Stop Me Before I Vote Again

professor dave garroway?

http://www.nndb.com/people/106/000043974/

I was thinking maybe Justice Arthur Goldberg --

-- with a sneer borrowed from Alan King?

If a whole field like "Women's Studies" or "Economics" can be created out of the ether to sustain a legion of pretentious polysyllable-proffering pus-bags, it must be good for the "economy" -- no?

Money for nothing. Chicks (and for some, dicks) for free.

I mean, look at that shitbird David Michael Green -- professor of "political science" at Hofstra, but completely clueless on the subject for which he holds a tenure spot.

Why should anyone make anything useful? Why should a "professor" have to know anything useful?

House of cards, baby!

Source of the evil commie Jew image = American Legion Magazine.

http://pages.slc.edu/~archives/exhibits/mccarthyism/01.php

Brilliant. How on earth did you find this?

Here's another one: http://firedoglake.com/2007/08/02/feminists-marxists-and-post-modernists-oh-my/

My secret weapon: http://www.tineye.com/

The Legion has a page of covers, but it's pretty sparse: http://www.american-legion-post.us/300/ALMCP.htm

I sent them this one, of course. Hopefully they'll add it to the collection.

Louis Budenz is an interesting character. "In 1945, Budenz renounced communism, returned to the Roman Catholic Church, and became an anti-communist advocate. He became an informant for the FBI and testified as an expert witness at various trials of Communists and before many of the Senate and House committees that were formed to investigate Communists."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_F._Budenz

I'm going to be spending a lot of time on tineye.com...

".... On college and university campuses around the country, students are exposed to challenging new ideas, guided by well-trained professional scholars who take pride in their craft and are excited to introduce students to the “life of the mind.” Are there exceptions to this general characterization? Seeing as how professors are human, of course there are exceptions, but they are few and far between. Unfortunately, ultraconservative critics of the academy have been nothing if not persistent in getting their message of the “liberal bias” of the academy into the public sphere."

"...challenging new ideas, guided by well-trained professional scholars "

ahh to be about a raid
of one of these fine establishments

desultory pillage rapine
wanton destruction
contrived conflagration
the removal of an occasional
professorial ear ...
makes a brute's heart
rise to a tenor's song of delight

Probably those represented in the first block quote are fulfilling some kind of neoliberal agenda since tenured professors (along with doctors and others in the professional/managerial class) probably aren't necessary (in their present privileged form) for the elite to thrive. And the pwogs, since they generally belong to the professional/managerial class, are understandably worried about this development--it's not necessarily that they are fools who misunderstand what the education industry actually amounts to.

But of course whatever can hasten the demise of Hackademia I am well in favor of.

Looks like a young Henry the K, to me.

"Louis Budenz is an interesting character"

best line here at SMBIVA in maybe three
or five weeks

Steve Allen -- but of course he was a hipster not a professor.

I sense a lot of former, would-have-been, or almost were academics on this site. I'm one myself. I don't resent the ones who made it. Henry Smith, professor of American Lit at Berkeley, said what it took to become chairman of the department was a thick skin. Maybe it's not their mission in life, but universities do manage to harbor coteries of genius, non-conformists and left thinkers, in their midst. Jonathan Nitzan at the U. of Toronto comes to mind.

The attack on education is not aimed at the elite schools, but the state universities and colleges where working class kids have been able to improve their skills and get a chance to move upwards. Of course we don't need working class kids anymore, especially educated ones, but that's not something to laugh about.

Mr. Conklin?

"Maybe it's not their mission in life, but universities do manage to harbor coteries of genius, non-conformists and left thinkers, in their midst. Jonathan Nitzan at the U. of Toronto comes to mind."

I think he's actually at York. They have a clique of marxists there associated with Leo Panitch.

UofT is pretty thin on radical thinkers. I think that most of the left wing there are either middle-of-the-road pwogs or continental philosophy/critical literary theory types.

Doesn't this persuade? Everything but the swept back mane.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_qFgmPelbHLU/S2ltApuG4hI/AAAAAAAADLY/TDq4pLf9rBU/s1600-h/dave+garrowat

... and the curled lip, and the shrugged shoulders, and the heavy eyelids, and the upturned palm. I see what you're getting at, but Garroway was a benign avuncular figure, and Professor Comintern is not only a menacing figure, he might have stepped out of the pages of Der Sturmer into a Robert Hall suit and a Land Grant classroom. In some ways things really have changed for the better in this benighted land of ours: you wouldn't see something like this now.

I wish you hadn't mentioned Robert Hall .... it dredged up a jingle I had not thought of for about 45-50 years... 'Robert Hall... this season.... will show you the reason... low overhead... da da dadot ... low overhead'

maybe if I turn up the Scarlatti real loud.....

This is a very low order of debate. It should be painfully obvious that this is not about. Is tenure responsible for the hellishness of contemporary academic bureaucracy? Or is are the attempts to strap it to the wheel of neo-liberal managerialism and 'efficiency'? Undoubtedly, many of the academic proles who

"The intellectuals are parasites!" Well, that can sound leftist I suppose, but it is being sung to a deeply reactionary tune this time.

