kunstler | At a moment in history when the
US is beset by epochal problems of economy, energy, ecology, and foreign
relations, campus life is preoccupied with handwringing over the hurt
feelings of every imaginable ethnic and sexual group and just as
earnestly with the suppression of ideological trespassers who don’t go
along with the program of exorcisms. A comprehensive history of this
unfortunate campaign has yet to be written, but by the time it is,
higher education may lie in ruins. It is already burdened and beset by
the unintended consequences of the financial racketeering so pervasive
across American life these days. But in promoting the official
suppression of ideas, it is really committing intellectual suicide,
disgracing its mission to civilized life.
I had my own brush with this
evil empire last week when I gave a talk at Boston College, a general
briefing on the progress of long emergency. The audience was sparse. It
was pouring rain. The World Series was on TV. People are not so
interested in these issues since the Federal Reserve saved the world
with free money, and what I had to say did not include anything on race,
gender, and white privilege.
However, after the talk, I went
out for dinner with four faculty members and one friend-of-faculty.
Three of them were English profs. One was an urban planner and one was
an ecology prof. All of the English profs were specialists in race,
gender, and privilege. Imagine that. You’d think that the college was a
little overloaded there, but it speaks for the current academic
obsessive-compulsive neurosis with these matters. Anyway, on the way to
restaurant I was chatting in the car with one of the English profs about
a particular angle on race, since this was his focus and he tended to
view things through that lens. The discussion continued at the dinner
table and this is what ensued on the Internet (an email to me the next
morning):
On Oct 29, 2015, at 4:37 PM, Rhonda Frederick wrote:
This is what I posted on my social medias, am sharing with you and your agent.
Yesterday, novelist/journalist James Howard Kunstler was invited to give a talk at BC (see his bio at http://www.bc.edu/offices/lowellhs/calendar.html#1028).
At the post-talk dinner, he said
“the great problem facing African Americans is that they aren’t taught
proper English, and that … academics are too preoccupied with privilege
and political correctness to admit this obvious fact.” No black people
(I presume he used “African American” when he meant “black”) were
present at the dinner. I was not at the dinner, but two of my
friends/colleagues were; I trust their recollections implicitly. Whether
Kunstler was using stereotypes about black people to be provocative, or
whether he believed the ignorance he spouted, my response is the same: I
cannot allow this kind of ignorance into my space and I am not the one
to cast what he said as a “teachable moment.” I do think there should be
a BC response to this, as the university paid his honorarium and for
his meal. Here’s some contact information for anyone interested in
sharing your thoughts on how BC should spend its money:
Lowell Humanities Series at Boston College (http://www.bc.edu/offices/lowellhs/about.html)
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