“STUDY: UC EDUCATION IS TOO LEFTIST”
I was taken aback when I caught this headline of the UCSD school paper, "The Guardian," last week. I thought that someone had stolen my thunder, pre-empted the personal project that I had started a few weeks previously after attending a conference entitled "Political Civility and Objective Science." I had come to the same conclusion as the report that was written by the California division of this organization entitled, “A Crisis of Confidence, The Corrupting Effect of Political Activism in the University of California.” I decided that I would try to connect with the presenters, try to show them one person at a time the errors of their ways, I started my own website, Virulent Partisanship-The Academic Challenge, that has become a chronicle of my effort, including conversations with some of those who spoke at the conference.
I read the eighty seven pages of the study, “A Crisis of Confidence,” with great care, and wrote this extensive review. If this NSA report was sociology, my website is anthropology, participant research with personal observations of individual cases, with generalizations to the larger academic setting. While I had sent a notification that I would be attending as a critical observer to the chair of the first panel, this was not generally known to the presenters of this conference, scholars in the field of history, philosophy and sociology of science from premier institution of this country and Europe.
Education is important to me for several reasons, some admirable and others less so. To the degree that any academic setting deviates from its “ideal,” there is a loss of the vital endeavor of instilling those qualities of mind that many have tried to define. It’s easier to capture this ideal by the deviations from it- indoctrination, socialization, partisanship, credential mongering and the list goes on. “The Crisis of Confidence” report focused on the harm of partisan indoctrination, with one section on African Americans, whom as a group most need what higher education has to offer. This I could identify with, although not being of this race.
I had known more than most the pain of ignorance from a very early age. “What” I asked my Dad, “could that boy have done to have deserved such a terrible punishment.” There he was, his head bobbing between the waves, out there in the cold river alone with no one helping him. My Dad, a kind hearted good natured man who left school at fourteen to join the Army as a baker in WWI, seemed a bit amused, and somewhat frustrated, perhaps because such bad things could happen, and he just repeated, “it’s a boy.” emphasizing the word, and to me the child’s terrible fate. I accepted it as the way the world was. Of course not too much time passed, but too much time for a child, before I figured it out, that the boy that he said was out there was a buoy. I couldn’t hear the difference and my Dad didn’t understand homophones, so how could he explain that this had caused the misunderstanding.
The neighborhood kids played ball on an empty field with the Capitol dome visible in the distance, and many of their parents worked for something that it represented called the government. But, it was a long time before I had an idea what this thing was. I knew what a postman or a baker did, but had no idea what so many people were doing at this Government thing. Not only didn’t my parents have the ability to explain the concept, neither did the families of those working class kids I played with. There were no computers to find answers, we didn’t have an encyclopedia, or any other book in the house.
Knowledge, what schools are charged with providing, was for me what food is to a starving emaciated person. It still is; and so when I feel that it is not being done as well as possible, it is personal, not so much for me anymore, but for others like I was so many years ago. Moral conundrums that confound others, such as whether hard truths should be suppressed in the name of advancing a given social end, no matter on what side of the political spectrum; for me brings up the welling pain of memory of being deprived, of not only not knowing, but having no access to knowledge.
I can’t be angry at my Dad, as he gave me all he had to give. But I can be angry at others, those born into a world of learning who would distort reality to advance their own conception of a better world; whether it’s William Buckley and his successors who would deprive students of the understanding of human behavior that explains religions, or of Stephen J. Gould who would deny the reality of racial differences that are part of the amoral processes of evolution.
There are other painful truths besides those that Buckley, Gould and others still with us today would rather not face. One is the ubiquitous irresistible need to belong to a community, physical or epistemic, be it of Christians or atheists, conservatives or liberals, cosmopolitan or provincial--but to belong. It is an imperative that demolishes reason itself, warning the members away from expressing, and to be safer still, knowing, anything that would damage the needed group identity.
By never belonging, never having the pleasures of camaraderie that is shared among those who have lived this life of knowledge, to be among the professoriate, there are things that I am able to see, to understand, to articulate without the fear of losing an identity that I do not have.
So, I will continue to write on my blog, to express my thoughts, without the pleasures. or the constraints of belonging that I saw among the participants of the UCSD conference. I also recognized the same group dynamics underlying the report of this esteemed group on the liberal mindset of the UC system, Transcending this very human quality of group identity is difficult; the only question is whether it is possible at all.
