With attitudes like this, what is Biddy to do?

Edit – please view this post at its new location

About a week ago this blog started a discussion on who bore the responsibility for the strained relations between the UW and the state legislature. I wrote then that some legislators had attitudes that were so anti-higher education that the only hope might be to replace them. Well, on an issue like this I hate to say “I told you so,” but I don’t know if I could imagine better evidence to show that no many what Biddy Marting does differently in her dealings with the state legislature, it probably won’t be enough to convince some members of the legislature to change their opinions.

Is the state Legislature’s most vocal critic of the University of Wisconsin gearing up to give the new UW-Madison chancellor a hard time?

An aide to Rep. Steve Nass, R-Whitewater, circulated a Web link Monday to a National Review Online story slamming Carolyn “Biddy” Martin, the provost at Cornell University, who is expected to be confirmed this week by the Board of Regents.

…

Mike Mikalsen, an aide to Nass, sent the article to Senate and Assembly Republicans.

And what exactly did this National Review article say? Here it is in its entirety:

Only Universities have This Kind of Head Executive [Travis Kavulla]

Can you be an obscure, self-indulged, theory-laden, post-modern scholar and manage to be an effective university president?

University of Wisconsin at Madison is hoping “yes.” It has picked Biddy Martin, Cornell provost and women’s studies professor, as its new chancellor. Her best-known work is a little something called Femininity Played Straight, which features chapters entitled “Sexualities without Gender and Other Queer Utopias” and “Teaching Feminism.” The one review that Amazon.com has picked up on the book is truncated to a single sentence, though it pretty much sums up the obtuseness of Ms Martin’s field: “Martin’s eccentric use of the body as drag… is wittily set against the queer privileging of transgender identification.”

She is also an editor of an anthology Do the Humanities Have to Be Useful? (pdf). In her essay, she positively raves about the state of progressive enlightenment she found as a college student:

Something in my language and speech at the end of a year in college seemed to have changed me and make me [sic] an infidel [to my family]. The anti-intellectualism with which I was inundated as a child, adolescent, and young adult was aimed at ensuring loyalty to the forms of racist bigotry and social conformity that have long helped to cement familial and community bonds in that part of Virginia.

Ladies and Gentlmen, Biddy Martin: A creature of the university, for the university, who thinks that universities are ‘useful’ in the sense that they can flush students of the bigotry found in most of American society. Just charming.

05/30 05:36 PM

I would think that having a chancellor who is an intellect-valuing scholar and isn’t a racist bigot is a good thing, but I guess there are those who disagree. There is nothing in that article that in any way reflects upon her ability to be the next chancellor of UW-Madison and it entirely discounts her experience as provost by making it seem as though her only accomplishments are her scholarly works. Just like a math professor’s area of specialty being complex analysis instead real analysis or an English professor’s preference for poetry over short stories has nothing to do with their ability to chair their respective departments, her chosen field of study has nothing to do with her ability to be chancellor. Circulating such a negatively biased article about her before she is even officially confirmed as the next chancellor can only have one motive: to ensure that she is unable to effectively work with members of the state legislature by biasing them against her before she is even the chancellor.

This adds some perspective to the statement that Nass released when Biddy was announced as the next chancellor.

“I certainly wish Dr. Martin the best as she tackles an extremely challenging job. I am cautiously optimistic that Dr. Martin, as an outside selection, will shake up the status-quo and return UW-Madison’s focus to a balance between undergraduate education and research.

The people of Wisconsin want a public university that educates based on a model of sifting and winnowing to obtain fact. They don’t want a university promoting the liberal indoctrination of young minds at the altar of political correctness.

If Dr. Martin leads with a commitment to the educational values of Wisconsin taxpayers and families she can count on my full support of her goals in the Wisconsin Assembly.”

I think the only thing he is “cautiously optimistic” about is that Biddy might decide to do what he wants instead of whats best for the UW. I guess by “a model of sifting and winnowing to obtain fact,” he means ensuring that people who disagree with him aren’t in positions of power but trying to undercut any chances they might have to advance their beliefs rather than trying to defeat them in the arena of ideas.