Let me rant about Katherine Kersten for a minute
OK, it's easy to dislike someone who is both outspoken and also opposes many of your core values. For me, that group includes Katherine Kersten, columnist for the Star Tribune. Kersten may very well be a gracious and kind person, but there's something in almost every column of hers that makes my stomach turn. (Question: so why does Jerry still read her? Maybe I like that feeling...) Here's today's quote, from a column about the U of M's refusal to play North Dakota State due to their Native American nickname ("the Fighting Sioux"). She ridicules a professor from the U's sociology department and says the following:
Hartmann is the author of that upcoming spellbinder, "Race, Class and Gender: An Emerging Perspective." You may also soon catch his "Putting Whiteness Theory to the Test: An Empirical Analysis of Core Propositions."
I'm not sure exactly what she's getting at here. That his work is boring? Earth to Kersten: this is a research university. You could pick almost any professor here, conservative or liberal, look at their CV, and find such titles. Is it that he deals with race and is himself probably quite liberal? That seems the more likely candidate to me--I think "whiteness theory" is an obviously intentional choice, and many of us fair-complected ones don't like to consider ourselves as having a culture at all, let alone worth studying. And there's the obvious appeal to the anti-intellectualism common in American life, which I would assume she herself would disapprove of.
In fact, one of Kersten's common rants is on the state of our educational system, that it's being "dumbed down." But her rhetoric is often highly calculate to provoke an emotional, not a intellectual, response, and passages like the one above don't lead me to take her seriously as a thoughtful, rigorous writer. What's education for if not a empirical consideration of the world? She's no Anne Coulter (thanksfully!) but she's definitely not for me.