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"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
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(Rate Your Students)
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except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Friday, March 25, 2005

GROVERS

Look. Can we talk? It’s one thing to have, at a high-profile university, a tenured plagiarist, a professor who has misrepresented himself as a minority in order to gain advantages. The University of Colorado will be within its rights to dismiss Ward Churchill on these grounds.

It’s another thing to have, at an obscure campus, a tenured absurdity who does not plagiarize and who has never misrepresented himself.

The critics of the academy who have turned their attention from Professor Ward Churchill to the Muppety-sounding Professor Grover Furr - a veteran English faculty member at Montclair State - are barking up the wrong jackass.

Yes, Furr is an illiterate Stalinist. He uses the same boilerplate as the communist letter-writer George Orwell immortalized fifty years ago in “Politics and the English Language.” Here he is on the fascist CIA client, Solidarnosc:

'Why does the CIA support Solidarity? Because…the U.S. ruling class, in fact everyone but the public, from whom the truth as been withheld, knows that Solidarity is as reactionary as they come. It is a fascist organization, not unlike Hitler’s, resembling nothing so much as the Moscow and Warsaw ‘communists’ whom it opposes so bitterly. … In Poland as elsewhere racism is used to divert the workers’ movement towards scapegoats, away from its real enemies, and into pro-capitalist directions. [Albert Shanker] and Walesa are birds of a feather, loyal supporters of big business, enemies of workers everywhere, clones of one another… A real workers’ revolt…would be directed first against these wolves in sheep’s clothing, traitors who prey on the crying needs of workers and others for a better life.'

Birds of a feather are cloned and become wolves in sheep’s clothing and none of us knows about it because we’re dupes of the ruling classes… If we’d read Grover Furr in the early ‘eighties we’d have avoided the catastrophe of Solidarnosc and the larger collapse of communism it helped to bring about…



So there’s a fossil to be found at Montclair State. He’s teaching his students how to write like Brezhnev and think like Khrushchev. But look. A number of colleges and universities up and down this great land of ours have Grovers stashed away in labs and linen closets -- weird little men (women, it seems to UD, are underrepresented in this cohort) writing about space aliens (see UD, 7/16/04) and Sun Persons and Solidarnosc…

Students are of course advised to stay away from these people, and most do. But these people have been tenured. They have been allowed to toil for the length and breadth of their days alerting us to the aliens and fascists and Ice People among us. A big country with a diversified higher education system will generate, and should tolerate, a few Grovers.