It's a breath of fresh air to see that so many individuals made it through to the other side after a few despots tried to fart us out of their gas factory.

College was so different for my generation and those who went before.
When I was young every parent wanted their children to go to college. These days I wouldn't know how to find a trustworthy institution and my son graduates from high school three years hence. Even MIT has employed that walking contradiction Chomsky.

I'm glad someone said it! I studied sociology, English and philosophy for three years because I found it interesting....then I got a REAL job!

Reminds me of another quote:

"I am missing and have gone to look for myself. If I should return before I get back, please ask me to wait!"

THAT kind of "finding"?

Why wouldn't any research institution be thrilled to have Chomsky on staff? If he had done nothing other than write [i]Syntactic Structures[\i] he would still be one of America's greatest scholars.

You might find his politics distasteful, but his scholarship is positively breathtaking.

John

I could not agree more with that statement. It saddens me when our intellectual national treasure fill their chests with fools gold.

There have been many brilliant people throughout history, which were scholars, leaders, authors and some, were all three, but it is their politics or their ideology that prevents me from wanting them teaching my children.

Think about it! Would you want these men, Hitler, Linen, Marks, and Stalin teaching your children?

Politically active professors don't have a reputation for leaving their politics out of the classroom; as an institution, you have to question whether your hire's goal will be education or indoctrination.

You can't leave politics out of education anymore than you can not communicate.

Of course you can. With most disciplines, at least. With disciplines into which politics tend to leak, you can attempt to present them in a neutral fashion, presenting a variety of viewpoints as expressed by reasonably competent champions of those viewpoints, or you can attempt to use your position to indoctrinate the students into your own favored ideology, by either neglecting to mention alternative views, or by using poor spokespeople for them.

I've attended classes with some of the most politically loaded subject matter there is (criminal law, constitutional law) and had professors who bent over backward to avoid even giving a hint of their own personal beliefs, and I've had politics-neutral (or politics-almost-neutral) courses such as creative writing, or English literature, in which the professor took every opportunity to advance a particular ideology. It's simply a matter of being aware of the possibility of misusing one's position as an educator, and having enough integrity and intellectual honesty to try not to do it.

It's simply a matter of being aware of the possibility of misusing one's position as an educator, and having enough integrity and intellectual honesty to try not to do it.
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Absolutely. Just think whose interest it's being served and the power differential.

Thinking that one can be neutral is in itself a political position. Kind of like Fox's "fair and balanced." No such animal. There are always conscious and unconscious biases. (Note: the preceding sentences were also political positions.)

I can teach painting, sculpting and magic without letting politics enter in to it. Many professors do not; they use their teaching platform for their particular brand of propaganda and also give good grades to the students that alien themselves with their way of thinking and not on the student’s ability.

Accepting this position at face value, it still ignores the point in favor of sophistry. That's like saying that you can't measure exactly one cup of sugar. Well, ok...maybe you're invariably a few grains heavy or light; but if a recipe calls for a cup of sugar, and you have a guy who tries to put in a cup, and really gets 0.994 of a cup, or 1.02 cups, you're not going to complain, and your cake will taste just fine. On the other hand, you could get a guy who decides to put in 3 cups, because that's the way he likes it, or he doesn't care what anyone says he "should" do.

Even if you can't keep politics out of the classroom in an absolute sense, you can still strive to be as objective as possible. It's not hard to present both sides of an argument with a straight face. You can teach constitutional law by presenting the back-and-forth cases on, say, the death penalty, written in the own words of the justices who authored the decisions, or you can editorialize. My criminal law professor's pet peeve was "3 strikes" laws, which she hated; she even spent an entire class session telling us why we should vote to repeal the one we have in California. I didn't rack up a hundred grand in student loans to hear her own personal politics; I did it to learn the law. Funny, but when I took the bar exam, there wasn't an essay question anything remotely like "Explain in 1,000 words or less why 3 Strikes laws are bad." Of course, I shouldn't be surprised, as she'd never practiced law, but why would anyone care about that as a prerequisite for teaching a class comprised of aspiring lawyers?

So, even if you don't succeed, I'd say in order of desirability, you have:
1. Professors who attempt to keep their own personal beliefs out of the classroom, and do a pretty good job of it.
2. Professors who attempt to keep their own personal beliefs out of the classroom, but don't do that good a job of it.
3. Professors who intend to use their positions primarily to indoctrinate students into their own political/philosophical worldviews.

Saying "Well, it's impossible to be completely objective" doesn't mean that they're all in the same group (those that aren't objective, i.e. everyone). They're not.