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But publicity highlights high-priority initiative

The Wall Street Journal headline worked, insofar as it got readers’ attention: “Help Wanted: Lefty College Seeks Right-Wing Prof,” it said.

The subject of the story, which quickly aroused the national and regional media, was the proposal to establish a Visiting Chair of Conservative Thought and Policy within the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Colorado.

With a $9 million privately funded endowment, which the ���������� Foundation is pursuing, the post would rotate among leading scholars of conservative thought. They would teach courses, make public presentations and engage in productive, scholastic discourse about conservative thought and policy.

As the Journal’s headline demonstrated, some observers failed to understand that the chair of conservative thought and policy would be a scholar, not a proselytizer. Many observers assumed that the appointee’s job would be to propound conservative ideology, rather than to discuss its social, historical and political significance.

David Horowitz, a “conservative agitator” quoted by the Journal, said he opposed the idea because it would amount to appointing a “token right-winger,” who would resemble “an animal at the zoo.”

With one of his trademark similes, conservative pundit George F. Will told the Journal: “Like Margaret Mead among the Samoans, they’re planning to study conservatives. That’s hilarious.”

But in a personal call to Chancellor Bud Peterson, Will later endorsed the idea.

New York Times Columnist Stanley Fish, meanwhile, argued that “conservative thought, like any other form of thought, is a perfectly appropriate candidate for academic interrogation.” One important story of the last half-century, Fish noted, is the rise of conservatism that followed the 1964 the trouncing of Barry Goldwater.

Such trends, Fish said, “could be explored at length in a perfectly respectable college course, and again, the political affiliation of the instructor would be irrelevant.”

Peterson emphasizes that point, noting that the visiting chair would be expected to foster contemporary dialogue on the “broad and ever-evolving subject of conservatism,” which, among other things, is defined as being grounded in the political thinking of John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Adam Smith, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison.

The university is “making progress” on the endowment, university spokesman Bronson Hilliard said recently.

For more information and to get involved, please contact Beverly Stokes, associate director of development, ���������� Foundation, at 303-541-1460 or via e-mail at beverly.stokes@cufund.org.