Here.
The New York Times has an interesting--if somewhat fawning--piece up about a new strategy conservatives are using to try to swing universities and colleges to the right (h/t thers at Obsidian Wings). My view on this enterprise can be summed up as you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. In other words you can pump money into organizations and try to prop up conservative college programs, but you can't really make the student buy your swill. Thers's view on the matter can be summed up as:
Conservative foundations and think-tankers and ideologues and busybodies have apparently decided to quit bitching about how The Liberal Academy is too liberal and instead are looking to toss heaps of cash at any perfesser who's willing to call Derrida a douchebag.
I'm going to put aside the rather overly-generous tone of the New York Timespiece. The key to this whole thing, and the part that made me giggle, is this:
“These are not ideological courses,” said James Piereson, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, which created the Veritas Fund for Higher Education to funnel donations to these sorts of projects. The initiatives are only political insofar as they “work against the thrust of programs and courses in gender, race and class studies, and postmodernism in general,” he said.
I could make a joke at this point about the ridiculousness of today's conservatives ridiculing postmodernism and identity politics, considering the entire conservative movement (or, at least the part that's in electoral politics) has fully embraced this philosophy. Conservatives have been exploiting identity politics--or some bastardized, overly pomo version of it--in order to win elections for at least a decade. Sarah Palin? George Bush's anti-elitism? The entire McCain campaign?
Whatever. This whole article reeks of the poor white men persecution complex that conservatives have inexplicable picked up. This is somewhat funny, though, I suppose, attacks on academic freedom really shouldn't be. Well, I report, you decide. Read the article for yourself. Just try to keep in mind the conservative movement's surface over substance campaign strategies when you do it. Then see if you can keep a straight face.
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