Berube comes clean...
I've been ... damn busy making sure that my department doesn't hire any conservatives this year. We have two positions open in Rhetoric; we're interviewing candidates at the MLA in late December, of course, and we'll be conducting campus visits in the first five or six weeks of the new year. I'm not on the search committees, but I am the ad hoc political advisor to those committees, and it's my job to screen all the application letters and writing samples to make sure that no conservatives sneak through. And it's hard work. It's hard, hard work.
First of all, you have to understand that there are literally thousands of politically conservative Ph.D. candidates in the field of English language and literature, just as there are untold thousands of political conservatives applying for academic jobs in the visual arts, in special education, and in philosophy. Over the last ten years, we've tried to head them off at the pass by telling them that graduate school involves anywhere from five to ten years of rigorous study culminating in the production of a 300-page work of original research, and that when they've completed all that while living hand-to-mouth on stipends or taking out student loans, then they get to go on the academic job market with the knowledge that they have about a one-in-three chance of landing a tenure-track job and making somewhere in the high 40s. But they just won't listen. These bright young twenty-something conservatives just will not be deterred from the pursuit of scholarship in the arts and humanities, and they've been clogging our graduate schools to the point at which we've simply had to institute hiring quotas to keep them from joining the professorial ranks and eventually overrunning us.