The AP story is a sort of hit job, intended to discredit Daniels who is coming up for his six-month review as head of Perdue University. Its actual effect, on me, anyway, was to increase my already high esteem for the man. Here is a chap that not only saved the state of Indiana from the fiscal nightmare that leftist-run states like Illinois and Michigan are suffering (remember Detroit?), but he is also someone who can spot a Communist fraud at 100 paces and isn’t afraid to say that left-wing propaganda is not the same as history and should not be purveyed as such on the taxpayer’s dime. Zinn’s book, wrote Daniels in one of those emails, “is a truly execrable, anti-factual piece of disinformation that misstates American history on every page.” That’s exactly right.
…Note well, Daniels doesn’t say Zinn’s book oughtn’t to be allowed to be published. He doesn’t want to censor the book. He merely says it shouldn’t be taught as history. He would, I’d wager, say the same thing about The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. And he’d be right.
The country needs a lot more Mitch Danielses. It’s a shame that he didn’t run in 2008.
The idea of going to a theme park, on your parents’ dime, with fashionable political fear, having undertaken no scholarly preparation…every single thing about this enterprise seemed wrong.
And expensive and destructive. We have a generation that’s putting off home buying and starting a family because they wasted tens of thousands on either useless degrees or (worse yet) never graduated at all.
The radical scholars recognized Western Civ had to be erased to achieve their goal of destroying the old order and ushering in the new “inclusive” inclusive manifesto. (Remember Jesse Jackson’s chant at Stanford? “Hi-ho, hi-ho, Western Civ has to go”). In the process, the General College was abandoned – and with it went the foundation of a proper college education.
And out went academic standards, which suited the radicals who adopted grade inflation as a gesture against the Vietnam War. College students found it much easier to remain full time students without contending with the onerous course load, and even easier to maintain a 2.0 academic average – the minimum to avoid losing the student draft deferment. Plus students could now choose courses across the spectrum without having to build a foundation of academic rigor.
By the late 1970s, many radical scholars were gaining tenure — the archaic privilege enjoyed by academics that guarantees a job for life — and the power to push their advantage to mold the curriculum to their purposes. New hires were screened for allegiance to the radical manifestos. Traditional liberal arts course work was re-defined to focus on women, race, sexual technique, gays and the environment. The result has been unsound subjects masquerading as worthy academic pursuits — and college graduates who are unaware of their inherited culture.
The public was mostly unaware of this revolutionary change.
Unfortunately, it probably still is. As noted in the piece,the current “humanities” aren’t worth saving, or worth the cost of the tuition for them. At least more people are starting to figure that out.
It’s been over thirty years since that report on the subject, that said if a foreign power had imposed such a system on us, it would be rightly considered an act of war. But we continue to do it to ourselves, and nothing has changed. If anything, it’s gotten worse.
The virtually thoughtless piling on is perhaps the most appalling. So many of the criticizers whose comments I have come across admit they haven’t even read the columns in question. Once the ball of shunning and shaming got rolling, hundreds of onlookers, alerted by social media, jumped on the bandwagon, attracted by the enticing glow of participating in shared moral outrage. Moral preening is on overload; industry professionals and would-be professionals frantically signal to each other that they are right-thinkers. According to the mau-mauers, Mike and Barry did not merely misspeak (miswrite?); they did not have decent-enough intentions which were ruined by Paleolithic habits and blinkered upbringings; they are morally suspect, malign and vicious and evil. It’s burn the witch! all over again, but this time on a pyre of blog posts and Tweets.
I mentioned before that I completely understand the vehemence of Barry’s reaction to all this. One sadly ironic aspect of this brouhaha is that Barry is a lifelong man of the Left. He was staunchly antiwar during the Vietnam era (see early stories such as “Final War”), and his dream president was (and remains) Eugene McCarthy. I fully believe, based on his writings about Alice Sheldon and Judith Merril, that Barry considers himself a feminist, and an avid one. Condemnation from one’s “own side” always burns hotter in one’s craw than condemnation from “the other guys,” which can be easily rationalized away; just as criticism (especially when viewed as unfair) from one’s own family hurts much worse than criticism from relative strangers. Forty years ago (and in all the years since), Barry was a fierce advocate of the New Wave in science fiction, whose practitioners (with the sole exception of R. A. Lafferty) were all politically aligned with the Left, as opposed to old-timers such as John W. Campbell and Robert Heinlein. Now Barry must feel as though the children of the Revolution are eating their elders (as so frequently happens, it seems).
This is actually one reason that I don’t read anywhere near as much SF as I did when I was a kid.
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