Winston's Diary

I am informed of a new academic blog, written by a graduate student of English at the University of Oregon who is brave enough to actually identify herself to the world (unlike yours truly, who's still hoping to find himself in that lucky 40%).

Rose Nuñez's blog The Naive Humanist, promises to be well worth a few minutes of your daily blog reading time. She's in the process of incorporating a comments function into the blog, and is hoping that there will be some real discussion as her blog grows.

In her initial posting, she describes her purpose:

What I want to do instead is go for rambling walks across the fields that drew me to graduate school in the first place, and invite a few talkative folks to come along and keep the conversation alive. As outspoken as I've become over the years, I still find that I'm reluctant to express my evolving conservative viewpoint in papers and in seminars. In part that's because my viewpoint is evolving, and sometimes I'm walking on ground that shifts even as I speak and discover what I actually think. But I'm also reluctant to express my views in class because I've watched, again and again, as grown, educated, supposedly tolerant and pluralistic men and women shut down the conversation when someone asks tough questions about the prevailing ideology.

That sounds a pretty accurate description of graduate school to me, and a pretty accurate description of the difficulties inherent in carrying on a "conversation" with the ideologues that make up far too large a portion of the "intelligensia".

Check it out. Her take on the Fruits of the Sexual Revolution is also worth a read.