CURIOUSER AND CURIOUSER. Voluntary Xchange reports that controversial Southern Utah political scientist Stephen Roberds was denied tenure at the University of North Alabama at about the same level of review (beyond the department) and, as has been the case at Southern Utah, students organized to protest the decision once it became public.

In both cases, students alleged that a left-wing professor has been wronged at a university deep in a conservative county (sorry, I have trouble using "red" as a metaphor for conservative.)

Professor Tufte notes that Professor Roberds has incentives to make his own files public, which he has not. That, however, is not dispositive: silence is not admission of guilt.

The case, however, suggests that the alleged Left monopoly of the academy is not as strong as some pundits suggest. I forget where I read the observation that a truly effective Left would buy off the best Right scholars with positions at academic backwaters, rather than foreclose academic opportunities to them completely and drive those people to Heritage or Cato. (As if there would be much use for literary critics at such places. Cato and Heritage compete with Chicago, Rochester, and assorted other not-backwater universities for people who know how to do policy analysis.) As a tactic, sending active leftists to academic backwaters where they get into trouble unrelated to their scholarship seems a bit weak.