Posted on 06/08/2008 11:54:41 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
I was asked recently - by a child porn advocate, no less - why I write books with chapter titles that are so “offensive.” Citing two such chapter titles – “Fag Hags and Rainbow Flags” and “The Liar, the Witch, and the Wardrobe” – the child porn advocate asked what some of my fellow UNC professors had done to make me sound so “nasty.” I think the question is worth answering.
Put simply, I use provocative language in chapters (more often in columns) criticizing a small minority of my fellow professors for two reasons: 1) because they are proponents of fascism, and 2) because the UNC administration is too cowardly to confront fascist professors due to political correctness - the principal means of enforcing academic fascism.
Let me be more specific by relying upon a recent example involving one of our more authoritarian UNC professors.
Students taking a criminology course approached me after the professor banned (fortunately in writing) the use of the word “mankind” as “sexist.” Students were threatened specifically with point deductions for every single use of the word in exams or papers. Unfortunately, students did not stand up to the professor. Now I have learned that the professor has adopted another rule – this one banning use of the terms “BC” and “AD.”
The professor in question told the students that using “BCE” and “CE” is now a “convention.” Of course, it is simply incorrect to say that prohibiting students from using BC/AD and forcing them to use BCE/CE is a “convention.” It is a practice employed by a very small number of professors – most having strong antipathy towards Christianity.
Even if this unconventional BCE/CE timeline were now the convention it must have been initiated for some other reason. After all, one cannot say it was always the “convention.” It is likely that the original reason for this petty infringement on students’ religious freedom is one of the following:
1. Concerns over “separation of church and state.” It is clear to all but the least educated among us that the First Amendment Establishment Clause was meant to keep the federal government from establishing one particular Christian denomination as an official government church. The notion that BC must be replaced because the “C” stands for “Christ” is both historically and legally indefensible. But some professors actually have (or pretend to have) such an extreme interpretation of the Establishment Clause. This extremism even led several to say (in writing on the Faculty Senate mailing list) that the official university calendar had to use the term “spring holiday” in place of “Good Friday.” This was a stance they attributed to their “strong commitment” to separation of church and state.
That is why (in a future column) I will encourage students to sign up for the criminology professor’s class and defy her BC/AD ban. As of this writing, I have already obtained legal counsel for the students. That other part of the First Amendment mentioning free exercise of religion will be the subject of the federal litigation.
2. Questions about the historical claims of Christianity. It does not help matters that the professor responsible for the BC/AD ban also subscribes to wild conspiracy theories related to the origins of Christianity. She once told me that she thinks the Four Gospels were established as valid during a power struggle at the Council of Nicea. It is this kind of ignorance that leads to questions about whether Jesus was actually an historical figure. Those who tend to answer the question in the negative are naturally inclined to replace the BC/AD convention. Nonetheless, it is still the convention.
3. The Right to be Un-offended. Often, censors will ban words in an effort to preserve a so-called right to be un-offended. In the case of the BC/AD ban I have seen no evidence that anyone was ever offended by the now-banned letters. However, three students have now reported that they are offended by the ban itself. This is an example of how censorship generally backfires. And it is evidence that censors are often socially inept.
When one contemplates the ever-expanding list of words and ideas that are banned from college campus, the need for a caustic response is readily apparent. Strong language is often of good way of letting the censors know you won’t be intimidated. But more than strong language is needed in these times.
Just a few years ago I sent a warning to Georgia Tech letting them know they would soon be sued for a number of policies violating the First Amendment. They willingly abandoned an unconstitutional speech zone policy prior to litigation. But they chose to defend an unconstitutional speech code and unconstitutional manual telling gays which churches were “good” or “bad” on gay rights issues.
Because Georgia Tech did not take my warnings seriously they have lost more than just a pair of highly embarrassing First Amendment rulings. They are about to write a check for $300,000 to the attorneys I found to represent the students.
If some child porn advocate is reading this column he is free to consider it a “nasty” piece of journalism. If some UNC administrator is reading this column she is free to consider it a threat of litigation.
Finally. Somebody fighting back against the PC crowd. I cant wait to see what happens in litigation, or court; IF it goes that far.
College campuses (and the public schools) are nothing but indoctrination centers for the fascist hate-America left. We ought to be staging Palmer Raids on every campus in America.
I love it when political correctness backfires.
.......and common sense rules the day!
Oh, he’s good.
And how they hate him there. The liberals there detest him with a virulence and passion that is enough to tell you he is not only on target, but scoring direct hits.
They HATE it when people stand up to them.
Forced change from BC/AD to BCE/CE has been one of the most offensive manifestations of political correctionism forced upon us in the past hundred years. I see it especially pervasive on the History Channel, Discovery, A&E, and throughout liberal television media. For at least the past 2 years, I have changed channels every time I hear this abomination of political correctness.
I'm an alumni of Tech twice over. When I was there it was one of the most conservative schools around with the exception of a few notable "clubs" and "associations". It's a shame to see that crap took root.
Speaking as a regular recipient of beg-a-thon letters, it's nice to know they took a couple of well placed kicks to the 'nads.
Because Georgia Tech did not take my warnings seriously they have lost more than just a pair of highly embarrassing First Amendment rulings. They are about to write a check for $300,000 to the attorneys I found to represent the students.
As an alumni of Tech, I am ashamed.
mark
Sorry about that... I’m going to have to take the blame for the shift to the “Common Era” abomination.
I was the one poking it in the eye of libs when I’d ask “what year is it, and why?”
“It seems to me that the regulative idea that we heirs of the Enlightenment, we Socratists, most frequently use to criticize the conduct of various conversational partners is that of ‘needing education in order to outgrow their primitive fear, hatreds, and superstitions’ . . . It is a concept which I, like most Americans who teach humanities or social science in colleges and universities, invoke when we try to arrange things so that students who enter as bigoted, homophobic, religious fundamentalists will leave college with views more like our own . . . The fundamentalist parents of our fundamentalist students think that the entire ‘American liberal establishment’ is engaged in a conspiracy. The parents have a point. Their point is that we liberal teachers no more feel in a symmetrical communication situation when we talk with bigots than do kindergarten teachers talking with their students . . . When we American college teachers encounter religious fundamentalists, we do not consider the possibility of reformulating our own practices of justification so as to give more weight to the authority of the Christian scriptures. Instead, we do our best to convince these students of the benefits of secularization. We assign first-person accounts of growing up homosexual to our homophobic students for the same reasons that German schoolteachers in the postwar period assigned The Diary of Anne Frank. . . You have to be educated in order to be . . . a participant in our conversation . . . So we are going to go right on trying to discredit you in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist religious community of dignity, trying to make your views seem silly rather than discussable. We are not so inclusivist as to tolerate intolerance such as yours . . . I don’t see anything herrschaftsfrei [domination free] about my handling of my fundamentalist students. Rather, I think those students are lucky to find themselves under the benevolent Herrschaft [domination] of people like me, and to have escaped the grip of their frightening, vicious, dangerous parents . . . I am just as provincial and contextualist as the Nazi teachers who made their students read Der Stürmer; the only difference is that I serve a better cause.”
-‘Universality and Truth,’ in Robert B. Brandom (ed.), Rorty and his Critics (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 21-2.
Rorty held teaching positions at Wellesley College, Princeton University, and the University of Virginia, Rorty’s last academic post was as professor emeritus of comparative literature and philosophy, by courtesy, at Stanford University. He was especially popular during this period, and once quipped that he had been assigned to the position of “transitory professor of trendy studies.”
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