Making Little Monsters

For continuing detailed coverage of zero-tolerance lunacy in education, see ZeroIntelligence.net.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2010-Mar-13, by Peter Berkowitz:

Climategate Was an Academic Disaster Waiting to Happen
The notion of objective truth has been abandoned and the peer review process gives scholars ample opportunity to reward friends and punish enemies.

Last fall, emails revealed that scientists at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England and colleagues in the U.S. and around the globe deliberately distorted data to support dire global warming scenarios and sought to block scholars with a different view from getting published. What does this scandal say generally about the intellectual habits and norms at our universities?

This is a legitimate question, because our universities, which above all should be cultivating intellectual virtue, are in their day-to-day operations fostering the opposite. Fashionable ideas, the convenience of professors, and the bureaucratic structures of academic life combine to encourage students and faculty alike to defend arguments for which they lack vital information. They pretend to knowledge they don't possess and invoke the authority of rank and status instead of reasoned debate.

Consider the undergraduate curriculum. Over the last several decades, departments have watered down the requirements needed to complete a major, while core curricula have been hollowed out or abandoned. Only a handful of the nation's leading universities—Columbia and the University of Chicago at the forefront—insist that all undergraduates must read a common set of books and become conversant with the main ideas and events that shaped Western history and the larger world.

There are no good pedagogical reasons for abandoning the core. Professors and administrators argue that students need and deserve the freedom to shape their own course of study. But how can students who do not know the basics make intelligent decisions about the books they should read and the perspectives they should master?

The real reasons for releasing students from rigorous departmental requirements and fixed core courses are quite different. One is that professors prefer to teach boutique classes focusing on their narrow areas of specialization. In addition, they believe that dropping requirements will lure more students to their departments, which translates into more faculty slots for like-minded colleagues. By far, though, the most important reason is that faculty generally reject the common sense idea that there is a basic body of knowledge that all students should learn. This is consistent with the popular campus dogma that all morals and cultures are relative and that objective knowledge is impossible.

The deplorable but predictable result is that professors constantly call upon students to engage in discussions and write papers in the absence of fundamental background knowledge. Good students quickly absorb the curriculum's unwritten lesson—cutting corners and vigorously pressing strong but unsubstantiated opinions is the path to intellectual achievement.

The production of scholarship also fosters intellectual vice. Take the peer review process, which because of its supposed impartiality and objectivity is intended to distinguish the work of scholars from that of journalists and commercial authors.

Academic journals typically adopt a double blind system, concealing the names of both authors and reviewers. But any competent scholar can determine an article's approach or analytical framework within the first few paragraphs. Scholars are likely to have colleagues and graduate students they support and whose careers they wish to advance. A few may even have colleagues whose careers, along with those of their graduate students, they would like to tarnish or destroy. There is no check to prevent them from benefiting their friends by providing preferential treatment for their orientation and similarly punishing their enemies.

That's because the peer review process violates a fundamental principle of fairness. We don't allow judges to be parties to a controversy they are adjudicating, and don't permit athletes to umpire games in which they are playing. In both cases the concern is that their interest in the outcome will bias their judgment and corrupt their integrity. So why should we expect scholars, especially operating under the cloak of anonymity, to fairly and honorably evaluate the work of allies and rivals?

Some university presses exacerbate the problem. Harvard University Press tells a reviewer the name of a book manuscript's author but withholds the reviewer's identity from the author. It would be hard to design a system that provided reviewers more opportunity to reward friends and punish enemies.

Harvard Press assumes that its editors will detect and avoid conflicts of interest. But if reviewers are in the same scholarly field as, or in a field related to that of, the author—and why would they be asked for an evaluation if they weren't?—then the reviewer will always have a conflict of interest.

Then there is the abuse of confidentiality and the overreliance on arguments from authority in hiring, promotion and tenure decisions. Owing to the premium the academy places on specialization, most university departments today contain several fields, and within them several subfields. Thus departmental colleagues are regularly asked to evaluate scholarly work in which they have little more expertise than the man or woman on the street.

Often unable to form independent professional judgments—but unwilling to recuse themselves from important personnel decisions—faculty members routinely rely on confidential letters of evaluation from scholars at other universities. Once again, these letters are written—and solicited—by scholars who are irreducibly interested parties.

There are no easy fixes to this state of affairs. Worse, our universities don't recognize they have a problem. Instead, professors and university administrators are inclined to indignantly dismiss concerns about the curriculum, peer review, and hiring, promotion and tenure decisions as cynically calling into question their good character. But these concerns are actually rooted in the democratic conviction that professors and university administrators are not cut from finer cloth than their fellow citizens.

Our universities shape young men's and women's sensibilities, and our professors are supposed to serve as guardians of authoritative knowledge and exemplars of serious and systematic inquiry. Yet our campuses are home today to a toxic confluence of fashionable ideas that undermine the very notion of intellectual virtue, and to flawed educational practices and procedures that give intellectual vice ample room to flourish.

Just look at Climategate.

Mr. Berkowitz is a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2010-Mar-13:

Student Loan Chutzpah
Mr. Petri's bill of college subsidies.

In a nearby letter, Republican Congressman Tom Petri writes that we have been "sold a bill of goods on student loans." Our sin is to oppose a government takeover of college financing, which will take a giant leap forward if Congress jams its pending student-loan changes on to the health-care reconciliation bill.

One element of the takeover is a ban on private companies making loans largely guaranteed by government, in favor of loans made directly to students by the Department of Education. Therefore, Mr. Petri claims, "There is no 'takeover' here. Eliminating guaranteed loans in favor of direct loans means replacing a wasteful program with one that is more cost-effective."

In fact, Congress has been selling its own bill of goods since 1965, when it created student-loan subsidies, and both parents and taxpayers have found that there is nothing cost-effective about it. Combined with ever-expanding grant programs, federal loan subsidies have ensured that higher-education costs have been growing even faster than health-care costs—increasing more than 400% in the 25 years ending in 2007. Colleges have been able to consistently raise prices only because of these ever-increasing subsidies toward the purchase of education.

We're all for ending this subsidy machine, and the day that Mr. Petri introduces a bill to do that, he will have our support. Unfortunately, he has joined with Congressional Democrats and the White House to expand the subsidy machine, while systematically driving private companies out of higher-education financing.

New regulations in a 2008 law made it more difficult to issue private loans without a government guarantee. And the plan that passed the House last year with Mr. Petri's support further discourages purely private loans by offering sweeter deals on government-backed loans. One government option is a low adjustable-rate loan, except rate increases are capped, so taxpayers lose if interest rates spike. How can private lenders compete with that?

As for the plan to ban private companies from originating and servicing the government-guaranteed loans, the head of the Congressional Budget Office has admitted that the promised "savings" are unlikely to materialize. But Congress will nonetheless begin spending that money immediately by ramping up the Pell Grant program—more subsidies that will ultimately be pocketed by colleges and show up as tuition increases.

One has to take a leap of faith to believe that the Department of Education will originate and service loans better than private companies do. We're not sure even Carl Lewis could make this leap after learning that CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf has explicitly stated that the government accounting rules he's forced to use underestimate the default risks of such direct government lending.

Having created the subsidy for private lenders, Congress is now denouncing its own creation in order to put nearly all student lending in government hands. The only benefit to this complete federal takeover is that we'll see the fruits of socialism in action, including a preview of the kind of "public option" that liberals still hope to construct in health care.

from Commentary's Contentions blog, 2010-Feb-17, by John Steele Gordon:

A Crack in the College Cartel?

Say one thing for recessions: they force companies, governments, and institutions (not to mention individuals) to look for ways to be more efficient and to decrease costs. That’s why productivity always soars in a recession.

Today’s New York Times reports that people are increasingly fed up with the high costs and high-handed ways of American colleges. It’s about time. As the Times reports: “`One of the really disturbing things about this, for those of us who work in higher education,' said Patrick Callan, president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, `is the vote of no confidence we're getting from the public. They think college is important, but they're really losing trust in the management and leadership.'”

College tuition has risen far faster than inflation. In the 1960s, I paid $2,200 a year to attend a first-rate university. From the month I graduated to December 2009, there was an inflation of slightly over 550 percent. So tuition today, net of inflation, should be on the order of $12,500. It’s $37,005, almost three times higher. Why?

Well, high-prestige colleges have market power and can charge more. But even second- and third-tier institutions in terms of prestige have been able to jack up their tuition far beyond inflation because there is a cartel in operation. Entrance into the marketplace by new competitors is very restricted, and colleges and universities are not subject to antitrust laws, so they are free to conspire to set prices. In effect, they do. But all cartels require an enforcement mechanism, and in this case, it is the accrediting agencies that often prevent colleges from competing by means of price. They often require ever more elaborate plants and facilities, like a large library even if the institution is located in a city with a large, easily accessible municipal library. Unnecessary courses are often required, even if the student can demonstrate competence in the subject. Colleges often cannot fully use the new communications technologies that would greatly lower costs, and they often cannot employ great ideas like the wonderful college-level courses offered by, for example, The Teaching Company.

If colleges were able to compete freely in terms of prices — still better, if they were required to compete, like profit-seeking corporations — those prices would come down wondrously. In fact, today's New York Times has a perfect example of that near the article on the public’s growing resistance to college costs. It’s a full-page advertisement by Fidelity, the huge brokerage and mutual fund company, offering stock trades for $7.95 each and bragging that that’s cheaper than the prices charged by its largest competitors.

From the first beginnings of what would become the New York Stock Exchange, in 1792, members were required to charge the same fees, no competing by means of price. In the 1970s, trading 100 shares could easily cost you $70.00. Trading 1,000 shares cost 10 times as much, even though the cost to the firm of executing the trade was the same. But May 1, 1975, (May Day in Wall Street history) was the day the SEC required the NYSE to stop fixing prices. They immediately declined drastically and, despite inflation, have been declining ever since. That is by far the most important reason behind the huge increase in stock exchange volume in the last 35 years and the ever-higher percentage of American families owning securities in their own right. The brokers had to undergo an agonizing restructuring, and many did not survive. But I notice few tears being shed for Wall Street these days.

It will take a lot of pressure to kill the higher-education cartel, but it will do a lot of good if the effort succeeds.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2010-Feb-2, by Mary Pilon:

What's a Degree Really Worth?

A college education may not be worth as much as you think.

For years, higher education was touted as a safe path to professional and financial success. Easy money, in the form of student loans, flowed to help parents and students finance degrees, with the implication that in the long run, a bachelor's degree was a good bet. Graduates, it has long been argued, would be able to build solid careers that would earn them far more than their high-school educated counterparts.

The numbers appeared to back it up. In recent years, the nonprofit College Board touted the difference in lifetime earnings of college grads over high-school graduates at $800,000, a widely circulated figure. Other estimates topped $1 million.

But now, as tuition continues to skyrocket and many seeking to change careers are heading back to school, some researchers are questioning the methodology behind the high projections.

Most researchers agree that college graduates, even in rough economies, generally fare better than individuals with only high-school diplomas. But just how much better is where the math gets fuzzy.

The problem stems from the common source of the estimates, a 2002 Census Bureau report titled "The Big Payoff." The report said the average high-school graduate earns $25,900 a year, and the average college graduate earns $45,400, based on 1999 data. The difference between the two figures is $19,500; multiply it by 40 years, as the Census Bureau did, and the result is $780,000.

"The idea was not to produce a definitive 'This is what you'll earn' number, but to try and give some measure of the relative value of education attainments," says Eric Newburger, a lead researcher at the Census and the paper's co-author. "It's not a statement about the future, it's a statement about today."

Mark Schneider, a vice president of the American Institutes for Research, a nonprofit research organization based in Washington, calls it "a million-dollar misunderstanding."

One problem he sees with the estimates: They don't take into account deductions from income taxes or breaks in employment. Nor do they factor in debt, particularly student debt loads, which have ballooned for both public and private colleges in recent years. In addition, the income data used for the Census estimates is from 1999, when total expenses for tuition and fees at the average four-year private college were $15,518 per year. For the 2009-10 school year, that number has risen to $26,273, and it continues to increase at a rate higher than inflation.

Dr. Schneider estimated the actual lifetime-earnings advantage for college graduates is a mere $279,893 in a report he wrote last year. He included tuition payments and discounted earning streams, putting them into present value. He also used actual salary data for graduates 10 years after they completed their degrees to measure incomes. Even among graduates of top-tier institutions, the earnings came in well below the million-dollar mark, he says.

And just like any investment, there are risks—such as graduating into a deep economic downturn. That's what happened to Kelly Dunleavy, who graduated in 2007 from the University of California, Berkeley, with $60,000 in loans. She now works as a reporter for a small newspaper in the Bay Area and earns $34,000 a year. Her father is currently paying her $700 monthly loan payments. "It's harder than what I think I expected it to be," she says.

"Averages don't tell the whole story," says Lauren Asher, president of the Institute for College Access & Success, a nonprofit group based in Berkeley, Calif. She points out that incomes vary widely, especially based on majors. "The truth is that no one can predict for you exactly what you're gong to earn," she says.

And that includes the College Board, which recently said on its Web site: "Over a lifetime, the gap in earning potential between a high-school diploma and a bachelor of arts is more than $800,000. In other words, whatever sacrifices you and your child make for [a] college education in the short term are more than repaid in the long term."

The $800,000 number, it turns out, was pulled from a footnote of the College Board's 2007 "Education Pays" report that explained lifetime earnings. The report's author, Sandy Baum—an emeritus Skidmore College economics professor who didn't write the promotional text on the Web site—says that $450,000 is actually a more reasonable estimate of the difference in lifetime earnings, something she's said in interviews for more than a year.

Steve Talbott, a journalism professor at Cleveland State University who is researching the cost of education and student-loan debt, says he urged the College Board to take down the "misleading use" of the $800,000 number a year ago. Others have voiced their objections to the College Board figure via letters and blogs.

A College Board spokeswoman says it doesn't have a record of when the content was written and that "it's possible that during an update of the content the writer misinterpreted the data within the report." She also says the text represented old data and reflected "a different methodology." The $800,000 figure was removed from its Web site in December, once the group learned of the error, she says.

from Fox News, 2010-Feb-3, by Lee Ross:

Schools: U.S. History Out, Environment In

Change often leads to controversy and that is certainly the case in North Carolina where an effort to revamp the state's education system has some people outraged that high school students will not learn enough American history.

The formula for teaching American history has been pretty simple. Start at the beginning and go forward. But a new proposal under review in North Carolina threatens to disrupt that standard teaching philosophy.

"If our students don't know what happened in world history, and if they don't know what happened in U.S. history from George Washington's presidency all the way up through the Civil War, then they will not be able to grasp the big picture," said Mike Belter, a Social Studies teacher in North Carolina.

The state's on-going curriculum review hits all subjects but it's the proposed changes for high school students learning social studies that have provoked fears. Under the new guidelines, students will graduate without learning enough about world history and key parts of American history including Abraham Lincoln, westward expansion or much else that happened before 1877 when Reconstruction ended, critics say.

"We are certainly not trying to go away from American history. What we are trying to do is figure out a way to teach it where students are connected to it. Where they see the big idea. Where they are able to make connections and draw relationships between parts of our history and the present day so the students who see it as relevant," said Rebecca Garland of the N.C. Department of Public Instruction.

Right now, high school students learn world history in the ninth grade, civics and economics in the tenth and the entirety of U.S. history in the eleventh grade. Under the proposed change, all ninth graders wouldn't study world history. Instead, they''ll have to take a course called Global Studies focusing on the modern issues like the environment.

Tenth graders will still get Civics and Economics, while the junior year U.S. history class would start in 1877. State officials say events prior to that year will be taught before high school and also incorporated into the sophomore year Civics class.

Education officials acknowledge this is a big change but believe it will allow them to connect with a standard of teaching based on a new national initiative called called Common Core which emphasizes standards to help prepare students with the knowledge and skills they need to succeed in college and careers and to be prepared to compete globally.

"The whole notion of the common core is fewer, clearer and more in depth standards. So that our students remember what's important," Garland said.

" I'm all for a global outlook but it should not be at the expense of American history and learning about American institutions and ideas. And unfortunately this curriculum does just that," said Terry Stoops, an Education Expert and member of the John Locke Foundation.

North Carolina officials are quick to emphasize that the proposal is just that--a proposal. And they are encouraging feedback from teachers and the public about the plan.

from the New York Times, 2009-Oct-20, by Thomas L. Friedman:

The New Untouchables

Last summer I attended a talk by Michelle Rhee, the dynamic chancellor of public schools in Washington. Just before the session began, a man came up, introduced himself as Todd Martin and whispered to me that what Rhee was about to speak about — our struggling public schools — was actually a critical, but unspoken, reason for the Great Recession.

There’s something to that. While the subprime mortgage mess involved a huge ethical breakdown on Wall Street, it coincided with an education breakdown on Main Street — precisely when technology and open borders were enabling so many more people to compete with Americans for middle-class jobs.

In our subprime era, we thought we could have the American dream — a house and yard — with nothing down. This version of the American dream was delivered not by improving education, productivity and savings, but by Wall Street alchemy and borrowed money from Asia.

A year ago, it all exploded. Now that we are picking up the pieces, we need to understand that it is not only our financial system that needs a reboot and an upgrade, but also our public school system. Otherwise, the jobless recovery won’t be just a passing phase, but our future.

“Our education failure is the largest contributing factor to the decline of the American worker’s global competitiveness, particularly at the middle and bottom ranges,” argued Martin, a former global executive with PepsiCo and Kraft Europe and now an international investor. “This loss of competitiveness has weakened the American worker’s production of wealth, precisely when technology brought global competition much closer to home. So over a decade, American workers have maintained their standard of living by borrowing and overconsuming vis-à-vis their real income. When the Great Recession wiped out all the credit and asset bubbles that made that overconsumption possible, it left too many American workers not only deeper in debt than ever, but out of a job and lacking the skills to compete globally.”

This problem will be reversed only when the decline in worker competitiveness reverses — when we create enough new jobs and educated workers that are worth, say, $40-an-hour compared with the global alternatives. If we don’t, there’s no telling how “jobless” this recovery will be.

A Washington lawyer friend recently told me about layoffs at his firm. I asked him who was getting axed. He said it was interesting: lawyers who were used to just showing up and having work handed to them were the first to go because with the bursting of the credit bubble, that flow of work just isn’t there. But those who have the ability to imagine new services, new opportunities and new ways to recruit work were being retained. They are the new untouchables.

That is the key to understanding our full education challenge today. Those who are waiting for this recession to end so someone can again hand them work could have a long wait. Those with the imagination to make themselves untouchables — to invent smarter ways to do old jobs, energy-saving ways to provide new services, new ways to attract old customers or new ways to combine existing technologies — will thrive. Therefore, we not only need a higher percentage of our kids graduating from high school and college — more education — but we need more of them with the right education.

As the Harvard University labor expert Lawrence Katz explains it: “If you think about the labor market today, the top half of the college market, those with the high-end analytical and problem-solving skills who can compete on the world market or game the financial system or deal with new government regulations, have done great. But the bottom half of the top, those engineers and programmers working on more routine tasks and not actively engaged in developing new ideas or recombining existing technologies or thinking about what new customers want, have done poorly. They’ve been much more exposed to global competitors that make them easily substitutable.”

Those at the high end of the bottom half — high school grads in construction or manufacturing — have been clobbered by global competition and immigration, added Katz. “But those who have some interpersonal skills — the salesperson who can deal with customers face to face or the home contractor who can help you redesign your kitchen without going to an architect — have done well.”

Just being an average accountant, lawyer, contractor or assembly-line worker is not the ticket it used to be. As Daniel Pink, the author of “A Whole New Mind,” puts it: In a world in which more and more average work can be done by a computer, robot or talented foreigner faster, cheaper “and just as well,” vanilla doesn’t cut it anymore. It’s all about what chocolate sauce, whipped cream and cherry you can put on top. So our schools have a doubly hard task now — not just improving reading, writing and arithmetic but entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity.

Bottom line: We’re not going back to the good old days without fixing our schools as well as our banks.

from the Washington Post, 2010-Jan-29, by Nick Anderson:

Bill ending banks' role in student loans stalls in Senate

Four months after it sailed through the Democratic-led House, legislation to overhaul federal student lending and channel about $80 billion in savings toward an array of education initiatives has stalled in the Senate.

In his State of the Union address Wednesday, President Obama exhorted the Senate to pass the bill, which he said would revitalize community colleges and make college more affordable. But the bill faces unified opposition from the Republican minority and sharp questions from at least some Democrats, according to congressional aides from both parties, and the Democratic majority has put it on hold during the drawn-out health-care deliberations.

The assumption on Capitol Hill is that Democrats will attempt to move the student loan bill through a special procedure that requires a simple majority rather than the usual 60 votes out of 100 needed to stop a filibuster. That tactic is also under discussion for health-care reform, said the aides, who asked for anonymity to speak candidly. So the two issues have become intertwined.

Timing is significant. because the student loan legislation would require all colleges to use direct government lending as of July 1 for federal loans. Currently, they can choose between direct lending and a federal program that guarantees student loans made by private banks. The bill would not affect nonfederal loans.

By cutting banks out of the equation, the administration expects to reap $80 billion over the next decade for increased student aid, community colleges, early childhood education and other programs. Those funding estimates, however, are being questioned because they are several months old.

Prominent players in the lending industry, including Sallie Mae, oppose the legislation, saying that it will eliminate thousands of jobs and that there are ways to save the government money without shutting out private lenders. Republicans depict themselves as defenders of market competition.

Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, has not introduced his version of the House bill, passed in mid-September on a vote of 253 to 171. He said he plans to move a bill "early this year."

In the meantime, Republicans are on the attack. "Relying on budgetary gimmicks to stage another Washington takeover, this time of 15 million student loans, is not good for college students," said Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), a former education secretary. "The Department of Education in Washington will not be able to serve students as well as 3,000 lending institutions."

Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) and a few other Democrats also have raised questions about the bill, although it appears that most in the party support it.

Bob Shireman, deputy undersecretary of education, said colleges are preparing to switch to direct lending. "I'm confident that we'll see movement on this bill."

The University of Maryland is preparing to switch to direct lending if needed, said Sarah Bauder, the school's financial aid director, but she added that she prefers the public-private guaranteed lending program. "My concern is that no one's made a decision yet" in Congress, Bauder said. "It's holding the students hostage."

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Nov-5, by Richard Whitmire:

The Lost Boys

This week, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights announced that it will investigate whether colleges discriminate against women by admitting less qualified men. It will strike many as odd to think that American men would need such a leg up. From the men-only basketball games at the White House to the testosterone club on Wall Street, we seem surrounded by male dominance.

And yet, when looking to America's future—trying to spot the future entrepreneurs and inventors—there's reason to be troubled by the flagging academic performance among men. Nearly 58% of all those earning bachelor's degrees are women. Graduate programs are headed in the same direction, and the gender gaps at community colleges—where 62% of those earning two-year degrees are female—are even wider.

Economists at both the Department of Education and the College Board agree that, to ensure high future earnings, men and women have an equal need for college degrees, and yet only women are getting that message. The numbers are startling. This summer the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University published the results of a study tracking the students who graduated from Boston Public Schools in 2007. Their conclusion: For every 167 females in four-year colleges, there were 100 males.

In theory, the surge in the number of educated women should make up for male shortcomings when we're looking at the overall prospects for the economy. But men and women are not the same. At the same levels of education, women remain less inclined to roll the dice on risky business start-ups or to grind out careers in isolated tech labs. Revenue generated by women-owned businesses remains less than 5% of all revenue. And while the number of women taking on economically important majors is rising, women still earn only a fifth of the bachelor's degrees granted in physics, computer science and engineering.

Why males don't seem to "get" the importance of a college education is a mystery, especially considering the current collapse of jobs that traditionally don't require post-high-school study. (Even "cash for clunkers" isn't going to mark the return of car companies as a major employer of uneducated men.) And who could miss the message of the recession, where as many as 80% of the workers laid off have been male?

Too many boys arrive at their senior year of high school lacking both the skills and aspirations that would get them into, and through, college. At a typical state university, a gender gap of 10 percentage points in the freshman class grows by five points by graduation day, as more men than women drop out.

All this explains why colleges have been putting a thumb on the scale to favor men in admissions. There just aren't enough highly qualified men to go around. Determining that colleges practice discrimination doesn't take much detective work. Higher acceptance rates for men show that colleges dig deeper into their applicant pool to find them. The final proof: Freshman class profiles reveal that the women, with their far higher high-school grade point averages, are more academically qualified than the men. Interviews with admissions officers reveal that the girls' essays sparkle compared to the boys', and girls far outshine boys in extracurricular activities as well.

The Commission on Civil Rights cited an example written about in U.S. News & World Report in 2007: Virginia's University of Richmond was maintaining its rough gender parity in men and women only by accepting women at a rate 13 percentage points lower than the men.

It would be patriotic to report that this discrimination against women is carried out in the national economic interest of boosting graduates in key math and science fields. But, in truth, it's really a social consideration. Colleges simply want to avoid approaching the dreaded 60-40 female-male ratio. At that point, men start to take advantage of their scarcity and make social life miserable for the women by becoming "players" on the dating scene.

The case to abolish male gender preferences is problematic. Most of those male preferences are granted by private colleges, which consider themselves on solid legal ground. (Some public colleges and universities also grant those preferences at considerable legal risk, an indication of the depth of the fear about broaching that 60-40 threshold.)

In truth, these gender preferences are a sideshow. The real issue is the flagging academic interest among boys, a phenomenon that dates back only about two decades. It's a new issue to most Americans but hotly debated in countries such as England. So far, nobody has solved the boy mystery, but some countries are years ahead of the U.S. Australia has had some success with literacy-boosting programs for young boys. Until the code gets cracked, there's a national economic interest in keeping those preferences in place—just for a few more years.

Mr. Whitmire is the author of the forthcoming book "Why Boys Fail."

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Oct-17, p.A12:

Professors of the World, Unite?
Wisconsin tests whether profs will be thinkers or unionists.

If some professors at the University of Wisconsin at Madison get their way, the first thing a newly minted PhD will learn about is not research or teaching—but union dues. This summer Wisconsin's Democratic Governor Jim Doyle gave the school's professors the right to unionize. Not all want to, so this fall the faculty lounges are livelier than usual.

Organized labor has already wreaked havoc on the nation's K-12 public-school system, and it's often thought this could never happen to a higher education system that is the envy of the world. But over the past 10 years or so, unions have become an increasingly common presence at colleges and universities. More than 375,000 faculty and graduate students are members of a collective bargaining unit, according to the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions. That's about a third of the total, and a 24% increase in the past decade.

Thanks to unionization provisions Gov. Doyle put into Wisconsin's biennial budget, things are likely to get worse. There were three important elements in the initiative.

Research assistants at all Wisconsin campuses would be able use a "card check" process to form a union. When a majority of the RAs sign a form saying they'd like to form a union, it will be done without a secret ballot.

Next, the union could engage in something called "unit clarification." That means it can look through employment records to decide whether a staff member should be reclassified and placed in the union without his or her consent. The governor issued a partial veto of this provision, but the unions still claim they're legally entitled to do this. Finally, the governor made it possible for the entire faculty of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, to vote on unionization.

There is opposition on campus to the first two provisions, including by some who have no position on unionization. Donald Downs, a First Amendment scholar, is worried about pressure on research assistants if there is no secret ballot. The Public Representation Organization of the Faculty Senate, which favors giving university employees the right to join unions, wrote the governor to object to unit clarification. It said this would "force thousands of UW academic staff into existing state bargaining units without a vote."

But it's the last provision that has the greatest symbolic importance. Traditionally the most prestigious public university campuses have resisted unionization. (Private college faculty were barred from organizing after the Supreme Court's 1990 decision, NLRB v. Yeshiva University, which said that university faculty, with tenure and a shared role in university governance, looked more like management than labor.)

John Witte, an education scholar at the school, says he would quit if the faculty organize. He tells us it would be "demoralizing to see my hard work rewarded with the same pay as someone who doesn't do hard work." Unionization, he says, would be "devastating to the university." Others worry that the campus's pervasive atmosphere of political correctness will sway much of the faculty to vote for unionization.

In 2008, the American Federation of Teachers announced a joint campaign with the American Association of University Professors to unionize more public universities. "We don't have a number in mind," Sandra Schroeder, chairman of the AFT's higher education council, said, but it's "as many as we possibly can." If UW Madison goes, expect more former free-thinkers to go over to the union mind set.

from the Chronicle of Higher Education, 2009-Sep-11, by Mark Lilla:

Taking the Right Seriously
Conservatism is a tradition, not a pathology

This month the University of California at Berkeley opened a Center for the Comparative Study of Right-Wing Movements. The center is housed in the Institute for the Study of Social Change, which the university advertises online as an institution placing "issues of race, gender, and class at the center of the agenda," conducting "research with a conscience," and capitalizing on "Berkeley's history as the birthplace of transformative social movements." Needless to say, the center is not promoting conservatism. This is, as the university reminds us, Berkeley.

It's not even clear that the faculty members involved have figured out what terms like "right wing" and "conservative" might mean. The Web-site blurb introducing the center describes anti-Communism as the "transcendent" issue for the right for most of the 20th century, and says that since the end of the cold war, right-wing groups have "spun on to the political stage with centripetal energy," whatever that means. This statement does not inspire confidence. In fact, the right-wing political parties in Europe have much older pedigrees, going back to the 19th-century counterrevolution. So do American and British conservatism, which came onto the political scene at least a century before 1989. In his recent book, The Conservatives: Ideas and Personalities Throughout American History (Yale University Press), Patrick Allitt, a professor of history at Emory University, explores the full range of conservative concerns: states' rights, religion, the corruptions of urban life, immigration, the League of Nations, mass democracy, creationism, the New Deal, free markets, race, and so on.

It is a convenient left-wing dodge to reduce 20th-century American conservatism to cold-war politics, since it implies that conservative ideas are embedded in a world that no longer exists and never should have. In fact, in the 1930s American conservatives were far more obsessed with Franklin D. Roosevelt and his domestic legacy than with Joseph Stalin, and looked askance at all foreign entanglements, including the Second World War. The anti-Communist cause was first conceived by cold-war liberals, not by conservatives.

And what of the Berkeley center's mission to encourage and nurture "comparative scholarship on right-wing movements both in the U.S. and abroad during the 20th and 21st centuries"? That could be a good thing. For instance, it would be useful to know something about the affinities between European right-wingers like Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of the National Front in France, and David Duke, the American white supremacist and anti-Semite now living, as it happens, in Austria. But mainstream American conservatism, which pretty much is all there is to the American right, shares nothing meaningful with those protofascist figures. Our conservatives accept the legitimacy of constitutional self-government, even when they hate the legislation and court decisions resulting from it; they play by the rules. The same cannot be said of the European right, which has always been suspicious of parliamentary politics. One wonders whether "comparative study" in the Berkeley context presumes a continuous slippery slope running from conservatism down to violent far-right movements. It's a little like the Hoover Institution announcing a study "comparing" the Red Brigades with, say, Adlai Stevenson.

But beggars can't be choosers. The unfortunate fact is that American academics have until recently shown little curiosity about conservative ideas, even though those ideas have utterly transformed American (and British) politics over the past 30 years. A look at the online catalogs of our major universities confirms this: plenty of courses on identity politics and postcolonialism, nary a one on conservative political thought. Professors are expected to understand the subtle differences among gay, lesbian, and transgender studies, but I would wager that few can distinguish between the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Cato Institute, three think tanks that have a greater impact on Washington politics than the entire Ivy League.

Why is that? The former left-wing firebrand David Horowitz, whom the professors do know, has a simple answer: There is a concerted effort to keep conservative Ph.D.'s out of jobs, to deny tenure to those who get through, and to ignore conservative books and ideas. It is an old answer, dating back to the 1970s, when neoconservatives began writing about the "adversary culture" of intellectuals. Horo witz is an annoying man, and what's most annoying about him is that … he has a point. Though we are no longer in the politically correct sauna of the 1980s and 1990s, and experiences vary from college to college, the picture he paints of the faculty and curriculum in American universities remains embarrassingly accurate, and it is foolish to deny what we all see before us.

Over the past decade, our universities have made serious efforts to increase racial and ethnic diversity on the campus (economic diversity worries them less, for some reason). Well-paid deans work exclusively on the problem. But universities show not the slightest interest in intellectual diversity among faculty members. That wouldn't matter if teachers could be counted on to introduce students to their adversaries' books and views, but we know how rarely that happens. That's why political diversity on the faculty does matter. As it stands, there is a far greater proportion of conservatives in the student body of typical colleges than on the faculty. A few leading thinkers on the right do teach at our top universities—but at some, like Columbia University, where I teach, not a single prominent conservative is to be found.

Contra Horowitz, the blackballing of conservatives and conservative ideas is by now instinctive and habitual rather than self-conscious, reflecting intellectual provincialism more than ideological fervor. I recall being at a dinner in Paris in the late 1980s with a distinguished American historian of France who had gathered her graduate students for the evening. The conversation turned to book printing in the early modern era, which she was studying, and the practice of esoteric writing, which was more widespread than she had imagined. I mentioned that there was a classic book on this subject by Leo Strauss. She searched her mind for a moment—this was before the Iraq war made Strauss a household name—and then said, "But isn't he a conservative?" In a certain way he was, I said. Silence at the table. She smiled that smile meant to end discussion, and the conversation turned to more-pleasant topics.

I have experienced similar reactions throughout my academic career. In the early 1980s, I helped edit the neoconservative public-policy journal The Public Interest, and though I haven't considered myself a conservative for at least two decades, many academics I meet are astonished to learn this little fact. Some are rendered speechless. Others ask, "Are you still a neoconservative?," by which they mean, "Are you still beating your country?"

All this understandably drives conservatives crazy. But what can be done about it? David Horowitz inclines toward witch-hunting, which he practiced with malicious skill in his book The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America (Regnery, 2006). Horowitz makes hay (and money) by affirming conservatives' longstanding conviction that the university is a hostile place best avoided. He apparently doesn't see how his campaign hurts the larger conservative cause, since it gives students one more reason not to pursue graduate studies and actually become professors. My brightest conservative students, brought up on hair-raising tales of political correctness, dismiss academic careers out of hand because they are certain of not being hired or getting tenure. And I can't say I blame them. Even as an ex-conservative, I was lucky to have passed through the eyes of those two needles.

The late Paul Lyons, a professor at Richard Stockton College of New Jersey until his death, in January, recognized the problem but proposed something far more radical than anything David Horo witz has considered. And that was to persuade his liberal colleagues to teach courses on conservative political thought. Lyons was an American historian who wrote about the 60s and made no secret of his liberal politics or his loathing of Reagan and post-Reagan conservatism. But he was also disturbed by how few colleges offer courses on conservatism, treating it as a "pathology" rather than a serious political tradition, and by reports from his conservative students that "most of their liberal professors blow their comments off." So he not only posted a course on American conservative thought in 2006 but also kept a diary about his teaching experience. That diary has now been published, along with some of his own essays, in American Conservatism: Thinking It, Teaching It (Vanderbilt University Press).

The diary is fascinating and reassuring, at least about our students. Lyons's class was split almost evenly between liberal and conservative students, who had no trouble arguing with each other. They seemed to understand what thin-skinned professors wish to forget: that intellectual engagement is not for crybabies. The students had loud debates over Reagan's legacy, Bush's foreign policy, religious freedom, abortion, even the "war on Christmas"—and nobody broke into tears or ran to the dean to complain. And the more the students argued, the more they came to respect one another. According to Lyons, students learned that that conservative guy was no longer just the predictable gun nut or religious fanatic. And the conservative students learned that they had to make real arguments, not rely on clichés and sound bites recycled from Fox News.

There were many surprises as the students examined the history of conservatism. The biggest one, for both Lyons and me, was how attractive all the students found Whittaker Chambers and how much they enjoyed his cold-war memoir, Witness. Who knew? If anything, the liberal students were more enthusiastic because they saw Chambers as an idealist participating in a cosmic battle between good and evil, which is how they saw themselves. Apparently it never occurred to them that conservatives, too, could be idealists. Even Lyons caught the bug, admitting that before reading Witness he had considered Chambers a "degenerate," but now saw him as a "compelling if sad figure." It turns out a book can change your mind. Again, who knew?

The course was wide-ranging and gave the students a good sense of the various strands of conservatism. They read selections from Burke, Maistre, Hayek, Buckley, Ayn Rand, Irving Kristol, Allan Bloom, and many others, including Lyons's personal favorite, Peter Viereck. (Now, answer honestly, dear reader of The Chronicle Review: How many of these authors have you yourself read?) Lyons also invited to class a young colleague, who had recently won tenure and was rumored to be a conservative, to talk about living as an ideological minority in the university. She told them how hard it had been and why she had kept her politics hidden until she got tenure. Apparently she had had a sharp political argument with one of her senior colleagues shortly after she was hired, and he told her that unless she moderated her ideological views, she would never get tenure. Whether this was a prediction or a threat was unclear, so she took a vow of silence. Lyons was appalled.

Paul Lyons clearly loved his students and must have been a wonderful teacher. We should be grateful for his modest book, which has lessons for everyone. It reminds liberal academics of just how narrow-minded and conservative (in the nonpolitical sense) they are in their hiring and teaching, and how much they have to learn if they want to understand the political world we live in.

There are lessons for conservatives, too. Anti-intellectualism has always dogged conservative tradition (you betcha!), and figures like David Horowitz, who stoke the hysteria, only contribute to the dumbing down. Hopped up on Fox News, too many young conservatives have become ignorant of the conservative intellectual tradition and incapable of engaging civilly with their adversaries. The truth is that a former student of Paul Lyons probably has a greater chance of becoming a serious conservative thinker than a follower of Horowitz does.

So, in the end, I give my ex-conservative blessing to the Center for the Comparative Study of Right-Wing Movements and wish it a long life. If nothing else, it will get professors and students to discuss ideas and read books that until now have been relegated to the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. That's a start. And who knows, maybe Berkeley will even begin hiring conservative professors, if only to preserve its reputation as "the birthplace of transformative social movements."

Mark Lilla is a professor of humanities at Columbia University.

from Observer-Reporter of Washington Pennsylvania, 2009-Oct-11, by Dawn Goodman:

Columbus has his day in court, Fort Cherry-style

That's what a Fort Cherry fourth-grade jury decided earlier this week after a trial to determine whether Columbus was guilty of abusing his position, misrepresenting the crown and stealing gold.

In advance of Columbus Day, Laurie Crawford's class staged the trial, which included everything from opening statements to closing arguments. Historical witnesses testified, including Columbus, sailors who were on voyages with Columbus and Queen Isabella of Spain.

One sailor testified that Columbus stole items from the natives and that he didn't return all of the gold he had to the Spanish king and queen. Another said Columbus was a good guy.

Queen Isabella, portrayed by Grace Lipscomb, said she and King Ferdinand were outraged. She said they provided Columbus with three of their best ships, and he promised to sail to find the Indies and return with spices, gems, silk and gold. He failed, she said

“As you can see, his route did not take him to China,” she said. “He brought back parrots, fruit and some gold, but I know he did not turn it all over to the crown.”

The last witness to testify was Columbus himself, portrayed by Alyssa Ersek.

“This is scandalous! I am a hero and should be treated as such,” she said. “I risked my life for the Crown.”

During closing arguments, the prosecutor, portrayed by Cameron Schaub, said Columbus mistreated natives by taking more gold than what he traded trinkets for, that he kept gold for himself.

“Based on the charges we heard today, I think Columbus took advantage of his position, stole from the Crown and misrepresented Spain,” he said. “I hope that you can find it in your hearts to charge him and make him pay for the injustices that he has done.”

The defense attorney, portrayed by Megan Cottrill, said the prosecution witnesses were lying.

“I tell you that all we heard today are exaggerations of mean and jealous people,” she said, adding that all the queen was really worried about was her spices, gems and gold. “Based on that fact, who is the greedy person here? Who is really guilty of misrepresenting their power or place in society? Columbus or the Crown? You decide.”

With that, the jury walked out into the hallway and discussed the possibility. The jury members returned a few minutes later with a 9-3 guilty verdict.

Heather Martin, Crawford's student teacher, was the judge. She sentenced Columbus to life in prison.

Jury member Gabby Nissly said she thought he was guilty. For her, it was simple. He said he would give the king and queen all of the gold and he didn't.

Jury member Riley Carter had the opposite point of view. Columbus didn't take gold from the natives; he traded trinkets for gold, Carter said.

In the end, the lesson was fun, said fourth-grader Taiya Godwin. The students aren't done yet, though. They still must participate in a Web quest scavenger hunt about Columbus and answer essay questions about him.

“We got to learn what court was like and about Christopher Columbus,” she said.

from the New York Times, 2009-Sep-14, by Alfie Kohn:

When a Parent's `I Love You' Means `Do as I Say'

More than 50 years ago, the psychologist Carl Rogers suggested that simply loving our children wasn't enough. We have to love them unconditionally, he said — for who they are, not for what they do.

As a father, I know this is a tall order, but it becomes even more challenging now that so much of the advice we are given amounts to exactly the opposite. In effect, we're given tips in conditional parenting, which comes in two flavors: turn up the affection when they're good, withhold affection when they're not.

Thus, the talk show host Phil McGraw tells us in his book “Family First” (Free Press, 2004) that what children need or enjoy should be offered contingently, turned into rewards to be doled out or withheld so they “behave according to your wishes.” And “one of the most powerful currencies for a child,” he adds, “is the parents' acceptance and approval.”

Likewise, Jo Frost of “Supernanny,” in her book of the same name (Hyperion, 2005), says, “The best rewards are attention, praise and love,” and these should be held back “when the child behaves badly until she says she is sorry,” at which point the love is turned back on.

Conditional parenting isn't limited to old-school authoritarians. Some people who wouldn't dream of spanking choose instead to discipline their young children by forcibly isolating them, a tactic we prefer to call “time out.” Conversely, “positive reinforcement” teaches children that they are loved, and lovable, only when they do whatever we decide is a “good job.”

This raises the intriguing possibility that the problem with praise isn't that it is done the wrong way — or handed out too easily, as social conservatives insist. Rather, it might be just another method of control, analogous to punishment. The primary message of all types of conditional parenting is that children must earn a parent's love. A steady diet of that, Rogers warned, and children might eventually need a therapist to provide the unconditional acceptance they didn't get when it counted.

But was Rogers right? Before we toss out mainstream discipline, it would be nice to have some evidence. And now we do.

In 2004, two Israeli researchers, Avi Assor and Guy Roth, joined Edward L. Deci, a leading American expert on the psychology of motivation, in asking more than 100 college students whether the love they had received from their parents had seemed to depend on whether they had succeeded in school, practiced hard for sports, been considerate toward others or suppressed emotions like anger and fear.

It turned out that children who received conditional approval were indeed somewhat more likely to act as the parent wanted. But compliance came at a steep price. First, these children tended to resent and dislike their parents. Second, they were apt to say that the way they acted was often due more to a “strong internal pressure” than to “a real sense of choice.” Moreover, their happiness after succeeding at something was usually short-lived, and they often felt guilty or ashamed.

In a companion study, Dr. Assor and his colleagues interviewed mothers of grown children. With this generation, too, conditional parenting proved damaging. Those mothers who, as children, sensed that they were loved only when they lived up to their parents' expectations now felt less worthy as adults. Yet despite the negative effects, these mothers were more likely to use conditional affection with their own children.

This July, the same researchers, now joined by two of Dr. Deci's colleagues at the University of Rochester, published two replications and extensions of the 2004 study. This time the subjects were ninth graders, and this time giving more approval when children did what parents wanted was carefully distinguished from giving less when they did not.

The studies found that both positive and negative conditional parenting were harmful, but in slightly different ways. The positive kind sometimes succeeded in getting children to work harder on academic tasks, but at the cost of unhealthy feelings of “internal compulsion.” Negative conditional parenting didn't even work in the short run; it just increased the teenagers' negative feelings about their parents.

What these and other studies tell us, if we're able to hear the news, is that praising children for doing something right isn't a meaningful alternative to pulling back or punishing when they do something wrong. Both are examples of conditional parenting, and both are counterproductive.

The child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, who readily acknowledged that the version of negative conditional parenting known as time-out can cause “deep feelings of anxiety,” nevertheless endorsed it for that very reason. “When our words are not enough,” he said, “the threat of the withdrawal of our love and affection is the only sound method to impress on him that he had better conform to our request.”

But the data suggest that love withdrawal isn't particularly effective at getting compliance, much less at promoting moral development. Even if we did succeed in making children obey us, though — say, by using positive reinforcement — is obedience worth the possible long-term psychological harm? Should parental love be used as a tool for controlling children?

Deeper issues also underlie a different sort of criticism. Albert Bandura, the father of the branch of psychology known as social learning theory, declared that unconditional love “would make children directionless and quite unlovable” — an assertion entirely unsupported by empirical studies. The idea that children accepted for who they are would lack direction or appeal is most informative for what it tells us about the dark view of human nature held by those who issue such warnings.

In practice, according to an impressive collection of data by Dr. Deci and others, unconditional acceptance by parents as well as teachers should be accompanied by “autonomy support”: explaining reasons for requests, maximizing opportunities for the child to participate in making decisions, being encouraging without manipulating, and actively imagining how things look from the child's point of view.

The last of these features is important with respect to unconditional parenting itself. Most of us would protest that of course we love our children without any strings attached. But what counts is how things look from the perspective of the children — whether they feel just as loved when they mess up or fall short.

Rogers didn't say so, but I'll bet he would have been glad to see less demand for skillful therapists if that meant more people were growing into adulthood having already felt unconditionally accepted.

Alfie Kohn is the author of 11 books about human behavior and education, including “Unconditional Parenting” and “Punished by Rewards.”

from the New York Times, 2009-Oct-12, p.A1, by Ian Urbina:

It's a Fork, It's a Spoon, It's a ... Weapon?

NEWARK, Del. — Finding character witnesses when you are 6 years old is not easy. But there was Zachary Christie last week at a school disciplinary committee hearing with his karate instructor and his mother’s fiancé by his side to vouch for him.

Zachary’s offense? Taking a camping utensil that can serve as a knife, fork and spoon to school. He was so excited about recently joining the Cub Scouts that he wanted to use it at lunch. School officials concluded that he had violated their zero-tolerance policy on weapons, and Zachary was suspended and now faces 45 days in the district’s reform school.

“It just seems unfair,” Zachary said, pausing as he practiced writing lower-case letters with his mother, who is home-schooling him while the family tries to overturn his punishment.

Spurred in part by the Columbine and Virginia Tech shootings, many school districts around the country adopted zero-tolerance policies on the possession of weapons on school grounds. More recently, there has been growing debate over whether the policies have gone too far.

But, based on the code of conduct for the Christina School District, where Zachary is a first grader, school officials had no choice. They had to suspend him because, “regardless of possessor’s intent,” knives are banned.

But the question on the minds of residents here is: Why do school officials not have more discretion in such cases?

“Zachary wears a suit and tie some days to school by his own choice because he takes school so seriously,” said Debbie Christie, Zachary’s mother, who started a Web site, helpzachary.com, in hopes of recruiting supporters to pressure the local school board at its next open meeting on Tuesday. “He is not some sort of threat to his classmates.”

Still, some school administrators argue that it is difficult to distinguish innocent pranks and mistakes from more serious threats, and that the policies must be strict to protect students.

“There is no parent who wants to get a phone call where they hear that their child no longer has two good seeing eyes because there was a scuffle and someone pulled out a knife,” said George Evans, the president of the Christina district’s school board. He defended the decision, but added that the board might adjust the rules when it comes to younger children like Zachary.

Critics contend that zero-tolerance policies like those in the Christina district have led to sharp increases in suspensions and expulsions, often putting children on the streets or in other places where their behavior only worsens, and that the policies undermine the ability of school officials to use common sense in handling minor infractions.

For Delaware, Zachary’s case is especially frustrating because last year state lawmakers tried to make disciplinary rules more flexible by giving local boards authority to, “on a case-by-case basis, modify the terms of the expulsion.”

The law was introduced after a third-grade girl was expelled for a year because her grandmother had sent a birthday cake to school, along with a knife to cut it. The teacher called the principal — but not before using the knife to cut and serve the cake.

In Zachary’s case, the state’s new law did not help because it mentions only expulsion and does not explicitly address suspensions. A revised law is being drafted to include suspensions.

“We didn’t want our son becoming the poster child for this,” Ms. Christie said, “but this is out of control.”

In a letter to the district’s disciplinary committee, State Representative Teresa L. Schooley, Democrat of Newark, wrote, “I am asking each of you to consider the situation, get all the facts, find out about Zach and his family and then act with common sense for the well-being of this child.”

Education experts say that zero-tolerance policies initially allowed authorities more leeway in punishing students, but were applied in a discriminatory fashion. Many studies indicate that African-Americans were several times more likely to be suspended or expelled than other students for the same offenses.

“The result of those studies is that more school districts have removed discretion in applying the disciplinary policies to avoid criticism of being biased,” said Ronnie Casella, an associate professor of education at Central Connecticut State University who has written about school violence. He added that there is no evidence that zero-tolerance policies make schools safer.

Other school districts are also trying to address problems they say have stemmed in part from overly strict zero-tolerance policies.

In Baltimore, around 10,000 students, about 12 percent of the city’s enrollment, were suspended during the 2006-7 school year, mostly for disruption and insubordination, according to a report by the Open Society Institute-Baltimore. School officials there are rewriting the disciplinary code, to route students to counseling rather than suspension.

In Milwaukee, where school officials reported that 40 percent of ninth graders had been suspended at least once in the 2006-7 school year, the superintendent has encouraged teachers not to overreact to student misconduct.

“Something has to change,” said Dodi Herbert, whose 13-year old son, Kyle, was suspended in May and ordered to attend the Christina district’s reform school for 45 days after another student dropped a pocket knife in his lap. School officials declined to comment on the case for reasons of privacy.

Ms. Herbert, who said her son was a straight-A student, has since been home-schooling him instead of sending him to the reform school.

The Christina school district attracted similar controversy in 2007 when it expelled a seventh-grade girl who had used a utility knife to cut windows out of a paper house for a class project.

Charles P. Ewing, a professor of law and psychology at the University at Buffalo Law School who has written about school safety issues, said he favored a strict zero-tolerance approach.

“There are still serious threats every day in schools,” Dr. Ewing said, adding that giving school officials discretion holds the potential for discrimination and requires the kind of threat assessments that only law enforcement is equipped to make.

In the 2005-6 school year, 86 percent of public schools reported at least one violent crime, theft or other crime, according to the most recent federal survey.

And yet, federal studies by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and another by the Department of Justice show that the rate of school-related homicides and nonfatal violence has fallen over most of the past decade.

Educational experts say the decline is less a result of zero-tolerance policies than of other programs like peer mediation, student support groups and adult mentorships, as well as an overall decrease in all forms of crime.

For Zachary, it is not school violence that has left him reluctant to return to classes.

“I just think the other kids may tease me for being in trouble,” he said, pausing before adding, “but I think the rules are what is wrong, not me.”

from FoxNews.com, 2009-Oct-13, by Maxim Lott:

New York Eagle Scout Suspended From School for 20 Days for Keeping Pocketknife in Car

A 17-year-old Eagle Scout in upstate New York has been barred from stepping foot on school grounds for 20 days — for keeping a 2-inch pocketknife locked in a survival kit in his car.

Matthew Whalen, a senior at Lansingburgh Senior High School, says he follows the Boy Scout motto and is always prepared, stocking his car with a sleeping bag, water, a ready-to-eat meal — and the knife, which was given to him by his grandfather, a police chief in a nearby town.

But Lansingburgh High has a zero-tolerance policy, and when school officials discovered that Whalen kept his knife locked in his car, he says, they suspended him for five days — and then tacked on an additional 15 after a hearing.

The incident is similar to the case of Zachary Christie, a 6-year-old Cub Scout in Delaware who faces up to 45 days in his district's reform school for bringing a scout utensil that can be used as a fork, spoon and knife to school. But for Whalen — who has received an award from the Boy Scouts of America for saving a life and completed 10 weeks of basic military training last summer — the stakes are much higher:

He is concerned that the blot on his school record could kill his dream of attending West Point.

In an interview with Foxnews.com, Whalen recalled the incident that led to his suspension.

He said his school's assistant principal, Frank Macri, approached him on Sept. 21 and asked him if he was carrying a knife.

"I was taken down to the office, and they told me that a student told them that I was carrying a knife," Whalen said.

He said he told them "they could search me and everything, and they said, 'There's no need for that.'"

Whalen said he doesn't know who might have said he was carrying a knife, but he was open with school officials.

"And they said, 'Do you own a knife?' I said, 'Yes, I'm a soldier and an Eagle Scout — I own a knife.'

"And they were like, 'Well, is it in your car or anything?' And I told them, 'Yeah, it's in my car right now.'

"And they asked me to show it to them. I didn't realize it was going to be a problem. I knew it wasn't illegal — my police chief grandfather gave the knife to me."

Whalen said he took school administrators to his car because he thought their fears would be allayed when they saw it was just a 2-inch knife.

"They thought I had a dagger in my car or something like that, so I thought yeah, I'd show it to them," Whalen said.

"I showed it to them, and they told me I had a knife on school property and had to be suspended."

But things didn't end there, Whalen said.

"They brought a cop in, who told them 'he's not breaking any laws, so I can't charge him with anything.'"

Whalen said he asked Macri why a 2-inch pocketknife would be considered more dangerous than other everyday items around the school.

"I said to him, 'What about a person who has a bat, on a baseball team? That could be a weapon.' And he said, 'Well, it's not the same thing.'"

The school district's policy lists "Possessing a weapon" under "examples of violent conduct," which "may be subject to disciplinary action, up to and including suspension from school."

School district officials did not reply to requests for comment.

Whalen says Macri gave him the longest suspension possible — five school days.

"They gave me the five-day suspension, because that is all a principal can suspend a student for," he said. "And from there, they had a superintendent hearing to see if the superintendent wanted to suspend me for longer.

"But the superintendent wasn't even at the hearing. It was the principal and the athletic director. The vice principal who originally suspended me wasn't even there, and neither was the superintendent. They basically asked me, 'Did you have the knife in your car?' And I said 'Yes, I did.' The meeting was recorded and they told me they were going to play the tape to the superintendent.

"They asked me if I wanted to say anything, and I told them all my accomplishments and what I've done, and the principal even admitted that I had no intent to use the knife, that I had no accessibility to the knife."

But school officials decided to suspend Whalen for an extra 15 days anyway, he said. And unless the decision is changed, he will not be allowed on school grounds until Oct. 21.

Whalen said he does not know why the 15 days were added, but he said a school district employee told him it was because the school wanted to apply its policies consistently.

"I've been told by someone who works for the district that they had to do it, because if someone else had a knife and they saw that I didn't get a suspension, that it would look bad for the school."

School superintendent George Goodwin and Lansingburg Senior High School Principal Angelina Bergin did not return calls for comment Tuesday morning.

Whalen said he has no record of disciplinary problems.

"I think I have a detention from like 10th grade for being late or something like that," he said.

He said the suspension has put his college dreams in jeopardy by keeping him out of class, while making him still responsible for assignments.

Though he is provided with a tutor for 90 minutes a day, he said, "I've been suspended for something like a ninth of my school year, so I'm falling behind drastically in my classes."

In addition to getting back to school as soon as possible, Whalen wants the school to drop the incident from his transcript.

"My dream college would be West Point, and having a pock mark like this on my record could be detrimental. They're looking for the best of the best, and if someone didn't take the time to look through it and examine the case, they would just say, 'hey, this guy had a weapon on school property, and we don't want him at our college.'"

Whalen said that he has received support from the community during the last few weeks.

"I've received tremendous communal support. Almost everyone I've talked to has said they're behind me 100 percent, that it's ridiculous that [the school has] done this me."

Whalen said he is not considering a lawsuit.

"I don't know what I could do, because technically ... I did break the rules, and I'll accept that punishment," he said.

"Perhaps I should have been more aware of the rules. However, I'm more upset about the additional 15 days.... That was entirely optional, and they decided to go through with that."

from Fox News, 2009-Oct-18, by Joseph Abrams:

School Chief Sticks By 'Zero Tolerance' Ruling for Eagle Scout

The upstate New York school superintendent who suspended an Eagle Scout for 20 days for keeping a 2-inch utility knife locked in his car is unwilling to speak to the teen's family or bend in his ruling.

Lansingburgh Central School District Superintendent George J. Goodwin, 55, said in a written statement that his district "has an established policy of zero tolerance with respect to the possession of weapons of any kind on school property or in school buildings."

But nowhere in the school district's rule book, which is published online, is there any mention of a "zero tolerance" policy, leading some to question whether Goodwin, in fact, was compelled to suspend the youth.

Seventeen-year-old Matthew Whalen, a senior at Lansingburgh High School in Troy, N.Y., says he got in trouble over a survival kit he keeps in his car that includes a sleeping bag, water, a ready-to-eat meal and the small pocketknife, which was given to him by his grandfather, a police chief in a nearby town.

When Whalen acknowledged he had the knife locked in his car, he was barred from school for a calendar month. Now that he is getting just 90 minutes a day with a tutor instead of 7 hours of instruction in class, he says he is worried that the suspension will mar his academic record and affect his application to attend the U.S. Military Academy.

Whalen was initially suspended for five days by his assistant principal — but then had another 15 tacked on by Goodwin following a hearing to decide his fate. Though Goodwin was not present at the hearing, he told Fox News he listened to a tape of the proceedings, and decided to extend the suspension.

Since then, Whalen's family says, Goodwin has refused to speak to Matthew even during daily interactions at the district's head office, where he meets with his tutor.

District policy appears to leave it to the discretion of school officials to decide whether any punishment will be meted out for an infraction, and it is not clear how or why Goodwin decided on a month of exile for a student with no prior record. The school's policies say:

"Students may be subject to disciplinary action, up to and including suspension from school" for engaging in violent conduct, which includes merely "possessing a weapon."

Though the school has branded possession of the knife to be violent conduct, that might be news to Whalen, who was taught as an Eagle Scout how to handle tools including the pocketknife, and actually instructs Boy Scouts how to handle knives as well.

"Scouting instills safety in them from the earliest age," Matthew's father, Bryan Whalen, said in an interview. "And it's actually the older boys like Matthew who instruct the younger boys in knife safety."

The Boy Scouts of America, which awarded Whalen a Life-Saving Heroism award for performing CPR on his aunt after she had a seizure, concurred.

"Our handbook teaches the appropriate use and safe use of a variety of tools, and that includes pocketknives," said Deron Smith, national spokesman for the Boy Scouts of America National Council.

The ruling from Goodwin has outraged Whalen's family, which said if district officials are unable to use their own judgment, their roles aren't necessary.

"I don't think it's unreasonable to ask for some intelligence on the part of administrators to use discretion and judgment in their daily decisions," said Bryan Whalen. "Otherwise, what are we paying them for?

"You could have a trained monkey or a computer sitting there just spitting out right and wrong and never any gray areas. That's just not the way the world works," he told Foxnews.com.

Goodwin's office did not return repeated requests for comment from Foxnews.com. His office took a message seeking an interview, but one was not granted.

But the superintendent said Tuesday in an interview with the Albany Times Union that he thinks the punishment was "appropriate and fair," a necessary application of the district's zero-tolerance policy.

"Sometimes young people do things they may not see as serious," he told the paper. "We look at any possession of any type of knife as serious."

Zero-tolerance policies for weapons were widely put in place following the passage of the 1994 Gun-Free Schools Act; they became more popular after the 1999 Columbine High School massacre.

But in recent years the rigid rules have come under increasing fire in school districts across the country. Texas eased its law statewide in early October.

Bryan Whalen said that hundreds of e-mails, calls and letters have been sent on his son's behalf to the school district urging a change in the policy, including one from his local scoutmaster that arrived the day of the suspension hearing.

"The school district must be getting deluged with that," he said. "It's spreading like wildfire."

To contact the Lansingburgh Central School District superintendent, call: (518) 233-6850 or e-mail: ggoodwin@lansingburgh.org.

from the Arizona Republic, 2009-Sep-25, by Reach MacEachern:

Tucson schools create race-based system of discipline

It has been a busy summer for our friends running the Tucson Unified School District.

As always, the annual Institute for Transformative Education summer seminar, hosted by TUSD's amply funded Mexican/American raza-studies program, was fun. So much racial bitterness to obsess over.

Tim Wise, the ultra-angry Tulane University poli-sci grad who has made a great living finding racism under every doormat, was the featured speaker. Everyone was wowed.

In a year in which hundreds of district teachers received pink slips, meanwhile, TUSD spent thousands on recruiting teachers from out of state.

And it hired a coordinator at $80,000 per annum to lead the effort.

The recruiting was prompted by what is fast becoming the consuming passion of the TUSD governing board and its allies - to establish a corps of teachers that precisely mirrors the racial make-up of its heavily minority student population.

You can argue the efficacy of such issues legitimately, certainly.

On a certain emotional level, it is a good thing for a minority student with few incentives to achieve much academically to see others who have.

But, as always, TUSD's race-obsessing board of governors is taking racial bean-counting to preposterous extremes.

This summer, the TUSD board adopted a "Post-Unitary Status Plan" that it expects will help the district escape a decades-old federal desegregation order.

The plan includes increasing the number of minority teachers - per the summer hiring spree, which netted 14 special-education teachers and one math-science teacher.

It also includes a vast expansion of the district's controversial Mexican-American studies program.

Despite the budget-enforced closing of school libraries, the shuttering of arts and music programs and the layoff of teachers and counselors in other disciplines, the Post-Unitary Status Plan calls for a vigorous expansion of the program run by TUSD's happy band of unrepentant political leftists.

The board's plan also calls for changes intended (however counterproductive those plans may be) to improving the lot of minority students.

It wants to see more minority students enrolled in advanced-placement programs, for example - a laudable goal, certainly. But consider one significant part of the plan for "improving" the academic status of TUSD's Black and Hispanic students:

The board is calling for a two-tiered form of student discipline. One for Black and Hispanic students; one for everyone else.

With the goal of creating a "restorative school culture and climate" that conveys a "sense of belonging to all students," the board is insisting that its schools reduce its suspensions and/or expulsions of minority students to the point that the data reflect "no ethnic/racial disparities."

From the section of the 52-page plan titled "Restorative School Culture and Climate," subhead, "Discipline":

"School data that show disparities in suspension/expulsion rates will be examined in detail for root causes. Special attention will be dedicated to data regarding African-American and Hispanic students."

The board approved creating an "Equity Team" that will oversee the plan to ensure "a commitment to social justice for all students."

The happy-face edu-speak notwithstanding, what the Tucson Unified School District board of governors has approved this summer is a race-based system of discipline.

Offenses by students will be judged, and penalties meted out, depending on the student's hue.

Certainly, from the point of view of a public-school administrator, such a policy is beyond insane.

TUSD principals and disciplinarians (assuming such creatures still exist) are being asked to set two standards of behavior for their students.

Some behavior will be met with strict penalties; some will not. It all depends on the color of the student's skin.

It is an invitation to chaos.

The students of the Tucson Public School District certainly deserve more.

They deserve a chance to excel academically.

Instead, they get this. Genuine apartheid.

from American Thinker, 2009-Oct-8, by Troy Silva:

Kevin Jennings' twisted terminology

Kevin Jennings is Safe School Czar not by some vetting breakdown. He was an official in the Obama Campaign as its Gay-Lesbian-Bisexual fund-raising co-chair. For twenty years until 2008, Jennings succeeded on a massive scale at pro-homosexual propagandizing of school children. His adeptness and accomplishment at semantic deception are extraordinary.

In a 1990 "report" for the Massachusetts Governor's Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth, it was Jennings himself who re-coined the very term "safe school" to mean a pro-homosexual school. Just as the word "gay" is forever tainted and can now rarely be used in its original sense without prompting the snickers or confusion of the listener, so the term "safe school" is now a post-op product of Jennings that bears no similarity to its original meaning.

This fairly recent change is lost on most of the public, to the severe detriment of millions of American children in public school whose curriculum is controlled by edu-crats who use the Jennings definition. The term "safe school" in the fraudulent sense used by Jennings, et al, must not be confused with the original sense of the term, which was quite literal. The term in this original sense dates at least to the Reagan-era Department of Education "safe school" initiative to curb drug and alcohol use in schools. Remember the "Just say no" campaign of that era? Today, however, the term in the speciously redefined sense is now used on the Department of Education web site, where incidentally it states that Jennings and his partner, Jeff Davis "are the proud parents of three dogs",  including a "grand dog". The cultural notion of what constitutes absurdity has slackened a bit, has it not? Were Ronald Reagan to have read such a line, he would most assuredly have thought it a spoof!

Jennings boasted in a 1995 speech entitled "Winning the Culture War" that he "tilted" the 1990 Massachusetts report with use of the term "safe" in order to put opponents of pro-homosexual curriculum in that state "on the defensive". His national template, used over and over in hundreds of districts and thousands of schools across the country, is to fabricate an epidemic of bullying and violence to homosexuals in schools, in part by citing bogus census or other statistics where classes of people are conflated to come-up with artificially high numbers of incidents of sexual-orientation-based "bullying", "harassment" or violence.

The next step is to contend that the only solution is to make "allies" out of 100% of the straight students in the school or district. "Allies" are made by implementing a usually district-wide "safe-schools" or "anti-bullying" curriculum that force-feeds homosexual propaganda to kindergarten through 12th grade. Prominent psychologists and psychiatrists who oppose them notwithstanding, these towering intellects that run school districts reject all research that will contradict their foregone conclusions.

While there is much controversy even among secular mental health professionals as to whether or not homosexuality is disordered, there is no such controversy as to heterosexuality. This is an additional, secular reason that all lifestyles should therefore not enjoy parity in school curricula. Why do the Jennings types fear the presentation of research data from all sides, rather than just their own? If indeed Jennings and company valued academic freedom and fearless intellectual inquiry, they would also present the findings of these prominent doctors, who have a lot of studies to back up their positions.

The term "ally", a play on Jennings' Gay-Straight Alliance, is another buzzword which denotes a straight student who worships LGBT's and unequivocally endorses their lifestyle, and who reports on any student who so much as voices an opposition to homosexuality. Such voiced opposition is punished as the "bullying" of a "hater". "Ally of the month" awards are then handed-out at monthly school assemblies. Even assuming for the sake of argument that there were an epidemic of bullying and violence at schools against homosexuals, the contention of parents who oppose the pro-homosexual curricula is that what the schools are doing is unconstitutional. The purported end does not justify the means here. Those pushing this pro-homosexual curricula, who omit from the equation the Constitutional rights of the parents and children who oppose them, ought to be able to understand this concept.

In his revelatory 1995 speech, Jennings accurately stated that in order for his side to win, it was essential to keep control of the terminology, especially the term "safety". He admittedly seized on the pre-existence of this popular Reagan theme and nomenclature of "safe schools." The tactic worked well for him; he got his pro-homosexual curriculum in Massachusetts. And if it worked in Massachusetts, Jennings realized that it could work nationwide -- and it has.

Jennings founded the Gay Straight Alliance GSA and the Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network (GLSEN) which have imparted and logistically supported his original propaganda model to thousands of GSA staff presently indoctrinating children in grades K-12 in every state. A couple of other important examples of his ability to lie semantically are his use of the terms "Straight" and "Alliance" in the GSA and GLSEN names in order to falsely imply that the GSA and GLSEN are some dialoguing roundtable. He thus nicely disguises the insidious propaganda machines that these organizations truly are. Parents should check their school or district curriculum for seemingly innocuous terms as "safe school", "anti-bullying", "safe space", "hate-free", "tolerance", "respect differences", "be an ally", "no name calling day", "be who you are", "free to be fully me", "day of silence", and so forth. If these terms are present, they are defined by Jennings, not Webster, and the accompanying curricular material will probably be objectionable.

Jennings' jargon and the mythical bullying epidemic even showed-up in the recent Presidential address to school children: (emphasis added):

Maybe you'll decide to stand up (referring to "allies") for kids who are being teased or bullied (disagreed with) because of who they are or how they look (homosexual or transvestite), because you believe, like I do, that all kids deserve a safe (pro-homosexual) environment to study and learn.

The Jennings terminology in this line of the controversial speech was no doubt unrecognized by the average adult reader as anything but generic. Unlike the adult audience who watched the speech voluntarily if at all, children across the country in public schools, at whom the speech was directed and who were its captive audience, hear these identical psychobabble terms day in and day out in the very precise context of the nationwide pro-homosexual curriculum designed by Jennings. These children knew exactly what was meant by these terms as used in the Presidential speech.

For the students who may have previously debated or voiced any opposition to their school's pro-homosexual curriculum content, there was now the President on television taking the side of their school administration and its curriculum content. It's ironic that the Presidential bully pulpit was used in support of the fraudulently-named "anti-bullying" regimen of so many hundreds of school districts. Had the speech line been referring to race, handicap or gender, there would have been no need to disguise terms. Nor would the trademark Jennings jargon have been used.

The influence of the Jennings ilk on the speech is quite obvious to those of us who are sensitized to the jargon used nationwide by the homosexual-indoctrination movement. In echoing the jargon of the pro-homosexual curricula, the President mightily validated the profound distrust voiced by so many Americans when his intention to give the school speech was announced.   

Fox News and Rush Limbaugh recently covered the scandal of some 250 California public schools ordering the pro-homosexual "Boy in a Bikini" cartoon indoctrination video. I am the father who was interviewed recently on Fox and Friends with my attorney, Brad Dacus of the Pacific Justice Institute. 

The topics were the video and the force-fed pro-homosexual curriculum in my school district and others. Although until now the Jennings and school-video scandals have been covered separately, there is a substantial connecting line to draw between Kevin Jennings and "Boy in a Bikini." Kevin Jennings founded the GSA in 1988. Youth in Motion, the video producer comprised of a partnership between Jennings' GSA and the company Frameline, actually produced "Boy in a Bikini", and also distributes this indoctrination video to hundreds of schools -- including our local elementary school. So the reprehensible "Boy in a Bikini" video and many other vile propaganda videos were co-produced by the very GSA founded by Safe School Czar Kevin Jennings!

Expect more of this, funded with your federal tax dollars.

from FOXNews.com, 2009-Sep-24, by Cristina Corbin and Michael Sorrentino:

Elementary School Students Taught to Sing Praises of President Obama

Nearly 20 young children are captured in an online video as they sing songs that overflow with campaign slogans and praise for "Barack Hussein Obama," as they repeatedly chant the president's name and celebrate his accomplishments.

Some parents in a New Jersey school district are up in arms after a class of elementary school students was videotaped singing the praises of President Obama, an activity that has been criticized as "indoctrination."

The tension at B. Bernice Young Elementary School escalated to such a degree Thursday that the school was placed temporarily on lockdown after its principal received death threats over a YouTube video that showed nearly 20 children being taught songs lauding the president, though back-to-school night events continuing as planned Thursday night at the school.

Video of the students at the Burlington, N.J., school shows them singing songs seemingly overflowing with campaign slogans and praise for "Barack Hussein Obama," repeatedly chanting the president's name and celebrating his accomplishments, including his "great plans" to "make this country's economy No. 1 again."

One song that the children were taught quotes directly from the spiritual "Jesus Loves the Little Children," though Jesus' name is replaced with Obama's: "He said red, yellow, black or white/All are equal in his sight. Barack Hussein Obama."

The video has set off some families in Burlington, who said they were horrified that their children at the being "indoctrinated" to view the president like a cult figure.

"I'm stunned -- I can't believe it's our school," said Jim Pronchik, who told FOXNews.com his 8-year-old son Jimmy was one of the 18 students in the video. "We don't want to praise this guy like he's a god or an idol or a king or anything like that. That's the wrong message to be sending."

Song 1: Mm, mmm, mm! Barack Hussein Obama He said that all must lend a hand To make this country strong again Mmm, mmm, mm! Barack Hussein Obama He said we must be fair today Equal work means equal pay Mmm, mmm, mm! Barack Hussein Obama He said that we must take a stand To make sure everyone gets a chance Mmm, mmm, mm! Barack Hussein Obama He said red, yellow, black or white All are equal in his sight Mmm, mmm, mm! Barack Hussein Obama Yes! Mmm, mmm, mm Barack Hussein Obama Song 2: Hello, Mr. President we honor you today! For all your great accomplishments, we all doth say "hooray!" Hooray, Mr. President! You're number one! The first black American to lead this great nation! Hooray, Mr. President we honor your great plans To make this country's economy number one again! Hooray Mr. President, we're really proud of you! And we stand for all Americans under the great Red, White, and Blue! So continue ---- Mr. President we know you'll do the trick So here's a hearty hip-hooray ---- Hip, hip hooray! Hip, hip hooray! Hip, hip hooray!

Pronchik said he and his wife were never informed about the lesson, which the superintendent of Burlington Township schools says was held in February as part of Black History Month "to honor the contributions of African Americans to our country."

But Andrea Ciemnolonski, the parent of another one of the students in the video, said the song was part of a second-grade project on a variety of topics related to the month of February, such as Groundhog Day, Valentine's Day and Presidents Day.

"They did songs about President Washington, Lincoln, and they did do one about President Obama," Ciemnolonski said. "My daughter was in the class that did the songs about Obama. It was black history month. ... It was something for the kids to celebrate."

Ciemnolonski said she "just can't look at it as indoctrination," though she added, "The comparisons made were a little exuberant."

Superintendent Christopher Manno said in a written statement Thursday that the taping itself was out of order, but failed to address whether the lesson was approved. "The recording and distribution of the class activity were unauthorized," he wrote in a note to parents and the media.

Other families arriving at Bernice Young Elementary to pick up their children said they were outraged at the songs, which also tout a fair-pay bill Obama signed in January: "He said we must be clear today/Equal work means equal pay." 

