In a new in-depth essay at NAS.org, NAS Chairman Steve Balch argues that the burden of proof should rest with those who deny bias: they must prove that it does not exist rather than demanding proof that it does.

Dr. Balch’s timely essay comes the week after NAS published “They So Despise Her Politics – Do Conservative Faculty Members Get a Fair Shake?. That article describes the case of Teresa Wagner, who believes she was denied a teaching position because of her conservative politics. There we published documents from Wagner’s lawsuit against the University of Iowa College of Law.

What do you think? How can we know for sure whether conservatives face systemic discrimination in the Ivory Tower?

Although Dr. Nussbaum embraces Socratic self-examination, ideology blinds her to her own biases.  She is pedantic when attacking pedantry, and she abhors “the dead hand of authority” yet repeatedly invokes the authority of Nobel Prize credentials.  She advocates critical thinking to combat “demeaning stereotypes,” then proceeds to stereotype men, women, whites, and Southerners.  Masculinity comes off badly unless it is “maternal” which, she implies, is the true essence of human nature (making masculine behavior an aberration, less than human).  In this book, women are saintly and victimized (unless they are named Margaret Thatcher).  Nussbaum scorns the image of the self-reliant cowboy, then, on the next page, explains that every child must develop “less need to call on others.”  Decrying education that involves mere inculcation of facts (more Seventies flotsam), she later admits to the necessity for “a lot of factual knowledge.”

Worse, Dr. Nussbaum extols the individual but avoids any mention of the tribalizing effects of multiculturalism and its diminution of . . . the individual.  Among several straw man arguments, she condemns “the facile equation of Islam with terrorism” without mentioning just who ever assumed that equivalence.  The values she prizes are particularly Western, giving her desire to spread them globally a whiff of cultural imperialism.  And Dr. Nussbaum recommends role-playing to develop sympathy for “the other.”  I met an eyewitness from one progressive school in Northern California that did just that:  to develop sympathy for slaves on a ship, teachers locked students in a Quonset hut, chained to their desks surrounded by rotting fish.

In fact, Dr. Nussbaum’s book is a call not for a new humanism but for an old political correctness.  She even warns that because artworks are so effective at creating empathy, teachers must exercise “careful selectivity” so that students do not read “defective forms of `literature’” which evoke unsocial feelings and “uneven sympathies.”  Yikes!  Goodbye Salinger, Twain, Poe, O’Conner, Dostoyevsky, and Kafka.  With friends like Dr. Nussbaum, liberal arts education doesn’t need enemies.

Marketing his new book, Cary Nelson, spear point of the AAUP, says

I’m a dyed-in-the-wool, devout believer that you only have academic freedom and free speech if you have job security.  If you don’t have job security, you can’t speak out forcefully, and I think that means academic freedom will be diminished.

I rarely agree with Dr. Nelson, a fellow I find usually animated by left-wing, social constructivist, and Sixties sentiments, but in this case he is right.

Mr. Knowles paints administrators as ex-teachers called to a higher mission.  However, in college, many administrators have little or no classroom experience, and Mr. Knowles seems oblivious to just how political, punitive, and self-serving careerist administrators can be (just look at how many of the cases at FIRE originate from administrative excesses).  Without tenure, my campus would have no discernible conservative voice at all.  I would have been fired by at least three different college presidents for a variety of transgressions:  organizing the faculty union, suing the college, publically criticizing multiculturalism, openly opposing “student learning outcomes.”

Students can survive a poor teacher (how many great teachers are there?), but they can’t survive a university monoculture that is an ideological echo chamber.  Tenure may sometimes protect incompetent knaves but, where it still exists, tenure also protects vital intellectual pluralism.

One of the funniest sequences in Evan Coyne Maloney’s documentary film  Indoctrinate U is when he wanders from campus to campus asking for directions to “the Men’s Center.”  If Male Studies takes hold, maybe someday Evan might actually be able to find one.

Here are the details and the call for papers from the convener, Dr. Miles Groth of Wagner College:

“Wagner College will host the first annual Conference on Male Studies, on Friday and Saturday, October 1-2, 2010. Six themes representing several disciplines will be addressed by panels and individual presenters:

▪  The deep biology of the experience of being male (genetics, biology, psychoneuroendocrinology, paleoanthropology);

▪  Literacy and education of boys and college males (pedagogy, sociology);

▪  Socioeconomic factors leading to males’ over-involvement in the criminal justice system, underemployment and limited opportunities as fathers, resulting from changes in child custody law (economics, forensics, law, public policy);

▪  Misandric representations of boys and mature males in the media and advertising (media studies including cinema, television and internet, and advertising);

▪  Accounts of the experience of being male (history, literature, autobiography);

▪  Pressing issues related to the emotional well-being of boys and older males, most notably depression and suicide (clinical psychology, medicine and psychiatry, social work).

