I’ve worked academic libraries for a number of years now, and not in a back room either. I have spent every working minute directly assisting students and faculty of the various universities as either a reference or circulation librarian, and I think I can put this one in perspective.
First of all, whether Dr. Butler is officially affiliated with the university or not, the fact that she was hired by that university for diversity training of their RA’s is pretty damning, and as far as that’s concerned, I’m with Weirddave on this one. I would say that pretty much proves that the university condones her views enough to give her money to train, unless you want to argue that the university hired her for some other reason without realizing that she held these views and that it was just all a confusin’ coinkidink. I mean, I’m no liberal myself, but if my university needed a trainer for our Dean of International Studies and just happened to pick David Duke, I would suddenly have quite a few serious questions, his qualifications as a trainer be damned.
And that brings me to why Weirddave is wrong about “liberal diversity”. Dr. Butler is no more a liberal than Mr. Duke is a conservative. They’re both radicals, and that fact is behind the reason I’m planning on getting out of academia and into business.
See, if universities and colleges were being run by liberals, I would have no problems. As a conservative, I’m quite happy to recognize the good that liberals have done, such as desegregation, FDR’s various programs, unions–the list goes on. I have liberal friends, and we have discussions, and I find them to be open-minded and fair about pretty much everything. Liberals are good people. The problem is that universities are not being run by liberals. They’re being run by the radical left.
Oh yes they are! Our library along with every other library in the Boston area watched as across the Charles River, Larry Summers got drummed out of his position at Harvard due to some innocuous remark. It wasn’t the students who drummed him out, either, but a few academic bullies who couldn’t stand to hear even a whiff of criticism toward their canon. All across the nation, conservative speakers are routinely shouted down, and some are physically attacked. Students are harrassed and threatened for voicing conservative opinions and they are mocked for their religious beliefs by professors who couldn’t survive outside of their dusty offices and tenured positions for a year. For the past eight years, I’ve seen it, I’ve heard it, and I’m disgusted by it, and next year, I’m going to start on my second masters in business, not education and start looking for a corporate job pretty much for this reason.
Oh yes, corporate is a pain in the ass, and the hours are long, and I’ll probably never make THAT much money, but at least corporate people have experience in the real world. I’ve seen the consequences of spending too much time on Planet College, and there’s no way I’m going to allow it to happen to me. Radicalism has a way of yielding to reality that is starting to appeal to me more and more.