Regarding a lack of apology from Houston Baker and Duke administators, VDH accuses:
Because deeply entrenched among the Left is a notion of moral justice that transcends the law and is now to be adjudicated by elites versed in race/class/gender theories. In this way of thinking the “rape” is just a matter of semantics, the law an obstruction to the larger question still unresolved: a poor black woman performed sexually for white rich males.
De facto this is an indictment of our entire male-dominated capitalist system that put the poor, the female, the person of color in bondage to the white, male and wealthy.
In that prism, technicalities of law don’t matter and surely don’t address these larger pathologies so endemic in the United States, against which the university nearly alone exists to combat. That the “victim” lied under oath, ruined the reputations of innocents, was on drugs, was engaged in promiscuous sexual activity, and had a criminal record is simply proof of her victim status. This notion of a higher law unto themselves is used frequently by Left and Right, it is true, but never in such an injurious or hypocritical fashion as by the academic Left that on campuses has developed a real contempt for our laws of free speech and due process—again, seen as impediments to their version of heaven on earth.
Ouch that smarts. But yeah.
I was listening to Chomsky on the Prager show the other day and something occurred to me that I never really thought about before. When academics get involved with political issues they are never really called on on the democratic merits of their positions. This is tangential to the particulars about the Duke Rape Case, but I sense a pattern here too.
What Chomsky asserted was that the US is broken and anti-democratic with regard to the prosecution, nay the very existence of the the Bush policy in Iraq. He ably argues that the public opinion which is being ignored by the foreign policy wonks of the Administration are demonstrating their ability to come up with solutions to which our governement is demonstrably unresponsive. And so he suggests that America itself fulfills many of the criteria of a failed state - the same ones we pitch at Iran, for example.
Just as the devil can quote the Bible to suit his purposes, academics can quote polls. But if we are to take them seriously with regard to the viability of pursued solutions we should also ask upon what grounds they make these claims. Who died and elected Chomsky king? It had to be somebody because he wasn't elected. In fact academics aren't elected by anyone. There is few institutions who demonstrate a contempt for popular opinion as a properly run university. Or at least that's what I understand to be true about the tenure process. You aren't elected, you are nominated and maybe 12 people own you for 6 years and then you are promoted. Where in academia, are any pontificating professors speaking from the benefit of a democratic mandate? If a campus the size of say... Virginia Tech has 26K students, the population of a small town, when would an average 40% voter turnout decide tenure of a professor? You'd need at least 5 thousand or so votes to be appointed for life. It will never happen.
It never happens because we have agreed to be bound by rules of expertise which are not subject to public debate, and every college student buys into that and accepts those rules. No academic granted tenure has ever been removed by democratic mandate. It simply doesn't apply, and for good reason.
What I'm saying is simply this. There are areas in which academics are faulty and they are good for what they are good for. But they should acknowlege (pardon my Lacanian French) the regimes of truth under which they serve and stop pretending that they have any responsibility towards the politics of the general public. Most professors and academics could not get elected dogcatcher, and for good reason. The last thing we need, or should expect from them is some authority on democratic politics.
With that in mind it should be expected that their moral universe is constrained, and that those who pretend to speak with the authority of the university should beware of the ground upon which they tread. They may well speak for the university, but their authority is only academic. What works in that moral universe of liberal free-thinking should not be mistaken for the currency of political thought in a free society. They will always be outvoted and more importantly, irresponsible to the public. Nobody's head rolls at the U. when they run counter to the political calculations of parties and public partisans. Moreover they do not enact, practice or defend the law. VDH is correct in his perception that they may decide to defend a certain ethos in the context of a campus community, but that is not society and the relationship between academics and students is not a relationship of equals. Nor, I would hasten to add, is it one that most students or professors would like to have made permanent. It is why they call that which is outside of academia 'the real world'. The ethics and relationships of college don't work in the real world.
I wouldn't suggest that professors and academics are dysfunctional in the real world or that there are not exceptions to this rule. I am saying that academia is not a republic and chances are that they will be more out of step than instep with the mind of the nation.
The same thing goes, by the way, for the military. Do what you do best and leave the political nuances to the political work of the public.
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