NAS Blog

You can watch our Illinois affiliate president Jonathan Bean here, as he discusses the role of business in breaking down racial barriers.

Jonathan is professor of history at Southern Illinois University, where he has frequently defended academic freedom and free speech.

His newest book is the anthology Race & Liberty in America.

Candace de Russy notes at Phi Beta Cons that Columbia has dropped a course from its list of Spring offerings that would have been devoted to the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Apparently, this was proposed, and would have been taught by, an enthusiastic supporter of OWS. What’s the annual tuition at Columbia? It’s an Ivy League school, right?

With Candace, I’m glad that this “course” has been axed. But I’m still marveling that it was ever allowed to fly in the first place.

So we read in this piece in today’s IHE, where our Beach Books reports for 2010 and 2011 were the topic of conversation, often sympathetic. If you haven’t yet seen these two studies, take a look here and here.

In brief, both reports survey the Common Readings which entering freshman have been asked to read over the summer, in preparation for their first semester college. With few exceptions, it’s been pretty thin stuff: overwhelmingly contemporary, intellectually vapid and heavily freighted with politically correct thematic material. It’s encouraging to read that so many at the MLA gathering apparently think that something’s wrong as well.

Kudos to NAS Communications Director Ashley Thorne, whose Herculean research labors made both studies possible.

That’s the title of this piece posted today over at IHE, announcing the release of a new report tasking American higher education with bolstering “civic learning and democratic engagement.” The report, A Crucible Moment, was commissioned in 2010 by the US Department of Education, prepared by the National Task Force on Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement, and is being presented today at the White House.

You can access the full text here. Do have a look. In the minds of the authors, “civic engagement” is important enough to be integrated through the entire curriculum, not confined to a single course or left as optional.

Your reaction will depend on how you understand “civic learning” and “democratic engagement.” I’d like to think that I promote those very things in my American Government and Politics course. Students should indeed know who their legislative representatives at all levels of government are, how the president is elected, that it is Congress and not the President which has the power to declare war, that car insurance rates are not set by the federal government, etc. They should also have a good basic grasp of American history, some comparative perspective with other political systems and how democracies survive or perish.

But given the current lopsided ideological imbalance in the academy, and the report’s frequent references to “systemic change,” “social justice,” and “global interdependence,” I’m pretty sure what “civic engagement” is likely to consist of on most campuses. It doesn’t much resemble my approach.

Via George Leef at Phi Beta Cons, I learned of this piece by attorney Larry Purdy, posted at the Pope Center’s web page. CEO’s Roger Clegg also weighs in.

Purdy, who served on the legal team representing Barbara Grutter in her unsuccessful challenge to the University of Michigan law school’s race based “diversity” admissions policies, explains why the Supreme Court’s 2003 decision was wrong, and why it should be overturned. First, the Court will have to grant certiorari in the petition of Fisher v. Texas, which challenges a race-based admissions program currently in use at the University of Texas. As of today, it hasn’t yet done so.

Purdy is also the author of Getting Under the Skin of Diversity, a 2003 study available here.

The Grutter ruling, as Purdy and Clegg argue convincingly, is constitutionally unsound, and was a major setback for opponents of racial preferences. Hopefully the Court will follow their advice, and use the Fisher case to reverse its 2003 error.

As if on cue from my post yesterday, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has sent an open letter on sexual harassment to Russlyn Ali, Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights in the US Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights. OCR is charged with enforcing federal civil rights laws as they apply to colleges and universities receiving federal funds, and that includes just about all of them. We’re happy to be one of FIRE’s cosigners.

The letter requests that Ali resolve the bewildering confusion with respect to what constitutes “sexual harassment” among students (not between students and teachers or professors) at educational institutions. That’s been a problem for quite some time, as our 1993 statement on the subject confirms. As we saw yesterday, the folks at UC/Chico seriously believed that the idea extended to professors who make use of the generic “he” or “his” in their classrooms. I still can’t quite believe that this really happened.

Anyway, as the best solution, FIRE urges the assistant secretary to adhere to the clear standard enunciated in the US Supreme Court’s ruling in Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education, (1999). Under the Davis test, “harassment” consists of behavior that is so “severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive” that it interferes with a victim’s “educational experience.”

No definition can ever be perfect in this area, but you’d have to agree that it’s a vast improvement over the one at Chico State and hundreds of other campuses. I hope that Assistant Secretary Ali is persuaded as well.

