Reply to How come right wing people don't have their own Harvards?

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Reply to "How come right wing people don't have their own Harvards?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Is there something about their way of thinking that makes it impossible to recruit the brightest and the best?
All this talk about affirmative action would be trivial if the right had really good schools of their own. [/quote]

It's path dependent and the result of incentives playing out over time.  The "Left"---recognizing the inherent imprecision of this term---has successfully captured those institutions and uses their power to harass and purge wrong-thinkers.  As they have always done.  These institutions have the commanding heights---both in terms of institutional prestige and raw financial resources in endowments---that make it incredibly hard for parallel institutions to compete.

Because elite universities effectively have a monopoly on issuance of socially valuable credentials, students of all persuasions are essentially forced in that direction.  And why move heaven and earth in a near-futile attempt to create competing institutions (which has succeeded in a few times and places, see for example George Mason), when it isn't all that hard to keep your mouth shut for a few years?  Intellectual conservatives generally recognize academia as an uncongenial place for them and pursue other opportunities, or they keep their mouth shut if they pursue academic fields where it is possible to do so (engineering or the hard sciences, as compared to the humanities and the social sciences).  A few iterations of this dynamic and you get what we have now -- an emergent intellectual monoculture where the gatekeepers barely have to act to maintain their position anymore (although they unquestionably do). [/quote]

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