"I felt this was reminiscent of 1930's Germany, and the indoctrination of children to worship their leader," said Robert Bowen, father of two children at Bernice Young Elementary.

"I thought that if this was a civics class in say high school or upper level middle school, in might be appropriate to discuss policies or politics, but as far as children in first grade, second grade -- those types of levels -- it's inappropriate to discuss how a president is changing the world after only six weeks in office."

Parents said the songs were performed in Elvira James' second grade class. James, who refused to comment to FOXNews.com, retired at the end of the previous school year on a full pension in New Jersey.

Bowen said he thought there should be consequences for having provided such a one-sided lesson to impressionable students there.

"It's something that there should be serious repercussions for ... the administration here, and I think the school board needs to be answerable to the parents of the community," said Bowen. School board members did not respond to requests for comment.

Though the school was not planning to address the tape during back-to-school-night events, many parents were heading in with with a lot of questions about the tape.

"This video is disturbing," said a grandparent named Sandy, who spoke on the condition that her last name not be included. "We don't teach politics in pre-school -- or kindergarten or first grade." 

"This has no place in the classroom," said Sandy, added Sandy, who told FOXNews.com she has two grandchildren attending Bernice Young Elementary. "It may have been the opinion of one or two, and someone should pay the consequences for it."

The author of the songs is unknown, but a woman -- possibly a teacher -- can be heard in the beginning of the video correcting and helping a student who has forgotten the words. Another woman, the person holding the camera, cheers the students on: "All right," she says. "I like that."

"Alteredbeat," the YouTube user who posted the video on the Internet, told FOXNews.com that the video was first put online by Charisse Carney-Nunes, an activist and author of the children's book "I Am Barack Obama," which her Web site says "allows children to see themselves through the inspirational story of President Obama." Carney-Nunes has been promoting the book during visits to schools on the east coast.

A poster for the book can been seen near the stage of the auditorium in the video of Bernice Young Elementary, but it is unclear whether Carney-Nunes had visited the school or was present during the filming.

"Alteredbeat" told FOXNews.com that he reached out to Carney-Nunes, who insisted that the program had been filmed in June as part of a Father's Day tribute to President Obama. "The kids made up the songs on their own," she wrote, according to the YouTube user.

"Alteredbeat" originally posted the video Sept. 6, two days before Obama made an address to the nation's schoolchildren in which he praised the American education system as the best in the world and urged students to stay in school.

"At the end of the day, we can have the most dedicated teachers, the most supportive parents, and the best schools in the world," Obama said.

from FOXNews.com, 2009-Sep-2, by Joshua Rhett Miller, with David Paulsen contributing:

Critics Decry Obama's 'Indoctrination' Plan for Students

A suggested lesson plan that calls on students to write letters to themselves about what they can do to help President Obama following his address to students nationwide is troubling and establishes the president as a "superintendent in chief," education experts told FOXNews.com.

A suggested lesson plan that calls on school kids to write letters to themselves about what they can do to help President Obama is troubling some education experts, who say it establishes the president as a "superintendent in chief" and may indoctrinate children to support him politically.

But the White House says the speech is merely "designed to encourage kids to stay in school."

Obama will deliver a national address directly to students on Tuesday, which will be the first day of classes for many children across the country. The address, to be broadcast live on the White House's Web site, was announced in a letter to school principals last week by Education Secretary Arne Duncan.

Obama intends to "challenge students to work hard, set educational goals and take responsibility for their learning," Duncan wrote. Obama will also call for a "shared responsibility" among students, parents and educators to maximize learning potential.

"The goal of the speech and the lesson plans is to challenge students to work hard in school, to not drop out and to meet short-term goals like behaving in class, doing their homework and goals that parents and teachers alike can agree are noble," Tommy Vietor, a White House spokesman, told FOXNews.com. "This isn't a policy speech. This is a speech designed to encourage kids to stay in school."

But in advance of the address, the Department of Education has offered educators "classroom activities" to coincide with Obama's message.

Students in grades pre-K-6, for example, are encouraged to "write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president. These would be collected and redistributed at an appropriate later date by the teacher to make students accountable to their goals."

Teachers are also given guidance to tell students to "build background knowledge about the president of the United States by reading books about presidents and Barack Obama."

During the speech, "teachers can ask students to write down key ideas or phrases that are important or personally meaningful."

For grades 7-12, the Department of Education suggests teachers prepare by excerpting quotes from Obama's speeches on education for their students to contemplate -- and ask as questions such as "Why does President Obama want to speak with us today? How will he inspire us? How will he challenge us?"

Activities suggested for after the speech include asking students "what resonated with you from President Obama's speech? What lines/phrase do you remember?"

Obama announced his intention to deliver the address to students during an interview with Damon Weaver, a middle school student from Florida who gained a following of his own last year on the campaign trail for his interviews of high-profile figures.

The Department of Education is using the president's address to kick off a video contest titled, "I Am What I Learn," in which students are invited to submit videos of up to two minutes on the importance of education in achieving their dreams.

Obama's critics say the lesson plans and the president's calls for a "supportive community" are troubling on many levels.

"In general, I don't think there's a problem if the president uses the bully pulpit to tell kids to work hard, study hard and things like that. But there are some troubling hints in this, both educationally and politically," said Neal McCluskey, associate director of Cato Institute's Center for Educational Freedom.

Among the concerns, McCluskey said, is the notion that students who do not support Obama or his educational policies will begin the school year "behind the eight ball," or somehow academically trailing their peers.

"It essentially tries to force kids to say the president and the presidency is inspiring, and that's very problematic," McCluskey said. "It's very concerning that you would do that."

Parents of public school students would also have to pay for that "indoctrination," regardless of their political background, he said.

"That's the fundamental problem. They could easily be funding the indoctrination of their children."

Meanwhile, Patti Kinney, a former teacher and middle school principal with 33 years of teaching experience, said she found nothing wrong with the lesson plans.

"They're designed as a menu, so it doesn't mean you have to do everything," said Kinney, associate director for middle level services at the National Association of Secondary School Principals. "You have to pick and choose which will work best for your class."

Kinney said suggestions like asking students to recall "other historic moments" when the president spoke to the nation and to hone their listening skills by taking notes during the address are useful.

"You're asking them to listen to particular things and to take notes," she said. "That's a good teaching strategy to help students develop their listening skills."

Asked if she was troubled by the suggestion that students write letters "about what they can do to help the president," Kinney said she would have reworked that sentence.

"I would have probably reworded that to say goals the president is suggesting," Kinney said. "But again, you call upon teacher expertise to do what's appropriate with their students ... I did not see anything that I saw as problematic."

Frederick Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, said the suggested lesson plans cross the line between instruction and advocacy.

"I don't think it's appropriate for teachers to ask students to help promote the president's preferred school reforms and policies," Hess said. "It very much starts to set up the president as a superintendent in chief."

Amid the debate on the federal government's level of involvement on issues like health care and others, Hess said, "There's a lot of people" on both sides of the political spectrum who will rightfully be concerned with the president's call to action.

"It shows exactly what the problem is," he said. "This is going to open the door to all kinds of concerns."

After reading the Department of Education lesson plans for the speech, McCluskey said he noticed several passages that should set off "alarm bells," including language that attempts to "glorify President Obama" in the minds of young students.

"It could be a blatantly political move," he said. "Nobody knows for sure, but it gives that impression."

McCluskey also noted that the lesson plans for young students contain suggestions to write letters to themselves on how they can help the president, but that suggestion is not in the lesson plan for middle and high schoolers -- perhaps due to the likelihood of increased political ties at that age.

"You don't want to see this coming from the president," McCluskey said. "You don't want to see this coming from the federal government."

from City Journal online, 2009-Apr-17, by Anthony Paletta:

Ideology My Teacher Taught Me
David Horowitz and Jacob Laksin profile political indoctrination in academic departments.

One-Party Classroom: How Radical Professors at America’s Top Colleges Indoctrinate Students and Undermine Our Democracy, by David Horowitz and Jacob Laksin (Crown Forum, 336 pp., $26.95)

To some extent, the recent jury verdict holding that the University of Colorado had wrongly fired Ward Churchill was correct: political pressures did inspire the investigation leading to his termination for academic misconduct. It doesn’t follow, though, that Churchill was fired for his political views, which notoriously included comparing 9/11 victims to “Little Eichmanns.” Plagiarism and falsification of evidence aren’t covered under any definition of academic freedom.

The Churchill verdict makes an appropriate moment for the appearance of David Horowitz and Jacob Laksin’s new book, One-Party Classroom. The authors note that several of the fraud charges against Churchill “had apparently been well known by scholars in the field, although perhaps not by responsible University personnel, for years before the University took any action whatsoever concerning them, and it did so only after the controversy over Professor Churchill’s essays became national news.” Churchill was an academic provocateur who made his career in the politicized world of ethnic-studies departments, where he was easily hired, promoted, and tenured despite not having a doctorate and the growing doubts about the veracity of his work. His peers even voted him department chair.

Ethnic- and gender-studies departments have provided fertile soil for the growth of academic radicalism. One-Party Classroom examines such departments at 12 universities. The selection doesn’t appear scientific—all are large universities, but little unites them otherwise. Some have strong radical reputations; it’s little surprise to read again about Duke, or Columbia, or U.C. Santa Cruz. It’s perhaps more useful to find detailed profiles of radical programs at universities without much political reputation. Who knew of a burgeoning women’s studies department at Penn State, or the School of Social Justice and Inquiry at Arizona State University? Each features heavily politicized professors, mission statements, and course offerings. All they lack is a Ward Churchill to make them famous.

Behind every academic radical, the authors argue, you’re likely to find a department offering eager support. The Duke lacrosse players’ scandal is a case in point. Members of the infamous “Group of 88”—liberal-arts professors who signed an open letter that ran in newspapers condemning the players—were clearly not accustomed to confining their opinions to such paid advertisements. They offered them daily in their teaching. English professor Karla Holloway, one of the signatories, published a scholarly article in which she asserted that the lacrosse players had victimized blacks and women. As the first head of Duke’s African and African-American Studies program, she insisted on race- and gender-influenced hiring and a mission statement proclaiming that “it ought not be surprising that many of the courses in the African and African American Studies (AAS) Program reflect a concern with issues of social justice, nor that our intellectual stance is often one of critique.” Eduardo Bonilla-Silver, another Group of 88 signatory, teaches a class called “White Supremacy and Global Capitalism.” The course description asserts that “central to this discussion is understanding that ‘racism’ is not ‘prejudice,’ ‘ignorance,’ or a ‘set of beliefs’ but a comprehensive historical system of racial domination organized by the logic of white supremacy.” Jumping to quick conclusions about the Duke lacrosse players’ guilt came naturally for such professors.

The academic departments have developed spurious core competencies for their students. The Columbia Teachers College Peace Education Center’s mission statement, for example, declares that its goal is to “further the development of peace education, particularly in recognition of the unprecedented need to address issues of security, war and peace, human rights and social justice, sustainable development, and ecological balance.” Think that’s academically tendentious? Try the Peace Studies Program at the University of Missouri, where peace is defined as “providing the basic necessities of life for every human being.” The declarations don’t end at mission statements, either. Missouri’s Introduction to Peace Studies notes, in its course description, that “this course will deal primarily with issues related to peace building and social justice. . . . Hopefully the student will consider the ways in which phenomena such as poverty, racism, sexism, and violent conflict are closely intertwined with one another as well as linked to human suffering generally.” Well, hopefully.

Take your pick of any other modish discipline and you’ll find similar expressions chronicled in One-Party Classroom. As Horowitz and Laksin write, “numerous academic disciplines have incorporated sectarian ideologies as ‘scholarly truths’ and view their academic mission as instilling these doctrines in their students. These ideological programs include Women’s Studies, African-American Studies, Peace Studies, Cultural Studies, Chicano Studies, Gay Lesbian Studies, Post-Colonial Studies, Whiteness Studies, Community Studies, and recently politicized disciplines such as Cultural Anthropology and Sociology.”

For the uninitiated, One-Party Classroom provides an invaluably detailed profile of academic radicalism—and a decisive rejoinder to claims that explicitly politicized instruction is isolated or marginal. Apart from the courses that Churchill taught, for example, the University of Colorado’s curriculum is still peppered with offerings such as “Queer Rhetorics: Program for Writing and Rhetoric 3020-026,” which requires volunteer work for LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer) organizations, and “The Civil Rights Movement in America: Black Studies 4650,” whose instructor frankly declares that “it is my contention that the Black Civil Rights Movement in America is a kind of domestic war created and sustained by white people (or their surrogates), whose origins may be found in the involuntary transportation of Africans to the New World.”

Not all of the courses or instructors profiled here seem set on indoctrination. Some of the classes included on, say, African history or Marxist literary theory set out frankly narrow, yet not especially political or objectionable, frameworks. Such debatable entries might expose Horowitz and Laksin to criticism that they’re seeking to purge academia of views that they dislike. Yet the unavoidable truth is that these 12 schools are replete with explicitly left-wing courses and departments that allow no answer from other perspectives. I challenge any critic to come up with a companion volume on right-leaning classes or departments at these universities. The nearly complete homogeny of left-wing opinion on campus provides an atmosphere in which ideological indoctrination doesn’t attract scrutiny, let alone criticism.

The next time a Ward Churchill or a Group of 88 appear in academia, as they inevitably will, be sure to take a look at the courses they teach and the academic departments that support them. Or you could spare yourself the trouble and peruse One-Party Classroom.

Anthony Paletta is senior editor of MindingTheCampus.com, a web magazine sponsored by the Manhattan Institute’s Center for the American University.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Apr-18, by David Horowitz:

Campus Leftists Don't Believe in Free Speech
Conservative speakers now have bodyguards when they visit universities.

I arrived in Austin, Texas, one evening recently to give a speech about academic freedom at the university there. Entering the hall where I was to give my speech, I was greeted -- if that's the word -- by a raucous protest organized by a professor and self-styled Bolshevik, Dana Cloud. Forty protesters hoisted placards high in the air and robotically chanted "Down With Horowitz," "Racist Go Home," and "No More Witch-hunts."

Fortunately, a spokesperson for the administration was present to threaten the disrupters with arrest if they continued on this course. (The threat was administered very carefully, with three formal warnings before any action could be taken.) This quieted the crowd enough that I could begin my talk, which proceeded without further serious incident.

Even so, there were occasional heckles and demonstrative cheers from the group when I mentioned the name of Sami Al-Arian ( whose organization, Palestine Islamic Jihad, is responsible for the deaths of more than 100 innocent victims in the Middle East), Black Panther Huey Newton (convicted of killing an Oakland police officer in 1967, although he was eventually released on a technicality), or when I uttered the word "communist" -- even though I did so to remind the audience that communists killed 120 million people in the last century trying to implement Marx's ideas.

Among the organizations participating in these outbursts were the International Socialist Organization, whose goal is the establishment of a "dictatorship of the proletariat" in the United States; Iranians for Peace and Justice, supporters of Hezbollah and Hamas; and Campus Progress, the unofficial college arm of the Democratic Party.

One of the local members of Campus Progress had written a column in the campus newspaper attacking me in advance of my talk, and defending Sami Al-Arian as a victim of political persecution. The conservative students who invited me to the University of Texas told me that organizations such as the Muslim Students Association routinely join with College Democrats in protests against the state of Israel.

At the end of the evening, Prof. Cloud stepped up to the microphone to ask a question, which was actually a little speech. Even though the protocol for such occasions restricts audience participants from making their own speeches, I did her the courtesy she tried to deny me by letting her talk.

She presented herself as a devoted teacher and mother who was obviously harmless. Then she accused me of being a McCarthyite menace. Disregarding the facts I had laid out in my talk -- that I have publicly defended the right of University of Colorado's radical professor Ward Churchill to hold reprehensible views and not be fired for them, and that I supported the leftist dean of the law school at UC Irvine when his appointment was withdrawn for political reasons -- she accused me of whipping up a "witch-hunting hysteria" that made her and her faculty comrades feel threatened.

When Ms. Cloud finished, I pointed out that organizing mobs to scream epithets at invited speakers fit the category of "McCarthyite" a lot more snugly than my support for a pluralism of views in university classrooms. I gestured toward the armed officers in the room -- the university had assigned six or seven to keep the peace -- and introduced my own bodyguard, who regularly accompanies other conservative speakers when they visit universities. In the past, I felt uncomfortable about taking protection to a college campus until a series of physical attacks at universities persuaded me that such precautions were necessary. (When I spoke at the University of Texas two years ago, Ms. Cloud and her disciples had to be removed by the police in order for the talk to proceed.)

I don't know of a single leftist speaker among the thousands who visit campuses every term who has been obstructed or attacked by conservative students, who are too decent and too tolerant to do that. The entire evening in Texas reminded me of the late Orianna Fallaci's observation that what we are facing in the post-9/11 world is not a "clash of civilizations," but a clash of civilization versus barbarism.

Mr. Horowitz is the author, most recently, of "One-Party Classroom: How Radical Professors at America's Top Colleges Are Indoctrinating Students and Undermining Our Democracy" (Crown Forum, 2009).

from the Washington Examiner, 2009-Aug-23, by Diana West:

Filthy lucre is behind Yale cartoon censorship

Fear of Muslim violence is the official explanation for why Yale University Press censored the Danish Muhammad cartoons from an upcoming book about, well, the Danish Muhammad cartoons. That's what Yale, its administration and press, says publicly, matter-of-factly, and, it seems, without shame.

But it is a shameful thing. Yale's decision to censor pictures of Muhammad from an academic text about them is one of those watershed moments that history will record as institutional capitulation to Sharia (Islamic law) at one of the storied centers of Western learning, American branch. It also happens to be my alma mater.

Yale is hardly unique in academia in bending to Islamic law. Harvard, for instance, boosts Sharia-compliant finance, operates a gym on Islamic rules separating the sexes, and permits a Harvard chaplain to condone the Islamic penalty of death for leaving Islam without sanction.

Such deference to Islam is the embodiment of what historian Bat Ye'or calls "dhimmitude," the stunted cultural existence of non-Muslims living in thrall to Sharia. If Yale is not unique in this, censoring its press according to Islamic restrictions on Muhammad imagery makes Yale a leading contender for All-Ivy dhimmi.

But is fear of violence alone driving Yale's dhimmitude? I don't think so, and not just because the book in question, "The Cartoons that Shook the World" by Jytte Klausen, promises a pro-Muslim essence ("I am not Geert Wilders," Klausen recently told a Dutch newspaper).

The university was muscularly involved in this Sharia-affirming publishing decision. For example, Yale Vice President and Secretary Linda Lorimer helped Yale University Press break the censorship news to author Klausen.

The university is also muscularly involved in pursuing Sharia-affirming donors. If Yale suddenly feared the contents of a book -- finished in 2006 and due out in November -- I think the fear was not over violence that might break out, but rather over money that might dry up -- Islamic money. Or that such money might never come Yale's way.

Lorimer figures prominently in Yale's "Middle East outreach," which so far hasn't much paid off. Sure, Lorimer in April declared herself and Yale to be "inspired" by the work of the Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Foundation after this new United Arab Emirates fund announced a preliminary agreement with several business schools, including Yale's.

But before Lorimer further rhapsodizes about "partnering with the foundation for years to come," I suggest she examine the Al Maktoum family's history of supporting jihad causes, including the Taliban, Hamas, Hamas-linked CAIR, and Muslim Brotherhood spiritual leader Yusuf al-Qaradawi. I suggest concerned alumni do the same.

Still, Yale -- whose endowment is off this year (30 percent) -- has yet to receive a massive infusion of cash from the typical Muslim sources. Georgetown and Harvard, for example, both accepted $20 million apiece from Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, who has likewise contributed millions to families of Palestinian "martyrs," and whose part-owned Iqra TV incites jihad.

That's the same Saudi prince, by the way, to whom then-New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani defiantly returned $10 million after Alwaleed blamed U.S. Middle East policy for Sept. 11.

Yale has also failed to "partner" with the new, multi-billion-dollar King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, whose founding trustees include Princeton President Shirley Tilghman and Cornell President Emeritus Frank H.T. Rhodes.

According to a publication of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, KAUST largesse includes $36 million to Berkeley, $60 million to Stanford and miscellaneous millions ($8 million to $25 million) to other institutions.

Nothing, as far as I can tell, directly to Yale. The Middle East looks like just one big dry well for Old Eli: Yale's negotiations with Abu Dhabi to franchise a Yale arts institute ended in failure last year.

Imagine the frustration. What's Yale gotta do for its share of Sharia bucks? Censor those Sharia-defying Danish Muhammad Cartoons? Hmm. Not a bad idea.

And here's more "outreach" for you: As one of its 2009 "world fellows," Yale selected Muna Abu Sulayman, general secretary of the charitable foundation of -- what a coincidence -- Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal.

Pita bread on Gulf waters, Yale may think. But how does that old song go? "... God have pity on such as we. Baa, baa, baa-aa."

Examiner Columnist Diana West is syndicated nationally by United Media and is the author of The Death of the Grown-Up: How America's Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization.

from the Chicago Tribune, 2009-Aug-25, by Stephanie Banchero with Darnell Little contributing:

Chicago selective enrollment high schools face huge demand for few spots
Amid federal investigation of admissions, parents and students complain the process is complicated and secretive

When Celia Hensey applied to Walter Payton College Prep last year, she felt confident she'd get into the top-flight Chicago public school.

The Hyde Park teenager was a straight-A student who aced the selective enrollment high school entrance exam. She scored in the 90th percentile on her middle school tests and tallied 984 points out of 1,000 on the overall admissions scale.

But Celia did not get in.

Her likely downfall? A nasty flu bug in 7th grade that kept her out of school for five days. In the complex and competitive world of selective enrollment scoring, Celia was docked 10 points for five absences.

"It's so crazy competitive that you basically have to send your kid to school sick just to make sure she doesn't ruin her chances of getting into a good high school," said Celia's mother, Lisa Hensey. "My daughter did everything she had to do academically, but she gets punished because she got sick. What kind of message does that send to kids?"

As a federal investigation swirls around admissions practices at Walter Payton and the city's eight other vaunted selective enrollment high schools, it has spotlighted a troubling problem in the city's education system: There are so few good high schools that high-achieving teenagers like Celia must fight over scarce slots.

And they are battling odds they don't understand and that school officials are reluctant to fully explain.

A bad cold, a few wrong questions on a state math exam, or a B instead of an A in 7th-grade social studies is enough to keep a student out of an elite school. So, too, can falling on the wrong side of racial enrollment guidelines put into place to help balance the makeup of selective-enrollment city schools.

Celia was among more than 15,000 students who applied for about 3,000 spots in the 2008-09 freshman selective enrollment class. About 80 percent of them were totally shut out.

Competition at the top schools was especially fierce. Walter Payton accepted only 2.5 percent of applicants. Northside College Prep took 3.2 percent.

And the competition is not letting up.

For the upcoming school year, more than 16,000 students applied, a 34 percent increase from 2006, according to recently released data. The average admission score of students accepted to Lane Tech College Prep was 877 in 2007, compared with 909 for the upcoming school year. At Whitney Young, the mean score jumped from 941 to 965.

For many city families, Chicago's selective-enrollment high schools offer an educational opportunity generally found only in pricey suburbs or private schools. Spread across the city, these premier schools are far superior to most neighborhood schools and are among the best in the state.

The average ACT score at the elite Chicago public schools was 24 last year, compared with 16 in Chicago's neighborhood schools and 21 in Illinois. Four of them bested academic powerhouse New Trier in Winnetka in performance on the state achievement exam.

"To me, the best part was the quality of the staff," said Alyssa Van Denburg, 19, who graduated from Walter Payton in 2008 after spending part of her senior year in Hungary with her math class. "They are the best-trained teachers I've ever seen. Plus, they focus on developing relationships with students."

Still, every year students and parents across the city complain that the admission process is so complicated, secretive and -- some charge -- rigged, that it's impossible to know why some students get in and others don't.

Chicago Public Schools chief Ron Huberman has declined to discuss the issue and did not return a phone call seeking comment.

Landing a spot at the top schools is a complex process that takes into account race, gender, achievement, attendance and other factors school officials have long been reluctant to fully detail. Entry is based on a point system, with 1,000 as the top score. Points are generated from the student's entrance exam score, 7th-grade math and reading state test scores, grades and attendance.

But there are hidden details that many parents don't completely understand until it's too late.

For example, the district awards points based on students' 7th-grade state math and reading scores. But only a small section of the test -- a portion whose questions allow a national comparison of performance -- is used to determine the points. This explains why a student might post a high overall score on the state exam but receive fewer points on the admission scale. Students also are penalized for absences. Until last year, they were docked two points for every day they missed. The rule was changed to allow three absences, but many parents complain that it still puts undue pressure on 12- and 13-year-olds.

Some teachers and principals at top-flight elementary schools have complained privately that parents send their 7th graders to school sick, if only for part of the day, to get attendance credit.

Other parents argue that the system used to award points for classroom grades is unfair. A student who gets an A in math at a gifted school receives 75 admissions points -- the same as a student who gets an A from a less rigorous school.

"The 7th graders at the gifted schools are doing 8th-grade-level work, and they should be rewarded for that," said Katie McKnight, an associate professor in the education department at National-Louis University, who went through the admissions process with her daughter. "They should give extra weight to A's in the gifted program just like they do for AP classes in the high schools."

Complicating matters is a federal desegregation order that requires selective enrollment schools to strive for racial balance. The order does not mandate specific numbers but says schools will be considered desegregated when 15 to 35 percent of the enrollment is white and the remainder minority.

To comply, principals sometimes skip over more qualified students of one race to select a lower-scoring student of another race.

This, according to Lisa Hensey, happened to Celia.

Hensey said Payton officials would not fully explain why a student who scored 984 points was not accepted when the average score of those who got in was 956. She said they told her only that the race guidelines mandated by the federal government would not let them admit one more white female.

What Celia didn't know, and Chicago schools officials hesitate to talk about, is that only 32 white girls got into Payton last year out of the thousands who applied, state enrollment data showed.

Lisa Hensey said she supports affirmative action and accepts the decision, but complains that the process was not transparent and the application documents provided by the district misleading. "I talked with my daughter about the fact that we reap a lot of benefits from being white and sometimes other people reap benefits from their race, and she understood that," Hensey said. "But I think they should just be honest, upfront and explain how they select students. It would lift the cloud that hangs over the process."

Walter Payton officials could not be reached for comment.

Celia was already enrolled in the middle school honors program at Kenwood Academy High School, one of the highest performing neighborhood schools in the city, and decided to stay there for high school. She says she does not regret failing to get into Payton.

To further muddy the process, the district adopted a policy last year that gives principals the power to handpick 5 percent of students based on extenuating circumstances, such as extracurricular activities, leadership, family hardship or whether a sibling attends the school. That 5 percent is the focus of the federal probe.

Federal investigators subpoenaed the district last month seeking documents that might show whether public officials had a hand in clouting students into the top schools. Michael Scott, head of the Chicago Board of Education, also was subpoenaed to testify in the matter.

Julie Woestehoff, executive director of the watchdog group Parents United for Responsible Education, said the admissions process has been so confusing for so long that parents simply do not trust it.

"They think this information just goes into some magic black box and, without any rational explanation, out come some names," she said.

Chicago school officials are acutely aware of the pressures on their top schools and have responded by opening new selective enrollment schools. Three years ago they created Lindblom Math and Science Academy in Englewood. This year, Westinghouse High School will open on the West Side.

But they cannot keep up with the demand.

Mayor Richard Daley said this month that the surge in applications proves the city needs more of these Ivy League-type schools.

Schools like the new Westinghouse, he said, are "what we want to build in every community, here in Austin, Lawndale, South Side, North Side of the city."

from the Wall Street Journal, excerpted from the Best of the Web blog, 2009-Apr-28, by James Taranto:

It Takes One to Know One

"Harvard Law professor Mary Ann Glendon, one of the most prominent Catholic conservative intellectuals in the United States, announced yesterday that she would refuse a prestigious award from the University of Notre Dame rather than appear on the same platform on which President Obama is being awarded an honorary degree," the Boston Globe reports.

The Globe notes that not all Catholics are unhappy with Notre Dame's plan to give the president an honorary degree:

"There are some well-meaning people who think Notre Dame has given away its Catholic identity, because they have been caught up in the gamesmanship of American higher education, bringing in a star commencement speaker even if that means sacrificing their values, and that accounts for some of this," said the Rev. Kenneth Himes, chairman of theology department at Boston College. "But one also has to say that there is a political game going on here, and part of that is that you demonize the people who disagree with you, you question their integrity, you challenge their character, and you brand these people as moral poison. Some people have simply reduced Catholicism to the abortion issue, and, consequently, they have simply launched a crusade to bar anything from Catholic institutions that smacks of any sort of open conversation."

Now read this 2006 Associated Press dispatch:

Nearly 100 faculty members at Boston College have signed a letter objecting to the college's decision to award Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice an honorary degree.

The letter entitled "Condoleezza Rice Does Not Deserve a Boston College Honorary Degree," was written by the Rev. Kenneth Himes. . . .

"On the levels of both moral principle and practical moral judgment, Secretary Rice's approach to international affairs is in fundamental conflict with Boston College's commitment to the values of the Catholic and Jesuit traditions and is inconsistent with the humanistic values that inspire the university's work," the letter said.

Himes, it seems, is an expert on demonization.

from the Associated Press via the Boston Globe, 2006-May-3:

Boston College faculty object to honorary degree for Rice

BOSTON --Nearly 100 faculty members at Boston College have signed a letter objecting to the college's decision to award Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice an honorary degree.

The letter entitled "Condoleezza Rice Does Not Deserve a Boston College Honorary Degree," was written by the Rev. Kenneth Himes, chairman of the department of theology, and the Rev. David Hollenbach, who holds the Margaret O'Brien Flatley chair in the department, and sent to all faculty inviting their signatures.

The theology department said nearly 100 have signed it, but declined to release their names, The Boston Globe reported Wednesday.

Rice was announced Monday as commencement speaker for the May 22 ceremonies. Hollenbach said he has no objection to Rice being a speaker, but said she does not deserve an honorary degree.

"On the levels of both moral principle and practical moral judgment, Secretary Rice's approach to international affairs is in fundamental conflict with Boston College's commitment to the values of the Catholic and Jesuit traditions and is inconsistent with the humanistic values that inspire the university's work," the letter said.

The letter also cited Pope John Paul II's objection to the Iraq war.

The debate over the Rice invitation underscored tensions between liberal and conservative Catholics.

"This is the only time these people have cited Pope John Paul II on anything," said the Rev. Paul McNellis, who is an adjunct professor in the philosophy department.

Some faculty members said having such a notable speaker is an honor for the university. Political science professor Marc Landy said the letter was a "grotesque mistake" and sent his own letter asking colleagues not to sign the Himes-Hollenbach letter.

"This isn't about agreeing or disagreeing with Condoleezza Rice," Landy said. "She is the secretary of state of the United States, and there is a presumption in favor of according a warm and dignified reception to arguably the third most important executive officer."

The State Department would not comment on the letter or say whether Rice had accepted the invitation. According to BC, however, she has confirmed.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Apr-17, p.W11, by Meghan Cox Gurdon:

Scary Green Monsters

If you have somehow missed the fact that April 22 is Earth Day, it's probably because you are grown up. Were you a child, there's not a chance you'd be allowed to miss the urgent chthonic nature of the day -- nor the need to recycle, to use water sparingly, to protect endangered creatures and generally to be agitated about a planet in peril.

Contemporary children are so drenched with eco-propaganda that it's almost a waste of resources. Like acid rain, but more persistent and corrosive, it dribbles down on them all day long. They get it at school, where recycling now competes with tolerance as man's highest virtue. They get it in peppy "go green" messages online, on television and in magazines.

And increasingly, the eco-message is seeping into the pages of novels that don't, on their face, necessarily seem to be about environmentalism at all. Thus children who might like to escape into a good book are now likely to find themselves pursued into that imaginative realm by didactic adults fixated on passing along endless tellurian warnings.

Susceptible children are left in no doubt that we're all headed for a despoiled, immiserated future unless they start planting pansies in their old shoes, using dryer lint as mulch, and practicing periodic vegetarianism. Not surprisingly, many young people are anxious. The more impressionable among them are coming to believe that their smallest decisions could have catastrophic effects on the globe. This, of course, is nonsense, unless their smallest decision involves tipping vats of mercury into forest streams. But they're children, for goodness' sake: They tend to believe what adults tell them -- minus the nuance.

Thus we have the spectacle of a 12-year-old becoming distraught when her father orders seared tuna at a restaurant (this happened to a friend of mine), on account of over-fishing, or a 6-year-old (son of an acquaintance) panicking at the prospect of even a yogurt container going into the trash: "But I can use it as a toy!"

The patriarch of the vogue for green-themed children's books is surely Carl Hiaasen, the novelist and Miami Herald columnist who shot to eco-stardom in 2002 with "Hoot," a novel for middle-schoolers about three children who foil a corporation's attempt to build a pancake restaurant over a burrow of endangered miniature owls. "Hoot" won a Newbery Honor Award, and was followed in 2005 by "Flush," a tale recounting the adventures of a different group of youthful oddball allies that is seeking to expose a casino-boat operator who's been flushing raw sewage into harbor water.

Mr. Hiaasen's latest, "Scat," which came out in January, ever so slightly betrays the strains of extending the franchise. Here the story features a new group of three children who band together with an eccentric biology teacher and an armed eco-terrorist to stop a buffoonish Texas oilman from illegally extracting petroleum from the habitat of the endangered Florida panther.

In all Mr. Hiaasen's books for children, young readers are asked to sympathize with environmentalists who thwart businessmen, even when the good guys take destructive measures such as sinking boats or torching billboards. And the eco-tropes that have worked so well for Mr. Hiaasen -- Good nature! Bad capitalist! -- are steadily creeping into books across the age range.

Joan Bauer's "Peeled" (Putnam, 2008) won a Newbery Honor and hordes of young adult readers with its lively tale of a courageous teenage journalist who manages to outfox corporate interests that are trying to bamboozle a small apple-growing town. A newer novel for teenagers, Timothee de Fombelle's "Toby Alone" (Candlewick, March), is also getting buzz. In this story, we meet a boy on the run from a thuggish industrialist who, you will not be surprised to learn, is both fat and rich. The tycoon's rapacious practices endanger the entire world of the book's characters, who -- and this is skillfully drawn -- are tiny people no taller than two millimeters who dwell on the branches of a giant, weakening tree. Shades of the global warming debate, anyone?

Children a step younger who open the latest in the popular "Grk" books by Joshua Doder, "Operation Tortoise" (Delacorte, January), will learn how a boy named Tim and his dog discover a secret laboratory on a tropical island in which a billionaire mistreats tortoises in the hopes of extracting from them whatever it is that causes them to live so long. When Tim reproaches the wicked magnate, the man smiles: "You're very young. You don't know much about life. Let me tell you how the world works. The rich make the laws and the poor obey them."

Even younger readers who are drawn to the appealing pastel illustrations of Katherine Hannigan's "Emmaline and the Bunny" (HarperCollins, March) will find within a risibly didactic tale about a little girl who lives in a town dominated by a fleshy, bowtie-wearing mayor. The pudgy politician has ordered all trees to be cut down, and all grass paved over, to keep the place tidy. Poor Emmaline yearns for a rabbit, but the mayor has banished wild creatures. Eventually the child finds a pet, but only after encountering a brusque old crone with a long white braid: "Humans," the woman snorts. "Cutting this, clearing that, concreting everything. They don't care a bunny's hair about anyone else."

When Emmaline protests, "I care," the young reader probably will too -- which, we have to assume, is the point of the exercise.

As any parent can tell you, children like routine. They're not put off by predictability in stories. They're accustomed to princesses being pretty, dragons being fearsome, and, it seems, alas, their fictional businessmen being corpulent and amoral. So it's probably pointless to object to the eco-endlessness on the grounds of artistic feebleness.

Yet there is something culturally impoverished about insisting that children join in the adult preoccupation with reducing, reusing and recycling. Can they not have a precious decade or so to soar in imaginative literature before we drag them back down to earth?

Mrs. Gurdon reviews children's book for the Journal.

from the New York Times, 2009-May-2, p.A11, web-posted 2009-May-1, by John M. Broder:

Seeking to Save the Planet, With a Thesaurus

WASHINGTON — The problem with global warming, some environmentalists believe, is “global warming.”

The term turns people off, fostering images of shaggy-haired liberals, economic sacrifice and complex scientific disputes, according to extensive polling and focus group sessions conducted by ecoAmerica, a nonprofit environmental marketing and messaging firm in Washington.

Instead of grim warnings about global warming, the firm advises, talk about “our deteriorating atmosphere.” Drop discussions of carbon dioxide and bring up “moving away from the dirty fuels of the past.” Don't confuse people with cap and trade; use terms like “cap and cash back” or “pollution reduction refund.”

EcoAmerica has been conducting research for the last several years to find new ways to frame environmental issues and so build public support for climate change legislation and other initiatives. A summary of the group's latest findings and recommendations was accidentally sent by e-mail to a number of news organizations by someone who sat in this week on a briefing intended for government officials and environmental leaders.

Asked about the summary, ecoAmerica's president and founder, Robert M. Perkowitz, requested that it not be reported until the formal release of the firm's full paper later this month, but acknowledged that its wide distribution now made compliance with his request unlikely.

The research directly parallels marketing studies conducted by oil companies, utilities and coal mining concerns that are trying to “green” their images with consumers and sway public policy.

Environmental issues consistently rate near the bottom of public worry, according to many public opinion polls. A Pew Research Center poll released in January found global warming last among 20 voter concerns; it trailed issues like addressing moral decline and decreasing the influence of lobbyists. “We know why it's lowest,” said Mr. Perkowitz, a marketer of outdoor clothing and home furnishings before he started ecoAmerica, whose activities are financed by corporations, foundations and individuals. “When someone thinks of global warming, they think of a politicized, polarized argument. When you say `global warming,' a certain group of Americans think that's a code word for progressive liberals, gay marriage and other such issues.”

The answer, Mr. Perkowitz said in his presentation at the briefing, is to reframe the issue using different language. “Energy efficiency” makes people think of shivering in the dark. Instead, it is more effective to speak of “saving money for a more prosperous future.” In fact, the group's surveys and focus groups found, it is time to drop the term “the environment” and talk about “the air we breathe, the water our children drink.”

“Another key finding: remember to speak in TALKING POINTS aspirational language about shared American ideals, like freedom, prosperity, independence and self-sufficiency while avoiding jargon and details about policy, science, economics or technology,” said the e-mail account of the group's study.

Mr. Perkowitz and allies in the environmental movement have been briefing officials in Congress and the administration in the hope of using the findings to change the terms of the debate now under way in Washington.

Opponents of legislation to combat global warming are engaged in a similar effort. Trying to head off a cap-and-trade system, in which government would cap the amount of heat-trapping emissions allowed and let industry trade permits to emit those gases, they are coaching Republicans to refer to any such system as a giant tax that would kill jobs. Coal companies are taking out full-page advertisements promising “clean, green coal.” The natural gas industry refers to its product as “clean fuel green fuel.” Oil companies advertise their investments in alternative energy.

Robert J. Brulle of Drexel University, an expert on environmental communications, said ecoAmerica's campaign was a mirror image of what industry and political conservatives were doing. “The form is the same; the message is just flipped,” he said. “You want to sell toothpaste, we'll sell it. You want to sell global warming, we'll sell that. It's the use of advertising techniques to manipulate public opinion.”

He said the approach was cynical and, worse, ineffective. “The right uses it, the left uses it, but it doesn't engage people in a face-to-face manner,” he said, “and that's the only way to achieve real, lasting social change.”

Frank Luntz, a Republican communications consultant, prepared a strikingly similar memorandum in 2002, telling his clients that they were losing the environmental debate and advising them to adjust their language. He suggested referring to themselves as “conservationists” rather than “environmentalists,” and emphasizing “common sense” over scientific argument.

And, Mr. Luntz and Mr. Perkowitz agree, “climate change” is an easier sell than “global warming.”

Note on the following: the toll in human misery and poverty from government-imposed CO₂ emission limits or onerous taxes vastly exceeds that associated with unregulated CO₂ emissions themselves. The Eco-psychos and Destroying the Free Market chapters of AMPP document this from various angles. It is precisely the costs, particularly the long term costs, of regulation in general and this sort of regulation in particular, that the proponents of CO₂ controls neglect.

from the New York Times, 2009-Apr-19, by Jon Gertner:

The Green Issue
Why Isn't the Brain Green?

Two days after Barack Obama was sworn in as president of the United States, the Pew Research Center released a poll ranking the issues that Americans said were the most important priorities for this year. At the top of the list were several concerns — jobs and the economy — related to the current recession. Farther down, well after terrorism, deficit reduction and energy (and even something the pollsters characterized as “moral decline”) was climate change. It was priority No. 20. That was last place.

A little more than a week after the poll was published, I took a seat in a wood-paneled room at Columbia University, where a few dozen academics had assembled for a two-day conference on the environment. In many respects, the Pew rankings were a suitable backdrop for the get-together, a meeting of researchers affiliated with something called CRED, or the Center for Research on Environmental Decisions. A branch of behavioral research situated at the intersection of psychology and economics, decision science focuses on the mental processes that shape our choices, behaviors and attitudes. The field's origins grew mostly out of the work, beginning in the 1970s, of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, two psychologists whose experiments have demonstrated that people can behave unexpectedly when confronted with simple choices. We have many automatic biases — we're more averse to losses than we are interested in gains, for instance — and we make repeated errors in judgment based on our tendency to use shorthand rules to solve problems. We can also be extremely susceptible to how questions are posed. Would you undergo surgery if it had a 20 percent mortality rate? What if it had an 80 percent survival rate? It's the same procedure, of course, but in various experiments, responses from patients can differ markedly.

Over the past few decades a great deal of research has addressed how we make decisions in financial settings or when confronted with choices having to do with health care and consumer products. A few years ago, a Columbia psychology professor named David H. Krantz teamed up with Elke Weber — who holds a chair at Columbia's business school as well as an appointment in the school's psychology department — to assemble an interdisciplinary group of economists, psychologists and anthropologists from around the world who would examine decision-making related to environmental issues. Aided by a $6 million grant from the National Science Foundation, CRED has the primary objective of studying how perceptions of risk and uncertainty shape our responses to climate change and other weather phenomena like hurricanes and droughts. The goal, in other words, isn't so much to explore theories about how people relate to nature, which has been a longtime pursuit of some environmental psychologists and even academics like the Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson. Rather, it is to finance laboratory and field experiments in North America, South America, Europe and Africa and then place the findings within an environmental context.

It isn't immediately obvious why such studies are necessary or even valuable. Indeed, in the United States scientific community, where nearly all dollars for climate investigation are directed toward physical or biological projects, the notion that vital environmental solutions will be attained through social-science research — instead of improved climate models or innovative technologies — is an aggressively insurgent view. You might ask the decision scientists, as I eventually did, if they aren't overcomplicating matters. Doesn't a low-carbon world really just mean phasing out coal and other fossil fuels in favor of clean-energy technologies, domestic regulations and international treaties? None of them disagreed. Some smiled patiently. But all of them wondered if I had underestimated the countless group and individual decisions that must precede any widespread support for such technologies or policies. “Let's start with the fact that climate change is anthropogenic,” Weber told me one morning in her Columbia office. “More or less, people have agreed on that. That means it's caused by human behavior. That's not to say that engineering solutions aren't important. But if it's caused by human behavior, then the solution probably also lies in changing human behavior.”

Among other things, CRED's researchers consider global warming a singular opportunity to study how we react to long-term trade-offs, in the form of sacrifices we might make now in exchange for uncertain climate benefits far off in the future. And the research also has the potential to improve environmental messages, policies and technologies so that they are more in tune with the quirky workings of our minds. As I settled in that first morning at the Columbia conference, Weber was giving a primer on how people tend to reach decisions. Cognitive psychologists now broadly accept that we have different systems for processing risks. One system works analytically, often involving a careful consideration of costs and benefits. The other experiences risk as a feeling: a primitive and urgent reaction to danger, usually based on a personal experience, that can prove invaluable when (for example) we wake at night to the smell of smoke.

There are some unfortunate implications here. In analytical mode, we are not always adept at long-term thinking; experiments have shown a frequent dislike for delayed benefits, so we undervalue promised future outcomes. (Given a choice, we usually take $10 now as opposed to, say, $20 two years from now.) Environmentally speaking, this means we are far less likely to make lifestyle changes in order to ensure a safer future climate. Letting emotions determine how we assess risk presents its own problems. Almost certainly, we underestimate the danger of rising sea levels or epic droughts or other events that we've never experienced and seem far away in time and place. Worse, Weber's research seems to help establish that we have a “finite pool of worry,” which means we're unable to maintain our fear of climate change when a different problem — a plunging stock market, a personal emergency — comes along. We simply move one fear into the worry bin and one fear out. And even if we could remain persistently concerned about a warmer world? Weber described what she calls a “single-action bias.” Prompted by a distressing emotional signal, we buy a more efficient furnace or insulate our attic or vote for a green candidate — a single action that effectively diminishes global warming as a motivating factor. And that leaves us where we started.

Debates over why climate change isn't higher on Americans' list of priorities tend to center on the same culprits: the doubt-sowing remarks of climate-change skeptics, the poor communications skills of good scientists, the political system's inability to address long-term challenges without a thunderous precipitating event, the tendency of science journalism to focus more on what is unknown (will oceans rise by two feet or by five?) than what is known and is durably frightening (the oceans are rising). By the time Weber was midway into her presentation, though, it occurred to me that some of these factors might not matter as much as I had thought. I began to wonder if we are just built to fail.

Columbia's behavioral labs are located underground and consist of a windowless suite of bright, sparsely furnished rooms with whitewashed cinder-block walls and gray industrial carpet. Each lab has a common area with a small rectangular table; adjacent to the common area are several tiny offices equipped with Dell computers. Depending on the experiment, test subjects, who are usually paid around $15 to participate and who are culled largely from Columbia's student body, can work on tests collaboratively at the table or individually in the private offices.

Each lab room is also equipped with a hidden camera and microphone. One afternoon in February, I sat in a small viewing room and watched, on a closed-circuit television monitor, a CRED experiment being conducted down the hall by Juliana Smith, a graduate student at Columbia. Three subjects were dealing with several quandaries. The first involved reaching a consensus on how to apply $5 billion worth of federal funds to wind-energy technologies. Should they spend it all on conventional wind turbines? Should they invest some (or all) of the money on an as-yet-unproven technology that would employ magnetic levitation to create a huge, long-lasting, superefficient wind-powered generator? After the group came to a consensus in each of the test segments, its members were asked to go into the offices and figure out their own individual decisions.

When I first heard about these particular experiments at CRED, I assumed they were meant to provide insight into our opinions about wind power. It turned out the researchers had little curiosity about what we think of wind power. Because CRED's primary goal is to understand decision-making in situations of uncertainty, the wind-turbine question — should we spend money on building turbines now with a proven technology or should we finance technologies that might be more efficient someday? — was intriguing not for its content but for the way it revealed how our minds work. The familiar variables were all there: uncertainty, time, potential gains, potential losses.

For the researchers, it was crucial to understand precisely how group dynamics shaped decisions during the experiment. In Weber's view, many important environmental choices (building codes, for instance, or vehicle purchases) are made by groups — households, companies, community boards and the like. And various experiments at CRED have established the ease of getting random individuals to cooperate; in one test, simply giving some subjects a colored sticker, a blue star, say, and telling them they were on the “blue-star team” increased group participation from 35 percent to 50 percent. (Just seating them together at a table increased participation rates to 75 percent.) “So cooperation is a goal that can be activated,” Weber told me one morning. Her point was that climate change can be easily viewed as a very large “commons dilemma” — a version, that is, of the textbook situation in which sheepherders have little incentive to act alone to preserve the grassy commons and as a result suffer collectively from overgrazing. The best way to avoid such failure is by collaborating more, not less. “We enjoy congregating; we need to know we are part of groups,” Weber said. “It gives us inherent pleasure to do this. And when we are reminded of the fact that we're part of communities, then the community becomes sort of the decision-making unit. That's how we make huge sacrifices, like in World War II.”

A few days before visiting Columbia's behavioral labs, I watched a test run of the same experiments at a large conference table at CRED's nearby offices in Schermerhorn Hall. Student subjects, two men and one woman, debated the two windmill scenarios. “We should put more money in project A,” one said. Another countered, “But science grows exponentially, so I think we should put more in B.” An impassioned discussion about wind turbines went round and round.

I sat between Weber and Michel Handgraaf, a member of CRED and a professor of psychology at the University of Amsterdam. Handgraaf, who had already started running a similar experiment in Amsterdam, leaned over and whispered to me: “You'll notice they're saying, `This has so-and-so effect over so many years' — that's analytical. But then often they're saying, `But I feel this way' — that's emotional.” In short, what Handgraaf and Weber were hearing wasn't a conversation about the best wind turbine but a tussle between the subjects' analytical and emotional methods of risk assessment. These experiments would be run with 50 different groups in New York, Handgraaf told me, and the conversations would be recorded and scored for data. The data were in the words. They were in how individuals parsed uncertainty and future trade-offs; they were in the phrases they used as they navigated between thinking and feeling; they were in the way the subjects followed a winding path to a consensual decision, soothing worries or explaining technical information to one another or appealing to the group's more courageous instincts.

Embedded deep within the experimental structure was another inquiry, too. The subjects in half of the 50 test groups would first make their decisions individually and then as a group; the other half would make group decisions first and individual ones second. Weber and Handgraaf were fairly confident, based on previous work, that the two approaches would produce different results. In Amsterdam, Handgraaf told me, he had already seen that when subjects made decisions as a group first, their conversations were marked far more often by subtle markers of inclusion like “us” and “we.” Weber, for her part, had seen other evidence that groups can be more patient than individuals when considering delayed benefits. “One reason this is interesting is that it's general practice in any meeting to prepare individually,” Handgraaf said. Or, to put the matter another way: What if the information for decisions, especially environmental ones, is first considered in a group setting before members take it up individually, rather than the other way around? In Weber's view, this step could conceivably change the decisions made by a corporate board, for example, or a group of homeowners called together for a meeting by a public utility. Weber's experiments have also looked at how the ordering of choices can create stark differences: considering distant benefits before immediate costs can lead to a different decision than if you consider — as is common — the costs first. Here, then, is a kind of blueprint for achieving collective decisions that are in the world's best interests, but I asked Weber if that wouldn't that skew the natural decision-making process.

“We tend to always wonder,” she replied: “What's that person's true preference? What do they really want? I think that's the wrong question, because we want it all.” People have multiple goals. If group involvement or the ordering of choices changes the process of making a particular decision, and in turn the result — whether because it tweaked our notions of risk or because it helped elevate social goals above individual goals and led to better choices for the global commons — that isn't necessarily a distortion of our true preference. There is no such thing as true preference.

At the moment, about 98 percent of the federal financing for climate-change research goes to the physical and natural sciences, with the remainder apportioned to the social sciences. In science-policy-speak, that leftover percentage is typically referred to as “human dimensions” research, an omnibus description for studies on how individuals and groups interact with the environment. Paul Stern, a psychologist who heads the Committee on Human Dimensions of Global Change at the National Research Council in Washington and whose work includes looking at how people consume energy in the home, told me that human-dimensions work usually falls into one of three categories: the human activities that cause environmental change, the impacts of environmental change on people and society and the human responses to those consequences. Much of CRED's research is about the human responses to the experiences (or anticipated experiences) of climate change. What makes CRED's work especially relevant, though, is that various human attitudes and responses — How can there be global warming when we had a frigid January? What's in it for me if I change the way I live? — can make the climate problem worse by leaving it unacknowledged or unaddressed. Apathetic and hostile responses to climate change, in other words, produce a feedback loop and reinforce the process of global warming.

Lab experiments in the social sciences, like the ones I witnessed at Columbia, are sometimes criticized for their counterfeit drama. After all, how often do we actually get to disburse $5 billion from the Department of Energy on windmills? Also, is the real world made up entirely of Columbia University students? These factors don't necessarily affect the knowledge that researchers can gain about human decision-making processes; lab experiments on investment decisions, for instance, have long been shown to offer useful insights into our real-world investment choices. Nonetheless, fieldwork has a value that can't always be reproduced in a lab. The lab experiment designed by Weber and Handgraaf actually took a cue from research done by another CRED member, Ben Orlove, an anthropologist at the University of California, Davis, who studied farmers in southern Uganda. In 2005 and 2006, Orlove observed how the behavior of the region's poor farmers could be influenced by whether they listened to crucial rainy-season radio broadcasts in groups or as individuals. Farmers in “community groups,” as Orlove described them to me, engaged in discussions that led to a consensus, and farmers made better use of the forecast. “They might alter their planting date,” he said, “or use a more drought-resistant variety of seed.” Those in the community groups also seemed more satisfied with the steps they took to increase their yields.

In 2005, Anthony Leiserowitz, a CRED member who directs the Yale Project on Climate Change, began a multiyear field project when he drove to Anchorage in a camper with his wife and 2-year-old son. “I had worked on some national studies about American perceptions of climate change,” he told me, “and one of the clear findings was — and still is — that most Americans think about climate change as a distant problem. Distant in time, and distant in space.” In Alaska, however, there was already evidence of melting permafrost, insect-driven tree mortality and diminished sea ice. Leiserowitz saw a natural opportunity. The possibility that society won't act decisively on global warming until we experience a shattering realization — a Pearl Harbor moment, as the climate blogger and former Department of Energy official Joe Romm recently put it — aligns with our tendency to respond quickly to the stimulus of experience and emotion, but slowly to a risk that we process analytically and that may be rife with uncertainties. Leiserowitz simply wondered if Alaskans, now living in a state of easily perceived climate changes, could illuminate how — and by how much — direct experience could change attitudes.

Traveling the state, Leiserowitz interviewed scientists, journalists, environmental leaders, politicians and — in the remote northwestern city of Kotzebue — indigenous tribal leaders. He also commissioned a survey. His data showed that the majority of Alaskans had indeed detected a change in climate and attributed it to man-made causes; they also said they believed warming would have significant impacts on Alaska and the world. But Leiserowitz found deep perceptual gaps between urban Alaskans, whose experience of climate change was limited, and rural residents. (People living in Kotzebue, for instance, were experiencing a threat to their culture from the erosion of sea ice, which limited their ice fishing.) In sum, Alaskans were no more worried than the American public as a whole about climate change. And they were no more inclined than typical Americans to see it as a serious threat to themselves or to their communities. About half of them, in fact, considered climate change a long-term problem that required more study before acting.

Among other things, the results suggested that experience of climate change is a relative thing: something happening to another part of your state, or to a different cultural group, doesn't necessarily warrant a change in your own response. It likewise hinted at the complexity of instilling feelings of climate-related urgency in Americans. If you don't think or feel there's a risk, why change your behavior? In response, researchers like Leiserowitz have investigated messages that could captivate all different kinds of audiences. Reaching a predominantly evangelical or conservative audience, Leiserowitz told me, could perhaps be achieved by honing a message of “moral Christian values,” an appeal possibly based on the divine instruction in Genesis 2:15 to tend and till the garden.

Over the past few years, it has become fashionable to describe this kind of focused communication as having the proper frame. In our haste to mix jargon into everyday conversation, frames have sometimes been confused with nudges, a term made popular in a recent book, “Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness,” written by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein when they were academics at the University of Chicago. (Sunstein later moved to Harvard Law School and has since been nominated as the head of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.) Frames and nudges are not precisely the same; frames are just one way to nudge people by using sophisticated messages, mined from decision-science research, that resonate with particular audiences or that take advantage of our cognitive biases (like informing us that an urgent operation has an 80 percent survival rate). Nudges, more broadly, structure choices so that our natural cognitive shortcomings don't make us err. Ideally, nudges direct us, gently, toward actions that are in our long-term interest, like an automated retirement savings plan that circumvents our typical inertia. Thaler and Sunstein explain in their book that nudges can take advantage of technology like home meters, which have been shown to reduce electricity usage by making constant feedback available. These appeal to our desire for short-term satisfaction and being rewarded for improvement. Or a nudge might be as simple as a sensor installed in our home by a utility that automatically turns off all unnecessary power once we leave for the day — a technology, in effect, that doesn't even require us to use our brains. “I think the potential there is huge,” Thaler told me recently, when I asked him about environmental nudges. “And I think we can use a whole bag of tricks.”

Leiserowitz and Weber spend a fair amount of time talking to scientists and policy makers about how to translate their insights into possible frames and nudges. In Weber's view, CRED was established because the traditional model of using decision research — in which physical scientists doing a study might seek the input of psychologists at the end to help them frame their findings — seemed both backward and ineffective. “By then it's too late,” Weber said, “because you haven't explored all the initial options that would have been more beneficial.” In other words, Weber says he believes decision science isn't only about structuring choices or finding the right frame to get a better outcome; it's about identifying useful information that can be used for innovative products, policies and scientific studies. At the National Research Council, Paul Stern offered the example of a climatologist who had been discussing climate change with cherry farmers in several Michigan counties. The farmers didn't care about future temperatures as much as the date of the last spring frost. “No one has been interested in trying to predict the date of the last spring frost,” Stern told me, but maybe they should be. “They've been trying to predict average temperature and heat waves.” Weber likewise envisioned a similar application in technology or government policy. “Whatever you design as the most cost-effective or technologically feasible solution might not be palatable to the end users or might encounter political oppositions,” she said. Behavioral research could have helped you see such hurdles ahead of time. “You could have designed a way to implement it better. Or you could have thought about another solution.”

Over the winter, the Obama administration began working on regulations for carbon-dioxide emissions, arguably the most important climate-related policy ever undertaken. While many economists favor the simplicity of a carbon tax, it seemed every person of influence in the United States government agreed that a cap-and-trade policy — in which carbon emissions are capped and firms can buy and sell credits — was preferable. Perhaps this was understandable: the poisonous associations of the word “tax” appear to doom it as a policy. And yet this assumption can obscure what actually happens in the minds of Americans on this issue. Not long ago, David Hardisty, a student of Weber's, led an experiment in which a 2 percent fee added to an airline ticket was described to various subjects as either a carbon “tax” or a carbon “offset.” The subjects were told the fee would finance alternative-energy and carbon-reduction technologies. Hardisty predicted he would get different results from Democrats and Republicans, and that was indeed the case. Democrats were willing to pay a fee for an offset or a tax; Republicans were willing to pay for an offset but not a tax. Clearly, the tax frame affected the outcome — very much so for Republicans.

A more interesting part of the experiment came next. Hardisty asked his subjects to write down their thoughts, in order, as they decided whether to pay the tax or the offset. Why should this matter? We've long understood that many of us find the word “tax” repellent, but we don't know precisely how it repels us. For the past few years, Weber and her husband, Eric Johnson, a professor at Columbia's business school, have been looking at how we construct our preferences when making a choice; they theorize that we “query” ourselves, mustering evidence pro and con from memory as we clear a path to a decision. The order of the thoughts matters — early thoughts seem to sway our opinion, biasing subsequent thoughts to support the early position. For Republicans in the experiment who considered a carbon tax, their early thoughts were strongly negative (“I will be old and dead by the time this world has an energy crisis”) and thus led to conclusions that were overwhelmingly negative, too. That's why they rejected the tax. Yet for the same group, the word “offset” actually changed the way subjects processed their choice. In their thinking, they considered the positive aspects of the offset first — the financing of clean energy — and found the overall evidence positive and acceptable. Indeed, in a follow-up study by Hardisty, merely asking people to list their thoughts about the fee in one order or another (pros first or cons first) affected their preference, regardless of whether they were Democrats or Republicans.

So in terms of policy, it may not be the actual tax mechanism that some people object to; it's the way a “trivial semantic difference,” as Hardisty put it, can lead a group to muster powerful negative associations before they have a chance to consider any benefits. Baruch Fischhoff, a professor at Carnegie Mellon and a kind of elder statesman among decision scientists, told me he's fairly convinced a carbon tax could be made superior to cap and trade in terms of human palatability. “I think there's an attractive version of the carbon tax if somebody thought about its design,” Fischhoff told me, adding that it's a fundamental principle of decision research that if you're going to get people to pay a cost, it's better to do it in a simple manner (like a tax) than a complex one (like in cap and trade). Fischoff sketched out for me a possible research endeavor — the careful design of a tax instrument and the sophisticated collection of behavioral responses to it — that he thought would be necessary for a tax proposal to gather support. “But I don't think the politicians are that informed about the realm of the possible,” he added. “Opinion polls are not all that one needs.”

One objection to potential nudges, whether on carbon taxes or household energy use, is that they can seem insidious. “They empower government to maneuver people in its preferred directions,” Thaler and Sunstein note in their book, “and at the same time provide officials with excellent tools by which to accomplish that task.” Thaler and Sunstein conclude that a crucial principle is to always preserve choice as an option (nudging people with a home energy meter, for instance, is fine as long as they can opt out of using it). Weber and David Krantz, two of the co-directors of CRED, have given the matter a good deal of thought, too. “People need some guidance over what the right thing to do is,” Krantz told me. But he said that he was doubtful that you could actually deceive people with decision science into acting in ways that they don't believe are right. “Remember when New York tried to enforce its jaywalking laws?” he asked. “You can't enforce stuff that people don't believe should be done.”

When I raised the issue of possible ethical dilemmas with Weber, she countered by claiming that government constantly tries to instill behaviors that are considered to be in society's best interest. “There's no way around it,” she told me. “We're always trying to push some agenda.” Take the decision to allow certain kinds of mortgages and securities to be sold that are now considered disastrous. In doing so, according to Weber, “we were privileging certain people, and certain institutions. And for a long time we were pushing the idea that everyone should own a house.” As for the question of manipulation, Weber contended that there is no neutral, “value-free way” of presenting people with information. “I think you have to take it as a given that whatever we do, whether it's what we currently do or what we plan to do,” she said, “has some value judgment built into it.” The crucial question, at least to her, is whether (and when) we want to use the tools of decision science to try and steer people toward better choices. If our preferences aren't fixed the way we think they are — if, as Weber has argued, they're sometimes merely constructed on the spot in response to a choice we face — why not try new methods (ordering options, choosing strategic words, creating group effects and so forth) to elicit preferences aligned with our long-term interest? That has to be better, in Weber's opinion, than having people blunder unconsciously into an environmental catastrophe.

In fact, any potential climate disasters, at least to a behaviorist like Weber, would likely signal the start of an intriguing but ultimately dismal chain of events. A few years ago Weber wrote a paper for the journal Climatic Change that detailed the psychological reasons that global warming doesn't yet scare us; in it, she concluded that the difficulties of getting humans to act are inherently self-correcting. “Increasing personal evidence of global warming and its potentially devastating consequences can be counted on to be an extremely effective teacher and motivator,” she wrote, pointing to how emotional and experiential feelings of risk are superb drivers of action. “Unfortunately, such lessons may arrive too late for corrective action.”

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-May-5, p.A15, by William McGurn:

School Choice for the Few
The new do-as-I-say double standard.

Some hypocrisies are apparently more equal than others. If, for example, you are a politician who preaches "traditional values" and you get caught in a hotel with a woman who is not your wife, the press is going to have a field day with your tartuffery.

If, however, you are a pol who piously tells inner-city families that public schools are the answer -- and you do this while safely ensconcing your own kids in some private haven -- the press corps mostly winks.

Tomorrow afternoon at 1 o'clock in Washington, we'll learn if anything has changed. Two groups -- D.C. Children First and D.C. Parents for School Choice -- are holding a rally at Freedom Plaza, just across from the offices of the city government. As their flier explains, "D.C. families deserve the same kind of choices that the Mayor, City Council Members, and Federal leaders with children have."

The precipitate cause of this rally is the Democrats' passage of an amendment tucked into the omnibus spending bill. Sponsored by Sen. Richard Durbin (D., Ill.), the amendment effectively ended the Opportunity Scholarship Program, a lifeline now used by more than 1,700 schoolchildren to escape one of America's most miserable public school systems. Rally organizers say that the silence from local leaders was a big reason the Democratic Congress felt free to kill off the program.

"This rally is the first step in what is the biggest civil rights issue for this community," says Kevin P. Chavous, a former D.C. council member who is one of the organizers. "We intend to show that there is huge support for this locally, that this support is growing, and that we're not going away."

It ought to make for an interesting event. In addition to Mr. Chavous and former mayor (current D.C. council member) Marion Barry, speakers will include former mayor Anthony Williams -- whose leadership played a pivotal role in establishing the Opportunity Scholarships five years ago. Mr. Chavous also says there will be figures from black entertainment, as well as moms and dads and schoolchildren.

As strong as the outright opposition may be, perhaps the biggest problem faced by these parents is the Beltway's complicity in a smarmy double standard. Two weeks ago, the Heritage Foundation highlighted this double standard with the release of a new study showing that 38% of the members of Congress are sending or have sent their children to private schools.

That's more than three times the rate for rest of America. For Democrats especially, their choice of a private school for their own families tends to make them opponents of choice for others. The bargain the teachers unions offer is this: We won't fuss about private or parochial schools for your children, provided you don't help any other kid get the same chance.

For the most part they fall in line. And so we have today's Washington, a city where none of the major players making decisions about the D.C. public schools have any skin in the game:

- President Barack Obama. Though the president talks a good game about putting kids first, and could save the Opportunity Scholarships Program with a few words, he remains silent -- even as his daughters attend the exclusive Sidwell Friends School.

- Education Secretary Arne Duncan. When Mr. Duncan chose a safe suburban school in Virginia for his kids, he explained it this way: "I didn't want to try to save the country's children and our educational system and jeopardize my own children's education."

Fair enough. Mr. Duncan also stated that the children who now have scholarships should be grandfathered. This reporter called his office to ask what, specifically, his department is doing to make that happen. A spokesman said they are working on a budget request -- though the administration has not yet decided whether the funding would be just for their existing schools or stay with them through high school.

- Mayor Adrian Fenty. The mayor nominally favors the Opportunity Scholarships, but he's been an uncertain trumpet -- and his lack of leadership was a green light to a Democratic Congress itching to end the program. Though the mayor has promised that his two sons will go to D.C. public schools come fall, right now they too are in a private school.

- Sen. Durbin. In his floor statement defending his killer amendment, Mr. Durbin admitted he chose Catholic schools for his own children. "If I entrusted my own children to [private education], I certainly believe in it." But he went on to say this choice should be there only for Americans who pay for it.

Hmm. Wonder if Mr. Durbin's voting record reveals a consistent respect for not funding things when Americans can't afford them -- or if this fiscal rectitude is reserved only for programs that rile his friends in the teachers unions?

There's only one institution capable of holding these leaders' feet to the fire: the national press corp. Parents and their children will be rallying just a few blocks from the White House. What are the odds that our networks and newspapers will think it is worth covering?

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Mar-27, by Bret Stephens:

Politics for the Preschool Set

In the asphalt yard of my daughter's New York City public school, the children line up at the sound of the morning bell, waiting to be brought up to their classrooms. As on most days throughout this winter, five-year-old Lara wears her double-thick coat and a pink backpack adorned with little animals. Among boys, Spiderman is a common theme. Girls are into princesses. And then there's that other popular motif: the Obama '08 campaign button.

Since when did the president become a superhero among the kindergarten set? As a second-grader I remember my father cheering the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 (there you have the answer to where my politics come from), but it's not as if my parents made me don campaign paraphernalia. In high school a friend of mine and I volunteered an afternoon's work at the Boston headquarters of the Bush-Quayle campaign, which was uncool not so much because we were Republicans in the Bay State but because we took an interest in politics, period. Cool in my adolescence was Ferris Bueller taking his hot girlfriend for a spin in a borrowed Ferrari, not participating in voter-registration drives.

It seems, however, that my kids are destined to be members of the Earnest Generation. Or, to be more specific, programmed to be members of it. Consider, for instance, a minute-long clip recently featured on Nickelodeon's "Noggin" channel -- my daughter's favorite -- which advertises itself as "preschool on TV."

Typically, Noggin features such fare as "Dora the Explorer," "The Backyardigans," "Blue's Clues" and the deeply enigmatic "Yo Gabba Gabba." And typically, my wife and I are grateful for these sweet-natured, violence-free, semi-educational programs, even if Noggin's claim to being "commercial-free" elides the fact that it is one big ad for all the merchandise (dolls, toys, books, DVDs, the works) that goes with the shows.

Yet there we were -- my right-leaning self, my otherwise-leaning better half, the Obama-aware-though-not-yet-politically-engagée Lara and her slightly befuddled younger brother Noah -- watching the Noggin channel as it "celebrates President Barack Obama and some of his favorite things." With a voice-over that sounded like a Noggin character and a set of brightly colored illustrations of the 44th president and his family, the segment continued as follows:

Barack Obama is the first African-American to be President. That is what's called a historic event.

Leading a country is no easy task. So what does he do to relax you may ask?

He loves shrimp linguini and the chili he cooks.

He also plays Scrabble; collects comic books.

He likes classical and hip hop and jazz music too.

He always goes shopping for the same type of shoe!

He reads lots of books and writes wonderful speeches.

He goes on vacation and takes walks on beaches.

He loves basketball; it's his favorite sport.

In the White House backyard he'll have his own court.

He reads bedtime stories to his daughters at night.

The president in pajamas, what a sight!

Now you know the president better than before.

Which leaves just one thing:

When he sleeps does he snore?

It concluded with the message: "For more about President Barack Obama, go to Parents.NickJr.com." Curious, I went to the Web site but found only the same video (it seems to have since been removed). Still curious, I called Nickelodeon, where I was told the clip was done for black history month (along with clips of other notable African-Americans) and had "no political overtones."

Maybe so, but why then select Mr. Obama when there were plenty of non-partisan role models to choose from? I suppose I wouldn't object to a bit of civic consciousness-raising among preschoolers. Then again, I've been watching Noggin on a more-or-less daily basis for four years, and I can't remember a similar clip about President Bush, his bike rides, cowboy boots and Scottish terrier. So I'm left to conclude that a channel whose chirpy slogan is "I'm using my Noggin!" is up to something else. Actually, boys and girls, Noggin is using you.

Still, it's not too late for Noggin to mend its ways with a bit of balance, something that better meets the needs of a politically diverse household such as my own. A few lines come to mind:

Barack Obama's election was indeed a historic event;

But don't forget, kids, he only got 53 percent.

Leading a country is no easy task;

And if you campaign as a messiah, better not drop the mask.

It helps to have Volcker, and Gates, and maybe Jones too.

But Geithner didn't pay his taxes – nor Daschle (boo-hoo).

A better world awaits us, about that there is no doubt.

Just don't bankrupt the country, Mr. President, while you bail everyone out.

Mr. Stephens writes the Journal's "Global View" column. If you have a better poem, write to bstephens@wsj.com.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Apr-16, by Caitlin Flanagan:

The High Cost of Coddling

William Dean Howells observed that at the theater Americans want a tragedy with a happy ending. But in life we are made of sterner stuff and demand from tragedy only this: a lesson.

That the mass killing at Columbine High School a decade ago -- it was on April 20, 1999, that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold murdered 13 and wounded 23 -- could offer us more than sorrow and outrage has been an article of faith since the nation first learned of the crime. The exact lesson, however, has proved elusive, and the search has seemed obdurately focused on the obscure or the strange: the trenchcoats; the question of social isolation; the possibility that jocks and cheerleaders might be so nasty to an outsider that they could render him into a sociopath.

Apparently, the thing to do was to look not at the largest questions posed by the incident but rather at its particulars and to adopt a "zero tolerance" policy toward any behavior that seemed to mimic them. The result was a longish, culturally embarrassing interlude when kindergartners could get tossed out of school for bringing a nail clipper in a backpack. We began to look like a nation of adults who were terrified of our smallest children.

The one aspect of Columbine that seemed unworthy of examination -- when it came to pondering the policy changes that might actually make American schools safer places -- was the fact that the two killers had a long track record of doing exactly what deeply disturbed teenage boys have been doing since time out of mind: getting in trouble -- lots of it -- with authority.

Ten months before their shooting spree, Harris and Klebold were charged and convicted of stealing tools from a parked van. They were sentenced to a "juvenile diversion" program, which was intended -- by dint of counseling, classes, and the coordinated efforts of school administrators, social workers and police officers -- to keep the boys out of the criminal-justice system. According to the records of that experience, Harris reported having homicidal feelings, obsessive thoughts and a temper. Both boys were placed in anger management, although -- strangely, given Klebold's history of alcohol use and his submission of a dilute urine sample to his minders -- they were excused from the substance-abuse class.

Back at school (which they attended throughout their enrollment in the juvenile-diversion program), they smoked cigarettes in the hollow behind campus, cut classes and blew off schoolwork. According to Dave Cullen's new book, "Columbine," when Klebold carved obscenities into a freshman's locker and was confronted by a dean, "Dylan went ballistic. He cussed him out, bounced off the walls, acted like a nutcase." Both boys also picked on younger children and got into fights.

All of this was in addition, of course, to the notorious AOL postings in which the boys laid their murderous plans bare. Those postings were the basis of the affidavit that the Jefferson County district attorney compiled for a search warrant of the boys' houses. Lacking enough evidence to present it to a judge, however, the affidavit was not acted upon, and the thugs moved closer and closer to their goal. There was a time when boys like these would have been labeled "juvenile delinquents" and removed from the society and company of good kids, whose rights were understood to supersede those of known offenders against the law. It was once believed that good kids should be neither endangered nor influenced by criminals-in-training.

At the turn of the last century, the U.S. -- a nation of laws, of course, and a nation with an ever-evolving sense of sympathy for children and teenagers -- decided that sending youthful offenders to adult prison was a grotesque form of punishment, and so were born the juvenile code and the juvenile court system. With these innovations came something that was still talked about in tones of dread and excitement when I was a girl in the 1960s and '70s. "He's going to end up in reform school," we would say of a bully or a fighter, some luckless child of a rotten drunk or a mean single mother. One way or another, it came to pass: Boys disappeared and were not missed.

