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.

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.

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".

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.'"

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.

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.

(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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.'

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

(H/T: SDA)

Mike S. Adams:

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

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.

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.

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'...

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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 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.

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)!

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.

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.

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...

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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?

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.

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."

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.

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?

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.

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."

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.

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."

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.

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'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."

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.”

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.

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.”

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.)

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

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.

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.

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.

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 . . . .

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.

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?

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.

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?

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".*

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.

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.

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.

(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?"

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.

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?

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.

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...

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.

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

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.''

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Ed Morrissey writes that two college kids "decided that planting fake bombs in the subway would be a humorous way to blow off some midterm steam. New York City officials are less than amused":

[The students] actually took pictures of their stunt and planned to make it part of an art project.

Its theme? The inability of officials to detect terrorist plots.

I think they just flunked.

Every year brings a raft of articles on the stars of the NFL and other professional leagues run amok; Terrell Owens and his did-he-or-didn't-he-suicide attempt is merely the latest and most high-profile. How much is college to blame for not preparing young men by infusing them with sufficient character to survive the high-pressure world of professional sports? Probably quite a bit, if the fictitious campus of Tom Wolfe's Dupont University is anything like reality:

Charlotte’s experiences at the fictional Dupont University shed light on these questions, as the ambitious girl from backwater North Carolina is transformed by her sophisticated and salacious surroundings. Far from being the path to higher civilization and refinement of character, Dupont is a toxic impediment to the yearning for higher things, built on a dogmatic denial that higher civilization and refinement of character are even possible. Where, in a former age, the impressionable young student might have aspired to religious salvation or genuine wisdom, today’s typical college student lives more for entertainment, sensation, and release, all the while demanding and largely getting immediate gratification. The individual still seeks status and recognition. But the marks of distinction are all too often inebriation, “hooking up,” expertise at sarcasm (“sarc one,” “sarc two,” and “sarc three”), and insouciance toward matters intellectual and moral. As students learn about and fall into this new ethic, the university not only fails to stand in opposition, it accelerates the process. Dupont, that composite of Duke, Stanford, Yale, and the University of Michigan, corrupts the promising young Charlotte. For revealing this disturbing truth, the author has been reviled by those who are thereby revealed.

More importantly, the teaching of Dupont University is precisely that the soul and the moral dimension of being are illusions. In the past, the university (at its best and in principle) sought to cultivate the human soul toward completion or excellence. The modern university, as Wolfe portrays it, denies that there are truthful distinctions between higher and lower; it teaches that the soul is not real, and that perfection of the soul is thus a thing of the past.

The setting of I Am Charlotte Simmons is truly “postmodern”—a world dominated by Nietzsche and neuroscience, a world which has jettisoned the moral imagination of the past. Not only is God dead, but so is reason, once understood as the characteristic that distinguishes man from the rest of nature. We now understand ourselves by studying the behavior of other animals, rather than understanding the behavior of other animals in light of human reason and human difference. We learn that it is embarrassing for any educated person to be considered religious or even moral. Darwin’s key insight that man is just another animal, now updated with the tools and discoveries of modern biology, has liberated us from two Kingdoms of Darkness. Post-faith and post-reason, we can now turn to neuroscience to understand the human condition, a path that leads to or simply ratifies the governing nihilism of the students, both the ambitious and apathetic alike.

* * *

I Am Charlotte Simmons is an indictment of the primary centers of higher education in America today. These institutions do not well serve the real longings and earnest ambitions of the young people who flock to them, at great cost and with great expectations, year after year. Instead of pointing students to a world that is higher than where they came from, the university reinforces and expands the nihilism and political correctness that they are taught in public schools, imbibe from popular culture, and bring with them as routine common sense when they arrive on campus. Of course, these two ideologies are largely incompatible: nihilism celebrates strength (or apathy) without illusion; political correctness promulgates illusions in the name of sensitivity. But both ideologies are the result of collapsing and rejecting any distinction between higher and lower, between nobility and ignobility, between the higher learning and the flight from reason.

Is it really any wonder that institutions that combine nihilism and narcissism produce athletes that exhibit the exact same traits when put under pressure?

Victor Davis Hanson spots an ugly international feedback loop. He writes, "The Left sees it as McCarthy-like to even suggest that our own are the ideological godheads of the enemy. But it is true":

There is a hot-house plant feel to this shrillness, in which authors sell books, and filmmakers rake in profits, but their invective supposedly doesn’t really weaken the system enough to imperil them and their children. But for a terrorist to read from these American intellectuals that the United States is the greatest source of terror in the world is not to begin a “conversation,” but to embolden them even further to try ending American altogether.

Second, the hysteria of the hate Bush’s America industry has moved the entire critique of the United States far to the left—and now over the edge. Hugo Chavez’s performance trumped Khrushchev’s shoe-thumping, and was right up there with Hitler at Nuremberg. The Council on Foreign Relations welcomed in Ahmadinejad, who once again denied the Holocaust to their faces: would they have invited Pinochet to lecture them about the “lies” that any Chileans were killed, or a P.W. Botha to assure them apartheid was a vast exaggeration? We live in an age not merely of award-winning films and mainstream novels depicting the assassination of President Bush, but of Venezuelan, Cuban, Iranian, and North Korean thugs relying on just this domestic industry of self-hate for their very message.

Update: Related thoughts from The Anchoress.

Amir Taheri writes that when Iran's former president, Muhammad Khatami, spoke at Harvard he employed not just doublethink, but maybe triple or quadruple-think:

He used a vocabulary carefully designed to hoodwink the Americans without angering his fellow Khomeinists back home. The trick was reinforced by the fact that he often said one thing in Persian, while the interpreter said something else in English for the benefit of the Harvard audience.

On Sesame Street, Roosevelt Franklin was a Muppet who was one of the first casualties of political correctness. Betsy Newmark spots a page on Target's Website that needs to be killed ASAP as well:

Poor Target--they really need some remedial history lessons. Take a look at their Franklin Roosevelt doll. Franklin's out of his wheelchair and wearing the bifocals that he invented right after he responded to the day of infamy. Probably ready to charm the ladies and the French while he's at it.

A year ago, David Gelernter wrote:

knowing history is worse than ignorance of math, literature or almost anything else. Ignorance of history is undermining Western society's ability to talk straight and think straight.

Don't look now, but many well known celebrities are undergoing religious conversions--and not to Scientology or the Kabbalah:

Pinocchio, Tom Sawyer and other characters have been converted to Islam in new versions of 100 classic stories on the Turkish school curriculum.

"Give me some bread, for Allah's sake," Pinocchio says to Geppetto, his maker, in a book stamped with the crest of the ministry of education.

"Thanks be to Allah," the puppet says later.

In The Three Musketeers, D'Artagnan is told that he cannot visit Aramis. The reason would surprise the author, Alexandre Dumas.

An old woman explains: "He is surrounded by men of religion. He converted to Islam after his illness."

Tom Sawyer may always have shirked his homework, but he is more conscientious in learning his Islamic prayers. He is given a "special treat" for learning the Arabic words.

Incidentally, I can't wait to see what sort of treatment The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged gets...

Gerry Garibaldi writes:

Since I started teaching several years ago, after 25 years in the movie business, I’ve come to learn firsthand that everything I’d heard about the feminization of our schools is real—and far more pernicious to boys than I had imagined.

[A]cross the nation, public school students are being indoctrinated in "health" classes and other venues to treat their families with skepticism and to regard traditional mores as "dysfunctional." Liberals have achieved what the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci only dreamed about: They have completed "the long march through the institutions" and now control the commanding heights of the culture. Conservatives are going to have to figure out the same trick if they do not want to see the country drift irrevocably to the left.

While liberal teachers preach, conservative parents must teach their own kids to become screenwriters, journalists, professors, teachers and producers. The rallying cry of Gramsci's acolytes was "Capture the culture." Ours should be "Recapture the culture."

With mass culture and mass media now fractured (not the least of which was via the Internet and the Blogosphere), Lileks wonders if there’s enough of any common culture left to allow for such retrospective japery, "other than making fun of the fact that we really lack a common culture", he says.

"In one respect, I like this", he understandably adds. "I like the fact that there are so many culture opportunities out there, that the monoculture no longer charges the whole show. But the death of the monoculture means that there is a less of a sense of common identity, and how that plays out is something that we are going to learn in the next ten to 15 years.

That the bonds on the right haven't been entirely erased since the late 1960s is proof of how strong these connections are. And, fortunately, an increasingly demassified culture, even if still dominated by the left, makes them that much harder to further weaken.

Hopefully.

Ann Althouse has some thoughts on Kevin Barrett, the 9/11 conspiracy theorist who is a part-time instructor at the University of Wisconsin's Madison campus. Patrick Farrell, the campus provost, won't fire Barrett, but he doesn't want him to take advantage of the enormous PR platform his incendiary views are creating. She quotes this excerpt from the Chicago Tribune:

"[I]f you continue to identify yourself with UW-Madison in your personal political messages or illustrate an inability to control your interest in publicity for your ideas, I would lose confidence ... ,"...

Announcing his decision on July 10, Farrell declared, "We cannot allow political pressure from critics of unpopular ideas to inhibit the free exchange of ideas."

Farrell said he wanted Barrett to know that he could reconsider his decision if he did not meet expectations. He said Barrett has "modestly made some efforts" to cut down on publicity.

"I was trying to be fairly careful to not inhibit his privilege of speaking freely," he said. "My point was that he should be aware as he exercises those rights there may be a time when I have to rethink the assurances he has given me about his ability to separate his opinions from what happens in the classroom."...

Farrell scolded Barrett for identifying himself as a UW-Madison instructor in e-mails in which he challenged others to debate his theories. The provost said the challenges suggest "that you speak for the university -- precisely what I told you was inappropriate in that context."

When I go on radio or TV, I am introduced as a professor at the University of Wisconsin, whether I'm talking about law or politics or culture or some other topic I presume to blab about. It's never even occurred to me that stating this true fact -- where I work -- means that I "speak for the university" or that listeners might be confused into thinking that I do. You'd have to think ordinary people are idiots to believe that they think Kevin Barrett is speaking for the university when he spews his offensive theory. The problem is not confusion about whom he speaks for, but the embarrassment to the university that he thinks what he thinks and he teaches here. How can you justify suppressing this factual information of great public interest?

Academic life, like the rest of social life, unfolds within a frame of rules and permissions. At one end, there are things that one must (or must not) do; at the other end, there is rule of whim. The middle range, in which behavior is neither explicitly governed by rules but is not entirely free, is that realm governed by what the British jurist John Fletcher Moulton, writing in the early 1920s, called “Obedience to the Unenforceable.” It is a realm in which not law, not caprice, but virtues such as duty, fairness, judgment, and taste hold sway. In a word, it is the “domain of Manners,” which “covers all cases of right doing where there is no one to make you do it but yourself.” A good index of the health of any social institution is its allegiance to the strictures that define this middle realm. “In the changes that are taking place in the world around us,” Moulton wrote, “one of those which is fraught with grave peril is the discredit into which this idea of the middle land is falling.” One example was the abuse of free speech in political debate: “We have unrestricted freedom of debate,” say the radicals: “We will use it so as to destroy debate.”

The repudiation of obedience to the unenforceable is at the center of what makes academic life (and not only academic life) today so noxious. The contraction of the “domain of Manners” creates a vacuum that is filled on one side by increasing regulation—speech codes, rules for all aspects of social life, efforts to determine by legislation (from the right as well as from the left) what should follow freely from responsible behavior—and on the other side by increased license. More and more, it seems, academia (like other aspects of elite cultural life) has reneged on its compact with society. What, as Lenin memorably asked, is to be done?

* * *

The bright side of the Ward Churchill affair was the fact that public scrutiny brought dramatic, if local, changes. The melancholy side of the affair lay in the fact that the scrutiny had to be enormous and unremitting and that, as the media’s attention wandered so did the public’s interest. If real change is going to come to academic culture, criticism must be ceaseless, pointed, and deep. It is not enough to expose Ward Churchill. The academic culture that breeds and rewards such figures—and their name is legion—must be exposed for what it is: a thoroughly politicized rejection of the principles that inform liberal learning.

Jeff Goldstein's Protein Wisdom was one of the first blogs to link to mine, after I went online in the Blogosphere's Jurassic period back in early 2002. And I had the pleasure of meeting Jeff and his better half in Denver a couple of years later. So this ugly, ad hominem attack coupled with a more or less simultaneous denial of service attack on his blog (which is currently still 404-ing as I'm posting this) against him yesterday was horrific to watch. Power Line and Michelle Malkin have many more details.

Update: Michelle's just posted an update. Afterhis recent Viagra incident, Rush Limbaugh said, somewhat as a throwaway line, "I'll tell you, the election cycles of '06 and '08, especially '08, I think it's going to be one of the most vicious and filthy of our lifetimes". With incidents such as the attack on Jeff, and the "special delivery" to the offices of Colorado Republican Congresswoman Marilyn Musgrave (also allegedly by an academic, for what it's worth), looks like the first salvos of '06 have begun, long before their typical September/October appearance in election years past.

We've written several posts over the past few months about Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, Yale's Big Taliban On Campus. On Michelle Malkin's Hot Air.com site, Clinton W. Taylor writes that "he won’t graduate from Yale", which certainly sounds like good news for Yale, its alumni, and everyone else concerned.

I'll believe it when it finally happens, but according to a local Denver news channel's Website, "The University of Colorado announced Monday that it will dismiss controversial professor Ward Churchill".

Of course, to paraphrase (and use in an entirely different context) a line from M*A*S*H, Chutch is merely a symptom. The disease continues to run rampant throughout academia.

Update: Occidentality has a round-up of additional links.

Last year, as Ward Churchill's antics helped to reveal how out of control much of the modern academy seems, Roger Kimball of The New Criterion wrote a powerful essay titled, "Retaking the university: a battle plan". As Kimball writes:

Many parents are alarmed, rightly so, at the spectacle of their children going off to college one year and coming back the next having jettisoned every moral, religious, social, and political scruple that they had been brought up to believe. Why should parents fund the moral de-civilization of their children at the hands of tenured antinomians? Why should alumni generously support an alma mater whose political and educational principles nourish a world view that is not simply different from but diametrically opposed to the one they endorse? Why should trustees preside over an institution whose faculty systematically repudiates the pedagogical mission they, as trustees, have committed themselves to uphold? These are questions that should be asked early and asked often.

Cathy Young writes that Israel is the unfair target of selective academic outrage:

In the 1980s, there was a concerted movement to make South Africa a pariah state because of its policy of racial apartheid. Today, a similar effort is directed at the state of Israel. A week ago, the anti-Israel campaign achieved two significant victories. Britain's National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education, one of the country's two leading educators' associations, voted for a boycott of Israeli academics and colleges unless they take a stand against Israel's "apartheid policy." On the same day, the Ontario division of the Canadian Union of Public Employees, the largest labor union in Canada, voted for a boycott of Israel because of its treatment of Palestinians.

The British Foreign Office condemned the teachers' boycott as "counterproductive and retrograde." The reaction from Israel was even stronger. The chairman of the Knesset Committee for Science and Technology, Zevulun Orlev, asked the British parliament to "decry the anti-Semitic and racist decision."

Anti-Semitic or not, the movement to boycott Israel is hypocritical, sanctimonious, and quite simply wrong. It is a shocking example of selective outrage. Yes, Israeli policies are a legitimate target for criticism, and even most of Israel's supporters will admit there has been ill-treatment of Palestinians. Yet no one is demanding a boycott of Russian academics over Russia's occupation of Chechnya, and the accompanying atrocities (which dwarf Israel's human rights abuses in the occupied territories). No one wants to boycott China because of the occupation of Tibet, the persecution of religious minorities, and other abuses by the Chinese regime. No one wants to boycott Saudi Arabia because of its misogyny and religious intolerance.

Partly, this double standard is rooted in the familiar leftist mentality that strenuously condemns bad behavior by Western or pro-Western governments while turning a blind eye to the far worse misdeeds of communist and Third World regimes. But the movement to boycott Israel is especially repulsive for several reasons.

Apartheid-era South Africa, whose pariah status also reflected a double standard, was at least a truly repugnant regime intent on preserving white supremacy. Israel is a flawed democracy intent on preserving itself in the face of forces intent on its destruction.

What's more, the anti-Israel boycott combines this anti-Western, anti-democracy bias with an element of "picking on the little guy." The British professors and the Canadian public employees are not boycotting American institutions because of the occupation of Iraq. Obviously, such a boycott would cripple any institution's ability to function. But lashing out at Israel as a proxy for America is something that can be done with minimal inconvenience.

