No one who has ever dealt with a journal editor or reviewers will be surprised by any of this. At least they didn’t ask Schill to cite their own work, to pump up their Academic Analytics metrics.
Eugene Weekly reporter Corrine Boyer has obtained the public records on the back and forth between President Michael Schill and the NYT editors, over the op-ed he wrote after whatever happened at his October 17 State of the University that sort of didn’t happen. Story and links here.
President Schill seems to have written it all without help from UO’s army of PR flacks. This is unusual. Dave Frohnmayer had a speech-writer on staff. Mike Gottfredson paid a rumored $30K to a consultant for advice on how to talk to his own faculty at Senate meetings. And Bob Berdahl would have been well advised to have paid someone to edit his comments before he posted them on this blog. (Hi Bob!)
The EW story has a fair amount on the NYT editors’ efforts to influence Schill’s interpretation of events. It was Ms Shutler who pushed Schill to compare our students to fascists:
Full disclosure: I’ve never had an editor write crap like that to me, but if one did I’d probably submit a revision along the requested lines too. A pub’s a pub.
Meanwhile, Ms Shutler’s copy editor is either extremely earnest, or has a wicked sense of humor and is on to her fascist obsession. I’m going to go with the latter:
All too often these days, no one cares to understand the historical roots or movements that lead to various terms used to now make a buzz-word comparison.
Perhaps the best treatment of the origin of fascism (largely as an economic system) and its primary architect (Mussolini – yes that’s right) can be found here:
http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/Fascism.html
Under that treatment, The Cossacks were not fascists but rather an ethnicity that decided to self-govern themselves – so yes, extreme “nationalists” but they operation was not fascist by
the manifestation of fascism discussed above.
I am sure other academics will now say that dogs continue to be full of crap and should stick to only what they know. Problem, as remarked on before, dogs don’t know shit … so there is nothing to stick to
I love how sloppy Ms. Shutler’s writing is. It has always been fascinating to me that you can make your way into an organization that allegedly values critical thinking and communication, and even to the upper echelons of that organization, based on qualifications other than clear critical thinking and communication.