Due process? Who knew, who cared? All we knew was that the funny-looking, heavy-set boy who used to smash kids' heads into the porcelain backsplash at the drinking fountain of Cragmont School was no more a menace in our lives.

Harsh fate that would send a boy away for no greater crime than the accident of his birth! Homeward the course of juvenile justice went, reinventing the system in yet another iteration, the one in which Harris and Klebold were allowed to stay put in their own houses and at Columbine, during the very time that they were not only committing petty thefts and cursing out their teachers but also communicating openly about their plans for mayhem.

Today only the most incorrigible young offenders are removed from their guardians' care and forced to live and study in correctional facilities. Furthermore, to expel a student in most public school districts is an arduous business. An expulsion hearing is required, and parents may choose to appeal the decision, a process that rains down a world of legal woe on whatever teachers and administrators have been involved in the action. Many expulsions, moreover, constitute a strange reinterpretation of the very word: They are time-limited and include within them plans for re-enrollment.

It is, of course, the responsibility of the state to provide some sort of education to all its children under the age of 18, and so for a host of legal, moral and economic reasons we end up with an ugly truth about our nation's schools: By design, they contain within them -- right alongside the good kids who are getting an education and running the yearbook and student government -- kids whose criminal rehabilitation is supposedly being conducted simultaneously with their academic instruction.

As someone who taught school for a decade and who has now been a mother for about as long, I can tell you that -- when it comes to children -- the rigid exercise of "due process" in matters of correction and discipline makes for high comedy at best and shared tragedy at worst. Someone needs to stand apart from children and decide what is best for them and for those around them. When it comes to matters of state-ordered punishment, someone needs to stand apart from their parents, too, and make the necessary decisions. It's a complete bummer; I will grant you that.

Who would possibly be willing to side not with the students of an institution -- those fun-loving creatures of the now -- but with the institution itself, a place ostensibly devoted, above all else, to the well-being of its population? I'll tell you who: adults. Remember them?

In my teaching days, no single document shaped my thinking as much as Flannery O'Connor's 1963 essay called "Total Effect and the Eighth Grade." It concerned neither guns nor violence, neither cliques nor experimental approaches to the treatment of adolescent depression. It was about . . . books. In defending the teaching of the great works of the Western canon rather than those of the modern day (which kids far preferred), she said something wise, the sort of thing an adult might say. She said that the whims and preferences of children should always, always be sublimated to the sense and judgment of their elders.

"And what if the student finds this is not to his taste?" O'Connor asked. "Well that is regrettable. Most regrettable. His taste should not be consulted; it is being formed."

Ms. Flanagan is the author of "To Hell With All That." She is at work on "Girl Land," about the emotional lives of pubescent girls.

from the New York Times, 2009-Apr-19, p.BR13, web-posted 2009-Apr-16, by Jennifer Senior:

The End of the Trench Coat Mafia

Had Dave Cullen capitulated to cliché while writing “Columbine,” he would have started his tale 48 hours before Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold's notorious killing spree, stopped the frame just before they fired their guns, and then spooled back to the very beginning, with the promise of trying to explain how the two boys got to this twisted pass. But he doesn't. As Cullen eventually writes, “there had been no trigger” — at least none that would be satisfying to horrified outsiders, grieving parents or anyone in between. Eric Harris was a psychopath, simple as that. Dylan Klebold was a suicidally depressed kid who yoked his fate to a sadist. Instead, what intrigues the author are perceptions and misperceptions: how difficult a shooting spree is to untangle; how readily mass tragedies lend themselves to misinformation and mythologizing; how psychopaths can excel at the big con.

COLUMBINE By Dave Cullen 417 pp. Twelve. $26.99

The broad outlines of what happened at Columbine High School in Colorado one decade ago are well known. On April 20, 1999, just weeks from graduation, Harris and Klebold murdered one teacher and 12 of their peers, making this the most lethal high school massacre in the nation, and wounded two dozen. Then they holed up in the school library and turned their guns on themselves.

Yet what's amazing is how much of Cullen's book still comes as a surprise. I expected a story about misfits exacting vengeance, because that was my memory of the media consensus — Columbine, right, wasn't there something going on there between goths and jocks? In fact, Harris and Klebold were killing completely at random that day. Their victims weren't the intended targets at all; the entire school was. Columbine, it turns out, was a failed attempt at domestic terrorism. Shortly after 11:14 a.m., the two boys hauled a propane bomb into the cafeteria, programmed to go off at 11:17. It never did. Had the massacre gone as planned, it would most likely have killed more than 500 people, yielding far less readily to rumors about high school's tribal politics.

It's to his credit that Cullen, a Denver journalist who covered the story for Salon and Slate, makes the reader care about getting it right. “Columbine” is an excellent work of media criticism, showing how legends become truths through continual citation; a sensitive guide to the patterns of public grief, foreshadowing many of the same reactions to Sept. 11 (lawsuits, arguments about the memorial, voyeuristic bus tours); and, at the end of the day, a fine example of old-fashioned journalism. While Cullen's storytelling doesn't approach the novelistic beauty of “In Cold Blood” (an unfair standard, perhaps, but an unavoidable comparison for a murder story this detailed), he writes well enough, moving things along with agility and grace. He leaves us with some unforgettable images — like the pizza slices floating aimlessly about the school commons, which was flooded with three inches of water because the sprinkler system had gone off — and he has a knack for the thumbnail sketch. “He was a shrink turned hostage negotiator turned detective, with an abridged version of the complete works of Shakespeare in the back seat of his car,” Cullen writes of Dwayne Fuselier, an F.B.I. agent and one of the book's heroes. “He could be a little stoic. Hugging his sons felt awkward but he would reach out to embrace survivors when they needed it.”

Fuselier is one of the people Cullen spotlights in his retelling in order to clear up the historical record. Some of the confusion generated by Columbine was inevitable: Harris and Klebold started out wearing trench coats, for instance, but at some point removed them, giving the illusion that they were four people rather than two. The homemade pipe bombs they were tossing in all directions — down stairwells, onto the roof — only seemed to further the impression that there were more of them. And then there were the SWAT teams: students trapped inside the building would hear their rifle fire, assume it was the killers and report it to the media by cellphone, complicating the cops' efforts to keep them safe. “This was the first major hostage standoff of the cellphone age,” Cullen notes. The police “had never seen anything like it.”

But the most subtle distortions of the media echo chamber, it seems, did not concern logistics. They concerned motive. As early as two hours into the live coverage of Columbine, news stations began to report that something called the Trench Coat Mafia, a group of disgruntled goths, was possibly behind the attack. Many of the students, watching this coverage on classroom televisions while still trapped inside the building, began to repeat this information to reporters on the outside once they'd escaped. (And it made sense: the killers were wearing trench coats.) And so a loop began, reinforced by four eyewitnesses who said the gunmen were deliberately targeting their victims. One offered such a precise level of detail — the killers were taking aim at “anyone of color, wearing a white hat or playing a sport” — that it proved irresistible, both to students and to members of the media, who (Cullen speculates) were out of their element in this teenage universe, and therefore willing to repeat this rumor whether their “witnesses” had seen the gunmen or not. “Reporters,” the author points out, “would not make that mistake at a car wreck.”

Of course, tragedies often lend themselves to myths, so as to meet the needs of the day. For weeks after Sept. 11, the lovely legend persisted that the Rev. Mychal Judge, a New York Fire Department chaplain, died from falling debris when he took off his helmet to give last rites to a firefighter. As I wrote sometime later in New York magazine, that's not how he died. But people had a stake in that belief. And Columbine generated a similar tale of spiritual martyrdom. A boy who witnessed the murders in the school library told people afterward that a slain student, a fellow evangelical named Cassie Bernall, was asked by one of the killers if she believed in God. “Yes, I believe in God,” he said she replied. Two other witnesses, both sitting near Cassie, heard no such thing, and Cullen goes on to say that a 911 tape from that day “proved conclusively” that she hadn't uttered these words. It didn't matter. The story caught the imagination of the evangelical world, and Cassie's mother, Misty Bernall, wrote a book, “She Said Yes,” that has since sold more than one million copies.

“Columbine” is weakest when Cullen tries to channel the voice of Eric Harris. (“Five or six hundred dismemberments ought to be enough for one awesome afternoon of TV” is one such example.) As the author himself makes clear, Harris's mind isn't a particularly interesting place to inhabit — just sneering and young and unfathomably angry. But his nuanced dissection of the differences between Harris and Klebold is first-rate, leaving readers in the strange (and challenging) position of feeling pity, almost, for Klebold. Cullen walks us carefully through the definition of psychopathy, and how it differs from insanity, noting how perfectly Harris met the profile — particularly in his egomania, outsize contempt for humanity and talent for manipulation. (Just months before the attack, a teacher wrote on one of his essays, “I would trust you in a heartbeat.”) Whereas Klebold, for most of the book, seems forlorn, awkward and miserable. “The anger and the loathing,” Cullen explains, “traveled inward.”

In case you're wondering, we don't get the granular details of Harris and Klebold's last 48 hours until the end of the book, when we know so much more it's almost beside the point. Which isn't to say some of the testimony still isn't chilling. That Sunday, in a homemade videotape, Harris addressed his parents. “They could not have stopped him, Eric assured them,” Cullen writes. “He quoted Shakespeare: `Good wombs have borne bad sons.' ”

Jennifer Senior is a contributing editor at New York magazine.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Feb-26, by James Bowman:

Oops! I'll Do It Again. And Again. And Again...

Beginning next month, the College Board will allow high-school students who have taken the SATs multiple times to submit only their highest score to the colleges to which they are applying. Called "Score Choice," this policy brings the SAT into line with the ACT, the rival college-entrance examination, and it is supposedly designed to reduce the stress that this examination places on students worried about their futures.

Of course, Score Choice will also give what many would see as an unfair advantage to those who can afford the time and the money to take the test more than once -- and the more they can take it, the greater the advantage. For colleges, it must make the job of assessing their applicants' abilities more difficult and may thus contribute to the trend toward downgrading or eliminating standardized testing in college admissions.

But Score Choice is also a manifestation of the do-over mentality whose insidious creep into the larger culture has been made apparent over the past several months by the queue of failed businessmen and financiers who have come to Washington with their hands out, asking to be rescued from the consequences of their own poor answers to life's examination questions.

Friedrich Hayek once wrote, in "The Constitution of Liberty," that a free society depends on the willingness of its people to take responsibility for their actions. Not to do so is not merely to create what we have all lately learned to call "moral hazard," but to jeopardize the very foundation of our free institutions.

If we had to point to a cause of today's all-but-universal sentiment in favor of rewarding the improvident, we might want to look first to the self-esteem movement in education. Many of the financial hotshots now wielding begging bowls must have been schoolchildren in the 1980s, when this curious philosophy took hold of our educators.

Back then, in Maryland's Montgomery County, near Washington, the school district banned placing students in alphabetical order for fear that the self-esteem of those whose names began with the later letters of the alphabet would suffer.

In 1986, California was the first state to introduce self-esteem education as such. It was based on the assumption that constant praise for even the feeblest effort would encourage schoolchildren to do better. In fact, it simply removed the incentive for them to work hard. The de-emphasis on competition in school sports and the grade inflation that has become so unfortunate a feature of the academy since then have had similar effects.

Studies have shown that, while American students perform poorly compared with many foreigners of the same age, they are top of the charts when it comes to how well they think they have performed. Artificially pumping up their self-esteem produces only self-deception in the first instance and frustration and anger when -- or if -- the truth must be faced.

Maybe it is our instinctive recognition of this fact which has made "American Idol" the most popular show on television. There, people are forced to face unwelcome truths about their abilities -- most of them from the British judge, Simon Cowell, whose unconcern about treading on people's vanities makes him sound deliciously naughty in a world based on self-esteem. The loud resentment felt by many of those whose illusions have been punctured is another manifestation of this culture-wide sense of entitlement.

A friend of mine not long ago listened to her 8-year-old granddaughter play a piece on the piano and suggested to her that she needed to practice some more. The child burst into tears. "Grandma," she wailed. "You're not proud of me!"

We do children no favors by teaching them that they have a right to a favorable outcome in all that they do. It used to be the case that education was thought of not just as the acquisition of knowledge -- still less as the acquisition of credentials -- but as a form of character building. And one of the ways to build character is to submit students to the same sorts of stresses and failures that adult life does, in order to teach them how to cope with such things.

There are some signs that the worst may be over. Last summer, after the British Olympic team did better than expected in Beijing, the Labour prime minister, Gordon Brown, gave a speech saying that competition was a good thing after all.

But much of our popular culture is still wedded to the assumptions behind the self-esteem movement. On her most recent album, the popular chanteuse Joni Mitchell rewrote Rudyard Kipling's famous poem, "If . . . ," changing his words,

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds' worth of distance run . . .

to her own,

If you can fill the journey of a minute

With sixty seconds worth of wonder

and delight.

Of course, there are no more unforgiving minutes in the wonder and delight of Ms. Mitchell's imaginary land of endless do-overs -- which gives the lie to her subsequent promise: "Then the Earth is yours and everything that's in it, / But more than that I know you'll be all right."

No you won't. If you fail, sooner or later that failure will have to be recognized, confronted and put to rights. Not to do so in a timely fashion is only to spread the consequences of failure much more widely -- to the whole educational system in the case of the SATs and the ordinary taxpayer in the case of the bailouts. Both deserve better.

Mr. Bowman is a resident scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and the author of "Honor, A History" and "Media Madness," both published by Encounter Books.

from WebMD.com, 2007-Jul-18, by Steven Parker, MD:

"Developmental Delay" or "Mentally Retarded?"
Getting Off the Euphemism Treadmill

It was an all too common story in our School Achievement Clinic: 12-year-old Bertie was doing terribly in school and had just failed 6th grade. Her parents believed it was because she was "lazy" and because the school had lousy teachers.

On formal testing, Bertie's IQ was in the high 60s, meaning she had scored in the "mild mental retardation" range. So it was no mystery to us why school was so difficult for her.

But it was to her parents. "Mentally retarded!?" they exclaimed, incredulously and angrily. "We have known she was developmentally delayed since she was 3 years old, but no one ever said anything about mental retardation."

This is one example of a pediatric euphemism that was taken too far and used for too long, which then created misunderstandings, inappropriate expectations, and insufficient therapeutic services. Mea culpa.

I know why this happens so often. Nice guys and compassionate to a fault, we pediatric providers hate to give bad news and avoid it when we can. We want to keep hope alive (even if it isn't particularly justified) and, at the same time, avoid our own discomfort with not being able to cure a problem. We think we are doing the family a favor: doesn't "developmentally delayed" sound so much more hopeful, so much nicer, than "mentally retarded?"

One reason is that "developmental delay" implies that the child's developmental functioning may some day catch up to her peers. After all, a delayed train eventually reaches its destination. But after a certain point - different for every child - it becomes clear that she will not catch up, that her intelligence will always lag well behind her peers, that she is, in fact, retarded and will remain so, no matter what her educational program provides.

By avoiding straight talk, by sugarcoating what is really going on, we pediatricians don't allow parents to understand their child's true potential. How are they then to provide the best possible environment to meet the unnamed developmental challenges?

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A euphemism is "a word or expression intended to be less offensive and troubling to the listener." In some cases - such as pet words for a child's genitals or excretions - it's a way to avoid a word that is embarrassing to the speaker. I think this sort of thing is harmless and most families have funny pet names for their child's wee-wee and poop. No harm, no foul.

But other times, a euphemism is meant to lessen the emotional hurtfulness inherent to some terms. That's why we pediatricians have now been advised not call kids "obese" but "overweight" or "at-risk for overweight." That's another reason we prefer "developmentally delayed" to "mentally retarded."

Why? What's so bad about the word "obese?" Well, people have negative associations with "obesity," so it's felt that a kinder, gentler word will dispel that hurtful emotional baggage and perhaps even serve to change our attitudes towards obese kids. Thus is born "political correctness," wherein absurd word acrobatics are mandated, that we might soften our prejudices.

One slight problem: it doesn't work. The negative connotations of a word come not from the word itself, but from people's pre-existing prejudices. Changing the offending words is a stop-gap non-solution, because eventually the politically correct euphemism acquires the same negative baggage as the old word. This called the "euphemism treadmill" by Steven Pinker, the neuropsychologist. (A patient of mine was recently ridiculed by a bunch of kids on the playground who pointed and hollered, "Overweight! Overweight!" Do you think he now experiences the word "overweight" as kinder than "obese?").

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Nowhere has the euphemism treadmill been clearer - and more heartbreakingly ineffective - than the terms we use for people with developmental disabilities. In 1900, the terms "imbecile," "moron," and "idiot" were introduced to define a person's developmental level. These terms were seen as a great advance in their scientific precision. But, since our society doesn't take kindly to folks with disabilities whatever we call them, these terms - initially devoid of offense -- became insults and had to be dropped.

New terms came and went ("lame," "crippled," "handicapped," "disabled," "retarded") on the treadmill, until someone decided that even implying a problem was dehumanizing. Thus the term "differently-abled" was created. Aside from its absurdity and its insensitive trivialization of what is really a hard road to hoe on many levels, the politically correct crowd actually thinks such a term will improve our attitudes. Would that it were so easy to do so. I shudder to think what term will come next, after "differently-abled" becomes an unacceptable insult.

Another problem with euphemisms is that they amplify the undue negative power of the old, banished term. If "retarded" is now an unmentionable insult, it wounds even more when hurled at your child.

Finally, euphemisms are confusing for kids. So your dead doggie "went to sleep." That's so much less harsh than "died", right? But explain that to the five-year-old who then is afraid to fall asleep, lest she meet the same fate as Rover.

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Go ahead and use euphemisms all you want with your kids. But, remember, when the stakes are high, avoiding explaining to your child about hurtful words only furthers their power to hurt. In that case, it's OK to embrace simple, direct, unambiguous terms, to teach your vulnerable child that "sticks and stones may break my bones but names can never hurt me," and to teach all your kids that wounding others with bad words is unacceptable.

But don't count on clear, unambiguous words from pediatricians, because we are forever developmentally delayed at not always giving you the unvarnished truth. Excuse me, I'd like to write more, but I have to go perform a not entirely benign procedure on a consumer.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Apr-25:

Teach for (Some of) America
Too talented for public schools.

Here's a quiz: Which of the following rejected more than 30,000 of the nation's top college seniors this month and put hundreds more on a waitlist? a) Harvard Law School; b) Goldman Sachs; or c) Teach for America.

If you've spent time on university campuses lately, you probably know the answer. Teach for America -- the privately funded program that sends college grads into America's poorest school districts for two years -- received 35,000 applications this year, up 42% from 2008. More than 11% of Ivy League seniors applied, including 35% of African-American seniors at Harvard. Teach for America has been gaining applicants since it was founded in 1990, but its popularity has exploded this year amid a tight job market.

So poor urban and rural school districts must be rejoicing, right? Hardly. Union and bureaucratic opposition is so strong that Teach for America is allotted a mere 3,800 teaching slots nationwide, or a little more than one in 10 of this year's applicants. Districts place a cap on the number of Teach for America teachers they will accept, typically between 10% and 30% of new hires. In the Washington area, that number is about 25% to 30%, but in Chicago, former home of Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, it is an embarrassing 10%.

This is a tragic lost opportunity. Teach for America picks up the $20,000 tab for the recruitment and training of each teacher, which saves public money. More important, the program feeds high-energy, high-IQ talent into a teaching profession that desperately needs it. Unions claim the recent grads lack the proper experience and commitment to a teaching career. But the Urban Institute has studied the program and found that "TFA status more than offsets any experience effects. Disadvantaged secondary students would be better off with TFA teachers, especially in math and science, than with fully licensed in-field teachers with three or more years of experience."

It's true that only 10% of Teach for America applicants say they would have gone into education through another route, but two-thirds stay in the field after their two years. One program benefit is that its participants don't have to pass the dreadful "education" courses that have nothing to do with what they'll be teaching. Those courses are loved by unions as a credentialing barrier that makes it harder to get into teaching.

Some districts may be wising up. Mississippi's education superintendent has asked Teach for America to double the size of its 250-member corps in the poor Delta region and is encouraging local superintendents to raise hiring caps. Since Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans has also sharply increased the percentage of corps members among its new teachers, to 250.

But why have any caps? Teach for America young people should be able to compete on equal terms with any other new teaching applicant. The fact that they can't is another example of how unions and the education establishment put tenure and power above student achievement.

from City Journal, 2009-Winter, by Heather Mac Donald:

Recession-Proof Diversity
Harvard expands its futile quest for proportional faculty.

The college diversity racket is immune to economic downturns. Harvard University has announced its latest diversity dean for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Any rational budget analyst would mark this deanship for the ax, since it overlaps with the senior vice provost for faculty development and diversity—and with the cochairpersonships of the Standing Committee on Women. Yet it would appear that no financial meltdown, no matter how great, can shake academia’s manic and irrational pursuit of a creature as imaginary as a unicorn: an even remotely qualified faculty made up of proportional numbers of blacks, Hispanics, and women.

Back in 2005, then-president Larry Summers inflated Harvard’s already bloated diversity bureaucracy in penance for suggesting, in the spirit of open academic debate, that the distribution of high-end math skills in men and women could at least partly explain male dominance in the hard sciences. That recklessly truthful comment ultimately cost Summers his presidency, but not before he bootlessly tried to placate the diversity machine by creating a diversity sinecure—the senior vice provost for faculty development and diversity—and committing $50 million to a fanatical search for a racially and sexually proportional faculty.

Now, Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust and dean Michael D. Smith have appointed sociology and African-American studies professor Michele Lamont the Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ diversity dean. Lamont—an “expert on the dynamics of social exclusion in France and the United States,” the Harvard Crimson says—will also chair yet another new diversity committee. But please don’t confuse the diversity dean for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences with the senior vice provost for faculty development and diversity. They are not the same, though how they differ is a mystery beyond ordinary human ken. The diversity provost just published a report comparing the percentage of minority and female professors at Harvard and other universities; the new diversity dean will use this latest report to browbeat departments for their lack of diversity, which the diversity provost does as well.

Not daunted by the superfluity of her role, Lamont plans to “research what other universities are doing on the diversity front,” the Crimson reports, something that the senior vice provost for faculty development and diversity also does. The answer, no matter who’s asking, is simple. For the last 30 years, Harvard and its peers have pledged repeatedly to find the Holy Grail of perfect diversity. They have remained deliberately blind to the fact that the critical precondition to attaining diversity—a sufficient number of qualified minority Ph.D.s across the academy and of female Ph.D.s in the hard sciences—is not in place. They have desperately searched the horizon for a miraculous, undiscovered trove of qualified “diversity” candidates, and lowered hiring standards when they have failed to discover it. And, of course, they have obsessively produced comparative diversity studies for years, as if running the numbers would magically produce candidates who don’t exist.

If ever there were a time to reconsider this futile quest, now would be it. Harvard lost at least $8 billion from its endowment—or 22 percent—between the end of June and early December. The university has put a freeze on faculty salaries, searches, and promotions. In a November 10 letter to the Harvard community, President Faust called for “greater financial discipline” and said that “tradeoffs and hard choices” could no longer be put off. Well, getting rid of Harvard’s duplicative diversity apparatus wouldn’t even be a “hard choice.” When one is cutting budgets, the most obvious items to target are those that don’t accomplish anything. The diversity racket fits that description to a tee.

Lamont is already up to speed in the three essential qualifications of a diversity bureaucrat: pretending that the sinecure requires special expertise, repeating the same tired bromides that have been endlessly regurgitated for years, and ignoring reality. “I’m basically using my knowledge to advise [Dean Smith] and to educate the Faculty,” she told the Crimson. And in what arcane science will she be “educating” the faculty? In the agonizingly trite and wholly unjustified assertion that “diversity and excellence are not opposites—they’re additive.”

On the reality front, the fact that faculty searches and promotions have been frozen would seem to preclude “diversity” hires and promotions. Not to a diversity dean, however. Lamont says that she sees “opportunity” in the financial crisis. Departments will be able to focus more on diversity issues, Lamont said, according to the Crimson. Believing that departments can make diversity hires during a hiring freeze is no more irrational than believing that a department can achieve racial proportionality when the number of black and Hispanic Ph.D.s in substantive fields barely registers.

Lamont’s expertise in the “dynamics of social exclusion” will no doubt sharpen her eyes to the exceedingly subtle ways that Harvard excludes blacks and minorities. Someone without the special insights of a diversity dean might find such a claim of exclusion inconsistent with Harvard’s having poured millions of dollars into finding and promoting minorities and women. Too bad Harvard can’t direct just as much energy to scoping out waste. Somewhere within that massive university, vital scholarship and scientific research takes place. While such research may be jeopardized by the current financial crisis, it’s all the more at risk from Harvard’s foolish conformity to diversity nonsense.

Heather Mac Donald is a contributing editor of City Journal and the John M. Olin Fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Her article is adapted from her William E. Simon Lecture on Philanthropy and Social Entrepreneurship, supported by the William E. Simon Foundation.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Feb-27, p.W11, by Bari Weiss:

On the Barricades -- and Loving It

On the evening of Feb. 19, 24 hours after some 70 students forcibly occupied a cafeteria inside New York University's Kimmel Student Center, a kaffiyeh-draped crowd gathered at Washington Square Park to show its solidarity. There were all the telltale signs of elite student struggle: homemade banners about democracy; radical 'zines about the prison-industrial complex tucked into jacket pockets; cigarettes and coffee; a letter of support from Noam Chomsky; and the requisite Palestinian flag. NYU's "feminist ninjas" came out in the afternoon to show their support by going topless. (Better than to let the mild February weather go to waste.)

This "sleepover for student empowerment" and "party for participation" led by a group called Take Back NYU! was the latest in a series of student occupations on campuses across the Northeast and in Britain. The raison d'être shared by protesting students at Cambridge University, the London School of Economics and elsewhere: Israel's recent military campaign in the Gaza Strip. The irony of occupying in order to protest an occupation seems to escape them.

Joining the occupation at NYU were students from the nearby New School. Back in December, "in explicit solidarity with those occupying the universities and streets in Greece," they had taken over some of their own institution's buildings as part of a continuing attempt to oust New School President Bob Kerrey and restore "scholarship free of oppressive political regimes." Also among the NYU crowd were students who had shlepped from the University of Rochester, where, earlier this month, they occupied buildings on that upstate New York campus to demonstrate solidarity with Gaza. At Rochester, nine hours of occupation by Students for a Democratic Society led the university administration to capitulate to their demands. The university will now send school supplies and humanitarian aid to Gaza, and will host a forum to disclose any university investments in Israel.

Rochester protester Jake Allen, 18, thrilled about the SDS's victory, rushed to the Village because he "felt it a duty to come down" to show his solidarity. "We're in the belly of the beast," he told me excitedly on Feb 19. Ryan Acuff, 26, a graduate student in psychology at Rochester, said that the wave of student occupations made him feel empowered: "We're sort of re-emerging and finding our feet after Bush." He predicted that the NYU administration would cave in like Rochester's.

Three floors up in the Kimmel Center, NYU freshmen Emily Stainkamp felt similarly euphoric. "There's nothing more inspiring than taking action," Take Back NYU!'s spokeswoman told me. This "awesome" show of students' power, she added, was "beautiful. It inspires me. It makes me so happy and hopeful."

Ms. Stainkamp said that she and her colleagues, armed with MacBooks and vegan treats, were settling in for the long haul. Early on during the occupation, the administration offered to negotiate with the students if they agreed to leave the cafeteria. The students laughed off this offer. "We think it's ridiculous," said Ms. Stainkamp. "We have secured this space and we're not going to leave until our demands are met."

Take Back NYU!'s grab bag of no fewer than 13 demands reveals the obsessions of today's campus leftists: the establishment of a student-elected, socially responsible investment committee (first order of business: "an in depth investigation of all investments in war and genocide profiteers, as well as companies profiting from the occupation of the Palestinian territories"); donations to the Islamic University of Gaza; a tuition freeze; and, for good measure, public access to the university library.

When I asked Ms. Stainkamp what Gaza and student tuition have in common, she assured me that "they're about student empowerment." Mr. Acuff, her comrade from Rochester, concurred: "What ties them together is democratizing the university."

But assuming the administration wouldn't meet all 13 demands, what was their top priority? Ms. Stainkamp answered my question quickly: "Our foremost demand is full amnesty for everyone involved." Indeed, on a detailed list posted on their Web site, atop all else was the students' demand for "full legal and disciplinary amnesty for all parties involved in the occupation."

In other words, for all of their talk about war profiteering and oppression, about human-rights abuses in Gaza, this stunt was really about one thing: the students themselves.

By last Friday morning, the 18 students still barricaded in the cafeteria were approached by university administrators and NYU public-safety officers. No demands would be met, and the students would face suspension. The singular theme of the interaction, captured on video by a student negotiator, is not the protesters' passion for any cause, but their desire for martyrdom -- in the face of no real threat.

The video shows students screaming "Do not use brutality!" at unarmed NYU officers walking calmly on the other side of the room. One student shouts "f- snake" and "dirty scumbag" at a patient NYU administrator who actually agreed to grant the occupiers time to "democratically decide in a consensus area" whether to cooperate with him. They accuse NYU of "using force" and ask an officer to cover her ears while they discuss "the hierarchy here, the power relationship here."

The students, now suspended, have already branded themselves the Kimmel 18, no doubt because they see themselves as inheritors of a tradition of civil disobedience that includes the Freedom Riders of the 1960s. I don't recall those activists having meal plans.

Meantime, Take Back NYU! is onto the next phase of its battle for democracy. This week, it's held press conferences about its members' suspensions, solicited legal advice, and asked supporters to organize keg parties and dance-offs on their behalf. Keep the whole world watching, by any means necessary.

Ms. Weiss is an assistant editorial features editor at the Journal.

from TCSDaily, 2009-Feb-12, by Tim Hammond:

Scientific Stagnation

Today is the 200th Anniversary of Darwin's birth, and this year marks the 150th Anniversary of the Publication of On the Origin of Species. But what should be a celebration of scientific discovery is spoiled by a simple and shocking truth -- science and medicine today are at a dead-end.

To illustrate the problem, look back what we thought were the most important challenges, say, thirty years ago:

• A vaccination for malaria
• Discovering the causes of heart disease and cancer
• Curing genetic conditions
• A workable theory of quantum gravity
• New sources of energy, in particular nuclear fusion

We have made little or no progress in any of these areas, or the dozens of others we could list alongside them. And while we have made amazing progress in the last 100 years, it has been a long time since we achieved anything of real note.

Take medicine, for example. Smoking was identified as a major risk factor in lung cancer in 1950, the polio vaccine was first developed in 1955, the first kidney transplant was in 1963, a cure for most childhood cancers was discovered in 1971, and the first test-tube baby was born in 1978. Since then: pretty much nothing. Despite thousands of research papers and billions of dollars we still have only a limited understanding of the causes of cancer and heart disease and are years away from a vaccination for malaria. The extraordinary promise of Watson and Crick has led to only confusion and dispute.

But perhaps the biggest failure -- because it is where the brightest minds are supposed to reside -- is in physics. For many years, physicists have tried to unify quantum theory and relativity, to unite our theories of the very big, and the very small. For a while it seemed that string theory, or at least one its many variations, would be the answer. But this now looks like a dead-end, even though string theorists continue to make confident noises. Add to this the problem that our current theories of the universe require most of the Universe to be composed of unseen dark matter and dark energy, and we are clearly no further forward then we were in the 1970s.

Furthermore, those we entrusted to make progress are unwilling to admit that there is a problem. Unacknowledged failure has led to a culture of "spin" and, in some cases, outright deceit. A typical example is the ludicrous insistence of cancer specialists that a quarter of cancer cases are caused by lifestyle factors. This claim is made despite a complete lack of evidence, and the contrary, obvious and undisputed fact that most cancers are a consequence of aging.

And as the failures continue, to give the illusion of progress we have turned to solutions that don't work for problems that do not exist. Billions will be spent on reducing CO2 emissions that would reduce temperatures by only tenths of a degree -- even if global warming is real. Hundreds of millions have been spent on anti-obesity programs in schools when there is no evidence that childhood obesity causes health problems in later life, and plenty of evidence that the programs do not work.

But why is this? Have we simply reached our intellectual zenith? Perhaps we are just not intelligent enough to reconcile quantum mechanics and Einstein's theories, or to discover a vaccine for malaria. Or perhaps it is an emotional and social problem. As Thomas Huxley said:

"Science ... warns me to be careful how I adopt a view which jumps with my preconceptions, and to require stronger evidence for such belief than for one to which I was previously hostile."

Is it that we cannot overcome our preconceptions and aspirations because today's problems are so complex? I do not believe so.

A few years ago I was an investment banker in New York. Each year we spent a full day interviewing graduates. It was a depressing experience; not because the candidates were dull, or unpleasant, but because all of them were absolutely and determinedly identical. Their C.V.s were all the same, their answers were all the same, and they claimed to have the same motivations and ambitions. My background was from a British bank, where a degree in History or Philosophy (rather than Business) was welcomed, and where intellectual (rather than racial or religious) diversity was actively sought. By contrast, the U.S. bankers actively sought Groupthink.

This has become the norm in Medicine, Physics, and many other branches of science. Independence of thought, the value of different and varied experiences, the willingness to experiment and learn from experimentation -- all the traits that are absolutely vital for scientific advancement -- have been devalued and disavowed. Try getting a good job if you're an excellent scientist, but believe string theory is wrong, or that global warming not man-made. Try getting a good job if you'e a fine doctor, but believe that the obesity crisis is overblown, or that cancer is not simply a matter of lifestyle. The consequence is total stagnation.

Darwin and Einstein were unemployable even in their own time, but it was possible to publish truly amazing discoveries and ideas despite not having the backing of the United Nations, or a Vice President. Unless the once-great institutions of science and medicine recognise that there is a problem, then there is little chance of improvement. Perhaps the philanthropists of our time could endow a chair or two specifically for those who are not part of any consensus. And the journals must regain their boldness, start challenging the Establishment, and promote new ideas and real debate.

Ironically in this year of Darwin, to save science we need revolution, not evolution.

from CNN, 2008-Dec-19, by Elizabeth Landau:

Charting the psychology of evil, decades after 'shock' experiment

If someone told you to press a button to deliver a 450-volt electrical shock to an innocent person in the next room, would you do it?

Common sense may say no, but decades of research suggests otherwise.

In the early 1960s, a young psychologist at Yale began what became one of the most widely recognized experiments in his field. In the first series, he found that about two-thirds of subjects were willing to inflict what they believed were increasingly painful shocks on an innocent person when the experimenter told them to do so, even when the victim screamed and pleaded.

The legacy of Stanley Milgram, who died 24 years ago on December 20, reaches far beyond that initial round of experiments. Researchers have been working on the questions he posed for decades, and have not settled on a brighter vision of human obedience.

A new study to be published in the January issue of American Psychologist confirmed these results in an experiment that mimics many of Milgram's original conditions. This and other studies have corroborated the startling conclusion that the majority of people, when placed in certain kinds of situations, will follow orders, even if those orders entail harming another person.

"It's situations that make ordinary people into evil monsters, and it's situations that make ordinary people into heroes," said Philip Zimbardo, professor emeritus of psychology at Stanford University and author of "The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil."

How Milgram's experiments worked

Milgram, who also came up with the theory behind "six degrees of separation" -- the idea that everyone is connected to everyone else through a small number of acquaintances -- set out to figure out why people would turn against their own neighbors in circumstances such as Nazi-occupied Europe. Referring to Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann, Milgram wrote in 1974, "Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?"

His experiment in its standard form included a fake shock machine, a "teacher," a "learner" and an experimenter in a laboratory setting. The participant was told that he or she had to teach the student to memorize a pair of words, and the punishment for a wrong answer was a shock from the machine.

The teacher sat in front of the shock machine, which had 30 levers, each corresponding to an additional 15 volts. With each mistake the student made, the teacher had to pull the next lever to deliver a more painful punishment.

While the machine didn't generate shocks and a recorded voice track simulated painful reactions, the teacher was led to believe that he or she was shocking a student, who screamed and asked to leave at higher voltages, and eventually fell silent.

If the teacher questioned continuing as instructed, the experimenter simply said, "The experiment requires that you go on," said Thomas Blass, author of the biography "The Man Who Shocked The World: The Life and Legacy of Stanley Milgram" and the Web site StanleyMilgram.com.

About 65 percent of participants pulled levers corresponding to the maximum voltage -- 450 volts -- in spite of the screams of agony from the learner.

"What the experiment shows is that the person whose authority I consider to be legitimate, that he has a right to tell me what to do and therefore I have obligation to follow his orders, that person could make me, make most people, act contrary to their conscience," Blass said.

An update

Because of revised ethical standards for human subject research, this kind of experiment cannot be replicated exactly. But Jerry Burger, professor of psychology at Santa Clara University in Santa Clara, California, made some tweaks to see if Milgram's results hold up today.

His study's design imitated Milgram's, even using the same scripts for the experimenter and suffering learner, but the key difference was that this experiment stopped at 150 volts -- when the learner starts asking to leave. In Milgram's experiment, 79 percent of participants who got to that point went all the way to the maximum shock, he said.

To eliminate bias from the fame of Milgram's experiment, Burger ruled out anyone who had taken two or more college-level psychology classes, and anyone who expressed familiarity with it in the debriefing. The "teachers" in this recent experiment, conducted in 2006, also received several reminders that they could quit whenever they wanted, unlike in Milgram's study.

The new results correlate well with Milgram's: 70 percent of the 40 participants were willing to continue after 150 volts, compared with 82.5 percent in Milgram's study -- a difference that is not statistically significant, Burger said.

Still, some psychologists quoted in the same issue of American Psychologist questioned how comparable this study is to Milgram's, given the differences in methods.

The idea of blind obedience isn't as important in these studies as the larger message about the power of the situation, Burger said. It's also significant that the participant begins with small voltages that increase in small doses over time.

"It's that gradual incremental nature that, as we know, is a very powerful way to change attitudes and behaviors," he said.

Stanford Prison Experiment

This idea of circumstances driving immoral behavior also came out in the Stanford Prison Experiment, a study done in 1971 that is the subject of a film in preproduction, written and directed by Christopher McQuarrie. Work on the film will resume in 2009 after McQuarrie's "Valkyrie" is released, his spokesperson said.

In this study, designed by Stanford's Zimbardo, two dozen male college students were randomly designated as either prison guards or prisoners, and lived in the basement of the university's psychology building playing these roles in their respective uniforms.

Within three days, participants had extreme stress reactions, Zimbardo said. The guards became abusive to the prisoners -- sexually taunting them, asking them to strip naked and demanding that they clean toilet bowls with their bare hands, Zimbardo said. Five prisoners had to be released before the study was over.

Zimbardo's own role illustrated his point: Because he took on the role of prison administrator, he became so engrossed in the jail system that he didn't stop the experiment as soon as this cruelty began, he said.

"If I were simply the principal experimenter, I would have ended it after the second kid broke down," he said. "We all did bad things in this study, including me, but it's diagnostic of the power situation."

Turning the principle around

But while ordinary people have the potential to do evil, they also have the power to do good. That's the subject of the Everyday Heroism project, a collection of social scientists, including Zimbardo, seeking to understand heroic activity -- an area in which almost no research has been done, he said.

Acts such as learning first aid, leading others to the exit in an emergency and encouraging family members to recycle [oh puhleeeeeez... -AMPP Ed.] are some heroic behaviors that Zimbardo seeks to encourage.

"Most heroes are everyday people who do a heroic deed once in their lifetime because they have to be in a situation of evil or danger," he said.

from CNN.com, 2009-Jan-15, by Elizabeth Landau:

Why so many minds think alike

You're in a room with 10 other people who seem to agree on something, but you hold the opposite view. Do you say something? Or do you just go along with the others?

Decades of research show people tend to go along with the majority view, even if that view is objectively incorrect. Now, scientists are supporting those theories with brain images.

A new study in the journal Neuron shows when people hold an opinion differing from others in a group, their brains produce an error signal. A zone of the brain popularly called the "oops area" becomes extra active, while the "reward area" slows down, making us think we are too different.

"We show that a deviation from the group opinion is regarded by the brain as a punishment," said Vasily Klucharev, postdoctoral fellow at the F.C. Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands and lead author of the study.

Participants, all female, had to rate 222 faces based on physical beauty on a scale from 1 to 8. Afterwards, researchers told each participant either that the average score was higher or that it was lower than her rating. Some participants were told the average rating was equal to her rating. The researchers then chatted with the participant before suddenly asking the participant to do the rating again. Most subjects changed their opinion toward the average.

The two leading theories of conformity are that people look to the group because they're unsure of what to do, and that people go along with the norm because they are afraid of being different, said Dr. Gregory Berns, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia.

Berns' research, which he describes in the book "Iconoclast: A Neuroscientist Reveals How to Think Differently," found that brain mechanisms associated with fear and anxiety do play a part in situations where a person feels his or her opinion goes against the grain.

Participants looked at projections of three-dimensional objects, and had to identify which shapes were similar. As with the new study in Neuron, participants tended to shift their opinion to the majority view, although in this case the problems had objectively correct answers. The effect was also more potent in this experiment because actors were in the room to simulate a group with a shared opinion, he said.

But brain images revealed participants were not lying just to fit in. Changes in the activation of the visual part of the brain suggest the group opinion actually changed participants' perceptions of what they saw.

One reason behind conformity is that, in terms of human evolution, going against the group is not beneficial to survival, Berns said. There is a tremendous survival advantage to being in a community, he said.

"Our brains are exquisitely tuned to what other people think about us, aligning our judgments to fit in with the group," Berns said.

The most famous experiments in the field were conducted by Solomon Asch in the 1950s. He found that many people gave incorrect answers about matching lines printed on cards, echoing the incorrect answers of the actors in the room.

But unlike Berns' finding that fear and anxiety relate to this effect, Asch saw conformity studies reflections of people's reliance on one another for knowledge of the world, experts say.

The darker side of conformity relates to Stanley Milgram's experiments of the 1960s and 1970s, in which most people obeyed orders to deliver electric shocks to an innocent person in the next room. As in these studies, subjects caved into social pressure, presumably going against their own previous moral convictions.

The research calls into question decision-making bodies that operate by consensus, Berns said. For example, in the U.S. legal system, many cases are decided by the unanimous judgment of the members of a jury.

"You can't separate those judgments from the fact that you have 12 people who have to come to a unanimous decision, and have to conform their opinion to each other, so of course it will distort how they view evidence," he said.

"Any type of group decision-making process that does not require unanimous decisions is likely to make a better one," Berns said. "That applies to committees in particular."

What does it take to break the conformity effect?

Asch talked about the power of the "minority of one." When a unanimous group pressures the individual, that group is weakened as soon as one person breaks off.

"Anyone inclined to draw too pessimistic conclusions from this report would do well to remind himself that the capacities for independence are not to be underestimated," Asch wrote in a 1955 "Scientific American" article describing his research. "He may also draw some consolation from a further observation: Those who participated in this challenging experiment agreed nearly without exception that independence was preferable to conformity."

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Feb-25:

Obama's School Choice
Democrats want to kill vouchers for 1,700 poor kids.

President Obama made education a big part of his speech Tuesday night, complete with a stirring call for reform. So we'll be curious to see how he handles the dismaying attempt by Democrats in Congress to crush education choice for 1,700 poor kids in the District of Columbia.

The omnibus spending bill now moving through the House includes language designed to kill the Opportunity Scholarship Program offering vouchers for poor students to opt out of rotten public schools. The legislation says no federal funds can be used on the program beyond 2010 unless Congress and the D.C. City Council reauthorize it. Given that Democrats control both bodies -- and that their union backers hate school choice -- this amounts to a death sentence.

Republicans passed the program in 2004, with help from Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein, and it has been extremely popular. Families receive up to $7,500 a year to attend the school of their choice. That's a real bargain, given that D.C. public schools spend $14,400 per pupil on average, among the most in the country.

To qualify, a student's household income must be at or below 185% of the poverty level. Some 99% of the participants are minority, and the average annual income is $23,000 for a family of four. A 2008 Department of Education evaluation found that participants had higher reading scores than their peers who didn't receive a scholarship, and there are four applicants for each voucher.

Vouchers also currently exist in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Louisiana, Utah and Wisconsin. And school choice continues to proliferate elsewhere in the form of tax credits and charter schools. The District's is the only federally funded initiative, however, and local officials from former Mayor Anthony Williams to current Mayor Adrian Fenty and Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee support its continuation. As Ms. Rhee put it in a December 2007 interview with the Journal, "I would never, as long as I am in this role, do anything to limit another parent's ability to make a choice for their child. Ever."

Ms. Rhee is working to reform all D.C. public schools, which in 2007 ranked last in math and second-to-last in reading among all U.S. urban school systems on the federal National Assessment of Educational Progress. Without the vouchers, more than 80% of the 1,700 kids would have to attend public schools that haven't made "adequate yearly progress" under No Child Left Behind. Remember all of those Members of Congress standing and applauding on Tuesday as Mr. Obama called for every American child to get some education beyond high school? These are the same Members who protect and defend a D.C. system in which about half of all students fail even to graduate from high school.

On Tuesday, Mr. Obama spoke of the "historic investment in education" in the stimulus bill, which included a staggering, few-strings-attached $140 billion to the Department of Education over two years. But he also noted that "our schools don't just need more resources; they need more reform," and he expressed support for charter schools and other policies that "open doors of opportunity for our children."

If he means what he says, Mr. Obama won't let his fellow Democrats consign 1,700 more poor kids to failing schools he'd never dream of letting his own daughters attend.

from USA Today, 2008-Dec-16, by Mike Snider:

'Santa Goes Green' grants Christmas wish with a cause

A children's book author hopes that her new Christmas story will help kids realize that they can have an impact on global warming.

Santa Goes Green (Mackinac Island Press, $15.95) is the story of a boy, Finn, who writes Santa and asks him to help raise awareness about global warming. Finn is interested in the environmental issue because he has adopted a polar bear, and polar bears are losing habitat to global warming. [See here for a full treatment of the environmentalist movement. -AMPP Ed.]

Finn tells Santa he does not need any toys for Christmas, but instead he wants the jolly old elf's help. "Santa can do anything in (Finn's) mind," says author and publisher Anne Margaret Lewis.

The book has sold about 13,000 copies since the small Traverse City, Mich., children's books publisher put a previewable version of the entire book online last month (at mackinacislandpress.com). Now in its second printing, it's a runaway hit.

Success has come without the embrace of mass-market booksellers, although Borders Books bought some for its Great Lakes area stores. Librarians across the country are ordering Santa and other books, too, says associate publisher Brian Lewis. "It's really word-of-mouth people buying copies," he says. "It's this organic growth that we love."

One convert, ExtraordinaryMommy.com blogger Danielle Smith, bought Santa and other titles after looking at them online. She began touting the books. "People get to see every single page and every single detail," she says.

Santa Goes Green's "artistry is so rich, and the story is so sweet and well-told," Smith says. "I think that it resonates this time of year. And green is something we try to do in little bits and pieces, and when you have it in front of you, it's tangible on a child's level."

The project is a Lewis family affair. Anne, who has written 10 children's books, has been married to Brian for 22 years. And their son, Cameron, who is 6, gave Anne the idea for the book.

The Lewises married several years after they met in northern Michigan while windsurfing. She worked part time, then full time at Sleeping Bear Press, another small publishing firm that Brian started and sold six years ago. Before that, he also sold Lewis Publishers, an environmental publishing company started with his father in 1984. Then in 2004, Anne started Mackinac Island Press.

Theirs is not the only new, green Santa book. Another is When Santa Turned Green (Thomas Nelson Publishers; $15.99), but what makes the Lewises' book different is that you can see the whole book online before committing to buy it. "This mechanism has opened the door," says Brian Lewis. "We don't have to rely entirely on someone in New York City" to decide the fate of their product.

Early last summer, Anne and Cameron were reading a National Geographic article about how global warming has melted glaciers, which in turn reduced places for bears to live and hunt. "He asked how we could help the polar bears, so we started going around the house every time we left a room and shut the lights off. Then we would say, 'We just saved another polar bear,' " she says. "I was trying to convince him that you can make a difference, and it worked."

That got Lewis to wondering whether she could write a book that would pass along the feeling. "I wanted it to be about polar bears because of how it came to be," she says. "And then I thought, who would a child think is the most powerful person who could help him do that? Santa. The story just started evolving."

Such a story of self-sacrifice fit into her writing style. "I tend to hide messages in books because I want (children) to learn through characters and the actions of characters that they can have fun or be a loyal friend," Lewis says. "But they are not preachy. … My message is that kids can make a difference."

Glad tidings continue to come in for Santa Goes Green. Possibly under Christmas trees next year: Gund plush toys of Finn and Leopold, the polar bear.

And a movie could be in the works. "When I saw the illustrations and saw the story, I just thought it could really be a good children's story," says Penny Milliken, one of two former Disney executives whose new edutainment firm, SeaStars Partnership, secured the rights. "The script will be longer, but everything is there. There is something about it. The time is right for it."

from the Lone Star Times, 2008-Dec-17:

Not Your Fathers Christmas Play

The following letter is circulating among conservatives in my county. I received permission from the author to post it here on LST.

Last night, December 15, I attended the [local Elementary School's Christmas Production].

The children were well rehearsed, and the principle characters read their parts remarkably well. The closing numbers choreography was cute. The singing was outstanding.

In my opinion, it was the worst show I have ever seen in my half century of living!

I was not prepared when I was tricked into sitting through a half hour long political statement on Global Warming. I was not appreciative that my grand-daughter is being taught this unproven theory of mankind destroying the Earth, and that even Santa must do something to prevent its self-destruction.

The program Santa Goes Green began with a lively number Merry, Merry Christmas. The children's chorus sang Christmas wishes to the audience as Santa and Mrs. Claus appeared on stage. The show went downhill from there; Mrs. Claus informed Santa how terribly wasteful many traditions are, including how even Rudolf changed his nose to an LED light, all the while forgetting that the original was lit by an inner light of love that did not use power at all.

The soloists, during The Greenhouse Effect, preformed admirably. The argument that cutting down trees would make the North Pole as hot as Mexico was laughable. When lumber companies Clear Cut they also replant, which is why trees are considered a renewable resource.

Next, Santa was encouraged to use an Electric Sleigh for his Christmas Eve Deliveries in the tune called Turn Off the Pump(and Plug in the Sleigh). If the writer of this piece of political propaganda had thought it through, they would realize that Santa already uses the most ecological source of power; hay burning reindeer whose exhaust can be used as compost.

“Power to the People”, reminded me of the Anti-American chants and diatribe of my teenage years in the late 1960's and early 1970's. As Americans, we are already making the choice to use or not to use alternative power. With the determining factor often being cost and efficiency, fossil fuels are most often chosen by the people.

One number that caused me to chuckle a bit was Recycle the Fruitcake. It is a common joke that no one ever really eats fruitcake, that there is only one that is being continually re-gifted. The nagging refrain of Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle' irritated me. Most residents of our agricultural based, local economy were taught by their parents to be good stewards of their resources. Examples of this are seen by the recycling bins at WalMart for bags and bottles and the aluminum can recycling by the local Habitat for Humanity chapter. The farmers, ranchers, and gardeners did not need to be reminded that “It's Our World and We're Going Green”.

I fled the auditorium as soon as possible. I was angry and offended. I would have left in the middle of the show, except I was sitting in the middle of the row and I did not want to hurt my grand-daughter's feelings by walking out in the middle of her big night. The premise of the show was awful. It drained the joy of Christmas from my very soul.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2008-Dec-5, by Eric Gibson:

Pleading Poverty: Colleges Want Parents to Foot the Bill for Their Largess

We can now add colleges and universities to the list of victims of the financial crisis. The stock-market collapse has badly eroded endowments, forcing schools to suspend capital projects, freeze hiring, rethink need-blind financial-aid policies and cut budgets. The Journal reported this week that Harvard University's giant-killer endowment, which stood at $36.9 billion as of June 30, has lost 22% of its value in the months since and that the university's administration is planning for a 30% decline for the fiscal year ending next June.

In a letter to the Harvard community two days ago, President Drew Gilpin Faust announced that the school is "reconsidering the scale and pace of planned capital projects, including the University's development in Allston, and . . . taking a hard look at hiring, staffing levels and compensation." Many private colleges and universities are doing the same thing. In response to falling endowments, some have considered suing their brokers for putting funds into risky investments, while others are trying to get a slice of any future congressional stimulus package. Can clamor for a bailout be far behind?

Incredibly, one or two schools have even contemplated making up their shortfalls the old-fashioned way -- by increasing tuition. If you'll pardon the pun, that's rich.

The soup-to-nuts cost (tuition, room and board, extras) of one year at a private college is already in the region of $50,000, bringing the cost of a bachelor's degree to close to a quarter of a million dollars. As one wag has observed, that's like buying a new BMW every year and driving it off a cliff.

Moreover, tuition increases have consistently outpaced inflation. Since 1992, inflation has averaged between 2.5% and 3% a year; annual tuition increases have often been as high as 6%. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, the reason that tuition increases at private four-year institutions kept pace with inflation this year is not that these schools suddenly curbed their free-spending ways but that inflation itself jumped dramatically. The average tuition increase was 5.9%, while the Consumer Price Index rose 5.6% in the 12 months from July 2007.

In spite of this, universities are still crying poor. Surely beleaguered college presidents are already tapping their in-house experts in the economics departments to tell them how to live within their means. No? Then allow me to help. Having spent the fall visiting several colleges with a son who is applying for next year, I've been getting a tutorial in college costs. And what an education it has been.

Let's start with presidential salaries. In its latest survey, published last month, the Chronicle reports that compensation for private university presidents rose on average 6% in the past year, a figure that represents 50% more than the standard annual merit increase for private-sector employees. The total compensation (salary plus benefits) of three private university presidents for 2007, the most recent year for which data are available, was in the stratosphere: Columbia University's Lee C. Bollinger earned $1,411,894 and Northwestern University's Henry S. Bienen, $1,742,560; Suffolk University in Massachusetts paid David J. Sargent $2,800,461.

Then there's the cost of college life itself. I've been wide-eyed on some of my visits, struck by the extent to which being a student today resembles living at Versailles, where Louis XIV's every whim was so thoroughly accommodated that there was even a Superintendent of the King's Furniture. One college tour guide proudly informed us that upon arrival every freshman is issued a brand-new laptop. Even if the students already have one? Why, yes, the guide replied.

Then there's the food. I can't say we were deprived when I was an undergraduate 35 years ago. (For a time steak was served every Saturday night.) But compared with today's students we were like inmates of a gulag, having to survive on a single daily bowl of gruel. Nowadays, every taste and eating disorder is catered to -- Japanese, Mexican, vegan -- and, in many cases, 24/7.

Indeed "24/7" could be the motto of undergraduate life. Facilities like libraries and gyms are open around the clock. Computer services are available at all hours, too. One college we visited must keep its tech support team doped up on amphetamines. Accidentally dump a cup of coffee into your laptop? No problem! They'll have it back to you in full working order in a day -- something no private-sector IT department could afford to offer.

On every tour we took, guides proudly boasted about the wide selection of clubs at their respective institutions -- a number that almost everywhere runs into the hundreds. And they reassured us that if, after surveying these abundant offerings, a student finds some lack, he can start his own organization and the college will subsidize it -- no questions asked.

Of course, it isn't really the college subsidizing it. It's us, the parents. Until I started these tours, I used to assume that college kids tilted left politically because they were young and impressionable. Maybe, but it's also because they get introduced to the welfare state at a tender age and become addicted. The government (college) offers cradle-to-grave (matriculation-to-graduation) care and feeding, levying higher taxes (tuition) on the populace (parents) whenever the spirit moves them -- which is every year. Not even the actual government is that brazen.

Indeed, private higher education has it better than an actual welfare state. Politicians are answerable to the electorate. In theory their efforts to take a larger slice of your paycheck can be thwarted at the polls. Not private higher education. There's nothing to put a brake on their fiscal expansiveness. Colleges have something close to a monopoly; they can charge what they like because they have a captive audience. As Robert J. Massa, vice president for enrollment and student life at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, told the New York Times earlier this month in an article on colleges' current financial strain: "What we've done in higher education is let our dreams and aspirations dictate our cost structure."

The silver lining here is that, coupled with the hot breath of recent congressional scrutiny in the form of Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley's demands that universities cease hoarding their endowments, the hardships imposed by the financial crisis are forcing private higher education to reconsider business as usual. Applications to Binghamton University, part of New York's state university system, were up 50% this fall. A similar loss of market share by private colleges is no doubt taking place in other states. Could it be that, as families struggle with the new economic climate and reduced financial aid, some of these colleges will find themselves having to choose between cutting back to realistic levels -- trimming the presidents' paychecks and the students' imperial lifestyle and limiting tuition increases to only the rate of inflation, for example -- or being priced out of the market? One certainly hopes so.

"Several years ago, we started thinking about sustainability in environmental terms," Colorado College President Dick Celeste told the Times. "Now we need to be thinking about sustainability in economic terms."

Go to the head of the class.

Mr. Gibson is the Journal's Leisure & Arts features editor.

from Fox News, 2008-Dec-16:

Student Says School Persecuted Him for Being Conservative

A former student at the Rhode Island College School of Social Work is suing the school and several of his professors for discrimination, saying he was persecuted by the school's "liberal political machine" for being a conservative.

William Felkner, 45, says the New England college and six professors wouldn't approve his final project on welfare reform because he was on the "wrong" side of political issues and countered the school's "progressive" liberal agenda.

Felkner said his problems with his professors began in his first semester, in the fall of 2004, when he objected in an e-mail to one of his professors that the school was showing and promoting Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" on campus. He said he objected because no opposing point of view was presented.

He said Professor James Ryczek wrote to him on Oct. 15, 2004, saying he was proud of his bias and questioning Felkner's ability to "fit with the profession."

"I think the biases and predilections I hold toward how I see the world and how it should be are why I am a social worker. In the words of a colleague, I revel in my biases," he wrote.

Felkner's complaint, filed two years ago, alleges that Ryczek discriminated against him for his conservative viewpoint and gave him bad grades because of it in several classes. It also alleges discrimination by other professors and administrators.

Felkner said he received failing grades in Ryczek's class for holding viewpoints opposed to the progressive direction of the class.

Felkner says he was also discriminated against by Professor Roberta Pearlmutter, who he says refused to allow him to participate in a group project lobbying for a conservative issue because the assignment was to lobby for a liberal issue. He alleges that Perlmutter spent a 50-minute class "assailing" his views and allowed students to openly ridicule his conservative positions, and that she reduced his grade because he was not "progressive."

The Rhode Island College School of Social Work did not respond to a request for comment.

Felkner, a self-proclaimed free-market conservative, told FOXNews.com that during his final year, he wanted to do a project on "work first" welfare, which requires that recipients get jobs before they can get benefits. He said the school advocated an "education first" system, in which recipients get job training and don't have to work for benefits.

"Basically it was a system that resulted in 2 percent of [Rhode Island's] recipients being on welfare for over 10 years. It was just not working," Felkner said. While at the college he had an internship with the governor's office on public policy to work on welfare reform.

The social work organizing and policy degree program requires a student to complete a project that works for "progressive social change." He was scheduled to complete his project in January, but he said the defendants' actions kept him from finishing and graduating.

"There were two years worth of discrimination really, there's no better way to put it, because I had different views than the school does," Felkner said. "It's kind of insane to think that someone studying how to help the poor can't research welfare reform."

Felkner also alleges in his complaint that the school's treatment of him restricted his ability to express his opinions and that his bad grades damaged his professional reputation and would make it difficult for him to get a job as a social worker.

Kim Strom-Gottfried, professor of social work at U.N.C. Chapel Hill, said that faculty members should not impose their politics on students.

"My bottom line is I think clearly as faculty we have to appraise our students based on required competencies and demonstrations of that, whether critical thinking or whatever, but there shouldn't be a belief litmus test for joining the profession or for an assignment," Strom-Gottfried said.

"The questions I have in cases such as his — why would someone choose to affiliate with a profession that's so at odds with his beliefs and his value-base? That's always a question for me," she said.

Bruce Thyer, professor of social work and former dean at the College of Social Work at Florida State University, has written about discrimination against conservatives and against evangelical Christians in social work. He said discrimination hurts the profession.

"I have seen students actively discouraged from perusing social work because of their politically conservative views. I've also seen it happen with students who have held strong religious views," he said. "I think that the profession is a great and noble discipline and there are occasional episodes like this that cast a black eye, and it's really unnecessary."

Thyer said liberal and conservative social workers have the same goal — to help people — and that the school overstepped its bounds in Felkner's case.

"I think it's an overzealous faculty wishing to impose their own political views upon those of their students, and that's unfortunate because there are many areas in which liberal and conservative thinkers within the discipline of social work have so much to agree upon," he said. "Nobody's advocating, certainly not Bill Felkner, that people not be helped."

The college filed a motion for summary judgment this summer, but it was recently denied by the court. Felkner said the school is now seeking a settlement.

He said he would still like to receive his masters in social work, and he is still working on government policy on social welfare programs in Rhode Island through the Ocean State Policy Research Institute, which he founded after leaving the school.

"You can say what you want about the war on poverty and how it's going, but I think that it hasn't gone well and I think there are better alternatives, and I think it was a shame I wasn't even allowed to research and pursue those interests," Felkner said. "It's indoctrination."

from the Examiner, 2008-Sep-17, by J.D. Tuccille, Civil Liberties Examiner:

The plausibly deniable draft - Obama's very modern take on national service

Both Barack Obama and John McCain have long supported some sort of "national service" that involves large-scale participation by Americans in projects deemed worthy by a government agency. It may mean building housing, assisting with the provision of medical care or patrolling the border, but overall it involves putting aside personal preferences for, as McCain puts it, "a cause greater than yourself."

Obama devotes an entire section of his campaign Website to national service; McCain does the same and penned a column back in 2001 praising AmeriCorps and calling for expanded opportunities for government-sanctioned service. Both candidates recently appeared at a national service forum sponsored by Time magazine, which has made the issue its house hobbyhorse. McCain and Obama each have praised local volunteerism, but seem to think that donating your time to a soup kitchen, a clinic or a church is less valuable than participation in a grand-scale scheme managed by the state.

I have a lot of thoughts about politicians who deem hours spent in grassroots service to causes chosen freely by volunteers to be inferior to government programs run from D.C., but I'll hold my tongue -- for now. What does interest me, though, is whether all of this talk of "national service" means that the grand old days of conscription are about to return, though now with draftees stuffed into hospital scrubs and denim as often as they're required to don camouflage.

McCain was once an advocate of the draft, though, as far as I can tell, he's uttered nary a word in favor of conscription since he started pursuing residency in the White House. The national service section of his Website is full of talk of opportunities and incentives -- lots of carrot, but no stick. Whatever his personal feelings, he seems to understand that draft boards are no longer compatible with presidential ambitions.

At first glance, Obama's scheme is similar. His proposal even specifically refers to "universal voluntary citizen service." It's all very touchy-feelly. But, as Michael Kinsley put it so well in the pages of Time: "Problem number one with grand schemes for universal voluntary public service is that they can't be both universal and voluntary. If everybody has to do it, then it's not voluntary, is it? And if it's truly up to the individual, then it won't be universal."

Of course, Barack Obama could be playing the usual politician's game of throwing empty words at an audience, without worrying overly much about their meaning. But his campaign has put forward a detailed plan for national service, and on close inspection, it's clear that he really does mean "universal." And while there's no call for old-fashioned conscription, his national service carrots are matched by very modern sticks that introduce almost as much compulsion as the old kind.

In fact, Obama's national service plan is "voluntary" in a technical sense -- nobody will be arrested for declining to participate. But non-participants also won't be allowed to graduate from high school, and without those diplomas, life could get a bit rough.

Obama's national service plan (PDF) says:

Schools that require service as part of the educational experience create improved learning environments and serve as resources for their communities. The Obama-Biden plan sets a goal for all students to engage in service, with middle and high school students performing 50 hours of service each year, and college students performing 100 hours of service each year. Under this plan, students would graduate college with as many as 17 weeks of public service experience under their belts.

But schools set their own policies, don't they? Well ... sort of. You see, as the saying goes, "he who takes the king's coin becomes the king's man." And most public schools depend on federal dollars. As Obama elaborated in a speech last December, "At the middle and high school level, we'll make federal assistance conditional on school districts developing service programs, and give schools resources to offer new service opportunities."

So, it won't be the nasty federal government forcing your kids to donate their time to government-approved service, it'll be the local schools -- but that requirement will be the among the strings attached to federal money.

This is a very modern way of imposing mandates from the top down. The uniform 21-year-old national drinking age, for instance, is nominally the choice of each state government, not a federal law. But the states set the age at 21 as a condition of continuing to receive a full measure of federal highway funds. The same goes for the late, unlamented 55mph speed limit.

Of course, state and local agencies could choose to give up the checks from D.C., but they almost never do. And so, violations of federal policies get punished by state and local authorities.

Under Barack Obama's plan, a refusal to participate in a national service program touted at the federal level will be punished by the withholding of high school diplomas by the school district in your town. And without that diploma, few colleges or employers will even bother to look at your application.

It's a softer sort of authoritarianism which requires no draft boards, muddles the identity of the "bad guy" and produces no martyrs in handcuffs for the evening news. You just can't get a job if you don't do as you're told.

Such "soft" mandates are easier to escape than the old draft. Private schools will still be able to set their own criteria for graduation, as will homeschoolers. At least, they will so long as they can resist social pressure to conform to the requirements imposed by public schools.

And 50 hours of service isn't exactly a tour in the rice paddies. Most people will just roll their eyes and do what it takes to get that diploma. (The 100 hours required of college students will be in return for a $4,000 grant, which amounts less to conscription than to the world's most expensive work-study scheme.)

But make no mistake: Barack Obama wants your kids. And he's willing to draft them, in a plausibly deniable way.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2008-Nov-24:

The Sidwell Choice
The Obama family leads by example.

Michelle and Barack Obama have settled on a Washington, D.C., school for their daughters, and you will not be surprised to learn it is not a public institution. Malia, age 10, and seven-year-old Sasha will attend the Sidwell Friends School, the private academy that educates the children of much of Washington's elite.

Vice President-elect Joe Biden's grandchildren attend Sidwell -- as did Chelsea Clinton -- where tuition is close to $30,000 a year. The Obama girls have been students at the private University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, where tuition runs above $21,000. "A number of great schools were considered," said Katie McCormick Lelyveld, a spokeswoman for Mrs. Obama. "In the end, the Obamas selected the school that was the best fit for what their daughters need right now."

Note the word "selected," as in made a choice. The Obamas are fortunate to have the means to send their daughters to private school, and no one begrudges them that choice given that Washington's public schools are among the worst in America.

Most D.C. parents would also love to be able to choose a better school for their child, but they lack the financial means to do so. The Washington Opportunity Scholarship Program each year offers up to $7,500 to some 1,900 kids to attend private schools, but Democrats in Congress want to kill it. Average family income for kids in the voucher program is about $22,000.

Mr. Obama says he opposes such vouchers, because "although it might benefit some kids at the top, what you're going to do is leave a lot of kids at the bottom." The example of his own children refutes that: The current system offers plenty of choice to kids "at the top" while abandoning those at the bottom.

from the Chicago Tribune, 2008-Nov-13, by John Kass:

Tolerance fails T-shirt test

As the media keeps gushing on about how America has finally adopted tolerance as the great virtue, and that we're all united now, let's consider the Brave Catherine Vogt Experiment.

Catherine Vogt, 14, is an Illinois 8th grader, the daughter of a liberal mom and a conservative dad. She wanted to conduct an experiment in political tolerance and diversity of opinion at her school in the liberal suburb of Oak Park.

She noticed that fellow students at Gwendolyn Brooks Middle School overwhelmingly supported Barack Obama for president. His campaign kept preaching "inclusion," and she decided to see how included she could be.

So just before the election, Catherine consulted with her history teacher, then bravely wore a unique T-shirt to school and recorded the comments of teachers and students in her journal. The T-shirt bore the simple yet quite subversive words drawn with a red marker:

"McCain Girl."

"I was just really curious how they'd react to something that different, because a lot of people at my school wore Obama shirts and they are big Obama supporters," Catherine told us. "I just really wanted to see what their reaction would be."

Immediately, Catherine learned she was stupid for wearing a shirt with Republican John McCain's name. Not merely stupid. Very stupid.

"People were upset. But they started saying things, calling me very stupid, telling me my shirt was stupid and I shouldn't be wearing it," Catherine said.

Then it got worse.

"One person told me to go die. It was a lot of dying. A lot of comments about how I should be killed," Catherine said, of the tolerance in Oak Park.

But students weren't the only ones surprised that she wore a shirt supporting McCain.

"In one class, I had one teacher say she will not judge me for my choice, but that she was surprised that I supported McCain," Catherine said.

If Catherine was shocked by such passive-aggressive threats from instructors, just wait until she goes to college.

"Later, that teacher found out about the experiment and said she was embarrassed because she knew I was writing down what she said," Catherine said.

One student suggested that she be put up on a cross for her political beliefs.

"He said, 'You should be crucifixed.' It was kind of funny because, I was like, don't you mean 'crucified?' " Catherine said.

Other entries in her notebook involved suggestions by classmates that she be "burned with her shirt on" for "being a filthy-rich Republican."

Some said that because she supported McCain, by extension she supported a plan by deranged skinheads to kill Obama before the election. And I thought such politicized logic was confined to American newsrooms. Yet Catherine refused to argue with her peers. She didn't want to jeopardize her experiment.

"I couldn't show people really what it was for. I really kind of wanted to laugh because they had no idea what I was doing," she said.

Only a few times did anyone say anything remotely positive about her McCain shirt. One girl pulled her aside in a corner, out of earshot of other students, and whispered, "I really like your shirt."

That's when you know America is truly supportive of diversity of opinion, when children must whisper for fear of being ostracized, heckled and crucifixed.

The next day, in part 2 of The Brave Catherine Vogt Experiment, she wore another T-shirt, this one with "Obama Girl" written in blue. And an amazing thing happened.

Catherine wasn't very stupid anymore. She grew brains.

"People liked my shirt. They said things like my brain had come back, and I had put the right shirt on today," Catherine said.

Some students accused her of playing both sides.

"A lot of people liked it. But some people told me I was a flip-flopper," she said. "They said, 'You can't make up your mind. You can't wear a McCain shirt one day and an Obama shirt the next day.' "

But she sure did, and she turned her journal into a report for her history teacher, earning Catherine extra credit. We asked the teacher, Norma Cassin-Pountney, whether it was ironic that Catherine would be subject to such intolerance from pro-Obama supporters in a community that prides itself on its liberal outlook.

"That's what we discussed," Cassin-Pountney said about the debate in the classroom when the experiment was revealed. "I said, here you are, promoting this person [Obama] that believes we are all equal and included, and look what you've done? The students were kind of like, 'Oh, yeah.' I think they got it."

Catherine never told us which candidate she would have voted for if she weren't an 8th grader. But she said she learned what it was like to be in the minority.

"Just being on the outside, how it felt, it was not fun at all," she said.

Don't ever feel as if you must conform, Catherine. Being on the outside isn't so bad. Trust me.

from the Chicago Tribune, 2008-Nov-14, by John Kass:

Girl's lesson: Bias, like shirts, picked out at home

Catherine Vogt—the brave 8th grader who used a T-shirt test to find out about political tolerance in Obamaland—is something of a celebrity now, thanks to you readers of this column.

By the time you read this, she will have already finished a round of TV and radio interviews, including a PBS spot for a Philadelphia station. It's all somewhat unsettling for a 14-year-old girl who had important high school entrance exams Thursday and a tryout for "The Music Man" at Gwendolyn Brooks Middle School in Oak Park.

"Well, a lot of people came up to me and told me that they saw me in the paper, and my teacher told me that a lot of people were telling her 'Way to go, way to support your student' and everything," Catherine told me Thursday. "It's been very exciting and hectic too."

The Catherine Vogt Experiment on Diversity of Thought took place before the presidential election. She shared her idea secretly with her history teacher, Norma Cassin-Pountney.

Catherine wore a McCain shirt one day and secretly recorded the comments of teachers and students in her journal. The next day, she wore an Obama shirt and also recorded the comments.

Her findings?

When she wore the McCain shirt, she was stupid and was told to go die. One kid said she should be "crucifixed," which should prompt outrage from that student's grammar/lit teacher. Crucifixed?

One student whispered—perhaps like Winston Smith in "1984"—"I really like your shirt." But she said it quietly so no one else would hear and denounce her.

And when Catherine wore the Obama shirt? Her brains grew back and she was smart again and welcomed into polite society.

Since many liberal journalists live in Oak Park, I expect to receive many snarky reviews. My crime? I dared to illustrate, through the actions of a brave 8th-grade girl, that even high-minded liberal communities can be intolerant, no matter how many times parents gush on about "diversity" at their cocktail parties.

So much for the audacity of hope.

But it's also true that if Catherine lived in a beet-red community and wore an Obama shirt, she'd get a similar negative, intolerant and ugly reaction. And certainly some Republican children would outrage their grammar/lit teachers by wanting her crucifixed as well.

All such outrage is predictable. Whether red or blue or right or left, many adults don't get it. But Catherine Vogt sure gets it: Children learn their politics from their parents.

A kid doesn't learn to love Democrats or hate Republicans or vice versa by reading editorials. You can't blame this one on bloggers or "Grand Theft Auto." You can't even blame Fitty Cent or however he incorrectly spells his own stage name.

Many parents in Oak Park and elsewhere want their kids to figure out things for themselves. Others only want a mirror for their own tribalism. Parents, Catherine told me, "are actually a pretty big influence on kids. They take a lot of what's home to school."