Nor should anti-Semitism be discounted. British scholar Mona Baker, a leading champion of the boycott, has written that while other countries are guilty of abuses, singling out Israel is appropriate because "Zionist influence [that is, Israeli influence] spreads far beyond its own immediate areas of dominion, and now widely influences many key domestic agendas in the West... This is particularly obvious in the case of the United States, where Zionist lobbies are extremely powerful with both Congress and the media." An international Jewish conspiracy: a sadly familiar tune.

Yesterday, we kicked off a post on an apparently growing trend towards racism in education with a link to Betsy Newmark's look at Seattle's public school system. Betsy has an update today:

Yesterday, I blogged about Seattle Public School's laughable racism policy. As I noted and the the Seattle newspaper reports today, they have now taken down their controversial description of racism and replaced it with another statement sure to rile people up. Part of that explanation had this sentence in it.

Our intention is not to put up additional barriers or develop an “us against them” mindset, nor is it to continue to hold onto unsuccessful concepts such as a melting pot or colorblind mentality.

So, apparently, the school system now thinks that Martin Luther King's plea for a society where his children could be judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin is a rejected and unsuccessful goal in Seattle.

It shows how far we've come in our approaches to race these days that what was a noble statement by Martin Luther King over 40 years ago is today a sign of racism itself.

Betsy Newmark links to a Wendy McElroy piece on cultural racism in Seattle public schools, and writes:

The Seattle Public Schools just bought themselves a heap of controversy by attempting to define racism. Their definition is laughably racist itself.

The systematic subordination of members of targeted racial groups who have relatively little social power in the United States (Blacks, Latino/as, Native Americans, and Asians), by the members of the agent racial group who have relatively more social power (Whites). The subordination is supported by the actions of individuals, cultural norms and values, and the institutional structures and practices of society."

Only whites are racist. They don't even recognize the possibility that preferring one race above another could involve seeking to elevate Blacks or Latinos over whites. Couldn't they have just used the dictionary? If so, they would have found a defintion that wouldn't have been so, er, race-based, such as this one.

The belief that race accounts for differences in human character or ability and that a particular race is superior to others.

They then get themselves into more trouble by trying to give examples of various types of racism.

We don’t necessarily want to go to White schools. What we want to do is teach ourselves, teach our children the way we have of teaching. We don’t want to drink from a White water fountain, we have our own wells and our natural reservoirs and our way of collecting rain in our aqueducts. We don’t need a White water fountain. So the whole issue of segregation and the whole issue of the Civil Rights Movement is all within the box of White culture and White supremacy. We should not still be fighting for what they have. We are not interested in what they have because we have so much more and because the world is so much larger. And ultimately the White way, the American way, the neo liberal, capitalist way of life will eventually lead to our own destruction.

Pinch Sulzberger of the New York Times recently personally apologized at a college commencement ceremony for the state of America; somehow I doubt though, that these decisions by academia were what he had in mind.

Update: La Shawn Barber has some related thoughts on this topic.

Arnold Kling looks at the possible coming of Pelosism:

Meanwhile, the Washington Post reports that Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi plans to use control of Congress to launch an investigation into the Bush Administration. For those of us who have not been drinking the Kos Kool-Aid, this seems like a questionable enterprise.

In the late 1940's, the Republicans finally took control of Congress. Seething after years of the Roosevelt Administration, one of the things that Republicans did in the late 1940's and early 1950's was launch investigations into the "treason" of the Roosevelt-Truman State Department, as well as former Communists in various professions. When I was three years old, one of the investigating committees decided that my mother, who had joined the Communists in the 1930's and left the Party in the 1940's, was of sufficient national security interest to be hauled before the Grand Inquisition. A few of the people that these committees investigated did turn out to be foreign agents or traitors. However, most of those investigated, like my mother, never did anything wrong.

In the 1950's, the Republican Right saw the investigations into "un-American activities" as a way to righteously smite down the Democratic Party. They wanted to expose their opponents' scandals and treason. Instead, they wound up exposing their own bad judgment, radicalism, and incivility. In the long run, the investigations damaged both parties. Certainly, the Republicans gained nothing. Apart from the war hero Eisenhower, their electoral fortunes sagged -- they lost control of Congress from 1958 until 1994. It seems rather odd that Democrats should want to try a similar strategy today.

The most famous of the inquisitors was Senator Joe McCarthy. In American politics today, McCarthyism is an epithet. I am not sure why the Democrats want to turn Pelosism into its synonym.

(Say, is there a subliminal message buried in that?)

Perhaps hearing the not-so-subliminal writing on the wall, Pelosi's spokesman is currently saying, "impeachment is off the table; she is not interested in pursuing it".

But where could all this partisan rancor lead? A Blue! Red! civil war in 2008!

An often compelling read about a polarized electorate heading to explosion over a contested presidential election in 2008, Blue! Red! nevertheless sometimes veers into the realm of the unintentionally hilarious.

Even though the book begins with the mandatory disclaimer that it "is a work of fiction and that any resemblance to real persons is purely coincidental," the plucky Democratic candidate in the book is a female senator ("Sheila Brinton") whose husband was once president of the United States. Senator Brinton shows a lot more intestinal fortitude than the previous Democratic candidates for president who, in the book's retelling, meekly allowed themselves to be cheated out of the presidency.

"I want to keep fighting," Senator Brinton declares. "I want the Presidency with every fiber of my being - I want it for the Party, for our people who've been beaten down . . . I'm afraid that if I concede now, and I run again next time, they'll steal the election again. If they steal election after election, we have no choice but to not accept it. I'll not back down; I'll not concede like those soft men who were candidates before me conceded."

Strangely, Blue! Red! foresees the college football bowl games becoming the site of armed conflict between rabid partisans (with Republicans naturally being the aggressors).

Walking around Harvard Yard...Sometimes it must seem like Paris in 1789 with all the politically inspired fury sprouting up among the lattes. But if Harvard professors want to storm the Bastille--or start a civil war--they'll have to do it themselves. And that's not very likely.

After all, they don't even want Army recruiters on campus.

Update: A new issue is emerging for the 2008 elections: Stop global demagnetizing!

I'm sure there will be a Daily Degauss blog to focus on it by then...

Another Update: Welcome Real Clear Politics readers; please look around, there's much here you may enjoy.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a staggeringly brave member of the Dutch Parliament, and one of Time's 2005 "World's Most Influential Leaders" spoke at Harvard today. Blogger Miss Kelly has filed a great report:

One business school student (Muslim male) asked "If Islam is so oppressive to women, how can you explain that Muslim countries like Pakistan and Indonesia have had women prime ministers?" Her response to that was deadly: "In some Muslim countries such as Iran and Afghanistan, under sharia, women are forced to wear hijab, adulters are stoned (mostly women, not the men), daughters get half the inheritance that sons do, and a man can easily get a divorce, while it's very difficult for women to get divorced. In secular Muslim countries like Turkey and Indonesia, fundamentalist Islam is on the rise. Twenty years ago, Indonesian women did not go around in hijab, now it is commonplace. There is an attitude of denial in the face of a great deal of empirical evidence about the oppression of women. Anyone who denies this evidence is personally contributing to the subjugation of women." (That means YOU, Dude).

The last questioner (Bangladeshi woman) asked "Do you identify yourself as a woman? If so, why aren't you concerned with domestic abuse? Why are you only harping about Islam?" Ayaan was amused. "Yes, I identify myself as a woman, I think that's self-evident."

Betsy Newmark notes that writer Stephen Budiansky is attempting to craft a satiric novel "about a university prostituting itself to bump up its U.S. News and World Report rankings. But he keeps finding his ideas being stolen by real universities".

Betsy writes, "It's rather pitiful when the reality exceeds possible satire". But that's the very definition of Muggeridge's Law, which Budiansky is finding himself running straight into.

Stanley Kubrick's classic Dr. Strangelove was originally going to be a straight Cold War thriller, but, "As I kept trying to imagine the way in which things would really happen, ideas kept coming to me which I would discard because they were so ludicrous", he once told an interviewer. "I kept saying to myself: 'I can't do this. People will laugh.'" Eventually, he felt forced to adopt the wild satiric tone that made the film timeless.

In contrast, these days, it's virtually impossible to write about higher education without making readers laugh at its near-universal absurdities.

As a follow-up to the previous post, Deborah Orin notes that communism's sway over the many college professors holds firm (which illustrates just how reactionary the academy remains):

Harvard University has a bizarre idea of how to advance the education of its grads: Instruct them to bow down to North Ko rea's paranoid dictators and show proper "respect" for the Axis of Evil.

It's the ultimate in radical Stalinist chic - the Harvard Alumni Association's $636-a-night totalitarian luxury tour of a rogue nation where thousands are deliberately starved to death.

"Demonstrations of respect for the country's late leader, Kim Il Sung, and for the current leader, Kim Jong Il, are important," instructs the Harvard Alumni Association's tour memo.

"You will be expected to bow as a gesture of respect at the statue of Kim Il Sung and at his mausoleum."

Harvard even tries to pretend that bowing down to thugs is perfectly normal - explaining that it's because "North Korea, like every country, has its own unique protocols."

Well, yes, that certainly is a charming use of euphemism to cover up an ugly and unique reality - since North Korea is not "like every country."

North Korea's "protocols" feature massive human-rights abuses, deliberate famine, concentration camps, religious persecution, gas chambers, likely genocide and trafficking in women and children.

Plus sending body snatchers to Japan and South Korea to kidnap children and force them to train North Korean spies.

Satie Yokota, the mother of a Japanese girl kidnapped in 1977 at age 13 while clutching her racket on the way home from school badminton practice, calls North Korea "enemies of humanity." Now 70, she fears she'll die before she ever sees her daughter again.

Then there's the Stalinist personality cult - when the Harvard alums bow down, they'll be joining the national worship that requires every North Korean to wear a Kim Il Sung lapel pin or else.

Not surprisingly, the Harvard alums are also instructed to carefully censor their reading matter because "certain types of literature may not be allowed into North Korea."

In other news concerning the academy, John Leo is handing out his annual Sheldon Award, "given annually to the university president who does the most to look the other way when free speech is under assault on campus".

In a column titled "Environmentalism and the apocalypse", Cathy Young writes:

The most contentious recent battle between creationists and evolutionary biologists is not the debate about the newly discovered ''missing link" between fish and land animals. Rather, it is a bizarre incident that involves predictions of doomsday and charges of encouraging terrorism. At bottom, this conflict is not about religion versus science but about the clash of two religions.

It started early in March when Eric Pianka, an ecologist at the University of Texas who was named Texas Distinguished Scientist of 2006, gave a speech at a meeting of the Texas Academy of Sciences, filled with dire warnings about the fate of humanity and the earth. About a month later, Forrest M. Mims III, chairman of the Environmental Science Section of the Texas Academy of Science, posted an article about the event in a Web magazine called The Citizen Scientist. He asserted that Pianka advocated the death of more than 5 billion people from a virus for the cause of saving the planet -- to enthusiastic applause from the audience.

Mims's allegation, picked up by a local Texas newspaper, The Seguin Gazette-Enterprise, caused quite a stir on the Internet and a flood of angry e-mails to the Texas Academy of Sciences and the University of Texas. Meanwhile, William Dembski, a philosophy professor at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and a leading champion of intelligent design, proudly announced that he had alerted the Department of Homeland Security to a possible Pianka plot to infect people with a deadly virus.

Meanwhile, many scientists, academics, and liberal bloggers have rallied to the defense of Pianka, who, they say, was not advocating apocalypse but simply delivering a warning about the disastrous consequences of humanity's profligate ways. They see him as a victim of a smear by creationists (Mims is also an intelligent design proponent) who want to portray mainstream science as evil and by right-wingers who want to portray liberal academics as loony extremists.

But while Pianka's critics may be seriously biased and lacking in credibility, this does not quite get Pianka himself off the hook. No, there is no reason to believe that he advocated actively bringing about an epidemic that would kill billions of people. Rather, he asserts that because of overpopulation, we are on the brink of a major epidemic that will wipe out 80 to 90 percent of humanity. And he seems to regard this as a good thing.

(Via Tim Blair.)

Glenn Reynolds has a lengthy update on Yale's favorite Big Terrorist On Campus, Rahmatullah Hashemi.

In The Vision of the Anointed, Thomas Sowell wrote of the "mascots of the anointed", of which Hashemi surely must be--along with Mumia Abu Jamal--among the most wretched.

Update: Compare and contrast Yale's fawning treatment of Hashemi with Ohio State's treatment of another man who is also from a less modernized culture.

Ace of Spades links to a report by the Alliance Defense Fund which sums up the poor mental health of the modern academy:

Officials at the Ohio State University are investigating an OSU Mansfield librarian for “sexual harassment” after he recommended four conservative books for a freshman reading program. ADF has demanded that OSU cease its frivolous investigation, yet the university is pressing forward, claiming that it takes the charges “seriously.”

“Universities are one of the most hostile places for Christians and conservatives in America,” said ADF Senior Legal Counsel David French, who heads ADF’s Center for Academic Freedom. “It is shameful that OSU would investigate a Christian librarian for simply recommending books that are at odds with the prevailing politics of the university.”

Scott Savage, who serves as a reference librarian for the university, suggested four best-selling conservative books for freshman reading in his role as a member of OSU Mansfield’s First Year Reading Experience Committee. The four books he suggested were The Marketing of Evil by David Kupelian, The Professors by David Horowitz, Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis by Bat Ye’or, and It Takes a Family by Senator Rick Santorum. Savage made the recommendations after other committee members had suggested a series of books with a left-wing perspective, by authors such as Jimmy Carter and Maria Shriver.

the loathsome propagandizing of the educational establishment rests in large part on the fact that the academic elites have a political party whose beliefs are broadly the same. The 2010 census will further reduce representation in the north and east and transfer it to the south and west, and so will the 2020 census, and after that, 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.

(Via Instapundit.)

The Return of the Primitive was the title of an Ayn Rand book on the post-McGovern left. I borrowed it to use for my category on some of the more extreme examples of the flight from reason that's an ongoing part of much of today's society.

There's a review of Henry T. Edmondson III's John Dewey & the Decline of American Education by M.D. Aeschliman, professor of education at Boston University in the new "dead tree" edition of National Review (subscription required, sadly). Aeschliman explains how mass education itself was made primitivist in the early decades of the 20th century, rather ironically by a movement that dubbed itself "progressive":

Quentin Anderson has described Dewey’s resulting “child-centered,” primitivist “conception of the school” as “the most extravagant and nationally influential of his fantasies.” This school is a present-oriented, limited-literacy, “experiential” tool for the “reconstruction of society.” As close, critical observers such as W. C. Bagley, Arthur Bestor, and Glenn have asked, when did Dewey or his disciples ever consult parents or elected officials to ask whether they thought that their children and future citizens should be dragooned into this utopian project? And, as Diane Ravitch and E. D. Hirsch have noted, the 80-year dominance of Dewey’s “Progressive” ideas — almost indelibly institutionalized in the world of teachers’ colleges, teachers’ unions, and certification procedures — has been a gross failure in terms of the educational levels and competences of our public-school graduates. “Standards-based” education reforms at the state level and the bipartisan No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, whatever their defects or difficulties, are well-warranted responses by parents, citizens, and legislators to generations of scholastic decline that have left many of our children and young adults not only functionally incompetent and quasi-illiterate but also vulnerable to an unprecedented tide of polluted cultural effluvia. The “child-centered school” has helped give birth to an infantile culture — one that threatens the very capacity of the American republic to retain and convey its economic accomplishments, social decencies, and civic self-understanding.

Like many thoughtful and liberally educated critics of Dewey, Henry Edmondson is puzzled and depressed at how widespread and long-lasting his influence has proved to be, given the turgid, confusing quality of both his thought and his prose, his logic and his rhetoric. Even admirers of Dewey have conceded the opacity or obscurity of his literary style: Both William Heard Kilpatrick and Sidney Hook started their own academic careers by trying to communicate Dewey’s thought to others, recognizing how badly he needed such help. (The experience of having to read large quantities of his prose has been compared to sawing wide logs with a dull saw and to taking a slow subway train to hell.)

Edmondson’s critique of Dewey is useful, clear, and brief. He rightly sees Rousseau’s primitivism as a major influence, and he rightly distinguishes Dewey from Jefferson, whose reputation and lineage Dewey was eager to claim as his own. Like E. D. Hirsch, but at more length, Edmondson is eager to show how decisively Dewey departs and differs from the heritage of Jefferson and the other Founders on the questions of the centrality of literacy and history in the American K–12 curriculum: Dewey and his disciples and allies promoted “hands-on” experience and “social studies” as against literacy and the study of history.

