Leave it to UC Beserkley to institute something called a Center for Comparative Study of Right-Wing Movements and a Tea Party Working Group.........
The below article is written by Arnold Ahlert.
http://frontpagemag.com/2011/09/02/berkeley-takes-on-the-tea-party-2/
What a joke! Here we have the usual assortment of liberal, academic oddballs gathering together to affirm each others' opinions without debate. As the Frontpage article pointed out, no Tea Party representative was invited.
Of course, nothing was mentioned about the problems raging on their own campus, courtesy of groups like Students for Justice in Palestine and the Muslim Students Association. Currently, we have a female Jewish student filing a lawsuit against the university stemming from a recent incident when she was struck from behind by a shopping cart allegedly held by the head of the SJP. Then there was that recent episode when swastikas started appearing on campus bathroom stalls. When a group of Jewish students held a peaceful protest, they were heckled and given the finger by a Berkeley professor.
http://garyfouse.blogspot.com/2010/05/uc-berkeley-professor-objects-to.html
Maybe this latest group of mad-hatters wanted to lay those swastikas off on the Tea Party.
This conference reminds me of the one I attended a couple of years back at UCI (Whither the Levant), where every speaker and professor was anti-Israel. Anyone who spoke up for Israel or disagreed with their one-sided presentations could be expected to be hooted by a crowd in the hundreds. (I know from personal experience).
Anyway, can anyone be surprised that the verdict at the end of this UCB conference-same as the UCI conference was that the Tea Party and Israel respectively were...
GUILTY.
This is scholarship? This is education? No, this is an embarrassment. The University of California system (I teach part-time at UC-Irvine) has become a laughing stock due to people like this who have made a mockery of scholarship. Whatever happened to the days when university students could be exposed to different sides of an issue? This stuff is about as objective as a Hitler Youth camp.
These boobs can call tea-partiers racist all day long, but there have been no such incidents, nor have any tea-party speakers made racist statements. Nor have any tea party events ever been violent except for a few instances when the bully-boys of SEIU showed up to punch a few folks. Did anybody mention that three of the tea-partiers favorite candidates are Allen West, Herman Cain and Marco Rubio? Of course not. None of these accusations can stick. Maybe it's those American flags that they fly that gets the professors upset. The only flags these characters would fly is a Palestinian flag.
What the UC system needs is a thorough housecleaning-not the professors, mind you- I wouldn't make them martyrs. It needs to go much higher.
You must be posting even as I type my comments. It is 21:16 CDT, so that would make it 19:16 PDT. You must be posting just after a leisurely dinner, or just before a late supper.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, you're right about this one. There is no coherent definition of "right wing" to sustain any kind of objective "studies." The Tea Party is too new to merit mention in American history. Perhaps if it is still around in 2015. There is no objective basis to study it in any rigorous academic manner as yet.
Advocacy is for voluntary campus organizations, not classrooms and departments. The Free Speech Movement established that students to not relinquish at the gate to Sproul Plaza their right to run their mouth on anything they please. If they someone wants to set up a table dedicated to the proposition "I don't like the Tea Party," that's their choice. By 1975, the right to set up information tables at Sproul Plaza was so overworked that nobody who had any free time uncommitted to half a dozen causes bothered to stop at any tables. I doubt if that has changed much since.