At school Thursday in Ms. Cassin-Pountney's class, they discussed Catherine's experiment and my column.

"The students were mostly shocked because when they read it they kind of figured it out. They were like, 'Oh, I actually said that thing to her and now—I'm not mentioned—but I'm actually in the paper for saying something mean?' "

She said her classmates tried to determine whether she cracked and gave up their names to me, but because she's not a Chicago machine politician under federal indictment, she didn't have to name names.

"They were all like, 'So who did you mention and what did you say?' But I didn't give out any names," she said.

There were some rough patches on Thursday. The phone rang off the hook at home. She had her big tests and that tryout. And her parents—liberal Democratic mom and conservative Republican dad—had to run down to school to stave off an impromptu imposition of the Fairness Doctrine.

"Some parents were upset that one teacher remarked about her shirt. And other parents were upset that the experiment was conducted in the first place, and didn't go through 'proper channels,' " said Catherine's mom, Pamela Webster.

"So we rushed down to school to say we were backing the principal and all the teachers and not to make a big thing of it," she said. "It was just crazy. There was no crime committed here."

Not even a thought crime?

"No," she said. "We support the principal and the school. Let this be a way for students and teachers to discuss the issue. That's what we want in our home, not indoctrination but discussion."

Catherine still won't say whether she's a Democrat or a Republican.

"I still have four years to pick a guy or a woman," she said of the presidential election in 2012, which will be her first. "I've still got four more years. Then I can decide."

Catherine says she doesn't want to become a lawyer, but perhaps a surgeon. Either way, this week, she was a great teacher.

Thank you, Catherine.

from First Things, 2008-Jun-24, by James Kerian:

Yellow Science

In the late nineteenth century, William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer developed what would come to be known as yellow journalism. By disregarding what had been standard journalistic methods, particularly in regards to the verifying of sources, these two publishers were able both to push their country toward war with Spain and dramatically increase the circulation of their respective newspapers.

Man has always had a healthy desire for knowledge, and it is the feeding of this hunger that ennobles journalism. Hearst and Pulitzer were acutely aware that man has a less healthy but no less voracious desire to believe that he has knowledge; particularly knowledge of something sensational. It is the feeding of this hunger that irreparably disgraced journalism, and a century later now threatens to do the same to science.

Scientists, like journalists, are called upon to plumb the depths of the unknown and to fairly and objectively report their findings to their own professional community as well as the general public. Scientists, like the journalists of yesteryear, have specific methods for ensuring that the public trust placed in them is not abused. The most fundamental of these methods is the well-known, if not so creatively named, scientific method. The essence of the scientific method is the formulation of hypotheses (ideas) and the using of these hypotheses to make predictions that can be experimentally tested. In the words of Sir Thomas Eddington in The Philosophy of Physical Science, “Every item of physical knowledge must therefore be an assertion of what has been or would be the result of carrying out a specified observational procedure.”

Nevertheless, over the last several decades an increasing number of scientists have shed the restraints imposed by the scientific method and begun to proclaim the truth of man-made global warming. This is a hypothesis that remains untested, makes no predictions that can be tested in the near future, and cannot offer a numerical explanation for the limited evidence to which it clings. No equations have been shown to explain the relationship between fossil-fuel emission and global temperature. The only predictions that have been made are apocalyptic, so the hypothesis has to be accepted before it can be tested.

The only evidence that can be said to support this so-called scientific consensus is the supposed correlation of historical global temperatures with historical carbon-dioxide content in the atmosphere. Even if we do not question the accuracy of our estimates of global temperatures into previous centuries, and even if we ignore the falling global temperatures over the past decade as fossil-fuel emissions have continued to increase, an honest scientist would still have to admit that the hypothesis of man-made global warming hardly rises to the level of “an assertion of what has been or would be the result of carrying out a specified observational procedure.” Global warming may or may not be “the greatest scam in history,” as it was recently called by John Coleman, a prominent meteorologist and the founder of the Weather Channel. Certainly, however, under the scientific method it does not rise to the level of an “item of physical knowledge.”

Nevertheless the acceptance of man-made global warming as scientific fact has become so prevalent that the secretary-general of the United Nations, Ban Ki-Moon, recently declared: “The debate is over. It's time to discuss solutions.” Leaving aside the question of the secretary-general's qualifications that is certainly one of the most anti-scientific statements ever made. The first question that this raises is why have so many scientists chosen to ignore this glaring failure of the global warming hypothesis to meet the standards of their own profession? The second question is what, if anything, can be done about it?

The first, and most obvious, temptation for this sort of willful blindness is financial. Hearst made only a fraction of his estimated $140 million in net worth from yellow journalism. Global warming, on the other hand, has provided an estimated $50 billion in research grants to those willing to practice yellow science. Influence in the public sphere is another strong temptation. It might not be as impressive as starting the Spanish-American War, but global-warming alarmists have amassed a large group of journalists and politicians ready to silence any critics and endorse whatever boondoggle scheme is prescribed as the cure to our impending climate catastrophe. Finally, one should not underestimate the temptation of convenience. Just as it is far easier to publish stories without verifying the sources; so is it much more convenient to practice yellow science than the real thing. It takes far more courage, perseverance, and perspiration to develop formulas, make predictions, and risk being proved wrong than to look at historical data and muse about observed similarities. Yellow scientists have fled the risks of science that Albert Einstein described when he said, “No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right, a single experiment can prove me wrong.”

The layman might object that this is not his problem. Surely Joe Six-Pack should not be expected to monitor the findings of research physicists; if anything is to be done about this collapse of scientific standards, it must be done by the scientific community itself. Unfortunately history has shown the inability of professional communities to police their own ranks. When it first reared its head, yellow journalism was roundly condemned by the journalistic community. In fact, it was these critics who coined the term yellow journalism. The condemnation of their peers was an insufficient deterrent for Pulitzer and Hearst, because it was the approval of the public that drove their circulation. Eventually the entire journalistic community acceded to the sensationalism that the public seemed to insist on. In recent decades, the scorn of prominent scientists such as John Coleman has been similarly unable to stop the ascendancy of the global-warming hypothesis as the public has been increasingly drawn by its sensationalism. The scientific community as a whole is on the brink of acceding to Ban Ki-Moon's insistence that “the debate is over” and turning now to their grant applications.

Ultimately, it is only the public that holds the power to enforce professional standards, and therefore each of us must accept this responsibility. Most of us will not be able to comprehend the latest climatologic studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but fortunately that is not necessary. However complex the information may be, the standards are quite clear. One need not be a beltway newshound to know that whatever follows the phrase “unnamed sources in the capital” or “rumors in Hollywood are” is not real journalism. Similarly, one does not need an advanced degree in natural science to understand that whatever follows the phrase “most experts agree” or “no one can measure the exact effect but” is not real science. In fact, if there is no possible way that a statement can realistically be tested, it probably fails to meet the standards for any professional community and is of no real use to the public.

The long-term results of yellow journalism have probably been more devastating than the war it started. Journalists have lost the respectability of their profession, and the public has lost real journalism. We are in very real danger, as scientists and as a nation, of losing the respectability of a professional community that has done so much to make this country great in the past hundred years. If yellow science overcomes real science it will not only be on account of the greed, ambition, and cowardice of our scientists but also the sloth and cowardice of a public that is unwilling to stand up and demand professionalism. This is why, as the editors of the New York Press said in 1897, I “called them yellow because they are yellow.”

James Kerian is a mechanical engineer and small business owner in Grafton, North Dakota.

from the New Criterion via the Wall Street Journal, 2008-Jun-27, by Alan Charles Kors:

On the Sadness of Higher Education

The academic world that I first encountered was one of both intellectual beauty and profound flaws. I was taught at Princeton, in the early 1960s—in history and literature, above all—before the congeries that we term "the '60s" began. Most of my professors were probably men of the left—that's what the surveys tell me—but that fact was never apparent to me, because, except in rare cases, their politics or even their ideological leanings were not inferable from their teaching or syllabi. Reasoned and informed dissent from professorial devil's advocacy or interpretation was encouraged and rewarded, including challenges to the very terms of an examination question.

In retrospect, professors who must have disagreed fundamentally with works such as David Donald's "Lincoln Reconsidered" (with its celebrated explanation of the abolitionists' contempt for Lincoln in terms of the loss of status of their fathers' once-privileged social group) assigned them for our open-minded academic consideration. My professor of Tudor-Stuart history, emerging from the bitter Oxbridge debates over explanations of the English Civil War in terms of class conflict, assigned Jack Hexter's stunning "Reappraisals in Social History" to us. When I opined to him somewhat apprehensively that Hexter appeared to have exposed the tendentious use of statistics in my professor's own prior work, he replied, "You're absolutely correct." These were not uncommon experiences in Princeton's classrooms, and I knew, then and there, that I wanted both to do history and to teach.

In grad school at Harvard, while a few dates left in the midst of dinner on discovering my free-market and hawkish politics, and while I did get thrown out of a party for opposing, when asked, Eugene McCarthy's view of Vietnam (this should have been a warning), the classroom remained open and, by design, intellectually pluralistic. In our graduate colloquium, we read the major historiographical debates, in works theoretical and monographic, and critical acumen was acknowledged in the force of an argument, not in its political provenance. When Harvard exploded, in 1966–67, I was in Paris, researching my dissertation in the Bibliothèque Nationale; when Paris blew up the next year, I was locked away in Cambridge, Mass., finishing my dissertation. (My friends on the left, only partly in jest, explain my backwardness by my having missed two revolutions.) When I went off on job interviews, I was not once asked a question, ever, about my worldview, but only about my historical research and notions of teaching. Politics were simply not in the category of appropriate inquiry.

In social contexts, up through the 1970s, some few colleagues might be harsh over our political differences, but most loved the idea of individuals who thought differently from themselves. In the midst of the "cultural revolution" of the early 1970s, I co-founded a College House and lived warmly with students who mostly ranged from liberal Democrats to true believers of the New Left. They loved to discuss everything, and they did so in good faith and (almost) always ad rem. My students, whom I still meet frequently outside of class, still love to discuss everything, and they still do so in good faith and without ad hominem distractions from real conversation and debate. Critics of higher education who blame students for today's catastrophes are categorically wrong about agency. It is the faculties (both the minority of zealots and the majority of cowards) and the administrations (both the minority of ideologues and the majority of careerists with double standards) who are to blame.

The academic world I so loved revealed itself best in an undergraduate course I'd taken on the history of Europe in the 20th century. When the professor, a distinguished intellectual of the left, returned the midterms to the hundred-plus or so of us who were in his course, he said that we'd saddened and embarrassed him. "I gave you readings that allowed you to reach such diverse conclusions," he explained, "but you all told me what you thought I wanted to hear." He informed us that he would add a major section to the final exam: "I'm going to assign the book I disagree with most about the 20th century. I'm not going to ask you to criticize it, but, instead, to re-create its arguments with intellectual empathy, demonstrating that you understand the perspectives from which he understands and analyzes the world." I was moved by that. The work was Friedrich Hayek's "The Road to Serfdom," and it changed the course of my intellectual and moral life.

It also showed me immediately how I wanted to teach as an intellectual historian. Each year, I teach thinkers as diverse as Pascal and Spinoza, Hobbes and Butler, Wesley and Diderot. I offer courses on intellectual history, and the goal of my teaching is to make certain that my students understand the perspectives and rich debates that have shaped the dialogue of the West. I don't want disciples of my worldview. I want students who know how to read deeply, how to analyze, how to locate the essential points of similarity and divergence among thinkers, and, indeed, how to understand, with intellectual empathy, how the world looks from the diverse perspectives that constitute the history of European thought. I know that I am not alone, but I also know, alas, that I am in a distinct minority in my pedagogical goals in the humanities and the so-called social sciences.

* * *

The academic world that won the heart of a kid from Jersey City's hardscrabble Dickinson High School was also a deeply flawed place in those early 1960s. It was virtually impossible for the most qualified black applicants to gain admission to Princeton; there were exceptions, but they were few indeed. There was widespread, crude racial bigotry among students; there was contempt for the women imported into Princeton on weekends, with a sharp division made between those gentlewomen one might marry and those coeds to whom anything might be promised for favors ("Sweet Briar to wed; Trenton to bed" was one of the politer formulations); there was a vulgar, sadistically cruel and, indeed, violent hatred of homosexuals there, with exceptions occasionally made for reasons of social class. There was an anti-intellectualism in the student body that astonished me, a lack of interest in all but the most famous speakers or performers, and—the terms truly were used—a contempt by those pleased by "gentlemen's Cs" for those "grinds" who studied long hours or with enthusiasm. There was a social snobbery more reminiscent now of the 1920s than of anything more recent, and an emphasis on "seeming" over "being" that would have confirmed Rousseau for his later admirers.

My freshman year was Princeton's final year of mandatory chapel (of one's choice, at least)—a requirement I found deeply intrusive, although they'd advertised it fairly enough—but if exposure to spirituality were meant in any way to replace coarseness with kindness and decency, mandatory chapel was without value. That Princeton also was a place of undergraduate political intolerance. In my junior year, the rooms of two quite thoughtful, warm, bright and intellectual Marxist seniors were broken into, their "Little Lenin Library" ripped to shreds, and the sole copies of their applications to graduate schools ruined by bottles of ink. The perpetrators turned out to be some of the "biggest men" on campus, and they all were let off with barely a slap on the wrist. That was no golden age, and honest souls across the political spectrum never will talk realistically about the tragedy of higher education today without acknowledging that moral and historical reality.

There was much about the best sides of "the '60s," thus, that I admired and welcomed: the assault on racial discrimination and prejudice; the recognition of women's moral and legal equality, and the critique of vulgar sexual stereotypes; the softening, despite SDS, of so many students' lives; the manifest growth of tolerance of human difference (far more, in retrospect, among the "flower children" than among the would-be revolutionaries); the striking respect with which individuals increasingly treated each other across racial, sexual and heterosexual/homosexual divides. When I began teaching in 1968, I found my students often off-the-wall in terms of what they believed about the political (let alone astrological) worlds, but I preferred them immeasurably to the bigoted, closed, smug, self-inflated and callous students whom I had known just four to eight years before (as I had preferred my classmates from Dickinson High School to my classmates at Princeton). There must have been one moment in the mid-'70s when the pendulum had swung to as ideal a place as one might realistically have hoped for; I probably slept late that day.

* * *

What has changed? In terms of the university in loco parentis, which has been restored and expanded with a vengeance, the revolution has been breathtaking. For students from "the '60s" who moved into the world apart from the academy, there were adjustments to the reality principles and values of a free, dynamic and decent society. The activists of the 1960s who stayed on campus, however—in original bodies or in spirit imparted to new bodies—expected students to take them always as political and moral gurus. Students did not do so. They had the gall first to like disco, and then to like Reagan. Such students had to be saved from the false consciousness that America somehow had given them.

Thus, under the heirs of the academic '60s, we moved on campus after campus from their Free Speech Movement to their politically correct speech codes; from their abolition of mandatory chapel to their imposition of Orwellian mandatory sensitivity and multicultural training; from their freedom to smoke pot unmolested to their war today against the kegs and spirits—literal and metaphorical—of today's students; from their acquisition of young adult status to their infantilization of "kids" who lack their insight; from their self-proclaimed dreams of racial and sexual integration to their ever more balkanized campuses organized on principles of group characteristics and group responsibility; from their right to define themselves as individuals—a foundational right—to their official, imposed and politically orthodox notions of identity. American college students became the victims of a generational swindle of truly epic proportions. If that part of the faculty not complicit in this did not know that it was happening, it was by choice or willful blindness.

In the academic university—the curriculum and classroom, and the hiring that underlies them—it all varies by where one looks. To understand why and to understand one of the few vulnerabilities of universities to actual accountability and reform, one must understand the hierarchy that predicts academic institutional behavior: sexuality (in their language, "sexual preference") trumps neutrality; race properly conceived easily trumps sexuality; sex properly conceived (or, in their language, "gender") easily trumps race; and careerism categorically trumps everything. From that perspective, the careerists who run our campuses have made a Faustian bargain (though they differ on which is the devil's portion).

Being careful, on the whole, to keep the natural and physical sciences, mathematics, and a variegated Column A of departments (sometimes psychology, sometimes philosophy, sometimes linguistics), and the professional schools that relate symbiotically to practical America relatively free of political agendas—though even in these cases, the barriers to crude politicization may break down—the careerist administrators have kept largely intact those disciplines where added value might be measured. From diverse motives of ideological sympathies and acute awareness of who can blackball their next career moves, they have given over the humanities, the soft social sciences and the entire university in loco parentis to the zealots of oppression studies and coercive identity politics. In the latter case, it truly has been a conspiracy, with networking and common plans. In the former case—the professoriate and the curriculum—it is generally, with striking politicized exceptions, a soft tyranny of groupthink, unconscious bias and self-inflated sense of a mission of demystification. Most of the professors I meet are kind, indeed sweet, and certainly mean no harm. It is profoundly sad to see what they have become.

There also has been, compounding academic problems, a dumbing down of the professoriate that quite numbs the mind—best seen not in the monographs that earn people their degrees, but in the egregious nonsense, crude meta-theorizing, self-indulgence and tendentious special pleading that are not merely tolerated without criticism, but rewarded at the highest levels. Those who want to understand critically the degradations that have occurred should look at, for starters, the stunning works of Daphne Patai and Will H. Corral, editors, "Theory's Empire: An Anthology of Dissent"; John Ellis, "Literature Lost: Social Agendas and the Corruption of the Humanities"; and Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, "Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science."

Academia also has become a place where professors can achieve the highest rewards, except in the protected fields, for acting out their pathologies. In higher education, to paraphrase the Woody Allen stand-up line, we increasingly send our students to schools for learning-disabled and emotionally disturbed teachers. One cannot wholly escape these sides of universities even by majoring in the hard sciences; at least a few humanities and social science courses in oppression studies and demystification are generally required for graduation. Even if students escape these phenomena in their choice of study, though, they will meet them in freshmen orientations, residential programming and the very rules and regulations of their campuses.

Those often kindly teachers, however, do have a sense of urgent mission. Even if we put them on truth-serum, the academics who dominate the humanities and social sciences on our campuses today would state that K-12 education essentially has been one long celebration of America and the West, as if our students were intimately familiar with the Federalist Papers and had never heard of slavery or empire. Having convinced themselves that the students whom they inherit have been immersed in American and Western traditions without critical perspective—they do believe that—contemporary academics see themselves as having merely four brief years in which to demystify students, and somehow to get them to look up from their Madison and Hamilton long enough to gaze upon the darker side of American and Western life. In their view, our K-12 students know all about Aristotle, John Milton and Adam Smith, have studied for twelve years how America created bounty and integrated score after score of millions of immigrants, but have never heard of the Great Depression or segregation.

Academics, in their own minds, face an almost insoluble problem of time. How, in only four years, can they disabuse students of the notion that the capital, risk, productivity and military sacrifice of others have contributed to human dignity and to the prospects of a decent society? How can they make them understand, with only four years to do so, that capitalism and individual- ism have created cultures that are cruel, inefficient, racist, sexist and homophobic, with oppressive caste systems, mental and behavioral? How, in such a brief period, can they enlighten "minorities," including women (the majority of students), about the "internalization" of their oppression (today's equivalent of false consciousness)? How, in only eight semesters, might they use the classroom, curriculum and university in loco parentis to create a radical leadership among what they see as the victim groups of our society, and to make the heirs of successful families uneasy in the moral right of their possessions and opportunities? Given those constraints, why in the world should they complicate their awesome task by hiring anyone who disagrees with them?

* * *

The power of universities comes from their monopoly of credentials. As Richard Vedder so deeply understands in his "Going Broke by Degree," they are the only institutions allowed to separate young individuals by IQ and by the ability to complete complex tasks. They do not add value to that, except in technical fields. Recruiters do not pay premiums because of what the Ivy League or the flagship state universities teach in English, history, political science, or sociology. They hire there despite, not because of, that. Recruiters do not pay premiums because our children have been sent to multicultural centers for sensitivity training. Recruiters pay premiums for the value already there, which universities merely identify. So long as recruiters pay premiums, however, it is rational for parents who wish to gain the most options for their children to send them to the university with the most prestigious degree. That will not change in the current scheme.

We now have closed-shop, massively subsidized, intolerant political fiefdoms, and they are the gatekeepers of society's rewards. Without incentives for different models of higher education, we shall have this same system of colleges and universities as far as the mind can foresee. The tax-free mega-endowments will grow. The legislators and the public will not end the subsidy. The alumni will continue their bequests. The trustees will proudly attend the administrative dog-and-pony shows, the most efficient act on any campus. Well-intentioned donors will support ghettoized "centers" (without faculty lines, cross-listed courses, graduate fellowships, or degrees) that marginalize inquiries that should be central to the academy. These provide protective coloration for administrators, help with fund raising in certain quarters, and permit a transfer of funds to the accelerating thirst for ever new forms of regnant campus orthodoxies. Until civil society makes administrators pay a price for the politicized hiring, curriculum and student life offices they administer, nothing truly will be reformed.

In my fantasies, I try to imagine a way to force these academic enterprises to engage in the truth in advertising they claim to value. Let colleges and universities have the courage, if they truly believe what they say privately to themselves and to me, to put it on page one of their catalogues, fundraising letters and appeals to the state assembly: "This University believes that your sons and daughters are the racist, sexist, homophobic, Eurocentric progeny or victims of an oppressive society from which most of them receive unjust privilege. In return for tuition and massive taxpayer subsidy, we shall assign rights on a compensatory basis and undertake by coercion their moral and political enlightenment." It won't happen.

One still can protect a few individuals and keep a hint of pluralism alive by means of honest exposure, shame and ridicule, but this is work—vital and moral, and an end in itself—that affects only the margins. The sad bottom line is that there are no incentives for administrators to offer a different product, such as a niche of high-quality education, equal treatment, liberty and merit. Parents invest understandably in the value of degrees, not in the quality of curriculum and faculty.

A model of higher education that offered a prestigious degree, high admissions standards, a superb and rigorous education, a faculty that was truly and usefully intellectually pluralistic, and a climate of individual rights and responsibilities (joined with rights of voluntary association) would, I believe, sweep the field. No one can afford to build a great university to offer that model, however. For obvious structural and institutional reasons, no one is going to "seize" a major university for such an experiment, though the vision of what could be accomplished by one great alternate model is mesmerizing. Until then, we only can work to protect the innocent, expose what the media are willing to expose, and await a generational shift in administrators and the professoriate. Such a shift, alas, not only is not on the horizon, but also recedes ever further from view given the bigotry against intellectual difference and pluralism, the incentives for conformity, the disincentives for courage and independence of mind, and the willingness, indeed eagerness, of society to subsidize those who have contempt for the very culture and values that make both that subsidy and that tolerance of derision and condescension possible.

The academic world that I entered is gone. I teach for my students, whom I love, and I fight for intellectual pluralism, for legal equality and for fairness simply because it is my duty to bear witness to the values I cherish, with no expectation of success.

Mr. Kors is a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2008-Oct-24, by Naomi Schaefer Riley:

When Academic Freedom Lost its Meaning

Late last week, the University of Nebraska rescinded an invitation to William Ayers to speak on its campus after the election. Mr. Ayers, the co-founder of the Weather Underground and the man responsible for bombing a number of federal buildings in the 1960s, has been the subject of much media attention recently, thanks to his associations with Barack Obama. When Nebraska politicians learned of Mr. Ayers's forthcoming visit to the university, they were outraged. Democratic Sen. Ben Nelson said: "His past involvement in a violent protest group and incendiary comments are not consistent with the agenda of unity that we need in America."

The university cited "security concerns" as the reason for its action (certainly ironic, given Mr. Ayers's own background), but it was seen, in certain quarters, as mere censorship. "It's a major infringement on academic freedom," David Moshman, an educational psychology professor told the Lincoln, Neb., Journal Star. Mr. Moshman called the decision "a dangerous precedent." The one upside to the publicity surrounding this controversy, he said, was that the university "may also get a major lesson in academic freedom."

Lately, it seems, Mr. Ayers, an education professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, has become something of a poster child for "academic freedom." An online petition signed by more than 3,000 educators explained: "The attacks on and the character assassination of Ayers threaten the university as a space of open inquiry and debate, and threaten schools as places of compassion, imagination, curiosity, and free thought."

Compassion and free thought? We should remember that Mr. Ayers was a domestic terrorist. He has never expressed the slightest regret for his violent actions; indeed, he pointedly said, in 2001, that he and his collaborators "didn't do enough." And he has continued his radical project in the classroom. As Stanley Kurtz recently explained in these pages: Mr. Ayers favors "individual schools built around specific political themes," which "push students to 'confront issues of inequity, war, and violence.' He believes teacher education programs should serve as 'sites of resistance' to an oppressive system." Surely someone whose has devoted his life to attacking the system -- one way or another -- is not exempt from attacks on his own character or ideas. But champions of Mr. Ayers's "academic freedom" seem to want exactly this sort of exemption. After all, no one is talking about taking away his professorship -- just his good name.

A new book out by one of the academy's more esteemed fellows offers some useful reflections on the subject of academic freedom. "Save the World on Your Own Time," a short treatise by Stanley Fish, suggests a return to an earlier and more limited definition of the idea. Citing a 1915 statement by the American Association of University Professors, Mr. Fish writes: "Academic freedom can be asserted only by 'those who carry on their work in the temper of the scientific inquirer' and never by those who would use it for 'uncritical intemperate partisanship.' "

Mr. Fish's idea of academic freedom -- what he calls the "freedom to do the job" -- follows from a more narrow idea of a college education. He writes: "Pick up the mission statement of almost any college or university, and you will find claims and ambitions that will lead you to think that it is the job of an institution of higher learning to cure every ill the world has ever known: not only illiteracy and cultural ignorance, which are at least in the ball-park, but poverty, war, racism, gender bias . . . and the hegemony of Wal-Mart." Mr. Fish is merciless in mocking the overreach of the modern university, concluding: "I want an academy inflected by no one's politics, but by the nitty-gritty obligations of teaching and research."

By such a measure, Mr. Ayers is an activist professor out to save the world by way of the classroom, and he should cut it out. Just as important, there is nothing wrong with criticizing his efforts to save the world outside the classroom because, to go by Mr. Fish's comments, such criticism in no way affects academic freedom. And yet, in an essay on his New York Times blog this spring, Mr. Fish defended, you guessed it, Mr. Ayers, accusing Sen. Obama's critics of "McCarthyism" for bringing Mr. Ayers into the discussion. And Mr. Fish confessed to trying to persuade Mr. Ayers to stay at the University of Illinois, where Mr. Fish was a dean until recently, when Harvard was trying to lure him away. In short, Mr. Fish is a defender and admirer of Bill Ayers.

What should one make of this? I asked Peter Berkowitz, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, whether Mr. Ayers's behavior in the classroom fit into Mr. Fish's model of an apolitical education. "The way a square peg fits into a round hole," he replied. "From almost every point of view, Stanley Fish reveals himself to be a colossal hypocrite."

But the problem is bigger than hypocrisy. Mr. Berkowitz went on to note that it is no longer possible to say you are going to restrict people to their discipline and expect a classroom free of politics: Disciplines themselves are politicized. Prof. Mark Bauerlein of Emory University agrees. In many cases, he says, "ideological content has drifted down to the fundamental norms of the discipline." Whether it's education studies, Mr. Ayers's specialty, or women's studies or black studies, the entire premise of the discipline is a political agenda.

Mr. Ayers doesn't spend his classes asking students to assess objectively the arguments about whether America is an oppressive regime. As Mr. Berkowitz notes, Mr. Ayers's purpose is "not to make refined minds think more sharply, but to turn teachers into preparers of young radicals." Who in turn can grow up to be college professors.

Ms. Riley is the Journal's deputy Taste editor.

from the Brown Daily Herald, 2008-Oct-22, by Stephanie Bernhard:

Professors sign statement in support of Ayers

Over 3,000 educators nationwide, including six Brown professors, have signed a statement supporting the man Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain called a "washed-up terrorist" at the third presidential debate last Wednesday.

In recent months, the McCain campaign has criticized Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama for his connection to William Ayers. McCain and his running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin, have accused Obama of being "friends" with Ayers and claimed Obama has hidden the extent of their relationship.

Both residents of the Chicago area, Ayers and Obama first met in 1995 when they served on the board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a school reform initiative. They also were board members of the Woods Fund, a Chicago charity, from 2000 to 2002.

Ayers, now a distinguished professor of education and senior university scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago, was a co-founding member of the radical activist group the Weather Underground in 1969. The group's extreme tactics to end the Vietnam War included planting bombs in the Pentagon and the United States Capitol.

In response to the McCain campaign's focus on Ayers' radical acts of the 1960s and 1970s, "Friends and supporters of Bill Ayers" are circulating a statement online to vouch for the professor he has become.

"I think he's doing a lot of positive, progressive, constructive work right now," said Professor of English William Keach, the first member of the University's faculty to sign the statement of support. Keach was referring to Ayers's work in the field of education.

As a professor, Ayers has written more than a dozen books on his holistic approach to learning that downplays the boundaries between teacher and student. Ayers was one of the original proponents of "free schools," where students call teachers by their first names and don't receive grades on assignments.

Constance Crawford, an adjunct lecturer in theater, speech and dance, was educated in free schools and said she disagrees with the concept, favoring a more traditional approach. But she signed the statement supporting Ayers, and said his ideas "should be combated with clarity, not with personal demonization and vilification."

Keach voiced a similar opinion regarding Ayers's involvement with the Weather Underground, saying he "disagree(s) with Ayers's tactics," but he signed the statement "without any hesitation." Keach also protested the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s, and said he wanted to show "solidarity" with Ayers. He said he wished Obama could have done the same when Ayers came up during the third debate.

"He's being unnecessarily cautious," Keach said.

Ayers entered the debate in the context of a question about both sides' negative campaigning. Ayers hosted a coffee event for Obama's first office run in 1995, prompting McCain to say to Obama, "You launched your political campaign in Mr. Ayers' living room."

Obama responded, saying, "Mr. Ayers is not involved in my campaign. He has never been involved in this campaign. And he will not advise me in the White House."

Keach thinks "it's disturbing that he had to take such a dismissive approach." He added Obama could have "brought up the positive things about the person (Ayers) has become."

Crawford signed the statement supporting Ayers because she thinks it is necessary to appreciate the man's accomplishments, not just what she calls the mistakes of his past.

"It's easy to paint someone with a broad brush," she said. "It's easy to vilify, but it's harder to consider."

from the Telegraph of London, 2008-Jul-7, by Rosa Prince:

Toddlers who dislike spicy food 'racist'

Toddlers who turn their noses up at spicy food from overseas could be branded racists by a Government-sponsored agency.

The National Children's Bureau, which receives £12 million a year, mainly from Government funded organisations, has issued guidance to play leaders and nursery teachers advising them to be alert for racist incidents among youngsters in their care.

This could include a child of as young as three who says "yuk" in response to being served unfamiliar foreign food.

The guidance by the NCB is designed to draw attention to potentially-racist attitudes in youngsters from a young age.

It alerts playgroup leaders that even babies can not be ignored in the drive to root out prejudice as they can "recognise different people in their lives".

The 366-page guide for staff in charge of pre-school children, called Young Children and Racial Justice, warns: "Racist incidents among children in early years settings tend to be around name-calling, casual thoughtless comments and peer group relationships."

It advises nursery teachers to be on the alert for childish abuse such as: "blackie", "Pakis", "those people" or "they smell".

The guide goes on to warn that children might also "react negatively to a culinary tradition other than their own by saying 'yuk'".

Staff are told: "No racist incident should be ignored. When there is a clear racist incident, it is necessary to be specific in condemning the action."

Warning that failing to pick children up on their racist attitudes could instil prejudice, the NCB adds that if children "reveal negative attitudes, the lack of censure may indicate to the child that there is nothing unacceptable about such attitudes".

Nurseries are encouraged to report as many incidents as possible to their local council. The guide added: "Some people think that if a large number of racist incidents are reported, this will reflect badly on the institution. In fact, the opposite is the case."

from the Telegraph of London, 2008-Jul-5, by Nick Britten:

Schoolboys disciplined for 'refusing to pray to Allah'

Two schoolboys were allegedly disciplined after refusing to kneel down and "pray to Allah" during a religious education lesson.

A spokesman for Cheshire County Council said 'Educating children in the beliefs of different faiths is part of Cheshire's diversity curriculum'

It was claimed that the boys, from a year seven class of 11 and 12-year-olds, were given detention after refusing to take part in a practical demonstration of how Allah is worshipped.

Yesterday parents accused the school of breaching their human rights by forcing them to take part in the exercise.

One, Sharon Luinen, said: "This isn't right, it's taking things too far. I understand that they have to learn about other religions. I can live with that but it is taking it a step too far to be punished because they wouldn't join in Muslim prayer.

"Making them pray to Allah, who isn't who they worship, is wrong and what got me is that they were told they were being disrespectful."

Another parent Karen Williams, 38, whose 12-year-old daughter is a classmate of the boys, said: "I am absolutely furious my daughter was made to take part in it and I don't find it acceptable.

"The teacher had gone into the class and made them watch a short film and then said 'we are now going out to pray to Allah'.

"Then two boys got detention and all the other children missed their refreshments' break."

She added: "Not only was it forced upon them, my daughter was told off for not doing it right.

"They'd never done it before and they were supposed to do it in another language."

She said the pupils were asked if they had water on them, and when one girl produced a bottle, the teacher began washing her feet with it.

Her husband Keith, 44, a painter and decorator, said: "The school is wonderful but this one teacher has made a major mistake. It seems to be happening throughout society. People think they can ride roughshod over our beliefs and the way we live."

The alleged incident, at the Alsager school, one of Cheshire's top performing schools, happened on Tuesday afternoon. The teacher, Alison Phillips, the school's subject leader in RE, is understood to be staying away from the school until the furore dies down, although she has not been suspended.

She is said to have got prayer mats out of the cupboard and also asked children to wear Islamic headdresses.

Deputy headmaster Keith Plant said: "I have spoken to the teacher and she has articulately given me her version of events."

Sources at the school said the incident could have been down to Miss Phillips instigating a role play and not properly briefing the pupils, all aged around 12, what she was doing.

A spokesman for Cheshire County Council said they were investigating. He added: "The headteacher contacted the authority immediately complaints were received. Enquiries are being made into the circumstances as a matter of urgency and all parents will be informed accordingly.

"Educating children in the beliefs of different faiths is part of Cheshire's diversity curriculum on the basis that knowledge is, of course, is essential to understanding.

"We accept that such teaching has to be conducted with commonsense and sensitivity."

from the New York Times, 2008-May-27, by Tamar Lewin:

2 Colleges End Entrance Exam Requirement

Smith College, a women's college in Northampton, Mass., and Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C., will no longer require prospective students to submit SAT or ACT scores as part of their applications.

At both institutions, the policies will take effect with the class entering in fall 2009.

The number of colleges and universities where such tests are now optional — mostly small liberal-arts colleges — has been growing steadily as more institutions have become concerned about the validity of standardized tests in predicting academic success, and the degree to which test performance correlates with household income, parental education and race.

Some schools that have made standardized tests optional have found that they have attracted a more diverse student body, with no decline in academic ability.

“By making the SAT and ACT optional, we hope to broaden the applicant pool and increase access at Wake Forest for groups of students who are currently underrepresented at selective universities,” said Martha Allman, Wake Forest's director of admissions. Wake Forest will announce its change on Tuesday; Smith announced it on May 16.

While students will still have the option of submitting standardized test scores — and in fact, the majority of applicants still do so at many test-optional colleges — the most important criteria for admission will be high school curriculum and classroom performance, writing ability, extracurricular activities and evidence of character and talent.

Wake Forest, with 4,500 undergraduates, is ranked 30th among national universities by U.S. News & World Report, and is the highest-ranked on that list to have dropped its testing requirements. Smith, the nation's largest undergraduate women's college, with 2,600 students, received 3,771 applications this year, the most in its 137-year history.

Generally, only small colleges and universities with the resources to pay attention to recommendations, essays and extracurricular activities, as well as to a student's grades and test scores, have been able to eliminate their testing requirements.

But some state universities, too, now admit most of their freshman class without regard to standardized test scores.

At the University of Texas, for example, most students are admitted under a state policy guaranteeing admissions for those in the top 10 percent of their high school class.

from ZDNet.com, 2008-Jul-25, by Christopher Dawson:

Girls are as smart as boys, but tests are getting dumber

New research published in the journal Science confirms what all of us teachers have known for a long time: girls are just as smart as boys. I hope none of our tax dollars went into that one. A quick quote from the article before I get into the more interesting findings from the researchers:

Overall, the researchers found “no gender difference” in scores among children in grades two through 11. Among students with the highest test scores, the team did find that white boys outnumbered white girls by about two to one. Among Asians, however, that result was nearly reversed. Hyde says that suggests that cultural and social factors, not gender alone, influence how well students perform on tests.

So on to the good stuff. The researchers found that most of the standardized tests on which they based their results were omitting difficult math questions. These are the questions that require critical thinking or simply call on higher-level math courses. As we all know, especially here in the States, teachers everywhere must “teach to the test,” since so much is tied to the standardized testing mandated by No Child Left Behind (anyone here counting down until GW gets left behind, by the way?). Whether it's graduation, funding, or teacher promotion, a lot rides on these tests.

Yet the tests are designed to ensure that all kids meet a certain basic level of understanding, meaning that teachers rarely have time to teach upper level math, focusing instead on the lowest common denominators (no pun intended):

The study's most disturbing finding, the authors say, is that neither boys nor girls get many tough math questions on state tests now required to measure a school district's progress under the 2002 federal No Child Left Behind law. Using a four-level rating scale, with level one being easiest, the authors said that they found no challenging level-three or -four questions on most state tests. The authors worry that means that teachers may start dropping harder math from their curriculums, because “more teachers are gearing their instruction to the test.”

Christopher Dawson is a teacher and IT administrator for Athol, MA High School. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2008-Jun-14, p.A10:

Amazing Teacher Facts

This month 3,700 recent college grads will begin Teach for America's five-week boot camp, before heading off for two-year stints at the nation's worst public schools. These young men and women were chosen from almost 25,000 applicants, hailing from our most selective colleges. Eleven per cent of Yale's senior class, 9% of Harvard's and 10% of Georgetown's applied for a job whose salary ranges from $25,000 (in rural South Dakota) to $44,000 (in New York City).

Hang on a second.

Unions keep saying the best people won't go into teaching unless we pay them what doctors and lawyers and CEOs make. Not only are Teach for America salaries significantly lower than what J.P. Morgan might offer, but these individuals go to some very rough classrooms. What's going on?

It seems that Teach for America offers smart young people something even better than money – the chance to avoid the vast education bureaucracy. Participants need only pass academic muster and attend the summer training before entering a classroom. If they took the traditional route into teaching, they would have to endure years of "education" courses to be certified.

The American Federation of Teachers commonly derides Teach for America as a "band-aid." One of its arguments is that the program only lasts two years, barely enough time, they say, to get a handle on managing a classroom. However, it turns out that two-thirds of its grads stay in the education field, sometimes as teachers, but also as principals or policy makers.

More importantly, it doesn't matter that they are only in the classroom a short time, at least according to a recent Urban Institute study. Here's the gist: "On average, high school students taught by TFA corps members performed significantly better on state-required end-of-course exams, especially in math and science, than peers taught by far more experienced instructors. The TFA teachers' effect on student achievement in core classroom subjects was nearly three times the effect of teachers with three or more years of experience."

Jane Hannaway, one of the study's co-authors, says Teach for America participants may be more motivated than their traditional teacher peers. Second, they may receive better support during their experience. But, above all, Teach for America volunteers tend to have much better academic qualifications. They come from more competitive schools and they know more about the subjects they teach. Ms. Hannaway notes, "Students are better off being exposed to teachers with a high level of skill."

The strong performance in math and science seems to confirm that the more specialized the knowledge, the more important it is that teachers be well versed in it. (Imagine that.) No amount of time in front of a classroom will make you understand advanced algebra better.

Teach for America was pleased, but not exactly shocked, by these results. "We have always been a data-driven organization," says spokesman Amy Rabinowitz. "We have a selection model we've refined over the years." The organization figures out which teachers have been most successful in improving student performance and then seeks applicants with similar qualities. "It's mostly a record of high academic achievement and leadership in extracurricular activities."

Sounds like the way the private sector hires. Don't tell the teachers unions.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2008-May-27, p.A19, by Bret Stephens:

Homeland Security Newspeak

The Department of Homeland Security thinks it's a bad idea to use the word "liberty" when describing America's foreign policy goals. Nor does it much like the terms "Islamist" and "jihadist." Heaven forbid the federal government cause needless offense in the current war against, well, whoever.

Such are the recommendations on "Terminology to Define Terrorists," a nine-page, "Official Use Only" memo issued in January by Homeland Security's Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. It purports to represent the suggestions of a "wide variety" of unnamed American Muslim leaders consulted on the subject. And while it is not a statement of official policy, it neatly captures the sophisticated government thinking about its rhetorical strategies for what used to be called the "Global War on Terror."

Now, thanks to the DHS brain trust, we are offered a "Global Struggle for Security and Progress." Perhaps with further moral and intellectual refinement, we can someday embark on a General Effort Against Negativity and Ungoodness.

In "1984," George Orwell famously created Newspeak, "the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year." How things haven't changed. The Homeland Security memo begins by declaring that "Words matter," whereupon it proceeds to suggest that some words matter so much it's best not to use them at all. Instead, the memo proposes a "strategic terminology" to dictate the utterances of public officials regarding the so-called Global Struggle.

In the new dispensation, much of which has reportedly been adopted by the State Department, using the word Islamic is out because it potentially "[concedes] the terrorists' claims that they are legitimate adherents of Islam." Use of the word jihad is said to "glamorize terrorism." Islamist – a neutral and broadly accepted term for those who espouse Islam as a political system – is frowned upon because "the general public . . . may not appreciate the academic distinction between Islamism and Islam." Using the word Salafism, the religious variant of Islam espoused by al Qaeda, may have the unfortunate effect of demonizing those Salafists who aren't violent. The term moderate Muslims may include those who aren't religiously observant, and thus offend those Muslims who are. "Mainstream Muslim" is supposedly better.

In its most eye-catching recommendation (which goes strangely unmentioned in an Associated Press story about the memo), the DHS authors explain their preference for the word "progress" over "liberty."

"The struggle is for 'progress,' over which no nation has a monopoly," reads the memo. "The experts we consulted debated the word 'liberty,' but rejected it because many around the world would discount the term as a buzzword for American hegemony. But all people want to support 'progress,' which emphasizes that there is a path for building strong families and prosperity among the current dislocations of globalization and change. And progress is precisely what the terrorists oppose through their violent tactics and through their efforts to impose a totalitarian world view."

It seems to have escaped the authors' notice that the most formidable totalitarian movement of the 20th century – communism – was, by its own lights, "progressive." It seems to have escaped their notice that the essence of a totalitarian system is the denial of liberty (often in the name of progress). It seems to have escaped their notice that "progress" is a word that signifies nothing. Exactly what is one progressing to?

It also seems to have escaped their notice that Muslims themselves might aspire to live in conditions of political, economic and social liberty, U.S. "hegemony" notwithstanding. As for defining the current struggle as one for "security," it might be observed that dictatorial regimes often have solid track records as crime fighters: Mussolini crushed the mafia.

The inanity here is so mind-boggling that it seems almost deliberate, and causes one to wonder just which "American Muslim leaders" the U.S. government is consulting. Last October, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff was a guest of honor at a Ramadan event at which, according to one participant, he was publicly thanked by the president of the Islamic Society of North America for "keeping the doors open so we can advise you on how to engage the Muslim world."

For the record, the ISNA was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the case of the Holy Land Foundation, a U.S.-based charity alleged to have had ties with Hamas. Imagine if the Kennedy administration had consulted with the Workers World Party on strategies to contain the Soviet Union, and you get a sense of what Homeland Security is doing today.

No doubt the government really does need better terminology to describe the war we're in, which is against violent Islamic extremists and every regime, warlord, charity, school or imam supporting them. No doubt, too, we need the support of every Muslim we can rally to our side. Those many millions who do not shrink from the word "liberty" might just fit the bill.

from Foreign Policy, 2008-Jan/Feb, by Stefan Theil:

Europe's Philosophy of Failure

In France and Germany, students are being forced to undergo a dangerous indoctrination. Taught that economic principles such as capitalism, free markets, and entrepreneurship are savage, unhealthy, and immoral, these children are raised on a diet of prejudice and bias. Rooting it out may determine whether Europe's economies prosper or continue to be left behind.

Millions of children are being raised on prejudice and disinformation. Educated in schools that teach a skewed ideology, they are exposed to a dogma that runs counter to core beliefs shared by many other Western countries. They study from textbooks filled with a doctrine of dissent, which they learn to recite as they prepare to attend many of the better universities in the world. Extracting these children from the jaws of bias could mean the difference between world prosperity and menacing global rifts. And doing so will not be easy. But not because these children are found in the madrasas of Pakistan or the state-controlled schools of Saudi Arabia. They are not. Rather, they live in two of the world's great democracies—France and Germany.

What a country teaches its young people reflects its bedrock national beliefs. Schools hand down a society's historical narrative to the next generation. There has been a great deal of debate over the ways in which this historical ideology is passed on—over Japanese textbooks that downplay the Nanjing Massacre, Palestinian textbooks that feature maps without Israel, and new Russian guidelines that require teachers to portray Stalinism more favorably. Yet there has been almost no analysis of how countries teach economics, even though the subject is equally crucial in shaping the collective identity that drives foreign and domestic policies.

Just as schools teach a historical narrative, they also pass on “truths” about capitalism, the welfare state, and other economic principles that a society considers self-evident. In both France and Germany, for instance, schools have helped ingrain a serious aversion to capitalism. In one 2005 poll, just 36 percent of French citizens said they supported the free-enterprise system, the only one of 22 countries polled that showed minority support for this cornerstone of global commerce. In Germany, meanwhile, support for socialist ideals is running at all-time highs—47 percent in 2007 versus 36 percent in 1991.

It's tempting to dismiss these attitudes as being little more than punch lines to cocktail party jokes. But their impact is sadly and seriously self-destructive. In Germany, unemployment is finally falling after years at Depression-era levels, thanks in no small part to welfare reforms that in 2005 pressured Germans on the public dole to take up jobs. Yet there is near consensus among Germans that, despite this happy outcome, tinkering with the welfare state went far beyond what is permissible. Chancellor Angela Merkel, once heralded as Germany's own Margaret Thatcher, has all but abandoned her plans to continue free-market reforms. She has instead imposed a new “rich people tax,” has tightened labor-market rules, and has promised renewed efforts to “regulate” globalization. Meanwhile, two in three Germans say they support at least some of the voodoo-economic, roll-back-the-reforms platform of a noisy new antiglobalization political party called Die Linke (The Left), founded by former East German communists and Western left-wing populists.

Many of these popular attitudes can be traced to state-mandated curricula in schools. It is there that economic lessons are taught that diverge substantially from the market-based principles on which the Western model is based. The phenomenon may hardly be unique to Europe, but in few places is it more obvious than in France and Germany. A biased view of economics feeds into many of the world's most vexing problems, from the growth of populism to the global rise of anti-American, anti-capitalist attitudes.

ECONOMICS À LA CARTE

“Economic growth imposes a hectic form of life, producing overwork, stress, nervous depression, cardiovascular disease and, according to some, even the development of cancer,” asserts the three-volume Histoire du XXe siècle, a set of texts memorized by countless French high school students as they prepare for entrance exams to Sciences Po and other prestigious French universities. The past 20 years have “doubled wealth, doubled unemployment, poverty, and exclusion, whose ill effects constitute the background for a profound social malaise,” the text continues. Because the 21st century begins with “an awareness of the limits to growth and the risks posed to humanity [by economic growth],” any future prosperity “depends on the regulation of capitalism on a planetary scale.” Capitalism itself is described at various points in the text as “brutal,” “savage,” “neoliberal,” and “American.” This agitprop was published in 2005, not in 1972.

When French students are not getting this kind of wildly biased commentary on the destruction wreaked by capitalism, they are learning that economic progress is also the root cause of social ills. For example, a one-year high school course on the inner workings of an economy developed by the French Education Ministry called Sciences Economiques et Sociales, spends two thirds of its time discussing the sociopolitical fallout of economic activity. Chapter and section headings include “Social Cleavages and Inequality,” “Social Mobilization and Conflict,” “Poverty and Exclusion,” and “Globalization and Regulation.” The ministry mandates that students learn “worldwide regulation as a response” to globalization. Only one third of the course is about companies and markets, and even those bits include extensive sections on unions, government economic policy, the limits of markets, and the dangers of growth. The overall message is that economic activity has countless undesirable effects from which citizens must be protected.

No wonder, then, that the French default attitude is to be suspicious of market forces and private entrepreneurship, not to mention any policies that would strengthen them. Start-ups, Histoire du XXe siècle tells its students, are “audacious enterprises” with “ill-defined prospects.” Then it links entrepreneurs with the tech bubble, the Nasdaq crash, and mass layoffs across the economy. (Think “creative destruction” without the “creative.”) In one widely used text, a section on technology and innovation does not mention a single entrepreneur or company. Instead, students read a lengthy treatise on whether technological progress destroys jobs. In another textbook, students actually meet a French entrepreneur who invented a new tool to open oysters. But the quirky anecdote is followed by a long-winded debate over the degree to which the modern workplace is organized along the lines imagined by Frederick Taylor, the father of modern scientific management theory. And just in case they missed it in history class, students are reminded that “cultural globalization” leads to violence and armed resistance, ultimately necessitating a new system of global governance.

This is a world apart from what American high school students learn. In the United States, where fewer than half of high school students take an economics course, most classes are based on straightforward, classical economics. In Texas, the state-prescribed curriculum requires that the positive contribution of entrepreneurs to the local economy be taught. The state of New York, meanwhile, has coordinated its curriculum with entrepreneurship-promoting youth groups such as Junior Achievement, as well as with economists at the Federal Reserve. Do American schools encourage students to follow in the footsteps of Bill Gates or become ardent fans of globalization? Not really. But they certainly aren't filling students with negative preconceptions and suspicions about businesses and the people who run them. Nor do they obsess about the negative side effects and dangers of economic activity the way French textbooks do.

French students, on the other hand, do not learn economics so much as a very specific, highly biased discourse about economics. When they graduate, they may not know much about supply and demand, or about the workings of a corporation. Instead, they will likely know inside-out the evils of “la McDonaldisation du monde” and the benefits of a “Tobin tax” on the movement of global capital. This kind of anticapitalist, antiglobalization discourse isn't just the product of a few aging 1968ers writing for Le Monde Diplomatique; it is required learning in today's French schools.

LEARNING TO LOVE THE DOLE

Germans teach their young people a similar economic narrative, with a slightly different emphasis. The focus is on instilling the corporatist and collectivist traditions of the German system. Although each of Germany's 16 states sets its own education requirements, nearly all teach through the lens of workplace conflict between employer and employee, the central battle being over wages and work rules. If there's one unifying characteristic of German textbooks, it's the tremendous emphasis on group interests, the traditional social-democratic division of the universe into capital and labor, employer and employee, boss and worker. Textbooks teach the minutiae of employer-employee relations, workplace conflict, collective bargaining, unions, strikes, and worker protection. Even a cursory look at the country's textbooks shows that many are written from the perspective of a future employee with a union contract. Bosses and company owners show up in caricatures and illustrations as idle, cigar-smoking plutocrats, sometimes linked to child labor, Internet fraud, cell-phone addiction, alcoholism, and, of course, undeserved layoffs. The successful, modern entrepreneur is virtually nowhere to be found.

German students will be well-versed in many subjects upon graduation; one topic they will know particularly well is their rights as welfare recipients. One 10th-grade social studies text titled FAKT has a chapter on “What to do against unemployment.” Instead of describing how companies might create jobs, the section explains how those without jobs can organize into self-help groups and join weekly anti-reform protests “in the tradition of the East German Monday demonstrations” (which in 1989 helped topple the communist dictatorship). The not-so-subtle subtext? Jobs are a right to be demanded from the government. The same chapter also details various welfare programs, explains how employers use the threat of layoffs as a tactic to cut pay, and concludes with a long excerpt from the platform of the German Union Federation, including the 30-hour work week, retirement at age 60, and redistribution of the work pie by splitting full-time into part-time jobs. No market alternative is taught. When fakt presents the reasons for unemployment, it blames computers and robots. In fact, this is a recurring theme in German textbooks—the Internet will turn workers into “anonymous code” and kill off interpersonal communication.

Equally popular in Germany today are student workbooks on globalization. One such workbook includes sections headed “The Revival of Manchester Capitalism,” “The Brazilianization of Europe,” and “The Return of the Dark Ages.” India and China are successful, the book explains, because they have large, state-owned sectors and practice protectionism, while the societies with the freest markets lie in impoverished sub-Saharan Africa. Like many French and German books, this text suggests students learn more by contacting the antiglobalization group Attac, best known for organizing messy protests at the annual G-8 summits.

One might expect Europeans to view the world through a slightly left-of-center, social-democratic lens. The surprise is the intensity and depth of the anti-market bias being taught in Europe's schools. Students learn that private companies destroy jobs while government policy creates them. Employers exploit while the state protects. Free markets offer chaos while government regulation brings order. Globalization is destructive, if not catastrophic. Business is a zero-sum game, the source of a litany of modern social problems. Some enterprising teachers and parents may try to teach an alternative view, and some books are less ideological than others. But given the biases inherent in the curricula, this background is unavoidable. It is the context within which most students develop intellectually. And it's a belief system that must eventually appear to be the truth.

CAN OLD EUROPE DO NEW TRICKS?

This bias has tremendous implications that reach far beyond the domestic political debate in these two countries. These beliefs inform students' choices in life. Taught that the free market is a dangerous wilderness, twice as many Germans as Americans tell pollsters that you should not start a business if you think it might fail. According to the European Union's internal polling, just two in five Germans and French would like to be their own boss, compared to three in five Americans. Whereas 8 percent of Americans say they are currently involved in starting a business, that's true of only 2 percent of Germans and 1 percent of the French. Another 28 percent of Americans are considering starting a business, compared to just 11 percent of the French and 18 percent of Germans. The loss to Europe's two largest economies in terms of jobs, innovation, and economic dynamism is severe.

Attitudes and mind-sets, it is increasingly being shown, are closely related to a country's economic performance. Edmund Phelps, a Columbia University economist and Nobel laureate, contends that attitudes toward markets, work, and risk-taking are significantly more powerful in explaining the variation in countries' actual economic performance than the traditional factors upon which economists focus, including social spending, tax rates, and labor-market regulation. The connection between capitalism and culture, once famously described by Max Weber, also helps explain continental Europe's poor record in entrepreneurship and innovation. A study by the Massachusetts-based Monitor Group, the Entrepreneurship Benchmarking Index, looks at nine countries and finds a powerful correlation between attitudes about economics and actual corporate performance. The researchers find that attitudes explain 40 percent of the variation in start-up and company growth rates—by far the strongest correlation of any of the 31 indicators they tested. If countries such as France and Germany hope to boost entrepreneurship, innovation, and economic dynamism—as their leaders claim they do—the most effective way to make that happen may be to use education to boost the cultural legitimacy of going into business.

The deep anti-market bias that French and Germans continue to teach challenges the conventional wisdom that it's just a matter of time, thanks to the pressures of globalization, before much of the world agrees upon a supposedly “Western” model of free-market capitalism. Politicians in democracies cannot long fight the preferences of the majority of their constituents. So this bias will likely continue to circumscribe both European elections and policy outcomes. A likely alternative scenario may be that the changes wrought by globalization will awaken deeply held resentment against capitalism and, in many countries from Europe to Latin America, provide a fertile ground for populists and demagogues, a trend that is already manifesting itself in the sudden rise of many leftist movements today.

Minimal reforms to the welfare state cost former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder his job in 2005. They have also paralyzed modern German politics. Former communists and disaffected Social Democrats, together with left-wing Greens, have flocked to Germany's new leftist party, whose politics is a distasteful mix of anticapitalist demagoguery and right-wing xenophobia. Its platform, polls show, is finding support even among mainstream Germans. A left-leaning majority, within both the parliament and the public at large, makes the world's third-largest economy vulnerable to destructive policies driven by anticapitalist resentment and fear of globalization. Similar situations are easily conceivable elsewhere and have already helped bring populists to power in Latin America. Then there is France, where President Nicolas Sarkozy promised to “rupture” with the failed economic policies of the past. He has taken on the country's public servants and their famously lavish benefits, but many of his policies appear to be driven by what he calls “economic patriotism,” which smacks of old-fashioned industrial protectionism. That's exactly what French schoolchildren have long learned is the way the world should work.

Both the French and German cases show the limits of trying to run against the grain of deeply held economic ideology. Yet, training the next generation of citizens to be prejudiced against being enterprising and productive is equally foolhardy. Fortunately, such widespread attitudes and the political outcomes they foster aren't only determined by tradition and history. They are, to a great extent, the product of education. If countries like France and Germany hope to get their nations on a new economic track, they might start paying more attention to what their kids are learning in the classroom.

Stefan Theil is Newsweek's European economics editor. He completed his research of American, French, and German textbooks and curricula while a trans-Atlantic fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States.

from the Los Angeles Times, 2007-Sep-29, by Tim Rutten:

Ahmadinejad walks away with a win

His Columbia engagement gives him what he wants -- legitimacy -- and his hosts look rude to Islamic eyes.

One of the world's truly dangerous men, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, left New York a clear winner this week, and he can thank the arrogance of the American academy and most of the U.S. news media's studied indifference for his victory.

If the blood-drenched history of the century just past had taught American academics one thing, it should have been that the totalitarian impulse knows no accommodation with reason. You cannot change the totalitarian mind through dialogue or conversation, because totalitarianism -- however ingenious the superstructure of faux ideas with which it surrounds itself -- is a creature of the will and not the mind. That's a large lesson, but what should have made Ahmadinejad's appearance at Columbia University this week a wholly avoidable debacle was the school's knowledge of its own, very specific history.

In the 1930s, Columbia was run by Nicholas Murray Butler, to whose name a special sort of infamy attaches. Butler was an outspoken admirer of Italian fascism and of its leader, Benito Mussolini. The Columbia president, who also was in the forefront of Ivy League efforts to restrict Jewish enrollment, worked tirelessly to build ties between his school and Italian universities, as well as with the powerful fascist student organizations. At one point, a visiting delegation of 350 ardent young Black Shirts serenaded Butler with the fascist anthem.

Butler also was keen to establish connections with Nazi Germany and its universities. In 1933, he invited Hans Luther, Adolf Hitler's ambassador to the United States, to lecture on the Columbia campus. Luther stressed Hitler's "peaceful intentions" toward his European neighbors, and, afterward, Butler gave a reception in his honor. As the emissary of "a friendly people," Luther was "entitled to be received with the greatest courtesy and respect," the Columbia president said at the time.

It was such a transparently appalling performance all around that one of the anonymous authors of the New York Times' "Topics of the Times" column put tongue in cheek and looked forward to the occasion when "the Nazi leaders will point out that they were all along opposed to any measures capable of being construed as unjust to any element in the German population or as a threat to peace in Europe."

Arrogance, though, is invincible -- even to irony.

Three years later, Butler sent a delegation of Columbia dignitaries to participate in anniversary celebrations at the University of Heidelberg. That was after Heidelberg had purged all the Jewish professors from its faculty, reformed its curriculum according to Nazi educational theories and publicly burned the unapproved books in its libraries.

It would be interesting to know if any consideration of these events -- and all that followed a decade of engagement and dialogue with fascism -- occurred before Columbia extended a speaking invitation to a man who hopes to see Israel "wiped off the face of the Earth," has denied the Holocaust and is defying the world community in pursuit of nuclear weapons. Perhaps they did and perhaps that's part of what motivated Lee Bollinger, Columbia's president now, to deliver his extraordinarily ill-advised welcoming remarks to Ahmadinejad.

Bollinger clearly had an American audience in mind when he denounced the Iranian leader to his face as a "cruel" and "petty dictator" and described his Holocaust denial as designed to "fool the illiterate and the ignorant." Bollinger's remarks may have taken him off the hook with his domestic critics, but when it came to the international media audience that really counted, Ahmadinejad already had carried the day. The invitation to speak at Columbia already had given him something totalitarian demagogues -- who are as image-conscious as Hollywood stars -- always crave: legitimacy. Bollinger's denunciation was icing on the cake, because the constituency the Iranian leader cares about is scattered across an Islamic world that values hospitality and its courtesies as core social virtues. To that audience, Bollinger looked stunningly ill-mannered; Ahmadinejad dignified and restrained.

Back in Tehran, Mohsen Mirdamadi, a leading Iranian reformer and Ahmadinejad opponent, said Bollinger's blistering remarks "only strengthened" the president back home and "made his radical supporters more determined," According to an Associated Press report, "Many Iranians found the comments insulting, particularly because in Iranian traditions of hospitality, a host should be polite to a guest, no matter what he thinks of him. To many, Ahmadinejad looked like the victim, and hard-liners praised the president's calm demeanor during the event, saying Bollinger was spouting a 'Zionist' line."

All of this was bad enough, but the almost willful refusal of commentators in the American media to provide their audiences with insight into just how sinister Ahmadinejad really is compounded the problem. There are a couple of reasons for the media's general refusal to engage with radical Islamic revivalists, like Ahmadinejad. He belongs to a particularly aggressive school of radical Shiite Islam, the Haghani, which lives in expectation of the imminent coming of the Madhi, a kind of Islamic messiah, who will bring peace and justice -- along with universal Islamic rule -- to the entire world. Serious members of this school -- and Ahmadinejad, who was a brilliant university student, is a very serious member -- believe they must act to speed the Mahdi's coming. "The wave of the Islamic revolution" would soon "reach the entire world," he has promised.

As a fundamentally secular institution, the American press always has had a hard time coming to grips with the fact that Islamists like the Iranian president mean what they say and that they really do believe what they say they believe.

Finally, there's the fact that the neoconservative remnants clustered around Vice President Dick Cheney are beating the drums for a preemptive military action against Iran before it becomes a nuclear nation, as North Korea already has, thereby constraining U.S. policy in northwest Asia. After being duped by the Bush administration into helping pave the way for the disastrous war in Iraq, few in the American media now are willing to take the Iran problem on because they don't want to be complicit in another military misadventure.

Fair enough -- but that anxiety doesn't exempt the press from being realistic about who Ahmadinejad really is and the danger he really does pose to all around him.

from the Times of London, 2008-Jan-13, by Brendan Montague:

Anti-war Soros funded Iraq study

A STUDY that claimed 650,000 people were killed as a result of the invasion of Iraq was partly funded by the antiwar billionaire George Soros.

Soros, 77, provided almost half the £50,000 cost of the research, which appeared in The Lancet, the medical journal. Its claim was 10 times higher than consensus estimates of the number of war dead.

The study, published in 2006, was hailed by antiwar campaigners as evidence of the scale of the disaster caused by the invasion, but Downing Street and President George Bush challenged its methodology.

New research published by The New England Journal of Medicine estimates that 151,000 people - less than a quarter of The Lancet estimate - have died since the invasion in 2003.

“The authors should have disclosed the [Soros] donation and for many people that would have been a disqualifying factor in terms of publishing the research,” said Michael Spagat, economics professor at Royal Holloway, University of London.

The Lancet study was commissioned by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and led by Les Roberts, an associate professor and epidemiologist at Columbia University. He reportedly opposed the war from the outset.

His team surveyed 1,849 homes at 47 sites across Iraq, asking people about births, deaths and migration in their households.

Professor John Tirman of MIT said this weekend that $46,000 (£23,000) of the approximate £50,000 cost of the study had come from Soros's Open Society Institute.

Roberts said this weekend: “In retrospect, it was probably unwise to have taken money that could have looked like it would result in a political slant. I am adamant this could not have affected the outcome of the research.”

The Lancet did not break any rules by failing to disclose Soros's sponsorship.

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2007-May-23, by Wendy Kaminer:

The American Liberal Liberties Union
The ACLU is becoming very selective about what it considers "free" speech.

"ACLU Defends Nazi's Right to Burn Down ACLU Headquarters," the humor magazine The Onion announced in 1999. Those of us who loved the ACLU, and celebrated its willingness to defend the rights of Nazis and others who had no regard for our rights, considered the joke a compliment. Today it's more like a reproach. Once the nation's leading civil liberties group and a reliable defender of everyone's speech rights, the ACLU is being transformed into just another liberal human-rights group that reliably defends the rights of liberal speakers.

This transformation is gradual, unacknowledged and not readily apparent, since evidence of it lies mainly in cases the ACLU does not take. It's naturally easier to know what an organization is doing (and advertising) than what it is not doing. But a review of recent free-speech press releases turns up only a handful of cases in which ACLU state affiliates defended the rights of conservative, antigay or otherwise politically incorrect speakers. And lately the national organization has been remarkably quiet in several important free-speech cases and controversies.

One of the clearest indications of a retreat from defending all speech regardless of content is the ACLU's virtual silence in Harper v. Poway, an important federal case involving a high-school student's right to wear a T-shirt condemning homosexuality. Of course, the ACLU doesn't speak out on every case, but historically it has vigorously defended student speech rights, as its Web site stresses. It is currently representing a student in a speech case before the Supreme Court, Morse v. Frederick (involving the right of a student to carry a nonsensical "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" banner at an off-campus event). The ACLU pays particular attention to the right to wear T-shirts with pro-gay messages in school, proudly citing cases in which it represented students wearing pro-gay (as well as anti-Bush) T-shirts. This year, the ACLU awarded a Youth Activist Scholarship to a student who fought the efforts of her school to bar students from wearing T-shirts that said "Gay, Fine by me."

So in 2004, when Tyler Chase Harper was disciplined for wearing a T-shirt declaring his religious objections to homosexuality, civil libertarians might have expected the ACLU to protest loudly. Mr. Harper was barred from attending classes when he wore the antigay T-shirt to school on an official "Day of Silence," when gay students taped their mouths to symbolize the silencing effect of intolerance. Represented by the Alliance Defense Fund, he sued the school district. That same year, the ACLU initiated the first of two actions against a Missouri school that punished students for wearing "gay supportive T-shirts," eventually securing a promise from the school to "stop censoring," the ACLU Web site boasts. Mr. Harper, however, was unsuccessful in his quest to stop school censorship. In a patronizing, antilibertarian decision in which Judge Stephen Reinhardt stressed the imagined feelings of gay students, the Ninth Circuit rejected Mr. Harper's First Amendment claims. (There was a sharp dissent from Judge Alex Kozinski.)

Perhaps the ACLU was observing its own prolonged Day of Silence, because, while it pays close attention to federal appellate court decisions on civil liberties, it effectively ignored this terrible precedent, even when Mr. Harper appealed to the Supreme Court. The Court dismissed the case as moot because Mr. Harper had graduated but took the unusual step of vacating the decision so that it no longer exists as precedent (no thanks to the ACLU). Mr. Harper's younger sister, still in school, continued pressing his claims and her case is pending before the Ninth circuit. The ACLU has not adopted her cause either.

The Harpers didn't need representation from the ACLU. But the organization frequently speaks up for the rights of people it does not represent, like Guantanamo detainees, and often files amicus briefs in important civil liberties cases. Given its focus on student rights and religious liberty (one of the ACLU's priorities), it's hard to explain the ACLU's apparent equanimity about the violation of Mr. Harper's First Amendment rights--unless you consider the content of his speech.

---

This case does not appear to be anomalous. Despite its professed commitment to religious liberty, for example, the ACLU tends to absent itself from cases on college campuses involving the associational rights of Christian student groups to discriminate against gay students, in accordance with their religious beliefs. But conservative students might be grateful for the ACLU's absence. Consider its intervention in a successful federal court challenge to an unconstitutional speech code at Georgia Tech, brought by the Alliance Defense Fund in 2006 on behalf of two conservative religious students. The ACLU of Georgia filed an amicus brief proposing a substitute but still overbroad "antiharassment" policy that included a prohibition on "injurious communications . . . directed toward an individual because of their characteristics or beliefs." In other words: Students should be punished for sharply criticizing or satirizing each other's beliefs if their remarks are deemed "injurious." Occasionally an ACLU affiliate does intervene in defense of politically incorrect speech and vigorous debate on campus. But the Foundation for Individual Rights In Education has become a much more reliable advocate for the rights of all college students, regardless of ideology or religion. (I serve on both FIRE's advisory board and the board of the Massachusetts ACLU affiliate.)

The ACLU was even AWOL in one of the most visible and frightening free-speech controversies in recent years--the Muhammad cartoons, which many condemned as "hate speech." When Muslim groups violently protested the cartoons (first published in the Danish press), when American newspapers declined to publish them for fear of reprisals, and when the U.S. State Department condemned their publication--the ACLU exercised its right to remain silent. In fact, its press office actually advised ducking questions about the cartoons that might arise during discussions of torture at Abu Ghraib. A set of talking points from the press office recommended responding to questions about the cartoons by exhorting the U.S. government to "demonstrate . . . that it is taking the Abu Ghraib images seriously." (This was later spun as an effort to stay on message about abuses at Abu Ghraib.)

Not until an ACLU donor complained about this silence on the cartoon controversy, and questions about it were raised before the ACLU board, did ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero speak up--quietly. He mentioned the controversy in a relatively obscure dinner speech to the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. He sent a letter to the University of Illinois urging it not to discipline student editors who published the cartoons in a campus paper. In a letter to the ACLU board, Mr. Romero both denied and defended the ACLU's relative silence: "With regard to the cartoons, rather than put out a hortatory statement that no one would read (except insiders) but might make us feel good about ourselves, we have tried to engage in thoughtful forums and discussions that relate to the issue. Speaking out on an issue involves more than slapping a paragraph together and posting it on a website."

Perhaps. But, like other advocacy groups, the ACLU routinely circulates hortatory statements to insiders that herald the organization's important work. And it regularly posts slapped-together paragraphs on the ACLU Web site (and in emails) about the abuses of the Bush administration, among other subjects. In fact, much of the ACLU's post 9/11 work (and its budget priorities) involves public education. Whatever Mr. Romero's reasons for staying out of the cartoon controversy, they did not include disdain for paying lip service to free speech.

Why did the ACLU avoid issuing a loud and clear public statement decrying violent efforts to suppress the Muhammad cartoons? Its silence may have reflected growing sympathy among ACLU leaders and supporters for restricting what many liberals condemn as hate speech. "Take hate speech," Mr. Romero remarked to the New York Times in May 2006. "While believing in free speech, we do not believe in or condone speech that attacks minorities." (He was commenting on a proposal to bar board members from criticizing the ACLU--a proposal that was amended only after being exposed in the Times.)

---

Liberal sympathy for restricting hate speech may also explain the failure of the New York Civil Liberties Union to oppose the New York City Council's recent, symbolic moratorium on use of the n-word. NYCLU Executive Director Donna Lieberman justified her silence to the New York Times, explaining that, "The Council is entitled to a point of view. It would be an entirely different matter if the Council was considering a law to ban use of the n-word." But this ignores the natural tendency of an official, symbolic ban on speech to encourage support for an actual ban. If the City Council passed a symbolic resolution denouncing flag burning or criticizing the president, I'd bet my yearly contribution to the ACLU that Ms. Lieberman would oppose it vociferously.

Finally, the ACLU has affirmatively supported legislative restrictions on speech it does not like, even when it is clearly political. Last March, the ACLU announced its support for a bill introduced by Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D., N.Y.) aimed at barring antiabortion centers from advertising "abortion counseling" services. While some crisis pregnancy centers that offer abortion counseling can fairly be accused of engaging in a bait and switch (trying to lure women seeking abortions into counseling sessions with antiabortion advocates), they're also engaged in political speech at the core of First Amendment protections. Not surprisingly, the ACLU's endorsement of legislation restricting this speech generated controversy when it was reported in the New York Sun. How did ACLU leaders respond? The press release announcing support for the Maloney bill was deleted from the ACLU Web site. Today, one year later, the national board is seriously considering adopting a policy on commercial speech that would support restrictions on advertising by nonprofit antiabortion clinics.

This is not the same organization that once took pride in its costly, principled decision to defend the rights of neo-Nazis to march in a community of Holocaust survivors in Skokie, Ill. Of course the ACLU hasn't definitively abandoned its defense of speech: Large, national organizations change incrementally. But people should no longer depend on the ACLU to defend what they preach (especially at a cost), if it disapproves of what they practice.

Ms. Kaminer, a lawyer and author, blogs on civil liberties at thefreeforall.net.

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2007-Sep-1, by Joseph Rago:

Mr. Rodgers Goes to Dartmouth
A cautionary tale about a businessman who ventured back into the Ivory Tower.

SAN JOSE, Calif.--T.J. Rodgers does not seem pleased, his gelid stare intensifying at a recent project meeting. "You're not being aggressive enough on the transistors, so I'm going to help you," rumbles the chief executive of Cypress Semiconductor, a Silicon Valley chip maker. This leads into a technical debate with one of his senior engineers: "Are you serious about using Indium instead of Boron?"

Mr. Rodgers founded Cypress in 1982, and now, a lifetime later in the hypercompetitive semiconductor business, it is an industry leader. Mr. Rodgers, for his part, has reached that phase where success purchases new opportunities.

Some men of his means and achievement buy a yacht, or turn to philanthropic work, or join other corporate boards. Mr. Rodgers went back to school: He became a trustee of his alma mater, Dartmouth College--and not a recumbent one. He has now served for three years; and though he notes some positives, overall, Mr. Rodgers says, "It's been a horrible experience. I'm a respected person here in Silicon Valley. Nobody calls me names. Nobody demeans me in board meetings. That's not the way I'm treated at Dartmouth. The behavior has been pretty shabby."

