Looking for conservatives in all the wrong places

Ellen Riggle, associate director of the "Gender and Women's Studies Program," has responded to The Family Foundation's call for diversity in her department with the following in the Kentucky Kernel, the University of Kentucky student newspaper:

The faculty members whose profiles were published in the handouts had varying reactions to the complaint. Ellen Riggle, associate director of the Gender and Women's Studies Program, said she did not think the handouts were personal attacks on either herself or her colleagues, but an attack on the university community at large.

"This is an attack on education in general, all professors contributing to
the academic mission, and the students at UK," she said.

Riggle said she has faith that students are able to evaluate the ideas presented to them, and her mission, and mission of her colleagues, is to facilitate the learning of those critical skills. And, Riggle said, she believes that their mission is to conduct research, which addresses problems facing the Commonwealth, the nation and the world.

"The Gender and Women's Studies Program and its faculty contribute critically to the study of these problems and the mission of the university," Riggle said.

An "attack on education in general"? This from someone who heads a department in which education seems to take a back seat to left-wing political ideology. But Riggle says nothing about why her department, although it claims to be diverse, has no conservatives in it.

Then there is this:

Melanie Otis, an assistant professor in the College of Social Work, said the handouts are indictments targeting all faculties engaged in the scholarship that contributes to the elimination of social injustice.

Gee, I wonder what she means by "social injustice". Oh, but wait. There is Lucinda Ramberg. Maybe she is the conservative we were looking for in this diverse department:

Lucinda Ramberg, assistant professor in the women's studies program, said as a scholar of kinship, she shares an interest in the Family Foundation's definition of "family."

Looks promising. She's "interested" in the Family Foundation's definition of "family" (note how that word is put in quotes). But, alas, it is for naught. Turns out she spouts the same erroneous figures about traditional families favored by those who don't seem to like traditional families very much:

But, with less than 25 percent of U.S. households comprised of nuclear families, according to the 2000 census, Ramberg said that the form of the family has varied through culture and time.

I wonder what her definition of a nuclear family is. In fact, that figure comes from counting only families with a mother and a father with one or more children younger than 18 still at home--and no one else. That wouldn't even include Ozzie and Harriet--once the kids moved out. As David Blankenhorn has pointed out, it doesn't include married couples who can't have children, or married couples who don't have children yet, or married couples with children, but with grandparents also in the home, or boarders, or foster children.

But that erroneous 25 percent figure does seem to bolster the liberal view of families, doesn't it?
I wonder if there is any professor in the diverse "gender and women's studies department" to dispute this figure.

Not likely.