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About The Battalion. (College Station, Tex.) 1893-current | View Entire Issue (March 8, 1988)
Page 2/The Battalion/Tuesday, March 8, 1988 mtmmmmmmmKMOMmim&Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmrmmmmmmmmmmmmmm Open-mindedness in the liberal arts isn’t all that great How often in college have we been strongly ex horted by our pro fessors or peers to “keep an open mind?” Or how many of us in ar guing with some- one holding a strong opinion contrary to our own have resorted to calling him “closed-minded” to dis credit his position? The virtue of having an open mind seems self-evident. We are frequently warned of the dangers of blindly and dogmatically holding to an opinion. Our professors mockingly point to figures like Jerry Falwell as perfect examples of closed-mindedness. They teach us that no one can know for certain that he is right, that there is no truth by revelation or otherwise, and a confidence that your standards are valid for others beside yourself is the height of presumption. In its popular useage, “open-minded” means to hold no strong convictions, es pecially none that apply to everyone; to accord all viewpoints equal merit; and to tolerate equally all opinions and those holding them. “Closed-minded” is its opposite and is especially reserved for those who believe that there are abso lute rights and wrongs governing hu man relations. At college, this open-minded toler ance is exalted as the highest possible virtue. Closed-mindedness is so great an evil that to pin that label on a person is to effectively discredit his opinion, no matter what merit his argument may have. Yet to practice indiscriminate open- mindedness is impossible. Men by na ture must make value judgments. Those who preach open-mindedness would hide behind the guise of impartiality, but in reality are usually as opinionated as those they condemn. Liberal arts professors are particular offenders in this regard. Feeling a sa cred duty to liberate their students from the myths (the ideas and values) with which the students were raised, the pro fessors expect their students to be open- minded and tolerant of all new ideas — that is, the professors’ ideas. When a few students have the audacity to challenge their professors’ prejudices, the profes sors berate them for being closed- minded. To practice the open-mindedness preached today, one must believe that it is impossible to know reality. An accu rate knowledge of reality enables one to decide how best to deal with it, how best to live. The common notion in the lib eral arts that it is impossible to know anything for certain evinces the liberal arts’ rejection of reality. This attitude is not found in the phys ical sciences. Scientists believe that real ity is knowable. From the knowledge they acquire they are able to make deci sions on how best to respond to that reality. They discover such laws as the law of gravity. From that knowledge, they are able to deduce that no amount of wishing or believing to the contrary will enable someone to avoid the conse quences of jumping from a cliff. You do not find scientists and engineers exhort ing their students to be open-minded to the ideas that the sun revolves around the earth or that one can build a skys craper without a foundation. A very different view prevails in the liberal arts, where man and his relations with other men is the proper study. There it is held that no such laws govern human relations as govern nature. No reality about men can be known (if it even exists), and even if it were knowa ble, one cannot derive general laws gov erning human relations from that knowledge. “You can’t be certain that you are right!” they tell us. We must be open-minded and accept everyone else’s opinion (especially the professor’s per sonal opinion). We must then tolerate and accept other cultures because we have no basis for claiming that our own is better. We can live peacefully with communism be cause they are people “just like us.” (Our history professors are careful to point out all the “great atrocities” of American history and the “humane” ac complishments of the Soviet Union.) It is closed-minded to call the USSR the “evil empire,” for that is horribly intol erant and judgmental. It doesn’t matter that there is a wealth of empirical evi dence upon which to base such a judgment. We furthermore are told that we must tolerate and accept “alternative lifestyles” because no one can say one way of life is better than another. It doesn’t matter that these “alternative lifestyles” breed deadly diseases. More over, these “lifestyles” lead to broken homes. The suffering of children in these “homes” doesn’t matter as long as all acts between consenting adults are accepted. It