Candidate Jimmy Carter said yes on the campaign trail, but history remembers his actual presidential administration with much more of a gimlet eye. And President Obama is having more than a few Carteresque moments of his own.

Found via Steve Green's weekly roundup of Blogs at PJTV.com, Barbara Curtis writes:

On Tuesday, as press secretary Gibbs fielded questions from the press regarding Daschle's dropping out as HHS secretary, Obama and Michelle "escaped" to read a book to second graders at a DC public school:

[Click for video]

There's certainly the irony that his own girls are going to the most elite school in DC while the Obamas grandstand among the common kids in a public school.

But ponder the significance of a man who spent only several months in the Senate and then campaigned for almost two years to get to the White House, who now spends two weeks flubbing administratively while entertaining lavishly, then together with his wife acts like it's such a terrible burden they have to "cut loose" and "break out."

And just imagine if Bush had done something similarly shallow in the midst of constantly crying "Crisis!" to the citizens of this country.

"Who is this guy? Where is the Barack Obama who charmed the country and challenged it to greatness?" is New York Daily News columnist Michael Goodwin's cri de coeur.

Over at his American Spectator blog, Robert Stacy McCain responds:

Campaigning is tough, but governing is infinitely harder. Remember when first Hillary Clinton, and then Republicans, tried to point out that Obama had no executive experience, had never really shown leadership in his legislative jobs, et cetera? Now his deficiencies are hurting him every day. The White House has many advantages, but it's not a very good place to hide.

Orrin Judd looks into distance and observes: "Somewhere, a killer rabbit licks its chops."

The etymology of an all-too popular and surprisingly insidious pop-culture phrase, explored by the new blog (and like ours, a Sekimori design), Gotham Resistance.

"What if the National Portrait Gallery had the graffiti it showcases in the exhibit vandalized on the side of their building? It would be helpful to have even a small amount of education."

(Or at least me--it was guaranteed to happen like clockwork, particularly before Christmas break.)

"Study: Lack of Sleep Increases Risk Of Obtaining Cold"

OK, everybody say it with me: I need a study to tell me this?

As a follow-up to our earlier look at England's mental meltdown, check out John Hawkins' post on "Britain's Slide Into The Politically Correct Abyss Part #8728". As John writes, "Wow. You'll just have to see it to believe it":

Prison officers have been told not to refer to their charges as "inmates" because it might offend them.

Ministers claim the age-old term is not appropriate if criminals are to be treated with "respect and dignity".

...Earlier this year prison inspectors at Bullingdon jail in Oxfordshire, said prisoners should be addressed by their first names, given free condoms and be served evening meals later time to stop them feeling hungry in the night.

In 2006, the Chief Inspector of Prisons, Anne Owers, criticised jail staff for calling prisoners "cons".

Meanwhile, another English institution isn't crazy about its colloquial name: "The new £4.7m school that won't call itself a 'school'... because it has 'negative connotations.'"

For some thoughts on the cause of this societal self-lobotomization, here's another link to the Linda Kimball post we mentioned earlier today.

As the denizens of Berkeley celebrate the incoming Obama administration by remembering the aura of the penumbra of a vaguely remembered emotion called patriotism (having long since confused it with nationalism and filed it away under the heading of Scoundrel, Last Refuge Of), Orrin Judd responds, "If you're only 'loyal' when your preference prevails, it is yourself you love, not your country."

See also this lengthy post from Linda Kimball titled "The New Left, Cultural Marxism, and Psychopolitics Disguised as Multiculturalism."

"Bad move Number 1: Wearing a Nazi outfit. Bad move Number 2: Pointing a rifle at police:

The University of Washington student shot to death by police in the first hours of 2009 after pointing a World War II-vintage rifle at officers had an abiding fascination with the past, but no love of Nazism.

The 22-year-old student of German and Scandinavian history was wearing a Nazi-era uniform when two Seattle police officers shot him early Thursday morning near the door of his University District apartment.

According to police, officers were called to the 5200 block of 17th Avenue Northeast to investigate a report of two or three men firing weapons into the air. Officers say they fired on the man after he brandished what was described by witnesses as a bolt-action rifle.

Stupid fool--if you're going to reenact World War II, follow the lead of the Batley Townswomen's Guild:





On-campus Liberal Fascism of a different sort observed here.

This is fiendishly brilliant:

As a prank, students from local high schools have been taking advantage of the county's Speed Camera Program in order to exact revenge on people who they believe have wronged them in the past, including other students and even teachers.

Students from Richard Montgomery High School dubbed the prank the Speed Camera "Pimping" game, according to a parent of a student enrolled at one of the high schools.

Originating from Wootton High School, the parent said, students duplicate the license plates by printing plate numbers on glossy photo paper, using fonts from certain websites that "mimic" those on Maryland license plates. They tape the duplicate plate over the existing plate on the back of their car and purposefully speed through a speed camera, the parent said. The victim then receives a citation in the mail days later.

Students are even obtaining vehicles from their friends that are similar or identical to the make and model of the car owned by the targeted victim, according to the parent.

"This game is very disturbing," the parent said. "Especially since unsuspecting parents will also be victimized through receipt of unwarranted photo speed tickets.

The parent said that "our civil rights are exploited," and the entire premise behind the Speed Camera Program is called into question as a result of the growing this fad among students.

As Mark Hemingway writes, "Yes, it would be just awful if the speed camera program was called into question as a result of this."

Betsy Newmark reminds readers of the other side of Che Guevara:

Like the useful idiots who used to proudly wear their Mao jackets, now we have uncounted millions buying the Che T Shirts, putting up the poster, getting a Che tattoo, and buying tickets to see movies that portray Guevara as simply an idealistic revolutionary out to help the underclass. Actor Benicio del Toro who portrays him in the current film compares Che to Jesus except without that whole turn-the-other-cheek nonsense. It's a depressing commentary on the delusions of idealism that have led so many to idolize this guy and turn their own cheek to the reality of history.

Of course, as Mark Gladdblatt reminds us with a round-up of some of Che's more infamous quotes, the real Che was just a tad less sentimental than his modern disciples:

"In fact, if Christ himself stood in my way, I, like Nietzsche, would not hesitate to squish him like a worm."

Which of course sounds like something your average university Decon 101 professor would say to his freshman class. No wonder radical college professors like Bill Ayers (who emulated Che's actions) and Ward Churchill (who nostalgically emulates Che's poses) think he's Che chic.

The inadvertent Desperate Housewives edition of a German scientific publication.

(Via Maggie's Farm.)

"You think, I dare say, that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We're destroying words -- scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We're cutting the language down to the bone. The Eleventh Edition won't contain a single word that will become obsolete before the year 2050.'"

Update: More from Roger Kimball.

Ron Radosh notes that much of the country have confused politics and religion:

If you consider Obama the closest man can get to God, you are probably among those who think that George W. Bush is the closest man can get to being the devil. As Canadian journalist Robert Fulford writes in The National Post, "liberal Americans who see the Republicans as the party of the devil have enjoyed eight years of intense self-righteousness." These are about to end, thankfully.

Actually, (and it's safe to say that Radosh would agree with this), if you literally think either man is the closest one can get to God or the devil, you're insane.

Radosh adds, "As Obama takes over our nation's helm, hopefully more reasoned opinion will prevail on the question of George W. Bush's legacy as President", adding some thoughts on how history will view Bush. That's a topic that's also being explored by David Frum and Victor Davis Hanson this weekend. It's safe to say that history in toto will likely be much kinder to Bush than the cartoon caricature that's been created by the media, academia, and the left (sorry for the redundancy), once the 2004 election year and the media's coverage of Katrina the following year allowed the festering emotions on the left to burst, to borrow Charles Krauthammer's metaphor.

Though as with President Nixon, numerous leftwing historians will have to continue to justify the staggering amount of hatred they've invested in the man for ideological reasons, especially since, as was the case with Nixon, Bush's policies weren't all that different from his immediate predecessor.

Headline via the Derb; it perfectly fits this example of what hopefully is a one-off leftwinger's meltdown, and not a trend, transforming Thanksgiving into yet another holiday that Dare Not Speak Its Name.

Related: Heard through the Grapevine, Greg Gutfeld rounds up his Thanksiving Turkey list.

PJTV subscribers can watch Evan Coyne Malone's 88-minute Indoctrinate U video here.

For my 2006 interview with Evan on DIY video, click here.

Gee, it's always fun to see a leading German magazine running a photo of a US president with a bullet hole in his forehead.

In more "Deutschland is happy and gay" news, "German Students Lay Waste to Holocaust Exhibit."

(H/T: Steve Green, who writes, "Just like Herr Hasselhoff, we're big in Germany!")

The Onion: "Should The Government Stop Dumping Money Into A Giant Hole?"

Meanwhile, in a story that both indirectly involves The Onion and seems tailor made for it, a college professor has sued students who've slandered him:

After you've been called racist by some students, can you sue to get your reputation back?

Richard J. Peltz, who teaches law at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, tried. The idea of suing students intrigued and worried many observers of the professoriate, and Peltz's case prompted much discussion about free speech and the respect that should be accorded both professors and students. Peltz has now dropped his suit -- but he did so only after the law school agreed to fully investigate the charges against him and after he received a letter affirming that, based on that investigation, he had done nothing racist or inappropriate.

The university has also agreed to discuss allowing Peltz to again teach required courses, which he was barred from offering once the complaints against him were filed.

* * *

The demands for Peltz to be punished and removed from teaching required courses came from the Black Law Student Association at Little Rock and from a local group of black lawyers -- groups whose leaders Peltz sued and who did not respond to requests for comment either now or when the suit was filed. The complaints concerned a series of class discussions in his constitutional law course that touched in some way or another on race or affirmative action. The complaints started after Peltz participated in a campus debate on affirmative action -- at the invitation of the black law students' group -- and argued against it.

The various accusations against Peltz were circulated to people at the law school in memos that Peltz cited in his defamation suit. In his own detailed accounting of the charges, now backed by the university, he answers the charges against him point by point.

One of the examples of his alleged racial insensitivity was that he used an article on the death of Rosa Parks from The Onion to prompt class discussion. The black students' memo called The Onion "a conservative based medium that uses satire" and said that the article "poked fun at the contribution Rosa Parks made" to the civil rights movement. As Peltz has noted, The Onion is not seen by most people as conservative and in fact regularly makes fun of conservatives (as well as liberals), and the article in question appears to mock, not Parks, but Republicans who think that racial discrimination is all in the past.

(Via Glenn Reynolds.)

Power Line goes "Inside the mind of an 'Obamacon'"--who all but says, "As a Conservative, I Must Say I Do Quite Like the Cut of this Obama Fellow's Jib."

Related: I'm not at all sure if I want to take her up on her invitation, but Noemie Emery asks us to "Meet the Fastidiocons"--whose model of the perfect conservative Republican, as Emery notes, is apparently Merkin Muffley himself, Adlai Stevenson.

Forget the Black Panthers, hobnobbing with High Society on Park Avenue, happily dining on "asparagus tips in mayonnaise dabs, and meatballs petites au Coq Hardi". Bill Ayers is the workingman's unrepentant former domestic terrorist, and as such has earned longest of long shot third party presidential candidate Dave Burge's coveted support.

(Sirhan Sirhan could not be reached for comment.)

From the department of "Be Careful What You Wish For", in my recent "Bonnie & Nixon" video, I incorporated a little of the audio from Bobby Kennedy's March 1968 speech at the University of Kansas, in which he quoted early 20th century progressive William Allen White's call for violence and upheaval by way of higher education:

"I am also glad to come to the home state of another great Kansan, who wrote, 'If our colleges and universities do not breed men who riot, who rebel, who attack life with all their youthful vision and vigor then there is something wrong with our colleges. The more riots that come on college campuses, the better the world for tomorrow.'"

As to bring things full circle (and then some), note who's namechecked on the dedication page of a book authored by a noted '60s rioter and rebel turned academician much in the news recently.

Over the weekend, Michelle Malkin pasted up quite a rogue's gallery of the violent left. John Hawkins provides an equal number of quotes to go along with them.

Just don't expect the Victorian Gentleman to pay much attention.

Jonah Goldberg once described feckless Europe as the world's biggest college campus. Michael Barone and Mark Steyn wonder if that dubious distinction will quickly be supplanted by America under an Obama administration.

Mark Sheldon of IlliniPundit writes, "I got a call yesterday from Steven Gray, a reporter for Time magazine who was in town today doing an article on student voter registration":

He left a message on my voice mail asking for ten minutes of my time. I didn't get back to him so he showed up in my office today. He asked for five minutes, no doubt noticing how busy I was and I politely said no. He comes back with..."come on, just five minutes?"

I told him no, because first, I was busy, and two, I really had no idea what he would do with the video he was planning to shoot of me. He gave a little roll of the eyes and so I asked if I could have an unedited copy of the entirety of what he taped of me. He said "No one does that!" That was the end of the conversation.

He seemed like a nice guy and I have no particular reason to doubt his integrity as a reporter. Except for his instant negative reaction to my request.

Glenn Reynolds, Instapundit, has suggested that everyone bring their own cameras to interviews. I was a little busy to try that stunt, so I went with the next best thing. I wasn't surprised that the reaction was negative, if for no other reason than I expect my response was pretty much out of the blue.

Not doing the interview is probably a good career move. After all, if Time does you right, you get 15 minutes of fame. If they do you wrong, you get a lifetime of infamy on their website.

No hard feelings Mr. Gray. Next time I won't ask for the tape, I'll take Reynolds' advice and bring my own camera.

I guess it's a form of progress that Gray's reply was simply a startled, "No one does that!", because a decade ago, our sensitive legacy media considered taping your own interview "intimidation", as former CBS journalist Bernard Goldberg wrote in Arrogance, his sequel to his first inside the trenches book on media bias:

You know the old saying "They can dish it out but they can't take it"?

In October 1999 the ABC newsmagazine 20/20 was about to air a story on a man named Michael Ellis, the founder and CEO of a company that markets a controversial weight-loss pill. It was the kind of investigation that doesn't always end well for the person on the other end of the camera, the one being interviewed. So, fearing his comments might be taken out of context and that the interview might be edited to make him look bad, before the 20/20 piece aired Ellis took the unedited transcript and video of the entire interview-which he'd recorded on his own-and put it out on the World Wide Web.

This made people at ABC News very angry. In fact, one vice-president told the New York Times, without a hit of irony, that "We don't want other people attempting to get into and shift the journalism process." [Things were much more fun for the legacy media when they had a monopoly--Ed]

Next to be heard was former ABC News Vice President Richard Wald, now teaching young journalists at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. Wald called the CEO's strategy, "a not-so-subtle form of intimidation".

Got that? When the media disseminates information about "other people", it's news. When "other people" disseminate information about themselves, it's intimidation.

It didn't take long for the tsunami to reach CBS News, where its president, Andrew Heyward, put out the following in-house memo. I share it with you now, in its entirety.

You can read Heyward's memo at my original blog post on the topic from 2005. Bernie doesn't mention if CBS typed it up on the 1973 edition of Microsoft Word or not, though.

(H/T: IP)

Since I spent a semester learning at NYU, it's only fair that I return the favor. Their Department of Psychology is hosting an online academic research study "to learn more about the psychological bases of political attitudes and voting behavior", as their Website puts it.

They've emailed me, along with other bloggers, to ask that their readers take part in their survey, which takes about 15 minutes to complete, once you start here.

It's compare and contrast time! First up, this passage from academia's Ayers apologia:

All citizens, but particularly teachers and scholars, are called upon to challenge orthodoxy, dogma, and mindless complacency, to be skeptical of authoritative claims, to interrogate and trouble the given and the taken-for-granted. Without critical dialogue and dissent we would likely be burning witches and enslaving our fellow human beings to this day. The growth of knowledge, insight, and understanding--- the possibility of change--- depends on that kind of effort, and the inevitable clash of ideas that follows should be celebrated and nourished rather than crushed. Teachers have a heavy responsibility, a moral obligation, to organize classrooms as sites of open discussion, free of coercion or intimidation.

As witnessed by this moment at Brandeis:

Professor Donald Hindley, on the faculty for 48 years, teaches a course on Latin American politics. Last fall, he described how Mexican migrants to the United States used to be discriminatorily called "wetbacks." An anonymous student complained to the administration accusing Mr. Hindley of using prejudicial language. It was the first complaint against him in 48 years.

After an investigation, during which Mr. Hindley was not told the nature of the complaint, Brandeis Provost Marty Krauss informed Mr. Hindley that "The University will not tolerate inappropriate, racial and discriminatory conduct by members of its faculty." A corollary accusation was that students suffered "significant emotional trauma" when exposed to such a term. An administration monitor was assigned to his class. Threatened with "termination," Mr. Hindley was ordered to take a sensitivity-training class.

Call it "The Tyranny of Nice", to coin a phrase.

Or call it Anarcho-Authoritarianism, to borrow from an Fred Siegel's look at H.L. Mencken from a few years ago in the Weekly Standard, which I flashed back to earlier today, mainly because I was looking for a euphemism for "radical chic" in my post linking to Roger L. Simon's "Running On Empty" reminiscences on Bernadine Dohrn and her apologists in Hollywood:

The Sage of Baltimore needs to be placed in a broader intellectual context. The man who is still selectively celebrated by people like Rodgers, as if he were nothing more or less than an American iconoclast, was one of a number of anti democratic thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic. Some of them, like D.H. Lawrence, were proto-fascists; others, like H.G. Wells, were apologists for Stalin [Wells was no slouch as a proto-fascist himself, either--Ed]. But they all denounced democracy in the name of vitalism, eugenics, and a caste system run by an elite of superior men.

Part of the reason it's so hard to make sense of Mencken is that he was, paradoxically, an anarcho-authoritarian. He agreed with the American Civil Liberties Union on the importance of free speech. But while that organization, under the influence of principled men such as Felix Frankfurter, argued for such freedoms on the grounds that "a marketplace of ideas" (to use Justice Holmes's term) was the best method of arriving at the truth, Mencken supported it in order to shield superior men like himself from being hobbled by the little people. For the same reason, Mencken was a near anarchist when it came to America, but an authoritarian when it came to the iron rule of the Kaiser and General Ludendorff. We are more familiar with anarcho-Stalinists such as William Kunstler, who had a parallel attitude toward the United States and the Soviet empire, but it was Mencken who blazed the trail down which Kunstler and his ilk would travel.

