This is a not-so-peaceful entry, but one that I felt compelled to write after hearing Glenn Beck last week talk about the need for the American people to “steel” themselves against the evils of what he calls “reeducation camps:” colleges and universities, and the people who work there. According to Monsieur Beck, higher education is chockablock full of radical communists who want nothing more than to brainwash the youth of America into Mao-quoting automatons.
Funny—in all my time on college campuses, I’ve yet to see a course devoted to the study of communism. Not that such a course might not exist somewhere, but I’ve never seen it in any college catalog. On the other hand, every college or university I’ve been to has had an entire school or department of business and also economics, two whole academic fields devoted to advocating for the free market system. But I digress.
After hearing Beck, I felt like I needed to vent a bit. Maybe it’s because I’ve been around academics my whole life. Maybe it’s because I just got done putting together my application for tenure, a process that involved a lot of reflection on what it is that I do for a living and why I’ve chosen to do it. And maybe it’s because this weekend marked the 11th anniversary of my Dad’s passing, a man who embodied what being an intellectual could and should be.
Whatever the reason, I felt the need to respond in the form of an open letter to Mr. Beck, which takes the form of a Keith Olbermann-esque “Special Comment.”
