The Mess In The Academe

IN HER LATEST article marriage advocate Maggie Gallagher takes out after the fake Obama world tour. Even Andrea Mitchell, she writes, realizes that Obama is faking it, faking press conferences when no media was actually there.

"Let me say something about the message management. He didn’t have reporters with him, he didn’t have a press pool, he didn’t do a press conference," either in Afghanistan or Iraq, noted Mitchell on the air. Instead Obama manufactured "what some would call ’fake interviews,’ because they are not interviews from a journalist[.]"

The problem is that the candidate is all symbolism and impressions, not grounded and critical.

This ties in with some mournful comment about the halcyon days of the university—before the PC era. Paul Greenberg writes about the extraordinary professors he studies under at Columbia, Missouri.

The remarkable thing about those teachers was not their scholarship, though theirs was indeed remarkable, but the immense care and patience - the tenderness almost - that they took with us students.

Of course, these professors were almost all liberal. But they wanted their students to know both sides of the story. In The New Criterion historian Alan Kors writes elegiacally of the “sadnesss” of today’s university education.

The problem is that professors today are in a hurry. They have only four years to demolish the US-centric world-view of their students so they don’t have time for scholarship and development of a critical mind. They must just push their agenda, every day.

The problem with this sort of thing is that, in the end, you end up hurting yourself, not your students. And the folks powering Sen. Barack Obama’s fake world tour will find that out too, sooner or later.

Today’s generation of liberals won’t listen to conservatives, and won’t give them the opportunity to contribute to the academic conversation. That means that the mistakes of today’s generation of liberals will not be exposed until they have actually been enacted into law and into foreign policy.

We can see a preview of what is in store from the current energy flap. It’s all very well to confidently predict a new Flood a century from now as global warming engulfs the planet. These prophecies may be right or they may be wrong. But what about the impact of $4.50 per gallon gasoline on working Americans right now? Our liberal friends seem not to have thought about tha. Indeed they seem not to care.

Conservatives have been worrying about it for a while. In part, we care because liberals have taught us to care.

So when the current liberal generation comes face to face with reality, whether in 2009 or 2013, it ain’t gonna be pretty.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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