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interest in philosophy 5 despite '90s cynicism proposed to restructure the university to follow a business format known as Total Quality Man agement, or TQM. Professor Moor contributed to the forum, and was the only speaker to repre sent a traditional liberal arts discipline. "In business, the customer has the last word," Moor said. "The customers are expected to know what they want, and are entitled to de mand what they pay for. But in education, the people who are getting the service are just the people who don't know." Moor said that William Buckley's book, "God and Man at Yale" gives an example of the marketplace idea of the university. "He thought that the people who pay the bills ought to dictate what the instructors teach, and so he recommended firing a majority of Yale's faculty members in quite a few depart ments: mostly the social sciences departments, and philosophy, and religion, too, because the people in the religion department weren't suffi ciently theistic." Buckley's thesis goes back to the 50s, but in times of economic hardship for universities, such as PSU's Measure 5 budget crisis, the hard est hit departments always seem to be the social sciences and philosophy. Changes in political thought will also necessarily cause discussion on how these changes should impact the social sci ence disciplines and the way in which those subjects are taught, when many other depart ments, like math and the sciences, would be completely unaffected. Moor said that when he first taught at PSU al most 30 years ago, some politically radical indi viduals wanted to change the university from within. "I suppose that the people who are ac cused now of wanting to impose political cor rectness have a viewpoint that's in some ways like that of the left-radicals of the 60s," Moor says. "People (in the 60s) were expressly fight ing against the war and against racism, and they saw those two evils as connected with a class of people, the ruling class.. . those who have mon ey, essentially, and other sources of power." Moor said that the radical 60s activism against the ruling class may seem similar to the radical 90s activism that is often seen as being against white male values, "it may be similar but it isn't apparent to a lot of us that it's very simi lar, because a lot of us who were involved in that (60s activism) aren't involved in this (90s activism)." Moor says that academically, many of the people who were protesting the war are conservatives. "We could have been more or less at home in Plato's Academy or the European universities of 500 years ago." —Suzanne Levinson Suzanne Levinson Suzanne Levinson Top: Preparing for finals week in the Philosophy Department. Above: Logic can he fun. 97
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