You will recall what I said about academic mailing lists, that nowhere will you see leftist academics flaunting their insanity so openly. I’m not sure what it is. Perhaps there’s something about the depersonalized medium of email that fertilizes groupthink.
In the 80s, I was teaching ESL (English as a Second Language). Now, other than possibly folklore and cultural anthropology and all the post-modernist “X-studies” pseudo-disciplines, no field attracts more hippie wannabe, starry eyed Peace Corps wackjobs than ESL. Mary, Queen of the Moonbats is depressingly exemplary of the field.
I was on this mailing list, sponsored by the international organization, TESOL (that would be Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages, in case you’re interested). It was quite a large mailing list, with some very big names as members — and some of those very big names have all the intelligence, collectively, of a small artichoke.
I didn’t fit very well. For one thing, I didn’t much like it when Arab or Korean students would lecture me about why the United States was an evil nation — and you see, ESL folks eat that crap up. They love it. Then there was the whole ex-pat thing (ESL is full of ex-pats). Anyway, I didn’t post much, because if I had, well …
There was this one moron on the mailing list who was teaching English in Japan. One day I logged in, and saw a message from him that went something like this:
We did a study and found that Japanese students prefer canned dialogues to actual speech. Therefore, we’re going to speak only Japanese in class …
Don’t forget. That’s English class.
because they’ll learn more if we use canned dialogues than speak to them in English.
I was amazed. So amazed, in fact, that I broke my silence. I replied:
Wait. So if I do a study and find that Martian students prefer blue shoes to brown shoes, that means that blue shoes are better for their feet?
And the flaming began. I was called a “cultural imperialist” and lots of other names, because (I guess) if they like it, that’s all that counts. I guess.
Or there was another time when “cultural imperialism” was the topic of discussion. This was left-wing groupthink in its purest form: there was no dissent from the party line, which is that teaching English is evil, “cultural imperialism.”
Uhm, okay, you do remember that all these people teach English, right? So you’re wondering why they do it, if they feel it’s evil, right?
I can only hear this nonsense so long before I ask that one question that must be asked, and I did. All I got was what an evil racist I was, so I backed off.
Or there was the time that I said when students were going to attend US universities, it was our obligation to prepare them for the university classroom (as in teach them what is and is not plagiarism, how to document sources, that sort of thing) and spent two days deleting messages flaming me for again, being some evil, reactionary, racist cultural imperialist.
Then there was that sigfile. I had written a shell script that inserted a random .signature at the ends of my email messages. No, I know what you’re thinking, and you’re wrong. I limited myself to witticisms and literary quotations.
One day, I got this long rant, calling me everything under the sun, from the very biggest name on the list — because my script had appended a Mencken quotation to my message. She wasn’t taking issue with anything I’d said, mind. She was just raving like a slobbering idiot about Mencken. And she went on, screen after screen, truly one of the most abusive email messages I’ve ever received. And from one of the biggest names in the field.
Then there was the nutjob who insisted that not screwing your students was a “corrupt Western” ethic, and not only should we not follow it with internationals, but we should become “intimate” with as many of our students as possible.
Now, keep in mind that there was all kinds of discussion about this, as if this were one of the most profound, one of the wisest things they’d ever heard. What this guy was saying, of course (stripped of all the pseudo-academic nonsense meant to make it sound less crass) was “you should screw all your students.”
I did raise my hand once to ask if this were professional behavior, but was summarily bitchslapped for it.
You see, it makes no difference how outrageous or stupid your idea might be, if you couch it in the right gooey-gushy anti-American phraseology, they will all fall right in and goo all over it. You can see evidence of that in any academic journal, particularly those for the humanities and social sciences.
jimmyb says:
What a sad tale.
November 18, 2005, 9:24 pmPC will be the death of us.
weaver says:
sad, but true. someday academics will be about critical thinking again, instead of PC. i have a friend who teaches in ed. psych. he’s a white male. some master’s student actually flipped him off so he could see during a class break and when he mentioned the incident in the next class [without using names], she stood up and said ‘i did it’. later some students castigated him, in writing, for publically humiliating the student who did it. duh. when did this behaviour become acceptable? from students and professors?
November 18, 2005, 9:49 pmDaniel Levesque says:
Correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t people attending American universities supposed to already know English? How else could they possibly understand what they are being taught? English as a second language has got to be the silliest college class I have ever heard of.
Then again . . . some of our native speakers speak english so badly that maybe they could benefit from such a class. Naaah, if they can’t learn English by living here their whole lives I doubt one class will fix the problem.
www.ravingconservative.com
November 19, 2005, 12:57 amrightwingprof says:
Foolish man! Can we say big money, as in tuition?
No seriously, they come take ESL to learn English. Well, that’s the idea, anyway. Sometimes they have to pass through the ESL program before they enter the university; sometimes they don’t. Depends on the university, though there are more and more these days where they don’t.
That’s not the only function of ESL. There are also programs targeted toward immigrants.
November 19, 2005, 8:45 amjoubertconlon says:
Sounds a lot like living in San Francisco where I was called a “racist cultural imperialist” at least once a day during the 25 years I lived there. At first I thought I could make a difference fighting but it finally dawned on me that commie multiculturalism is a cult and I could not “deprogram” them all by myself - so I moved back to the USA.
November 19, 2005, 11:43 am