TIME MAGAZINE COMES FULL CIRCLE:

Shot: “The New, New Deal,” Time magazine’s cover story for November 24, 2008, featuring Obama Photoshopped into the second coming of FDR.

Chaser: “Time and the Left Trot Out 75 Year-Old Excuses For the Poor Economy,” Tom Blumer at NewsBusters, yesterday, linking to a story at Time headlined, “This Theory Explains Why the U.S. Economy Might Never Get Better.”

Hangover: “FDR’s policies prolonged Depression by 7 years, UCLA economists calculate,” press release by UCLA, August 10, 2004.

Apparently, Time thought that promoting the incoming 44th president as the next FDR was a tribute, not a warning.

WHEN DID THE ACADEMY TIP? In my Bloomberg View column on Passing on the Right, I note that the authors’ data suggest that younger right-of-center professors feel much more pressure to hide their views before tenure than older scholars experienced in their day. In a recent conversation with Tyler Cowen, social psychologist Jon Haidt, who studies the “moral foundations” of political cultures, discusses the shift:

The sacred value of universities from sometime in the 19th century through maybe the 1980s was truth. Now it was not perfect, but we all talked that way. Look at the mottos of Harvard and Yale — Veritas, Lux et Veritas, it’s right there on the motto, veritas, truth.

We made a big show — it was largely true — of saying this is what we’re here for, we’re here to find truth. But in the 1970s and ’80s as we had a big influx of baby boomers who were involved in social protest, who were fighting for very good causes, civil rights, women’s rights — they flood into the academy in ’70s and ’80s, they get tenure in the ’80s and ’90s, but also in the 1990s, the Greatest Generation begins to retire. There were a lot of Republicans who became professors after World War II.

But the ’90s is the decade where everything flips. At the start of the 1990s, the overall left‑right ratio of the academy, taking all departments, was two to one, just twice as many people on the left as right. That’s fine, that’s not a problem. But by 2005, it had gone to five to one, five people on the left for every one on the right. Those people on the right are mostly engineering, nursing, things like that. If you look at the core — the humanities and the social sciences, other than economics, it’s closer to 10 to 1 or 20 to 1.

In other words, right‑wing, or libertarian, or social conservative voices have basically vanished between 1995 and 2005. This has made us unfunctional, but it’s in the social sciences and humanities where the sacred value has become social justice and the protection of victims. That’s the division. One university of the sciences still pursues truth, the other university in the social sciences and humanities pursues social justice.

In Passing on the Right, authors Jon Shields and Joshua Dunn make the point that even a small number of conservative professors in an otherwise liberal department—say, 5 percent, rather than zero—can make a big difference. The problem, in other words, isn’t that universities lean left. It’s that too many departments have no place at all for political diversity (or even political neutrality), or they define diversity as running from Bernie Sanders to Hugo Chavez.

DISPATCHES FROM AIRSTRIP ONE: “My name is Melanie and in seven days’ time I will become a criminal,” Melanie Reid writes at Scotland’s STV Website. Beginning April 6th, “every dog in the UK over eight weeks old must be compulsorily microchipped and its details registered on an approved database. And right now I have no intention of complying.”

If only someone had warned England immediately after World War II about the creeping totalitarianism to come.

AUSTIN BAY: In Nigeria, Terrorists Exploit Corruption. “The ‘safe space’ created by political corruption is one reason terrorist organizations can infiltrate, collect intelligence, launch attacks and frankly, continue to exist. This is a global phenomenon, and it isn’t new.”

WHILE OBAMA SLEEPS: Hackers with ‘Syria Ties’ Infiltrate Water Utility’s Control System. “Although the location of the utility has not been revealed and its name has been changed in reports, [the attack] seems most likely to have taken place in the United States.”

YES, CONSERVATIVE PROFESSORS EXIST: But a lot of them stay in the closet. My latest Bloomberg View column looks at the important new book, Passing on the Right: Conservative Professors in the Progressive University, which documents what life is like for right-of-center scholars in the social sciences and humanities.