"Now this analogy seems a little forced. Cutting "education" is arguably more like cutting the police budget, or the military budget. Pensions put money in people's pockets, and vacations give them leisure, but "education" as we know it takes money out of people's pockets and deprives them of what little leisure they have."

I utterly agree that education today is largely a manufacturing of consent, but it is also one of the few fields where that consent is challenged. Do you really think that cutting education budgets will translate to increased expenditure on welfare or increased leisure? Or, considering the forces that. To have an education system that was a more pleasurable experience and was cheaper would require massive investment - and the handing over of control to student/faculty bodies directly. Arguments about decadent intellectuals stealing the people's bread take us further from this, not closer.

You know what forces distort the education system. And you must surely see that the attacks being launched from 'liberal' sectors are in alliance with those forces. You are also aware that the students have to be there because of the constricting actions of those forces on their own lives: because without it they would have even more dead-end prospects, and scarcely any opportunity to scrape up the strands of cultural provenance not commodified and bastardised by the culture industry. And no place to ask questions.

The standard of intellectual inquiry and critical thinking in contemporary institutions is staggeringly bad: but this is precisely because such things are considered to be useless fripperies that cause trouble

What is your view of an ideal world? A free cheque and a holiday? And the professors are the ones who are parasites! In any case, if you truly believe this line of argument brings that dream closer to reality, by all means pursue. If however, you truly want to consider.

By all means the radical destruction of the academy and its bureaucracy: But what to put in its place? We know that, at the moment, any attack on 'bureaucracy' would be translated into 'marketisation' and a destruction of free enquiry to supposed 'economics'.

Everything written here suggests you and the majority of the commenters could easily find yourselves on the side of management, bureaucrats and consultants when it comes to a struggle like the one in Middlesex, in England:

http://savemdxphil.com/

http://thethirdestate.net/2010/04/middlesex-university-shamefully-cuts-philosophy-department/

Thanks, FB, for the correction on Nitzan. A "marxist clique" anywhere is not to be sneered at. There was a marxist/situationist clique at Cal Berkeley a few years ago, called Retort, which published a short work on the meaning of 9-11 called "Afflicted Powers" -- still the most interesting analysis of that event I've read.

What is your view of an ideal world? A free cheque and a holiday?

Yes. The basic income cheque and extended holidays are absolutely essential. The academic Stakhanovites will still want to parse blogs for signs of moral turpitude, but even Utopia has its little problems.

Well played, Al, well played.

"Everything written here suggests you and the majority of the commenters could easily find yourselves on the side of management, bureaucrats and consultants when it comes to a struggle like the one in Middlesex, in England:"

You're probably right about that too. I could give a fuck less about that or any other continental philosophy department closing, and so in that sense I would find myself on the side of management. I can't seem to muster up the outrage of k-punk et al. Maybe I need to find a few more spooky photographs for my "hauntology" collection, or whatever other dumb-as-rocks fad is big in the continental scene these days.

FB: Am I hearing a trace of anti-intellectualism in your comments? The ratio of radicals to centrist and conservatives in academia is about the same as it is in the general population. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Senecal, that's a fair point. I'll echo MJS for a bit and say that the worst problem is the top-heavy administrative sector. They set the institutional pace and they are the ones in charge of turning interested, interesting people into time-serving, child-grinding hacks. I've yet to see a school where the teachers themselves couldn't handle all the real institutional coordination needs. For the most part, that's how it plays out anyway. Teachers who are at liberty to recruit students' parents. their own friends and knowledgeable visiting instructors do a splendid job.

FB, I'd forgotten about hauntology. Little more need be said against philosophy departments. The hermeneutics of the vampire rabbit is its own indictment.

I'd actually go even farther than Al. I kind of regret the dissolution of the monasteries, and economic efficiency holds no charms for me. I wouldn't mind if we kept as many academics as we have now, entirely at the public charge, if all they were doing was teaching -- if they lectured on a given subject at a given time and place to whoever showed up, and left it at that. Kind of like mediaeval universities. There's certainly a place for that dish on the menu of my own particular cookshop of the future.

What I object to is actually existing "education", which is half an arm of the indoctrination sector and half an arm of the enforcement sector, and operates largely to legitimize inequality under the rubric of meritocracy.

Get rid of degrees and grades and transcripts -- not to mention administrators -- and I will love the profs like a brother. I might even try to become one.

However, since my Utopia seems not to be on anybody's agenda, I can't deplore the current assault on the existing Penal Colony machinery.

"FB: Am I hearing a trace of anti-intellectualism in your comments?"

It wasn't intended. I was just griping about pomos. Disliking zizek/badiou/baudrillard/ballard/derrida/etc. is not anti-intellectualism. Their proponents do seem particularly quick with that accusation anytime doubts about continental philosophy/critical theory are expressed.

Order of evaluation matters, as so often. (anti-intellectual)-ism != anti-(intellectual-ism).