Someone emailed me yesterday and asked why, given that I find his non-scholarly arguments so hysterical, I bother the occasional read of Brian Leiter's Leiter Reports. Besides the general idea that one should read the loudest voices of the opposition even when they aren't the best, it's posts like his on "scholarly diversity" that make me grin. For instance, let's look at a post from another blog that he quotes approvingly, excerpting this segment:

[W]hile I have always been in favor of diversity of viewpoints on a faculty, and our own faculty ranges from very liberal to quite conservative -- although we see no need to hire the right wing kooks who seem to be taking over the world -- I have lately begun to wonder about the intellectual diversity argument. The right wing has taken over the government, radio, part of television, a significant part of the newspaper world, and certain religiously based universities. Having taken over much of the world, is it really necessary that they be given a major voice in universities too? They�ve done pretty well without a major foothold at lots of universities. Why give these nuts still more power?

Read the rest of the post, which is authored by the Dean of the Massachusetts School of Law. It's as reasoned and temperate a post as you'd expect, including such passages as "Terrific: I can hardly wait until Heinrich Himmler applies for a professorship at Harvard," and "But because they all seem to be following the code of silence -- isn�t this called omerta or something? -- as a way of trying to have all the matters of dishonesty at Harvard blow over, it�s dollars to doughnuts that they will not respond." Well worth a ten-minute study break.

In the meantime, the passage Leiter quoted reminds me of the old joke that Prof. Volokh often quotes about two rabbis reading newspapers in Jerusalem. One's reading the Jerusalem Post, and notices that the other is reading an Egyptian newspaper full of anti-Israeli bile. The first fellow, justifiably startled, asks the other why he'd read such a rag, to which he gets the following reply: "Well, if I read the Post, the news is all bad. There's bombings, beheadings, terrorism, and worry of invasion. Whereas if I read this paper, we control the United States, the international media, the U.N...."