Thomas O'Keefe explains why "conservatives run from the teaching profession"
By Lee Russ
Sunday, April 23, 2006 at 09:06 PM
In The Contra Costa Times, guest commentator Thomas O'Keefe succinctly explains why academia is largely liberal: conservatives run from teaching.
First, as always with conservatives, is money. [Thomas] Sowell and his fellows at the Hoover Institute can rake in six-figure incomes talking down to working people. Why would they want to take an 80 percent cut in pay? And they are small time compared with Tom DeLay, Duke Cunningham, Jack Abramoff and the other Republicans feeding at the public trough.Second, pundits and politicians can pontificate and publish all kinds of preposterous theories. To get published in academia one must undergo peer reviews, designed to minimize ideas directly contradicted by facts.
This means that right-wingers cannot claim that Gov. Pat Brown closed the mental hospitals in California, because the record shows that Ronald Reagan signed the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act in 1967, then later cut support for local programs, resulting in the large number of homeless mental patients we see on our streets today. They also cannot teach that "trickle-down economics," such as Bush's huge tax cuts for the rich, is successful. The facts show that in President Bush's first five years the Dow has gained 271 points. In President Clinton's first five years, retracting prior GOP tax cuts, the Dow gained 4,487 points.
Now there's a thought: Ann Coulter writing an article for publication in a respected journal. Where they have fact checkers and citation checkers, and peer reviewers. Just think: 15 minutes to write her current inaccurate and unsupported diatribes, versus maybe a week a page if she wanted a prayer of getting published in a respectable journal. I like the idea. Think how much less Coulter clatter there'd be to wince your way through.
Think how much amusement she could provide for the fact checkers.