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Symposiums for academic freedom are nice. But what are liberal professors doing to organize for real political change at the universities they work for?
While Conservatives are planning to get the upper hand many Liberal professors are lolling around instead of using what influence they still have to drive policy. As universities are becoming increasingly dependent on corporate support administrators are caving in to conservative pressure.
For most progressive professors, their only concerns seem to be scholarship, classroom skills and occasionally day-long-to-late-evening gossip and arguments at weekend retreats. Having attended one as an non-academic and outsider, my head spun listening to hours of rival’s skeletons being dragged out of closets and the bickering, inner-world politics of a university, each man or woman being cleverer than the other in weaving webs of words around any subject academic. Endless self-conscious cleverness of pointless arabesque. What a silly way to live while a war is being waged against them.
Meanwhile, Conservatives have been effectively organizing for years and spending millions to dictate what should be taught or not taught at universities. Take that Right-wing activist David Horowitz, roving all over the country masterminding his "Academic Bill of Rights". His objective is to make sure that someday the government will regulate the content of what a professor may or may not teach, an academic dictatorship of sorts. If successful, some university of the future will mount a statue in his honor. I also watched in awe one afternoon while UVA students raptly listened to Pat Robertson on television, who I realized happens to be another rover in the name of dictating what people should do with their personal lives in this country.
http://www.campusprogress.org/
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9939709/
No checks and balances whatsoever. The problem with the new laws embedded in the Patriot Act most citizens don’t understand the fine distintions between what’s in print and what is actually practiced. We now have less rights than the Danes did under the Nazi occupation. For those who feel all this is necessary for our security just let them get caught in the FBI web once. They will change they’re tune fast.
1."The Oriental doesn't put the same high price on life as does a Westerner. Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient."
—Gen. William Westmoreland, who died Monday at the age of 91, as quoted in the 1974 Vietnam documentary Hearts and Minds.
From the Boston Globe's Derrick Jackson (via the Light of Reason):
The quote so stunned director Peter Davis that he gave Westmoreland a chance to clean it up. In a 1997 guest letter to the Washington Post in response to criticism that he cherry-picked the quote to push his antiwar agenda, Davis said,"When we filmed the interview, Westmoreland paused after making that statement, yelled 'Cut!' and said he wanted a retake because that wasn't how he meant to express himself.2. "This is not altruistic. This is good business.""In the second take, the general began saying exactly the same thing but we ran out of film. We then gave him a third chance to amend his remarks—much the way Ted Koppel gave Al Campanis of the Los Angeles Dodgers a chance to change what he was saying about nonwhite baseball players lacking the 'necessities' to be managers—and Westmoreland repeated the statement about the 'Oriental.' I used the third take, since the statement was most complete.
—Jim Cinegal, the chief executive of Costco, explaining why it's in his company's self-interest to give its employees significantly higher wages and benefits than its competitors.
John Podhoretz links to this WParticle from February 2005:
On Dec. 3, 2001, Times reporter Judith Miller telephoned officials with the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, a Texas-based charity accused of being a front for Palestinian terrorists, and asked for a comment about what she said was the government's [namely, Fitzgerald’s] probable crackdown on the group. U.S. officials said this conversation and Miller's article on the subject in the Times on Dec. 4 increased the likelihood that the foundation destroyed or hid records before a hastily organized raid by agents that day.Fitzgerald subsequently sought Miller’s phone records to uncover the source of a potential leak in his own office, but a liberal New York judge, Robert Sweet, quashed the subpoena.
It is interesting to contrast the sort of passive euthanasia of infants that is deemed acceptable in our sanctity-of-life culture with the active form that has been advocated in the Netherlands. The Groningen protocol is concerned with . . . unbearable and unrelievable suffering. Consider the case of Sanne, a Dutch baby girl who was born with a severe form of Hallopeau-Siemens syndrome, a rare skin disease. As reported earlier this year by Gregory Crouch in the Times, the baby Sanne's ''skin would literally come off if anyone touched her, leaving painful scar tissue in its place.'' With this condition, she was expected to live at most nine or 10 years before dying of skin cancer. Her parents asked that an end be put to her ordeal, but hospital officials, fearing criminal prosecution, refused. After six months of agony, Sanne finally died of pneumonia.In a case like Sanne's, a new moral duty would seem to be germane: the duty to prevent suffering, especially futile suffering. That is what the Groningen protocol seeks to recognize. If the newborn's prognosis is hopeless and the pain both severe and unrelievable, it observes, the parents and physicians ''may concur that death would be more humane than continued life.'' The protocol aims to safeguard against ''unjustified'' euthanasia by offering a checklist of requirements, including informed consent of both parents, certain diagnosis, confirmation by at least one independent doctor and so on.
The debate over infant euthanasia is usually framed as a collision between two values: sanctity of life and quality of life. Judgments about the latter, of course, are notoriously subjective and can lead you down a slippery slope. But shifting the emphasis to suffering changes the terms of the debate. To keep alive an infant whose short life expectancy will be dominated by pain—pain that it can neither bear nor comprehend—is, it might be argued, to do that infant a continuous injury.
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