Re: however, this is a tragic situation

Daniel,

Aren't you ever embarrassed about writing such sweeping generalizations about an entire industry -- especially when you seem to know so little about it?

There are plenty of hard core conservatives here where I work --people who routinely criticize Bush for being soft on all sorts of things. One of them, in fact, teaches Medieval lit for us and has an office right here on the same floor as I do. And I had two others here when I was in grad school, one of whom was a Naval Academy man who taught 16th and 17th Century British poetry and who had his walls adorned with a catlog of modern warships and was to the right of Genghis Kahn.

And even Ivy League schools have their own sort of ideological diversity as well. You really think the faculty of the Wharton School of Business is a hotbed of liberal activism?

I just think all this nonsense and curious resentment about "acdemia," like the silly claim that grad students are not being allowed into programs and professors are being denied tenure because they are Republicans or like the claim that Harvard PhDs are being discriminated against professionally just because of their politics or like the stupid generalizations you make so often, all have little or nothing to do with actual daily life on my campus and in the meetings I attend and in the procedures I see at work and the colleagues I share the hallways with.

But believe what you want if it makes you feel better in some way. It's OK with me. The last thing I would ever want is for academia to become popular. It's hard enough to get a good job as it is.

Besides, it's part of our job description -- a good professor should be pissing off the people around him, even the simple minded ones.

--John

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Received on Mon Sep 29 12:21:53 2003