Robert Oscar Lopez "You may ask, where are they? I can't tell you. The academic right simply doesn't exist. Conservative professors are frightened, invisible, and often embarrassed. Ideological exile is scary. It gets tiring when colleagues ask you to defend birthers, the Westboro Baptist Church, Rush Limbaugh, George Bush, George Zimmerman, and David Horowitz before you've even had your morning coffee, especially when they are going to vote on your tenure. The ignorant asides about Fox News are usually thrown in during department meetings, somewhere between announcements of the latest conference about homosexuality and elections to the personnel review committee. Hold your tongue and count to ten, then scream as you jog at dawn the next day.
...."The response from a right-wing Army wife: "Your thanks for being a teacher is your paycheck and your pension. Shut up and be grateful."
Prof Lopez wrote this follow-up a few days later: A gigantic thank you from a conservative professor "In reality, the shopkeepers and petty bourgeois tradesmen who put Margaret Thatcher in power in the UK exist in a parallel form in the US, and they are not going to Harvard or even Berkeley. They are at state schools where teaching is more important than research. Conservatives must not overlook universities like mine - CSU Northridge - where there are veterans, home-schooled evangelicals, recent immigrants from socially conservative countries like South Korea and the Philippines. These will be the lifeblood of the next right that rises."
...."The response from a right-wing Army wife: "Your thanks for being a teacher is your paycheck and your pension. Shut up and be grateful."
"Elsewhere, a retired Air Force officer wrote, "I detest people like you."
"That's what it's like to be a conservative professor."
Robert Oscar Lopez teaches American literature and Classics at CSU Northridge. His book, Colorful Conservative: American Conversations with the Ancients from Wheatley to Whitman, came out in 2011.Prof Lopez wrote this follow-up a few days later: A gigantic thank you from a conservative professor "In reality, the shopkeepers and petty bourgeois tradesmen who put Margaret Thatcher in power in the UK exist in a parallel form in the US, and they are not going to Harvard or even Berkeley. They are at state schools where teaching is more important than research. Conservatives must not overlook universities like mine - CSU Northridge - where there are veterans, home-schooled evangelicals, recent immigrants from socially conservative countries like South Korea and the Philippines. These will be the lifeblood of the next right that rises."
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