I wish I'd thought of this...
...when I was a student! Don't feel like working? Go on strike!
They'd better hope Yale doesn't take a page from Ronald Reagan and go PATCO on them.
Posted by Evan Coyne Maloney
20 Apr 2005 @ 11:29pm
Bucknell's Biased "Women's Resource Center"
At National Review Online, Allison Kasic, a current Bucknell student, discusses the political agenda of the Women's Resource Center at Bucknell:
Purportedly devoted to women's equality, the WRC is really just an example of wasted tuition dollars. It's a shaky proposition in the first place to dedicate an entire administrative office to only one gender. But the WRC has shown it can't even do that. Given its appalling record of partisanship over my four years here, it might be more appropriately called the Radical Feminist Resource Center. This office shamelessly uses its paid staff, its many programs, and Bucknell students' money to undertake such noble enterprises as encouraging the sale of vagina-shaped lollipops. It divides the women on campus by embracing a few man-hating radicals while dismissing any woman who rejects its extremist ideology.
Evan Coyne Maloney, the director of Brainwashing 101, recently wrote about Bucknell's Women's Resource Center in "The Campus Political Establishment."
Posted by webmaster
19 Apr 2005 @ 10:17am
Columbia's ROTC problem
In the New York Post, former New York City Councilman Charles Millard takes Columbia University to task for its ban on ROTC:
You might think that, at a university where virtually every student and faculty member was directly affected by 9/11, there'd be respect and gratitude for ROTC. Reserve Officer Training Corps students, after all, seek to serve and protect their country and their community. Instead, President Lee Bollinger (who's also under fire over alleged anti-Semitism in his Mideast Studies Department) has said he allows ROTC recruiters at the Law School only "with regret," and ROTC itself is banned on the Columbia campus.
[...]
Columbia banned ROTC in 1969, a few months after the height of the famous campus demonstrations against the Vietnam war and all things military. Yet that knee-jerk anti-military attitude doesn't apply to today's Columbia students: Two years ago, a student referendum to bring ROTC back to campus passed with 65 percent of the vote.
The faculty is another matter. It took a year after the referendum before the faculty-dominated University Senate would even form a task force to study the isssue. After a year of town halls, email exchanges and committee meetings, the committee is deadlocked, 5 to 5, over whether to change the existing policy. The full Senate is set to decide on May 6.
ROTC opponents claim that they're not anti-military -- that their opposition is solely related to the military's "Don't ask, don't tell" policy. That's supposedly the one issue that has the committee deadlocked, because the policy doesn't match with Columbia's own non-discrimination policy.
One can only wonder: If (God forbid) terrorists launched an attack at Columbia, would these critics block the gates of 116th and Broadway to prevent the military from entering the campus because "Don't ask, don't tell" violates Columbia's anti-discrimination policy?
Keep in mind that ROTC students have their tuition partially paid by Uncle Sam; checks are sent directly to Columbia from the "Don't ask, don't tell" U.S. Army. Columbia has yet to send any of those checks back.
It seems the university's principles don't extend to not taking the money from the government. Keep in mind that Columbia's bias policy quite haphazardly enforced; Columbia professors can make statements like the following, and be elevated to chair entire departments:
Half a century of systematic maiming and murdering of another people has left... its deep marks on the faces of the Israeli Jews, the way they talk, walk, the way they greet each other... There is a vulgarity of character that is bone-deep and structural to the skeletal vertebrae of its culture.
Hamid Debashi
Chairman, Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures (MEALAC) Department
September 23, 2004
Al-Ahram, an Egyptian newspaper
Posted by Evan Coyne Maloney
18 Apr 2005 @ 10:21am
Institutionalized bias
Brainwashing 101 director Evan Coyne Maloney has a new column describing how some schools, like his alma mater Bucknell University, have created permanent political institutions on campus that routinely recruit students to take specific positions on controversial political issues:
Unfortunately, the [Women's Resouce Center] isn't the only political office into which Bucknell pours money. The university also has an Office of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Awareness. In February, the LBGT office used Valentine's Day to promote "National Freedom to Marry Week." The office handed out t-shirts and buttons and sent an e-mail to all students asking them "to show their support in a very visible way [...] regarding marriage rights."
In other words, the university was asking students to take a specific political stance in support of gay marriage. Clearly, the university stepped over the line of appropriate action; this wasn't a case of one professor or administrator speaking his or her opinion at a rally, this was an official arm of the university--staffed by paid university employees--asking students to support gay marriage "in a very visible way."
Now, you don't have to oppose gay marriage to oppose what Bucknell is doing here. I personally believe that gay couples should be afforded the same legal rights as straight couples, but the question must be asked: should the university be spending precious resources to further a controversial political agenda opposed by many students, parents and alumni? And since when did such politicking become part of the university's mission? Alumni might consider these questions next time the phone rings with an eager Bucknell undergrad seeking contributions.
