So I’m eating breakfast in a faculty lounge in California and I hear an angry female faculty member loudly discussing politics with her male counterpart. As I eat my cantaloupe, I am treated to the following tidbits: Karl Rove and others like him are funneling money to the Republicans (I sure hope so!), Romney finally said how he really feels about the 47%, (that condescending a**hole!), why can’t Ross Douthat at the New York Times be more like David Brooks (who thinks just like a Democrat but calls himself a Republican)) and how does this Douthat have the gall to write a book on religion –he doesn’t know a thing (because he is–gasp! a conservative). And seriously, does Douthat need their permission to write such a book?
The angry voices and condescension toward anything or anyone who did not toe the line of the New York Times or the academic “elite” was staggering. These two faculty members had the critical thinking skills of a couple of gnats and no ability to understand anything outside their worldview. I thought higher education was supposed to teach critical thinking skills. Wishful thinking on my part. Perhaps these people should get out of their faculty club bubble every once in a while and talk to people who are different from them and maybe even try listening. What a novel concept!
The “ivory tower” is deliberately built tall and narrow to discourage contact with “the ground” as completely as possible. Think of the typical university faculty member as a self-imprisoned Rapunzel, albeit without the hair and the ability to spin thread into gold.
Well you know Dr. Helen, it is the speck in your eye that is the problem, it could not possibly be in their own eyes. They are man perfected, heaven’s earthly angels don’t you know. It must be so cool for them to walk around knowing that they know everything about everything. They are smart dammit, because they said so. Ashamedly, I admit that I used to be a know it all little bitch like that.
When everything collapses, we could EAT these people.
Oh Goody, Goody!
They’re too bitter.
*applause*
“…no ability to understand anything outside their worldview.”
A world view completely at odds with reality, by definition a psychosis. And we all line up for the opportunity to deliver our fortunes and our treasures to these people.
As I’ve noted elsewhere, I was a bit flabbergasted while having a conversation with a college e-du-ma-cated intern who tossed out the comment (quoting his guidance councilor) that college was more about cutting ties to ones family than about actually learning anything specific.
He also noted he had learned more that summer on his internship than in all of his previous college education combined.
One of the things I also find interesting is this: Liberals tend to be very hypocritical.
The examples you noted were apparently quite loud in their opinions, probably because they did not for a second think anyone would dare disagree with them. This was probably an accurate assumption on their part.
Were someone to disagree, I suspect they would be shouted down rather rudely. Could be wrong, but that’s been my personal experience more often than not on the matter.
Basically, they feel free to voice their very negative opinions in very blunt and ugly terms, yet demand everyone else tiptoe around their own feelings and be deferential towards them.
The lack of civility that has been noted by the leftists, IMO, is little more than the the rest of us getting fed up with their hypocrisy and giving them divergent views couched in the same terms they have been using to lambast the rest of us for years….
Good points. I agree that the lack of civility charges by the left are in part because the “silent majority” are no longer remaining silent. Nor should we.
This one-sided battle has been going of for a long time. I remember a conversation over lunch back in the late 1980s with a coworker. She was an Air Force Captain and a devout Christian. We were discussing political correctness and she asked, “Why is it that I have to walk on egg shells to avoid saying anything that offends them but they’re perfectly free to shout things that offend me?”
Too many academics have little connection with reality. They spend decades as students (K-12, undergrad, grad school to Ph.D, post-doc) and then become part of the faculty. If they ever worked outside academia, it was likely in a restaurant. They simply don’t know how the real world works but they have their perfect set of theories of how everything should operate if only “the proper people were in charge” (meaning themselves, of course). When academics do get politions of policial power such as in the Obama administration, the results are usually terrible. However, reality isn’t enough to discredit their theories. Like Obama himself, they may be “book smart” (but only on selected leftist) books but because they’re unable to learn from failure, they show no signs of intelligence much less wisdom.
Academia—First up against the funding wall when the revolution comes….
Your observation, Dr. Helen, is as common as snow in the Rocky Mountains.
What you should really try to connect to is the current president. He is even more twitchy jerky than the two geniuses you observed. Forget about Dinesh D’Souza’s nice little movie — in my opinion, “spoiled brat faculty” is the ONLY way to see BHO.