Hot Off The Presses

Class warfare may have little appeal to the masses but academics, who are mostly in the upper class,  can’t get enough of it. Consider this trio of offerings from the University of Illinois catalogue:

o   From Jim Crow to Jay-Z: Race, Rap and the Performance of Masculinity by Miles White, who teaches at the University of Seattle campus in Bratislava, Slovakia;

o   Guest Workers and Resistance to U. S. Corporate Despotism by Immanuel Ness, political science professor at Brooklyn College;

o   The Gospel of the Working Class: Labor’s Southern Prophets in New Deal America by Erik S. Gellman and Jarod Roll. Gellman is an assistant professor of history at Roosevelt University in Chicago. Roll directs the Marcus Cunliffe Centre for the Study of the American South at the University of Sussex in England.

Ness, his ratemyprofessors.com ratings indicate, has charisma to spare but one of the dissident raters offers an interesting insight: “The man is a menace, he brags about punching cops in class and weekly attending one radical protest after another, then treats those of any opposing viewpoint (anything reasonable so liberals might want to beware too), like dirt.”

Another claims that, “He doesn’t let students finish their views if they disagree with his. And he is so clumsy, he broke his arm twice.” Maybe a couple of those punches didn’t connect.

Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.

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