Posted on 07/20/2013 3:45:10 PM PDT by Kaslin
Did former governor, now university president, Mitch Daniels seek to censor the late Howard Zinn, a Communist prof who wrote the anti-American bestseller A People’s History of the United States? No, but that’s what the AP suggested. “Mitch Daniels looked to censor opponents,” ran the headline. “[E]mails obtained by The Associated Press show Daniels went out of his way during his second term as governor to destroy what he considered liberal breeding grounds at Indiana’s public universities.” The second bit appears to be true. And congratulations to Mitch Daniels for his efforts at swamp-clearing. Public universities should not be breeding grounds for any ideology, Left or Right.
The AP writer doesn’t get that, of course. But it’s important that more dispassionate souls recognize that there is no connection between Mitch Daniels’s effort to depoliticize the university system in Indiana — a task that, given the ideological complexion of American higher education, meant showing leftists (the AP calls them “liberal,” but actually they are illiberal leftists) the door — there is no connection, I say, between that effort and the “censorship” he was alleged to have been engaged in.
The AP story is a sort of hit job, intended to discredit Daniels, who is coming up for his six-month review as head of Purdue University. Its actual effect, on me, anyway, was to increase my already high esteem for the man. Here is a chap that not only saved the state of Indiana from the fiscal nightmare that leftist-run states like Illinois and Michigan are suffering (remember Detroit?), but he is also someone who can spot a Communist fraud at 100 paces and isn’t afraid to say that left-wing propaganda is not the same as history and should not be purveyed as such on the taxpayer’s dime. Zinn’s book, wrote Daniels in one of those emails, “is a truly execrable, anti-factual piece of disinformation that misstates American history on every page.” That’s exactly right. Also right were Daniels’s efforts to remove it from the curriculum: “Can someone assure me,” he asked “that it is not in use anywhere in Indiana? If it is, how do we get rid of it before more young people are force-fed a totally false version of our history?”
Turns out it was being taught at Indiana University, but that’s hardly a surprise. Zinn’s exercise in anti-American agit-prop — the historian Oscar Handlin called it a “deranged fairy tale” — is far and away the bestselling book of American history in the country. It has sold more than 2 million copies and is used in high schools and colleges across the country. Again, Daniels’s response was spot on: “This crap should not be accepted for any credit by the state. No student will be better taught because someone sat through this session.” (Readers interested in a fuller version of my take on Zinn can find it in this piece for National Review.)
Note well, Daniels doesn’t say Zinn’s book oughtn’t to be allowed to be published. He doesn’t want to censor the book. He merely says it shouldn’t be taught as history. He would, I’d wager, say the same thing about The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. And he’d be right.
The Left is skirling that Mitch Daniels wants to deny academic freedom. No, he wants to support it. But he understands that academic freedom is not a license to engage in political propaganda. It is the freedom to pursue the truth. This is a point that Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, gets exactly right. “Academic freedom,” Wood writes in a column on the controversy for The Chronicle of Higher Education, ”is a principle that thrives only when it is sturdily woven together with academic responsibility. That’s what Daniels in his plain-speaking e-mails called for.”
It’s worth pausing over Wood’s observation about academic freedom. First, note that free speech — the right to peaceful political dissent — is not the same thing as academic freedom — the more limited right to pursue, teach, and publish about the truth. This is a distinction that is often elided. As the sociologist Edward Shils wrote in an important essay on the subject, academic freedom is “the freedom to seek and transmit the truth.” It does not, he noted, “extend to the conduct of political propaganda in teaching.”
Academic freedom is the freedom of university teachers to perform their academic obligations of teaching and research. These are obligations to seek and communicate the truth according to “their best lights.” Academic freedom is not the freedom of academic individuals to do just anything, to follow any impulse or desire, or to say anything that occurs to them. It is the freedom to do academic things: to teach the truth as they see it on the basis of prolonged and intensive study, to discuss their ideas freely with their colleagues, to publish the truth as they have arrived at it by systematic methodical research and assiduous research.
“That,” Shils concludes, “is academic freedom proper.” A number of corollaries follow. One is that one assess academic things according to academic or intellectual criteria, “regardless of the person’s political or religious beliefs, his or her sex, ethnic origin, personal qualities, kinship connections, friendship or enmity toward the individual or the work assessed.” It also follows that academic freedom is limited in certain ways. For example, “An academic is not free to falsify the record of his observations; he is not free to forge or misrepresent the contents of documents and inscriptions.” Shils also goes on to argue that although “academic freedom includes political freedom,” it is nonetheless “desirable that teachers should not expound their own political or moral preferences and values in their classes,” and, if they do, that “they should take care to distinguish evaluative judgments from their statements of fact.”
