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Wednesday, February 18, 2004

The left claims dominion over the very air you breathe

In response to conservatives’ recent calls for expos?©s of liberal bias in academe, one reader writes in to say,

“Thanks for the enlightening article on the campus domination of the left.

“As a student in the PhD program in Atmospheric Science, it is required that none of my research support any right-wing causes. If my results do not support anti-business/pro-environment causes, they are rejected out of hand. Because of the domination of the left in our program, I was unable to proceed with my research that showed the ozone hole never existed and that global warming is a myth created by wacko liberals whose sole goal is to bring down big business, simply because of their hate for capitalism.

“I hope someday to do science and let the results speak for themselves and not be influenced by political motivation. Maybe a little too idealistic?”

Wow!  Who knew that the left’s influence extended so far across the campus?  I mean, I was aware that the left had the arts and humanities locked up, but I’m stunned to find that atmospheric science is in their hip pockets (so to speak!) as well.

I’d love to hear from civil engineers and low-temperature physicists who can testify to the left’s long march through the institutions, too.  Don’t be shy!  If pervasive leftist bias is preventing you from developing flexible new materials for highway construction or underfunding your work with liquid helium, let me know.  I’m here for you.

(Oh, all right, I’ll break the frame.  The reader in question actually wrote not to me but to Edward Feser, whose work I mention below.  Proving once again that the American right is a No-Irony Zone, the good Professor Feser took the letter at face value-- and will no doubt file it among his horror stories.)

Posted by Michael on 02/18 at 08:28 AM
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Tuesday, February 17, 2004

On the campus right

Andrew Sullivan, among others, is inviting people to write in with stories about liberal professorial bias.  His first correspondent says this:

“It isn’t just Duke. I just wanted to pass along this anecdote from my days attending Indiana University. It was the fall semester of 1994 and it was also the evening of the midterm elections which brought the Republicans to majority status in the House. My prof strolled into class (a class on the Beatles) and began to spew left wing hate in all directions. He said he could not belive a country was so naive as to elect the Nazis (how I tire of this comparison) to head the House of Representatives. Then, as an aside, he smiled and winked at the class, and said, ‘well, at least I know no one in here contributed to the end of America as we know it.’ I wanted to stand up and scream, ‘I did!! I am bringing about a revolution in American governance and I am damn proud of it.’ But, feeling a little ostracized, I did not. I am not one who normally gets ‘offended’ by other people and the things they say but, I have to say I was on this occasion.”

There are plenty more stories like this, from what I’ve heard over the past few months, and I promise to say more about them in some other medium. Can’t say too much more just now-- I’m being watched by right-wing campus groups! And to Sullivan’s credit, he has posted one letter from a Princeton undergrad who thinks this whole conservative-persecution-in-academe thing is overblown.  But can I say just one thing about anecdotes like this-- leaving aside, for now, the question of whether Sullivan’s first correspondent was right to think that he or she had in fact brought about “a revolution in American governance”?

What political work, exactly, is being done by professors who mouth off like this at their classes? Do snarky left-leaning professors really believe for a moment that the right bit of snark or the perfect vent, perfectly timed, will cause the scales to fall from the eyes of their conservative students?  Do any of us seriously think that all we have to do is to mutter an aside about the unelected fraud, etc., in order for right-wing students to smack their foreheads and cry, “Eureka!  It had not occurred to me before now, but Bush is indeed both unelected and a fraud!  To hell with conservatism? I wanna be like my cool left-leaning, aside-muttering professor!”

I’d like to suggest that Andrew Sullivan, David Horowitz and company shouldn’t get too upset about such classroom moments.  Quite the contrary: so far as I can see, professors who go on like this about Republicans and conservatives (and yes, there are a few of us who do this-- not all these stories are made up) are doing Sullivan’s and Horowitz’s work for them.

That is, producing even more whiny, aggrieved conservatives-- who then graduate and go whining to journalists and legislators about their exposure to snarky, venting left-leaning professors.

Pedagogy is partly about rhetoric and persuasion, folks.  And you’re not going to be very good at the arts of rhetoric and persuasion if you begin by assuming that there isn’t a single person in the room who might disagree with you.