Only the economists interviewed routinely expressed the conviction that their political convictions were irrelevant to their professional advancement and to the standards of research quality. (The authors seem surprised that right-of-center economists spoke highly of Paul Krugman’s scholarship, if not his New York Times columns.) Economics is also the only field Shields and Dunn studied where professors’ partisan affiliation mirror the general public’s. Marxists are more common in the social sciences and humanities than conservatives.

The modern academy pays lip service to diversity. Yet as a “stigmatized minority,” the authors note, right-of-center professors feel pressure to hide their identities, in many cases consciously emulating gays in similarly hostile environments. “I am the equivalent of someone who was gay in Mississippi in 1950,” a prominent full professor told Shields and Dunn. He’s still hiding because he hopes for honors that depend on maintaining his colleagues’ good will. “If I came out, that would finish me,” he said.

More often, conservatives follow Rossman’s strategy, hiding their views until they’re safely tenured. “Nearly one-­third of professors in the six disciplines we investigated tended to conceal their politics prior to tenure,” write Shields and Dunn. The number rises to nearly half when you exclude economics.

Tenure is, as intended, a politically incorrect scholar’s best friend. Read the rest here.

THE BATTLE FOR THE BATHROOMS. “Fair warning: If you come to New York and you see a dodgy looking dude hanging around the little girl’s room, you’re better off keeping it to yourself. His reality is all that counts.”

This isn’t the 21st century I was promised as a kid.

TO BE FAIR TO THE VOTERS, A LESS-SLOPPY POPULISM WASN’T ON OFFER: Victor Davis Hanson: Trump’s Sloppy Populism.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1056.

STOCKHOLM SYNDROME IN THE 21st CENTURY: British hostage, 26, posed for a selfie with hijacker during EgyptAir ordeal and texted it to his friend with the caption: ‘Turn on the news lad!!!’

IT’S COME TO THIS: Ann Coulter and Milo Yiannopoulos wonder if Trump’s losing it.

FALLOUT FROM HILLARY’S UNCONSTITUTIONAL WAR OF CHOICE: Libya to “Open the Floodgates” to Europe.

The refugee flow from Libya to Italy could double this year, and Libya’s shambolic “government” says it lacks money to deal with the issue. . . .

Libya appears to be eyeing some of the funding the EU has so generously doled out to Turkey to keep its refugees at home recently. . .

Is this the Libyan government’s fault for misdiverting funds, the West’s fault for not following through, or just an omnishambles? Nobody’s saying—and the media doesn’t seem particularly curious to find out, or to put the pieces together. Of course, if Obama were a Republican there would be non-stop, wall-to-wall coverage of this continuing disaster, and if Hillary Clinton were a Republican the press would never let anybody forget for a minute that this is the policy she once hoped would be the star in her crown.

Smartest woman ever!

IT’S AN ESSENTIAL PART OF THE RE-EDUCATION PROCESS: George Orwell Call Your Office: Marquette Demands Ritual Apology From Embattled Professor. Marquette is a national disgrace.

IS THAT YOU, FOX BUTTERFIELD? “Gee, what could possibly cause ‘violent extremism’? The New York Times is stumped. Matt Apuzzo reports: ‘Who will become a terrorist? Research yields few clues.'”

(Classical reference in headline.)

ALCOHOLIC BEHAVIOR OR JUST FOLLOWING UNION LOGIC TO ITS PREDICTABLE END? Federal disability Judge Sridhar Boini admits he repeatedly showed up drunk for work at the Social Security Administration. So have some of his colleagues but they weren’t disciplined, he told the Merit Systems Protection Board.

Since management didn’t stop them, it must mean, according to federal employee union logic, that it’s ok to show up soused at the SSA, reports the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Luke Rosiak. And that in turn means Boini can’t be disciplined, he told MSPB.

But that’s not all. Boini also claims his drinking qualifies him for a disability pension! And despite MSPB’ rejection of hi appeal, the board note that Boini can still take his case to the federal courts. Rosiak is not making this up, I promise.

TEN THINGS EVERY COLLEGE APPLICANT SHOULD KNOW. Here’s my advice: (1) Don’t borrow money. (2) Know what you want to do. (3) Don’t borrow money. More detailed advice can be found here.

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