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Another Place To Eschew Politics

Politics: It’s a method by which people organize to get their interests served. It’s about the acquisition of power.

Notice that I’ve said nothing about truth. Politicians and their followers aren’t much interested in truth. They are all about power. They need what Stephen Colbert calls “truthiness”—which is a nice word for the sort of BS that politicians throw around in order to justify what their followers already believe.

When was the last time you heard a politician say, “In truth, the people supporting my position on this issue are quite wrong.”? You won’t ever hear politicians saying this sort of thing—not if they want to get elected.

Well, colleges and universities are supposed to be about truth, not power. But when Boards of Trustees or governors impose their political agendas on universities, truth is eclipsed by power, and pretty soon it’s no longer safe to teach certain things in certain ways.

The same goes for “political correctness” on campus. P.C. is a power ploy: a demand that this group or that group receive instant, mandatory, and utopian social justice. Before you know it, a more complex analysis of race and gender is eclipsed by political pressure, whether it comes from students or administrators or fellow faculty.

The only way to save truth is to make sure our schools of higher learning are 100 percent politics free. This sounds like pie in the sky, and maybe it is. But it’s the only way to protect the truth that’s supposed to set us free. 

This is Tom McBride, and that’s my Perspective.

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