College Professors: A New Hate Target

Now that comprehensive immigration has been defeated, the right-wing is focusing more of their hate on college professors. Here's a rant about a college professor in New York by Jason Rantz of the Family Security Foundation that was posted on the TownHall.com site.

Something I hate more than the New York Times is the Los Angeles Times. Something I hate more than the LA Times is a professor who puts his or her politics and personal beliefs over the proper curriculum of the class. What I hate the most is when a major liberal propagandist newspaper celebrates selfish professors who bring their politics into a classroom that isn’t supposed to be about politics. Unfortunately, that’s what the LA Times did this past weekend.

Hate's an extremely flexible thing for the right. Depending on the news of the day, it shifts from blacks to gays to feminists to white liberals to Muslims to Mexican immigrants. Given the roulette wheel nature of right-wing hate, college professors were bound to become a primary target one of these days, and it looks like that day has arrived. The popular right-wing critic of academics David Horowitz has been campaigning for years to force colleges and universities to adapt an affirmative action program for right-wingers. More recently I've seen articles on the supposed dangers of parents sending their conservative students off to college and other articles about revoking tenure for college faculty.

The target of Jason Rantz' hatred is Steven Brodner, a professor at the School for Visual Arts in New York who made the Iraq War the focus of an art class. Rantz' idea is that art and politics are entirely different topics and that an artist should focus on "looking at things, finding the lines and shadows, and copying them onto a sheet of paper" while talking about the Iraq War should be limited to political scientists or even more narrowly, specialists in international relations.

Talk about naive definitions of art!

Actually, Prof. Brodner has exactly the right tone.

I felt that while they were in my class, students should focus on what I believe to be the most urgent issue of our time: the Iraq war.

Given that the Iraq war is "the most urgent issue of our time," organizing classes around war oriented themes is an appropriate way to enhance student interest in topics like painting, sculpture, literature, music, and even mathematics. Given the elements of social and political commentary in so much art-work, art professors probably should be introducing political issues into classes as a way of getting art students to think about subjects and potential subjects to address with their art pieces.

To be honest though, I wouldn't use the Iraq War as an organizing theme for my political theory classes. For the purposes of my teaching, I prefer themes that carry a lot of ambivalence. Students thus have to think out their positions on themes like "individualism" while learning the arguments of bell hooks, Locke, Plato, or Jesus. Given the ambivalence Kentucky students have about individualism, focusing on individualism is a good way to get them out of their comfort zone and encourage independence of thought. The same is not true of the Iraq War anymore. As urgent as the issue of the war is, a large majority of students have already made up their minds that the war is wrong and that Bush is an idiot. As a result, there's not enough ambivalence for the war to still be a useful theme.

In that sense, conservatives should appreciate the intensity with which Prof. Steven Brodner approaches the war. Most professors I know don't talk about the war because they think the war was an obvious mistake and failure and that talking about the war is boring. For a lot of people, the Iraq War is yesterday's news and saying something about the war is almost always a conversation killer. Conservatives should recognize that the common ground they share with Prof. Brodner in thinking that the war is still a live issue and appreciate the passion he still brings to it.

I certainly do.