The Stinking Ninth

Recently, there has been a lot of buzz in the Blogosphere about the Professorate. I’ll take a look at some of this in a moment, but something troubles me about these so-called intellectuals. We have a professorate and academic class that seems to be actively hostile to the West and towards the United States in particular.

Many academics also have an affection for Communist systems and some are hard-core Stalinists.

Worse still, these scholars seem to have a problem with long established standards for scholarship and often will ignore research that conflicts with their biases. If their research doesn’t confirm their firmly held theses, they will invent new data out of whole cloth. Michael Bellesiles is a case in point.

Here are a few more examples of these overeducated and overhyped idjits.

Just last week, we wrote about an Associate Professor(Saul Cornell) at Ohio State University who has a somewhat revisionist take on the Second Amendment. Smallest Minority delivered a well placed smack down.

Now we are hearing about Ward Churchill who likened the victims of the World Trade Center attacks to “Little Eichmanns” in a turn of phrase that is outrageously offensive to both the American people and victims of the Holocaust. Mr. Churchill is a tenured professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder and until recently was head of the Department of Ethnic Studies. Churchill received tenure despite his rather dubious scholarship and possibly outright fraud.

Closer to home, we have the case of David Stowell, an associate professor of history at Keene State College. Stowell’s office door is liberally covered with anti-war, anti-Bush sentiments. A student who also happens to be a veteran complained that these sentiments create a hostile learning environment for veterans. The student’s complaints were dismissed because of Stowell’s First Amendment rights. We have to wonder if the charge would be so easily dismissed if Stowell was a Conservative professor and the student was Left Wing.

These are not atypical. They seem to represent a mindset that is fully supported and encouraged by university administrators and is often ignored by alumni and taxpayers that fund much of what goes on in the hallowed halls of academia.

But, I’ve often wondered why intellectuals gravitate to the Left when the regimes they admire often have little love for intellectuals. During the Cultural Revolution in China, Mao divided the enemies of the State into nine classes. Intellectuals were considered the worst of the lot and were called the “Stinking Ninth”. Mao’s Red Guards tormented teachers in their classrooms and many intellectuals were sent off to work as peasants in far-flung provinces. Many were jailed for years.

Mao was a lamb compared to Pol Pot who rounded up anyone who even looked like an intellectual (ie. people who wore glasses), herded them into Concentration Camps and slaughtered them. Pol Pot went on to die peacefully in his bed, never having to answer for his crimes. Even Pol Pot has had his defenders, among them Noam Chomsky, the beloved guru of the Leftist Intellectual.

So we have an intellectual class that despises the system that has allowed them more freedom than any other in the history of Humanity, but admires and even loves systems of government that have little love for outspoken academics and would probably quickly dispatch a professor that created a hostile environment for veterans or attacked their own country at every opportunity.

Maybe we can arrange a swap, their intellectuals for ours. Who knows, maybe they might realize what tyranny is really like if they had to live under its thumb. But somehow I doubt it.