Frederic in my experience its fine for professors to be Marxists or (though this is quite rare) left anarchists as long as its armchair -- academic. There are exceptions of course but the lines between advocacy and so-called objectivity (and between the ivory tower and the actual world inhabited by working class people)are drawn to keep them pretty safe and tepid. The profs generally observe the limited parameters and exhibit stunning cowardice --- even people with freaking lifetime job security who call themselves Marxists and so forth. Chomsky\'s comment "never understimate the cowardice of intellectuals" goes double for academicians. Not all.  And some schools are weird and have a good left department or two where the progressivity reaches beyond the classroom

But on the whole my experience with "left" professors is depressing. You see their names on "historians for Obama" petitions  and hear them telling people Obama will be good on the war or on race but of course you never saw them at the Cindy Sheehan lecture or at the antiwar march (the ones other than the really big ones) or at the local presentation on racially disparate mass incarceration.   They\'re too damn good for all that pedestrian stuff.  Yes there are exceptions of course but less and less it seems.

It have terrible stories - a book\'s worth.

Good professors often make really bad thinkers and advocates outside their occupational worlds.  Partly I think its because their brains are scrambled by endless clerical paper work -- grading, committee work, peer review, trying to fix every endnote on the latest irrelevant and incestuous piece of innocuous drivel meant to get tenure or a promotion. So they don\'t have a lot of brain power left when it comes to doing non-academic things.  

Another big problem with them is the "hey look at  and listen to me I\'m a know-it-all you have nothing to tell me" syndrome that comes from having a doctorate (I struggle with the syndrome as a legacy of years in and around the academy) and also from spending years talking to large captive audiences of people half your age who are subordinated to your supposedly wise and all-seeing grading and thesis-supervising and job-recommending powers.  Being a Marxist doesn\'t seem to correct the syndrome for some profs, it seems.  

I ran into this alot when canvassing (in a big university town) leading up to the Iowa Caucus; you could talk in a productive and friendly way to everybody except (1) the Obamanists and (2) the professors and these two categories overlapped pretty heavily. Creepy know it all people....

Academic culture does not give rise to very good activists on the whole.

I know about and envy the exceptions who inspire - Zinn, Chomsky, Fox-Piven, Charles Derber, and others.

But note what the academy did to Norman Finkelstein and even Ward Churchill and remember that there are many other less known and less spectacular stories (i have some good freinds who are such stories and I am one such story in a way) along those lines.

Hello Frederick , the Erics et mr Street.

The politicians don\'t want to talk politcics playing with petty emotional stuff, the medias are mainframed about narrowed topics, and the majority of listeners  are gangrened or taught to avoid talking politics at diners or any social events.

The media succeed in dirverting the attention on what is r eally going on.

What I often hear ( always someone!) that we must never talk politics or religion; so most of the time, someone want to impose my silence.. there is an intellectual blocage imposed on people.

To be fair, Paul, for every Rumsfeld there\'s openly anti-racist anti-capitalist professors. But yes, the Horowitzian claims that the academy is a Marxist training ground is openly laughable.

I was watching the San José Sharks games and playing Marvel vs. Capcom instead of watching the debates.

Word to that, Mr. Patton.

The rather shameful antics of the pimps and hustlers that make up the state corportist dominated mass media here during last nights "debate" is by no means an accident - it is a

result of the all too sucessful attempt to infantilize the public by making politics into a realtiy series. While some of the fallout from this might be a bit encoraging, it will probably be just another kerfuffle that is quickly sent down the memory hole. Real media reform will only occur if people would "become the media" to borrow a term from Jello Biafra, thereby denying the creation of minor media stars like Boy George and Li\'l Charlie Gibson. It is one of the many impediments to any semblance of democracy that\'s left in the corportist landscape that is America in 2008.

I\'ll take a strike \'em out - throw \'em out at 2nd base double play over those media clowns anyday of the week,  Paul.

eb

Not planning to leave the U.S. but also not too attached to leave if a really good coordinator class job offer came up somewhere beyond our shores or borders, which is unlikely since elites/employers are no more sympathetic to actually radical writers/speakers in other national outposts of the world capitalist system.  Word to the "future expatriates:" they have class systems and authoritarian ideological and thought-control systems outside the U.S.  Sad but true. 

Here in the U.S. thought it gets ptretty bad. We give a Newsweek column to Karl Rove and a New York Times column to neoconservative war monger William Kristol.  How about that liberal/left media?

And by the way had a look at the presidential debate last night - if anything my post above was easy on the corporate media thought-controllers/framers who exercise such God like power over what passes for a democratic political culture in the US  Stephanopolous and Gibson and their staff have established a new proto-fascistic low.  Truly shameful.

And then there\'s the academy. War criminal, cretin and Al-Capone admirer Donald Rumsfeld had some gig/fellowship at the Stanford-affiliated Hooover Institute.  Imperial bit pull and war criminal Tony Blair will teach at Harvard. Moronic neocon Iraq War agent Doug Feith (once described by war criminal Tommy Franks as "the stupidest motherfucker who ever lived") taught at Georgetown recently; so I think did George Tenet. 

Karl Rove recently got $40,000 from the University of Iowa Lecture Committee to come sit in a chair and say snotty and adolescent things to a liberal-left academic interviewer and to students and community members who heckled him (BTW he was literally run out of town after his "lecture").  A cool 40 G.  In originally advertising his appearance, the lecture commtitee noted that it had a long tradition of bringing in some of the "finest minds" in the world.

How about that liberal/left academia?

And how about that great American meritocracy? 

On making America better, it may or may not to be possible but you have no choice but to put academic speculation aside and believe that it is. It\'s Pascal\'s bargain.

It\'s a damn shame that you\'re not a respected pundit on the TV circuit, or even given space in the NYT\'s op-ed pages.  If any of that happened, though, I think you\'d be the first to say that that would mean there would be something seriously wrong with the system.  (By the way, I hope you\'re still not considering leaving the US for good; a few friends of mine call themselves "future American expatriates," and that kind of talk I find heartbreaking-- and futile, because then there\'s less of people like me in a country that I wish to make better!)