In article <4840F536.9040307@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
Dan Clore <clore@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> http://tinyurl.com/4zatta
> The smog of academic consensus
> By Crispin Sartwell
> Special to the Los Angeles Times
> Saturday, May 31, 2008
>
> That the University of Colorado is raising $9 million to endow a
> professor of conservative studies is rather delicious in its ironies. It
> smacks of affirmative action and casts conservatism in the syntax of
> departments decried by conservatives for decades: women's studies, gay
> studies, African-American studies, Chicano studies and so on.
>
> Furthermore, the idea of affirmative action for conservatives seems
> gratuitous. These other groups may be oppressed, but conservatives run
> whole wars, black site prisons, sprawling multinational cor****ations. In
> fact, if these other groups are oppressed, it's conservatives who are
> the oppressors, which may render faculty meetings a bit tense.
>
> But as an academic who is neither a liberal nor a conservative
> (anarchism has its privileges), let me tell you why I think a "professor
> of conservative thought and policy" in Colorado, or anywhere else, is
> not such a bad idea.
Conservatives and conservatism certainly ought to
be studied, but first it will be necessary for the
University to determine what the word "conservative"
and its derivatives mean. In American political
discourse, they are used in wildly divergent and
contradictory ways. I wonder how they're going to
resolve this issue, since any conservatives left
out are going to be infuriated. They may require
a professor -- or a department -- for each
subgroup.
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