Andrew: it's not that I can't be convinced, or anything. But: I read the piece you linked to and got mad, not because of anything to do with the military, but because it burns me to see any Professor treating his or her students with such blatant disrespect. So I googled her, and I don't think (a) that she's representative of much of anything, and (b) that it's at all likely that her hostility towards the military is somehow increasing. She seems to have been that way all along. So I don't think she can fairly be cited as evidence that anything is on the rise.

She seems to have a thing about George Soros, btw. (As in: she really really really doesn't like him.) And she gives her residence as "the Empire entity referred to as the USA."

Best I can tell, she's a straight-up unreconstructed Marxist, not the 'if you disregard the deformation of Marx's thought introduced by Lenin, the guy had some very interesting ideas that might be worth thinking about, and the Critique of the Gotha Program sure is suggestive' kind, but the 'I belong to a splinter of a splinter group that incarnates the forward trend of history even though no one but me and my two fellow members knows it exists, and that devotes its time to exposing the ideological deviations of other splinter groups that no one else knows exist either, and trying to convince the workers who have never heard of us, and who we scarcely ever actually encounter, that through our painstaking class analysis, we have figured out what they ought to do and thus should be their vanguard' kind.

(Note: all of the preceding para. was made up to give you the flavor. I just didn't feel like linking to her pages, for sort of the same reasons I don't normally link to LGF.)

I agree that the attitude she seems to have towards her students is scary, and "inappropriate" (what a nice umbrella word, covering such a variety of sins!).

That said, do you find anything at all disconcerting about her depiction of her students' behavior/attitude in the first paragraph of her post? That's ASSUMING (arguendo) that she's reporting fairly, which you may find to be a rather heroic assumption.

My hope would be that if you do have children, they don't carry on like that in class. (I certainly hope that mine didn't, but suspect they wouldn't tell me if they had.)

This minor quibble, however, should not detract from my fundamental agreement with you and Hilzoy, that Dr. Terpstra is way out of line, and as the person in classroom authority, all the more responsible for her behavior.

Hilary,

I probably should have written more, but it was late and I was tired. (Now it's early and I'm tired. A much better time to write more. ;)

I do not think she is representative of the left as a whole. What I think is that in a nation of 300 million people there are a nontrivial number of people who dislike the military, and that the war has now gone on long enough that we will see more and more of them become comfortable enough to surface. I suspect the ratio of military-haters is little changed from Vietnam, but they can be pretty loud if they want to be.

Dr. Ngo,

If she is reporting fairly, then I'd argue the students said some pretty unpleasant things. The way she describes it makes me doubt she is recounting the story accurately, but if she is, the students may well have been schmucks. Unfortunately, the military does include its share of knuckleheads, much as I would like it to be otherwise.

Andrew: fair enough.

Dr. ngo: her general take on things made me suspect her reporting. Less that she made up the entire exchange than that when she said things like "these students proudly proclaimed that they terrorized and killed defenseless Iraqis. They intimated that their Arab victims are nothing more to them than collateral damage, incidental to their receipt of some money and an education", what was 'intimated' might not exist outside her head, and terms like 'terrorized' and 'defenseless Iraqis' might not, um, adequately capture the Marines' intent. (I mean: I could imagine them having said: there were some people approaching; we signaled them to stop; they didn't; we killed them; we were following the rules of engagement', and her saying what she did. I also trust neither her claims about what regret, if any, they felt, nor her ability to elicit any basis for describing their level of regret accurately.)

That said, if she was reporting this accurately, then we have bad academics and bad Marines. Personally, I hope it's just the former, since (given what I read) I can't realistically hope for no bad anyone.

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