We’re All Conservatives Now

[groovedaddy]

Last week conservative activist David Horowitz, author of the Academic Bill of Rights, e-mailed me to report, in sorrow, that Penn Sate University had weakened “the only academic freedom provision . . . worthy of the name.” What the university had done was revise an 1987 statement stipulating that “it is not the function of a faculty member . . . to indoctrinate his/her students with ready made conclusions on controversial subjects.” That sentence disappeared, as did a warning against “introducing into the classroom provocative discussions of irrelevant subjects not within the field of study.” The National Association of Scholars Web site declares that academic freedom at Penn Sate is “ruined.” The left had won again, and the university world remains a bastion of radical political forces.

Not so, according to a new book I received in the same week. “Academic Freedom in the Post-9/11 Era” (edited by Edward J. Carvalho and David B. Downing) boasts a roster of prominent left-wing academics including Noam Chomsky, Cornel West, Ward Churchill, Henry Giroux, Norman Finkelstein and Cary Nelson. In these pages the downcast and discouraged David Horowitz who wrote to me is presented as “powerful,” a “force,” a “bully,” “notorious,” “a perfect cynic,” “dangerous,” a purveyor of “McCarthian sensibilities” and all too successful. It is because of his efforts and the efforts of other right-wing groups (listed by John K. Wilson in an essay titled “Marketing McCarthyism”) that “higher education is increasingly abandoning its role as a democratic public sphere as it aligns itself with corporate powers and military values” (Giroux). Despite the tears shed by Horowitz and his allies for the plight of conservative students, “censorship in academia by conservatives” is, according to Wilson, “more common than censorship on the left.”

Both sides can’t be right, can they? Well, actually, they can.

The left is right to point to the withdrawal of state funds from public universities as precipitating “the neoliberal rush to privatize and vocationalize all facets of higher education,” a rush that has brought us “educational cuts, tighter budgets, increasing tuition and student debt, hiring freezes, the rise of contingent faculty and the erosion of secure academic employment” (Carvalho and Downing).

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/20/were-all-conservatives-now/?ref=opinion

[xchrom]

1. very interesting. nt

[Democrats_win]

2. Conservative wisdom: kill the goose that laid the golden egg.

This really is Darwinism at its best. The faulty genes that have given us such "wisdom" will rule over an increasingly weaker country.

[patrice]

3. When I try to think about or discuss questions like this, I have found it more useful to try to

estimate (usually intuitively, but it could be a more rationally empirical effort too) how much of which, Conservative:Liberal, and of course that depends upon context, so you pretty much have to at least outline/sketch a context under consideration.

My guess is that we'd find the sources of censorship in our post-secondary educational institutions tilted in favor of the Right, maybe something like 60:40.

[patrice]

4. The reason I think that kind of estimate is useful is because, no matter how right you are about the

60% of the sources of censorship being Right/Conservative, if a given instance happens to be in the 40% that comes from Left/Liberal sources, that fact is MORE significant to those having that experience and that would be true even if the ratio was 90:10, or even more skewed.