Utterly Meaningless

It’s Dr. Cobranchi, thank you very much. 🙂

As usual, I think you’re reaching in condemning the Times. The piece is not about what caused the collapse of the WTC nor about 9/11. It’s about academic freedom. In that regard, the Times is not engaging in he said/she said journalism.

The school has found that he’s not injecting his personal (wacko) conspiracy theories into the classroom and that he is apparently following the syllabus (as an adjunct, that’s his job). As such, I believe he has every right to stay at his position. The university is a public (that is governmental) body. As such, stifling his speech, no matter how strange, is unacceptable.

And you’re right. If he promoted Intelligent Design IN THE CLASSROOM as science, I’d be blasting him for not doing his job (unless the school was a Bible college). Outside the classroom, he’d be free to promote it all he wants.

Of course, real scientists would be laughing at him all the while.

Dr. Ross paging Dr. Cobranchi – academic emergency on legal philosophy floor, stat!

Standard protocol is for us to now inject Dr. Stanley Fish and his crash-cart distinctions between protected liberty and not-protected indoctrination.

At least, that’s protocol according to the New York Times. 🙂

July 23, 2006 Op-Ed Contributor
Conspiracy Theories 101

Dr. Cobranchi? In that hat?

How I read Fish:

Society recognizes that to peform the professional duties of “academic” requires what we’ve come to call academic freedom.

That’s not the same protection nor the same reasoning as the Constitution guaranteeing individual “freedom of expression.” Professors and teachers still have that too, as private citizens, but that’s not what their job’s “academic freedom” is about. Academic freedom is aimed at protecting and advancing access to knowledge and ideas — for the larger benefit of society and our institutions.

I wonder if this would be less confusing, easier to achieve, if we had come to call it academic ethics or responsibilities rather than “academic freedom”, and/or if we’d developed some better sort of enforceable guild or “bar” in academe, through which private citizens would direct concerns about unethical academic behavior for adjudication, as they do their complaints about unethical lawyer behavior.

Kevin Barrett is doing a marvelous job of advancing the conservative agenda. I’m convinced he’s a Rove plant.

Spiro Agnew used to rail against the “nattering nabobs of negativism,” the “hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history”, the “effete corps of impudent snobs”, and “the liberal intellectuals [and their] masochistic compulsion to destroy their country’s strength,” but it has taken folks like Barrett and the good people at the Times to persuade a voting majority of Americans that he was onto something.

Where is our wandering Spiro tonight?

Taxpayers can just vote down funding for any university that allows academics they consider garbage? Seems like that’s what the larger concept of “academic freedom” is needed to protect against though — back to evolution, or nekkid theatre, atonal music, etc – garbage that in many states down my way might lose at the polls and hobble if not wipe out many fine (much needed!) universities.

JJ makes a good point… if tax-funded universities teach whatever a majority of the voters want, we’re in trouble.

So… can someone remind me why we have tax-funded universities?

You think a voting majority of Americans agree with you? Man I can’t WAIT ’til November 8th! Will YOU be in for a shock!

No, I don’t think a majority of Americans agree with me. But I do think a majority of voters now believe that the “mainstream press” has a “liberal bias.” I haven’t seen any evidence to support this claim, but I suspect that a majority of voters believe that state colleges and universities lean to the left, too.

Before you set me straight about the “myth of liberal bias,” please note I’m only talking about my PERCEPTION that there is a public PERCEPTION of mainstream media bias.

And my point here was that Kevin Barrett seems to be feeding this perception, big time. Which is why I make the Rove joke so often. The net political effect of guys like him is to energize conservatives and put liberals on the defensive. Do you really need this problem?

I’d say I believe both, Scott — that MS media and MS academe both lean left, compared to the general population and that they protest too much, maybe because they can’t see themselves completely and objectively.

That simple perception on my part doesn’t tell me much though, much less prove America is doomed, or point the way for any education policy initiative I can make sense of. I don’t see this as a matter to be exploited for political purposes, argued or panicked over, interfered with, voted on or used to justify firing anybody in either journalism OR academe.

I think it’s interesting and worth noticing and thinking about.

Seems to me them that don’t like how them others lean, need to get busier writin’ and teachin’ and publishin’ for them they like better.

So I guess I agree with Chris on that point, if he’s saying there’s no need for us to mobilize in purging perceived leaners from the MSM and academe, or to stifle them, that more freedom and more speech is almost always a better solution than less, and less majority control of minorities (however they may lean) is generally better than more?

This is starting to remind me of Lucy, holding the football for Charlie Brown to kick. Here’s why:

The new media makes it WAY too easy to expose what a tax-funded professor says in his government-run classroom, so any conservative college kid with an MP3 recorder can put streaming audio up where the Drudge Report will pick it up and run with it. That goes through the Rush Limbaugh echo chamber and the university goes into a n academic huddle. Whatever they say sounds defensive (perhaps because it is?) and ineffective (see previous parenthesis), but now we’ve reached the critical “he said/she said” threshold where the old media reports the story… only by now, the tried-and-true mainstream regurgitates the totally predictable “academic freedom” meme. It’s a touchdown for the Right, and Ann Coulter can be counted on to kick the extra point with some really snide (yet zingy) post.

If the battle is over public perceptions, then the Left seems to be trapped in a no-win position. As long as there are professors who are speaking out on my nickel, I’ll be rooting for the kid with the MP3 recorder. At the same time, I’m against “censoring” professors for their speech–even if it is demonstrably wacko.

If the universities tilted right, this would be a problem for me. It scares me to imagine the kinds of things some of my political comrades-in-arms might say if they got tenure at State U. But there doesn’t seem to be much risk of that, at present, so I’ll just order an extra big bag of popcorn and enjoy the show at Daryl’s expense.

If you are studying Aero engineering, your professor’s opinion on Bush has no bearing on his ability to teach you how to design an airplane that will stay in the sky.

Agreed. And evidently Barrett kept his opinions about 9/11 outside the classroom. So why the high “Drudgeon,” Scott?

Before you set me straight about the “myth of liberal bias,” please note I’m only talking about my PERCEPTION that there is a public PERCEPTION of mainstream media bias.

I agree. The VRWC has been successful after pushing the meme for 20 years. Doesn’t make it true, though. (See WaPo editorial page, WSJ editorial page, etc.)

BTW, you’ve never addressed how any of this reflects badly on the NYT.

“It seems like the political stuff almost always comes up in the context of some class that does not really matter. The kids taking gender studies, or Barrett’s Islam class, are the the future waiters of America.”

Oh, Chris; my heart is broken.

Evidently, crack-pottery is not restricted to leftist professors.

Good blog name, Crackpottery.

It alliterates well too, say with Chris, Confer, Cobranchi —
or Christian, curriculum, campaign, college?
[insert tongue sticking out here]

Actually I was thinking more that you call crackpottery as you see it. 🙂

Just saw this Alfie Kohn “academic freedom” legal news . . . which also made me think of kids’ valedictorian speeches cancelled because they just “aren’t in line” with whatever government officials had expected and approved.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. –State education officials violated the First Amendment rights of an MCAS critic by keeping him from speaking at a public education conference, a Superior Court judge has ruled. . .”What he was going to speak about did not fall in line with what the grant application specified,” said DOE spokeswoman Heidi Perlman. “We strongly disagree with this decision and we stand by what we did in the first place.”

Dr. Cobranchi? In that hat?

Daryl Cobranchi, D.EqSc (Doctor of Equestrian Science)