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| Bus Them In |
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| CU wants to bus in conservative faculty; irony alert |
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This is Dark Cloud on Wednesday, May 14, 2008. It’s the best time of year in Boulder right now. CU has had its graduation and we’re short 20k people. The creeks and agricultural ditches are full. I counted, as I left my apartment in central Boulder yesterday, 11 young deer on our lawn. Because I have no choice, I’m paying more attention to bird songs, these days. They roost outside my window in evergreens and apple trees, and there is no missing the end of Civil Twilight on day’s approach. From dead silence to arrangements by Thomas Tallis in a split second, and I’ve discovered that if, and only if, I shut my eyes immediately after they spring awake long enough for me to process the reason they and I are now alert, I can get another hour’s repast. Otherwise, I’m up and crabby all day. Today, as the descendents of the Tyrannosaur and Diplodocus broke into the rather beautiful opening notes of Tallis’ Spem in Alium, my eyes sprung open and I looked up and in doing so knocked something off the far end of the bed. I wondered what it might be, and the time portal passed. Like it or not I was up. Made coffee and faced the computer screen. Here in Boulder the Damned, it seems the rush to tongue bathe Republican political animal Bruce Benson is paying off, for with the Presidency of CU in the safe hands of Big Oil, Republican Chancellor of the CU Campus, Bud Peterson, has announced that on top of football deficits and lack of money for all sorts of infrastructure and teaching needs, the University of Colorado is considering a $9 million program to bring high-profile political conservatives to teach on the supposedly left-leaning campus. CU officials say it would be in the form of an endowment for a “Visiting Chair in Conservative Thought and Policy.” Such an individual would get a staff person and a stipend which together would cost about $200,000 per annum. CU apparently feels getting the money is no problem, and the first such individual might be in place as early as next year. According to CU, the program would bring in scholars, historians, politicians and media personalities to CU. I’ve often wondered how - if a reporter or a scholar or a historian could be described as left or right wing, progressive or conservative, Marxist or fascist - they could be considered a reporter, a scholar, or a historian at all. You either continually submitted to evidence uncovered by your discipline, or you did not. The totally estimable historian Barbara Tuchman, I believe a secular Jew, having a decided prejudice against Germany and Germans, broke all this into the open by announcing in her books that this prejudice existed, she wanted the reader to know that. Despite that prejudice, her books are embarrassingly accurate and fair minded, and it wasn’t really possible to come away from them thinking Germans were subhuman as a species, despite the periodic evidence the Nazis were just that, and that they had firm footing for their emergence under the Kaiser and further back. I myself had several very conservative Catholic professors in college and course masters in high school. I had at least one college professor who was a Marxist in the clean academic sense, and an activist on his own time. We knew this, and I cannot recall the conservative Catholics praising Catholic poets over Protestant, hesitating to discuss the Beats or blanching at foul language, or trying to convert us. I can recall my Marxist prof, who was Jewish, trying very hard to impart the importance of Henry Ford in his world, and the good and common wealth his advances achieved, and his brilliance on some issues. Yes, Ford was a noxious anti-Semite and became more rancid as he aged. But it didn’t erase the palpable good, and the Prof insisted that we keep that in mind about Ford, Lindberg, not a few Popes when we would point all this out in that activist age. His wife, I think it was, had numbers tattooed on the underside of her wrist. College age is the age of rebellion and hormones and learning the hard way. The establishment moves left and right, and student bodies chemically move in opposite directions. This is good, and the way it should be. It can be argued that the right wing professors that CU currently has are more vocal than those on the left. Barack Obama taught at the University of Chicago, quite conservative and so comfortably right wing it has no need to hire a token Liberal. He knew his subject, and was held in high regard by all the faculty. Nobody felt brainwashed. He was a professor, not a politico in the class room coming on to the babes. That’s all a college should worry about: that their faculty knows of what they speak and can teach it and fears not controversy by association. Absolutely all. What is a proposed busing program for conservatives to be employed at liberal colleges rather defies comment. |
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