The Chronicle of Higher Education, and presumably its academic readership, thinks it newsworthy that a professor of environmental studies at Amherst College, Jan Dizard, is also a hunter.
Mr. Dizard, who was instrumental in creating the environmental-studies major at Amherst, says he is the only professor at the college who hunts. That he is an environmentalist might seem even more incongruous. Not so, he says.
“Before there was a cultural shift from sustainability to conservation, hunters were more accepted as part of the environmental movement,” Mr. Dizard says….
Hunting has an enormous positive effect on the environment, he notes, both in terms of wildlife management and from the license and equipment-tax revenue that supports various conservation efforts.
Nevertheless, Prof. Dizard says, “his colleagues are sometimes aghast at his hobby.”
I assume those aghast colleagues — every last man, woman, and child of them, if they resemble most college faculties — think of themselves as committed devotees of “diversity.” Incongruous as that might seem.
