Governor Walker’s Son on Political Bias at Marquette

Matt Walker, son of Governor Scott Walker and a Marquette student, gave a fairly lengthy interview to Brietbart.com, and talked about his experiences at Marquette.

Two key issues where how he has been treated as the son of a governor whom most faculty voted against, and how much ideological bias he has encountered in his classes. Quoting the article:

“It always comes down to the professor in the end,” he said when asked if he’s treated fairly.

But one of the most surprising themes of my experience in college has been that political bias appears less in my political courses (as a political science and economics double major), but more so in classes like English, Philosophy, and other humanities.

In the beginning years of my time at Marquette, I don’t think most professors knew who I was. I don’t think too many professors treat me differently when they find out, but every now and then I’ll have a minor issue.

He said that conservatives and Republicans on college campuses who are aiming to fight back against liberal bias by leftist professors and academia figures should work to create bias reporting systems to expose any double standards they face.

This is consistent with our experience, and indeed with a lot of data on ideological bias in academia. Intolerant political correctness is most common in the humanities, and in some social sciences, especially sociology and some subfields in psychology. It’s less common in political science and much less common in economics.

Marquette’s Political Science Department, for example, leans heavily liberal, but there are conservative voices (including ours, which Marquette is trying to shut up), but most of what our liberal colleagues preach is “disciplinal:” more concerned with the theoretical constructs of political science than with raw liberal or conservative politics.

The humanities are very different, and several fiascoes in Marquette’s Philosophy Department are just the tip of the iceberg.

Humanities faculty, lacking any disciplined view of politics, simply give vent to their biases.

With this in mind, the recent move by Dean Rick Holz to water down the Arts & Sciences core curriculum may be a good thing. Students will be more free to pursue the subjects they want, with less burden of politically correct indoctrination in Marquette’s humanities departments.

But in any real “Catholic university” there would be a robust humanities requirement, and it would not consist of politically correct indoctrination.

Academics (Especially in the Humanities) Write Very Badly

This isn’t new, but we can’t resist posting about it.

Between 1995 and 1998, the journal Philosophy and Literature had a Bad Writing Contest. You’ll want to check out all the winners, but here, for your edification, is one winner. According to a press release from Philosophy and Literature. . .

Judith Butler, a Guggenheim Fellowship-winning professor of rhetoric and comparative literature at the University of California at Berkeley, admired as perhaps “one of the ten smartest people on the planet,” wrote the sentence that captured the contest’s first prize.

And just what piece of prose won this honor?

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

One might be tempted to say it takes real talent to write such turgid, stilted and opaque prose. Surely, this must a a parody, right? But no, it’s not.

We are rather a fan of George Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language.” Orwell insists that bad language doesn’t merely show ineptness, it results from intellectual slovenliness and downright dishonesty.

Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.

The reason that foolish language is so often found in the humanities is, quite simply, that academics in the humanities so often have foolish thoughts.

Paper Titles From the Modern Language Association Meeting

The “MLA” meeting is a “scholarly” conference at which the especially politically correct humanities faculty get together to share their current research.

From Minding the Campus blog, some selected presentations:

I know this is almost too easy, but here are several nominees for the best paper titles at this year’s MLA Conference:

“The Buggering Hillbilly in the Buddy Movie: Male Sexuality in Deliverance”

“Giving Ourselves a Good Kick in the Assessment: Entering and Expanding the Outcomes Conversation,”
and my favorite:

“Queer in a Vaginal Economy: Global Capital and Heteropatriarchal Violence in Filipino American Gay Fiction”

The best panel titles were “Biomarxism” and “Scripting Brutality On The Queer Asian American Body”

I’m sure you’ll all write in for the paper abstracts.

This last one, remember, is not just one paper, it’s an entire panel!