Encouraged by a thoughtful email from a reader taking issue with her lauding of science and engineering departments as less corrupted by politics than the humanities, Erin O’Connor posts an interesting discussion, with useful links, of that issue.
Her correspondent wrote:
Those very science and engineering departments that many of your correspondents suggest are untainted by politics are, I would suggest, the most overwhelmingly politicized departments at virtually every major research university. With literally tens of millions of dollars at stake in NIH, Defense, Energy, and Corporate Research grants, they abandoned any pretense of academic freedom decades ago.
It’s a nice point, and a useful reminder that mindless, incompreshensible post-modernist prose in the service of political correctness is not the only form of academic corruption.
Not one to be outdone in the thoughtful reader department, I would like to quote a message that was just delivered over the electronic Discriminations transom:
Erin O’Connor has a posting complaining about corporate influences in universities.
Perhaps this is a good excuse for you to point out that the people who usually complain the most about this (not Erin) are the same people who offer as a reason for racial preferences: “This is what the corporations want us to do.”
Consider it pointed out.
Perhaps it is worth adding that these are often the same folks who applauded the military brass as a progressive force in society for filing a brief in support of racial preferences in the Michigan cases but who now want to bar military recruiters from campus because of the military’s policy regarding homosexuals.
