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13 comments - Last on 05/18/2009
Reason? Reason? We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Reason!
Scholarship Today
Editor’s Introduction. Late last month we posted an article forthcoming in Academic Questions, “The Classroom Without Reason” by Professor Douglas G. Campbell. It has occasioned several strongly-worded replies. One of those, posted last Thursday by a graduate student at Duke University, caught our attention. It’s an extravagant display of how someone who rejects the rule of reason sees the world of scholarship. We think it is worth more attention than it might get on the list of comments on a month-old article. Below we re-post the comment by the Duke grad student and present responses from both Professor Campbell and NAS president Peter Wood.
Part I. “An Actual Demonstration on My Part Would Send Everything I Have To Say Clearly Over Your Head”
Dear Mr. Doug Army Guy,
The other day your piece “The Classroom Without Reason” landed in my email through a chain of forwarded messages. Until this morning I had no idea what the NAS was, but found your essay on its blog site. Because all aspiring writers welcome and indeed crave public feedback for the creative efforts, I have decided to put aside my books here at Duke University to offer my own insights into your piece. As an actual graduate student, studying at a university other Americans have actually heard of, I found much of your piece a little hard to believe based on my own experiences with some pretty left-wing professors and students. As I see it, the point of academia is to take note of the simplified caricatures society produces - whether by the media, a variety of counter-cultural knownothings, or crusty intellectual posers like yourself - and try to complicate them by pealing away their layers of obfuscation. If you haven’t figured it by now I have no intention of sticking to the rules of “reasoned debate” as you and the NAS describe them because I find it nowhere in your self-serving polemic, and I fear that an actual demonstration on my part would send everything I have to say clearly over your head. So here goes.
Duke University was recently cited by David Horowitz (another nutbag I’m sure you have a shrine dedicated to in the shower), as one of the ten “most dangerous” liberal faculties in America. You might be interested in the fact that many of the grad students here are former military officers. One of our incoming students next year is an Air Force officer himself. There are many specialists here who study military history and military culture. Their aim is to understand the military as a sophisticated social institution, like the university, that presents problems continuous with themes social scientists have long considered important, such as the rise of the modern state, demography, economic trends, the history of the family, and wider social hierarchies. Their interests are not in advertising the military as an isolated bastion of unique values and heroic ideals mere "civilians" could never appreciate, nor are they concerned with waiving peace signs. Both represent boring ideological agendas that inevitably lead to the same conclusions devoid of any sophistication. Any young historian knows that a project simply painting the military as a brainwashing tool for the government would get laughed out of any seminar by all scholars, no matter what their politics are. The consensus in history and the humanities, perhaps the only issue academics actually agree on, is that exceptional research projects generate more questions than conclusions, opening doors for further research and the refinement or disposal of traditional paradigms. Polemical works always gain more attention from the media, and this is precisely why many historians are insufferable snobs when it comes to best-sellers because it often suggests that a scholar has forsaken nuance and complexity for narrowness and stale homogeneity in their research. This is not always the case, and the ideal is to communicate complexity to as broad an audience as possible, but the inclinations of audiences should have no say in how the subject is historically researched and represented.
But let’s quit the bullshit and get at the real concerns motivating rightwing insecurities about the state of universities. It is not difficult to see this as just an updated version of an ancient fear among daddy-worshipping morons concerning the presence of effeminate 'faggots', 'commies', and women in positions of higher learning, and oh God forbid, positions of actual influence upon our youth! This has nothing to do with "rational debate", it is merely an expression of paternalistic insecurities that always come to the surface and assume new forms as the traditional coordinates of public authority in society are renegotiated and debated. It took place during the civil rights era, when minorities sought to expand the boundaries of the public sphere, and it continues today as Americans have fewer children, gay culture is public, an astonishing number of women have acquired positions in public life, including university professorships, and Americans debate their new civic identities in a post-Cold War world lacking a clearly defined evil counterpart.
Paternalistic discourse offers emotional security to those who view pedagogy as a one way street ultimately ending with the student's awakening to the moral truths already known to their teachers. This of course, is not really teaching, it is an idealized model of paternal authority, of daddy’s fantasized pedagogical relationship to his children; a clean transmission of one's virtuous self to another. Using the family model of pedagogy, i.e. "paternalism", as a source of moral authority to critique university 'brainwashing' and the lack of open rational debate in classrooms carries its own ironies. The phrase "Go to your room" is not an invitation to discuss the meaning of virtue in Plato's Republic. Attending Sunday school is not a choice many kids make freely. The university is where most young adults apply and assess the disciplinary boundaries and values they were trained to recognize while living under a household. Perhaps the real concern underlying conservative diatribes such as yours is that many universities may be working too well in demanding students to ask questions, reflect upon their unexamined assumptions, and consider the troubling possibility that experience and understanding are not always one and the same thing. Experiences are always colored by cultural and personal assumptions that we often wield like swords as natural truths capable of withstanding any assault. The truth is there is no Excalibur, and the point of the university is not to teach students how to forge one. The real aim is to teach students how to examine their own ideological toolkits they carry with them, and unconsciously use on a daily basis to frame problems and engage with the world. How we frame problems shapes how we act in the world, and the last eight years of American politics should effectively illustrate this truism. Our assumptions have consequences.
Rejecting this as a purely "academic" conclusion has suited an anti-intellectual agenda with a long history in American culture. Now the anti-intellectual critique (of which your piece is a part despite your posturing), takes this agenda seriously enough only to use it as a gold standard universities are not meeting. Universities have apparently turned into breeding grounds for a politically correct "false consciousness" among teachers and their sycophant students. This critique is simply a shift in strategy, a maneuvering for authority that while deploying a new rhetoric, still uses the traditional moral authority of family pedagogy to reinstitute similar hierarchies in public institutions. The aim in practice, beyond the carefully strategized rhetoric, is to restrict the intellectual diversity now present in universities and reestablish old canons of established authority in scholarship. You and the NAS claim to be defending “Western Civilization” in academic institutions. I still have no idea what this means, and what it is that Western Civilization needs to be defended from. My area of specialty is the Italian Renaissance, and in my four years of graduate study on this topic, and as an instructor at the University of South Florida, I have come to appreciate the contested status of this term over the centuries. Though you would prefer to fix the essential meanings of the “West” to pursue your own ideological agenda in the present, no respected historian today would deny that the shifting meanings of the West from Aristotle to Foucault were developed through constant dialogues, encounters, and conflicts with those considered non-Western. What the West stands for has always been a matter of debate both inside and outside of Europe, but to presume that non-Westerners were never involved in those dialogues as active participants would require that we stick our heads in the sand. Placing the “West” within this wider frame of historical interactions does not threaten its values or its relevance in the university rather, it makes it more relevant by revealing its multiple origins, and thus enriching its possibilities as a resource for engaging in political dialogue with the world.
