For a segment aired on Monday,  O’ Reilly sent his squad down to Eugene to research the political imbalance of the U of O faculty.  He surveyed the same five departments– journalism, political science, sociology, law and economics–as I did and came up with slightly different figures but the same conclusion:  The UO faculty lacks conservative voices.

The segment didn’t mention my columns, which was fine by me.  I was contacted by O’Reilly’s producer but never responded because I didn’t want  be complicit in the sort of blood-thirsty ambush interviews that his show has become infamous for.  Sure enough, the segment was punctuated by a FOX News reporter chasing Provost Jim Bean from an athletic club to his car.

Other than that, it wasn’t such a bad discussion.  Lars Larson, a conservative Oregon radio host, was paired against a San Francisco liberal for a brief sparring match.    There was a bunch of stock footage of UO students walking around, then O’ Reilly fulminated a bit and that was that.

Emerald reporter Alex Tomchak Scott has a nice post about the episode, citing the lack of  comparable statistics from other universities and the specious nature of O’Reilly’s assertion that:

“In the country, there are twice as many conservative individuals as liberal in the country, OK? That’s what it is. And I think it breaks down in academia the same way.”

This is of course not true. A great piece of research I came across lately by political scientist Matthew Woessner shows that liberals pursue doctorate degrees–a necessity for college professors–twice as often as conservatives. I don’t think this statistic makes up the extreme disparities we see in higher education, but it’s vital to take into account.

Accra, Ghana

There, gorgeous sandy waterfronts and funky-looking fishing skiffs lie cheek in jowl with endemic poverty and filth.  It is the sort of place where you’ll peer down the coast and see radiant sunshine, azure surf, grinning children splashing in the shallows and gregarious fisherman hauling in the day’s catch.  But, as you walk closer, you realize that each wave that crashes brings with it an infusion of refuse; that the children are malnourished, skipping school and illiterate; that most of the day’s catch is nothing more than garbage and seaweed;  that the fisherman are actually idle, sitting on their boats listlessly.

There is no garbage pick up in Choco, at least not that I could see.  The residents simply toss their refuse onto the beach in huge, stinking piles.  A cadre of fat, repugnant pigs mill about, chortling amidst the squalid remains. Along the beach, patches of human feces dot the sand.  I watched  a man squat and defecate unabashedly just feet away from where a group of children congregated around a fishing net.  I strolled over and they pointed excitedly at the silvery undulations of a sea snake trapped amidst a net full of junk and a few morbid-looking fish.

Many I spoke with on the beach asked me for a handout, either a dollar or two or preferably some marijuana.   The community is rife with drug-dealing, human trafficking and prostitution and according to a teacher at a nearby school almost 80% of the town is illiterate. The local dialect is Ga and few residents speak decent English.  At 11am on a Tuesday, packs of children were roving the beaches–clearly not in school.  The teachers I talked to said that many only attended class when the fishing harvest was plentiful.  When the fish were scarce, they were compelled to work all day hawking cheap goods to feed themselves.

A local social worker and I spoke with teachers at the schools.  At the public school, there were big signs forbidding the students from speaking in dialect.  The sole teacher we spoke to looked exhausted.  She said the school served students from first to ninth grade and was without a single computer.  “It’s difficult to keep them off the streets,” she said.

The main gripe at the private school was funding.  In fact, the majority of the students at the private school were the sons or daughters of the skiff owners–a privileged class amongst the neighborhood–but even they had difficulties paying the $100 a year tuition.  I asked if there were any public health programs dealing with HIV or Malaria that the students were exposed to. The three teachers shook their heads.  “Many of them [ the students] go fishing all night, then sleep outside on the ground.  What’s a mosquito to them,” one said.

In the wake of my column on ideological diversity last week, my in-box has  flooded with responses from people all over the country.   Ninety-five percent of them have been supportive but I have received some criticism.  Most of it has been pretty incisive and I have appreciated it greatly.    However, occasionally I come across a gem like like this:

What the world needs now is for Dan Lawton to move into the beautiful hills around Eugene and go to work as a tree planter. Dan, please, newspapers are a waste of good trees. Your writing is a waste of education. Plant trees, you aren’t going to be a newspaper person.

