It’s pretty funny that (a) this complaint about “bringing politics into” the previously cloistered and Olympian groves of academe — always framed as a very recent development — has been made in op eds continuously for over 50 years…
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Exactly the same, as I noted in my thread, about his implication that "blurring of the lines between scholarship and activism" is of recent vintage, rather than a longstanding conservative critique that dates back to William F. Buckley in 1951, and even before that.
There are all kinds of ironies and hypocrisies with the position of the “campus free speech” conservatives, but this highlights one more. In the US, since the development of the modern university, professional academia has been highly politicized. Between the 19th century and the 1960s, 1/n
discipline-based professional organizations, like the American Economic Association, enforced a political consensus as well as a theoretical and methodological one. Ask the first generation of professional social scientists, who were trained in Germany, and were forced to renounce 2/n
“German socialism” as their price of admission to the newly secular academy. It was only the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s that made it possible for academics to freely express a political viewpoint outside the mainstream of opinion among their professional colleagues. 3/n
PS: I’m reminded of a poem I found in the letters of one of those American“German socialists,” written after his return to the “land of liberty”
When e’er with haggard eyes I view/ This dungeon that I’m rottin’ in/ I think of my companions true/ Who studied with me at the U/ University of Gottingen
I guess the single parent without childcare doesn't get an extension either in his class after working two jobs to teach them some "professionalism" which is of course totally apolitical...
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The @nytimes.com is part of the problem
When e’er with haggard eyes I view/ This dungeon that I’m rottin’ in/ I think of my companions true/ Who studied with me at the U/ University of Gottingen