The accusations of "collectivization" and homogenization are, ironically, impassioned reactions to the reality of university trends moving in the opposite direction towards diversity in both the range of scholarly concerns and the composition of university populations. This has also translated into a more informal classroom and academic culture in contemporary universities where younger scholars from more diverse backgrounds tend to eschew the "sage on the stage" routine of older tweed-jacketed professors, in favor of open class dialogue and debate in which the instructor acts as an experienced moderator. In other words, in both structure and practice, university cultures reflect the diversification of the public sphere in American culture since the Second World War, which has greatly softened the university professor's cultivated veneer of authority, and reduced the distance between students and instructors. Many who attended college in the 1950’s would probably find this atmosphere a bit unsettling, however, the effect has not been to homogenize thought in the university, but to loosen the forms of paternal authority and academic "gatekeeping" that prevented diversification.
Smugness and self-satisfaction will always be a part of university landscapes, but how does this actually separate the domains of higher learning from any other social arena? I witnessed more pretentious social climbing, pathetic pandering to authority, and dismissive arrogance among middle managers in lowly retail jobs than I ever did among accomplished scholars in a university setting. What I appreciated most from my advisors is that they all consistently refused to outline my research for me, or even to help me decide on a topic. This was always my independent task and their input was almost exclusively restricted to advice on writing and presentation. There is little glory in scholarship; the hours are long and the pay not all that great. There are other more lucrative opportunities to satisfy the ego, and winning the slight admiration of a few students is hardly a meaningful endgame for any scholar willing to put up with the lengthy struggle to produce new knowledge. “Brainwashing”, therefore, requires a level of effort and planning that few if any scholars would ever be willing to put into their work. The benefits are just not that interesting for personalities attracted to lonely recesses, personal independence, and the creative challenge of producing new knowledge even if it will only be appreciated by a small number of readers.
Moreover, and this perhaps irritates me the most, is your incredibly arrogant disregard for the capacity of students to weigh the value of their instructor’s opinions against their own, and to maintain a healthy dose of critical distance in the classroom. There is much that goes on in the minds of students that you are not aware of, and it is your hubris that encourages you to believe that any student who expresses values different from your own must be a victim of some other pedagogical sorcery, rather than a critical and judicious thinker in his/her own right. Why, General Doug, do we never hear any of the details of your presentations that supposedly elicited these irrational reactions from academics and students? My impression is that you are someone who takes pleasure in inciting audiences, but then gets defensive and tries to paint himself afterwards as a victim of a witch hunt. I was sixteen once myself General Doug, I know how insecurity can generate some of the most ingenious tactics of manipulation when you lack the emotional resources of an adult.
My point, Mr. Doug Army Guy, is that there are other more meaningful targets to attack if you insist upon exposing society’s many ills. You might want to consider, however, that the most logical reason for the proliferation of liberal attitudes on university campuses lies in the fact that books of a higher quality than those you cited are hardly in short supply there. I think we found your real culprit General Doug, get the bonfires blazing if you really want to do something about it. I look forward to hearing the responses of your pissant cronies as they derail my lack of professional decorum, obvious indoctrination, or failure “to understand your thesis”. Your supposed thesis was not all that interesting, the passions that motivated it and what it aims to conceal, however, are quite interesting indeed.
Sean Parrish
Duke University History Department
Part II. The Reactive Mind: Douglas Campbell Replies
Seldom are writers presented with a perfect specimen of their thesis. I owe a debt of gratitude to Mr. Parrish, who presents himself as a “graduate student” at Duke University and “instructor at the University of South Florida,” for successfully displaying the emotional outbursts, the rejection of reasoned debate, the fear of accountability, the reliance on childish name-calling and the tendency for self-indulgent elitism that I attempted to describe in my article. Since Mr. Parrish fortunately chose to post his comments at NAS.org, I urge you to read my article “The Classroom Without Reason” and Mr. Parrish’s reply as supporting evidence of my thesis.
Without question, a healthy and educated mind, unencumbered by immediate threats, anger, avarice or intoxicating agents, should respond to rational argument in some rational way. I suspect that most people would agree that rational people may come to different conclusions based on differences in basic assumptions and values. The philosopher Isaiah Berlin said “there are many different ends that men may seek and still be fully rational, fully men, capable of understanding each other and sympathizing and deriving light from each other.”
In Mr. Parrish’s outburst we see not a rational mind, but a reactive mind driven by a set of destructive emotions. From his first words, a childish humorless gibe, his hate and prejudice are revealed. From Mr. Parrish’s own description of himself as an “actual graduate student, studying at a university other Americans have actually heard of” we see the phenomenon of self-doubt being self-medicated by claims of elitism and superiority. In dismissing any discussion of the actual content of my article and claiming that reason is over my head, he excuses himself to indulge in assigning a hateful stereotype to me. He assigns to me and anyone agreeing with me the following motive and traits, “an ancient fear among daddy-worshipping morons concerning the presence of effeminate 'faggots', 'commies', and women in positions of higher learning.” This is not exactly the intellectual argument that one might expect from a graduate student at “a university other Americans have actually heard of.”
After Mr. Parrish has given himself freedom to ramble, he indulges in attacking academia in general until he fixes upon a conspiracy theory. He states that the real agenda of those desiring rational discussion and reasoned positions is to “restrict the intellectual diversity.” Perhaps in this Mr. Parrish displays his true fear that he would be held to a standard that he is not prepared to meet?
From Mr. Parrish’s derogatory tone and references to “paternal authority,” “academic gatekeeping that prevented diversification,” “older tweed-jacketed professors,” and “smugness and self-satisfaction” among mature faculty, we have the impression that he has encountered some faculty that have not been impressed by his antics. Finally, Mr. Parrish’s attempted coup-de-grace fizzles as it is nothing more than a climaxing vent of ad hominem insults.
One might be quick to dismiss Mr. Parrish as unimportant, but I urge you not to do so. Instead I ask you to consider how Mr. Parrish or someone similar to him would conduct himself as a faculty member? Perhaps Mr. Parrish is truly gifted in his specialty area of the Italian Renaissance, but what will be his classroom demeanor? Based on his diatribe, do we have some insight into whether he is likely to encourage rational thinking and debate? Will he tolerate, respect and share arguments and conclusions other than his own? Will he teach the subject or will he simply use the classroom to advocate for personal agendas beyond the scope of the classes? Will he conduct himself will dignity and with respect toward others and their opinions? Will he speak respectfully and truthfully? Will he be the type of rational and reasonable role model that students paying for their education have a right to expect? I leave you to decide.
