Think Professors Are Liberal? Try School Administrators

1. Probably because if you're very liberal and 100% of your peer group is very liberal, you will have a lot less chance to network with somebody non-liberal and thus less chance to hire such person. And if you never hire one, there would not be one in your organization.

2. Yes, presence of liberal viewpoints is certainly beneficial for conservative students. Presence of 100% liberal viewpoints and nothing else - not so much. That's the whole point of diversity - or should be - 100% of the same perspective is not as good as the mix of different ones.

3. They do. But then there are protests, huge security fees, demands to fire whatever administrator allowed the unperson to speak on campus, death threats, speakers cancelling out of fear for their physical security, property damage, hostile environment complaints against organizers, etc. etc. Swimming downstream is a lot easier than swimming upstream.

4. That depends on what you call "justice for women". As it happens in politics, people choose very appealing brands for their ideas, but the underlying reality may or may not be appealing. If "justice for women" means a woman accusing a man in sexual harassment leads to automatic expulsion of the accused man, on her words alone, no due process - is that something that the man would get behind? If "justice for women" means that since women have been discriminated in hiring in the past, now men should be discriminated instead, to achieve summarily just outcome - that would be a very controversial opinion. A lot of things can be called "justice for women", it all depends what is under the brand name.

You are conflating real world policy execution with values. Substance can't be mapped onto reality without prioritizing values and deciding accordingly. The belief of individual liberty is shared throughout America, its real world execution will vary depending on the value system of the population in question. We have the same belief, but disagree about how to get there.

I think you're sort of on the right track about values being root goals. Values come first, then we execute policy based on those values. One goal may come at the expense of another. And some lefties might not even recognize a trade off if statistically they don't value something that conservatives value very highly. Or vice versa.

Your last point is in alignment with everything I've said before. We have the same over arching goal (happiness), we just disagree about how to get there. The two paths to the goal are mutually incompatible, not the goal itself. The path is what is in question and conflict, not the goal. This is why it is so important that the path is discussed honestly and openly. Good intentions do not automatically lead to good outcomes, and if we as a society choose the wrong path we are f*. So to bring it full circle, this is EXACTLY why we need more conservatives on campus: to discuss the other paths and evaluate them objectively so that the best path may win.

> You are conflating real world policy execution with values.

No, I'm not.

> Substance can't be mapped onto reality without prioritizing values and deciding accordingly.

That is a syntactically-valid sentence but I have no clear idea what it is trying to communicate relevant to the discussion.

> The belief of individual liberty is shared throughout America

The idea that there is a thing called “individual liberty” that is to be valued is broadly shared. What that label actually means is not a product of such a broad consensus. This isn't a matter of “how to achieve individual liberty” being a matter of disagreement (that is true, too, but a different issue) but the fact of what it means to say “individual liberty” being a matter of disagreement, with mutually incompatible views as to what that means.

> Your last point is in alignment with everything I've said before

No, it's directly opposed to it.

> We have the same over arching goal (happiness), we just disagree about how to get there.

No, that's what you said. What I said is that Alice has the goal “Alice should be happy” and Bob has the goal “Bob should be happy”, and these are not the same goal, and may (depending on what actually concretely produces happiness for Alice and Bob, respectively) may be mutually incompatible goals. And when you scale up to hundreds of millions of people with goals of that style, absolutely are, in very many cases, mutually incompatible goals.

This is not at all a matter of dispute about ideal path to a shared goal, because the goal is not shared. The language Alice and Bob use to describe the goal might be shared (each might say “I want happiness”), but the actual goal is different, it's just the differences are elided in the casual description.

Please don't do this here.

You're not wrong, it's an instance of a heckler's veto.

But HN policy is (basically) to allow the veto to work as the lesser of two evils, on the theory that there are lots of other places to discuss this sort of stuff. I think that's a reasonable policy for a tech site.