Hey Professor! What do you profess?

Communications Professor Mellisa Click University of Missouri

No one pops out of a womb acting like a brat. It's a long, slow nurturing process by parents, teachers and administrators who are themselves brats. 

When über liberal Harvard law professor, Alan Dershowitz starts eating his liberal children, then you know there is a problem in later day liberalism. As he recently told Business Insider magazine; 

"The last thing these students want is diversity.  They may want superficial diversity, because for them diversity is a code word for 'more of us.' They don't want more conservatives, they don't want more white students, they don't want more heterosexuals."  (source: http://www.businessinsider.com/alan-dershowitz-thinks-student-protesters-dont-want-true-diversity-in-colleges-2015-11 )

Queer, is it not? Our current malaise about student protests suppressing free speech on, of all places, college campuses, needs explanatory context. We're blaming the wrong people. Let's be honest. We can't only blame the self-absorbed, narcissistic, easily offended students. We, administrators, faculty and parents, trained them that way. Notice I did not use the word educate. Indeed, when parents relinquish their child's discipline, in loco parentis, to a college or university, then the college or university is the main suspect we need interrogate when students become brats. 

From personal experience I can testify that this movement away from a duty to scholarship towards a desire to change society began in the late '60's. Today, many faculty see their role as social justice Mr.(s) 'fix-it' instead of scholars in their discipline. This is especially the case in the so-called 'social sciences' which, it turns out, are not so very scientific. If faculty see themselves as social justice field commanders, is it a wonder that students see themselves as social justice foot soldiers enforcing default liberalism? And just what is default liberalism you ask?  It's an invidious and insidious notion afoot in most  academic and millennial circles. That false notion claims that there are certain social dogmas one must believe if one is truly a modern, social justice minded professor, and human being. Nonsense! 

To his everlasting credit, Professor Dershowitz, is the only prominent tenured faculty calling 'bullshit' on our college brats and their faculty. There are no such dogmas. There is no 'default' ethical, moral, social justice or political point of view in the conduct of the academy and certainly not in my discipline of philosophy. College is encounter with opposing views. Philosophy is the ability to entertain opposing views. It is not as Oklahoma Wesleyan University President, Dr. Edward Piper 'day care center'. Today's 'safe space' students are ignorant of these facts. Why?

 Where does this notion come from that the default worldview of ethics and social justice is somehow a new liberal-socialism? It comes from professors who demand default liberal views from administrators, students. and faculty colleagues. Multiculturalism that condemns American exceptionalism, Diversity that excludes white, religious, male conservatives, and Social Justice that means a Bernie Sanders like 1930's socialism are the core dogmas of today's professors in most cases. Just the other day a fellow professor ranted against Donald Trump, "He's driven by fear not by logic or compassion." as though logic and moral compassion have default political dogmas. Rubbish! Logic is only concerned with whether your conclusion follows by necessity from your premises. There is no 'common core' social justice view of compassion.  If that's how our faculty and administrators really think then is it a wonder that their students cry for a 'safe space' where no opposing views can be presented?

In a real sense I had a hand in this transformation from scholar to moral-den-mother of society. Forty-eight-years ago, as a tenderfoot professor just twenty-three-years-old, I got into the habit of assigning this question to my novice philosophy students at Westfield State University in western Massachusetts; "Professor, what do you profess? The assignment called for the students to seek out any other professor on campus, ask this very question, and then bring back their answers to class for discussion. Naturally, this made me very unpopular in the faculty senate...to my great delight. Mostly the results were aphorisms, platitudes, epigrams, sayings, maxims, proverbs, and a few axioms:

Physics professor: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,”

Sociology professor: “Do unto others before they have a chance to do it unto to you.”

Psychology professor: “It’s all about the hokey-pokey, hoochie-coochie, and humpie-stumpie.”

Economics professor: “The evil corporations make sure we’ll always have poverty.”

Political science professor: “A bad treaty is better than a good war.”

Philosophy professor: “What exactly do you mean by ‘profess’?

 Professor Lawrence C. Foard, Jr.  Professor Mark McIntire, Professor Gerald Tetrault

 Westfield State University Philosophy Department 1968

That was back in 1966-1972. Things sure have changed. Some of those students then are themselves now professors of today. Here's what some of them profess.

