English Professor Adopts Pro-Reading Stance
For unfortunate reality-based reasons, I have had to spend quite a bit of time recently thinking about the practice of teaching, which has ended up with me reading things like this interview with University of Virginia professor Mark Edmundson.
He’s a big booster of Emerson and Thoreau. I’ve never read Emerson, what little Thoreau I’ve seen has struck me as a bunch of hippie claptrap, and lines like
Thoreau is a tough, brutal critic of one central tenet — one central tendency in American life, and that is consumerism, all right? Simplify, simplify, simplify. There`s no writer who knows more about the perils of consumerism.
don’t exactly inspire me to pursue it further. (Thoreau’s noble embrace of asceticism led, if I recall correctly, to his dying of TB.) Regardless, Edmundson seems like an interesting fellow, and there’s some good stuff here on the seemingly deathless issue of politics in academia:
Also, I think a lot of the kind of angry conservative movement that rubs me the wrong me, the Rush Limbaugh kind of stuff, came about because people going to college felt, All my professors are liberal, I could never give them my reservations about the liberal line, so that those things festered and got darker and nastier. And then, you know, welcome to talk radio. There they are, expanded to 90 times their size. If they`d been listened to in a tolerant way and disagreed with in an affectionate way, we might have a little bit better civil discourse in the country… one of the things that English departments, in particular, need to do is become receptive to hiring more people who have conservative political views. You can`t have a real dialogue if all you have are liberals, leftists and leftists to the left of leftists.
I particularly like the phrase “disagreed with in an affectionate way”.
Read all the way to the end and, in lieu of a cookie, you get an amusing Hayek-related moment.
