ever, the tragic situation

You base your generalized rebuttal on personal anecdotal examples and then
ask about my embarrassments. How do you know how little or how much I know?
Yet, your inability to know the quantity of my knowledge does not withhold
your typing fingers? Rhetoric, John, nice try. You say 'plenty' but what
is plenty? 10% of the overall faculty? And of the faculties of academia
across America? I am glad that you have some conservatives in your
humanities midst but we are talking of the crowding horde around that midst.
You seem so sure concerning who is or is not marginalized in your school yet
modern academia lives and breathes unsureness. How do you know who has been
turned away from what? I find it interesting that the vast majority of
academic types in humanities are liberal yet there is no discrimination. If
this interesting situation existed for any other marginalized group out
there you would be calling for a trial.

A good professor? What exactly is that? Simple minds? How
marginalizing. John, your feet do not nearly have enough sitting room.

"Embarrassment", John, you make me smile big again, but my bladder is still
full.
Daniel

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 13:07:40 2003