The devil went down to Georgia

I’m tempted to start a new category of postings: “You have got to be kidding.” But even though appropriate, we’ll make do with cross-listing this in Political Economy and Education which also works. From today’s Inside Higher Ed:

“In the university, the higher up the hierarchical structure, the more one has decision-making power and the further one is from the actual ‘work’ (discovering and disseminating knowledge).”

Timothy J. L. Chandler, the co-author of a 1998 journal article with that quote about university hierarchies, is going to stay a step closer to actual work. On Thursday, he announced that he is turning down the position of provost at Kennesaw State University — in part because of furor set off in the local area over the article, which applies class analysis and several times cites Marx.

You know, there was a time when “political economy” was code for Marxism, because you couldn’t teach Marx without being run out of town on a rail. I thought we had gotten past that (and, of course, there was the rediscovery of neo-classical political economy as a field.)

A search consultant makes what I think is the right point:

But this search consultant said that Kennesaw State may be the real loser. “Would a really good candidate who values intelligent intellectual discourse want to go there right now?” she said. “They just cut their pool of good people dramatically.”