I suggest that Mr. Parrish is a product of some faculty members and administrators who have encouraged his hostility toward rational thought and reasoned debate. I suggest that from the evidence documented by the contributors to Academic Questions, NAS.org and our own observations, we know with certainty that such faculty members and administrators exist in significant numbers in some disciplines and are discouraging and in many cases punishing those who wish to express ideas and opinions that diverge from the politics or propaganda of political correctness. Rational thinking is opposed by these activists because it would allow students to challenge the foundations of the specific cultural, social, and political paradigms which with they are bombarded.
These things are being done by elitists such as Mr. Parrish who think that they are superior. I restate my thesis: such faculty and administrators endanger and undermine the quintessentially American acceptance of the right of individuals to come to their own educated conclusions, and then to speak and act according to these conclusions and their own conscience. This situation is a challenge to individual rights and the foundations of responsible self-government. A populace that is not comfortable with rational discussion, reasoned debate and with freely forming and speaking their own opinions, is at risk of manipulation by those who appeal to their emotions and their baser instincts, specifically fear, hate, anger, avarice and insecurity. Such manipulators are most comfortable with these tools, as Mr. Parrish has so amply demonstrated.
We must do our best to teach and encourage rational thinking and debate. We must strive to enable teachers to teach and students to learn in an environment free from coercion and deceit. We must strive to return civility, rationality, the open exchange of ideas, and the virtues of tolerance to their rightful place of honor throughout our universities.
Part III. At War with Reason. Peter Wood
Seldom are writers presented with a perfect specimen of their thesis. I owe a debt of gratitude to Mr. Parrish, who presents himself as a “graduate student” at Duke University and “instructor at the University of South Florida,” for successfully displaying the emotional outbursts, the rejection of reasoned debate, the fear of accountability, the reliance on childish name-calling and the tendency for self-indulgent elitism that I attempted to describe in my article. Since Mr. Parrish fortunately chose to post his comments at NAS.org, I urge you to read my article “The Classroom Without Reason” and Mr. Parrish’s reply as supporting evidence of my thesis.
Without question, a healthy and educated mind, unencumbered by immediate threats, anger, avarice or intoxicating agents, should respond to rational argument in some rational way. I suspect that most people would agree that rational people may come to different conclusions based on differences in basic assumptions and values. The philosopher Isaiah Berlin said “there are many different ends that men may seek and still be fully rational, fully men, capable of understanding each other and sympathizing and deriving light from each other.”
In Mr. Parrish’s outburst we see not a rational mind, but a reactive mind driven by a set of destructive emotions. From his first words, a childish humorless gibe, his hate and prejudice are revealed. From Mr. Parrish’s own description of himself as an “actual graduate student, studying at a university other Americans have actually heard of” we see the phenomenon of self-doubt being self-medicated by claims of elitism and superiority. In dismissing any discussion of the actual content of my article and claiming that reason is over my head, he excuses himself to indulge in assigning a hateful stereotype to me. He assigns to me and anyone agreeing with me the following motive and traits, “an ancient fear among daddy-worshipping morons concerning the presence of effeminate 'faggots', 'commies', and women in positions of higher learning.” This is not exactly the intellectual argument that one might expect from a graduate student at “a university other Americans have actually heard of.”
After Mr. Parrish has given himself freedom to ramble, he indulges in attacking academia in general until he fixes upon a conspiracy theory. He states that the real agenda of those desiring rational discussion and reasoned positions is to “restrict the intellectual diversity.” Perhaps in this Mr. Parrish displays his true fear that he would be held to a standard that he is not prepared to meet?
From Mr. Parrish’s derogatory tone and references to “paternal authority,” “academic gatekeeping that prevented diversification,” “older tweed-jacketed professors,” and “smugness and self-satisfaction” among mature faculty, we have the impression that he has encountered some faculty that have not been impressed by his antics. Finally, Mr. Parrish’s attempted coup-de-grace fizzles as it is nothing more than a climaxing vent of ad hominem insults.
One might be quick to dismiss Mr. Parrish as unimportant, but I urge you not to do so. Instead I ask you to consider how Mr. Parrish or someone similar to him would conduct himself as a faculty member? Perhaps Mr. Parrish is truly gifted in his specialty area of the Italian Renaissance, but what will be his classroom demeanor? Based on his diatribe, do we have some insight into whether he is likely to encourage rational thinking and debate? Will he tolerate, respect and share arguments and conclusions other than his own? Will he teach the subject or will he simply use the classroom to advocate for personal agendas beyond the scope of the classes? Will he conduct himself will dignity and with respect toward others and their opinions? Will he speak respectfully and truthfully? Will he be the type of rational and reasonable role model that students paying for their education have a right to expect? I leave you to decide.
I suggest that Mr. Parrish is a product of some faculty members and administrators who have encouraged his hostility toward rational thought and reasoned debate. I suggest that from the evidence documented by the contributors to Academic Questions, NAS.org and our own observations, we know with certainty that such faculty members and administrators exist in significant numbers in some disciplines and are discouraging and in many cases punishing those who wish to express ideas and opinions that diverge from the politics or propaganda of political correctness. Rational thinking is opposed by these activists because it would allow students to challenge the foundations of the specific cultural, social, and political paradigms which with they are bombarded.
These things are being done by elitists such as Mr. Parrish who think that they are superior. I restate my thesis: such faculty and administrators endanger and undermine the quintessentially American acceptance of the right of individuals to come to their own educated conclusions, and then to speak and act according to these conclusions and their own conscience. This situation is a challenge to individual rights and the foundations of responsible self-government. A populace that is not comfortable with rational discussion, reasoned debate and with freely forming and speaking their own opinions, is at risk of manipulation by those who appeal to their emotions and their baser instincts, specifically fear, hate, anger, avarice and insecurity. Such manipulators are most comfortable with these tools, as Mr. Parrish has so amply demonstrated.
We must do our best to teach and encourage rational thinking and debate. We must strive to enable teachers to teach and students to learn in an environment free from coercion and deceit. We must strive to return civility, rationality, the open exchange of ideas, and the virtues of tolerance to their rightful place of honor throughout our universities.
