Sherry Chandler » 2006 » January » 20
How did we get to the point where this sort of thing is tolerated at all?
LOS ANGELES, California (Reuters) — An alumni group dedicated to “exposing the most radical professors” at the University of California at Los Angeles is offering to pay students $100 to record classroom lectures of suspect faculty.
The Web site of the Bruin Alumni Association also includes a “Dirty Thirty” list of professors considered by the group to be the most extreme left-wing members of the UCLA faculty, as well as profiles on their political activities and writings.
I heard a report about this on Morning Edition yesterday morning. The last several years have given me much to be outraged about, but this kind of thought policing is both outrageous and frightening. In the NPR report, they interviewed one student who said her women’s studies professor had said she had to be careful, now, what she said for fear of being blacklisted.
Think about that.
This post was written by sherry
A man sitting reading a book in a library while a mouse ran past him unobserved would not be in a more subjective state than a cat, but he would appear so to the cat. A desire for a contest with reality is psychologically quite different from a desire to escape it.
— from Northrop Fry Unbuttoned. Wit and Wisdom from the Notebooks and Diaries (Gnomon, 2004)
[Note: I really don't know what this quotation means, if it means anything. Nor do I know whether it falls under wit or wisdom. I'm not sure who is having the contest with reality here – probably the man, though I'm pretty sure the cat wouldn't spare much philosophical thought on the matter and the one trying to escape is the mouse. Also, if the man lets mice run around his library unobserved, pretty soon he'll have one big mouse's nest and nothing to read.]
This post was written by sherry
