Tuesday, March 15, 2005
(2:42 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
My Assessment
Robert "KC" Johnson is wrong. By persisting in his incorrectness after repeated good-faith attempts by the author to clarify, Prof. Johnson is effectively lying about what Michael Bérubé said -- that is, even if he intends to be telling the truth, he absolutely should know better and is responsible for his failure to act on that better knowledge. Prof. Johnson may be a brilliant scholar in some respects -- I don't know first-hand, and his blog posts don't even begin to tempt me to do any further research on that topic -- but in regard to the "conservatives in academia/liberal bias in the academy" debate, he is a partisan hack with an ax to grind, period.For those who haven't been following it, Prof. Johnson is basically claiming that Michael Bérubé thinks conservatives are retarded, or are similar in many important respects to retarded people when, in point of fact, Prof. Bérubé wrote an article pointing out the ways in which a particular kind of conservative student -- many of whom, I would add, has been rigorously trained by every possible media outlet precisely to disrespect teachers, to assume that teachers are giving them nothing but politically correct shit that should be challenged (a kind of cultivation to which Prof. Johnson is, in his own small way, contributing enthusiastically) -- can present challenges insofar as they attempt to dominate the discussion. Toward the end, he mentions other types of students who also create challenges in the group dynamic, including those with particular mental disorders.
That was an unfortunate juxtaposition given the fact that it gave people ammunition against him, but given Prof. Bérubé's mentally disabled son and his vigorous activism for rights for the disabled, I would conclude that he would never make a comparison between conservatives and the mentally disabled in order to score a cheap insult and moreover that it would be completely contradictory to everything we know about him to think that he would even consider using the category of mental illness as a means of derision in any case -- that is, to reach the conclusion that Prof. Bérubé is saying what Prof. Johnson claims he is saying, we would have to make Prof. Johnson's interpretation of this one sentence an interpretive key to his life and work as a whole. That, in my opinion, would not be good hermeneutical practice.
In addition, Prof. Johnson's repeated contention that he would not want to be someone who expressed a conservative opinion in Prof. Bérubé's class -- based on Prof. Bérubé's responses to his peers in a public forum, rather than Prof. Bérubé's account of how he actually dealt with a conservative student, in which he sounds like he was more than fair -- is the sheerest idiocy. He's just trying to come up with some way to still be right, in this case by dodging the issue of his continued willful ignorance and changing the subject to Prof. Bérubé's understandably harsh responses to Prof. Johnson's slander -- and therefore, apparently, claiming that his underlying assumption that Prof. Bérubé is an asshole has been vindicated. I say: shame on you, Prof. Johnson. Shame on you for slandering Prof. Bérubé, and shame on you for claiming victim status when he called you on it.
That is my assessment.
