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The only thing that has even a remote chance of working is forcing universities to hire thousands of young right-wing tenured faculty for ‘ideological balance’. The left will still try to allow them to all be fired when they come back to power, but you can at least try to hold that up in the courts. The grant stuff is meaningless, they will swear fealty to this regime to get money and in a few years will swear fealty to the next. The only thing that works is getting your people into the machine.
This could conceivably work, but the more-likely result is the same thing that always happens with affirmative-action, where there is a clique of “real” researchers doing “real” science, and then a bunch of affirmative-action hires producing slop that no one actually cares about.
I think that you are spot-on that @2rafa's proposal is exactly affirmative action, and it will work out just as badly, while also destroying any credibility of MAGA as a principled opponent to affirmative action and setting the precedent for the left to do the same when they come back into power.
I am all for hiring without regard to the applicants political positions, just as I am for hiring color-blind, but I am doubtful if the right has the academic manpower to restore political balance to the academic system with merit-based hiring.
Basically, certain occupations select for certain political leanings. For example, I would expect pacifists to be severely underrepresented in the military.
The road to tenure is long, hard, and not particularly rewarding, financially. While there are some walking it purely for the love of science (or humanities or whatever), most will at least partly have some ideological reason for preferring academics to industry. For the left, there are plenty of reasons to prefer academics:
By contrast, a conservative researcher will likely believe that earning a lot of money is generally good and will detest the lefty academic environment. If he is doing research, he will be more likely be motivated by the competitive advantage of his country, which makes working in industry or restricted government facilities more attractive.
So if the fallacy of the left is to expect that any inequality of the racial distribution of tenured faculty is proof of unfairness, the fallacy of the right is to believe that any inequality of the political distribution of tenured faculty is proof of unfairness.
Nobody gives MAGA any credit for principles anyway, and the precedent is long since set.
If the best anyone can do is balance left-wing wokeys with right-wing Q people, it's STILL better than the status quo ante.
It won’t be Q people. There’s a reservoir of right wingers trying to do science already- creationism(and climate change skeptics). You would have to make universities hire people like Ken ham and give them tenure.
if giving Ken Ham is the solution to left wing bias in universities' I think I'll just stick with annoying liberal groupthink.
As someone who doesn't regret his "obnoxious atheist" phase of his online life from about 15 years ago, it saddens me to say that I'd take that tradeoff in a heartbeat, because I can't honestly judge Ham's "scholarship" as any worse than the mountains of "scholarship" that is produced by modern academia. And, unlike the latter, the Hams of the world don't actively try to subvert the ability of other fields to do good scholarship by denigrating basic concepts like "logic" and "empirical evidence" as tools of White Supremacy that must be discarded for us to get at the truth. So if we can reduce the latter at the cost of increasing the former, I'd see it as an absolute win.
But I don't think increasing the former would reduce the latter anyway, so I think the plan would be bad if implemented with Creationism. As someone else alluded to, if we could get good HBD research along with the nonsense critical theory "research," it would be a strict improvement, since it'd be helping to reduce the dilution of academia's truth discovery by the critical theory nonsense.
If you believe the truth of HBD, this claim is objectively correct.
It is not in the short-term (or even medium-term) group interest of non-white groups to abandon the critical theory frame, even putting the matter of group dignity aside. If nonsense is the only thing keeping Liberia at bay, then nonsense shall be spread.
If you believe in logic, then no, that is not the case.
But it's not the only thing keeping Liberia at bay. In fact, it's doing the exact opposite.
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