Watson is a professor in the English Department.
By Robert Watson
Guess what? If you decide to define radical-liberal as anything
that dares to challenge the conventional thinking and jingoistic
self-congratulation in which schools and communities in the U.S.,
as in most countries, indoctrinate their young people, then, voila,
you will find that your best intellectual investigators tend to be
radical-liberals.
McCarthyism and the American Legion hounded my World War I
veteran father out of his jobs when I was a child, deeming him a
subversive because he did things like helping establish Consumer
Reports magazine (which made it too hard for corporations to cheat
people) and standing up early for the Scottsboro Boys (which made
legalized lynching too awkward).
By the time he was unanimously vindicated by the U.S. Supreme
Court, he was making his living as a college professor, which I
suppose confirms Andrew Jones’ claim that “those who
couldn’t get a real job” and “found the cold
winds of reality in the wider world a little harsh … retreated to
the cozy cocoon of teaching” (“Campus suppresses
“˜right’ education,” Daily Bruin, Viewpoint, Oct.
31).
Look, I graduated in the top 1 percent of my class at Yale;
presumably I could have gotten into a good business or law school
and earned a big salary, if that had been what I most wanted, as
did my roommate and another best friend, each of whom I’m
sure make millions annually, one as a top executive at Morgan
Stanley Dean Witter, the other as a senior partner at a leading New
York law firm. We’re still all close friends, because we
accept that our divergent views of the world led us to choose
different paths, and we’re each happy where we are.
I promise you that you will find a lot more staunch
conservatives among the tenured faculty at UCLA than you will
leftist radicals among the managing partners at major financial
institutions. Is that because of a sinister conspiracy ““ or
is there perhaps again a more organic explanation?
Possibly, people who are willing to give up the extreme wealth
that some careers offer, preferring instead the opportunity to
teach young people and to retain intellectual independence, tend
also to be people who will question the self-worship and
money-worship of American culture. And somehow this “pitiful
state of American campus faculty” as one Jones supporter
writes, with what another supporter discerns as our “active
promotion of perversion,” makes us the envy of the world,
which unaccountably sends us its best students to ruin.
This academic world isn’t paradise, of course, and here as
anywhere else some people will hold their opinions strongly and
disapprove of those who have opposing views. If they are any good
as teachers, they will treat those disagreements respectfully, and
separate their personal feelings from their professional
evaluations. I certainly hope that the thousand UCLA students who
have worked with me during my 15 years of teaching here feel I have
done so.
So there’s something quaint about the spectacle of people
writing from around the country to congratulate Jones ““ as he
was already heartily congratulating himself ““ for being so
extremely brave as to stand up on the side of the government, the
army, the police, the church and all the big-money interests of the
society. It must be a lonely if heroic place to stand, with only
those forces and the entire political mainstream behind you. I
mean, what if some professor asks you a question? Yikes!