April 5, 2003
PITY THE TENURED RADICALS:
Professors Protest as Students Debate (KATE ZERNIKE, April 5, 2003, NY Times)It is not easy being an old lefty on campus in this war.At the University of Wisconsin at Madison, awash in antiwar protests in the Vietnam era, a columnist for a student newspaper took a professor to task for canceling classes to protest the war in Iraq, saying the university should reprimand her and refund tuition for the missed periods.
Irvine Valley College in Southern California sent faculty members a memo that warned them not to discuss the war unless it was specifically related to the course material. When professors cried censorship, the administration explained that the request had come from students.
Here at Amherst College, many students were vocally annoyed this semester when 40 professors paraded into the dining hall with antiwar signs. One student confronted a protesting professor and shoved him.
Some students here accuse professors of behaving inappropriately, of not knowing their place.
"It seems the professors are more vehement than the students," Jack Morgan, a sophomore, said. "There comes a point when you wonder are you fostering a discussion or are you promoting an opinion you want students to embrace or even parrot?"
Across the country, the war is disclosing role reversals, between professors shaped by Vietnam protests and a more conservative student body traumatized by the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Prowar groups have sprung up at Brandeis and Yale and on other campuses. One group at Columbia, where last week an antiwar professor rhetorically called for "a million Mogadishus," is campaigning for the return of R.O.T.C. to Morningside Heights.
Even in antiwar bastions like Cambridge, Berkeley and Madison, the protests have been more town than gown. At Berkeley, where Vietnam protesters shouted, "Shut it down!" under clouds of tear gas, Sproul Plaza these days features mostly solo operators who hand out black armbands. The shutdown was in San Francisco, and the crowd was grayer.
All this dismays many professors.
Professors here at Dartmouth say that one thing students have done over the past several years, to escape the influence of these Leftists, is to reduce the number of Humanities courses they take, opting for more Sciences and Economics than History and English. Subjects with patently correct answers tend not to attract Marxist professors. Posted by Orrin Judd at April 5, 2003 10:47 AM
That last sentence seems just factually incorrect as in my experience, and from what I've read, a huge number of physicists and mathematicians are/were Marxists or communists.
Posted by: Wrighty at April 5, 2003 11:07 AMWrighty - as a former academic physicist, I can assure that there are few Marxists/communists. Most are conventionally liberal for, I believe, selfish reasons: their salaries and grants are paid ultimately by the federal government, and they want taxes and the size of government to remain large so they don't have to compete for funding. Their jobs depend on maintaining big government ...
Posted by: Paul Jaminet at April 5, 2003 11:40 AM"[A] more conservative student body traumatized by the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001." I cannot express how much I hate this condescending, superior, billiard-ball and just plain wrong psychological argument.
Posted by: David Cohen at April 5, 2003 11:57 AMFrankly Economics has typically attracted as many fruitcakes as voodoo.
Posted by: M Ali Choudhury at April 5, 2003 12:15 PMJust up the road from Amherst, at UMass, is probably the last extant Marxist Economics Department in the US.
Posted by: David Cohen at April 5, 2003 12:22 PMOur state U. has a peace faculty. I mean,
it's a department, you can get a degree in it.
Also a Department of Hawaiian Studies devoted
to destroying the government that funds it.
Harry:
What do they read, great Hawaiian novels?
It's hard to believe this stuff still goes on. Another reason to get the feds out of the redistribution business.
Posted by: Tom C., Stamford, Ct. at April 5, 2003 4:43 PMA history professor of mine (History of Canada) said something early on along the lines of "The Iroquois, basically, never contributed anything to humanity." The class was absolutely stunned by the honesty. Up until that point I had never realized how in all my classes on the Soviet Union, I had never heard any real criticism of it, even as we discussed the purges and the forced famines, and I went to a very conservative school.
That professor, who was much older than the 'Nam generation and retired one year later, opened my eyes more in one sentence than all my other history professors had up until then.
So what's in the future of these schools anyway? Everyone talks about the Vietnam generation faculties, will this whither? Or will newer leftists take over?
Posted by: RC at April 5, 2003 5:51 PMWell, as a matter of fact, one thing the Hawaiian
studies program does teach is the myth that
the US Constitution was borrowed from the
polity of the Five Nations.
The one-time director of the Hawaiian school,
Lilikala Kamaeleihiwa, once wrote a book of
over 600 pages whose first sentence stated
that the Hawaiians had never gotten anything
valuable from the Europeans.
My guess is that what it means is, in 20-odd years, there will be many college students who are flaming left-wing radicals wearing T-shirts with Bin Laden's, Saddam's and Kim's smiling pictures on them.
Posted by: Barry Meislin at April 6, 2003 12:56 AM