Now the college's establishment is working to ensure that the likes of T.J. Rodgers never again intrude where they're not welcome. What follows is a cautionary tale about what happens when the business world crosses over into the alternative academic one.

---

Founded in Hanover, N.H., in 1769, Dartmouth has long been famous for the intensity of its alumni's loyalty. It is not unfair, or an exaggeration, to call it half college and half cult.

In part this devotion is because of what the school does well. "Dartmouth is the best undergraduate school in the world," says Mr. Rodgers, who graduated in 1970 as salutatorian, with degrees in chemistry and physics. There were "small classes taught by real professors, not graduate students," he says, "and I never realized how that was heaven on earth until I went on to my next school." (Mr. Rodgers earned a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford in 1975.)

Partly, too, Dartmouth's alumni fidelity is a result of engaging graduates in the life of the college. It is one of a few schools in the U.S. that allow alumni to elect leaders directly. Eight of the 18 members of Dartmouth's governing Board of Trustees are chosen by the popular vote of some 66,500 graduates. (The other seats are reserved mostly for major donors, along with ex officio positions for the governor of New Hampshire and the college president.) This arrangement has been in place since 1891.

Until recently, though, Dartmouth's elections have been indifferent affairs, with the alumni choosing from a largely homogeneous slate handpicked by a committee closely aligned with the administration. In 2004, things got--interesting. Mr. Rodgers bypassed the official nomination channels and was named to the ballot by collecting alumni signatures; he needed 500 and ended up acquiring more than 15 times that. He was dissatisfied with the college's direction and resolved to either "do something or stop griping about it." He was elected by 54% of the voters.

Although there were a lot of political issues churning about the campus, Mr. Rodgers decided "that I would pursue just one issue, and my one issue, the one substantive issue, is the quality of education at Dartmouth. . . I decided that if I started debating the political argument du jour it would reduce my effectiveness."

That kind of pragmatism, however, didn't inhibit a highly political response from the aggrieved, including the college administration and some of the faculty. Mr. Rodgers notes that certain professors "seemed to specialize" in accusing him of being retrograde, racist, sexist, opposed to "diversity" and so forth. Or, in the academic shorthand, a conservative.

A curious label for a man who is in favor of gay marriage, against the Iraq war, and thinks Bill Clinton was a better president than George W. Bush. Mr. Rodgers's sensibility, rather, is libertarian, and ruggedly Western. He is also a famously aggressive, demanding CEO, with technical expertise, a strong entrepreneurial bent and an emphasis on empirics and analytics. His lodestars, he says, are "data and reason and logic."

At Dartmouth, he remarks, he has produced dozens of long, systematic papers on the issues. His first priority was to improve its "very poor record of freedom of speech." Soon enough, the college president, James Wright, overturned a speech code. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a watchdog group, elevated Dartmouth's rating from "red" to its highest, "green," one of only seven schools in the country with that status. "We made progress, and I was feeling pretty good," Mr. Rodgers says.

He intended to move on to quality of education next, but the political situation at Dartmouth degenerated. Mr. Rodgers's candidacy was followed by two further elections, in which petition candidates--Peter Robinson, a fellow at the Hoover Institution, and Todd Zywicki, a professor of law at George Mason University--were also elected. Mr. Rodgers says that, like him, they're "independent people willing to challenge the status quo."

Perhaps sensing that a critical mass was building, Dartmouth's establishment then tried to skew the petition trustee process. The details are complex and tedious, but last autumn they cooked up a new alumni constitution that would have "reformed" the way trustees were elected. In practice, it would have stacked the odds, like those in a casino, in favor of the house.

The measure needed two-thirds of alumni approval to pass, and in an election with the highest turnout in Dartmouth's history, it was voted down by 51%. "It lost big time," Mr. Rodgers says.

---

Earlier this year another petition trustee, Stephen Smith of the University of Virginia Law School, was elected with 55% of the voters. Quite naturally, Dartmouth's insular leadership has loathed all of this. A former trustee, and a current chair of Dartmouth's $1.3 billion capital campaign, publicly charged that the petition process had initiated a "downward death spiral" in which a "radical minority cabal" was attempting to hijack the Board of Trustees. That was among the more charitable commentaries.

Curious, again, that Mr. Rodgers has been cast as the leader of some sinister conservative faction, since he is open about what his actual goals are. "They attack things that don't matter because they can't attack you for what you stand for--quality of education. . . . The attacks become ad hominem. . . . We get called the problem. The fact is that we're a response to the problem."

In Mr. Rodgers's judgment, the increasingly political denigration--the "rancor," he calls it--has seriously impinged on his effectiveness as a trustee, and on the effectiveness of the board in general. "Before I ever went to my first board meeting," he says, "I did what any decent manager in Silicon Valley does--management by walking around. You actually go and talk to people and ask how they're doing and what they need to get their jobs done."

He noted trends: over-enrollment, wait lists and an increased percentage of classes taught by visiting or non-tenure-track faculty. He concluded that many departments--economics, government, psychology and brain sciences, in particular--were "suffering from a shortage of teaching."

"It's a simple problem," Mr. Rodgers says. "You hire more professors." His effort to get an objective grip on the problem would be comic were it not so unfathomable. "I've had to scrounge to get data," he says, the administration not being forthcoming. "My best sources of data come from faculty members and students."

While he can't discuss internal figures, he says there's been "a modest improvement since 2004. It's about 10 professors net gain." That's "going in the right direction, but not nearly as fast as I would like." While the college has added 1.1% faculty per year over the last decade, at the same time its overall expenses have increased by 8.8%, "so the inevitable mathematical conclusion of those numbers is that the percentage of money we spend on faculty is going down, and it has gone down consistently for a long time."

"In general, I don't have a prescription," he says. "I'm not trying to micromanage the place. What I'm saying is take the huge amount of money that an institution like Dartmouth has and focus it on your core business, which is undergraduate education, and make it really, really good. If you want to pinch pennies, pinch pennies somewhere else and not on the core business. That's all I'm saying."

Trustee politics is the reason that this problem with "the core business," as he puts it, has not been addressed. "I don't think we pay enough attention to it and care enough about it. We have time to worry about other things and somehow the main business of the college, which is to educate, doesn't dominate our meetings.

"I obviously don't want to talk a lot about what happens in board meetings, but I keep pushing to spend time on it--and that makes me an annoyance. . . . The priority has been, if you look at it, changing the rules to get rid of the petition trustees who are willing to criticize the administration.

"Basically," he continues, "I find the meetings to be pro forma--this is an overstatement, but almost scripted. No, we don't roll up our sleeves and think real hard. I certainly don't feel like that what I have to offer to any organization is being used by the board of Dartmouth College."

Now, Mr. Rodgers says, the argument has come to its endgame. "This is not a conservative-liberal conflict. This is a libertarian-totalitarian conflict."

One of the main criticisms leveled at the petition trustee process is that it is polarizing, divisive and somehow detrimental to the college. Mr. Rodgers replies, "If 'divisive' means there are issues and we debate the issues and move forward according to a consensus, then divisive equals democracy, and democracy is good. The alternative, which I fear is what the administration and [Board of Trustees Chairman] Ed Haldeman are after right now, is a politburo--one-party rule."

And so, after losing four consecutive democratic contests, the Dartmouth administration has evidently decided to do away with democracy altogether. "Now I'm working on the existence question," Mr. Rodgers notes mordantly.

---

Though he cannot say for sure--"I'll be kept in the dark until a couple of days before the meeting on what they're planning on doing"--a five-member subcommittee, which conducts its business in secret and includes the chair and the president, has embarked on a "governance review" that will consolidate power. "It looks like they're just going to abandon, or make ineffectual, the ability of alumni to elect half the trustees at Dartmouth," Mr. Rodgers says.

He believes that the model is the Harvard Corporation, where a small group "makes all the decisions. They elect themselves in secret. They elect themselves in secret for a life term. How's that for democracy?"

The rest of the Dartmouth trustees, Mr. Rodgers says, "will go to the board meetings to have a couple of banquets and meet a few students and feel good about ourselves and brag to our compatriots that we're indeed on the board of trustees of Dartmouth College."

This drastic action, he says, is unnecessary. "These are small problems that are fixable," Mr. Rodgers argues. "Instead of making them major political wars, we simply ought to go solve the problems and get on with it."

The alternative remedy, he continues, is poor corporate governance, for one. "This is committees working in secret, which is a very bad way to run any organization." Besides transparency, it may also present conflicts of interest, in which the college president would dominate those who ultimately evaluate his performance.

But he contrasts the situation especially with his experience at Cypress: "Silicon is a very tough master. It operates to the laws of physics, there are no politics, you can't vote or will or committee your way around it. . . . Therefore the culture of Silicon Valley, where winning and losing is being technologically successful or not, is an objective, nonpolitical culture. It's just different on the Dartmouth board."

Mr. Rodgers expects to be "severely criticized, unfairly and personally," for talking to The Journal. He may even be removed from his post entirely. "It's worth it," he says. "Doing what is right for the college that I love is more important than holding what is largely a ceremonial position."

Mr. Rago, a Dartmouth graduate, is an editorial page writer for The Wall Street Journal.

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2007-Sep-2:

The Illiberal College
Elite academia doesn't like oversight.

One of the more momentous cases in Supreme Court history, Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819), involved an attempt by the state of New Hampshire to wrest control of the privately chartered school from its board of trustees. But a corporate charter like Dartmouth's, the Marshall Court ruled, is the same as a private contract; the state could not simply annex the school.

The sanctity of contract has preserved the independence of not a few colleges and universities. But institutions of higher learning now shy from the same oversight their faculties have demanded of the corporate world, and some of the lessons learned in that 1819 case are being unlearned. Consider the Dartmouth of today, still serenely humming on the banks of the Connecticut River, but home to what appears to be a power play against its own alumni.

In 1891, Dartmouth agreed to a pact that instituted a novel scheme of democratic governance. Alumni--the school's financial underwriters--won the right to elect half of its non-administrative or ex officio trustees, who oversee the school and hire and fire its president. (The remaining seats are filled by appointment and typically go to big donors.)

The candidates for elected trusteeships have traditionally been vetted by a small committee, ensuring quiescence. Over the last four years, however, no fewer than four reform-minded candidates won seats on the board using a provision allowing nomination by petition. They include Silicon Valley CEO T.J. Rodgers and Virginia law professor Stephen Smith, who have raised the profile of such issues as academic standards, bureaucratic bloat and free speech.

Their presence has proven to be a tremendous offense to Dartmouth's inner circles. Like administrators at most universities, these academic elites expect only money--not opinion and oversight--from their alumni donors. A year ago, the administration worked with a small committee of alumni to alter the petition process to make it less likely that outsiders could win. They lost in a rout in an alumni referendum.

---

But rather than accept that rebuke and seek some common ground, the school's president, James Wright, and his trustee allies now seem prepared to overhaul the school's governance more or less by fiat. The scheme the board's governance committee is most likely to adopt this week has been dubbed "The Harvard Plan" because it would preserve the faint form of democracy while arrogating most power to an unelected internal committee. At Harvard, this is called the "Corporation"; a larger elected body, the Overseers, has little power.

Former Harvard Dean Harry Lewis recently recounted the disposition of the Corporation during the Larry Summers debacle: "[It] was a leadership vacuum. . . . If Harvard were a public corporation . . . the shareholders would have been up in arms about the failure of the directors to care responsibly for the institution." It is not surprising that the "best practice" Dartmouth seeks to emulate is precisely the practice that enabled Harvard's expulsion of Mr. Summers.

Should the board decide to vitiate Dartmouth's own experiment in democracy, it will be a departure from standards of good governance now required in the marketplace, as T.J. Rodgers explains nearby. Worse, it will be one more sign of a widening crevice between the real world and life on the nation's campuses.

The endowments of the 25 wealthiest institutions of higher learning total $178 billion, and a college education is one of the largest investments a person will ever make (in tuition and donations as an alumnus). It isn't a surprise that alumni stakeholders have begun to show interest and exert influence. The only surprise is the lengths to which academic elites will go in order to keep out the light of day.

from the Detroit News, 2007-Jun-18, by Karen Bouffard:

Muslims won't fund footbaths
Leaders cite ACLU's decision not to oppose use of public money for UM-Dearborn project.

DEARBORN -- Muslim leaders in Metro Detroit have decided not to raise private money to pay for two footbaths at a local college campus now that the American Civil Liberties Union has said the plan doesn't pose constitutional problems.

The University of Michigan-Dearborn's plan to spend $25,000 on the footbaths was criticized on conservative blogs and radio shows this month. Critics said using public money for the project would violate the First Amendment, which says governments can't favor or subsidize religions.

Muslims are required to wash body parts, including feet, up to five times daily before prayers.

University officials say the floor-level wash basins are needed because some students at the 8,600-student campus wash their feet in the sinks.

Dawud Walid, executive director of the Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), said his group was concerned a public outcry would cause the university to back down from the project.

"If the ACLU had decided to take legal action against the UM-Dearborn, we probably would have called for the university to raise the funds privately, just so that the UM-Dearborn wouldn't have to go through the trouble of having to defend its position against the ACLU," Walid said.

Kary Moss, director of the Detroit branch of the ACLU, said its review concluded the plan is a "reasonable accommodation" to resolve "safety and cleanliness issues" that arose when Muslims used public sinks for foot cleaning before prayers, which often spilled water on bathroom floors.

"We view it as an attempt to deal with a problem, not an attempt to make it easier for Muslims to pray," said Moss, who likened the plan to paying for added police during religious events with huge turnouts.

"There's no intent to promote religion."

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2007-Jun-17:

A College Education
Revolt of the alumni and other good news.

Any number of colleges and universities seem to be having PR travails these days, but this may be a case where the turmoil is healthy. The school year that is now ending has turned out to be something of a banner year for academic reform.

Consider the recent unrest at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. When the school's tour guides were informed in an email last winter that a century-old cross was to be expelled from the school's chapel, alumni and students mounted a "Save the Wren Cross" campaign. Press releases, a Web site, and a petition that collected 18,000 signatures led to a restoration.

This experience has emboldened what might be called the William and Mary electorate. A new organization is now asking if the governing Board of Visitors should renew the college president's contract. That's normally a rubber-stamp affair, but now college executives are being forced to defend themselves against charges of poor financial stewardship.

The merits of these disputes seem less important than the fact that there is now earnest and public discussion about the performance of college administrators, who, like career government bureaucrats, are usually adept at avoiding accountability. Stakeholders are suddenly feeling empowered.

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That's certainly true at Dartmouth College, in New Hampshire, where alumni have used a petition process for the board of trustees to elect four independent candidates in recent years. These "petition candidates" have run against disciplinary procedures that lack due process rights, speech codes, and an increased budget emphasis on administrative bureaucracy at the expense of academics.

The Dartmouth administration responded last fall by proposing a new set of trustee election rules that would have made these outsider candidacies more difficult. The measure needed support from two-thirds of voting alumni to pass but failed to get even a majority. The year ended with the election of a fourth reformist, University of Virginia law professor Stephen Smith.

Elsewhere, market forces prevailed. Antioch College in Ohio--which became famous for sundry curious radicalisms like requiring verbal consent before two students may kiss--was designed to accommodate 2,700 students, but will soon close its doors indefinitely. Its enrollment, now around 300, is no longer sustainable.

The radical professoriate has also had a bad year. Ward Churchill, the University of Colorado professor who called Americans killed on September 11 "little Eichmanns," was recommended for dismissal. And Norman Finkelstein, who wrote "The Holocaust Industry" and professed the belief that "Schindler's List" was designed to blind Americans to current Middle East policy, was denied tenure at DePaul University.

Does it seem uncouth that students and alumni are pouring their criticisms into press releases? It shouldn't. Colleges and universities have largely brought this stakeholder activism on themselves--when they decided to become instruments of fashionable politics instead of repositories of knowledge.

from City Journal, 2007-Winter, by John Leo:

Free Inquiry? Not on Campus
And the college speech police threaten the liberty of us all.

Remember when the Right had a near-monopoly on censorship? If so, you must be in your sixties, or older. Now the champions of censorship are mostly on the left. And they are thickest on the ground in our colleges and universities. Since the late 1980s, what should be the most open, debate-driven, and tolerant sector of society has been in thrall to the diversity and political correctness that now form the aggressive secular religion of America’s elites.

The censors have only grown in power, elevating antidiscrimination rules above “absolutist” free-speech principles, silencing dissent with antiharassment policies, and looking away when students bar or disrupt conservative speakers or steal conservative newspapers. Operating under the tacit principle that “error has no rights,” an ancient Catholic theological rule, the new censors aren’t interested in debates or open forums. They want to shut up dissenters.

In October, for instance, a student mob stormed a Columbia University stage, shutting down speeches by two members of the Minutemen, an anti-illegal-immigration group. The students shouted: “They have no right to speak!” Campus opponents of Congressman Tom Tancredo, an illegal-immigration foe, set off fire alarms at Georgetown to disrupt his planned speech, and their counterparts at Michigan State roughed up his student backers. Conservative activist David Horowitz, black conservative columnist Star Parker, and Daniel Pipes, an outspoken critic of Islamism, frequently find themselves shouted down or disrupted on campus.

School officials seem to have little more interest in free speech. At Columbia this fall, officials turned away most of a large crowd gathered to hear former PLO terrorist-turned-anti-jihadist Walid Shoebat, citing security worries. Only Columbia students and 20 guests got in. Colleges often cite the danger of violence as they cancel controversial speeches—a new form of heckler’s veto: shrinking an audience so that an event will seem unimportant is itself a way to cave to critics. In 2003, Columbia, facing leftist fury at the scheduled speeches of several conservatives (myself included), banned scores of invited nonstudents who had agreed to attend. Though some schools cancel left-wing speakers, too—including Ward Churchill and Michael Moore, or abortion-supporters Anna Quindlen and Christie Whitman at Catholic universities—right-of-center speakers are the campus speech cops’ normal targets.

Official censorship—now renamed speech codes and antiharassment codes—pervades the campuses. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) recently surveyed more than 300 schools, including the top universities and liberal arts colleges, and found that over 68 percent explicitly prohibit speech that the First Amendment would protect if uttered off campus. At 229 schools, FIRE found clear and substantial restriction of speech, while 91 more had policies that one could interpret as restricting speech. Only eight permitted genuine free expression.

A 2002 New York Times article reported that today’s college kids seem more guarded in their views than previous generations of students. The writer suggested several possible explanations—disgust with partisan politics and uncivil debates on cable news shows, perhaps, or simple politeness. A more likely reason is that universities have made honest disagreement dangerous, making students fearful of saying what they think.

Much campus censorship rests on philosophical underpinnings that go back to social theorist Herbert Marcuse, a hero to sixties radicals. Marcuse argued that traditional tolerance is repressive—it wards off reform by making the status quo . . . well, tolerable. Marcuse favored intolerance of established and conservative views, with tolerance offered only to the opinions of the oppressed, radicals, subversives, and other outsiders. Indoctrination of students and “deeply pervasive” censorship of others would be necessary, starting on the campuses and fanning out from there.

By the late 1980s, many of the double standards that Marcuse called for were in place in academe. Marcuse’s candor was missing, but everyone knew that speakers, student newspapers, and professors on the right could (make that should) receive different treatment from those on the left. The officially oppressed—designated race and gender groups—knew that they weren’t subject to the standards and rules set for other students.

Marcuse’s thinking has influenced a generation of influential radical scholars. They included Mari Matsuda, who followed Marcuse by arguing that complete free speech should belong mainly to the powerless; and Catharine MacKinnon, a pioneer of modern sexual harassment and “hostile environment” doctrine. In MacKinnon’s hands, sexual harassment became a form of gender-based class discrimination and inegalitarian speech a kind of harmful action.

Confusing speech and action has a long pedigree on the PC campus. At the time of the first wave of speech codes 20 years ago, Kenneth Lasson, a law professor at the University of Baltimore, argued that “racial defamation does not merely ‘preach hate’; it is the practice of hatred by the speaker”—and is thus punishable as a form of assault. Indeed, the Left has evolved a whole new vocabulary to blur the line between acts and speech: “verbal conduct” and “expressive behavior” (speech), “non-traditional violence” (Lani Guinier’s term for strong criticism), and “anti-feminist intellectual harassment” (rolling one’s eyeballs over feminist dogma).

Campus censors frequently emulate the Marcusian double standard by combining effusive praise for free speech with an eagerness to suppress unwelcome views. “I often have to struggle with right and wrong because I am a strong believer in free speech,” said Ronni Santo, a gay student activist at UCLA in the late nineties. “Opinions are protected under the First Amendment, but when negative opinions come out of a person’s fist, mouth, or pen to intentionally hurt others, that’s when their opinions should no longer be protected.”

In their 1993 book, The Shadow University, Alan Charles Kors and Harvey Silverglate turned some of the early speech codes into national laughingstocks. Among the banned comments and action they listed: “intentionally producing psychological discomfort” (University of North Dakota), “insensitivity to the experience of women” (University of Minnesota), and “inconsiderate jokes” (University of Connecticut). Serious nonverbal offenses included “inappropriate laughter” (Sarah Lawrence College), “eye contact or the lack of it” (Michigan State University), and “subtle discrimination,” such as “licking lips or teeth; holding food provocatively” (University of Maryland). Later gems, added well after the courts struck down campus codes as overly broad, included bans on “inappropriate non-verbals” (Macalaster College), “communication with sexual overtones” (Lincoln University), and “discussing sexual activities” (State University of New York–Brockport). Other codes bar any comment or gesture that “annoys,” “offends,” or otherwise makes someone feel bad. Tufts ruled that attributing harassment complaints to the “hypersensitivity of others who feel hurt” is itself harassment.

Brockport, which banned “cartoons that depict religious figures in compromising situations,” “jokes making fun of any protected group,” and “calling someone an old hag,” helpfully described for students what does not constitute sexual harassment: “non-coercive interaction(s) . . . that are acceptable to both parties.” Commented Greg Lukianoff of FIRE: “The wonder is that anyone would risk speaking at all at SUNY Brockport.”

Despite numerous court decisions overturning these codes, they have proliferated. College officials point to the hurt feelings of women or minorities as evidence that a violation must have occurred, in part because they want to avoid charges of racism, sexism, and homophobia— an overriding fear in today’s academe, where diversity offices can swarm with 40 or 50 administrators. The Clinton administration’s commissioner of civil rights in the Department of Education, Norma Cantú, reinforced this trend by interpreting racial and sexual harassment broadly, with an implied threat to withhold federal funds if universities didn’t vigorously counter it. In 2003, the DOE office of civil rights issued a weary clarification, explaining to universities that harassment doesn’t mean merely feeling offended. The letter has had little effect on the censoring fervor of the campuses, however. Occidental College officials soon found a student radio shock jock guilty of sexual harassment for using various crude terms on the air, calling one student a “bearded feminist” and another “half man, half vagina.” On many a campus, tastelessness equals harassment.

Georgia Tech went so far as to ban “denigrating” comments on “beliefs,” which would make almost any passionate argument over ideas a violation. Needless to say, the targets here are usually conservative. Ohio State University at Mansfield launched a sexual harassment investigation of a research librarian, Scott Savage, for recommending the inclusion of four conservative books, including popular works by David Horowitz and ex-senator Rick Santorum, on a freshman reading list. Two professors had complained that one of the books, The Marketing of Evil, by journalist David Kupelian, was “homophobic tripe” and “hate literature.” This may have been the first time that a campus charged that a book recommendation qualified as sexual harassment. After a burst of publicity and a threat to sue, the university dropped the investigation.

Student censors regularly spirit away whole print runs of conservative student newspapers, almost always without reproof from administrators. Over the years, campus officials, including a few university presidents, have even encouraged such stealing. After repeated thefts of the Dartmouth Review, an official egged on the thieves by calling the paper “litter” and “abandoned property.” In a commencement speech, former Cornell president Hunter Rawlings III praised students who seized and burned copies of the conservative Cornell Review in retaliation for printing a gross parody of Ebonics.

Once in a blue moon, a college president vigorously defends free speech. At Northern Kentucky University, president James Votruba rebuked and suspended a tenured feminist professor, Sally Jacobsen, who led a group that demolished a campus-approved right-to-life display. Jacobsen cited two justifications: her deep feelings and her alleged free-speech right to tear down displays that offend her. “I did invite students to express their freedom of speech rights to destroy the display if they wished,” she said. “Any violence perpetrated against that silly display was minor compared to how I felt when I saw it.”

But far more typical than Votruba was Washington State University president V. Lane Rawlins, who hailed the disruption—and subsequent cancellation—of an intentionally offensive student play that irritated blacks, Christians, Jews, gays, and others. Rawlins defended the disrupters, saying that they had “exercised their rights of free speech in a very responsible manner.” Later documents showed that the university had actually organized and financed them. In the real world, such a revelation would have cost Rawlins his job. But on today’s campus, it passes without comment, in part because students can point out, with perfect moral justification, that forcing the cancellation of speeches and stealing newspapers are just logical extensions of campus speech codes.

Nothing makes the campus censors angrier than someone who dares to question race and gender preferences, especially if he uses satire to do it. That’s why the anti-affirmative-action bake sales that conservative students have sponsored at many schools—white male customers can buy cookies for $1, with lower prices for women and various minorities—have provoked such ferocious responses from campus authorities.

Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan, provides a typical example. A Republican club there staged a bake sale, and several students then said that they felt offended. This amounted to a powerful argument, since hurt feelings are trump cards in the contemporary campus culture. (At the University of Wisconsin, for example, a black student testified in defense of the faculty speech code, complaining bitterly that a professor had used the word “niggardly” while teaching Chaucer. “I was in tears,” she said. “It’s not up to the rest of the class to decide whether my feelings are valid.”)

Next came the usual administrative scramble to suppress free speech while expressing great respect for it. The university charged the club with a violation of the student code and threatened sanctions. The students folded under administrative pressure and apologized. When the Republican club president refused to back down, club members asked him to resign, and he did. The students’ retreat was understandable, if not very courageous. The university in effect was trying them for bias, with the likelihood that a notation of racism would become part of their academic record and follow them to post-college job interviews.

The College Republicans at Northeastern Illinois University canceled an announced affirmative-action bake sale after the administration threatened punishment. Dean of students Michael Kelly announced that the cookie sellers would be violating university rules and that “any disruption of university activities that would be caused by this event is also actionable.” This principle—politically incorrect speakers are responsible for attacks on them by students who resent their speech—is dear to campus censors’ hearts. The university didn’t view itself as engaging in censorship—and double-standard censorship at that, since it freely allowed a satirical wage-gap bake sale run by feminists. Absurdly, Kelly said that the affirmative-action sale would be fine—if cookie prices were the same for whites, minorities, and women. Other administrators complained that differential pricing of baked goods is unfair, thus unwittingly proving the whole point of the parody.

Schools will use almost any tactic to shut the bake sales down. At the University of Washington, the administration said that the sponsor had failed to get a food permit. At Grand Valley, the university counsel argued that the sale of a single cupcake would convert political commentary into forbidden campus commerce. At Texas A&M, the athletics director argued that a satirical bake sale would damage the sports teams by making it harder to recruit minorities.

One of the PC campus’s worst excesses in suppressing unwanted speech is the drive by gays and their allies to banish or break Christian groups for their traditional beliefs on sexuality. Some 20 campuses have acted to de-recognize or de-fund religious groups that oppose homosexuality (as well as nonmarital sex), often accusing them of violating antidiscrimination rules—that is, refusing to let gays be members, or allowing them to belong but not serve as officers. The language of many policies would require a Democratic club to accept a Republican president, a Jewish group to allow a Holocaust-denying member, or a Muslim organization to accept a leader who practices voodoo.

About half of the attempts to move against Christian clubs have failed. The University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill dropped its move against a Christian club three days after getting a friendly warning letter from FIRE. “UNC couldn’t defend in public what it was willing to do in private,” said FIRE president Alan Charles Kors. “If an evangelical Christian who believed homosexuality to be a sin tried to become president of a university’s Bisexual, Gay and Lesbian Alliance, the administration would have led candlelight vigils on behalf of diversity and free association.”

Such Marcusian double standards—freedom for me, but not for thee—now have a beachhead in the law, thanks to the legendarily left-wing Ninth Circuit. In response to a “Day of Silence” sponsored by the Gay-Straight Alliance at his Poway, California, high school, Tyler Harper wore a shirt that proclaimed, on the front, “Be Ashamed, Our School Embraced What God Has Condemned,” and on the back, “Homosexuality Is Shameful/Romans 1:27.” The school principal ordered Harper to take off the shirt. Harper refused, and sued. He argued that the purpose of the “Day of Silence” was to “endorse, promote and encourage homosexual activity” and that he had a First Amendment right to use his T-shirt message as a rebuttal.

When the Poway case reached the Ninth Circuit, Judge Stephen Reinhardt and his colleague Judge Sidney R. Thomas argued in a two-to-one decision that it is permissible to exclude T-shirt messages from First Amendment protection if they strike at a “core identifying characteristic of students on the basis of their membership as a minority group”—with minority status conveyed by categories “such as race, religion, and sexual orientation.” This ruling, unless the Supreme Court takes it up and overturns it, creates a large new category of viewpoints that the First Amendment doesn’t safeguard, at least within the Ninth Circuit. Based on the loose language—“such as” could apply to numerous groups—criticism of illegal aliens might now lack First Amendment protection, says UCLA law prof Eugene Volokh. Presumably, too, one can no longer criticize any minority religious opinion, such as the Islamic view that cartoons mocking Mohammed are out-of-bounds. But pictures of Christ in urine would be perfectly fine, since Christianity remains America’s majority faith.

Some on the left applaud such Marcusian hairsplitting, arguing that First Amendment “absolutists” must learn to “balance” free speech and special protections for vulnerable groups. But in dissent, Judge Alex Kozinski expressed “considerable difficulty understanding the source and sweep of the novel doctrine the majority announces today”—nothing in state, federal, or common law supports it, he noted.

To understand the rising disrespect for free expression in the U.S., Kozinski might have been better off looking to Canada and Europe, both a bit ahead of us—if that’s the right phrase—in embracing PC censorship.

Despite stated respect for free speech in its national constitution, Canada now has a national speech code and judges and elites eager to expand it. The Canadian Supreme Court has issued a series of rulings stating that the government may limit speech in the name of worthwhile goals, such as ending discrimination, ensuring social harmony, or promoting sexual equality. The state may now seize published material judged to “degrade” or “dehumanize” any group.

What free-speech supporters would regard as horrendous abuses have become commonplace. In 1997, for instance, the mayor of London, Ontario, ran afoul of Canada’s Human Rights Code for refusing to declare a Gay Pride day, citing her Christian beliefs. The British Columbia College of Teachers refuses to certify teacher education programs at Christian universities if they urge students to abstain from premarital sex, adultery, or homosexual sex. The province’s hate-speech laws use extremely broad language, criminalizing statements that “indicate” discrimination or that “likely” will expose a group or one of its members to hatred or contempt.

Ted Byfield, editor of the now-defunct Alberta Report, violated that province’s human rights law by publishing an article noting that some children were grateful for the education they received at the government’s residential schools for Indians, much despised by multiculturalists and admittedly abuse-plagued. An injunction against the Alberta Report forbade stories on partial-birth abortions after Byfield ran a story quoting unnamed nurses and official documents saying that some babies subject to the procedure at a Calgary hospital were born alive and deliberately allowed to starve to death.

Canada has become “a pleasantly authoritarian country,” observes Alan Borovoy, general counsel of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association. Robert Martin, a constitutional law prof at the University of Western Ontario, is harsher: Canada is now “a totalitarian theocracy,” he says, devoted to the secular state religion of political correctness.

Things are no freer across the pond. The Irish Council for Civil Liberties announced that it would prosecute any priests found distributing or quoting the pope’s words forbidding gay marriage. In England, author Lynette Burrows drew a police investigation for saying on a talk show that she opposes homosexual adoption. An Oxford student fared worse after a night out to celebrate the end of exams. Stopped by a mounted policeman, he drunkenly quipped, “Excuse me, do you realize your horse is gay?” Unfortunately, the humor-free local constabulary arrested the young man under the Public Order Act for making homophobic remarks.

By law, 11 European nations can punish anyone who publicly denies the Holocaust. That’s why the discredited Holocaust-denying British historian David Irving went to prison in Austria. Ken Livingstone, London’s madcap mayor, drew a monthlong suspension for calling a Jewish reporter a Nazi. A Swedish pastor went through a long and harrowing prosecution for a sermon criticizing homosexuality, finally beating the rap in Sweden’s supreme court.

Naturally enough, Muslims want to play the same victim game as other aggrieved groups. The French Council of Muslims says that it’s considering taking France Soir, which reprinted the Danish cartoons, to court for provocation. When French novelist Michel Houellebecq said some derogatory things about the Koran, Muslim groups hauled him into court, which eventually exonerated him. The late Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci wrote an angry anti-Muslim book, meant to waken the West to the gravity of the threat posed by Islam. Her prosecution in Italy for writing the book was pending when she died in October.

Much of Europe has painted itself into a corner on Muslim-driven censorship. What can Norway say to pro-censorship Muslims when it already has a hate-speech law forbidding, among other things, “publicly stirring up one part of the population against another,” or any utterance that “threatens, insults or subjects to hatred, persecution, or contempt any person or group of persons because of their creed, race, color, or national or ethnic origin . . . or homosexual bent”? No insulting utterances at all? Since most strong opinions can seem insulting to someone—can hurt someone’s feelings—no insults means no free speech.

Chafing under First Amendment restrictions, many censorship-prone American leftists look longingly toward successful speech control up north or overseas. That’s what they want right here.

We are very lucky to have the First Amendment. Without it, our chattering classes would be falling all over themselves to ban speech that offends sensitive groups, just as Canadian- and Euro-chatterers are doing now. We know this because our campus speech codes, the models for the disastrous hate-speech laws elsewhere, were the inventions of our own elites. Without a First Amendment, the distortions and suppressions of campus life would likely have gone national. Mel Gibson, Michael Richards, and many rap artists would be in jail, or at least facing charges.

The cause of free speech can no longer expect much help from the American Civil Liberties Union, more concerned today with civil rights and multicultural issues than with civil liberties and free speech. True, the ACLU still takes some censorship cases—it led the fight against the first wave of campus speech codes circa 1990, for instance. But the rise of the ACLU’s internal lobbies or “projects,” such as the Lesbian and Gay Project and the Immigrants’ Rights Project, has made the organization look more and more like a traditional left-wing pressure group, with little passion for the First Amendment. The ACLU is also following the money: funds flow in because the group responds to concerns of feminist, gays, and other identity groups, not because of its historical defense of free speech and civil liberties.

These days, the ACLU visibly stands aloof from obvious First Amendment cases—such as the college speech and harassment codes—and even comes down on the anti-free-speech side. Consider the group’s stance in Aguilar v. Avis Rent-A-Car System, a case involving ethnic epithets aimed by supervisors at Latino employees of Avis in San Francisco. A California court ruled that Avis had permitted a hostile environment. The California Supreme Court, abetted by both the northern Californian and the national ACLU, agreed, and upheld the lower court’s startling speech restriction: prior restraint on workers’ speech, forbidding a judge-made list of specific words. These words, not yet revealed or promulgated, will soon be taboo in every California workplace, even outside the earshot of Latino employees, and even if they are welcome. As civil libertarian Nat Hentoff wrote: “This may be the broadest and vaguest restriction of speech in American legal history.”

Even with the ACLU, the mainstream media, school officials, and much of the professorate AWOL, the speech police haven’t gone unopposed. Just ask former Clinton official Donna Shalala. As chancellor of the University of Wisconsin in the late eighties, she proved a fervent early advocate of campus speech restrictions. Though Shalala occasionally praised free speech, she and her team imposed not only a full-fledged student speech code, later struck down in federal court, but also a faculty code that provoked the first (and so far, only) pro-free-speech campus campaign strong enough to repeal such repressive restrictions. The Wisconsin faculty code was a primitive, totalitarian horror. Professors found themselves under investigation, sometimes for months, without a chance to defend themselves or even to know about the secret proceedings. One female professor said: “It was like being put in prison for no reason. I had no idea what it was that I was supposed to have done.”

A small group of free-speech-minded faculty formed the Committee for Academic Freedom and Rights (CAFR). The group asked for help from the Wisconsin chapter of the pro-free-speech National Association of Scholars, which enlisted as speakers such celebrated allies as Alan Dershowitz and National Journal columnist Jonathan Rauch.

The First Amendment forces got a lucky break when the university signed a foolish contract with Reebok, in which it received millions of dollars in exchange for the use of the company’s footwear by campus sports teams. The contract included a clause forbidding negative comments on Reebok products by any “University employee, agent or representative.” The clause greatly irritated the anticorporate campus Left, which had usually been lukewarm or indifferent to free-speech concerns, helping convert some of its members to the anti-speech-code side. Later, a strong defense of free speech by a homosexual professor, called a traitor to his identity group for his courage, brought in other campus leftist allies. CAFR was amazed at how quickly many would-be censors backed down when confronted with controversy and threatened lawsuits. Wisconsin rescinded its faculty code—the first university to do so without a court order.

New national groups have joined the fight for free speech on campus (and off), among them the Center for Individual Rights, the Alliance Defense Fund, and FIRE, the most relentless of the newcomers. FIRE usually starts a campaign with a polite letter to a university president, noting that some policy is either unconstitutional or a clear violation of civil liberties. If it doesn’t get the change it wants, it will then write to trustees, parents, and alumni, and take its case to the media.

FIRE now has an extensive network of campus free-speech “spies,” as its cofounder, Harvey Silverglate, jauntily calls them (Alan Charles Kors, the other cofounder, prefers “concerned members of the community”). The organization is seeking new ways to open up closed campus systems, too, such as suing administrators as individuals, which FIRE believes will get their full attention. Another new tactic is to publicize what colleges spend on fighting for unconstitutional speech codes. Most of all, FIRE is trying to show stubborn administrators that the era of hiding gross civil liberties violations behind a PC wall of silence is over: the group wins more than 95 percent of its cases.

Political correctness took hold when there were 40 radio talk shows, three networks, and no bloggers. Today, the cross-referencing of PC outrages among bloggers, radio talkers, and rights groups makes it hard to run an old-fashioned repressive campus. University presidents now understand that their reputations do not rest entirely with the PC platoons. Donna Shalala escaped Wisconsin with her reputation intact. Sheldon Hackney, former president of Penn, did not. (I named my own annual award for the worst college president, the “Sheldon,” in his honor.) When he stepped down from the Penn presidency, he didn’t become the head of a major foundation, as many expected; instead, he wound up returning to Penn as a professor. Other reputations hang in the balance. Lee Bollinger, a First Amendment expert (and affirmative-action advocate), was invisible during the free-speech debates at Michigan and is almost as recessive today as president of Columbia. But it is getting harder for the Hackneys and Bollingers to waffle.

Perhaps the battle to release the campuses from the iron grasp of PC will take decades, but the struggle for free speech is being fought—and won—now.

from the Denver Post, 2007-Jul-24, by Tom McGhee:

Regents vote to fire Churchill

Boulder — Regents at the University of Colorado voted 8-1 today to terminate ethnic studies professor Ward Churchill.

The vote was made en masse; regent Cindy Carlisle was the lone vote in favor of keeping Churchill.

Immediately after the announcement, protestors began a loud demonstration in the Glen Miller Ballroom of CU's Memorial Hall, with chants and drums.

Churchill's lawyer, David Lane, has said he has a lawsuit ready to be filed. He alleges that the regents were acting in retaliation for the professor's controversial comments about victims of the 2001 terrorist attacks.

Churchill, Lane and a handful of faculty members held a news conference immediately after the announcement.

Churchill told reporters: "I'm going nowhere. It's not about break, it's not about bend, it's not about compromise. It's not about negotiate. ... If you negotiate your rights, you will have no rights."

Emma Perez, an associate professor of ethnic studies, said, "I'm disappointed because the University of Colorado and the regents have succumbed to the political agenda of the neo-conservatives."

CU president Hank Brown and regents Chairwoman Patricia "Pat" Hayes called a competing news conference.

Hayes said that Carlisle had agreed with an investigation's findings, which stated that Churchill was guilty of plagiarizing and falsifying information in his writings, but she disagreed with the sanctions being imposed. Carlisle was not immediately available for comment.

Hayes told reporters that the regents had deliberated for many hours and had spent the past few weeks reading extensively from Churchill's writings, but at the end of the day, they supported Brown's recommendations. They were guided by three faculty committees, she said, including 25 tenured faculty members.

She said their decision was not pre-determined, and they heard no testimony today. The essay that started the controversy was not discussed, she said.

Brown said there wasn't much choice in how to vote because the regents had to protect the integrity of research at the university.

He said the threatened lawsuit never came up in discussions and a "great university can't be intimated by a lawsuit."

Hayes added that that true academics will say "this is the place we want to be" because of the long process that was followed.

She said, "The bottom line was the board felt ... (the faculty committees) had done their work, and we should do our work."

Lane told reporters earlier after he and Churchill emerged from a closed-door meeting with the regents that the school's administration was lined up against the ethnic studies professor.

It's all about Churchill's comments about the 9/11 victims, Lane said. "I told them (the regents) we are at a crossroads, and that they will do irreparable damage to academic free speech if they fire him.

"The world will perceive that he was fired for his free speech."

He added that people will think that by speaking up at a university by saying something controversial, a person will be dragged through a two-and-a-half year process that's aimed at making it look like the school is treating the person fairly. "And at the end, they will fire you," Lane said.

"The world will see this as retaliation. There's a lot of pressure in there to make this a unanimous vote.

"He will be terminated to satisfy the baying of the right-wing members of the media, maybe get them off CU's back."

But Brown said before the regents' vote that was not the case.

He said there is no retaliation involved in the investigation, but that the review found that Churchill falsified information and had a deliberate research strategy to "create the appearance of independent, verifiable information."

Brown said regents have been careful to say nothing that indicates they have made up their minds in advance.

"What the committee came up with were a series of places where he plagiarized information, falsified information and ghost-wrote, he said."

Brown added that early on, the acting CU chancellor rejected the idea that Churchill could be punished for the essay about the 9/11 victims that sparked the controversy.

Protestors were on campus all day.

"We think the regents are doing a pretty poor job of protecting the university," said protestor Tom Moore, who was carrying a sign that said "CU Conformity University Be Bland."

Lane said earlier that if Churchill is fired, he will file a lawsuit Wednesday in Denver claiming that the firing was retaliation that violated Churchill's First Amendment rights of free speech.

Lane said such a lawsuit needs to prove only that retaliation was a motivating factor. He said he doesn't need to prove it was the only reason for the firing.

"The Supreme Court has ruled that retaliation for free speech, you only have to prove that is a piece of why you were fired," he said.

Churchill gave only a brief comment to the media that his arguments before the board "went just fine." He gave a television interview inside a broadcast truck, then drove away with his wife.

This morning, before he was allowed to argue his case, Churchill condemned the closed-door meeting the regents were holding to decide whether to fire him.

"We want all of you here to witness the deliberations," he told a gaggle of reporters and photographers on the sun-splashed patio in front of Memorial Hall, the university's student union. "This is a scripted performance put on by the regents."

Hovering nearby were a small number of supporters wearing T-shirts sporting Churchill's image, bordered on top by the words "It's not about scholarship" and on the bottom by the words "It's about politics."

Churchill, dressed in jeans and a black sport jacket while smoking unfiltered Pall Mall cigarettes, promised to sue the school if he is fired.

The regents have violated the rules of confidentiality by making information about him public while using those same rules to shield their deliberations, Churchill said.

The controversy that led to today's action has its roots in January 2005, when Churchill was to speak at Hamilton College in New York.

A student journalist writing an advance article about the speech publicized a piece Churchill had written in which he described some of the 9/11 victims in New York City's World Trade Center as "little Eichmanns" — a reference to World War II war criminal Adolf Eichmann, who helped manage the logistics of the Nazis' mass exterminations.

The article in the student paper prompted the cancellation of Churchill's speeches there. Within days, Gov. Bill Owens had called for Churchill to be fired, and Colorado talk shows were awash in invective about the professor.

The university launched an investigation.

It soon became clear that Churchill's scholarship had been questioned for years by other professors. Thomas Brown of Lamar University in Texas had long challenged Churchill's assertion that early European settlers of North America had intentionally spread smallpox among Indians by handing out infected blankets.

Eventually, other revelations about Churchill became public, including that his hiring bypassed most of CU's normal processes for awarding tenure and that he had no proof of his claimed American Indian ancestry, which was the foundation of his hiring.

Ultimately, a CU faculty committee charged Churchill with inaccurately describing historical facts in some of his writings — including the smallpox case.

The professor was also accused of plagiarizing other authors in his writing. In one case, he was shown to have lifted several passages from a pamphlet on native fishing rights in Canada for his own publications. Churchill has argued that his works are meticulously footnoted, and that he would have no reason to intentionally plagiarize another author.

But the panel charged that sometimes Churchill created fictitious characters to write something inflammatory, then simply footnoted to those works when he published under his own name.

Churchill has denied it all.

Some faculty members are concerned that the proceedings against Churchill will lead to a suppression of academic freedom, said Daniel Kim, who teaches English.

The university is supposed to be an incubator for the free expression of ideas, he said. Some faculty members speak in hushed tones about the case.

They worry that in the future they won't be able to teach controversial subjects, Kim said.

Kim, who is not tenured, said he fears that his vocal support for Churchill could lead to his having to leave the university.

Widespread media attention of the case has made it impossible for Churchill to get a fair hearing, said Kim.

"The entire process has been irretrievably tainted," he said.

from the Scotsman, 2007-Jun-10, by Marc Horne:

Daycare children 'more antisocial'

EVIDENCE is mounting that young children who spend significant periods of time in daycare while their parents work are more prone to developing aggressive and antisocial behaviour.

A new study from the United States suggests that children who went to nursery during their pre-school years rather than staying at home were more likely to be disruptive once formal education began.

The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) has followed the progress and development of 1,300 children since 1991. It concluded that the longer above 10 hours a week a child spent in group care, the more likely teachers were to report difficult behaviour once they started school.

The findings are strikingly similar to the results of a recently published government-funded research project carried out by Oxford University and the Institute for Fiscal Studies.

It concluded that children under the age of three who spend more than 35 hours a week at nursery show higher levels of antisocial behaviour than those spending less time in daycare.

In Scotland, the Executive provides free nursery places for three and four-year-olds, which entitles parents to 12.5 hours care a week.

Almost 99% of four-year-olds take up the places, compared with 96% of three-year-olds. Many parents supplement this with longer-term private care.

The growing demand to balance childcare and work has meant the number of people employed in pre-school education in Scotland has grown to more than 30,000.

The new NICHD research showed that teachers of 11 and 12-year-olds in the US reported that those who spent more time in early childcare were more likely than other children to "be disobedient", to "get in many fights" and to "argue a lot".

This was not reflected in children who were looked after by family members, childminders or nannies.

Teachers involved in the research had a "problem checklist" which they used to rate children on behaviours such as bullying, bragging, arguing, fighting, lying, cheating, cruelty and destructiveness, including arson.

Dr Jim Griffin, NICHD's programme director for early learning and school readiness, believes the low-level negative behaviour may be fuelled by youngsters competing for adult attention in nurseries and childcare centres.

He said: "These findings add to the growing body of research showing that the quality and type of childcare a child experiences early in life can have a lasting impact on their development."

The authors will now continue to follow the children's development in secondary school to see if the effects shown in the current research persist.

The study, the most in-depth of its kind in the world, has tracked the same children at intervals since birth, evaluating their cognitive and social skills, behaviour and academic achievement in the context of their childcare experiences.

Separate research from Cambridge University and the Free University of Berlin found the level of the stress hormone cortisol doubled in some toddlers during their first nine days at nursery.

The levels were still relatively high several months later, even though the toddlers showed no outward signs of distress.

The study, led by Professor Michael Lamb of Cambridge and Lieselotte Ahnert of Berlin, monitored 36 girls and 34 boys aged between 11 and 20 months. The children had all been cared for mainly at home and were then placed in nurseries for 40 hours a week.

Their stress levels were found to be between 75% and 100% higher compared with when they had been at home.

The National Day Nurseries Association felt the research did not give the whole picture. "We hope that families are not needlessly worried by these reports, which only relate to behaviour difficulties in a small number of cases," said a spokeswoman.

"Children from workless households were rated as less cooperative and sociable than children in centres with high levels of working parents. This indicates there is a complex mix of factors that influence a child's behaviour and that careful attention is needed to ensure children are supported appropriately."

But a spokesman for the UK Department of Education said: "Any argument that there is evidence women are letting down their children by going out to work is faintly ludicrous."

A Scottish Executive spokesman said: "We are committed to extending access to high-quality, affordable and flexible childcare services which match children's needs and parents' working patterns."

from the Washington Post, 2007-Jun-18, p.B1, by Maria Glod:

Va. School's No-Contact Rule Is a Touchy Subject

Fairfax County middle school student Hal Beaulieu hopped up from his lunch table one day a few months ago, sat next to his girlfriend and slipped his arm around her shoulder. That landed him a trip to the school office.

Among his crimes: hugging.

All touching -- not only fighting or inappropriate touching -- is against the rules at Kilmer Middle School in Vienna. Hand-holding, handshakes and high-fives? Banned. The rule has been conveyed to students this way: "NO PHYSICAL CONTACT!!!!!"

School officials say the rule helps keep crowded hallways and lunchrooms safe and orderly, and ensures that all students are comfortable. But Hal, 13, and his parents think the school's hands-off approach goes too far, and they are lobbying for a change.

"I think hugging is a good thing," said Hal, a seventh-grader, a few days before the end of the school year. "I put my arm around her. It was like for 15 seconds. I didn't think it would be a big deal."

A Fairfax schools spokesman said there is no countywide ban like the one at Kilmer, but many middle schools and some elementary schools have similar "keep your hands to yourself" rules. Officials in Arlington, Loudoun and Prince George's counties said schools in those systems prohibit inappropriate touching and disruptive behavior but don't forbid all contact.

Deborah Hernandez, Kilmer's principal, said the rule makes sense in a school that was built for 850 students but houses 1,100. She said that students should have their personal space protected and that many lack the maturity to understand what is acceptable or welcome.

"You get into shades of gray," Hernandez said. "The kids say, 'If he can high-five, then I can do this.' "

She has seen a poke escalate into a fight and a handshake that is a gang sign. Some students -- and these are friends -- play "bloody knuckles," which involves slamming their knuckles together as hard as they can. Counselors have heard from girls who are uncomfortable hugging boys but embarrassed to tell anyone. And in a culturally diverse school, officials say, families might have different views of what is appropriate.

It isn't as if hug police patrol the Kilmer hallways, Hernandez said. Usually an askance look from a teacher or a reminder to move along is enough to stop girls who are holding hands and giggling in a huddle or a boy who pats a buddy on the back. Students won't get busted if they high-five in class after answering a difficult math problem.

Typically, she said, only repeat offenders or those breaking other rules are reprimanded. "You have to have an absolute rule with students, and wiggle room and good judgment on behalf of the staff," Hernandez said.

Hal's parents, Donna and Henri, say that they think Kilmer is a good school and that their son is thriving there. He earns A's and B's and, before this incident, hadn't gotten in any trouble. Still, they say they encourage hugging at home and have taught him to shake hands when he meets someone. They agree that teenagers need to have clear limits but don't want their son to get the message that physical contact is bad.

"How do kids learn what's right and what's wrong?" Henri Beaulieu asked. "They are all smart kids, and they can draw lines. If they cross them, they can get in trouble. But I don't think it would happen too often." Beaulieu has written a letter to the county School Board asking it to review the rule.

Hal's troubles began one day in March when he got up from his assigned cafeteria table and went to a nearby table where his then-girlfriend was sitting. He admits he broke one rule -- getting up from his assigned table without permission -- and he accepts a reprimand for that. "The table thing, I'm guilty," he said.

A school security officer spotted the hug and sent Hal to the office, where he was cited for two infractions. He was warned that a third misstep could lead to in-school suspension or detention.

School officials said that the girl didn't complain and that they have no reason to believe the hug was unwelcome.

Hal said that he and his classmates understand when and how it is appropriate to hug or pat someone on the back in school and that most teenagers respect boundaries set by their peers. Today, his seventh-grade year ends as school lets out for the summer. Next fall, he hopes Kilmer officials reconsider the rule.

"I think you should be able to shake hands, high-five and maybe a quick hug," he said. "Making out goes too far."

from the New York Post, 2007-May-12, by Sol Stern:

RADICAL TEACH
N.Y.C. SCHOOLS' NEW FAD

MORE than 400 New York City high-school math teachers and education professors gathered in Brooklyn late last month for a three-day conference on "Creating Balance in an Unjust World: Math Education and Social Justice."

At many of the 28 workshops, city math teachers proudly showed how they used classroom projects to inculcate their students in seeing social problems from a radical, anti-capitalist perspective.

At a plenary session, Prof. Marilyn Frankenstein of the University of Massachussets' math-ed department proclaimed that elementary-school math teachers shouldn't use traditional math lessons where students calculate the cost of food. Instead, they should use lessons to get their students to see that in a truly "just society," food would "be as free as breathing the air."

The city's Department of Education insists nothing was inappropriate about its teachers participating in the radical conference. In fact, the DOE got the whole ball rolling with a grant to Jonathan Osler, a math teacher at El Puente Academy for Peace and Justice (a small social-justice high school in Brooklyn).

Back in 2005, Osler and two colleagues from other schools applied to the DOE's Zone Teacher Inquiry Grants Program for aid in "the creation of a system to bring together NYC math teachers to share, ideas, curriculum, resources, and experiences integrating issues of social justice into math classes."

Osler & Co. listed some issues to explore in math class: "Check cashing locations ripping off poor people. H&R Block and Jackson Hewitt ripping off poor people. Foreclosure agencies ripping off poor people. Issues of joblessness, homelessness, incarceration, lack of funding for education, excessive funding for war."

DOE decided this was worth $3,000 in city funds - giving its official imprimatur for the idea of teaching for "social justice" in math class.

Conference participants got to observe model "social justice" lessons in math classes in seven city public schools. East Side Community HS, for example, showed off its "The Mathematics of Sweatshop Labor" project (taught in Algebra II), in which students calculate the degree of wage exploitation in a sneaker factory in Nicaragua and then comment on the injustice of it all.

What if you're a parent with the old-fashioned view that public education in a democracy must be politically neutral - that teachers have an ethical and professional responsibility to keep their politics (left, right or center) out of the classroom? What if you don't want your child to waste precious time on "Sweatshop Math"?

Well, you won't get much help from the city Department of Education.

A few days before the conference, I provided Schools Chancellor Joel Klein with details on the city teachers and schools participating. His response:

"This is a private conference, at which a range of views will be expressed. It seems that many of these views are hardly 'radical.' . . . In any case, the people who are speaking at this conference are participating in their personal capacity, not as representatives of the Department of Education. We are committed to making sure that all of our teachers teach math to our high standards."

Since gaining control of the city schools in 2002, Mayor Bloomberg has won the plaudits of business leaders for his corporate-style reorganization of the system and for supporting market-oriented initiatives such as charter schools and merit pay for teachers. But there has been a dark side: a hands-off approach to what's actually taught.

The result has been travesties like the radical math conference and the proliferation of social-justice schools - and the legitimization of bringing leftist politics into the classroom.

It's ironic that, as Mayor Bloomberg extols the benefits of the market approach in education, his schools are becoming rife with radical teachers using the classroom to trash the American system of market capitalism.

Sol Stern is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. From the Web site of City Journal, city-journal.org.

from the Daily Breeze of Los Angeles, 2007-Jun-15, by Paul Clinton:

Disarmed in RPV
Cornerstone at Pedregal School students are told to cut weapons off toys on mortarboards before they could participate in promotion ceremony.

Who knew a 2-inch toy army man could cause such a stir?

A fifth-grade promotion ceremony in Rancho Palos Verdes turned into a free-speech battleground Thursday, when students were asked to remove weapons from toys that had been placed on mortarboard caps because of the school's zero-tolerance policy for weapons on campus. Sword Medical

Each year, students decorate wide caps with princesses, football goal posts, zebras, guitars and other items to express their personalities and career goals. Cornerstone at Pedregal School is the only Palos Verdes Peninsula public school to practice the tradition.

On Thursday, before the ceremony, one boy was told he couldn't participate unless he agreed to clip off the tips of the plastic guns carried by the minuscule GIs on his cap. Ten others complied with the order before the event.

Parents reacted angrily, calling Principal Denise Leonard's decision censorship, but the Palos Verdes Peninsula School District defended her.

Cole McNamara and Austin Nakata, 11-year-old buddies who share an interest in all things military, said they put the toys on their hats to support American troops in Iraq.

"I was kind of mad because they just went over and clipped them off and didn't say anything about it," Austin said.

His father, Glen Nakata, said he was disappointed that parents were not approached or consulted on elimination of the "firearms."

"I felt they were keeping the boys from expressing their patriotism, their strong beliefs toward the military," he said.

Glen Nakata's father served in the U.S. Air Force. And Austin wants to attend a military academy when he's older. Cole wants to join the Marine Corps, said his father, Paul McNamara.

To treat the "injuries" caused by the order to remove the offending weaponry, Austin wrapped the plastic stumps in white gauze and painted on faux blood.

The principal pulled Cole aside Thursday morning, handed him a pair of scissors and said the guns had to go.

"We're supporting our troops," Cole said. "But I wanted to graduate, so I just cut the guns off."

A teacher at Cornerstone started the mortarboard tradition about a decade ago. At Thursday's ceremony, the 62 fifth-graders each gave a 30-second speech in the auditorium, as their pictures flashed on a large screen.

Leonard, a first-year principal, didn't respond to several requests for comment, deferring to district administrators, who said the toys with miniature rifles and grenades violated a zero-tolerance weapons policy.

Leonard "directed students not place images of weapons on student-created mortarboards to be used in the promotion ceremony," according to a district statement. "The district fully supports her decision to comply with school rules and practices. In addition, practically all fifth-grade parents understood and accepted this decision and, in some cases, modified the student mortarboards, sans the weapon images."

In enforcing the decision, the district cited its Safe Schools policy and the federal Gun Free Schools Act of 1994, a federal law designed to remove firearms from schools.

Susan Liberati, an assistant superintendent, said she believes "the principal has interpreted district policy accurately, and we support her in that."

A copy of the district's Safe Schools policy obtained by the Daily Breeze includes no mention of toy army men. Students found to be "possessing, selling or otherwise furnishing a firearm" are expelled for one year, the policy states.

Weapons are also mentioned in the board's "weapons and dangerous instruments" policy that allows only authorized law enforcement or security personnel to possess "weapons, imitation firearms or dangerous instruments of any kind" on school grounds.

Board President Barbara Lucky declined comment on the incident or the policy.

"Sounds like a good question for legal counsel," Lucky said.

from the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, 2007-Apr-12, by Katherine Kersten:

Is college using a double standard on 'entanglement' with religion?

Cultural clashes involving Islam have recently made headlines in Minnesota. At the airport, some Muslim taxi drivers refuse to transport passengers carrying alcohol; at Target stores, some Muslim cashiers won't scan pork products. Now there's a new point of friction: Minneapolis Community and Technical College.

Its officials say the college, a public institution, has a strict policy of not promoting religion or favoring one religion over another. "The Constitution prevents us from doing this in any form," says Dianna Cusick, director of legal affairs.

But that seems to depend on your religion.

Where Christianity is concerned, the college goes to great lengths to avoid any hint of what the courts call "entanglement" or support of the church. Yet the college is planning to install facilities for Muslims to use in preparing for daily prayers, an apparent first at a public institution in Minnesota.

Separation of church and state is clearest at the college during the Christmas season. A memo from Cusick and President Phil Davis, dated Nov. 28, 2006, exhorted supervisors to banish any public display of holiday cheer: "As we head into the holiday season ... "all public offices and areas should refrain from displays that may represent to our students, employees or the public that the college is promoting any particular religion." Departments considering sending out holiday cards, the memo added, should avoid cards "that appear to promote any particular religious holiday."

Last year, college authorities caught one rule-breaker red-handed. A coffee cart that sells drinks and snacks played holiday music "tied to Christmas," and "complaints and concerns" were raised, according to a faculty e-mail. College authorities quickly quashed the practice.

They appear to take a very different attitude toward Islam. Welcome and accommodation are the order of the day for the college's more than 500 Muslim students. The college has worked with local Muslim leaders to ensure that these students' prayer needs and concerns are adequately addressed, Davis told me.

Muslim prayer is an increasingly controversial issue. Many Muslim students use restroom sinks to wash their feet before prayer. Other students have complained, and one Muslim student fell and injured herself while lifting her foot out of a sink.

Some local Muslim leaders have advised the college staff that washing is not a required practice for students under the circumstances, according to Davis. Nevertheless, he says, he wants to facilitate it for interested students. "It's like when someone comes to your home, you want to be hospitable," Davis told me. "We have new members in our community coming here; we want to be hospitable."

So the college is making plans to use taxpayer funds to install facilities for ritual foot-washing. Staff members are researching options, and a school official will visit a community college in Illinois to view such facilities while attending a conference nearby. College facilities staff members are expected to present a proposal this spring.

In Davis' view, the foot-washing plan does not constitute promotion or support of religion. "The foot-washing facilities are not about religion, they are about customer service and public safety," he says. He sees no significant difference between using public funds to construct prayer-related facilities for Muslim students and the cafeteria's provision of a fish option for Christian students during Lent.

College officials claim that the restrictions on Christmas displays apply to employees who are state agents, and so are subject to more restrictions, while students are free to express their religious beliefs.

But where the Muslim prayer facilities are concerned, college authorities themselves are consulting with religious leaders, researching other schools, and using taxpayer money to make improvements to facilitate one group's prayer.

Issues surrounding the intersection of church and state and religious accommodation are complex. But the college's treatment of Christianity and Islam seems to reflect a double standard.

It's hard to imagine the college researching and paying for special modifications to the college to facilitate Christian rituals. And the "safety" justification? Imagine if a particularly strict group of Christian students found it necessary to sometimes baptize others in the restroom sinks. Would the school build them a baptism basin because a student hit his head on a sink?

from City Pages of Minneapolis, 2007-May-9, by Ward Rubrecht:

Gun Shy
After the Virginia Tech tragedy, even talking about concealed carry is grounds for suspension

Sipping soda from a straw and leaning on his elbows at Perkins, Troy Scheffler seems harmless enough. The 31-year-old Hamline University grad student resembles a post-Pulp Fiction John Travolta—slightly overstuffed, with graying sideburns and a small, tense smile. It's easy to imagine him hitting on a girl at a dance club.

But Scheffler is packing heat. A gun-toting concealed carry permit holder, he rarely leaves home without his sidearm. He feels safer in the rough areas of town when he's armed, though he knows not everyone feels safe around him. A couple of days ago, he got pulled over for speeding. When the cop noticed the concealed carry permit, he ordered Scheffler out of the car, patted him down, and searched his car.

"A clear violation of my Fourth Amendment rights," Scheffler says with an exasperated chuckle, referring to the constitutional protection against unreasonable search and seizure.

It wasn't the first time Scheffler's gun got him into trouble.

On April 16, colleges were rocked by the news coming out of Virginia Tech. Initial reports were sketchy and confused, but by the end of the day a clear picture emerged: An angry and deranged Seung-Hui Cho had killed 32 students and faculty before turning his gun on himself in the largest mass shooting in American history.

In the aftermath, officials at Hamline University sought to comfort their 4,000 students. David Stern, the vice president for academic and student affairs, sent a campus-wide email offering extra counseling sessions for those who needed help coping.

Scheffler had a different opinion of how the university should react. Using the email handle "Tough Guy Scheffler," Troy fired off his response: Counseling wouldn't make students feel safer, he argued. They needed protection. And the best way to provide it would be for the university to lift its recently implemented prohibition against concealed weapons.

"Ironically, according to a few VA Tech forums, there are plenty of students complaining that this wouldn't have happened if the school wouldn't have banned their permits a few months ago," Scheffler wrote. "I just don't understand why leftists don't understand that criminals don't care about laws; that is why they're criminals. Maybe this school will reconsider its repression of law-abiding citizens' rights."

After stewing over the issue for two days, Scheffler sent a second email to University President Linda Hanson, reiterating his condemnation of the concealed carry ban and launching into a flood of complaints about campus diversity initiatives, which he considered reverse discrimination.

"In fact, three out of three students just in my class that are 'minorities' are planning on returning to Africa and all three are getting a free education on my dollar," Scheffler wrote with thinly veiled ire. "Please stop alienating the students who are working hard every day to pay their tuition. Maybe you can instruct your staff on sensitivity towards us 'privileged white folk.'"

After clicking send, Scheffler didn't think much more about his emails. He'd never felt his conservative views were welcome on campus. In classes, he was often shouted down by students—sometimes even by professors.

But after the Virginia Tech massacre, school administrators across the country were ramping up security. Flip to any cable news channel and you'd hear experts talking about warning signs that had been missed. Cho had a history of threatening behavior and stalking. And a psychological evaluation had deemed him a threat to himself.

So Hamline officials took swift action. On April 23, Scheffler received a letter informing him he'd been placed on interim suspension. To be considered for readmittance, he'd have to pay for a psychological evaluation and undergo any treatment deemed necessary, then meet with the dean of students, who would ultimately decide whether Scheffler was fit to return to the university.

The consequences were severe. Scheffler wasn't allowed to participate in a final group project in his course on Human Resources Management, which will have a big impact on his final grade. Even if he's reinstated, the suspension will go on his permanent record, which could hurt the aspiring law student.

"'Oh, he's the crazy guy that they called the cops on.' How am I supposed to explain that to the Bar Association?" Scheffler asks.

He has also suffered embarrassment. Scheffler obeyed the campus ban and didn't go to class, but his classmate, Kenny Bucholz, told him a police officer was stationed outside the classroom. "He had a gun and everything," Bucholz says. [James Taranto comments at this point, “Hey, wait. Why would the policeman need a gun? Oh yeah, for protection!”. Uh huh. -AMPP Ed.] Dean Julian Schuster appeared at the beginning of class to explain the presence of the cop, citing discipline problems with a student. Although Schuster never mentioned Scheffler by name, it didn't take a scholar to see whose desk was empty.

Scheffler has tried to get answers from the university, to no avail. On April 25, he called President Hanson's office to request a meeting, but when he told the secretary his name, she claimed the computer system had crashed and she couldn't access the president's schedule. She promised to call Scheffler back, but more than a week later, he's still waiting.

Hamline administrators were similarly circumspect when a reporter called. School officials declined to be interviewed, citing student privacy concerns. Requests for information were diverted to lawyer Rebecca Bernhard, who said Hamline acted appropriately in light of recent events at Virginia Tech. "Hamline takes campus safety very seriously," she says.

Now Scheffler is looking to hire a lawyer of his own. Even if Hamline lifts the suspension, he doubts he'll return to campus, he says. "If they're going to treat me that way before, how will they treat me after?"

from the Times of London, 2007-Apr-2, by Alexandra Frean:

Schools drop Holocaust lessons to avoid offence

Teachers are dropping controversial subjects such as the Holocaust and the Crusades from history lessons because they do not want to cause offence to children from certain races or religions, a report claims.

A lack of factual knowledge among some teachers, particularly in primary schools, is also leading to “shallow” lessons on emotive and difficult subjects, according to the study by the Historical Association.

The report, produced with funding from the Department for Education, said that where teachers and staff avoided emotive and controversial history, their motives were generally well intentioned.

“Staff may wish to avoid causing offence or appearing insensitive to individuals or groups in their classes. In particular settings, teachers of history are unwilling to challenge highly contentious or charged versions of history in which pupils are steeped at home, in their community or in a place of worship,” it concluded.

However, it was concerned that this could lead to divisions within school, and that it might also put pupils off history.

from the Northern Echo, 2007-Jul-13:

Churchill dropped from new national curriculum

Winston Churchill has been cut from a list of key historical figures recommended for teaching under a secondary school curriculum published yesterday.

Ministers announced reforms to the national curriculum for 11 to 14-year-olds to bring secondary education up to date and allow teachers more flexibility over what they teach.

But Britain's wartime prime minister - along with Hitler, Gandhi, Stalin and Martin Luther King - has been dropped from the detailed guidance accompanying the curriculum.

Among the few named figures in the new curriculum are William Wilberforce, who will be studied for lessons on the slave trade.

The history of the development of the European Union has also survived as a specified topic for study.

A spokesman for the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority said: "Teachers know that they need to mention these pivotal figures.

"They don't need to be instructed by law to mention them in every history class. Of course, good teachers will be teaching the history of Churchill as part of the history of Britain. The two are indivisible."

Conservative MP Nicholas Soames, Winston Churchill's grandson, said the move was "madness", while Chris McGovern, director of the History Curriculum Association and a former Government advisor, condemned the reforms.

He warned that some classes already taught the Second World War without teaching Churchill, and many children were ignorant of key figures including Hitler.

"I'm appalled by all this," he said. "Unless we nail down these key individuals in world history, British history in particular, they are not going to get taught."

Shadow Schools Secretary Michael Gove also stressed that Churchill must be taught.

"Winston Churchill is the towering figure of 20th Century British history," he said. "Our national story can't be told without Churchill at the centre."

The curriculum, which will be taught from September next year, is intended to be far more flexible than the present national curriculum.

Ministers said the reforms would free up about a quarter of the school day by cutting down on duplication, so teachers could concentrate on giving extra help to pupils who were falling behind.

Schools Secretary Ed Balls insisted he had protected key traditional elements in the curriculum, while allowing for more flexibility. The two world wars and the Holocaust, for example, were still named as topics in the new statutory history curriculum.

"I have protected the classic elements of the curriculum that have stood the test of time, such as Shakespeare, algebra, historic dates and the world wars," he said.

Steven Harness, headteacher at Woodham Community Technology College, in Newton Aycliffe, County Durham, said: "I welcome the idea that we regularly review the curriculum, otherwise it becomes fossilised."

Elaine Kay, regional secretary with the Northern area National Union of Teachers, said: "If it gives teachers greater choice to be able to exercise their own professional judgement and allow them to show more creativity and flexibility in being able to deliver classes that best meet the needs of the children in their care, then it is a good thing."

from CNSNews.com, 2007-May-9, by Randy Hall:

RI Students Must Watch 'Inconvenient Truth' to Graduate

To receive a degree from Roger Williams University in Rhode Island, students are being forced to watch "An Inconvenient Truth," the documentary on global warming produced by former Vice President Al Gore.

The science class requirement has prompted one conservative student to declare that "we should stop calling these schools 'bastions of knowledge' since they're really bastions of leftist thought."

The controversy at Roger Williams University (RWU) in Bristol, R.I., began the week before Earth Day, when the professors teaching the laboratory portion of "Core 101: Science, Technology and Society" required their students to watch Gore's Oscar-winning film in class.

The course is one of 12 that students at the university must take in order to graduate.

However, Dana Peloso, an RWU junior and president of the school's chapter of the College Republicans, sent a letter questioning the course requirement to Jeffrey Hughes, assistant dean of marine and natural sciences.

"With the issue of global warming being such a highly politicized topic, with the scientific community unsure if global warming is man-induced or part of the natural cycle of the earth, do you think that it is intellectually honest to only show the alarmist viewpoint?" Peloso asked.

"If the movie is still shown, what plans are there to incorporate the ideas of leading global warming skeptics into class discussion?" he added.

In his email response, Hughes stated that "I only recently saw 'An Inconvenient Truth' and have to think that it's an ideal subject for a Core lab," because "the point of Core is to inform students of scientific principles and help them make decisions on issues with a scientific basis in their everyday lives."

"After an initial and heated debate, scientists no longer question whether the atmosphere is being warmed due to human activities and instead are increasingly impressed with the speed and impact of the process," Hughes wrote. "I repeat: there is no doubt that we're warming the earth and that a continuation of our activities will lead to profound changes.

"Penguins, polar bears and your unborn children have no vote in this. They must live with decisions we make today," the assistant dean said.

"As educators, we're charged to encourage your intellectual growth," Hughes added. "That can (actually, will) be uncomfortable at times, and we're also here to help you deal with that discomfort. It's truly what makes being a human such a joy, privilege and challenge."

Peloso told Cybercast News Service on Tuesday that his fellow students have reacted to the situation in one of two ways.

"Those who understand that there are multifaceted points of view" are "really troubled by this," he said. But others "are so naive" that they take Gore's position "as gospel, the final word on global warming. They see Al Gore is a former vice president, so it's got to be true."

The RWU junior approached other members of the faculty and staff regarding the matter, but "I can count on one hand the number of conservative professors I actually know of" at the university, he stated.

Peloso also sought assistance from the conservative Young America's Foundation, and Jason Mattera, a spokesman for the group who graduated from RWU in 2005, responded that Hughes' behavior amounted to "gross intolerance" at a university that promotes itself as a place that values "collaboration of students and faculty in research" and "appreciation of global perspectives."

"That aside, it's a bold-faced lie for him to argue that all scientists agree with Al Gore," Mattera added.

Cybercast News Service previously reported that climate change skeptics have called "An Inconvenient Truth" a "sci-fi disaster" movie, and scientists who do not agree with the former vice president's view claim their perspective is being shunned in favor of trying to attain a "consensus" on the subject of global warming.

Mattera told Cybercast News Service that he "wasn't surprised" to hear about the situation because liberal professors often use their positions of authority to indoctrinate young minds. "This happens all the time, so we might have to stop calling these schools bastions of knowledge since they're really bastions of leftist thought," he said.

However, Susan Rivers, vice president of public affairs for RWU, told Cybercast News Service on Tuesday that this semester is the only time the film has been shown to students and as to whether it will be shown in the future, "the faculty and the deans agree together as a group what the content of these courses will be."

