Sometimes people get riled up or feel uncomfortable when they confront an inconvenient truth. Encouraging people to think and to question is our job as educators and it should be the job of journalists and opinion-makers. The once proud profession of journalism has become increasingly a world of stenographers to power and on radio and TV, a world of pundits and yelling contests. There was a time when the iconic newsman or woman as investigators, digging for the truth, was not merely a comic book hero. Watergate and Bob Woodward before he sold himself for access to the corridors of power seems a distant memory now.
Today, the Washington Post that dared to antagonize the Nixon White House and breached a barrier that the New York Times wouldn’t continues to attack Joseph Wilson as if he’s to blame for the Iraq War and syndicates the horrid ideas of Michael Kinsley who on November 8 claimed without a trace of irony that Lawrence Summers, Obama’s appointment for heading up the White House’s Economic Council, was right to assert in a memo that he signed that “the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.”
Says Kinsley, who used to play the “liberal” on CNN’s Crossfire: “If an industrial plant that causes pollution is going to be built somewhere, it ought to be built where life is worth less. This sounds brutal, but it isn't.”
Kinsley is not a liberal. He is a neoliberal. Look around you at the world that neoliberalism has wrought: tens and hundreds of billions being disbursed like candy from Santa’s sleigh to the leaders of the capitalist corporate world who have driven us collectively into the gulch, while the average person wonders how they’ll pay their medical bills, worries that they can’t find a job or are about to lose their job, millions of them losing their homes, and through relatives or friends, finding out firsthand how cheap their lives are as soldiers from the lofty “homo economicus” perspective of the Kinsleys and Summers of the world.
Encouraging students to complain about being brought face to face with truths that they didn’t know - and/or truths that they find discomforting or annoying or personally affronting of their lifestyle or belief systems - sabotages what education is all about. It creates, as Horowitz intends, an atmosphere in which faculty are afraid to offend students’ sensibilities, lest they lose their jobs.
What are you being educated in, if you’re not being educated? Who’s in charge if the full-grown adults don’t take charge?
Opposite Poles of the Same Stupidity
What these two stories have in common – Matthew Miller’s OpEd and the institutionalization of student complaints against professors who “stray” - is the preservation of privilege and insularity by attempting to muzzle those who have truths or at least alternative ways of considering things to reveal. On the one hand, Miller wants the prerogatives of high office to be protected against criticism by former officials and on the other hand, several universities want to preserve the insularity of their students who might – lord save us - be exposed to material that is “one sided” or not sufficiently “germane” to the course subject matter. Anything but that!
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