Home | Away

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
(0) Trackbacks • Permalink
Page 1 of 1 pages