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PROFESSORS SCHOOLED
The Cavalier Daily’s Anthony Dick reports:
It isn’t often that a group of college professors is soundly and thoroughly embarrassed by a collection of mere students in an intellectual arena. But that’s exactly what happened at the end of February, when the University of Alabama’s Student Senate passed a sharp resolution directly opposing a heavy-handed, short-sighted and illiberal “hate speech” resolution that their Faculty Senate had already passed. The Faculty Senate’s original resolution called for the creation of a series of new regulations which threatened to drastically curtail First Amendment rights at their public university. With their remarkably independent and sophisticated response, UA’s students have schooled their teachers with a much-needed lesson in the fundamentals of a free and open society.
And how. Read the whole thing. Dick concludes:
This clash of paradigms between UA’s students and faculty is a sign of the times in academia, where the left has become the establishment, embracing the very tools of censorship and repression that 1960s radicals fought so bravely against. It’s also deeply instructive of how the left’s corrupting power on college campuses has tempted many leftists to become thoroughly illiberal, landing them on the wrong side of the divide between liberty and authority.
Way to go. I am doing my masters at University of western australia and have been given shitty marks because I am a boring conservative, and have been known to publically support Keith Windshuttle for his scholarly research methods. Not being an obvious lefty sycophant means I am back in the queue to access the professors for advice on my papers. This great institution prefers students to affirm their political view rather than we should question the establishment and expand the boundaries of knowledge.
Hooray for the young ones. We’ve already lost too much of our democracy to lazy thinking and the avoidance of personal responsibility.
Citizens have the right to say what they think about any deviant child molestor, on campus or off. What this country needs is national service and the return of capital punishment.
I’ve always found it ironic that the baby boomers broke every rule, ingested every substance, f***ed with gleeful abandon, and flipped the bird at authority while doing whatever the hell they wanted - and then after they took the reins, promptly became the most authoritarian generation since the Puritans. Smoking bans, zero-tolerance policies at schools, PSA’s up the ass about making sure your kids don’t do the drugs you did, speech codes… on and on and on. F***ing hypocrites.
Money quote:
It’s also deeply instructive of how the left’s corrupting power on college campuses has tempted many leftists to become thoroughly illiberal, landing them on the wrong side of the divide between liberty and authority.
I put the big phrase in bold text - enough of letting these refried Marxists call themselves ‘liberal.’ I like the cut of this guy’s jib.
Aren’t academics busy enough with research, advancing science and the arts, lecturing, preparing and administering labs and tutorials, attending meetings and keeping up with what the rest the research community is doing? Do they also have to determine their own (and others’) free speech rights? Can’t universities adopt some productivity enhancing policies that would let academics do their jobs in peace?
An essay I wrote for a university in Australia began, ‘The two young ladies who kindly consented to be recorded ...’ A conversation for a project on the analysis of second language speech.
A staff member wrote in the margin, ‘You risk being seen as patronising here!’
I emailed her expressing my astonishment. She returned that the university had an ‘inclusive’ language policy and that I should have used a more neutral word in a formal essay. Huh?
I didn’t mean ‘foxy ladies’, I wasn’t trying to imitate a pimp or a disco singer, get down or boogie; I simply wanted to imply that these sixteen year olds were mature and well-mannered, the female counterpart of ‘gentlemen’ - is all. What could be more formal?
But ‘lady’ ist verboten by the university thought police, it seems. Has the Oxford Dictionary been told?
This is an attempt to weld a political bias to understood conventions about essay writing. Absurd and comical if it were not also so damn Orwellian. And what gets you is the little bonus whiff of intimidation.
Dave S — Don’t forget the PMRC. Whenever you hear a lefty complaining about Brent Bozell and the FCC, remind them of Tipper “I rolled around in a big sweaty pile with Ozzy and Sabbath but you kids straighten up and fly right” Gore and the rest of the Washington wifeys…
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2005 03 18 at 12:03 AM • permalinkOn a point of detail regarding Dick’s conclusion, I am not sure that the radicals of the 60s fought bravely against censorship and repression. I was there at the time and it looked to me that they were supporting any line that was against democratic capitalism. Maybe he is thinking of the more principled draft resisters who deserved a great deal of sympathy especially those who were not leftwing radicals but just felt strongly about the war. The radicals were most noticably supporting psychopaths like Mao, Che and Ho.
G.K. Chesterson’s great book, Orthodoxy. The Romance of Faith has this:
The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.’
The New Humanitarians are all about ‘compassion’ but what really turns some them on is power and politics.
‘Good’ causes become masks for the maintenance of industries that have a vested interest, however unconscious, in perpetuating resentment and division. The objects of compassion pawns in the game of embarrassing political opponents.
In the case of speech codes, the old hippies who are now in positions of power get to have it both ways. They can be as authoritarian as their despised predecessors and at the same time feel they are ‘fighting the good fight’.
A pox on them.
Look, when a student goes through classes and finds out that his grades depend on how closely his statements and test answers align with those of the professor, well, you learn to align. Whatever the professor says, you say.
I once took a philosophy class from the oldest most god awful boring professor I’ve ever known. Stood up at the front of a very large class, looked up to the ceiling, and spoke in a low monotone about things that to this day I have no idea what they meant. (I mistakenly signed up for the 2nd of a two part class without taking the first part. The class might as well had been called Rambling and Babbling Part II. I mean I’ve listened to people speak in tongues with more clarity than this man).
We had one exam for the course. A final take home exam. I looked at the questions and understood them as well as I did his lectures. So I went to the library and asked if they had any books that he wrote. To my surprise and happiness, they had one, a big fat one, which I believe was titled The Meaning of Meanings or something equally inane.
I took it to the table with the intention of reading passages of it to help me understand what the hell he’d been trying to say for 10 weeks. I ended up taking whole pages, writing it down word for word, on the essay booklet. Think Ward Churchill. Naturally I received an A and the comment “You understand it better than anyone else!”.
Hell no, I just repeated what he said. And I think most students feel the need to do the same. For the Senate Senate to take exception to a motion passed by the Faculty Senate is a singular act of courage and integrity. Thank goodness they didn’t rely on me to do it.
Posted by wronwright on 2005 03 18 at 11:46 PM • permalink
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As a UVa graduate that brings a tear of pride to my eye.