ACTA Responds To The Academics It Has Scared
Before commencing, I would like to note that tenured professors cannot be fired.
At Inside Higher Ed, Anne Neal posts a response to critics of ACTA's report, "How Many Ward Chruchills".
If ACTA’s report has a take-home message for academics, it is that they urgently need to justify to a skeptical public why their work deserves special protections. Only then, ironically, will they have a chance of preserving the independence they cherish. With transparency comes respect; with accountability comes autonomy.
There are extensive and interesting comments, which boil down to academics comlaining about methodology, as I had predicted, and others demanding that academics answer the charges instead of whining that the report is beneath their standards. My favorite comment is this one, from R.A.S.:
" .. The ACTA report remains a blatant exercise in cherry-picking course titles and descriptions that sound "leftist" .."
Are you [referring to the commenter quoted above] suggesting that Grover Furr is not a Stalin apologist? Are you suggesting that Angela Davis is just another, run-of-the-mill professor? Are you suggesting that Billy Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn sat out the Vietnam War?
What’s next? Trying to convince us, Larry Summers isn’t an economist who worked for Clinton?
Country-western music has it right — "Denial is not a river in Egypt."
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