One of the many frustrations that critics of ideological trends in higher education
face is that so many of our audience do not recognize extreme cases as
significant to the overall intellectual condition of the campus.
They hear about Ward Churchill and think, “Boy, he’s a wild one,” and that’s all. Churchill ran a large “studies” department for many years at a flagship public university, overseeing personnel and curriculum, and prospering in a complex academic machinery, but outsiders don’t register the validation of his outlook and how it might have had a wide local influence.
Or they think the same thing about the Michigan State creative writing professor who ranted about Republicans who have “raped” our country, and the same thing about the American Studies Association boycott of Israel.
However heated and forthright are those extremists, they are quickly dismissed as wacky academics, a type that the campus environment has had and will always have, and the best thing to do is to tolerate them when we can and punish them quietly when we cannot, or if the story hits the media, make our punishment so circumspect and deliberative that the administrators look clean and upright.
New Left - Read More
They hear about Ward Churchill and think, “Boy, he’s a wild one,” and that’s all. Churchill ran a large “studies” department for many years at a flagship public university, overseeing personnel and curriculum, and prospering in a complex academic machinery, but outsiders don’t register the validation of his outlook and how it might have had a wide local influence.
Or they think the same thing about the Michigan State creative writing professor who ranted about Republicans who have “raped” our country, and the same thing about the American Studies Association boycott of Israel.
However heated and forthright are those extremists, they are quickly dismissed as wacky academics, a type that the campus environment has had and will always have, and the best thing to do is to tolerate them when we can and punish them quietly when we cannot, or if the story hits the media, make our punishment so circumspect and deliberative that the administrators look clean and upright.
New Left - Read More
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