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That Professor Obama Dog Won't Hunt Anymore
American Thinker
James V Capua
5/30/2012
Excerpt:
"Professor" Obama, like so many of the other Obamas, is a fraud.
Law Professor Steven Carter shakes his disapproving finger and sets Governor Romney and the rest of us straight: "If you think President Obama has bad ideas, say so. If you want to criticize his record, go ahead[.] ... [But] please don't drag the faculty lounge into it. Leave that space free for our serious, uncensored arguments. Our democracy will be the better for it." (Emphasis mine.)
Professor Carter is so determined to enlighten us that he even accepts the inappropriate term "faculty lounge" rather than the more accurate "faculty club" for the purposes of his piece. Faculty lounge is what Romney, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and other skeptics have popularized as shorthand for Cloistered Cloud Cuckoo Land of Tendentious Theoretical Speculation in the Academy, and which many opponents now view as the source of Obama's and his apparatchiks' malignantly misguided policies. (Faculty lounges proper are usually dingy holes reminiscent of car dealer service department waiting rooms. These are found in elementary and secondary schools, while in colleges and universities "lounges" are generally reserved for graduate students, teaching assistants, and the growing corps of adjunct cheap labor. "The Club" is the usual "space" for the kind of elevated clash of titanic tenured professorial intellects that Carter romanticizes, and in many of them the ambiance and fare are well above lounge standards.)
Carter, while disapproving, is generous in allowing that we come by our ignorance honestly. Citing every frustrated American would-be philosopher-king's favorite inspirational text, Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963), he explains that everyday American slugs are practically predestined to undervalue the peregrinations of the elevated minds among us -- to, as Carter puts it, "disdain" the highly educated, because of our "supposition that the dominance of the intellectual is undemocratic." This attitude is particularly unproductive, Carter believes, because in the "principles" of the faculty lounge (club) lie the salvation of our grubby politics: "[t]he principles of the faculty lounge at its best include tolerance of disagreement, preference for reason over authority, and avoidance of slogan and emotional appeal. These are the principles that those of us who teach (and, one hopes, all adults) should model for our students, and encourage them to carry with them into the world beyond the groves of academe. The better we do our work, the better our politics will be."
One is tempted to ask where Carter has been the last twenty years. The degeneration of so much of the academy into rigid orthodoxy and intolerance, all the while failing in its most rudimentary functions; ever-increasing numbers of debt-ridden young Americans; and their disillusioned parents is a story that does not need to be recounted here. Enough simply to say that the "work" of colleges and universities has not been done very well at all -- although through gaming the rating systems, a higher proportion than ever before of American colleges and universities are now labeled highly competitive. We need look no farther than the sorry tale of "Cherokee Elizabeth" Warren to understand the cynicism and hypocrisy which render contemporary higher education in the aggregate just another dodgy crony in the Brave New Land of Hope and Change."
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View the complete article at:
http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/...t_anymore.html
American Thinker
James V Capua
5/30/2012
Excerpt:
"Professor" Obama, like so many of the other Obamas, is a fraud.
Law Professor Steven Carter shakes his disapproving finger and sets Governor Romney and the rest of us straight: "If you think President Obama has bad ideas, say so. If you want to criticize his record, go ahead[.] ... [But] please don't drag the faculty lounge into it. Leave that space free for our serious, uncensored arguments. Our democracy will be the better for it." (Emphasis mine.)
Professor Carter is so determined to enlighten us that he even accepts the inappropriate term "faculty lounge" rather than the more accurate "faculty club" for the purposes of his piece. Faculty lounge is what Romney, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and other skeptics have popularized as shorthand for Cloistered Cloud Cuckoo Land of Tendentious Theoretical Speculation in the Academy, and which many opponents now view as the source of Obama's and his apparatchiks' malignantly misguided policies. (Faculty lounges proper are usually dingy holes reminiscent of car dealer service department waiting rooms. These are found in elementary and secondary schools, while in colleges and universities "lounges" are generally reserved for graduate students, teaching assistants, and the growing corps of adjunct cheap labor. "The Club" is the usual "space" for the kind of elevated clash of titanic tenured professorial intellects that Carter romanticizes, and in many of them the ambiance and fare are well above lounge standards.)
Carter, while disapproving, is generous in allowing that we come by our ignorance honestly. Citing every frustrated American would-be philosopher-king's favorite inspirational text, Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963), he explains that everyday American slugs are practically predestined to undervalue the peregrinations of the elevated minds among us -- to, as Carter puts it, "disdain" the highly educated, because of our "supposition that the dominance of the intellectual is undemocratic." This attitude is particularly unproductive, Carter believes, because in the "principles" of the faculty lounge (club) lie the salvation of our grubby politics: "[t]he principles of the faculty lounge at its best include tolerance of disagreement, preference for reason over authority, and avoidance of slogan and emotional appeal. These are the principles that those of us who teach (and, one hopes, all adults) should model for our students, and encourage them to carry with them into the world beyond the groves of academe. The better we do our work, the better our politics will be."
One is tempted to ask where Carter has been the last twenty years. The degeneration of so much of the academy into rigid orthodoxy and intolerance, all the while failing in its most rudimentary functions; ever-increasing numbers of debt-ridden young Americans; and their disillusioned parents is a story that does not need to be recounted here. Enough simply to say that the "work" of colleges and universities has not been done very well at all -- although through gaming the rating systems, a higher proportion than ever before of American colleges and universities are now labeled highly competitive. We need look no farther than the sorry tale of "Cherokee Elizabeth" Warren to understand the cynicism and hypocrisy which render contemporary higher education in the aggregate just another dodgy crony in the Brave New Land of Hope and Change."
.............................
View the complete article at:
http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/...t_anymore.html