Professors and Social Media

AIA-FL Blog ^ | May 20, 2010 | Deborah Lambert

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Professors and Social Media

Deborah Lambert, May 20, 2010

If you think that today’s professors spend their free time roaming through dusty library stacks, think again. Apparently 80 percent of today’s faculty members “have at least one account with either Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Skype, Linkedin, MySpace, Flickr or GoogleWave,” . . . and nearly 60 percent keep accounts with more than one, and a quarter use at least four, according to InsideHigherEd.com.

And that’s just the beginning. The study also showed that over 50 percent used social media as a teaching tool.

The survey of just under 1,000 professors said all age ranges were equally involved with social media, which was a surprise to researchers.

While use of social media across the age spectrum shows up in all current surveys, the use of social media in the classroom has also resulted in some controversy....

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Clearly, the "professors" at most colleges and universities have, for many years, not spent much time in what this writer calls the "dusty stacks" of libraries--at least in the American History section of those stacks!

Had they spent time in the writings of America's Founders, they would not have been teaching Marx and Mao and undermining the very ideas which have allowed them their so-called "academic freedom" to propagandize the nation's youth.

A reading of the following excerpt from a letter written from abroad by Thomas Jefferson to George Wythe on August 13, 1786, speaks of the lack of "emancipation of the minds" of Europeans of that day and of the necessity for teaching the ideas of liberty to rising generations of Americans in order to enlighten their minds and preserve freedom:

"The European papers have announced that the assembly of Virginia were occupied on the revisal of their code of laws. This, with some other similar intelligence, has contributed much to convince the people of Europe, that what the English papers are constantly publishing of our anarchy, is false; as they are sensible that such a work is that of a people only who are in perfect tranquillity. Our act for freedom of religion is extremely applauded. The ambassadors & ministers of the several nations of Europe resident at this court have asked of me copies of it to send to their sovereigns, and it is inserted at full length in several books now in the press; among others, in the new Encyclopedie.

"I think it will produce considerable good even in these countries where ignorance, superstition, poverty, & oppression of body & mind in every form, are so firmly settled on the mass of the people, that their redemption from them can never be hoped. If the Almighty had begotten a thousand sons, instead of one, they would not have sufficed for this task. If all the sovereigns of Europe were to set themselves to work to emancipate the minds of their subjects from their present ignorance & prejudices, & that as zealously as they now endeavor the contrary, a thousand years would not place them on that high ground on which our common people are now setting out. Ours could not have been so fairly put into the hands of their own common sense had they not been separated from their parent stock & kept from contamination, either from them, or the other people of the old world, by the intervention of so wide an ocean. To know the worth of this, one must see the want of it here. I think by far the most important bill in our whole code is that for the diffusion of knowlege among the people. No other sure foundation can be devised, for the preservation of freedom and happiness. If anybody thinks that kings, nobles, or priests are good conservators of the public happiness send them here. It is the best school in the universe to cure them of that folly. They will see here with their own eyes that these descriptions of men are an abandoned confederacy against the happiness of the mass of the people. The omnipotence of their effect cannot be better proved than in this country particularly, where notwithstanding the finest soil upon earth, the finest climate under heaven, and a people of the most benevolent, the most gay and amiable character of which the human form is susceptible, where such a people I say, surrounded by so many blessings from nature, are yet loaded with misery by kings, nobles and priests, and by them alone. Preach, my dear Sir, a crusade against ignorance; establish & improve the law for educating the common people. Let our countrymen know that the people alone can protect us against these evils, and that the tax which will be paid for this purpose is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests & nobles who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance."

Jefferson's final point here is important, for by allowing the Progressives of the 20th Century to censor the Founders' ideas of liberty from America's school textbooks, from the teachings in the colleges, universities, and law schools, we have the present crop of pseudointellectuals who dominate the current Administration, media, academia, and now, alas, threaten to become Supreme Court justices.

These folks, ignorant of the history of civilization's struggle for liberty, wish to take on the failed ideas from which the Founders fled Europe. The Chicago political elitist class, one supposes, constitutes the "nobles" Jefferson envisioned who might rise up, were the Americans to fail to teach rising generations the ideas of liberty.