-Caveat Lector-
In a message dated 99-09-19 22:31:39 EDT, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
>The purging of dissidence within the universities continues to this day. More
>frequent but less visible than the firings are the nonhirings. Highly
>qualified social scientists who are also known progressives have applied for
>positions at places too numerous to mention, only to be turned down in favor
>of candidates who--as measured by their training, publications, and teaching
>experience--are far less qualified.
> Scholars of a dissident bent are regularly discriminated against in the
>distribution of research grants and scholar ships. After writing "The Power
>Elite," C. Wright Mills was abruptly cut off from foundation funding. To
this day,
>radical academics are rarely considered for appointments within their
>professional associations and are regularly passed over for prestigious
lecture
>invitations and appointments to editorial boards of the more influential
>professional journals.
Gee, thanks for the reminder ...
And here I was, starting to take more seriously my wife's suggestion that I
return to school, get a higher degree, and teach, while developing a
reputation as a scholar ... Yeah, right -- like they'd ALLOW an iconoclast
like *me* to have tenure ... ROFL
I take issue with the author of this piece, however, on his rather sweeping
claim that the "conservatization" of the university system is as near-total
as he makes it sound. He didn't tell you, for example, that the
aforementioned Angela Davies, after being denied tenure everywhere else,
finally found a home at MY alma mater, San Francisco State U. (once rivalling
UC Berkeley in radicalism, and still proud of it), now an EXTREMELY PC
institution, where the polar opposite of his thesis was the rule, speaking
from first-hand experience. (My description could be confirmed by the Old
Lefties among the school's administrators, with whom I used to hang out,
sharing shudders as we contemplated the icy ideologism and quasi-fascist
conduct of this "New Guard.")
To win my degree in interdisciplinary Soc Sci and graduate second in my class
with a 4.0 GPA --in THAT major (I was a double major, the other being Clin
Psy, where faculty bias was even more rampant)-- I'd frequently had to go
over the heads of martinet PC professors to more rational and seasoned
department heads to get a fair hearing and a less "ideological" appraisal of
my papers, which, in subject matter, were sometimes controversial (to PC
eyes) but flawlessly researched by other criteria of scholarship.
So, personal experience in this one particular academic discipline --the
field perhaps MOST vulnerable to political pressure (sometimes brute but
often subtler and more insidious) from the "social engineering"-minded "New
Left"-- leaves no doubt in my mind that there IS a quite influential and
powerful PC "counterculture" in academia today -- but it IS mostly confined
to certain niches (e.g., the STATE university system in some places like
Kalifornia and increasingly popular "women's" colleges like Antioch) which
capital-A Academia (still defined by the Ivy League campuses for the
next-generation conservative elite and corporate Business Schools like MIT)
holds in some disrepute, and it IS a minority point of view -- although, I
must emphasize, it is a vocal and highly ORGANIZED one, making up for its
small size by its stronger "networking" throughout academia and its strategy
for making its "truths" appear more substantial than they are and more widely
held, using two means: (1) ignoring the existence of any other point of view
in overview, and (2) citing only its own "authorities," who only quote each
other, incestuously and in "separatist" fashion. (Mirrors reflecting
mirrors, till just a few voices sound like a great multitude.) And also, by
their wanton disregard of rules in social science against falsifying data and
against over-extrapolating conclusions from small and biased samplings --
rules they deliberately (and secretively) break in the name of "furthering
The Cause" -- thereby MANUFACTURING and REINFORCING those very "variables"
which they only claim to be "studying." Which is why earlier I used the term
"social engineering" -- a nod to their "Social CONSTRUCTION of Reality"
hypothesis, hallowed as epistemological dogma by these Politically Correct
"social scientists."
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