The College Fix

OPINION: C’mon, trust the professors … they CARE

One of the things I learned early on in my teaching career was to be introspective — never dig in or get set in your ways, apologize when you make a mistake, and listen (really listen) to others.

But I also learned progressive educators possess a certain self-righteousness that can be nauseating.

For example, once at a community meeting regarding a referendum for additional school/district funding, a colleague took the mic and proceeded to lecture the audience about how she “gets up so early in the morning” and “goes to bed late” because she has so many papers to grade … and cares “so deeply” about her students.

The groans were quite audible.

Thankfully, one gent spoke up and asked how she was so different than he — he had to get up at 3:30 a.m. to load his delivery truck, and then put in between 100-200 miles on the road — for less pay and a fraction of the benefits.

And so it was timely that I came across a pair self-congratulatory professor pieces this week. One is from Princeton’s Jen Jennings, who teaches sociology and researches “racial, socioeconomic, and gender disparities in educational and health outcomes.”

But due to a quite relevant follow-up story, I’m zeroing in on Rice University English Professor Helena Michie who emulated my old colleague and wrote an op-ed defending her profession from “powerful billionaires.”

Michie doesn’t name the specific powerful billionaires (unless Donald Trump counts), and does her best to tie in the president’s recent higher ed efforts by invoking the specter of Republican enemies past — like Richard Nixon who once said “The professors are the enemy.”

The feminist and literary theory researcher’s point is that most professors aren’t “elite” — they “don’t make nearly as much money as other people with advanced degrees,” don’t have tenure, and in states like California have been known to sleep in their cars due to lack of money (yes, that deep-blue state of California).

Nevertheless, the Right considers universities “ground zero for wokeness” which, Michie (pictured) claims, is just “fearmongering.”

The author of “five books in Victorian studies and the study of gender and sexuality,” like the brains in the mainstream media, would really have your average Joe Six-Pack believe, given the disparate political bent of universities as a whole, that instructors are somehow above it all and contain their biases … they don’t “force a particular [point of view] on an unsuspecting class.”

But hilariously, Michie admits she is “woke,” and the examples she provides about how everyone holds a “gender ideology” (like one who believes in the “trad-wife” movement “likely” thinks men are superior to women) do little to help her point.

MORE: Rice University announces plan to move statue of slaveholding school founder

She concludes by echoing that old colleague of mine — the how DARE you question us because we CARE tactic:

[The] world comes to us. Students tell us about deported family members and parents who have lost their jobs — especially in this recent spate of cutbacks. I have had students tell me they are struggling to complete their work due to lack of health care, including pregnancy and abortion care and, for trans students, hormone therapy. Of course, we as faculty are by no means immune to financial and psychological loss, but we are haunted by what our students go through. At night in our beds — and for the most vulnerable of us, in our cars — we find it impossible to sleep.

In the event you just might be swayed (even a tad) by Michie’s piece, a couple of weeks later the Rice University Office of Public Affairs celebrated the creation of … a new “media studies” major.

Program director Michael Dango (pictured) said “[T]he media studies major here at Rice is a really exciting combination of both the critical and the creative. On the critical side of things, we’re thinking about where media comes from, thinking about these questions of power and politics that are at stake in media.”

Dango added the program is planning internships and “community placements” for students “who might be interested in social media campaigns for nonprofits or thinking about how media can serve different political and activist projects.”

Ah. “Activist projects.”

According to his faculty page, Dango is a “scholar of contemporary art and literature […] and its intersection with feminist political theory, especially theories of violence, Marxist feminism, and racial capitalism.”

His personal website highlights his book “Madonna’s Erotica,” which “explores the politics of sex in the wake of the AIDS crisis and the 1990s culture wars,” and how such ties into contemporary “hysteria” regarding “queer theory and critical race theory.”

Nevertheless, I’m confident this new major will be ideologically balanced and/or politically neutral, and won’t “force a particular point of view on an unsuspecting class.”

Sike.

MORE: Rice U. students engage in massive group hug – yes, literally – to process Trump victory

IMAGE CAPTION & CREDIT: Kurt Russell says “Trust Me”; “Used Cars”/YouTube. INTERIOR IMAGES: Rice University

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