OxBlog

# Posted 10:03 PM by Ariel David Adesnik

ACADEMIC POLITICS MATTER! Ralph Luker has been following the disturbing story of two tenured professors at the University of Southern Mississippi whose jobs were terminated for reasons that the university president refuses to elaborate.

Ralph isn't happy with OxBlog because I recently dismissed these sorts of academic crises as "tempests-in-a-teapot". Perhaps that description was a bit harsh. I fully support all those who actively defend the right of free speech. It's just my sense that such incidents happen so often on campuses across the nation that one shouldn't approach them as landmark battles in a national culture war. (NB: I was unaware of the USM affair before today. The "tempest" comment was about academic politics in general.)

As Kikuchiyo observes, the ivory tower has a strong propensity to overestimate the significance of its own affairs. As Henry Kissinger once said, "University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small." That isn't the whole story, but it is a big part of it.

Kikuchiyo is also right to speculate that OxBlog takes a similar approach to academic slugfests regardless of whether they take place in the Ivy League or the Mississippi Delta. While Ralph detected a note of condescension in my original comments, the fact is that my lack of interest in academic politics reflects my experiences at Yale and Oxford, rather than any sense that political controversies only matter if they happen at Yale or Oxford.

Finally, I don't think Ralph was being fair to Salma Hayek.

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