Do I. Talk. Like that?

Thanks to the Baltimore Sun, I have effectively demonstrated the best way to become a target of those who claim that the professoriate is left-leaning.

“This is do-it-yourself media,” says Alex Halavais, an assistant professor of communications at the University at Buffalo in New York. “People are doing this for fun. They’re not looking for any kind of profit. They have day jobs. But they’re willing to make time to do this. Even Marx said this was the one thing people had a natural interest in doing – producing things for themselves, being creative.”

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10 Comments

  1. Posted 1/18/2005 at 8:08 pm | Permalink

    ^^

  2. Posted 1/18/2005 at 10:38 pm | Permalink

    Just checking

  3. Posted 1/19/2005 at 1:38 am | Permalink

    What is the “party of the left in America” by Larry Elder? Is it a club only for left-handed people?

  4. Posted 1/19/2005 at 3:59 pm | Permalink

    Sometimes I’m quite happy to live in Europe (Germany) where we don’t have such organisations. Or at least no one cares about them…

  5. Chheng Hong
    Posted 1/19/2005 at 11:28 pm | Permalink

    Don’t left-handed people here form a club, union, or something like that?

  6. Chheng Hong
    Posted 1/19/2005 at 11:30 pm | Permalink

    OH, sorry I misunderstand Peter’s words, could you please delete my message? sorry about that…..>_<

  7. Posted 1/21/2005 at 12:20 am | Permalink

    But American academia is full of leftists and liberals. On that there should be no argument.

  8. Posted 1/21/2005 at 12:25 am | Permalink

    Well, you get a bunch of bright people who care about education together, and … ;)

  9. Posted 1/21/2005 at 5:37 pm | Permalink

    …and you should have diversity, reflective of the populace, unless something fishy is going on.

  10. Posted 1/21/2005 at 6:44 pm | Permalink

    Sure, it could be something fishy, but, you know, the law of parsimony tends to rule out a vast left-wing conspiracy. Seems simple enough to me:

    I teach at a public institution of learning. I make roughly half what I would if I were to take a job in the private sector. I tend to value things much more than money, and believe that privatized education is bad, as do most of my colleagues.

    It seems like a pretty simple calculus. If I am on the right, and I am bright, I am much more likely to go into business.

    I don’t see any good reason to have proportionate representation of political beleifs in education any more than I do cultural beliefs. I bet there are far fewer pro-wrestling fans than there are in the population as well, and I’m OK with that. I’m also OK with the fact that (and no, I have no evidence of this but would be very surprised if I were wrong) there tends to be a conservative monoculture in the financial industry.

    Finally, I urge you to consider that if the proportion of those on the left is different in universities and in the general population, perhaps it is not the university that needs changing. How many Americans think that evolution is “just a theory” with no basis in fact? While knowledge is never a one-way street, it seems clear to me that our job in the academy is to get people to think, and that is always a radical (and not little “c” conservative) idea.

One Trackback

  1. By Alex Halavais » iCult on 2/1/2005 at 8:30 pm

    […] iCult
    In the tradition of getting large sectors of the population mad at me, I’ve extended the Mac religious war into […]

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