“We try to hire the best, smartest people available,” Brandon [Robert Brandon, chair of the philosophy department] said of his philosophy hires. “If, as John Stuart Mill said, stupid people are generally conservative, then there are lots of conservatives we will never hire.

“Mill’s analysis may go some way towards explaining the power of the Republican party in our society and the relative scarcity of Republicans in academia. Players in the NBA tend to be taller than average. There is a good reason for this. Members of academia tend to be a bit smarter than average. There is a good reason for this too.”

Brandon’s explication is slipshod reasoning. First of all, the full Mill quotation is: “I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative.” But certainly, to be “stupid” is not to be average, but less than average in terms of reasoning ability. Brandon implies that Mill said that leftists were smarter than average, and that Mill is arguing that the distribution of conservatives is centered among “stupid people” ? but Mill doesn’t make those arguments at all.

To say, as Brandon did, that if stupid people are generally conservative, then there are lots of conservatives we will never hire, is to make a straw man out of the Duke Conservative Union’s point. They are not arguing for “lots of conservatives” to be hired. Their argument is “not saying the University needs to hire more Republicans,” but for Duke “to be open to conservative perspectives in the hiring process.”

Even if you accept Mill’s premise, Brandon’s use of it as explaining “the relative scarcity of Republicans in academe” is still flawed. To illustrate:

A: Stupid people are generally conservative
B: Duke only hires “the best, smartest people available”

therefore

C: Duke will generally not hire conservatives

Proposition A is the flaw. “Stupid people are generally conservative” does not imply “the best, smartest people are generally not conservatives.” So Brandon’s argument is a non sequitur even without testing the truth of its individual propositions.