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Friday, December 03, 2004
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UD LIBERAL ELITIST SCUM
Ooch. Ouch. Eech. UD feels like O.J. Simpson in the opening scene of Naked Gun, when he keeps getting shot at. Everybody's after her because she's a liberal humanities professor, and she's not even a liberal. (She subscribes, for instance, to the conservative magazine whose attack on American university professors she just linked to.) Yes, she voted for Kerry, but she dislikes his arrogance, as she dislikes all arrogant liberal elites (one of her favorite books is Christopher Lasch's The Revolt of the Elites And the Betrayal of Democracy), even though you probably think she's a member of the liberal elite. And UD acknowledges that on cursory as well as deeper examination she sort of looks that way. But it's one of the larger goals of this website to suggest that political, intellectual, and cultural identities are much more mixed and complicated than this. One of UD's friends is a son of John Kenneth Galbraith, and although he's certainly a Democrat, he's also a veritable hawk compared to his father. On many issues - school choice, death penalty, affirmative action - UD is closer to the right than the left. On university matters - curriculum, speech codes, grade inflation - she's a dead ringer for Lynne Cheney. UD does not think her own complex affiliations are unusual. Yes, she knows professors who are 'tenured radicals,' and she certainly wishes she didn't, and she has condemned a number of them on this weblog. She also knows professors who make Grover Norquist look like a moderate. Most of the professors UD knows and has known fall between these extremes and exhibit the complicated characteristics of reflective people. |