doesn’t even matter that there is abundant empirical evidence that broken homes lead to higher social costs: crime, poverty, and wasted lives. No, we can’t know reality in the lib eral arts, and thus we cannot determine right and wrong behavior for humans. For some reason, an engineer can know for certain what size and strength a steel beam must be to support a floor, but the liberal arts cannot determine how men can best live. Sunk in this intellectual im potence, they can offer men no better rule to live by than open-mindedness. Whether it be a man’s personal stan dards or a society’s standards encapsu lated in its laws, men need standards by which to live. It is the proper domain of liberal arts to determine what the hu man realities of our existence are and how we as humans should best respond to them. All ideas and behaviors are not of equal merit. By preaching their indis criminate open-mindedness as the stan dard for living in society, the liberal arts fail to give us the tools for distinguish ing between the good and the bad in life, much to the detriment of mankind. Brian Frederick is a senior history and Russian major and a columnist for The Battalion. ' Brian Frederick The Battalion (USPS 045 360) Member of Texas Press Association Southwest Journalism Conference The Battalion Editorial Board Sue Krenek, Editor Daniel A. LaBry, Managing Editor Mark Nair, Opinion Page Editor Amy Couvillon, City Editor Robbyn L. Lister and Becky Weisenfels, News Editors Loyd Brumfield, Sports Editor Sam B. Myers, Photo Editor Editorial Policy The Battalion is a non-profit, self-supporting newspa per operated as a community service to Texas A&M and Bryan-College Station. Opinions expressed in The Battalion are those of the editorial board or the author, and do not necessarily rep resent the opinions of Texas A&M administrators, fac ulty or the Board of Regents. The Battalion also serves as a laboratory newspaper for students in reporting, editing and photography classes within the Department of Journalism. The Battalion is published Monday through Friday during Texas A&M regular semesters, except for holiday and examination periods. Mail subscriptions are $17.44 per semester, $34.62 per school year and $36.44 per full year. Advertising rates furnished on request. Our address: The Battalion, 230 Reed McDonald, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843-1 111. Second class postage paid at College Station, TX 77843. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to The Battal ion, 216 Reed McDonald, Texas A&M University, Col lege Station TX 77843-4 111. For th< lent and working < illy evah inally ha orm of ieen pro nd Facul Studen aid the ion wot hoose pr Five gt tudents ywide su The ct ommitte lavenpoi hy and ilack, a : ustrial-e ’ould all' luestions “The rr allege d Congratulations, Brian EDITOR: After almost two semesters of being puzzled by Brian Frederick’s articles, matters have finally become clear. I now realize that his column is a parody of anti-intellectua- lism, fascism, racism, misogyny and religious fanaticism. Thinking back, the tip-off came in his column on school newspapers. He said censorship of school newspa pers really wasn’t all that bad because the only press that matters in this contry is the privately owned press. Not one to be ham-handled, he left his readers to draw for them selves the logical consequence of the comment. The Battal ion, since it is not privately owned, doesn’t matter: there fore, Brian Frederick’s column, since it is contained in The Battalion, doesn’t matter. Great work! A mark of a great parodist is self-parody! To the resourceful Brian, I say: “Congratulations: for a while, you really had me going. Now, however, you have joined Joe Bob Briggs on my list of favorite columnists. Now I chuckle my way through each and every one of your columns. (By the way, the timing of the one about not be ing able to be moral unless you are religious was perfect. You were lampooning that TV preacher from Baton Rouge — right?)” Larry Hickman Department of Philosophy without taking any English course. After all, “Practict makes perfect.” Alfonso R. Ledezma, grad student The shanty quiz BALL imounts Jnd other into the ci :: 18 comp polluters, Dallas EDITOR: The shanty: a) makes us learn about apartheid. b) makes us angry with the Students Against Apartheid for defacing the Texas A&M University campus. I think the answer is b. Chris Samsury ’90 lie comp the busin< pste hac [hey ran] arge, hig Metals, |ls and What the shanty means tonsume :r were sewers th /aste wai the Trini late. “All of EDITOR: SOS for ELI EDITOR: I am very pleased that some authorities at A&M are in terested in the problems faced by international new grad uate students in the ELI, and I want to make some