In addition, Dewey’s promotion of what he called “social experimentation leading to great social change” was a working out of Whitman’s social, psychological, and sexual radicalism and egalitarianism. Dewey decently defended Trotsky against the Stalinists in the late 1930s — perhaps his finest hour — but his own version of the need for “permanent revolution” has had more long-lasting and insidious effects than Trotsky’s, creating a climate and expectation for novelty, change, and experimentation in American public education — uncritical “neophilia” and what Frederick Hess has called bogus “policy churn.” Dewey slandered a wide range of more conservative or traditionalist education-policy thinkers and critics as “fundamentalists” obsessed with a fruitless, retrograde “quest for certainty” (the title of his 1929 book). In this regard he is the father — as that agile nihilist Richard Rorty has seen — of our contemporary “postmodern” deconstructionists, with their attacks on “foundationalism” and “logocentrism.” But some of the most powerful and enduring criticism of the whole “Progressive” movement of which Dewey is the patron saint came early from thoughtful liberal-traditionalist Columbia Teachers College professors such as W. C. Bagley and Isaac L. Kandel. Kandel protested the illogical riot of Whitmanian “experimentation” in what Diane Ravitch calls his “classic” study, The Cult of Uncertainty (1943). A Jewish immigrant writing in a dark time, Kandel knew that Dewey’s influential denial of history, traditional learning, and moral common sense in teacher training and the schools was a new form of barbarism. We are living with its consequences.

In her review of Bush Country, John Podhoretz's 2004 book, Carol Devine-Molin wrote of what Podhoretz described as "one of the defining moments in Dubya's young life":

Podhoretz also cites one of the defining moments in Dubya's young life, when, at the age of 18 at Yale, the university's "rock-star-famous chaplain" William Sloane Coffin denigrated his father who just lost a Senate election. Coffin stated, "Oh yes, I know your father. Frankly, he was beaten by a better man." Apparently, the young George W. Bush said nothing, but Barbara Bush stated years later: "You talk about a shattering blow. Not only to George, but shattering to us." Podhoretz believes that this incident helped situate "George W. Bush at odds with the Eastern Establishment," and was instrumental in his decision to move back to Texas.

William Sloane Coffin, acting from his position as a civil rights leader, chaplain of Yale University, and member in good standing of the American WASP aristocracy, did a great deal to legitimize this form of illegitimacy and illegality. His example helped to convince a generation that the law was dispensable when it conflicted with duly ratified liberal sentiments. That these sentiments should seem to be invested with the authority of religion made them all the more appealing to anyone seeking to enhance his sense of moral election. Like many Sixties radicals, Coffin regarded civil disobedience as a form of no-fault political theater. One broke the law in as noisy a way as possible, and then one was hauled off to jail, generally for a token sentence. The willingness to endure jail (which radical activists rarely did for more than a few hours before their lawyers arrived to bail them out) was supposed to legitimize the illegality. But as George Kennan's noted in "Rebels Without a Program" (1968). "The violation of law is not . . . a privilege that lies offered for sale with a given price tag, like an object in a supermarket, available to anyone who has the price and is willing to pay for it."

Kennan is an especially noteworthy critic in this context because he, too, was deeply opposed to U.S. involvement in Vietnam. But he understood, as the Coffin did not, that in a democracy illegality is not a justifiable brand of political opposition. And he also understood that, even when one disagrees with specific policies, one's country continues to exercise a legitimate claim on one's allegiance, a claim that cannot be disposed of in a fit of self-righteous bravado.

Update: James Taranto compares Coffin's deplorable behavior with a comment by Justice Sam Alito during his confirmation hearing:

I saw some very smart people and very privileged people behaving irresponsibly. And I couldn't help making a contrast between some of the worst of what I saw on the campus and the good sense and the decency of the people back in my own community.

Frankly, I'm pretty sure that that's one vision that rarely occurs to the anointed.

Betsy Newmark looks at the Duke lacrosse story:

When the Duke lacrosse story first broke, people wondered if the story would follow the storyline of Tom Wolfe's I am Charlotte Simmons or Bonfire of the Vanities. It now seems to be leaning more towards the latter with the evidence for the prosecution getting shakier every day.

Jeff Harrell of The Shape of Days attended last night's Celebrity Death Match Struggle between David Horowitz and Ward "Little Eichmanns" Churchill, where Chutch was heard to utter, "There is no truth". Jeff begs to differ:

If Ward Churchill were charged with a crime and spouted that “There is no truth” stuff in front of a judge, he’d be found incompetent to stand trial. The guy is nuts.

Either that, or he actually knows better and he’s just talking to hear himself talk. Which is fine if he wants to do it on the radio or a talk show or on a blog. But in front of a room full of impressionable kids? That’s reckless endangerment of a minor, man.

There is objective truth and that truth is this: The best way to debate Ward Churchill is to give him a microphone and let him go.

Random observation: you could ski off of Churchill’s chin. He’s a very handsome guy, in a 60’s-counterculture sort of way. I’m sure he got a lot of co-eds in his younger days. Horowitz, on the other hand, looks like a bearded Larry David (from Curb Your Enthusiasm). He’s funny, he’s not throwing bombs. He just makes the point that academics exist in a vacuum, and “in a democracy, academic freedom is important because the purpose of education is to open minds, not to indoctrinate them”. It’s about “how to think, not what to think”, which I absolutely agree with.

Churchill says he went to Elmwood Grade School in central Illinois! Quick blogosphere… someone find his report card! Churchill also just said he got a two weeks detention for voting socialist in a mock election. Okay, now I think we really DO need to find his report card.

“Ward seems to be very inquisitive, but he keeps poking Mary Sue with his ginormous chin and making her cry. Also, he voted socialist. I think you should send him to Red China. Sincerely, Mrs. Beasley”

8:40 p.m.- I am now reminded why I hated college. This, at least for now, is not a debate. It’s a lecture. And I hate being lectured to.

Maybe Jim Geraghty’s right. Maybe we’re all just so lowbrow now that I’m waiting for, hoping for the train wreck to occur. Someone throw a chair at Ward Churchill! Someone throw a tomato at David Horowitz! Food Fight!!!!

Update: Horowitz and Churchill appeared afterwards on Hannity & Colmes; Expose The Left has a video clip.

Another Update: Cam Edwards wrote about that Horowitz "looks like a bearded Larry David". Gregg Hanke provides the "Separated At Birth" for David's debating partner. Hey, hey; my, my!

Betsy Newmark, herself a teacher, notes:

Teachers unions were furious at John Stossel's ABC program, Stupid in America, that blamed them for a lot that is wrong with public education and advocated for more choice in our system. They said that he didn't know how hard it is to teach because he's not a teacher and that his eyes would be opened if he taught for just a week. They challenged him and he said he'd love to do it and they could pick the school. For some reason, they chose a school that has some choice in getting in and for which students have to submit a portfolio in order to attend. It sounds like a school with fewer of the problems that Stossel was highlighting in failing schools. But Stossel was game and they set up a class that he would teach. But it all fell through. That's a shame. It would have been an interesting experiment and good television.

Too bad. Letting cameras into schools would be a good thing. Taxpayers might finally get to see how more than $200,000 per classroom of their money was being spent.

I wonder why the union even made the challenge. I suspect the UFT didn't expect me to say yes. When I turned out not to be easily intimidated, the teachers' union and the government school monopoly folded. Perhaps there's a lesson there.

But I wasn't trying to call a bluff. I wanted to accept an invitation. I'd like 20/20's cameras to see me struggle to be a good teacher.

I wonder what else our cameras might see.

Tammy Bruce writes that she has been arguing "for years now that the destruction of humanity, literally, is the actual agenda, conscious and unconscious, of Leftists worldwide":

They have become progressively ugly and hateful politically and otherwise because they hate themselves and consequently project that hate, as Malignant Narcissists do, back onto humanity as a whole. Their frustration at the rejection of their agenda (history at least has taught us something) that they bother less and less with sugar-coating their nihilistic rage.

Leftists, manifest as radical conservationists, feminists, animal rights extremists or political hacks, all base their politics in how evil Man. In other words, that humanity is the overriding problem. I note in my new book, The New American Revolution, that every act of state-based mass-murder and genocide has been perpetrated by leftist and fascist governments. Why? Because historically the Leftist worldview has always been the same because it's rooted in the same self-loathing leftist politics.

Their politics alone speak to this agenda to demonize Man, while their MalNarness has become more and more obvious over the years. Now, as the Left becomes more and more desperate, we've all seen their ugliness emerge with fewer control, fewer concerns about masking their true intentions.

Astoundingly, his audience gave the speech a big Standing-0.

Last September, we linked to a brilliant post over at the Gates of Vienna blog on the “Coalition Against Civilization”, a bunch of folks who like to hand out bumper stickers that read "Visualize Industrial Collapse!" and instruction manuals on how to achieve just that.

Naively, I never thought I'd see someone go them one better--or at least so quickly.

Michael Ledeen takes the pulse of religious hatred amongst America's Blue State elites:

We’re living at a moment when hatred of religion and of religious groups is gathering momentum. Perhaps this is a reaction to the global religious revival that has been underway for two generations, but whatever its roots, it is now so common that hardly anyone notices (except, paradoxically, when it’s directed against Muslims). Some attention was given to the singularly intolerant action taken by the local regime in St. Paul, Minnesota, barring public displays of bunnies during the Eastern season. And then, to the near-total indifference of the journalistic hunting pack, in late March the San Francisco City Council, angered by Catholic opposition to gay adoption, unanimously approved a resolution that read:

It is an insult to all San Franciscans when a foreign country, like the Vatican, meddles with and attempts to negatively influence this great city’s existing and established customs and traditions, such as the right of same-sex couples to adopt and care for children in need.

One could almost see the torch flicker at John F. Kennedy’s gravesite across the Potomac, and one had a great impulse to yell very loudly in the fine words of Oriana Fallaci, who lies in pain in Manhattan, snarling back at the cancer that has taken over her body:

How come that, in a country where 85 percent of the citizens say to be Christian, so few rebel to the ludicrous offensive which is going on against Christmas?!? How come that so few protest when your Caviar Left speaks about abolishing Christmas holiday, Christmas-trees, Christmas-songs, the same expressions Merry Christmas and Happy Christmas?!?

That’s the sort of anger that comes from a self-described "religious atheist" like Oriana, who knows that if anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism spread again, it is only a matter of time before they will come for people like her.

As indeed they have already, with their legal briefs and their anti-hate-speech codes, dragging her off to the latest version of the Inquisition for the sin of apostasy against the Church of Political Correctness. San Francisco, under cover of "existing and established customs and traditions," bans free speech. The little reichs of San Francisco, St. Paul, and Paris ban free religion. And "top professors" at Harvard and Chicago take off after the Jews.

No wonder Ayman al Zawahiri and his buddy, the Ayatollah Khamenei, think we’re going to be an easy prey.

Heather Mac Donald surveys the sorry state of education in America, where both genders are now victim groups. As she writes, If both boys and girls are now oppressed classes, who’s left?

Riehl World View notes that "blood found in a trash bin on The College of New Jersey campus in Ewing this week is from John Fiocco Jr., the 19-year-old freshman missing since early Saturday".

There've been a few bizarre occurrences on New Jersey campuses recently.

Sitting in for Michelle Malkin, Allahpundit has some advice for America's youth:

if you're planning to have a youthful criminal indiscretion, and you're trying to decide between shoplifting and blowing up a skyscraper, think big.

(With apologies to Elwood and "Joliet" Jake for paraphrasing one of their riffs.)

What is it with colleges in the state I grew up in and The Reich Stuff, anyhow? Last year, Fairleigh 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:

The guest curator is Isolde Brielmaier, a Ugandan art professor from Vassar College who seems to have a particular affection for anti-social “art” including explicit anti-Jewish themes. One work featured in the exhibit, created by artist Deborah Grant (who has no relationship to Ramapo College), depicts a Jewish rabbi dressed in phylacteries with a Star of David on his yarmulke, holding up Torah scrolls with the Nazi swastika instead of text. The inscription below the image reads: “The Old and the New Testament.” The implication could not be clearer: the Jews’ holy text is fascism and they are the new Nazis. [Don't miss the photo that accompanies the article--Ed]

The exhibition is part of African Ancestry Month. What does such an anti-Semitic image have to do with African ancestry? One also wonders what American taxpayers would make of the exhibition which they are funding in part by grants from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts/Department of State, a Partner Agency of the National Endowment for the Arts.

For obvious reasons, the college has not been eager to publicize its controversial exhibition. Indeed, I learned of the art only after a Jewish student, upset with the college’s insistence on keeping it in the exhibit during its entire six weeks run, provided a photograph she had secretly taken of it.

That an outsider obtained a copy of the photo did not go down well with the college publicist, Bonnie Franklin, the Vice-President of Communications at Ramapo. Her initial reasons were bureaucratic: the campus gallery discourages photos of exhibits and especially their release to the public. But Franklin was eager to defend the artist’s right of self-expression. Although admitting that she personally found the work “offensive,” she stressed that it “has been extremely stimulating on our campus as an educational instrument.” She further explained that the campus had held several forums to discuss the work. “The piece is subject to interpretation, people have read other things into it. Some have seen it as anti-Christian for example. There have been a number of interpretations.” Finally, she fell back on the default position that the college is a “public institution and such things are protected by the first amendment.”

The simple truth is that Grant’s image equates Jews with Nazis, as curator Isolde Brielmaier admits. Speaking in the post-modernese language of Grant’s work, she says that it “frequently engages in pop culture and politics, issues of race, neo-colonialism, oppression, violence against women, and the history of fascism.” Brielmaier also notes that artist Deborah Grant studied the style of Nazi film propagandist Leni Riefenstahl—a fact that reveals much about her intent in contrasting the Old Testament, the holy book of Jews, Muslims and Christians, with a New Testament of Nazism.

Ramapo president Peter Mercer said that when he first saw Grant’s piece, he contacted the state attorney general to determine whether exhibiting it was illegal. Informed that it was legal, he proceeded to give his go-ahead, after being assured by Isolde Brielmaier that the artist had “no intention to shock anybody.”

a Jewish rabbi dressed in phylacteries with a Star of David on his yarmulke, holding up Torah scrolls with the Nazi swastika instead of text. The inscription below the image reads: “The Old and the New Testament.”

(Via Atlas Shrugs. For more examples from the Reactionary Art World, click here and here.)

Update: Compare and contrast Ramapo College's art exhibition with NYU's panel discussion on those cartoons. Notice what's curiously missing from the latter: the actual artwork!

Would-be UNC-Chapel Hill motorterrorist Mohammad Reza Taheri included this curious passage in his explanatory note to authorities:

In the Qur'an, Allah states that the believing men and women have permission to murder anyone responsible for the killing of other believing men and women. I know that the Qur'an is a legitimate and authoritative holy scripture since it is completely validated by modern science and also mathematically encoded with the number 19 beyond human ability

John Fund has really owned the story of Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, the former Taliban spokesman attending Yale--to the point where Fund's critics accuse him of "launching a vendetta against the school"--simply for pointing out the utter absurdity of an American school of higher learning gleefully admitting a terrorist to its ranks.

But then, as Fund notes in his latest piece, they've also had a pair of Nazis teaching there, as well.

One of whom was Paul de Man, whom Fund describes as "the leading guru of deconstructionism", who turned out to be a Nazi collaborator in his native France. As Dave Kopel noted a few years ago, it's no coincidence that movements such as deconstructionism and postmodernism have a shared past with totalitarianism.

Update: Roger L. Simon adds:

Fund raises the spectre of Paul de Man, the famous leader of deconstructionism, who rose to prominence on the Ivy League faculty while hiding his Nazi past. Ironically, the cultural relativisim behind that theory is the very idea that has so permeated the academy that all world views, including the Taliban's extremist Islam, are welcome.

Welcome to the Zen of Yale: Many eastern religions practice meditation as a way of emptying the mind's thoughts. Yale apparently believes that an empty mind is the sign of an elite education as well:

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.

Elsewhere in the Ivy League, the New York Sun notes:

A paper recently co-authored by the academic dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government about the allegedly far-reaching influence of an “Israel lobby” is winning praise from white supremacist David Duke.

The Palestine Liberation Organization mission to Washington is distributing the paper, which also is being hailed by a senior member of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist organization.

But the paper,“The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” by the Kennedy School’s Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, is meeting with a more critical reception from many of those it names as part of the lobby.The 83-page “working paper” claims a network of journalists, think tanks, lobbyists, and largely Jewish officials have seized the foreign policy debate and manipulated America to invade Iraq. Included in this network, the authors say, are the editors of the New YorkTimes, the scholars at the Brookings Institution, students at Columbia, “pro-Israel” senior officials in the executive branch, and “neoconservative gentiles” including columnist George Will.

