What Do These Professors Want?

The Wall Street Journal’s Dorothy Rabinowitz has built a career out of publicizing prosecutorial overreach, most notably in the fantastical abuse cases brought against the operators of day-care facilities back in the 1980s, most notably the Amirault Case.

Now she turns her attention to the two notable abusive prosecutions of the last year: the political lynching of Scooter Libby and the racial lynching of the Duke University lacrosse players.  But the Duke case was more than a racial lynching by a cynical race-baiting prosecutor.

It was in its searing way an educational event, not just about prosecutorial ambition run amok, but about a university world—reflective of many others—where faculty ideologues pursued their agendas unchecked and unabashed. Here was a nearly successful legal lynching, applauded by a significant chunk of the Duke faculty, proud to display their indifference to questions of guilt or innocence.

What is it about the faculties of our universities?  Why are they so utterly consumed with obsession over race, class, gender, and sexual orientation? 

Ordinary Americans plunk along in their lives.  They get jobs, get married, have children, and rub along pretty well.  Yet right next door there’s the frantic world of the academy where everything is viewed in the garish light of frightful oppression, and where the prudent keep their heads down, even prudent people like college presidents.

The great consuming career goal of our college and university presidents—with the exception of oddities like Harvard’s Larry Summers—has for more than two decades been the same: to avoid any word or deed that might incur the wrath of their gender- and race-obsessed faculties and allied campus activists.

And let Larry Summers be a warning to you college presidents!

Here is the irony.  There has never been a time, at least not since the dawn of the agricultural age, where race and class and gender have been less important.  The whole point of democratic capitalism is that it reduces everything to the cash nexus.  It doesn’t matter too much what class or race or gender you are.  So long as you can do the job and render service to your fellow man, you can participate and you can prosper.  Indeed, where race and class and gender oppression still lurk there are profit opportunities for the wily entrepreneur.

Yet we live in a time where the academic middle class is utterly consumed with fashionable theories about race and class and gender.  What is going on?

As Rush Limbaugh insists: Follow the Money. 

And the power.