism. Charlie disagreed with that.

It's fun to see leftists argue the same when it comes to discrimination against right wing or centrist academics.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disparate_impact

> To extend the base of the student movement, Rudi Dutschke has proposed the strategy of the long march through the institutions: working against the established institutions while working within them, but not simply by 'boring from within', rather by 'doing the job', learning (how to program and read computers, how to teach at all levels of education, how to use the mass media, how to organize production, how to recognize and eschew planned obsolescence, how to design, et cetera), and at the same time preserving one's own consciousness in working with others.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that a German student activist's definitionally anodyne proposal to engage with society and barely referenced in the decades since has probably been coopted more than a little to concoct a new boogeyman for the right wing.

Yes, often one wing of political thought leaders will adopt terms and ideas from the other wing to serve as a foundation for their theories. I never suggested that the term itself was invented by someone on the right, merely that it’s a term widely used to describe the very specific idea of a calculated political effort to expel conservatives from academia. Ironically, Rudi’s ambitions were much more grand than simply transforming academia, he wanted to transform society.

Anyway, what you presented is not a “gotcha”, despite the fact that I’ve heard it a million times when engaging with right wing “intellectuals”. It’s still a conspiracy theory.

You misunderstand, the idea of the “Long March Through the Institutions” is that innocent conservative intellectuals are the victims of a central, coordinated campaign for them to be expelled from academia in order to transform academia into an institution that serves leftwing agendas. It’s an explicit rejection that such a transformation could occur naturally, and can fairly be considered a conspiracy theory by the mainstream specifically because it meets Barkun’s criteria for conspiracy theories:

  - nothing happens by accident
  - nothing is as it seems
  - everything is connected

as well as the lack of a smoking gun.