Comprehension Unnecessary

Sometimes I can make the drive to campus without hearing an NPR story that makes my blood boil. Today, I had no such luck; the story running when I got into the car did the trick. From the Dominican Today:

Miami.– Gov. Jeb Bush said he will likely sign a bill that would make Florida one of the most restrictive states in the nation for college professors and students interested in traveling abroad. The bill bans travel to five countries identified as "terrorist states," including Cuba... Cuba, Syria, Iran, North Korea and the Sudan would all be off-limits for college or university-sponsored research trips if Bush signs the bill passed by lawmakers earlier this month.

...

Supporters of the bill said the issue is terrorism. They don't think taxpayers' money should be used to pay for research trips to countries that sanction terrorist activities. The bill also restricts college and universities from using privately-raised funds for trips to the five countries dubbed terror states. Bush thinks that money could be better spent.

For what it's worth, the American Association of University Professors is against the bill, as is the Palm Beach Post, which opines correctly, "Outside of U.S. intelligence agencies, no institutions should be more expert on Cuba than Florida colleges and universities... It's bad enough that the federal government continues to restrict travel to Cuba by people who want to visit their relatives. It would add to the problem if scholars and researchers couldn't visit. How prepared would Florida be if there is a change in government and an opening to the state and nation?"

For his part, the bill's sponsor, Florida Rep. David Rivera (R-Miami), says, no doubt with spittle flying everywhere, "To others, particularly some in the leftist higher education establishment, this bill is about disallowing what they want to do... I sincerely believe that these leftists of higher education don't understand the lack of a moral equivalent between America and her enemies."

Huh? "The lack of a moral equivalent"? This chowderhead probably wouldn't recognize academic research if my dissertation - or a study of the Spanish conquest of Cuba, for that matter - fell on his head. On NPR, the story included a line about the worry that academics studying in these countries might fall under the influence of the country's dictators. Again, a ridiculously mispaced concern almost on a par with the worry that physicists will suddenly start believing in astrology if they study the stars too closely. Even if some Florida undergrads went, starry-eyed, to Havana and came back to laud, say, the provision of decent health care to all Cubans, it's unlikely the average historian working in Syria would suddenly turn into a cheerleader for a murderer like Assad. And Sudan? Is Rivera even dimly aware of the near-universal repugnance in American academe over the situation in Darfur? Wait, I think I just answered my own question.

All in all, Rivera's bill is emblematic of everything wrong with intellectual life in Bush's America: the turning inward, the derision toward difference, the incuriosity, the preference of hate to understanding.