Specialists in all of the above disciplines as well as related areas of research will present position papers or engage in carefully organized panel discussions of the themes. We expect participants to include scholars from more than the 12 countries who participated along with you in the April 7, 2010 inaugural teleconference and webinar broadcast.

Proceedings of the conference will be published in the first issue of a new journal, Male Studies, in 2011.”

Students do not need to take a course on the principles of economics in order to earn this minor; nor will they encounter the devastating counter-attack on the very concept of “social justice” by F. A. Hayek in his book The Mirage of Social Justice. In one of the courses the students may take (Philosophy 273), however, they at least get a taste of Robert Nozick’s criticism of the mega-state.

This minor is far more agitprop than education.

1. There is no liberal bias in academia.
2. Everybody should go to college.
3. Academia is more noble than the business community.
4. Diversity makes everything better.
5. All faculty research is necessary and/or important.
6. Academic freedom means anything goes.
7. Higher education drives the economy.
8. Natural aptitude doesn’t matter.
9. Morality is relative.
10. All cultures are equally good.

As we have seen with Marxism, after radical movements lose credibility and die in the world at large, they remain in higher education and continue to shape the worldview of rising generations. This will also most likely be the case with the rising “sustainability” trend on campus.

Wyoming is no maverick.  I had a fight just getting my course approved.  The University of California bridled at accepting a course about men and uniquely male experience.  That’s understandable because anyone raised on Family Guy, The Simpsons, American Dad, beer commercials, sitcoms, gender feminism, and the glut of misandristic Hollywood films (misandristic appears not even to be a word in most dictionaries) naturally thinks that males must be roped, tied, and broken of their stupid, pathetic, and predatory ways.

Aaron, however, read serious literature by David Lloyd, Faulkner, Sam Shepard (“The Real Gabby Hayes”), Amy Clampitt, Philip Larkin, Christina Hoff Summers, Hemingway, Camille Paglia, Harry Crews, Steven Pinker, Homer, Harvey Mansfield, Isaac Clemens, Leonard Gardner, Thomas van Nortwick, Robert Hayden, James Dickey, Leonard Sax, Vergil, Harvey Swados, Tennyson, Joan Didion (“John Wayne:  A Love Song”), et al.  Aaron viewed Seven Samurai, Ghost Dog, Deliverance, Fight Club, and “I am the Lord thy God . . .” from Decalogue. Aaron studied lessons about “Boys,” “Fathers,” “Sons,” “Men and War,” “Male Codes,” “The Man of Letters,” “Love and Marriage,” and “Manly Aging, Manly Death.”

Too bad, pardner!  Those readings, those films, those topics are not worthy of study at the University of Wyoming because Wyoming has an agenda:   “. . . women, not men.”  This is not welcoming, not inclusive, and not education; it’s galloping gender discrimination.

The same day I heard of Aaron’s dilemma, I also heard of a new academic direction for men:  male studies.  As one of my gender feminist colleagues frequently asserts:  “Equity must be addressed!”  How right she is.  Cowboy up, Wyoming—time to plant this locoweed up on Boot Hill.

“I think of all Harvard men as sissies” from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s book This Side of Paradise (which I’m currently reading) was deemed offensive to homosexuals. Also check out FIRE’s coverage of this case.

Chronicle of Higher Ed: Yale, the (High School) Musical

Yale redeems itself with an awesome (albeit long) admissions video.

Slate: The Opening of the Academic Mind (via Minding the Campus)

A book review of Louis Menand’s The Marketplace of Ideas. “Professors, the people most visibly responsible for the creation of new ideas, have, over the last century, become all too consummate professionals,  initiates in a system committed to its own protection and perpetuation.”

Joanne Jacobs: More Students Refuse to State a Race

“‘We shouldn’t be judged by our race,’ said senior Jessica Mae Belcher, 17, whose roots are African and Cherokee. She prefers ‘none of the above’ because ‘we’re all different, but we’re all the same, too.’” See also McClatchy:

Doug Craig, who’s been principal at Laguna Creek for 10 years, appreciates the students’ desire to be judged on their merits, not their race.