That Ayers and Dohrn were consciously or not exploring concepts that were well over 60 years old at the height of their terrorist activities actually isn't all that surprising. When you're starting from zero, to borrow Tom Wolfe's line, it's easy to forget that you're also running in place--or at least in circles.

Kathy Shaidle suggests that the McCain campaign should make Bill Ayers "the hippie O.J.", adding:

It doesn't matter when Obama met up with Ayers, or how many meetings they ever had.

It's about the fact that Ayers went from domestic terrorist to "respected community leader", to the point where Ayers was throwing well attended fundraisers for Obama, and they sat on boards together.

Bill Ayers should never have achieved such respectable positions in the first place.

Bill Ayers should be sitting in jail, not on boards!

But that's how the 1960s Left's reputation-laundering works. Look at Angela Davis, and the convicted felon and torturer who invented (the Marxist inspired "holiday") Kwanzaa and, like Davis, is now a tenured prof.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, Ayers was quoted in the New York Times as saying he and his wife only regretted that they hadn't blown up more buildings. People were reminded that Ayers wife praised the Manson family murders.

That story was widely remarked upon for incredibly obvious reasons.

That story alone would make any decent, intelligent person say afterward: "Wow, I better not be seen anywhere near this guy, let alone sit on a board with him or go to his frickin' house. Boy, would THAT ever look bad."

So that means Obama isn't a decent, intelligent person. Period.

He's just another craven, arrogant, Chicago style politician.

The McCain campaign needs to spin this as an anti-hippie, anti-lefty, culture wars story:

Ayers and his wife are dangerous criminals and traitors who got away with it, and are now well off and respected. At least the Rosenbergs got the chair...

Look at how average Americans view O.J. -- make Ayers the hippie O.J.

Ask folks how they'd feel if Charles Mason was a professor now too?

Look:

a guy who has been photographed, as late as 2001, stomping on the American flag is one of Obama's supporters. [Obama served with Ayers on a board during this period, Charles Johnson notes--Ed.]

It doesn't matter if Obama denounces Ayers tomorrow.

It doesn't matter if their connection is/was "tenuous".

Here's what matters:

What does it tell you about Obama and his policies and his worldview that people like Ayers and his ilk are obviously going to vote for the guy?

Do you really want to vote for the same guy that unrepentant, unpunished domestic terrorists vote for?

Yes or no?

Pretty simple, but the McCain camp is blowing it.

Of course--but that doesn't prevent the AP from slagging anyone attacking their candidate and friends.

Meanwhile, Ed Morrissey notes another former associate of Obama who openly* called for the US invading Israel:

Power's ultimate aim is to send a massive American or Western force into Israel to stop what Power apparently sees as an Israeli genocide against the Palestinians. She specifically states that the force has to be "massive", not like a Srebrenica- or Bosnia-sized force. Why would it need to be so large? In order to neutralize the Israeli Defense Force, and protect the forces of Fatah and Hamas.

Had Barack Obama kicked her off of his advisory panel (rumored to number 300) after making remarks like this, it could have assuaged fears about his intentions towards Israel. Instead, he invited Power to advise him after making these remarks. She resigned only after calling Hillary a monster and after insinuating that Obama may not retreat from Iraq in 16 months if the ground situation changed -- which Obama later adopted as his own position after the primaries.

The interview ran in 2002, the period when the left essentially went to ground during the culture war in the immediate wake of 9/11, only to explode in often violent protests and bitter rhetoric in 2003 and 2004, which Charles Krauthammer memorably described as "the Pressure Cooker Theory of Hydraulic Release."

Read More »

"Political humor is no longer welcome in Academia as administrators choke the life out of parody."

Gee, now there's a shock.

(Via Maggie's Farm, where it's safe to say that satire survives unscathed.)

Well actually, of course you can--but that was before science got Title Nined, as Rod Dreher and John Tierney note. The latter writes:

Until recently, the impact of Title IX, the law forbidding sexual discrimination in education, has been limited mostly to sports. But now, under pressure from Congress, some federal agencies have quietly picked a new target: science.

The National Science Foundation, NASA and the Department of Energy have set up programs to look for sexual discrimination at universities receiving federal grants. Investigators have been taking inventories of lab space and interviewing faculty members and students in physics and engineering departments at schools like Columbia, the University of Wisconsin, M.I.T. and the University of Maryland.

So far, these Title IX compliance reviews haven't had much visible impact on campuses beyond inspiring a few complaints from faculty members. (The journal Science quoted Amber Miller, a physicist at Columbia, as calling her interview "a complete waste of time.") But some critics fear that the process could lead to a quota system that could seriously hurt scientific research and do more harm than good for women.

The members of Congress and women's groups who have pushed for science to be "Title Nined" say there is evidence that women face discrimination in certain sciences, but the quality of that evidence is disputed. Critics say there is far better research showing that on average, women's interest in some fields isn't the same as men's.

In this debate, neither side doubts that women can excel in all fields of science. In fact, their growing presence in former male bastions of science is a chief argument against the need for federal intervention.

Read the rest.

As Roger Kimball notes:

Buried in a story about baby-boomer profs retiring:

In general, information on professors’ political and ideological leanings tends to be scarce.

Clearly, more research needs to be done: the Ford Foundation should fund a multi-year study to ascertain the “political and ideological leanings” of professors. That’s one of life’s great mysteries.

Indeed. Especially when the headline of the Times' article is, "The ’60s Begin to Fade as Liberal Professors Retire."

But the truly curious thing is why that era has lived on for so long--1968 was forty years ago; as far away from us as Clara Bow and Calvin Coolidge were to the sixties. So why has its juvenile ethos cast such as a long-lasting spell on the left? As I wrote a few months ago:

Tom Stoppard describes 1968 as "The year of the posturing rebel". Or as John Lennon confessed a decade later:

"I dabbled in politics in the late 1960s and 1970s, more out of guilt than anything. Guilt for being rich and guilt thinking that perhaps love and peace isn't enough and you have to go and get shot or something, or get punched in the face to prove I'm one of the people. I was doing it against my instincts."

Fascinating though, that the 1960s and '70s, a period that was rife with poseurs such as Lennon, is still influencing us to this day. You can see it in music, in the form of ersatz nostalgia acts such as Lenny Kravitz and Sheryl Crow, who dress in period costume (sort of the tie-dyed equivalent of greasers like Sha Na Na in leather jackets and D.A.s in 1975, or a big band that same year still playing in tan dinner jackets and bow ties). Or much more dangerously, in a politics that still takes it rhetoric from a period now four decades in the past, whether it's John Kerry in 2004, or Rev. Wright in 2008.

But then, when starting from zero, one is always tempted to stay trapped in Year One.

Sadly, perhaps until this countdown reaches zero.

From Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five:

'How-how does the Universe end?' said Billy.

'We blow it up, experimenting with new fuels for our flying
saucers. A Tralfamadorian test pilot presses a starter button, and the
whole Universe disappears.' So it goes.

``If You know this," said Billy, 'isn't there some way you can
prevent it? Can't you keep the pilot from pressing the button?'

``He has always pressed it, and he always will. We always let him
and we always will let him. The moment is structured that way.'

"Alan Boyle reports on litigation over the Large Hadron Collider, and claims that it will bring about the end of the world universe."

Kids, you can trust Betsy Newmark on this one--she's a teacher: "If you're going to plagiarize a graduation speech, don't take one from The Onion."

Pretty amusing anecdote from The Diplomad, who writes, "Go to ‘Google,’ type in the phrase ‘highly educated voters,’ hit ‘Search News.’ Go ahead. We'll wait . . . OK, what do you get? All sorts of stories about Obama voters, and how he attracts the ‘highly educated.’ You will get the same from the pundits on network and cable news: lots of blather about how Obama appeals to ‘highly educated’ Americans":

A few years ago, more than I care to mention, I headed a large office at the State Department. I got tasked with hiring a couple of Presidential Management Interns (PMIs). These PMIs come from the elite of the elite student body at the elite of the elite universities. They get hired on a temporary basis and then, usually, get offered prestigious jobs in the government. I was told, in no uncertain terms, that whatever else I did, I had to hire women. So I began to pore over the resumes. My heart sank. I felt inadequate and so, so inferior to these kids. Their resumes, impeccably printed and organized, using dozens of words ending in "-ization," and listing prowess with a dazzling array of complex software programs, described accomplishments beyond my wildest dreams -- especially for when I was the applicants' age!

I thought I should resign and give up my job to one of the "brilliant" child wonders. Ah, naive me. I obviously had spent too much time overseas. I saw resumes as truthful documents actually written by the applicants, applicants, in this case, full of accomplishments and possessed of massive brains throbbing with energy and ideas. As I, however, kept reading, even slow-witted me began to notice oddities. They all began to look the same: the font, the format, the wording, the list of classes and even -- horrors! -- the "accomplishments." I noted this in passing to a cynical old friend (now, alas, departed) who worked in "human resources" (what a great phrase that). He laughed, "You dope! They get classes on how to write resumes! They have professors and computer programs that put these things together for them." (Remember, folks, computers were new things back then.) He said, "Just randomly pick a couple of women students, they're all the same, hire'em, and move on."

I could not do that. I stole a friend's idea and devised "The World War II Test." I invited the applicants for interviews. These PMI wannabes came off as slick and somewhat rude. I noted something among my subjects, a sense of entitlement, they all, to varying degrees, emitted a message along the lines of "Why are you bothering me with this silly interview? I am obviously brilliant. I have a degree from Columbia. I am not going to spend my whole life as you have in this stupid bureaucracy. I just need this to add to my resume. I am in a hurry." I hit them with the test, which consisted of about dozen questions about WWII and its aftermath. I recall a few,

Can you tell me how US troops got into Europe in the first place? When was WWII? (I would accept a variety of answers as long as the applicant could defend the dates as the true start and end of WWII.) What nations comprised the principal Allied and Axis powers? Who was Neville Chamberlain? What he did he do at Munich and with whom? Who was Mussolini? What did he do to Ethiopia? Who was Stalin? Who was Hirohito? What was D-Day? What President ordered the dropping of the atomic bombs and why? Can you name a result of the Conference at Yalta? What was the Berlin Airlift?

Of the 14 or 15 applicants I interviewed, only one got them all right -- the only male in the crowd, by the way. None, zero, zip of the rest got even ONE right. Not a single one. A very irritated applicant asked me, "Do we really need to know this old stuff?" I noted that we worked with NATO and Europe, hence, it was important to know the background that led to the creation of NATO and the then just-concluded Cold War. She stared at me and said, "What does World War II have to do with NATO, the Cold War and Europe?" I promptly offered the job to the male -- oh, the cries from "Human Resources" -- who turned it down for a more lucrative one in the private sector. In the best Foreign Service tradition, I stalled hiring anybody else, let my two-year assignment run out, and left my poor successor to get stuck with one of the clueless ones.

Back to our story. I wonder how many of the "highly educated voters" could pass that WWII test? Or the Vietnam War Test? Or the Cold War test? Or know much about American history? Or understand the economy? And worst of all, the odds are they can't fire a gun, either.

Well, there's always Wikipedia to fall back on...

Found via Michelle Malkin, who spots a school once again conflating pop culture with the real thing.

Last week, we mentioned the strange op-ed by Paul Auster that the New York Times published. The author of the Weekly Standard's Scrapbook column follows up with this:

Readers with long memories will recall the spectacle of Columbia undergraduates--children of privilege enrolled at a distinguished Ivy League institution founded when New York was still a British colony--invading classrooms and administrative offices, manhandling deans, professors, and fellow students, stealing and destroying books and documents, vandalizing chambers devoted to learning, roaming corridors in search of fodder to burn. The Columbia strike of 1968 made a temporary celebrity of a student named Mark Rudd, and publicized the episode's emblematic slogan: "Up against the wall, motherf--r!"

It also unleashed something instructive in Paul Auster:

Speech followed tempestuous speech, the enraged crowd roared with approval, and then someone suggested that we all go to the construction site and tear down the chain-link fence. .  .  . The crowd thought that was an excellent idea, and so off it went, a throng of crazy, shouting students charging off the Columbia campus toward Morningside Park. Much to my astonishment, I was with them. What had happened to the gentle boy who planned to spend the rest of his life sitting alone in a room writing books? He was helping to tear down the fence. He tugged and pulled and pushed along with several dozen -others and, truth be told, found much satisfaction in this crazy, destructive act.

One of the great parlor games of modern scholarship is pondering how the German people--citizens of the land of Bach, Kant, and Goethe--could find themselves marching in step behind Adolf Hitler. Well, Paul Auster and his Boomer companions at Columbia offer a clue. Here is as plain and startling a description of the mob mentality--together with the attendant hysteria and romanticized violence--as you are likely to find in the op-ed pages of the New York Times, nicely camouflaged in the language of nostalgia and social protest.

If, in this presidential election year, anyone wonders how the political left grew estranged from the American mainstream, yielding the politics of the past four decades, they need only read Paul Auster's tribute to the Columbia strike, written "alone in this room with a pen in my hand" as "I realize that I am still crazy, perhaps crazier than ever."

The writer of the Scrapbook adds that every now and then, he's "seized with the thought that the last, best hope of mankind--or at any rate, for our peace of mind--will be the death of the last surviving member of the Baby Boom generation."

Of course, he's far from alone in that department--and for those keeping score at home, just follow along with this easy-to-use toteboard!

Mark Steyn:

Jonah, mortarboarding at Gitmo is when detainees are made to put on a cap and gown and listen to back-to-back commencement addresses by alternating Clinton cabinet secretaries and PBS hosts. Most of them crack during Janet Reno.

I'd say that by far, this is the definitive example of mortarboarding--with this a close second. But the competition is fierce, with numerous new potential contestants participating each spring.

Stefan Beck quotes a terrific Theodore Dalrymple anecdote in the middle of his post on the “abortion as art” scandal involving Yale senior Aliza Shvarts:

Anyone seeking a little comic relief in the wake of Yale University’s alternately sickening and embarrassing “abortion as art” scandal need look no further than Terry Zwigoff’s 2006 comedy Art School Confidential. It’s very loosely based on a comic by Daniel Clowes, which appears in this anthology and is in many ways superior to the film as a satire of the mind-bending pretentiousness and inanity one finds in even the finest fine arts academies.

As I recall, one panel in Clowes’s original depicts the “old tampon-in-a-teacup trick”: Pressed for time? Cobble together some loaded imagery and insist with a straight face that it “raises questions” about something or other. “Raising questions” has enjoyed a lucrative career as the art world’s biggest con. When the shock-schlock “Sensation” exhibition appeared at the British Royal Academy of Art, Theodore Dalrymple asked its chief of exhibitions, Norman Rosenthal, what value he saw in a giant portrait, made up entirely of tiny handprints, of the child-murderess Myra Hindley. Right on cue, Rosenthal said that “the picture raises interesting questions.”

Dalrymple asked what those might be, politely reminding Mr. Rosenthal that “it must be possible to formulate them in words.” A picture is worth a thousand of them, after all—but in this case the ratio turned out to be more like 1:1, if a sharp intake of breath may count for a word.

Of course, most great works of art do raise questions, but they do so in addition to (for instance) being beautiful, or telling a story, or demonstrating proficiency of some kind. Bad art can rarely claim to do anything but raise questions. Yale senior Aliza Shvarts’s menstruation videos supposedly address “the ambiguity surrounding form and function [sic] of a woman’s body.” If, God forbid, that sounds to you like it might mean something, take a moment to pick it apart. What ambiguity? Is there some fundamental disagreement about whether the female form should function as a tube of red paint?

The fact that ridiculing the project and its unintelligible justification seems redundant is entirely the point. At any point in this project—which at best is a black eye for Yale and a waste of our time and at worst may lead to some lunatic assaulting Ms. Shvarts—an adult could have and should have stepped in and said, “This proposal is nonsense. There is nothing artistic about it and the questions it ‘raises’ are a figment of your imagination. You’re embarrassing yourself and your school.” None did.

Probably for about the same reason that Roger Kimball describes here:

A juror in the obscenity trial over Robert Mapplethorpe’s notorious photographs the S&M homosexual underworld memorably summed up the paralyzed attitude Orwell described. Acknowledging that he did not like Mapplethorpe’s rebarbative photographs, he nonetheless concluded that “if people say it’s art, then I have to go along with it.”

“If people say it’s art, then I have to go along with it.” It is worth pausing to digest that terrifying comment. It is also worth confronting it with a question: Why do so many people feel that if something is regarded as art, they “have to go along with it,” no matter how offensive it might be? Perhaps—just possibly—Aliza Shvarts has reminded us how untrue that statement is. If so, we are in her debt.

Of course, for those who think that a genre of "art" on the cusp of its second century is still "modern", you too can apply to the Yale Art School!

Update: Related thoughts from Maggie's Farm; be sure to follow the links.

The decline and fall of Western Civilization, high and low edition: First, found via the Corner, here's a slice of life amongst the down and out of Commerce City, Colorado, as "Parents Fight Over Which Gang Toddler Should Join":

A couple fighting about which gang their 4-year-old toddler should join caused a public disturbance that resulted in the father's arrest, Commerce City police said Thursday.

On Saturday, Joseph Manzanares stormed into the Hollywood Video store where his girlfriend worked, threatened to kill her and knocked over several video displays and even a computer, Commerce City police Sgt. Joe Sandoval said.

After he ran out of the store, police were called and the 19-year-old was arrested at his home.

His girlfriend told police that they had been arguing about the upbringing of their son and which gang he should belong to. The teen mother, who is black, is a member of the Crips. Manzanares is Hispanic and belongs to the Westside Ballers gang, the woman said.

"They have different ideas on how the baby should be raised. Basically, she said they cannot agree on which gang the baby would 'claim,'" Sandoval said.

Funny, when I was kid, my parents argued over whether I would join Kiwanis or the Rotary Club.

In the past, it was theorized that advanced education was a way out of the lower classes. But the Ivy League is rushing headlong to level the playing field, as this satiric IowaHawk post highlights: Learn art the Yale way, through their exclusive DYNAMIC TRANSGRESSION™ method! Got a body fluid? Then life's your canvas!

Which is certainly a reminder of one of James Lileks' key tenets: "If art contains s***, we should take it at its word."

