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University of Wisconsin professor Donald Downs (author of the excellent book Restoring Free Speech and Liberty on Campus) has an essay on Minding the Campus in which he discusses the battle taking place in Madison.

Do college professors ever use their courses to propagandize on political issues? That’s just a right-wing myth, say many defenders of the higher education establishment. Read the essay and you’ll learn that quite a few of Downs’ UW colleagues could not resist the temptation.

More people who have been infected by contemporary college education are likely to fall into the Hide camp than people who have been brought up free of higher education.  But among those who have been to college further distinctions can be made.  Business school and science graduates are likely to be Do’s; those in the humanities and most of the social sciences Hides. The Do camp has a moral grandeur wanting in the camp of Hides that comes from taking responsibility for one’s actions.  If one believes that we are what we hide, responsibility drops away because we are hostage to inner demons that, behind the scenes, are really calling the shots.”

Epstein’s dichotomy resonates with something Mark Edmundson said here the other night about higher education, that its goal seems to be “to undermine all aspirations to idealism.”  Reveal, debunk, demystify, revise, expose the Hider in each and all is the postmodern academy’s gloomy project. If becoming therapeutically adjusted to our hidden demons is the best we can hope for, life becomes just the search for jolts of pleasure from briefly-satisfied hungers and desires.  As Philip Rieff suggested, Freud (and the academy) offer man only “how to live with no higher purpose than that of a durable sense of well-being.”

Beck’s attention to Piven has driven much of the media interest in the story—but also much of the interest among faculty members, a great deal of which has been overheated. Cary Nelson and the American Sociological Association are no exceptions. They call sanctimoniously for “dialogue,” but  ignore the body of scholarly criticism that already exists about Piven’s work. It is hard not to see a flag of convenience in this newfound interest in “serious challenge” and “debate” by those whose usual practice is to ignore those who dissent from progressive orthodoxy.

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I don’t think American life in general has been improved by this too-ready resort to histrionic anger, whether it comes from Glenn Beck or Cary Nelson. It abides on both the left and the right. Whether it abides more on one side than the other is a ticklish question. The left explodes in anger if you suggest it is the more rageful of the two. The right tends to laugh at the idea. But there is clearly enough anger-spiked tea to fill everyone’s cup.

Higher education has no special immunity from the angri-culture. On the contrary, it is a privileged haunt for those who delight in scorn, derision, and wrathful dislike of mainstream American culture. We cite academic freedom as guaranteeing our right to be vitriolic.

To hear from Peter in person about anger in America now, come to “A Conversation with Peter Wood” in New York City on February 23.

Bill Ayers is back in the news. Robert Kennedy’s son, newly on the board of the U of I Chicago, led a move denying Ayers emeritus status as a retired professor. Newsweek covered the story here (they lost a bit of the nuance in my quote but the story is an accurate summation of the controversy).

I had not thought of Ayers since I blogged about him two years ago (“Little Red School House”). In retrospect, while the issue was balance, not bias (so I argued) how does one balance someone so far to the Left? Can one even imagine a former member of the John Birch Society sans explosives being welcomed with open arms by education schools?

On turning radicals into academic entrepreneurs: The more incendiary, the better (think Angela Davis, Ward Churchill). And think of the speaking fees one can draw as a radical professor! Sure, sure, the student fees are supposed to represent the range of opinions in society at large (U.S. Supreme Court, Southworth, 2000). But who polices such Court decisions? The barbarians within the gates? Hardly.

Professor Ayers, erstwhile domestic terrorist, lived on the wild fringe of sixties radicalism. Like so many others, Ayers secured a position in academe that allowed him to bore within education by promoting “social justice” and “revolutionary education.” While his ideas on education might seem “out there,” they are taught in education schools as part of the canon of “progressive thought”–often in “School and Society” courses required of all future K-12 teachers.

Not that I am ungrateful. I must thank the Ayers of the world for making education school so stultifying that I left and entered graduate school to become a historian – for better and worse.

So warns art critic Michelle Marder Kamhi, with the worthy view in mind of galvanizing parents against  proposed provisions in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, whose Congressional reauthorization is pending. These provisions would, in line with Paulo Freire’s dictum that all education is political, mandate social-justice art.

“Art”? Such as the pro-illegal immigration creation “Brinco,” or “jump” in Spanish, which would teach students to construct sneakers (jammed with compass, map, etc.) for people  attempting illegaly to cross our borders.

Americans to the barricades, in the defense of true art education!

Students do not need to take a course on the principles of economics in order to earn this minor; nor will they encounter the devastating counter-attack on the very concept of “social justice” by F. A. Hayek in his book The Mirage of Social Justice. In one of the courses the students may take (Philosophy 273), however, they at least get a taste of Robert Nozick’s criticism of the mega-state.

This minor is far more agitprop than education.

Ironically, three years later I was at Fort Ord teaching classes full of `Nam vets, some rotating back to the rice paddies and the jungle.  I learned the shorthand:  TDY, MOS, HALO jumping, “boo-coo” (beaucoup), “bookin’,” and I discovered the joy of teaching military students who were prompt, eager, did the reading, and called me “sir.”  For the next 20 years, outside our barracks classroom was Vietnam, Panama, Desert Storm; inside was Moby Dick and Dylan Thomas.  Then the Soviet Union’s collapse brought base closure, and I was transferred to main campus.

I furnish this prologue because recently I listened to a colleague expound passionately on the futility of war, and I wondered how a veteran would feel hearing that indictment of his sacrifice, however well-intentioned.  Professors with pacifistic sentiments are commonplace, of course, but one also finds naked hostility towards the military in academia, such as Dr. June Terpstra’s fever-dream, “Killers in the Classroom.”

That’s why I now include a “thank you for your service” in my syllabus and request that veterans identify themselves privately in case I need to adjust class material for them.  When studying film, I often show Apocalypse Now. Thirty years ago, a sergeant asked to be excused from the viewing because he, like Colonel Kurtz, had “gone native in Vietnam.”  Just last year, a quiet, Iraq War veteran also asked for an alternative assignment.  He ended up writing a stunning account of a chaotic, bloody firefight he was in on “IED Alley” outside Al-Qaiim.  He said it helped him to write about it and thanked me.  I could only reply, “No, Corpsman Chan, thank you.”