Part III. At War with Reason. Peter Wood
Goya titled one of his disturbing etchings, “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters.” A man, head down at his writing desk, his pen and papers under his folded arms, is beset by a flock of owls and bats as a strangely enlarged housecat looks on. We don’t get the sense that the fellow welcomed this visitation. He is suffering in the contortions of madness.The involuntary loss of reason, as Goya knew, is a terrible misfortune, but there is misfortune as well when people become entranced with the idea that reason is an enemy that should be vanquished or at least kept outside the castle gates. Who would think such a thing? The idea, rather surprisingly, has a following in higher education, principally in parts of the humanities. For an illustration, we have an extremely odd 2,000-word statement posted to the NAS website by a graduate student in the History Department at Duke University. His name is not especially important here, but as he identifies himself, we will too. Mr. Sean Parrish wrote to us in response to an article we posted, “The Classroom Without Reason,” by Douglas G. Campbell.
Mr. Parrish’s letter speaks for itself, though perhaps not entirely in the way he intended. He repeats some of the familiar Foucaultian clichés to the effect that “reason” is a mask of power, or, more precisely, only a mask of power. Those who, like Professor Campbell, express concern that ideology is increasingly crowding out reasoned discourse on campus are, in Parrish’s view, hypocrites. Their aim, he says:
Mr. Parrish’s letter speaks for itself, though perhaps not entirely in the way he intended. He repeats some of the familiar Foucaultian clichés to the effect that “reason” is a mask of power, or, more precisely, only a mask of power. Those who, like Professor Campbell, express concern that ideology is increasingly crowding out reasoned discourse on campus are, in Parrish’s view, hypocrites. Their aim, he says:
in practice, beyond the carefully strategized rhetoric, is to restrict the intellectual diversity now present in universities and reestablish old canons of established authority in scholarship.
He also gives us his version of the received faith among members of the Church of the Left that the only legitimate purpose of higher education is liberation from stultifying ideas. In his words:
As I see it, the point of academia is to take note of the simplified caricatures society produces - whether by the media, a variety of counter-cultural knownothings, or crusty intellectual posers like yourself - and try to complicate them by pealing away their layers of obfuscation.
The letter wouldn’t be worth more attention if it was just another uncritical recitation of these claims. Once you ask yourself how Mr. Parrish knows that any part of his fairy-tale pseudo-history of scholarship is accurate or true, you are left with a cipher. He appears to be an arch-traditionalist of the school that race-class-gender explain everything everywhere with satisfying completeness, and that anyone who might venture to disagree is suffering from grim frustrated desire for power. But Mr. Parrish does go a step further. He provides an example of what a mind looks like when proudly loosed from the trammels of reason.
But let’s pause for a moment. The National Association of Scholars has summarized its basic stance since its founding in the 1980s as support for “reasoned scholarship in a free society.” That doesn’t sound like a terribly provocative thesis. A free society has room for many things besides “reasoned scholarship”—room for love, artistic creativity, sports, grieving at funerals, friendship, partisan bickering, wild nights at the saloon, hangovers, religious exaltation, family picnics, dark nights of the soul, days spent filling out tax returns, and all the rest of life. The “reason” in reasoned scholarship is not a claim that we should be ruled by reason alone, divorced from humanity. But it is a claim that, within the world of scholarship, reason should be preeminent. Claims need to be argued and evidence adduced and cross-examined. Premises do not win their way by mere assertion; they too must be examined skeptically, and subject to disciplined comparison to alternative premises.
Reason, we know, has its limits. It cannot, by itself, supply the facts that may be needed to judge among competing hypotheses. And some urgencies demand answers now that reason may only hope to give later. Reason is a tool, not a god, as some in the French Revolution misconceived it. But it is the characteristic and we think indispensable tool of scholars. Without it…well, without it, we may get a variety of things, but none that are likely to sustain a claim to serious intellectual attention and respect.
Mr. Parrish evidently disagrees. So what does he teach us about the graduate student mind liberated from “paternalistic” reason? The reader might wish to compile his own list, but here’s mine:
(1) Snobbery. Mr. Parrish gets started with the modest declaration that, “As an actual graduate student, studying at a university other Americans have actually heard of…” Mr. Parrish is at Duke; Professor Campbell teaches at California State University at Chico. Once we dismiss reason, snobbery is as good an argument as anything else. ‘I attend a better known institution, therefore heed me.’
But let’s pause for a moment. The National Association of Scholars has summarized its basic stance since its founding in the 1980s as support for “reasoned scholarship in a free society.” That doesn’t sound like a terribly provocative thesis. A free society has room for many things besides “reasoned scholarship”—room for love, artistic creativity, sports, grieving at funerals, friendship, partisan bickering, wild nights at the saloon, hangovers, religious exaltation, family picnics, dark nights of the soul, days spent filling out tax returns, and all the rest of life. The “reason” in reasoned scholarship is not a claim that we should be ruled by reason alone, divorced from humanity. But it is a claim that, within the world of scholarship, reason should be preeminent. Claims need to be argued and evidence adduced and cross-examined. Premises do not win their way by mere assertion; they too must be examined skeptically, and subject to disciplined comparison to alternative premises.
Reason, we know, has its limits. It cannot, by itself, supply the facts that may be needed to judge among competing hypotheses. And some urgencies demand answers now that reason may only hope to give later. Reason is a tool, not a god, as some in the French Revolution misconceived it. But it is the characteristic and we think indispensable tool of scholars. Without it…well, without it, we may get a variety of things, but none that are likely to sustain a claim to serious intellectual attention and respect.
Mr. Parrish evidently disagrees. So what does he teach us about the graduate student mind liberated from “paternalistic” reason? The reader might wish to compile his own list, but here’s mine:
(1) Snobbery. Mr. Parrish gets started with the modest declaration that, “As an actual graduate student, studying at a university other Americans have actually heard of…” Mr. Parrish is at Duke; Professor Campbell teaches at California State University at Chico. Once we dismiss reason, snobbery is as good an argument as anything else. ‘I attend a better known institution, therefore heed me.’
(2) Ad Hominem invective. This starts with Parrish’s salutation, “Dear Mr. Doug Army Guy,” and gets progressively worse throughout the letter. Who does Mr. Parrish think he is? He thinks he is someone entitled to treat with contempt people he disagrees with.
(3) Uncivil language and abusive assertions. One of the rules of reasoned discussion is that we avoid gratuitous characterizations. Mr. Parrish knows virtually nothing about Professor Campbell, but freed from the restrictions of reason, he invents his own elaborate
psycho-sexual fantasy and projects it on to Professor Campbell as:
…an ancient fear among daddy-worshipping morons concerning the presence of effeminate 'faggots', 'commies', and women in positions of higher learning.
If we ask, “How does Mr. Parrish come by this privileged knowledge?” we can find the answer in his first paragraph. These are, he tells us, “insights.”