The distinction between free speech and the more limited privilege of academic freedom is not novel. But it is one that many well-meaning people have difficulty wrapping their minds around. Our society provides many outlets for the expression of political opinions. Thank God for that. It has also taken care to provide for educational institutions whose purpose is learning, scholarship, and pedagogy. Academic freedom is not the same thing as free speech. It is a more limited freedom, designed to nurture intellectual integrity and to protect those engaged in intellectual inquiry from the intrusion of partisan passions. The very limitation of academic freedom is part of its strength. By excluding the political, it makes room for the pursuit of truth.
This is a point that is articulated well by the late Kenneth Minogue in his book The Concept of the University.
Universities were based, like all social institutions, on something valued—on a “value judgment,” to use the current jargon. They were based (if I may use an old formula) on “the disinterested pursuit of truth.” It was this pursuit, as it were, that constituted the moral basis of their authority. They had no direct concern with justice, and no one was ever sent to a university to make him courageous. Their excellence was to be found in their limits. Academia dealt in the virtues of truth and exactitude.
What happened? In the 1960s, universities collapsed “in the face of a little juvenile swagger.” They never recovered, most of them, and we continue to reap the fruits of that moral and intellectual dégringolade. We owe an enormous debt of gratitude to those (alas, few) public figures who, like Mitch Daniels, have both the wit and the courage to buck the PC-tide and stand up for truth amidst the mephitic currents of left-wing propaganda purveyed by ideologues like Howard Zinn.
He clearly came to class stoned quite often. He always had an escort of a couple of the best looking young women in his class, it was said they always got high grades and weren't all that smart, trading sex for those grades.
The man could not argue his way out of a paper bag if challenged.
I remember one of my daughters friends talking about Howard Zinn's wonderful historical work. When I told him what the guy was actually like, he turned beet red.
The idea that he has the most read "history book" in the US is appalling......
It is indeed appalling
I do believe Mitch is safe with his job at Purdue for a bit longer...
http://www.journalgazette.net/article/20130719/NEWS07/130719432
Purdue gives Mitch Daniels a performance bonus
I'd love to meet a few more, they're fun to watch when they get told.
Stay shocked my friend, it might do you some good.
Just curious: what college was that?
IIRC, I saw Zinn on a PBS American history documentary series, which was based on his textbook. He commented on it, and may have even narrated it. Of course, since it was on PBS, it was partly financed by federal taxpayer dollars.
Paul Johnson wrote a book, IIRC, “A History of the American People”, which is a splendid survey.
I believe Paul is a conservative Briton. He has written a history of Christianity, one of the Jewish people, and a book called “Modern Times”, a history of the last century. Excellent and thorough historian.
What people don’t realize,outside of a handful of those who fight the Academic Left, is that Zinn was always a communist, a one-time member of the Communist Party USA, and an ideologue, first and foremost.
I don’t give a damn if a commie writes a book about history, per se. It is the fact that most of them are so demonstrably biased, inaccurate, and ideological, that they have almost no “educational value”. Propaganda value, yes, but educational value, no.
However, to the reds they do have an “educational value”, which is known as misinformation, disinformation, obscuring the facts, omitting the facts, and promoting communism/marxism under the guise of teaching “history”.
There is a major debate raging among legitimate Vietnam scholars (many of whom are combat veterans of that war) and the Left historians who were never there during the war, have openly supported Hanoi’s aggression and genocide throughout Indochina, and who aim to destroy the truths about what was at stake in this war.
The Left blames America for the war, yet Hanoi decided in the 1950’s that it was going to conquer the South, in spite of treaties, promises of non-aggression, etc. There was a little predecessor war known as the Korean War which involved these same precepts of the communists, conquest by hook or crook.
Groups like Acccuray in Academia, Accuracy in Media (its parent body), the National Association of Scholars, SPME (pro-Israel scholars re the Middle East), CAMERA, etc., are dedicated to fighting academia leftist educational fraud courses and propaganda.
However, the newspapers are one of the biggest bunch of truth-offenders because of the ignoramuses they hire as “jouralists”, many of whom are on the far-Left themselves.
If I had a dollar for every time the NYT or the Wash. Post blamed something on McCarthyism (esp. in obituaries on the Leftists), I’d be in Hawaii right now, on a beach, tweeting away about nothing.
Zinn is a poster-child for communist professors and liars,but he is only the tip of the Red Iceberg of Academia.
Lower the oceans a bit and you’ll find more Red Ice than you could ever imagine (Columbia, Rutgers, NYU, CUNY, Berkeley, Johns Hopkins, Un. of Chicago, Harvard, Yale, etc).
And law schools are just as bad, if not worse.
Hopefully a lot of those in academia on the hardcore Left will be exposed in the near future. Conservatives are now more aware of what is out there then ever before, and “taking names, taking notes”.
Gonna be an interesting year, folks.
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