Posted by Michael on 02/17 at 09:43 AM
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Sunday, February 15, 2004

On the campus left

Edward Feser, a philosophy professor at Loyola Marymount University (Los Angeles) who has recently written that “the ideal presidential candidate of a Pacifica Radio Network listener or Mother Jones subscriber-- or, to make a more timely reference, a contributor to MoveOn.org” would be none other than Adolf Hitler, is back again-- this time with an analysis of why universities are dominated by the left.  The right-wing blogosphere is hailing Feser’s article as “brilliant,” and it’s not hard to see why.  The essay begins:

The hegemony of the Left over the universities is so overwhelming that not even Leftists deny it. Whether the institution is public or private, a community college or an Ivy League campus, you can with absolute confidence predict that the curriculum will be suffused with themes such as:

-- capitalism is inherently unjust, dehumanizing, and impoverishing;

-- socialism, whatever its practical failures, is motivated by the highest ideals and that its luminaries—especially Marx—have much to teach us;

-- globalization hurts the poor of the Third World;

-- natural resources are being depleted at an alarming rate and that human industrial activity is an ever-increasing threat to “the environment”;

-- most if not all psychological and behavioral differences between men and women are “socially constructed” and that male-female differences in income, representation in various professions, and the like are mostly the result of “sexism”;

-- the pathologies of the underclass in the United States are due to racism and that the pathologies of the Third World are due to the lingering effects of colonialism;

-- Western civilization is uniquely oppressive, especially to women and “people of color,” and that its products are spiritually inferior to those of non-Western cultures;

-- traditional religious belief, especially of the Christian sort, rests on ignorance of modern scientific advances, cannot today be rationally justified, and persists on nothing more than wishful thinking;

-- traditional moral scruples, especially regarding sex, also rest on superstition and ignorance and have no rational justification; and so on and on.

Personally, I think Feser’s list is glaringly inaccurate.  Speaking as a paid-up member of the campus left, I can say that he may very well have nailed our attitudes toward capitalism, socialism, globalization, the environment, sex and gender, the US underclass and the Third World, the oppressiveness and inferiority of Western civilization, and the foolishness of traditional religious beliefs and traditional moral scruples.  Fine.  But he completely forgot to mention our gratuitous Bush-bashing.

This is not a trivial matter.  By my own estimates (and I should know-- I’m talking about my closest friends and colleagues), 99.4 percent of American college professors are far-left elitists who spend most of their time sneering at “the unelected chimpster in the White House.” I myself spend six solid classroom hours a week denouncing Bush as a drunken, lying fratboy and reminding my students that they will be graded on the basis of how well their term papers argue that Bush is a drunken, lying fratboy.  And frankly, I don’t want this important aspect of my pedagogy to go overlooked.

Oh, one more thing.  Feser forgot to mention that people like me think that libertarians like him really aren’t very bright.

Many thanks to James K. Glassman at Tech Central Station for continuing to publish this guy.

Posted by Michael on 02/15 at 01:28 PM
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Saturday, February 14, 2004

Stuart Hall interlude

No time for blogging this weekend-- I’ve got to write my talk for the MLA “Disability Studies and the University” conference at Emory University (March 5-7, so register right now), and so I can’t follow up on the world-historical question of whether major media are running with (or even bothering to investigate) the story that a former AP reporter’s parents think that John Kerry may have been attracted to their daughter.

In the meantime, some words to live by from Stuart Hall’s brilliant 1983 lecture, “The Toad in the Garden: Thatcherism among the Theorists.” The political context is the British Left’s failure to anticipate or understand Thatcherism’s appeal for the very people it was screwing; in the following passage, Hall offers one of his most stinging rebukes to neo-Leninist Leftists who think that the masses will flock to their cause once the “objective conditions” of their society are sufficiently draconian.  Adapt to your local circumstances as you see fit-- and pass the word along to anyone you know who still thinks that all we need is another four years of Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Ashcroft-Wolfowitz-Rove in order for tens of millions of Americans to see the virtues of Green/ Socialist/ Anti-Imperialist/ Vegan politics:

