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"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
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, July 14, 2006

More Thoughts on
Bad Professors


A long time ago, at the University of Chicago, UD and her then-boyfriend, currently Mr UD, went together to some sort of communal supper.

While she was getting her food, UD watched Mr UD talk at some length with a local character who sometimes showed up at these free feeds -- a harmless madman, marooned in highly specific delusions about the Trilateral Commission and similar organizations.

"It was kind of you to listen to him so intently," UD said later. To which the future Mr UD said: "Kind? Not really. I find his mind and his ideas fascinating."

"Huh? You find the ideas of a schizophrenic fascinating?"

"Yes. Don't you?"

"No. Why should I find ... I don't know.. pitiable fanaticism interesting? I mean, if I were a clinician, sure... but humanly this guy's out of the running..."



Over the years, UD and her husband have gone back and forth on this question of whether in human terms there's anything of particular interest in the blankly reiterated arguments, utterly unsusceptible to discussion, let alone reason, of paranoid conspiracy theorists. UD maintains that the essential truth of such minds, whether certifiably insane or merely weird, is their numbing redundancy, the sense you have talking to them that these people are rats in cages, making the well-worn rounds for another audience. Mr UD argues that the very extremity of these rigid minds sheds a bright distorted light on everyone's attempts to make sense of the world. Or something.



The question of what to do with professors who turn out to be fanatic conspiracy theorists involves just this question, I think, of the likelihood of their being interesting -- interesting to students, and interesting to fellow scholars. Kevin Barrett, paranoid du jour, is an extremist who has shut his mind to the efforts of others to reason with him, and to the complexity of the world. Like Ward Churchill, he does not argue, but rather lets you in on the truth, if you're wise enough to listen to him.

As the blogosphere and some of the major media continue to contemplate the latest outing of a group of terrible professors (Frish, Barrett, Churchill again as his university attempts to fire him) at some of America's finest universities, it's important to remind ourselves why they're bad professors, and why these events should function above all to clarify the noble distinction of the university as the only major cultural institution devoted to the exercise of reason.

Much of the culture outside the university lazes about, secure in its belief in astrology, government plots, and the attainment of riches through the state lottery. These are popular views; this is popular culture. The university exists to educate people out of the stupidities of popular culture and into a considered, dispassionate, skeptical, and flexible view of the world. Given the enormous power of popular culture, the university will always be a fragile institution, distrusted and mocked and ignored for its lack of emotionality and its dedication to the pursuit of truth rather than comfort.

The entire integrity of the university rests on this serious truth-seeking, so that any incursion into it by unreasoning fanatics is a deep wound, to itself and to its reputation.

More immediately, each unreasoning fanatic in the university represents a demoralizing uselessness within it, an active, daily erosion of its students' capacity for free and rational thought. As the fanatic vehemently expounds his conspiracies in front of the classroom, some students may mistake his passionate intensity for impressive conviction, his rigid deadly dullness for fascination.


And speaking of fascination, I've always been fascinated by the very well-written psychological study that came out in the 'fifties, The Three Christs of Ypsilanti [http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0394703952/102-8002251-6150509?v=glance&n=283155] by Milton Rokeach.

Rokeach realized that in the mental hospital where he worked there were three schizophrenic men, all claiming to be Jesus. What fascinating conversations would ensue if he brought them all together and watched them deal with their rivals? How could they be the only son of God if there were two others in the room? Why not watch the sparks fly among them as they struggled with their sense of their supremacy in the face of these threats to it?

Excellent idea, disappointing outcome. Three rigid minds do not equal a frank and open exchange. The three Christs anxiously danced around one another for awhile but of course were unable to enter into any substance about their belief in their own deity or their sense of competition with rival deities. The had boring, closed, self-obsessed minds, and that was pretty much that.

Drones like Kevin Barrett, with their tawdry little notions, are not madmen; but they share the pathos of all closed minds as they stand their ground through life in a deeply peculiar intellectual wilderness. To put such people into classrooms with intelligent young thinkers is not to challenge students with a new and interesting mind, as the public relations office of the University of Wisconsin wants you to believe. It is to act irresponsibly and insensitively, inviting the student into a fourteen-week-long dialogue with a person incapable of dialogue. It is a cynical waste of everyone's time, a terrible blot on the institution.

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Update, via Ann Althouse: A powerful opinion piece by a graduate student in history at Madison.