(4) Just plain nastiness. Reason demands that we try to persuade people. Absent reason, the passions take over, and in this case, irritability seems to be in charge. I don’t have any idea what Mr. Parrish is like in person, but I would have advised him not to post this. If he intends, as he implies, to seek an academic career, search committees will, in exercising their due diligence, search the web and find his post. Perhaps some such committee will be deeply impressed with his dissertation, approve of his ideological stance, and otherwise think he is a strong candidate. But the committee will also have to evaluate him as a potential colleague. Reason isn’t blind. Is it really wise to present yourself as someone with this much disdain for those you consider to be your inferiors?
Goya gave us an image of the sleep of reason; Mr. Parrish gives us instead an image of reason cast aside, reason as an enemy or a spy for unfathomably evil forces. In his article, Professor Campbell tried to draw attention to this phenomenon in American higher education, and it is also something that NAS has taken note of as increasingly common. The first generation of post-modernists seemed to be in on their own joke: reason could be turned on its head to show the unreasonableness of some supposedly reasonable views. But the second generation of postmodernists seems to have lost the sense of irony that animated the best of their teachers. Many of this second generation act as though reason is truly an enemy. Mr. Parrish has handed us a specimen of this ethos, for which we should be grateful.
Although he hasn’t done much in this letter to draw my sympathy, I do sincerely regret the position he puts himself in. For better or worse, he represents a part of the coming generation of scholars. I fear he does neither himself nor scholarship any good by indulging his antipathy for reason.
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(1) Mr. Parrish says, "As I see it, the point of academia is to take note of the simplified caricatures society produces - whether by the media, a variety of counter-cultural knownothings, or crusty intellectual posers like yourself - and try to complicate them by pealing away their layers of obfuscation." Mr. Parrish does not recognize that the "point of academia" is the search for and discovery of truth. "Knowledge" is absent from his vocabulary. (2) As a student of history, Mr. Parrish might search for the origin of the term "West" - instead, he sneers at its use. He might also inquire why Greek scholars from Constantinople, escaping the conquering Turks, took with them their manuscripts, regarding them as precious. He might even read the reprints of those manuscripts, including Plato, The Republic, about the search for knowledge. The term "academy," after all, derives from the school Plato founded in Athens in the groves of Academus. (3) Mr. Parrish might read George Orwell's essay, "Politics and the English Language" to improve his English.
by Athena Posted on 05/18/2009
I'd also suggest that Parrish read Pope's "Essay on Criticism," with special attention to the following couplet:
All fools have still an itching to deride,
And fain would be on the laughing side.
Glenn Ricketts
by Glenn M.Ricketts Posted on 05/19/2009
All of this must be clearly over my head because I can't get past "pealing away their layer of obfuscation." I have no idea what that means.
by K. Tyson Posted on 05/19/2009
I remember seeing a T-shirt during the persecution of the Duke Lacrosse team. Under the team logo ran the caption "Evidence is Overrated." The institution and the media convicted those men solely because the storyline demonstrated so perfectly the mythos of paternalism that Parrish retells here. That there was no evidence (or that such evidence as there was was exculpatory) made no difference to the Duke Professors who signed the Lubiano-Holloway statement. Lubiano said she did not even care about evidence. The players were guilty because of her ideology.
Hubris and ideological certitude are a dangerous combination, especially if they are unchecked by any concerns about civility or evidence. But for a good legal team, three Duke students would have gone to jail for a long time. The faculty whose ideology Parrish typifies would have been largely responsible for this. Several members of the history department were in the Group of 88; so I can't help but wonder if Parrish would have signed the statement, had he been an actual professor. He has learned his catechism well enough.
by Brad Sealy Posted on 05/19/2009
I agree with NAS President Peter Wood that Mr. Parrish did himself no good, and perhaps considerable harm, by posting his immature, angry rant on this website. As merely one of the "pissant cronies" whom Sean Parrish so smugly dismisses, I have this to say to the "gent":
I served on many a hiring committee in my career and have met many an applicant for a tenure-track teaching position. While your unbridled hubris and dismissive view of logic, evidence and reason as being at the heart of scholarly pursuits may very well resonate with my postmodernist colleagues, you are eventually going to encounter someone like me during your future job search. You see, Mr. Parrish, some of us possess the experience to look right through your gift of gab and straight to the core of your arrogant, nasty being.
Don't get me wrong: we don't mind your disagreeing with us. Dissent is, after all, an essential part of rigorous academic discourse. The real reason some of us would object to hiring you is that you have dispensed with the boundary that delineates such discourse: CIVILITY. Since you have seen fit to toss civility on the ever-mounting trash heap of tradition, all you are left with are invectives and name-calling -- and your commentary proves it.
I know you will sneer at this, Mr. Parrish, but I regret to inform you that my hypothetical hiring committee just decided to reject you as a finalist for our full-time, tenure-track teaching position in the Department of History. A pity it is, indeed!
by ivorytowerreform Posted on 05/22/2009
Well this is indeed an honor to attract the attention of so many illustrious men who have had the privilege to drink so copiously from the eternal fount of Reason! This must be a slow month for the NAS and I have come to realize that taking you guys seriously enough to respond to one of your “treatises” was a sophomoric decision on my part. Lesson learned. Obviously older scholars who were not denied tenure for a lack of collegiality, and with far more experience than I have aren't giving you the attention you deserve. I guess they have books to write, research to complete...well you know, tasks that don't fit into your daily schedules. I also have to express my confusion that for men who so rigorously defend the purity of substance in academic debate, you do expend a great deal of energy criticizing the poorly developed rhetorical form of your opponents. Somewhere along the line I detect either a hint of envy for my skill in a shallow ad hominem art all of you are obviously well versed in, or an inability to respond to the pressing and “substantial” possibility that your precious Reason might actually have a history that should not be obfuscated by pretentious and self serving identifications with ancient scholars whose works you have never read, or much less considered as historical artifacts in their own right composed centuries ago without any concern for your narcissistic ideological agenda.
However, let us get to the issue of Reason shall we? General Doug obviously thinks that retelling a personal confrontation with a young undergraduate from fifteen years ago (he says it was a couple of years ago) somehow provides inductive proof that universities across America are failing in their task to offer all possible opinions to students to make up their own minds about an issue, as if critical thinking amounted to a consumer decision to pick the best among all available breakfast cereals. He continues with similar confrontations in his office with another “irrational” and smug female student, and finally in a professional conference with more self-centered academics who refused to give him a meaningful platform. I would first advise General Doug to look up the term “trope” since it obviously has served him well in his authoritative first person narratives. What amuses me is that G-Doug's supportive commentators seemed to think that the central issue revolved around the purported “factuality” of the event and not the implications G-Doug seemed to attach to it even if it did unfold as he says it did, though I think G-Doug's colleague Dr. Ron would have some issues with that. In what way is it “rational” to make such massive leaps between unverified personal experiences and the general state of university classroom discourse as a whole?