IowaHawk's post is titled "Close Cover Before Striking", and it's based on the ads one used to find on packs of matches. I wonder what ad was on the pack Virginia Woolf used to fight the heteronormative patriarchy back in 1938?

(70 years ago--which is a reminder at how ancient and clapped out so many "modern" and "transgressive" poses truly are.)

Michael Goldfarb writes:

Last night's episode of Bill Maher's Real Time featured evangelical atheist Richard Dawkins (the very poor man's version of Christopher Hitchens), explaining why scientists can't be certain of much of anything:

I think any scientist would be unwise to commit himself to saying there definitely is not anything. I mean, I can’t definitely commit myself to saying there are no fairies. I’m pretty sure there are no fairies. [laughter] But, I think it would be unscientific to do what the extreme religious people do and say, “I know there is a god.”

It's an interesting contrast to comments by NASA scientist James Hansen earlier this week complaining about a high school textbook that didn't portray global warming as a fact rather than a theory:

Hansen has sent Houghton Mifflin a letter stating that the book's discussion on global warming contained "a large number of clearly erroneous statements" that give students "the mistaken impression that the scientific evidence of global warming is doubtful and uncertain."

So Hansen is certain that global warming is real and the greenhouse gases are the cause. As are Bill Maher, Barack Obama, Al Gore, and every other luminary of the left. Immediately following his interview with Dawkins last night, Maher proceeded to mock Christians for their skepticism of global warming (or indifference, as he would have it), explaining it as a result of their belief in the Rapture. But hasn't the left embraced global warming as their own version of the Rapture? They do not harbor any doubt, but believe with the fervor of religious conviction that the end of civilization will come as a result of consumerism. And they seem completely unaware that in believing this, they have shed the very skepticism that is supposed to define the secular left.

I don't think you can really dub them secular these days, now that they've found an alternative religion to embrace wholeheartedly.

From The Ominous Parallels by Leonard Peikoff (though also quoted here, not surprisingly):

The only person who is still a private individual in Germany," boasted Robert Ley, a member of the Nazi hierarchy, after several years of Nazi rule, "is somebody who is asleep."

Ghost of a Flea's take on academia up in the 49th parallel (to namecheck a superb movie about a much more humanitarian Canada long since gone), sounds remarkably ominous itself:

People wonder why I quit university teaching. Imagine an office - all your colleagues and all your supervisors and anyone with a say in your tenure prospects, your research funding and your publications - where everyone organizes their careers in such a way that a "human rights" commission would have no reason to object. Their teaching practices, their research, their political views; everything they think and do including and especially their "private" lives from the television they (do not) watch to the fast food they (do not) eat to the sex lives they (do not) allow themselves to have. Even the concept of a "private" life dismissed as reactionary and/or illusory and in any event subject to the scrutiny of any undergraduate with internet access and a grudge. That is the life I escaped.

Can't say I blame him--though I imagine life in America's elite universities probably isn't much different. Like the man said: "1984 -- A user manual for lefties; a warning for the rest of us."

(H/T: SDA)

Mike S. Adams:

"There’s really nothing like a dose of condemnation from a moral relativist."

But are you sure she really fits the bill?

Jacob Sullum writes that "There are two kinds of people in the world":

The kind who think it's perfectly reasonable to strip-search a 13-year-old girl suspected of bringing ibuprofen to school, and the kind who think those people should be kept as far away from children as possible. The first group includes officials at Safford Middle School in Safford, Arizona, who in 2003 forced eighth-grader Savana Redding to prove she was not concealing Advil in her crotch or cleavage.

Add the zero-intelligence tolerance insanity of the crotch inspector to school junk food patrols and the asthma Nazi, which the late Cathy Seipp reported on back in 2002.

Anne Jacobson drops by "Harvard’s Segregated Gym". It's yet another step on academia's weird, growing obsession with Separate But Equal education, and another milestone towards, as Stanley Kurtz writes, the "Mother of All Cultural Battles."

Glenn Reynolds links to a new study on academia's monoculture: "OLD LINE: Left-leaning faculty are a right-wing myth. New line: Faculty Are Liberal — Who Cares?"

Isn't this pretty much the exact tone that many in Big Media have been taking since key media events during the first half of the decade beginning with 9/11, quickly followed by the rise of the Blogosphere, the publishing of former CBS insider Bernard Goldberg's books on bias, and the 2004 election? Or as I wrote last year:

Back in February of 2004, I wrote:

After decades of trying to claim impartiality, there have been several admissions lately by the media that they are indeed, biased.

A theme I followed up shortly thereafter in a couple of interviews with Bernard Goldberg at Tech Central Station, and an article a few months ago for the New Individualist titled Atlas Mugged, which explored the push-pull interaction between old media and new. The trend away from an 80-year old definition of objectivity was also also spotted last year by James Taranto, who wrote:

Something odd is afoot in America's elite media--increasingly, journalists are unabashed about admitting their liberal bias.

Much like the New York Times coming clean in 2004, it has something of a "Gosh, who knew!" quality to it, but add this announcement to the list as well. And as Stephen Spruiell asks, how long before their parent network makes official what is otherwise remarkably obvious.

I think it's a healthier trend for both institutions to at least admit their biases--since everyone, and every institution has them--than the former see-no-evil approach which dominated academia and the media for much of the 20th century.

Indeed we could, but this latest round of "pushers" aren't exactly the best material to write the backstory for Superfly: The Next Generation. Up on the Drudge Report is this headline:

School candy ban spurs underground 'sugar pushers'...

Who, other than the nanny staters, didn't see this one coming from a mile away?

Title by Jonah, review of Horton Hears a Who by The Conservative Mindcleaner:

It looks like I got Jonah Goldberg's attention with this one. I don't know what to make of his "Uh oh" though. Let's just say I'm not the only one who's going to make these connections. I might be the only one stupid enough, however, to say it out loud.

I wouldn't call it "stupid", as Libertas also noticed this otherwise probably innocuous film's inevitable Hollywood sucker punch moment.

As I noted three years ago:

Joanne Jacobs writes that all too frequently these days, pushers supplying contraband are roaming the halls of American schools--who have only themselves to blame.

The contraband in question back then? Candy, which is increasingly verboten on school property. And a bag of illicit Skittles has derailed (temporarily one hopes) an eighth-grade honors student in Connecticut.

Fascinating that boomers did all sorts of really illicit substances in the 1960s, and endlessly shouted "question authority." But now, as they approach their dotage and are the authority, they get the vapors from trivialities as silly as a bag of candy in school.

(Via Jules Crittenden.)

Update: "School clears kids in contraband candy caper", AP reports. And the student learns a valuable lesson regarding how juvenile the alleged leftwing grown-ups running his school are.

Via Orrin Judd, who notes, "The Right Has All The Fun." Heh, indeed.

Glenn Reynolds spots creeping Sharia in the Ivy League school, but then, there's been a growing back to the future trend towards the notion of "Separate But Equal" in general on campuses throughout America. Michael Graham's Redneck Nation remains as prescient as ever.

Todd Seavey writes:

Why, then, the eco-maniacal insistence on maintaining the ban, even in the face of massive human suffering caused by the elimination of DDT?

Around the time of the DDT ban, Dr. Charles Wurster, chief scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund, may have revealed how some environmentalists really feel about human beings when he was asked if people might die as a result of the DDT ban: "Probably...so what? People are the causes of all the problems; we have too many of them. We need to get rid of some of them, and this is as good a way as any."

He's not the only academician to posit such nihilistic fantasies of course; National Geographic has even produced a supersized snuff film just for this crowd.

Power Line and Jules Crittenden do a thorough job of demolishing an article by Susan Jacoby of the Washington Post titled, "The Dumbing of America: Call Me a Snob, But Really, We’re a Nation of Dunces." As Jules notes:

Like most nostalgia fests, this one envisions a past more intellectual than I suspect it actually was, tosses out all kinds figures about how dumb we are … most of them without any prior reference to indicate whether it’s an improvement or not … and while decrying the dropoff in reading of paper products in the computer age, neglects to note that reading of material from around the world, previously unseen except in the immediate vicinity of distant publishing plants, has skyrocketed.

In his book of the same name, Alvin Toffler posits that the beginning of the Third Wave of history occurred in the late 1950s, when white collar jobs in the US first began to outnumber their blue collar equivalents. Given the slow by inexorable shift that transistion marked towards an information-based economy, coupled with the mania of American parents to send children to college since at least the 1970s, it seems reasonable to assume that Americans as a whole are actually better educated today than they were at any time in the past.

But look at what's also changed during that period: first, the fracturing of a shared monoculture, some of which occurred deliberately, and some the accidental byproduct of technology, such as the hundreds of channels of cable and satellite TV, and more significantly, the launch of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s.

The fracturing of mass culture also has its benefits, of course. But it's been coupled with the death of middlebrow culture and the corresponding coarsening of the media in general, along with the rise of political correctness and the corresponding dumbing down of the educational system. (Not to mention journalism!) As one of Jules' commenters notes, "Isn’t it ironic that the same intellectuals that denigrated Western intellectual history as the product of Dead White European Males now complain that Americans have become anti-intellectual?"

John Stephenson's blog has a round-up of the early details, here.

Kathy Shaidle links to this Gawker collection of clips of movies about the newspaper industry. She spots someone in the comments saying, "We watched All The President's Men in my news reporting class." I can't really tell from the comment when this student was in school, but it's a pretty safe bet that more than a few journalism classes in America will be running that movie this year for their students. Just last month in the Washington Post, David Simon waxed mawkishly nostalgic and wrote, "Bright and shiny we were in the late 1970s, packed into our bursting journalism schools, dog-eared paperback copies of 'All the President's Men' and 'The Powers That Be' atop our Associated Press stylebooks."

But at 32 years old, the movie version of All The President's Men is these days the equivalent of a journalism class in 1976 running His Girl Friday, with Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell. Only instead of dark suits, fedoras, fast talking dames and candlestick phones, it's fat ties, polyester and IBM Selectric typewriters. But both movies reflect journalistic paradigms long since passed into history, no matter how painful that might be for newspaper journalists and the professors who taught them to come to grips with.

Stanley Kurtz writes, "For all the grousing about liberal bias in education, conservatives have done virtually nothing substantive to combat it":

Unfortunately, the Bush administration has intentionally avoided fighting the education battles that earlier administrations pursued under the leadership of Bill Bennett and Lynn Cheney. Leading a public campaign against the bias and foibles of the American education system could have put a far larger question mark behind the taken-for-granted leftism students find at school.

Read the whole thing.

Robert Bidinotto wonders if Super Tuesday (aka--today!) will annoint a new round of American "progressives". Meanwhile in the Christian Science Monitor, Jonah Goldberg (whom Bidinotto references in his post) suggests "You want a more 'progressive' America? Careful what you wish for: Voters should remember what happened under Woodrow Wilson."

Ironically, for a book with a smiley face with a Hitler mustache on the cover, Jonah's book may cause the most damage to Wilson's reputation, simply because so many inconvient truths of his presidency have been tossed down the memory hole by successive generations of Wilson's fellow "progressive" academics.

(Incidentally, I'm at Pajamas HQ in L.A. today, where they'll be having complete Super Duper Mega Ultra Crunktacular Tuesday coverage.)

Back in the mid-1970s, Jimmy Page told an interviewer that "I always thought the good thing about guitar was that they didn't teach it in school." In other words, for Page, and his fellow British guitarists growing up in the late 1950s, rock and roll and the blues were genres you had to be dedicated enough to learn on your own.

Found via Bloggingheads, David Brooks writes that "Miami" Steve Van Zandt, Bruce Springsteen's longtime rhythm guitarist (and eventually, owner of the Bada Bing Club) would like to see that changed:

It seems that whatever story I cover, people are anxious about fragmentation and longing for cohesion. This is the driving fear behind the inequality and immigration debates, behind worries of polarization and behind the entire Obama candidacy.

If you go to marketing conferences, you realize we really are in the era of the long tail. In any given industry, companies are dividing the marketplace into narrower and more segmented lifestyle niches.

Van Zandt has a way to counter all this, at least where music is concerned. He’s drawn up a high school music curriculum that tells American history through music. It would introduce students to Muddy Waters, the Mississippi Sheiks, Bob Dylan and the Allman Brothers. [Gee, not Springsteen, as well?--Ed] He’s trying to use music to motivate and engage students, but most of all, he is trying to establish a canon, a common tradition that reminds students that they are inheritors of a long conversation.

And Van Zandt is doing something that is going to be increasingly necessary for foundations and civic groups. We live in an age in which the technological and commercial momentum drives fragmentation. It’s going to be necessary to set up countervailing forces — institutions that span social, class and ethnic lines.

Music used to do this. Not so much anymore.

Education used to do this as well. Not so much, anymore.

But back to the main point of Brooks and Miami Steve. Jazz was essentially frozen in amber as a creative force once Lincoln Center hired Wynton Marsalis to be its "Musical Director of Jazz." Miami Steve wants to do the same thing to rock. And it's not like education isn't already dominated by Present Tense Culture.

(Or, for another way to look at Brooks' column: this just into the New York Times: Pop culture is fractured and demassified, something that Alvin Toffler predicted 28 years ago.)

I've already linked to this post on Minding The Campus once today, but Thomas Sowell writes that it works both ways, sad to note.

I don't think this counts, except perhaps extremely tangentially, as an example of the Adversarial Campus in action, but still, this doesn't sound like higher education's finest hour:

In 2000, when Mr. Potter was just three years old, Harold Bloom predicted that “[t]he cultural critics will, soon enough, introduce Harry Potter into their college curriculum.” And it came to pass at Stanford University just a few months ago.

Nothing like spending $33,000 or so a year to send your kid to Stanford so that he can study “present-tense culture", no matter how enjoyable the experience may be.

Kathy Shaidle reminds Maureen Dowd who won the Scopes Trial, adding "You're the ones who won't leave it alone."

Maureen might also want to check out this July 2007 essay by Garin Hovannisian, who actually bothered to read the original edition of the book at the heart of the trial, before successive versions were watered down by its publisher--against the wishes of the book's author--to placate school authorities:

George William Hunter's A Civic Biology: Presented in Problems (1914) was the book that sparked the controversy. Condemned as heretical in 1925, today it would seem to be a manual for enlightenment's battle against religion's perceived mysticism. Yet if John Scopes were to teach the very same Civic Biology in a modern classroom, he would probably be put on trial again. Because buried under the dust of history is the fact that this progressive, pro-evolution text was also quite racist.

Take, for example, these lines from page 196 of Hunter's original version:

At the present time there exist upon the earth five races or varieties of man, each very different from the other in instincts, social customs, and, to an extent, in structure. These are the Ethiopian or negro type, originating in Africa; the Malay or brown race, from the islands of the Pacific; the American Indian; the Mongolian or yellow race, including the natives of China, Japan, and the Eskimos; and finally, the highest type of all, the Caucasians, represented by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America.

Hunter was also a proponent of eugenics. "[T]he science of being well born," his text instructed, is an imperative for sophisticated society. "When people marry there are certain things that the individual as well as the race should demand," he wrote, arguing that tuberculosis, epilepsy, and even "feeble-mindedness are handicaps which it is not only unfair but criminal to hand down to posterity."

"If such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading," Hunter lamented in Civic Biology. "Humanity will not allow this but we do have the remedy of separating the sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways preventing intermarriage and the possibilities of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race."

Subsequent editions of the textbook, like the ones I found at the Library of Congress, were cleansed of such views. Terms like "civilized white inhabitants" were disappeared, while references to "evolution" were replaced with "development of man." But these revisions were chiefly the design of Hunter's publishers who, in spite of the author's protests, sought to "omit statements that are likely to give offense to large numbers of people in control of the schools."

Outraged by the "emasculation" of his work and out of patience by 1926, Hunter wrote, "I have never felt so depressed and disgusted with a revision as this one. I thought I had the material for a mighty good book and it was before you people spoiled it."

As Hovannisian writes, it's a book for no seasons. Which is why the inconvenient truth regarding its original contents has been tossed down the memory hole by the left.

Fausta has the details. But somebody should write a book or two about this topic!

Update: Hoax, according to the Daily Princetonian.

Compare and contrast: Over at Pajamas HQ, Aaron Hanscom wonders why college kids are mocking the dead:

More proof that tolerance for murder is becoming a trend comes from the story of two Penn State students who dressed as Virginia Tech shooting victims at a Halloween party. Not even a year has passed since Seung-Hui Cho murdered 32 people in the deadliest school shooting in U.S. history, yet one of the Penn State students was disgusted that a Virginia Tech student created a Facebook group called “People Against This Costume” in response to the tasteless choice of attire.

This is a group of college students who now think it’s trendy to be upset about their friends being killed…The thing is, everybody’s making a big stink about Virginia Tech. Virginia Tech was 32 deaths out of the 26 thousand that happen in America everyday. That’s the problem with college students. They all live in an ivory tower of privilege.

While it’s not politically correct to make a “big stink” about the killings of privileged college students or holiday shoppers at the mall, honoring the murderers of Israelis is PC approved. Consider last year’s big college costume controversy. When Syrian-born engineering student Saad Saadi showed up at a Halloween party dressed as a suicide bomber, University of Pennsylvania President Amy Gutmann had no problem posing with him for a photograph. Gutmann later explained that she wasn’t aware of Saadi’s choice of costume even though he’s shown in the photograph with a kaffiyeh around his head, a toy Kalashnikov rifle in his hand and six plastic sticks of dynamite strapped to his chest. Moreover, Saadi explained that Gutman jokingly asked, “How did they let you through security?” when he asked her to take the photograph with him.

One wonders if Gutmann would have also found the humor in the Nazi costume Prince Harry wore to a party in 2005. Harry would have fit in perfectly in the class of one Harvard University professor, who has described his shock upon learning that the majority of his students didn’t believe anybody was to blame for the Holocaust. He referred to his students’ attitude about the past as “no-fault history.”

Meanwhile, James Lileks scans the boards at Fark and is disappointed--if not exactly shocked--by the nihilism he observes:

There’s a great deadness in many people, a grim harsh joy in the conviction we are just “moist robots,” to use the cynic’s phrase, living our lives in a vast factory that arose by miraculous random happenstance. Nothing amuses them more than belief, and oddly enough, nothing angers them more. It’s not even what you believe. It’s the very fact of believing in something other than Flying Spaghetti Monster photoshop contest deadlines or the enhancements on Episode IV.

