:: blame the extended gestation.... ::

:: Sunday, November 28, 2004 ::

Leiter on George Will on academia
Leiter Reports: Black is White
One of the most disappointing features of actually making it to University was the fact that it wasn't the leftist paradise I was led to believe by the mass media. Instead I found myself in a intellectually tough free-zone of independent thought as long as you can back it up. George Will is just playing up to his readers in Kansas who already believe Universitys are left wing hell holes. Leiter puts it nicely:

So here's what things look like once you've fallen through the looking glass: a representative of the monochrome mass media--where diversity means a political spectrum so narrow that no social democrat, socialist, or genuine libertarian finds a regular home--has the audacity to suggest that the only institution where genuine intellectual diversity in the United States still exists (where it is possible to teach, as I do [and my situation is not atypical], with Burkean conservatives, free market utopians, socialists, social democrats, Clintonite democrats, and regular 'ole boring liberals) lacks diversity of "thought"! Perhaps never having had one, he doesn't recognize where it still exists.

But let us translate: what Mr. Will really means is that universities are places where the banalities and misinformation which are the lifeblood of the mass media are not taken seriously; where people who think Iraq attacked the World Trade Center have a tough time holding their own in grown-up conversation; where apologists for state terror have to confront the arguments of those who know an apology for state terror when they see it; where lies about economic and social policy are perceived as lies, and made to answer to facts and evidence; where, in short, the parochial smugness of an effete little simpleton like George Will (and his many clones who constitute the "diversity" of the mass media) is perceived as exactly that.

:: Jim Nichols 11/28/2004 05:23:00 PM [+] ::
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