Why, moreover, do I still not hear the contents of G-Doug's presentations that elicited so much wrath from the student and the academic conference? At this point they are mute questions since G-Doug can say what he wants and just expect us all to accept his version of events. But this is the central point since the “factual” events only acquire meaning insofar as they are construed to speak for larger realities: Reason does not exist in the classroom. Students all read just read their catechisms. Duke University is full of politically correct inquisitors. Sean Parrish obviously supported a shallow career driven prosecutor in accusing four innocent lacrosse players, etc, etc. Though I do enjoy drinking coffee every morning from my Duke Lacrosse mug (a X-mas present from mommy), I unfortunately was not a student here during all the festivities regarding that event. I watched it unfold on television just like many of you, the difference being that I am not prepared to exploit that event to prove the existence of a nationwide conspiracy of political correctness in contemporary universities.
How about the grocery store model of critical thinking in the classroom? I cannot really speak for an American Government class (or Leisure Studies G-Doug), but in a history course of any variety the point is to reveal the specific contexts of debates regarding problems of social concern: the meaning of salvation, the function of the state, ideas about justice, scientific knowledge, or even – and this is a good one – the practical manifestations of Reason and how to identify them. For some reason the more I delve into the sources of the past, the less coherence I discover among those differing voices concerning the meaning of Reason. In the archive it is perfectly “reasonable” to believe in miracles, to see women as imperfect versions of men (medieval medicine is interesting!), and to accept that skin pigmentation reflects the overall worth and ability of a person. Why is it no longer considered legitimate to suggest that such ideas are predicated upon “reason”? Should we credit the autonomous historical force of Reason for emerging from the fog and presenting its unalterable truth? I suspect that you guys have been reading more Hegel than Aristotle, and perhaps the “World Spirit” of German Idealism has taken permanent lodgings in your hallowed halls of Reason. Universal abstractions do not move history, human beings do through their debates on the extent and validity of those abstractions. My task in the classroom was to get students to ask questions of their sources and privilege the voices of the dead on their own terms. Investigating how medieval peasants understood the meaning of the Trinity, for example, takes far more scholarly creativity and patience than simply dismissing peasants and the Trinity itself for lacking the foundations of “Reason”. Most students, I found, were more comfortable layering their own standards over the text than in deciphering the standards employed by those they were studying. This is not critical exegesis, it is a shallow act of presentist validation that is difficult to break. I could not tell them what the text “meant” in some totalitarian way, but I could tell them that the statement: “Medieval peasants had no power, therefore their ideas about salvation replicated those of the Catholic Church,” was flimsy logic. Or how about the reverse: “The Catholic Church was a hegemonic power in medieval Italy, therefore Catherine of Siena's ideas about salvation served the interests of the Catholic Church.” The premises defeat the need for investigation. The point is to develop an awareness of one's premises, interpret the particulars in light of those often unacknowledged premises, and pursue the possibility of alternative conclusions. The consumer model of presenting discrete opinions on a classroom viewing shelf for students to choose from presumes that “opinions” are like decontexualized commodities, rather than the complicated and often convoluted webs of rhetorical strategies and assumptions that they really are. Such issues will only be resolved in analytic practice, not in silly blogs with appeals to transhistorical abstractions none of you seem willing or able to define.
I believe I have devoted enough of my energies to your little Symposium on “Reason” this month so I sadly have to inform you all that this will be my last post for your enjoyment. Unfortunately I have a dissertation to write and a whole slew of dead guys waiting for me to rehash their dusty old opinions. Since I now have a new fan club to keep in mind I will try to uphold G-Doug's standards of reasoned debate, pretentious self identifications with scholars far more accomplished than myself, and of course humorless elitism.
Goodnight Everybody
by bobsanders Posted on 05/23/2009
Well this is indeed an honor to attract the attention of so many illustrious men who have had the privilege to drink so copiously from the eternal fount of Reason! This must be a slow month for the NAS and I have come to realize that taking you guys seriously enough to respond to one of your “treatises” was a sophomoric decision on my part. Lesson learned. Obviously older scholars who were not denied tenure for a lack of collegiality (sounds embarrassing K.C.), and with far more experience than I have aren't giving you the attention you deserve. I also have to express my confusion that for men who so rigorously defend the purity of substance in academic debate, you do expend a great deal of energy criticizing the poorly developed rhetorical form of your opponents. Somewhere along the line I detect either a hint of envy for my skill in a shallow ad hominem art all of you are obviously well versed in, or an inability to respond to the pressing and “substantial” possibility that your precious Reason might actually have a history that should not be mystified by pretentious and self serving identifications with ancient scholars whose works you have never read, or much less considered as historical artifacts in their own right composed centuries ago without any concern for your narcissistic ideological agenda. General Doug, perhaps feeling a bit outgunned, seems to have rounded up the entire NAS posse to come down on a second year Phd student. My have things gone downhill for you guys since the good old days when even Stanley Fish actually stopped working long enough to acknowledge your presence! Let me present my response in three parts, dealing in order with what are obviously ascending levels of ignorance beginning with your largely anonymous fan postings (what are you guys afraid of?) and ending with old G-Doug himself, a man whom I might add obviously respects his professional colleagues enough not to consider publicly throwing them under the bus for his own personal gain on what is in truth a glorified MySpace blog. General Doug has way too much “professional” integrity for that.
