"Sane" Academics in an Insane World

I had an interesting and revealing exchange on Jeff Goldberg’s blog Protein Wisdom recently with a professor at Virginian Tech – Bob_R - on the subject of the massacre there and the school policy regarding guns. (Scroll down to the comments. I'm "Moneyrunner")

What I found most telling about the exchange was the whiff of hysteria that evidenced itself in the professor’s writings. He identifies himself as a professor of mathematics, a discipline that I viewed as very structured, very “disciplined.” A math prof is not someone I would expect to go off on flights of rhetorical hyperbole.

But heat up the rhetoric he did. He begins:

I am a Virginia Tech professor and a Blacksburg resident. Boortz is, of course, free to use the fresh blood or our students and faculty to make his political points and increase the profits of radio network. Jeff is, of course, free to suggest that by getting yourself elected to a part time position as a state legislator you forfeit the right to suggest to local radio stations (over which you have no legal control) that they would be better off not employing someone who had the bad taste to call 32 dead people cowards before their bodies had a chance to cool.

Note the reference to “fresh blood of our students” and the cooling bodies of Tech students.

But as the thread progresses we see that he’s more than a little sensitive about the views expressed about academics, referring to comments regarding academics he accuses me of creating:

rigid little narrative about liberal academia

And doesn’t want you to think that the teachers at Tech are anti-gun wusses:

We have great hunting around here, and gun ownership within the faculty is relatively high. Despite that, I would guess that handgun ownership is relatively low.

Referring to Tech as a “gun free zone” he comments:

A lot has been made about the “gun - free” rule. In principle, I agree. But I’ve asked other members of the faculty, and none of us can remember when this rule passed. The fact is that I don’t know of anyone who kept a gun on campus before the rule - it is like they passed a rule prohibiting serving haggis for lunch. No one noticed. There is simply so little violence and crime here that almost everyone judged the inherent risks of carrying a gun as worse than the benefits.

He gets back to Neil Boortz. He characterized his comments as “Vile Insults.”

The implication that they were “wusses” because they (with varying degrees of success) barricaded their doors rather than having organized a counterattack is a vile insult

.
To demonstrated how he is one with the people, he tells us that:

But I like venison, know a lot of hunters, and have admired a lot of gun cabinets.

And does not like to be lumped in with other academics:

We don’t all fit you simplistic little stereotype.

And he is at his best when building straw men:

I’m all for the right to bear arms. I simply don’t have an unrealistic, romantic idea that it will protect me from all dangers. And I don’t hurl insults at a bunch of people who are spending a big chunk of their time going to funerals in order make a point I am interested in in a situation where it doesn’t really apply.

And:

The idea that the only genuine support for the second amendment is a religious belief that it solves all problems of violence is ... well I guess I’m just never going to measure up to your messianic standards.

And:

But more specifically, your scenario of how the army of citizen soldiers would have stopped Cho simply exposes your ignorance of the specific situation and would be a good Exhibit A in any demonstration that second amendment purists have “silly romantic” notions of how it works in practice.

Regarding a comment about the tenured faculty at Duke in their public demonization of the lacrosse players before the case was brought to trial, he’s defensive about the issue of tenure:

I didn’t know I had to prove my loyalty by writing a 12 page essay on what idiots the Duke 88 are.

What’s interesting about Bob_R is that he is probably as close to a conservative as you will find on a college campus. No, that’s wrong, there are undoubtedly conservatives on college campuses. But here is a man, a tenured professor, who occupies a middle ground between the certifiable crazies like the Duke 88 or Ward Churchill and his supporters and, say Thomas Sowell, and he emotes all over the blogosphere, building enough straw men to field a small army.

I sort of like the guy. What I object to is the element of irrationality that inhabits his arguments, the emotion that colors his comments. I don’t expect much from academia. I expect less than nothing from the Liberal Arts faculty and the “studies” faculty. But somehow I expected more from the math and science faculty.