When John Holbo has the time for serious blogging he’s one of my favorites to read. He apparently has had time the last couple of days, because he has one great post on conservatives in academia, and then another one, and then an impressive essay on the dirty hands problem. [UPDATE: Whoops. The second entry there is from John’s coblogger and wife Belle Waring. Sorry, Belle!] Tim Burke also has a thoughtful post on the politics-and-academe problems.
Speaking of conservatives in academia, read Kieran Healy’s post on David Horowitz’s odd initiative, “Follow the Network,” which is apparently going to be one of those sprawling everythings-connected-to-everything conspiracy charts of the sort one sees in Christic Institute or John Birch Society publications combines with a high tech let’s-trash-people-anonymously function with a kind of six-degrees-of-separation game. (I note that there are established websites that try to make somewhat similar hay with right-leaning think tanks, foundations, universities, and individuals– but they don’t generally reach the absurd heights of including Osama bin Laden in the same network with Jack Balkin.) I think this looks so silly on its face that it’s not likely to attract the same kind of attention and worries that, say, Middle East Watch did. Horowitz’s team of researchers doesn’t seem to have done a very good job even at placing people, by the way. My colleague Cathy Cohen is listed as being at Yale, as is Penn’s Rogers Smith.
It doesn’t seem to take much to qualify as a “‘Progressive’ Academic,” the category that disreputable folks like three of my departmental colleagues and Michael Walzer get lumped into. The whole enterprise seems like a bad idea– or rather, three or four bad ideas rolled into one.
Comments are closed.