When your average person—or even your average Ivy League academnik thinks ‘Maya Angelou,’ what do you suppose they think? Probably ‘poet’, ‘Poet Laureate,’ or ‘literary figure.’ Maybe ‘successful black woman,’ ‘civil rights leader,’ or ‘Pulitzer Prize nominee.’

But when you ask a blogger at Red Ivy what they think, what do you get back?

LEEEEEEEEEBBBBBBRRAAAAAALLLLLLLL DO NOT WANT¹

What’s the deal with this? The desire to elevate liberalness to the top of the hierarchy of qualities in a public figure is well-known amongst conservatives. But it’s even more so amongst the ever-persecuted conservatives of academia, who see creeping leftism in everything that moves.

Yes, Angelou happens to be a Democrat. But, much more importantly, she happens to be one of the most important literary figures of the latter half of the century. Focusing on her liberal qualities is like asking who Oscar Wilde is and replying “that guy whose dad believed in socialized medicine, right?” She’s not being brought in to run Cornell’s political lobbying efforts—she’s being brought in to give it a speech.

As Roy Edroso notes over and over, a productive alternative to the persistent right-wing clucking about the lack of notable conservatives in the arts might be for conservatives to start producing art that isn’t this or this.

¹ Paraphrased, but not by much.