Rivers said Peloso was not enrolled in the course and therefore did not see the film. "He had already taken the class," she said, and in fact, "he was not enrolled during the semester in question."

Mattera acknowledged that Peloso learned of the situation from friends taking the course and decided to contact the teacher because of concern for his fellow students and the fact that he had no grade to be affected by the action.

"He's just trying to be a good student and continue being part in the educational community at RWU," Mattera added. "Besides, any university should not look to limit information but to expand it and have students come to their own conclusions."

from the Daily Mail of London, 2007-Apr-2, by Liz Hull:

Police send four police officers to tackle boy, 11, who called schoolmate 'gay'

When two policemen turned up unannounced at Alan Rawlinson's home asking to speak to his young son, the company director feared something serious had happened.

So he was astounded when the officers detailed 11-year-old George's apparent crime - calling one of his schoolfriends 'gay'.

They said primary school pupil, George, was being investigated for a 'very serious' homophobic crime after using the comment in an e-mail to a 10-year-old classmate.

But now his parents have hit out at the police, who they accused of being heavy-handed and pandering to political correctness.

"It is completely ridiculous," Mr Rawlinson said.

"I thought the officers were joking at first, but they told me they considered it a very serious offence.

"The politically correct brigade are taking over. This seemed like a huge waste of resources for something so trivial as a playground spat."

Cheshire police launched the investigation last month after a complaint from the parents of the 10-year-old younger boy who received George's e-mail.

They said their son had been called a 'gay boy' and were concerned that there was more to the comment than playground banter and that their child was being bullied.

As a consequence, two officers were sent to the boys' school, Farnworth Primary, in Widnes, Cheshire, to speak to the headteacher who directed them to the Rawlinsons' home in nearby St Helens, Merseyside.

George told his parents that the comment was in no way meant to be homophobic and that he had simply been using the word gay instead of 'stupid'.

Mr Rawlinson, 41, who runs his own business, and whose wife, Gaynor, also 41, is a magistrate, said his son was terrified when the police arrived at their home.

He feared he was going to be arrested and locked up in a cell because of it, he added. "I feel very aggrieved about this," Mr Rawlinson, who has lodged a formal complaint against the police, said.

"We are law-abiding citizens who have paid taxes all our lives.

"I've constantly contacted police about break-ins at my business and never get a suitable response.

"George was really upset, he thought he was going to be locked up. This just seemed like a huge waste of resources for something so trivial."

Inspector Nick Bailey, of Cheshire police, said no further action would be taken against George. However, he said the force had been obliged to record the incident as a crime and that they had dealt with it in a 'proportionate' manner.

"The parents of the boy believed it was more sinister that just a schoolyard prank," Inspector Bailey said.

"We were obliged to record the matter as a crime and took a proportionate and maybe old fashioned view.

"Going to the boy's house was a reasonable course of action to take. This e-mail message was part of some behaviour which had been on going.

"The use of the word 'gay' would imply that it was homophobic, but we would be hard pushed to say it was a homophobic crime.

"This boy has not been treated as an offender."

This is a latest in a series of incidents where police have been accused of heavy handedness for interviewing or threatening children with prosecution for seemingly trivial crimes.

Last October the Daily Mail revealed how 14-year-old Codie Scott was arrested and thrown in a police cell for almost four hours after she was accused of racism for refusing to sit next to a group of Asian pupils in her class.

Teachers reported the youngster, from Harrop Fold High School in Worsley, Greater Manchester, after she claimed it was impossible for her to get involved in the class 'discussion' because only one of the Asian pupils spoke English.

She had her fingerprints and DNA taken but was eventually released without charge.

The incident followed that of a 15-year-old boy from Burnley, Lancashire, who was arrested, thrown in a police cell, hauled before the courts and landed with a criminal record simply for throwing a snowball at a car.

The teenager, who cannot be named for legal reasons, was prosecuted under a little used 160-year-old law last March, and fined £100 in a case which provoked a public outcry.

from Steve Sailor at VDARE.com, 2007-Apr-22:

Cho's Professor Nikki Giovanni:  Teaching Hate At Virginia Tech

Ever since South Korean immigrant Cho Seung-hui gunned down 32 people at Virginia Tech, there has been much comment that the university should have realized just from his two hate-filled and inept plays that the senior English major was a dangerous creep who needed to be taken away.

For a playwrighting class, Cho penned Mr. Brownstone and Richard McBeef (which, despite the Macbethian title, is a Hamlet-knock off about a young hero's lethal conflict with the new stepfather who murdered his real father).

Richard McBeef includes such sterling dialogue as:

"I hate him. Must kill Dick. Must kill Dick. Dick must die. Kill Dick."

Many have asked: "How could the English Department not recognize the horrific implications of these works?"

No one who wonders that, however, is familiar with the poetic oeuvre of one of Cho's own teachers, Virginia Tech's Distinguished Professor of English and Black Studies, Nikki Giovanni (for her website, click here).

Among the most celebrated figures of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and recipient of 21 honorary degrees, Giovanni has published poems strikingly similar to Cho's plays in both vileness and incompetence. For example:

The True Import of Present Dialog, Black vs. Negro, by Nikki Giovanni

Ni**er
Can you kill
Can you kill
Can a ni**er kill
Can a ni**er kill a honkie
Can a ni**er kill the Man

Can you kill ni**er
Huh? Ni**er can you
kill
Do you know how to draw blood
Can you poison
Can you stab-a-Jew

Can you kill huh? Ni**er
Can you kill
Can you run a protestant down with your
`68 El Dorado
(that's all they're good for anyway)
Can you kill
Can you piss on a blond head
Can you cut it off

Can you kill
A ni**er can die
We ain't got to prove we can die
We got to prove we can kill
[More]

Ironically, the author of these lines was asked to deliver the closing remarks at Virginia Tech's convocation memorializing the 32 slaughtered by Cho. For some reason, Giovanni didn't read The True Import.

The above poem is not an isolated example. Cho's old professor has had, for example, a Molotov cocktail obsession:

Also a company called Revolution has just issued
A special kit for little boys

Called Burn Baby
I'm told it has full instructions on how to siphon gas
And fill a bottle

And, then there's this:

and it occurred to me
maybe i shouldn't write
at all
but clean my gun
and check my kerosene supply

She switched themes from kill-the-honkies to confessional self-obsession as the market for up-against-the-wall poetry dried up at the end of the 1960s, and now laughs off questions about her Cho-like early work.

Still, in 1997 the poetess had "Thug Life" tattooed on her arm to honor slain gangsta rapper Tupac Shakur, who was gunned down in a long-running fatal feud with other rappers. Wikipedia explains, with deadpan irony:

"She has stated that she would 'rather be with the thugs than the people who are complaining about them.' She also tours nationwide and frequently speaks out against hate-motivated violence."

Giovanni also writes prose:

RACISM 101;Giovanni, Nikki; $20.00; This book indicts higher education for the inequities it perpetuates, contemplates the legacy of the 60's, provides a survival guide for black students on predominately white campuses, and denounces Spike Lee while offering her own ideas for a film about Malcolm X. [From a list of "Books On The African American LGB Experience"]

She also has composed bon mots, such as:

"A white face goes with a white mind. Occasionally a black face goes with a white mind. Very seldom a white face will have a black mind."

And then there's her insight, "The honkie's whole sex thing is tied up to land."

As an anonymous commenter rhetorically asked on my blog:

"I wonder how many times Cho heard the phrase 'white privilege' while he was in college?"

(Click here to see how often the term appears in the Virginia Tech website.)

Giovanni is one of those sub-doggerel "poets" who has such Important Things to say that she can't be bothered to take the time to say them well. As she herself admitted to Brian Lamb on C-SPAN's Booknotes, "I'm not a very good rhymer." When she tries, it comes out like Cole Porter gone gaga:

if it's gum we can chew it
I hope it's love so we can do it

Perhaps her best-known poem is Ego Tripping (there may be a reason why), a slab of Afrocentrist drivel from 1973:

I was born in the Congo.
I walked to the Fertile Crescent and built the sphinx.
I designed a pyramid so tough that a star that only glows every one hundred years falls into the center giving divine perfect light.
I am bad.

Indeed.

Of course, Professor Giovanni, an elderly lady of 63, is not personally a danger to other people, no matter how bloodthirsty some of her poems are.  

(What impact she has had over the years on earnest, impressionable young people might be a different question, however.)

Instead, she is a minimally talented self-promoter who has exploited various ideological fads over the decades, such as black radicalism, feminism, and Afrocentrism, to secure herself a comfy sinecure at Virginia Tech and to spend her spare time traveling around to hear herself be praised. Her own website lovingly lists 124   "Awards and Honors" she has garnered.

Giovanni's fee for a personal appearance runs from $5,000 to $10,000. That's pocket lint compared to the $40,000+ demanded by Maya Angelou (who is ensconced down the road from public Virginia Tech at posh private Wake Forest), but it's a living.

Giovanni [email her] is a small town version of New York City charlatan Al Sharpton, You might think that the ringmaster of the 1987 Tawana Brawley hoax whose racist rhetoric helped incite the Crown Heights pogrom of 1991 and the Freddie's Fashion Mart mass murder of 1995 might, like Don Imus, have talked himself out of a job by now.

And, yet, Sharpton not only endures, but prospers—elbowing his way back into the spotlights as the moral arbiter at the center of the recent Imus brouhaha.

Being a race hustler apparently means never having to say you're sorry.

[Steve Sailer [email him] is founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute and movie critic for The American Conservative. His website www.iSteve.com features his daily blog.]

from the Washington Post, 2007-Apr-19, p.A9:

`You Forced Me Into a Corner,' Cho Says

The following are excerpts from the video Cho Seung Hui sent to NBC News on Monday:

· "You have vandalized my heart, raped my soul and torched my conscience. You thought it was one pathetic boy's life you were extinguishing. Thanks to you, I die like Jesus Christ, to inspire generations of the weak and the defenseless people."

· "Do you know what it feels like to be spit on your face and have trash shoved down your throat? Do you know what it feels like to dig your own grave? Do you know what it feels like to have your throat slashed from ear to ear? Do you know what it feels like to be torched alive? Do you know what it feels like to be humiliated and be impaled upon a cross and left to bleed to death for your amusement?

"You have never felt a single ounce of pain your whole life. And you want to inject as much misery in our lives because you can, just because you can. You had everything you wanted. Your Mercedes wasn't enough, you brats. Your golden necklaces weren't enough, you snobs. Your trust fund wasn't enough. Your vodka and cognac wasn't enough. All your debaucheries weren't enough. Those weren't enough to fulfill your hedonistic needs. You had everything."

· "You had a hundred billion chances and ways to have avoided today. But you decided to spill my blood. You forced me into a corner and gave me only one option. The decision was yours. Now you have blood on your hands that will never wash off."

· "I didn't have to do it. I could have left. I could have fled. But now I am no longer running. If not for me, for my children and my brothers and sisters that you [expletive]. I did it for them."

· "Jesus loved crucifying me. He loved inducing cancer in my head, terrorizing my heart, and ripping my soul all this time."

· "When the time came, I did it. I had to."

from the Associated Press via the Boston Globe, 2007-Feb-27, by David Crary:

Study: College students more narcissistic

NEW YORK -- Today's college students are more narcissistic and self-centered than their predecessors, according to a comprehensive new study by five psychologists who worry that the trend could be harmful to personal relationships and American society.

"We need to stop endlessly repeating 'You're special' and having children repeat that back," said the study's lead author, Professor Jean Twenge of San Diego State University. "Kids are self-centered enough already."

Twenge and her colleagues, in findings to be presented at a workshop Tuesday in San Diego on the generation gap, examined the responses of 16,475 college students nationwide who completed an evaluation called the Narcissistic Personality Inventory between 1982 and 2006.

The standardized inventory, known as the NPI, asks for responses to such statements as "If I ruled the world, it would be a better place," "I think I am a special person" and "I can live my life any way I want to."

The researchers describe their study as the largest ever of its type and say students' NPI scores have risen steadily since the current test was introduced in 1982. By 2006, they said, two-thirds of the students had above-average scores, 30 percent more than in 1982.

Narcissism can have benefits, said study co-author W. Keith Campbell of the University of Georgia, suggesting it could be useful in meeting new people "or auditioning on 'American Idol.'"

"Unfortunately, narcissism can also have very negative consequences for society, including the breakdown of close relationships with others," he said.

The study asserts that narcissists "are more likely to have romantic relationships that are short-lived, at risk for infidelity, lack emotional warmth, and to exhibit game-playing, dishonesty, and over-controlling and violent behaviors."

Twenge, the author of "Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled -- and More Miserable Than Ever Before," said narcissists tend to lack empathy, react aggressively to criticism and favor self-promotion over helping others.

The researchers traced the phenomenon back to what they called the "self-esteem movement" that emerged in the 1980s, asserting that the effort to build self-confidence had gone too far.

As an example, Twenge cited a song commonly sung to the tune of "Frere Jacques" in preschool: "I am special, I am special. Look at me."

"Current technology fuels the increase in narcissism," Twenge said. "By its very name, MySpace encourages attention-seeking, as does YouTube."

Some analysts have commended today's young people for increased commitment to volunteer work. But Twenge viewed even this phenomenon skeptically, noting that many high schools require community service and many youths feel pressure to list such endeavors on college applications.

Campbell said the narcissism upsurge seemed so pronounced that he was unsure if there were obvious remedies.

"Permissiveness seems to be a component," he said. "A potential antidote would be more authoritative parenting. Less indulgence might be called for."

The new report follows a study released by UCLA last month which found that nearly three-quarters of the freshmen it surveyed thought it was important to be "very well-off financially." That compared with 62.5 percent who said the same in 1980 and 42 percent in 1966.

Yet students, while acknowledging some legitimacy to such findings, don't necessarily accept negative generalizations about their generation.

Hanady Kader, a University of Washington senior, said she worked unpaid last summer helping resettle refugees and considers many of her peers to be civic-minded. But she is dismayed by the competitiveness of some students who seem prematurely focused on career status.

"We're encouraged a lot to be individuals and go out there and do what you want, and nobody should stand in your way," Kader said. "I can see goals and ambitions getting in the way of other things like relationships."

Kari Dalane, a University of Vermont sophomore, says most of her contemporaries are politically active and not overly self-centered.

"People are worried about themselves -- but in the sense of where are they're going to find a place in the world," she said. "People want to look their best, have a good time, but it doesn't mean they're not concerned about the rest of the world."

Besides, some of the responses on the narcissism test might not be worrisome, Dalane said. "It would be more depressing if people answered, 'No, I'm not special.'"

(The following item also appears in Paternalism.)

from the Washington Times, 2007-Feb-28, by Paul Belien:

2007 German horror tale

Earlier this month, a German teen-ager was forcibly taken from her parents and imprisoned in a psychiatric ward. Her crime? She is being home-schooled.

On Feb. 1, 15 German police officers forced their way into the home of the Busekros family in the Bavarian town of Erlangen. They hauled off 16-year-old Melissa, the eldest of the six Busekros children, to a psychiatric ward in nearby Nuremberg. Last week, a court affirmed that Melissa has to remain in the Child Psychiatry Unit because she is suffering from "school phobia."

Home-schooling has been illegal in Germany since Adolf Hitler outlawed it in 1938 and ordered all children to be sent to state schools. The home-schooling community in Germany is tiny. As Hitler knew, Germans tend to obey orders unquestioningly. Only some 500 children are being home-schooled in a country of 80 million. Home-schooling families are prosecuted without mercy.

Last March, a judge in Hamburg sentenced a home-schooling father of six to a week in prison and a fine of $2,000. Last September, a Paderborn mother of 12 was locked up in jail for two weeks. The family belongs to a group of seven ethnic German families who immigrated to Paderborn from the former Soviet Union. The Soviets persecuted them because they were Baptists. An initiative of the Paderborn Baptists to establish their own private school was rejected by the German authorities. A court ruled that the Baptists showed "a stubborn contempt both for the state's educational duty as well as the right of their children to develop their personalities by attending school."

All German political parties, including the Christian Democrats of Chancellor Angela Merkel, are opposed to home-schooling. They say that "the obligation to attend school is a civil obligation, that cannot be tampered with." The home-schoolers receive no support from the official (state funded) churches, either. These maintain that home-schoolers "isolate themselves from the world" and that "freedom of religion does not justify opposition against the obligation to attend school." Six decades after Hitler, German politicians and church leaders still do not understand true freedom: that raising children is a prerogative of their fathers and mothers and not of the state, which is never a benevolent parent and often an enemy.

Hermann Stucher, a pedagogue who called upon Christians to withdraw their children from the state schools which, he says, have fallen into the hands of "neo-Marxist activists," has been threatened with prosecution for "Hochverrat und Volksverhetzung" (high treason and incitement of the people against the authorities). The fierceness of the authorities' reaction is telling. The dispute is about the hearts and minds of the children. In Germany, schools have become vehicles of indoctrination, where children are brought up to unquestioningly accept the authority of the state in all areas of life. It is no coincidence that people who have escaped Soviet indoctrination discern what the government is doing in the schools and are sufficiently concerned to want to protect their children from it.

What is worrying is that most "free-born" Germans accept this assault on their freedom as normal and eye parents who opt out of the state system with suspicion.

The situation is hardly better at the European level. Last September, the European Court of Human Rights supported Hitler's 1938 schooling bill. The Strasburg-based court, whose verdicts apply in the entire European Union, ruled that the right to education "by its very nature calls for regulation by the State." It upheld the finding of German courts: "Schools represent society, and it is in the children's interest to become part of that society. The parents' right to educate does not go so far as to deprive their children of that experience."

While it is disquieting that Europeans have not learned the lessons from their dictatorial past — upholding Nazi laws and sending dissidents, including children, to psychiatric wards, as the Soviets used to do — there is reason for Americans to worry, too. The United Nations is also restricting the rights of parents. Article 29 of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child stipulates that it is the goal of the state to direct the education of children. In Belgium, the U.N. Convention is currently being used to limit the constitutional right to home-school. In 1995 Britain was told that it violated the U.N. Convention by allowing parents to remove their children from public school sex-education classes.

Last year, the American Home School Legal Defense Association warned that the U.N. Convention could make home-schooling illegal in America, even though the Senate has never ratified it. Some lawyers and liberal politicians in the states claim that U.N. conventions are "customary international law" and should be considered part of American jurisprudence.

At present, young Melissa Busekros' ordeal is a German horror story. Could it soon be an American one?

Paul Belien is editor of the Brussels Journal and an adjunct fellow of the Hudson Institute.

from the Boston Globe, 2007-Mar-12, by Barbara F. Meltz:

Spoiler alert
Are today's parents enabling their kids to be self-centered?

With a new study last week showing that today's college students are the most narcissistic and self-centered in decades, a small chorus of professionals is offering a bold response: We have no one to blame but ourselves.

"Things went too far," says psychologist Jean Twenge , lead author of the study and a professor at San Diego State University.

What she means is that parents overcorrected for the harshness of a previous generation that preferred children to be "seen and not heard." She points to the soccer trophies that coaches hand out to all team members just for showing up rather than to a few for outstanding athleticism, and to a song taught in a colleague's daughter's preschool to the tune of "Frere Jacques" : "I am special/ I am special/ Look at me."

"If you're that child, it's not surprising that pretty soon you start to believe it," says Twenge, whose new book, "Generation Me," examines feelings of entitlement among young Americans.

In her analysis, which uses a questionnaire that has been administered to college students periodically since 1982, a nationwide sample of 16,000 students choose among 80 statements to best describe themselves -- for instance, "I think I am a special person," or, "I am no better or no worse than most people." Thirty percent more students had elevated narcissism in the 2006 survey than in 1982, although the numbers have been steadily creeping up over the years.

Called the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, the study does not directly link children's increased entitlement to parenting style, but the connection is inescapable, says social psychologist and researcher Robert Horton of Wabash College in Indiana. Parent educators have long identified four styles of parenting: authoritative, authoritarian, permissive, and passive. The styles are based on a combination of how loving and restrictive parents are.

In the authoritarian style, parents are not very affectionate but very controlling, says Horton. Permissive parents tend to lavish love but are barely able to impose limits or consequences, and passive parents tend to be literally unavailable as well as unreliable and unpredictable.

"The ideal is to express affection and sets limits in a way that respects a child's feelings," says parent educator Nancy Samalin , director of the Parent Guidance Workshops in New York City. She's describing the authoritative style, probably the most labor intensive. It demands a careful balance between loving and restricting a child, between being involved but not suffocating. "It's a parent who sees the need for limits and is willing to be unpopular," says Samalin, author of the best-seller "Loving Without Spoiling."

Increasingly, being unpopular makes parents uncomfortable, says psychologist David Walsh of Minneapolis.

"Humans are born hard-wired with certain drives," he says -- for instance, to fight or flee, to seek pleasure rather than pain, and to seek connection. "Think of the drives as a team of horses. If you learn how to hold the reins and manage the horses, they take you to wonderful places. If the horses get out of control -- if one drive dominates -- you end up in a ditch."

Today's college kids are in the ditch called narcissism in part because the popular culture glamorizes the drive for pleasure above all others. " 'More! Fast! Easy! Fun!' " Walsh says. "That translates to parents as an allergic reaction to our children's unhappiness and an inability to say no for fear it will destroy their self-esteem."

Discipline Deficit Disorder -- a term he coined -- is the result. "The symptoms include impatience, disrespect, inability to delay gratification, self-centeredness, and rampant consumerism. Guess what? Those are also the characteristics of narcissism," says Walsh, author of "No: Why Kids of All Ages Need to Hear It and Ways Parents Can Say It."

He tells a story of one way this played out in his own parenting. When his children were young, he and his wife assigned them chores knowing that would help build a sense of responsibility. His 6-year-old daughter's chore was the bathroom. "She was doing a 6-year-old's version of cleaning," he says. "I came by and said, 'Let me show you.' Before long, she disappeared. My wife came along and asked, 'Do you want a clean bathroom or a competent daughter?' "

Whether it was his wish to make things easier for his daughter or easier for himself doesn't matter. Either way, he says, she got the message that she was entitled. Continually bailing children out or doing for them what they should do for themselves -- the book report, the science project -- describes the permissive style of parenting.

"By not giving them practice in handling frustration and disappointment we destroy self-esteem, not build it," he says.

Could this report end up spurring a backlash from parenting experts who call for a return to authoritarian parenting, which endorses spanking as well as a "because-I-said-so" attitude?

"I hope not. There's a lot of research that says spanking is a bad idea," says Twenge, who is the mother of a 4-month-old. Instead, she hopes the report will prompt parents to step back and examine their parenting.

"We live in a very individualistic culture. Telling each child he or she is special is based on the premise that building self-esteem leads to good outcomes. It works the other way around: Good outcomes lead to self-esteem. What people thought builds self-esteem turns out to build narcissism."

from James Taranto's Best of the Web, from OpinionJournal.com, 2007-Apr-5:

It's All About Jenny Ballantine

Rush Limbaugh has a fascinating transcript from a town-hall meeting John and Elizabeth Edwards held at the University of New Hampshire Monday. They were questioned by an undergraduate named Jenny Ballantine, who had this to say:

I need to be able to look to my leader and see words of encouragement, words of hope. I need to be able to trust that person. I need to be able to know that I'm going to be grow [sic in transcript] in a world that's not going to be full of hate and prejudice and racism and to know that I matter, that I wasn't just dumped in this world for no particular reason whatsoever.

I'm busting my ass in school, I work 25 to 30 hours a week, and it's just me and my dog. So what can you do for the people that are in my situation, that are trying their damnedest in school, wanting to go to grad school, is going to be hit with the loans--and, uh, I have no idea what I want to do when I grow up. I don't know what I want to be when I'm an adult. But I'm 22 right now, so people are like, "Honey, you are an adult." You know what? It's about me. It's about me voting for you or supporting somebody who's going to be the next president. So it's all about me right now. Just give me something.

Here is how the Edwardses responded:

Mr. Edwards: God bless you. If I were choosing a president, uh, that's what I'd be doing. I'd be looking for the specifics of what they want to do, because that matters, but I would also be judging them personally, because we need to trust our president.

Mrs. Edwards: I want to say something, too. I was really impressed with you, Jenny Ballantine, and I think probably everybody in this room was, and I want everybody in this room who believes that Jenny Ballantine is going to be able to do it to give her a round of applause.

According to Foster's Daily Democrat of Dover, N.H., the audience gave Miss Ballantine not only a round of applause but a standing ovation.

And so, my fellow Americans: Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what your country can do for Jenny Ballantine!

from James Taranto's Best of the Web, from OpinionJournal.com, 2007-Apr-6:

In Praise of Jenny Ballantine

We would have thought the baby boomers were the most narcissistic generation, but perhaps that is unfair to the vast bulk of them. The stereotypical "baby boomer"--Pinch Sulzberger, say--is typical only of a minority of his age cohort, but it is a minority with an outsized, and generally baneful, influence over America's elite cultural institutions. The narcissism of today's young adults is probably a consequence of the diffusion of Sulzbergerian self-absorption through institutions including the media and higher education.

This point came across yesterday when Limbaugh interviewed Jenny Ballantine, who turns out to be a much more sympathetic figure than she had appeared at the Edwards event. Limbaugh challenged her on her complaint about the prevalence of "hate and prejudice and racism," and it turns out she was merely regurgitating the nonsense her professors had fed her:

Limbaugh: There's always going to be racism. There's always going to be prejudice. There's always going to be bad guys. There are always going to be enemies. There are always going to be reprobates.

Ballantine: There's always going to be war, too, and I understand the reason for war. I actually enjoyed Machiavelli, "The Prince," very much so, and I really appreciate his philosophies, and that's what a lot of people use when they engage in war and the aftermath of it, and I respect war, and I understand why there is a need for it, and I understand why there's a need to push for democracy, and I understand the gap that occurred and happened--the widening gap I should say--with discrimination and so forth. It's all very interesting.

Limbaugh: But it's not. See, there is no widening gap of discrimination. It's getting better. See, your historical perspective, as with most people, most people, began the day you were born. You're 22 years old. You're going to have to really study because history education is pretty inept in this country, particularly in high school, but the discrimination that existed in this country in the '40s and '50s, even before, is far, far worse. So much progress has been made in all this! Racism is far less than it was. Prejudice--

Ballantine: Maybe it's because of the multicultural theory class I'm taking right now [laughs]. I think--

Limbaugh: Well, you're exactly right. You are. Way to go. The multicultural curricula is designed to get you feeling full of chaos and--

Ballantine: Right.

Limbaugh: --tumult over the unfairness and the injustice of the country, because the teachers--the people that believe in it--want that exact thing to happen in your mind.

Ballantine: I hope my professor is not listening to this, but I've always-- This is how I feel. She says, "Think outside the box." However, it's "thinking outside the box" on her terms, on her perspective, and the books that we're reading that we're engaged in, it's just full of, as you say, chaos, and it's just full of all these, you know, "This happened and this happened! Oh, God," and it's just like, "OK, we've addressed that. Why don't we start establishing legislation or whatever else, the Senate, to start working or progress or why don't we go ahead and state what the progress has been since we're just such a screwed-up nation back in the '40s and '50s?" I just don't understand the literature that we've been reading, and it's just been frustrating--and I'm not the only one who feels that way in my class and it's just been really different.

Limbaugh: Well, you are warming my heart.

The ideologies of "self-esteem" and "multiculturalism" are two sides of the same nihilistic coin. "Self-esteem" devalues achievement and responsibility, which are the sources of genuine self-respect. And "multiculturalism" is merely a pose of opposition to one's own culture; it entails no real regard for different cultures.

We were too hasty to mock Jenny Ballantine yesterday. What seemed a show of self-absorption was really a sincere if clumsy attempt by a confused young woman to connect with the real world. Three cheers to Rush Limbaugh for helping her along the way.

from OpinionJournal.com, 2007-Mar-1, by James Taranto, excerpted from Best of the Web:

When 'Sensitivity' Is a One-Way Street

The Associated Press reports from Santa Rosa, Calif., on an interesting political-correctness kerfuffle:

When a few classmates razzed Rebekah Rice about her Mormon upbringing with questions such as, "Do you have 10 moms?" she shot back: "That's so gay." . . .

After Rice got a warning and a notation in her file, her parents sued, claiming officials at Santa Rosa's Maria Carillo [sic] High violated their daughter's First Amendment rights when they disciplined her for uttering a phrase "which enjoys widespread currency in youth culture," according to court documents.

Testifying last week about the 2002 incident, Rice, now 18, said that when she uttered those words, she was not referring to anyone's sexual orientation. She said the phrase meant: "That's so stupid, that's so silly, that's so dumb."

But school officials say they took a strict stand against the putdown after two boys were paid to beat up a gay student the year before.

"The district has a statutory duty to protect gay students from harassment," the district's lawyers argued in a legal brief. "In furtherance of this goal, prohibition of the phrase 'That's so gay' . . . was a reasonable regulation."

We're not sure this is worth making a federal case over, but it's certainly a revealing window into the politically correct mindset. So vigilant is Carrillo High about protecting gay students from harassment that it has declared certain phrases unsayable, even when the intent plainly is not invidious and when--as appears to have been the case here--there were no gays around to feel "harassed" by the comment.

Yet according to Rebekah's parents, the students who actually were harassing her for her religion were not disciplined. Political correctness is not really about sensitivity and courtesy, which require mutual respect. Rather, political correctness entails intolerance for some prejudices but impunity for others.

from TCSdaily.com, 2007-Feb-28, by Maureen Martin:

L'Eggo My Lego

Some Seattle school children are being told to be skeptical of private property rights. This lesson is being taught by banning Legos.

A ban was initiated at the Hilltop Children's Center in Seattle. According to an article in the winter 2006-07 issue of "Rethinking Schools" magazine, the teachers at the private school wanted their students to learn that private property ownership is evil.

According to the article, the students had been building an elaborate "Legotown," but it was accidentally demolished. The teachers decided its destruction was an opportunity to explore "the inequities of private ownership." According to the teachers, "Our intention was to promote a contrasting set of values: collectivity, collaboration, resource-sharing, and full democratic participation."

The children were allegedly incorporating into Legotown "their assumptions about ownership and the social power it conveys." These assumptions "mirrored those of a class-based, capitalist society -- a society that we teachers believe to be unjust and oppressive."

They claimed as their role shaping the children's "social and political understandings of ownership and economic equity ... from a perspective of social justice."

So they first explored with the children the issue of ownership. Not all of the students shared the teachers' anathema to private property ownership. "If I buy it, I own it," one child is quoted saying. The teachers then explored with the students concepts of fairness, equity, power, and other issues over a period of several months.

At the end of that time, Legos returned to the classroom after the children agreed to several guiding principles framed by the teachers, including that "All structures are public structures" and "All structures will be standard sizes." The teachers quote the children:

"A house is good because it is a community house."

"We should have equal houses. They should be standard sizes."

"It's important to have the same amount of power as other people over your building."

Given some recent history in Washington state with respect to private property protections, perhaps this should not come as a surprise. Municipal officials in Washington have long known how to condemn one person's private property and sell it to another for the "public use" of private economic development. Even prior to the U.S. Supreme Court's 2005 ruling in Kelo v. City of New London, Connecticut, which sanctioned such a use of eminent domain, Washington state officials acting under their state constitution were already proceeding full speed ahead with such transactions.

Officials in Bremerton, for example, condemned a house where a widow had lived for 55 years so her property could be used for a car lot, according to the Institute for Justice. And Seattle successfully condemned nine properties and turned them over to a private developer for retail shops and hotel parking, IJ reports. Attempts to do the same thing in Vancouver (for mixed use development) and Lakewood (for an amusement park) failed for reasons unrelated to property confiscation issues.

The court's ruling in Kelo, however, whetted municipal condemnation appetites even further. The Institute for Justice reports 272 takings for private use are pending or threatened in the state as of last summer. It's unclear if Legos will be targeted. But given what's being taught in some schools, perhaps it's just a matter of time.

Maureen Martin (martin@heartland.org), an attorney, is senior fellow for legal affairs at The Heartland Institute, a nonprofit organization based in Chicago that promotes free-market solutions to social and economic problems.

from Life Style Extra, 2007-Feb-23:

'UK Kids Are Greener Than Their Parents'

Britain's kids are greener than their parents with one-in-10 youngsters saying that they regularly lose sleep over global warming, reveals a new survey.

Warnings about the environment from celebrities and politicians have affected Britain's children so much that half of the country's seven to 11-year-olds say they often worry about it.

And kids are pressuring their parents to become more green because they fear for their own futures.

Ten per cent of the 1,150 kids polled by supermarket Somerfield say they often stay awake until the early hours fretting about the planet.

The main concern for worried children is the welfare of animals, with 46 per cent worrying that they may become extinct if global warming continues.

But they are also worried about the effects climate change may have on their own lives, with 36 per cent fearing they may suffer poor health or even die as a result of global warming.

One-in-seven (15 per cent), British kids blame their own parents for the problem, while more than one-in-four (28 per cent) say that politicians have a responsibility to manage climate change.

Pete Williams, head of press and PR at Somerfield, said that this concern could counteract the complacency of their parent's generation.

He said: "I think really the influences about the environment on young people are everywhere, in the media and the TV, because it's such a hot topic, and it's not too surprising that kids are thinking about it, but it is surprising how seriously they take the issue.

"Haven't we all been too complacent about it? It is important, and it's vital that the next generation is armed with the knowledge and keen to come up with a solution.

"They will have a good impact on the planet and the environment, and make it a better place for all of us. They seem to have a good understanding of recycling, and they are keen to know more.

"They are very receptive to what they can do to change their habits and the habits of their parents."

Children in the south west are twice as likely to green than those in the north east, with 93 per cent saying they are environmentally aware, compared to only 50 per cent of their north eastern counterparts.

But while 86 per cent of British children have a good understanding of recycling, one-in-ten still think it has something to do with riding a bike.

And more than one-in-20 children are taking an optimistic view, saying that climate change is a positive thing because summers will last longer as a result.

Another six per cent are confident that superheroes will save the planet from global warming, with 11 per cent of those in the north west waiting for heroic intervention. Those in the south east and Yorkshire are more sceptical, with only one per cent relying on superheroes to save the day.

And 25 per cent of young environmentalists are hopeful that George Bush will come to the rescue and save the environment.

However, it looks like the true heroes will be the kids themselves, with 15 per cent pestering their parents to reduce their carbon emissions, and two-fifths, (40 per cent), saying that they will lower pollution by using the bus instead of a car when they are older.

Those in London are the most likely to give their parents a hard time about the environment, with 21 per cent nagging them to be more green, while only 13 per cent of children in the east and west midlands lay down the law to mum and dad.

And a fifth of kids (18 per cent) say they will sacrifice holidays abroad so they do not create carbon emissions by flying.

Mr Williams said that the survey showed that global warming was already having an impact on children, adding: "What surprised us is how serious an issue the environment is for young people.

"While many adults may look the other way, this study should show that global warming [hysteria -AMPP Ed.] is not only hurting the children of the future, its [sic -AMPP Ed.] harming the welfare of kids now.

"It is the little things that make a difference, like going to the supermarket without taking any bags - with a little bit of preparation and thought, using old bags is an easy step that we can all take to help the environment."

The survey is part of Somerfield's 'Bags for Life' scheme, which aims to reduce the eight billion plastic bags wasted in the UK every year.

Customers will be given a free 'Bag for Life' every five used bags they return to the store. The supermarket is also introducing a mini-sized bag for smaller purchases.

Ben Bradshaw, Minister for Local Environmental Quality, said that he supported the scheme.

He said: "Plastic and other disposable shopping bags are a symbol of our throwaway culture. We dump eight billion a year in landfill. Consumers already have the option of reusing old bags and refusing new ones, but retailers have a vital role to play by supporting their customers in making those choices and helping them to change their behaviour."

from PajamasMedia.com, 2007-Jan-8, by Victor Davis Hanson:

Cry the Once Beloved University

What are we to make of this increasingly corrupt institution, whose health is so necessary to the welfare and competitiveness of the United States? It brags that American higher education is the strongest on the globe, but that is largely true only because of the non-political and still untainted hard sciences, engineering, and informational and computer sciences—and despite the humanities, particularly literature, philosophy, and history that have become increasingly ideological and theoretical.

I was thinking of all this the other day, remembering the Larry Summers fiasco, eighty-eight of the Duke faculty weighing in through a public letter against their own students unjustly accused, the Ward Churchill mess, and the assorted outbursts of professors since 9/11.

We should at least insist on a little accountability from this increasingly medieval institution. After teaching some twenty years in the university and writing about its endemic problems, I keep asking myself the same questions.

Why? Why? Why?

Why does tuition continue to rise beyond the rate of inflation?

Why does the faculty castigate the free enterprise system that its own development officers court to ensure competitive faculty compensation? After all, their much praised socialism ensures under-funded universities, as we see in Europe where the once great institutions of higher learning have slipped badly and lack the resources of a Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Texas, or Berkeley.

Why do such vocal egalitarians stay mum, when part-time faculty and graduate students often teach classes for a fraction of professors' pay, in a hierarchical system of exploitation that even the much maligned Wal-Mart would never get away with?

Why do professors insist after six years on life-long tenure—when everyone from garbage collectors to lawyers and doctors do not enjoy such insulation from both the market and accountability about job performance? If it is for the promise of “academic freedom” and “intellectual diversity” then the resulting institutionalized uniformity and mediocrity were not worth the cost. Compare the lopsided Academic Senate votes about issues extraneous to the operation of the university from gay marriage to the war in Iraq. There are usually reminiscent of plebiscites in Saddam Hussein's Iraq or Castro's Cuba with majorities of 90-100%.

Why when academia is so critical of other American institutions, from the Republican party and corporations to churches and the military, does it ignore its own colossal failures? The level of knowledge of the today's graduate is the stuff of jokes, exactly what one would expect once a common shared instruction in science, history, literature, languages, and mathematics largely disappeared, replaced by a General Education potpourri of specialized classes in gender, race, class, and politics masquerading as knowledge-based?

All these thoughts I think explain the tragic-comic position of today's university presidents who Janus-like must talk like normal humans when courting alumni donors only to assume alien characteristics when dealing with their often lunatic faculty. I noticed once that UC Berkeley administrators always talked about a beloved “Cal” to their alumni constituents, but always “Berkeley” to their grim-faced faculty, as if there were two different campuses. And, of course, there were—the real tragic one of the present, and the idealized lost one of the past.

from City Journal, 2007-Feb-9, by Heather Mac Donald:

Harvard's Faustian Bargain
America's oldest university selects a dreadful president.

The feminist takeover of Harvard is imminent. The Harvard Crimson reported yesterday that the university is about to name as its new president Drew Gilpin Faust, dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Harvard's Corporation, which is likely to recommend Faust to the university's Board of Overseers for confirmation, could not have more clearly repudiated Lawrence Summers's all-too-brief reign of meritocracy and academic honesty, or more openly signaled that Harvard will now be the leader in politically correct victimology.

Faust runs one of the most powerful incubators of feminist complaint and nonsensical academic theory in the country. You can count on the Radcliffe Institute's fellows and invited lecturers to proclaim the “constructed” nature of knowledge, gender, and race, and to decry endemic American sexism and racism. Typical guest speakers include left-wing journalists Susan Faludi and Barbara Ehrenreich. At Radcliffe, Faludi argued that 9/11 had triggered yet another “backlash against feminism,” while Ehrenreich lectured on “Weird Science: Challenging Sexist Ideology Since the 1970s.” It is received truth among Radcliffe Institute lecturers that obstacles throughout American society block women's progress. Radcliffe speaker Rebecca Walker, for example, has created the “I Spy Sexism” initiative, which asks young women between the ages of 15 and 30 to keep logs of the “sexism, racism, and homophobia” that they see as they walk down the street or go to a movie.

With typical feminist hypocrisy, Faust has managed to wield massive power even as she rues female powerlessness. She headed the Task Force on Women Faculty, created after the firestorm over Summers's recklessly honest speculations about women in science, that strengthened the feminist hold on faculty hiring and promotions. The Task Force won a $50 million commitment to increase faculty “diversity efforts” at Harvard, notwithstanding that for decades the university has tied itself in knots trying to increase female and black faculty representation. Faust's Task Force also muscled into existence a remarkable new bureaucratic sinecure: the Senior Vice Provost for Diversity and Faculty Development. This new official sits with the president, the provost, and the deans of faculties, in order to push “diversity” quotas in every corner of the university's academic operations. Naturally, Harvard gave the new position to one of Faust's two co-chairs on the Task Force: Evelyn Hammonds, a professor of the history of science, and of African and African-American studies, who specializes in discerning bias against minority women in science and medicine. (Please do not question how Hammonds's unobstructed rise through the most elite American universities comports with her thesis of pervasive discrimination against black women.)

Should the Board of Overseers confirm Faust, the Senior Vice Provost for Diversity that she created will be even more redundant than before. Expect a constant push for ever greater female and minority representation throughout the university, backed up by academic “research” showing widespread discrimination against those favored beneficiaries—research unclouded by the fact that women now run many of the nation's most prestigious universities. Unbiased inquiry into why certain groups may not enjoy proportional representation in scientific and technical fields, of the sort that Summers engaged in to his demise, will be even more proscribed. This triumph of feminist ideology is a tragedy not just for Harvard, but for the American academic world, which will undoubtedly follow Harvard's lead in elevating feminist politics to premier intellectual standing.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2007-Feb-11, by John Hechinger and Daniel Golden with Zachary Seward and Charles Forelle contributing:

Harvard Taps Faust as President
First Female Leader May Bring Calm After Strife

Harvard University, seeking to close a period of management tumult, named faculty member Drew Gilpin Faust as the first woman to lead the 371-year-old institution.

The selection of a new president comes at a difficult time for America's richest university, which is trying to stay at the forefront of higher education while coping with the aftermath of a faculty rebellion that led to Lawrence Summers's departure from the top post a year ago. (Read the school's statement) [Drew Gilpin Faust]

Challengers to Harvard's preeminence, such as Stanford University and Princeton University, have eroded its lead in fund-raising and its reputation in undergraduate education. Mr. Summers spearheaded plans for a massive facilities expansion and curricular changes aimed at a greater emphasis on the sciences, but rankled faculty in the humanities, who didn't subscribe to his agenda.

"I am deeply grateful for the trust the governing boards have placed in me," said Faust. "I will work with all my heart, together with people across Harvard, to reward that trust."

Ms. Faust is a respected Civil War historian and her presidency marks a symbolic turning point for both Harvard and higher education. It would put women at the helm of half of the eight schools in the Ivy League, including Princeton, Rhode Island's Brown University and the University of Pennsylvania.

Women also run the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Michigan. Overall, the percentage of female college presidents reached 23% last year, from 10% in 1986, according to a study to be released Monday by the American Council on Education, which noted that women's numbers remain rarer among elite research institutions.

Ms. Faust, dean of Harvard's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, also represents a striking departure from Mr. Summers, the former U.S. Treasury secretary. Colleagues and friends describe Ms. Faust, 59 years old, as a diplomatic manager who has negotiated through a difficult time of change at Radcliffe, which was once Harvard's women's college but which has transformed into a research institute under the university's umbrella.

Judith Rodin, a former president of Penn who was the first female president in the Ivy League, said Ms. Faust had to deal with many "bristling" alumnae at Radcliffe showing a "kind of dexterity."

"She's got a great gift for bringing people together and consensus-building," says Ms. Rodin, who, now president of the Rockefeller Foundation, spoke with the Harvard search committee about Ms. Faust.

Mr. Summers turned to Ms. Faust for help after the uproar over his suggestion that innate gender differences help explain the absence of women in the upper echelons of the sciences and mathematics, tapping her to lead a committee to study the issue. A person familiar with the matter called her "a calming influence" who moved quickly for effective changes.

But many are sure to note that Ms. Faust's current administrative experience is leading an institute that hosts fellowships for professors in various disciplines, with a budget of nearly $17 million. By contrast, Harvard has a $3 billion budget, a $29 billion endowment, 20,000 students and 2,500 non-medical faculty.

In addition, many at Harvard felt Mr. Summers was rightfully challenging the faculty to bring change to a hidebound institution that many fear is losing ground to schools such as Princeton. U.S. News and World Report magazine recently ranked the New Jersey school No. 1 among colleges, surpassing Harvard. The two previously had been tied. At the same time, Stanford, with its ties to Northern California's nearby Silicon Valley, has become a more-potent challenger to Harvard's traditional role as higher education's biggest fund-raiser.

Harvard's ability to lead other schools to change has also been dimmed, in some eyes. In the fall, Harvard announced it was doing away with early admissions, saying the practice favors affluent applicants. Though many felt others would followed suit, most, except for Princeton and the University of Virginia, have stuck with the practice.

Some have worried that various fiefdoms at Harvard make it ungovernable, leaving the new president in a less powerful position to effect change.

"One would hope that it would not be an appointment of pacification," said Ruth Wisse, a professor of Yiddish and comparative literature who supported Mr. Summers. "This should be someone who could be a strong leader and take on the faculty of arts and sciences when that would be required."

Peter Gomes, a professor of Christian Morals at Harvard Divinity School and Harvard College who teaches courses in Harvard history, has publicly pushed for an outsider and said the search committee may have moved too quickly. While voicing "great respect" for Ms. Faust, he said, "The risk is that they haven't looked widely enough."

Among others, the search committee considered Steven Hyman, a neurobiologist and Harvard's provost; Elena Kagan, dean of Harvard Law School; and Thomas Cech, Ph.D., president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and a Nobel prize winning chemist, according to people familiar with the matter.

from KGO TV, 2007-Feb-7, by Ken Miguel (broadcast transcript):

Should S.F. Use Anti-War Text Book?
Controversy Over Proposed Book

Reading, writing and anti-militarism? That may soon be the case in San Francisco where a new comic book pushing a political point of view is raising serious questions.

Ronald Reagan hugging Osama Bin Laden, corporate America celebrating the spoils of war, a cartoon view of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal isn't off limits in this comic book -- "Addicted to War -- Why the U.S. Can't Kick Militarism."

It's an undisputedly leftist view of the United States involvement in wars, and it may soon come to classrooms in San Francisco public schools.

Pete Hammer, San Francisco Unified School District: "The topic is one that a lot of teachers would have an interest in bringing into the classroom."

Pete Hammer reviews new materials for the school district. He gave "Addicted to War" a thumbs up for use in the classroom.

Pete Hammer: "It hasn't been adopted as material that every teacher has to use, teachers will have their choice about whether they want to use it or not."

Frank Dorrel, Publisher, "Addicted to War": "We're really glad that the San Francisco School District, which is apparently against the war in Iraq, well not apparently, obviously is, has chosen to do this."

Frank Dorrel is now helping to supply the San Francisco Unified School District with 4,000 copies of the book for use in high school social studies and history classes. The books are being donated by a local anti-war activist.

Frank Dorrel: "It's important to show once again - the alternative history of U.S. foreign policy -- of U.S. wars, of U.S. militarism."

Leo Lacayo: "You need to focus in on both sides of the issue in order for students to create their own opinion."

Leo Lacayo is with the San Francisco Republican Party -- he opposes the book's approval. Lacayo accuses the district of being anti-military.

Leo Lacayo: "If you just look at this -- it's a comic book with bad illustrations. It's obviously made to poke fun at a very serious situation."

Lacayo isn't alone.

Col. Robert Powell, S.F. Junior ROTC: "We wouldn't have this United States if it wasn't for this revolutionary army to fight against England to be the United States. And like I said we'd probably have slavery if we didn't have the civil war."

Colonel Powell has run the San Francisco Junior ROTC program since 1983.

The San Francisco School Board voted to phase out the program last November, the board, taking a political position, says public schools are no place for the military. Colonel Powell says "Addicted to War" could be a valuable classroom tool, but he's concerned purely political ideology may cloud how teachers present the book.

Robert Powell: "You can put this out to stimulate discussion, and in fact use it to get discussion going in a good civics class, you know what I mean, but you go to have two opposing points of view."

There is however, no prescribed book for the opposing perspective -- that will be up to teachers. The district says it is looking for books that will adequately present an opposing points of view.

Pete Hammer: "We recommend that if teachers use it in the classroom -- that teachers use it along with other materials along the same topic that have different perspectives."

Leo Lacayo: "We're not teaching them -- we're basically washing their brains with liberal mish-mash."

Frank Dorrel you can't make someone believe something -- you can offer them the information and that's what we are doing here."

There is no word when the book will make it into classrooms. The anti-war activist who pushed for the district to use the book, is still pulling together the cash for the purchase.

Once the books have been given to the district, they will be made available to teachers. Because the are a gift, there is no further action required by the San Francisco School Board.

from the San Francisco Chronicle, 2007-Feb-8, p.B7, by Debra J. Saunders:

S.F. State -- Hecklers' paradise

WHAT IS San Francisco State University teaching that makes student leaders think that if they don't like what other students say, they can use student organizations to stifle those with dissenting views? Do they even know about the First Amendment?

This story starts with an "anti-terrorism rally" held last October on campus by the College Republicans. To emphasize their point, students stomped on Hezbollah and Hamas flags. According to the college paper, the Golden Gate (X)Press, members of Students Against War and the International Socialist Organization showed up to call the Republicans "racists," while the president of the General Union of Palestinian Students accused the Repubs of spreading false information about Muslims.

In November, the Associated Students board passed a unanimous resolution, which the (X)Press reported, denounced the California Republicans for "hateful religious intolerance" and criticized those who "pre-meditated the stomping of the flags knowing it would offend some people and possibly incite violence."

Now you know that there are students who are opposed to desecrating flags on campus -- that is, if the flags represent terrorist organizations.

But wait -- there's more. A student filed a complaint with the Office of Student Programs and Leadership Development. OSPLD Director Joey Greenwell wrote to the College Republicans informing them that his office had completed an investigation of the complaint and forwarded the report to the Student Organization Hearing Panel, which will adjudicate the charge. At issue is the charge that College Republicans had walked on "a banner with the world 'Allah' written in Arabic script" -- it turns out Allah's name is incorporated into Hamas and Hezbollah flags -- and "allegations of attempts to incite violence and create a hostile environment," as well as "actions of incivility."

At an unnamed date, the student panel could decide to issue a warning to, suspend or expel the GOP club from campus.

Maybe SFSU should just put up a sign that reads: Conservatives need not apply.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a group that stands up for free speech on campus, has taken up the College Republicans' cause. FIRE sent a letter to SFSU President Robert Corrigan that urged him to "spare SFSU the embarrassment of fighting against the Bill of Rights." The letter noted, "Burning an American flag as part of a political protest is expression protected by the First Amendment." And: "Speech does not constitute incitement if a speaker's words result in violence because people despise what the speaker said and wish to silence him or her.

"By punishing students on the basis of how harshly, violently or unreasonably others might react to their words," the letter argued, "SFSU would create an incentive for those who disagree to react violently, conferring a 'heckler's veto' on speech to the least tolerant members of the community."

The university's response? Spokesperson Ellen Griffin told me, "The university stands behind this process."

And: "I don't believe the complaint is about the desecration of the flag. I believe that the complaint is the desecration of Allah."

To which FIRE Vice President Robert Shibley responded, "It really doesn't make any difference whether it's the flag or a religious figure."

If the College Republicans had denigrated Allah, I would defend their right to do so, while noting I have no use for the gratuitous Islam-bashing endemic in certain circles.

But it is not the students' fault that Allah is on the Hamas and Hezbollah flags -- in a language they don't read.

Besides, every freshman should know that students have a right to say what they will about any religion, while believers enjoy the right to talk back.

"I'm confident that in the end of the day, the Constitution will vindicate us," SFSU junior Leigh Wolf of the College Republicans told me. Wolf is well aware of the double-standard on campus: Left-leaning students hide behind the First Amendment while trying to silence any conservative voices that dare to be heard.

Yumi Wilson, who teaches journalism at SFSU and previously worked at The Chronicle, told me, "My belief is that people should be able to have the freedom of expression, whether it is popular or not. That's what makes my country different from other countries." After all, she added, "If I don't like them, I can walk away."

As for the students who want to punish the College Repubs, they might want to consider how their actions reflect on SFSU. A university is supposed to be a place of learning and a forum made more vibrant by the free exchange of ideas, but this exercise makes SFSU look like a playground where bullies rule.

from FrontPageMagazine.com, 2007-Feb-5:

See No Jihad, Hear No Jihad

In a decision that reveals the state of denial on American campuses, the editorial board of the Georgica Tech student paper – The Georgia Tech Technique – has rejected an ad from the Terrorism Awareness Project warning students about the threat that radical Islam poses to America. Nor is it the first campus publication to chill open debate on radical Islamic terrorism.

Entitled “What Americans Need To Know About Jihad,” the ad warns students that “the goal of jihad is world domination,” and that “Jihad's battle cry is `Death to America.'” The ad includes quotes from several radical Islamic leaders, such as Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, who has declared, “Our hostility to the Great Satan [America] is absolute. Death to America. I encourage Palestinians to take suicide bombings worldwide.”

The Technique ad department initially accepted the ad and processed payment for it. But then the editors got a hold of it and killed the deal.

When asked to explain why the ad was rejected, an editor at the Technique declared that it was “hateful,” “offensive,” and “misleading.” In particular, the editor was upset that the ad draws a connection between Islamic radicals and the Nazis. This complaint refers to the pamphlet titled The Nazi Roots of Palestinian Nationalism and Islamic Jihad, which is advertised in the ad. The pamphlet describes the role that the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, the universally recognized father of Palestinian nationalism, played as a follower of Adolf Hitler during WWII.

When a representative from TAP offered to alter the ad, the Technique replied that everything in it was offensive and no alteration would help.

“The Technique's rejection of this ad reveals exactly why the Terrorism Awareness Project is needed on America's campuses,” commented TAP National Coordinator Stephen Miller, who is currently a senior at Duke University. “Universities and Middle East Studies Departments turn a blind eye to the threat of radical Islam, resulting in ignorance and denial. The editors of the Technique claimed that our ad was `hateful' and `misleading,' and refused to print it even if it were limited to actual quotes from radical Islamic leaders. In other words, the Techique's editors are simply trying to suppress the truth about the radical Islamic threat.”

The Technique is one of 15 college newspapers which have so far been approached about running the TAP ad. Several other universities—including Purdue, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Michigan—have rejected the ad, some without providing any reason for its rejection.

Jeffrey Wienir, who has been responsible for placing the ad in many of campus newspapers across the nation, also handled rejection calls. “When they reject the ad, I begin asking piece-by-piece: `What can we change to make the ad acceptable for your publication? What if we remove this, or that?'”

The editors, he said, usually branded the ad “hateful” and “misleading,” without specifying any change that could be made. One campus newspaper told Wienir it refused to run the article, because it feared those scanning the ad might think it was a pro-jihad organization (which does not speak well of the educational level of its students). Another said, incredibly, that any description of Islam would be misleading, because it was “not produced by a member of that group—as if I couldn't speak about jihad unless I was a jihadist.”

The TAP ad has been accepted for publication at a number of universities, including some of the most left-wing (and pro-Palestinian) campuses in the country: San Francisco State University, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and Duke University.

TAP has also produced a short flash video entitled The Islamic Mein Kampf, which documents the genocidal agendas of Islamic radicals like Iranian president Mahmoud Achmadinejdad and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. The video was distributed to more than 850,000 individuals across America this week, including the entire liberal arts faculties of several universities.

The Terrorism Awareness Project (TAP) is a new national program of the David Horowitz Freedom Center. It was launched this week to alert the American public—and particularly American college students—to the threat posed by radical Islam. The TAP ad and video clip can be viewed on the program's website at www.terrorismawareness.org.

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2006-Sep-27, by Pete du Pont:

What Do You Know?
If you're an American college student, probably not much.

"I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power."

Thomas Jefferson     
letter to William Charles Jarvis     
Sept. 20, 1820     

So how is America's modern education system doing in this regard? Are our citizens enlightened enough to exercise the powers of our democracy? Do our colleges and universities provide their students the American history and constitutional understanding needed to make them strong and responsible citizens?

A study released this week by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute--www.americancivicliteracy.org--demonstrates that the answers to both questions are no. The study concludes that "America's colleges and universities fail to increase knowledge about America's history and institutions." In a 60-question multiple-choice quiz ,"college seniors failed the civic literacy exam, with an average score of 53.2 percent, or F, on a traditional grading scale." And at many schools "seniors know less than freshmen about America's history, government, foreign affairs, and economy." (Disclosure: I am a member of the ISI's Civic Literacy Board, though I was not involved in preparing this survey.)

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In the fall of 2005 ISI worked with the University of Connecticut's Department of Public Policy to ask "more than 14,000 randomly selected college freshmen and seniors at 50 colleges and universities across the country"--an average of about 140 each of freshman and seniors on each campus--what they knew about America's constitutional and governmental history and policies. The colleges ran from state institutions--the University of New Mexico and the University of California at Berkeley, for example, to Ivy League schools like Yale, Brown and Harvard, and less-well-known institutions like Grove City College and Appalachian State University.

Some colleges did better than others, but few of them added very much to students' knowledge of America's history or government. College freshmen averaged 51.7%, and the seniors averaged 53.2%, so there was a slight gain in knowledge. But the average senior scored only 58.5% on American history questions, slightly above 51% on government and America-and-the-world questions, and 50.5% on market economy questions. By every college's grading system those are failing grades.

Among college seniors, less than half--47.9%--correctly concluded that "We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal" was from the Declaration of Independence. More than half did not know that the Bill of Rights prohibits the governmental establishment of an official religion, and "55.4 percent could not recognize Yorktown as the battle that brought the American Revolution to an end" (more than one quarter believing that it was the Civil War battle of Gettysburg that had ended the Revolution).

The questions about more recent matters produced more accurate answers. More than 80% of students could identify Franklin D. Roosevelt's programs as the New Deal, 79% knew that Brown v. Board of Education ordered an end to racial segregation, and 69% were aware that GDP was the best measure of output of our economy.

But the responses to the survey's 60 questions reflect the students' poor understanding of America's history and our institutions.

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As for the 50 colleges that participated in the program, the best-scoring students were not from the institutions one might expect. Rhodes College, Colorado State University and Calvin College were the top three, with senior students averaging between 9.5 and 11.6 percentage points higher than freshmen.

At the other end of the scale were 16 schools that showed "negative learning"--that is, seniors scored lower than freshmen. Cornell, UC Berkeley and Johns Hopkins were the worst three, their seniors scoring between 3.3 and 7.3 percentage points worse than their freshmen. And on the negative list were some other very prestigious universities: Williams, Georgetown, Yale, Duke and Brown.

How did these educational failures come to pass? ISI concludes that "students don't learn what colleges don't teach." In other words, in colleges where students must take more courses in American history they do better on the test, outperforming schools where fewer courses were completed. Seniors at the top test-scoring colleges "took an average of 4.2 history and political science courses, while seniors at the two lowest-ranked colleges . . . took an average of 2.9 history and political science courses." Similarly, higher ranked colleges spent more time on homework, 20 hours a week at fourth-ranked Grove City College and 14 or 15 at low-ranked Georgetown and Berkeley.

Parental education and family discussions of current events contribute to better civic learning as well. The study found that "73 percent of seniors' families at Grove City and Harvard [ranking 4th and 25th, respectively] discussed current events or history on a weekly or daily basis," whereas only half did at low ranked Berkeley and Johns Hopkins.

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So what should be done about our colleges' failure to offer sound educational courses on America's constitutional republic? Obviously they must improve the quantity and quality of their teaching, and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute recommends building "centers of academic excellence on college and university campuses for the teaching of America's history and institutions."

That would help people become, as Jefferson put it, "enlightened enough to exercise their control" over governmental matters. Many constitutional policy issues are before the Congress, from adding a line-item veto to the president's powers (a proper constitutional question) to regulating how many dollars a candidate for federal office may spend in a campaign or guaranteeing everyone a right to a home (improper ones).

Such issues must be understood by our citizens, for as Thomas Paine said after the original constitution was ratified by the states, "Government is only the creature of a Constitution. The Constitution of a country is not the act of its Government, but of the people constituting a Government."

Mr. du Pont, a former governor of Delaware, is chairman of the Dallas-based National Center for Policy Analysis. His column appears once a month.

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2006-Jul-25, by Charles Murray:

Acid Tests
No Child Left Behind is beyond uninformative. It is deceptive.

Test scores are the last refuge of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). They have to be, because so little else about the act is attractive.

NCLB takes a giant step toward nationalizing elementary and secondary education, a disaster for federalism. It pushes classrooms toward relentless drilling, not something that inspires able people to become teachers or makes children eager to learn. It holds good students hostage to the performance of the least talented, at a time when the economic future of the country depends more than ever on the performance of the most talented. The one aspect of the act that could have inspired enthusiasm from me, promoting school choice, has fallen far short of its hopes. The only way to justify NCLB is through compelling evidence that test scores are improving. So let's talk about test scores.

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The case that NCLB has failed to raise test scores had been made most comprehensively in a report from the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, released just a few weeks ago. The Civil Rights Project has an openly liberal political agenda, but the author of the report, Jaekyung Lee, lays out the data in graphs that anyone can follow, subjects them to appropriate statistical analyses, and arrives at conclusions that can stand on their scholarly merits: NCLB has not had a significant impact on overall test scores and has not narrowed the racial and socioeconomic achievement gap.

Is it too early to tell? As a parent who has had children in public schools since NCLB began, I don't think so. The Frederick County, Md., schools our children have attended have turned themselves inside out to try to produce the right test results, with dismaying effects on the content of classroom instruction and devastating effects on teacher morale. We actually lost our best English teacher to the effects of high-stakes testing. "I want to teach my students how to write," he said, "not teach them how to pass a test that says they can write." He quit.

So, yes, I think that if we parents have had to put up with these kinds of troubling effects on our children's schooling for four years, we are entitled to expect evidence of results. After all, "accountability" is NCLB's favorite word, and the Department of Education is holding school systems accountable for improvements in test scores with a vengeance. Sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander.

The Department of Education will undoubtedly produce numbers to dispute the findings of the Civil Rights Project, which brings me to the point of this essay. Those numbers will consist largely of pass percentages, not mean scores. A particular score is deemed to separate "proficient" from "not proficient." Reach that score, and you've passed the test. If 60% of one group--blondes, let's say--pass while only 50% of redheads pass, then the blonde-redhead gap is 10 percentage points.

A pass percentage is a bad standard for educational progress. Conceptually, "proficiency" has no objective meaning that lends itself to a cutoff. Administratively, the NCLB penalties for failure to make adequate progress give the states powerful incentives to make progress as easy to show as possible. A pass percentage throws away valuable information, telling you whether someone got over a bar, but not how high the bar was set or by how much the bar was cleared. Most importantly: If you are trying to measure progress in closing group differences, a comparison of changes in pass percentages is inherently misleading.

Take the case of Texas, from which George Bush acquired his faith in NCLB. As the president described it to the Urban League in 2003: "In my state, Texas, 73% of the white students passed the math test in 1994, while only 38% of African-American students passed it. So we made that the point of reference. We had people focused on the results for the first time--not process, but results. And because teachers rose to the challenge, because the problem became clear, that gap has now closed to 10 points." President Bush's numbers are accurately stated. They are also meaningless.

Any test that meets ordinary standards produces an approximation of what statisticians call a "normal distribution" of scores--a bell curve--because achievement in any open-ended skill such as reading comprehension or mathematics really is more or less normally distributed. The tests that produce anything except a bell curve are usually ones so simple that large proportions of students get every item correct. They hide the underlying normal distribution, but don't change it. Thus point No. 1, that using easy tests and discussing results in terms of pass percentages obscures a reality that NCLB seems bent on denying: All the children cannot be above average. They cannot all even be proficient, if "proficient" is defined legitimately. Some children do not have the necessary skills. Point No. 2 goes to the inherent distortions introduced by the use of pass percentages: Because of the underlying normal distribution, a gain in a given number of points has varying effects on group differences depending on where the gain falls.

To illustrate point No. 2, consider a test that has a hundred-point scale with a mean of 50 and a standard deviation of 15 (the standard deviation, a measure of the variability of the scores, tells you how tall and skinny or how short and broad the bell curve will be). How many students are involved when a range of, say, 10 points is at issue? The shaded areas in Figure 1 show two possibilities.

The total area under the bell curve includes all the students. The shaded area on the left includes all those with a score of 40 to 49 points--24.8% of all students, if the distribution is perfectly normal. The shaded area on the right includes all those with a score of 80 to 89 points--just 1.9% of all students. Suppose we are still comparing redheads and blondes. If the mean score of redheads goes from 40 to 50, it has risen all the way from the 25th to the 50th percentile of all students. If the blonde mean goes from 80 to 90, it has moved merely from the 98th to the 99th percentile of all students. You do not have to be a statistician to see that these built-in features of normally distributed scores--gains that are equal in points are not equal in the number of students they affect or in the percentile distances that students move--complicate the use of pass percentages when comparing groups.

If you want to get deeper into the math, you may visit a quirky and provocative Web site, www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com, run by someone who calls himself La Griffe du Lion. I surmise that he is an established scholar--a quantitative discipline seems likely--who once published on the fraught topic of group differences, learned how unpleasant and even professionally perilous that can be, and decided to remain anonymous henceforth. In any case, his technical skills are first rate. Click on the topic line entitled "Closing the Racial Learning Gap" for a much more detailed version of the argument and data that I am presenting here.

For our purposes, you need know only this: If the real difference between two groups, measured as it should be with means and standard deviations, remains constant, the size of the pass-percentage gap between two groups changes nonlinearly in a mathematically inevitable way. In other words, if there really is a constant, meaningful difference between groups, you can generate a curve that predicts how the point gap will change as tests are made easier or harder or as students become more or less competent. La Griffe has done this, and his curve fits the Texas data almost perfectly. In Figure 2, the white pass rate is used as the basis for predicting the size of the white-black gap. The circles represent the observed sizes of the test score gap from 1994 to 2002.

Test scores in Texas went up for both blacks and whites. Maybe that's good news, representing real gains in learning for everyone, or maybe it's not so good, representing the effects of teaching to the test. The data Texas reports do not permit a judgment. But the black gains are almost exactly what would be predicted if the magnitude of the underlying black-white difference remained unchanged. If there really was closure of the gap, all that Texas has to do is release the group means, as well as information about the black and white distributions of scores, and it will easy to measure it. Whatever the real closure may be, however, it cannot come close to the dramatic reduction that President Bush found in the difference between black and white pass rates.

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In this instance, the percentage-passed measure misleadingly showed a huge reduction in the black-white achievement gap. But look at the left-hand side of the curve. In a state that imposes tough standards--for example, one that establishes a threshold that only 40% of whites pass--across-the-board improvements in scores can misleadingly show an increase in the white-black achievement gap when none occurred.

Question: Doesn't this mean that the same set of scores could be made to show a rising or falling group difference just by changing the definition of a passing score? Answer: Yes.

At stake is not some arcane statistical nuance. The federal government is doling out rewards and penalties to school systems across the country based on changes in pass percentages. It is an uninformative measure for many reasons, but when it comes to measuring one of the central outcomes sought by No Child Left Behind, the closure of the achievement gap that separates poor students from rich, Latino from white, and black from white, the measure is beyond uninformative. It is deceptive.

Mr. Murray, W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author, most recently, of "In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State" (AEI, 2006).

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2007-Jan-16, by Charles Murray:

Intelligence in the Classroom
Half of all children are below average, and teachers can do only so much for them.

Education is becoming the preferred method for diagnosing and attacking a wide range problems in American life. The No Child Left Behind Act is one prominent example. Another is the recent volley of articles that blame rising income inequality on the increasing economic premium for advanced education. Crime, drugs, extramarital births, unemployment--you name the problem, and I will show you a stack of claims that education is to blame, or at least implicated.

One word is missing from these discussions: intelligence. Hardly anyone will admit it, but education's role in causing or solving any problem cannot be evaluated without considering the underlying intellectual ability of the people being educated. Today and over the next two days, I will put the case for three simple truths about the mediating role of intelligence that should bear on the way we think about education and the nation's future.

Today's simple truth: Half of all children are below average in intelligence. We do not live in Lake Wobegon.

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Our ability to improve the academic accomplishment of students in the lower half of the distribution of intelligence is severely limited. It is a matter of ceilings. Suppose a girl in the 99th percentile of intelligence, corresponding to an IQ of 135, is getting a C in English. She is underachieving, and someone who sets out to raise her performance might be able to get a spectacular result. Now suppose the boy sitting behind her is getting a D, but his IQ is a bit below 100, at the 49th percentile.

We can hope to raise his grade. But teaching him more vocabulary words or drilling him on the parts of speech will not open up new vistas for him. It is not within his power to learn to follow an exposition written beyond a limited level of complexity, any more than it is within my power to follow a proof in the American Journal of Mathematics. In both cases, the problem is not that we have not been taught enough, but that we are not smart enough.

Now take the girl sitting across the aisle who is getting an F. She is at the 20th percentile of intelligence, which means she has an IQ of 88. If the grading is honest, it may not be possible to do more than give her an E for effort. Even if she is taught to read every bit as well as her intelligence permits, she still will be able to comprehend only simple written material. It is a good thing that she becomes functionally literate, and it will have an effect on the range of jobs she can hold. But still she will be confined to jobs that require minimal reading skills. She is just not smart enough to do more than that.

How about raising intelligence? It would be nice if we knew how, but we do not. It has been shown that some intensive interventions temporarily raise IQ scores by amounts ranging up to seven or eight points. Investigated psychometrically, these increases are a mix of test effects and increases in the underlying general factor of intellectual ability--"g." In any case, the increases fade to insignificance within a few years after the intervention. Richard Herrnstein and I reviewed the technical literature on this topic in "The Bell Curve" (1994), and studies since then have told the same story.

There is no reason to believe that raising intelligence significantly and permanently is a current policy option, no matter how much money we are willing to spend. Nor can we look for much help from the Flynn Effect, the rise in IQ scores that has been observed internationally for several decades. Only a portion of that rise represents an increase in g, and recent studies indicate that the rise has stopped in advanced nations.

Some say that the public schools are so awful that there is huge room for improvement in academic performance just by improving education. There are two problems with that position. The first is that the numbers used to indict the public schools are missing a crucial component. For example, in the 2005 round of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), 36% of all fourth-graders were below the NAEP's "basic achievement" score in reading. It sounds like a terrible record. But we know from the mathematics of the normal distribution that 36% of fourth-graders also have IQs lower than 95.

What IQ is necessary to give a child a reasonable chance to meet the NAEP's basic achievement score? Remarkably, it appears that no one has tried to answer that question. We only know for sure that if the bar for basic achievement is meaningfully defined, some substantial proportion of students will be unable to meet it no matter how well they are taught. As it happens, the NAEP's definition of basic achievement is said to be on the tough side. That substantial proportion of fourth-graders who cannot reasonably be expected to meet it could well be close to 36%.

The second problem with the argument that education can be vastly improved is the false assumption that educators already know how to educate everyone and that they just need to try harder--the assumption that prompted No Child Left Behind. We have never known how to educate everyone. The widely held image of a golden age of American education when teachers brooked no nonsense and all the children learned their three Rs is a myth. If we confine the discussion to children in the lower half of the intelligence distribution (education of the gifted is another story), the overall trend of the 20th century was one of slow, hard-won improvement. A detailed review of this evidence, never challenged with data, was also part of "The Bell Curve."

This is not to say that American public schools cannot be improved. Many of them, especially in large cities, are dreadful. But even the best schools under the best conditions cannot repeal the limits on achievement set by limits on intelligence.

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To say that even a perfect education system is not going to make much difference in the performance of children in the lower half of the distribution understandably grates. But the easy retorts do not work. It's no use coming up with the example of a child who was getting Ds in school, met an inspiring teacher, and went on to become an astrophysicist. That is an underachievement story, not the story of someone at the 49th percentile of intelligence. It's no use to cite the differences in test scores between public schools and private ones--for students in the bottom half of the distribution, the differences are real but modest. It's no use to say that IQ scores can be wrong. I am not talking about scores on specific tests, but about a student's underlying intellectual ability, g, whether or not it has been measured with a test. And it's no use to say that there's no such thing as g.

While concepts such as "emotional intelligence" and "multiple intelligences" have their uses, a century of psychometric evidence has been augmented over the last decade by a growing body of neuroscientific evidence. Like it or not, g exists, is grounded in the architecture and neural functioning of the brain, and is the raw material for academic performance. If you do not have a lot of g when you enter kindergarten, you are never going to have a lot of it. No change in the educational system will change that hard fact.

That says nothing about the quality of the lives that should be open to everyone across the range of ability. I am among the most emphatic of those who think that the importance of IQ in living a good life is vastly overrated. My point is just this: It is true that many social and economic problems are disproportionately found among people with little education, but the culprit for their educational deficit is often low intelligence. Refusing to come to grips with that reality has produced policies that have been ineffectual at best and damaging at worst.

Mr. Murray is the W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. This is the first in a three-part series, concluding on Thursday.

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2007-Jan-17, by Charles Murray:

What's Wrong With Vocational School?
Too many Americans are going to college.

The topic yesterday was education and children in the lower half of the intelligence distribution. Today I turn to the upper half, people with IQs of 100 or higher. Today's simple truth is that far too many of them are going to four-year colleges.

Begin with those barely into the top half, those with average intelligence. To have an IQ of 100 means that a tough high-school course pushes you about as far as your academic talents will take you. If you are average in math ability, you may struggle with algebra and probably fail a calculus course. If you are average in verbal skills, you often misinterpret complex text and make errors in logic.

These are not devastating shortcomings. You are smart enough to engage in any of hundreds of occupations. You can acquire more knowledge if it is presented in a format commensurate with your intellectual skills. But a genuine college education in the arts and sciences begins where your skills leave off.

