NEW YORK ¨C A few days after the 2004 election, Gabriel Rossman went for a job interview with the UCLA sociology department. Rossman was finishing a doctorate at Princeton, and his research on how ownership affects mass media content was a good fit for a school in the entertainment capital. He got the job as an assistant professor.
But he also got a warning about academic culture. At a dinner following his day on campus, two of his future colleagues started ranting about George W. Bush¡¯s re-election. One called it ¡°a referendum against the Enlightenment.¡± Rossman smiled and nodded, never letting on that he¡¯d cast his ballot for Bush.
Rossman¡¯s story appears anonymously in ¡°Passing on the Right: Conservative Professors in the Progressive University,¡± just published by Oxford University Press. He agreed to break cover because, he said, ¡°I have tenure.¡± In an interview, he noted that staying in the intellectual closet doesn¡¯t require actively lying, merely letting colleagues assume that everyone shares the same political views.
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