Years later, I met Mayor Lindsay when I had married and moved to the East Side. He was long out of office by then. One day, leaving church, I was having a hard time getting the baby carriage containing my daughter down the steep church steps. Mayor Lindsay saw the problem I was having, came over, took the carriage on his back, and basically carried it down the steps.

And he wasn’t even running for office!

Kinder and gentler days back then, I guess!!

Sounds like a good title for a memoir. And you’re correct. “Figure of speech” is a more accurate depiction of the “breathing the air” comment.

Of all the lefties I know, Geoff, you are probably the least angry and the least likely to become, in the words of Obama, “bitter.” You also have a excellent sense of humor (occasional madness notwithstanding!).

I guess I should thank everyone and just accept the conciliatory remarks — and let this ride, but after thinking about it for a while I decided to reply.

First off, it wasn’t a joke. It was a figure of speech. I wasn’t an English major, so forgive me that I can’t remember whether it was synecdoche or metonymy but it was intended as one or the other. My hope is that this will clarify what I was saying.

I’ve been grappling with “elitist” — it’s an easy term to throw around and I see a lot of it nowadays. In any conventional sense of the term “elite”, it would seem that G. W. Bush is the member of the elite (Andover, Yale, Harvard, etc.), not I.

If we’re talking about an elite of merit rather than inheritance, I’m pretty sure that I do not qualify either. I’m taking a biology course at Northwestern Community College right now in which I’m getting killed in terms of grades by people who have not had my “advantages” and who we can be thankful will be taking care of us in our old age.

I think the first part of my original post, in which I lauded professors who made us think about controversial matters without tipping their own personal hands, I HOPE that I addressed the subject of liberal or conservative censorship — both anathema. You don’t learn to think by learning to parrot the professor. Ever. You may get a high grade by doing so, but that’s the tragedy of the whole thing, whether the censor is an evangelical college that simply doesn’t consider even inviting someone who doesn’t buy into their world view, or whether it is a more left wing (?) institution who condescends to invite someone to speak for the “other side”.

Regarding Janice’s depiction of me as “hate filled” and “enraged” there’s not really a lot I can say. In my life I’ve been a youthful protestor, an Army officer, a business functionary, a Republican committeeman (okay, it was in NYC), and now have settled into the role of a liberal — maybe that happened when my first Social Security check arrived. Occasionally I’ve been mad as hell, but the terms you chose are not ones that resonate with me.

I guess the most accurate term might be “disappointed”. I’ll echo you, Janice: “Fight the brainwashing.”

Cheers!!

But back to Mr. Horowitz. Recommended reading if you want to educate yourself on the state of academia with regard to liberal bias is Mr. Horowitz’s The Professors. Pretty scary. My motto to students at all levels “fight the brainwashing”. Cheers.

I think it is a left-right issue now, in the sense that it’s the left that dominate academia at this time.

Consider the case of Univ of Illinois at Chicago’s Bill Ayers, the former SDS and Weather Underground radical, who is unrepentant about his violent past and is at the center of controversy over his association with Barack Obama.

It’s hard to believe that a guy like that with a similar right-wing past would be tolerated in the academy, but it barely makes a ripple in academic circles.

Janice,

Thanks for your comment. To be fair to Geoff, although he is a committed liberal, I really think he was joking with the “breathing our air” comment.

Actually, I think we all have something in common in recognizing the failures of the Bush administration …

I’ve had professors over the years whom I ultimately decided were in all parts of the political spectrum. The very best teachers were the ones who, 20 years after you took their course, you still did not know the personal politics of (sorry for the terrible sentence!). For the most part, they were able to create enough controversy that the students felt inclined to dig a little deeper into the subject.

There were also those who tried to achieve this but didn’t quite make it. Some were more successful than others. The ones who wore their hearts on their sleeves, politically speaking, tended to be the least successful.

Regarding the current administration and the activities in Kent today, I would hope that as many people on the right as on the left participated. If Bush has accomplished one thing for sure, it has been to discredit the economic theories of the conservatives — principally because his administration has mouthed conservatism while practicing self-enrichment. That’s not to mention their repression of science in the interest of payoffs, which ought to enrage the normally apolitical scientists in academe.

Horowitz would be very hard-pressed to approve the performance of this administration or to defend it. And there’s the crux of the matter — teachers and professors who recognize the current mess in Washington as something other than philosophical and speak up are branded as idealogues, when they are actually nothing more than moralists.