“The traditional escape clause for classical marxism . . . is the recourse to ‘false consciousness.’ The popular classes, we must suppose, have been ideologically duped by the dominant classes, using what The German Ideology calls their ‘monopoly over the means of mental production.’ The masses, therefore, have been temporarily ensnared, against their real material interests and position in the structure of social relations, to live their relation to their real conditions of material existence through an imposed but ‘false’ structure of illusions.  The traditional expectation on the Left, founded on this premise, would therefore be that, as real material factors begin once more to exert their effect, the cobwebs of illusion would be dispelled, ‘reality’ would be transferred directly into working-class heads, the scales would fall from workers’ eyes, and Minerva’s Owl-- the great denouement promised by the Communist Manifesto, as the socialization of labor progressively created the conditions for mass solidarity and enlightenment-- would take wing at last (even if timed to arrive approximately 150 years too late).

“This explanation has to deal with the surprising fact that mass unemployment has taken a much longer time than predicted to percolate mass consciousness [Hall was writing at a time when unemployment in the UK had reached three million, even after analysts had predicted mass uprisings and riots once the number of unemployed reached two million]; the unemployed, who might have been expected to pierce the veil of illusion first, are still by no means automatic mass converts to laborism, let alone socialism; and the lessons that can be drawn from the fact of unemployment turn out to be less monolithic and predictable, less determined by strict material factors, more variable than supposed.  The same fact can be read or made sense of in different ways, depending on the ideological perspective employed.  Mass unemployment can be interpreted as a scandalous indictment of the system; or as a sign of Britain’s underlying economic weakness about which mere governments-- Left or Right-- can do very little; or as acceptable because ‘there is no alternative’ that is not more disastrous for the economy; or indeed-- within the sociomasochistic perspective that sometimes appears to be a peculiarly strong feature of British ideology-- as the required measure of suffering that guarantees the remedy will work eventually because it hurts so much (the Britain-is-best-when-backed-to-the-wall syndrome)! . . .

“It is a highly unstable theory about the world which has to assume that vast numbers of ordinary people, mentally equipped in much the same way as you or I, can simply be thoroughly and systematically duped into misrecognizing entirely where their real interests lie.  Even less acceptable is the position that, whereas ‘they’-- the masses-- are the dupes of history, ‘we’-- the privileged-- are somehow without a trace of illusion and can see, transitively, right through into the truth, the essence, of a situation.  Yet it is a fact that, though there are people willing enough to deploy the false consciousness explanation to account for the illusory behavior of others, there are very few who are ever willing to own up that they are themselves living in false consciousness!  It seems to be (like corruption by pornography) a state always reserved for others.”

-- from Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (U of Illinois Press, 1988), pp. 43-44.  Assigned (along with no fewer than nine other essays by Hall) in my current seminar, “What Was Cultural Studies?”

Posted by Michael on 02/14 at 08:08 AM
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Friday, February 13, 2004

Never mind Drudge-- read Sheehy

From the February 16 issue of the New York Observer, Gail Sheehy’s remarkable article on what we still haven’t learned about 9/11, thanks to White House stonewalling:

The politically divided 9/11 commission was able to agree on a public airing of four and a half minutes from the Betty Ong tape, which the American public and most of the victims’ families heard for the first time on the evening news of Jan. 27. But commissioners were unaware of the crucial information given in an even more revealing phone call, made by another heroic flight attendant on the same plane, Madeline (Amy) Sweeney. They were unaware because their chief of staff, Philip Zelikow, chooses which evidence and witnesses to bring to their attention. Mr. Zelikow, as a former adviser to the pre-9/11 Bush administration, has a blatant conflict. . . .

Melody Homer, the wife of Flight 93’s first officer, was at home in Marlton, N.J., the morning of Sept. 11 with their 10-month-old child. Within minutes of seeing the second plane turn into a fireball, Ms. Homer called the Flight Operations Center at John F. Kennedy International Airport, which keeps track of all New York-based pilots. She was told that her husband’s flight was fine.

“Whether or not my husband’s plane was shot down,” the widowed Mrs. Homer said, “the most angering part is reading about how the President handled this.”

