Liberals Miffed As Canine Cultural Studies Wins Course Of The Month - Road to the Middle Class

LIBERALS LIKE to say that university faculties are overwhelmingly liberal because liberals are just more intelligent. Naturally you would find more liberal professors than conservative ones, they tell us.

It is certainly true that no conservative could write a fictional parody of liberal academic antics that could beat the real thing. Truth is stranger than fiction, especially at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

The folks at John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy have decided unilaterally that they have a public duty to audit the goings-on at UNC-Chapel Hill. So they billed �Canine Cultural Studies� on their web site as Course of the Month, according to Jane Stancill.

Professor Alice Kuzniar was shocked to be lampooned by the conservative think tank.

"I feel it's such an incredible misrepresentation of what we're doing in the classroom," she said. "We're reading Virginia Woolf. We're reading Franz Kafka."

That is pretty amazing. You�d think that the modern college student would be hardly up to the challenge of Woolf and Kafka. In any case, the UNC-CH community of students and faculty are really riled up about the Pope Center.

Emotions are so strong that some want the university to refuse a potential multimillion-dollar grant by the related John William Pope Foundation.

Well, you see, the Pope Center wants to give money with strings attached. This year it gave money to the university to develop courses �that explore relationships between economics and politics in free societies.� Now they are mulling a grant to fund �a minor in Western culture studies.� No wonder that Professor Judith Bennett fears that if the money goes through she will feel that:

"Art Pope is sitting in the back of the classroom."

"If this program goes through, I would feel vulnerable to a whole new level of hostile surveillance," she said.

There�s no question that these tough hard-nosed feminist profs really know how to turn the clock back and act just like fluttering Victorian debutantes—when it serves their purposes.

Sphere: Related Content |

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

TAGS

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Hugo on Genius

“Tear down theory, poetic systems� No more rules, no more models� Genius conjures up rather than learns� ” —Victor Hugo
C�sar Gra�a, Bohemian versus Bourgeois

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Religion, Property, and Family

But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family. Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

mysql close 0