NAS Blog

Should campus groups be able to limit membership only to those who share a set of beliefs? Put it that way and the matter seems pretty innocuous. Ah, but if you state that in a pejorative way — should they be allowed to discriminate against those who don’t share that set of beliefs? — then alarm bells go off in the academic world because “discrimination” is contrary to the cherished notion that all groups must be “diverse.” And if it’s a Christian group doing the discriminating, add flashing lights and sirens to the alarm bells.

In today’s Pope Center piece, I comment on the recently argued case Christian Legal Society v. Martinez.

Even if five members of the Court have swallowed the diversity kool-aid and eventually decide against CLS and its First Amendment arguments, that doesn’t mean that universities have to go along with the diversity uber alles approach of Hastings Law School. College officials can and should recognize that there is nothing harmful in letting campus groups set their standards for membership.

NAS Chairman Steve Balch defends the right of Bill Ayers – former leader of the radical communist group the Weather Underground to speak at the University of Wyoming. “We need more debate rather than less at our universities and, of course, the First Amendment applies to all,” he wrote.

Cross posted from www.NAS.org

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In recent years, threats from Islamic extremists have resulted in murder of those simply depicting Mohammed (forbidden by Islamic tradition, although not unknown to Islamic culture).

From a prominent woman who fled Islamic death threats:

“‘South Park’ and the Informal Fatwa”

In a profile of cowardice, Comedy Central responded to a recent death threat by censoring the image of Mohammed on South Park

You can “piss Christ,” bash Buddha, mock the Pope, but humor is apparently not in the hadith.

Read:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2010/apr/22/south-park-censored-fatwa-muhammad

http://article.nationalreview.com/432601/self-censoring-isouth-parki/nina-shea

And here is the image (censored) that Comedy Central now allows:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SP-s10e04-censor.jpg

When Danish cartoonists published cartoons of Mohammed, Islamic extremists rampaged worldwide and killed 100 people. Those who published the cartoons in the “land of the free” (USA) lost their jobs or were forced to grovel with apologies. Others had to go into hiding.

Academics, of course, led the way by rotting out the foundations of any reasoned defense of a free and civil society.

“Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go” was the chant during the culture wars. There isn’t much left of “Western Civ” or any civilization, unless it is Nihilism with cowardly fear (but not reverence) for Islam.

Case in point: Years ago, Yale University admitted “Yale Taliban”--the propaganda minister for the Taliban–despite the fact he had only a fourth-grade education. Then, when Yale University Press published a book on the cartoon controversy, they censored the images for fear of death threats.

Now it is another sniveling retreat in popular culture (South Park).

“Land of the free”? “Home of the brave?

More of the same.

Shame on you Comedy Central!

Recently, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said that the new policy of forgiving student loan debts for those who “follow their heart” and enter public sector employment will do wonders for the U.S.

In this week’s Pope Center Clarion Call, I say that it’s utter nonsense. Public sector employment pays very well and gives much greater job security than those who labor in the competitive world. A very large number of college graduates want those government jobs and forgiving some of their student loan debt because they’ve worked at them for ten years is just a gift from the overburdened taxpayers.

One more thing — with the private sector (where wealth is produced, unlike the government) struggling these days under the many burdens and obstacles the government has put in its way, shouldn’t we worry about the government luring away talented people it needs?

I run a Great Books Program that offers courses online so that students anywhere can earn a certificate.  Recently I heard Gareth Williams, Chair of Columbia’s famous Lit-Hum core and emailed him for his thoughts on teaching great books online.  He was, not surprisingly, dubious:

As for Core courses online, I myself would be sceptical about the feasibility of such a step, at least from a Columbia perspective: so much here depends on the seminar format of voices heard around the table, and I feel that that format would be very hard indeed to reproduce in anything like its ‘real-life’ vitality if we tried it online.

I confess to similar doubts, admit that synchronous live dialogue is not reproducible, and acknowledge that the online courses are a marketing tool.  Still, in 2010, perhaps discussion takes a back seat to getting students exposed to challenging texts at all.  I started my program basically to keep frequently-cancelled literature courses alive in my institution (administrative pluses:  lower cost and a draw for disenfranchised literature students across the country).  Yet Professor Williams’s reply started me thinking about other virtues of online courses (I have taken at least a dozen and taught even more).  My defense of the online mode was bolstered by an experience of “voices around the table” while reporting to an informal group of students about the Association for Core Texts and Courses Conference where I heard Dr. Williams.  I could hardly get a word in edgewise with all the interruptions and crosstalk.  Everyone wanted to speak at once; everyone had an opinion; no one had a question; no one cared to listen.  I finally gave up.

