She that Lies with the Dogs, Riseth with Fleas¹

Academicians have an uncompromising responsibility to discover and to teach what they find important and true. They must neither make qualifications nor maintain silence about the interests of those to whom they speak despite race, gender, or any other consideration. Anything less defines as political correctness and political silence.

Dworkin describes the ideal of ethical individualism as the inspiration that supports freedom of speech and academic freedom.² Those who accept this philosophy profess truth protected by a right of conscience that forbids acceptance of moral or political judgments enforced by other people. This creates an ethical responsibility to speak out even when one knows that very few people will listen and requires a domain of independence in which to flourish.

Compromised principles for personal gain and academic privilege without merit.

Academic totalitarianism ranks as the prime enemy of academic freedom. It predicates upon a coercively persuasive, absolutist ideology supported by a system of punishments and rewards similar to those used in training circus animals to jump through hoops.³

This type of indoctrination insures a mediocre conformity and absolutist control over all aspects of learning. Generally, academic absolutism results from public ignorance of the difference between legal and illegal administrative authority. People do not understand that empowerment to endorse a professorial appointment does not automatically empower university officials to control what a professor subsequently says.

Academic employment does not compare with commercial employment. Commercially, the employer holds the power (within certain mandated equal opportunity limits) to hire and fire based on what the employee says and does to customers. Consequently, academic freedom allows university officials to endorse appointments but prohibits them from unethically restricting individual freedom of expression.

A recent example of the misuse of administrative power occurred with Kristin King, a PhD student at Boston University. In an obviously political move, and without a request from her doctoral committee, the provost, Jon Westling, appointed his associate vice provost, Peter W. Wood, to investigate her dissertation abstract.⁴

King’s thesis, Authorship, Authority, and Gender in Henry James, apparently challenged the provost’s tenuous masculinity. Wood, to authenticate his proscriptive action, posed as a “James scholar” and arbitrarily passed judgment on King’s abstract. He has neither published nor holds academic qualifications in literary criticism.

Wood has published a book review and only one article since he graduated in 1986. He apparently excerpted the article from his doctoral dissertation that focuses on the affinity of Catholic millenarianism with radical right politics.⁵ The dissertation has no bearing on the work of Henry James or that of Kristin King.

Consequently, one may assume that Wood knows very little about King’s critical inquiry into the limitations of James’s explorations of female consciousness and feminine authority. With his apocalyptic, political affiliation he probably views the Virgin Mary as the quintessence of feminism.

The chair of the English department subsequently described Wood as a "well-educated, literate man." One would hope that the associate vice provost of a major university would have at least passed the sub-literate level and would not need such an endorsement. However, levels of literacy have no bearing on the matter because they do not empower university officials to interfere in the doctoral process.

As with professorial employment criteria, academic freedom allows university officials to endorse doctoral dissertations but prohibits them from unethically restricting individual freedom of expression. Obviously the provost’s office at Boston University (like equivalent offices at the University of Washington and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) has a problem with politicization of the doctoral process.

Despotic administrative controls do not solve this type of problem in a supposedly democratic society. Long John Silber, president of Boston University and notorious during the 1960s for Boston’s Back Bay real estate piracy, has received many faculty complaints about the provost’s challenges to academic freedom.

Ironically, he has responded by anointing Westling, the next president. Will Westling reward Wood for jumping through his hoops and promote him to his next level of incompetence, or fire him as punishment for inciting satirists?

Conversely, affluent womynx⁶ pander to administrators like those at Boston University. They enjoy protection under equal opportunity laws⁷ and have taken illegal and unfair advantage of affirmative action⁸ to obtain special group privilege. They have extended their claims beyond alleged or proven discrimination to restrain the rights of unprotected groups.

This misuse of affirmative action contributes to its failure and increases the mediocrity extant within the academe. The abysmal performance of students exposed in a recent survey exemplifies this mediocrity. Only 8% of the seniors graduating from a variety of US colleges and universities knew that “government of the people, by the people, for the people” formed part of Lincoln’s 1863 Gettysburg address.⁹ How can university graduates understand and practice democracy if they do not even know its axioms?

These statistics dismay if applied to the public at large, however, they appall when they apply to university graduates and make the US academe an international laughing-stock. It probably also accounts for the political silence that both womyn¹⁰ and womynx have maintained in face of the recent attacks on affirmative action.

Affirmative action often traps members of the feminist “minority.” It prevents them from becoming anything but advocates of affirmative action because they have become beneficiaries of this special group privilege. The group self-interest becomes all consuming and eternal. Then, the identity crisis exacerbates, both politically and psychologically, as it becomes more ruthlessly exploited.¹¹

Given the university’s defining mission as discoverer and accumulator of knowledge, critical inquiry must again become the prerogative of those with the intellectual expertise to recognize meritorious ideas within their fields. Preferences based on gender do not derive from how best to discover knowledge or to educate students. Rather, they distribute social rewards to conform to predetermined social justice ideologies.

