Monday, October 03, 2005
The Ivy Tar Pits
Imagine a savannah under the Eocene sun, with light breezes riffling the sedge and cat-tails at the verge of a wide pond. Under the brilliant blue of the sky’s vault, a family of elands struggle in the shallows, trapped by the black oozing tar that has welled from deep within the earth, and now pools just below a cap of water. Drawn to the water for sustenance, instead they are held captive. But they will not starve or suffer a slow death of exhaustion; predators lurk, enticed in their turn by the easy pickings…
That to me is a metaphor for the worst of the tenured die-hard Marxist faculty of American academia, who use their protected status to inflict an utterly discredited doctrine upon hapless students who are as ill-served by the crude analytical tools of that doctrine, as they are scourged by their instructors in the learning.
Using Marxist dialectic to assess and analyze the world is like using a hand grenade to dissect a laboratory frog. For all the heat and energy it provides, it leaves the lab pretty dissheveled. Hors de combat.
Come to think of it, that’s pretty much what the Marxists intended.
In fact, we make our primary mistake in assuming the Ward Churchills of the planet actually believe in the principles they spout. The clichés and catchphrases they memorize are now rarely used as argument, especially in the span of years since their impracticability has been resoundingly shown in the failure of Soviet Communism. Instead for a long time Marxist rhetoric has served mainly as the call-and-response passwords by which the disaffected anti-capitalists recognize each other.
The source of my distaste for these unreformed Stalinists is that they are delusional, yet fully empowered to cause harm to others with their delusions. They’re delusional in that they cannot grasp that they are irrelevant. The tide of history has left their bankrupt philosophy behind like shingle on a beach after a storm.
To deny their impotence, they rage. To validate themselves in their fury, they victimize the only people within their power, the students drawn to university by thirst for knowledge, and who become mired in oozing bile.
Greek myth speaks of an embittered Attic highwayman Procrustes, who waylaid travelers and measured them on the frame of his iron bed. If the span of their body was greater than that of the bed, he used his blade to adjust the length of their limbs to match the bed. If their body was too short, he contrived to stretch their joints. His legendary abuse is apt to describe the enforced conformity being imposed on students by Marxists whose ideas are brushed aside in any “real-world” match. If a student’s philosophy extends beyond Marxist orthodoxy, the student is penalized and scourged, and grades are hacked much the way a joint is reduced by a butcher. If the student’s ideas are still juvenile and undeveloped, the good professor is temperamentally impelled to fill any void with Marxist baggage.
This, of course, is all done in the name of free speech and the celebration of intellectual objectivity. Marxists have always had a well-developed command of irony.
But, God help the student that reveals conservative political leanings to a Leftist professor.
There have been plenty of documented cases of Leftist professors publicly humiliating and insulting students for expressing conservative views or sympathies. And there are a few cases of professors punishing students by docking their grades specifically for expressing contrary views. These behaviors mark the line beyond which no professor or instructor should be allowed, any more than a teacher should be allowed to bully any student. Considering human nature, there is surely a similar weakness among people of many political or philosophical orientations to give in to a desire to coerce youngsters in their care to parrot their politics. But surveys of American and European colleges and universities indicate that the overwhelming majority of instructors and faculty identify themselves as leftist, liberal, progressive, Marxist, or communist, NOT right-wing conservative. Simply, the left are in a desperate struggle to maintain their dominance of university faculties.
Yet, however pervasive this phenomenon has become, it is even more significant that University administrators go far beyond tolerating it. They repeatedly invert the logic of free speech and enforce rules that selectively discriminate AGAINST identifiably conservative students and faculty. There is some comfort to be gleaned from the sure sense that many students are smart enough to instantly grasp the hypocrisy of such administrative misdemeanor. But the effects are far-reaching. American universities are still reverberating from the cave-in to the shot-gun brandishing radicals of the celebrated occupations of the 1960’s.
Many institutions at that time yielded to the radicals’ overt, contemptuous intimidation by abandoning (for a time) traditional grading systems and instituting “feel-good” ethnic/gender studies degree programs, hastily cobbled together for the purpose of deflecting violence, or to retain minority students that might otherwise bail and undermine the school's adherence to unacknowledged or explicit racial quotas. Some of those programs have since been refined with a view to making them as rigorous and intellectually challenging as other degree programs, but the legacy of gutlessness and sheer cowardice persists. There is a deep and ineradicable shame from the time when universities cried “Uncle” to student thugs, and I can't help feeling that it will not dissipate until all those who acquiesced have passed from the scene.
