AAUP lives down to expectations

KC Johnson on the latest crapola from the American Association of University Professors' Journal of Academic Freedom:

The AAUP recently produced a new journal devoted to exploring the state of academic freedom on today's college campuses. As customary with anything from the AAUP in recent years, the publication was as notable for what it didn't contain as what it did, in that it offered no mention of the internal threat to academic freedom coming from the ideological and pedagogical majority on most college campuses.

No, really? But much as I love Johnson (aw, shaddap) for his comprehensive takedown of the groupthink surrounding the Duke lacrosse case, it's always bothered me that he's taken care to maintain his liberal cred. In case you didn't know, he voted for Obama!

In this piece, for another example, he says this about the Wart case:

The highlight of the journal, however, comes from AAUP stalwart Ellen Schrecker. In the world according to Schrecker, far-left ideologues are not wildly overrepresented in the academy but instead are besieged, scarcely able to hold off the widespread conservative demands for their universities to fire them.

Schrecker spent 40 pages articulating this thesis, beginning with the case of Ward Churchill. People of good faith can disagree on whether Colorado handled the Churchill affair properly (I consistently opposed the attempt to dismiss Churchill, largely because it seemed to me that the University knew or should have known it was hiring an unqualified charlatan when it brought Churchill on staff---so it couldn't credibly release him only when it became politically inconvenient for the university to keep him as a professor). Schrecker's essay, on the other hand, reads more like a defense brief, portraying Churchill as an extraordinary scholar and wonderful teacher, driven out of the academy on trumped-up charges.

So Johnson thinks Churchill shouldn't have been fired for being a liar and a plagiarist. CU should be stuck with him because they were stupid enough to hire him in the first place. Good thinking.

(via the pirate whose parrot thinks he (the pirate) looks exactly like one of those Jonas Brothers (the cute one, or are they all cute?))