Simultaneously, the Denver Post profiles Jeanne Assam:

The guard who saved untold lives at New Life Church gives credit to God for giving her cover, and boosting her firepower as she shot a heavily-armed gunman.

“I give credit to God. I say that very humbly,” said Jeanne Assam. “God was with me, the whole time I was behind cover. Based on the firepower he had, compared to mine.”

“It seemed like it was me, the gunman and God,” Assam said.

Assam spoke at a press conference in Colorado Springs this afternoon. She is one of about 12 armed security officers at New Life Church, according to Pastor Brady Boyd.

She responded when Matthew Murray, 24, began targeting church members in Colorado Springs, after a rampage hours earlier in Arvada in which two missionary training center staff members were killed and two were injured. Two teenagers at New Life were fatally shot, and three others injured before Assam could shoot Murray.

There's something that makes Assam's attitude different than those in the other two items linked above. And I just can't put my finger on it.

Don't worry; it'll come to me eventually.

Recorded last year at Duke, as the college staff and local D.A. were attempting a real life mashup of Bonfire of the Vanities and I Am Charlotte Simmons:

(Many more videos to be found at Fora.TV; hat tip: The Brothers Judd.)

Tim Blair writes:

It’s not often one happens upon a story combining issues of architecture, environmentalism, institutes of higher learning and accidental avian windowcide, let alone such a story written in a manner joyously suggestive of B-grade horror movie previews. For this, we thank the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and journalist Andrea Jones.

As Tim adds, in full Monster Chiller Horror Theater Mode, "Read on. If you dare!"

The Guardian:

As Hitler shouted his way up the political ranks in Germany, the Guardian and Observer misjudged the extent of his early influence, writes Sir Ian Kershaw.

That's not entirely surprising, given the talent pool that the Guardian was presumably drawing upon in the 1930s, which is yet another reason why Winston Churchill was the proverbial lone voice in the wilderness prior to 1939.

Found via Rob Port, who notes that it's "Not very surprising, given that the same publications largely ignore the rising threat of Islamic fascism." Rob adds, "Some things never change, I guess, and some people never learn."

Just ask Columbia University.

Mr. President, we must not allow a mine shaft gap!

In the future, everyone will be Joseph McCarthy for 15 minutes.

(When they're not being Hitler, of course.)

Ann Althouse notices a superstar architect being sued for taking his deconstructionism just a little too seriously:

The building is incredibly cool, a showpiece. Check out these pics of the Stata Center at MIT, designed by Frank Gehry. But MIT is suing, "charging that flaws in his design... one of the most celebrated works of architecture unveiled in years, caused leaks to spring, masonry to crack, mold to grow, and drainage to back up."

Corbusier would have gone from Bauhaus to the poorhouse if his clients sued him along similar lines.

In "Death by Political Correctness", the Weekly Standard's Charlotte Allen performs a detailed forensic reconstruction of the long strange train wreck that is Antioch College.

The New York Post reports:

A swastika was found today spray-painted on the office door of a Jewish professor at Teachers College who studies the Holocaust and vehemently opposed the visit to the Columbia campus by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, cops said.

The reviled image, painted in brown, was discovered at 9:30 a.m. on the office door of Dr. Elizabeth Midlarsky, 66, co-chairwoman of the counseling and clinical psychology department at the college.

As the History News Network wrote last month, Columbia invited Hitler to speak on campus in 1933:

As Prof. Stephen Norwood of the University of Oklahoma has found in his research on the academic community’s response to Hitler in the 1930s, Columbia was not the only prominent U.S. university to behave shamefully with regard to the Nazis. Harvard hosted a visit by Hitler’s foreign press spokesman, Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl. American University chancellor Joseph Gray visited and praised Nazi Germany. MIT Dean Harold Lobdell personally tore down posters for a rally against a Nazi warship docked in Boston’s harbor, and MIT participated in a 1937 celebration at the Nazi-controlled University of Goettingen. Yale, Princeton, Bryn Mawr, and others continued student exchanges with Nazi Germany into the late 1930s, and more than twenty U.S. colleges and universities took part in the 1936 Heidelberg event.

But Columbia is unique in one important respect. Its administration alone seems to have learned so little from the mistakes of the 1930s that it is prepared to welcome the leader of yet another antisemitic, terrorist regime.

It shouldn't be an entirely unexpected consequence that a related symbols of hate, then and now, defiles its campus.

Chief Illiniwek rides again!

First the University of Illinois bowed to the forces of political correctness and booted out Chief Illiniwek as the campus’s mascot – after the Chief had served in this role for 81 years. The university’s student government association had declared the use of this symbol of honor and loyalty to be discriminatory and a racial stereotype.

Now, in the name of free speech, UI has lifted the prohibition, allowing the Chief’s logo on homecoming parade floats.

Hail to the Chief (and good sense at UI)!

Photos of the good chief's return, here.

Eric Scheie spots the Columbine killers in the process of becoming cult heroes:

Considering Che a hero while blaming the NRA for kids who go bad?

In a twisted way, there's a certain logic to it.

Sadly, yes (see also Oswald, Lee Harvey and his benighted status in Oliver Stone's JFK.) And if Cho Seung-Hui joins the list, we can trace a key moment in his ascension to this decision by NBC to create his Che/Oswald/Travis Bickle-style anti-hero pose.

Alan Dershowitz writes that "Oxford Union is dead":

This is an obituary for the Oxford Union, which claims to be one of the most famous and distinguished debating societies in the world. The reality is that it is no longer a debating society at all; it has become a propaganda platform for extremist views, primarily of the hard-left. It has now stopped even pretending to present both sides of controversial issues. To be sure, it puts forward a façade of balance, by presenting speakers who purport to represent both sides of an issue. But the Oxford Union has become a Potemkin village where a façade of fairness serves as a cover for the reality of bias.

But it's not the first time that sort of primitive mindset has flourished there.

Kevin McCullough:

Columbia University--you know--the same school that only days ago was welcoming Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with open arms despite thousands of New Yorker's objections, is now feigning indignation at a hangman's noose found on the door of one of it's African American professors in its Teacher's College.

But here's the million dollar dilema, how can a school pretend to be so offend by outright racism and ethnic prejudice, when they invite perhaps the most racist, anti-semitic person alive [and Ahmadinejad, too--Ed] to their campus and given him an uninterrupted microphone for more than 30 minutes?

Sure the noose carries with it a frightening symbol of ignorance that still occurs today, but how does inviting one of the world's biggest terrorists to take the coveted stage send the message that you're an instution that takes a stand against such ignorance?

Inquiring minds you know...

The danger of a multi-culti value system in which, as definitive 20th century primitive William Burroughs liked to say, "Nothing is true, everything is permitted", is that somebody is very likely to take you up on the idea.

Michael Barone visits the typical American college campus, and does not like what he sees:

Racial quotas and preferences continue to be employed, as a recent article on UCLA makes clear, in spite of state laws forbidding them, and university administrators seem to derive much of their psychic income from their supposed generosity in employing them. This, even though evidence compiled by UCLA Professor Richard Sander suggests they produce worse educational outcomes for their intended beneficiaries and even though Justice Clarence Thomas makes a persuasive case in his book My Grandfather’s Son that they cast a stigma of inferiority on them.

Of course, college and university administrators insist they aren’t actually using quotas when in fact they are, as O’Connor’s decisive opinion in 2003 invited them to do. The result is that one indispensable requirement for being a college or university administrator is intellectual dishonesty. You have to be willing to lie about what you consider one of your most important duties. So much for open inquiry and intellectual rigor.

This is not the only way the colleges and universities fall far short of what were once their standards. Sometime in the 1960s, they abandoned their role as advocates of American values — critical advocates who tried to advance freedom and equality further than Americans had yet succeeded in doing — and took on the role of adversaries of society.

The students who were exempted from serving their country during the Vietnam War condemned not themselves but their country, and many sought tenured positions in academe to undermine what they considered a militaristic, imperialist, racist, exploitative, sexist, homophobic — the list of complaints grew as the years went on — country.

English departments have been packed by deconstructionists who insist that Shakespeare is no better than rap music, and history departments with multiculturalists who insist that all societies are morally equal except our own, which is morally inferior.

Economics departments and the hard sciences have mostly resisted such deterioration. But when Lawrence Summers, first-class economist and president of Harvard, suggested that more men than women may have the capacity to be first-rate scientists — which is what the hard data showed — then, off with his head.

This regnant campus culture helps to explain why Columbia University, which bars ROTC from campus on the ground that the military bars open homosexuals from service, welcomed Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose government publicly executes homosexuals. It explains why Hofstra’s law school invites to speak on legal ethics Lynn Stewart, a lawyer convicted of aiding and abetting a terrorist client and sentenced to 28 months in jail.

What it doesn’t explain is why the rest of society is willing to support such institutions by paying huge tuitions, providing tax exemptions and making generous gifts. Suppression of campus speech has been admirably documented by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. The promotion of bogus scholarship and idea-free propagandizing has been admirably documented by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. It’s too bad the rest of America is not paying more attention.

They're asleep in New York. I bet they're asleep all over America...

Just to follow up on the addendum to our post earlier today, John Stephenson has the perfect headline for our times:

ACLU Files Suit for Teacher Fired for Painting With His Butt

Andres Serrano could not be reached for comment.

A year ago I wrote, "What is it with colleges in the state I grew up in and The Reich Stuff, anyhow?" It looks like the disease is spreading beyond its incubation on the Garden State's campuses out into its signature farmland.

"My name is Shiri Negari and I would like to speak at Columbia too, but I was murdered when Iran gave money to Hamas to blow up the bus I was on."

The Washington Times' Robert Stacy McCain emailed yesterday to remind us of this post from the early days of our blog, which is also referenced in the above link.

(Via Hot Air.)

Back in November of 2004, after the horrific brawl in the stands of the NBA's Detroit Pistons game at their home arena (in "New Fallujah", as Rush Limbaugh dubbed the city after watching the incident), I compared it to footage of sporting events from what seems like centuries ago--the mid-1960s:

A few years ago, when NFL Films began running its Inside The Vault series on ESPN, I was struck by how conservative and dignified most mid-'60s fans looked. There was little or no team merchandise available, so fans arrived to stadiums on Sunday looking like they had just come from church (which many no doubt had), rather than wearing rainbow-colored wigs, Darth Vader Helmets, or cheeseheads. No doubt, the games had their share of hecklers, but I'll bet that in general, fans of the past were much more subdued than today's members of Raiders Nation, the Philadelphia Eagles' crazed fans, or...the courtside fans of the NBA's Detroit Pistons.

This isn't meant to exclude the players' guilt in Friday's incident: compare atheletes of the past with today's every-millionare-for-himself attitude. (Indiana's Ron Artest, the player who was banned for the rest of the season for being the pointman in the fight, actually asked for time off before the fight--to promote a rap album he was releasing on his recording label!)

But somehow, and without really thinking consciously about it, society has created the notion that sports arenas are a place for fans to go almost literally insane, rather than merely observe the hometown team in person and cheer for them. But the Pistons/Pacers rumble gives sports--and the public that watches them in person--a chance to hit the control/alt/delete keys and reset.

In "The Death of Sportsmanship", Brent Bozell writes that based on the crowds' constant F-bombing of the Navy's football team at a Rutgers home game, that reset button is nowhere to be found.

At Pajamas HQ, Burt Prelutsky writes:

I can see how Rather may have decided that if he can somehow get his case heard in Los Angeles, he just might win his case in a cakewalk.

Still, if I were as old and as rich as Dan Rather, I don’t think I’d want to get myself tangled up with a slew of lawyers. Instead, I’d figure that I’ve already had all the revenge on CBS that I ever really needed. And her name is Katie Couric.

Meanwhile, Roger Simon has some thoughts on the malignant narcissism of "OJ, Dan Rather and now... Lee Bollinger", the latest successor in a surprisingly long line of Columbia presidents who've never met a radical chic mustache they didn't want to kiss.

It would take a heart of stone not to laugh at Andrew Meyer's shocking predicament:

As I wrote yesterday, souvenir T-shirts are available in the lobby!

Mark your calendars: October 22nd kicks off "Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week" on campus, which as Sondra K notes, "will feature a series of events designed to bring a message to these academic communities that challenges most of what students are taught about the so-called War on Terror both in the classroom and on the quad."

Don't miss their poster, which will be lucky to survive two nanoseconds on a typical campus's bulletin board. Especially when there far more important topics to protest.

Like Larry Summers.

(Via Five Feet Of Fury.)

Nice variation on the usual hackneyed leftwing "I was just kidding" routine.

I'd say 90 days of community service behind the counter of a Thomas Kinkade franchise would be suitable punishment for our budding performance artiste.

...And I feel fine. And thank you for asking!

But as Ann Althouse notes, Naomi Wolf doesn't. Though as another A.A. once wrote about Naomi:

Sometimes in the course of a great American debate there comes a moment when the big battle guns fall silent, the pundits run out of breath, and -- unexpectedly -- the long, bitter argument suddenly turns into farce.

Andrea Harris directs us to a video of the original farce that started it all, which has been close-captioned for the hearing impaired and viewable here.

To wind things down, Ace asks the natural exit question:

Can anyone explain to me how a liberal university acting to protect the dignity of a liberal Senator is somehow all the blame of the fascist Bush Administration?

And as you leave the U of F's auditorium, please pick up a souvenir T-shirt in the lobby.

You know, education, if you make the most of it, if you study hard and you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, uh, you, you can do well. If you don't, you get zapped by campus security for getting too rowdy during an appearance by a man that some leading historians believe may have once been a candidate for the presidency.

Just as dysfunctional as the old, pre-Lawrence Summers Harvard, Power Line's Scott Johnson writes.

Ed Morrissey wonders if Erwin Chemerinsky and Michael Drake will be hired for Miller Lite's next round of TV ads:

If UCI has its way, Erwin Chemerinsky and Michael Drake may become the next Billy Martin and George Steinbrenner of academia. Days after firing Chemerinsky, and a few days more after hiring him, UCI has begun an effort to re-hire the legal scholar to resolve the controversy over his dismissal. Also, the Los Angeles Times discovers those who fought Chemerinsky's appointment, and it doesn't quite square with Drake's previous explanations (via Instapundit):

UC Irvine officials on Friday were attempting to broker a deal to once again hire liberal scholar Erwin Chemerinsky as dean of its fledging law school, just three days after its chancellor set off a national furor by dumping him. ...

An agreement would be an extraordinary development after Chemerinsky contended this week that Drake succumbed to political pressure from conservatives and sacked him because of his outspoken liberal positions. The flap threatened to derail the 2009 opening of the law school and prompted some calls for Drake's resignation.

Also Friday, details emerged about the criticism of Chemerinsky that the university received in the days before Drake rescinded the job offer, including from California Chief Justice Ronald M. George, who criticized Chemerinsky's grasp of death penalty appeals. Also, a group of prominent Orange County Republicans and Los Angeles County Supervisor Mike Antonovich wanted to derail the appointment.

Drake has insisted that Chemerinsky didn't lose the dean's position because of his politics, saying that it was only because he expressed himself in a polarizing way.

Further confirmation that Drake fired Chemerinsky for his politics came from Orange County attorney Tom Malcolm, who has worked behind the scenes to repair the damage and get Chemerinsky to return to UCI. He told the LA Times that Chemerinsky has to transform himself from a "very outspoken advocate" to being a dean, strongly implying that UCI will not tolerate a dean who engages in political activity. In the same breath, he says that Chemerinsky's termination had "nothing to do with this academic freedom issue".

In other words, Malcolm says Chemerinsky will have all the academic freedom he wants, as long as he keeps his mouth shut. Huh?

So does that make Larry Summers the equivalent of John Madden or Bob Uecker in the old Miller Lite ads?

Found in James Taranto's Best of the Web column yesterday:

Here's an amazing story from the Chico (Calif.) Enterprise:

Bidwell Junior High School administrators said a letter sent home with students in an eighth-grade class Tuesday was a good idea for a history lesson, with bad execution.

The letter, which appeared to ask parents to renounce their U.S. citizenship, prompted phone calls to the school from several irate recipients.

Principal Joanne Parsley said teacher Mike Brooks never intended to have parents sign the letters, or forward them on to President Bush, to whom they are addressed. . . .

Reached at home, the teacher said his U.S. History class is studying the Declaration of Independence, and he decided to write a letter putting the document into modern language. His intention, he said, was to send it home for parents to review, and possibly discuss with their children.

He concluded the letter with "After careful consideration of the facts of our current situation, I have decided to announce to everyone that I am no longer a citizen of the United States, but a free and independent member of the global community."

"The point was, I wanted to ask parents if they would sign such a letter if conditions that existed prior to the Revolution were happening now," he said. "I just wanted to start a discussion."

Not surprisingly, it turns out that Brooks's complaints include the detention of terrorists at Guantanamo and the terrorist surveillance program. So under his scheme, pre-Revolutionary conditions exist now only if you assume that al Qaeda is the moral equivalent of the American colonists.

Why not? Jimmy Carter's best friend at the 2004 Democratic presidential convention wouldn't quibble.

John Luik has some thoughts on the recent study by Robert Putnam of Harvard:

For at least the last twenty years the cultural and political elites of the United States have championed the cause of multiculturalism by claiming that diversity was something that made all of us better. Little effort was ever made to define precisely just what was meant by diversity, difference or most crucially "better." Nor was there any significant research that provided empirical support for the claim that multiculturalism and diversity translated into better people, better communities, better organizations and businesses or a better country.

But now a considerable amount of solid evidence about multiculturalism is in, and it suggests that far from something positive, it is a corroding and corrupting influence on just about everything that it comes in contact with, from social capital, trust, and community spirit to altruism, volunteering, friendship and even happiness.

That's the startling conclusion from Harvard's Robert Putnam best known as the author of Bowling Alone. According to Putnam a variety of research from the United States, Canada, Australia and Europe shows that ethnic diversity is associated with lower social trust, lower "investment in public goods," less reciprocity, and less willingness to contribute to the community. In workplace situations diversity is associated with "lower group cohesion, lower satisfaction and higher turnover."

And speaking of Diversity's Dark Side, note that Putnam expressed a certain amount of fear of publishing his results, lest he be crucified by his fellow academicians.

