George Will: un-smart. (Edition 2)

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This post discusses Will's column "Free Ride for the Campus Left."

Will, like all good conservatives, hates higher education -- colleges, universities and the like.

And, like the majority of education-loathing conservatives, Will spent a lot of time becoming educated at the places he hates. He also spent a lot of time teaching at such places -- including Harvard, which Will cannot deride enough.

To wit: "Will graduated from University Laboratory High School of Urbana, Illinois, and attended Trinity College, in Hartford, Connecticut (B.A.). He subsequently read PPE at Magdalen College, University of Oxford (B.A., M.A.), and received M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in politics from Princeton University. His 1968 Ph.D. dissertation was entitled Beyond the Reach of Majorities: Closed Questions in the Open Society.

"Will then taught political philosophy at the James Madison College of Michigan State University, and at the University of Toronto. He taught at Harvard University in 1995 and again in 1998."

Will is a damned hypocrite. Like the vast majority of education-hating conservatives.

Also, Will may have daddy-issues, since his father was a professor of philosophy at the university of Illinois. Father Will specialized in epistemology, which "primarily addresses the following questions: 'What is knowledge?', 'How is knowledge acquired?', 'What do people know?', 'How do we know what we know?'" (Wikipedia)

Will's body of work strongly suggests his answers to these questions are: Knowledge is what is espoused in conservative talking points, is acquired through reading them, and that we know what we know through having read these talking points.

On to a few choice cuts of this column:

"Fish's advocacy of a banal proscription -- of explicit political preaching in classrooms -- may have made him anathema to academia's infantile left."

It is infantile to use unsupported ad hominem attacks.

Quoting Fish, Will writes: "'the fact of a predominantly liberal faculty says nothing necessarily about what the faculty teaches.' Note Fish's obfuscating 'necessarily.'"

Note that Fish is correct. How many university faculty are members of certain religions, agnostics, or atheists? Do they teach their religion (or lack thereof), even in religion classes? Et cetera.

Will writes: "Genuflecting before today's academic altar, [Fish] asserts what no one denies: Race and gender are 'worthy of serious study.'"

Which is odd, because just before writing that sentence, Will wrote of "the proliferation of race and gender courses, programs and even departments..."

He went on to assert that "the political nature of such curricula [race and gender studies] is why they often are set apart from established, and more academically rigorous, departments of sociology, history, etc."

Note the use of the loaded term "proliferation." What modern reader can imagine this term without also imagining nuclear non-proliferation efforts? Google "proliferation" and six of the first ten results have to do with keeping dangerous weapons from becoming more widespread.

And Will flat-out states that race and gender studies lack academic rigor.

The sum of these parts equal Will stating: Race and gender studies departments and courses grow and spread like nuclear weapons and are unimportant when compared to other topics.

Having stated the above -- his true feelings -- he feebly semi-disowns them by writing the opposite: that race and gender studies are important. So important that no one would deny the fact that they are.

Even if they just have, I suppose.

Will ends with: "People who tell you they are brave usually are not."

And people who tell you bullshit for a living usually are un-smart.
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