Just a point of order: free speech issues are about the _government_. Doug can tell you never to type 'walla walla bing bang' to this list and he's not violating your _right_ to free speech. If a university doesn't want WC to speak, that's not taking away his free speech rights. he can tell it to a cushion, to the Society for Leftist Wankers, join LNP3.exe's list, publish it in the Red Orange, join LOB, start a blog, whatever.
academic freedom seems to be what's at issue here if his article and this controvery get him canned. and, in that case, given your hostility to dot edus I'm really curious ..... :)) *ducking*
and *rrrrrrrrrrrrrunning!*
seriously, I get the sense that Thomas Brown's outrage is very much about feeling that his profession has been seriously compromised by this. Whether that's true or not, I won't say at the moment. I'm after the bigger issue here, which is that, if people like you, Bryan, find that dot edu's reputation leave much to be desired, that is because the dot edu types aren't living up to the ideals that scholars supposedly hold out for themselves. And, since the professions must police themselves, it's natural that a fellow member of the academic profession is going to be outraged by shoddy scholarship. Academics are supposed to judge those things and call them out .
It doesn't seem to me that Thomas wants to silence Ward's speech, but criticize his scholarship. Not going to bat for WC is, to my mind, the same as you crossing the picket line of a homophobic union. You refuse to go to bat for it because of it's actions, heterosexist policies. You support unions in the abstract, of course, just as Thomas supports free speech. You're just not going to go the whole nine yards and will, in fact, take actions that might hurt that particular union in the short term (since in the long term, it's better they shed heterosexism) --because you want to criticize it and advance it beyond its homophobia. Thomas seems to want to do the same thing here. (I can't blame him. It pisses me off to no end when I see shoddy scholarship. On another list, an adjunct has published a book and allowed the publisher to claim he's a _P_rofessor of history. Small potatoes, but to one of his fellow academics on this list, it's unethical, and he's outraged b/c that person tarnishes his profession and destroys the public trust.)
I'm not sure where I stand on the issue one way or another--as to whether Ward has made a major goof in his scholarship. I just wanted to point out that, if you put your right shoe on your left foot for a minute, you might be able to the parallel. You take a principled stand against homophobic unions and are willing to protest them by not heeding their call to support the line. Similarly, Thomas is taking a principled stand and not heeding any leftist call to defend WC's academic freedom by refusing to criticism him under these conditions. Thomas, I'm sure, defends academic freedom and defends Churchill's academic freedom, just as you support unions. He just doesn't defend shoddy scholarship in the name of academic freedom and you don't support homophobic unions in the name of aboslute labor solidarity at all costs.
>P.S. The homepage of Lamar University where Professor Brown
>works (I have warned LBOsters about "dot edu" thinking for a
>long time now) has at it bottom a link to Texas Homeland Security.
>
>The horrorshow increases.
I'm not sure what this has to do with anything. it's logical fallacy.
How does this address Thomas's argument?
kelley
"We live under the Confederacy. We're a podunk bunch of swaggering pious hicks."
--Bruce Sterling