This is a comment on a post written by Steven Reynolds, a blogger for a website called All Spin Zone, regarding my column and me.  It’s tagged with the terms, “media,” “right-wing nut job” and “stupid.”  It’s a strange thing to read– especially in the funky state of relaxation that imbues me at the moment–and it makes me wonder who Steve Reynolds is and whether or not he has a mustache.

If he does, I can’t imagine it’s as macho as mine.

Better yet, what did Steve’s face look like when he read my column? I can imagine the twisting grimace, the perspiration dripping down the nib of his nose, the quiver of his lip and the throbbing of his forehead vein.

Anyway without further delay, here are some excerpts (emphasis added).  You can read it all here.

The whole canard of liberals in academe is being argued again, this time by a student at the University of Oregon. Forget for a moment that he chose to attend college in Eugene Oregon, where granola is a highly prized commodity. Dan Lawton seems to be arguing for affirmative action for Republican academics in his sloppily written columns.

(Later)

Does Lawton really mean to say that our voter registration is what’s important? That’s an absurd reduction for a man claiming the high moral ground of impartial journalism in his writing. But the assumptions of Lawton’s article are far worse, and it is no wonder he’s been treated a bit badly by faculty there in Eugene, or so he claims. He simply doesn’t understand that the liberal values of faculty members also coincides with academic rigor and fairness. Would he get that from merely adding Republicans to faculties? Not if those faculty members acted like Republican journalists.

Of course,  I can’t respond to this, it’s just too strange.  Plus, there’s a dearth of granola out here in West Africa.  How could I ever understand that the” liberal values of faculty members coincide with academic rigor and fairness” without my grainy sustenance?

This is how I have I have spent the end of each day during the last week while conducting a reporting internship with the Accra Daily Mail.  It has been, to say the least, quite an adjustment from reporting in the U.S.  The heat is brutal, the rain bludgeoning and the administrative factions of government generally unresponsive to media query. But, what it lacks in creature comforts, it makes up for with novelty.  I am a journalist in Africa.  What could be more lovely than that?  It is a sweet, languorous existence, and I feel fortunate to be able to temporarily trade it for the hectic nature of writing in the West.

However, I must confess that I am somewhat leading a double life.

My column on political diversity printed in the Christian Science Monitor has initiated a firestorm of commentary, traffic and media requests.  I was on Lou Dobb’s radio show yesterday and FOX News is one of the many news outlets plastered through my in-box.  I have received approximately 300 emails–my address isn‘t even on the column–and most of them have contained effusive support . My blog is filled with new comments and subscribers and I have dozens upon dozens of Facebook friend requests. Suddenly, editors are writing  me instead of me desperately querying them.

It’s a bizarre and frenetic moment.  I guess this goes with the territory, but the deluge of publicity and praise feels burdensome from West Africa.  I just don’t have much motivation to Twitter here.  I don’t have much of a desire to speak with Bill O’Reilly either, although the concept of  bloviating with him from afar does appeal a bit to my inner ego.

In fact, I am a bit stressed over the whole scenario. One moment I’m in downtown Accra wading through chaos of the bus station and two hours later I’m beamed back across the ocean via cell phone to speak to Lou Dobbs. I’ve considered hiring a black magic priest to tranquilize my email inbox or possibly conduct a ritual sacrifice of my laptop to the gods.

Regardless of my mild discontent at all this attention, there’s no better feeling than having your work appreciated by so many people and knowing that it made a difference.  The lack of political diversity on college campuses is a big problem and I hope my column has incited some dialogue and opened some eyes.  The feedback I have received has been impressively sharp.  Much of it has been from those who have had similar experiences as students in the past.

I am a bit relieved, though, that I have the bulk of this continent to shield me from the media crush.  Everyone seems to want a piece of me at the moment, while all I want to do is disappear into the thrashing chaos of Accra.

The bill in question, a sprawling 895 page piece of legislation, would provide healthcare for 95% of Americans, according to Democrats.  It would also create a public health plan that would allow Americans to purchase health insurance from the government regardless of pre-existing conditions.  This public option, which is fiercely opposed by Congressional Republicans, was the focus of a robust  NYT/CBS public opinion poll released on Sunday.  Its results were ignored by Douthat in his analysis, while they were used as a building block for Krugman’s column.  The stylistic differences between the two pieces make it easy to see why Krugman’s work is consistently more polished then that of his colleague.

