Ken at Popehat critiques the Texas State Board of Education’s decision to soviet-style remove Thomas Jefferson from the state’s history curriculum. You see Jefferson was a deist, and that fucks with right wing dipshits’ fairy tale that we are a “christian nation.”
But… Ken stabs right through the Right wing, and hooks around to skewer the left too:
What happened before the Texas State Board of Education is appalling. But to the lefties of academia who are particularly incensed, I must paraphrase the pothead kid from the anti-drug advertisements: they learned it by watching you, okay? They learned it by watching you. The academic left has contributed at least equally to the crass politicization of education, knowledge, and epistemology. The scorn you see on the Texas board towards wrong-thinkers like Jefferson is just the Left’s sneer of “dead white males” repackaged and re-spun for modern conservative tastes. The lefty tropes of the sixties through the eighties — that a biased educational system has suppressed the truth about the groups we sympathize with in favor of the groups we don’t like — have been adroitly scooped up and brought to bear from the right. (source)
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Just how much time did Popehat spend with academic departments? Or is his contention about what is happening in colleges and universities based on the sensationalistic stories in the media?
Disclaimer: I am a lefty-academic. But I teach mathematics and I’ve never heard of a liberal differential equation. :-)
That is because you teach in the “useful” portions of academia. You are correct that math is what it is…
But I can tell you as someone who spent 13 years as a student and three years teaching, that left-leaning liberal politics are huge in curriculum development. and, just like you, I would call myself a lefty-academic type. Nevertheless, it always made me uncomfortable.
Only a couple of times have professors put their politics on me…and both were conservative! Ok, I went to Annapolis as an undergraduate so my personal experience might be a bit skewed.
I was one of the “one tenth of one percent” who didn’t see Ronald Reagan as being worthy of being put on Mount Rushmore. :)
So-called political ‘correctness’ was an invention of the Soviet Union and Maoist China. And that’s as far left as you can get.
And Marc, 13 years post-secondary? Did you get a PhD I didn’t know about?
“Christ. Seven years of college down the drain. Might as well join the fucking Peace Corps.” –John Blutarsky
Well Dave, you witnessed most of my seven years of undergraduate education at UMASS. I was class of 91, that didnt work out, so I was class of ’92. That didn’t pan out either, so class of ’93. Finally it stuck with class of ’94. So, 7 years of UG, three years to get my JD, and another two years to get my MA. Oh, okay, 12 years of higher education. See, I can’t do math.
Law: The highest-paying career that doesn’t require you to know math.
The soviets were erasing people from photos (and from history books) decades before Photoshop was invented.
Popehat is strikingly unspecific about what, exactly, the Left have done that is the equivalent of the religious Right stacking the school board and packing the public school curriculum with crassly ideological viewpoints. The whole “both sides are the same” assertion is almost always facile and lazy – it rings true at first blush, until you pay attention to the details.
There’s no question that the academic Left pursued a line of argument that attacked the “dead white men” perspective of history. However, they did so in the context of intellectual inquiry, in the marketplace of ideas. They gained a lot of press, but there’s little evidence that they ultimately gained any traction beyond the irrelevant confines of academia.
So here’s my question: what did the Left do that was actually objectionable in this context?
I don’t know that the left engaged in its academic putsch merely in the context of intellectual inquiry. Perhaps things have changed since the time I spent on campuses, but from the late 1980s to the mid 1990s, it was all out war – and the mission was to re-write history and to purge anyone who didn’t toe the party line. I’m not talking about the hard science departments or engineering, but any of the social science departments were like that.
I was in UG around the same time you were I don’t remember any all-out war. The campus you were on probably made quite a bit of difference, and would color a person’s perceptions of that time.
So while you were at UMass (guessing pretty left-leaning) and Ken was at Berkley (maybe? something like that, also known for leftward lean), I was at a small conservative private institution that gave fuck-all about purging history.
Also, lefties didn’t take over the largest school board in the nation in order to make their changes. This makes a huge difference because textbook publishers cater to that largest market and that means it has an impact on nearly the entire nation. The liberal academic bogeymen could only affect their own curriculum.
Also, lefties didn’t take over the largest school board in the nation in order to make their changes. This makes a huge difference because textbook publishers cater to that largest market and that means it has an impact on nearly the entire nation. The liberal academic bogeymen could only affect their own curriculum.
They would have if they had thought of it first.
But they didn’t.
That’s a very weak argument for assigning blame – it allows you to make an assertion without the need to actually back it up with evidence. How do you know they would have tried to take over school boards? I can just as easily speculate to the contrary:
Having had firsthand experience in academia (which, granted, was in a “hard” field), I would argue that it’s more likely they simply wanted to see their ideas dominate within their fields and the related journals; you can even see this going on today in physics, with the string theorists and anti-string theorists. Most academics care more about having their papers published than about “mere” public school curricula; there’s a lot of truth in the old saying that the politics of academia are so vicious because the stakes are so low.
Spend one day in a Sociology department, or an English department, or god forbid, a women’s studies department.
The fact is, in the social sciences, if you don’t stick to the party line, you will very quickly find your career derailed. I can’t explain it any simpler than that.
Hmm, I’ll have to look into that, as it predates my time in the academy by quite a bit (and was also outside my field).
Incidentally, similar political conflicts and exclusionary tactics occur in the useful sciences more than you’d realize, though it tends to be based on specializations rather than ideologies.
What’s missing here is the DEGREE of egregiousness. Yes, lefties slant things to the left, and righties to the right, but consider the results: Left-wing slants usually produce, in the end, some modicum of social justice — or at least increased discussion of the way issues are framed — while right-wing slants produce unearned profits and perks for corporations and billionaires.
I am not sure that left wing slants in academia produced any social justice. All I saw as an end result was speech codes on campuses and cushy chairs for otherwise useless sacks of protoplasm who now call themselves tenured professors.
I’m not saying that one is better than the other — it isn’t. But, “we” started the politicization of education. Now the chickens are coming home to roost.
all of this “christianity” BS coming from a Sicilian Roman Catholic!!!!!!!
I’m not Catholic.
Left and right leaning schools both teach history in a way that focuses on what they consider to be the good bits while trying to sweep away the bad. The only difference is that the left says that “these are good ideas and we should follow them” ignoring other philosophies while the right tries to say “the way things are now is how it’s always been, so why change?” and ignore anything that contradicts that.
Both methods are stupid and people who support them should be shot.
Apples and oranges. Religious asswipes have been warping high school education standards for years upon years, far longer than lefty doucheros have been attacking the canon at the college level.
This seems like an attempt to show one side is the same as another just for the sake of balance, but that isn’t the case.
I would like some examples of ways in which leftists skewed public school curricula that are the equivalent of removing Thomas Jefferson from history classes. The portrayal of, for example, Christopher Columbus has shifted from unquestioning adoration to a critical assessment of his motives and achievements, but I don’t recall anybody ever suggesting he be erased from American history books.
Popehat’s main point, that education has been politicized from both the right and the left, is a fairly empty truism. The motivation for “political correctness” in curricula and academia was to counter the political baggage that they already carried. The educational systems have always transmitted political indoctrination on a sideband; the only question is, whose message gets pushed?
Overall, I think this is a false equivalence. In and of itself, agitating for the inclusion of non-white, non-dead authors and thinkers in the Canon is nowhere near as pernicious as excising those authors and thinkers you deem undesirable. And it doesn’t lead inevitably to the result of stupider students, which I believe the Texas Board’s actions will.
I think you might find this interesting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/18/arts/18liberal.html