Coming February 6, 2024 . . .
MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE
by Michael Wolraich
Pre-order at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop
Coming February 6, 2024 . . . MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE by Michael Wolraich Pre-order at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop |
If our university community opposes racism, sexism, and heterosexism, why should we put up with research that counters our goals simply in the name of “academic freedom”?
Comments
Have not decided if this is snark (opposing heterosexism?) but am leaning toward NOT after checking the bio and oeuvre of the author but there is more than enough snark in the comments to compensate.
by EmmaZahn on Mon, 02/24/2014 - 2:11pm
The first 50 or so comments disagreeing, starting with Libtard's about Galileo (botti's about Lysenkoism is also very good,) have got it right.
Plus I will add that Korn wanders into a kind of Postmodernist claptrap to confuse the issue. Vaguely suggesting along the lines that there's academic politics involved in what papers get published and what research gets funded, so why not go all the way and make sure that all the stuff they do is agreeable to what kind of university we want it to be, whoever "we" is. The problem is: those are unfortunate things that happen which work against academic freedom, and no one for the principle of academic freedom purports they are good things, but rather that those are bad things that universities should always be trying as much as is humanly possible to guard against!
Of course we all know that there are liberally-biased universities and conservatively-biased universities, religion-biased universities and science-biased universities, and afro-amerocentric-biased universities, all kinds of biases about what kind of label the powers-that-be want to project and market to prospective students, faculty and the rest of the world. But does that mean the ideal should be to proudly go whole hog along those lines and just make them all heavily ideological? Not unless you want to have to have people attend like 20 universities to get a decent varied education!
Plus Korn confuses the issue further with adding the idea of boycott against Israeli academics. The suggested boycott of Israeli academics is not against their individual theories or work on classical music, quantum physics or gender bias or whatever, it is about putting pressure on the nation state they live in. And that's very far from what the rest of her essay is about.
P.S. Individual students can always "boycott" a professor by not taking their courses. And groups of students should always be able to protest a professor's theories, it is not even necessary to have the chops to do contrary scholarly work.
by artappraiser on Mon, 02/24/2014 - 2:44pm
At least two-thirds of those disagreeing with Korn are people I would not want to acknowledge as being on my side. I thought that Libtard was exactly right, but it seemed to me that most of the dissenters were dissenting on the idea that no, whites really are superior, so that's why you have to suppress the research, but you shouldn't because it's true that whites are superior. As I said, not people I would want to represent my "side", which is simply that we should not suppress uncomfortable research just because it's uncomfortable. We should vigorously point out why it's wrong (when it is), and we can even be political about how much effort we put into doing so, but we should argue based on truth, not silence.
by Verified Atheist on Mon, 02/24/2014 - 7:42pm