The university as a grifter's paradise

Writing at the American Spectator today, George Neumayr does the meta-analysis of the Ward Churchill story:

What passes for profundity on the left as it navigates its way through the Ward Churchill controversy is Voltaire's fatuous line, "I am willing to fight to the death for your right to express your belief freely." Shorn of its mindless piety, this position essentially means that people have a right to lie. Voltaire's line should read, "I am willing to fight to the death for your right to tell lies." It doesn't sound as grand and compelling then. It sounds absurd.

Ward Churchill is a faker and liar beyond caricature. But modern academia's notion of "academic freedom" is so hollow and useless that it extends even to him. Notice that the entire discussion about Churchill is framed in terms of "his rights," as if universities exist primarily to provide platforms for jobless grifters to feed students lies. Forming students in truth -- a very quaint notion at this point, I know -- is supposed to be the organizing principle of a university. So shouldn't ensuring that students aren't taught by liars be the first, not the last, consideration here?

Shouldn't the welfare of students determine the outcome of this controversy? To the extent that administrators even weigh this responsibility, they do so in the most shamelessly superficial manner. Struggling for a rationale to keep a barbarian on staff, they will say that exposure to odious ideas is a good learning experience, a rationale they never resort to when a reviled conservative's work is at issue.

On Wednesday night, CNN's Aaron Brown discussed the Ward Churchill controversy guest Dahlia Lithwick of Slate.com. He asked a question of her that produced a perfect description of modern universities. Brown: "Just on the face of it academic freedom ought to embrace even dumb things, I suppose. Is that right?" Lithwick: "That's sort of the cornerstone of the notion of what university is about, Aaron."

This cornerstone isn't exactly of an ancient coloring. It wasn't laid at Oxford, Bologna or Cambridge -- the scholars who started these schools would be surprised to learn that the promotion of irrationality is the university's founding purpose. No, this cornerstone was laid more recently at, say, Berkeley, and on its wobbly footing professors have been giving impressionable minds the chance to experience stupidity ever since.