NAS Blog

California taxpayers are now on the hook for  $100,000, which the San José/Evergreen Community College District (SJCCD) has agreed to pay an adjunct professor in lost earnings in exchange for dismissal of her First Amendment lawsuit.

The background of the lawsuit? Sheldon had led a short discussion about the nature/nurture debate regarding sexual orientation in her Human Heredity course. She was then fired due to a student complaint and went to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) for assistance.

“This welcome settlement demonstrates that colleges cannot get away with punishing a professor for teaching relevant class material, even if a student finds it offensive,” said FIRE President Greg Lukianoff.

An aspect of this case worthy of the attention of NAS afficionados is the SJCCD’s contention that Sheldon was teaching non-scientific material as science.

In any event, congratulations to Sheldon and FIRE for persevering in this good fight. And condolences to CA taxpayers.

You decide.

Tom Blumer observes that our leftist universities and their ilk possess and abuse their power to destroy careers and control people’s lives. The communists, he says, constructed checkpoints, whereas our leftist leaders use “chokepoints”:

Those who occupy positions in university systems, government bureaucracies, as well as certain union and professional organizations, often with the active assistance of the courts, serve as the system’s “Chokepoint Charlies.” You can’t get through or move on unless you jump through their hoops, comply with their demands, or behave according to their established norms.

Here is Blumer’s take on campus chokepoints:

In university systems, the most obvious chokepoint is tenure. If you achieve it, you have a position for life; if you don’t, your career is essentially over. Not surprisingly, leftist-dominated universities have used denial of tenure as a principal means of culling promising conservative professors, or even usually reliable liberals who utter occasional center-right thoughts, from their faculties’ ranks.

Other university chokepoints are in the classroom. For the most part, it’s still true that if you’re bright enough, apply yourself, keep your head down, and avoid making too many waves, you’ll get through. But if you happen to incur the wrath of an intolerant radical prof by expressing a dissenting view, no matter how well-supported, you may find yourself with a failing grade, a lengthy redress or appeals process with less than assured results, and perhaps the inability, at least at that university, to go on to the next step in your desired major.

Perhaps the most dangerous chokepoint at universities is in research. If your line of inquiry leads to conclusions that are contrary to established beliefs — say, just for the heck of it, if you find evidence that the earth really hasn’t been warming, or even if it is warming that it’s not significantly influenced by human activity — there’s more than a slight chance that your “peer reviewers” won’t be impressed and that your next funding request may not be granted. Just like that, you’re on the outside looking in.

Watch out for it — already a fixture in leading schools of art education –before it becomes the norm in K-12 classes throughout the land, thus vastly politicizing the arts by making anti-capitalist, race/gender/class-obsessed (ne0-Marxist) “art activists” of our young.

So warns art critic Michelle Marder Kamhi, with the worthy view in mind of galvanizing parents against  proposed provisions in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, whose Congressional reauthorization is pending. These provisions would, in line with Paulo Freire’s dictum that all education is political, mandate social-justice art.

“Art”? Such as the pro-illegal immigration creation “Brinco,” or “jump” in Spanish, which would teach students to construct sneakers (jammed with compass, map, etc.) for people  attempting illegaly to cross our borders.

Americans to the barricades, in the defense of true art education!

University presidents Nicholas Butler and Dwight Eisenhower staunchly resisted it, but alas, as Mal Kline notes, to no avail.

Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah just paid a visit to President Obama, almost  two years after the deadline by which the kingdom’s educational curriculum was to have been overhauled. This reform has not take place, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom wrote to the president last week.

As the National Review reports, this meeting was aimed at getting the two nations to coordinate in confronting terrorism and should also have been used by the president to personally persuade King Abdullah to fulfill his promise of textbook reform.

As NR notes,

Saudi textbooks teach, along with many other noxious lessons, that Jews and Christians are “enemies,” and they dogmatically instruct that various groups of “unbelievers” — apostates (which includes Muslim moderates who reject Saudi Wahhabi doctrine), polytheists (which includes Shiites), and Jews — should be killed. Under the Saudi Education Ministry’s method of rote learning, these teachings amount to indoctrination, starting in first grade and continuing through high school, where militant jihad on behalf of “truth” is taught as a sacred duty. These textbooks are used not only in Saudi Arabia but in Saudi-funded schools around the world.

It remains to be seen whether the president broached the matter to any avail with the Saudi king.

The incomparable Victor Davis Hanson thinks so, evincing evidence that ethnic centers have the run of our institutions, and economics and political science departments determine policy.

And so goes the nation, resembling for all the world “a faculty bull session over coffee.”

Michael Totten, a foreign correspondent, extols Paul Berman’s new book, The Flight of the Intellectuals:

While we haven’t had a repeat of the apocalyptic terrorist attacks on September 11, what we do have is an entirely new class of people in the Western democracies who live in hiding and under armed guard from the same sorts of killers. Salman Rushdie was but the first, and Somalia-born feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, one-time collaborator with the butchered Theo Van Gogh, is now but the most famous.

Totten describes Berman’s condemnation of much of the intellectual class to this persecution: “The killers’ would-be victims have been excoriated … , and even, in some cases, blamed for their predicament.”

Kudos to Berman for his defense of those preyed upon by Islamic extremists.

It seems that some teachers and administrators, when offered incentives (within systems such as No Child Left Behind) for boosting students’ test scores, act unethically to inflate them.

The Manhattan Institute’s Sol Stern recounts how two brave education officials are confronting assertions of “spectacular student progress” by forcing an outside audit of the tests.

Their efforts, he writes, should serve as a model for making all states “come clean” and (in education secretary Arne Duncan’s words) “‘stop lying to children.’”

A teen went public about her failing high school — a sick, sick place in Brooklyn where students have sex and smoke dope in the stairwells, where pregnancies and smoking pot are the stuff of every day, and where administrators and security guards are lazy and incompetent.

For her efforts, according to the New York Post, the student, Alisha Strawder, was barred from the school and told that it cannot guarantee her safety.

One student told the Post: “Everyone wants to fight her, to jump her. If they find her, they’re going to beat her up.”

Is it possible to reverse such institutionalized depravity? This young girl, unlike most of the educational establishment, has had the courage to try.