Horowitz has now given us the opportunity to “vote for the worst of the worst”:http://www.frontpagemag.com/survey/vote.asp , and Michael Bérubé is way out in front. Keep the votes pouring in and expose this dangerous radical as the dangerous danger he is to apple pie and all that.
{ 30 comments }
John Quiggin 02.24.06 at 5:21 am
I cast vote #104,502 a while back. At the time, Chomsky had 443 votes and Ward Churchill 79. Go Michael!
Brendan 02.24.06 at 5:54 am
I take it the winner does get a prize of some sort, yeah?
John Quiggin 02.24.06 at 5:55 am
Nicholas De Genova, rated the most hated professor in America in 2003, has only 11 votes so far.
That’s about right, I think. Ultraleftist posturing like his call for a million Mogadishus poses no threat at all to the Bush Administration; in fact, it’s highly beneficial for Bush. Maybe we should have a contest for America’s Least Dangerous Professors in which De Genova and Churchill could face off against advocates of Critical Theory whose criticisms are expressed in prose so dense as to be entirely impenetrable.
Chris Bertram 02.24.06 at 5:56 am
John Bellamy Foster is catching Berube fast!
John Quiggin 02.24.06 at 6:17 am
I wonder if Foster fans are using bots? The Berube crew is shameless in this regard.
Stephen 02.24.06 at 6:59 am
This may just be me, but whenever I see the name Ward Churchill on a list of lefty academics I have a moment of confusion: isn’t he the guy who we all pay to see play basketball, thus showing that capitalism is justified?
Chris Bertram 02.24.06 at 7:03 am
No, that’s Wayne Gretzky, surely?
Ron F 02.24.06 at 7:59 am
If you fancy a chuckle you might try the Amazon reviews of Horowitz’s The Professors
General J.C Christian’s review killed me.
Matt 02.24.06 at 10:10 am
I must say that I was more than a bit disapointed that no one here made the dangerous list. I know that many of you are not in the US, but if you’d only turn up your dangerousness a notch or two higher surely you be be dangerous all the way from the UK or Australia or where ever. I come here looking for dangerous ideas, after all, and if you don’t start delivering I’ll go elsewhere.
etat 02.24.06 at 11:48 am
I meant to ask about this last time round – and haven’t done the work myself: what’s the geographical spread of the people on the list? Obviously there are concentrations in the Northeast and California, and in urban areas moreso than rural, but, partly as a corollary to the red/blue state thing, I’d like to know which states have no representation on the list.
Tom F 02.24.06 at 12:51 pm
The idiots can’t even spell “Berkeley.”
Dan Simon 02.24.06 at 1:00 pm
Chris–keep making disrespectful references to our deity, and you’ll have enraged Canadians rioting in the streets, calling for you to be sent to Edmonton.
Thales 02.24.06 at 1:42 pm
Has there really been such a thing as a “dangerous academic” since Heidegger? That, like “tenured radical” seems to be a facile oxymoron.
Backword Dave 02.24.06 at 3:08 pm
What’s with the votes for Foster? Has he a fan club? Should I read his blog?
joel turnipseed 02.24.06 at 3:14 pm
Heh. Chomsky and Zinn must be bummin’ to be so far down the list… meantime, surprised to see Foner’s name so high: what kind of nut-job crap is going on in the right-wing blogosphere that his name is so high?
Another Damned Medievalist 02.24.06 at 4:50 pm
Considering how many of the people on the list are either Muslims or scholars who deal with the Middle East and/or Islam, I’m surprised no one is crying racism yet.
Pablo Stafforini 02.24.06 at 4:54 pm
Calling all Quigginians! Follow Dr Quiggin’s advise and vote for Chomsky. Chomskyan bots are also accepted.
Seth Finkelstein 02.24.06 at 5:39 pm
Can we have candidates’ speeches? As in, “I promise to continue my studies in neo-postmodernist Bolshevik mind-control, and to corrupt the precious bodily fluids of America’s youth”.
And the botnet teams could compete – I imagine names like “The Diebold Blackboxers”, “Karl Rove’s Angels”, “K Street Program”, “Swift Bot Veterans For Truth”, etc.
Is anyone coordinating this? It could be an event.
lemuel pitkin 02.24.06 at 6:15 pm
Foster is the co-editor of Monthly Review, so he has a better claim to his place than most of those on the list. He’s also a genuione marxist and (I think) an economist, the only one I recognize on that list. Isn’t anybody scared of value theory any more?
Also, as a sign of just how dumb they are, anybody else notice that the professor and school columns are flipped on the results page?
Yuri Guri 02.24.06 at 7:04 pm
I did my part and voted for Berube, although I agonized over whether I should throw my vote away on a third-party candidate like Chomsky. I hope Noam doesn’t take offense.
Still I was a bit surprised to see that Sami al Arian, who was recently put on trial for his affliation with Palestinian Islamic Jihad (and who allegedly was one of its leaders), only has 82 votes right now, which puts him below even Paul Ehrlich and Cornel West.
John Emerson 02.24.06 at 8:39 pm
This poll is being very heavily freeped by us. Berube isn’t the only one whose friends are voting for him. I’ve been keeping Victor Navasky on the charts singlehanded.
Nobody cares about Ron Karenga, who in my udnerstanding might be the only genuinely evile person there.
djw 02.24.06 at 9:34 pm
Foster’s a sociologist, or at least is currently housed in a Soc. dept. He seems like more of an economist though.
John Quiggin 02.25.06 at 12:40 am
There are nearly half a million votes so far! I wonder if Horowitz will pitch this as evidence of the popularity of his site.
Actually, it would be more in character to write some whiny piece about how evil leftists victimised him.
bad Jim 02.25.06 at 2:28 am
The scholars at Berkelyl, my alma mater, are not faring well in this ranking, and Mark LeVine, of my local UC campus, an occasional contributor to Juan Cole’s blog, is doing even worse. Not fair!
If they’d put a computer scientist on the list, it’s a fair bet that she would have gotten millions of votes by now.
Andrew Edwards 02.25.06 at 4:53 am
How is there not a single Harvard prof on here? I thought Harvard was a bastion of politically correct leftism?
DS 02.25.06 at 11:09 am
JQ: “There are nearly half a million votes so far! I wonder if Horowitz will pitch this as evidence of the popularity of his site. Actually, it would be more in character to write some whiny piece about how evil leftists victimised him.”
My guess, he will do both.
C 02.25.06 at 9:24 pm
DH’s constituency is his right-wing funders. He wants names those folks recognize and revile, which is why he names all those superannuated hippies that John keeps voting for. The list is largely filled out with people who have a public left (or Israel-critical) political presence. If you look at the sample here:
http://www2.truman.edu/~marc/Becker.pdf
it’s *entirely* about the guy’s politics.
jre 02.28.06 at 3:26 pm
Oh, no!
The Most Evil One, Penn State University, (who holds tenure at Michael Bérubé) has dropped to 1508 votes!
We are left to imagine the bales of virtual ballots taken out to the back alley behind FrontPage for incineration, and the rising plume of virtual black smoke revealing that, for the moment, we do not have an Evil One.
Backword Dave 02.28.06 at 8:15 pm
Indeed. I just voted and Foster has dropped to only five votes. Berube looks untouchable, although Juan Cole is now in third place.
David Brake 03.01.06 at 11:31 am
To cross with another thread here it’s nice to see he refers to all of the entrants as “professor”. But wouldn’t it be more respectful of bell hooks‘ wishes to de-capitalise her name?
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