Duke, a former Louisiana state legislator and one-time Ku Klux Klan leader, called the paper “a great step forward,” but he said he was “surprised” that the Kennedy School would publish the report.”

“I have read about the report and read one summary already, and I am surprised how excellent it is,”he said in an e-mail.“It is quite satisfying to see a body in the premier American University essentially come out and validate every major point I have been making since even before the war even started.” Duke added that “the task before us is to wrest control of America’s foreign policy and critical junctures of media from the Jewish extremist Neocons that seek to lead us into what they expectantly call World War IV.”

Mr.Walt said last night,“I have always found Mr. Duke’s views reprehensible, and I am sorry he sees this article as consistent with his view of the world.”

Update: Pamela of Atlas Shrugs has more.

Michelle Malkin quotes from a statement issued by Mohammed Taheri-azar, the "Tarheel Terrorist" who drove a rented Jeep through a crowd at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill:

"Allah gives permission in the Koran for the followers of Allah to attack those who have raged war against them, with the expectation of eternal paradise in case of martyrdom and/or living one's life in obedience of all of Allah's commandments found throughout the Koran's 114 chapters..."

"The U.S. government is responsible for the deaths of and the torture of countless followers of Allah, my brothers and sisters. My attack on Americans at UNC-CH on March 3rd was in retaliation for similar attacks orchestrated by the U.S. government on my fellow followers of Allah in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, and other Islamic territories. I did not act out of hatred for Americans, but out of love for Allah instead."

Speaking of on-campus terrorists, Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) has written an open letter to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff asking for the rexamination of the visa of Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, the former Taliban spokesman recently admitted to Yale.

As Yale Professor David Gelernter writes:

Hashemi was a member of an evil and macabre terrorist group. Worse yet, he became their official spokesman and apologist to the world for their crimes — the Afghani Goebbels. The Taliban were not, as some suggest, a group of benevolent Afghani governors, but a gang of terrorists. Here’s the first of a series of Taliban-committed outrages listed in a Human Rights Watch report on the group:

Yakaolang and Bamiyan districts, June 2001: After retaking central Yakaolang, Taliban forces under the command of Mullah Dadaullah burned about 4,500 houses, 500 shops, and public buildings. As they retreated east, they continued to burn villages and to detain and kill Shi'a Hazara civilians in villages and side valleys in eastern Yakaolang and the western part of Bamiyan district.

The fact that Hashemi didn’t do the actual killing does not absolve him; Geobbels didn’t shoot anyone either. Equally, the fact that he is now retired means nothing — he isn’t “redeemed” by his retirement any more than a mafia gangster would be. I do not care to have this fellow in my dining hall, my college, or my country.

Update: Daniel Pipes explores the causes of "Sudden Jihad Syndrome".

John Fund in his latest update to the "God and Taliban at Yale" story, quotes Ben Stein on the admittance of ex-Taliban spokesterrorist Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi:

"It's extremely discouraging. It's as if Yale had admitted a largely unrepentant SS man after World War II on the theory he would help rebuild Germany." He told me. "Yale is being run by Froot Loops and is wacky."

Last Wednesday, Mr. Surovov sent an angry email from a Columbia University account to Clinton Taylor and Debbie Bookstaber, two young Yale grads who are so frustrated at their alma mater's refusal to answer questions about Mr. Rahmatullah that they've launched a protest. Called NailYale, it focuses on the Taliban's barbaric treatment of women, which extended to yanking out the fingernails of those who wore nail polish. In a column on TownHall.com, they urged alumni "not give one red cent this year, but instead send Yale a red press-on fingernail."

Mr. Surovov, a Yale alumnus who has worked in its development office for three years and is on the board of the Yale Club of New Haven, wrote Mr. Taylor and Ms. Bookstaber at their private email addresses with the subject heading: "Y [sic] do you hate Yale." Here is his email in its entirety: "What is wrong with you? Are you retarded? This is the most disgraceful alumni article that I have ever read in my life. You failed to mention that you've never contributed to the Yale Alumni Fund in your life. But to suggest that others follow your negative example is disgusting."

Intrigued that someone had looked up his wife's giving record, David Bookstaber, a Yale computer science graduate, used Columbia's publicly accessible IT account database to trace the anonymous email. The trail led straight to Mr. Surovov's Yale office. On Thursday Mr. Taylor phoned Mr. Suvarov, who told him he was angry because the furor over the Taliban official was hurting fund raising and could lower Yale's rankings in the next U.S. News & World Report college survey. He also accused Mr. Taylor and Ms. Bookstaber of "terrorist tactics," which when challenged he amended to "terror tactics."

But sadly that is the definition of multicultural diversity--and modern intellectualism in general, as Theodore Dalrymple noted in 1998 when reviewing what passes for high art in England:

modern sophistication demands a sensibility that nothing can offend or even surprise, that is ironclad against shock or moral objection. To be a man of artistic taste now requires that you have no standards at all to be violated: which, as Ortega y Gasset said, is the beginning of barbarism.

(Via National Review's new "Phi Beta Cons" blog, where Fund says he'd be happy to move onto other stories "if Yale would just start answering questions and stop acting like the Nixon White House and stonewalling".)

Update: Roger L. Simon and his readers have some thoughts on Mr. Suvorov's deep knowledge of post-9/11 Middle Eastern geopolitics.

Joanne Jacobs writes:

Everyone's who tired of Jay Bennish, the Colorado geography teacher who compared Bush to Hitler as part of a long, rambling rant, should head to Miami to watch free speech advocates change sides.

Michelle Malkin describes a novel protest over Yale's admission of former Taliban spokesterrorist, Rahmatullah Hashemi.

Tim Blair applies Steyn's law to the terrorist attack unfortunate motoring accident on campus at UNC.

Update: More on the MotherPajamaShip.

When two men of such diverse viewpoints as Bill Bennett and Alan Dershowitz agree, it's worth noting:

So far as we can tell, a new, twin policy from the mainstream media has been promulgated: (a) If a group is strong enough in its reaction to a story or caricature, the press will refrain from printing that story or caricature, and (b) if the group is pandered to by the mainstream media, the media then will go through elaborate contortions and defenses to justify its abdication of duty. At bottom, this is an unacceptable form of not-so-benign bigotry, representing a higher expectation from Christians and Jews than from Muslims.

Of course, by Harvard standards, the two would probably on the same page, as Dershowitz noted to Hugh Hewitt:

"In America, I am left-center, but certainly closer to the left. And on the Harvard arts and sciences faculty, I would be on the extreme right."

Update:Ed Morrissey is much more optimistic about the repercussions of Dershowitz and Bennett's op-ed than I am:

The utter failure of the press to inform its readers and to defend free speech and open criticism has been remarked several times on this blog, but this effort by Dershowitz and Bennett will have major repercussions for the media in the politics of the day. We saw this coming with the media's love affair with the McCain-Feingold Act, in which Congress basically bribed the media with an exemption to the near-ban on political speech they imposed on almost everyone else. Once someone sells out, it becomes much easier to convince them to do it again.

When leading lights from across the political spectrum rise up to condemn the media for their cowardice -- I can find no other word -- the media can no longer hide behind a partisan analysis of the critique. They have exposed their own pusillanimity, and all Dershowitz and Bennett do here is shine a light on it.

The press is what is. I'd rather help build alternatives than call for reforms from within at this late date.

James Taranto frequently likes to refer to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer as being "intelligent as a post". Sometimes it seems fiiting though.

Here's how yesterday's story on University of Washington's recent attempts to block a memorial to legendary alumnus Gregory "Pappy" Boyington begins:

After rejecting a memorial to Marine Corps fighter ace Gregory "Pappy" Boyington, a University of Washington alumnus -- and feeling the sting of talk radio, television commentators and the e-mail-sending public -- UW students may now back a tribute to all former students who have received the Medal of Honor.

A resolution calling for students to recognize five Medal of Honor recipients has been submitted to the student government, and it will probably be considered next week. Student government leaders briefly discussed the issue at a meeting Tuesday night.

The university itself, which received hundreds of e-mails about the rejection of a memorial to Boyington, is also trying to cool public tempers that student leaders raised when, among other things, some questioned whether the university should honor a Marine who had killed people or another rich white man.

And as the Paradosis blog notes, Boyington wasn't exactly rich, either, despite having actor Robert Conrad portray him every week in the mid-1970s on NBC:

Also, clearly, the student who made the racist statement never met him because I will tell you that you could not mistake the Sioux in him. And while he did write a best-selling book (best selling authors are a dime a dozen), he was never really a rich man...rather he spent most of his last days wandering through Air Shows reliving the glory days, never in any grand luxury that I saw. He seemed a very nice man, who despite his personal problems did some extraordinary things to help defend freedom and defeat tyranny and injustice.

"As you surely realize", James D. Miller writes, the Lawrence Summers controversy at Harvard "mirrors the fight over the Mohamed cartoons" in the press.

Read the whole thing.

Update: Related thoughts from Mark Tapscott.

Dr. Sanity and Stanley Kurtz agree: appeasing tyrants is always a bad idea, as Lawrence Summers' resignation following his thoughtcrime at Harvard demonstrates. Dr. Sanity writes:

Summers abjectly apologized and fell all over himself backpedaling after making some perfectly harmless remarks which happend to mightily offend (to the point of causing a near-swooning episode) some of his female faculty. And for his herculean efforts to appease the eternal victims of academic feminism, Summers reaped only further scorn and rage, expressed in an angry offensive against his administration--not entirely dissimilar to the escalation of the more recent cartoon jihad.

In the history of academia, I don't think anyone has ever come closer to voluntary castration for the cause of radical feminism. And look where it got him.

As I have stated before, bullies --no matter what their gender or religion--only thrive on appeasement. The PC Feminists could have learned something from all this; it could have been the starting point of a self-analysis of where they had gone wrong and why they always feel put upon and victimized by life. It is possible that they could have grown and matured from the experience of having their childish tantrums dealt with appropriately for a change. But it will never happen on the PC campus, where free speech and diversity of ideas were sacrificed years ago.

Jack Kelly writes:

Sen. John Kerry said on the Today Show this morning that 53 percent of Americans don't graduate from high school.

The real figure for high school dropouts -- about 15 percent -- is appalling enough.

Last April (not on the 1st, thankfully), while Ward Churchill was first bursting onto the public scene, we linked to a Soxblog piece on what we described as "the strange case of Jacques Pluss, a former adjunct professor at Farleigh Dickinson University who sounds like he's been in the audience for 'Springtime for Hitler' long after its opening night".

After writing about Pluss, I had subtracted all thoughts of him from my mind, until reading a post by the Blogfather with the above title. Pluss is now claiming it was all for research:

Last March, Jacques Pluss was fired from his job as an adjunct professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University soon after it came to light that he was a prominent member of the National Socialist Movement of the United States. This weekend, in an online essay titled "Now It Can Be Told: Why I Pretended to Be a Neo-Nazi," Mr. Pluss purports to reveal his true intentions in joining the white supremacist group: He did it all for scholarship.

Read the rest on Workplace Prof Blog, who writes, "I lack the necessary wit to come up with the trenchant quips crying out to be made for this entry. Suggestions in this regard are most welcome". Feel free to help him out in his comments section.

As with Ferguson and Steyn, a new column by Michael Barone is best read in conjunction with another piece--David Brooks' equally timely "Losing The Alitos". Both do a tremendous job describing the cultural environment of central New Jersey in the late 1960s as a microcosm of America as a whole during that tumultuous period. Barone writes:

In his opening statement to the Judiciary Committee, Judge Samuel Alito told the senators where he comes from. First, Hamilton Township, N.J., the modest-income suburb of Trenton, where he grew up.

"It was a warm, but definitely an unpretentious, down-to-earth community," he said. "Most of the adults in the neighborhood were not college graduates. I attended the public schools. In my spare time, I played baseball and other sports with my friends. And I have happy memories and strong memories of those days, and good memories of the good sense and the decency of my friends and my neighbors." All positive memories.

Then Alito described Princeton, "a full 12 miles down the road," where he attended college. "And this was a time of great intellectual excitement for me. Both college and law school opened up new worlds of ideas." Still all positive. But then he sounds a negative note: "But this was back in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was a time of turmoil at colleges and universities. And I saw some very smart people and very privileged people behaving irresponsibly. And I couldn't help making a contrast between some of the worst of what I saw on the campus and the good sense and the decency of the people back in my own community."

To some of the senators, this must have seemed a jarring note. For them, universities like Princeton are places where young people are trained to renounce the racism, sexism and all the other evil -isms that are thought to be endemic in places like Hamilton Township. But Alito, a man of the highest intellectual ability and deep learning, sees the contrast another way. Witnessing radicals shut down a college and bomb university buildings, he saw the left-liberalism of the campus as an attack on one of civilization's highest institutions. And he did not think that campus radicals had higher moral standing than the middle-class people among whom he had grown up.

The late 1960s and early 1970s were a time of cultural conflict, a battle between what I have called the beautiful people and the dutiful people. While Manhattan glitterati thronged Leonard Bernstein's apartment to celebrate the murderous Black Panthers, ordinary people in the outer boroughs and the far-flung suburbs of New Jersey like Hamilton Township were going to work, raising their families, and teaching their children to obey lawful authority and work their way up in the world.

The glitterati in the 1970s seized and still hold the cultural commanding heights of our society -- the universities, the media, the Upper East Side of Manhattan and the Westside of Los Angeles. But, as the success of Sam Alito shows, they have not entirely won the hearts and the minds of the people. [That may be the understatement of a still quite young century. And God help the country if they ever do--Ed]

I recently traveled through both Hamilton Township and Princeton. The contrast between the million-dollar-plus homes and fancy shops of Princeton and the modest-to-downright- depressing neighborhoods and strip malls of Hamilton Township was stunning. So, too, are the voting figures. Princeton voted 76 percent for John Kerry in 2004. Hamilton Township voted 49.3 percent for George W. Bush and 49.8 percent for Kerry.

Our universities today have become our most intellectually corrupt institutions. University administrators must lie and deny that they use racial quotas and preferences in admissions, when they devote much of their energy to doing just that. They must pledge allegiance to diversity, when their campuses are among the least politically diverse parts of our society, with speech codes that penalize dissent and sometimes violent suppression of conservative opinion. You can go door-to-door in Hamilton Township and find people feeling free to voice every opinion across the political spectrum. At Princeton, you will not find many feeling free to dissent from the Bush-equals-Hitler orthodoxy.

It's interesting that Sen. Edward Kennedy tried to charge Alito with racism and sexism because he once belonged to an alumni group critical of Princeton. Evidently in Kennedy's mind, dissent from campus orthodoxy is prima facie evidence of bigotry.

Update: Joe Gandelman (found via Steve Green) has some very much related thoughts.

David Brooks explains how the Democrats slowly went off the rails in his latest New York Times column. On the Times' Website, It's hidden behind the self-defeating TimesSelect firewall, but the whole text can be found on the New London, CT Day (found with about five minutes worth of Googling). Growing up about 20 minutes south of Judge Alito's hometown of Trenton New Jersey, there's much here I can relate to:

Glenn Reynolds and Helen Smith's next InstaPodcast is online, featuring an interview with Evan Coyne Maloney on independent documentary production.

There's a priceless tip for anyone who wishes to do with Maloney has done contained within the podcast: when Evan was preparing for his first documentary, he rented a large, very professional-looking camera to shoot it, even though the sort of small camcorder you can purchase for a few hundred dollars at Best Buy would have done much the same thing. But having a cameraman following him with a bulky piece of hardware in his mitts would make him look far more like A Serious Professional Documentarian than any tiny camera.

Maloney is doing yeoman work opening up what I dubbed "The Culture War's Newest Front" when I interviewed Brian Anderson for TCS Daily about his South Park Conservatives book last year:

With some measure of parity achieved in the media, what's the next front in the culture war? Academia of course, which is where Anderson chooses to end "South Park Conservatives" (before an index and a volley of footnotes, including -- full disclosure time -- me, for this TCS article).

Anderson's ultimate objective isn't to achieve some sort of ideological reversal, where conservatives dominate campuses in the same fashion that the left currently does. Instead, he's trying to ensure that academia "isn't a machine for left-wing political advocacy". Anderson says that students "are trending to the right on issues from how to view capitalism to attitudes about abortion and many view campus PC orthodoxy with abhorrence -- which is why so many of them love South Park."

Anderson concedes that reforming academia is going to be a long slog. "Changes are only just underway, and the prospects for any quick turnaround somewhat remote".

