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

Gee, now there's a shock.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read the rest.

As Roger Kimball notes:

Buried in a story about baby-boomer profs retiring:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sadly, perhaps until this countdown reaches zero.

From Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It also unleashed something instructive in Paul Auster:

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

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

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

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

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

Mark Steyn:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michael Goldfarb writes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(H/T: SDA)

Mike S. Adams:

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

But are you sure she really fits the bill?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back in February of 2004, I wrote:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As I noted three years ago:

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

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

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

(Via Jules Crittenden.)

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

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

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

Todd Seavey writes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read the whole thing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Music used to do this. Not so much anymore.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Update: Hoax, according to the Daily Princetonian.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Simultaneously, the Denver Post profiles Jeanne Assam:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tim Blair writes:

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

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

The Guardian:

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

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

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

Just ask Columbia University.

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

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

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

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

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