Roger Dodger

After Fontana Labs revealed that Ward Churchill doesn't actually have a Ph.D. and Henry Farrell cited sound data to prove that terrorists aren't grown in Western comp lit departments, it's hardly worth the bother to say that Roger Kimball, still beating the Churchill drum, is still wrong. Everybody else seems to be ignoring him, but since he's made considerably more noise about the faults of Western academia over the course of his career than a clamorous couple of Instapundit posts, I think his name should enter in the mix. Kimball's just as good as Glenn, too—look where Kimball can get to given one leftist screwball's ridiculousness:

[A]cademic freedom is not the same thing as free speech. It is a more limited freedom, designed to nurture intellectual integrity and to protect those engaged in intellectual inquiry from the intrusion of partisan passions. The very limitation of academic freedom is part of its strength. By excluding the political, it makes room for the pursuit of truth.

You always, always know that a critic is about to sell you some grade-A snake oil when he tells you that his opinion is free of politics. The only critics who use those terms are the ones whose principal occupation is the politics. It's in the name of "excluding the political" that conservatives cry foul when wonderful and fresh writers like Zora Neale Hurston edge out wonderful but exhausted writers like Ernest Hemingway from the modernist syllabus. What a critic like Roger Kimball wants you to believe is that a college education absolutely must cover every book that you cannot help but find otherwise on the shelves of Barnes & Noble. And that straying from the European canon in order to include forgotten, suppressed, rehabilitated, or outsider texts amounts to shoehorning art into the canon (which is, by the way, college course schedules we're talking about, frankly). And this interrupts the process by which universities stamp a uniform civic identity on American minds. As Kimball understands them, those minds, naked and unmyelinized before the age of 25, cry out for universities to protect their hosts from unkosher texts and reasonable car insurance rates.

Maybe he believes that student minds aren't up to the task of seeing the whole cloth and cutting away the bad. If they're unprepared to filter out Ward Churchill, I'm afraid that they're ill-prepared to handle the mind of Voltaire—but anyway, I'm sure that that's not Kimball's point. I think there's a meaty subtext to the academic freedom/freedom of speech distinction: Kimball implies some bizarre belief about whom a university ought to be allowed to employ. (At least I think that's where's he going; maybe you can tease some better sense out of, "I should think that freedom of speech still translates into a freedom from employing troglodytes.")

But as I said, it's hardly worth the bother—especially now that John Holbo has written the exhaustive rebuttal to this newest outbreak of anti-academia hysteria. Huzzah, JH.

Posted by Kriston at February 4, 2005 5:56 PM