National Review Online carries a telling article about viewpoint discrimination at the University of Iowa's history department. Prof. Mark Moyar, now teaching at the Marine Corps University, has supported the War in Iraq and published a significant history of the Vietnam War. He was turned down in a department whose political allegiance is 27-0 Democratic. The rejected candidate is distinguished, the selected candidate obviously less so. Most significant is the hiring process that is revealed. In theory it emphasizes the need for "diversity", not only or race and ethnicity, but also ideology.

In practice, the University of Iowa has very few conservatives anywhere on its faculty. It is an under-represented class, as it were. The History Department in particular doesn't seem to want--or tolerate--real diversity. It wants only variations of liberal and left wing viewpoints. Notoriously anti-Catholic job placement ads in 19th century Boston read, "Irish Need Not Apply." In Iowa, the faculty ads should read, "Conservatives Need Not Apply."

This is the commonplace but scandalous state of American university life, including, for some reason, in Iowa. Ordinary conservatives are steamed up over it. So far, however, not one of the presidential candidates has come to the defense of academic freedom and academic diversity in Iowa or anywhere else. Nor have Congressional or state officials. Why not? Are they afraid of losing votes from the overwhelming liberal university faculties? Do they think the Des Moines Register won't approve? What are they afraid of?

There is an historic presidential caucus coming up in Iowa. It is only a couple of months away. Iowans should start to demand answers from their elected officials and candidates on the effective persecution of conservatives on many college faculties. Surely, political, religious and ideological discrimination is as serious as ethnic and gender bias. And surely it is bad pedagogy, especially in state-supported institutions, to have a faculty whose dominant political group freezes out others.

While raising the issue of the Moyar case at IU the candidates also should be asked about the disgraceful failure at nearby Iowa State University to offer tenure to Guillermo Gonzalez, co-author with Jay Richards of The Privileged Planet, because of Gonzalez' claims to find evidence of design in the origins of the universe. Gonzalez is internationally prominent, a star astronomer. But a campaign by Iowa's leading atheist, Hector Avalos, a tenured--indeed, recently promoted--professor in the Religion Department (where else?) succeeded in smearing Gonzalez for his writings. People have complained, but the political establishment remains silent.

The people of Iowa, even the Democrats, are far more conservative and traditional than the university faculties. Outsiders imagine that the universities would take public opinion into account in such a situation. Well, in their way, they do: they go even farther to the Left to make clear that they are not to be confused with the hoi polloi who pay their salaries and provide--through Congress and the Legislature--the grants that keep their research going.