Last week, I published this post (on Minding the Campus) about the American Association of University Professors. I argued that the AAUP is, under the presidency of Rudy Fichtenbaum, moving sharply to the left.
Over at Academe blog, which is published by but does not necessarily represent the views of the AAUP, co-editor John K. Wilson replied. The ensuing exchange is lively and worth a look. Note in particular the comment of Peter Kirstein, vice president of the Illinois Conference of the AAUP. It reads in part:
Organisations should stand for something: they should tolerate dissent and debate, but we live in a world of growing repression of the higher-educational system in the US. If that is surrendered to the thunder of the right or to bland liberalism, then the last bastion of resistance to American exceptionalism, white privilege, and the corporate buy out of critical thinking will be eliminated.
It is Kirstein’s view, in other words, that what I characterized as a move in the direction of naked partisanship is exactly the right direction for the AAUP.
But read the whole thing.