Professors with placards v Real men with firearms ?
Whilst your humble correspondent is happy to opine on a wide range of topics I don’t for a moment purport to be an expert on Texas, having visited the State only once. However from my admittedly very limited knowledge of that part of the world, I would say that former Congressman Charlie Wilson is held in reasonably high esteem by his former constituents.
Quickly scanning the news, before getting on my afternoon flight, it would seem that not everyone holds Mr Wilson in such high regard
Good time Charlie, the hard-drinking, skirt-chasing Texan politician played by Tom Hanks in the film Charlie Wilson’s War, is facing a new battle.
Plans to endow a Charlie Wilson chair in Pakistan studies at the University of Texas have riled the college’s liberal academics, who feel he is too “gung-ho” to be a role model for students.
They say Wilson’s support for Afghans fighting Soviet occupiers during the 1980s, when he covertly funnelled American government aid to the mujaheddin, led to the rise of the Taliban and its allies in al-Qaeda. “ It is outrageous,” said Dana Cloud, professor of communications at the university. “I thought it was a joke.”
Cloud, who is spearheading a global online petition against the chair, said that if the university did not abandon the plan, she would organise demonstrations by professors with placards. “A Charlie Wilson chair brings our university into ridicule,” she said. “I do not know one serious scholar who would take such a post.”
So a load of beardy liberal ‘academics’ are going to hold a protest march - & not just a protest march, one that is going to involve placards to boot. Gulp!
Now this is one protest that I so hope goes ahead & with a little luck, friends in Texas (who are not noted for being kindly disposed to such individuals as liberal academics) might even take if upon themselves to provide us with a first hand account of the event …once the happy crackle of gunfire has died anyway & the ‘bag’ is being counted.