That to me is a metaphor for the worst of the tenured die-hard Marxist faculty of American academia, who use their protected status to inflict an utterly discredited doctrine upon hapless students who are as ill-served by the crude analytical tools of that doctrine, as they are scourged by their instructors in the learning.
Using Marxist dialectic to assess and analyze the world is like using a hand grenade to dissect a laboratory frog. For all the heat and energy it provides, it leaves the lab pretty dissheveled. Hors de combat.
Come to think of it, that’s pretty much what the Marxists intended.
In fact, we make our primary mistake in assuming the Ward Churchills of the planet actually believe in the principles they spout. The clichés and catchphrases they memorize are now rarely used as argument, especially in the span of years since their impracticability has been resoundingly shown in the failure of Soviet Communism. Instead for a long time Marxist rhetoric has served mainly as the call-and-response passwords by which the disaffected anti-capitalists recognize each other.
The source of my distaste for these unreformed Stalinists is that they are delusional, yet fully empowered to cause harm to others with their delusions. They’re delusional in that they cannot grasp that they are irrelevant. The tide of history has left their bankrupt philosophy behind like shingle on a beach after a storm.
To deny their impotence, they rage. To validate themselves in their fury, they victimize the only people within their power, the students drawn to university by thirst for knowledge, and who become mired in oozing bile.
Greek myth speaks of an embittered Attic highwayman Procrustes, who waylaid travelers and measured them on the frame of his iron bed. If the span of their body was greater than that of the bed, he used his blade to adjust the length of their limbs to match the bed. If their body was too short, he contrived to stretch their joints. His legendary abuse is apt to describe the enforced conformity being imposed on students by Marxists whose ideas are brushed aside in any “real-world” match. If a student’s philosophy extends beyond Marxist orthodoxy, the student is penalized and scourged, and grades are hacked much the way a joint is reduced by a butcher. If the student’s ideas are still juvenile and undeveloped, the good professor is temperamentally impelled to fill any void with Marxist baggage.
This, of course, is all done in the name of free speech and the celebration of intellectual objectivity. Marxists have always had a well-developed command of irony.
But, God help the student that reveals conservative political leanings to a Leftist professor.
There have been plenty of documented cases of Leftist professors publicly humiliating and insulting students for expressing conservative views or sympathies. And there are a few cases of professors punishing students by docking their grades specifically for expressing contrary views. These behaviors mark the line beyond which no professor or instructor should be allowed, any more than a teacher should be allowed to bully any student. Considering human nature, there is surely a similar weakness among people of many political or philosophical orientations to give in to a desire to coerce youngsters in their care to parrot their politics. But surveys of American and European colleges and universities indicate that the overwhelming majority of instructors and faculty identify themselves as leftist, liberal, progressive, Marxist, or communist, NOT right-wing conservative. Simply, the left are in a desperate struggle to maintain their dominance of university faculties.
Yet, however pervasive this phenomenon has become, it is even more significant that University administrators go far beyond tolerating it. They repeatedly invert the logic of free speech and enforce rules that selectively discriminate AGAINST identifiably conservative students and faculty. There is some comfort to be gleaned from the sure sense that many students are smart enough to instantly grasp the hypocrisy of such administrative misdemeanor. But the effects are far-reaching. American universities are still reverberating from the cave-in to the shot-gun brandishing radicals of the celebrated occupations of the 1960’s.
Many institutions at that time yielded to the radicals’ overt, contemptuous intimidation by abandoning (for a time) traditional grading systems and instituting “feel-good” ethnic/gender studies degree programs, hastily cobbled together for the purpose of deflecting violence, or to retain minority students that might otherwise bail and undermine the school's adherence to unacknowledged or explicit racial quotas. Some of those programs have since been refined with a view to making them as rigorous and intellectually challenging as other degree programs, but the legacy of gutlessness and sheer cowardice persists. There is a deep and ineradicable shame from the time when universities cried “Uncle” to student thugs, and I can't help feeling that it will not dissipate until all those who acquiesced have passed from the scene.
# posted by Mad Fiddler @ 10:51 AM 
