There is a very impressive, very interesting, very well written article in today’s Chronicle of Higher Education by a beginning assistant professor of classics as “a university in the South” about the isolation of conservatives on campus.
A taste:
I first suspected that when I drove my Minnesota-seasoned ’91 Honda Accord wagon — sans bumper stickers — into the Volvo-Subaru showroom that is our college’s faculty lot.
Sporting “Peace” and “Support Our Troops: Bring Them Home!” and “Kerry-Edwards” bumper stickers, the rustless Volvos and Subarus exuded a clear semiotics of inclusion and exclusion, boldly proclaiming in unison: “Here we are enlightened thinkers; here we drive academic cars; here we vote Democrat — or Green. We belong; you don’t.”
To paraphrase Freud, sometimes a Volvo isn’t just a Volvo.
The most revealing aspect of the article however is not the plethora of incisive anecdotes; it is the fact that the author felt it necessary to use a pseudonym.
The reactions of the students confirms what I recall from being an undergrad in the Sixties and what I’ve heard from my kids and their friends.
Professors think they’re fooling the kids. Professors don’t have a clue that rooms full of adolescents see right through them.
“Tenure track”. That’s academese for “Gonna be in for life”, right? Combined with “academic freedom” meaning “I can say or do anything I want”, it’s a recipe for eventual disaster, no?
‘the rustless Volvos and Subarus exuded a clear semiotics of inclusion and exclusion’
I wonder how silenced he would feel if he were to use these words in corporate america.
‘The most revealing aspect of the article however is not the plethora of incisive anecdotes; it is the fact that the author felt it necessary to use a pseudonym.’
When arguing for victimization, it helps if you play the victim.
For what it’s worth, some commenters at Crooked Timber (which also linked this piece) think it’s a hoax. I have to say that, while it’s easy to imagine a conservative academic driving into a faculty parking lot in his rusty jalopy, parking alongside one of the sleek new academic trendmobiles, and musing about it, it’s harder to imagine him/her describing the experience as
the rustless Volvos and Subarus exuded a clear semiotics of inclusion and exclusion
without postulating a malicious wit that I don’t see any other evidence of in the piece. Seriously, that reads like a left-wing academic making fun of other left-wing academics via a conservative (fictional) protagonist. It’s pure David Lodge. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, read Lodge’s magnificent Small World. If you do know what I’m talking about, read it anyway.)
‘Seriously, that reads like a left-wing academic making fun of other left-wing academics via a conservative (fictional) protagonist.’
Perhaps it’s the Sokal “Hermeneutics” of the right wing victimization syndrome.
It brings back memories for me, of walking the gauntlet of anti-Bush and anti-war political cartoon-plastered office doors in various buildings on the campus of University of Hawaii. Happily, none of the professors I had to visit had such obvious displays of political opinion – or I would have found it very intimidating to knock on their door so I could discuss my thesis in support of the Japan Self-Defense Force (including their support of the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan.
My husband drives a red GMC pickup with a plate in the license plate holder on the front showing an American flag and a skeleton lying flat on its back, and the words “BORN FREE – TAXED TO DEATH”. I guess he’d fit right in.
: )
Ah yes.. the time in college where you learn to give the teacher what s/he wants.. not what you know to be right.
Great article. Worth it just for the perfect inclusion of a Blazing Saddles reference. :)