April 07, 2004
“Hatemonger’s Quarterly” News Special: Duke’s
“Hatemonger’s Quarterly” News Special: Duke’s History Department Down to 31 Dems
As is now well known throughout the “blogosphere,” the Duke Conservative Union (DCU) caused a national brouhaha by printing an advertisement in The Chronicle, Duke University’s student newspaper, demonstrating a massive discrepancy in registered Democrats and Republicans in eight departments at Duke, along with the Deans of the University. As The Weekly Standard rightly noted, this massive disparity—of an 18 to 1 order—“right away created quite a lot of ‘Oh, dear, how gauche!’ tongue-clucking down in Durham.” Among other findings, the DCU reported that Duke’s History Department contained 32 Democrats, 4 unaffiliated, and 0 Republican faculty members.That is, it seems, until now. A local television report offers this recent news story, that John French, associate professor of History at Duke, has been arrested along with his wife for masterminding an out-of-home drug-selling operation. It appears as if Dr. French, when not writing on the evil role of the United States in Latin American history, was doing his best to help out the Latin American economy the “Manuel Noriega way.”
Need we, the crack staff of “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly,” now suggest that the DCU offer a formal retraction of its advertisement? After all, there shall probably soon be only 31 Democrats in Duke’s History Department. That is, of course, unless Duke would like to offer Dr. French the “Peter Tosh Chair of History,” or some such impressive endowed professorship.
Need we suggest, moreover, that a Republican professor of History at Duke—if such a creature existed—would be far less likely to moonlight as a drug dealer? Perhaps, given the brand of vitriolic, left-wing partisanship emanating from much of Duke’s History Department, it is hard to tell who actually isn’t under the influence.
