Give alumni donations wisely
The very cool Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute has an excellent article in the Summer 2005 issue of City Journal, "Don't Fund College Follies," that delves into the continuing destructive work of tenured radicals in academia (think Ward Churchill "progressives") and offers smart solutions to the problem:
"... At a handful of schools, enlightened alumni not only have learned how to avoid misguided benevolence but are also figuring out how to re-introduce serious scholarship to their campuses. Their initiatives are doing what presidents and trustees have failed to do: break the Left’s illiberal stranglehold on their institutions’ intellectual life and restore true academic freedom to campus.
Their strategies are very different from most big-time college giving, which too often funds some of today’s more regrettable violations of scholarly seriousness. One of Harvard’s most prominent benefactors, Sidney R. Knafel (Harvard AB ’52, MBA ’54), is a prime example of misguided philanthropy. Chairman of Insight Communications, the nation’s ninth-largest cable company, with a market value of some $2.1 billion, Knafel has recently forked over a juicy $1.5 million to the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, a font of feminist grievance and left-wing posturing.
... But how could a businessman who graduated from college back in 1952 guess that beneath the ubiquitous 'discourses,' 'constructions,' and 'negotiated meanings'—behind the coy hyphens, parentheses, and slashes—lies the belief that there is no such thing as the 'self,' or 'truth,' or 'males' and 'females,' or 'good' and 'bad,' that all are arbitrary categories designed by an oppressor class of white male heterosexual capitalists to keep a victim class of minorities, women, and poor people silenced and powerless? How could he know that, according to the dominant campus ideology, Western civilization is merely a factory for 'colonialism, slavery, empire and poverty,' as a Yale English professor puts it, and that the purpose of studying its great works is to unmask the various defenders of white male privilege?"
And speaking of City Journal, GOP Vixen has been proud to tout "South Park Conservatives: The Revolt Against Liberal Media Bias," by CJ senior editor Brian C. Anderson. As something of a "South Park" scholar (who would have to viciously flunk Ward Churchill if he were my student in "South Park 101"), I love how Anderson uses the show's anti-liberal irreverence to anchor a broader argument of how and why the liberal media elite no longer hold all the cards. A snippet:
"In a 2004 interview, (Trey) Parker and (Matt) Stone expanded on just how much they loathed (Rob) Reiner and his ilk. 'People in the entertainment industry are by and large whore-chasing drug-addict fuckups,' Parker noted. 'But they still believe they're better than the guy in Wyoming who really loves his wife and takes care of his kids and is a good, outstanding, wholesome person. Hollywood views regular people as children, and they think they're the smart ones who need to tell the idiots out there how to be.' Offered Stone, 'In Hollywood, there's a whole feeling that they have to protect Middle America from itself ... And that's why 'South Park' was a big hit up front, because it doesn't treat the viewer like a fucking retard.'"
Buy the book. Read the whole thing. You won't regret it.
On a side note, I recently saw a commercial advertising that "South Park" was now in syndication and will be broadcast five nights a week on network Channel 9 here in L.A. starting this fall. My first question is, how? And furthermore, how? Just to edit "Sex and the City" for TBS leaves an inexperienced viewer not knowing what the hell is going on. (And that's going into syndication on network Channel 5!) I just hope that Parker and Stone will keep an iron fist over the editing.
When I saw Total Recal in the theater, I couldn't wait to see it on TV. I wasn't disapointed, they kept saying "fogged". "You fogged up his mind!"
Caught a little of you on Laura Inghram last night, cool.
Posted by: Dave Munger | July 26, 2005 at 07:13 PM