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September 19, 2005
Academic Bullies
AcademicElephant brings us a cautionary tale that illustrates the wisdom of her decision to maintain anonymity as a blogger. She relates that Brian Leitner, who holds an endowed chair in law and is also a professor of philosophy at the University of Texas, was presumably offended by a comment to his blog made by a graduate philosophy student. The student writes his own blog The Good and the Right, and he made the mistake of indicating his upcoming attendance at an academic conference. The exalted tenured professor, panties thoroughly in a wad, commented:
So a rude, reactionary and not very bright Emory grad student will be attending conferences in Madison this weekend. I’ll have to ask my friends to look for you, you are a piece of work.
What blatant nonsense--as the author of The Good and the Right points out, Leitner regularly spews out the most vile ad hominem diatribes against the Bush administration; that's his right, of course, but for Leitner to accuse anyone of "rudeness" is hypocritical in the extreme. AcademicElephant concludes:
For me, this episode reveals that the "heavy hitters" in academia are prepared to hold no punches in defending the ivory tower as liberal turf. They have lost sight of the fact that presenting contrasting viewpoints is one of the fundamental roles of the academy. Intimidating junior scholars who dare to criticize your work isn't a defense of your position, it's intellectual thuggery. [...]
In my post on the "Intellectual Dishonesty of Michael Moore", I wrote that constructive criticism (or presenting contrasting viewpoints, for that matter) was not a goal of those on the Left. As Stephen R.C. Hicks points out in his marvelous book Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault:
The postmodernists find themselves confronting a world dominated by liberalism and capitalism, by science and technology, by people who still believe in reality, in reason, and in the greatness of human potential. The world they said was impossible and destructive has both come to be and is flourishing. The heirs of the Enlightenment are running the world, and they have marginalized the postmodernists to the academy. (1)
The bullying tactics of these academic enforcers of the postmodern party line are a worthy target of the new media. I hope blogs like Elephants in Academia and The Good and the Right keep the inside information flowing--it's vital to winning this battle to get reasoned debate and honest scholarship reestablished in the academy.
(1)Stephen R.C. Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Scholargy Publishing, 2004), p. 198.
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» Vile and Hypocritical from Brian Leiter, Academic Thug
This blogger comments on Brian Leiter's vile behavior and hypocrisy. One wonders what Leiter hopes to accomplish by being so vicious. It's not...
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Comments
Thanks Jeff--the more people who see this the better. AE
Posted by: AcademicElephant at September 19, 2005 09:58 PM
