[lbo-talk] posh as fuck

[// ravi]

On Dec 9, 2011, at 6:29 AM, Jim Farmelant wrote:
> On Thu, 8 Dec 2011 20:47:26 -0500 // ravi <ravi at platosbeard.org> writes:
>> On Dec 6, 2011, at 11:03 AM, Michael Smith wrote:
>>> Academe as a bastion of free enquiry is a bit oversold, 
>>> too. There certainly are some bold thinkers in Academe, 
>>> but there's also a lot of faddism, groupthink, and parroting 
>>> of conventional wisdom. And there's a fair amount of 
>>> downright ideological thought-policing too; look at the 
>>> persecution of Norman Finkelstein vel sim. There are 
>>> courageous individuals within the Unis, but the Unis 
>>> are not courageous institutions. 
>> 
>> 
> 
>> Not  everyone is a Bertrand Russell (for good and bad!).
> 
> And Bertrand Russell ultimately had to spend most of
> his life outside the universities.  His protests during WW I
> against conscription and the war itself not only led to
> his imprisonment but also led to his college at Cambridge,
> Trinity, giving him the boot.  Years later when he was living
> in the US, the attempt by City College of New York to give
> Russell a lectureship ran aground when New York's Protestant
> and Catholic clergy teamed up, with the help of the Hearst Press,
> to get this quashed.  
> 

All true… I was thinking of these facts as I was writing my email, but to clarify: I was not thinking so much of the persecution of Russell but his patience nurturing of Wittgenstein, without which the latter’s strange and contrarian rants (IMHO) could well have faded into obscurity.

	—ravi