Posted on 09/24/2004 4:34:35 AM PDT by Behind Liberal Lines
ITHACA-Campus conservatives have finally come around to the notion that, when it comes to liberal bastions like affirmative action, their best strategy is: "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em." In order to speed their way into a coveted spot on the list of underrepresented minorities, right-wing students and critics are howling discrimination in every available forum.
Last week, I appeared on Right Angle, a local clone of Fox News' famous O'Reilly Factor. Host Mark Finkelstein, Tompkins County Republican Chair, said that the plight of conservative college students is akin to that of blacks in the American South during the Jim Crow era. I called the analogy "despicable." I cannot fathom how a politically aware adult could compare a contemporary Cornell education to, say, the 1955 lynching of 13-year-old Chicagoan Emmett Till in Money, Miss. for allegedly saying "Bye, baby" to a white woman as he exited her husband's store.
Conservative students and faculty-members around the nation have filled the mainstream campus press and right-wing college papers -- many of which, according to the Center for American Progress, are externally supported by national conservative groups -- with cries of oppression and marginalization. Yet they cannot offer up the patterns of abuse and discrimination to suggest that a problem needs solving. Instead, they beg universities to find and hire more conservatives to sway students while we're young.
Rightist polemics against campus liberalism and progressivism generally are about advancing ideology, so they never attempt to find common cause with other students who have had problems with professors because of their politics. There are plenty of students whose grades in the social sciences suffer because they have qualms about research methodologies that ignore certain social problems or systematically minimize the concerns of various groups. Especially in economics, where highly mathematized modeling makes the science look much harder and more rigorous than it really is, students who question basic tenets about minimum wage laws, the regulation of intellectual property, and certain kinds of environmental protections are routinely laughed at by professors in front of large lecture-halls full of other students.
But the conservative response to that sort of academic misbehavior is to snicker haughtily and tell progressive students to toughen up, learn some math, and listen to the professor, who is of course here to communicate the truth and willing to answer questions -- so long as they pertain to illegible handwriting and not to the core assumptions of a discipline whose political arm immiserates billions.
Conservatives whine loudly about liberalism on campus because nothing less than the truth is at stake. Hearing your views challenged with alternative truths is hard -- but also the most important part of any education. My own development over the last couple of weeks has been immeasurably aided by debates I've had with conservatives. This kind of debate can be delightfully affirming.
I challenge conservatives first to ...send me concrete instances of the rough road that conservative students hoe in the academy. I challenge myself, fellow liberals, progressives, leftists, and conservatives too to take the time and energy to make arguments, defend them, and dissect counterarguments, especially the dangerous ones.
Danny Pearlstein is a senior in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. He can be reached at dp89@cornell.edu. Thinking in Public appears Fridays.
Mr. P has requested "concrete instances of the rough road that conservative students hoe in the academy."
Let's find them for him and send them to him.
With that being said, let's be polite, no harassing emails, no emails that simply insult him without providing examples of what he is seeking...all that does is give him grist for a "bah, see, conservatives are jerks" column.
Let's give him what he asks for and see if he prints them. He can be reached at dp89@cornell.edu.
I am much more concerned with getting my A's.
So, acknowleging it happens, and then saying it doesn't happen enough to do something about it...
That is most telling of this article...
Hey!
Can you help us out on this one???
It looks like Mr. P is collecting information for his thesis. Wonder if he'll report what he finds fairly or with the same liberal elitest attitude the post contains.
Why is his standard higher than, say, the standard for alleging sexual harassment? All that is required is that victim "feel" uncomfortable. The "feeling" is then proof of a hostile work environment. If the conservatives feel harassed, then they are being harassed. (goose/gander sauce)
When I was at Wheaton college the political science prof was a Rockefeller Republican who engineered the ascendancy of moderates like the notorious Fawell's in the county GOP.
The poli sci prof ridiculed me as not a true Republican because I supported Goldwater. Well the key contest was the California primary in early June of '64. I go 97 absentee ballots for Goldwater to 1 for Rockefeller.
The moral. Don't play the victim card. Get even.
I wonder if this guy thinks Blacks were disenfranchised in Florida in 2000? There's no evidence of that at all, yet Leftists always make the claim.
www.noindocrination.org
A Republican has a column in today's Cornell Daily Sun taking up Pearlstein's challenge to document anti-conservative bias:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1245836/posts
Which Wheaton?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.