How could a correction of sorts play out in the next few decades? Last month, one of Mark Steyn's readers emailed him concerning the Red States and collge indoctrination:

Demographics of blue state composition no doubt do indicate falling numbers. However, red staters continue to send their children to universities for indoctrination. They, too often, come out of those institutions as blue staters, even if they return to red states. This, in my opinion, counteracts the demographic trends.

There is a degree of truth in that. However, the loathsome propagandizing of the educational establishment rests in large part on the fact that the academic elites have a political party whose beliefs are broadly the same. The 2010 census will further reduce representation in the north and east and transfer it to the south and west, and so will the 2020 census, and after that, 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.

As I said, it's a long slog, but it's not an impossible one: would anybody five years ago have predicted the way in which a new medium would bring Dan Rather's career as a network anchorman to its ignominious conclusion?

Biden hits the campuses, looking for co-eds:

I've learned now, any advice I give...when you become parents, whatever school you want your child to go to, don't mention it. And so I had been pushing Princeton, and this magnificently attractive, intellectually and physically, beautiful young girl, was a sophomore, was showing us around, and I figured we've got a lock now. My son is going to really be interested, and I know Senators aren't supposed to say things like that, but if he hadn't been interested, I would have been worried.

Update: Joe really knows how to work the audience.

Early on Friday, I linked to Lee Harris's article on Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his Holocaust denial. Harris wrote:

We in the West have already rewritten a great deal of history in the name of cultural tolerance and diversity. But are we prepared to deny the truth of the Holocaust in the name of the same principles?

Yet, if you think about it, why not? After all, if different cultures can have different values, why not let them write different histories? Who’s to say whose history is right anyway? Are not Muslims entitled to their own interpretation of the historical past, like everyone else? What gives the West the right to impose its own ethnocentric interpretation of history on the rest of mankind? If the West insists on forcing Muslim to accept that the Holocaust really occurred, isn’t this a form of “historical” imperialism?

You see here the slippery slope upon which the West has so frequently lost its footing of late. Let us hope that, in this one instance at least, it is prepared to dig its heels in and stand firm.

Looks like I shouldn't have. Charles Johnson writes:

Dr. Abdullah Muhammad Sindi, a US-based Saudi professor of political science who has taught at UC Irvine and Cal State Pomona agrees wholeheartedly with the Holocaust denial of Iranian president Ahmadinejad.

And he’s teaching American students.

Think they're up to the challenge? Sadly, me neither, but I'd love to be proven wrong.

Update: Dr. Helen writes:

Have you noticed that as time goes on and people start to forget the horror of tragedy that the mind tends to rewrite the past? Perhaps this is human--for example, a family member dies and we rewrite their life to fit into our own scheme of how we feel about our own lives. If Dad was a fairly pleasant guy, we might overstate how cruel he was to keep ourselves from grieving. But on the other hand, if Dad was downright cruel and abusive, we might rewrite history in our minds to make him out to be a good guy. Either way of thinking puts our mind at ease and gives us the opportunity to feel virtuous about ourselves. In the case of these Muslim leaders with dementia times two, we have a case where they use the denial of the Holocaust as a tool for provoking sympathy from the West and anger in their followers in the Mideast. What better way to further their cause. But can we really allow them to use the bodies of six million corpses to make a political point?

Dr. Helen looks at "Dangerous Class Assignments":

My cousin rarely cries. I figure he picked that up from one of us, his brother, me, or one of my brothers. But now, he’s practically in tears. Why? Because the class assignment was for them to write about their experiences with the causes of rape. The girls had to write about times they felt “pressured” by boys. And the boys… well, they had to write about times they tried to “force” themselves on girls. Not pressure them, force them.

I thought the "So, when did you stop beating your wife?" routine was strictly a cliche amongst cold-blooded trial lawyers. Now the concept is spreading to schools, as well??

While Reuters seems bent on entering David Irving terrority, in an essay in Tech Central Station, Stephen Schwartz looks at attempts by academics to whitewash the blood-stained history of the Soviet Union. Anne Applebaum has touched on this issue as well.

A few times recently, I've come across essays on the Web concerning ancient history, listing the birth and death years of famous men of the late Roman era followed not with B.C. and A.D., but the letters B.C.E. and C.E.

As usual, I'm late to the party, but an Associated Press article explains the latest round of newspeak from academia's P.C. cleanup police:

Especially to those of us who grew up in southern New Jersey, Princeton always had a reputation as an elite Ivy League College. But that was then, and this is now: Roger L. Simon writes they're "about to hire a professor with a pututative PLO past".

He'll be joining Peter Singer and Cornel West. Will Chutch be next?

In 2004, overall giving to U.S. colleges and universities rose by 3.4 percent. In contrast, that same year Princeton had a drop of 45 percent (or about $100 million) in donations.

Gosh, for the life of me, I can't imagine why.

Joanne Jacobs, whom I interviewed for my first article on Weblogs way, way back in March of 2002, (the Blogosphere's Pleistocene era, I believe)has a new book this month titled, Our School: The Inspiring Story of Two Teachers, One Big Idea and the School That Beat the Odds,, which profiles a San Jose charter high school that prepares underachieving Mexican-American students to succeed in college. She also has an article in Tech Central Station titled, "Beating the Scholastic Odds" that's well worth reading.

Update: Speaking of education, Pajamas says that a homeschooled California teenager has won the prestigious Siemens Westinghouse Competition in Math, Science and Technology and has a round-up of links to bloggers--including Joanne.

Right Reason, a weblog with some stellar writers on the topic of philopshical conservatism, has an interview today with Roger Scruton, the author of The Meaning of Conservatism:

I wrote The Meaning of Conservatism in 1979, during the last year of a failing Labour Government, when the Conservatives were in the process of choosing a new leader (Margaret Thatcher), and also looking around for a new philosophy -- or rather any philosophy, having subsisted to that point without one. I was teaching in the University of London, and had begun to take an interest in political thought. I was surprised to discover that the politics department of my college library contained largely Marxist or sub-Marxist books, that major conservative thinkers like Burke, de Maistre and Hayek were hardly to be found there, and that the journals were all uniformly leftist. Academic political science was in the style of the New Left Review, with a strong leaning towards the idiocies of 1968, a sneering contempt for England and its heritage, and a witch-hunting tone towards the opposition, which it dismissed as middle brow, middle class, and racist.

At the same time I was troubled to discover that the Conservative Party had no principle with which to oppose this kind of "resentment politics," other than the Free Market. I wanted to remind people that there really is a tradition of conservative thinking in politics, that it is wiser and deeper than the left-liberal orthodoxies of the day, and that it is not reducible to free market principles, even if it contains them.

It should be added that I would not have written the book, had I not been commissioned by Ted Honderich, then politics editor at Penguin and also a University colleague, who was desperate to find someone, somewhere, however feeble, to defend the conservative position. Without The Meaning of Conservatism, the intellectual left -- whose ideas, emotions and very existence depends upon a stance of opposition -- would have had nothing to oppose. Hence the book’s appearance caused a huge sigh of relief among my colleagues, who were at last able to hate again.

Speaking of the Gipper, in his great "A Time For Choosing" speech, he famously said:

No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. Government programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we'll ever see on this Earth.

And then some.

"As long as we have eyes, we’ll never be colorblind. That sentiment is just as laughable as any liberal’s dream of a socialist utopia. But public policy ought to be colorblind, and there’s no good reason why it shouldn’t be....A government with the power to discriminate in favor of blacks also has the power to discriminate against blacks. Remember that."

--La Shawn Barber

Blogger "Submandave" looks at the many shades of gray and nuance that one of the reviewers of Michelle Malkin's new book on Amazon.com demonstrates:

Michelle Malkin has a new book, Unhinged, that addresses the manic and irrational side seen far too often from Democrats these days. Brian Maloney noted a "preemptive strike" by an Amazon reviewer that reads, in part:

If you buy this book, you hate America- just like Michelle Malkin, who wants to destroy everything that's great about this country.

A neat thing about Amazon reviews, though, is that it allows the user to see other reviews written by the individual in order to better appraise the value of the review. A quick look at the "Patriotic Professor's" 15 Amazon reviews reveals an interesting pattern. For a person one might expect to exhibit nuance and understanding, her reviews demonstrate a total digital breakdown. Not only does the good Prof have just two speeds (1 for Hate, 5 for Love), with the exception of the single Jazz album reviewed the Love/Hate breakdown falls perfectly along party lines.

But wait, it gets better. Three of her reviews, for books by Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reiley and Sean Hanity are identical except for the tailored insult:

Simply put, if you agree with the sentiments expressed in this book, you hate America. Any person who agrees with [Bill O'Reilly's | Ann "B**ch" Coulter's | Sean "Pig-Head Idiot" Hannity] lies is unpatriotic and is an agent of Osama Bin Laden.

In essence, conservatives hate America. The only way to prove you don't hate America is 1. to not buy this book; and 2. to vote Bush out of office in November.

So, if I got this right, a person claiming to be a professor (i.e. educated and supposedly not unintelligent) who devotes their time to doing cut-and-paste mudslinging on Amazon.com against conservative authors takes offense with Michelle's characterization of the Left as "Unhinged" and proceeds to offer a live demonstration of her thesis. Michelle couldn't have paid for better advertising.

Near the beginning of Modern Times, his opus history of the twentieth century, Paul Johnson wrote:

At the beginning of the 1920s the belief began to circulate, for the first time at a popular level, that there were no longer any absolutes: of time and space, of good and evil, of knowledge, above all of value. Mistakenly but perhaps inevitably, relativity became confused with relativism.

No one was more distressed than Einstein by this public misapprehension. He was bewildered by the relentless publicity and error which his work seemed to promote. He wrote to his colleague Max Born on 9 September 1920: 'Like the man in the fairy-tale who turned everything he touched into gold, so with me everything turns into a fuss in the newspapers.' Einstein was not a practicing Jew, but he acknowledged a God. He believed passionately in absolute standards of right and wrong.

He lived to see moral relativism, to him a disease, become a social pandemic, just as he lived to see his fatal equation bring into existence nuclear warfare. There were times, he said at the end of his life, when he wished he had been a simple watchmaker.

The public response to relativity was one of the principal formative influences on the course of twentieth-century history. It formed a knife, inadvertently wielded by its author, to help cut society adrift from its traditional moorings in the faith and morals of Judeo-Christian culture.

HH: But have you personally been contacted by any member of the administration?

SY: Nothing personally yet.

HH: Have you been contacted by any professor?

SY: I've talked with a number of professors about it, and you know, trying to explain the situation as a lot of them are in the dark about this.

HH: And what have they said to you?

SY: They're really listening to the story and seeing how it progresses. Nothing really solid yet. After February...I never had a chance to talk to any professors specifically, as I was pretty busy doing other stuff.

HH: Has anyone stepped up to you and said Steve, you might not want to do this?

SY: You know, nobody personally has stepped up to me. No students, no administrators. They're very supportive of this, and that's the really odd thing.

Well, here's one liberal college's definition of gun control: got a reactionary radical chic professor coming whose entire look and mindset screams 1969 right down to his long hair parted in the middle, beret and AK-47?

Why not give him a fashion makeover? Bring him up to date. Into the 21st century! And airbrush that pesky ol' AK-47 right out of hands. There! Now he's all set to expose the kids to ideas that would been right at home at one of Leonard Bernstein's Black Panther fondue and Twister parties. (To borrow a great riff by Iowahawk.)

James D. Miller uses Bill Bennett's abortion kerfuffle last week to explore what is arguably the biggest cultural divide in the country--Feelers versus Thinkers:

Bennett said "If you wanted to reduce crime, you could -- if that were your sole purpose -- you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down." But Bennett then immediately added that doing so would be "an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do." No thinking person listening to Bennett would believe that he ever advocated aborting black babies.

But Bennett's abortion remarks did conjure a horrible image of the mass killing of unborn black children. Feelers, those who believe emotional reaction should trump all else, naturally were horrified at Bennett's comment. A feeler would find this image very painful to bear. A feeler, therefore, might feel that Bennett would have presented listeners with such a word-picture only if he himself was not bothered by the idea of killing black babies. Thinkers, however, have been defending Bennett because they believe that intellectual rigor often requires deliberately confronting painful images to get at truth.

Besides attacking Bennett, feelers have also gone after Larry Summers, Bill Maher and John Roberts. Harvard President Larry Summers recently suggested that researchers should look into whether genetics could explain why there are so few women scientists. Feelers immediately condemned him. Summers suggested something intensely painful for some feminists to hear. His feeler critics assumed that he would put them though such an emotional ordeal only if he hated them. For feelers Summers' comments were so horrible in part because deep down these feminists probably think there might be a genetic cause for the dearth of female scientists.

Bill Maher, the former host of Politically Incorrect, got in trouble with feelers when he said that the 9/11 hijackers were not cowards. A thinker would have to concede that those who deliberately give their lives for a cause, regardless of how horrid the cause, don't fit the conventional definition of cowards. A feeler, however, would violently reject associating any positive qualities, including bravery, with the 9/11 hijackers. A feeler would believe that Maher would have done this only if he sympathized with the terrorists.

Dianne Feinstein recently made herself the Queen of Feelers when the senator announced she was voting against John Roberts because he wouldn't answer questions as a son, husband and father but just as a dispassionate lawyer. She objected that Roberts gave only "very detached response[s]." Senator Feinstein clearly believes only feelers are qualified for our Supreme Court.

Schools, with their focus on raising students' self-esteem, are doing everything possible to raise our children as feelers. U.S. students do horribly on international math tests but get top marks in mathematical self-esteem. Anything that makes a person or group feel bad is considered a sin by the educational establishment. One educationist even frets over "the damage done to [students'] self-esteem by the dominant culture's fetish about reading and writing." Another consequence of the triumph of educational feelers is the prevalence of speech codes at many colleges which are designed to prevent favored groups from having their feelings hurt.

On Friday, I linked to Evan Coyne Maloney's post on the kerfuffle over the phrase "hunting terrorists" at Bucknell. He has an update today:

I have been in touch with Ms. Owens on several occasions and repeatedly asked her to give her side of the story. She declined to do so. I also gave her three opportunities to deny the account given by the students. Again, she declined to do so, and replied, "Although I appreciate your interest, in my interpretation that conversation was innocuous and cordial. I believe President Mitchell's administration has been marked by attention to all points of view and political speech." After point, she refused to respond to any further queries.

Still, even without Ms. Owens' testimony, it is quite clear why these three students were dragged into this meeting. President Mitchell's e-mail proves it. The three students, all of whom I spoke with independently, all give the exact same account of the meeting. And after trying to confirm these facts three times with Kathy Owens, she did not deny them once.

Now Bucknell is attempting to smear three of its students by implying that they're lying. My alma mater should be ashamed of itself.

According to Gateway Pundit (who has photos along with his excellent post), the Sooners were playing their football game yesterday not far from the bombing:

Police are investigating an explosion at the University of Oklahoma late Saturday afternoon that killed one person.

Authorities suspect it may have been a suicide. Campus police say the body was found outside the university's botany-microbiology building on the west side of the Oklahoma Memorial Stadium. A game was under way at the time.

The university's president says the blast could be heard by some in the crowd of 84-thousand, but that no one inside the stadium was ever in danger.

Update: In a post that's also highly illustrated with photos, Duane Patterson tours the memorial of another, far deadlier Oklahoma bombing from a decade ago.

Here's two otherwise unrelated posts which demonstrated how limited speech can be these days on campus. First up, Stefan Beck looks at "God and Man at Dartmouth":

Yesterday I wrote on NRO about a recent (actually, ongoing) dust-up at Dartmouth College. The short form is this: Noah Riner, the president of the student body, gave a convocation speech to the class of '09. The speech mentioned Jesus--and all hell broke loose:

Surely nothing as banal, as reliably soporific, as Riner's address could rankle anyone. Surely people didn't even listen to these things. As it happens, I couldn't have been more wrong. The bored work in mysterious ways, and a number of Dartmouth students saw the speech as a fine occasion for an attention-grabbing moral tantrum. The Daily Dartmouth's "Verbum Ultimum" allowed that "Riner had every right, as a member of a community that values the freedom of speech, to speak freely about what matters to him." But he chose an "inappropriate forum" — perish the thought — and "[preached] his faith from a commandeered pulpit." Clearly, Riner is corrupting the youth of Hanover. Somebody fetch the hemlock.

Two words. At Bucknell University, that's all it takes to get dragged into the President's Office for a half-hour discussion of word choice. And these aren't offensive words, at least not out here in the real world. But Bucknell apparently has a different definition of what is and is not acceptable.

On August 29th, the Bucknell University Conservatives Club sent out a campus-wide e-mail announcing an upcoming speaker: Major John Krenson, who had been in Afghanistan "hunting terrorists." Those two words--"hunting terrorists"--resulted in three students being called to Bucknell's Office of the President by Kathy Owens, the Executive Assistant to the President.

