(From the Daily Caller):
“The MLA’s moral and intellectual bankruptcy is a symptom of the Academy’s decline”
By Bruce Cole and Michael Poliakoff
This month, The Modern Language Association, the nation’s largest organization of humanities scholars, signaled that it wants to jump on the anti-Israel bandwagon. That bandwagon has lately been steered by MLA’s colleagues in the American Studies Association, who launched a boycott of Israeli universities last month. The MLA convention where its resolution criticizing Israel was debated (and from which The Daily Caller was banned ), revealed much ignorance of facts but no lack of vehemence and self-righteousness. Over two hundred college presidents have condemned the American Studies initiative, and a few universities have terminated their affiliation with it. Thus the attempt to marginalize Israel has largely succeeded only in marginalizing itself. But now the MLA is raring to go. Why are these academic professional associations showing so little professionalism, or even sense?
What has been overlooked in the efforts to counter their perverse political mischief is the perverse nature of contemporary humanities and social science.What has become pervasive is political grandstanding combined with the identity politics of race, class, and gender, often seasoned with adolescent foolishness and deep contempt for everything American. Professional principles of teaching and research, on which alone the credibility of higher education can rest, are ignored. READ MORE HERE