Dr. Helen writes:

was reading the National Journal today and found this little tidbit by Neil Munro entitled "Shrink Liberally:"

Everybody knows that the media and academia lean left. But these elites are bipartisan wafflers when compared with psychologists who donate roughly 21 times as much to Democratic candidates and political action committees than Republican ones. According to Opensecrets.org, psychologists gave 526 donations worth $499,982 to Democratic causes and candidates in the '04 and '06 cycles and the '08 cycles to date. In contrast, the shrinks opened their wallets to Republicans only 43 times, and gave just $22,255. Maybe that explains why some conservatives prefer prayer to psychotherapy.

When the APA wonders why more people don't take advantage of all that psychology has to offer, maybe they should understand that the conservative half of America doesn't trust them to be fair or objective. Diversity is a good thing, so maybe psychology needs more political diversity. It could hardly have less.

Once the left dominates a field (traditional journalism, Hollywood, academia, psychology, etc.,) they really bolt the door behind them. Tight.

In Commentary's "Contentions" blog, Michael J. Lewis has some thoughts on a recent essay by Yale's William Deresiewicz regarding America's increasing discomfort with the high priests of academia:

Deresiewicz, himself a professor at Yale, concedes that the modern professor is often a “careerist parvenu.” But if so, it is because he has no other choice; the old-boy network that once allocated teaching jobs among a small elite no longer exists. “[T]he old gentility rested on exclusion,” he explains, “and the new rat race is meritocracy in motion.” And he concedes that today’s professor is far more likely to sleep with his students than his pre-1960’s predecessors, but not with the freewheeling abandon that Hollywood imagines.

Deresiewicz is more interesting when he moves from the sociology of the professor to the sociology of the American public—and why Americans seem so hostile to academics. His proposed explanation is fascinating:

Americans’ traditional resentment of hierarchy and hostility toward intellect have intensified since World War II and particularly since the 1960s. Elites have been discredited, the notion of high culture dethroned, the means of communication decentralized. Public discourse has become more demotic; families, churches, and other institutions more democratic. The existence of academia, an institution predicated on intellectual hierarchy, irritates Americans’ insistence on equality, their feeling that intellect constitutes a contemptible kind of advantage. At the same time, as American society has become more meritocratic, its economy more technocratic, people want that advantage for themselves or their children. With the U.S. News rankings and the annual admissions frenzy, universities are playing an ever-more conspicuous role in creating the larger social hierarchy that no one acknowledges but everyone wants to climb. It’s no wonder that people resent the gatekeepers and enjoy seeing them symbolically humiliated.

Deresiewicz may well be right about this, but one element is missing from his spacious essay: the extent to which college professors have been complicit in their own loss of public prestige, particularly in the humanities, where Hollywood’s academic rogues are invariably found. Two generations ago they were respected for subordinating their lives to scholarship, and much of the prestige of their academic subjects—whether Shakespeare or Descartes or George Washington—accrued to them. Today, Shakespeare, Descartes, and Washington don’t seem to count as much as they once did. Now whose fault might that be?

(Via Pixologic.)

It always saddens me when an extreme religious faith distances a young person from his much more agnostic parents.

Campus Watch has some thoughts on Hamid Dabashi, a Columbia University professor:

Hamid Dabashi, Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature and Chairman of the Middle East Languages and Cultures department at Columbia University, figures prominently in the work of those of us trying to bring accountability and balance back to the field of Middle East studies. His anti-Western, pro-Islamist, and, at times, anti-Semitic commentary have been noted by Campus Watch on many occasions.

Indeed, he holds the current "Quote of the Month" spot for his review of the film "300," in which he likens the Persian Empire to modern-day America and the Spartans to the "Iraqi resistance, the Palestinians, [and] Hizbullah," while attempting to justify suicide bombings by comparing them to the Spartans' last stand at Thermopylae. This is what many have come to expect from Dabashi, whose apologetics seem to know no bounds.

Dabashi makes another appearance of sorts in an outtake from the upcoming documentary, "Indoctrinate U." The film, which will feature interviews with Middle East Forum director Daniel Pipes and Middle East scholar Martin Kramer, focuses on bias and the "institutional intolerance" that's rampant in higher education. Filmmaker Evan Coyne Maloney has been making deleted scenes available at the "Indoctrinate U" website and the first of these involves Columbia University (watch it here).

In a "Columbia Quiz" given randomly to students and other passersby on campus, Maloney uses a Dabashi quote to make a point about what passes for acceptable in academia today. Titled, "A Professor's Lesson in Tolerance and Civility," the clip features Maloney asking quiz takers to guess whether the following quote originated with "a) Adolph Hitler b) Osama bin Laden or c) a Columbia professor":

Who said of "Israeli Jews...the way they talk, walk, the way they greet each other, there is a vulgarity of character that is bone deep and structural to the skeletal vertebrae of its culture"?

The results are humorous, and yet also rather frightening. None of the quiz takers know off the bat that the quote belongs to Dabashi and one even tells Maloney that she suspects "this whole thing is designed to make me say a Columbia professor." A few correctly guess that a "Columbia professor" is the answer, while others, after appearing visibly shocked by the bigotry of the quote, assume that it originated with either Hitler or bin Laden.

When Maloney informs them that the quote is, in fact, attributed to "Hamid Dabashi, the Chair of the Middle East Languages and Cultures department," the reaction is mixed. Some just shake their heads in consternation, one cheers that she got the answer right, and others simply look uncomfortable.

Like I said, Ward was merely the tip of the iceberg.

NRO's Phi Beta Cons blog links to Frederick Hess's article on the limits of what is commonly described in today's shorthand as "tolerance":

Writing on NRO today, Frederick Hess examines the recent flap at the University of Maryland, where a student wearing a pro-Israel shirt was indignantly told by a cashier at the Maryland Food Collective that "Your shirt offends me. I won't ring you up."

The student was able to get another cashier to complete the transaction, but the episode led to a big flap over the rights of customers and cashiers. A spokesperson for the Food Collective says, "no one should have to have contact with people whose views they find hurtful."

If history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes, here's the San Francisco counterpoint to the above east coast incident, which Cinnamon Stillwell recently linked to:

Many Jewish customers have refused to enter Rainbow Grocery — the hippie-dippy worker-owned cooperative that preaches an "inclusive environment that is welcoming to everyone" — ever since two departments de-shelved Israeli products in an apparent anti-Israel boycott in 2002. (Store employee Naomi Jelks says it was done without store authorization, and the boycott was later shot down by an employee vote.)

Now the Human Rights Commission is investigating a complaint by ex-customer David Nahmod, who says he was called a "stupid Jew" more than a year ago by a cashier who employees say identifies as Palestinian. Nahmod, a 51-year-old freelance writer and dog-sitter, says he motioned to the woman's "Free Palestine" T-shirt and asked, "Wouldn't it be nice if they could all live in peace?" He alleges that she responded with the epithet and that suicide bombers should kill as many Jews as possible.

I worked in a retail store a couple of decades ago. Back then, the typical response to "Your shirt offends me. I won't ring you up", would have come from the store's manager and had the words "you're fired, schmuck" somewhere in the sentence.

Of course, the above incidents could have easily have escalated into something even more insane: at least no latex balloons were involved in either transaction!

(H/T: GR)

Last year, I linked to Tom Wolfe's In his Wall Street Journal profile, in which he discussed how out of touch most media elites are:

And so many of them are so caught up in this kind of metropolitan intellectual atmosphere that they simply don't go across the Hudson River. They literally do not set foot in the United States. We live in New York in one of the two parenthesis states. They're usually called blue states--they're not blue states, the states on the coast. They're parenthesis states--the entire country lies in between."

As a result, they simply can't understand President Bush's appeal to the majority of voters within those states:

George Bush's appeal, for Mr. Wolfe, was owing to his "great decisiveness and willingness to fight." But as to "this business of my having done the unthinkable and voted for George Bush, I would say, now look, I voted for George Bush but so did 62,040,609 other Americans. Now what does that make them? Of course, they want to say--'Fools like you!' . . . But then they catch themselves, 'Wait a minute, I can't go around saying that the majority of the American people are fools, idiots, bumblers, hicks.' So they just kind of dodge that question.

While Wolfe's thesis was aimed primarily at the MSM, it holds true for much of academia as well. Sitting in for "conservative blogger" (as he'll forever be called in the MSM) Andrew Sullivan on a blog hosted by The Atlantic magazine, ordinarily sensible libertarian-ish law professor Stephen Bainbridge gets his snark up to write:

I live in California. Our population is over 37 million, representing 12% of the total US population. Indeed, if we were a separate country, our population would be larger than that of all but the 34 biggest countries in the world! We're responsible for 13% of US GDP. Indeed, if we were a separate country, we'd be the 7th largest economy in the world. We produce cutting edge technology, world class wine, and much of the nation's food crop. We ought to matter. And yet, we're virtually irrelevant to American politics other than as source of money that candidates then go spend in places like Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina.

* * *

How is it that we persist in allowing these unrepresentative, yahoo infested, pissant states decide who gets to run for President?

I live in California, too. But I also know there are 48 other states out there, in-between the parentheses.

I'd like to think Bainbridge is kidding, and this is yet another example "Blurt and Retreat". And last I checked, there was a president not all that long ago in the scope of things who was once governor of California. Any second now, his name will come to me…

(Via Glenn Reynolds, who writes that Bainbridge's post is "not very nice. But I think the answer is, to piss off Californians and New Yorkers, something that the rest of the country agrees on . . . .")

Update: On the other hand, this is a criticism of Ames Straw Poll that's much tougher to argue with.

More: Lileks weighs in.

Back in 2002, when this site was just setting up shop, we linked to a Joanne Jacobs post on segregated college dorms, which in turn linked to this Suzanne Fields essay. Fields described Palo Alto's Stanford University as being a leading practitioner of social de-integration:

At Stanford, these dorms require a glossary for identification. Muwekma-tah-ruk is Native American, Ujamaa is African-American and Casa Zapata is Chicano/Latino. The Asian-American house is called Okada, named for the author of a book about the treatment of Japanese Americans during World War II, when they were sent to live in ethnic-themed resettlement camps.

Stanford students and administrators have been mildly embarrassed--there may be hope yet--since a civil rights organization exposed them in a study entitled: "The Stigma of Inclusion: Racial Paternalism/Separatism in Higher Education." The New York Civil Rights Coalition reports that color-coded universities encourage a "balkanized campus environment" and that minority students at Stanford are "indoctrinated" into a separate track for "special treatment" that many of them did not ask for, or expect, when they applied for admission.

"From those who believe that theme dorms represent a divisive form of self-segregation, to those who see them as paternalistic attempts by universities to improve minority students' chances of success in college," the Stanford Daily reports, "the system has a wide range of detractors."

Found via Glenn Reynolds, a Stanford undergraduate named Allysia Finley explains the consequences of "thinking different" on campus, to paraphrase the favorite advertising slogan of another Bay Area institution:

In my Politics of American Government class last winter, I learned that there are limitations on our right of free speech, limits delineated by terms such as "fighting words," "clear and present danger" and libel. During that same term, I also discovered just how restrictive many college students' idea of free speech really is.

In an editorial for a school newspaper, I criticized how the school's four ethnic theme dorms (African-American, American Indian, Asian and Latino) stereotyped minorities by categorizing individuals by race rather than considering broader personal experiences and values. The response: How dare I condemn the established multicultural institutions on campus! Didn't I know that I had no business commenting on the issue since, as one student stated on a campus forum, I was just a "white, libertarian girl from the O.C." Considering how often students refer to their right of free speech when they criticize the school or presidential administration, their reactions to my article were stunning.

Stunning? On the contrary, they were entirely predictible.

Setting aside the current working definition of "racist", in December 2002, when Michael Graham was promoting his then new book Redneck Nation, he told National Review's Kathryn Jean Lopez:

In 1948, Strom Thurmond was a politician obsessed with race. The modern American liberal is obsessed with race. Strom Thurmond thought schools and courts should treat citizens differently based on their skin color. Liberal supporters of, among other things, race-based admissions policies and hate-crime laws agree. Strom promoted the "multicultural" view that institutions like Jim Crow and segregation might appear irrational or unjust to outside agitators, but they were a perfect fit with southern culture.

* * *

Having fled these attitudes among my rural southern neighbors, I know live in a modern, liberal America where Ivy League colleges are building segregating housing because "race matters." I actually heard one modern defender of segregated public schools (blacks-only academies) say "black people learn differently from white people." Gee, I haven't heard that since I was 12 — from a klan member!

Finley writes:

I received so many caustic e-mails and messages the weekend after my article was published that my residential adviser actually asked me to inform him if I received any tangible threats. Luckily, these messages were just irrationally irate, not violent.

They haven't tried to lynch her for preaching integration? Well, there's your 40 years of civil rights progress right there!

Ace explores where politique-sans-frontières can lead.

(Pretentious but utterly needless French translation courtesy Babel Fish. And speaking of pretentious but utterly needless French translations, Jules Crittenden spots a Columbia professor conflating Bush with Napoleon, which seems silly considering how Bush could easily whip le tyran Français diminutif in a one-on-one B-Ball game.)

In the New York Post, David French writes:

For more than 25 years, conservative writers have been telling anyone who would listen that our higher education system was broken - that indoctrination was trumping education and our kids were throwing away their tuition dollars propping up vicious relics of the '60s and supporting universities that were increasingly repressive. These words, coming from such luminaries as Allan Bloom, Dinesh D'Souza, Alan Charles Kors and David Horowitz, persuaded much of the conservative chattering class that something was wrong. But mainstream Americans seemed unconcerned, with their own (often fond) college memories drowning out even the most eloquent cries for reform.

Enter Ward Churchill.

French writes that Churchill was "the tipping point":

That will be Ward Churchill's lasting legacy. He was the tipping point. Now, it's not just leading conservatives who view the academy as an out-of-control, disconnected bastion of petulant entitlement. In a recent Zogby poll, 58 percent of Americans reported that they now believe that political bias of professors is a "serious problem." Even more, 65 percent, viewed non-tenured professors as more motivated to do a good job in the classroom.

These are not isolated findings. A survey by the American Association of University Professors found that 58.4 percent of Americans had only some or no confidence in our colleges and that 82 percent want to modify or eliminate tenure.

Related thoughts from Stanley Kurtz.

This just in from the New York Times: Nerd culture discovered; Asians, other minorities hardest hit.

Update: The International Herald-Tribune, a spin-off of the New York Times, undertakes their own Noam Chomsky-style research on nerd linguistical patterns.

More: Jerome J. Schmitt adds: "In sum, I believe that this article and study reveal a lot more about the racial bigotry and monomania of the NY Times and swaths of the liberal arts and social sciences than it does about nerds."

Power Line quotes a a long email from William Katz, whom they describe as having had "a long and varied career, as an assistant to a U.S. senator; an officer in the CIA; an assistant to Herman Kahn, the nuclear war theorist; an editor at The New York Times Magazine; and a talent coordinator at The Tonight Show".

At the Power Line site, he has a marvelous fantasy of Alfred Hitchcock pitching Rear Window to what he calls a modern "fetus in a three-piece suit" studio executive:

Now, clearly, that meeting never took place, but it's a slightly overdrawn version of meetings that do take place every day in today's Hollywood. They reflect the problem that I call TMCG –- too many college graduates, of whom, I freely admit, I'm one. The industry dare not speak its name, and it's rarely, if ever, discussed in these terms. But everyone knows the problem: To a large degree, Hollywood, in its executive ranks, has replaced talent with education, and what you get is the scene described above, where all the life, the emotion, the entertainment value of a story is ripped out, replaced with analysis and more analysis.

Don't get me wrong. I'm certainly not saying that higher education automatically makes someone a bad filmmaker. There are wonderful artists who've had fine educations. Richard D. Zanuck went to Stanford. The late Jack Lemmon held a Harvard degree. But young people, in particular, are very much affected by the way they're taught to think in college –- and that approach has nothing to do with making movies.

The Duke of Wellington reportedly said that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton. The movies of today were written in the classrooms of Princeton. But it's highly unlikely that a 2007 Princeton graduate would imagine anyone singin' in the rain. He'd take a cab. And by the way, Mr. Kelly, the umbrella is held over the head, to keep us dry.

Mitchell Parish was one of our greatest lyricists -- "Star Dust," "Moonlight Serenade," "The Stars Fell on Alabama." Some years ago he was honored in New York. He came out before the concert began and spoke to members of the audience. He said, "When you hear my lyrics, don't analyze them, feel them." It's wonderful advice for anyone in entertainment, but not the kind of advice you get in English 101. "Hollywood," David Lean, the British director of "Lawrence of Arabia," said, "forgot how to tell stories." It forgot because Hollywood forgot how to feel. When Bogart says goodbye to Ingrid Bergman at the airport in "Casablanca," we feel it, we don't analyze it.

And how would "Casablanca" fare in today's Hollywood? Not too long ago a local reporter sent out the script of the movie, under a different title.

Almost no one recognized it.

The TMCG problem has another effect. It separates Hollywood from its audience. A talent agency head boasted that half his interns come from Ivy League schools. Well, that's wonderful, and I'm sure they're good, intelligent young people. But I've seen that, too often, they don't think of themselves as the audience. The audience is "those people out there."

And here's what studio executives are selling them!

To be fair though, there's at least one contrarian at Cornell--his take on AMC's new Mad Men mini-series sounds remarkably like my own.

And so as he flies the blue lady of the skies into the sunset, we say "Aloha, 5 O'clock Charlie!" and return to our duties. Let me remind you the Weblog is open 24 hours for your dining and dancing pleasure.

Update: "Chutch Faces Firing Squad at CU Today". But how long before he's sitting in for Olbermann?

Judith Weiss of Kesher Talk notes that tomorrow could be a big day for everyone's favorite dimestore Indian:

In February we reported on the academic campaign mobilized to defend faux-Indian "Ethnic Studies" professor Ward "little Eichmanns" Churchill, as the regents of Colorado University deliberated on whether to fire him for "research misconduct," including lack of academic qualification, plagiarism and misrepresentation about his Indian ancestry, his military service, his Weathermen activities.

The wheels of academic justice grind slowly, and the regents will announce their decision tomorrow, July 24th. Churchill's fans will turn out in force (they hope) to protest what they expect to be a thumbs-down on Churchill's continued employment at Colorado U.