According to the students, when they arrived at the President's Office for the meeting, Ms. Owens held up a print-out of the offending e-mail and said "we have a problem here," telling the students that the words "hunting terrorists" were offensive. For the next half-hour, the three students were given a lecture on inappropriate phrasing.

(When contacted, Ms. Owens did acknowledge that the meeting took place, but refused to answer any questions about what transpired. She did not deny the account of the students.)

Last year, while collecting footage for my upcoming film Indoctrinate U, I noticed that the campus was plastered with flyers that screamed "vagina" in large block letters. Although some people might find these flyers offensive, it is protected speech at Bucknell--as it should be--but apparently the phrase "hunting terrorists" is not.

(Perhaps someone should remind Bucknell's administrators that the American soldiers who are "hunting terrorists" are fighting the very sort of misogynistic thugs who would gladly stone a woman to death for talking about her vagina in public.)

For years, Bucknell has denied that it has a speech code, the speech-stifling regulations that many schools use to punish political speech they don't like. But if Bucknell isn't in the business of restricting free speech, then why did these students have to spend 30 minutes listening to criticisms of the phrase "hunting terrorists"?

Most students I know would prefer not to spend their time defending their speech in front of highly-placed university administrators. By taking this action, the Bucknell administration is sending a signal to students: say only those things we approve of, or we will hassle you. The long-term effect will be that students will think twice before engaging in political speech that they know will be unpopular with the administration.

Duane Patterson looks at a DVD of college football highlights produced by the dyslexic folks at the University of Southern California:

(Oh, like you've never made a mistake like that!--Ed. Rarely in the title...)

I recently received a review copy of Jay P. Greene's Education Myths. In a recent National Review Online article, he writes:

Much of what people believe about education policy is simply not true. An examination of the evidence reveals that many common claims about education are as mythological as anything found in Homer or Aesop.

For example, many people believe that schools are desperately under-funded. In fact, public K-12 spending is approaching $10,000 per pupil — double what it was three decades ago, adjusting for inflation. And total school spending is approaching $500 billion — more than we spend on national defense ($454 billion) and more than the entire GDP of Russia ($433 billion).

Many people believe that teachers are horribly underpaid. In fact, the average elementary-school teacher makes $30.75 per hour, more than architects ($26.64), mechanical engineers ($29.46), and chemists ($30.68).

Many people believe that student achievement has been deteriorating for decades. In fact, today’s students perform about as well as their parents in terms of standardized test scores and high school graduation rates.

Why is education so prone to myths?

Over in National Review Online's Corner today, John J. Miller mentioned a piece by Allan Bloom--currently being claimed, nearly a decade and a half after his demise, via the New York Times, as a member of the left, despite his strong anti-leftwing rhetoric. Bloom's "Our Listless Universities", As Miller noted, written by "the hero of 21st-century liberalism...[was] penned for that famously left-wing magazine called National Review" back in 1982.

He didn't link to an online version of it, but I found it pretty quickly via Google. Its description of then-contemporary life in academia still, sadly, holds up remarkably well today.

(Further up from Miller's post, Jonah Goldberg has some thoughts on Bloom and Nietzsche that are also well worth perusing.)

Daniel Drezner looks at "Helicopter Parents"--sort of like show biz parents, except they hover close to their kids' academic careers.

In an item titled "Academentia Watch", James Taranto begins his daily "Best of the Web" column by noting:

The American Political Science Association is holding its annual convention Labor Day weekend in Washington, and it features a panel discussion on the subject "Is It Time to Call It Fascism"?

Iowahawk boldly goes where no school principal has gone before, and reveals once again, how useful science fiction is at shining a light back at man's own absurdities.

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting review of a new book on diversity gone askew in law schools:

Dan Subotnik once went to his dean and asked to teach a course on race and the law, a subject to which he had devoted a great deal of his own scholarly effort. Teaching a course about something you know is a time-honored method of refining your ideas and, not least, of educating the young. But the dean turned him down. Why? He claimed that Mr. Subotnik's message would be unduly dismissive of racism, amounting to, as the dean put it, "get over it."

While the dean's decision may have been unfortunate for Touro Law School, where Mr. Subotnik is a professor, it was an excellent one for the rest of us because it prompted "Toxic Diversity" (New York University Press, 335 pages, $45), a thoughtful critique of identity politics in the nation's law schools. These days "critical race studies" and feminist jurisprudence are a routine part of law-school scholarship, and much of it is devoted to discovering in the law those white, male power structures that have become an obsession throughout our universities.

* * *

Mr. Subotnik argues that critical race theorists and feminists often publish dubious articles and books that ignore the relevant facts in an effort to deliver an unrelenting message of victimization. He wants to hold these scholars to the same standards by which other legal scholars are judged. That they are sometimes not speaks volumes about the double standards that plague all institutions--not only universities--when ethnic identity and gender become in themselves a criterion of judgment, even an axis upon which the institution turns.
Double standards are deeply embedded in the scholarship, too, according to Mr. Subotnik. Racist speech by whites, for instance, is treated as evidence of racism in whites, while racist speech by minorities is evidence of racism . . . in whites: It is either "justified" or part of the warped sensibility that the governing power structures have imposed on persons of color. Meanwhile, the facts that normally support arguments are treated loosely. One of the first African-American law professors recently lamented that his "colony" was at "risk" because law schools showed "little interest" in replacing black professors when they retired. But in the decade before he wrote those words African-Americans had risen to 7.8% of the legal professoriate, up from 4.8%, casting doubt on his central claim.

And then there is the neglect of social statistics. Many critical race theorists, for example, view efforts to discourage illegitimate children as an assault on the African-American community, where illegitimacy has recently run to more than 60% of newborns. But the theorists refuse even to acknowledge the data showing illegitimacy to be a major cause of crime, poverty and disorder there. By contrast, distinguished scholars outside the legal academy, like Harvard's Orlando Patterson, have written eloquently about the blighted lives that result from families without fathers. Mr. Subotnik sees such law-school myopia as typical of the way that critical race scholarship tends to celebrate any conduct that violates middle-class values, never mind the costs.

Mr. Subotnik's critique of feminist scholarship is less sweeping but no less shrewd. He focuses on claims that paradoxically impugn the fortitude and resilience of women. There are more than a few feminists who argue, for instance, that law schools need to change their ways because certain practices, such as the Socratic method of aggressive classroom interrogation, make female law students uncomfortable and cause them to lose their identity. Mr. Subotnik believes that feminists who make such arguments are reviving the stereotype by which the 19th-century Illinois Supreme Court dismissed women as unfit to engage in the "hot strifes of the bar."

Some of the same feminist scholars also call for the elimination of testing for admissions and hiring because tests do not take into account, among other things, "emotional intelligence." As Mr. Subotnik wryly wonders: Why should we pay attention to such soft academic speculations and not take seriously the comments of Bill Gates, who says that winning in business is all about I.Q.?

Monty Python's Flying Circus once had an episode featuring BBC TV News broadcasts proprietized for parrots, gibbons, and wombats.

Coming soon: history books written from the perspective of animals.

No word yet if Peter Singer will be writing their introduction.

Update: And speaking of Monty Python, here's news for cows, featuring an interview with Ward Churchill! If anchorcow Barbara Bovine's nom de hoof rings a (cow)bell, she first popped up here.

With Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise's new version of The War of the Worlds set to open later this week, John J. Miller writes that H.G. Wells, its original author, "was a sci-fi pioneer, but his political ideas were abominable":

Wells, for his part, was often appallingly wrong. "Human history is in essence a history of ideas," he once wrote. That may be, but Wells flirted with the worst ideas of his time. After interviewing Lenin, Wells called him "creative" and described communism as the best hope for reforming Russia. The man simply never met a collectivist movement that didn't intrigue him. "There is good in these Fascists," he said of Italians in 1927. "There is something brave and well-meaning about them." He despised Catholicism and mocked Jewish traditions as "nonsense." It was for views such as these that George Orwell delivered a blunt verdict in 1941: "Much of what Wells has imagined and worked for is physically there in Nazi Germany."

Orwell also was referring to the utopianism that distinguished so much of what Wells wrote. Whereas the author of "Animal Farm" and "1984" possessed a keen sense of how and why totalizing states go badly wrong, Wells was constantly drawing up plans for ideal societies driven by rationalist principles and governed by high-minded elites. This could lead to bizarre results: In "Men Like Gods," Wells envisioned a scheme of eugenic reproduction and centralized planning so perfect (in his mind) that everybody went shamelessly nude.

Defending this particular notion, Wells commented that the practice of wearing clothes was a silly taboo. He certainly had little patience for sexual mores. Admirers have hailed Wells as a proto-feminist, but he was more accurately an advocate of free love--a doctrine that typically benefits men who shirk their duties. As it happened, Wells treated the women in his life shabbily. He cheated on his wives and impregnated his mistresses.

Maybe he was just acting on Darwinian impulses. Wells was in fact a strident devotee of the evolutionary creed, which he learned from the biologist T.H. Huxley at the Normal School. "The War of the Worlds" is best interpreted as an aggressive statement of what C.S. Lewis called "Wellsianity"--the promotion of materialistic science as true faith. The moral of the story may be found in the novel's first sentence, which describes the sobering reality of "intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as our own." Humans aren't noble creatures of God, but animal feed for hungry Martians. If we are to go on living, it isn't for any purpose greater than "the sake of the breed" (as one character says in a late chapter).

At least Wells didn't let the Martians get away with their dastardly plot. They fall victim to disease spread by bacteria, which Wells called "the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon the earth." The author of these words would have profited from a little more humility himself. We should be grateful that he left his imprint on the science-fiction genre, and almost nowhere else.

Haldane was himself a very idealistic man, and in his youth was a devoted Communist and author of many articles in The Daily Worker. Events in the Soviet Union, such as the rise of the anti-Mendelian agronomist Trofim Lysenko and the crimes of Stalin, caused him to break with the Communist Party later in life. He joined the Communist party in 1937 but left in 1950, shortly after having toyed with standing for Parliament as a Communist Party candidate.

For more on a similar topic, but brought up to date, check out this post on The Volkh Conspiracy, where Clayton Cramer writes, "nothing has really changed; academics are overwhelmingly on the side of totalitarian thugs throughout the world".

Writing, staggeringly enough, in the L.A. Times, David Gelernter looks at how America's culture war is impacting our kids' knowledge of history--or lack thereof:

I was amazed to hear about teenagers who don't know Fact 1 about the Vietnam War draft. But I have met college students who have never heard of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge — the genocidal monsters who treated Cambodia in the 1970s to a Marxist nightmare unequaled in its bestiality since World War II.

And I know college students who have heard of President Kennedy but not of anything he ever did except get assassinated. They have never heard JFK's inaugural promise: that America would "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to ensure the survival and the success of liberty." But President Bush remembers that speech, and it's lucky he does.

To forget your own history is (literally) to forget your identity. By teaching ideology instead of facts, our schools are erasing the nation's collective memory. As a result, some "expert" can go on TV and announce (20 minutes into the fighting) that Afghanistan, Iraq or wherever "is the new Vietnam" — and young people can't tell he is talking drivel.

There is an ongoing culture war between Americans who are ashamed of this nation's history and those who acknowledge with sorrow its many sins and are fiercely proud of it anyway. Proud of the 17th century settlers who threw their entire lives overboard and set sail for religious freedom in their rickety little ships. Proud of the new nation that taught democracy to the world. Proud of its ferocious fight to free the slaves, save the Union and drag (lug, shove, sweat, bleed) America a few inches closer to its own sublime ideals. Proud of its victories in two world wars and the Cold War, proud of the fight it is waging this very day for freedom in Iraq and the whole Middle East.

If you are proud of this country and don't want its identity to vanish, you must teach U.S. history to your children. They won't learn it in school. This nation's memory will go blank unless you act.

Or the L.A. Times, of course.

Update (7/17/06): The full text of Gelernter's article has scrolled off the L.A. Times' site, but is still (at least for now) available at Jewish World Review.

I actually had no idea that some American colleges had separate graduation ceremonies for minority students until I read this post by Joanne Jacobs. (I definitely don't recall separate ceremonies when I graduated.) On the other hand, such practices are certainly in keeping with the thrust of Michael Graham's Redneck Nation.

...Windbag commencement speakers like Erica Jong, who joins PepsiCo's Indra Nooyi in this year's showing by the members of the Anti-American Commencement Speakers Bureau's Central Casting Division.

Actually though, I guess it's a tribute in a way, to how little of academia's leftist indoctrination actually sticks to most students, that speakers such as Jong and Nooyi still get noticed for their remarks.

(Even though he taped it in advance because he couldn't be present to deliver it himself, this commencement speech still ranks as the most astonishing ever allowed by a college, in my book.)

Nice to see California's legislature is being silly again, in an effort to reduce all of those hernias that high school kids report every year. Ed Morrissey writes:

California has provided yet another Great Moment In Education with the Assembly mandating the length of textbooks for use in its public schools. According to the just-approved AB 756, no textbook used in California public schools can exceed 200 pages.

* * *

Educated people already know that one cannot judge a book by its cover. We thought that the obvious corrolary of notjudging it by its page count would be understood implicitly. I'm sure we're correct, for most places. The intellect-challenged state capitol in Sacramento appears to be an exception to that rule.

And hopefully Gov. Schwarzenegger has his veto pen ready.

Roger Kimball asks, "Where is Hercules when you need him", to clean up the Augean Stables that modern academia has descended into. The latest example of academic excess that Kimball highlights perfectly fits his metaphor, by the way.

Ever since we started this blog in early 2002, we've written about some of the most egregious examples of collegiate excess, culminating in stories of Ward Churchill and other radical chic professors.

Big media has been much less sanguine about discussing these issues, perhaps because they rely on universities for so many interviewees--and of course, future journalists.

But perhaps this story will change that, and horrors of the academy will be reported with the same tone the media reserves for Abu Ghraib, stories of Guantanamo Bay, and other military-oriented reportage.

...Nahh; probably not.

Found on the Brothers Judd Blog:

"Academic politics is so vicious because the stakes are so small"--Henry Kissinger.

Back in March, we linked to a post by Stefan Beck on the New Criterion's Weblog, who argued that the far left cant of the academy is actually hurting its liberal students--and benefiting campus conservatives:

As I've written before on this blog, the predominance of these blue-state academics on campus is a problem--but hardly for conservatives. It is a problem for liberal students. These poor specimens must often retreat like turtles from debate, because they know nothing of conservative positions--except from their professors' testimonials, which rely on dilution or caricature. Meanwhile, conservatives are given every opportunity to "know the enemy," and they can test and strengthen their own opinions in the process. They ought to be thanking their instructors for providing a daily object-lesson in enemy S.O.P.

I think there really is a problem on college campuses and if you want liberalism to continue in this country — I don't — but just to give you a little tip: Liberal students are being let down by their professors, by the world.

I mean, they're buffeted along by a liberal media. They have liberal public school teachers. They go to college. They have liberal professors. They don't know how to argue. They can't put together a logical thought, whereas you could put a college Republican on TV right now and he can debate you...

HANNITY: Yes, they're good.

COULTER: ... and do a credible job. But liberals, they throw food, they curse.

Disturbing essay by Caroline B. Glick, the deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post, on the increasing anti-Semitism of England's elites:

Mainly due to Britain’s relationship with the US, Israelis have a tendency to view it as an ally. But the situation on the ground in Britain must force us to reconsider this friendly view. Today Britain manifests the symptoms of a suicidal society. Its elites have been taken over by far-Left bigots who, while purporting to care for the downtrodden, work to perpetuate a situation where the Arab world is wholly controlled by brutes who call for the destruction not only of Israel, but of Britain itself.

Anti-Semitism, which has become pervasive among Britain’s aristocracy, and the chattering classes in the media, culture and academia, is a sign of Britain’s steep and steady slide into nihilistic self-destruction. Their animus towards Israel and towards Jews who refuse to denounce the Jewish state, has nothing to do with Israel and everything to do with them. They are fully aware of the threats posed by the international jihad but rather than fight it they have tried to appease it by at once denying its danger and obsessively embracing Palestinian terrorists and calling for Israel’s destruction. They do this even as the jihadis in their own country make it clear that they are unappeasable.

There is nothing that Israel can do to stem Britain’s decline. All we can do is keep our distance from that self-destructive society which, like a dying lion, can still do us great harm if we let it get close to us.

Update: Welcome readers of Salon's "Dau Report", published by Peter Dau, who was online communications advisor to John Kerry's presidential campaign.

Another Update: Charles Johnson has more.

