The College Fix

Last week, The Stanford Daily’s Editorial Board published an attack against Victor Davis Hanson (Ph.D. ’80), a historian and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. In the editorial, they picked a single sentence from his recent post on academia’s growing isolation from reality as evidence of his supposed racism. The Daily editorial no doubt strengthens, in the minds of many of his supporters, his very point in that piece: that “the university is the most politically intolerant and monolithic institution in the country.”

But the story doesn’t end here. Dr. Hanson responded on his blog at length, countering The Daily’s claims and issuing a challenge:

So I offer an open challenge to the Stanford Daily: either apologize for the baseless slur of racism and the cheap language (e.g., “trash,” “toxic,” “despicable”), or at least show how I was in error, and that, in fact, there are logical and consistent criteria that qualify some groups for racial preference in admissions and hiring in the university and not others. Second, if race is used as a criterion, what then qualifies one as belonging to a particular targeted race or group? Does one warrant special consideration if he is one-half, she one-fourth, they one-eight of a particular targeted lineage? Or is the distinction merely ad hoc and impressionistic? Does the university employ such percentages? If so, such usage has a nightmarish tradition dating back to the antebellum South. Simply invoking the generic idea of “diversity” does not mean, de facto, that racial profiling should not require some concrete, explicit rationale.

Then the massively popular Instapundit blog picked up the story, telling its readers, “If after reading his piece and the linked editorial you agree with Hanson’s characterization (or, heck, if you don’t), you can write the Stanford Daily about it here.”

This morning, The Daily posted from the deluge of letters they received from supporters of Dr. Hanson. They’re all worth reading, but the best one is at the top:

That editorial was sophomoric, at best, but then, I suppose some of the staff are, indeed, sophomores.

(Full disclosure: Many wonderful sophomores work for The Stanford Review.)

We hope Dr. Hanson already reads The Stanford Review and our blog. We are the conservative, libertarian, and contrarian newspaper here at Stanford, and we hope our coverage of campus issues will give you hope that Stanford University is not a “politically intolerant and monolithic institution.”

Quinn Slack is the opinion editor of the Stanford Review and blogs at Fiat Lux. He is a contributor to the Student Free Press Association.

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