The pressure on Colorado University to dump Churchill is enormous; but it seems safe to say that the majority of it is coming from outside the university, not within it--so it's entirely possible Churchill could keep his job with little more than a slap on the wrist. And as Judith notes, "the case of Phil Mitchell makes clear that free speech is for me but not for thee."

I hope to have my own review of James Pierson's Camelot and the Cultural Revoltion online in the next week or so. In the meantime, Fred Siegel has a great write-up of the book's central thesis in Opinion Journal, and concludes:

Mr. Piereson's own argument is persuasive and well-presented, but liberalism was never as reasonable as he assumes. The irrationalism that exploded later in the 1960s had been a component of left-wing ideology well before. Herbert Croly, the liberal founder of the New Republic magazine, was drawn to mysticism. In the 1950s ex-Marxists fell over themselves in praise of Wilhelm Reich and "orgone box," hoping that sexual therapy might replace Marxist theory as the toga of the enlightened. And in the very early 1960s a veritable cult of Castro, informed by Franz Fanon's writings on the cleansing virtues of violence, emerged among intellectuals searching for an alternative to middle-class conventions.

It's not reason that is at the heart of modern-day liberalism but rather the claim to superior virtue and, even more important, to a special knowledge unavailable to the unwashed or unenlightened. Depending on the temper of the time, such virtue and knowledge can derive disproportionately from scientism or mysticism--or it can mix large dollops of both.

In the latest issue of City Journal, Myron Magnet extends those concepts from the mid-1960s to the present, with an emphasis on today's liberals' reaction to the Duke non-rape case, which Newsweek's Evan Thomas recently unwittingly crystalized down to a single sentence: "The narrative was right, but the facts were wrong".

Magnet explains how such a mindset can occur amongst seemingly sophisticated elites:

Part of what a university should teach is the critical reasoning power to analyze situations like these, with claims and counterclaims, and determine what actually happened. But the last few decades’ transformation of the academic worldview unfitted Duke administrators and faculty from making such a judgment. Like the scientists Swift’s Gulliver met in the kingdom of Laputa, they have one eye that looks inward at themselves and one eye that peers outward toward the farthest heavens, leaving no organ to perceive the reality right in front of their noses—the reality that, as George Orwell says, takes a constant struggle to see through the fog of orthodoxy.

Even for the clear-sighted, that reality takes an effort to discern, because we see the world not in an unmediated way but through the prism of our culture (and even of our class or subgroup), which can both clarify and distort. In the act of observing, we also interpret and judge, according to the terms of our culture’s values, morals, and manners. Our power of reason has limits, so that we have to depend on aid from education, tradition, belief, on what Edmund Burke called “prejudice”—again, all products of culture, built up from the inherited wisdom and experience and sometimes superstition of mankind.

Critical reason’s task is to peer through the cultural web in which we are enmeshed to perceive clearly the reality that actually exists, including the man-made reality of the social order, whose terms give our lives meaning. We have to question our culturally created assumptions to clear away attitudinizing or propaganda or superstitious prejudice. But the professors sidestep this challenge, simplifying and flattening these complex truths about culture and consciousness. They reach the false conclusion that all descriptions of society and our nature are not just colored or refracted by our cultural assumptions but are mere propaganda, aimed at convincing others that the world is as our class or subgroup wishes it to be. Moreover, since the profs believe that not just the social order but also what we take to be “human nature” is man-made, whoever wins the propaganda battle gets to mold society and human nature—human reality itself—into the shape he chooses.

From these assumptions flows academe’s well-known mania for unmasking Western civilization (including its literature and art) as a machine for oppressing the nonwhite, non-rich, and non-male. This worldview—which grants its adherents a sense of superiority over their supposedly racist and sexist fellow men and also a belief in their own special power to remake the world by their words—appears so self-evident on campus as to be impervious to such realities as accelerating black success, for example, or the crowding out of male students by female ones on college campuses themselves.

Needless to say, don't miss either man's essay.

Related: "The Kennedy Mythtique….and college snobbery…"

In a "Best of the Web" item on the media's swarming mass attack on the Duke lacrosse players, James Taranto spots this year's equivalent of 2004’s "fake but accurate" Ra^therGate defense, from Newsweek's Evan Thomas, famous for another line regarding media groupthink from that year.

Read the whole quote, which Taranto rightly calls "damning".

Update: Jules Crittenden has some thoughts that are well worth reading on how the media's narratives impact the war in Iraq.

The Weekly Standard explores "The forgotten aspects of John Scopes' famous biology textbook".

Surprisingly found in the L.A. Times, there's a good column by Meghan Daum titled "Who killed Antioch? Womyn":

Bard College President Leon Botstein (who in the 1970s was president of the seriously far-out and short-lived Franconia College) came down hard on what he sees as a failure of liberals to support their institutions.

"One of the tragedies of the progressive liberal movement," Botstein said, "is that unlike at a conservative institution — such as Princeton or Dartmouth, where the alumni are deeply loyal and give it support and money — for liberals, higher education is not a strong enough cause. Their causes are social causes, and higher education is left for the conservatives to fund."

Whether or not contemporary Princeton or Dartmouth can fairly be characterized as conservative (though, admittedly, you have to declare a major at these places, and it can't be in roach-clip design), Botstein makes a good point. He also conjectured that Antioch, which he called "the founding college of the American progressive movement," had been "killed" by, among other things, its own liberalism.

Botstein's not totally wrong, but as members of his baby boom generation are apt to do, he equates "liberalism" and liberals with the demonstrations of the 1960s and 1970s, including a six-week campus strike in 1973 during which students firebombed buildings to protest racial inequality at the school. But it was the next iteration of liberal excess that really did the place in. To later generations, Antioch is famous for one thing: its Sexual Offense Prevention Policy.

In 1993, it suddenly became national news that Antioch required anyone engaging in sexual activity on campus to ask for and grant permission throughout every step of the encounter. Conceived by a group called Womyn of Antioch, the policy stipulated that consent could not be granted through body movements, nonverbal responses or silence. Furthermore, it stated that "consent is required each and every time there is sexual activity" and that "each new level of sexual activity requires consent." Translation: dorm room make-out sessions were being punctuated by steamy questions like, "May I kiss you now?", "May I remove your (Che Guevara) T-shirt now?" and "May I … " (you get the idea).

Admittedly, this was the early '90s, a time when many liberal arts campuses were so awash in the hysteria of political correctness that it seemed entirely possible a lamppost could commit date rape. But the attention to the Antioch policy, which got as far as a "Saturday Night Live" sketch, not only came to symbolize the infantilizing dogma of the new left, it turned an already obscure college into a laughingstock.

Last year, Mark Steyn wrote, "unless they change, the academy will risk becoming a kook fringe unsupported by either party, increasingly abandoned by parents, and less and less able to justify their huge public subsidies".

Leftwing ideology becomes more and more oppressive as its policies moves away from the center, needless to say. America's Blue States have their own PC issues--in their case, punitive taxation, anti-family and anti-business policies--have had net population declines. And so too have the "liberals in a hurry" at Antioch demonstrated once again, that when it comes to the socialist eschaton, if you build it, they will leave.

Once someone shines a light on it, campus PC insanity is self-satirizing, of course. It would be perfect material for a documentary, we're an ambitious film maker so inclined...

Rick Moran links to John Leo's City Journal essay regarding Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam's study on immigration and multiculturalism. Leo's article, and others on Putnam's findings have been making the rounds in the Blogosphere, but Moran concentrates on the professor's fear that he may have commited one seriously doubleplusungood thoughtcrime:

Rather than look at the study, I am more intrigued with the Professor’s hand wringing over the fact that his work tends to knock the chocks from underneath a pillar of leftist thinking; that by pigeonholing Americans and recent arrivals into their own special group while encouraging a separateness based on culture and language, tolerance and acceptance will automatically follow in the country at large. This has been an article of faith on left for 30 years. It has affected school curricula for children as young as pre-schoolers on up through the speech codes and diversity mandates found in the finest institutions of higher learning in the land.

And rather than accomplish anything, it has made things worse.

As they say in Eurasia (or is it Eastasia?), read the whole thing.

Neo-Neocon explores "The unintended consequences of teaching expurgated history":

In my day, what was left out was anything that was too complex, and also anything that conflicted with the perception of America as a righteous and near-perfect place—which included any personal foibles and imperfections of the Founding Fathers (and of course, anything remotely related to sex). What’s left out today is anything that isn’t politically correct on either side (which of course is virtually everything of truth) and anything that might make the US look good (I’m engaging in only a slight bit of hyperbole there, I’m afraid).

In short, anything of interest is left out, as well as anything that would meaningfully connect the teaching of history with the problems we are facing today—which would be what would make it most interesting and most helpful.

The consequences of putting history into a blender and turning it into bland, featureless, and easily digestible pap is not just having students who are bored to tears, although that would be bad enough. Nor is it just that history textbooks now have a strong bias on the Left, although that isn’t a good thing either. The worst effect is that such an approach to the teaching of history creates an ignorant and naive populace that is even more condemned than would otherwise be the case to repeat history’s errors.

I’m convinced, for example, that failure to properly teach the history of the wars that we have fought in the past—their complications, controversies, and errors, as well as what led to them and what was accomplished by them—has led to unrealistic and simplistic expectations of warfare itself.

And, come to think of it, perhaps this is not an unintended consequence; it’s possible that the current overarching Leftist bias of the writers of today’s textbooks include a pacifist agenda, of which this is part.

In his latest essay, Mark Steyn explores how this sort of collective self-lobotomization can cripple a society: "It seems Her Majesty's Government in London was taken entirely by surprise by the scenes of burning Union Jacks on the evening news" as a result of the Queen knighting Salman Rushdie.

Dinesh D'Souza asks, "Now, what about those Duke professors?"

So Nifong is going to resign, and maybe get his license taken away too. Now what about the mau-mau artists at Duke, influential figures on the faculty, who whipped the campus up into a racial hysteria? What happens to the people who helped to create a mob mentality against students, rendering their lives miserable for more than a year, when their guilt was never established, never even probable, and now they have been shown to be innocent?

No wonder that on campuses across America, it's been a revolt of the alumni, as Opinion Journal notes.

Update: Power Line is also curious about what happens next at Duke.

Fred Thompson explores the current state of freedom of speech--or lack thereof--on American campuses.

Related: Is the lack of free speech on campus a logical result of treating your politics as a religion?

Jonah Goldberg asks, "Here’s a good question for you: Why have public schools at all?"

Read the rest; further thoughts from Jonah on the topic here.

The New Criterion back online after a malicious virus attacked, take a quick snapshot of where things stand with Ward “Little Eichmanns” Churchill:

A university committee went to work to investigate it all and to recommend disciplinary action. On May 16, the Associated Press reported on the committee’s findings. Yes, Churchill “committed multiple acts of plagiarism, fabrication, and falsification” and his work was “below minimum standards of professional integrity.” Nevertheless, the committee recommended that he be suspended for a year, not fired. Why? Because although his case “shows misbehavior,” it does not show “the worst possible misbehavior.”

"But wait: what would count as 'the worst'", the New Criterion asks.

And then it gets worse. I'd love to be proven wrong by the University of Colorado, but I'm not holding my breath waiting for any serious punishment to befall Churchill.

Building on George Orwell's “Politics and the English Language", John Leo explores how badly English has descended--particularly in academic usage--since Orwell wrote his seminal essay over 60 years ago.

As the New York Times reported in March of last year, Vermont "is losing young people at a precipitous clip":

Vermont, with a population of about 620,000, now has the lowest birth rate among states. Three-quarters of its public schools have lost children since 2000.

Vermont also has the highest rate of students attending college out of their home state — 57 percent, up from 36 percent 20 years ago. Many do not move back. The total number of 20- to 34-year-olds in Vermont has shrunk by 19 percent since 1990.

The Times claimed Vermont's Republican governor, Jim Douglas, "is treating the situation like a crisis", quoting him as saying, "There's an exodus of young people. It's dramatic. We need to reverse it. The consequences of not acting are severe."

Maybe it's just me, but this action doesn't sound like it's on the cutting edge of demographic repair:

Gov. Jim Douglas used six pens Friday to sign his name to a bill that will ban school buses from running their engines while parked on school grounds, except under special circumstances.

Seated in the library at Browns River Middle School, Douglas rewarded a seventh-grade social studies class for its efforts on behalf of the bill by coming to the students to transform the legislation into law. He handed the pens he used to five students who led the lobbying effort and their teacher, Patty Brushett.

“This is a great step forward for our state,” Douglas said, listing benefits such as fuel conservation, improved air quality and reduction in greenhouse gases…

George Crombie, secretary of the Agency of Natural Resources, joined Douglas for the ceremony and presented the school with a sign to post by the driveway.

“These signs will go to every single school,” Crombie said. The red sign reads, “Please turn off your engines for our health.”

Paging Julia Gorin and Mark Steyn--your next columns await.

Steve Chapman writes, "It's 10 p.m. Do you know how big your child's ego is?"

Fortunately, the antidote is easy: repeat the dosage of this visual downer enough times until the New Hopelessness kicks in amongst youngsters.

Gail Heriot explores "Religious Beliefs & Behavior of College Faculty".

Execupundit's Michael Wade notes that no corner of academia is immune from radical politicization. Meanwhile, Roger Simon explores an exceptional way to "Mau-Mau the Multiculturalists".

(And I'll second that emotion.)

"Your university may not honor your military service, but the United States of America does".

--President Bush in the White House East Room for an ROTC commissioning ceremony.

"This is what my 9th grade teacher told me government is all about and I finally got to experience it".

--Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) on today's immigration agreement.

Ace of Spades links to a Denver Post article which reports:

The attorney for University of Colorado ethnic-studies professor Ward Churchill said Tuesday that the committee reviewing his academic misconduct case has recommended a one-year suspension rather than dismissal.

I don't know about you, but I'm about as shocked as Louis Renault discovering gambling in Rick's Cafe (and at least he attempted to feign a penumbra of an aura of mock surprise) by this development. Ace's guest blogger "Slublog" has some thoughts on how this development is likely to further lower academia's reputation in the coming years.

Wow--this is just bizarre: Austin, Texas 7th grader "suspended because his hair is too short".

This sort of thing makes me feel so old: Why, sonny, I can remember the good ol' days back when schools were concerned about boys with long hair--long like Paul McCartney's, dagnamit!--not crew cuts.

(Via the always well-coiffed InstaPundit.)

Fire and brimstone isn't my thing (on either side of the aisle), but the religious leader passed away today at age 73.

Here's one of his more amusing moments (and the backlash to it was made somewhat ironic in light of this new puritanism from Hollywood), and here's a flashback to his final exit from polite society and the resulting birth of the Blogosphere's anti-idiotarian movement.

Roger Kimball asks, "How do you spell 'fatuous political grandstanding by over-privileged elites'?" When it's a hunger strike at Harvard.

As Kimball writes, "let's hope it is long and thorough".

Speaking of PC run amok, Charles Johnson has an update on the Lewiston, Maine student whose teenage prank became a casus belli.

Daniel Henninger checks in on where things stand in America's politically correct overculture:

Few would disagree that it would be a good thing if Don Imus became the last man in public to call a black woman a "ho." Few in the civilized world would miss hearing rappers rhyme women with "witch" and "bigger." And as a result, some would say, see, political correctness really does have its uses. It bans what nearly anyone would consider hateful, tasteless, insulting, abusive, disgusting language.
Right. That used to be known as good taste before the left delivered PC into the world. Over the years, political correctness has seemed to wax and wane, without ever disappearing. It was a relief when it offered a few laughs. What has never gone away, though, is the fact that ultimately political correctness is toxic.

Exhibit A is the Duke lacrosse team. Exhibit B is the annihilation of Harvard President Larry Summers. All the other exhibits are the forgotten professors, DJs and commentators whose jobs ended with a wrong phrase.

Duke was a particularly virulent strain of PC. It was breathtaking how fast the Duke incident broke into a politically correct scenario: privileged, women-baiting white males humiliate and assault a disadvantaged black female. Once rooted in the press, this "narrative" crushed the lives of the accused students, ruined the career of the team's coach and almost trumped the criminal justice system. For a falsity, that's pretty potent.

At a scholarly meeting two years ago, then-Harvard President Larry Summers suggested that women are underrepresented at the top of science and engineering because of what he described as the evidently more men than women who are "three and a half, four standard deviations above the mean." I recall back then reading the transcript of Mr. Summer's remarks, which is filled with caveats, obeisances, impenetrable prose and tangled logic. From this morass, it was possible to extract a big PC faux pas. But to think Mr. Summers was led from this turgid speech to the pyre, where his entire career as president of Harvard was immolated is, well, striking.

This is the way we live now: The only place where speech can occur without fear of job loss is on a cartoon show or in stand-up comedy. This means only the self-identified nuts can say what they want. Welcome to the asylum.

The left doesn't mind if comedians savage PC. So what? You get to laugh at the cartoon version but they use the real stuff to fire and eliminate whomever they wish. Thus do we all become their sheep.

Henninger proposes a truce:

Most people subscribe to the soft form of PC, which holds that the world will be a better place when we all have a little more equitable love in our hearts. Fine. But the hard form, played out at Duke and Harvard, is not about evening the odds; it's about exercising power, about reversing the odds. Thus, when a Larry Summers or Trent Lott trips up, the velvet glove of niceness comes off and the enemy is annihilated, abetted by a First Amendment media OK with executions for wrongful speech.

The result is that people sympathetic to PC's nominal goals are taken aback at its virulent results. Kind of like hip-hop. So in the spirit of Russell Simmons's overdue H-B-N ban, a proposed PC truce: Short of prosecutable acts, violations of PC should not lead to loss of livelihood. No more summary executions. No more firings. No more allowing the Al Sharptons to decide who makes a living and who doesn't. Don Imus is financially set, but not so the average college prof or schmo sports commentator. With this no-job-loss rule in place, Mr. Summers's enemies would have had to overthrow him on the merits of his presidency, not PC.

This won't solve all the depredations of political correctness, or its penchant for imposing lifelong stigma on offenders. But it would stop the zombies who serve as administrators, executives and advertisers from being instruments of career destruction. Sanctions or suspensions can be meted on a case-specific basis. "Nappy-headed hos" deserved at least a pistol-whipping.

Imus is hardly a casualty to mourn, but Duke was a PC travesty, which we shouldn't allow to slip down the memory hole. So was the Summers case. It's long past time to make political correctness politically correct.

