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Wednesday, May 25, 2005
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CURIOUSER AND CURIOUSER… …grows the short tale of Professor Timothy Shortell. His tale will be short because the president of Brooklyn College, where Shortell has been voted chair of the sociology department, has gotten wind of the fact that the man’s a bigot, and the university has started an investigation. To the extent that tenured faculty can be neutralized, Shortell will shortly be neutralized. We must sport with him while we may. This latest sniffing out of an extremist at a respectable American university (see also - via the Search button up there - Jacques Pluss, Nicholas De Genova, Ward Churchill, Grover Furr) adds one more name to the Stalin column (Hitler has only one entry so far, Jacques Pluss.) Shortell is not a very good writing model for his students. His prose reads like an English translation of Enver Hoxha (“The foot soldiers are spewing lies… Just as any fascist state, the megalomania of the [American] ruling elite is paid for in working class blood.”). He cannot spell. We have already seen (scroll down) his struggles with the word “turpitude.” On his syllabi he warns students that certain assignments are “manditory.” But what people are talking about is Shortell’s redhot hatred of religion. Anyone with the merest smidgeon of religiosity is a “moral retard.” Yet this aspect of Shortell is also curious. He earned his Ph.D. at Boston College, a fervently Jesuit institution which describes itself thus: “The Jesuit Community at Boston College is committed to maintaining and strengthening the Jesuit, Catholic mission of the University, especially its commitment to integrating intellectual, personal, ethical, and religious formation; and to uniting high academic achievement with service to others. Jesuits are active in all aspects of University life.” What the hell was this hellion doing at Boston College? Was he cynical enough to have accepted fellowships from the retards? Would a man with even a pinch of principle take an offer of admission, much less scholarship money, from this deeply tainted source? The only way UD can make sense of this execrator of religion having dallied with Jesuits for four years and gotten a Ph.D. off them is to presume that Shortell began his studies at Boston College as Father Timothy Shortell, S.J., and that something -- I won’t even begin to suggest what -- must have happened while he was there… |