The following hits a litttttle too close to home for me. And as many of you have heard from me, its waaay too true. Miami hates anything that has to do with the military. Idiots. Read on, and you'll see what life holds in store for me. :-P
news.enquirer.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?
AID=/20070607/COL05/706070314/1009/col05Cincinnati Enquirer
Last Updated: 1:30 pm Thursday, June 7, 2007
Help wanted at Miami - only liberals need apply
Mark Moyar looks like the perfect fit to teach history at Miami University: first in the history department and summa cum laude at Harvard; Ph.D. at Cambridge; speaks French and German; two successful books and a third on the way ...
But wait a minute - what's this on his resume about teaching at the Marine Corps University and the George Bush School of Government and Public Service? And whoa, don't choke on your green tea, but look at the title of his book: "Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965."
Triumph? Vietnam? In the same sentence?
If the faculty search committee at Miami were not too liberal for a "three-strikes" policy, Moyar's conservative history of Vietnam had to be strike three, he believes. He had better academic credentials and recommendations from the best historians, but he was not even granted an interview during the search last year, Moyar said.
"Your qualifications are fine," he was told. But Miami's history department had "its own priorities, its own gaps, its own desires."
Yet among the dozen candidates the faculty chose to interview were two who did not have doctorates, one whose dissertation was on "Race, Identity and Gender in the Panama Canal Zone," and another whose scholarship focused on "American Radio in East Asia."
Moyar wrote to the president of Miami: "Only a person divorced from reality would argue that the history of gender in the Panama Canal Zone or the history of American radio in pre-World War II East Asia are more germane to U.S. foreign policy than my wide-ranging work on the Vietnam War."
Maybe his work on Vietnam was a bit too wide-ranging.
"The only explanation I can find for the search committee's extraordinary decision is that the conclusions of my research are inconsistent with the ideological views of members of the search committee," Moyar wrote.
President James Garland backed the history department. When Garland retired, new President David Hodge told Moyar that Miami promotes "diversity of ideas on campus," but said the faculty had properly picked four candidates to hire, but none accepted. The search was closed. So was the investigation of Moyar's complaint.
It was nothing new to Moyar. He's been rejected by scores of universities, despite his strong credentials. "In this case it was particularly blatant because they ended up not hiring anybody," he said. "They come up with these crazy excuses" for what he calls "flagrant discrimination against conservatives in faculty hiring."
Moyar's research found that among Miami history faculty who declared party affiliation, Democrats outnumbered Republicans 15 to one. My own check of Butler County voter registration shows 13 Democrats and three Republicans in the history department.
"The pool consisted of a good number of well-qualified applicants," said Allen Winkler, who was chairman of the search committee. "In the case of Dr. Moyer, the committee felt that he was more a military historian than a diplomatic historian, the same judgment it made with regard to a number of other outstanding candidates, and it chose to interview the people it felt matched the advertised description of the position best. I cannot comment further, since this is a university personnel matter."
So faculty members decide who teach at public universities - without any accountability or scrutiny?
Miami is a beautiful campus with a reputation for a liberal faculty that annoys moderate and conservative students. The search may have been completely fair and unbiased. But Winkler's recent public radio attack on President Bush doesn't sound that way. He called Iraq "a costly and corrosive war that he (Bush) single-handedly began," and a "quagmire" like "the ill-fated and ill-conceived war in Vietnam."
Moyar's book, called "one of the most important books ever written on the Vietnam War," by Macubin Thomas Owens, professor of national security at the Naval War College, napalms the "quagmire" dogma and shows that even the North Vietnamese thought we were winning.
If Moyar is right, most history professors at most campuses are wrong. Not just about Vietnam - but also wrong about Iraq and other bricks in the ivy-covered walls of liberal conformity.
Maybe that's why they're still fighting the Vietnam War on campus - and conservatives are still not allowed to win.
