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Now Elroy
Posted by Raven on February 25th, 2005
Oh sorry, I meant LeRoy Ward Churchill. You know-that feather lovin Indian dude. Yet once again we are learning new and exciting details about the great Buffalo warrior’s life. Did you know he’s an artist? He has some pretty amazing works. I am in awe.
Glenn wrote this for FOX a few years ago and maybe it’s time his honor Elroy read it. (isn’t LeRoy such an INDIAN name now?)
1. Cleverness isn’t everything: In the academic world, originality is prized, and cleverness is almost as good as originality. But cleverness is overrated. To argue (as Cornell historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg and women’s health advocate Jacquelyn Jackson did in the Boston Globe) that women who wear bikinis to be fashionable are somehow just as “trapped” by “cultural confines” as Afghan women who are forced to wear burqas on pain of lethal beatings may be clever, but it’s also wrong — absurdly wrong. Academics may appreciate the cleverness, but non-academics tend to focus on the “absurdly wrong” part. Not surprisingly, they also tend to lose respect for the people, institutions and disciplines that appear incapable of making straightforward, comparative judgements. Clever explanations for hypocrisy (on PC versus free speech, for example) don’t help, either.
2. Being contrary isn’t the same as being insightful: As I said, academics want to look original. Actually being original, however, is hard work. The second-raters, therefore, tend to look for ways of seeming original without doing the heavy lifting required to actually come up with something new. One way of doing this is to set yourself against whatever the popular view is in the hopes that others will mistake this for incisiveness. (This frequently works, since other people are often not willing to put in the necessary effort to tell the difference). But knee-jerk contrariness isn’t original — it’s just conformity in the opposite direction. After a while, this becomes obvious even to casual observers.
3. Professors aren’t aristocrats: Today’s academia is descended from the clerical scholars and courtier intellectuals of the middle ages. Those folks naturally identified with the princes and potentates who provided their funding. Today’s academics affect to identify with the working classes, but many of their attitudes — a contempt for popular culture, a low regard for business and commerce and a desire to set themselves apart from the common herd — are leftovers from a bygone era. There’s a reason why kings and princes are no longer found in our society; emulating them isn’t going to make you popular.
4. Professors aren’t saints, either: Academic work is, in my opinion, a noble calling, at least when it is done well. But engaging in a noble calling doesn’t necessarily make you noble. Too many professors seem to think otherwise, believing that because their work is good, they must be too, giving them a pass on examining their own actions and positions as critically as they examine those of others. Non-academics, however, aren’t buying this, nor should they.
February 25th, 2005 at 3:22 pm
Honors For The “Psych” Ward
Joel Mowbray from Town Hall has written piece on Ward Churchill. A lot has been said about this leftist whacko professor who wrote an essay about 9/11 in which he labeled 9/11 victims “little Eichmanns”. Here is a quote from Mowbray’s column:
T…
February 25th, 2005 at 6:01 pm
That is so funny. and they think he is an original. He is just a Zerox copy. Ran through several times to make him look old.
February 25th, 2005 at 6:21 pm
I want to take Churchill’s head and run it through a BIG copy machine a few hundred times; then see how he looks. What a duffus. What will we learn next about him? That he used to be a woman or something?
February 25th, 2005 at 8:22 pm
Raven we will never learn that he used to be a woman. Dont you know that the uglyiest woman in the world would look better then him even if she had buck teeth.