In academic circles, it’s fashionable in Louisiana to complain that the larger public just doesn’t get it, in response to the mild but real revenue reductions to higher education over the past few years that draws little real outcry. But this imagined slight might become more understandable to its propagators were academia to do some self-scrutiny on its self-inflicted wounds.
One such example emanates from
the awarding of Louisiana State University’s Manship School of Mass
Communication’s most recent Courage and Justice Award, going to Louisiana native
(although attending college out of state) Zach Kopplin for his strident
opposition to the Louisiana Science Education Act, a law known less for its
actual purpose of encouraging critical thinking in educating by the sciences by
allowing instructors to add governing authority-approved readings in their
lecturing than for the straw man characterization followers of the trendy level
at it that it somehow (despite its wording disallowing this) permits the
teaching of creationism in the classroom. Kopplin, demonstrating the old saw
that youth lets its emotions run ahead of its wisdom, very much believes in
this mistaken notion and has conducted a vigorous campaign to excise the law
from Louisiana’s statutes.
While this is merely unfortunate
that he should be so confused, that the school endorses and celebrates the view
with the award is disturbing. From an explanation
about the choice in the Baton Rouge
Advocate:
The Courage and Justice Award is
given to an individual who pursues a “perceived just cause” while displaying
courage and ethics in the face of opposition, lack of resources and substantial
time commitment.
“No matter where you stand on
this issue, most would agree it takes an extraordinary amount of courage for
someone of his age to mount a campaign that has such a sweeping consequence,”
said Jerry Ceppos, dean of the Manship School.
Of course, in an objective sense
given the predilections of the academy, this particular selection displays
neither courage nor justice. To commiserate among the faculty in its bashing of
the law takes about as much courage as wearing purple and gold amongst a sea of
others doing the same in Death Valley on a Saturday night yelling your lungs
out in support of LSU’s football team. And since when is the shearing of the
legal code of protections of academic freedom considered to be a “perceived
just cause” – especially when academia, of all places, is supposed to cherish
academic freedom and guard it zealously?
This latter point is not merely
(forgive me) academic. Among the subjects set out explicitly in the law is the
issue of climate change, and already you have the Luddite-in-Chief Pres. Barack Obama
declaring that there
is no debate, that (despite glaring
evidence otherwise) it’s settled that man’s intervention does cause climate
change and in a profoundly negative way. It’s deplorable that academia should
be complicit in putting free inquiry out of bounds by rewarding those who seek
to threaten this liberty by their agitating for removal of protections granted to those
wishing to give comprehensive instruction on issues such as anthropomorphic significant
climate change.
And notice how the rationale used
by the dean, in his urging that you recognize “courage” in the pursuit of
perceived “justice” regardless of the content of the belief propagated as a
basis on which to judge the awarding, leads to absurdity. Over four decades ago
there was a passionate advocate at LSU itself who, with no resources and
espousing an opinion deeply unpopular, nonetheless bravely articulated it in
front of universally hostile crowds as often as possible as he perceived it,
then and now, as a “just cause.” His name was David Duke, and
he supported Nazism.
So in giving this award to this
individual, in essence a taxpayer-supported academic unit where lip service is
given to freedom to disseminate knowledge in a quest for discovering truth instead
celebrates efforts to increase censorship opportunities by the state. And
higher education mandarins wonder why the public doesn’t consider higher
education in the state as valuable as they think it should be?
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