com ments. After a month or two during the semester, I realized that I was being forced to enroll in just a fairly normal and easy English course. It did not have the quality it was meant to have. I have had much better English courses in my own country. Let us consider that students admitted to A&M must have had scored at least 550 on the TOEFL test. This score means a good, working knowledge of the English language, so a course intended for people to im prove should be a really hard and comprehensive course. This is not what the ELI offers. Even some students who registered voluntarily in the ELI feel disappointed by the kind of education that they found. And GUESS how much it costs! Besides academics, I want to comment on the way in ternational students are catalogued before the ELI staff. They give us a booklet at the beginning of the semester telling us such things as: “Please always come to classes. Do not cheat. We know that in other countries it is a normal practice but not here. Respect your professors, that is the custom in America. Be punctual.” A funny thing for mas ters and PhD students to hear, don’t you agree? Several of my friends and I who have taken an ELI course feel that the course(s) did not help at all. We all share experiences about learning more about English and American culture through American friends in one week than in the whole semester at the ELI. We know that we have the obvious problems of a person who has just switched languages, and we are eager to overcome these problems but I feel that the place to do so in not the ELI, given the quality of the courses. And anyway, people with more than 550 on the TOEFL are perfectly capable of cop ing with the first months, which will be difficult anyway, In contrast to the fantasy of dancing toads atop the Harrington building last spring, this campus was pre sented for a few short hours with a shattering reality in the form of a humble shanty. This was a stark reminder of the suffering of 23 million blacks in South Africa under the cruel system of apartheid. Apartheid is a system based on racism in which blacks cannot vote, travel freely or express ideas freely. Americans turn a blind eye as the South Afri can government employs its army-like police force to si lence those who disagree with its policy of apartheid, com monly using such tactics as “banning,” imprisonment without trial, torture and murder. The South African gov ernment last year imposed a total media blackout and has now banned all political activity by blacks. Families are of ten driven from their homes and relocated in “home lands,” or shantytowns without electicity or plumbing Then, as white suburbs develop closer to the homelands, the government may send policemen who bulldoze the shanties without warning, destroying everything, in order to force blacks to move out of the encroaching whites view. Out of sight, out of mind. I was saddened when I saw that Texas A&M “bulldo zed” its shanty. I urge the Botha-Busters to pursue estab lishing a permanent shanty sanctioned as a university art and awareness exhibit. Maybe the daily sight of this cruel reality will penetrate the insular world of A&M and en courage students to demand the university to divest front companies that support the economy of apartheid. The current United States policy of “constructive engagement that supports companies that invest in apartheid has been condemned as morally wrong by every major South Afri can black leader, including Nobel prizewinner Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Student support for divestment in many of the nation's top academic institutions in many of the nation’s top aca demic institutions, including Harvard, Yale, Columbia and Berkeley, has led to their partial or total divestment. Texas A&M’s burning desire to become a “world class” universit) might be achieved if we lead the campaign of divestmen! from South Africa in Texas colleges. The Botha-Busters shanty is an essential first step of awareness that will hope fully lead to vigorous student support of human rights divestment in South Africa. Melanie Shouse ’90 Letters to the editor should not exceed 300 words in length. The editorial staff tt serves the right to edit letters for style arul length, but will make every effort ® maintain the author’s intent. Each letter must be signed and must include tiu ck sification, address and telephone number of the writer. BLOOM COUNTY by Berke Breathe* ACTWUy, MflPAM, im quite -me PROORESdtVe ON WOMEN'S ISSUES. fOU'RE LOOKING FOK STEVE'S CLOSET. COULP YOU TELL US1HE my? \ SURE. 60 WEST - PAST THE FURNACE... TURN RIGHT, THEN A LEFT...ANOTHER LEFT... PAST THE SNORKCEmCKER, THEN RIGHT To EAST. 0OT J ) fTr y gp BOT, PONT OALS ^ HAVE me WORST TIME wrm DIRECTIONS ? \ L t