When asked about the appropriateness of politicking by university offices, Charlie Pollock, Bucknell's Vice President of Student Affairs, responded that "university funds sometimes help expose students to prominent holders of opposing viewpoints" by inviting speakers to campus. Still, while it is nice that the university "sometimes" gives a platform to other viewpoints, the occasional speaker is still a far cry from having a staffed office--essentially a permanent fixture on campus--routinely putting out political messages that bear the official stamp of the university.
Posted by webmaster
13 Apr 2005 @ 12:58pm
Columbia's whitewash
Campus Report has more information on the recent Columbia report in which the university absolved itself of charges of classroom bias in their Middle East Languages and Cultures program:
"Of the five members of the committee, two were members of MEALAC [Columbia's controversial Department of Middle East Languages and Culture] and a third was the dissertation advisor of an accused professor," CU alumnus Ron Lewenberg writes in an article on FrontPage.com. "A fourth, Mark Mazower has blamed Israel for post-war anti-Semitism and fathered the theory that a cabal of Zionists and neocons [neoconservatives] controls the U. S."
In other words, 80% of the people Columbia selected to investigate leftist and anti-Israeli bias in MEALAC either had ties with MEALAC or had demonstrated similar bias themselves in the past.
Posted by webmaster
13 Apr 2005 @ 8:57am
Documented bias in academia
Several recent studies over the past few years have documented the profound slant among the professorship in higher education. In the Boston Globe, Cathy Young discusses some of these (emphasis ours):
YET ANOTHER study has come out documenting what most conservatives consider to be blindingly obvious: the leftward tilt of the American professoriate. The latest report, by political scientist Stanley Rothman of Smith College, communications professor S. Robert Lichter of George Mason University, and Canadian polling expert Neil Nevitte, published in the online journal Forum, paints a stark picture of a politically skewed academy. Nearly three quarters of the professors in a 1999 survey of college faculty identified themselves as left/liberal, only 15 percent as right/conservative; 50 percent were Democrats and 11 percent Republicans.
[...]
Some academic liberals earnestly explain that conservatives are scarce in the universities because -- well, they're just not good enough. George P. Lakoff, professor of linguistics at the University of California-Berkeley, has told The New York Times that liberals go into the academy because, ''unlike conservatives, they believe in working for the public good and social justice, as well as knowledge and art for their own sake." Another variation on this theme is that liberals are better suited to academic life because, unlike those closed-minded, intolerant conservatives, they are open-minded and willing to allow the free expression of ideas they find disagreeable.
Sure. Unless, of course, the upsetting idea is that racial preferences in college admissions are a bad policy (Ward Connerly, the African-American businessman who espouses this heresy, has been repeatedly shouted down when appearing on college campuses). Or that the shortage of women among top scientists may be partly due to innate differences between the sexes (just ask Harvard President Lawrence Summers about liberal tolerance on this issue).
[...]
[T]here is on many campuses a climate in which a "normal" person is presumed to be liberal. A young woman who is a graduate student at a Midwestern university and a liberal Democrat told me in a recent e-mail exchange that after the 2004 election, the unanimous opinion among the professors was that Americans who voted for Bush were "either too stupid to know they 'should' vote for Kerry, or a bunch of right-wing bigots." She was open-minded enough to read some pro-Bush Internet sites and find a lot of Bush voters who bore no resemblance to this caricature. But she is convinced that if she were to share her observations with anyone in her department, the consequence would be social and professional ostracism.
Some conservatives want a political solution: legislation that would not only protect the rights of dissenting students but penalize professors who use the classroom to push a political agenda. Many professors are appalled, understandably, by the idea of legislative intervention in the classroom. The best way to avoid such intervention is for the academy to make a good-faith effort to recognize and correct its intellectual diversity problem.
Posted by webmaster
12 Apr 2005 @ 10:56pm
Academia Making Itself Irrelevant?
In the Washington Post, Steven Roy Goodman, a consultant who advises high school students and their parents on college admissions, has noticed an alarming trend in the perception of academia among the clients he serves. To an increasing number of people, higher education is seen more frivolous and less relevant to society at large. This, he argues, is the result of a hyper-political atmosphere on college campuses:
Colleges have long been hotbeds of political agitation, of course. But where it was once students who did the acting out, as they spread their intellectual and philosophical wings, now the professors and administrators are more likely to be playing politics -- and more and more Americans with college-age kids are getting fed up with it. In 18 years of in-the-trenches experience counseling kids on their college choices, I've never seen the unhappiness as widespread as it is today. If colleges don't tone down the politics, and figure out how to control ballooning costs, they run the risk of turning off enough American consumers that many campuses could marginalize themselves right out of existence.