Sorry, I can't see this happening--PC career annihilations are the left's version of Animal House's "Double Secret Probation", or Monty Python's Spanish Inquistion, and they like knowing that nobody expects where they will strike next.

Glenn Reynolds contrasts half a century in academia, from 1957's Far Rockaway High School Rifle Team to this Zen moment of mental minimalism:

Meanwhile, in 2007 Yale is banning fake weapons on stage. And to think that universities hold themselves out as bastions of critical thinking where people can make fine distinctions . . . .

So the audiences at Yale will giggle at a production without realistic prop weapons. Then go home and watch The Sopranos, 24, reruns of Miami Vice, Gunsmoke, Full Metal Jacket, etc.

As one clinical psychologist noted last year:

The purpose of an elite university education is no longer to become educated -- to acquire a well-furnished mind and familiarize oneself with the best things that have been thought and said -- but to become stupid by elevating a means to an end. Thus, upon contact with his luckless students, Professor Taylor tells them “that if they are not more confused and uncertain at the end of the course than they were at the beginning, I will have failed.” In short, the goal of education is to make students as lost and confused as Professor Taylor, through the deification of man’s capacity to doubt anything.

Meanwhile, AP notes, "Mass Shootings More Common Since 1960s"

And all through those years, the same questions have been asked: What is it about modern-day America that provokes such random violence? Is it the decline of traditional morals? The depiction of violence in entertainment? The ready availability of lethal firepower?

For some reason though, this topic is never explored.

Update: A commenter on The Volokh Conspiracy notes:

"I wonder if Dean Trachtenberg realizes that elsewhere, the university encourages sword-wielding psychos to practice their craft." Let's make them use wooden swords, too.

For the sake of Yale's apparently fragile collective emotional health, why not cut to the chase (with dulled plastic-tipped kindergarten safety scissors, of course) and ban them outright on campus?

Mickey Kaus links to up and coming tyro blogger "N. Ephron"; I appreciate his willingness to bring new and unknown talent to light in the Blogosphere. (Will you stop this riff?--Ed) Ephron thoroughly puts NBC and their airings of Imus and Cho into sharp perspective:

Another reason I didn't write about Imus, incidentally, is that by mid-week, the entry level into the Imus-commentary sweepstakes changed, and since I do not have two daughters, much less two beautiful black daughters, I was ineligible to comment on how Imus' remarks would deeply affect them (if they were old enough to read) or had already affected them so much that they would probably never recover. I might even have made the mistake of talking about Imus' "victims," when actually the victims were the only true winners of the week, and by the way, how bad can it be for the victims that they were insulted by a lunatic but then got to be on Oprah?

That's exactly right. We've defined the V-word down many, many notches when a championship basketball team can feel "scarred for life" over the ramblings of a shock jock with a salon for liberal Beltway elites. I wonder if any of the students (or their coach) have gained any perspective on their language after the Virginia Tech massacre, which left 32 real victims, plus hundreds of grieving relatives and friends.

Malcolm Muggeridge's Law states that there is no way that a writer of fiction can compete with real life for its pure absurdity. Such as this example: "James E. McGreevey, who resigned the governorship under a cloud of scandal, has a new job teaching law, ethics and leadership at one of New Jersey’s public colleges".

McGreevey's course should run about 30 seconds. Ideally, it would consist of him instructing his students, "If you'd like to remain office, just do the opposite of everything I did, and you should be OK. Goodnight--drive safely!

(And speaking of driving--safely or otherwise--McGreevy's successor has some interesting ethics as well, of course.)

If you haven't heard it yet, don't miss my podcast from last year with Steve Malanga of City Journal on how New Jersey slowly succumbed to such perilous governmental ethics that John Fund dubbed it "Louisiana North".*

Read More »

I wonder what someone whose worldview is similar to Ward "little Eichmanns" Churchill or Oliver Stone, who compared Al Qaeda terrorists to Einstein(!) shortly after 9/11 would think about the Virginia Tech massacre, given both men's sixties-minted love of terrorism and all things radical chic.

Chances are his thoughts would read very much like this.

Update: Just listening to the first few minutes of this week's Sanity Squad podcast, which touches upon some of these themes.

Mark Steyn describes America's burgeoning "Culture of Passivity":

I haven’t weighed in yet on Virginia Tech — mainly because, in a saner world, it would not be the kind of incident one needed to have a partisan opinion on. But I was giving a couple of speeches in Minnesota yesterday and I was asked about it and found myself more and more disturbed by the tone of the coverage. I’m not sure I’m ready to go the full Derb but I think he’s closer to the reality of the situation than most. On Monday night, Geraldo was all over Fox News saying we have to accept that, in this horrible world we live in, our “children” need to be “protected.”

Point one: They’re not “children.” The students at Virginia Tech were grown women and — if you’ll forgive the expression — men. They would be regarded as adults by any other society in the history of our planet. Granted, we live in a selectively infantilized culture where twentysomethings are “children” if they’re serving in the Third Infantry Division in Ramadi but grown-ups making rational choices if they drop to the broadloom in President Clinton’s Oval Office. Nonetheless, it’s deeply damaging to portray fit fully formed adults as children who need to be protected. We should be raising them to understand that there will be moments in life when you need to protect yourself — and, in a “horrible” world, there may come moments when you have to choose between protecting yourself or others. It is a poor reflection on us that, in those first critical seconds where one has to make a decision, only an elderly Holocaust survivor, Professor Librescu, understood instinctively the obligation to act.

As I wrote back in 2005 during the birth of the Cindy Sheehan-mania on the left and its media:

According to Hollywood, [America's soldiers are] children. Check out the messages on the signs carried by Hollywood celebrities protesting in Crawford last week in these photos: "Bring Our Children Home" and "'Before One More Mother's Child Is Lost'--Cindy Sheehan".

To understand what a radical transformation this is for Hollywood, consider how the sixties, that most golden of decade for the left, fetishized youth culture. 1967's Wild In The Streets promulgated the notion of a 24-year old rock star millionaire who gets elected after first securing the vote for 15 year olds.

Well, 15 year olds still can't vote, but 18 year olds can, thanks to the 26th Amendment, signed into law in 1971. In 1966, Time magazine named those "25 And Under" as its "Man of the Year". "Don't Trust Anyone Over 30" was a cliché of the era, and heck, William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson's original 1967 novel of Logan's Run envisioned a whole society where the maximum age that could be reached was 21.

Glenn Reynolds and Dr. Helen recently interviewed Robert Epstein, Director Emeritus of the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies in Massachusetts and author of The Case Against Adolescence: Rediscovering the Adult in Every Teen.

Liberal record executive (and former aide-de-camp to Led Zeppelin) Danny Goldberg wrote a book in 2003 titled, Dispatches from the Culture Wars: How the Left Lost Teen Spirit. We're I in my late teens or early 20s, I think I'd be pretty annoyed at how today's generation of leftists have sought to re-infantilize the same age group they once sought to empower--and perhaps I'd be equally surprised that conservatives seem to be defending the rights of young adults much more vigorously these days.

Update: Antidote to infantilization found: "Wanted: A culture of self-defense".

Dan Gilmour has some thoughts on what the coverage of the Virginia Tech massacre in both the Blogosphere and the legacy media says about the current states of each media:

The democratization of media is not just about creation, though that has been the most notable aspect so far. Putting the tools into everyone’s hands has produced an explosion of media creation, as blogs and sharing sites such as YouTube and Flickr show us.

Traditional media think of distribution: making journalism or movies or programs and sending them out to consumers. This is inverted in a democratized media world, where we all have access to what we want, as well as when and where.

I didn’t turn on my TV yesterday except in the evening, to watch a national network’s news report. I wanted to see a summary of what a serious journalism organization had to say about what it knew so far.

Instead, during the day, I used the online media — including the major news sites — to get the latest information, sifting it, making judgments about credibility and reliability as I read and watched and listened. That, too, is the future in many cases.

It’s also worth noting that the citizen media component of this terrible event is not a new to the digital era. When President John F. Kennedy was gunned down in Dallas back in 1963, Abraham Zapruder caught the gruesome killing on a home movie camera — footage that became an essential part of the historical record. But the difference between then and tomorrow is this:

In 1963, one man with a camera captured the event on film. In a very few years, a similar situation would be captured by thousands of people — all holding high-resolution video cameras — and all of those cameras would be connected to high-speed digital networks.

That is different.

Remember, too, that the passengers aboard the airplanes on Sept. 11, 2001, were making voice calls to loved ones and colleagues with mobile phones. What if they’d been sending videos to the world of what was happening inside those doomed aircraft?

We will still need journalists to help sort things out. But the “burning city” words from 2001 revealed something.

We used to say that journalists write the first draft of history. Not so, not any longer. The people on the ground at these events write the first draft. This is not a worrisome change, not if we are appropriately skeptical and to find sources we trust. We will need to retool media literacy for the new age, too.

Related thoughts here.

(Via Pajamas Media, which has been providing extensive coverage of the VT massacre.)

In TCS Daily, Jerry Bowyer writes:

This morning I read that the Virginia Tech shooter died with the name Ismail Ax written in red ink on his arm. The mainstream press doesn't seem to have a clue as to what this might mean. To quote Indiana Jones, "Didn't any of you guys go to Sunday School?"

Read the whole thing.

Update: Jules Crittenden has several more VT-related links, including Glenn Reynolds' op-ed in the New York Daily News, titled, "People don't stop killers. People with guns do". Here's a sample:

"Gun-free zones" are premised on a fantasy: That murderers will follow rules, and that people like my student, or Bradford Wiles, are a greater danger to those around them than crazed killers like Cho Seung-hui. That's an insult. Sometimes, it's a deadly one.

See also: England.

Dr. Helen has an interesting angle on Cho Seung-Hui's heinous crime yesterday:

It seems that everyone is blaming the "American gun culture" on what happened but perhaps Cho Seung-Hui took his cues from another infamous mass murderer, Woo Bum-Kon, also from Korea:

Bum-Kon had an argument with his live-in girlfriend in the afternoon of April 26, 1982. Enraged, he left the house and went to the police armory, where he began consuming large amounts of whiskey. He became moderately drunk, raided the police armory of its weapons and built a personal arsenal. Bum-Kon then stole a single high-powered rifle and some grenades and left the armory. It was by this point around dinner time. He walked from house to house, and abused his position as a police officer to make people feel safe and gain entry to the home. Then he shot the victims, or killed the entire family with a grenade. He continued this pattern for the next eight hours, and into the early morning hours of April 27.

Bum-Kon committed the worse mass murder in known history, killing 58 people--could the Virginia shooter have been trying to do the same?

Like I said, it's an interesting angle. It will also get near-zero-traction in the US media, for obvious reasons.

Betsy Newmark and Charles Johnson have some thoughts on Professor Liviu Librescu, a 76-year-old Holocaust survivor who sacrificed himself by throwing himself at the shooter, which also blocked the doorway to his classroom and allowed his students to flee through his classroom's windows.

Yesterday was Holocaust Remembrance Day, Betsy reminds us.

Details at Hot Air:

Seung Hui Cho, a permanent resident of the United States, a Korean national and a Virginia Tech student has been identified as the gunman in the shootings that left 33 people dead on the Virginia Tech campus Monday, ABC News has learned.

The student left a “disturbing note” before killing two people in a dorm room, returning to his own room to re-arm and entering a classroom building on the other side of campus to continue his rampage, sources said.

Cho’s identitiy has been confirmed with a positive fingerprint match on the guns used in the rampage and with immigration materials. It is believed that he was the shooter in both incidents yesterday. Sources say Cho was carrying a backpack that contained receipts for a March purchase of a Glock 9 mm pistol, sources said. Witnesses had also told authorities that the shooter was carrying a backpack. Sections of chain similar to those used to lock the main doors at Norris Hall, the site of the second shooting that left 31 dead, were found inside a Virginia Tech dormitory, sources confirmed to ABC News.

Elsewhere, some elements of ABC's coverage of Virginia Tech are recieving criticism. And speaking of media criticism, Glenn Reynolds reminds us that mass shootings at US schools are much less common than the media in general would lead us to believe.

Update: Not surprisingly, the PC police are already on clean-up patrol: "Asian American Journalists Association: Don't call shooter Asian!"

"Report: At least 20 dead, 28 wounded", says Allahpundit, who has details here as they develop.

Glenn Reynolds adds, "reader John Lucas, who works with a Virginia law firm, emails that Va. Tech is a 'gun-free zone.' Well, for those who follow the law".

Spot-on, sadly.

Update: No link yet to a specific article, but Matt Drudge adds:

At least 25 people have been killed in shootings on Virginia Tech University campus. The number of fatalities are expected to rise...

In January of last year, "A bill that would have given college students and employees the right to carry handguns on campus"--and thus defend themselves during an incident such as today's--"died with nary a shot being fired in the General Assembly".

More: Allah links to this MSNBC article, adding, "According to NBC, the killer used two 9mm handguns and killed himself". Meanwhile, Mary Katharine Ham has many more details, noting that "Apparently, there's cell phone video of the attack. Heard they showed it on CNN".

Update (11:10 AM PDT): "Before Today's Massacre, Virginia Tech Received 2 Separate Bomb Threats", according to ABC News.

Update (11:42 AM PDT): Virginia bloggers comment on the VT massacre.

Update (2:10 PM PDT): Mary Katharine Ham writes, "Republicans Drop the Internet Ball on Va. Tech Shootings":

To be clear, I'm not saying that Obama, Hillary, and Edwards care any more about the suffering on the ground in Blacksburg, Va. today than Mitt, McCain, and Rudy.

But to look at their websites, you wouldn't know a thing about what Mitt, McCain, and Rudy think about this national tragedy. It's doesn't mean they're terrible, selfish men, as I'm sure the Left will infer. On the contrary, I'm sure all of their thoughts and prayers are with the kids of Blacksburg, just as all of ours are. But the fact is that the Big Six in the presidential race are huge, public figures who are required, for better or worse, to have a public position on every issue, ever. Today is certainly no exception.

Political web operatives on the Left understand that websites move with the news, and are sometimes the fastest way to move those messages. Today, the Dem candidates' sites reflect that and the Republicans' do not.

In a very-much related post, NRO's various blogs write that the spinning on the story has already begun from AP and ABC. Expect a lot of that during the week.

Update (3:50 PM PDT): Like this one.

Update (8:22 PM PDT): Jim Geraghty writes:

Right On Cue, Virginia Tech Shootings Spur Calls for Gun Control, Even Though Gun Control Ensured The Victims Couldn't Defend Themselves

Further thoughts from Michelle Malkin.

More dispatches from World War II, as the Boston Globe's Alex Beam ponders how green could men in brown shirts actually be.

(Via Dean Barnett, who gives Beam bonus points for the title alone.)

Update: Responding to the ludicrous book that Beam lampoons in his article, Orrin Judd adds, "Note how easy it is to excuse Hitler when your idea of environmentalism matters more than the reality of Nazism".

"Duke Lacrosse Case Charges to Be Dropped".

For Mary Katharine Ham's video flashback to some of the things that never happened on the Duke Campus, click here.

Maybe, says Ace, who posts some thoughts on San Francisco State, which recently investigated College Republicans for flag desecration and blasphemy, two things which otherwise never occur on campus...

Update: Meanwhile, Jeff Goldstein explores conflicting on-campus identity politics.

Freeman Dyson tells Tech Central Station that "the western academic world is very much like Weimar Germany, finding itself in a situation of losing power and influence".

And the original certainly worked out well for all concerned, huh?

(Via Instapundit.)

Johnny Hart, the artist behind the long-running cartoon "B.C." passed away today. Ed Morrissey has a warm encomium to Hart, whose cartoon was a favorite of mine, as well as my late father:

It seems especially fitting that Hart went to his Lord on Easter, and passed away at the storyboard. May the Lord accept Hart with open arms. Godspeed, Johnny, and thank you.

Incidentally, as I wrote in 2005, academia is working hard to ensure future generations won't know what the cartoon's initials stood for.

In response to the "Christian Terrorists" cooked up by high school administrators in my old stopping grounds of Burlington Township, Kesher Talk explores a variety of additional "Politically safe hypothetical terror scenarios", including:

Angry Scientologists overrun the school, demanding reparations for something or other that happened in another galaxy, a million years or so ago. They announce that they will begin to confuse and bewilder the children with absurd theological theories plagiarised from old pulp science fiction books.

Heh.^TM

This is just bizarre--I didn't attend the school in this report (my parents sent me here), but it's just miles from where I grew up in South Jersey. And yet its worldview sounds like it's in another galaxy from the conservative (and largely Christian) townfolk I knew, and still know, in the area:

The head of a national, Texas-based pro-family group says a recent hostage drill at a New Jersey high school, which portrayed conservative Christians as terrorists, is reflective of a dangerous philosophy that has become prevalent in many parts of America, where it is having negative effects on education.

A local paper reports that a drill at Burlington Township High School in New Jersey involved police portraying mock gunmen, described as "members of a right-wing fundamentalist group called the 'New Crusaders' who don't believe in the separation of church and state." The fake gunmen were said to have been "seeking justice because the daughter of one [member] had been expelled for praying before class."

Robert Spenser writes, "Why do the authorities involved here invent a fake threat instead of dealing with the real one? Because they know that no Crusaders' Rights group will call them bigots on CNN. They know that no Christians will picket their offices or call them hatemongers."

Or as Relapsed Catholic adds, "Not to be confused with a typical Law & Order episode".

England's Daily Mail reports, "Teachers drop the Holocaust to avoid offending Muslims".

David Irving should be feeling awfully smug about this.

Update: More thoughts on the topic from American history teacher Betsy Newmark.

More: Follow the Insta-links for some additional related thoughts. And here's a reminder from seven years ago that England's recent societal meltdowm wasn't exactly unexpected.

Just click:

More details here; for our interview last year with Even Coyne Maloney on DIY video, click here.

Building on concepts from Joseph Schumpeter, Iain Murray has a great observation on the mobius loop that exists between the marble halls of academia and Washington:

As intellectuals became politically committed, so politicians portray themselves as intellectuals and convey their ideas by stealing the lightning of the academy. Al Gore, the world's greatest scientist, is the foremost example. The working man cannot hope to understand the science; the scientist cannot convey it to the working man; step forward the intellectual politician, who emerges as arbiter of both science and public opinion.