In engineering and most of the natural sciences, the demarcation between high-school material and college-level material is brutally obvious. If you cannot handle the math, you cannot pass the courses. In the humanities and social sciences, the demarcation is fuzzier. It is possible for someone with an IQ of 100 to sit in the lectures of Economics 1, read the textbook, and write answers in an examination book. But students who cannot follow complex arguments accurately are not really learning economics. They are taking away a mishmash of half-understood information and outright misunderstandings that probably leave them under the illusion that they know something they do not. (A depressing research literature documents one's inability to recognize one's own incompetence.) Traditionally and properly understood, a four-year college education teaches advanced analytic skills and information at a level that exceeds the intellectual capacity of most people.

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There is no magic point at which a genuine college-level education becomes an option, but anything below an IQ of 110 is problematic. If you want to do well, you should have an IQ of 115 or higher. Put another way, it makes sense for only about 15% of the population, 25% if one stretches it, to get a college education. And yet more than 45% of recent high school graduates enroll in four-year colleges. Adjust that percentage to account for high-school dropouts, and more than 40% of all persons in their late teens are trying to go to a four-year college--enough people to absorb everyone down through an IQ of 104.

No data that I have been able to find tell us what proportion of those students really want four years of college-level courses, but it is safe to say that few people who are intellectually unqualified yearn for the experience, any more than someone who is athletically unqualified for a college varsity wants to have his shortcomings exposed at practice every day. They are in college to improve their chances of making a good living. What they really need is vocational training. But nobody will say so, because "vocational training" is second class. "College" is first class.

Large numbers of those who are intellectually qualified for college also do not yearn for four years of college-level courses. They go to college because their parents are paying for it and college is what children of their social class are supposed to do after they finish high school. They may have the ability to understand the material in Economics 1 but they do not want to. They, too, need to learn to make a living--and would do better in vocational training.

Combine those who are unqualified with those who are qualified but not interested, and some large proportion of students on today's college campuses--probably a majority of them--are looking for something that the four-year college was not designed to provide. Once there, they create a demand for practical courses, taught at an intellectual level that can be handled by someone with a mildly above-average IQ and/or mild motivation. The nation's colleges try to accommodate these new demands. But most of the practical specialties do not really require four years of training, and the best way to teach those specialties is not through a residential institution with the staff and infrastructure of a college. It amounts to a system that tries to turn out televisions on an assembly line that also makes pottery. It can be done, but it's ridiculously inefficient.

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Government policy contributes to the problem by making college scholarships and loans too easy to get, but its role is ancillary. The demand for college is market-driven, because a college degree does, in fact, open up access to jobs that are closed to people without one. The fault lies in the false premium that our culture has put on a college degree.

For a few occupations, a college degree still certifies a qualification. For example, employers appropriately treat a bachelor's degree in engineering as a requirement for hiring engineers. But a bachelor's degree in a field such as sociology, psychology, economics, history or literature certifies nothing. It is a screening device for employers. The college you got into says a lot about your ability, and that you stuck it out for four years says something about your perseverance. But the degree itself does not qualify the graduate for anything. There are better, faster and more efficient ways for young people to acquire credentials to provide to employers.

The good news is that market-driven systems eventually adapt to reality, and signs of change are visible. One glimpse of the future is offered by the nation's two-year colleges. They are more honest than the four-year institutions about what their students want and provide courses that meet their needs more explicitly. Their time frame gives them a big advantage--two years is about right for learning many technical specialties, while four years is unnecessarily long.

Advances in technology are making the brick-and-mortar facility increasingly irrelevant. Research resources on the Internet will soon make the college library unnecessary. Lecture courses taught by first-rate professors are already available on CDs and DVDs for many subjects, and online methods to make courses interactive between professors and students are evolving. Advances in computer simulation are expanding the technical skills that can be taught without having to gather students together in a laboratory or shop. These and other developments are all still near the bottom of steep growth curves. The cost of effective training will fall for everyone who is willing to give up the trappings of a campus. As the cost of college continues to rise, the choice to give up those trappings will become easier.

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A reality about the job market must eventually begin to affect the valuation of a college education: The spread of wealth at the top of American society has created an explosive increase in the demand for craftsmen. Finding a good lawyer or physician is easy. Finding a good carpenter, painter, electrician, plumber, glazier, mason--the list goes on and on--is difficult, and it is a seller's market. Journeymen craftsmen routinely make incomes in the top half of the income distribution while master craftsmen can make six figures. They have work even in a soft economy. Their jobs cannot be outsourced to India. And the craftsman's job provides wonderful intrinsic rewards that come from mastery of a challenging skill that produces tangible results. How many white-collar jobs provide nearly as much satisfaction?

Even if forgoing college becomes economically attractive, the social cachet of a college degree remains. That will erode only when large numbers of high-status, high-income people do not have a college degree and don't care. The information technology industry is in the process of creating that class, with Bill Gates and Steve Jobs as exemplars. It will expand for the most natural of reasons: A college education need be no more important for many high-tech occupations than it is for NBA basketball players or cabinetmakers. Walk into Microsoft or Google with evidence that you are a brilliant hacker, and the job interviewer is not going to fret if you lack a college transcript. The ability to present an employer with evidence that you are good at something, without benefit of a college degree, will continue to increase, and so will the number of skills to which that evidence can be attached. Every time that happens, the false premium attached to the college degree will diminish.

Most students find college life to be lots of fun (apart from the boring classroom stuff), and that alone will keep the four-year institution overstocked for a long time. But, rightly understood, college is appropriate for a small minority of young adults--perhaps even a minority of the people who have IQs high enough that they could do college-level work if they wished. People who go to college are not better or worse people than anyone else; they are merely different in certain interests and abilities. That is the way college should be seen. There is reason to hope that eventually it will be.

Mr. Murray is the W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. This is the second in a three-part series, concluding tomorrow.

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2007-Jan-18, by Charles Murray:

Aztecs vs. Greeks
Those with superior intelligence need to learn to be wise.

If "intellectually gifted" is defined to mean people who can become theoretical physicists, then we're talking about no more than a few people per thousand and perhaps many fewer. They are cognitive curiosities, too rare to have that much impact on the functioning of society from day to day. But if "intellectually gifted" is defined to mean people who can stand out in almost any profession short of theoretical physics, then research about IQ and job performance indicates that an IQ of at least 120 is usually needed. That number demarcates the top 10% of the IQ distribution, or about 15 million people in today's labor force--a lot of people.

In professions screened for IQ by educational requirements--medicine, engineering, law, the sciences and academia--the great majority of people must, by the nature of the selection process, have IQs over 120. Evidence about who enters occupations where the screening is not directly linked to IQ indicates that people with IQs of 120 or higher also occupy large proportions of positions in the upper reaches of corporate America and the senior ranks of government. People in the top 10% of intelligence produce most of the books and newspaper articles we read and the television programs and movies we watch. They are the people in the laboratories and at workstations who invent our new pharmaceuticals, computer chips, software and every other form of advanced technology.

Combine these groups, and the top 10% of the intelligence distribution has a huge influence on whether our economy is vital or stagnant, our culture healthy or sick, our institutions secure or endangered. Of the simple truths about intelligence and its relationship to education, this is the most important and least acknowledged: Our future depends crucially on how we educate the next generation of people gifted with unusually high intelligence.

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How assiduously does our federal government work to see that this precious raw material is properly developed? In 2006, the Department of Education spent about $84 billion. The only program to improve the education of the gifted got $9.6 million, one-hundredth of 1% of expenditures. In the 2007 budget, President Bush zeroed it out.

But never mind. A large proportion of gifted children are born to parents who value their children's talent and do their best to see that it is realized. Most gifted children without such parents are recognized by someone somewhere along the educational line and pointed toward college. No evidence indicates that the nation has many children with IQs above 120 who are not given an opportunity for higher education. The university system has also become efficient in shipping large numbers of the most talented high-school graduates to the most prestigious schools. The allocation of this human capital can be criticized--it would probably be better for the nation if more of the gifted went into the sciences and fewer into the law. But if the issue is amount of education, then the nation is doing fine with its next generation of gifted children. The problem with the education of the gifted involves not their professional training, but their training as citizens.

We live in an age when it is unfashionable to talk about the special responsibility of being gifted, because to do so acknowledges inequality of ability, which is elitist, and inequality of responsibilities, which is also elitist. And so children who know they are smarter than the other kids tend, in a most human reaction, to think of themselves as superior to them. Because giftedness is not to be talked about, no one tells high-IQ children explicitly, forcefully and repeatedly that their intellectual talent is a gift. That they are not superior human beings, but lucky ones. That the gift brings with it obligations to be worthy of it. That among those obligations, the most important and most difficult is to aim not just at academic accomplishment, but at wisdom.

The encouragement of wisdom requires a special kind of education. It requires first of all recognition of one's own intellectual limits and fallibilities--in a word, humility. This is perhaps the most conspicuously missing part of today's education of the gifted. Many high-IQ students, especially those who avoid serious science and math, go from kindergarten through an advanced degree without ever having a teacher who is dissatisfied with their best work and without ever taking a course that forces them to say to themselves, "I can't do this." Humility requires that the gifted learn what it feels like to hit an intellectual wall, just as all of their less talented peers do, and that can come only from a curriculum and pedagogy designed especially for them. That level of demand cannot fairly be imposed on a classroom that includes children who do not have the ability to respond. The gifted need to have some classes with each other not to be coddled, but because that is the only setting in which their feet can be held to the fire.

The encouragement of wisdom requires mastery of analytical building blocks. The gifted must assimilate the details of grammar and syntax and the details of logical fallacies not because they will need them to communicate in daily life, but because these are indispensable for precise thinking at an advanced level.

The encouragement of wisdom requires being steeped in the study of ethics, starting with Aristotle and Confucius. It is not enough that gifted children learn to be nice. They must know what it means to be good.

The encouragement of wisdom requires an advanced knowledge of history. Never has the aphorism about the fate of those who ignore history been more true.

All of the above are antithetical to the mindset that prevails in today's schools at every level. The gifted should not be taught to be nonjudgmental; they need to learn how to make accurate judgments. They should not be taught to be equally respectful of Aztecs and Greeks; they should focus on the best that has come before them, which will mean a light dose of Aztecs and a heavy one of Greeks. The primary purpose of their education should not be to let the little darlings express themselves, but to give them the tools and the intellectual discipline for expressing themselves as adults.

In short, I am calling for a revival of the classical definition of a liberal education, serving its classic purpose: to prepare an elite to do its duty. If that sounds too much like Plato's Guardians, consider this distinction. As William F. Buckley rightly instructs us, it is better to be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard University. But we have that option only in the choice of our elected officials. In all other respects, the government, economy and culture are run by a cognitive elite that we do not choose. That is the reality, and we are powerless to change it. All we can do is try to educate the elite to be conscious of, and prepared to meet, its obligations. For years, we have not even thought about the nature of that task. It is time we did.

---

The goals that should shape the evolution of American education are cross-cutting and occasionally seem contradictory. Yesterday, I argued the merits of having a large group of high-IQ people who do not bother to go to college; today, I argue the merits of special education for the gifted. The two positions are not in the end incompatible, but there is much more to be said, as on all the issues I have raised.

The aim here is not to complete an argument but to begin a discussion; not to present policy prescriptions, but to plead for greater realism in our outlook on education. Accept that some children will be left behind other children because of intellectual limitations, and think about what kind of education will give them the greatest chance for a fulfilling life nonetheless. Stop telling children that they need to go to college to be successful, and take advantage of the other, often better ways in which people can develop their talents. Acknowledge the existence and importance of high intellectual ability, and think about how best to nurture the children who possess it.

Mr. Murray is the W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. This concludes a three-part series which began on Tuesday.

from the San Francisco Chronicle, 2006-Nov-15, p.B1, by Jill Tucker:

School board votes to dump JROTC program

After 90 years in San Francisco high schools, the Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps must go, the San Francisco school board decided Tuesday night.

The board voted 4-2 to eliminate the popular program, phasing it out over two years.

Dozens of JROTC cadets at the board meeting burst into tears or covered their faces after the votes were cast.

"We're really shocked,'' said fourth-year Cadet Eric Chu, a senior at Lowell High School, his eyes filling with tears. "It provided me with a place to go.''

The proposal approved by the board also creates a task force to develop alternatives to the program that will be tried out next year at various high schools.

The board's decision was loudly applauded by opponents of the program.

Their position was summed up by a former teacher, Nancy Mancias, who said, "We need to teach a curriculum of peace.''

The board's move to dismantle the popular program was led by board members Dan Kelly and Mark Sanchez with support from Sarah Lipson and Eric Mar. Casting votes against it were Jill Wynns and Norman Yee. Board member Eddie Chin was absent.

"I think people should not despair too much,'' said Sanchez. "I think now the work begins. To work within the community to develop new programs that will fulfill the needs of our students.''

About 1,600 San Francisco students participate in JROTC at seven high schools across the district.

Opponents said the armed forces should have no place in public schools, and the military's discriminatory stance on gays makes the presence of JROTC unacceptable.

"We don't want the military ruining our civilian institutions," said Sandra Schwartz, of the American Friends Service Committee, an organization actively opposing JROTC nationwide. "In a healthy democracy ... you contain the military. You must contain the military."

Students, parents and school staff from each of the seven high schools converged outside the school board meeting carrying signs and waving at cars, some of which honked in support.

At least 100 cadets edged into Franklin Street waving their signs before being pushed back to the sidewalk by their ROTC instructors.

Yet, in the end, the effort -- one of several rallies in the last several weeks -- fell on deaf ears.

"This is where the kids feel safe, the one place they feel safe," Robert Powell, a JROTC instructor at Lincoln High School and a retired Army lieutenant colonel, said earlier in the evening. "You're going to take that away from them?"

Opponents acknowledged the program is popular and even helps some students stay in school and out of trouble.

Yet they also said the program exists to lure students to sign up for the armed forces.

"It's basically a branding program, or a recruiting program for the military," Kelly said before the meeting.

The school district and the military share the $1.6 million annual cost of the program, with the military paying $586,000, or half the salaries of 15 instructors -- all of whom are retired military personnel. The district pays the other half of salaries and $394,000 in benefits.

Earlier, Mayor Gavin Newsom weighed in on the debate, chastising the board for the effort to eliminate JROTC.

"The move sends the wrong message," he said. "It's important for the city not to be identified with disrespecting the sacrifice of men and women in uniform."

Students in the program receive physical education or elective credits required for graduation.

A budget analysis found that the district could hire nine teachers with the money the district now spends on JROTC -- enough to cover the gym and elective courses for the 1,600 students should the program be eliminated.

But there wouldn't be money to create an alternative program serving that many students, said Wynns.

"I think the people who want to get rid of it have a responsibility to look at how we're going to pay for that and what we're going to do to replace it," she added.

Newsom also said he believed the vote would push more city residents away from the public schools.

"You think this is going to help keep families in San Francisco?" the mayor added. "No. It's going to hurt."

On other matters, the board introduced a resolution that makes race a factor in deciding what school a child will attend starting with the 2008-09 school year. No action was taken.

from the New York Post, 2006-Dec-4, by Matt Sanchez:

DIVERSITY DOUBLE-TALK
IVY'S 'INCLUSION' EXCLUDES MILITARY

DiD you hear the one about the Marines that Columbia University invited to campus for Fleet Week?

Not any time in the last few decades, you didn't.

But you might have heard the one about the Marine who was told by a fellow Columbia student that he was stupid for joining the military because he's Hispanic and didn't realize he was being used for cannon fodder.

It's actually kind of funny - but when it happened to me during Columbia's Activities Day last year, I was fighting mad. Not because I was publicly humiliated in front of several hundred of my fellow classmates (any devil dog who has spent a summer on Parris Island gets used to insults), but because of what the incident showed about New York's most prestigious university.

On the surface, Columbia is all for diversity (good, very good) and completely opposed to intolerance (bad, really bad). On any given day, eager undergrads can speak out for Starbucks employees forced to make coffee with non-ergonomic espresso machines, or call for the school to install non-gender-specific bathrooms.

The administration? Well, I've heard Mary McGee, the dean of students, speak with great consternation about the need to be sure that no student populations were marginalized or excluded. To illustrate the point, she pondered changing all the doorknobs on campus to accommodate those with physical limitations who might literally be "shut out." She said that, to date, no student had complained about the smooth metallic doorknobs, "but they should not have to"

I figured that a dean so concerned about student inclusion would certainly look into a simple case of student harassment. You see, I had a problem: fellow student Monique Dols.

Back on Activities Day, Dols didn't just lecture me on my stupidity in serving our nation; she also yelled that I was a baby killer. For a Marine, being called a killer is almost flattering - but for months Dols and her friends had been disrupting pretty much every event I attended.

Most famously, her crowd rushed the stage at another group's event, preventing the guest (from the border-enforcement advocates, the Minutemen) from delivering his remarks, and nearly causing a riot.

That day, Dols claimed to be protesting for the recognition of the humanity of illegal Hispanic immigrants. Yet somehow her concern doesn't apply to a citizen Hispanics proud to serve this country and eager to go to college.

And the Columbia administration seems to agree. Despite bringing national embarrassment to the university with her actions, she's gone completely unpunished.

The university has chalked it up to free speech. All points of view are welcome at Columbia, from Venezuelan presidents to voices from vaginas.

Unless you're in the military.

But Columbia's hypocrisy on inclusiveness isn't just a matter of the apparent immunity that Dols & Co. enjoy. The school also has no faculty member who specifically deals with veteran affairs.

Sure, Curtis Rodgers, the dean of admissions, says veterans are a great asset for the Columbia community - and a very nice woman at the bursar's office will help veterans process their GI benefits to pay tuition. Yet when a Marine deployed to Iraq was having problems clearing up an error on his tuition bill, no one on staff was prepared to help him break through the school's bureaucracy.

Columbia veterans would love to invite Marines and sailors onto the campus during next year's Fleet Week - but we don't want them to experience the Columbia version of a sniper attack. The sad fact that they'd face such an assault is something Columbia University just won't own up to.

Matt Sanchez is a corporal in the U.S Marines (Reserve) and a junior at Columbia. Matthew.a.sanchez@gmail.com

from the New York Daily News, 2006-Nov-26, by Douglas Feiden:

Free speech sacred - as long as you're a liberal?

In a chaotic brawl, Columbia student protesters stormed the stage at Lerner Hall on Oct. 4 to stop a speech by Jim Gilchrist, head of the anti-illegal immigration Minuteman Project.

But less-publicized assaults on free speech also mar campus life, students say. In one incident, a Columbia senior and Marine reservist was heckled and branded a "baby killer" by anti-war activists because of his outspoken pro-war views.

Matt Sanchez, 35, who returned to Columbia to complete his education, said he was angrily confronted late last year by three students at a table set up by the Military Society, a student club, in front of Low Library. "Columbia says it cherishes free speech, diversity and tolerance," Sanchez said. "But they don't live up to their own values when it comes to members of the military or others they disagree with."

But free speech is alive and well in the classroom.

Consider the approach taken by Prof. Peter deMenocal to the teaching of evolution in "Frontiers of Science," a required course on scientific thinking that has nothing to do with politics. As he lectured on the differences between man and ape, he displayed a slide with six unflattering photos of Bush - interspersed with six pictures of monkeys striking similar poses.

Confirming the episode, DeMenocal, who teaches Earth and environmental sciences, said in an e-mail, "The lecture itself had no political content or commentary."

Teaching a mandatory class to 550 freshmen "needs some levity," he added. "The slide got a little laugh, and we moved on to the science of what makes us human."

Not every student was chuckling. Chris Kulawik, the president of the College Republicans, said he was horrified at the trashing of the President and the politicization of a nonpolitical science class. "He got cheap laughs from a majority of students at the expense of a minority of students who were offended," he said.

But Mike Nadler, his rival as president of the College Democrats and the son of Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-Manhattan), said his professors' political views have never tainted their teaching missions. "My teachers often hide their political opinions and philosophies and tell students both sides of the story so we can form our own educated opinions," Nadler said.

from the Washington Post, 2006-Dec-3, p.B1, by Vincent J. Cannato:

Time's On His Side

After the 2004 election, a number of terribly depressed people at my university told me what a shame it was that President Bush had been reelected. If only people knew history, they lamented, they would never have voted for him.

It must be a comforting thought that this abstract thing called "history" can give us the wisdom to choose the right president, as if history books were Ouija boards and historians were modern-day oracles.

Certainly, some historians see themselves that way. In early 2004, just three years into the Bush administration, an "informal, unscientific survey of historians" by the History News Network found that more than 80 percent believed that the president was already a failure. And a miserable one at that.

Earlier this year, Princeton University historian Sean Wilentz took to the pages of Rolling Stone to ponder whether Bush is the "worst president in history" and concluded that he "appears headed for colossal historical disgrace."

So, case closed? Not yet. I long ago learned to look with suspicion when members of the left-leaning historical profession delve into contemporary politics or profess near unanimity. Today's pronouncements that Bush is the "worst president ever" are too often ideology masquerading as history.

Historical and popular judgments about presidents are always in flux. Dwight D. Eisenhower used to be considered a banal and lazy chief executive who embodied the "conformist" 1950s. Today, his reputation has improved because of more positive appraisals of his Cold War stewardship. Ronald Reagan, whom many historians dismissed as an amiable dunce, has also had his stock rise. On the flip side, Bill Clinton's presidency looks somewhat different after Monica Lewinsky, the bursting of the dot-com bubble and 9/11 than it did in 1997.

Perhaps Bush can take solace in the case of Harry S. Truman, who was reviled at the end of his presidency, with approval numbers hovering around 30 percent. Too liberal for conservatives and too conservative for liberals, Truman was saddled with an unpopular stalemate in the Korean War and accusations of corruption at home. Many saw him as a belligerent rube, too unsophisticated for the White House.

Today, however, many historians have revised their estimate of his presidency upward. There certainly are echoes of Truman in the current carping about Bush.

Most clearly, the Iraq war colors every judgment about Bush these days -- and increasingly, that color is dark. Weakened by the conflict, the administration is now stymied on challenges such as North Korea and Iran. And while focusing most of its energies on terrorism and Iraq, the Bush administration -- for which I worked briefly as a speechwriter in 2001 -- has been less energetic on the domestic front. Attempts at entitlement reform and tax reform have stalled, as has immigration reform. But there have been domestic policy successes: tax cuts, the No Child Left Behind Act, the prescription drug plan and housing policies that have expanded home ownership. All have their critics, but they represent some semblance of a domestic policy.

Any appraisal of Bush's record must consider that he took over in difficult times. By most objective measures, the economy is doing well: Inflation, interest rates and unemployment are low, economic growth is steady, and the stock market is climbing. Complaints about income inequality are legitimate, but the issue has long-term structural roots, and neither party has done much to address it.

What is disheartening is the tendency of many historians to rate presidents based on their support for liberal social policies. Just as frustrating is the inability to acknowledge the deep debates over law enforcement measures, such as the USA Patriot Act, enacted after 9/11. Rather than acknowledge the tough tradeoffs between security and privacy, we are left with the hyperbole that this administration is "trampling on civil liberties." Sometimes wisely and sometimes rashly, Bush has steered the nation through the post-9/11 world. It has been an uneven trip so far, but the country has not suffered another attack in more than five years.

Much of Bush's legacy will rest on the future trajectory of the fight against terrorism, the nation's continued security and the evolving direction of the Middle East. Things may look grim today, but that doesn't ensure a grim future.

No one expects historians to be perfectly objective. But history should at least teach us humility. Time will cool today's political passions. As years pass, more documents will be released, more insights gleaned and the broader picture of this era will be painted. Only then will we begin to see how George W. Bush fares in the pantheon of U.S. presidents.

I don't know how history will judge him. My guess is that, like most presidents, he will bequeath a mixed record. We can debate policies and actions now, but honesty should force us to acknowledge that real judgments will have to wait.

Vincent J. Cannato teaches history at the University of Massachusetts in Boston.

from RealClearPolitics.com, 2006-Dec-2, by George Will:

'Racial Balancing' in Seattle Schools

SEATTLE -- This city's school district decided in 2000 that because the son of Jill Kurfirst and the daughter of Winnie Bachwitz are white, they should be assigned to an inferior and distant high school. If they had not left the Seattle school system, this would have required them to rise at 5 a.m. in order to leave home by 5:30 a.m., alone and in the dark, to take the first of three buses, returning home between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m., with almost no time left for homework, family activities and adequate sleep.

The parents argue that the racial school assignments -- actually, assignments by pigmentation -- that so injured their children violate the Constitution's guarantee of equal protection of the laws. The reliably unreliable 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals -- often reversed but never in doubt -- predictably ruled, with interesting indifference to pertinent Supreme Court precedents, against the parents. Soon -- oral arguments are Monday -- the Supreme Court can remind the 9th Circuit of the Constitution's limits on what schools can do in the name of "diversity.''

Students can seek admission to any of Seattle's high schools. But the Seattle School District decided to engineer a precise racial balance in its most popular -- because much better -- high schools, which are chosen by more students than they can accommodate. The district wanted each oversubscribed school to reflect the entire system's ratio of 40 percent whites and 60 percent nonwhites. So it adopted a race-based admission plan to shape the schools' "diversity.''

The district gave preference to certain applicants, using considerations it called "tiebreakers.'' One, which benefited about 10 percent of applicants, was whether the student had a sibling at the desired school. Another was whether the student's race will produce or maintain a 40-60 balance.

When registering children for high school, parents were asked to specify each child's race. If parents did not specify, the district did so based on visual inspection of the parents' or child's pigmentation. The school board president has said "skin tone matters.''

The two children wanted to attend Ballard High School because of its Biotech Academy. In the 2000-01 school year, when 82 percent of the city's students sought admission to one of the five best schools, the children were among the 300 students denied admission to the school of their choice because their race interfered with racial balancing.

Although Seattle never had segregated schools, the district discusses its racial preferences with reference to "segregation'' and "integration.'' But a statement by the district reveals that racial preferences are supposed to serve social engineering: "Diversity in the classroom increases the likelihood that children will discuss racial or ethnic issues and be more likely to socialize with people of different races.'' Or different skin tones.

Is that a "compelling government interest,'' sufficient to justify race-based school assignments? The 9th Circuit, siding with the district, argued two propositions, both of which conflict with Supreme Court precedents.

One was that racial preferences are benign if they do not "unduly harm any students'' or "uniformly benefit any race or group of individuals to the detriment of another'' (emphases added). But the Supreme Court has rejected this idea that the equal protection clause protects group rights rather than individual rights.

Second, the 9th Circuit said broad deference is owed to the judgments of local school districts. But no line of cases has established that high schools enjoy even the limited latitude that universities have in treating race as a factor when deciding who may be admitted. Rather, the Supreme Court has held that public secondary education "must be available to all on equal terms.'' And here are samples of the Seattle district's judgments which the 9th Circuit thinks deserve deference:

Until June, the school district's Web site declared that "cultural racism'' includes "emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology,'' "having a future time orientation'' (planning ahead) and "defining one form of English as standard.'' The site also asserted that only whites can be racists, and disparaged assimilation as the "giving up'' of one's culture. After this propaganda provoked outrage, the district, saying it needed to "provide more context to readers'' about "institutional racism,'' put up a page saying that the district's intention is to avoid "unsuccessful concepts such as a melting pot or colorblind mentality.''

The Supreme Court has said that all racial classifications by government are "presumptively invalid'' unless narrowly tailored to serve a compelling government interest. The district's repellent Web site revealed the interest that the district considers so compelling that it justifies racial preferences. Supreme Court deference to such race-mongering would make a mockery of the equal protection guarantee.

from the Waco Tribune-Herald, 2006-Dec-10, by Emily Ingram:

Hug lands 4-year-old in suspension

When a Bellmead father received a letter from his son's school district saying the 4-year-old had inappropriately touched a teacher's aide, he said he couldn't believe what he was reading.

“When I got that letter, my world flipped,” DaMarcus Blackwell said.

The Nov. 13 letter from La Vega Independent School District stated his son, who was 4 years old at the time, was involved in “inappropriate physical behavior interpreted as sexual contact and/or sexual harassment” after the boy hugged a teacher's aide and “rubbed his face in the chest of (the) female employee” on Nov. 10.

The letter also stated Blackwell's son, who Blackwell requested not be named in this story for privacy reasons, spent the day in in-school suspension (ISS) as punishment for the incident.

Blackwell has since filed a complaint with the district.

In turn, the district changed the offense to “inappropriate physical contact” and removed references of sexual contact or sexual harassment from the boy's file, according to a subsequent letter from the district.

Still, Blackwell said the change isn't enough.

Putting out six bananas on the table, he asks, “What do you see? You say you see six bananas, but I say no, it's half a dozen. That's the same thing with this. Call it what you want, it's the same thing.”

Blackwell and his wife, Patricia, say their son does not know why he was sent to ISS.

Blackwell said school officials may have told him the reason for the punishment, but they say as parents, they should have been there when the punishment was explained.

A letter from the school district said efforts to telephone the parents about the incident failed.

Still, Blackwell said the district should have made more of an effort to include the parents in the issue.

School officials refused to comment on the incident, referring to student privacy laws.

Al Bishop, La Vega ISD assistant superintendent for personnel and administration, said he could comment only on the policy.

According to the district's student handbook, Bishop said, there are no specific rules or guidelines referring to contact between teachers and students.

There is a general statement, though, that says inappropriate physical contact will result in a discipline referral, he said.

While the handbook does not state what is inappropriate, Bishop conceded that determination came to a judgment call by school officials.

Bishop said a discipline referral goes into a student's discipline file, which is a part of the personal file.

Not all discipline referrals go into a student's permanent record, and each year the student's discipline file is removed, kept for one to two years and then destroyed, he said.

In the Blackwell's case, Bishop said he could not comment on whether a discipline referral was a part of the boy's permanent record.

Blackwell could not clarify whether the discipline report went into the boy's permanent record.

Regardless of where the report was filed, Blackwell said, the issue for him is that his son was punished for an act he is too young to understand.

The question of whether a touch is meant inappropriately or is an innocent gesture by a young child is not as easily answered through a checklist of factors, said David Davis, executive director of the Advocacy Center for Crime Victims & Children in Waco.

“A lot of variables come into play,” Davis said, adding he doesn't know the details of Blackwell's son's incident.

Variables such as age, maturity and exposure to factors like pornography or even molestation, influence whether a touch is innocent or not, he said.

In the recent case of a La Vega Independent School District elementary student who allegedly inappropriately touched a teacher's aide, Davis said the things to consider are not as much the gestures themselves as the behavior afterward.

“It's a concern if a child didn't respond to redirection,” Davis said. “I would be more concerned about a child's response to limits set by an adult more than the touch itself.”

Davis said some young children touch — sometimes inappropriately — out of curiosity.

When told they have done something inappropriate, a child who was acting out of curiosity would then typically withdraw or act embarrassed and respond to the redirection, Davis said.

A child whose actions were deliberately inappropriate would act compulsively, aggressively or through manipulation, Davis said.

The child would not respond to redirection, and his or her actions would continue.

While a touch could be read as innocent or inappropriate, “it is the behavior itself” that must be evaluated, Davis said.

from the Hagerstown Herald-Mail of Maryland, 2006-Dec-20, Erin Cunningham:

School accuses 5-year-old of sex harassment

HAGERSTOWN - A kindergarten student was accused earlier this month of sexually harassing a classmate at Lincolnshire Elementary School, an accusation that will remain on his record until he moves to middle school.

Washington County Public Schools spokeswoman Carol Mowen said the definition of sexual harassment used by the school system is, "unwelcome sexual advances, request for sexual favors and/or other inappropriate verbal, written or physical conduct of a sexual nature directed toward others."

Mowen said that definition comes from the Maryland State Department of Education.

According to a school document provided by the boy's father, the 5-year-old pinched a girl's buttocks on Dec. 8 in a hallway at the school south of Hagerstown.

Charles Vallance, the boy's father, said he was unable to explain to his son what he had done.

"He knows nothing about sex," Vallance said. "There's no way to explain what he's been written up for. He knows it as playing around. He doesn't know it as anything sexual at all."

The incident was described as "sexual harassment" on the school form.

School officials consider a student's age and the specific action when determining what administrative action to take, Mowen said.

Lincolnshire Principal Darlene Teach and Mowen said they were unable to discuss he incident involving the Lincolnshire student.

Teach said any student, regardless of grade level, can be cited for sexual harassment.

"Anytime a student touches another student inappropriately, it could be sexual harassment," Teach said.

School administrators at a Texas school in November suspended a 4-year-old student for inappropriately touching a teacher's aide after the prekindergarten student hugged the woman.

"It's important to understand a child may not realize that what he or she is doing may be considered sexual harassment, but if it fits under the definition, then it is, under the state's guidelines," Mowen said. "If someone has been told this person does not want this type of touching, it doesn't matter if it's at work or at school, that's sexual harassment."

The incident will be included in the boy's file while he remains at Lincolnshire, but Mowen said those files do not follow students when they move on to middle school.

She described the incident as a "learning opportunity."

During the 2005-06 school year, 28 kindergarten students in Maryland were suspended for sex offenses, including sexual assault, sexual harassment and sexual activity, according to state data. Fifteen of those suspensions were for sexual harassment.

During the 2005-06 school year, one Washington County prekindergarten student was suspended from school, and 12 of the county's kindergartners were suspended for various offenses, according to state data.

from the State News, 2006-Dec-1, by Lindsay Machak and Kris Turner:

Protesters crash immigration event

A campus discussion about illegal immigration turned violent Thursday evening, when protesters clashed with the MSU College Republicans and Young Americans for Freedom, who sponsored the event.

Kyle Bristow, chairman of the Young Americans for Freedom, or YAF, said he was kicked and spat upon by some of the protesters when he was outside the MSU College of Law, where the discussion was being held.

"It saddens me that my fellow Spartans would display this type of behavior," he said. "They are racist. It's sad we need police to come to control these radical leftists."

Unable to identify the people who assaulted him, Bristow said he wasn't planning to file a police report.

MSU police were dispatched to the event after an employee of the law college called the department, MSU police Sgt. Brian McDaniel said.

"About 10 to 20 protesters disrupted the event," he said. "We believe they were responsible for pulling the fire alarm."

Protesters said they came to show their opposition to controversial Republican congressman Tom Tancredo, of Colorado, who spoke at the event. Before Tancredo arrived and while the event was being set up, protesters gathered on the fourth floor of the law college with signs that read "Ignorant Racist."

Someone in the building set off a fire alarm twice throughout the evening. After the first alarm was pulled, a few hundred people were evacuated from the building. The person or persons responsible for pulling the alarm could face a misdemeanor or felony charge if caught, McDaniel said.

Randy McPherson, whose sign read "Where's the wall to keep you out?" came to protest when he heard that the congressman would be speaking.

"God works in mysterious ways," said McPherson, a food science and premedical junior, after the second fire alarm was pulled. "(Tancredo) shouldn't be here."

Some protesters weren't allowed inside the discussion room because they had signs, which aren't allowed in the law college. The people who attended to oppose the event said they came to represent themselves — not the minority campus groups with which they are affiliated.

Another student who came to protest the event said she wanted to make sure it was known that Tancredo is racist.

"We were here to protest the whole event," said Claudia Gonzalez, an interdisciplinary studies in social science and community relations senior. "It got heated and there was a lot of disagreement and argument. This is a very big issue."

While waiting for the discussion to start, accounting graduate student Matt Ledesma said he witnessed someone being pulled out of the discussion area for spitting on someone.

"They were being disruptive," he said. "Someone pulled the fire alarm, which got us all out here."

After everyone was allowed back into the law college, Tancredo addressed a crowd of more than 40 people, who clapped and booed when he began speaking.

His speech focused on illegal immigration in the United States and emphasized looking at the issue with a clear head.

"Look, you can't get emotional," Tancredo said during his speech. "Let's just talk about the policy."

He also stressed the importance of a single national language, which he believes should be English, but added he supports people who are bilingual.

"I think diversity is a great thing," he said. "But it becomes a negative thing when it's the only thing."

A 10-minute question-and-answer session was held at the end of the event. Students wrote their questions on note cards, and MSU College Republicans chairman Jeff Wiggins asked a few of the questions. Tancredo left shortly after he spoke, ignoring many of the questions.

Wiggins, who helped arrange the event, said he was surprised at the protesters' reaction.

"(Tancredo) was not in the building when this went on," he said. "We were in here setting up. We tried to tell them signs are not allowed in the law college."

Jose Villagran, a interdisciplinary studies in social science senior, asked "Why have you been cited for hiring undocumented workers for personal construction?" His question was not asked by Wiggins, who did not pose controversial questions.

from Bloomberg, 2006-Nov-3, by David Evans:

Fourth Grader Suspended After Refusing to Answer Exam Question

Tyler Stoken was a well-behaved fourth grader who enjoyed school, earned A's and B's and performed well on standardized tests.

In May 2005, he'd completed five of the six days of the Washington State Assessment of Student Learning exam, called WASL, part of the state's No Child Left Behind test.

Then Tyler came upon this question: ``While looking out the window one day at school, you notice the principal flying in the air. In several paragraphs, write a story telling what happens.''

The nine-year-old was afraid to answer the question about his principal, Olivia McCarthy. ``I didn't want to make fun of her,'' he says, explaining he was taught to write the first thing that entered his mind on the state writing test.

In this case, Tyler's initial thoughts would have been embarrassing and mean. So even after repeated requests by school personnel, and ultimately the principal herself, Tyler left the answer space blank. ``He didn't want them to know what he was thinking, that she was a witch on a broomstick,'' says Tyler's mother, Amanda Wolfe, sitting next to her son in the family's ranch home three blocks from Central Park Elementary School in Aberdeen, Washington.

Because Tyler didn't answer the question, McCarthy suspended him for five days. He recalls the principal reprimanding him by saying his test score could bring down the entire school's performance.

``Good job, bud, you've ruined it for everyone in the school, the teachers and the school,'' Tyler says McCarthy told him.

`He Cried'

Aberdeen School District Superintendent Martin Kay ordered an investigation. ``My suspension was for refusal to comply with a reasonable request, and to teach Tyler that that could harm him in the future,'' McCarthy told an investigator. ``I never, for a second, questioned my actions.''

Tyler, who's 4 feet (1.2 meters) tall and weighs 70 pounds (32 kilograms), hasn't been the same since, his mother says.

``He liked the principal before this,'' she says. ``He cried. He didn't understand why she'd done this to him.''

Now, Tyler blows up at the drop of a hat, his mother says. ``They created a monster. He'll never take that test again, even if I have to take him to another state,'' she says.

Tyler's attitude about school changed. He became shyer. He's afraid of all tests and doesn't do as well in classes anymore, his mother says.

`Blatant Defiance'

McCarthy's May 6, 2005, letter to Tyler's mother detailed her son's suspension. ``The fact that Tyler chose to simply refuse to work on the WASL after many reasonable requests is none other than blatant defiance and insubordination,'' McCarthy wrote.

In the letter, she accused Tyler of bringing down the average score of the other 10 students in his class. ``As we have worked so hard this year to improve our writing skills, this is a particularly egregious wound,'' McCarthy wrote.

Her accusation was wrong, state regulations show. There is no averaging of the writing scores. Each student either meets or fails the state standard.

Tita Mallory, director of curriculum and assessment for the Aberdeen School District, says school officials feel tremendous pressure because of the high-stakes tests.

While there's no academic effect on elementary school children taking the exams, there can be repercussions for school administrators. When schools repeatedly fail to show adequate yearly progress, as defined by No Child, the principal can be fired.

``In many ways, there's too much emphasis on the test,'' Mallory says. ``I don't want that kind of pressure on our kids.''

Out of 74,184 fourth graders taking the WASL test last year, 42.3 percent failed to meet the state standard for writing.

Juanita Doyon, director of Mothers Against WASL and author of, ``Not With Our Kids You Don't! Ten Strategies to Save Our Schools'' (Heinemann, 144 pages, $14.95), says Tyler's experience is representative of what's wrong with tests like the WASL.

``They took a student who loved his school and crushed his spirit,'' Doyon, 46, says.

``We've elevated test scores to be the most important part of school. The principal and teachers are so pressured by the test that they've lost good sense in dealing with children.''

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2006-Jul-21, by Naomi Schaefer Riley:

The Future Will Be Different!
So why study?

What will higher education look like in 50 years? If you weren't in Honolulu a couple of weeks ago, you might not know. Alas, I wasn't there either. But a glance at the panels of a conference convened there--called "The Campus of the Future"--offers a clue: College in the coming decades will have even less to do with learning than it does now.

Of the conference's almost 200 offerings--e.g., "Responding to Climate Change," "Branding Your Identity" and "Takin' It to the Streets"--none seemed to have even a tangential relation to the idea that, in college, teachers are supposed to impart knowledge to students.

The organizers, in their defense, are not academics and probably don't consider it their jobs to think about what goes on inside classrooms. (The sponsoring groups included the Association of Higher Education Facilities Officers and the National Association of College and University Business Officers.) But they were interested enough in classroom life to ask Thomas Friedman to lecture on the topic. The New York Times columnist obliged, offering his thoughts on what colleges can do to keep America competitive in a global economy.

According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, Mr. Friedman "urged educators to focus less on concrete outcomes like grades and test scores and more on teaching students how to learn, instilling passion and curiosity in them and developing their intuitive skills." To anyone who has followed the rhetoric of educationists in recent years, these bromides will sound familiar. Suffice it to say that if colleges take up Mr. Friedman's suggestions, they will move further away from their academic mission, and the kind of student who thrives in a university environment will change.

---

Mr. Friedman suggested to his audience of 4,000 that preparing students for an uncertain future was akin to "training for the Olympics without knowing which sport you will compete in." This blustery overstatement is also painfully familiar: Change is so rapid, we are told, that we can't even imagine what the future will look like. I recently found myself at a "career night" at my old high school in Worcester, Mass., where I heard ideas similar to Mr. Friedman's. An alumnus on my panel advised students that "the job [you] will hold probably doesn't even exist today."

One has to wonder whether such claims will become, for students, an excuse for laziness. Remember the young Alvy Singer in Woody Allen's "Annie Hall"? Upon finding out that the universe will eventually come to an end, he decides to stop doing his homework. In such a way, students today--hectored about the hyper-changing world they are in--may decide that there is no point in traditional learning since the future will be so very different. Why read Gibbon when only "intuitive skills" are going to be worth anything?

But for all the anxiety of education experts, it may well be that the skills that were useful to our parents and grandparents will be useful for years to come. People who edit Web sites, after all, still have to know grammar. Biologists who manipulate DNA still have to know the phases of meiosis. Businessmen--who, Mr. Friedman suggests, now need to be "synthesizers," and "adaptors"--still have to know how to calculate the bottom line. Even columnists may find that the history they learned in school comes in handy (though perhaps not often enough).

---

A few years ago, David Brooks wrote a piece for The Atlantic called "The Organization Kid," in which he described the harried life of a college student today. At Princeton, Mr. Brooks recounted, he "asked several students to describe their daily schedules, and their replies sounded like a session of Future Workaholics of America: crew practice at dawn, classes in the morning, resident-adviser duty, lunch, study groups, classes in the afternoon, tutoring disadvantaged kids in Trenton, a cappella practice, dinner, study, science lab, prayer session, hit the StairMaster, study a few hours more."

Perhaps, as Mr. Brooks concluded, students are amazingly diligent these days. Perhaps they are more serious about college than, say, the baby boomers were. But study after study has shown that less and less of their time is devoted to academics. It is given over instead to "leveraging," "synthesizing" and other Friedman-ite activities, often aided by handy electronic organizers.

Some might say that a palm-piloted life is exactly what a young person will need for the 21st century. But not everyone is suited for it. We've been reading a lot recently about boys falling behind girls in school. You don't have to hang around teenagers for long to realize that girls are much bigger fans of to-do lists and neat calendars than boys. They are more adept at "multi-tasking," too. Meanwhile, boys throw themselves into one or two subjects, keep messy notes and need to be reminded where they have to be next.

Some dean may chalk these proclivities up to immaturity, but there is a reason to value the kind of academic single-mindedness that male students often bring to an educational environment--the kind of thing that pushes up those old-fashioned test scores. Even on the campus of the future.

Ms. Riley is the Journal's deputy Taste editor and the author of "God on the Quad."

from the Los Angeles Times, 2006-Oct-6, by Jennifer Delson:

Minuteman Founder Forced From N.Y. Stage

Jim Gilchrist, the illegal immigration foe from Aliso Viejo, draws protesters at Columbia University, who rush the podium.

Jim Gilchrist, the Aliso Viejo accountant who co-founded the Minuteman Project, was forced offstage seconds into his speech at Columbia University on Wednesday night by students who said his anti-illegal immigration message was not welcome in New York.

Gilchrist, who was invited by the Columbia University College Republicans, was unharmed but was unable to continue speaking as planned and was forced to leave the stage after an altercation with students.

Afterward, Gilchrist said Columbia "is a gutter school. The students are not being taught how to learn but how to hate…. It is a shame that we cannot discuss the issues."

Referring to immigration enforcement, he said the students "simply do not want to accept that this is about being in a country that respects the rule of law."

Gilchrist said he would continue to take his controversial message anywhere he could. He has talks scheduled in Iowa, Alabama and other locations in coming months.

It was not the first time violence erupted at one of his events. In May 2005, five demonstrators were arrested in Garden Grove after a Gilchrist supporter tried to force his van through a blockade by protesters.

Gilchrist gained a national reputation after organizing citizen border patrols to spot illegal immigrants, an activity that prompted President Bush to call him a vigilante.

The Columbia melee began after two students rushed from behind the stage toward Gilchrist and unrolled a banner that read in Spanish, English and Arabic, "No One Is Illegal."

Seeing the two, others in the audience ran toward the stage, including about two dozen who managed to get onto the 3-foot-high platform, past security guards and ropes, where Gilchrist was only a few words into his speech.

The lectern was knocked over and Gilchrist fell back, smashing his reading glasses.

"It was pandemonium. Tables and chairs were knocked over. The microphones were ripped out. Papers were all over," said Chris Kulawik, president of the College Republicans chapter, which also paid his travel costs.

No one was arrested. The incident was videotaped and shown on TV newscasts.

On Thursday, a statement was issued on the Internet, including on the Minuteman site, by people saying they were "those who occupied the stage":

"We peacefully occupied the stage and spoke ourselves. Our peaceful protest was violently attacked by members of the College Republicans and their supporters…. The Minutemen are not a legitimate voice in the debate on immigration. They are a racist, armed militia who have declared open hunting season on immigrants."

Gilchrist met with hundreds of protesters outside before speaking. They carried signs with messages such as "Minute-Klan, Get the Khell Out of New York" and "The Minutemen Are Not Our America."

Sharon Black, who was among the protesters, said neither Gilchrist nor his message was welcome in New York City. "We are a city of immigrants. His message is one of division, racism and hate."

Black, a volunteer for the New York May 1 Coalition comprising trade unionists, students and immigrants, said New Yorkers were increasingly aware of Gilchrist's activities because of protests conducted by a Minuteman group in the city, and because Gilchrist began promoting his recent book at Ground Zero, where the World Trade Center towers were destroyed by terrorists.

For that reason, Kulawik invited Gilchrist to the campus.

"We wanted to hear views we don't usually hear at Columbia," Kulawik said.

"I'm quite ashamed of the university and my peers. I expected them to listen and ask tough questions."

from the Boston Globe, 2006-Oct-5, by Marcella Bombardieri:

As world changes, so may Harvard
Task force urges curriculum shift

CAMBRIDGE -- Harvard's idea of what every student should study before donning cap and gown may be about to change dramatically.

Undergraduate education should be far more relevant to the real world than it is now, according to a curriculum task force's proposal distributed to professors yesterday. The courses that students are required to take outside their majors should teach them what they need to know to be responsible citizens in the 21st century, no matter what career they choose.

And what they need to know, the report says, includes two major subjects that Harvard does not require students to study now: religion and the United States.

Today, the core curriculum, as it is known, is more esoteric, and students could fill a literature requirement with a narrowly focused course called ``Women Writers in Imperial China." If the faculty adopts the proposal, students would be more likely to take something broader, like ``The Emergence of World Literature" or ``Art and Censorship."

Faculty members will probably discuss the report at a November meeting and may vote on a final draft early next year, according to a task force leader. Message Board YOUR VIEW: Do you think colleges should make students take religion curriculum?

Supporters see the proposal, the latest twist in three years of controversy over the curriculum, as part of broader efforts to make the faculty more responsive to the needs and interests of students.

``The core was really designed to get faculty to agree to teach in it," by allowing them to teach whatever they wanted, said Mary C. Waters, a sociologist who served on the task force.

In contrast, future course requirements should connect scholarship with ``what you are going to be like and what the world is going to be like when you get out of college," said Louis Menand, an English professor and task force cochairman.

The report addresses what to do about general education, the required courses students take outside their majors, roughly a year's worth of work. The core, designed amidst the culture wars of the 1970s, requires students to take courses that expose them to different approaches to knowledge, regardless of the subjects.

The new proposal harkens back to an earlier era at Harvard, when professors were less squeamish about imposing values. During World War II, the college designed a curriculum that sought to define what students needed to know in order to contribute to society and that was widely influential in academia.

The report differs sharply from a proposal floated last year, which would have resembled what many schools do, requiring students to take a certain number of classes in particular areas, such as science. But the proposal did not lay out a strong vision of what an education should be. It died partly because it was unpopular, but also because it became entangled in the controversy over the leadership of former president Lawrence H. Summers. The latest proposal, however, does echo some of Summers's goals for improving the curriculum.

Students interviewed yesterday sharply criticized the core curriculum. Several said they found little rationale for the courses offered.

``At least [the proposal] is attempting to give us a range of what seems important, so we won't just take Alexander [the Great], Dinosaurs, Cosmic Connections, and Magic of Numbers," said junior Olivia Brown, referring to well-known core courses.

But senior Jenny Tsai said the proposal sounds too fleeting, betraying an anxiety about the contemporary world.

``It seems to be about fears about the Middle East and the need to learn science so we can create better weapons to maintain American supremacy," said Tsai, a social studies major.

Menand, however, said that being up to date was the point.

``No general education should be timeless," he said. ``There's no question it's a response to the world we live in now."

from the Hartford Courant, 2006-May-25, by Shawn Courchesne:

Rule Tackles Blowouts In High School Football

Expect New London High School football coach Jack Cochran to operate next season as he always has, and if that means his team wins by 50 points or more, so be it. And expect Cochran to be suspended for doing so.

In what some are referring to as the "Cochran rule," the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference football committee passed a score management policy to be instituted next season. The rule says if a team wins by 50 or more points, the coach is suspended for the next game.

Although many have accused Cochran of running up scores, he doesn't see it that way. And he doesn't like this rule. On that point, he has company.

"It won't change anything with how I prepare for a game," Cochran said. "Where it's going to run into problems is when you've got your second team in or you've got your freshmen in; what do you tell them? One coach is saying he's just going to have his guys take a knee. I would never do that. I would never tell a kid to run out of bounds instead of scoring.

"I will probably have to take a suspension next year. If it comes down to letting a freshman or a [junior varsity] player score at the varsity level or me being suspended, I'm not going to stop that kid from doing that. I cherish the sport too much and believe in it too much to tell some kid he can't play the game the right way."

The rule, passed in April, says if a team wins by 50 points or more it will be called an unsportsmanlike act. Under the CIAC's disqualification rule, the coach will be suspended for the next game. The football committee is made up of coaches and school administrators, all formerly involved in coaching.

"Our football committee has been discussing this topic for two or three years and they've been studying policies," said CIAC Assistant Executive Director Tony Mosa. "It certainly didn't just come about after last year. We certainly have been having a lot of criticism regarding what appeared to be a high number of high scores."

Mosa said 12 games last season had a differential of more than 55 points.

"That's really not an exorbitant number, but 12 is too many," Mosa said.

Of the 659 games reported to the CIAC last year, there were 27 in which teams won by at least 50 points. Cochran's New London team won four games by 55 or more, including a 90-0 victory over Griswold.

"The CIAC is sending the wrong message," Cochran said. "It's protectionism of those that can't compete. Do you tell people at work that everyone has to make the same amount of money and they can't succeed? This is about teaching kids to work hard and that success will come. For a lot of guys out there, when they get beat handily it makes them stronger and they go back and work harder."

Some states use a system that calls for a running clock when a team has reached a certain advantage. Although Connecticut has no rule that allows a running clock, many coaches employ the practice in blowouts.

"I had a season where I had seven games where the clock was run in the second half. It works," Cochran said. "The problem with that is sometimes opponents won't do it. The Griswold coach [Glenn LaBossiere] wouldn't do it with me last year. But I've very rarely had a coach that didn't want to do that."

Mosa said the running clock system was something the football committee saw as prohibitive to giving second- and third-string players the chance to play.

"You do that and the game is over before anybody can even get in," Mosa said.

The rule applies only to the final score. A team could be leading 55-0 and back off defensively so that its opponent could score a touchdown that prevents a coach's suspension.

Tim Panteleakos, coach of the Tourtellotte (Thompson)/Ellis Tech (Danielson) co-op team, sees putting in a rule to thwart running up the score as a double-edged sword.

Panteleakos, who has coached the co-op team since its inception in 2000, was charged last season with breach of peace after having words with Cochran as they were leaving the field at halftime of a game in New London. Panteleakos said he was angered when Cochran used a timeout late in the half so his team could score more points. New London won, 60-0.

"I think it's a very progressive rule," Panteleakos said. "You really have to adhere to scoring management. It's not something that when you come in as a young coach that you're really aware of because you just want your kids to succeed."

But Panteleakos sees problems with the rule, too.

"We had a small school like Putnam on our schedule last year, and they're experiencing some problems with numbers and that sort of thing," Panteleakos said. "Putnam didn't have enough kids to go to a second string. So now you've got a few kids on that field from Putnam that are getting their butts whipped week in and week out and they're angry young men. Now me, as the head coach on the other side, I'm reluctant to put some of my second and third string in against a kid on the other side who is going to take the head off of any kid he sees. So I have to leave my first string in there, and they're going to keep playing the game."

Asked whether he thought the CIAC was instituting the rule because of the actions of one coach, Panteleakos said, "I think at the moment they are."

Mosa denied that, saying the rule was "not directed at one particular school or individual."

Cochran took umbrage with Hyde-New Haven coach John Acquavita referring to the rule in a published report as the "Jack Rule."

"He's pointing blame, and I don't think that's fair of him," Cochran said. "He's got a lot of lopsided scores. They're a hell of a football program. But it's easy to blame someone else when you don't like something new."

Northwest Catholic-West Hartford coach Mike Tyler said he was surprised by the decision to implement the rule and says many coaches have the same feeling.

"I'm still trying to absorb the whole thing," Tyler said. "When I was told about it, I just thought there wasn't much discussion about this."

Like many in the state, Tyler sees the rule as leading to troublesome situations.

"Regarding telling kids to just fall on balls and don't pick it up, you've got kids that are in there that don't get to get in often, and it's their chance to shine a little bit," Tyler said. "How do you tell that kid not to pick it up and run? I don't know if I could tell a kid that, but if I was going to get suspended in the next game it would be different."

Cochran sees the rule as another hindrance in helping kids in the state to move on with their football careers at higher levels.

"You look at all the other states, we're one of the weakest when it comes to football," Cochran said. "It's simply because of the restrictions put on us for coaching time. Until that changes, it's a disservice to every kid that plays football in this state. At the end of the day, they're competing against kids from Pennsylvania and New Jersey and Florida to move on and it's not a level playing field. This is just another restriction that's going to hinder football in this state."

from the Boston Globe, 2006-Apr-27, by Jeff Jacoby:

When parents' values conflict with public schools

OF THE FIVE candidates running to succeed Mitt Romney as governor of Massachusetts, all but one have chosen to send their children to private schools. Nothing wrong with that -- millions of parents would move their kids out of public schools tomorrow if they thought they could afford something better. For millions more, government schooling isn't an option in the first place: They would no sooner let the state decide what their children should learn than they would let it to decide whom they should marry.

In an interview this month, Lieutenant Governor Kerry Healey, the only Republican in the race, explained why she and her husband picked a private school for their son and daughter. "I want my kids to be in an environment where they can talk about values," she said -- talk about values, that is, "in a way that you can't always do in a public school setting."

It's hard to see anything objectionable in Healey's words, but they triggered a broadside from Attorney General Thomas Reilly, a Democrat and the only gubernatorial candidate whose children all attended public schools.

Healey is "completely out of touch with the lives of regular people," he snapped. "Somehow the perception is that the kids in public schools are not learning the values that they should be learning. ..... Public schools reinforced the values of our home. ..... It was a wonderful experience." Those quotes appeared in The Boston Globe on April 17. Now consider a story that appeared three days later.

On April 20, in a story headlined "Parents rip school over gay storybook," the Globe reported on the latest controversy in Lexington, where school officials committed to normalizing same-sex marriage have clashed with residents who don't want homosexual themes introduced in class without advance parental notice. Last year, a Lexington father named David Parker complained to officials at the Joseph Estabrook Elementary School about the "diversity" curriculum in his son's kindergarten class, which included pictures of families headed by gay and lesbian couples. Parker was arrested on trespassing charges when he refused to leave the school grounds without a promise that he would be alerted before similar lessons were taught in the future.

The latest incident, also at the Estabrook School, was triggered when a second-grade teacher presented to her class a storybook celebration of homosexual romance and marriage.

There is nothing subtle about "King & King," the book that Heather Kramer read to her students. It tells the story of Prince Bertie, whose mother the queen nags him to get married ("When I was your age, I'd been married twice already," she says), and parades before him a bevy of princesses to choose from. But Bertie, who says he's "never cared much for princesses," rejects them all. Then "Princess Madeleine and her brother, Prince Lee," show up, and Bertie falls in love at first sight -- with the brother. Soon, the princes are married. "The wedding was very special," reads the text. "The queen even shed a tear or two." Bertie and Lee are elevated from princes to "King and King," and the last page shows them exchanging a passionate kiss.

Dismayed by such blatant propagandizing, the parents of one student made an appointment to discuss their concerns with school officials. "This is a highly charged social issue," Robin and Robert Wirthlin told them. "Why are you introducing it in second grade?" Kramer said she had selected the book in order to teach a unit on weddings. When the Wirthlins checked the Lexington Public Library, they found 59 children's titles dealing with weddings, but "King & King" wasn't among them. The library's search engine listed it instead under "Homosexuality -- Juvenile fiction."

Massachusetts law requires schools to notify parents before "human sexuality issues" are taught in class and gives parents the right to exempt a child from that portion of the curriculum. But the Wirthlins' request to be given a heads-up before something as contentious and sensitive as same-sex marriage comes up in their child's class again was rejected out of hand.

"We couldn't run a public school system if every parent who feels some topic is objectionable to them for moral or religious reasons decides their child should be removed," Lexington's superintendent of schools, Paul Ash, told the Globe. "Lexington is committed to teaching children about the world they live in, and in Massachusetts same-sex marriage is legal." Reviewing "King & King" for the website Lesbian Life, Kathy Belge -- who describes herself as a longtime lesbian activist and the director of a queer youth program -- writes that it is "sure to capture a child's imagination" and praises it in particular for its nonjudgmental embrace of homosexuality: "The same-sex attraction is normalized. There's no proselytizing, no big lesson. It just is."

But homosexuality and gay marriage are not like subtraction or geography; they cannot be separated from questions of morality, justice, and decency. No matter how a school chooses to deal with sexual issues, it promotes certain values -- values that some parents will fervently welcome and that others will just as fervently reject. And what is true of human sexuality is true of other issues that touch on deeply felt religious, political, or ideological values.

When it comes to the education of children, there is always an agenda -- and those who don't share that agenda too often find themselves belittled, marginalized, or ignored. Perhaps it was true, as Thomas Reilly says, that the public schools his children attended "reinforced the values of our home." But as the Parkers and Wirthlins in Lexington can testify, other families have a very different experience. When Kerry Healey says she wants her children "to be in an environment where they can talk about values ..... in a way that you can't always do in a public school setting," many public-school parents will know exactly what she means.

from WorldNetDaily.com, 2005-Aug-4:

Father faces trial over school's 'pro-gay' book
Arrested after objecting to kindergartner's reading material

A Massachusetts man faces a court trial over a dispute about the teaching of homosexuality in his son's kindergarten class.

David Parker, of Lexington, spent a night in jail and was charged with criminal trespassing after refusing to leave a scheduled meeting with school officials April 27, unless they gave him the option of pulling his child out of certain classes.

Parker says the officials had indicated they would agree to a notification policy then suddenly refused. He insists he has done nothing wrong and is willing to contest the charge rather than plea-bargain.

At a hearing Tuesday, Parker's trial date was set for Sept. 21.

The Lexington School Board contends Parker deliberately set out to be arrested and make national headlines.

Parker's attorney, Jeffrey Denner, rejected that claim as supporters picketed outside the courthouse.

David Parker's son brought home the book 'Who's in a Family?' in school's 'Diversity Book Bag' (Image: Article 8 Alliance)

"That is simply untrue. I don't speak for the school, but that is simply untrue," he said. "He was invited to come in, he came in, there was a dialogue going back and forth, there were faxes sent back and forth, from the school to the school committee. His intent was absolutely not to be arrested. His intent was to establish a dialogue to protect his own children and other children as well."

The dispute began last spring when Parker's then-5-year-old son brought home a book to be shared with his parents titled, "Who's in a Family?" The optional reading material, which came in a "Diversity Book Bag," depicted at least two households led by homosexual partners.

"There's a larger issue here locally and nationally and internationally about the role of family and what kind of encroachments government can make into children's and people's lives," Denner told reporters.

The illustrated book, according to the local non-profit group Article 8 Alliance, says, "A family can be made up in many different ways" and includes this text:

"Laura and Kyle live with their two moms, Joyce and Emily, and a poodle named Daisy. It takes all four of them to give Daisy her bath."

Another illustrated page says:

"Robin's family is made up of her dad, Clifford, her dad's partner, Henry, and Robin's cat, Sassy. Clifford and Henry take turns making dinner for their family."

Article 8, an opponent of the state's same-sex marriage law, says the book "uses subtle but powerful emotions to normalize homosexual relationships in the minds of the young children."

A backer of the Lexington School District, Laura Tully, argued, according to WCVB-TV in Boston, "A 5-year-old who is coming to the classroom with two moms deserves to be in a classroom that includes books that show his family."

Denner said he is negotiating with school officials to prevent the trial, but he also indicated that Parker likely will file a civil suit in federal court by this fall against the town of Lexington, the school system and its officials.

from OpinionJournal.com, 2006-May-24, by Vincent J. Cannato:

The Confusion on Campus
A Harvard prof reflects on the hollowness of higher ed.

Are American universities now in their golden age? Many rank as the leading research institutions in the world. A college education is within reach for more Americans than ever before. Applications continue to rise as colleges attract the best and the brightest from the U.S. and from overseas. And yet it is hard not to get the feeling that there is something amiss at American schools.

Recent headlines certainly suggest troubles at individual universities--Duke with its lacrosse scandal, Yale with its admission of a former Taliban member, Harvard with its routing of president Lawrence Summers. But Harry Lewis, a former dean at Harvard who still teaches computer science there, thinks the problem is deeper than a handful of alarming anecdotes might suggest. In "Excellence Without a Soul," Mr. Lewis decries the "hollowness of undergraduate education."

He takes Harvard as his case study, but many of his conclusions apply to the rest of American higher education. Mr. Lewis finds American universities "soulless" and argues that they rarely speak as "proponents of high ideals for future American leaders." He bluntly states that Harvard "has lost, indeed willingly surrendered, its moral authority to shape the souls of its students. . . . Harvard articulates no ideals of what it means to be a good person."

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Arguing that American universities are soulless did not originate with Mr. Lewis, of course. In fact, it is one of the main themes of Allan Bloom's classic (and more entertaining) "The Closing of the American Mind," a book to which Mr. Lewis strangely never refers. Still, "Excellence Without a Soul" has some fresh arguments and a few pleasantly maverick views. Mr. Lewis defends the benefits of college athletics, for instance: Far from being an overcommercialized distraction, they are a "source of joy" and embody an "ethos of self-sacrifice, perseverance, drive [and] endurance." The much-lamented dangers of date rape, he suggests, result in part from a combustible campus mix of alcohol and sexual liberation. Mr. Lewis even includes a game, if unconvincing, defense of grade inflation: Students are better, he says; teaching is better; and more small courses push up grades deservedly "because students and faculty get to know each other better."

The core of this book, though, is a defense of the idea that universities should be about something. What makes an educated person? Unfortunately, too many professors and administrators, if they ever bother to think about it, would have difficulty answering the question beyond the pabulum found in most university brochures.

So how does Harvard define an educated person? A Harvard education, the university states, "must provide a broad introduction to the knowledge needed in an increasingly global and connected, yet simultaneously diverse and fragmented world." Mr. Lewis, rightfully dismissive, notes that the school never actually says what kind of knowledge is "needed." The words are meaningless blather, he says, proving that "Harvard no longer knows what a good education is."

Such institutional incoherence has consequences. In his sharpest criticism, Mr. Lewis charges that Harvard now ceases to think of itself as an American institution with any obligation to educate students about liberal democratic ideals. As the school increasingly focuses on "global competency," the U.S. is "rarely mentioned in anything written recently about Harvard's plans for undergraduate education." In the absence of agreement on common values or a core curriculum, anything goes. Echoing Allan Bloom's critique of relativism, Mr. Lewis writes that at Harvard "all knowledge is equally valued as long as a Harvard professor is teaching it."

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Mr. Lewis skips past many campus matters that seem ripe for discussion (affirmative action, speech codes, the academic monoculture, the viability of the tenure system). He is less an angry prophet than a genteel provocateur. But the portrait he draws, however limited, is disturbing enough.

There is too little accountability at most schools, Mr. Lewis observes. Trustees often abdicate their responsibilities, while college presidents have become glorified fund-raisers. Most professors are "narrowly educated experts" with little experience outside academia. They are "poorly equipped to help college students sort out" their lives. Meanwhile, professors teach what they want to teach based on their own interests, not on the needs of their students. At too many schools, Mr. Lewis argues, students pursue an "à la carte" course schedule that lacks coherence and can leave large gaps in knowledge.

There is little incentive, he adds, for reform among the university's various "constituencies." Students want a high grade-point average and a college degree that is a passport to a well-paying job, but they also want freedom from authority. Tenured professors want to be left alone to conduct research without academic oversight. Administrators who prize stability and consensus are loath to rock the boat.

But one "constituency" should be concerned. Parents preparing to shell out a small fortune for their children's education will want to read Mr. Lewis's book as they ask themselves: What exactly are we paying for?

Mr. Cannato teaches history at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. You can buy "Excellence Without a Soul" from the OpinionJournal bookstore.

from the Washington Post, 2006-Aug-29, p.A2, by Dana Milbank:

Pronouncing Blame on the Israel Lobby

It was quite a boner.

University of Chicago political scientist John Mearsheimer was in town yesterday to elaborate on his view that American Jewish groups are responsible for the war in Iraq, the destruction of Lebanon's infrastructure and many other bad things. As evidence, he cited the influence pro-Israel groups have on "John Boner, the House majority leader."

Actually, Professor, it's "BAY-ner." But Mearsheimer quickly dispensed with Boehner (R-Ohio) and moved on to Jewish groups' nefarious sway over Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), who Mearsheimer called " Von Hollen."

Such gaffes would be trivial -- if Mearsheimer weren't claiming to be an authority on Washington and how power is wielded here. But Mearsheimer, with co-author Stephen Walt of Harvard's Kennedy School, set off a furious debate this spring when they argued that "the Israel lobby" is exerting undue influence in Washington; opponents called them anti-Semitic.

Yesterday, at the invitation of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), they held a forum at the National Press Club to expand on their allegations about the Israel lobby. Blurring the line between academics and activism, they accepted a button proclaiming "Fight the Israel Lobby" and won cheers from the Muslim group for their denunciation of Israel and its friends in the United States.

Whatever motivated the performance, the result wasn't exactly scholarly.

Walt singled out two Jews who worked at the Pentagon for their pro-Israel views. "People like Paul Wolfowitz or Doug Feith . . . advocate policies they think are good for Israel and the United States alike," he said. "We don't think there's anything wrong with that, but we also don't think there's anything wrong for others to point out that these individuals do have attachments that shape how they think about the Middle East."

"Attachments" sounds much better than "dual loyalties." But why single out Wolfowitz and Feith and not their non-Jewish boss, Donald Rumsfeld?

"I could have mentioned non-Jewish people like John Bolton," Walt allowed when the question was put to him.

Picking up on the "attachments" lingo, Mearsheimer did mention Bolton but cited two Jews, Elliott Abrams and David Wurmser, as "the two most influential advisers on Middle East affairs in the White House. Both, he said, are " fervent supporters of Israel." Never mind that others in the White House, such as national security adviser Stephen Hadley, Vice President Cheney and President Bush, have been just as fervent despite the lack of "attachments."

This line of argument could be considered a precarious one for two blue-eyed men with Germanic surnames. And, indeed, Walt seemed defensive about the charges of anti-Semitism. He cautioned that the Israel lobby "is not a cabal," that it is "not synonymous with American Jews" and that "there is nothing improper or illegitimate about its activities."

But Mearsheimer made no such distinctions as he used "Jewish activists," "major Jewish organizations" and the "Israel lobby" interchangeably. Clenching the lectern so tightly his knuckles whitened, Mearsheimer accused Israel of using the kidnapping of its soldiers by Hezbollah as a convenient excuse to attack Lebanon.

"Israel had been planning to strike at Hezbollah for months," he asserted. "Key Israelis had briefed the administration about their intentions."

A questioner asked if he had any "hard evidence" for this accusation. Mearsheimer cited the "public record" and "Israeli civilian strategists," then repeated the allegation that Israel was seeking "a cover for launching this offensive."

As evidence that the American public does not agree with the Israel lobby, the political scientist cited a USA Today-Gallup poll showing that 38 percent of Americans disapproved of Israel's military campaign. He neglected to mention that 50 percent approved, and that Americans blamed Hezbollah, Iran, Syria and Lebanon far more than Israel for the conflict.

Walt kicked off the session with a warning that we face a "threat from terrorism because we have been so closely tied to Israel." This produced chuckles in the audience. Walt allowed that this was "not the only reason" for our problems, but he did blame Israel supporters for the hands-off position the Bush administration took during the Lebanon fighting.

"The answer is the political influence of the Israel lobby," Walt said. He also hypothesized that if not for the Israel lobby, the Iraq war "would have been much less likely."

Up next, Mearsheimer ridiculed U.S. leaders for "falling all over themselves to express support for Israel." And he drew groans from the crowd when he spoke about a lawmaker who, after questioning Israel's policy, "met with various representatives from major Jewish organizations, who explained to him the basic facts of life in American politics."

When the two professors finished, they were besieged by autograph- and photo-seekers and Arab television correspondents. Walt could be heard telling one that if an American criticizes Israel, "it might have some economic consequences for your business."

Before leaving for an interview with al-Jazeera, Mearsheimer accepted a button proclaiming "Walt & Mearsheimer Rock. Fight the Israel Lobby."

"I like it," he said, beaming.

from the New York Sun, 2006-Mar-20, by Eli Lake:

DAVID DUKE CLAIMS TO BE VINDICATED BY A HARVARD DEAN
Paper Issued by Kennedy School Blames War on Israel Lobby

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.”

“I think that the people who wrote that report were working for the interest of the American people,” a senior member of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood's guidance council, Abdulmo'em Abulfotah, said yesterday.“I ask a question here: Is it in the interest of the American people to clash with 1.3 billion people in favor of 5 million people who represent the Zionist project? Not even the Jews, but the Zionists.”

The Kennedy School published the essay nearly a month before a trial is scheduled to begin of two lobbyists for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Keith Weissman and Steve Rosen, on charges that they conspired to leak classified material to an American journalist and an Israeli diplomat. But it also comes as public support for the Iraq war has ebbed to new lows. Messrs. Mearsheimer and Walt argue that “neoconservatives” in particular launched a “campaign to manipulate intelligence” that led to that war.

While the arguments in Messrs. Mearsheimer and Walt's paper are hardly new — allegations of dual loyalty have flitted about the Internet since before the war, and the left-wing press in particular has focused on the role of the Pentagon in making the case for the war — the fact that these points are now being made by such establishment thinkers has raised concern among Israel's friends in America and cheers from their adversaries.

“The content is not significant.Those seeking to damage the U.S.-Israel relationship have been saying this for a while.The fact that it carries the imprimatur of the Harvard Kennedy School is. Those that don't know better would assume it has validity, when it doesn't,” the executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Malcolm Hoenlein, said.

A professor at Harvard Law School, Alan Dershowitz, whom the authors call an “apologist” for Israel, said he found much of the paper to be “trash.” He said, “It could have been written by Pat Buchanan, by David Duke, Noam Chomsky, and some of the less intelligent members of Hamas.An intelligent member of Hamas would not have made these mistakes.”

Those mistakes for Mr. Dershowitz include, for example, the assertion that “There is no question,for example,that many Al Qaeda leaders, including bin Laden, are motivated by Israel's presence in Jerusalem and the plight of the Palestinians,” which Mr. Dershowitz says “is just absurd.”

Mr. Dershowitz was particularly troubled by the claim in the paper that Israeli “citizenship is based on the principle of blood kinship.” He pointed out that the authors had conflated Israel's law of return with its criteria for citizenship.“That's right from the neo Nazi Web sites. Anybody can be a citizen of Israel. He confuses the law of return for the criteria for citizenship. He never mentions that a Jew cannot be a citizen in Jordan and Saudi Arabia,” Mr. Dershowitz said.

Mr. Walt said on this citizenship point last night that he wanted to check into it. “We were not writing on Saudi Arabia and Jordan,” he said.

