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"The intellectual tradition is one of servility to power, and if I didn't betray it I'd be ashamed of myself."
Noam Chomsky
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UCLA's Distinguished & Emeritus Professors
In
2007, I contacted UCLA Distinguished Professor, Edward Keenan, to ask
if he would be willing to join other UCLA faculty members to examine
the facts of my termination and then possibly take up my case with UCLA
administrators.
In response to my question, Distinguished Professor Keenan wrote back:
"[T]o
be clear, I am not willing to form a committee with you and some other
faculty you might round up in order to launch a move to reinstate you.
I regard this as hopeless, because a random collection of faculty
(however distinguished) has no status within the university power
structure. No one would be obliged to pay any attention to us."
The quote above ended a letter I received from UCLA Distinguished Professor Keenan on the case of my termination. The following quote, taken from the same letter, is Keenan's offering "one further thought about what action you might take" regarding the case:
"[A]pply for admission to the GSE [Graduate School of Education]. You can say that you used to be a grad student there, and you have decided you want to pursue your degree notwithstanding any misunderstandings in the past. If you apply for admission the dept [education department] has to consider your case, so the faculty member you mentioned might be able to push for readmission without the dept [education department] having to acknowledge any wrong doing." (emphasis mine)
This particular "thought" should provide the public a deeper understanding of how Isaiah Berlin's "secular priesthood" operates within a leading American university, as it shows that a UCLA "distinguished" faculty member's concern is with shielding a UCLA department from "having to acknowledge any wrong doing." This quote also shows that this "distinguished" faculty member is willing to suggest that an expelled student (mis)characterize any wrongdoing by the university's departments as "misunderstandings in the past" as a way to be readmitted when this (ex-)student is pursuing facts and UCLA's own academic and ethical principles to demonstrate egregious wrongdoing by this public university.
Before posting more excerpts from Keenan's letter, I am providing the letter to which Professor Keenan was replying, and my reply to his letter.
(page under construction. . . )
page in (very slow) progress...
...but perhaps a few remarks on this particular page are now in order as this experiment on the university progresses, albeit rather slowly. My sense from the few inquiries I've received on this page is that the above statements on UCLA faculty—"(however distinguished)"—by UCLA Distinguished Professor Edward Keenan may be essentially incomprehensible to the so-called intellectual class—the secular priesthood. That is, when these individual words are strung together in this particular configuration, Keenan's statements and their implications simply do not register in the minds of these intellectuals. Or relatedly, it may be that these intellectuals see that Keenan has merely written some nonsense sentences here, analogous to Chomsky's "Green ideas sleep furiously" (as Keenan is also a Chomskyan linguist), and therefore promptly disregard them in their entirety.
Or from a different perspective, because we are dealing here with the secular priesthood, it may well be as if one of the University's distinguished high priests had, in a moment of uncharacteristic clarity and candor, written to a student (whom he trusted to be just another obedient charge) a note admitting that this University high priest does not actually believe in his own University's exalted (and heavily marketed) motto: "Let There Be Light." And then this obedient-student-turned-rascal thought he'd give his University a good laugh by passing this note around to all his classmates (metaphorically putting a tack on this "distinguished" professor's much elevated seat). However, in such a case as this the entire membership of the secular priesthood must then remain silent or risk being defrocked.
My sense is also that if UCLA Distinguished Professor Keenan's statements here ever do find their way out into the public supporting (and paying dearly to attend) the University of California, some within this citizenry will clearly understand Keenan's statements and immediately grasp all their crucial implications. And if these people then want to put actual substance into this public University's exalted motto, "Let There Be Light," they'll take Keenan's statements directly to the University of California Office of the President and demand that there be light focused sharply on how this University operates behind its slick corporate-style marketing campaigns, as the University of California goes about its own business of pursuing increasingly bold strategies to more fully privatize a corporation that has proved to be too socially valuable (read: powerful) to be left in the hands of a public actually demanding, "Let There Be Light."
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"Incidentally, part of the genius of this aspect of the
higher education system is that it can get people to sell out even while
they think they're doing exactly the right thing. So some young person
going into academia will say to themself, "Look, I'm going to be a real
radical here"— and you can be,
as long as you adapt yourself to these categories which guarantee that
you'll never ask the right questions, and that you'll never even look at the right questions. But you don't feel
like you're selling out, you're not saying "I'm working for the ruling
class" or anything like that — you're not, you're being a Marxist
economist or something. But the effect is, they've totally neutralized
you." (original emphases)
Noam Chomsky
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