Yet the dangers are obvious. As Schumpeter foresaw, the intellectuals and in particular the intellectual politician, who has far more power than the mere intellectual, are attacking the capitalist system that created them.

Exactly.

Update: In a rare moment of synchronicity between neoclassical economics and tasteful conservative fashion, Manolo For The Men weighs in on the substance of Schumpeter's sybaritic style.

Tammy Bruce notes an inconvenient statistic:

I've noted here and on my show numerous times, the appalling fact that 50 percent of our college seniors are graduating functionally illiterate. Well, a new study reveals that a full 21 percent of the American public is illiterate, while 36 percent of people in Washington, DC are.

That's right, 1 in 5 Americans and 1 in 3 residents of DC cannot comprehend a simple 500-word newspaper opinion piece, read a bus schedule, a map, nor can they fillout a job application.

As Tammy writes, "The short bus is getting really packed".

Mark Steyn has some thoughts on William Wilberforce, "one very persistent British backbencher [who] secured the passage by parliament of an Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade throughout His Majesty's realms and territories". Steyn writes that Wilberforce was also the inventor of "what New Yorkers came to know in the '90s as the 'broken windows' theory":

What we think of as "the Victorian era" was, in large part, an invention of Wilberforce that he succeeded in selling to his compatriots. We children of the 20th century mock our 19th century forebears as uptight prudes, moralists and do-gooders. If they were, it's because of Wilberforce. His legacy includes the very notion of a "social conscience": In the 1790s a good man could stroll past an 11-year-old prostitute on a London street without feeling a twinge of disgust or outrage; he accepted her as merely a feature of the landscape, like an ugly hill. By the 1890s, there were still child prostitutes, but there were also charities and improvement societies and orphanages. It is amazing to read a letter from Wilberforce and realize that he is, in fact, articulating precisely 220 years ago what New Yorkers came to know in the '90s as the "broken windows" theory: ''The most effectual way to prevent greater crimes is by punishing the smaller.''

The Victorians, if plunked down before the Anna Nicole updates for an hour or two, would probably conclude we're nearer the 18th century than their own. A "social conscience" obliges the individual to act. Today we call for action all the time, but mostly from government, which is another way of excusing us and allowing us to get on with the distractions of the day. Our schoolhouses revile the Victorian do-gooders as condescending racists and oppressors -- though the single greatest force for ending slavery around the world was the Royal Navy. Isn't societal self-loathing just another justification for lethargy? After all, if the white man is inherently wicked, that pretty much absolves one from having to do anything. And so the same kind of lies we told ourselves about slaves we now tell ourselves about other faraway people, and for the same reason: because big changes are tough and who needs the hassle? The hardest thing in any society is "the reformation of manners.''

And societal self-loathing and its inherent lethargy are precisely what are taught in elite schools today.

At TCS Daily, Aaron Hanscom, an elementary school teacher in the Los Angles Unified School District and a freelance journalist, explores a topic we've also posted on from time to time over the past few years:

Principal Hansen of Mount Diablo High says, "In this country, race is a very uncomfortable topic, and it's time we got over it." Until that day, apparently, she'll go right ahead making her students feel uncomfortable by reminding them of the color of their skin in segregated assemblies.

Read the whole thing.

Step back and watch a pair of amusing scuffles:

Round One: "Maureen Dowd Column Incites Hillary-Obama War of Words"!

Round Two: Academic Nerd Fight!

(Round Three was also originally on the bill, but it was over before it got started.)

I don't think anyone's proposing banning popcorn this week, so fire up the microwave and enjoy the fights.

Chris Sprow of The Chicago Sports Review writes

KC Johnson is a 38-year-old bowtie-wearing Brooklyn College professor with a Harvard degree. He has a passion for American history, and he enjoys the classroom. And due to his own peculiar mixture of annoyance and curiosity, he might be the most oft-cited source for those looking for coverage of what could formerly be called "The Duke Rape Case."

That it was ever dubbed "The Duke Rape Case" as opposed to "The Duke Investigation" or "Allegations in Durham" is part of why he exists as we know him. He's a common story in New York and Durham. Kurt Andersen has written about Johnson's work in New York Magazine, and calls him "heroic." The exceptional legal writer Stuart Taylor Jr. has written about him in Slate. Many others have, and some will surely follow.

And yes, old-media lovers, he's a mere blogger; a word that our Microsoft Word still holds in contempt, an underlined outsider.

My copy of Word doesn't--it only takes a keystroke to keep it up to date. Speaking of which:

He's also further evidence of how, even inside a newsroom, it's long not been a debate whether the "web logger" has changed modern journalism for the better, no matter how much it can sting us in the old school…To. Print. That.

Just because you come from the old school of dead-tree journalism doesn't mean you can't keep up to date with the new.

In the body of the interview, Johnson states:

there's a tendency among activist-left in the academy to just brand anyone who disagrees with them as a right wing-nut. It works, and it's hard for them to give up that stance. … Put it this way: before this case started I had never seen defending civil liberties as a right wing position.

As Glenn Reynolds rebuts, "It all depends on whose civil liberties, K.C."

Now available from Amazon!

As Tom Wolfe likes to say, "An intellectual is a person knowledgeable in one field who speaks out only in others". That definition applies in spades to Professor Philip Bohlman of the University of Chicago, who is the president of the now legendary Society of Ethnomusicologists.

For sheer non-humor that becomes unintentionally hilarious in its stuffed shirt starched-into-concrete rigidity, don't miss the audio recording of his interview with Hugh Hewitt. How this professor must shriek in horror every time he sees a production of Guys & Dolls...

Ruth Wisse explores what she calls the growing "gliberalism" of American universities:

Recent surveys confirm that university faculties have been tilting steadily leftward, but I think it is wrong to assume they have been tilting toward "liberalism" as is commonly assumed. Liberalism worthy of the name emphasizes freedom of the individual, democracy and the rule of law. Liberalism is prepared to fight for those freedoms through constitutional participatory government, and to protect those freedoms, in battle if necessary. What we see on the American campus is not liberalism, but a gutted and gutless "gliberalism," that leaves to others the responsibility for governance, and arrogates to itself the right to criticize. It accepts money from the public purse without assuming reciprocal duties for the public good. Instead of debating public policy in the public arena, faculty says, "I quit," but then continues to draw benefits from the system it will not protect.

The national and international crisis may eventually pull the elite universities into action, but by then, gliberalism will have done its damage.

In I Am Charlotte Simmons, Tom Wolfe, through the eyes of his eponymous student from tiny Sparta, NC, famously writes in astonishment at the trend in American universities since the 1970s towards the co-ed bathroom.

If that sounds extreme, consider the movement towards the opposite direction in Aussie campus facilities spotted by Tim Blair:

The successful integration of Muslims into the broader Australian community continues apace:

A row has erupted over Muslim-only washrooms at La Trobe University that can be accessed only with a secret push-button code.

Apparently most Australian universities provide Muslim-only prayer and washrooms for students. Shouldn’t they be called multiversities?

Think of it as a school-sponsored return of Separate But Equal.

Update: More "gliberalism" spotted from a not-at-all surprising source: Ruth Bader Ginsburg. But what do they think about Justice Ginsburg's comments at Harvard?

In 2003, Rogert Scruton wrote:

By 1971, when I moved from Cambridge to a permanent lectureship at Birkbeck College, London, I had become a conservative. So far as I could discover there was only one other conservative at Birkbeck, and that was Nunzia—Maria Annunziata—the Neapolitan lady who served meals in the Senior Common Room and who cocked a snook at the lecturers by plastering her counter with kitschy photos of the Pope.

One of those lecturers, towards whom Nunzia conceived a particular antipathy, was Eric Hobsbawm, the lionized historian of the Industrial Revolution, whose Marxist vision of our country is now the orthodoxy taught in British schools. Hobsbawm came as a refugee to Britain, bringing with him the Marxist commitment and Communist Party membership that he retained until he could retain it no longer—the Party, to his chagrin, having dissolved itself in embarrassment at the lies that could no longer be repeated. No doubt in recognition of this heroic career, Hobsbawm was rewarded, at Mr. Blair’s behest, with the second highest award that the Queen can bestow—that of “Companion of Honour.” This little story is of enormous significance to a British conservative. For it is a symptom and a symbol of what has happened to our intellectual life since the Sixties. We should ponder the extraordinary fact that Oxford University, which granted an honorary degree to Bill Clinton on the grounds that he had once hung around its precincts, refused the same honor to Margaret Thatcher, its most distinguished post-war graduate and Britain’s first woman Prime Minister.

Via Maggie's Farm.

More strange doings on the campuses of my home state. In 2006, I wrote:

What is it with colleges in the state I grew up in and The Reich Stuff, anyhow? Last year, Farleigh Dickinson had on its staff an admitted Neo-Nazi. Now Mahwah's Ramapo College is running an art exhibition featuring paintings that look like they're straight out of Joseph Goebbels' private collection.

Then there's this fellow, with a remarkably similar totalitarian bent and heads-is-tails worldview:

For twenty years, Grover Furr has been an English professor at Montclair State University in Montclair, New Jersey, where he educates students in his peculiar worldview, which is an updated Stalinism and in which America is the world’s biggest oppressor and greatest terrorist state. While his academic expertise is English literature, he presents himself as an expert on communism, and scours academic forums like the Historians of American Communism net, defending Joseph Stalin and calling America’s role in bringing down the Soviet Empire a moral outrage. “Was there something morally wrong in trying to bring down the Soviet Union? I think the only honest answer possible is: Yes, it was wrong,” says Furr.

Not at all surprisingly, he has rather different opinions concerning Israel and those who seek to bring it down.

Mary Katharine Ham takes a video tour of Things That Did Not Happen on the Duke Campus:

More thoughts from MKH on the Duke Lacrosse case, here.

Back in March, at the height of Yale's Taliban man debacle, blogger Penraker wrote:

We now have the first generation of college students who have learned NOT to think; they don't even allow certain thoughts in their heads.

Welcome to the class of '06, the first generation educated to become drones.

Don't believe him? Then listen to Mark Taylor, religion and humanities professor at Williams College, and "Gagdad Bob", who runs roughshod over his zen-like thought of no-thought:

The purpose of an elite university education is no longer to become educated -- to acquire a well-furnished mind and familiarize oneself with the best things that have been thought and said -- but to become stupid by elevating a means to an end. Thus, upon contact with his luckless students, Professor Taylor tells them “that if they are not more confused and uncertain at the end of the course than they were at the beginning, I will have failed.” In short, the goal of education is to make students as lost and confused as Professor Taylor, through the deification of man’s capacity to doubt anything.

Via "Bird Dog" of Maggie's Farm, who asks:

America's first colleges: King's College (Columbia now), Harvard, Yale, the College of New Jersey (now Princeton) - were all begun as places to mainly educate clergy, and/or religiously-interested lay people. Have they simply been co-opted by a new religion? Are colleges still doctrinal seminaries, with new doctrines?

Yes.

Last year at Thangsgiving, I posted some thoughts on Rough Creek Lodge, an upscale hunting lodge and resort on 11,000 acres in Glen Rose, Texas, about 90 minutes outside of Dallas.

As I was just telling Tammy Bruce and her radio listeners, my wife and I thought it would be a fun place to spend Christmas, and it certainly is--but blogging may be at a reduced pace over the weekend.

The two breaking stories today are this truck crash, made more suspicious because of its cargo, and the Duke lacrosse case, with the D.A. dropping the main charge of rape. As I mentioned to Tammy, the timing of it--on a Friday afternoon, the weekend before Christmas--seems to imply that his office was attempting to minimize the damage to Mike Nifong's reputation as much as they possibly could.

Will the remaining two charges against the Duke players be dropped during another quiet period in the news cycle--say, the weekend before New Years? Or will Nifong continue to try to string this out as long as possible?

A few years ago, David Frum wrote a book titled How We Got Here, which explored how many of today's societal trends had their roots in the 1970s. Today, Daniel Henninger writes:

Chief Justice Warren Burger's long-forgotten dissent is relevant to a society today that vulgarizes simple conversation while euphemizing or banning its darker thoughts. Justice Burger defended the right of students to criticize their school or government "in vigorous, or even harsh, terms." But he called the student publication "obscene and infantile." A university, he suggested, is " an institution where individuals learn to express themselves in acceptable, civil terms. We provide that environment to the end that students may learn the self-restraint necessary to the functioning of a civilized society and understand the need for those external restraints to which we must all submit if group existence is to be tolerable."

"Tolerable." That's an interesting, old-fashioned word. It's not quite the same as "tolerant," is it? As t-words go, I think I prefer "tolerable" to the current alternatives.

Meanwhile, Betsy Newmark writes:

Roger Kimball has a column today about how some universities are turning down grants of money because the faculty doesn't want to have any sort of curriculum that might break away from the leftist ideology so prevalent on American campuses. They'd rather turn down grants of millions of dollars than chance having some program that doesn't denigrate western culture and history. His prime example is Hamilton College, a school that has had no problem inviting former prostitutes, a leder of the Weather Underground, or Ward Churchill to come talk or teach on campus. But try to found a center based on the contributions associated with the man whom the college is named after and the faculty balks.

Does anyone still think of colleges, or at least their non-science, non-engineering departments as "institution[s] where individuals learn to express themselves in acceptable, civil terms"?

Despite the endless dumbing down of the education process over the last 20 years or so, it's awfully reassuring to see that the same methods used to grade exams when I went to school are still being employed today.

Back in my college days, I would have signed up for this course in an Old Milwaukee second. Cathy Young writes:

Maybe the next frontier in the academic battle against all varieties of oppression should be "drunk studies." Why not an academic program championing the idea that "alcohol abuse" is an artificial construct based on the mainstream culture's oppressive notions of what constitutes appropriate and inappropriate consumption of alcohol? "Drunk studies" could tell us that the stigmatization of drunkenness stems from the Western valorization of such dubious values as self-control, rationality, and obedience to social norms, and reflects a pernicious fear of rebellion against inhibitions and authority. Of course, it would also question conventional wisdom -- supposedly based on scientific evidence, but really rooted in anti-drunk bias -- about the deleterious health consequences of alcohol abuse and the dangers of drunk driving. After all, the goal of "drunk studies" would be to empower drunks!

Glenn Reynolds suggests the perfect professor to helm the course; Ann Althouse has some thoughts on the just-as-ludicrous actual course that inspired Young's proposal.

Incidentally, if the courses that Young and Althouse discuss ever got together for a chat, this would have to be the food of choice at the interdepartmental meetings!

Scott Johnson of Power Line looks at a Clinton-style apology "for offenses he had not committed to those who had not suffered them" from Dartmouth's athletic director concerning the--gasp!--American Indian name of another(!) college's hockey team, and writes:

Dartmouth has now managed to distinguish itself on the national stage for its political correctness. Adjusted for degree of difficulty, this is an almost unbelievable accomplishment. Surely some kind of award is in order.

Fortunately, there is one.

Hugh Hewitt interviewed Victor Davis Hanson today, and asked him about these photos of University of Pennsylvania president Amy Gutmann's Halloween party, which Democracy Project describes thusly:

University of Pennsylvania president Amy Gutmann threw her annual Halloween costume party at her home Tuesday night. Among the guests was Saad Saadi, who came dressed as a suicide bomber, complete with plastic dynamite strapped to his chest and a toy automatic rifle. Worse, Gutmann posed with Saadi!

An obvious question: would Gutmann have posed with a guest--or even allowed him into her house--if he'd dressed as Adolf Hitler or a Nazi SS officer? A KKK member?

But in modern liberal circles, posing as a Palestinian suicide bomber (see his kefiya) is just fine. After all, he mainly tries to kill innocent Jews.

Hanson replied to Hewitt:

Well, I saw that, and again, I think it's emblematic of this endemic problem on the left, that they don't really see that we're in a war, they don't really see that there's a moral difference between suicide bombers and people who try to deliberately kill people, and people in the war who have collatoral damage by accident, when they try to target terrorists. So I mean, it's a problem we're having, these Fraudian slips. John Kerry didn't mean to slur soldiers, but he has a problem. And when he makes a mistake, and he makes a gaffe, that's the type of things that comes out. It reveals a deep-seated distrust, just like Kennedy, just like Jay Rockefeller, just like Senator Durbin, just like all of these people when they have these outbursts, and they lapse into sort of a stream of consciousness. What you expect to come from them is a 1960's deep distrust of the United States socio-economic and military system. And then they do silly things, such as President Gutmann, who was provost at Princeton University, allowing a picture of her with a suicide bomber. They just don't have the same antenna that most of us do.

As Hugh writes on his blog, "As reaction to these photos builds, please reserve your anger for the adults, not the stupid kid". (And he has since apologized for his actions; see the end of the Democracy Project post.)

This wasn't an isolated incident on Halloween, though. As I noted yesterday:

Karl Rove's mind control rays somehow caused the attorney and former Democratic candidate for governor of Maine who was behind the November Surprise of 2000 to wear an Osama bin Laden mask and toy guns and hand grenades on the side of the road in Maine, where he was promptly arrested.

For a sense of a decadent, dissipated culture which turned a blind eye to the horrors happening even then in their own backyard, it's worth re-reading this superb article by Jonathan Last which compared liberal elites in English universities in the 1930s with today's left in America.

I was only mildly surprised yesterday that Senator Kerry expresses no remorse over his Radical Chic phase in the early 1970s; I wonder if those who've professed admiration for today's terrorists will be any better able to genuflect on their own allegiances in a decade or two.

Michelle Malkin asks, "Why is Ward Churchill smiling? Because he is still employed by the University of Colorado and collecting a publicly-subsidized paycheck." Read the rest here.

James Lileks visits his young daughter's Minneapolis school and observes before him, in 2006, separate but equal education:

At one point the Hispanic students came by. The Hispanic students are not mainstreamed, but held in special separate classes until third grade, at which point I gather they are magically integrated into all the social relationships that have built up over the three previous years. It really was quite remarkable. The teacher led a line of brown-skinned students through the atrium, and of course they all looked at what we were doing. (“We” at this point included two white kids, an Asian kid, and an African-American kid.) I noted to the other parent: I never thought I’d see the days when schools were racially segregated again.

But that’s progress.

Unfortunately, schools across the country actually think it is.

Thus making the thesis of Michael Graham's Redneck Nation as current as ever.