Posted on 02/28/2005 11:31:52 AM PST by Pendragon_6
"Who is defending Ward Churchill, may I ask?" That was the question posed by John Holbo, a philosophy professor and contributor to the leftwing academic blog Crooked Timber, when news broke that the University of Colorado was harboring a leftist extremist in its midst. The gist of Holbo’s question was that no respectable person on the Left could come to the defense of someone so demonstrably in leave of his senses as the former Weatherman accomplice, academic fraud, and faux-Indian.
One can only hope that the professor’s academic acumen is better than his news judgment. In fact, no sooner had the media picked up on Churchill’s now-notorious essay than his leftwing enablers rushed to rescue his reputation.
Carrying the flag of the pro-Churchill campaign was the academic community. Colorado University President Elizabeth Hoffman, before revising her views in the face of broad public condemnation, initially condoned Churchill’s likening of the victims of September 11 to Nazi apparatchiks, insisting that “Prof. Churchill's comments have precipitated a discussion we ought to have.”
Continued
Thanks!
The "friggin purpose" of universities is to educate students so that they can perform tasks useful to society. It is not a refuge for anyone. Perhaps you have it confused with a mental hospital, nowadays, a natural mistake.
Most conservatives don't care about the existence of radicals, they care about supporting them with tax dollars.
Write on, uh, Right on. And being wrong isn't the kind of thing that should make him lose tenure.
Chomsky could start his own school. Free Speech, Free Entreprise! Tenure -- by all experience -- has exactlty the anti-effect of what it once purported to benefit.
I think I disagree. It could be that a University is a trade school on steroids, but I think the purpose of an education is to teach one how to be a free man. Sure, PART of that is knowing how to do something useful, something that other people will trade money for. But that's not enough.
I think schools should be thought of as refuges -- places where students and faculty alike are free from distractions and hindrances so that they can learn and teach.
What you have nowadays is the abuse of that freedom, and just as the abuse of freedom of the press is likely to lead to the loss or diminishing of that freedom, so the abuse of academic freedom is likely to lead to its end. Too bad.
Where does propaganda fit into your equation ? Ever see the bullshit courses in most colleges? half these professors are there to push a political doctrine , not teach .
Under the heading of "abuse".
Moderately full disclosure: I am not an academic (God forbid!)(I don't play one on TV either ...) but I am all too familiar right now with an academic institution of allegedly higher learning where the thinkers and teachers with whom we here would probably tend to sympathize would be run out of the joint if it weren't for tenure. I'm seeing a college being saved by not being able to sack people it disagrees with.
To: chemainus you said
"Noam Chomsky does write beautifully...he's just wrong .."
Write on, uh, Right on. And being wrong isn't the kind of thing that should make him lose tenure.
83 posted on 03/01/2005 12:31:20 PM PST by Mad Dawg (My P226 wants to teach you what SIGnify means ...)
My response to you:
1. Only you are talking about Chomsky.
2. Chomsky does not give a speech in public to students and urge them to repeat the murder of 9-11 then tell them how to make bombs.
3.Stop trying to de-rail and beg the question. That is a Marxist tactic and it doesn't work with me.
4. Churchill's woes have not a damned thing to do with freedom, rather punishing him for the many times over criminal and probable felon he is.
5.Tenure is a fake proposition created 50 years ago by a mutual admiration society of leftists and has absolutely NO basis in law.
I hope you can follow the numbers.
Regards
Go read the Cardinal Principles of Education....Google them
As to your number (2), that supports the distinction I am drawing between Chomsky and Churchill.
(3) You are the one trying to stop and derail the conversation. I was having a polite conversation -- without any accusations or personal attacks -- with zeroisanumber, a conversation he started with his post #6.
(4) I agree. You might take the trouble to try to read and understand what I write before you assault me and mischaracterize me and my argument.
(5) Would you be so good as to show me where I said that tenure had a basis in law? It may be that in its modern form tenure is younger than I am, but some form of tenure has existed for centuries, and Harvard had tenured charis in the nineteenth century.
As to the seven cardinal principles of education, I will indeed Google them. I wonder if I could ask you to check out Saint John's College. I don't really care too much what the big universities think of education. I think I followed the numbers okay. Now why don't you try following the argument?
This may be true to some degree, but for the most part it's the left who is intolerant these days.
Heh. Go back and read JFK's posts on this thread.
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