For those of you who think of business school as the last bastion of conservatism on campus, unsullied by the Ideological Imperative of the Left's Long March through the departmental org chart, think again. While it's hard to stand up and claim that a high inventory ratio is a good thing, the softer classes are ripe for the sort of intellectual gerrymandering that leads to calls for and Academic Bill of Rights. Our Global Business class has had a substitute professor twice, and twice he's managed to assert, virtually without contradiction, the kind of gobbledygook that has turned the social science departments into ongoing ad campaigns for the Green party.

In the course of a case study discussion about multinationals doing business with unsavory governments, we learned that the best hope for determining and enforcing international norms for governmental behavior was for the UN to grow fangs, er, teeth. In a discussion during class breaks, I learned that many people would say that we have too much influence in the UN, which is really a democratic institution. Please see Powerline, Little Green Footballs, Instapundit, and Hugh Hewitt for commentary on this once-respectable point of view.

Tonight, our case study involved the appointment of host-country nationals (Americans) to expatriate posts. We were informed, in the course of two hours that:

• Companies appoint expatriate CFOs from racist mistrust of the host-country
  
• Women only account for 15% of expats because of discrimination
  
• Most corporations are "white-male, single-income" oriented
  

Let's take these one at a time, shall we? I was under the impression that most American companies appointed American CFOs because they wanted someone on the scene representing their interests. That, and the fact that positions involving a high level of trust are usually filled on the basis of relationships as much as on known technical competence. That, and the fact that many third-world countries have had, until yesterday, third-world standards of accounting and financial analysis. Of course, he offered no evidence that American companies were any more willing to trust Germans than they were to trust Japanese, two pick two countries with similar industrial and financial histories, but with different predominating skin colors and facial features.

I raised the point that a Wall Street Journal article dealing with the curious phenomenon of the Husband-as-Trailing-Spouse hadn't even hinted at discrimination as a reason for the minority of women expats. He actually had a hard copy of the article in his file, and didn't argue, especially when I pointed out (from memory) that the article had been written by a woman. Maybe women are less likely to have house-husbands. Maybe women are more likely to be anticipating families, so are less likely to be wedded to their careers. Shoot, I don't know. I do know that his fall-back position was to suggest that "more studies are needed." Dennis Prager, take note.

I don't even know what #3 means. Especially the "white" part. We're talking about dual-career families, the very notion of which is almost exclusively American and European. John Derbyshire has written a number of times about the backflips that companies do to avoid being labeled "racist" or "sexist." Now, companies, much more than governments, are pushing same-sex-partner benefits. Corporations are not inherently socially conservatives, and it's foolish to expect them to be so. Social conservatives need to get over their disappointments, and social liberals need to stop the stereotyping.

Business schools need to have a variety of views, too. But it's important that 1) people understand the nature of the beast, and 2) those views be adequately defended and debated, not shoved down the throats of evening students too tired to care, or day students too callow to know how to argue.