Booklists, Battles and the budding western mind
The National Association of Scholars is
compiling a list of political tracts that are widely assigned. I emailed them to note that those academic clowns Eric Schlosser and Jared Diamond were notably missing from their list. One thing this brings to mind, though, is that conservatives have this silly academic notion of being tourists at the zoo, where they peer in on the academy and remark at how many stripes the zebra has or how ugly the monkeys, but they never leap over the cage and start attacking the bears in order to dominate the cage and demonstrate who is boss. They never engage, the battles always take place exterior to what is the central place, the central aspect of college: the classroom. I suppose you could secondarily claim that it's the co-ed dorms, but let's focus on that classroom. The books assigned are trash and almost all, these days, polemic tracts firmly embued with Marcuse's notion of intolerance to anything from the right. If some right-wing book is assigned, it's something mindless from Hannity or some fluff piece of trash, or something mislabeled as 'conservative' such as that awful woman Alyssa Rosenbaum's "Atlas Shrugged" - no, students are never to get what is a cogent analysis of true conservative thought. They read about the enlightenment without de Maistre, they get the revolution (so rarely even then!) without the anti-Federalists. They get wartime dissent from communists and never isolationists, critiques of capitalism from Marx and never from Catholicism and Chesterton. These are the academic battles worth fighting, not rearguard actions of an army in defeat, but standing straight up defending against the onslaught. One is reminded of Soviet General Zhukov's advance towards Berlin in April of 1945, and Himmler had what remained of the German army as the Army Group Vistula to protect Berlin from Zhukov's advance and, instead of actually engaging the oncoming hordes, the Army sat idly aside as Zhukov, wisely, avoided the army altogether and advanced towards Berlin. There was no defense, in the face of a mortal enemy there was nothing but impotence, and millions of Germans and Eastern Europeans died brutal deaths as a result. In the face of the intellectual onslaught of campuses, our 'conservative movement' is as mindless, reckless and impotent as Himmler's defense. They stand idly by and don't fight, they don't even try. The great western battles of Salamis and Thermopylae, Tours, Lepanto, Clavijo, or Trafalgar or Waterloo, our inheritance from that greatness is to stand by as our minds are corrupted from within.
Labels: academia, campuses, college, conservativism, theory
Public Intellectuals and academic warfare
Nearing the autumn of any iota of my own relevance on the topic of academic or college organizing issues, I ran across
a John Derbyshire article on the issue of who is and is not a "public intellectual." If there was a functioning conservative movement in this country, they should start by documenting, dissecting and deconstructing the scholarship of the most prominent left-wing intellectuals. I would add Barbara Ehrenreich and Eric Schlosser to this list, and perhaps the awful Tim White, but regardless there are more left-wing ones than Derbyshire was listing in 2004. As well, the conservative movement, if it still exists, ought to find a better way to really attack the scholarship of these individuals and fight them where it matters: in the battle of ideas.
Labels: academia, college, ideas, leftists
Sitting amongst political scientists and seeing hope
So I snuck into the
APSA conference in Boston for a few sessions. It was good, and I enjoyed it, specifically the sections on "
Urban Politics" -- it made me get back into the professorial mindset, and being amongst them helped rekindle that atmosphere of academia. While in one session, though, I witnessed quite a discussion: the urban politics crowd discussing whether they ought to 'come clean' about their own values, and hence, their own bias. They freely talked about how white flight was due solely to racism, and yet, during this limited discussion, they opined that perhaps these suburban families desired the peace, security and tranquility of that life. The features of "
urbanity" such as the creativity that comes from constantly being on one's toes, perhaps, doesn't appeal to all-- and that it appeals to intellectuals who enjoy city life, should tell them that perhaps they simply don't understand the suburban ethic. I was shocked to hear this, especially since the discussion was so frank, and, well, so honest. Even leftist intellectuals desire to be thorough and many are trying hard to be good academics, they are, in my opinion, simply conditioned so hard that they end up with
confirmation bias: so that the only reason whites could move out of the cities is due to racism and not, as I suspect, due more to
crime than anything else.
Labels: academia, politics, race, racism
Comparing Curriculums
I
found this off of slashdot, but I thought it was interesting: a way to
compare curriculums in a few science classes and business classes. I didn't care much for the specific interface, but the concept was sound. And of course I'm more interested in the Humanities, and I would add a lot more interactivity and different content to the stuff here, but it's a great start.
Labels: academia, college
The Academy Stripped Bare: Putting Your Ass in the Spotlight
I thought
this article, about a graduate student who pays his way for his graduate degree through homosexual stripping says many things about society and colleges in particular. It shows the nature of the current generation, my generation, being post-shame and entirely focused on issues of self-identity and self-gratification. Normally, I've been conditioned to think that strippers are degraded, and that they all must be single moms trying to earn a living after being laid off at the textile factory, but that obviously isn't the case. As Craig Seymour says, "The overall context was all about me" and that was part of its appeal. This modern vice, as harmless as it may seem, is tempting in so many ways: it plays on the loneliness of those shelling out dollars, and it tempts those in spiritual and financial poverty to seek affirmation by revealing themselves in a lustful way to find carnal affirmation. A former fellow AU alum, Marty Beckerman has written a book on this issue, Tom Wolfe wrote "I am Charlotte Simmons" on the general topic (which I'm now reading) and yet, even with all of these words, the full shift here isn't being understood. The entire mindset and values of the current college generation is changing. It's not just materialism or feminism or postmodernity, it's an entirely different value system which is quite frightening. It's one thing to go to a strip club, or work at one, and still at least admit it was wrong. It's quite another for it to infect your personality to such a degree that you validate it any way you can. As evidence, I think Seymour's statement about incorporating his nighttime employment into his academic pursuits is the most telling:
Seymour’s stripping had its origins, appropriately, in academic enterprise. His master’s thesis, based on participant observation and interviews but not (at that point) practice, was entitled "Desire and Dollar Bills: An Ethnography of a Gay Male Striptease Club in Washington, D.C." (He writes: "[B]y far the most controversial thing I did in the thesis – though it seemed like a good idea at the time – was to include an appendix with photocopies of pictures from gay porn magazines featuring models doing a full bent-over ass-cheek spread." The appendix complemented his argument, in which he outlined “how the anus operates as a site of desire within the context of clubs.")
He's of course lying to us and lying to himself, but it seems as though no one wants to tell the emperor that they have no clothes.
Labels: academia, culture, homosexuals, materialism, society