“I’d love to look at individual kids and leave it at that, but we wouldn’t even know there was an achievement gap if we didn’t measure our kids,” he said. “There must be a systemic reason and we need to figure out what causes it and how to fix it.”

Stanford Review: The Man-Made Myth

“Email and poster bombardments encouraging students to live sustainably (with the goal of cutting CO2 emissions) are based on flawed reasoning. [...] We have grown up in a society in which the myth of man-made global warming is so thoroughly pervasive, doubt is heretical. But science proves human carbon dioxide emissions are not responsible for global warming.”

Stanford Review: ES 10 Students Take on Climate Change Skeptics (via Campus Reform)

“While much of the layman world still debates the reality of human-induced global warming, the scientific community treats it as unquestionable fact. And, like scientists, says Head TA Jess McNally, in ES10 ‘We don’t debate climate change; it is just something we teach.’”

“ES10 is environmental ed, and so, it should result in a change of behaviors.”

New York Times: Professor is a Label That Leans Left

College professors are liberal because of typecasting – the same reason why nurses are women and cops are conservative.

Chronicle of Higher Ed: The Poetry is in the Proof

Why liberal arts students should learn mathematical proofs.

Minding the Campus: What is the AAUP Up To?

A review of Cary Nelson’s No University is an Island. “Nelson’s position on teaching social justice points to a related problem. He provides a ringing defense of academic freedom, but is reticent to discuss the legitimate limits to this freedom.”

I don’t understand, what is the problem with this exam? It explores many common sociological theories. Not once does it proclaim that a certain way of thinking is right or wrong, nor does it discuss America and how the student should feel about it; in fact, the student actually begins an answer with “some say…”, which means that he or she recognizes that these are just theories, not objective fact.

The questions are asking the student to examine, explain, describe, compare, and analyze. Contrary to your claim, all of these skills are highly desirable in most career fields. Sociology as a discipline emphasizes critical thinking, not blindly following the “old Soviet agitprop of the Fifties”, as you say.

I’m not sure what China and India have to do with this topic, since many universities in both countries offer comprehensive liberal arts and social science programs, including Sociology. I encourage you to do some research on Peking University, Tsinghua University, and Nankai University in China, and the Indian Institute of Technology in India, before assuming that they have eschewed all humanities and social sciences (“hate-America” fields?) in favor of technology, mathematics, and engineering – which are, apparently, fields that really love America.

The respondent is quite right that the exam I made public is quite mainstream in sociology. The problem is, however, that the entire discipline is so corrupt that nobody within the discipline still seems capable of perceiving anything wrong with it.

The exam speaks for itself. It is biased on the face of it because, from beginning to end, its point of view is entirely anti-capitalist, anti-white, anti-male. No other perspective is included, even as a hypothetical.

For instance, the professor who composed the test might have asked why corruption is endemic in the Third World and why developing economies are often wrecked by indigenous dictators, such as President Mugabe in Zimbabwe. Students could have been called on to compare and contrast how Adam Smith and Karl Marx would view Third World development. But no, the only questions asked, and the only answers acceptable, are limited to the view that all the ills of the world are the fault of capitalist, white, male America.

In response to the question regarding the “matrix of domination,” the student focuses exclusively on whites dominating blacks. He or she does not discuss, for example, black-on-white crime statistics available from the FBI. Nor does the student evaluate (or was he or she asked to evaluate) high black crime rates or high school dropout rates in light of decades of affirmative action.

Nor does the student mention that males have lost more jobs than females in the recession, or that females outnumber men in college (58% of attendees are female, whereas 42% are male). Such inconvenient facts as the nation having a black president and a female Speaker of the House are omitted. Are these not positions of power and domination? Rather, the “correct” but empirically false answer – since the exam was graded 100% – is that whites dominate blacks, and males dominate females.

The exam’s unremitting bias is also on display in the question on immigration. The professor does not ask students to consider the possibility that restricting illegal immigration, which brings many criminals and welfare cases to the U.S., might be in the national interest.

But, then, what does one expect now of sociology? True critical, nuanced thinking? Hardly.

In short, the exam’s questions and answers – no doubt greatly encouraged and perhaps prompted by the professor – are transparently one-sided. They contain not even a hint of competing ideas.