Jennifer Ruth’s Useful IdiocyPowerful forces are indeed taking aim at academic freedom, as Jennifer Ruth contends, but they are not politicians. They are ideologues who increasingly infest and control university bureaucracies.
By Stanley K. Ridgley
March 8, 2022
Jennifer Ruth is a professor of film studies at Portland State University, and she has carved out a dubious reputation for herself as a proponent for academic freedom in our universities, most prominently as junior partner-author to scholar Michael Bérubé of Penn State. I say “dubious” because her umbrage is quite selective. She routinely ignores actual threats to academic freedom while finger-wagging at elected legislators as if she’s Lillian Hellman in 1952.
Her latest effort, in the Chronicle of Higher Education, goes after elected representatives who have the chutzpah to demand accountability from institutions receiving the confiscated wealth of taxpayers. Ruth took a break from suckling at the government teat long enough to criticize the cow’s owners. “It’s easy to rally people behind you when you feed them propaganda,” she opines. And she demonstrates this truism with her own brazen effort at it.
Ruth seems more interested in perpetuating a fraud than in addressing the actual threat to academic freedom in our universities. While she attacks “the Right” for supposedly threatening academic freedom, Ruth provides cover for the ideological lockstep colonization of the university by bureaucrats piped in from schools of education, who threaten faculty academic freedom far more than any state legislator ever could.
A threat to academic freedom is certainly afoot, but it has nothing to do with “the Right.” Ruth helps maintain the façade that hides the threat.
She has three main points: The “Right” is attacking the tenure system as it seems to subsidize the teaching of a noxious ideology; the “Right” misrepresents the substance of critical race theory; critical racialist indoctrination does not occur on the university campuses.
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Source:
https://amgreatness.com/2022/03/08/jennifer-ruths-useful-idiocy/
