Eugenics is a liberal philosophy

"’I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it.’

“John Stuart Mill, in a Parliamentary debate with the Conservative MP, John Pakington (May 31, 1866); this seems to have become paraphrased as ‘Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives.’ which was a variant published in Quotations for Our Time (1978), edited by Laurence J. Peter. – Wikipedia article on John Stuart Mills quotes.

Taken out of context to defend a bias: “In 2004, for instance, after a Duke Conservative Union study, Duke's then-Philosophy chairman, Robert Brandon, justified the school's partisan imbalance on the following grounds: ‘We try to hire the best, smartest people available. 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.’"

http://www.mindingthecampus.com/forum/2012/08/no_conservatives_pleasewere_co.html

So we have a department chairman in a prestigious university inaccurately quoting a noted philosopher, with complete disregard for the capital C, that is, a Conservative member of Parliament. The 1978 Quotations editor made the same mistake with lower case “c” in “conservative.”

Would Duke’s admittedly liberal Brandon defend Mill’s belief in Malthusian population control, lessening the working class so as to guarantee food for the educated elite? Considering the prevalent approval of eugenics by educated Americans in the early 1920s and since (although liberals will not directly mention approval), the answer is “Yes.”

Link to mindingthecampus from maggiesfarm.