by Steve White
Professor KC Johnson of the superb Durham in Wonderland blog wrote last week on the attempts the GOP has made to link Senator Barack Obama to figures such as former Weathermen terrorist and current UIC education professor William Ayers, and controversial Columbia Prof. Rashid Khalidi. Johnson is unhappy at the linkage, but the reason isn't what you'd think. Here he is:
For the GOP attack to work, Ayers and Khalidi have to be viewed as exceptional figures--wholly unlike nearly all other professors. Obama's judgment can hardly be questioned if his "buddies" were not marginal characters but instead people who resemble lots of other academics, especially since Obama lived in an academic neighborhood (Hyde Park) and spent several years teaching at the University of Chicago Law School.
Yet the truth of the matter is that the basic pedagogical and academic approaches of Ayers and Khalidi fit well within the academic mainstream. Ayers is, after all, a prestigious professor of education (hardly a field known for its intellectual diversity, as I have explored elsewhere). Khalidi was of such standing that Columbia hired him away from the U of C, and named him to chair its Middle East Studies Department. From that perch, he presided over a wildly biased anti-Israel curriculum, even as he informed readers of New York that students of Arab descent--and only such students--knew the "truth" about Middle Eastern affairs.
I agree with [Governor] Palin that there's a scandal here--but it's not that Obama, among his hundreds of associations with academic figures, was acquainted with, and received support from, Ayers and Khalidi. The scandal is the evolution of a groupthink academic environment that has allowed figures such as Ayers and Khalidi to flourish. The tolerance for extremism is on one side and one side only: the academy doesn't offer carte blanche endorsement to some types of unrepentant domestic terrorists or to figures who suggest that politically incorrect ethnic groups know the "truth." Imagine the chances of someone who had bombed abortion clinics in the 1980s becoming a prominent education professor. Or consider the likelihood of a man who claimed that Jewish and only Jewish students knew the "truth" about Middle Eastern matters becoming chairman of a major Middle East Studies Department.
As anyone who followed the [Duke University] lacrosse case understands, professors with worldviews like those of Ayers or Khalidi are hardly out of the norm in the academy.
I'm not sure what's more damning here: linking Senator Obama to exceptional figures like Ayers and Khalidi, or linking them to unexceptional figures like Ayers and Khalidi.
Prof. Johnson is certainly correct about the American academy: once you venture away from the hard sciences, you encounter a world in which people like William Ayers, Rashid Khalidi, Ward Churchill and others like them are not just ordinary and common-place, but both accepted and powerful. |