Having earned a Master’s and a PhD at Stanford University, I’m under no illusion that the place is a bastion of progressivism.
After all, Condoleezza Rice was the university’s provost from 1993 to 1999. She later returned to Stanford after her tenure as a warmongering villain in the George W Bush administration, and now heads its conservative Hoover Institution. And that same institution gave a lovely sinecure in 2007 to Donald Rumsfeld, Dubya’s former defence secretary and one of the handful of people even more directly responsible than Rice for the heinous torture and human rights abuses carried out by the US in Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay.
In recent years, Stanford has been responding to concerns about political polarisation in the US by pushing notions of “intellectual diversity” (sometimes also called “ideological diversity” or “viewpoint diversity”), which essentially means taking extraordinary measures to make conservatives feel more included. Rice has played an important role in the relevant discussions at Stanford.
