Saturday, May 07, 2005

J. Budziszewski on opinionated professors

From Boundless Webzine via titusonenine...

"Do you know Muito Egregious, the Spanish and Portuguese teacher?"
"Only by reputation."
"Well, I'm a Spanish major, and I can't avoid taking his courses."
"Does he live up to his name?"
"Sure does. He never misses an opportunity to be insulting or obscene — if possible, both at once. What he said this morning about Mother Theresa was unspeakable. I wish I could clean out my memory with soap."
"You think you've got it bad," said Don. "My Modern European teacher, Peccata Mundi, is a woman with a mission. Did you know that Christianity is responsible for all of the evils of the world? No? Well, that's what she says. Oppression of women? We did it. Slavery? Our fault. The Holocaust? We did that too, according to her. Stalin's purges? Before becoming a Communist, Stalin was a seminary student, so again we're to blame. Terrorism? We're just getting what we deserve."
"I can top that," said Peter. "My public policy professor, Prentice Schlange, isn't just nuts -- he's a sadist. Yesterday he opened class by saying, 'All of you here are too intelligent to be pro-life, right?' A girl in front of me said, 'I'm pro-life.' He tore her down for five minutes."
"You didn't tell us about that," said Theresa. "What did he say?"
"He figured her reasons were religious, so the first thing he did was label her a 'fundamentalist.' It was downhill from there on. A lot of his diatribe was recycled quotations from other people. I recognized a couple of them, like H.L. Mencken's line about uneducable people who belong to the species homo boobiens. By the time my teacher was finished, the girl was in tears. Then he asked, 'Would anyone else like to say anything?' Of course no one else did, so he smiled nastily and said to her, 'It seems that you're a minority of one."
I raised a judicial eyebrow. "Are you saying that all of your teachers are like these three?"
"Yes and no," replied Theresa. "Not many faculty are that extreme. On the other hand, there's a persistent left-wing, anti-religious bias in almost all of our classes. Sometimes mild, sometimes not."
"Make that anti-Christian bias," said Peter. "They hardly ever criticize, say, Hinduism or New Age religiosity."


Great read.
A bit long, but quick reading.
Be sure to read both parts.


***

We don't agree about capital punishment, he and I, but Budziszewski is clearly one of the giants of the faith today. I would never presume to engage him in an argument.

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