At mindingthecampus.com, Jonathan Imber reacts to the story about a student at the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater who recorded a professor’s rant about Republicans. Responds Imber:
The modern university classroom is no longer a sanctuary of thoughtful engagement with ideas and the pursuit of the truth. The problem with a good deal of sociology taught to undergraduates today is not its touching upon controversial and morally complex matters, it is how those matters are reduced to simplistic, often stupid, assertions about right and wrong. Textbooks and introductory courses in sociology are filled more and more with judgments rather than analyses, that is, it seems perfectly consistent to invite Republican-bashers into such a classroom without asking students to analyze those judgments. That is not what sociology is for.
The college campus as a marketplace of ideas is, sadly, dead. The Boomers, who now run the show in higher education, have become the closed-minded establishment they once decried.
