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About ArmaVirumque ( AHR-mah wih-ROOM-kweh) In the Aeneid, the Roman poet Virgil sang of "arms and a man" (Arma virumque cano). Month in and month out, The New Criterion expounds with great clarity and wit on the art, culture, and political controversies of our times. With postings of reviews, essays, links, recs, and news, Armavirumque seeks to continue this mission in accordance with the timetable of the digital age. Recent posts
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Feb 07, 2005 01:52 PM by Stefan Beck
A fellow called Kriston, who wears glasses he found on the L Train, writes on his blog Grammar.police that "Roger Kimball, still beating the Churchill drum, is still wrong." Zounds! Surely Kriston isn’t defending Ward Churchill? Well, no. His argument, which I have heard elsewhere with minor variations, goes like this: Maybe he believes that student minds aren’t up to the task of seeing the whole cloth and cutting away the bad. If they’re unprepared to filter out Ward Churchill, I’m afraid that they’re ill-prepared to handle the mind of Voltaire--but anyway, I’m sure that that’s not Kimball’s point. I think there’s a meaty subtext to the academic freedom/freedom of speech distinction: Kimball implies some bizarre belief about whom a university ought to be allowed to employ.I’ve always said that when universities hire left-wing profs exclusively, they hurt their avowedly liberal students most. The right-wingers, we may safely assume, have been exposed to right-wing ideas, but the left-wing ones are receiving half an education, unless they go out of their way to supplement what they’re taught. I tried not to complain about my professors’ uniformly leftist bent--one way or another, I was getting both sides of the debate. Nevertheless, if Ward Chuchill had taught at my college, I’d certainly have complained. Why? Simple: a college education costs a lot. It’s the one commodity that, despite being preposterously expensive, is subject to virtually no quality controls. (That’s how come Shelby Grantham still works at my alma mater.) Give Ward Churchill’s now-infamous essay a read, and ask yourself whether this sputtering rant, replete with juvenile barbs ("Madeline Albright, squatting in her studio chair like Jaba [sic] the Hutt") but devoid of disinterested scholarship, is worth even a tiny fraction of the money paid to its author. If you’re fortunate enough to live in New York City, you can stroll down to Union Square on a Sunday afternoon and hear essentially the same thing, free of charge, screamed through a megaphone by some stoned and unwashed trustafarian. Yes, most students are capable of recognizing that Ward Churchill is not a serious scholar. So what? Should they pay thousands of dollars for this opportunity to test their judgment?
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