And on the seventh day, he rested.
Not for any moral, ethical, or religious reasons, mind you. I was just plain shuckered out after yesterday's walk, and was fighting a resurgent dose of hay fever to boot. So most of the day I spent in bed reading d'Souza's Illiberal Education.
Which was actually much more reasonable than I expected. I had read the Village Voice article documenting the errors in the reporting of the Harvard chapter, so I approached the book with a critical attitude, and was rather surprised when everything turned out to be extensively (if I wasn't an academic at heart myself, I would say anally) footnoted.
Occasionally some of the lists of supposed excesses were what a deconstructionist would call problematic. (Or as the joke goes, "How does a deconstructionist say ``fuck you''?" Answer: "I find your statements problematic.") Like there will be several examples of administrative timidity in the face of unfounded student protests and then something like "Yale seem unconcerned about its developing image as a 'gay' University." Of course, as my leftist friends would say, it could just be that as a libertarian bisexual, I bring my own set of biases to the text.
The only other big problem with the book is that its main thesis, that somehow affirmative action programs are related to critical response theory to freedom of speech restrictions to nonwestern civilization requirements, remains substantial unproved. The links that he cites are rarely anything more than "Professor X believes in both" or "Administrator Y used A to justify B to the alumni." Of course, it's hard to imagine what substantial proof of his thesis would amount to, if anything less than a full out and out cultural, philosophical, and sociological study of academia.
I wish I could take credit for coming up with "If the PC controversy didn't exist, it would be necessary to invent it", but I can't. I did, however, once suggest that since almost nobody admits to being PC any more, we should eliminate the word entirely and replace it with "PC-but", as to be used in the following construction: "I'm not PC-but I don't think it is ok to go around beating up gays." The discerning reader will surmise from the above that my own personal take on the situtation is that the entire issue is not (as some would maintain) a right-wing construction or a bunch of crazy radical taking over the academy. Rather, it is a cultural and philosophical conflict occurring both within and without the university, and the main problem is that both "sides" treat it not as such, but as ideological. The difference between an ideological and a philosophical conflict is clear to anyone whose ever read USENET: an ideological conflict requires attacking supposed orthodoxies on both sides, the construction and placement of strawman, standard polemic tactics, and above all, the complete absence of ideas.
Anyway, after reading four paragraphs of pompous philosophy like the above, you are probably ready to excuse yourself and head to the restroom. Me and my hayfever were heading to the bathroom every other page of d'Souza for a while there, as that was the nearest place to obtain kleenices (plural of kleenex). Eventually I just swipped 'em. Now, Smith College is a women's college, and as a previous installment of these postings remarked, that means that the bathrooms have no urinals. It also has two other repercussions in that arena. First, all of the restrooms in the dorms are marked "W". To get around this, signs were made up for the summer conferences, one side of which said "The Usual" and the other "The Unusual." These signs are then placed on the bathroom doors, and flipped according to the present occupiers. The repercussion is that each restroom stall contains twelve (12) toilet paper dispensers.
The other big excitement for the day was talking to Carol and J.R., two first year math grad students from Rutgers, over dinner. There aren't that many grad students at Rutgers, it seems, so they turned out to know t.b regular Jeff Vogel rather well. Carol, in fact, is going to buy some furniture from him in about a month. We discussed furniture food-chains for a while, then traded Jeff Vogel stories, the main themes of which were (1) he's a whole lot stranger in person than on the net, and (2) his daily schedule and habits are scarily similar to my own.