When teaching the liberal arts becomes an un-American activity

[babylonsister]

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/5904

When teaching the liberal arts becomes an un-American activity
by Pierre Tristam | Mar 6 2007 - 3:02pm

There was a time when members of Congress felt comfortable sitting around their committee tables judging how citizens should think. Those were the days of the House Un-American Activities Committee and the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations, when people suspected of "subversion" or communism would be impulsively investigated, summoned to committee hearings, sometimes publicly and infamously browbeaten by the likes of Sen. Joe McCarthy.

Those days are gone. The habit of attacking people for being "un-American" isn't. Beginning in the late 1980s with the publication of Allan Bloom's "The Closing of the American Mind" -- which the late historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called "that murky and pretentious book . . . about the degradation of American culture" -- conservatives have been complaining that American universities are failing students for being too subversive, too liberal, too un-American.

Remember the wars over "political correctness" in the early 1990s? "On one side," the book critic Michiko Kakutani wrote in 1992, "are the radicals, who argue that traditional courses at American universities have been unjustly dominated by the culture of white males. . . . On the other side are the traditionalists, who argue that the radicals have subordinated the teaching of the humanities to political imperatives, substituting ethnic cheerleading for objective standards of excellence."

Oddly enough, this (I think fake and sensational) division of American values between the "radicals" (or "secularists") and the "traditionalists" is at the heart of best-selling books like "Culture Warrior," the latest of many screeds by Bill O'Reilly -- the television shout-show host -- and many others to decry the degradation of American culture. The groupthink machinery that produces the books, like the Fox News network or its radio mutants, could be dismissed as the entertaining bilge of any open society. Then again, the conservative alarmists have been screaming about the degradation of American culture for two decades even as Congress, the presidency, the Supreme Court, the media and even Hollywood have all shifted rightward. So they have a valid point: degradation indeed.

But what to do when the bilge becomes grist for public intimidation, through the Internet, of "un-American" professors, or proposed legislation that would institutionalize ideological litmus-tests of professors and corrode academic freedom in the very name of academic freedom? That's the push behind organizations like "Students for Academic Freedom," a creation of right-wing ideologue David Horowitz. The rhetorical similarities between the language and methods of the House Un-American Activities Committee and the words and methods of Horowitz and the O'Reilly brigades are a study in mimicry.

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[msongs]

1. the bible is literally true. that's all you need to teach and learn :-) nt

[niyad]

2. k & r!!

[no_hypocrisy]

3. Having attended and graduated from a small independent liberal arts

women's college in Virginia, I believe that the ultimate consequence of the variety of courses that I took (and some that I wish I took) is an insatiable curiosity and a humility toward all that I don't yet know or know well enough. I studied music, three languages, European history, deductive logic, chemistry, literature, modern dance, etc., etc. But more importantly, my professors CHALLENGED what I learned. Passive absorption wasn't enough. You had to think critically and argue, be responsible for your own learning.

I can see why some sectors could see this as dangerous thinking and antithetical toward a "united" America.

[SharonAnn]

4. I remeber taking an elective "The Culture in Cinema" because I had to have an arts elective.

I thought, how hard can it be? Watch some movies, write some papers, go to bed early. And I can write a paper practically in my sleep.

Well, I found that I really learned a lot. There's all the cinematic technique stuff, but really paying attention to a film and what the author/director are trying to say, brought a lot of heavy thinking. Meaning of life. Social and cultural values. Quality of life. The morals of people. The morals of society. And on, and on. Oh, and we had to discuss it, argue it, and write about it.

I really had my eyes opened. So, I took some literature classes, a class on science and its impact on culture and society, etc. Wow!

Now, keep in mind that I had 30 years programming experience, had taken so many college level and industry technical, science, and math courses that I couldn't count them. I had very analytical thinking, which I still have.

But now I know there's another dimension to knowledge. And it's necessary for our lives to have meaning.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

5. Increasingly, our society does not value that kind of education

Corporations want employees with business skills and nothing else, certainly not employees who will think and question and not be afraid to disagree with the boss.

[tom_paine]

6. Kicked

:kick: