At times, Slavitt sounds like he is pursuing political office on a whim.

“My life is my hobby,” he says. “I’ve never [run for office] before. I’m 69 years old. The chances of my taking up snowboarding are remote. But this is an interesting new thing I can do.”

Later on, he waxes patriotic.

“It seems to me to be the unselfish thing to do,” he says. “I owe it to a country that’s been very good to me.”

A socially liberal conservative, Slavitt is pro-choice and supports same-sex marriage. He stands by his Republican affiliation, however.

“Santa Claus is a Democrat, God is a Republican,” he quips. The Democrats “make people dependent on the government. The system works best when it’s left to itself.”

There are literary concerns, too.

“The best writers are really quite conservative,” Slavitt says. “Hemingway, Faulkner.... The lefty crazies in college manage to teach these books without ever letting you know that they’re right-wing.”

Indeed, Slavitt is not happy with the current state of American academia.

“They want diversity, they want everybody to be represented,” he says. “They’ve thrown out Dryden and put in Morrison.”

And to Slavitt, the faculty assignments at these institutions are just as flawed as the curricula.

“You can’t have a non-Asian-American teaching Asian Studies; you can’t have a non-black teaching black studies. You can hardly have a straight guy teaching Auden, Whitman, or James Merrill,” he says, lamenting what he believes are current university hiring practices.

DON’T TALK TOOMEY

Slavitt’s dislike of the opposition is anything but equivocal.

He accuses his opponent (“Tinny Tiny Timmy Toomey, as I try not to call him”) of taking orders from Thomas M. Finneran, the Democratic speaker of the house.