What should a student do when he thinks his professors intellectually inferior?

Diana,

I'm a 40 year old graduate student in a Master of Public Administration program (pretty close to finishing, thankfully). I entered into this program, to be honest, because I wanted to "know my enemy." I don't know that I'd call myself an Objectivist - though I've read quite a lot of Rand's work, but I'm certainly see the evidence for many of the theories that she espoused. I, ideally-speaking, am a Libertarian, a minarchist, socially liberal, and somewhat anti-interventionist. I'm sort of a T.E.A. Partier. I am not some neo-conservative Republican, despite being accused of that by both my fellow students and our program director, many times. I am well read in the subjects that should inform Public Administration work - especially economics. What I have found in this program is that my classmates are not as well-informed as me. Many of them, for instance, have Criminial Justice degrees, but seem to know nothing about many of the topics of that field; death penalty statistics, for instance. What I have found in this program is that most of my fellow students, the program director, even the Public Administration discipline/profession itself, are oriented to acting as shills for leftist/Democrat policies, to the the total exclusion of all others. But the main problem I'm having is with the Program Director.

Our program director is a D.P.A. graduate of USC. He claims to have over 40 years of experience in the field, and refuses to call himself a Public Administrator, but rather a "Public Administrationist." He tells us in nearly every class and semester that the DPA is the same as a Ph.D. (which anyone who knows anything about academia know is not true). And spends almost all of each semester - no matter the particular class - on the various social services that governments provide, to the exclusion of regulatory activities that it undertakes, despite the fact that there are over 15 regulatory agencies for every 1 social service agency. In other words, he doesn't know anything about government regulation, and plays on the ignorance of my classmates about the governments activities in conducting this program. He even has told me that since none of my fellow students have the experience with regulation that I do, and they only have knowledge of social services, he has to focus on the government-social services complex. In other words, pushing back the frontiers of ignorance is not on the menu in this program.

Most lately, he even barred me from posting on a class discussion board because he said that my explanations of rather basic economic theories and laws were "condescending" to my classmates. Now as far as I know, none of them complained about being condescended to. And none of them "shut down" in their posting behavior, as he contends. I think he simply doesn't know what I know about economics (and that's just one area), and it makes him uncomfortable.

The evidence that what the Program Director charges is false is overwhelming. Not only did my classmates NOT "shut down," two of them, who were new in the program started to make citations in their discussion board posts (like I do), and the number of posts by all my classmates dropped by 90% (no shit, really, 90%) after I was no longer allowed to make posts. In other words, I believe that I was acting as a catalyst for a general rise in the level of discourse. In addition, he intimated that he had talked to university administration officials about the situation and basically threatened me with throwing me out of the program. As you can imagine, I have pretty angry about the Program Director's behavior. In other words, I think I am one of the people who Rand was addressing in "For the New Intellectual."

What do you think? Is that sort of what you were getting at in the question?

Cheers!