Uh-oh. It looks like a brawl over at Georgetown University. Never mind, they just hired ex-Pentagon official Douglas Feith as a faculty member at the School of Foreign Service, according to the New York Times. Needless to say, Professor Feith’s welcome by his fellow faculty members has not been warm.
Feith’s appointment as a professor at Georgetown has sparked widespread controversy over his role in supporting the Iraq war during his tenure at the Pentagon. Washington’s uppity side of town has held protests of the appointment, and yet they were notably absent when former Secretary of State Madeline Albright, former national security adviser Anthony Lake, and former C.I.A. director George Tenet, Clinton appointees all, were appointed to the faculty. Well of course, they’re all liberals. So much for Lake’s advising on national security. Under his tenure, the World Trade Center was bombed, over one hundred people were killed in Oklahoma City, and oh, the USS Cole was bombed by Muslim extremists. One hell of a track record, is it not?
Mark N. Lance, a philosophy professor who teaches in the program for Justice and Peace at Georgetown, organized a campus protest of Feith’s appointment. Lance told the New York Times that he will not be shaking Feith’s hand upon being introduced to the new professor. “And if he asks why, I’ll say because in my view you’re a war criminal and you have no place on this campus.” Isn’t that mature? Perhaps if Feith came to the faculty meeting bearing bongs and marijuana for his colleagues, he would gain acceptance into the “club.”
It comes as no surprise that former Weathermen, who torched ROTC buildings in the 1960s are perfectly fit to teach at America’s elite universities, but people who have actually held a real job outside of Georgetown’s Queer Studies department (not a joke) are unfit to serve as educators. After all, Georgetown renounced its adherence Catholic teaching decades ago, yet it still bills itself as a Catholic institution in the Jesuit tradition. Georgetown was one of 27 “Catholic” colleges that put on the Vagina Monologues, a play portraying vulgar slang, the objectification of female anatomy, and the raping of a 14-year old girl by an adult lesbian as “sexually liberating,” for Women’s History Month in 2006. Call me a crazy conservative, but I know obscenity when I see it.
The ironic part of Georgetown’s rejection of Catholic teaching and diversity of thought is that the Catholic Church pioneered universities as a place to study classical philosophy and theology, such as Plato, Aristotle, etc. Classical texts have since been banned as intolerant works, but then again, is that really all that surprising? That’s what I thought.
Instead of protesting the appointment of faculty members with whom they disagree, perhaps Professor Lance and company should revaluate what exactly a university is supposed to be.