Ross Douthat

The meat of Douthat’s problem is that he’s not really sure if he wants to write about healthcare at all.  He begins by addressing the process of government itself.  “There was one small consolation for Republicans amid last November’s shellacking. For at least four years, their opponents would enjoy the dubious pleasure of trying to govern the United States of America,” he says.

A paragraph later he states that in a hypothetical world without political constraints “conservatives would encourage people to self-ration, by putting a certain number of health care dollars directly in their hands and leaving the rest to market forces.” However, this vision collides with the desires of those within the Republican Party.

In the NYT/CBS poll, half of Republicans supported a public plan, in addition to three-fourths of Independents and 9 out of 10 Democrats, making Douthat’s vision of cohesiveness amongst his cohorts fiction.  Of course, it’s possible his “conservatives” may just be a reference to the Republican leadership, which then by Douthat’s admission is completely out of touch with what its party wants.

And how do Americans rate the GOP’s plans for healthcare reform?  Eighteen percent of those surveyed said the Republicans are more likely to better healthcare, while 57 percent said Democrats would usher in more helpful reform.  In fact, even a quarter of Republicans said Democrats had a better vision for healthcare.  And yet, instead of addressing this schism, or putting forth a few basic reasons why a “market-based” system of healthcare would work, Douthat spends his time trolling about in the  muck of hypothetical and pelting the reader with his musings about how the Democrats will soon realize that governing is much harder than they thought.

Paul Krugman

In Krugman’s column, he cites the poll off the bat, saying,  “If surveys like the New York Times/CBS News poll released last weekend are any indication, voters are ready for major change.”  It gives his argument–that centrist Democrats must refrain from railing against a public option and obfuscating reform–a punch that sustains it throughout the piece.  Krugman’s read is that it is not Republicans (who on healthcare, seem to be uniformly saying nothing more than no) but Democrats that are the greatest danger to reform.  It  is a provocative and seemingly accurate conclusion.  But, it’s not an idea that’s simply reliant upon his observations.

Krugman quotes Democratic Senator Ben Nelson as saying the public plan is a “deal breaker,” because private insurance companies can’t compete and he implicates North Dakota Senator Kent Conrad as well.  “[Conrad] offers a  perfectly circular argument: we can’t have the public option, because if we do, health care reform won’t get the votes of senators like him,” Krugman says.

This reasoning has some teeth.  It doesn’t conflate a hypothetical with the stubborn  logistics of government in order to simply conclude that legislating is tough stuff.  No, instead  it tells me something important that I need to know about a crucial policy debate, which is what good column writing should accomplish.

Of course, I write this from Austria, where I’ve been asking everyone I meet about how their health care system–a single payer, government run program–measures up.  Though most Austrians have only public health insurance, private insurance is available for a price.  I asked one couple in Salzburg why someone would buy private insurance.  Was it to avoid long bureaucratic lines?  Was it to procure better treatment?  They shook their heads and said that the main reason to buy private health insurance was to ensure a private room and a bigger menu at the hospital.  The fact that this is the defining factor between public and private health insurance in some countries in fodder for 10 columns in itself.

(1) So really now, to become a faculty member at a university like this, you must have some intelligence and be somewhat aware of what’s going on in the world  around you. Is it possible that they simply have common sense? Once the republicans pull their heads out of their asses and decide to bring something constructive to the debate, instead of deliberately working to undermine the attempts of our current President, then it will be appropriate for their views to be included in the debate.

–UO Student Michael Vucinovich

Note:  Vucinovich gets huge bonus points for actually addressing me as the “Watchdog” in his letter.

(2) While I enjoyed your article about the dearth of Republican professors, the answer to your dilemma is quite obvious.  Professors, by definition, tend to be very intelligent individuals.  That would explain why so few professors are Republicans.

–Dave Taube

(3) You may be very upset that the University of Oregon, which, I may point out, is funded by people who live in a liberal state, and therefore, no surprise, tends to be liberal, attracts professor applying for a job who tend to be liberal. But as a student you have a choice. You do not have to come here. You most certainly can choose to spend your money to go to school in Alabama, or Texas, or Mississippi, or Georgia, or Louisiana or South Carolina.  And if you like conservatism, you can certainly attend the University of Texas, and you can walk past the statue of Jefferson Davis every day on your way to class.

