Posted on 12/07/2004 2:48:55 PM PST by SteveH
See, this is part of the problem---the notion that a life of questioning, research, etc. is somehow inferior to the "real world." What is needed are MORE thinking conservatives, such as moi, to do battle on these campuses. It does no good to denigrate educators.
Couldn't agree more. There's nothing wrong with researching class, race and gender...as long as its done from both sides...or from all sides I should say. too many people here off handedly regard humanties as a second hand field. If you have no interest in studying the culture then you shouldn't be surprisedthat others who do will have their views about it hold sway since no one else is disputing them.
True, but no one's career prospects depend on listening to talk radio or reading Free Republic.
Liberal and apolitical parents aren't spending thousands of dollars a year to have their children listen to talk radio or read FR so that they get an "education."
Also, talk radio and FR fans interact with lots of people everyday who don't share their assumptions. Professors can pretty much live within an academic "community" where they never have to come in to contact anyone who disagrees with them.
bttt
There is a very simple and easy to understand answer to this question.
Lazy greedy hippies discovered that being a professor was a low-effort high-paying job.
If you think that being a college proffesor pays well...
As I said, lazy greedy hippies discovered that being a professor was a low-effort high-paying job. Professor's have been accurately described as the new leisure class.
Then the author of this JUST WASN'T paying attention! What was the point of his article, after all?
Clearly academia has been made a joke, outside of science and tech, and certain specialities like music or medicine, because those WHO ADMIT and HIRE have C O N S P I R E D ered! to freeze out any conservative merely for the crime of their not being PC. That's it. That's the explanation.
It's literally a conspiracy. Look at the authors even of various tech papers, these days. Not only note the names, but their national affliation. Red . . China! Commies edge out Americans in places like the Univ. of Mich, just as an example, at the graduate level. But pick any university you like. Chens and Li's, and some such. Hometown - Beijing. That seems to be just fine and peachy keen with the people who admit such students.
And that's where the problem is - people on admission's committees, people who hire and fire. It doesn't take THAT many libs to screw up the whole of western academia. They just take care that they are placed in such key positions. Nobody really seems to object. I do. But I don't see it from a lot of others.
Engineering is a very popular field in places like China and India. That's why so many American companies are sending TECH jobs there. It has nothing to dow with the students being admitted it's the fact that conservatives generally don't go into the humanities. Sad but true.
I also agree on the battle over what what acceptable scholarship and the 'tipping point' theory that conservatives accept liberal colleagues but radicals do not accept colleagues more conservative than themselves. Was it Benda in The Treason of the Intellectuals who first talked about the pas d'enemie au gauche (no enemy to the left) approach? An interesting study of the liberal worldview written in the '60s is James Burnham's The Suicide of the West, which I commend to you if you don't have it. It is only fully being borne out now, but it really does nail the mentality.
No, they are attempting to save what they see as costs. To be honest, that actually provides a competitive advantage to real companies, rather than mere failing bureacracies which CALL themselves companies. But the problem is in the numbers, overall. While the phony corporations try to save 'costs' and get what they pay for, basically, those are jobs that could have been done better in a free society, maybe ironically by even those from Red China, or Russia, and elsewhere - but here, in the US of A. It's very wrong what they do to avoid hiring in this country, for various reasons. Find a real company, and produce real products and services to a standard of excellence, yes. Run rings around such 'out-sourcers', of course. But the big picture remains. And it is harmful to the nation.
Calculate the hourly rate of the average professor sometime. You'll be stunned.
Yes, I do think that profs are paid well, compared to the average American. They may not be paid well when compared to Tom Cruise, I guess.
My biggest gripe is the view of merit when applied to the salary's of professors. I took two degrees from Michigan Technological University; a BS in Civil Engineering and an MS in Civil Engineering. During my MS days I became more aware of the financial workings of the teaching staff, because (I believe) I was now more privy to hearing things which the undergrad normally doesn't hear. You just become accepted as a more equal citizen in academia. It's hard to explain if you haven't been there.
Anyway, the profs that were pulling in the really big bucks were those who had figured out how to get the grant and research money out of federal and state government. They learned how to get to the pig's nipple.
Very little credit is given to teaching excellence when it comes to salary, despite what you may be told. I had two profs who were about the best teachers I ever had. They were very interested in research as it applied to their disciplines, but they were uninterested in going to Washington to solicit funding
In short, they were a huge pain in the department head's ass, mainly because they showed obvious disdain when it came to short-changing their students in order to go to Washington and beg some federal bureau-schlep for money. They cared more about teaching than begging, and they were both still Associate Professor's when I was there, despite the fact that they had been teaching there for almost 20 years.
Many conservatives aren't really that hard on out-sourcers since there are free market principles at work. Of course as Alan Keeys has said there is no such thing as free trade...not when the people you are trading with have slave labor.
Agreed, he never really gets around to it.
Those Assoc Profs were who I was thinking about when I made my statement. I have an MA in English and many of the Profs who I got to know told me they make less then the manager of a Fast Food resteraunt. Of course there is nothing stopping them from going to manage a fast food place...
My point was that there is nothing shameful about devoting your life to scholarship and suffice it to say that the great majority do not go into this field to make a lot of money.
Looks like we created our own government-sponsored madrases
Well, that is the crux of this article, or at least one of them. Go apply for a job on one of these campuses. If you're a conservative, you won't get hired. You don't even have to tell them you're conservative; they know one when they see one; they'll know just from talking to you.
Even if you do get hired without them knowing you're conservative, you'll never get away with trying to indoctrinate the students with conservatism. The minute you try to "do battle" you will become an Orwellian non-person; your life will become a living PC hell. Dubious charges will be laid at your feet and your fellow profs will treat you like a leper.
academia is a bastion of the left because it was targeted by the socialist international back in the 1930's as a crucial element in overthrowing capitalism, as recommended by the italian communist antonio gramsci
I'm a history grad student, ...when I started undergrad at another school, there were ZERO conservatives in my department. The Profs ranged from LBJ Democrats to Trotskyites. The notion that anyone would be a conservative republican puzzled them. You learned to couch your writing to the professors beliefs, or lose a grade....sad but true!
When I entered Grad School, there were ZERO conservatives again, only now your choices were between Green Vegan Environmental Wackos, Red Marxists, Queer Power activist, and two "traditional democrats", who both agreed Clinton was ok, but too.....conservative for them!
Then, one day, a new prof shows up. A young guy, married with kids. On his office door emerges a portrait of....Ronald Wilson Reagan...Eureka!
You see, the faculty had accidentally hired a brilliant young conservative...suddenly, kids start taking history classes again, he becomes the go to guy in the department.
I almost quit, but that fellow convinced me that there is a place for conservatives in the social sciences.
Don't hate liberal professors, become conservative professors.
PS. as an aside, the funniest exchange I witnessed of this young prof took place like this, in a hallway in the Soc.Sci department.
LibProf: "I see you got that Young Americans for Freedom thing published:
ConsProf: "Yep"
LibProf:"I still haven't heard anything back on my latest, they seem to be stalling on it, it's killing me."
ConsProf: "What are you working on?"
LibProf: "It's a collection of Oral Histories, of Lesbian Farmworkers in the Hispanic Rights movement."
ConsProf: "They haven't rushed that to the presses? Well, frankly, I'm shocked. Good luck with that!"
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.