Colleges are having an ever-harder time making what they do comprehensible to the families footing the bills. I counsel families of all political stripes -- liberal, conservative and in-between -- and varied income levels, but they all agree on one thing: the overly politicized atmosphere on campuses is distracting colleges from providing a solid education to our young people.
[...]
Over-the-top professors and enthusiastic development officers with insatiable appetites for more funds will probably always be with us. But the sheer number of outlandish political controversies at universities across the country, coupled with escalating fees, is alienating parents from the very institutions they have been supporting through tax and tuition dollars.
[...]
Even loyal alumni are pushing back -- in part, I believe, because of recent professor-led campus political battles. The national percentage of alumni donating to their alma maters has declined for three years in a row and is now below 13 percent.
[...]
Maybe we can learn from recent campus incidents. Maybe we can ask ourselves what we would like our universities to actually do. Maybe university communities can engage in real soul-searching to figure out how they can benefit both their students and the country in ways that the broader public can support.
If they don't at least try, the university as an institution may have seen the heyday of its influence.
Posted by webmaster
11 Apr 2005 @ 9:44pm
Columbia conveniently clears self
As Columbia University demonstrates, the nice benefit of investigating yourself is that nobody can overrule you when you declare yourself innocent:
The faculty committee appointed by Columbia's president, Lee Bollinger, to investigate a series of student allegations against professors in the Middle Eastern studies department issued a report yesterday largely clearing the accused scholars of blame.
[...]
Columbia's top administrators released statements applauding the report
[...]
In an effort to manage favorable coverage of its investigation into the complaints, the university disclosed a summary of the committee's report only to the Columbia Spectator, the campus newspaper, and the New York Times. Those newspapers, sources indicated to The New York Sun last night, made an agreement with the central administration that they would not speak to the students who made the complaints against the professors.
[...]
The committee's report - four months in the making and the product of dozens of interviews with students and faculty members - represents a significant victory for Columbia's Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures.
[...]
On the issue of anti-Semitism, the committee concluded: "We found no evidence of any statements made by the faculty that could reasonably be construed as anti-Semitic. Professor Massad, for one, has been categorical in his classes concerning the unacceptability of anti-semitic views."
The committee made no mention of an article that an Iranian professor at Columbia, Hamid Dabashi wrote for an Egyptian newspaper, Al-Ahram, last fall in which he wrote that Israelis suffer from "a vulgarity of character that is bone-deep and structural to the skeletal vertebrae of its culture."
[...]
The panel also essentially cleared the professors who on April 17, 2002, canceled classes on the day of an anti-Israel rally on campus and encouraged students to attend the demonstration.
In an editorial, The New York Sun asks:
President Bollinger of Columbia University seems pleased as punch with the report from the faculty committee investigating professors in Middle East studies who have been criticized by students. "The Committee's work and report help sustain our trust in the absolutely critical norm of peer review," Mr. Bollinger said. By "peer review," Mr. Bollinger means that the faculty should be left to police itself. The whole point about the controversy at Columbia, however, is that such an approach is not credible. At least two of the five "peers" on the Columbia committee had called on Columbia to divest from companies selling arms to Israel, a position that Mr. Bollinger himself once termed "grotesque" and that the president of Harvard, Lawrence Summers, has called anti-Semitic in effect if not intent.
In our view, the text of Columbia's report tends to undermine the concept of peer review rather than support it. The faculty members criticize "outside organizations," "outside bodies," and "outside advocacy groups." Inside bodies, however, totally flubbed earlier investigations of the scandal in Middle East studies, and only because of outside bodies has any action been achieved at all. The only such groups the faculty committee carps about, moreover, are the pro-Israel ones, Campus Watch and the David Project. The "peer review" completely ignores the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Aramco, two outside bodies hostile to Israel that have, between them, poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into backing a certain Columbia professor and his center.
Nor did the committee deal with questions of bias and inaccurate information, which constituted the majority of complaints made by students. The committee said such questions should be left for "peer review of teaching" and "departments." But the committee lashed out at one unnamed pro-Israel professor, saying, "We find it deeply disturbing that faculty were apparently prepared to encourage students to report to them on a fellow-professor's classroom statements." How are the faculty supposed to review each other if they can't ask students about their colleagues' classes?
Good question. It seems obvious that Columbia is more interested in sweeping this under the rug than in fully investigating it. After all, why would the university initially release the report to only one outside news outlet (The New York Times) and then do so only on the condition that the Times didn't speak to any of the students making the complaints? That's shameful behavior, not only on the part of Columbia, but on the part of The New York Times as well.
Posted by Evan Coyne Maloney
4 Apr 2005 @ 10:22am
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