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Sunday, January 22, 2006
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Enormous Bullshit at the Last Minute UD has always liked the title of a collection of Grace Paley short stories, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute. She thought of it - slightly altered - when she read Susan Estrich’s opinion piece about the Bruin Alumni Association, a rapidly dwindling group that proposed paying UCLA students to record naughty radical lecture content. The proposal was idiotic and the group will soon disappear, but into these its last days rushes Estrich, all rage and rhetoric: It is one of the worst ideas to hit academia: paying students to tape their professors, in the hopes of discouraging their expression of views that one side considers to be “radical.” Most alumni associations aim to improve their alma maters. But the Bruin Alumni Association -- an unofficial group, not to be confused with the official UCLA Alumni Association -- seems determined to do just the opposite. If it has its way, the classroom will no longer be a place where students and faculty can discuss ideas freely. Shame on them. Shame on them. Have they no decency? If they have their way, intellectual freedom as we know it will be at an end. It is one of the worst ideas… ...hm, yes, it is by all accounts, including those of much of its membership, which has now resigned, one of the worst ideas. So how hard is it hitting academia? About as hard as my goose down featherbed hits my head when I lie on it. UD found a detail about how Estrich teaches intriguing. She seems to see the classroom as the functional equivalent of the psychoanalytical couch. One of her rules, she tells us, is that “Nothing said in the classroom leaves the classroom.” What can this in fact mean? What sort of defender of academic freedom has a rule like this? |