Found via Michelle Malkin, Scott Sala of Slant Point says that Ward Churchill and MEChA (remember them?) have teamed-up, for maximum academic moonbat silliness:

Hmmm. Hispanics mad that America took their land. Native Americans mad that America took their land. A match made only in modern American academia.

Update: More here.

On September 11th, 2003, we linked to a James Taranto item about the Copperheads, which one reference source described as:

in the American Civil War, a reproachful term for those Northerners sympathetic to the South, mostly Democrats outspoken in their opposition to the Lincoln administration.

So many people turned to the accusations of anti-Semitism, ethnic intimidation, and politics trumping academics at an Ivy League School in a liberal voting district. Columbia's president, Lee Bollinger, said as much in his interview with The New York Times a few weeks ago:

Although Mr. Bollinger did not comment last night on what the report is likely to say, he said it was "simply preposterous to characterize Columbia as anti-Semitic or as having a hostile climate for Jewish students and faculty."

I would argue that it is precisely this assumption of liberal, enlightened behavior that blinds the public to anti-Semitism on Columbia's campus--and to wherever radical professors use the cover of the liberal university to their illiberal advantage. Remember that it took an outside organization, the David Project, to bring Columbia's problems to national attention.

I wouldn't be surprised if it was not this same attitude that set Columbia University up one hundred years ago as the headquarters of racial scholarship regarding the Civil War and Reconstruction. That right--the intellectual apologists of Southern Redemption were based right here in New York City. Professor William Archibald Dunning became Columbia's first Lieber professor of history and political philosophy in 1904. His popular theories of the Reconstruction provided the source materials for, among other things, D. W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation," and cemented racist ideologies throughout the country for half a century.

From the school of William Archibald Dunning to the school of Edward Said: Columbia University enters the twenty-first century in the same tradition it entered the twentieth. All this, from the heart of New York City.

Matt Labash of the Weekly Standard has a great piece of reporting on Ward Churchill's visit to San Francisco.

Here's a lengthy excerpt:

Found via Glenn Reynolds, Cathy Young has a staggering example of hate speech at Stanford University.

The casual acceptance of this sort of thing gives academia its horrible taint in much of the public's eye. It was a shame to see Lawrence Summers cave so quickly at Harvard a few months ago; the headmaster who actively speaks out against idiotarian ravings on his college campus has a terrific Sister Souljah opportunity waiting for him--and box cars full of enrollment money from parents who would breath a tremendous sigh of relief.

Update: Firsthand details from a Stanford Student, here.

Betsy Newmark links (via Thomas Lifson) to this unintentionally hilarious article (at least I think most of the humor is unintentional) on transgendered campus politics at Smith College, a historically all-women college (with a famous alumni as diverse as Gloria Steinem and Nancy Reagan). Several currently-attending students have started off there as women, and then became men--but wished to remain at a previously all-girls college.

Which of course, in the name of unlimited tolerance, Smith has allowed them to. As Betsy writes, "You know, sometimes it just seems that civil rights issues ain't what they used to be."

And how!

My review of Brian Anderson's South Park Conservatives is online at Tech Central Station, complete with extensive quotes from my recent interview with Brian.

Kenny was not harmed in the writing of the article.

Soxblog looks at the strange case of Jacques Pluss, a former adjunct professor at Farleigh Dickinson University who sounds like he's been in the audience for "Springtime for Hitler" long after its opening night:

The students’ story had numerous classic vignettes: There was Professor Pluss whining in regard to his dismissal that he had been “stolen away in the night.” There was a student who observed, “Now that I think about it, Dr. Pluss seemed to have a morbid fascination with Hitler and Nazism.” And then there was Professor Pluss again castigating the university for “following the typical Jewish, lawyerly, Hebrew line."

Lest you think the modern Nazi only dislikes Jews, Professor Pluss also had some rather negative observations regarding Farleigh Dickinson’s mostly African American basketball team, alleging that the players were “n***** to the core” and prone to listening to “ghastly rap music.” As perhaps the crowning touch to a story that seemed too surreal to be true, Farleigh Dickinson did not dismiss Professor Pluss because he was a hate-spewing Nazi. Rather, they found his six absences during the past academic semester to be his sole hanging offense.

By the way, this is an unintended classic, found at the top of a quick Google search under Pluss's name. The National Socialist Movement (no, I hadn't heard of them either, at least not since '45) has issued a press release on Pluss's purging:

The NSM officially condemns Fairleigh-Dickinson University for engaging in acts of left-wing McCarthyism.

This past Monday, Professor Jacques Pluss, was removed from his teaching position at this university apparently for no other reason than being a member of [the National Socialist Movement].

(Via Charles Johnson.)

Curiously, inside the academy, more and more, life seems to imitate Linda Ronstadt.

Uh, let me explain.

Back in July, we wrote that if you're a Republican and/or fundementalist Christian, Linda doesn't want you in her audience:

In a gushing profile in The San Diego Union-Tribune she's quoted as saying:

"It's a real conflict for me when I go to a concert and find out somebody in the audience is a Republican or fundamental Christian. It can cloud my enjoyment. I'd rather not know."

The remark goes uncommented on by the paper.

Whatever happened to the days when music was supposed to be a unifying force? Bringing people together? Plug in any other phrases in place of "Republican or fundamental Christian" and imagine what the outrage would be.

So why isn't this paper crying foul?

“I think it would be far too stressful for me to teach children of Republicans,” the Multiculturalist commented over cappuccino in Padua, after expounding on profiling as a bigoted, narrow-minded policy of Eurocentrists.

I was tempted to ask if children of Republicans, indeed, young Republicans themselves or — God forbid — conservative professors were forced to stay in a closet of their own at her college, whose mission statement, after all, stipulates diversity in regards to race, gender and religion, but makes no mention of political affiliation. Would she have them wear a bright red R lest they enroll in her classes or sit next to her in the faculty lounge?

I shuddered to think how any of us would react to a colleague making the same statement, substituting party preference with an ethnic, gender or religious denomination: “It would be far to stressful for me to teach children of a gay couple … to teach children of Arab immigrants … to teach children of “fill-in-the- blank” (then run for cover). Yet no one else at our table seemed to view her statement as bigoted or even the slightest bit outrageous...

Just to keep our trend on PC infantilism going, Ed Morrissey writes that university students have taken to throwing food and even shoes(!) at speakers they disagree with. He links to an AP article that begins:

Commentator and former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan cut short an appearance after an opponent of his conservative views doused him with salad dressing.

"Stop the bigotry!" the demonstrator shouted as he hurled the liquid Thursday night during the program at Western Michigan University. The incident came just two days after another noted conservative, William Kristol, was struck by a pie during an appearance at a college in Indiana.

If the attacks weren't so pathetic, they'd be dangerous -- and that may yet come as the International ANSWER/MoveOn faction descends further into its immature, neurotic state. I'm no fan of Buchanan, but he does debate rather well, as does William Kristol. It seems that the Left has no answer for their skill, and so they instead sabotage the debate by hurling food. When that fails, as it did with Kristol, what comes next? Smoke bombs? Worse?

Before that happens, expect to see universities quit hosting such conferences, out of concern for student and guest safety. That's what the radical Left wants; they will brook no dissent from the pseudo-Utopian orthodoxy they've spent a lifetime building in Academia, and will fight any attempt to inject reality by any means necessary.

These poor specimens must often retreat like turtles from debate, because they know nothing of conservative positions--except from their professors' testimonials, which rely on dilution or caricature.

Did I say that life imitates Animal House? Nah--the Delta House gang may have been exuberant party animals, but the professors at a 1962-era college were infinitely saner than many of today's.

Howard Kurtz notes that college faculties tilt remarkably to the left.

(Also just in: sun sets in west, rises in east!)

In other collegiate news, Betsy Newmark writes that Princeton (home of Peter Singer and Cornel West) has seen quite a drop in donations this year.

She also notes that at Harvard, home to the man who sent West packing to Princeton, and who's now under-fire from its remaining professors for daring to say the bloody obvious, a poll finds that student satisfaction ranks near the bottom of a group of 31 elite private schools.

Strange days for academia. Of course, this still ranks as the strangest indeed.

Ward Churchill spoke in San Francisco on Friday; his most ardent supporters wore chicken hats on their heads.

Say what? Just click, and it will all be come clear. Nuts, but clear.

When Douglas Kern created the chickendove meme for Tech Central Station last month, I never thought it would catch on so quickly. I also like this comment on Charles Johnson's blog:

Looking at this, I remember a comment from Uncle duke in Doonesbury years ago when Bush I was in office. "I stopped taking drugs years ago. Who can tell the difference?"

Update: Not sure if it's included in this videotape--it may have been commercially released before Churchill spoke last week. Maybe the next the volume.

Jeff Brokaw writes, "These are scary times for college-bound kids with actual working brains, and for their parents. I.e., those who are not looking to get brain-washed by aging liberal hippies":

You shouldn’t have to pretend to be an America-hating radical lefty, just to avoid pissing off your professors. Nor should you, as a normal student or as an esteemed University president, have to pretend that women are identical to men in every way, just to avoid pissing off touchy feminists and their sisters-in-arms.

The fact that some kids feel they must do exactly that is a big problem all by itself, without even addressing the actual damage done to our kids by these people.

As I've written before on this blog, the predominance of these blue-state academics on campus is a problem--but hardly for conservatives. It is a problem for liberal students. These poor specimens must often retreat like turtles from debate, because they know nothing of conservative positions--except from their professors' testimonials, which rely on dilution or caricature. Meanwhile, conservatives are given every opportunity to "know the enemy," and they can test and strengthen their own opinions in the process. They ought to be thanking their instructors for providing a daily object-lesson in enemy S.O.P.

Betsy Nemark links to a Denver Post story about Phil Mitchell, another professor under siege at Colorado University. His crime:

Mitchell taught at the Hallett Diversity Program for 24 straight semesters. That is, until he made the colossal error of actually presenting a (gasp!) diverse opinion, quoting respected conservative black intellectual Thomas Sowell in a discussion about affirmative action.

Sitting 5 feet from a pink triangle that read "Hate-Free Zone," the progressive head of the department berated Mitchell, calling him a racist.

"That would have come as a surprise to my black children," explains Mitchell, who has nine kids, as of last count, two of them adopted African-Americans.

Then, Mitchell had the audacity to use a book on liberal Protestantism in the late 19th century. So repulsed by the word "god" was one student, she complained, and the department chair fired him without a meeting, he said.

There's a key quote by Mitchell that sums up a huge difference between liberals the left:

"People say liberals run the university. I wish they did," Mitchell says. "Most liberals understand the need for intellectual diversity. It's the radical left that kills you."

Update: Somewhat related thoughts on liberals, leftists and intellectual diversity, here.

Vermouth-infused Update: Dead-on-target thoughts, from Stephen Green.

Douglas Kern of Tech Central Station says that colleges should have more speech codes--many more:

Big academia promulgates the illusion of free speech while quietly enforcing the de facto reality of opinion censorship. It's the worst of both worlds.

Like every good baby conservative, I spent my college years inveighing against academic speech codes that canted the sphere of acceptable public discourse to the far left. Naively, I assumed that the abolition of speech codes would inaugurate a new era of open, civilized academic discourse, free from artificially imposed bias. Ah, the bitter folly of youth! There was nothing artificial about that bias. Ridiculous speech codes were a symptom of deranged ideology, not the cause.

So let's stop playing five-card socialist stud and start playing five-card Texas Cultural Hold'em. Let's pull our smelly little institutional orthodoxies out in the open. Hey, big academia: you don't like social conservatives? Don't want to tolerate anti-feminist opinions, or reactionaries who reject rights for gay couples, or Neanderthals who question Darwin? Fine -- but say so directly. And be prepared to accept the consequences from alumni, bloggers, and taxpayers. The same goes for conservative schools, or schools supported with tax money squeezed out of conservatives. Don't want the Ward Churchills of the world to promulgate crypto-Islamicism on your time and your dime? Okay, but have the guts to put that rule in writing.

I hasten to add that I have no problem in principle with smelly little orthodoxies. I hold to quite a few of them myself, and some orthodoxies aren't so smelly. Every thinking person embraces a host of biases and prejudices with which to sort through a confusing, contradictory world. But I accept my prejudices. I don't conceal them. Quite the contrary -- I hold them up for public display and judgment. My "speech codes" are a matter of public record. Can Harvard say the same?

Had Harvard told its faculty from the very start that belief in the equality of the sexes was non-negotiable, reasonable people might have asked some probing questions: Why can't faculty members hold that view? What harm could come from such an opinion? Why does the pro-equality crowd fear even the possibility of open discussion of the subject? Open, fully articulated rules can be discussed, and accepted or rejected on their merits. But what good comes from a "speech code" that hides the preferences of the school under an unconvincing veneer of free speech?

Big academia suffers from the same problem of bias that afflicts the mainstream media. It's fine to be overtly politicized, but when you hide your biases behind a posture of perfect, disinterested neutrality, you insulate your biases from critical scrutiny. Behold the debacle of Memogate. Would CBS have behaved so recklessly but for its irrational certainty that its left-wing biases were nothing more than tough, objective journalism? Having concealed its prejudices for so long that it even fooled itself, CBS was rendered helpless when those same prejudices consumed its professional judgment. Harvard and Colorado know that helplessness well.

To paraphrase one of my favorite lines from Robert Altman's original film version of M*A*S*H, "Fair's fair, Colonel: if I call 3000 innocent casualties 'little Eichmanns', plagiarize art and punch a reporter, can I ask for ten million dollars from my employer, too?"

Accused by a Boulder, Colorado TV reporter of plagiarizing, then selling, famous artwork depicting American Indians, academia's golden boy responds by taking a swing at the reporter's cameraman:

BOULDER, Colo. (CBS4) An exclusive report by CBS4 News indicates embattled University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill may have broken copyright law by making a mirror image of an artist’s work and selling it as his own.

Placing Churchill’s work beside that of renowned artist Thomas E. Mails and the two look like mirror images. But one is a copyrighted drawing. The other is an autographed print by Churchill.

When CBS4 News tried to talk to Churchill about a possible copyright infringement, we received an angry response.

“Get that camera out of my face,” Churchill said.

CBS4 News reporter Raj Chohan: “This is an artwork we’ve got called ‘Winter Attack.’ It looks like it was based on a Thomas Mails painting; it looks like you ripped it off. Can you tell us about that?”

That prompted Churchill to take a swing at Chohan.

Should he lose his tenure? Jim Geraghty has an interesting discussion on the topic, as does Glenn Reynolds.

Update: Watching the video again, Churchill took a (rather wussy) swing at the reporter himself, not his cameraman.

Roger Kimball looks at just how deep the roots in academia run when it comes to hiring professors like Ward Churchill.

Incidentally, like the collegiate equivalent of an NFL superstar being nominated to the Pro Bowl, Ward's off to the Aloha state to discuss "little Eichmanns" at the University of Hawaii.

Charles Johnson, linking to a piece in Front Page, writes that while "Colorado University professor Ward Churchill may have written and said some outrageous things", Northwestern University has on its faculty somebody who's done some outrageous things--a former member of the '60s far, far left radical group the Weathermen:

Michael J. Totten has an interesting piece in Tech Central Station about all of the post-9/11 protestors who march against President Bush in the bluest regions of the blue states. As his title implies, "They March for Themselves".

It's a very good piece, but there's a passage in it that caused me to do a doubletake:

I protested the Persian Gulf War back in 1991 when I attended the University of Oregon in Eugene. Every night I hit the streets with the rest of the university town's motley radicals. We carried "No Blood for Oil" signs. We flashed the peace sign (which I didn't then know also means "Victory") at the police who were -- I must say -- remarkably tolerant of our antics.

Maybe it's because I'm several years older and grew up in the '70s, when the afterburn of the 1960s was still remarkably present, but heck, I'm pretty sure that I knew the original meaning of the peace symbol before I was 10 years old.

Earlier today, I linked to a piece by Stefan Beck, who wrote, "I've always said that when universities hire left-wing profs exclusively, they hurt their avowedly liberal students most".

He may be more right than he knows.

We've been following Ward Churchill since late last week. He's the university professor who referred to the Americans killed in the 9/11 terrorist attack as 3000 "little Eichmanns". Today, Charles Johnson writes:

Hamilton College has canceled the panel discussion with Colorado University professor Ward Churchill—not because his monstrously inverted opinions deserve to be shunned, but because of alleged “threats of violence.”

Ward Churchill, whom we wrote about on Friday, is the University of Colorado ethnic studies professor who described the victims of the 9/11 attacks as 3,000 "little Eichmanns".

Charles Johnson writes that Churchill has "resigned his post as chairman (but not his professorship), and released a lengthy statement defending his vile essay".

Roger Kimball has some thoughts as well.

