I had a conversation on Twitter today with Professor Claire Potter, the subject of the post Tenured radicals cannot be trusted with our academic freedom.
Potter first forcefully and repeatedly opposed the academic boycott of Israeli educational institutions proposed by the American Studies Association because it violated principles of academic freedom and freedom of speech, and was conducted in such a way as to ambush those opposed to the resolution.
After vigorous social media attacks, Potter flipped and now supports the boycott in order to give the boycott “a chance.”
You can read the conversation here and here.
Who is paying me?
Unfortunately, no one.
Not the Israeli Lobby (whatever that is). Not AIPAC. Not any of the groups you just know she had in mind.
These things always end badly. It’s why we cannot trust our academic freedom to tenured radicals.
MT @TenuredRadical "Oh please. Who is paying you?" >> so that's where u go with it? PPL who disagree w U must be paid off? Oh please.
— Legal Insurrection (@LegInsurrection) December 11, 2013
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tell her the great liberal company google pays some from ads.
make sure she knows google adsense supports israel….
The question “who is paying you,” is not asked in a vacuum, Wm; it is asked within the context of the denial of absolute values. Therefore, since there is no right, no wrong, no Truth, no God, everyone standing up for right, wrong, Truth, God, and so on must be a mouth organ for some great puppetmaster effectively making the speaker merely a ventriloquist’s dummy lacking in core values.
That is the position from which the Communists amongst us operate, and that is what they project onto us.
Ms. Potter probably believes that whatever position she supports is indeed Right and Good and True, and if it’s different from the position she held yesterday, that’s because she had yet to be fully enlightened on the issue. But anyone who disagrees with Ms. Potter is either an ignorant moron, which is a hard case to make regarding Prof. Jacobsen, or on the take from some shadowing engine of evil — the Koch brothers, the NRA, the Zionist lobby …
You’re not getting a weekly stipend from the brothers Koch like the rest of us are?!
Ripped off!!
Sometimes, that’s the only thing that keeps me going, in between my monthly checks from Big Oil!
😉
I think you are getting paid and paid well.
I, for one, pay heed to a lot of what you say. 😉
Thank you for this blog!!!
Principles, what principles! Socialists ain’t got no stinking principles!
Oops, forgot that they might have one: love of the collective. Or maybe it’s just fear of being excluded from their beloved collective!
Professor, just an FYI, the Koch Brothers prefer sending checks to a P.O. Box so that Media Matters and Think Progress have a harder time tracking your ill gotten gains.
I’m going to have to switch to direct deposit. All my checks from the Koch brothers, Exxon and Israel seem to have got lost in the mail.
Hence my objection to taxpayer money going to higher education where it sustains tenure for morons like her.
If the New School wishes to invest their endowment or the unsubsidized tuition of their students on the likes of her, that’s their business. More power to them.
But not a dime of mine, folks. Why must I pay so she can play?
I, Rush Koch-Murdoch, am paying him.
Why do you ask?
Poor Prof. Potter, who relinquishes free speech while pretending to defend it. P.C.’s a drag, eh?
This PhD would like to advocate separation of academia and State. No more gov’t grants, no more gov’t student loans. Earn your keep, Prof. Potter. See what it’s like to be a disenfranchised commoner who’s forced to pay for others’ free speech.
Awhile back, when I worked for a public university, a leftist acquaintance wondered why I didn’t support Democrat policies since they would (he claimed) benefit me personally in that situation. The idea of supporting what I considered good public policy apart from what might be to my advantage in the short time was perplexing to that caring, compassionate leftist.
“PPL who disagree w U must be paid off? Oh please.”
I love it when he holds out the tip jar and, with those sad, puppy-dog eyes, implores, “Oh please!”
Looks just like a 10-year-old Mark Lester, he does, our Professor J, begging for another bowl o’ gruel.
OMG someone downvoted that.
they must REALLY hate those floppy eared (illusion from the hippie hair) and doe eyed looks the prof gives us.
How do these tiny minds get tenured to begin with?
Because those tiny minds will fit neatly into the intellectual space that’s allowed on campus.
“Claire Potter@TenuredRadical
@glenntwo Currently right wing fringies are batting @ tweets and blog post about me. Interesting overlaps w/ Duke lax athletic supporters.”
Professor Potter,
You’re obviously referring to a comment I made in yesterday’s (Dec. 10) post.
I just have one question (and my hand is raised):
What?!?!
She’s awfully defensive.
People who put their values and opinions up for sale always assume everyone else does as well.
Professor J,
You’re a bully. Behold the power of gentle persuasion on an academic lass:
FROM THIS:
https://twitter.com/TenuredRadical/status/410894117493698560
TO THIS:
https://twitter.com/TenuredRadical/status/300342226305810434
A marriage of congrievance.
Whoopsie. Links are in the wrong order and should be switched.
Click the second one first.
Who is paying you? The vast free-thinking-protect-the-First-Amendment-conspiracy group. This group could be made up of any of us who read this blog and care about truth speaking.
Clair has lost all of her intellectual credibility. Maybe that was her intent when she gave in. Maybe she got ‘tired’ of defending her position. Maybe the hate groups wore her down. Claire, why not give the First Amendment “the chance” instead of giving hate the opportunity to silence?
re the tenured: As I read this post I remembered what read on the train yesterday. From Theodore Dalrymple’s book Life at the Bottom, the chapter on England’s public housing projects titled, “Do Sties Make Pigs?”:
“Thus public housing tenancy is to psychopaths what tenure is to academics: no better invitation to irresponsibility could be possibly be imagined.”