Neil Postman preached that

for every advantage a new technology offers, there is always a corresponding disadvantage. The disadvantage may exceed in importance the advantage, or the advantage may well be worth the cost.

For now, the cost of electronically embracing what Victor Davis Hanson calls the “vanquished civilization of readers” may be the loss of “voices around the table.”  The advantage of online discussions, however, is the opportunity to complete one’s thought.   Students can also take time to frame their words, reflect rather than react, revise, expand, cross reference,  corroborate, and fact-check.

My online classes often turn into one-on-one tutorials, epistolary, more time-consuming than the classroom but with a balance of distance and intimacy.  The shy can “speak” as loudly as the bold.  Discipline is limited to enforcing the flaming policy.  No one is watching the clock or tweeting, and students are no longer packed in a box (by the end of the day, my 1940s era classroom is redolent of a high school locker room).  Martin Pawley used to argue that all technology acts as insulation against human contact.  Sometimes that’s not a bad thing.

In “Why Professors Are Liberal: Explanation or Apologia?” NAS Chairman Steve Balch dissects recent research by sociologist Neil Gross on why so few conservatives choose an academic profession. Gross has come to be seen as an authority on this matter, and his studies are often cited to disprove what are seen as exaggerated claims of bias in higher education against conservatives. Dr. Balch has responded to each of Gross’s reports, and his latest analysis is well worth a read.

I stumbled upon this picture in Flickr today: http://www.flickr.com/photos/rmontgom/4408200024/

This is an unidentified image from the March 4 protests, a nationwide exercise in angry socialist agitprop masquerading as rallies against tuition hikes. Jay Schalin uncovered the radical roots of the protests in “The New Campus Radicals.”

The photo linked here, however, is worth a thousand words.

The banner pictured reads, “The Whole Capitalist System has to Go! We Need Revolution + COMMUNISM!”

Last fall the CUNY faculty union, the Professional Staff Congress (PSC), settled Professor David Seidemann’s law suit by paying Seidemann’s pro bono attorney, Jones, Day, $250,000 in legal fees, roughly 1.5% of the PSC’s budget.  The suit concerned the PSC’s use of dues to pursue political activities unrelated to contract negotiation or administration.  There have been periods when the PSC has released e-mails concerning the Iraqi War virtually every day.

At issue was the agency fee arrangment whereby non-members are compelled through the threat of state violence to pay union fees.  Seidemann’s case went through several appeals, and was remanded to a magistrate sympathetic to the PSC at least twice. As the appellate court was mandating that more and more of the PSC’s budget be reviewed for being “non-chargeable” to dissenting non-members, the PSC settled.  The PSC had originally claimed that less than one percent of its budget is used for unrelated political purposes.   The settlement occurred at a point where the amount had increased to over 14 percent.  Seidemann suspects that the actual number is much higher.   A witness heard a PSC spokesperson say that the percentage is between 15  and 20%.

In a statement to its executive committee the PSC calls its payment to Jones, Day and the increase from 0% to over 14% “a victory”.  I wrote a two-page description of some of the details of the PSC’s loss and the leadership’s recidivist lying in Sharad Karkhanis’s Patriot Returns newsletter that is released to 13,000 CUNY employees.

The following column on George Orwell’s advice to free students from bad academic writing is worth reading:

http://chronicle.com/article/Bad-WritingBad-Thinking/65031/?sid=ja&utm_source=ja&utm_medium=en

In two decades of teaching, I’ve worked with exceptionally bright undergraduates. Once they enter graduate school, however, they conform to the “smelly little orthodoxies” of theory and the jargon-ridden writing of their discipline. I’ve always despised jargon that deadens prose and will be passé by the time these young conformists hit old age. Future generations will have to decipher why words and phrases such as “subaltern,” “post-structuralist,” “late capitalism” meant to the scribbling class of early 21st century academics.

The advice Orwell gives is very similar to advice Winston Churchill gave on good writing. This passage says it best (from Orwell, “Politics and the English Language”):

“Orwell leaves us with a list of simple rules:

* Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

* Never use a long word where a short one will do.

* If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

* Never use the passive where you can use the active.

* Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

* Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

I am posting this for my own students and as a reminder to myself (fallen creature that I am).