March 8, 2006
America's Own Cartoon Flare-Up
By Froma
Harrop
America has had its
own little cartoon flare-up. The subject matter is "biased
professors." The conservative campaign against these enemies
of the people has gained a second wind with the recent forced
resignation of Harvard's president. The angry ones are calling
on government to step in and stop colleges that receive taxpayer
money from "indoctrinating" students in the wiles of
liberalism.
A couple of things
differentiate this culture war from the Muslim riots over the
unflattering depictions of Muhammad. The obvious one is that the
American version is not violent. In this country, political resentments
get aired on talk shows until the outrage mellows into stupefaction.
For this service, our media deserve thanks.
The other interesting
difference is the source of the cartoons. Muslims were incensed
by cartoons created by Europeans. In the American case, the people
who are complaining also drew the cartoons.
What the cultural
warriors do is scour this big country for the odd professor who
says profoundly stupid anti-American things and turn him into
a caricature of liberal academia. They distribute their comic-strip
story of a professoriate in full sedition, then implore lawmakers
to micro-manage the hiring at colleges.
You could
smell Roger the Rat when anti-liberal crusader David Horowitz,
in his umpteenth essay on the topic, unburdened himself in USA
Today with the following: "There are too many people
like Ward Churchill -- the University of Colorado professor who
compared 9-11 victims with Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann --
on faculties across the nation. They confuse their classrooms
with a political soapbox."
My opinion of Ward
Churchill is that he is a nut job. But Horowitz and the other
echoers never come up with the names of "many people like
Ward Churchill." It's always Ward Churchill, and they repeat
his demented thoughts unto Google exhaustion. They sometimes come
up with other left-wing professors who say provocative things,
but most of them are contenders in rational debate, who don't
deserve to have Ward Churchill hung around their necks.
The campaign was
running out of gas when the talkative Lawrence Summers was relieved
of his job at Harvard University. The warriors used the opportunity
to add a few more miles to their sputtering crusade. They re-released
earlier charges that the liberals at Harvard were persecuting
a good man for speaking his mind.
Now no one would
deny Summers his First Amendment rights to say that women may
be genetically handicapped in the sciences, or to reprimand a
leading black scholar for making rap recordings. The question
is whether he can say these things and remain president of Harvard
University.
Summers is a smart
guy, but not smart enough to recognize that the academic stars
he managed also think they are brilliant. Another failing was
his lack of organization. Even people who liked him personally
felt frustrated by his management style. Had Summers performed
similarly as chief executive of Cooper Tire & Rubber, he would
have been canned.
Speaking of corporations:
If, as some cultural conservatives insist, politicians should
monitor political leanings at universities because they receive
government support, why not extend that supervision to all companies
accepting taxpayer dollars?
In 2005, Harvard
received $500 million in federal research grants, plus a few million
more through student aid. But defense contractor Lockheed Martin
obtained $6 billion in federal contracts. I want to know how many
liberals populate Lockheed's executive suite.
Actually, I don't
want to know. I imagine that close to no liberals run America's
defense companies, and I don't have a problem with that. Defense
contractors tend to be culturally conservative, and universities
tend to be liberal. That's the way it is.
Nonetheless, one
conservative group has come out with an industry-specific "Academic
Bill of Rights." It requires universities to "maintain
political pluralism and diversity." I await a comedy channel
parody that applies the Academic Bill of Rights to Dick Cheney's
old boardroom at Halliburton, a prodigious taker of taxpayer money.
Someone who did the
analysis would almost certainly find more conservatives teaching
at Harvard than liberals managing at Halliburton. The cartoon
version of academia doesn't reflect these realities. And that's
why the culture warriors have to draw their own cartoons.
Copyright
2006 Creators Syndicate