“There are some circumstances, for example, where the newborn baby is severely disabled and where the parents think that it’s better that child should not live, when killing the newborn baby is not at all wrong … not like killing the chimpanzee would be. -- Peter Singer, Princeton University Professor of Ethics

“The people of the Third World need our sympathetic understanding and, much more than that, they need our help. We can provide them with a margin of survival by internal disruption in the United States. Whether they can succeed against the kind of brutality we impose on them depends in large part on what happens here. -- Noam Chomsky, MIT, professor of linguistics

“On September 11, 2001, nineteen Arab hijackers demonstrated their willingness to die – and to kill – for their dream. They died so that their people might live, free and in dignity.” -- Shahid Alam, Northeastern University, professor of economics

“If you go to the Republican convention in Florida, you see all of the old Republicans with the dead skin cells washing off them. They’re cheap. They don’t want to pay taxes because they have already raped this country and gotten everything out of it they possibly could.” --William S. Penn, Michigan State University, professor of literature

“We need to think very, very clearly about who the enemy is. The enemy is the United States of America and everyone who supports it.” --Haunani-Kay Trask, University of Hawaii at Manoa, professor of Hawaiian Studies

“I live to harass white folks.” -- Derrick Bell, Harvard University, professor of Law

“Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, Kill your parents.”  -- Bill Ayers, University of Illinois at Chicago, professor of education

Liberal-progressivism is dying. 'Liberal’ used to stand for freedom of speech that welcomes opposing views. In this classical sense, I am still ‘liberal’. But now ‘liberal’ stands for oppression of free thought and speech. Now, liberal means there are no correct views except liberal views. Not only are you wrong in your views, many academic liberal-progressives insist, but also you cannot be allowed to express those views because they are 'wrong' views. And they are wrong views because liberal-progressives say they are wrong. So many are of this noxious view that 'safe spaces' are demanded by students who are 'scared' of hearing opposing views which are, by professorial default, wrong.

If you are a student just ask any professor....."Professor, what do you profess?" Then ask, "What am I free to profess?" You'll quickly separate the true liberals from the fakes. To delve deeper into the liberal morass on today’s campus here’s a link to David French's article:

It’s Time to Declare a Cultural and Political War on the Corrupt and Lawless University Left

It makes the argument that what passes for 'critical thinking' in whole academic departments at our 'liberal-progressive' universities is really a systematic and futile search of the utopia of the left. In this fantasy. 'Critical thinking' insists the left, requires not just analysis but complete destruction of traditional principles, values, ideas and the people who both hold them and teach them. Whole academic departments, mainly in 'social sciences', blackball any teaching candidate that even hints at a non-liberal-progressive views of reality. The article points to the exploitation of student athletes, the disproportionate hiring of administrators versus faculty, the contempt tenured faculty have for adjuncts and the unconstitutional college administration 'safe zones', 'trigger warnings' and rape-witch -hunts all conducted by people to claim to be 'liberal'. 

I still recall as a 26-year-old philosophy professor, the wildly popular college education philosophy was a very conservative interpretation of ‘in loco parentis’ (in place of the parents). It wasn’t working. So, on my campus, I created and led a campus-wide-lobby of administrators, faculty, students and alumni that overthrew Massachusetts Westfield State College President, Dr. Leonard J. Savignano in 1971. 

Consequently, I have sympathy for the students, faculty and administration grievances that go unaddressed by any college president. My revolt succeeded WITH free speech, peaceful protests, lobbying Governor Frank Sargent, constant media contact, and an 82-day fast from solid food, but NOT by prohibiting the free speech of those who disagreed with me. Using these peaceful means and with respect for the First Amendment rights of all parties concerned, Dr. Savingnano was out in a year and a half. These recent Yale and Mizzou college suppression of free speech are not defensible under our Constitution.

So, before you send your kid to a college or a university, ask some of the professors this question; “Professor! What do you profess?” You might not write that check after you hear their replies.

How would I answer you? Here’s what I profess to students in philosophy at the beginning of each semester

 On Philosophy:  

“Philosophy is training the mind, as Aristotle taught, 'to entertain an idea without accepting it.' Philosophy is the only academic course of study that asks, without assumptions, just four basic questions all humans want answers to before they die: What is Real? What is True? What is Good? What is Beautiful?  Philosophy questions the assumptions propping up all other academic courses of study. Failure to study philosophy is failure to understand and go beyond the conceptual models built by others.”

 On Education: 

“The goal of education is to 'lead out' our innate physical and mental skills, abilities, interests and temperaments endowed by our nature as a person. Education has only one purpose; teaching the young to 'learn how to learn on their own'. The outcome is to free the person to lead a meaningful existence before death. Education only stops with our last breath.”

On my temperament:

If anyone agrees with me, then surely I must be mistaken..

--- The Meddlesome Priest