If it isn’t obvious by now, I have a bit of a bee in my bonnet over the way that universities operate. Shockingly, this article appeared in the Globe and Mail (not exactly a bastion of rational argument). But Wente nails this one. What she describes is NOT out of the ordinary, nor will her comments be surprising to any open-minded individual who sets foot on campus. As a side note, I ran across this article on social media accompanied by the ravings of a number of ‘liberal arts’ students. What I found there was indistinguishable from self-parody as comment after comment reinforced the main tenets of Wente’s argument.
academic freedom
We’re Back!
Well, that was a much longer hiatus than what I had initially planned. I’ve been immersed in research, exams, and romantic languages for several weeks. That said, I’ve got a ton of material to share, and plenty of thoughts to get out. Expect a fair bit of material over the next while.
Just to play a bit of catch-up, here’s a short commentary that I put together back in May (or thereabouts) when this was whole issue was a little fresher. While the controversy has died down a bit, the underlying issues haven’t, so here’s my take on it.
Relevant background links: Here and Here
The Kipnis Controversy
Laura Kipnis is right, and her critics prove it.
Kipnis talks about sex between students and professors, which seems to set many people on edge. But she’s an academic critiquing academia, so naturally this is the example she uses. She could just as easily have talked about the kindergarten teacher marrying the principal, the hygienist dating the dentist, Dr. Smith sneaking a quick kiss with Nurse Brown, or the CEO having a romantic weekend getaway with his secretary.
Hitting the Links
Academic Caviar
Scruton details the evolution of the modern university, and the de-volution of the university’s contemporary form. His description of the underground universities of Soviet-occupied Europe is fascinating.
Academic Caviar
Tuesday’s are when I’ve planned to share academic articles that I find to be of great interest. While the intent is to share pieces of fairly recent vintage, I think that I’ll go with a bit of a throwback for this week. Here’s Samuel P. Huntington’s “The Clash of Civilizations”. Detractors like to quibble with Huntington’s word choice and definitions, but considering that this article come from 1993, it’s hard to argue that the piece hasn’t held up.
N.B.- Provided you haven’t used up your free monthly article from Foreign Affairs yet, this link should work well for you. Otherwise, you’ll need to register or Google-search an alternate copy.
Liberal Bias in Academia
Some years ago I recall reading the (possibly apocryphal) story of a conversation had by the Soviet Politburo in the late 1980s where the subject of potato-farming came up. These were Gorbachev’s years of Glasnost and the leadership was discussing ways in which they could modernize Soviet agriculture and de-couple it from the state apparatus. One of the men suggested that potato farmers should be made responsible for the harvesting of their own potatoes, to which the reply went something along the lines of “This would be impossible! Even in the United States, the Army is mobilized every year to help with the potato harvest!”
Now these were not stupid men. To the contrary, they were extremely well-educated and had been conducting the affairs of a world superpower for decades. And yet their limited worldview led them to believe, in all honesty, that potatoes simply could not be harvested without the intervention of the state (by employing the manpower of the army no less). That this anecdote seems farcical today, as it would have even at the time, tells us something profound about how inbuilt intellectual bias and limited experience can narrow the bounds of thought without the thinkers even being aware of the limitation.
A Fascist Protest Against Free Speech on Campus
Chants of “My Body, My Choice” rang across the local university’s central park-space this week in response to Go Life’s (admittedly graphic) pro-life display. Go Life is, of course, the local campus pro-life group; and much-maligned they are! When I arrived to see what the fuss was about, I couldn’t help thinking that the protesters were missing the point of the argument. Go Life believes that abortion is a human rights violation against the “pre-born.” Love it or hate it, that’s a bold statement. In contrast, “my body, my choice” sounds eerily like an attempt to silence an abolitionist on the grounds that abolition is an infringement on property rights. The juxtaposition of the pro-choice argument against Go Life’s statement isn’t convincing. And both sides know it. And that’s why the pro-choice protesters don’t like the display. If abortion is just a question of what a woman chooses to do with her own body, then whose fingers and toes are displayed in those photographs?
Hail & Grapeshot 