O'Reilly Bullet Point #1: For anonymous fan “Athena,” you in fact touched on my area of specialty with your ridiculous comment that I “snear” at the idea of the West. My dissertation in fact focuses upon the impact of Greek scholars from Constantinople upon Italian medical theories of contagion in early sixteenth-century Venice and Padua. You suggest that I might read manuscripts of Plato's works heroically saved from the Turks after 1453. I'm not sure what Plato's words would add to this debate, but it would be helpful to understand what Renaissance scholastic philosophers and humanists thought about the ideas of Plato and Aristotle, and who they believed to be important authorities on Greek texts. Strangely, guys like Pico della Mirandola, yeah the supposed founder of modern individualism, were pretty big fans of a couple of medieval Arabs: Averroes and Avicenna. While most of you are probably so blinded by the title of Pico's On the Dignity of Man, you seem to miss the fact that the entire text is a sustained cosmopolitan argument on the need to synthesize the wisdom of all the world's philosophical and religious traditions; ancient and modern, Christian, Muslim, and Jewish. How novel. Avicenna's Canon was THE university authority on medicine until well into the seventeenth-century. Neo-Platonism did not replace the “Aristotle” of the Arabic commentators, it was synthesized with that tradition by humanists, or was used by Catholic reactionaries threatened by Aristotelian natural philosophy which denied the intelligibility of the soul as a distinct entity beyond the body. The natural philosopher Pietro Pomponazzi, who never learned Greek, in fact denied the immortality of the soul at the turn of the sixteenth-century based upon his copious readings of Averroes's translations and commentaries on Aristotle. His student Fracastoro developed the first materialist theory of contagion and disease that many medical historians tend (perhaps erroneously) to identify with modern germ theory. Their ideas were crucial for the later development of natural history, the mechanical philosophies of Bruno and Gassendi, and dare we say the most obvious cultural manifestation of your precious “Reason”: modern experimental science itself. The debates during this period were not linear nor were these novel thinkers so concerned as many of you seem to be with the meaning of the “West” (which implied what it said, a direction), or even the less anachronistic label “Christendom”. Since you fashion yourselves as heroically occupying the middle road between the impassioned politics of university academics and the heavy hand of the Inquisition (i.e. political correctness), I suggest you explore your own genealogical connections with a group you seem to have much in common with, the practitioners of “mosaic physics” in the Renaissance. In their concerns you will find much to identify with, if very little to actually be proud of: http://www.jstor.org/stable/237557
Ann Blair, “Mosaic Physics and the Search for a Pious Natural Philosophy in the Late Renaissance,” Isis, Vol. 91, No. 1, (March 2001), pp. 32-58.
O'Reilly Bullet Point #2: Dear Peter Wood...you spelled “Foucauldian” wrong, there is in fact no “t” even though his name is “Foucault”. Since this is one of those classic shortcut adjectives invented by mediocre grad students who attempted to read Foucault and then quit on page 2, I think your careful decision to mobilize it in your response indicates the extent of your expertise on his writings and philosophy. I have come to realize that I seem to be dealing with some conservative Classicists and Americanists as far as historians go. How else to explain the methodological obsession with origins and the purity of the past that so clearly informs your criticisms. They are the classic concerns of modern nationalists whose investigations into the unique variety of the past always somehow lead back to their own reflections. The battle with the so-called “Church of Race, Class, and Gender” rarely ever incited the level of vitriol among Europeanists as it did for Americanists, perhaps for obvious reasons. As for my own work, I've never felt any compunction to simply map those categories over the voices of my historical subjects, and I don't ever recall any seminar controversies erupting when numerous students and instructors suggested that Joan Scott or David Roediger were reductionist in their methods. Your efforts to pigeon hole me into a specific methodological paradigm of RCG (which I assume dismissively refers to any work that is not a narrative about a battle or three years in the life of some statesman), based solely on the fact that I found no actual reason in an article purporting to demonstrate the lack of reason in the classroom, suggests an inability to overcome the limits of your own binary thinking. If not A, then logically B. No other possibilities need enter the picture and if they do they should be silenced until they can be squeezed into known paradigms. It is impossible not to find amusement in the fact that you and your followers are constantly chasing an academic chimera, chewing on the refuse of ideas that other members of the “conformist avant garde” in academia have already spit out as a result of their own debates and actual research practice. If you would like to know the value I ascribe to Foucault in my own areas of research, I would point you towards Ian Maclean's essay from ten years ago: “Foucault's Renaissance Episteme Reassessed: An Aristotelian Counterblast,” Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 59, No. 1 (Jan. 1998); http://www.jstor.org/stable/3654059.
If you would like to understand the difference between reactionary criticisms of academic conformism, and informed criticism that is actually productive though no less trenchant, then I would suggest Frederick Cooper's very intelligent, Colonialism in Question, (University of California Press, 2005). Happy reading.
O'Reilly Bullet Point #3: Finally, let's address the issues of reason, logic, and pedagogy according to General Doug. Obviously G-Doug thinks that retelling a personal confrontation with a young undergraduate from fifteen years ago (he says it was a couple of years ago) somehow provides proof that universities across America are failing in their task to offer all possible opinions to students to make up their own minds about an issue, as if critical thinking amounted to a consumer decision to pick the best among all available breakfast cereals. He continues with similar confrontations in his office with another “irrational” and smug female student, and finally in a professional conference with more self-centered academics who refused to give him a meaningful platform. I would first advise General Doug to look up the term “trope” since it obviously has served him well in his authoritative first person narratives. What amuses me is that G-Doug's supportive commentators seemed to think that the central issue revolved around the purported “factuality” of the event, and not the implications G-Doug seemed to attach to it even if it did unfold as he says it did, though I think G-Doug's colleague Dr. Ron would have some issues with that. In what way is it “rational” to make such massive leaps between unverified personal experiences and the general state of university classroom discourse as a whole?
Why, moreover, do I still not hear the contents of G-Doug's presentations that elicited so much wrath from the student and the academic conference? At this point they are mute questions since G-Doug can say what he wants and just expect us all to accept his version of events. But this is the central point since the “factual” events only acquire evidential meaning insofar as they are construed to speak for larger realities: Reason does not exist in the classroom. Students all read just read their catechisms. Duke University is full of politically correct inquisitors. Sean Parrish obviously supported a shallow career driven prosecutor in accusing four innocent lacrosse players, etc, etc. Though I do enjoy drinking coffee every morning from my Duke Lacrosse mug (a X-mas present from mommy), I unfortunately was not a student here during all the festivities regarding that event. I watched it unfold on television just like many of you, the difference being that I am not prepared to exploit that event to prove the existence of a nationwide conspiracy of political correctness in contemporary universities.
How about the grocery store model of critical thinking in the classroom? I cannot really speak for an American Government class (or Leisure Studies G-Doug), but in a history course of any variety the point is to reveal the specific historical contexts of debates regarding problems of social concern: the meaning of salvation, the function of the state, ideas about justice, scientific knowledge, or even, and this is a good one: the practical manifestations of Reason and how to identify them. For some reason the more I delve into the sources of the past, the less coherence I discover among those differing voices concerning the meaning of Reason. In the archive it is perfectly “reasonable” to believe in miracles, to see women as imperfect versions of men (medieval medicine is interesting!), and to accept that skin pigmentation reflects the overall worth and ability of a person. Why is it no longer considered legitimate to suggest that such ideas are predicated upon “reason”? Should we credit the autonomous historical force of Reason for emerging from the fog and presenting its unalterable truth? I suspect that you guys have been reading more Hegel than Aristotle, and perhaps the “World Spirit” of German Idealism has taken permanent lodgings in your hallowed halls of Reason. I suppose officially sanctioned practices of racial discrimination in this country would have magically disappeared with time because Reason takes care of itself, implying there was no need for civil rights activists to “rock the boat” and force the issue. Universal abstractions do not move history, human beings do through their debates and interventions on the practical implications of those abstractions.