–UO Journalism Professor Dan Morrison

Note:  I have invited Professor Morrison to publicly debate the merits of political diversity.  He has unfortunately declined.

Well, what can I say except that I was dead wrong.  My suggestion that UO is intolerant of ideas on the Right couldn’t have been more off base, as evidenced by these three pieces of feedback that argue that (a) conservative ideas should be blacklisted because they’re inappropriate (b) only stupid people are Republicans and (c) students at UO with conservative ideas should smarten up and flee to the South, as their sort of savage dogma is better served by universities with Confederate icons.

Yet regardless of these responses, I feel supremely unfulfilled. I think ideological diversity is important, but clearly a lot of other people disagree.  However, they haven’t done much to convince me.  For this reason, I’ve decided to offer a 12-pack of beer to anyone who will debate me on camera about the merits of ideological diversity in higher education. That’s right, all you have to do is spend thirty minutes hashing out the issue, and if at the end you can look into the camera and state “I don’t think it’s harmful that only around 2% of faculty members at UO are registered with the Republican Party,” you take home the brew of your choice.  If you’re not 21, 20 bucks.

In this time of economic crisis, we all need to do our best to stimulate spending.  Here at DanLawton.com, we’re more than happy to do our part.  Simply leave a comment with your email address or contact me at the email in the about section and you’ll be knocking back a dozen cold ones in no time.

The piece in question was written by UO faculty member Mohamed Jemmali and mainly criticized the role of the U.S. in supporting Israeli acts of provocation.

Jemmali wrote: “I know that my taxes are supporting American weapons given to Israel to kill Palestinians, occupy their land and destroy their homes. I know America is the only supporter of Israel in the U.N. I know these are the primary causes of promoting hatred among Arabs against Americans.”

Though the tone of the opinion piece was indeed inflammatory and Mr. Jemmali’s politics bled right through, nothing in the piece advocated hate.  Weismann states that such a “volatile” article should not have been run and says,”If you insist on publishing an article laced with unsupported judgment, the appropriate measure would have been to place an article arguing the opposing point of view right next to Jemmali’s article.”

I agree that it’s always nice to see opposing points of view on the opinion page and it would benefit many newspapers if they ran point-counterpoint features on hot-button issues.  It also would have aided Jemmali’s article if he had substantiated his claims better.  But, the suggestion that newspapers should pull volatile content off the opinion page is flat wrong.

I can think of no better exercise in dialogue than two writers presenting different perspectives on an issue, which is what, by printing Weismman’s article, the ODE provided.  Though she alleged Jemmali’s claims were inaccurate, she provided no evidence.  She also showed a passionate bias herself, strongly identifying with the Jewish state and admitting that she took “personal offense” at some of the comments made.

The opinion page should be a medium for intelligent discourse and dissent.  Newspapers have a responsibility to make sure there is factual accuracy in their content, but just because a writer shows bias or aggression or writes in an inflammatory way doesn’ t mean their voice should be removed.  If we abandon hot-button issues and strong opinions in editorial journalism, we gut its most fundamental components.  Then, what’s the point of having an opinion page at all?

That’s what I discovered last week, via the public voting terminal at the Lane County Voting Office. I spent two hours there, with a spreadsheet full of names generated from the various department Web sites. It was a laborious process, but I was in no hurry. In fact, I even took a break to eat a sandwich and muse on the gorgeous summer weather outside. There would be plenty of time to continue the long, winding procession of faculty down the screen.

When I finished, there were 98 Democrats, nine Independents, two Republicans and two members of the Pacific Green party staring back at me. Both of the two Republicans were in the School of Law, and one of them was University President Dave Frohnmayer. I wondered, as I came across his name marked red in a sea of blue, if he was aware of the monolithic politics of University faculty. Did it irk him? Did it belie the diversity standards that his tenure had ushered in?

