RSS
TOP NAV
BOOK
BLOGS 12
BLOGS 11
BLOGS 10
BLOGS 09
BLOGS 08
BLOGS 07
BLOGS 06
BLOGS 05
BLOGS 04
| Ninety Years After the Somme | The Internet is Amazing |
Conservatives Take Academic Freedom from Liberals
by Christopher Chantrill
July 03, 2006 at 4:51 am
IF YOU LISTEN to liberals—and I do, very carefully—you sense that “academic freedom” is a concept that has high totemic value for them.
Academic freedom is something that liberals are for, and they know that their support for it defines them as a force for reason and enlightenment. It is all that is noble and decent, and it defines the courageous researcher beavering away on the frontiers of knowledge beset by the forces of darkness and superstition. He knows that, but for academic freedom, yahoos and fundamentalists would put him out of a job.
In consequence, the Academic Bill of Rights campaign of radical-turned-conservative David Horowitz makes liberals very angry. For Horowitz is speaking truth to academic power and he is saying that college professors abuse their power damnably.
Horowitz’s campaign is now three years old, and Valerie Richardson reviews the progress. Eighteen states have passed academic freedom laws, and a couple of state university systems have passed academic freedom policies to avoid legislation. Princeton university students passed “a version of the Student Bill of Rights by a vote of the entire student body.”
And that is the point of the movement. Academics have a right to academic freedom, but student have a right to an education, not an indoctrination. And that seems very hard for some professors to understand, so convinced are they of their sacred right to academic freedom.
Not that anyone should be surprised. When you give people tenure and rights then they will start to abuse it. One man’s freedom is another man’s servitude.
As kings learned to understand their powers as a Divine Right, so professors, without court jesters to bring them back to earth, have discerned in the heavens a Divine Right to academic freedom. And God forbid that any jester should make fun of college professors.
I don’t really understand all this business about academic freedom. If you can’t find someone to fund your research then you are out of luck. If you don’t do the job teaching your student then you should be out of a job.
And if you are a dedicated left-wing activist longing to bring peace and justice to the world, then surely there is some left-wing foundation that is willing to pony up the cash to keep you in business.
Of course, if you are just a run-of-the-mill lefty academic without any distinguishing talent or original work product... Sorry. Academic freedom was never intended to give you a sinecure.
If it was, then I’m against it. Get a job, pal.
Sphere: Related Content |Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.
What Liberals Think About Conservatives
[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican
Racial Discrimination
[T]he way “to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,”
Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300–301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop
discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
Roberts, C.J., Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District
Liberal Coercion
[T]he Liberal, and still more the subspecies Radical... more than any other in these latter days seems under the impression that so long as he has a good end in view he is warranted in exercising over men all the coercion he is able[.]
Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State
Churches
[In the] higher Christian churches… they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm
Sacrifice
[Every] sacrifice is an act of impurity that pays for a prior act of greater impurity... without its participants having to suffer the full consequences incurred by its predecessor. The punishment is commuted in a process that strangely combines and finesses the deep contradiction between justice and mercy.
Frederick Turner, Beauty: The Value of Values
Pentecostalism
Within Pentecostalism the injurious hierarchies of the wider world are abrogated and replaced by a single hierarchy of faith, grace, and the empowerments of the spirit... where groups gather on rafts to take them through the turbulence of the great journey from extensive rural networks to the mega-city and the nuclear family...
David Martin, On Secularization
Conservatism's Holy Grail
What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph
Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture
These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self
Drang nach Osten
There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion
Government Expenditure
The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
Living Law
The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital
German Philosophy
The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since
1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and
philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be
inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West
mysql close 0