Friday, March 04, 2005
How Ward Churchill Will Improve Our Universities
Whatever the outcome for Churchill, the battle lines have formed and are hardening. Here's what many of us, I hope most, would like to see: substantive change, a revolution even, at the University of Colorado. It must start with electing regents who have a commitment to restoring real, intellectual diversity and an evenhanded exchange of ideas. That means hiring conservative professors to balance the now left-lopsided scales.
It means ending politically correct speech codes for students and the "diversity" and "sensitivity" re-education camps freshmen are forced to attend. It means a housecleaning of administrators, starting with President Betsy Hoffman. It means hiring new administrators with sufficient backbone to take on the entrenched, leftist faculty with knowledge that the regents will stand behind those administrators. If the changing culture disturbs some in the tenured left who preferred their monopoly, let them leave, and good riddance.
Amen, Brother!
Those of us who attended universities in the early 60s have seen a 180 degree shift in the power structure of academe. In that long-past age, university administrations were asserting in loco parentis control over students' daily lives, faculty were largely conservative in thought, if not political leaning (by which I mean that courses in Western civilization and American literature were taught as examples of progress and were mandatory) and the students were demonstrating against the Vietnam war and for free speech. Now administrations have adopted an "anything goes" policy on campus morality, the faculty (other than perhaps the hard sciences and business) is overwhelmingly leftist, Western civilization and American thought are taught only as examples of evil, free speech and independent thought are under assault by the PC police, faculties are almost universally opposed to the GWOT and some students (bless 'em) are beginning to demonstrate in support of true intellectual diversity and (ironically) free speech.
