Juan Cole has addressed better than I’d ever be likely to bother to do the recently recurrent bugaboo about liberals in academe. In short—it’s not clear exactly what counts as a ‘liberal’; it’s probably not true (if one includes conservative programs like engineering and economics) that there are a disproportionate number of them in academia; to the extent that is it true it can’t be a conspiracy but is probably because the pay is so low and right-wingers can make more money in the private sector of business or think tanks. Not to mention that those think tanks and corporate boards are disproportionately republican/right, and no one is talking about rebalancing those by adding some leftists. Also, I would add, maybe liberals have more of a service ethic and are more willing to work for lower pay, and what about the possibility that more education makes people more liberal? How is it that education and intelligence seem to be disqualifying factors in American public life?
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Her face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, she sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of her feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm . . . . irresistibly propels her into the future to which her back is turned, while the pile of debris before her grows skyward. (Walter Benjamin, revised)
