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Retaking the university: a battle plan
I forgot where I saw this today:After the Vietnam War, a lot of us didn''t just crawl back into our literary cubicles; we stepped into academic positions. With the war over, our visibility was lost, and it seemed for a while——to the unobservant——that we had disappeared. Now we have tenure, and the work of reshaping the universities has begun in earnest. ——Jay Parini, The Chronicle of Higher Education The old Marxist strategy of ""increasing the contradictions""——a strategy according to which the worse things get, the better they really are——is a license for thuggery. It excuses all manner of bad behavior for the sake of a revolution that will (so it is said) finally transform society when all the old allegiances have finally collapsed. If one or two tottering institutions require a little push to finish them off, so be it. Shove hard: You cannot, as comrade Stalin remarked, make an omelette without breaking eggs. As with anything to which the word ""Marxist"" applies, there are at least eighty-seven things wrong with this strategy. Morally, it is completely irresponsible. Intellectually, it depends upon a fabricated ""contradiction"" to confer the illusion of inevitability. In real life, the only thing inevitable is the certainty of surprise. Nevertheless, as one looks around at academic life these days, it is easy to conclude that corruption yields not only decay but also opportunities. Think of the public convulsion that surrounded the episode of Ward Churchill''s invitation to speak at Hamilton College earlier this year. The spectacle of a highly paid academic with a fabricated background comparing the victims of 9/11 to a Nazi bureaucrat was too much. Churchill''s fellow academics endeavored——they are still endeavoring——to rally round. But the public wasn''t buying it. Such episodes, as Victor Davis Hanson noted in National Review recently, were like ""a torn scab revealing a festering sore beneath."" .... Posted by: anonymous2u 2005-05-04 |
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