Please remove the beam from thine eye before asking me to remove the beam from mine eye Dept.

There I go again, attacking one of my favorite bloggers. Brad DeLong runs an item that reads, in its entirety, thus:

The Los Angeles Times Gives John M. Ellis and Charles L. Geshekter a Platform to Oppose a Just, Free, and Equal Society

If Ellis and Geshekter think that America should not aim to be a “just, free, and equal society”, they need to take it up with Thomas Jefferson.

It really is remarkable the tripe that the Los Angeles Times will print:

UC system faculty replaces academics with activism: [T]he tilt to the left among college faculty members has been growing nationwide for several decades. At UC Berkeley, the ratio of Democrats to Republicans even in the hard sciences had grown to 10 to 1 in 2004…. The visible signs of activism at work are shocking. Why should the mission statement of the sociology department at UC Santa Cruz claim that a “just, free and equal society” may require “fundamental social change”? Sociology classes should help students understand how societies work, but at Santa Cruz, the mission seems to be enlisting students in activism…

Why oh why can’t we have a better press corps?

In the first place, Brad, making fun of the tendency of the Washington Post and the New York Times, and the LA Times, to run not information or even misinformation but rather willful disinformation in their news columns, which you often do, is something I not only enjoy but frequently emulate. In this case, however, the LA Times is simply running an op-ed, which is a little different.

Secondly, Ellis and Geshekter are not stating their opposition to a “just, free, and equal society,” but rather to the notion that the sociology department in a state-run university should announce that achievement of that goal “may require ‘fundamental social change’,” which is also a little different. I would further note that slave-ownin’ (and slave-lovin’) Tom Jefferson’s pursuit of a “just, free, and equal society” could appear a bit dilatory at times.

More seriously, it’s a good bet that many members of the sociology department at UC Berkeley believe that a “just, free, and equal society” means, among other things, equality of income, which they would likely enforce in Robin Hood fashion.* I don’t think that most Americans, or most Californians, or even I, or even you, Brad, think that way. While we would both happily increase taxes on the rich, I think that even in Brad DeLong’s paradise Bill Gates would still be a billionaire and lots of people of people would still be struggling to make ends meet, even if they did have free health care, not to mention bullet trains.

Although Ellis and Geshekter’s conclusion (that politicized university campuses have ruined higher education) is false, their examples of UC Berkeley political correctness ring painfully true. For example, the course description for Feminist Studies 320, which describes the “experiences of women of color, both within the U.S. and globally, with interlocking systems of racism, classism, sexism, homophobia/transphobia, ableism and colonialism.” Brad, does that sound like scholarship to you?

Why oh why can’t we have a better press corps? Brad, don’t you mean, Why oh why can’t we have editorial boards that won’t print the truth about political correctness at Berkeley?