My task in the classroom, was to get students to ask questions of their sources and privilege the voices of the dead on their own terms. Investigating how medieval peasants understood the meaning of the Trinity, for example, takes far more scholarly creativity and patience than simply dismissing peasants and the Trinity itself for lacking the foundations of “Reason”. The point is to develop an awareness of one's premises, interpret the particulars in light of those often unacknowledged premises, and pursue the possibility of alternative conclusions. The consumer model of presenting discrete opinions on a classroom viewing shelf for students to choose from presumes that “opinions” are like decontexualized commodities, rather than the complicated and often convoluted webs of rhetorical strategies and assumptions that they really are. Such issues will only be resolved in analytic practice and research, not in silly blogs with appeals to transhistorical abstractions none of you seem willing or able to define.
Organizations like NAS are not animated by conscious conspiracies, they are motivated by arrogance and fear, in other words human conceits and sentiments that have little to do with conceptual planning. Your conceit is in believing that you possess special faculties that justify your claims to authority, your fear concerns the possible consequences of subjecting those claims to the widest possible critique. One does not need to demonstrate a conspiracy to conclude that your methods – recycled anecdotes, meaningless labels, weak inductive logic, childish binary reasoning – all produce the collective effect of silencing dissent by speaking for it before it can speak for itself. Because I do not see reason underlying your own methods, does not automatically imply that I have no interest in analyzing evidence, weighing its relative value, or in presenting a falsifiable version of the past. Again I am baffled at your willingness to construe isolated events, statements, utterances, and criticisms into evidence supporting much larger assumptions. Your conclusions resemble a bowling ball balancing on the evidence of a needle.
I believe I have devoted enough of my energies to your little rec room Symposium on “Reason” this month so I sadly have to inform you all that this will be my last post for your enjoyment. Unfortunately I have a dissertation to write and a whole slew of dead guys waiting for me to rehash their dusty old opinions. Since I now have a new fan club to keep in mind I will try to uphold in my dissertation General Doug's standards of “reasoned” debate, pretentious self identifications with scholars far more accomplished than myself, and of course humorless elitism. As for my own apparent issues with tweed jacketed authority, I can safely say that I have thus far never met a professor that I did not like, until now.
Goodnight NAS land and sleep tight,
Sean Parrish
by bobsanders Posted on 05/24/2009
My apologies but after reading Mr. "ivorytowerreforms" response above I could not resist! Being threatened with the consequences of a "hypothetical" hiring committee speaks volumes as to where NAS members are speaking from: early retirement and the fringe world of online universities. I have no problem with scholars who still respect empirical principles in research (I consider myself one of them), but the cult of "rugged individualism" is a bit too self-congratulatory for me, and too often excuses flippant responses to new ideas not easily reconcilable with previous assumptions. I'm sure the old cliche that "C students end up teaching the A students" has a receptive audience among you guys. Somehow this sounds like a hope more than an observation. In the meantime though, I'm am glad that you independent thinkers have decided to form your own institutional clubhouse, carry identical badges of belonging, and....well, announce to the world your "rugged individualism".
S. Parrish
by bobsanders Posted on 05/24/2009
Parrish's reply is more of the same.
Without any evidence, or indeed any reason to address these topics, Mr. Parrish has replied that he knows that the underlying motivations for every writer who posts on this blog are (1) to justify the enslavement of blacks, (2) to diminish the status of women, and (3) to justify violence and discrimination against gays.
I can see nothing in this discussion that even broaches these topics.
Throughout his essay, Parrish uses a variety of terms that express contempt for men because they are white and mature. It's pretty clear that Parrish is simply asserting that, if you are white, hetero and male, you bear historic guilt for the sins that animate his essay.
So, Parrish has given us more of the same.
by Shouting Thomas Posted on 05/25/2009
Christ, but you're boring, Parrish. You're a caricature of the stereotypical leftist academic in the "humanities," your arguments are weaker than a newborn kitten, and if you manage to dupe some no-name institution into granting you an assistant professorship, you're going to get your intellectual ass handed to you in front of your whole class by the first intelligent moderate/conservative who steps into your unfortunate classroom. How I wish I could be there to see it. You're going down in flames, son.
by Defenseman Emeritus Posted on 05/25/2009
The money quote was the "I am not prepared to exploit" bit about the Duke LaCross travesty--conclusively proving that Mr. Parrish is every bit the condescending intellectual coward that I've come to expect from all too many who consider themselves--as I think I can say without fear of contradiction that Mr. Parrish indeed does--men "of the left." For him to claim that he feels it best to not "exploit" this incident by refusing comment (while simultaneously implying that to merely cite the historical facts about this by now iconic example of all--or certainly a great deal--that is wrong in the humanities faculties on campus is somehow beyond the pale) simply because he wasn't physically "on the scene" at the time is like saying that one has to fly to the surface of the sun to know that it is hot. Please.....I'm just sittin' here reading Parrish and eatin' that s**t with a spoon....
by virgil xenophon Posted on 05/26/2009
Wow Parrish's response really attracted the best of NAS readership. I suppose we should all be proud that San Quentin Community College now offers a course in basic reading, but it is obvious that the last three writers missed the registration date. Defenseman Emeritus, I guess Parrish did not have time to illustrate his response with doodles of naked ladies and sports cars to hold your preadolescent attention span. I'm sure you are used to blogosphere responses with less substance than what Parrish had to say, and feel a bit cheated sitting in your local sportsbar doinking away at your computer. Perhaps you should give the receding hairline a chance to breathe and take off the baseball cap while reading. Apparently this is a trick all fading jocks use to prevent overheating when called upon to read bedtime stories, write checks, or compose a birthday card.
You are out of your league boys and you know it!
by kilgore trout lives Posted on 05/27/2009
It's always such fun to observe the kind of spastic prolixity that affronted vanity can generate in academics like Parrish/Kilgore Trout. I can only imagine what befalls hapless students who challenge him in class. Does anyone have contact information for the Three Stooges? As I recall, they had a very direct and practical way of dealing with pontificating professors. More, Mr. Parrish/Kilgore Trout, more!
Glenn M. Ricketts
by Glenn M.Ricketts Posted on 05/28/2009