Those scholars who continue to subscribe to decisions based on social justice must eventually forfeit their claims to tenure and academic freedom because group preference creates a conflict of interest. This advances a novel principle of group rights.¹²

University officials claim a need for diversity (although they cannot define it) to support their ideological and illegal quota systems that prefer less-qualified, less-experienced females over more-qualified, more-experienced males. Consequently, they allow both womyn and womynx to place their feminist contemporaries in demeaning, compromising, and bizarre situations and at the mercy of male despots like Westling and Wood. They implicitly endorse academic terrorism and the coercive persuasion that establish academic totalitarianism. They create a culture of group self-interest in which freedom of expression can no longer exist.

A mythical analogy seems pertinent. In Hebrew myth, Lilith the first wife of Adam associated with the night demon (death) and became known as the screech owl who stole and killed children. According to the myth, Yahweh made both Lilith and Adam from earth. However, Yahweh used clean earth for Adam's creation, but for Lilith he used filth and impure sediments: an attitude prevalent in many cultures to this day.

Lilith became the first collegiate wife of Adam and like many battered wives she has never left him. However, she presumed the role as equal partner and would not prostrate herself under him during mind copulation. Her independent attitude did not endear her to Adam because he considered it insubordinate and later demanded retribution.

Lilith quickly learned that an independent woman in the academic cabal represents eternal and fundamental disruption of a "divinely" ordered male state of affairs. However, with some condescension, the cabal allowed Lilith to assume a modicum of power because, as retribution to Adam, she now prostrates herself beneath him.

Lilith now uses her demonic power to avenge herself by negatively affecting the minds (and academic standing) of other scholars who do not support the totalitarian doctrines of the cabal to which she has succumbed. The mythical serpent symbolic of Lilith allows its shadow to fall upon scholars and coercively persuades them intellectually to copulate with demons.

Seduced professors then grant PhD degrees based in carnal epistemology. Newly empowered, Lilith roams the halls of the ivory tower in search of other scholars whose minds she may pervert to avenge the sins of her father. She smiles her inscrutable smile, then psychologically castrates them one by one.

The resulting intellectual death reinforces academic mediocrity and her own insecurity. Denial then translates into self-fulfillment. She agrees to domination in a paradox that defines dependence and dominance interchangeably. The myth perpetuates and she avoids punishment for her own feminist fantasies of power in a male dominated cult.

Academic cabals exemplify how myth, literally conceived, creates or sanctifies prejudice. They support "divinely" inspired totalitarian doctrines. They show Lilith the way to save herself, as a serpent saves itself, from the wrath of her cult leader. Myth also justifies her continued subjugation to him.

Scholars should heed the warning and not trust her lest they fall prey to her injustice, lying, and intolerance. Many of them will insist upon academic freedom and, by that, trigger her wrath. If they refuse to conform to her totalitarianism and sexism, then she becomes a permanent hazard to their academic and professional health.

However, a cadre of professors, graduate students, and college administrators (despite gender differences) have begun to commit themselves to critical inquiry and rational discourse. They have created a foundation for academic life that reflects a free and democratic society. They abhor dogmatism and ideologies that undermine coherent scholarly debate. This encourages a renewed assertiveness among scholars who value reason and an open intellectual life.

Fortunately, their number grows each day. Women now predominate in the field of education and have reached parity with men in the social sciences and humanities.¹³ Perhaps, some sanity may return and bring an end to the gender wars that politically correct extremists have deliberately engendered for self-aggrandizement. Then, perhaps more than 21% of graduating seniors, both men and women, will know that Plato wrote The Republic.¹⁴

Apologia [but not in any sense an apology]

The US constitution establishes limits to the power of institutions. It also denies university administrators the power arbitrarily to deprive others of their constitutional rights. Such arrogance manifests the quintessence of academic totalitarianism now extant within US universities.

The author, well knows the practices described in this essay. His essays now appear on the Internet after censorship and prior restraint by officials at the University of Washington. Officials made frivolous claims of rules infraction to deny the author computer access, apparently to prevent publication of exposé like this essay.

[The author has since served jail time for this web site at the invitation of a superior court judge (James A. Doerty). Both Doerty and the appellate judge (Mary Kay Becker), who affirmed his decision, graduated from University of Washington Law School - arguably with no gender imbalance. That case presently awaits Washington Supreme Court review after four years of judicial misconduct by both judges].

The author compositely describes the aberrant behavior that exists at five different universities. He reveals the details of his personal experiences during the sixteen years as a professor, administrator, or PhD student, at the University of Massachusetts/Boston, Fitchburg State College, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, San Jose State University, and the University of Washington. Officials at all five universities have denied him due process in one way or another.

Both Rensselaer and University of Washington expropriated all of his research and editorial databases and have covered up their censorship and prior restraint by misusing their powers to deny due process. His legal case against the University of Washington, still pregnant [nine years later] after a nine-month investigation by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), portends more protracted labor.

His case against Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute for academic racketeering and discrimination now receives the active attention of the Civil Rights Bureau, Department of Law, State of New York [still awaiting review nine years later]. The attorney handling the case against the University of Massachusetts/Boston absconded with the retainer and the Massachusetts Bar Association whitewashed his malfeasance.

[Nmesis]

© Copyright 1996 by Paul Trummel
All Rights Reserved: 14 Aug 96/06:28 PST
Edition: #603-06-00/08-0126-23:51
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