Mr. Bush was notified 14 minutes after the first attack, at 9 a.m., when he arrived at an elementary school in Sarasota, Fla. He went into a private room and spoke by phone with his national security advisor, Condoleezza Rice, and glanced at a TV in the room. Mrs. Homer’s soft voice curdles when she describes his reaction: “I can’t get over what Bush said when he was called about the first plane hitting the tower: ‘That’s some bad pilot.’ Why did people on the street assume right away it was a terrorist hijacking, but our President didn’t know? Why did it take so long to ground all civilian aircraft? In the time between when my husband’s plane took off [at 8:41 a.m.] and when the second plane hit in New York [9:02 a.m.], they could have turned back to airfield.” . . .

After 14 months of watching while commissioners politely negotiated with a White House that has used every known ruse and invented some new ones to evade, withhold and play peekaboo with the commissioners, the Four Moms and their Families Steering Committee feel frustrated almost to the boiling point. . . .

The widows are furious that Dr. Rice was allowed to be interviewed in private and has not agreed-- nor been subpoenaed-- to give her testimony, under oath, before the American people.

When 9/11 commission chairman Tom Kean gave his sobering assessment last December that the 9/11 attacks could have been prevented, the Bush White House saw the bipartisan panel spinning out of its control. In the President’s damage-control interview with NBC’s Tim Russert last weekend, Mr. Bush was clearly still unwilling to submit to questioning by the 9/11 commission. “Perhaps, perhaps,” was his negotiating stance.

Asked why he was appointing yet another commission-- this one to quell the uproar over why we attacked Iraq to save ourselves from Saddam’s mythical W.M.D.-- the President said, “This is a strategic look, kind of a big-picture look about the intelligence-gathering capacities of the United States of America. Congress has got the capacity to look at the intelligence-gathering without giving away state secrets, and I look forward to all the investigations and looks.”

Congress has already given him a big-picture look-- in a scathing 900-page report by the joint House and Senate inquiry into the intelligence failures pre-9/11. But the Bush administration doesn’t look at what it doesn’t want to see.

“It is incomprehensible why this administration has refused to aggressively pursue the leads that our inquiry developed,” fumes Senator Bob Graham, the former co-chairman of the inquiry, which ended in 2003. The Bush White House has ignored all but one or two of the joint inquiry’s 19 urgent recommendations to make the nation safer against the next attempted terrorist attack. The White House also allowed large portions of the inquiry’s final report to be censored (redacted), claiming national security, so that even some members of the current 9/11 commission-- whose mandate was to build on the work of the congressional panel-- cannot read the evidence.

Senator Graham snorted, “It’s absurd.”

Actually Bob Graham is quite wrong about this, on two counts.  One, it’s entirely comprehensible, and two, it’s not absurd-- it’s obscene.

But it would appear that Al-Qaeda’s recent endorsement of Bush is looking better and better.

Full story right here.  And write a nice letter to Ms. Sheehy while you’re at it.

Posted by Michael on 02/13 at 07:47 AM
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Thursday, February 12, 2004

WaPo:  Bush plans to back marriage amendment

Nut grafs (in various senses of the term):

Many conservative Christian groups have pushed for wording that would ban civil unions as well as same-sex marriage, and a few held out hope yesterday that Bush still might embrace their position. “Let’s do it right and also ban phony marriage that is called something else,” said Jan LaRue, general counsel of Concerned Women for America.

Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, said conservative Christian groups will continue to oppose civil unions at the state level. “I think civil unions are a problem, but I don’t think you fight both of those battles at the same time on the federal level,” he said.

For months, conservative Christian leaders have complained about Bush’s hesitation to flatly endorse a constitutional amendment on marriage.

“I think from the beginning the White House felt that there was a sense of timing in this and they needed the right set of events, which they got with the Massachusetts court decisions,” said Paul M. Weyrich, chairman of the Free Congress Foundation.

You know, I’m old enough to remember when these people complained night and day about how gay promiscuity was rending our moral fabric-- and, not coincidentally, bringing down God’s wrath in the form of a plague.

Seems like the only things the “Christian” wingnuts (and their allies, like Weyrich) hate more than promiscuous gays and lesbians are monogamous gays and lesbians.

Full story is here.

Posted by Michael on 02/12 at 03:54 AM
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