Higher education and low comedy. Thomas Sowell.

SolitaryRoad.com

Website owner:  James Miller

[ Home ] [ Up ] [ Info ] [ Mail ]

The following is from The Thomas Sowell Reader, pp. 340 - 342:

______________________________________________________________________________

Higher education and low comedy

If you liked Alice in Wonderland, you will love The Chronicle of Higher Education, the trade publication of academia. Just one issue — dated the 13^th of October (1993), for those who are superstitious — contained stories about professors that make you wonder if academics ever grow up.

In that issue, New York University advertized for a faculty member in the performing arts, for what it called “Gendered Performance.” The specific duties of the job include “drag, transvestite performance, queer theories.” The university “encourages applications from women and members of minority groups.” None of the usual stuff about being an “equal opportunity/affirmative action employer,” that we have grown so used to that its internal contradictions no longer bother us.

In what literally became a federal case, a professor at the University of Alabama injected his religious views into a physical exercise class that he taught. When the university told him to stop it, he sued. Eventually, he lost the case but gained tenure, so perhaps it was a stand-off.

Had he injected left-wing ideologies into wholly unrelated subjects like biology or English — he would never have been warned.

Another federal case arose because a professor who cussed out his students in class ignored warnings to stop it and then sued when he was eventually fired. This case went as the U. S. Circuit Court of Appeals, where the prof lost.

This does not mean that mere profanity in the classroom is grounds for firing a professor. It was only the fact that the profanity was directed against students that got the professor in trouble. All across the country, and all up and down the academic pecking order from Harvard to Podunk A & M, four-letter words are O.K. in the classroom under the broad umbrella of “academic freedom.”

Professors who go to bed with their students are also covered by “academic freedom,” even if they are not covered by anything else. The same issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education includes letters from readers responding to an essay by a professor at the University of Massachusetts who says that he remedied the problem of female students whose virginity was “unnaturally prolonged.”

Again, we need have no fear for this professor’s job, either for his actions or his subsequent boasts about them. It is very unlikely that his de-flowering of student virgins will add to the congestion of the federal courts.

At Stanford, incidently, male students can get into all kinds of trouble under a new and vaguely worded “sexual harassment” code, but Stanford professors who go to bed with their students are merely admonished.

Mob rule is also alive and well in academia. The same issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education reports on a riot at U.C.L.A. in which students attacked the faculty club. They “broke the club’s plate-glass windows, wrecked furniture, and carved graffiti in its walls.”

In due course they were rewarded by the U.C.L.A. administration’s promise to add two new professors in Chicano Studies and to exempt ethnic studies programs from any of the cutbacks that might hit such non-relevant subjects as mathematics or economics.

The Chronicle also reported on similar events at Berkeley. “Several hundred protesters ran through two campus buildings and pulled fire alarms. No one was arrested.”

Note that “protestors” is the politically correct term for rioters, vandals, or storm troopers on campus.

Although these “protestors” are routinely reported as expressing their “rage” or their “anguish,” one of the Cornell student leaders may have captured the real spirit more accurately when he said, after various organized acts of vandalism there: “This is very exciting.”

One of the reasons we don’t hear much about such campus outbursts in the general media, the way we did back in the 1960s, is that they happen too often to be news — and are accepted too supinely to have the drama of conflict.

Experienced academic administrators have also learned how to minimize the number of such episodes by various techniques of pre-emptive surrender. By staying constantly aware of what is most likely to set off the most volatile elements among the students and faculty, administrators know which way to bend academic policy and whose misconduct or outright crimes are to be overlooked.

This game works only because many outside of academia are not even aware that the game is being played. But, before deciding whether to contribute to dear old Alma Mater, it might be well worthwhile to subscribe to The Chronicle of Higher Education. You could end up deciding to donate to medical research instead, or to invest the money in the marketplace, where it will help to create jobs.

______________________________________________________________________________

10 Dec 2023