Marxist Profs or Sensitive Students?
Nick Gillespie | April 14, 2008, 5:16pm
Over at the LA Times' Dust Up, reason.tv interview subject and chief skeptic at The Skeptic Michael Shermer and The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education's Greg Lukianoff are discussing academic freedom, student indoctrination, and the like. Two snippets:
Shermer: "...Unless they are openly teaching a course entitled, in effect, 'Why Liberals Should Rule the World,' professors have no business introducing their political bias to students. Their job is to teach the curriculum of their subject, not churn out a bunch of Marx-worshiping, Bush-hating, Che Guevara-loving, pinko graduates who will go out into the world woefully ignorant that most Americans think entirely differently from the way they do...."
Lukianoff: "...Is having an opinionated professor really the same as indoctrination? I have seen claims—often from conservative students—that students have a right not to be "harassed" by the left-leaning opinions of their professors. This drives me nuts because if there is one thing conservatives should not be doing, it is legitimizing the idea that merely being exposed to different points of view is the same thing as harassment. Harassment rationales are used to shut down people with dissenting opinions (often the socially conservative, the un-PC, or the merely unlucky) far too often...."
More here. They'll be kicking each other around each week.
reason on campus bias and more here.
Elemenope | April 14, 2008, 10:36pm | #
Do you defend them or what??
I think that to point out that people who are poor and live in an economically depressed area of the country are serially pissed-off about their situation is no crime. Especially because it tends to be true.
It is also no crime to point out that in situations of economic weakness, people's political behavior becomes focused upon those things that give them a feeling of strength (Guns, God, etc.). I think it is no comment on the validity of those things, just simply the tendency of people to read them into their political behavior that changes (i.e. publicly "cling" to them).
I think he phrased some parts of his comments poorly, and he said them to the wrong audience (San Francisco is not the best place to talk about the mid-west, IMO). It was a foot-in-mouth moment, and if anywhere it should have happened in rural Pennsylvania, not a 'coastal' fundraiser, to use your term.
To infer from his comments that he is somehow elitist is a stretch, especially since for the vast majority of his life, unlike his two opponents, he was far from wealthy. So I do not agree with the dominant media frame of the comments, and to that extent, I defend his comments.
More to the point, there are more important things to be concerned with than a comment that, while phrased poorly, was essentially true. Like, for example, *what these three people actually stand for*.
