Another day, another liberal professor....

Quote of the Day/Week/Millenium:

I would rather have a nod from an American, than a snuff-box from an emperor. ~Lord Byron

If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.

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Name: Sian
I paint, write, and dance. Also cook vegetarian food.

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Wednesday, 05 October 2005

Another day, another liberal professor....

What is it that makes professors think that just because I'm paying to take their class that I want to hear their politics day in and day out? What I'd really like to know is exactly how he thinks that his opinions on politics of 2005 relate to Republican Rome? Bronze Age Greece? Any part of the Mediterranean prior to Alexander the Great? Actually, the general premise is that Rome under Sulla was led by corrupt leaders and the United States is led by Conservatives. Then he names the particular conservatives that he-- as a liberal--considers to be corrupt.

So, here I am, venting my political frustrations to my non-captive audience.

This isn't the first liberal professor I've ever had. I think we can all agree that the Vietnam War ensured that there would be far more liberals on campus than conservatives for at least a generation. After all, isn't that the prefered draft dodge of upper class, educated liberals? Go to college and don't serve your country. I'm sure a lot of people got through post-doctoral training on the draft dodge plan.

The truth is that the colleges and universities of the world--like politics, in general-- are cyclical, and we happen to be seeing the end of the liberal part of the cycle. Higher education has reached its liberal saturation point, and there's just nowhere to cram one more liberal. We have reached the point that in order to find a new or exciting opinion, idea, or belief structure, it has to be conservative. There are already too many professors pushing the happy beatnick bohemian intellectual brand. We've heard it before. We've heard it repeatedly. We're sick of paying for it. The early adaptors--the liberals who originally thought this stuff up, the ones who may, or may not have had good reasons for it--are now retiring, and dying off, and they have been for at least a couple of decades.

What we have left in the Universities are the posers, the late-comers, the liberals who got to the party a decade late because they heard there was some good weed. Listen to your aging-progressivist granny: doesn't it sound like she's describing a great party, when she talks about her protesting, liberal youth? Dude, you can get stoned without paying three hundred bucks a credit hour to do it.

The pendulum is swinging back the other way.

After you've taken just so many classes where the syllabus might as well read, "Toe the Party Line and Get An A," you begin to get angry. Once you've sat through "Revisionist History 101," and suffered through the "Diversity Requirement" at your school, you get sick of paying for the priveledge. Three Hundred Bucks a credit to sing "Hail the Flapping Armpit Hair?" Three Hundred Bucks a credit to take "Diversity 101" and learn not to hit?

Yeah. That coulda gone on forever and ever.