Here is a profile of some of the Group of 88 at Duke, faculty members eager to jump to certain conclusions about members of the student body we have previously discussed:

The 69 permanent faculty signatories included only two professors in math, just one in the hard sciences, and zero in law. (It would have been difficult indeed for a law professor to have signed a statement deeming irrelevant “the results of the police investigation.”) Of the permanent signatories, 58—an astonishing 84.1 percent—describe their research interests as related to race, class, or gender (or all three), in some cases to an extent bordering on caricature.

One Group of 88 member stated that his current project “argues that unless we attempt to read racialized trauma according to a more Freudian, Lacanian understanding for subjectivity we will continue to misunderstand why racial stigma persists and, more generally, why the laws humans create to protect against forms of discrimination leave in place a notion of the racialized subject as emptied of interiority and the psychical.”

Another reasoned that “it was not merely military mobilization . . . that paved the path to war [in Iraq] but a highly gendered war talk.” An example? Laura Bush’s late 2001 comments about the plight of Afghan women, which “furthered the [U.S.] imperial project in her highly gendered appeal to a world conscience.” A third signatory, after beginning her career exploring “postmodernist theory about the individual and the body,” is now ” working on a new project critiquing animal rights from speciesist perspective.”

Apparently many University boards of trustees do not take their jobs very seriously. They certainly are not the watchdogs for parents and alumni who want their dollars well-spent as well as academic excellence in the university. (HT: Instapundit)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 19th, 2006 at 7:49 am and is filed under art, culture, General, idiots!, Left of Left, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.