She had to ask.
She could not help it.
That’s what tenure on the public dime does to you and to your intelligence.
But then again, maybe she was always like that, for tenure on the public dime attracts her kind like dung attracts flies.
But don’t let the apparent childishness (is that even a real word?) confuse you. That same childish non-argument has been used for years to imprison dissidents in Cuba, China, North Korea, Venezuela…
Claire de Loon.
My theory is that most irrational accusations coming from the leftists, emanate from denial of their own behavior. It is the left that has Soros backing some 1000 groups, with direct propaganda from some (allegedly) used as legit news sources by the networks.
So it is reflexive/defensive for the left to assume others are also funded, rather than operating from a legit concern for country.
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/viewSubCategory.asp?id=1237
Offtopic: Is her avatar a pic of Speed Racer? That’s kinda neat, I won’t lie. 😛
Ontopic: I can’t help but note that while her initial stand against BDS was based on a solid ideological principle (worldwide academic freedom), her position after flip-flopping seems to lack any such basis. She quotes the ASA’s member vote as a reason for changing her mind, as though doing the wrong thing with a crowd of others is preferable to doing the right thing alone (though she would not have been alone in opposing BDS tactics in truth). One can only assume that she either did not hold academic freedom in very high esteem after all, or she simply bowed to unexpectedly aggressive peer pressure. Either way, a disappointing outcome.
It is important that we don’t assail even a faculty member who does consistently oppose such boycotts on “academic freedom” grounds. These boycotts must be opposed because they is based on falsehoods about Israel and because they are acts of bigotry. I know it seems like this is asking too much, but as educators these professors should be expected to speak the truth or not speak at all if they are ignorant on a subject. There is no room for lies, and the supporters of Israel and the truth have been to lax in permitting lies to be repeated in the past.
NOTE: I also posted part of the below comment in yesterday’s column about whether the ASA would also boycott Cornell, but they are relevant to the point above.
I asked the chair of the American studies department at Cornell (happens to be my alma mater) about the boycott vote. She kindly replied and wrote the following:
“The American Studies Program at Cornell, as program, has not taken a position, and I don’t think it should. Some of our faculty will be members of ASA (and as such are free to vote as they want to), while others will not be members. In other words I take it to be an ASA issue that is quite separate from our program.”
On the one hand, I am very relieved they don’t actively support it. I also understand that to maintain their illusion of academic freedom they can’t tell or suggest that faculty oppose it (however, it is not an academic issue). Yet, I am disturbed that this is apparently the PC response. The acceptable response should be that however individual professors chose to vote, there is no place for such a boycott, the boycott is based on falsehoods, and the boycott is an act of bigotry. As an educator, the department should be able to refute the lies propagated by the main scholarly organization in their field.
I looked at the Cornell American Studies website. Title page statement: “The Program in American Studies offers an interdisciplinary study of diversity ….”
The spring semester is packed with course offerings such as:
An Introduction to Africana Studies: Blackness in Global and Transnational Perspective.
Introduction to American Indian Studies I: Indigenous North America to 1890.
Hip Hop, Dance, and Asian America.
The Archeology of North American Indians.
Iriquois Archeology.
Inbdigeneous and Local Ecological Knowledge.
Everything You Know About Indians is Wrong: Unlearning Native American History.
Being and Becoming Black.
Latinos in the USA.
Race & Social Entrepreneurship, Environmental Justice, & Urban Reform.
The American Left: A Critical History.
On and on (with some courses on popular culture thrown in (e.g. Politics of ’70s Films).
This “multi-cultural” (read “Science of Victimhood”)l propaganda likely taught to a Marxist beat is what represents American Studies.
(I am old enough to remember the roster of the Cornell AS program when it offered classes on culture / history / politics, etc. as applied to ALL Americans. THAT would be an interesting class: The AS Program: Then and Now.)
The ASA — left disinformation arm and brainwasher of the next generation. Expect no good thing from these rotters.
I second all the posters calling for separation of academia and state.
The intrusion of philosophical integrity is never allowed to fester long on the left. If the foundation of your belief is collective, then deviation is anethema. It has to be stamped out, and with such enthusiam and violence that every instance of doctrinal variance quickly and inevitably becomes a life or death issue. Conform or be outcast. It would seem ironic to anyone who believed the labels, but of course that’s why there are labels. They keep the norms from understanding the nature of things.
This would be a good time to place a fake entry on Wikipedia identifying the Professor as a relative of the Koch brothers, watch ’em go nuts with it, one of those ‘too good to check’ finds for them.
“The Secret Third Koch Brother!!11!!!”
Seriously though, I have met David Koch, through his charity work, and my uncle was at MIT with him, AND I’ve hit the good professor’s paypal button. That’s probably enough to bury our kind host right there, in a “six degrees of Kevin Bacon” kind of way! 🙂
Amy, bacon is pork and that’s insensitive to the Islamic minority. Don’t be a hater.
Hey! Being an attack liberal is easy!
Potter cannot imagine a principled argument which contradicts her own perspective. She may want to lay off the selective history and outrage. They do not offer sufficient grounds to defend her position.
It is the classic liberal descent into an ad hominem when there is not logic or facts to defend their position.
I would like to be paid off …..
You’re going to love this:
Here’s a picture of Claire Potter:
http://www.jenniferboylan.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/MyPicture-1.jpg
“Who is paying you?” -I am, and it’s the best $10 I ever spent. When on this site I’m served a steady diet of thought-provoking discussions by lucid, intelligent people and for dessert a daily music video.