>
> Gregory wrote:
>
>> Chomsky and Michael Albert have often noted this distinction between
>> another
>> technical/ideological pair, MIT and Harvard. Chomsky:
>>
>> "By conventional measures, the Harvard faculty is much more liberal,
>> in fact left-liberal. MIT faculty are very conservative often, even
>> reactionary. I get along fine with MIT faculty, even when we disagree
>> about everything (which is the usual case). If I show up at the Harvard
>> faculty club, you can feel the chill settle; it's as if Satan entered
>> the room." ("Disciplined Minds," Jeff Schmidt, Rowan and Littlefield,
>> 2000,
>> p. 14).
>
> I wonder what departments he's comparing. It wouldn't suprise me if,
> say,
> Harvard left-liberal political scientists disdain Chomsky's political
> forays while his MIT linguistics colleagues are willing to indulge him:
> the former know more about politics (or at least think they do) and have
> a
> bigger stake in being right than the latter.
I think Chomsky's onto something, actually. I regard myself to be towards the radical-left end of things (believe it or not), and I've probably had a chillier response from liberals than I've ever had from conservatives. (I could go on about the loss of several friends when I voted for Nader a few years back. Veyr unforgiving people, they were.) Maybe Philadelphia breeds a more civil brand of conservative, but I get the sense that they seem to _like_ a decent civil argument once in a while, and in a Democrat city, they're sort of forced to understand that one's politics aren't a yardstick over whether one's a decent human being or not. A lot of liberals seem to feel physically hurt when people disagree with them, so they tend to see conservative politics as proof-positive of absolute evil.