Roger Kimball has weighed in on the Berkeley course controversy, as have many of Kimball's readers. Kimball is his usual contrarian contentious self in the piece, which is titled "The Intifada Curriculum." He is also his usual highly intelligent, deeply literate self, and reminds us in words worth quoting how far today's college curriculum has strayed from the ostensible ideals of academic inquiry:

Universities used to be dedicated to the advancement of knowledge. It was understood that if they were to be successful, they had to presuppose what Matthew Arnold called the ideal of "disinterestedness." In describing criticism as "disinterested," Arnold did not mean that it speaks without reference to a particular point of view. Rather, he meant a habit of inquiry that refused to lend itself to any "ulterior, political, practical considerations about ideas."

We might say that Arnold looked to criticism to provide a bulwark against ideology, something that John Searle, a very different sort of Berkeley professor, put with his customary lucidity: "The idea that the curriculum should be converted to any partisan purposes is a perversion of the ideal of the university."

Since the 1960s, however, universities have become havens for displaced radicals and the humanities instruments of political agitation. Arnold's vision of the civilizing potential of "the best that has been thought and said" gives way to a smorgasbord of attacks on Western civilization that are a part of the "multicultural" agenda.

Matthew Arnold and John Searle: Kimball does know how to bait the academic left. Arnold, a Victorian poet and critic who has become symbolic of all that is wrong--in the academic left's mind--with liberal humanism, wrote a stunning essay in 1865 about why disinterested criticism is a necessary and important contribution to a culture increasingly oriented around profit, politics, bottom-line practicality, and self-interest. Entitled "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time," it's worth a look to see where Arnold, and the Kimball who quotes him, is coming from.

Searle, for his part, is in many ways a latter-day Arnold. A major philosopher who has no truck with the post-structuralist continental theory that underlies a great deal of postmodern academe's pretensions to methodological and pedagogical radicalism, Searle exemplifies a reasoned rejection of the pseudo-intellectual claptrap that has come to stand in for thought in far too much scholarship and in far too many classrooms. In 1990, Searle reviewed Kimball's Tenured Radicals as part of a fantastic essay about the campus "culture wars" for The New York Review of Books. Entitled "The Storm Over the University," it is as timely today as it was twelve years ago. Don't miss his definition of a well-educated person (it's at the very end). Match yourself up against it, match your education up against it, and see what you think.

Searle's essay is long, but you can't find a better introduction to the issues that are at work in the Shingavi situation, which is, after all, simply one instance of a far more widespread conversion of the undergraduate classroom into the scene of political re-education.

For background on Shingavi and the Berkeley situation, see this piece by Rory Miller (a.k.a. blogger "Angry Clam"), which documents in chilling detail the anti-conservative bias that is the norm at Berkeley, as well as how the pro-Palestinian movement on campus has been accompanied by virulent and unchecked anti-Semitism.

And, if you want another example of a prof who demands political conformity from students, check out FIRE's most recent cause: a women's studies professor at the University of South Carolina who makes adherance to a certain set of ideological principles the condition of speaking in class. Class participation is 20% of the grade. In order to speak, you have to agree to the professor's "Guidelines for Classroom Discussion," which include acknowledging "that racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, and other institutionalized forms of oppression exist," agreeing that "we are all systematically taught misinformation about our own group and about members of other groups," assuming "that people always do the best they can," and promising to "create a safe atmosphere for open discussion." Sounds more like the professor is running a support group than a graduate class, no? And not a terribly supportive one at that. Such guidelines do less to create a "safe atmosphere" in women's studies than to prevent anyone from challenging the founding principles of women's studies itself.

Lynn Weber, the professor in question, has published these guidelines (they originally appeared in Women's Studies Quarterly 18 [Spring/Summer 1990]:126-134, and a revised version appeared in "Empowering Students Through Classroom Discussion Guidelines," in Marybeth C. Stalp and Julie Childers, eds., Teaching Sociological Concepts and the Sociology of Gender, Washington, D.C.; American Sociological Association Teaching Resources Center, 2000). In other words, Weber has been recommending for over a decade that these guidelines become part of the women's studies curriculum. If you are a teacher and you use these guidelines, you might want to think twice about both the constitutionality and the morality of your pedagogy. If you are a student and you have been subjected to such guidelines, you might want to contact FIRE. I'm sure they'd love to hear from you.