"The Life of a Conservative Professor in Academia"

The American Thinker has a conservative professor's interesting piece on his experience for 40 years at the University of Maryland (his school isn't mentioned in the piece, but people can find this out quickly by searching on the internet). I never met Ron at the university, but I can personally attest to the fact that he made some differences at the margin. Here is just a small part of his essay:

My epiphany came about 20 years ago at the inauguration of a new campus president. In his acceptance speech, he said many things that seemed bizarre to me, but the comment I recall most vividly was his insistence that he would create a world-class university by building "excellence through diversity." His point seemed to be that by substantially increasing the number of minority and female faculty, staff and students (and consequently decreasing the number of white males), this would of necessity make us a great university.

I always thought that the best way to build a great university was to attract the brightest, most innovative and productive faculty and students -- regardless of their hue -- but I realized at that moment, as the applause for his idea rained down, how out of step I was. . . .