The Diversity Plan that Frohnmayer signed off on in May 2006 was a massive effort reviewed by more than 1,000 people, and will remain a prominent feature of his legacy. Contrary to popular belief, it is not just dedicated to increasing racial and ethnic diversity, but takes a broad-based approach to helping “the individual learn to question critically, think logically and communicate clearly.” In addition, it explicitly includes political affiliation as one of the elements of diversity it intends to promote.

Three years later, it’s hard to give the University’s efforts on political diversity anything besides a failing grade. Not only do voting statistics reveal political uniformity, but the checkbooks of the faculty members are just as indicative. Ninety-six percent of political contributions made by faculty to presidential candidates in 2008 went to Democrats. In 2004, it was 100 percent.

As a student with liberal social viewpoints and a middle-of-the-road economic philosophy, I didn’t expect to feel out of place at the University. I assumed the faculty would be primarily left-leaning, but that there would be a small yet formidable cadre of intellectual conservatives to provide the other side of the spectrum.

There wasn’t.

That’s not to say there isn’t a range of political viewpoints on campus. But those on the right of University faculty are basically Social Democrats, with the left represented by an anti-capitalism that flirts openly with Marx. When conservatism does enter the picture, it’s only as a punching bag for students and professors, a tired act that became all too frequent during the presidential election.

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reflect,” Mark Twain once said. I spent my first few months as a graduate student here doing just that. I came back to school to prepare myself for a career in which I would be expected to defend my convictions. I matriculated seeking discourse and found conformity, and as I realized there would be little intellectual challenge going left, I drifted right.

In part, I believe this transformation aided my intellectual and professional development. Liberal journalism is so normative that it’s difficult to stake a claim. But if your politics are independent enough that you can occasionally gravitate across the aisle, there’s an expanse of fertile ground waiting. From this realization I have profited, but, in general, the dearth of conservative viewpoints damages the experiences of University students, regardless if they acknowledge it.

The lifeblood of learning is exposure to a diverse and combative set of viewpoints. This sort of framework allows students to sift through ideologies and compose their own independent belief systems. The concept of “diversity” and the “marketplace of ideas” shouldn’t just act as convenient adages for progressive grandstanding, but as a philosophy that operates at the core of higher education.

There needs to be movement – along with intellectual consistency – on the issue of political diversity by faculty and administrators. If queried, most professors would likely agree that a university with only 2 percent Democrats would be inadequate. However, when the discrepancy is in their favor, they appear uninspired to act.

As a student, I want a campus full of professors not only from different ethnic and racial backgrounds, but different political backgrounds as well. I want Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, Marxists, Independents and anyone with a halfway decent idea that doesn’t incorporate hate. That’s what true diversity means to me. I want that more than free football tickets, a new basketball arena or pretty much anything else a University could offer. In exchange for paying $20,000 in tuition a year, I think I deserve it.

Don’t you.

This column was published in the Oregon Daily Emerald on June 1

Related Post:  Do Journalism Schools Need More Conservatives?

When I arrived, UO Law professor Ryan Vacca was giving an informative presentation on liability in Internet law. One of the most fundamental questions he answered, in my mind, was the liability of web hosts for the content of others.  I’ve always wondered what would happen if someone, in the form of a comment, appropriated content or wrote something libelous on my blog.

According to Vacca,  a blogger or message board host would most likely be protected in such a case under section 230 of the Communication Decency Act, which states that, ” No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”  From a strict liability perspective, Vacca said that the best way to deal with copyright claims on user content was not to to acknowledge them in writing, as doing so can potentially weaken protection.

The second panel featured a designer and administrator from PR and marketing firm Wagner Edstrom, who spoke about the different strategies their firm employed and advised graduating students on how to approach employers in the PR and marketing industry.  Also sitting on the second panel, was the sole journalist speaking at the event, Register Guard Entertainment Editor Senera Markstrom .  Markstorm paid a quirky homage to conventional media by breaking out a pink box labeled 1994 that contained a telephone and handwritten notes.  She also talked about integrating social media into her work at the Register Guard, which outside her, appears to have virtually no social media approach.

The keynote speaker at the panel was Lauren Gelman, Executive Director of Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society.  She spoke about the variety of the legal issues that continue to pop up as social media users post more and more personal information about themselves online.  In the Q and A session, I asked Gelman about her thoughts on the recent class-action settlement that Google negotiated on behalf of their digital book project.  Some, including myself, believe that if approved the settlement would give Google a monopoly on digital books.  When I asked Gelman if she thought fear of the plan was justified, she was brisk with her response, saying, “You should be terrified.”

