NAS Blog

Former Cal State Fresno history professor Victor Davis Hanson writes here about the sad history of American higher ed over the last 50 years. He refers to “the Fannie and Freddie university” meaning that higher ed has been politicized, subsidized and over-expanded due to government intervention.

Professor Daphne Patai of UMass-Amherst has a good post at Minding the Campus. She writes about the uniformity of thought she encounters among her fellow academics, which of course ranges from Marxist to “progressive.” One result, she observes, is that students absorb statist cliches, such as the notion that the Tea Party is rooted in racism, and rarely hear any arguments to challenge them. But when a conservative or libertarian tries to add programs, professors or speakers to provide the case for liberalism (in its original meaning) and to show how damaging the concentration of government power is, he is sure to be vilified for “undermining academic freedom” and “trying to buy the curriculum.”

Over at The Beacon, I have a post on the latest requirement that Something Else must be taught in K-12 history textbooks. This time it is gay history but the real problem is the politicization of textbook content. Result: history is just “one damn thing after another.”

In a National Review Online article describing the decline of Middle East Studies in American higher education, Daniel Pipes quotes from Andrew Bieszad’s recent article, “Islamo-Correctness at Hartford Seminary,” in Academic Questions:

The Hartford Seminary rapidly “turned from being the premier Protestant seminary for missions to the Muslim world into an institution promoting Islamization.”

At a June 2 hearing of the Congressional Subcommittee on Research and Science Education, Peter Wood urged for “cuts to be made shrewdly” to national funding for the social sciences.

Read Dr. Wood’s synopsis of the hearing, “How to Save the Social Sciences,” in the Chronicle of Higher Education‘s Innovations blog.

Read the press release from the Committee on Science, Space and Technology summarizing the witnesses’ arguments.

Watch the webcast of the hearing.

Over at the leading libertarian magazine, Reason, writer Shikha Dalmia attacks conservatives for using FOIA laws to invade the privacy of historian William Cronon. At the same time, Dalmia defends Open Records laws while noting that groups may abuse their rights by going after individuals. On that score, the Left comes in for a tongue lashing for politicizing the process (and so much else in academia).

The University of Wisconsin’s Professor William Cronon has involved himself in a partisan Wisconsin battle concerning public employees’ bargaining. In his blog he bloviates against the Republican Party’s open records law request for e-mails he may have sent from his university e-mail account relating to partisan advocacy. I argue that a distinction needs to be made between the GOP’s political response to Cronon’s political advocacy and academic freedom:

Cronon has chosen to involve himself in the political process . He states that he has been careful to separate his personal e-mails from his university computer, and makes the spurious argument that communications with students constitute records under the Buckley Law….as a public official with a partisan affiliation Cronon has entered the political fray. He ought to expect that he be treated as a political player subject to the same tactics to which Cronon and his allies would subject GOP-affiliated officials. Even in his self-serving bloviation about the GOP’s request Cronon cannot refrain from partisan rhetoric.

A student, Yosef Sobel, decided to invite David Horowitz to Brooklyn College in response to campus protests. The campus protesters pretended to be Israeli military officers stopping students at checkpoints. I was impressed that Yosef, an undergraduate, found a way to arrange Horowitz’s visit in response. Nevertheless, two different professors normally involved with Middle Eastern and Judaic studies refused to sponsor the event. (The College would not permit an event that at least one faculty member would not sponsor.) I offered to do so.

Horowitz is a dramatic speaker. I hadn’t attended a campus event of this kind before and was disturbed at the overt anger, thinly distinguishable from violence, on the part of the anti-Horowitz protesters in the room. Their intent was to stifle Mr. Horowitz and those who agree with him. At the conclusion of the talk I asked the chief protester to give a response to Mr. Horowitz. Failing to address any of Horowitz’s points, he responded with an inarticulate series of insults. His confederate on the other side of the room screamed at the room filled with yarmulke-clad Jews, “This is a bunch of Nazis.”

The event was a success largely because one of CUNY’s trustees lent his support. He insisted that the university’s chief security officer oversee a concerted security effort that involved a metal detector search of each attendee. Speech on campus is not free, unless one expresses a left wing viewpoint. Without the trustee’s influence, campus security would have failed to provide security, and the protests may have become violent. As faculty sponsor I was able to control the audience to some degree only because of the security, which, in the end, suggests why check points are necessary in Israel.

AP Photo

University of Wisconsin professor Donald Downs (author of the excellent book Restoring Free Speech and Liberty on Campus) has an essay on Minding the Campus in which he discusses the battle taking place in Madison.

Do college professors ever use their courses to propagandize on political issues? That’s just a right-wing myth, say many defenders of the higher education establishment. Read the essay and you’ll learn that quite a few of Downs’ UW colleagues could not resist the temptation.

An article in the Guardian this weekend tells about a Berkeley physics professor, Richard Muller, who has assembled a team of scientists for an initiative he calls the Berkeley Earth project. His goal is to do research on climate change by essentially starting over and creating new models from scratch. He intends to use different methods than the ones that have already been used to produce findings currently hailed as evidence for global warming.

Muller acknowledges that as of now, there is still no consensus on the state of warming, and that the skeptics have made legitimate criticisms of the methods used in research so far. He seeks to produce results untainted by political influence and, according to the Guardian, is strictly interested in scientific accuracy. ”Science has its weaknesses and it doesn’t have a stranglehold on the truth, but it has a way of approaching technical issues that is a closer approximation of truth than any other method we have,” he said.