I was taken aback when I caught this headline of the UCSD school paper, "The Guardian," last week. I thought that someone had stolen my thunder, pre-empted the personal project that I had started a few weeks previously after attending a conference entitled "Political Civility and Objective Science." I had come to the same conclusion as the report that was written by the California division of this organization entitled, “A Crisis of Confidence, The Corrupting Effect of Political Activism in the University of California.” I decided that I would try to connect with the presenters, try to show them one person at a time the errors of their ways, I started my own website, Virulent Partisanship-The Academic Challenge, that has become a chronicle of my effort, including conversations with some of those who spoke at the conference.
I read the eighty seven pages of the study, “A Crisis of Confidence,” with great care, and wrote this extensive review. If this NSA report was sociology, my website is anthropology, participant research with personal observations of individual cases, with generalizations to the larger academic setting. While I had sent a notification that I would be attending as a critical observer to the chair of the first panel, this was not generally known to the presenters of this conference, scholars in the field of history, philosophy and sociology of science from premier institution of this country and Europe.
Education is important to me for several reasons, some admirable and others less so. To the degree that any academic setting deviates from its “ideal,” there is a loss of the vital endeavor of instilling those qualities of mind that many have tried to define. It’s easier to capture this ideal by the deviations from it- indoctrination, socialization, partisanship, credential mongering and the list goes on. “The Crisis of Confidence” report focused on the harm of partisan indoctrination, with one section on African Americans, whom as a group most need what higher education has to offer. This I could identify with, although not being of this race.
I had known more than most the pain of ignorance from a very early age. “What” I asked my Dad, “could that boy have done to have deserved such a terrible punishment.” There he was, his head bobbing between the waves, out there in the cold river alone with no one helping him. My Dad, a kind hearted good natured man who left school at fourteen to join the Army as a baker in WWI, seemed a bit amused, and somewhat frustrated, perhaps because such bad things could happen, and he just repeated, “it’s a boy.” emphasizing the word, and to me the child’s terrible fate. I accepted it as the way the world was. Of course not too much time passed, but too much time for a child, before I figured it out, that the boy that he said was out there was a buoy. I couldn’t hear the difference and my Dad didn’t understand homophones, so how could he explain that this had caused the misunderstanding.
The neighborhood kids played ball on an empty field with the Capitol dome visible in the distance, and many of their parents worked for something that it represented called the government. But, it was a long time before I had an idea what this thing was. I knew what a postman or a baker did, but had no idea what so many people were doing at this Government thing. Not only didn’t my parents have the ability to explain the concept, neither did the families of those working class kids I played with. There were no computers to find answers, we didn’t have an encyclopedia, or any other book in the house.
Knowledge, what schools are charged with providing, was for me what food is to a starving emaciated person. It still is; and so when I feel that it is not being done as well as possible, it is personal, not so much for me anymore, but for others like I was so many years ago. Moral conundrums that confound others, such as whether hard truths should be suppressed in the name of advancing a given social end, no matter on what side of the political spectrum; for me brings up the welling pain of memory of being deprived, of not only not knowing, but having no access to knowledge.
I can’t be angry at my Dad, as he gave me all he had to give. But I can be angry at others, those born into a world of learning who would distort reality to advance their own conception of a better world; whether it’s William Buckley and his successors who would deprive students of the understanding of human behavior that explains religions, or of Stephen J. Gould who would deny the reality of racial differences that are part of the amoral processes of evolution.
There are other painful truths besides those that Buckley, Gould and others still with us today would rather not face. One is the ubiquitous irresistible need to belong to a community, physical or epistemic, be it of Christians or atheists, conservatives or liberals, cosmopolitan or provincial--but to belong. It is an imperative that demolishes reason itself, warning the members away from expressing, and to be safer still, knowing, anything that would damage the needed group identity.
By never belonging, never having the pleasures of camaraderie that is shared among those who have lived this life of knowledge, to be among the professoriate, there are things that I am able to see, to understand, to articulate without the fear of losing an identity that I do not have.
So, I will continue to write on my blog, to express my thoughts, without the pleasures. or the constraints of belonging that I saw among the participants of the UCSD conference. I also recognized the same group dynamics underlying the report of this esteemed group on the liberal mindset of the UC system, Transcending this very human quality of group identity is difficult; the only question is whether it is possible at all.
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