All and all, it was a pretty solid event, but  I really would have liked to have seen more journalists speaking.  We know that P.R. gets the Internet–there are endless social media gurus out there to prove it–but there seems to be a dearth of voices on how journalism is effectively utilizing social media to combat its economic woes.  Although, that might be partly due to the fact that the future of journalism is a question that few people currently answer with much besides pessimism and abject nostalgia.

Read My Column on Google’s Book Project Here

As the medium evolves, so do the labels, leaving many readers feeling helpless in evaluating authenticity among a mosaic of voices. In the throes of the new media revolution, credibility is more fluid than ever before. Sure, a New York Times byline may be impressive, but how does it fare against 25,000 Twitter followers and a top-10 Technorati blog?

Image by Patrick Finney

The answer, for the most part, is in the eye of the beholder; but the question gains much more saliency when it migrates from a media context into the realm of the law. Toss in an unsolved San Francisco homicide, a couple of First Amendment lawyers and a journalism student with a blog, and you’ve achieved the perfect storm of ingredients to wreak havoc on the California Shield Law.

A San Francisco State University journalism student – who has remained anonymous because of safety concerns – is invoking the shield law to resist attempts to turn over photographs and other information that police say could help them solve a murder. The student was working on a photojournalism project in a rough neighborhood when an individual he was profiling was murdered while shooting dice. The circumstances of the incident are cloudy, but when police arrived, the student was taking pictures of the victim and the scene. He may have also witnessed the slaying firsthand.

Lawyers for the student argue that because he had written blog posts about his project, he is protected under the California Shield Law. The majority of U.S. states have passed some degree of shield law legislation, which is intended to protect journalists from having to reveal confidential sources or information to law enforcement. The idea is simple enough: When doing valuable reporting, journalists often rely on confidential sources. If courts can force reporters to betray promises of anonymity, watchdog journalism will suffer.

The California Shield Law applies to journalists “connected with or employed by a newspaper, magazine or other periodical publication, or by a press association or wire service.” Not surprisingly, there is no provision for journalism students or bloggers, but many First Amendment lawyers insist they are covered as well.

But if the Shield Law protects any and all bloggers, that potentially exempts an estimated 10 million-plus Americans from having to disclose information related to anything about which they are blogging. It’s hard to see how granting such widespread journalistic immunity helps either the rule of law or journalism flourish, outside of generating a new breed of citizen bloggers in the organized crime industry.

When press rights clash with the power of the judiciary, it is often a titanic battle. Both institutions are necessary components of a functioning democracy, and inhibiting either can have profound ramifications. When journalists are compelled to reveal certain confidential sources, it strikes a blow to public interest reporting, but when they are permitted to evade subpoenas for specious reasons, the judicial system is atrophied.

In this case, there is no anonymous source to be revealed: The source is in a grave. His killers are free and a citizen journalist who has valuable information is cloaking himself in the First Amendment not to protect the public interest, but because he is scared of retribution. Is his fear valid? It may be, but fear or danger are not allowances to dodge subpoenas and withhold information, nor should they be. It is rarely comfortable to testify in a murder case, but without the fortitude of key witnesses, thousands of additional murders would be unsolved. Just like any other citizen, the student journalist should be forced to disclose information and/or testify.

Shield laws should not be utilized as broad-based immunity invoked whenever convenient, but as rare exceptions in cases where the public interest is at stake. They should also not be available to every “Joe Blogger” out there, though online journalists doing rigorous and authentic reporting should be covered regardless of their medium. More importantly, journalists and First Amendment advocates should abandon a bit of their paranoia regarding journalists working with police.

Journalists are citizens too, and a press pass shouldn’t relieve them of basic civic responsibilities. If the creed of the press, as many suggest, is to seek truth and demonstrate a loyalty toward the populace, then it should promote such ideas by assisting the judiciary whenever ethically possible. Not doing so not only damages the legal process, but also sends the message that those seeking accountability from others are immune from it themselves.

This column was published in the Oregon Daily Emerald on May 27.