A Nerd Rant: The Politicized Campus

Hmmmm.  Well, OK, but as usual this sort of generalized conversation bothers me because it focuses almost exclusively on "wow, there are so many leftists in academia" and has no mention or thought AT ALL of the conservatives, libertarians, centrists, and independents who ARE ALREADY THERE.  Gee, thanks a lot.  What are we, chopped liver?  So on one hand we have liberals basically crowing that they have a chokehold on campus culture and on the other we have folks complaining about it.  What about my tiny group of compatriots and me who are doing our best out there as teachers and students?  We want a vibrant place for debate of all ideas and political outlooks.  I for one am not advocating that we exchange one kind of campus mental hegemony for another.  Anyway, what we need is a good shot of intellectual honesty -- read this -- though I'm pretty sure we're not going to get it from anywhere.  The politicized campus is so riven with ideological faultlines that it's almost too unstable for rational discourse.  Rant follows after the jump:





For the campus leftists:  Your constant assumptions of your own "obvious" moral rectitude and intellectual superiority are FREAKING ANNOYING, and so is your easy and unthinking hostile contempt for everyone and anyone who disagrees with your particular point of view.  You haven't been challenged in a long time to make cogent defenses of your policy and ideological talking points, and you've been coooooooooooooasting.  In social situations if you're ever at a loss for a good quip, you bring out the moth-eaten brain-dead old jibes about the GOP and Bushitler.  It is LAME.  Besides, your all-too-ready impulse to label your opponents as "evil" marks your thought process as simplistic at best and non-existent at worst.  Your utter inability to self-critique is breathtaking, a sordid talent exceeded only by your ability to overly politicize everything. Your insistence on portraying "Rethuglicans" and conservatives as bajillionaire Neanderthals who want to turn your babies into clones of Montgomery Burns is laughable. You guys annoy the hell out of me -- some way more than others, you few loudmouthed people who give us all a bad name.  The ones who use the classroom as a bully pulpit to fulminate against whatever your cause du jour is ... You annoy me most of all.  PSA: Michael Moore is a moron.

For the shrillest critics of said leftists:  Complaining in a tone of moral outrage about campus liberalism is not helping.  It sounds almost lame sometimes, as if you're on the outside looking in and fuming about it.  Get real.  You should be focused on defending real education -- and, by the way, you don't have to be a conservative in order to be a judicious, responsible, wonderful teacher.  Telling people "you should be an academic because academia needs more not-leftists" is also no way to give career advice.  Portraying all "academics" with a broad-brush ease as being wild-eyed radical Marxists who want to turn your babies into lockstepping zombies-for-ACORN is also not helping.  You guys annoy the hell out of me too -- though less than those other guys.  PSA: Ann Coulter is a harpy.

At the same time, I can tell you from the nerd trenches that campus culture can be weird and it is definitely a leftist sort of place. But the biggest problem of all is the idea by people of all political views that campus is some kind of place for culture wars.  The campus should be about EDUCATION.  It should be a place of robust debate, NOT be a place for activism or advocacy of any type.  And I don't have to tell how education's been one of the first victims.