Some Things Never Change

[arisbe]

"The faculty at Bard College, a liberal arts school at Annandale, NY, includes a scholar who glories in the title Alger Hiss Professor of Social Studies..."

I applied to Bard and got in, but after a brief visit, attended Earlham unseen.

Today they are much the same, though Bard may be a bit more tolerant of ideological eccentricity.

Comments

[supergee.livejournal.com]

When I was at Swarthmore, we considered Bard, Reed, Oberlin, and Carlton the four schools closest to us.

[arisbe.livejournal.com]

I recall President Bolling saying that he had no intention of turning Earlham int a Quaker Oberlin (or was it Antioch?) or an Indiana Swarthmore.

[joffridus.livejournal.com]

"...Joel Kovel, who believes the Soviets were never a threat to the Americans and that U.S. criticism of communism was the product of hysteria."

I wouldn't say that they were never a threat, but it does seem to me that they weren't as much of a threat as we were led to believe. And I think that there was a lot of fear and criticism based on hysteria.

I think there was definitely some piling on

[calaf.livejournal.com]

If you read about how the Cold War got started, you can see that a lot of people in a position to make decisions realized they could do very well politically and monetarily if there was a great power threat out there. And the Soviets did behave in enough inhuman ways so that it was easy to cast them in the part.

Very gradually, and in more ways than can be counted, we became them and they became us. Luckily, the transformation here is not quite complete. There're multiple ways to resist and the penalties for resisting here are nowhere near what they were under Stalin.

So we have no excuse for accepting the status quo, do we?

[thecatinside.livejournal.com]

I applied to both Earlham and Oberlin and was accepted at both, but chose my woman's college instead. Earlham was my second favorite of the seven colleges to which I applied.

I'm on the far Left

[calaf.livejournal.com]

. . . and yeah I tend to give people Nixon went after the benefit of the doubt.

But after the Verona documents came out . . . I sure wouldn't want to be the Alger Hiss professor of anything.

I've read one of Professor Kovel's books

[calaf.livejournal.com]

Red Hunting in the Promised Land.

It's a great book, no doubt about it. He gets his ducks lined up. I just wonder what he makes of the Verona documents.

"Treason" is in the eye of the beholder.

[publius-aelius.livejournal.com]

Robert E. Lee was a "traitor" to something, and so were the Founding Fathers. The Jesuits who disobeyed the murderous heretic Elizabeth Tudor in order to bring the Catholic Sacraments back to England have been called "traitors" by English historiagraphers, but I deem them to have been saints and heroes. These communist "fellow travelers" and spies thought they were "saving democracy"--which to them included social democracy--from the threat of fascist, capitalist terrorism. They are to be judged in the context of their times, not ours. And when that is done, there are many working class people all over the world who'd consider them worthy of the mausoleums in Red Square some of 'em got.