A Pilgrim’s Digression

http://www.sonnets.org/shelley.htm#300

Mike S. Adams is a professor at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington. This morning, I read a column of his titled Georgia On My Mind and felt compelled to respond. Adams writes about academia from a Conservative perspective, and his articles have often pissed me off in the past, but I have never felt compelled to write him and express myself. Today, I decided to write him, for all the good it will do. I look at it now and it seems rather rambling, but maybe I adequately defended my point of view. Read the article first, then read my response below.

In your recent editorial “Georgia on my mind” you state that Universities which bring in “consultants” on homosexuality to talk to the student body do not provide contrary viewpoints even when requested.

I understand your point about Universities being publicly funded, therefore they ought to be politically neutral. If Universities were solely an arm of the government, I might agree with you; however, Universities are not government bureaus. Government employees and government agencies are carefully regulated as to their right to free speech in the political arena. University students and faculty are not government employees. Universities themselves are funded by a combination of public and private funding, all of which dilutes the force of your argument that these schools have a constitutional responsibility to be apolitical.

Anyway, I wonder why you think students aren’t already exposed to “contrary viewpoints” at home, in church, and in the conservative media? Is it the purpose of a college to be an amen choir for what most freshmen come to college already believing? Funny, I thought college was supposed to be about exposure to points of view other than what the student may already believe. If a student merely wants to have his or her beliefs reinforced, rather than challenged, then he or she should go to a private institution that reflects those values. I feel little sympathy for someone who willingly goes to a state university and then complains because it is a wretched hive of promiscuity and villainy.

You know, maybe you weren’t informed of this, but Republicans won the election a few weeks ago. They won overwhelmingly. For liberals like me, it was a devastating loss. Yet you people, the winners, act as if you are beseiged on all sides by a host of pagan infidels. It’s not enough that you win, you have to leave a scorched earth behind you. I confess I do not understand such a paranoid mindset. Liberals are now effectively reduced to a museum display, an antique curiosity, and yet Conservatives act as if even the most insignificant encroachment by liberals upon your vaunted “values” represents the gravest threat to decent society man has ever known since the rise of Adolf Hitler.

To be frank with you, as a liberal, I think that conservative calls for “neutrality”—whether for the media to be neutral, or for universities to be neutral—are little more than a deceitful way to silence opposition. Better that we live in a society in which the battle lines are clearly drawn, and in which we know on which side a particular media outlet or University stands, than that we live in a society with this artificial veil of “neutrality” keeping us from looking the enemy directly in the eyes.

The interesting thing about Adams is that his biography at TownHall.com says that he is “a vocal critic of the diversity movement in academia.” Yet in this article, he seems to complain that there is not enough diversity. I wish I’d read his biography before writing my response, because I probably would have asked him about that.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking recently about this issue of neutrality, and wondering if in fact it does not handicap the mainstream media. Conservatives have been making hay for years about the so-called “liberal bias” of the media, so much so that most people, even apolitical people, believe it simply as a common sense fact. Conservatives have been able to make such inroads into cable news precisely because of the common belief that a few strident conservatives in the media are bringing “balance” to news coverage. Instead, they have tipped the balance. Conservatives are allowed to be as vocal and as biased as they wish; liberals must keep quiet, maintain this “veil of neutrality,” as I call it in my response to Adams. Actually, it’s more like a burka of neutrality. We are not to be seen, unless we’re being screwed.

Personally, I think it’s time for the veil to be ripped aside. I’d like to see Dan Rather replaced with an out-of-the-closet liberal. How about Ron Reagan, Jr.? I loved his coverage of the election for MSNBC. If CBS really wanted to shake things up in the media, they would give us the liberal equivalent of Bill O’Reilly from six until seven every evening.

Why won’t they do it? Why are they likely to stick with the formula that hasn’t worked for them, that of a gravelly-voiced, neutral White Geezer? Probably because they are too afraid of the Conservative backlash. Can you imagine the outcry?