I am in Day Three of capturing all my book, article, review, and chapter publications as well as radio, television and e-mail interviews, media appearances, speeches and talks, over the last 2-3 years so as to update my professional resumé and my academic vita. I can’t believe how much public intellectual stuff (along with some more standard academic work). I have done in this time period and over the last 10 plus years. The citations and links go on for pages and pages. It’s kind of neat and a little scary to bring it all together in once place (I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t proud of all this work) but here’s the really sick thing – something that totally indicates what total bullshit it is to claim (ala FOX News and right wing talk radio) that modern academia is “radical left” (or even remotely left-progressive). I am referring to the ugly reality that I would have to remove as much as 90 percent of this content from the two documents (the resumé and the vita) if I do not want to be automatically dismissed from serious consideration in an academic or non-profit (research) hiring process. My (often deeply researched and heavily annotated) intellectual work is clearly political and consistently serious-left and that is taboo as far as the boot-licking masters of liberal arts and “social science” (and non-profit liberal research) hiring are concerned. And I’m not talking here mainly or really at all about right wing or Republican authorities. I’m talking about tenured academic and non-profit authorities who would generally call themselves liberals and even progressives. I guarantee that more than 90 percent are Democrats. So I’m not talking about people who listen to Rush Limbaugh and who subscribe to the doctrines of Lynn Cheney and Dick Bennett. The authoritarian anti-Left Big Brothers in my professional worlds aren’t Republicans. They are part of what Limbaugh and the rest of the FOX crowd absurdly call “the left.” In any event, I have always found the notion of “radical Left academia” to be a very cruel joke. If such a thing existed, my uncensored vita and my uncensored resumé would (including years of strong teaching evaluations) readily garner me a regular flow of good job offers. It doesn’t exist, even remotely, and as a result I probably have a better shot at becoming a self-supporting rock and roll musician (the odds there are worse than 1000 to 1, to say the least) than I have of being hired in a tenured track academic position. Adjunct work – now that’s a different story…..
Posted on: Tue, 09 Jul 2013 21:35:40 +0000
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