[RogerD]

"It’s been rumored that professors Samuel A. Chambers and Alan Finlayson are planning ..."

In case anyone is wondering about the specialties of these two academics:

"Alan’s research interests encompass ... poststructuralist philosophy and radical politics ... Marxism, theories of class politics and multiculturalism ... Gender and Politics ... Marxist theories of aesthetics literature and culture..."

"Sam has very broad interests in ... the theory and practice of gender and sexuality ... the relationship between political theory and queer theory ... philosophy and gender studies "

No surprises there, and none of my kids are going to a school that considers their work to be a form of education.

[HowlinglyMind-BendingAbsurdity]

Marcusean and poststructuralist approaches to Ann Coulter? That should be a riot. How many sinsemilla bong hits does it take to dream this up? This requires one of those "today's word" segments on The Colbert Report.

[Some Fat Guy in L.A.]

These “academics” are obviously closet heterosexuals who probably wrote their paper one-handed while researching on Ann’s web site.

[Billthedrill]

Thank you for dredging that up. I did sort of get the hint that our boys might be dabbling in a little pomo logorrhea - well, actually you can't produce a "little" of that stuff - but it appears that the credentials are all in place: postructuralism, Marxism, theories of class politics, multiculturalism, and a host of other intellectual sandboxes that have to be sifted occasionally to filter out the occupants' turds. But check this out:

...political theory should be part of the process of identifying and encouraging all sorts of political and social ‘experiments in living’, taking part in a kind of ‘high-energy’ democracy capable of sustaining ongoing transformative experimentalism in production, political organisation, learning and living.

A feller could starve trying to survive on the semantic content in that torrent of intellectual styrofoam. A textbook full of that stuff printed on the shiny paper will cost some poor undergrad's parents a hunnert buckadingdongs and end up on the floor holding up a wobbly table. That would be its finest moment.

[xtinct]

Kids going to JHU ??? Have them major in engineering, medicine, nursing, and the sciences. They are not bothered by such nonsense in the sciences.

A JHU, Whiting School of Engineering Alum

[JamesW]

How come the description about these guys academic specialities has been edited in a misleading fashion. For instance, for the first one it has been posted here that

“Alan’s research interests encompass ... poststructuralist philosophy and radical politics ... Marxism, theories of class politics and multiculturalism ... Gender and Politics ... Marxist theories of aesthetics literature and culture...”

But when you look at the actual website to which it links, under the heading ‘Research’ it says ‘Alan’s research interests encompass political theory, media and British Politics as well as some aspects of the theory and method of political analysis’. It then lists his publications and concludes with ‘He is currently mostly concerned with theories of rhetoric and the ways in which they might be used to analyse political ideas and arguments in a world of electronic media’.

There is then an entirely separate section about things he teaches. This says that he ‘teaches about the politics of contemporary media (film, newspapers, television and internet)’ and that he ‘He also lectures on Marxism, theories of class politics and multiculturalism’.

None of this tell us what he actually advocates. And I can’t see what is necessarily wrong with students of politics going to lectures on these things as they have been very important parts of recent politics.