Almost exactly one year ago, Washington Post journalist Anne Applebaum wrote a terrific lead to a column about 2004's feminist kerfuffle of the century in academia:

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

Update: For more academic farce, Roger Kimball has some thoughts on Catharine MacKinnon, tenured professor at the University of Michigan Law School, and founder of what has been dubbed "feminist fundamentalism", including the banning of all pornography, First Ammendment be damned:

Donald Luskin says there's "signs of life amidst the leftist graveyard known as academia", and posts an email that highlights a debate between a small-l libertarian economics major at a California university and his "very liberal" professor who "shares an office with an econ professor who is an avowed Socialist".

Meanwhile James Taranto writes:

If you're a college student fed up with heavy-handed leftism from the faculty, here's a chance to do something about it, and possibly end up on the silver screen...Evan Coyne Maloney, a young New York-based documentarian, is looking for students to help the full-length version of his film "Brainwashing 101."

Update: On the flip side, Jim Lindgren looks at two Nobel Prize-winning free market economists who were driven out of the University of Virginia during the 1960s for "being on the wrong side of history" back in those Galbraith-dominated central planning days.

Eric Adler and Jack Langer, writing in The Wall Street Journal, describe how the Intifada came to Duke this fall.

Leonard Nimoy Jonah Goldberg discovers something that I never saw when I was in high school or college: kids under 21 who said that they don't drink because it's against the law!

Of course, the drinking age in New Jersey was raised from 17 to 21 during my senior year in high school, so it was very new, and we were young bucks who wanted to protest. And it was much closer to the '60s and '70s ethos of getting drunk and having a good time on the weekends. As Jonah writes (and he's a few years younger than I am), "I associate college so much with social drinking; I have such an ingrained and generalized contempt for the 21 drinking age; and I’ve simply never met anybody who used this explanation before, let alone heard that this is a fairly widely held attitude among college students. It makes me rethink the power of the law to shape culture in America."

In two long posts on "The Corner", Jonah Goldberg looks at:

the generalized ignorance or silence of mainstream liberals about their own intellectual history. Obviously this is a sweeping -- and therefore unfair -- generalization. But I read a lot of liberal stuff and have attended more than a few college confabs with liberal speakers speaking on the subject of liberalism itself. And it seems to me that liberals are intellectually deracinated. Read conservative publications or attend conservative conferences and there will almost always be at least some mention of our intellectual forefathers and often a spirited debate about them. The same goes for Libertarians, at least that branch which can be called a part or partner of the conservative movement.

Just look at the conservative blogosphere. There's all sorts of stuff about Burke, Hayek, von Mises, Oakeshott, Kirk, Buckley, Strauss, Meyer, the Southern Agrarians, et al. I can't think of a single editor or contributing editor of National Review who can't speak intelligently about the intellectual titans of conservatism going back generations. I'm not saying everybody's an expert, but I think everybody's made at least the minimal effort to understand their intellectual lineage and I think that's reflected in conservative writing, for good and for ill. I would guess that the same hold true about the gang over at Reason.

I just don't get the sense that's true of most liberal journalists. When was the last time you saw more than a passing reference to Herbert Croly? When was the last time you read an article or blog posting where a liberal asked "What would Charles Beard think of this?"

Joanne Jacobs notes a teachers' union official's attempt to equate charter schools with Nazis, and quotes from a newsletter which has this unintentionally hilarious line written by the president of the Federal Way Education Association, Michael Comstock:

To paraphrase what Joseph Gerbles, the Nazi propaganda minister said, 'Repeat anything enough times loudly enough, no matter how untrue it is, and people will begin to believe it.'

OK, so let me see if I have this straight. 20 years after the event--and four years after she consulted for the would be successor to the president who never met an intern he didn't like--feminist icon Naomi Wolf accuses literary scholar Harold Bloom of having put his hand on her thigh at Yale University 20 years ago.

As Anne Applebaum writes, "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":

What is most extraordinary about Wolf is the way in which she has voluntarily stripped herself of her achievements and her status, and reduced herself to a victim, nothing more. The implication here is that women are psychologically weak: One hand on the thigh, and they never get over it. The implication is also that women are naive, and powerless as well: Even Yale undergraduates are not savvy enough to avoid late-night encounters with male professors whose romantic intentions don't interest them.

The larger implications are for the movement that used to be called "feminism." Twenty years of fame, money, success, happy marriage and the children she has described in her books -- and Naomi Wolf, one of my generation's leading feminists, is still obsessed with her own exaggerated victimhood? It's not an ideology I'd want younger women to follow.

UPDATE: Earlier this week, in a post about TV's Sex in the City, Jonah linked to one of his articles from 1998, which really captures those hazy days of pre-9/11 innocence and silliness:

Something remarkable has happened to the cultural Left in the 1990s. Sex is everything. Sexuality has become the linchpin of human identity, replacing race as the chief source of activism and passion in discussions of civil rights, politics, and public morality. In a calculated maneuver, the Left has decided to brand Clinton's sexual behavior with Monica Lewinsky private-despite all of the evidence that Clinton dragooned the country into the most public illicit affair in modern history and then compounded his misdeed with other crimes. Yes, the affair was metaphysically tacky and bordered on the deviant, but the more unconventional the expression of sexuality, the more comfortable the Left is in defending it.

Obviously, this represents a tectonic shift in feminist dogma. It is a shift that was occurring well before the Lewinsky scandal. Today, the most provocative academic feminist isn't a sex hater. She is Jane Gallop, Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin. When asked about her sexual preference-at a conference entitled "Flaunting It"-she responded, "Graduate students." On talk shows and on the op-ed pages, the sex-is-rape school is in full retreat while the sex-is-a-passport-to-a-cushy-job school is attracting adherents in droves. Katie Roiphe in the New York Times says of Lewinsky, "There is nothing inherently wrong . . . with her attempt to translate her personal relationship with the President into professional advancement."

The Lewinsky affair was a tricky issue for most liberal feminists, who were caught between protesting sexual harassment and supporting the president they had elected. Wolf did both, by turning the issue into an object lesson on women's professional success. "The people who should be looking into these allegations is not a partisan prosecutor but the EEOC," she opined on the talk-show circuit.

Farce, indeed.

Joanne Jacobs writes, "Diane Ravitch, author of The Language Police, got her hands on New York state's guidelines for textbooks. Anything that could offend anybody is out".

And how!

Or, as George Orwell wrote, some 56 years ago:

'Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten. Already, in the Eleventh Edition [of 1984's Newspeak Dictionary], we're not far from that point. But the process will still be continuing long after you and I are dead. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. Even now, of course, there's no reason or excuse for committing thoughtcrime. It's merely a question of self-discipline, reality-control. But in the end there won't be any need even for that. The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect. Newspeak is Ingsoc and Ingsoc is Newspeak,' he added with a sort of mystical satisfaction. 'Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?'

Near the end of 1984, George Orwell wrote this interchange between Winston Smith and O'Brien, his tormenter in one of Oceania's gulags:

'We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull. You will learn by degrees, Winston. There is nothing that we could not do. Invisibility, levitation -- anything. I could float off this floor like a soap bubble if I wish to. I do not wish to, because the Party does not wish it. You must get rid of those nineteenth-century ideas about the laws of Nature. We make the laws of Nature.'

'But you do not! You are not even masters of this planet. What about Eurasia and Eastasia? You have not conquered them yet.'

'Unimportant. We shall conquer them when it suits us. And if we did not, what difference would it make? We can shut them out of existence. Oceania is the world.'

'But the world itself is only a speck of dust. And man is tiny helpless! How long has he been in existence? For millions of years the earth was uninhabited.'

'Nonsense. The earth is as old as we are, no older. How could it be older? Nothing exists except through human consciousness.'

'But the rocks are full of the bones of extinct animals -- mammoths and mastodons and enormous reptiles which lived here long before man was ever heard of.'

'Have you ever seen those bones, Winston? Of course not. Nineteenth-century biologists invented them. Before man there was nothing. After man, if he could come to an end, there would be nothing. Outside man there is nothing.'

'But the whole universe is outside us. Look at the stars! Some of them are a million light-years away. They are out of our reach for ever.'

'What are the stars?' said O'Brien indifferently. 'They are bits of fire a few kilometres away. We could reach them if we wanted to. Or we could blot them out. The earth is the centre of the universe. The sun and the stars go round it.'

Winston made another convulsive movement. This time he did not say anything. O'Brien continued as though answering a spoken objection:

'For certain purposes, of course, that is not true. When we navigate the ocean, or when we predict an eclipse, we often find it convenient to assume that the earth goes round the sun and that the stars are millions upon millions of kilometres away. But what of it? Do you suppose it is beyond us to produce a dual system of astronomy? The stars can be near or distant, according as we need them. Do you suppose our mathematicians are unequal to that? Have you forgotten doublethink?'

The academics in non-rigorous fields were not even needed any longer to help bridge the gap between the scientists and laymen. In 1991, John Brockman wrote:

In the past few years, the playing field of American intellectual life has shifted, and the traditional intellectual has become increasingly marginalized. A 1950s education in Freud, Marx, and modernism is not a sufficient qualification for a thinking person in the 1990s. Indeed, the traditional American intellectuals are, in a sense, increasingly reactionary, and quite often proudly (and perversely) ignorant of many of the truly significant intellectual accomplishments of our time. Their culture, which dismisses science, is often nonempirical. It uses its own jargon and washes its own laundry. It is chiefly characterized by comment on comments, the swelling spiral of commentary eventually reaching the point where the real world gets lost.

In 1959 C.P. Snow published a book titled The Two Cultures. On the one hand, there were the literary intellectuals; on the other, the scientists. He noted with incredulity that during the 1930s the literary intellectuals, while no one was looking, took to referring to themselves as "the intellectuals," as though there were no others. This new definition by the "men of letters" excluded scientists such as the astronomer Edwin Hubble, the mathematician John von Neumann, the cyberneticist Norbert Wiener, and the physicists Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, and Werner Heisenberg.

But what Snow eventually referred to as a "third culture" began to appear, though not exactly in the way he expected. Scientists and other technical people began to reach out directly to the laymen, to explain what they were doing and why and what significance it had, and why it was so fascinating. (Blush, people like me.)

Scientific topics receiving prominent play in newspapers and magazines over the past several years include molecular biology, artificial intelligence, artificial life, chaos theory, massive parallelism, neural nets, the inflationary universe, fractals, complex adaptive systems, superstrings, biodiversity, nanotechnology, the human genome, expert systems, punctuated equilibrium, cellular automata, fuzzy logic, space biospheres, the Gaia hypothesis, virtual reality, cyberspace, and teraflop machines. Among others. There is no canon or accredited list of acceptable ideas. The strength of the third culture is precisely that it can tolerate disagreements about which ideas are to be taken seriously. Unlike previous intellectual pursuits, the achievements of the third culture are not the marginal disputes of a quarrelsome mandarin class: they will affect the lives of everybody on the planet.

But no one was paying comparable attention to the kind of stuff that the self-styled intellectuals were doing. The worst thing you can do to a proud man is to ignore him; and increasingly the "men of letters" found themselves being ignored or treated as curiosities.

Increasingly isolated, frustrated, useless on a practical level, and with prestige declining, they became intellectually inbred. Since no one else respected them, they "respected" each other and decided no one else's opinion really mattered. The swelling spiral of comment-on-comment continued, divorced from reality. Over the course of maybe thirty years, a form of intellectual "pseudoscience" developed.

UPDATE: Whoops--Steven emailed me to inform me that his post is actually the second of what he believes will be a four-part series. Here's the first part.

"NYC Schools Given Lumps of Coal for Banning Nativity Scenes".

Duke University will be launching an Axis of Evil film festival, showing films from Iraq, North Korea and Iran, and rogue states such as Cuba, Syria and Libya. Check out this quote by Ariel Dorfman, a professor of literature and Latin American studies at Duke University:

"I'd urge everyone who believes in cultural dialogue -- and particularly those who don't -- to come and submerge themselves in these works of art from the very places that some in the United States would like to bomb out of sight and out of existence".

And then there's this statement by Negar Mottahedeh, assistant professor of literature at Duke:

We know how Bush sees 'the Axis of Evil.' How does someone from within that Axis see his or her own everyday life?"

By the way--nice use of quotation marks by Reuters. And nice of Reuters to list a film series about largely enslaved film makers under their "Oddly Enough" category.

(Link via James Russell.)

Charles Paul Freund has an excellent essay on the overtly racist 28th president in Reason.

Funny, I don't remember learning any of this stuff at the College of New Jersey, when I attended history courses that praised Wilson for his love of big government and parliamentary politics.

Joanne Jacobs has a post that includes a link to a recent Suzanne Fields essay about "ethnic theme houses", a euphemism for segregated college dorms.

Diversity, for the Left, has long been an oxymoron in regards to thought. Today, it's easier than ever to receive a college education while only being around people who look--as well as think--exactly like you do.

U.S. News & World Report's John Leo writes that the left has lost its moral bearings:

Everywhere you turn these days, someone on the left is denouncing President Bush as Hitler, Satan, a terrorist or a tyrannical emperor. A Yale law professor said Bush is "the most dangerous man on Earth." A famous editor referred to Bush as "a lawn jockey" and "Pinocchio."

Some of the angry rhetoric flirts with the fringe idea that the United States planned the terrorist attacks. A Purdue professor said "there is no ground to be certain" that America and Israel aren't behind the 9/11 attacks. A Columbia law professor compared 9/11 to the Reichstag fire in Nazi Germany -- Bush is not responsible for 9/11, he said, but he exploited a national disaster to suspend civil liberties, just like Hitler. A Berkeley professor helpfully pointed out that some Indonesian groups think the U.S. planned the Bali bombing.

The rhetoric accurately reflects the current condition of much of the left -- bitter, stymied, alienated, politically impotent, full of loathing for America and the West, and totally unable to address the crisis wrought by 9/11, except to imply (or say) that the U.S. deserved to be attacked.

Nice essay by Tim Cavanaugh on Daniel Pipes' new organization, Campus Watch, in Reason. I particularly liked this idea:

We may in fact need an update of Mike Godwin's Hitler constant, with a corollary that the first person to use the word "McCarthy" in a debate automatically forfeits the point.

Found on The Wall Street Journal's Best of the Web Today section. I was tempted to call this "outrage of the week" when I first read it, then immediately came to my senses--it ranks fairly low in the outrage department compared to the rest of the headlines so far this week:

What's Next, Yellow Stars?
Nazi Germany forced homosexuals to wear pink triangles. Cleveland's WEWS-TV reports on a student Lakeland Community College "who we'll call Ian," whom the college tried to force to wear a Nazi-style triangle. "The assignment was to wear a pink triangle around school for the day as a symbol of gay rights and then write about the experience," the station reports. Ian objected to the assignment on moral grounds. "I asked 'What if a student were to feel uncomfortable with this--would there be an alternate assignment? [The instructor] said no."

Ian got an F and was threatened with expulsion, but WEWS says when it contacted the college, it backed down. "When NewsChannel5 spoke with Ian later in the day, his teacher had given him an apology note that read, in part, that the requirement was waived."

In the spirit of Muggeridge's Law, check out John J. Miller on the Polly Awards in today's National Review Online. The Polly Awards are handed out by the Collegiate Network "to highlight the noxious tendencies of radical faculty and students at the nation's colleges." The University of California at Berkeley won two of five "Polly" awards today for outrageous political correctness.

Berkeley's first award came for a case of what the CN calls "multicultural hooliganism": In February, a group of left-wing students broke into the office of The Patriot, a conservative student newspaper, and stole its entire press run, valued at $2,000. Editors who filed a police report were then met with death threats. The incident apparently was occasioned by a Patriot article critical of a radical Hispanic group, MEChA, which calls for the revolutionary liberation of the "bronze continent for bronze people." The Berkeley chapter of MEChA receives $20,000 from the university.

Berkeley's other award was for its now-famous sex-education class, which featured "an orgy at a class party and [a visit to] a strip club, where [students] watched an instructor have sex onstage."

Stanley Kurtz, writing on The Corner on National Review Online, says that the CampusNonsense site run by Josh Mercer’s "is more than just a conservative campus blog."

It aims to be a kind of clearing house for conservative blogs nationally, which are linked in the right-hand column. Click on Arizona State’s “Collegiate Conservative,” for example, and you’ll read the story of yet another conservative paper theft. Many of these papers were burned. (The Left seems to have entirely forgotten the terrible images of Nazi book burning.) CampusNonsense has also got a bunch of links to campus conservative papers. And the blog itself features entries by Mercer and others. Check out Harold Eustache Jr.’s account of what happens to black conservatives when they try to speak their mind. This blog is the future.