|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
Teaching the Humanities and the Western Future
| Article
# : |
19856 |
|
|
Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
|
| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1991 |
2,889 Words |
| Author
: |
Paul Gottfried
Paul Gottfried is a senior editor of the Modern Thought
section of The World & I and author of The Search for
Historical Meaning: Hegel and the Postwar American Right. |
Most of the contributors to this symposium on American higher education will likely point to the problem of thought control pervading our universities. Politically correct speech has become so much a part of the educational landscape that the New York Times and Newsweek, neither a noticeably conservative publication, have done full-length stories on the raging intolerance in higher education. Sensitivity, diversity, victimization, and minority have all been given bizarre and twisted meanings among university faculties and administrations. Even in my own small Church of the Brethren college, faculty members, particularly in the humanities and psychology, are working to promote the "F word" as a necessary rhetorical trope in lectures but insisting at the same time on the inappropriateness of any sexist distinctions in speech. As one outraged colleague explained to me: "Soon you'll have to swear in talking to students, but you won't be allowed to use the word 'men.'" One professor has already been reprimanded by most of his colleagues for daring to insert mankind into his provisional title for a projected course in biology. Such language policing, done by those who claim to be freeing us from verbal inhibitions, combine vulgarity and arrogance with utter hypocrisy.
Sykes' Criticisms
Numerous books have appeared on the menaces of academic thought control, and student publications dealing with this matter are multiplying on campuses across the country. Only recently Charles J. Sykes, of Profscam fame, brought out The Hollow Men: Politics and Corruption in Higher Education (Washington: Regnery-Gateway, 1991), a biting indictment of university administrations and humanities faculties. Betraying their educational mission, Sykes' hollow men parrot and impose prescribed ideological slogans, to the detriment of critical thought. In Profscam (1988), Sykes went after lazy and pretentious professors, who drew high salaries for the avoidance of work. In his newest book, he evokes a more frenetic academic scene, perpetually agitated by an American Red Guard stampeding cowardly and unprincipled administrators into following changing party lines.
Sykes may be--in my opinion, anyway--overly sympathetic to the muckraking Dartmouth Review. The editors overstepped the bounds of propriety by harassing professors targeted for abuse and by allowing tasteless quotations from Mein Kampf to contaminate one of their issues. Though the Review's defenders have blamed the latter indiscretion on a saboteur, there are still certainly grounds for charging the paper's editors with inexcusable boorishness. And the readiness of self-styled mavens on
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
