Hi, all. I'm a former UIUC staff member (and a former editor at the Daily Illini), now working at The Point in Chicago. The problem with this new academy should be obvious: It was created to espouse a specific political view under the university's aegis. This would be unusual for any university, moreso for a publicly funded one founded as a land-grant college in the proto-progressive vein. The norm is to allow and even encourage professors to advance their own political views, and not to censor a particular view. But a department such as this, by its definition, would necessarily be hostile to, or even be required to squelch, a social liberal or progressive position. It doesn't make much sense for an academy to do this.
I've created a "problem" area on The Point to help crack this nut:
www.thepoint.com/problems/uiuc-academy-on-capitalism
This can lead to a campaign by those of you who are interested in this issue.
FYI: the Academy was talked about in three previous threads here on IP, under the following headings (ordered chronologically, all authored by Mark Sheldon):
Academy for Capitalism and Limited Government (closed for comments)
The Academy (closed for comments)
and
Academy Kickoff a Success (open for comments)
The first was a long, rambling, trainwreck of a thread, that devolved (pardon the pun) into a discussion of Darwin's theory of evolution and religion at the September 13th, 2007 at 11:37 AM post onwards. Go through it if you like, but the thread quickly got jacked and never returned...
(having re-read a portion of that thread, I'd like to apologize to D. Boon for disparging his comment at September 13th, 2007 at 12:16 PM; i misread his post and confused his point...)
The next two threads were shorter than the first and didn't cover as much ground, so i don't know if they're useful for your campaign/petition/idea...
HG
Just to clarify - the threads with closed comments are due to a plugin which this site uses that automatically closes comments on all threads that haven't seen a new non-spam comment for seven days. It's a way to limit spam.
That said, if anyone wants to continue to discuss the Academy, you can do so here, or in a new blog post. I think it'll continue to be a topic for a while.
Okay, I stopped after the first line:
The University of Illinois, a land-grant college, was founded on the principles of a developing societal progressivism.
Let me know if there's anything in there I should know.
I'd like to apologize to D. Boon for disparging his comment at September 13th, 2007 at 12:16 PM; i misread his post and confused his point...
No problem. It happens to me a lot over here. I am trying to evolve as a writer to a clearer prose because of this site and the fact a lot of people probably think I am a horse's ass when they have (imo) fundamentally misunderstood much of what I have written.
I blame myself. But the bias that comes from reading text written in a debate format often leads us to misunderstand each other. It is hard to give people the benefit of the doubt to someone on the other side of a debate. That is also something I am working on.
Okay, I stopped after "Okay, I stopped after the first line."
Just kidding. Do we have an open mind here? That's just an introduction. If you dismiss something after the first sentence, how do you know what you're missing?