Mr. Dershowitz also objected to the paper's claim that the 2000 Oslo offer to Yasser Arafat would have created “Bantustans.” Mr. Dershowitz said, “They should talk to President Clinton about that. The West Bank territory would have been completely contiguous.”

“What he is saying is,`some of my best lobbyists are Jews.Don't confuse what we are saying with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion,'” Mr.Dershowitz said.“Sorry,but it sounds very similar to me. The only difference is the Protocols are a forgery, but this is actually written by two bigots.”

The authors attempt to distinguish their argument from that of classical anti-Semites, writing at one point, “there is nothing improper about American Jews and their Christian allies attempting to sway U.S policy towards Israel. The Lobby's activities are not the sort of conspiracy depicted in anti-Semitic tracts like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” At another point, the authors distance themselves from the president of Iran by writing, “Israel's survival is not in doubt — even if some Islamic extremists make outrageous and unrealistic references to `wiping it off the map.'”

Yet the paper also refers to “the unmatched power of the Israel Lobby.” It says, “Were it not for the Lobby's ability to manipulate the American political system, the relationship between Israel and the United States would be far less intimate than it is today.”

“AIPAC, which is a de facto agent for a foreign government, has a stranglehold on the U.S. Congress,” says the paper, which also accuses “the Lobby” of “manipulating the media” and being “a critical element” in the American decision to attack Iraq in March 2003.

A retired lecturer at Harvard, Martin Peretz, who is editor of The New Republic, a magazine named in the report as one of those that “zealously defend Israel at every turn,” said, “It is easier to attribute disloyalty to Jews than to question the loyalty of Islamists.This is really questioning the loyalty of Jews, that is what this is about. Everyone is looped in, even people who are a little dicey about Israel like Aaron David Miller and Howard Dean. This goes from the lobby in capital letters, from Jerry Falwell to every left wing Jewish Democrat in the House. It is the imagining of a wall to wall conspiracy and therefore it's nutsy.”

The executive director of the Committee for Accurate Middle East Reporting in America, Andrea Levin, said yesterday that she would be asking the Kennedy School to withdraw the paper because it failed to meet academic standards. She said the paper relied too much on “new historians,” a group of Israeli academics who have been critical of the founding of Israel. She called them “a thoroughly discredited lot.” She also said the authors wrongly say that her group organized a rally in front of the Boston affiliate of national public radio.

One of the claims in the paper is that “The Lobby's goals are also served when pro Israel individuals occupy important positions in the executive branch.” To prove this point they point to a former Aipac official, Martin Indyk's high positions in the Clinton administration and the fact that Dennis Ross left government service in 2001 to join the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. This list of these pro-Israel officials also included Mr. Ross's former deputy Aaron Miller, who they point out “has lived in Israel and often visits there.”

Mr. Miller, who wrote an opinion piece for the Washington Post in 2005 complaining that during the 2000 failed peace negotiations he helped broker, American diplomats often served as “Israel's lawyer,” differed with Messrs. Walt and Mearsheimer. “The lobby has an important influence but not control. On issues related to assistance for Israel there is no question the organized Jewish community has a profound impact,” Mr. Miller said.“The argument breaks down when he says the Jewish lobby is somehow responsible for Iraq.” Mr. Miller added that the pro-Israel lobby is not powerful enough to influence the executive branch in the manner in which Messrs. Mearsheimer and Walt say.

Another way the authors say the Israel lobby exercises influence is through think tanks. Under the subchapter heading “Think Tanks that Think One Way,” the authors say, “Pro Israel forces have established a commanding presence at the American Enterprise Institute, the Brookings Institution, the Center for Security Policy, the Foreign Policy Research Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Hudson Institute, the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis, and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA).”

The president of the Hudson Institute, Herbert London, said the notion that his institution had a standard line on American policy to Israel “was patently absurd.” He pointed out that a senior fellow at his institute was the former director of the National Security Agency, William Odom, who has not only been a vociferous critic of Israel but also the Iraq war.

“The Saudis want to express an opinion,I don't object.People have the right to express their opinions,” Mr. London said. “They don't have anything to say about how the Saudis try to influence opinion in think tanks, universities, and corporations.”

In December of 2005 Harvard announced it had received a $20 million gift from a Saudi prince, Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Alsaud.

A former executive director of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Morris Amitay, who is quoted in the Kennedy School paper, minimized the document's significance. “I would be worried if Henry Kissinger was saying this. But who are these guys?” Mr. Amitay said. “As far as I'm concerned this is a tribute to the Jewish community. We couldn't do anything about Auschwitz,but look,we now control foreign policy for a region of the world so vital to American interests.”

from USNews.com, 2006-Mar-27, for print issue 2006-Apr-3, by David Gergen:

An Unfair Attack

It brings no joy to issue a public rebuttal against a valued colleague, but there are moments that demand no less. The occasion is the publication of a nerve-jangling essay entitled "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," written by two professors, John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt, the academic dean and my colleague at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.

In essence, their 82-page piece argues that U.S. policy in the Middle East has been hijacked by a pro-Israel "Lobby." "The core of the Lobby," they say, "is comprised of American Jews who make a significant effort in their daily lives to bend U.S. foreign policy so that it advances Israel's interests." As a result, "the United States has a terrorism problem in good part because it is so closely allied with Israel." Mearsheimer and Walt assert that for decades, and especially since the Six-Day War in 1967, the lobby has manipulated our political system to give short shrift to Palestinians, was a "critical element" in the decision to invade Iraq, and is now skewing our policy on Iran (the United States, they say, "can live with a nuclear Iran").

Not only are these charges wildly at variance with what I have personally witnessed in the Oval Office over the years, but they also impugn the loyalty and the unstinting service to America's national security by public figures like Dennis Ross, Martin Indyk, and many others. As a Christian, let me add that it is also wrong and unfair to call into question the loyalty of millions of American Jews who have faithfully supported Israel while also working tirelessly and generously to advance America's cause, both at home and abroad. They are among our finest citizens and should be praised, not pilloried.

Commitment. To be sure, pro-Israeli groups in this country, led by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, push hard to gain the support of U.S. political leaders and public opinion in favor of positions that keep Israel strong and secure. AIPAC is officially registered as a lobbying group, and it is very effective. But that does not mean that its members are somehow disserving America or engaging in something sinister. The Founding Fathers believed interest groups were intrinsic to democracy (see Madison, Federalist 10), and anyone who thinks Jews are unusual hasn't met the Irish, Italians, Greeks, and Armenians who lobby just as hard for their brethren.

Moreover, it is just not true that the Israel "Lobby" has captured U.S. policy toward the Middle East. As David McCullough writes, Harry Truman recognized Israel in 1948 out of humanitarian concerns and in spite of pressure from Jewish groups, not because of it. Since then, 10 straight American presidents have befriended Israel--not because they were under pressure but because they believed America had made a commitment to Israel's survival, just as we have to other threatened outposts of freedom like Berlin, South Korea, and Taiwan.

Over the course of four tours in the White House, I never once saw a decision in the Oval Office to tilt U.S. foreign policy in favor of Israel at the expense of America's interest. Other than Richard Nixon--who occasionally said terrible things about Jews, despite the number on his team--I can't remember any president even talking about an Israeli lobby. Perhaps I have forgotten, but I can remember plenty of conversations about the power of the American gun lobby, environmentalists, evangelicals, small-business owners, and teachers unions.

Moreover, history shows many instances when our presidents have sharply opposed the Israeli government in order to protect American interests. I was there when Ronald Reagan, a great friend of Israel, was so repelled by pictures of victims in Lebanon that he insisted the Israelis call off their assault on Beirut (they did). He acted in the same spirit as Dwight Eisenhower, who insisted that the Israelis, British, and French pull back from the Suez in 1956 (they did).

History is also replete with examples of American governments working tirelessly to mediate or negotiate peace between Israel and its neighbors. Who can forget the shuttles of Henry Kissinger, the heroic efforts of Jimmy Carter, the last-minute push for peace by Bill Clinton? These men and their colleagues weren't hostages of some sinister Israeli "Lobby." They were acting in what they correctly perceived to be America's own security interest--and they weren't afraid to put pressure on Arabs or Israelis if that's what it took.

Has Washington sometimes tilted too much toward Israel? Of course, just as we have toward other friends overseas. Is our policy in the Middle East worthy of serious debate? Absolutely, and we should defend the right of academics like Mearsheimer and Walt to question it. But let that debate go forward with a clear mind and an understanding heart. And let us remember that our friendship with Israel has always been rooted in noble values--just as our friendships have been with other outposts of freedom.

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2006-Apr-17, by John Fund:

Meet Masood Farivar
The Afghan Yale refused to admit.

In February, former Yale admissions dean Richard Shaw was explaining why the university had admitted Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi. Yale once had, as the Times put it, "another foreigner of Rahmatullah's caliber" who applied. "We lost him to Harvard," Mr. Shaw told the New York Times. "I didn't want that to happen again."

Who? No one would say. Deborah Orin of the New York Post reported that a Yale spokesman acknowledged only that if that was Mr. Shaw's contention, "I'm sure he was telling the truth." As for Harvard, Ms. Orin noted it took her alma mater four days to call her back and say that "it would violate university policy to say if Harvard had admitted a Taliban-type applicant."

Now the Harvard Crimson might have located the mystery student, though Mr. Shaw won't confirm or deny it. Meet Masood Farivar, a 1994 Harvard graduate who now works for Dow Jones Newswires as an oil markets reporter. (The newswires, like this Web site, is owned by Dow Jones & Co.)

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At first glance, one might view Mr. Farivar as a "Taliban-type applicant," but his background is actually quite different from that of Mr. Hashemi. Born in 1969, he left Afghanistan with his family in 1983, during the Soviet occupation. He was educated in a refugee school set up by the International Relief Committee, although he also attended an Islamic religious school. In 1987 he returned to his native land and spent two years fighting the Soviets as a mujahideen warrior. "I wanted to fight for my country because so many around me were," he told me.

While operating out of the caves of Tora Bora, which Osama bin Laden would later use as refuge, Mr. Farivar earned some money by writing for the U.S. government-funded Afghan Media Resource Center. One of the people he encountered was an exotic fellow mujahideen, Carlos Mavroleon. Mr. Mavroleon, son of a Greek shipping tycoon, had graduated from Harvard and worked on Wall Street. He had also converted to Islam, changed his name to Kari Mullah, and taken up arms against the Soviets.

Sometime after Mr. Mavroleon returned to his home in London, a package from him was delivered to Tora Bora by a courier. "Inside was an application to Harvard," recalled Mr. Farivar in a 2002 New York Observer interview, "with a letter of recommendation that Carlos had written on my behalf to one of his professors there." In early 1989, having received Mr. Farivar's application, the Harvard admissions office suggested that in light of his spotty academic record he should consider attending a year of U.S. high school first.

Mr. Farivar was able to get into the Lawrenceville School, outside Princeton, N.J. "I got off the plane with my big Osama bin Laden beard, my Afghan rebel hat and traditional garb," he recalled. "There I was with these 15-year-old kids. They were probably scared. I must have seemed very unapproachable, and I must have smelled." Still, Mr. Farivar did well enough to be admitted to Harvard.

For the first two years, he kept his beard and prayed five times a day. Gradually, he made more friends and became part of campus life. He graduated in 1994 after writing his senior thesis on St. Thomas Aquinas. The next year, he landed his job at the Dow Jones Newswires. When Mr. Farivar read of Mr. Shaw's comments in the New York Times, he says, "I wondered if he was referring to me, but I had no way of knowing." Not wanting to inject himself into the story, he said nothing. But then Benjamin Heller, one of his Harvard classmates, read about Mr. Shaw's comment in the Harvard Crimson and contacted the paper saying that the reference might be to his friend.

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The circumstantial evidence checks out. A former official at Yale's admissions office recalls Mr. Shaw discussing the loss of Mr. Farivar, whose application would have been handled before Mr. Shaw became Yale admissions dean in 1992. "I believe Shaw was referring mostly to Farivar and also perhaps partly to another 'exotic' student who applied while he was dean," the former admissions official told me. There are other clues. Mr. Farivar applied to 10 schools, but he says Yale "was the only or one of only two rejections I received. I didn't make too much of it."

If Mr. Farivar is indeed the student "who got away" from Yale, his friend Mr. Heller says, any comparison to Mr. Hashemi would be bizarre. "If [Farivar] is who Shaw is referring to, then he is full of crap," Mr. Heller wrote the Harvard Crimson. "Farivar was not some agent of a criminal regime like Rahmatullah Hashemi."

For his part, Mr. Farivar says he feels pity for Mr. Hashemi. "He strikes me as either a terribly misguided person or a charlatan and con artist," he told me. "What else can explain his almost overnight conversion to moderation? If he's truly changed his stripes, and the world has one fewer extremist, we'll all be better off. But I'm skeptical."

Such skepticism seems warranted in light of the few public statements Mr. Hashemi has made since the Times broke the news of his presence at Yale. Mr. Hashemi told Tim Reid of the Times of London that he had done poorly in his class "Terrorism: Past, Present and Future," something he attributed to his disgust with the textbooks: "They would say the Taliban were the same as al Qaeda."

Mr. Farivar says the Taliban were almost the same as al Qaeda. "What really turned me against the Taliban were their links to al Queda, who had Taliban officials on their payroll. [Taliban leader] Mullah Omar even gave Osama bin Laden the title of 'Commander of the Faithful,' a term fraught with deep meaning in Islam."

In his interview with the Times of London, Mr. Hashemi also shifted blame for many of the Taliban's brutal practices onto its Ministry of Vice and Virtue, even though he had defended its actions during his infamous U.S. tour in 2001, a few months before 9/11. As for the infamous filmed executions before crowds in Kabul's soccer stadium? "That was all Vice and Virtue stuff. There were also executions happening in Texas."

"That statement is inexcusable, an old, tired rehash of Taliban-era arguments," says Mr. Farivar. "The Taliban would also respond to claims that they oppressed women by saying that they were also abused in the West through domestic violence."

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Yale now doesn't even attempt to claim that Mr. Hashemi has changed. In conversations with donors, president Richard Levin has fallen back on two arguments: that Mr. Hashemi currently is a nondegree student, and that the State Department issued him a visa. But Mr. Hashemi's application to become a sophomore in Yale's full degree program, the same type of program that Mr. Farivar graduated from at Harvard, is pending before Mr. Levin. That makes his continued presence at Yale especially relevant as Yale's Board of Governors, the body that supposedly runs the university, prepares to meet this week.

Many in the Yale community are appalled at the damage university officials have caused by their failure to address the Hashemi issue after seven weeks of controversy. "That silence has provoked bewilderment and anger among many," David Cameron, a Yale political science professor wrote The Wall Street Journal last week. "Yale appears to have no convincing response to those who ask why, given the nature of the Taliban regime, his role in it, its complicity in the 9/11 attacks, and his apparent failure or refusal to disavow the regime, Mr. Hashemi has been allowed to study at the university."

Even some who defend the right of Yale to make its own admissions decisions now say it went too far with its Taliban Man. Mark Oppenheimer, a Yale grad who edits the New Haven Advocate, an alternative weekly, says he has "finally come to the conclusion" that "Yale should not have enrolled someone who helped lead a regime that destroyed religious icons, executed adulterers and didn't let women learn to read. Surely, the spot could have better gone to, say, Afghani women, who have such difficulty getting schooling in their own country."

Mr. Oppenheimer attributes his prior reluctance to realize Yale had erred to "basic human stubbornness" and says he finds it "awfully upsetting to agree with jokers like Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly," both of whom have discussed the Yale story on Fox News Channel. "The harder they flogged this issue, the more I became convinced that they had to be wrong. I just feel better across the fence from them. . . . I think it's utterly fair to blame the right wing for making me so desperate to dissemble."

James Kirchick, a Yale senior, wrote last month in the Yale Daily News that he was disturbed by the refusal of liberals to be outraged over the religious fascism the Taliban represent. Echoing Mr. Oppenheimer, he noted that "a friend of mine recently remarked that part of his and his peers' nonchalance (and in some cases, support for) Hashemi has to do with the fact that the right has seized upon the issue. Our politics have become so polarized that many are willing to take positions based on the inverse of their opponents'. This abandonment of classical liberal values at the expense of political gamesmanship has consequences that reach far beyond Yale; it hurts our national discourse."

Yale's Board of Governors isn't likely to address those broader issues at its meeting this week. But it will no doubt take some action in response to the Taliban Man scandal. Charley Ellis, one of the university's governors, has written to some alumni noting that "a careful review" of the school's "special student" admissions "is likely to lead to significant change: fewer folks allowed and stricter requirements and really close supervision." Mr. Ellis concludes that "if a mistake was made--either by the U.S. government or by Yale--it will not be repeated--not even close."

His response is revealing. Top people at Yale still won't admit the Taliban Man's admission was a mistake and continue to shift responsibility for his presence to the State Department. Several U.S. senators are indeed demanding answers from State and are preparing hearings on its procedures for granting student visas.

But Yale also owes itself a more searching examination of its own admission policies. Donald Kagan, a history professor and former dean of Yale College, told me there is growing anecdotal evidence that the supersecret world of university admissions often operates in such a capricious or unpredictable way that "people are justified in questioning the fairness of the process." He suggests that both public and private universities voluntarily disclose more of their admissions procedures to satisfy concerns that abuses are common. "If we have policies that we are proud of, then we should let people know how they operate," he told me.

More openness would be especially appropriate now. This spring, the nation's top schools received record numbers of applications and accepted a smaller percentage of them than ever before. Since many students have perfect SAT scores and grades, some parents are spending thousands to hire private admissions advisers. Anne Marie Chaker reported in last Thursday's Wall Street Journal that more and more admissions offices are looking for "a passion or commitment communicated in a clear voice" that goes beyond intellect or athletic ability. She quoted Swarthmore admissions dean Jim Bock noting that one successful applicant took a year off to work with AIDS-infected drug addicts. As an admissions dean, he says, "you don't forget it."

Given the ultracompetitive desire of applicants to stand out, admissions officers now have more discretion than ever. "This is the zone of discretion within which the admissions officials do their work," says one former top Ivy League official. "Much mischief is done within this zone--especially by the application of the academic elite's rather selective notions of authenticity and 'commitment.' For example, rest assured that religious commitment, or a fascination with one or another kind of entrepreneurial business, would be unlikely to attract the attention of admissions officials."

---

The real story of Taliban Man at Yale is the mindset it exposes among Ivy League admissions offices. After the New York Times broke the story of Mr. Hashemi's admission, Haym Benaroya, a professor at Rutgers, wrote to Mr. Shaw expressing disbelief that Mr. Hashemi, who has a fourth-grade education and a high school equivalency certificate, could be at Yale. Mr. Shaw replied that his Taliban applicant had "personal accomplishments that had significant impact" and insisted those accomplishments had been "positive."

"There you have the moral blind spot," Mr. Benaroya told me. "On the margin, admissions officials go for the 'exotic' over the well-grounded, and we aren't well served by that. They love to brag among themselves about the 'special' students one or the other has landed. The Taliban student shows some are special in ways we wouldn't want."

Indeed, I was told a chilling story of another Ivy League University that had two applicants from the same inner-city high school. Both were Hispanic. One applicant was a very good student who had participated in school and community affairs. The other was a mediocre student who had frequently clashed with authorities and even had a scrape with the law. A leading graduate of the school was trying to help the former student get admitted. The deciding factor might have come during his senior year when his parents managed to save enough money to move a few miles away to a suburb. "When I heard of their move I told the mother her son was doomed, because I knew how the admissions office thought," the graduate told me. "Sure enough the more marginal kid got in, because he was viewed as a more 'authentic' representative of the Hispanic community."

Benno Schmidt, Mr. Levin's predecessor as Yale president, supports diversity programs, but says that cases such as that of the Taliban Man demonstrate that "diversity simply cannot be allowed to trump all moral considerations." It also should not be allowed to trump common sense, as it apparently did in the case of the two Hispanic applicants. It's no wonder that Peter Kirsanow, a member of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, thinks admission preferences should be made more public. "Let's let the sun shine in," he says. There appear to be a whole lot of dark corners in university admission offices that deserve illumination.

from the Yale Daily News, 2006-Mar-27, by James Kirchick:

Afghan politician contrasts with student

Rahmatullah Hashemi and Malalai Joya seemingly have much in common. Both are 27, come from the same region of Afghanistan and are interested in international relations. But the similarities between Hashemi, silver-tongued former spokesman for the Taliban, and Joya, one of the new Afghani Parliament's youngest members, end there. Not long ago, while Hashemi toured the United States defending the public murder of unchaste women, Joya risked her life to teach girls -- which at the time was a capital crime.

Visiting last week, Joya gave Yale a piece of her mind. Hashemi's presence here is, to her, "disgusting" and an "unforgivable insult." When I asked whether she believes herself to be more deserving of a place here than a former (and current) propagandist for the Taliban, she replied, without a trace of bitterness, "I am not jealous." She has a country to rebuild and is working hard to do so. While she has survived several assassination attempts in the past four years and must travel with armed guards in Afghanistan, Hashemi noshes on the kosher offerings at the Slifka Center and defended the Taliban to the Times of London in an article three weeks ago. Joya does not have time for an American college education. "My people need me," she says.

"Hashemi at first should face the court," she told me, demanding he be brought to his native country and answer for his role in advancing the Taliban's foreign policy goals so many years. Surprisingly for a man who loved the press so much five years ago -- speaking before crowds at universities across the country, meeting with editorial boards of influential newspapers, appearing in Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" -- Hashemi has laid low since his tell-all profile was printed in the New York Times Magazine last month. But in the Times of London interview, Hashemi proved himself to be a morally glib apologist for religious authoritarians.

Asked about public executions in football stadiums, Hashemi said, "That was all vice and virtue stuff. There were also executions happening in Texas." Irate that a Yale-issued textbook would relate his former employer to the terrorist group it sponsored and hosted in the run-up to Sept. 11, Hashemi complained, "They would say the Taliban were the same as al-Qaida."

"This kind of germ does not belong in the U.S.," Joya told me, and after having heard the few scraps of equivocation Hashemi has shared in the month since his front-page expose, I am inclined to agree. Had Joya been caught for her underground activities during the Taliban era, she probably would have been publicly executed and Hashemi would have defended her public murder. Correction: might still defend her public murder.

Former Yale Dean of Admissions Richard Shaw told the Times Magazine Hashemi "could educate us about the world." Whether one believes Hashemi should be at Yale or not, his presence has been instructive in one way: It has caused a reckoning at Yale over the issue of cultural relativism.

Outrage over religious fascism ought to be the province of American liberals. But in Hashemi's case it has been almost entirely trumpeted by Fox News, the Wall Street Journal editorial page and right-wing bloggers. A friend of mine recently remarked that part of his and his peers' nonchalance (and in some cases, support for) Hashemi has to do with the fact that the right has seized upon the issue. Our politics have become so polarized that many are willing to take positions based on the inverse of their opponents'. This abandonment of classical liberal values at the expense of political gamesmanship has consequences that reach far beyond Yale; it hurts our national discourse.

In a bold declaration that she will, with any hope, one day come to regret, Della Sentilles '06 wrote on her feminist Weblog, "Broad Recognition," "As a white American feminist, I do not feel comfortable making statements or judgments about other cultures, especially statements that suggest one culture is more sexist and repressive than another." While I cringe at the implications of this, I applaud its honesty. It lays bare a method of thinking that is quite pervasive on our campus, and that many, if not most, students claim allegiance to. It is at once racist -- for holding non-Westerners to a lower standard of behavior -- and dangerous in its cold abandonment of those who suffer under totalitarian and theocratic regimes. "They shamelessly defer to oppressive religious and cultural norms in the name of respecting diversity, betraying the victims of oppression in the process," British gay-rights activist and self-described "radical, left-wing Green" Peter Tatchell wrote of his comrades on the left who refused to condemn barbaric practices in Muslim societies. Joya has no problem saying Taliban Afghanistan was "more sexist and repressive than" the U.S. Why can't Sentilles?

As with any spin doctor, it is difficult to discern what Hashemi thinks, so crafty is he with language. He is quite adept at getting what he wants from Westerners with guilt complexes, be they adventurous CBS cameramen, Ivy League admissions officers or self-professed "feminists." Come this summer, if Yale refuses to accept Hashemi as a degree student, few of us will be sorry to see him go.

James Kirchick is a senior in Pierson College. He is an occasional columnist.

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2006-Mar-27, by John Fund:

Mr. Levin, Meet Ms. Rohbar
If Yale's president wants to educate a deserving Afghan, I've got just the woman for him.

NEW HAVEN, Conn.--The BBC calls Malalai Joya the most famous woman in Afghanistan. On Thursday the 27-year-old women's rights activist, a member of the Afghan Parliament, mounted a stage at Yale and turned her fire on the university's decision to admit a former Taliban official as a special student.

"All should raise their voice against such criminals," she told a crowd of 200. "It is an unforgivable insult to the Afghan people that he is here. He should face a court of law rather than be at one of your finest universities." The Yale Daily News reported that the large attendance at her speech showed that the former Taliban official "continues to be widely controversial." Last night the Yale College Council, the undergraduate student government, began debating a resolution urging the university's administration not to admit Mr. Hashemi as a regular sophomore in the fall.

Ms. Joya has standing to speak for Afghan women. She ran an underground school for women during the Taliban's rule and today receives frequent death threats after giving speeches in Parliament against "fanatical warlords." She is strongly critical of U.S. support for her country's new government, which she claims is increasingly influenced by warlords, as evidenced by the now-abandoned attempt to try an Afghan named Abdul Rahman for the capital crime of converting to Christianity. "Why has $12 billion in foreign aid not made it to my suffering people?" she asked me during an interview. "Fraud and waste have largely diverted your aid to others."

But it was her criticism of Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, the 27-year-old Taliban ambassador-at-large turned Yale student, that stuck in the minds of some audience members at a reception afterwards. "Before I was like, who cares if the guy was Taliban or not?" Yigit Dula, a sophomore from Turkey, told the Yale Daily News. "But it means a lot more to [Afghans] to have someone like Hashemi educated at Yale." Aisha Amir, a physician who fled war-torn Afghanistan, told me she sympathized with the difficult choices people had to make to survive under the Taliban, but added that "there are so many more deserving Afghan students who belong in Hashemi's place."

---

I met one of those students at the reception. Makai Rohbar, an Afghan student whose family legally immigrated to New Haven in 2002, served as Ms. Joya's translator for the evening. After Ms. Joya's speech, I asked Ms. Rohbar what she was studying. She told me she was taking classes in chemistry and biophysics in the hope of someday becoming a physician. I then inquired how long she had been at Yale. She blushed. "I don't go here," she said. "I attend classes at Gateway Community College," also in New Haven. She had never imagined that she could be accepted into Yale or ever find a way to pay for it.

Intrigued, I later called her up to get her full story. She left a refugee camp in Pakistan with her mother, Maroofa, and her four younger siblings in 2002. Like Mr. Hashemi she has only a high school equivalency degree, because schooling in the refugee camp was limited. Her mother can't work and knows only basic English, so she and her sister Rona are the only means of support for the family beyond food stamps and $600 a month in housing assistance from the state.

I asked her what her life was like. "It's hard, but certainly better than Pakistan," she told me. "I am very grateful, but I must work 50 hours a week and also go to class. Sometimes, I am so tired I can't attend." She earns $8 an hour as a clerk in a local retail store.

I asked what she thought about Mr. Hashemi attending Yale with the help of a Wyoming foundation and a discount from Yale of 35% to 40% on tuition. "It's like a nightmare that you can't believe when you wake up," she told me. "This is a good country, but I think some people in New Haven are so complacent they don't know what officials like Hashemi did to my people."

Asked what part of the Thursday evening event most impressed her, she said it was the film "Afghanistan Unveiled," which was shown just before Ms. Joya spoke. A documentary that aired on PBS in 2004, it is the work of young female Afghan video journalists working with a French director. While acknowledging progress in the capital of Kabul, it depicts the enduring lack of women's rights in many rural provinces. The heart of the film is a searing journey to Bamiyan, a place that made headlines in March 2001, when the Taliban blew up giant 1,500-year-old statues of Buddha there. That month Mr. Hashemi visited me and my colleagues at The Wall Street Journal to launch an impassioned defense of the destruction of the monuments, which had been declared a world heritage site by the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.

At the time, no one knew what else the Taliban were doing in Bamiyan beyond blowing up Buddhas. Nearby, the Afghan video journalists found the remnants of the Hazara tribe. One survivor told them the Taliban had "tried to exterminate" the entire tribe, starting with the men.

Zainyab, a Hazara woman so thin and wrinkled that her age was indeterminate, was found by video journalist Marie Ayub living in a cave "like an animal." She told the filmmakers that "from hundreds of women here, not one has a husband. From 100 children, maybe just one still has two parents. They bulldozed houses with women and children inside; they cut off women's breasts." But despite the devastation, she hasn't given up hope. "Bring us looms," she tells the filmmakers. "Then we can be paid to weave rugs."

A small effort to help build a modern economy in Afghanistan was launched by Paula Nirschel in 2002, when she founded the Initiative to Educate Afghan Women. Her goal is to match qualified women with at least a GPA of 3.5 or more with U.S. colleges, where they can pursue a degree. The initiative grants all its women full four-year scholarships. They come to college prepared; none need remedial classes. (That's something that can't be said of all U.S. students. Last year, only 52% of entering freshmen in the California State University system passed the English placement test.)

As The Wall Street Journal reported in an editorial Friday, Ms. Nirschel sent a letter to Yale in 2002, asking if it wanted to award a spot in its next entering class to an Afghan woman. Yale declined, as did many other schools. Today, the program enrolls 20 students at 10 universities.

---

After four weeks of growing controversy, Yale refuses to answer any questions about Mr. Hashemi's case, citing privacy concerns. It continues to defend his admission with a single 144-word statement that raises more questions than it answers.

But a rising tide of alumni and student concern has already compelled Yale's president, Richard Levin, to take some action. Last week, he agreed to a request for a meeting from Natalie Healy, the mother of a Navy SEAL who died in Afghanistan last year after the Taliban blew up his helicopter. She was driving down from her home in New Hampshire and wanted to tell President Levin that Mr. Hashemi's student status is an insult to U.S. soldiers currently fighting the Taliban.

Ms. Healy was tied up in traffic and arrived 15 minutes after Mr. Levin had to leave the office for the day. A Yale public affairs officer heard Ms. Healy's complaint. But a Yale official tells me that Mr. Levin has wrested control of the decision as to whether or not his school's prize diversity catch will be admitted as a sophomore next fall away from the admissions office. He will now make the final call.

While he ponders that choice, he could also dust off Ms. Nirschel's 2002 letter and perhaps reconsider her suggestion that another truly worthy Afghan student be admitted. Ms. Rohbar, the aspiring physician, may be someone he could invite over for a chat. After all, she lives only four miles from his office. On days when she doesn't have homework, she is free after around 6 p.m., when her shift as a clerk ends.

from the Telegraph of London, 2006-Apr-9, by Andrew Alderson and Chris Hastings:

July 7 bombs were a 'demo' not terrorism, claims professor

The London bombings were not acts of terrorism but "a demonstration", according to a senior academic.

Prof Ron Geaves has sparked controversy by claiming that the attacks on Tube trains and a bus that killed 52 innocent people in July were part of a long history of protests by British Muslims.

He also said that to refer to the attacks as terrorism risked "demonising" those involved.

His comments were made as he prepared to give a lecture at the University of Chester to dignitaries and members of the Muslim community in the North West.

As part of his research, Prof Geaves has looked at the history of demonstrations by British Muslims. His work charts the changing nature of Muslim communities from the demonstrations against the author Salman Rushdie to the anti-war protests after the invasion of Iraq.

"I have included, rather controversially, the events in London as primarily an extreme form of demonstration and assess what these events actually mean in terms of their significance in the Muslim community," Prof Geaves said last week.

"Terrorism is a political word which always seems to be used to demonise people."

Prof Geaves, whose lecture was entitled Twenty years of fieldwork: reflections on 'reflexivity' in the study of British Muslims, said: "The title refers to the personal transformation that has taken place over the last two decades in which I have moved from a position of academic neutrality to one of active engagement with the Muslim community."

Prof Geaves, who has written at least four books on religion and has been at the university's department of theology and religious studies for five years, claims to be pioneering what he calls Britain's first Muslim youth work degree programme.

Chester became a university only last year after previously having college status.

Last night Andrew Dismore, the Labour MP for Hendon, described Prof Geaves's claims as "absolutely barking". He said: "What happened on July 7, 2005, fits with every international definition of terrorism. If any of the men behind the attacks had survived the incident they would have quite rightly been tried under the anti-terror laws. I don't think it's helpful that we have a mealy-mouthed academic trying to justify deaths of innocent people. It is ludicrous."

Four suicide bombers killed themselves and 52 others on July 7, while more than 700 people were injured in the attacks. Two weeks later, on July 21, devices on four Underground trains in the capital failed to explode.

Sir Iqbal Sacranie, the secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain, also insisted that the attacks were acts of "criminality" and "terrorism".

He said Prof Geaves's comments were unhelpful because they could actually be seized upon by people seeking reasons to target Muslims.

"For me, the definition of terrorism is when an innocent human life is lost. These bombings were an act of criminality and terrorism because that loss occurred.

"No motive can justify an act of terrorism. I think this kind of speculation is unhelpful because it is taken seriously by some sections of the community who want to demonise Muslims."

Loyita Worley, 50, a legal librarian who was injured in the Aldgate Station blast on July 7, said: "I would totally disagree with his point of views. There are other ways of protesting. The circumstances in which these people died were particularly nasty."

In February, an ICM poll for the Sunday Telegraph revealed that 40 per cent of British Muslims wanted Sharia law in parts of the country.

It also indicated that 20 per cent had sympathy with the "feelings and motives" of the suicide bombers, although 99 per cent thought it wrong to carry out the atrocity.

Last night Prof Geaves, 56, said: "What I was trying to say was that the word terrorism, like the word evil, does not take us very far.

"During the lecture I spoke about the changing nature of Muslim protest. I concentrated on the Salman Rushdie controversy and the demonstrations against the two Gulf wars."

He added that it was possible to draw parallels between the July 7 attacks and atrocities in Northern Ireland, which claimed the lives of 3,500 people.

"If you look at the Troubles there were various different types of protest going on at the same time.

"The terrorism which occurred during the Troubles could also be seen as an extreme form of protest or demonstration."

from Reuters, 2006-Apr-17, by Robert Green:

Ex-professor pleads guilty to aiding Islamic Jihad

TAMPA, Fla., - Former university professor Sami al-Arian has pleaded guilty to aiding the Palestinian group Islamic Jihad and agreed to be deported, according to documents made public on Monday by a U.S. court in Florida.

Al-Arian and three co-defendants were arrested in 2003 and charged with helping the group carry out attacks in Israel. In December, a federal jury found al-Arian not guilty on eight charges and failed to reach a verdict on nine others after a six-month trial.

The United States has designated Islamic Jihad a terrorist organization.

Al-Arian accepted the plea agreement on Friday to avoid another trial on the deadlocked charges.

According to the documents, the former University of South Florida professor admitted he "... conspired to make and receive contributions of funds, goods and services to or for the benefit of specially designated terrorists."

U.S. District Judge James Moody scheduled sentencing for May 1.

from National Review Online, 2006-Mar-8, by Shannon Blosser:

Students Are Terrorized. But It's Not “Terrorism”?
Rewriting reality is just so much nicer.

Chapel Hill, North Carolina — On Friday afternoon, an act of terrorism at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill left students and faculty in disbelief, wondering why a former student would ram an SUV into a crowded group of students. Many of them extended their disbelief to include a willful denial that the attack was an act of terrorism at all.

Mohammad Reza Taheri-azar, a 22-year-old Iranian native who graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill in December, rented a Jeep Cherokee Laredo from a local rent-a-car dealership and launched his attack at a popular gathering place for students known as "the Pit," located near the student union and campus libraries. Nine people were injured — none seriously — in Taheri-azar's rampage. On Monday, he made his first appearance in Orange County District Court, where prosecutors read out the 18 charges levied against him, including nine counts of attempted murder.

Coverage of the offense has focused on two themes: the reasons for the attack and the reaction of the campus community. The two story lines would presumably be closely related: The motives are revealed, and the campus proceeds to denounce them. But it hasn't been that simple, and the second story line has become oddly disconnected from the first.

Taheri-azar has not exactly been ambiguous about his motives. "I'm thankful you're here to give me this trial and to learn more about the will of Allah," Taheri-azar said to District Court Judge Pat DeVine. More information will likely come to light in coming weeks, but this much is clear: Taheria-azar intended his attack as a response to U.S. foreign policy, and by doing so he thought that he would be viewed as a martyr by radical Islamists who promote terror worldwide.

UNC-Chapel Hill officials released an audio of Taheri-azar's 911 call to dispatchers turning himself in, just moments after he ran over the students. In the four-minute call, Taheri-azar sounded as though he couldn't wait to be arrested. When the dispatcher asked why he ran over the students, Taheri-azar responded, "The reason is to punish the government of the United States for their actions around the world." He went on to tell the dispatcher of a letter in his apartment that explained his reasoning in more detail. Not sure what to expect, local police approached the building with extreme caution, as if to defuse a bomb. None was found.

Perhaps Taheri-azar's decision to attack UNC-Chapel Hill had something to do with a cartoon published recently in The Daily Tar Heel, the student newspaper of UNC-Chapel Hill, depicting the Prophet Muhammed. The cartoon caused a controversy on campus instigated by members of the Muslim Student Association, who claimed the cartoon was offensive. Members of the group denounced Taheri-azar's actions on Friday.

There is more to Taheri-azar than just his words to police. His actions in court, and the images of him in the media, suggest that he views himself as a hero in the Muslim world. A smug smile as he walked out of the courthouse and an exuberant wave to the TV cameras indicated that he thinks someone in the Middle East, or maybe in the United States, will look upon him as a leader and follow his example. He reportedly told detectives that "people all over the world are being killed in war and now it is the people in the United States['] turn to be killed." If this comment doesn't lead people to conclude that this was an act of terrorism, it is difficult to see what could.

While Taheri-azar's actions and intentions seem pretty straightforward, the reaction by the Chapel Hill community has reflected political ideology more than reality. Though school officials and students have denounced the incident, they have not called it an act of terrorism. UNC-CH Chancellor James Moeser didn't use the word "terrorism" once when he gave his first public comments on the incident. In fact, no one from the school administration has uttered the term. "In times like this, it is so important for our community to pull together, remain calm and offer comfort and assistance to one another," Moeser said in a statement. He added that the school would host an event on the incident once students return from spring break.

On Monday, some students took the initiative to denounce the attack and stage a rally to label it as an act of terrorism. Jillian Bandes, a columnist who was fired from The Daily Tar Heel in September for comments she made about Muslims and terrorism, told The News & Observer, "Why not label terrorism? Not doing so suggests a certain leniency toward that kind of thing."

But many of the attendees at the rally were there to denounce the use of the term. Muslim students told the media they were offended by those who believe it was an act of terrorism. By Monday afternoon, signs were seen in the Pit that called the rally organizers racists and asking about 100,000 people killed in Iraq.

A UNC sophomore, Johnathan Pourzal, told the Durham Herald-Sun that the mission of the event organizers offended him. "By calling it religious violence, you are telling people that Muslims are violent," he said.

Far from it. When we described incidents for what they are, we do not paint broad strokes of judgment on an entire group of people. Do we refer to all pro-life advocates as bomb-wielding terrorists because of the likes of North Carolina's Eric Rudolph? No. Mohammad Reza Taheri-azar tried to kill students in Chapel Hill last week in the service of a wicked ideology. In the process, he has exposed not only the continuing danger of domestic terrorism but also the inability of some leaders and communities to recognize that danger and take it seriously.

— Shannon Blosser is a reporter for Carolina Journal, the newspaper of the Raleigh-based John Locke Foundation.

from the Huffington Post, 2006-Feb-22, Alan Dershowitz:

Lawrence Summers's Dishonest Opposition

The academic coup d'etat engineered by hard left members of the faculty of arts and sciences against Harvard's president Lawrence Summers has broad implications beyond Cambridge and even beyond the Ivy League. It represents a major victory for hard-left censors over reasoned discourse about controversial issues. The political correctness cops won a big victory, and reasoned discourse suffered a significant defeat. If you don't believe me, just listen to the chief architect of the putsch, Professor J. Lorand Matory, who introduced the original resolution of no confidence that eventually led to Summers's ouster. Taking a victory lap last night on a local PBS talk show, Matory explained some of the reasons why he insisted on getting rid of the controversial and sometimes acerbic president. Listen carefully to Matory's words:

"He [Summers] was telling us we should be more patriotic. He was telling us that people who insist that Palestinians have rights should be quiet because they're being anti-Semitic."

The idea that a president should be fired because he believes in patriotism should shock every American. Moreover, Summers never defined patriotism as uncritical support for one's government. He himself was highly critical of many governmental policies and urged others to express criticism as well.

Now listen to what Summers actually said about Israel and the Palestinians, and you will see that Matory's statement about what "he was telling us" is an outright and categorical lie. Here's what Summers actually said:

"Of course academic communities should be and always will be places that allow any viewpoint to be expressed. And certainly there is much to be debated about the Middle East and much in Israel's foreign and defense policy that can be and should be vigorously challenged.

"But where anti-Semitism and views that are profoundly anti-Israeli have traditionally been the primary preserve of poorly educated right-wing populists, profoundly anti-Israel views are increasingly finding support in progressive intellectual communities."

"Serious and thoughtful people are advocating and taking actions that are anti-Semitic in their effect if not their intent."

Summers then gave several examples of academics who have "called for an end to support for [only] Israeli researches," who force Israeli scholars off the board of an international literature journal, and who "single out Israel for divestiture." He also pointed to students who equate Hitler and Sharon and who raise money for organizations that support terrorism. This is a far cry from demanding silence from those "who insist that Palestinians have rights."

The Matorys of Harvard now feel empowered. Indeed when I confronted Matory after his television show and offered $1000 to his favorite charity if he could prove that Summers had ever said that people who insisted that Palestinians have rights should be quiet, he began shouting at me that I was a terrible professor and suggesting that I was not qualified to teach at Harvard.

This is the sign of things to come. If you believe, as I do, in both Palestinian and Israeli rights, and support the two-state solution, while opposing the singling out of Israel for boycotts and divestiture, then you are not qualified to teach at Matory's Harvard. Of course no reasonable academic would want to teach at any academic institution over which Matory and his political correctness cops had any control.

Let's hope that no American university becomes what Matory and his ilk want Harvard to become.

Alan Dershowitz is a professor of law at Harvard. His latest book is Preemption: A Knife that Cuts Both Ways (Norton, 2006).

from TownHall.com, 2006-Apr-18, by Rebecca Hagelin:

So much for academic freedom

Scott Savage is a peaceful, devout Quaker who, like the Amish, avoids much of modern technology, and by all accounts is a gentleman in both his personal and professional life as a librarian in Mansfield, Ohio.

So, why has Scott been accused of sexual harassment at work, and why is his case lighting up the blogosphere?

You see, Scott works at Ohio State University's Mansfield campus, where he serves as head of Reference and Instructional Services at the university's Bromfield Library. Recently, the entire faculty voted – without a single dissenting vote – to investigate Scott for sexual harassment.

So what was his crime? Did Scott make sexually suggestive comments to a student? Did he grope a co-worker?

Nope. As a member of OSU Mansfield's "First Year Reading Experience Committee," Savage had the nerve to suggest four conservative books as required reading for the school's freshman class, namely: "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 Sen. Rick Santorum.

Suggesting these four controversial best-sellers was painful enough for the ultra-liberal professors there, but one of the books – Kupelian's "The Marketing of Evil" – caused the faculty to blow its circuits.

In fact, three professors became so agitated and threatened by the mere suggestion of their students' exposure to "The Marketing of Evil" that they claimed they felt "unsafe" and "threatened" on the campus, because of Kupelian's book, which they called "hate literature" and "homophobic tripe."

For instance, Assistant Professor Norman Jones (who teaches a course in "lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender literature") said: "The anti-gay book Scott Savage endorses falsely claims that 'the widely revered father of the "sexual revolution" has been irrefutably exposed as a full-fledged sexual psychopath who encouraged pedophilia.' This is a factually untrue characterization of Dr. Kinsey and his work on every point. ... I am frankly embarrassed for you, Scott, that you would endorse this kind of homophobic tripe."

Excuse me, professor, but Judith Reisman, a Ph.D. researcher and world-renowned Kinsey expert, absolutely vaporizes your laughable defense of the mad pedophile sex scientist in her pioneering book "Kinsey: Crimes and Consequences."

Then there's Associate Professor J.F. Buckley (author of such gems as "The Social Critic: The Rise of Queer Performance Within the Demise of Transcendentalism"), who wrote:

Rather than waste your time with the paucity of intellectual rigor that Kupelian brings to the table, I encourage you to visit his website, and see for yourself his unmitigated homophobia and xenophobia. In short, he is a pontificating, phobic, cultural atavism bemoaning the loss of an (Anglo) America that only existed on such shows as "The Lone Ranger." ... As a gay man I have long ago realized that the world is full of homophobic, hate-mongers who, of course, say that they are not. So I am not shocked, only deeply saddened – and THREATENED – that such mindless folks are on this great campus. I am ending now, with the hope that I have seriously challenged you Scott, and anyone who "thinks" as you purport to do. You have made me fearful and uneasy being a gay man on this campus. I am, in fact, notifying the OSU-M campus, and Ohio State University in general, that I no longer feel safe doing my job. I am being harassed.

Fortunately, the Alliance Defense Fund has, like the Lone Ranger, ridden to the rescue and is vigorously defending Scott Savage from this vicious and obviously kooky attack on him.

Saying this is one of the most absurd cases he has ever seen, ADF Senior Legal Counsel David French commented: "Universities are one of the most hostile places for Christians and conservatives in America. It's shameful that OSU would investigate a Christian librarian for simply recommending books that are at odds with the prevailing politics of the university."

You can read the ADF's 48-page "Cease and Desist" letter here, which contains all the professors' demented e-mail rantings about Savage and Kupelian.

For a university that prides itself on academic freedom and presenting diverse points of view to students from all walks of life, it smacks of hypocrisy to ban materials that challenge the liberal orthodoxy. "The Marketing of Evil" is regarded as one of the hottest, best researched, and most eye-opening books of the year covering numerous issues. Unable to attack the substance of the book, the professors have resorted to the most effective (and most childish) form of “acceptable” intimidation – name calling.

The author of “The Marketing of Evil”, David Kupelian, gave a speech at the Heritage Foundation last September on the insidious marketing techniques employed to rewrite history and truth. Kupelian’s book is a must-read for anyone interested in public policy, marketing, or the reason for the fall of American culture. He’s also one of the best public speakers I’ve had the privilege of hearing. His words and work are brilliant and eye-opening, and should be required reading for college students across the nation.

As a matter of fact, “The Marketing of Evil” is one book every American needs to read. The OSU professors – frightened out of their wits just at the possibility that "The Marketing of Evil" could touch down on their campus – have made the case more eloquently than I ever could.

Related column: Don’t be manipulated by the master marketers by Rebecca Hagelin.

Rebecca is the author of Home Invasion: Protecting Your Family in a Culture That's Gone Stark Raving Mad and a vice president at The Heritage Foundation, a Townhall.com Gold Partner.

from The Arizona Republic, 2006-May-19, by Doug Carroll:

Basha students stomping mad; ketchup costs them

Kirk Alvers has done the math: He's being charged $3 for a gallon of gas but $18 for 36 ounces of ketchup.

Alvers and other Basha High students are seeing red over a school policy that charges them 25 cents for two half-ounce packets of ketchup at lunch. The policy was enacted recently to limit waste and messiness in the school's lunch area.

Three free ketchup packets come with the purchase of a burger and fries, but students are charged for any extras. There is no charge for other condiments.

"If you have unrestricted access to things that explode, things will happen," said Kristine Marchiando, the school's principal. She said students were twisting ketchup packets and stomping on them, requiring an outdoor lunch area to be steam-cleaned regularly.

Students opting to bring their own ketchup bottles to school have had them confiscated by security. They have been told the bottles are considered open food containers and represent a health-code violation. Students have been threatened with suspension if they persist.

"It's almost the end of the school year, and they have to be military about this," Alvers said of Basha's administration.

Alvers, a senior, said that some students wore "Free Heinz" T-shirts to school last Friday and put up posters with a similar message. He said most of the initial ketchup-abuse problems were with freshmen and he thinks it's unfair to punish all students for the actions of a few.

The episode is the latest in a stressful year at Basha, a relatively new school that graduates its first senior class May 31.

Overcrowded conditions at the school and massive road construction in its southeast Chandler neighborhood have been persistent headaches. And a recent dispute over the selection of graduation speakers caused hard feelings when the two highest-ranking students in the Class of '06 were told they could not speak.

Last school year ended on a down note after a student, Kelley Kaminski, was arrested in April 2005 on suspicion of planning a violent attack on campus. The school also has dealt with an infestation of black-widow spiders.

"This is not newsworthy," Marchiando said of the ketchup controversy. "This is the time of the year when kids look for any excuse (for mischief)."

from the Washington Post, 2006-Apr-8, p.B1, by Lori Aratani, with Nick Anderson, Tara Bahrampour, Maria Glod and V. Dion Haynes contributing:

Montgomery Is Criticized Over Credit for Students

The Montgomery County schools' decision to grant students community service credit for attending Monday's immigration rights protest is raising concern among some parents as well as activists who say officials should focus on education, not political advocacy.

Montgomery is the only Washington area school system offering students credit for taking part in the event, to be held on the Mall -- a decision Superintendent Jerry D. Weast said is consistent with how the system has operated.

"This is nothing new,'' schools spokesman Brian K. Edwards said about the decision. "Advocacy is allowed."

But in the superheated atmosphere surrounding the immigration debate, the decision is drawing sharp criticism from many quarters. Yesterday, school system offices were flooded with angry phone calls as word of its action circulated among conservative radio hosts.

In a memo sent to Board of Education members, Weast said that "callers were abusive to school system staff, using derogatory ethnic comments in expressing their views." He added, "This is not the first time the national debate on immigration policy has engendered harsh commentary for the school system and staff as a target for political purposes."

Edwards said students will receive service learning hours for participating in the rally as long as they do so under the supervision of a community group that has been approved by the school system.

Student participation in the event is being organized by CASA of Maryland Inc., a Silver Spring-based group that works with the Latino community. It is CASA's role -- as organizer -- that has some questioning whether the school system is allowing an outside group to push its political agenda on students. "I do understand that CASA offers some worthy services to immigrants and that's noble, but it's a stretch to allow students to protest for a particular side of an issue,'' said parent Melissa Andersen. "I'm taken aback by it. I think it's poor judgment."

Maryland students are required to put in 60 hours of community service to graduate from high school. They can undertake a number of activities -- including working for political campaigns -- as long as the work is done for a secular, nonprofit community organization that is tax-exempt and that school officials have approved.

Edwards said students who participate in the rally, which takes place during the school system's spring break, will be required to have a sponsoring organization verify their attendance. Students must complete a written assignment to be approved by their service learning coordinator. They receive one hour of credit for every hour spent on the activity, up to a maximum of eight hours in a 24-hour period.

Brad Botwin, whose son is a senior at Richard Montgomery High School in Rockville, said student community service is important. But he doesn't view the rally as a community service so much as a political statement.

"It's the wrong thing for the schools to be pushing,'' he said. "This is way outside the balance. You can send kids to a nursing home, but a rally? This is not learning."

School board member Stephen N. Abrams (Rockville-Potomac) said students have the right to express their opinions, and if they choose to do so at a political rally -- as long as they abide by the credit rules -- they should not be barred from participating.

"The last time I checked, the First Amendment is not a right to question what the speech is," he said. "I'm sure if students were participating in a tax cap rally, these same people would not be objecting to that."

School systems in Virginia and the District do not have community service requirements. Although teenagers there have been among the most active in protesting the immigration legislation, no systems planned to grant credit for participation in Monday's rally. However, in Fairfax County, school officials said a teacher in a government class, where a service project is often assigned, may choose to consider the rally as part of that requirement.

from WCVB Boston, 2006-Apr-5:

Girl, 5, Forced To Apologize For Hugging Classmate
Parents Looking For New School For Girl

MAYNARD, Mass. -- A family in Maynard is outraged after their 5-year-old daughter was forced to write a letter denouncing hugging after a classmate embraced her.

NewsCenter 5's Amalia Barreda reported that Brenda Brier and Michael Marino pulled their daughter, Savannah, out of school early Wednesday. The couple was angry after a meeting with officials at the Greenmeadow Elementary School in Maynard, where Savannah is in kindergarten.

At issue is a hug Savannah said she got on the playground from a friend named Sophie. Savannah hugged Sophie back. The hugs resulted in Savannah having to write a letter, complete with teacher corrections, that read, "I touch Sophie because she touch me and I didn't like it because she was hugging me. I didn't like when she hugged me."

"She said, 'I'm really sad that I got in trouble for hugging,'" Brier said.

"I can understand if boys are playing rough or kids are pulling each other around -- that's one thing. But when kids are being affectionate, I mean hugging, hey, they shouldn't be disciplined over it and they shouldn't be lying in letters making the kid say the opposite that they don't like to hug," Marino said.

School Superintendent Mark Masterson told NewsCenter 5 there was a "dispute of the facts between a hug and a lifting of a child off the floor." The superintendent said the school reported "one girl bear hugged another girl and lifted her off the ground. The aide who was monitoring told the teacher. The teacher asked several students to write a note to their parents and describe what happened."

Savannah said she did not lift her classmate off the ground.

"They're trying to accuse her now, basically," Brier said.

Savannah's parents said it should have never gone this far, and want an apology from the school. The family said they are so upset they'll start looking for a new school for their daughter to attend.

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2006-May-26, by David S. Kahn:

How Low Can We Go?
SAT scores dropped significantly this year. Blame the schools, not the test.

Colleges across the country are reporting a drop in SAT scores this year. I've been tutoring students in New York City for the SAT since 1989, and I have watched the numbers rise and fall. This year, though, the scores of my best students dropped about 50 points total in the math and verbal portions of the test (each on a scale of 200 to 800). Colleges and parents are wondering: Is there something wrong with the new test? Or are our children not being taught what they should know?

Before 1994, the verbal section of the SAT was about 65% vocabulary (55 out of 85 questions) and 35% reading comprehension. Then the Educational Testing Service shortened and reworked the test, devoting half of the 78 questions to each area. Last year ETS changed the test again, and now it is heavily skewed toward reading: 49 of the 68 items require students to read, synthesize and answer questions.

In such a way, ETS has increased the penalty for not reading throughout one's school years. Studying vocabulary lists before the test--a long-favored shortcut to lifting scores--just won't cut it anymore. Students who read widely and often throughout their elementary and high-school years develop the kinds of reading skills measured by the new SAT. Students who avoid reading don't--and can't develop them in a cram course.

The math section of the test also got more challenging. The SAT used to test algebra, geometry and arithmetic. Students weren't allowed to use calculators on the original SAT, so some of those problems were simply difficult arithmetical calculations (fractions, decimals and percentages). In 1994, calculators were allowed, and the questions got a bit easier--and I watched my students' math scores jump. But last year ETS made it harder by adding pre-calculus questions, and my students have struggled.

Now there are also fewer math questions--each of which counts for more. The 54 math questions count for 11 points each now (on the 200 to 800 scale); before, there were 60 questions that counted for 10 each. So if a student gets 20 questions wrong, he effectively loses 222 points instead of the former 200.

Quite simply, this is not the same SAT. Students, anxious parents and college admissions officers can't really equate this new test with those of previous years--or their results. We need to adjust our expectations accordingly. It used to be that a 650 was a really high score. After a batch of adjustments, 700 became a really high score. Now it's probably around 670. Or to use the new SAT scale--a scale that includes a writing sample graded for another possible 800 points--you've done pretty well if you eke out a score of 2000, out of a possible 2400.

---

Some colleges attribute the drop in numbers to the fact that the test is longer--the writing sample has added about an hour to the test's time. If so, then students should do worse on the last sections of the test than they do on the earlier parts. (There are 10 sections to the new SAT.) That hasn't been the case for my (admittedly small) sample of students.

The colleges also think that the lowering of average test scores may have something to do with the cost of taking the test. It is now $41.50, up from $28 in 2004, and so they suggest that fewer students are taking the test twice (which generally results in a slightly higher score). But that theory is weak. Colleges also report that potential students are sending them more applications than ever before, from an average of five per student to 10 or more. Given that college applications usually cost between $50 and $75 per school, the colleges are saying that students are paying an extra $250 and more to apply to additional colleges but won't pay to take the SAT a second time because the price of the test has gone up $13. I'm skeptical.

The explanation is much more straightforward. The average American receives a pretty mediocre education. The average SAT score drifted down from 1000 in the 1960s to 880 in 1993. Education activists attributed this plummet to cultural factors, a change in the testing pool and other matters. The blame was placed everywhere but on schools. That the quality of education in America declined from the 1960s to the 1990s was hardly noted in debates over the SAT.

And then the test was "recentered." Thanks to the change in the SAT scale and the change in the kinds of questions that were asked on the test, scores went up and people were able to ignore the fact that most students are not well-educated. Indeed, parents compared their children's scores with their own and concluded that their children were brilliant. Now ETS has made it a little harder to get away with not knowing your three R's.

---

People complain that the SAT is biased and that the bias explains why students don't do well. That's true--it is biased. It's biased against people who aren't well-educated. The test isn't causing people to have bad educations, it's merely reflecting the reality. And if you don't like your reflection, that doesn't mean that you should smash the mirror.

That the new SAT tests more reading comprehension than the old test did is a good thing. Colleges complain that their incoming students don't have sufficient skills to read and analyze the kind of material that their professors will assign them. I hope that the new SAT's emphasis will make students realize that you can't get much of an education if you can't read.

Maybe the decline in SAT scores will force people to notice that their children are not getting good educations. If your children don't read or do math, why would you think that they would do well on the SAT? I would love to get into a time machine and go back to 1960 and give this new SAT to high-school students back then. I suspect that they would do much better than today's students. If we want people to get good scores on the SAT, I have a suggestion. Stop complaining about how unfair the test is and do your homework.

Mr. Kahn is the head of a private tutoring company in New York City.

from Reuters, 2005-Nov-18, by Arthur Spiegelman:

"Deferred Success" is new term for failure?

LOS ANGELES - In 2005, some people wanted the word "brainstorming" replaced by "thought shower" so as not to offend people with brain disorders, and they also wanted "deferred success" to replace "failure" so as not to embarrass those who don't succeed.

Both phrases appear on a tongue-in-cheek list released on Thursday of the year's most politically correct words and phrases issued by Global Language Monitor, a nonprofit group that monitors language use.

The phrase that topped this year's list was "misguided criminals," one of several terms the British Broadcasting Corporation used so as not to use the word "terrorist" in describing those who carried out train and bus bombings in London that killed 52 people in July, according to Paul JJ Payack, the head of Global Language Monitor.

He added, "The BBC attempts to strip away all emotion by using what it considers 'neutral' descriptions when describing those who carried out the bombings in the London Tubes."

Second on the list was "Intrinsic Aptitude," a phrase used by Harvard University President Lawrence Summers to explain why women might be underrepresented in engineering and science. The phrase met with "deferred success" and Summers had to fight to keep to his job.

"Thought shower" was third and a French word for riff-raff or scum, "la racaille," was fourth thanks to being used by French Interior Minister Nicholas Sarkozy to describe rioters of Muslim and North African descent in suburbs outside of Paris.

"Out of the mainstream," which Payack said was used to describe the ideology of any political opponent, was fifth and in sixth place was "deferred success" the euphemism for "fail" that Britain's Professional Association of Teachers considered using to bolster students' "self-esteem." The move met with "deferred success."

Seventh on the list was "womyn" for women in order to distance the word from men and eighth was using C.E. (Common Era) for A.D (Latin for "Year of Our Lord") so as to be more neutral in dates.

Ninth on the top 10 list was words and phrases that either de-Christianize the Christian holidays or neuter their genders. For example "God Rest Ye Merry Persons" replaces "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen" and "Seasons Greetings" replaces "Merry Christmas."

In 10th place was a move aimed at the heart of Australian culture when security staff were banned from using the word "mate" to address members of parliament. The MPs rebelled and said not being called "mate" was unpatriotic.

from the Claremont Review of Books, Summer 2005, via OpinionJournal.com, 2005-Sep-27, by Victor Davis Hanson:

Ivory Cower
University presidents have lost their dignity.

Whether or not you agreed with them, university presidents used to be dignified figures on the American scene. They often were distinguished scholars, capable of bringing their own brand of independent thinking to bear on the operation and reform of their institutions. Above all, they took seriously the university's mission to seek and transmit the Truth, and thereby to strengthen the free society that made such inquiry possible.

But it has been a long time since Woodrow Wilson (at Princeton), Robert Hutchins (at Chicago) or James Bryant Conant (at Harvard) set the tone for American campuses. Over the past year, four university presidents have been in the news--from Harvard; the University of California, Santa Cruz; the University of Colorado; and the University of California, Berkeley. In each case, the curtains have briefly parted, allowing the public to glimpse the campus wizards working the levers behind the scenes, and confirming that something has gone terribly wrong at our best public and private universities.

Hypocrisy, faddishness, arrogance and intellectual cowardice are among the ailments of the American university today, and it is hard to say whether even a great president could save higher education from its now institutionalized vices. Amid the variety of scandals afflicting the campuses, the one constant is how the rhetoric of "diversity" trumps almost all other considerations--and how race and gender can be manipulated by either the college president or the faculty in ways that have nothing to do with educating America's youth, but everything to do with personal aggrandizement in an increasingly archaic and unexamined enclave.

---

At Harvard University, beleaguered President Lawrence Summers challenged notions of "diversity" and paid a steep price. He suggested--off the record, at a conference of the National Bureau of Economic Research--that factors other than institutional prejudice and cultural pressure might help explain the relative dearth of women faculty in the hard sciences at Harvard and other elite universities. If the intent of that mildly provocative, off-the-cuff exegesis was to jumpstart debate among serious thinkers, it proved a big mistake. Within seconds, one tough-minded feminist was reduced to bouts of nausea and swooning, and within hours many were calling for Mr. Summers to apologize, if not resign.

As the country soon learned, Mr. Summers had touched the live wire of the contemporary campus by hinting that inequality of result might be due to something other than invidious and institutional discrimination. Mr. Summers fell back limp from that high-voltage jolt; only massive and repeated doses of self-abasement could resuscitate him. Accordingly, he quickly renounced and denounced his own musings, promising task forces, "independent listeners," investigations, committees and ample largesse (including $50 million from Harvard's own bulging coffers) to be distributed to the purported victims of his insensitivity--who are in fact some of the most educated, privileged and upscale women on the planet.

But to save Mr. Summers's job it will probably cost much more than his pledge of $5 million a year for a decade. His special task force already has urged the appointment of a senior "vice provost for diversity and faculty development," along with improved recruitment and the "mentoring" of junior faculty members. According to a communiqué from his office, the members of his task force "propose a series of reforms and enhancements to the way women pursuing science and engineering are treated at every point along the 'pipeline,' from undergraduates, to graduate students, to post-doctoral fellows, to the faculty ranks." And lest we think $50 million is too much, Mr. Summers's statement also added that it is merely a down payment: "There is no doubt that these initiatives will require significant additional expenditures. But we want to make clear at the outset that this is a serious effort calling for a serious commitment of resources."

Somehow the former secretary of the Treasury, who once helped manage the Byzantine world of global commerce, failed to realize that the entire campus industry of mandated retroactive compensation--targeted fellowships, release time (i.e., excusing teachers from teaching), ideological curricula, favorable hiring and promotion considerations, tenure decisions based on criteria other than merit, and other forms of recompense that Mr. Summers in fact scrambled to grant--would be imperiled by a few politically incorrect syllables. Perhaps Mr. Summers naively thought that Harvard was about free speech and unfettered discourse--its motto, after all, is Veritas, "Truth." In any event, he quickly recovered, winning back through penance, self-censorship, and spoils a job that he had almost forfeited in a passing moment of intellectual curiosity.

---

One of President Summers's chief critics, Denice Denton, the newly appointed chancellor of the University of California, Santa Cruz, heralded Mr. Summers's public humiliation as a "teachable moment." As one president to another, she objected: "Here was this economist lecturing pompously [to] this room full of the country's most accomplished scholars on women's issues in science and engineering, and he kept saying things we had refuted in the first half of the day."

But Chancellor Denton has her own shortcomings. They do not revolve around mere impromptu remarks, nor have they been trailed by public apologies and task forces. Yet in its own way her controversy goes to the heart of the same contemporary race-and-gender credo that governs the university, enjoying exemption from normal scrutiny and simple logic.

Before her arrival, Ms. Denton arranged the creation of a special billet--ad hoc, unannounced and closed to all applicants but one: Ms. Denton's live-in girlfriend of seven years, Gretchen Kalonji. Most recognize this as the sort of personal accommodation--old-boy networking, really--that Ms. Denton presumably wishes to replace with affirmative action, thus ending backroom deals and crass nepotism.

But if race and gender--what we now refer to as "diversity"--are to be taken seriously, one wonders whether there was not a qualified African-American or Latina woman who could at least have been interviewed for the lucrative UC position. After all, Chancellor Denton herself praised UC Santa Cruz for its "celebration of diversity." And earlier, she insisted that "it is really shocking to hear the president of Harvard make statements like that," i.e., statements that ever so gently questioned the diversity shibboleth. Consider the reaction had President Summers arrived at a public, tax-supported university and arranged for his live-in girlfriend to have lifelong employment in a specially created job, complete with a subsidized move into a rent-free home.

And a six-figure salary: Gretchen Kalonji's unusual position pays $192,000 a year. Now, it happens that Chancellor Denton--whose salary is $275,000--was granted $68,750 to subsidize the move into the rent-free University President's House. But Ms. Kalonji, too, received a grant for expenses incurred during her "transition" to the Santa Cruz campus--$50,000, in fact.

The decision to pay $120,000 in public money for moving expenses to a couple with a combined salary of $467,000 can be defended, perhaps, but one group was certainly outraged: the university's maintenance staff, secretaries, and blue-collar workers. UC Santa Cruz's workers had not received a raise in three years. Yet in response to questions about her controversial partner accommodation--and the message that it sent to less-fortunate others on the campus--Chancellor Denton did not sound like a woman of the Left. "It's a typical practice," she explained in an interview with the local Santa Cruz Sentinel, "in the corporate world or academia." As if turning for support to the suspect world of capitalism was not enough, Ms. Denton also sought the sanctuary of victimhood, of someone at the mercy of red-state yahoos: "We got caught in the middle of national forces, gay marriage, red-state/blue-state issues and a state ruling. It's a hot item right now, and it heightened the tension. I was kind of surprised at the San Francisco Chronicle coverage saying 'lesbian lover.' It seemed more like a tabloid headline."

It proved impossible for a white male like Larry Summers to find shelter from the storm. But a gay woman had simply to ignore questions of social equity by playing the diversity card herself--in addition to claiming corporate precedents for her own unusual perks. Aware of the growing controversy over the hire, Ms. Denton returned to the mantra of diversity to explain her own decision to come to Santa Cruz. "The focus on diversity and social justice is important to me," she emphasized to the Sentinel, recalling how she had spoken out against Mr. Summers's remarks: "We need to address the issue of equity and access. It requires a cultural change and university presidents have to provide leadership."

Gretchen Kalonji certainly had "access," and Ms. Denton certainly provided "leadership" in assuring "equity" to her partner. Perhaps Ms. Kalonji's hiring even resulted in the desired "cultural change." But it is fortunate for Chancellor Denton that she does not share the politics of, say, Rep. Tom DeLay, who endured far more obloquy for hiring his wife, for far less money, to work on his congressional campaigns.

---

Now we come to the third case: University of Colorado President Elizabeth Hoffman. She recently resigned, ostensibly following athletic scandals, but more likely as a result of the uproar over Ward Churchill. We remember him now as the strange professor who compared the 3,000 murdered in the Twin Towers and Pentagon to "Little Eichmanns," supposed cogs in the military-industrial wheel who deserved their fate. The public grudgingly accepted that Mr. Churchill's wartime praise for the 9/11 murderers ("combat teams" rightfully avenging America's murder of "500,000 Iraqi children") is protected free speech. But it could not quite fathom why Mr. Churchill was not summarily dismissed for other sins.

And they were legion. He had fabricated a Native American heritage, lying on affidavits about his ethnic identity to help make up for his lack of credentials and suspect work. Mr. Churchill had been promoted to full professor at a major research university without the requisite Ph.D. degree, enjoying apparent ethnic immunity from a series of old allegations involving theft of intellectual property, plagiarism and academic misrepresentation. Most people outside the university were amazed not so much that Mr. Churchill was not immediately terminated as that he had been hired and promoted in the first place. To them he seemed like a swerving drunk driver, who when pulled over is found to have a long rap sheet. Yet how many others like the $112,000-a-year, department-chairing Mr. Churchill scramble about in the unexamined sanctuaries of the modern university, parlaying real or imagined victim status into lucrative careers?

President Hoffman did her best to deflect attention from the Churchill mess by a now-familiar victimization gambit. The scandal was not Mr. Churchill and his remarks but the reaction to them: academic freedom was under assault from--what else?--"a New McCarthyism." At the barricades, as it were, she boasted to her faculty senate that "I was a tiger about speech. There was no way I was going to touch speech." She went on, "We are in dangerous times. I'm very concerned. . . . It's looking a lot like [former CU president] George Norlin being asked to fire all the Catholics and Jews or the McCarthy era. We need to make sure we don't let ourselves go down that path, no matter how much shouting there is from the outside. There are forces that would push us down that path if we let them."

Meanwhile, the media-savvy Mr. Churchill--replete with long gray locks, beaded headband, shades, buckskin and the Native American name Keezjunnahbeh (which means "kind-hearted man"; Ward Churchill is his "colonial" name)--was determined to capitalize on his windfall fame. Indeed, he was undoubtedly grateful, after years of toiling in painful obscurity, that the media had at long last noticed his outrageous behavior. He grasped that he was already eligible for lucrative retirement benefits, which now could be enhanced by a generous golden parachute from the University of Colorado, eager to avoid millions of dollars in lawsuits and more bad press.

So Mr. Churchill keeps on touring and speaking to audiences about American culpability for September 11, praising those who murder Americans and vowing hostility to the very idea of America. President Hoffman announced her resignation in March, and Mr. Churchill's lawyer now negotiates the promised buyout with her successor.

---

Finally, there is Robert J. Birgeneau, the new chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley. Upon arriving in the Bay Area, he quickly vowed to solve the problems he had found. Surprisingly, these had nothing to do with a decline in academic standards, deterioration in the quality of Berkeley's key departments, or a state funding crisis. Instead, the chancellor complained that Berkeley has fewer Native American, Hispanic, and African-American students enrolled than it should--the campus was only 3% black, 9.5% Hispanic, and 0.4% Native American, in contrast with about 45% Asian-American and about 33% white. (The California population comprises 6.5% blacks, 33% Hispanics, 0.92% Native Americans, 11% Asian-Americans, and 45% whites.) Mr. Birgeneau is obsessed with racial diversity, as determined by percentages and quotas. But as we shall see, the numbers, under closer examination, may make him regret pandering to the diversity industry.

Chancellor Birgeneau blames the apparent statistical injustices on Proposition 209, the 1996 California ballot initiative that forbids the use of racial criteria in state hiring; it passed with the support of 55% of the electorate. In his view, however, democracy ought to defer to elite opinion; thus, to this Canadian academic the state's voters were obviously misguided: "I personally don't believe that most of the people who voted for 209 intended this consequence."

One can learn a lot about the pathologies of the contemporary university from what its presidents say--and don't say. A close look at the data suggests a different picture from the one implied by Mr. Birgeneau's gratuitous lamentations about the lack of diversity. Whites, for instance, are underenrolled at Berkeley: They amount to around 35% of undergraduates versus 45% of the state's population. Given this fact, why doesn't the Chancellor complain about the shortage of whites on campus?

He is oddly quiet, too, about the more explosive issue of the Asian-American presence. This group constitutes almost half the Berkeley student population, even though Asians make up only about 11% of California residents and 4% of the general U.S. population. Why doesn't Mr. Birgeneau admit that achieving his racial utopia would require deliberately reducing the enrollment of Asian-American students--presumably by discounting meritocratic criteria and test scores and instead emphasizing "community service" or other nebulous standards designed to circumvent Proposition 209? But because the new chancellor is obviously a sensitive sort, he cannot say what he apparently means: something like, "We have too many Asians, almost five times too many, and I am here to impose a quota on them and other suspect races." Instead, he worries about "underrepresentation" of some, while denying the logical corollary of "overrepresentation" of others. The same logic applies to gender, by the way. UC campuses enroll thousands more women than men, very much out of proportion to the general population, and yet Mr. Birgeneau does not decry the "overabundance" of women.

Remember, too, that Asians have suffered a particularly long history of discrimination in California. Despite everything from immigration quotas to forced internment during World War II, they have the highest high-school graduation rates in the state, while blacks and Hispanics suffer the lowest. What, then, could we learn from the Asian-American experience that seems to render past hurdles to achievement irrelevant to present academic performance? Don't expect Chancellor Birgeneau to take the lead in asking this question.

There is enormous intellectual arrogance on the campus these days, manifested in condescension towards the average taxpaying citizen. We sense such haughtiness when for the last 30 years the rate of tuition increases has exceeded inflation, without either much worry or accountability from university administrators. They assume that the public has no business questioning whether tenure, release time, research perks, top-heavy administration, and therapeutic programs constitute a wise use of education funds.

Instead, Mr. