Flutterby™! : FBI: Liars with an agenda 2002-06-10 15:01:36+00

FBI: Liars with an agenda

2002-06-10 15:01:36+00 by Dan Lyke 10 comments

The SF Chronicle reports that the FBI and CIA collaborated in disrupting activities at UC Berkeley, and helped Ronald Reagan dodge possible felony prosecution. The whole report is Reagan, Hoover and the UC Red Scare.

So Hoover kept records on who was gay - probably read them while lounging in his red dress...

The FBI was wrong to spy without warrents of course, but having been around during the 60's I can say we should not forget the violent attacks on any speaker at UC Berkely who attempted to speak on any topic not found in favor by the UC administration at the time -- and it still goes on.

Although "they started it" is rarely a defense, given that the sit-ins didn't really kick in 'til 1964 or so, it seems like that might be an apropos response here. It's not just that the FBI was spying without warrants, it's that they were actively lying in order to advance their own agenda. So all those paranoid rumblings were, essentially, right.

As for solutions to the modern "education" situation, it alas goes a lot deeper than just firing a few professors. In order to reform education, we'd have to start at the elementary school level.

By reforming the universities, you will have elementary teachers who teach what they have been taught. It all begins with the professors; today they are anti-american.

I must be forgetting--which of my professors was anti-American? The physicist? The engineering ethics professor? The Marine (no such thing as an ex-Marine) that lectured on middle English?

The best thing that could happen to that school and other universities in America would be for there to be a periodic review by randomly selected voters, like a grand jury, during which they vote on whether the professor should remain employed.

Good heavens, I wouldn't want my children attending a university whose professors were voted on by "randomly selected voters". Most random voters haven't got the brains of a rock: just look at the people they've elected lately! Their uninformed opinions about the skills, abilities, and knowledge necessary in a good professor would land us squarely back in the Stone Age, roughly around where the Taliban led Afghanistan in the last few years. (How's that for tossing around images that raise hackles, eh?) Or do I hear someone pining for the "good old days" of the McCarthy era, when one needed to swear a loyalty oath to take out the trash? That's not the America I'm proud to live in.

Me, I'm hoping my sons still have a chance at a free and open education once they get to college age. I trust them to be thinking, rational young men, not mindless lumps of PlayDoh that are like taffy in the hands of those mean nasty ugly scary "anti-American" professors who probably beat cute little puppies right after they finish brainwashing our sweet innocent all-American blank-book sons and daughters, mwah hah hah!

Sigh. Sorry I let myself get sucked into that one. It was a troll, right?

Electing professors would not be the best choice, but since 'democracy' has been drummed into everyones minds, it would fit into everyones thinking, and be an incremental step forward. Of course, the only moral solution would be to close all public universities, reduce the taxes extracted at the point of a gun from everyone, and then all universities would be private, and they could do what they want. And we would be able to direct our money toward what we want, not what the 'public' wants.

Today we have the professors preaching utilitarianism, egalitarianism and socialism. In short, they work toward the destruction of Western Civilization. This is what our sons and daughters will hear in college.

As much as I'd like to see the overthrow of a system which still names their highest honor after the philosophy department, rather than, say, the physics department, I'm afraid that the democratization of public universities would serve mainly to cause school-board like politics to invade those institutions. We'd see "technology initiatives" forcing capital expenditures on worthless devices that have no curriculum based needs. We'd see administrations start to become sensitive to the "crank of the moment". Not an overall pretty sight.

And the more I see about this situation in particular, the more I'm having trouble seeing why the nature of the institution matters at all. The FBI did things which no institution, public or private, should have to tolerate.

Dan: `names their highest honor after the philosophy department' gets it more-or-less exactly backwards. Exclusive use of the word philosophy to refer to the study of logic, aesthetics, ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology is fairly recent. The broader sense (e.g. as in the archaic phrase Natural Philosophy, meaning science), for which the degree is named, is much older.