That title is deliberately ornery, but I had to do it after reading this press release from FIRE (there they are again, intrepidly fighting the good fight). Every time you think we’ve hit bottom in the ongoing Orwellian follies of campus sexaul harassment codes, some new development pops up to prove that the limit of absurdity hasn’t yet been reached.

Take due note of what earned CSU-Chico FIRE’s “Speech Code of the Year”
distinction, happliy rescinded after much-deserved public ridicule. Pre-revision, Chico’s code held that the use in classroom lectures of traditional masculine/inclusive words such as “he,” “his” or “man” constituted sexual harassment, since they perpetuated sexual stereotypes, etc., etc. Well, that’s a point of view, although I’ll date myself by noting that I grew up hearing nothing other than such language and had no difficulty distinguishing “man” as male from “man” as humanity, as with any other homonyms familiar to native speakers. Ah, but we live in very different times now, don’t we?

Anyway, I’m very glad that these idiotic statutes have been withdrawn, but I’m still adjusting to the fact that someone really did draft and impose them, folks who, I imagine, don’t laugh very much or take kindly to criticism of their efforts. Such humorless grim enforcers seem never to rest, and we can only be grateful for FIRE’s equally tireless vigilance on behalf of free speech on public campuses.

In the meantime, I invite all readers to MAN UP: I make a special point of using masculine inclusives much more than I ever did in the past, simply because I’m affronted by the people who keep telling me not to. Go ahead, it’s fun to watch ‘em sputter.

If only the Marx Brothers and the Three Stooges were still with us: they had a distinct way of dealing with academic stuffed shirts.

That’s what New Criterion editor Roger Kimball asks in this commentary at PJ Media. If you haven’t heard about it, he’s referring to an “incident” last month, in which racial epithets had been scrawled on a Williams College dormitory wall. Replicating a pattern that’s become familiar over the last decade or so, the president of Williams all but sent in a S.W.A.T. team in response: he ordered classes and athletic practices cancelled, and organized a “day of reflection” for soul-searchng, healing and speech-making to emphasize how fervently he and the Williams administration detest racism and what they’re doing to stamp it out, etc., etc. That’s not all, either: Kimball writes that a student who found the whole thing farcical and possibly a hoax, vented on his blog and was hauled in for interrogation by campus police and – get this – the FBI. But maybe that’s not surprising, at least if you know anything about the “bias intervention” procedures that are waiting to pounce on so many college campuses these days. Have a look at this one from Rutgers, where the admininstration also stands ready to send in the 101st Airborne.

But the central point of Kimball’s piece is a question: is this for real? Or is it another of the “hate crime” hoaxes which have been perpetrated frequently over the past few years, often by a member of the putative victim group? Kimball provides a list of recent similar cases, indicating why he’s skeptical of the one at Williams.

In any case, neither the Williams police nor the FBI has yet turned up a suspect, and maybe they won’t. But if it does turn out to be a fabrication, I’m not expecting any classes to be cancelled this time.

So writes Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby in this piece today. Admitting poorly prepared minority students to demanding programs in the hard sciences or engineering at elite schools may make admissions officers or affirmative action supporters feel good about themselves, but it virtually sets such students up to fail; as Jacoby notes, the attrition rate is prohibitive. No wonder that the students given such “opportunity” often come away feeling isolated and embittered. The sad part is that they’d probably have better prospects of succeeding at second-tier state institutions. It’s among the many reasons that we continue to oppose group-based preferences of any kind, as I wrote here last week. Jacoby also cites the stellar, tireless work of NAS board member Gail Heriot, a law professor at the University of San Diego, who has marshalled compelling arguments and data demonstrating the consistently bad results of race-based affirmative action policies. Compelling, that is, for everyone except the admissions officers at elite universities who continue to claim resounding success for their “diversity” policies.

Free speech seems to be ever more unpopular on college campuses these days, where it’s increasingly regarded as an unwelcome nuisance. As reported here by FIRE, the administration at Drake University have decided that the public expression of individual students’ private political opinions is something that can’t be permitted on campus. So they’ve created a “free speech zone” nearby where – for the time being, at least – you can stump for your favorite candidate. I wonder if there’s a sign posted that reads “Restricted Area: Free Speech Allowed.”