Liberty Is Fun

The word liberty in the mouth of Mr. Webster sounds like the word love in the mouth of a courtezan. —Ralph Waldo Emerson on Daniel Webster

Perhaps Mr. Emerson wouldn't mind if we substituted "George Mason University" or "Ms. Amy Phillips" for "Mr. Webster." In any case, the brochure arrived, looking like a piece of junk mail. The word "liberty" caught my eye, not quite looking like the word "liberty" in the usual sense of Liberty Mutual Insurance or Liberty International Underwriters (did they have one for Undertakers too?) or Liberty Corporation (yes, it really exists) or even Liberty University, run by Baptist fundamentalists. Nope. This sort of looked bona fide.

Institute for Humane Studies (George Mason University) Summer Seminars on Liberty were free, and one of them would be held not too far away from me in Boston at Simmons College. Still, did I want to drive all the way into the city for a day-long seminar without pay? Well, I could hand out American Dissident flyers. It would, after all, be interesting to see if "liberty" students and professors would prove as indifferent to them as the poets had been. Hell, I had a large pile of them.

Thus, I filled out the application and included a required essay on “liberty.” I had tons of them. Which one had I chosen? Well, always prepared and eager to test the waters of... liberty, I'd asked myself what the Institute would likely not appreciate: “Warning: The Citizen General Has Deemed the Current Academic Culture May Be Harmful to the Spirit of Democracy” (see 10/16/08 blog). Hopefully, it would at least irritate a black-robed sycophant or two.

The Institute boasted: “Advancing a freer society by supporting students, recent graduates, and academics interested in the ideas of liberty.” Yeah, tell me about it, baby. When academics held seminars on liberty, likely what they had in mind was the liberty-for-us-but-not-for-you kind. It was akin to politicians holding seminars on truth or corporate CEOs on ethics.

A month later, I received an unoriginal automaton form-rejection letter from the director of the Summer Seminars, Amy Phillips: "I'm sorry to inform you that after careful review of this year's applications, the Institute for Humane Studies Seminar Review Committee is unable to offer you one of the limited places available at our 2009 Summer Seminars. We received a record number of applications this year, and competition was extremely tight."

There I was, editor of The American Dissident, rejected for a free seminar on "liberty"! In other words, I certainly had the credentials. I examined the Institute's website and learned that “Amy enjoys musical theater, crime novels, and grammar.” Had I made a grammatical error or two on my essay? “Amy holds a bachelor's degree in Philosophy from New York University, where she was president of the Parliamentary Debaters' Union and a nationally ranked debater." So, she wasn’t even a professor. But she was still entrenched in the academic milieu, which, interestingly, had redefined “liberty” to essentially exclude free speech, vigorous debate, and criticism, especially when close to home. Was my essay thus too serious and too close for their comfort and particular brand of “liberty”? Was The American Dissident website, which I’d emphasized on my application, equally too close for their “liberty”? Of course, I’d never know because the director (i.e., Amy) would never respond to either question. Perhaps the non response was an affirmation?

The Institute’s website also indicated that each year “Amy works to make those seminars challenging and fun…” So, “liberty” now had to be made into a “fun” activity. Imagine our revolutionary patriots sitting in on one of Amy’s “fun” seminars on “liberty”! Well, I did obtain a certain degree of intellectual satisfaction questioning and challenging those who stood for anything but “liberty,” while openly claiming how much they loved it. But was it “fun”? Not really! It was often sad, depressing, and highly disappointing to witness the state of non-liberty in academe and elsewhere in America. In any case, I wrote the director an email, mirroring her “sorry” with “I'm sorry to inform you that I’m not at all surprised you’d rejected my application. After all, you certainly wouldn't want an IMPOLITE professor like me at your seminars, one apt to speak out against the herd, even the "liberty" herd.Yet “liberty” demanded such courage, as opposed to bourgeois civility, taste, and aesthetics. Oddly or perhaps not, given Orwell, George Mason University, home of the Institute, was designated by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education as one of the worst institutions of higher learning in the entire country with regards... LIBERTY. "George Mason University: Unconstitutional Policies and Suppression of Dissent" was the title of one of FIRE's web pages devoted to the subject (see www.thefire.org/index.php/case/690.html).

How could one possibly expect GMU professors and administrators to hold seminars on “liberty,” while in practice either propagating suppression of dissent or keeping their mouths shut regarding it?

Had the director even manifested the curiosity to examine the website I’d brought to her attention? After all, “liberty” demanded a certain degree of active citizen CURIOSITY. If she had actually examined it, had it disgusted her in its lack of deference to PC ideology, the university, and tenured professors and administrators at the trough? Likely, unlike most professors and students chosen to attend the summer “liberty” seminars, I actually believed in “liberty” sufficiently to fight openly for it and to manifest the courage and willingness to even RISK CAREER for it.

If the Institute were at all serious about discussing “liberty,” it would first discuss GMU’s terrible record with liberty’s regard, then seek out and invite rare professors like me who had fought for “liberty” in the university against probably the very likes of the director herself, other CEOs of the Institute, and PC Deans of the university spouting their love of “liberty.” My fear was that the director would be using the seminars to further indoctrinate and otherwise corrupt student ability to think critically and individually.

In my email, I mentioned those things and also asked whether or not selected candidates for the seminars possessed websites like mine and published journals like The American Dissident, devoted to literature, democracy, and dissidence; in other words, to liberty. I also asked whether or not the director had ever RISKED her career for “liberty,” or was she, as I fully suspected, just another contented careerist lodging at a highly authoritarian institution of purported higher learning run on the corporate model of rigid hierarchy, products to sell, clients to satisfy, and growth, growth, and ever more growth? Liberty, after all, demanded RISK, as opposed to arbitrarily defined and dictated CIVILITY. What had the director ever RISKED?

Finally, a clear choice remained for the director, host of "liberty" seminars, between ignoring my criticism and questions or engaging in vigorous debate, cornerstone of democracy and… liberty. Like the director of Tufts University Experimental College, she opted for the former, as opposed to the latter. I’d also suggested she have her summer conference candidates examine The American Dissident website in the name of... liberty. But, as mentioned, she’d made her choice… and it was sure as hell not for LIBERTY.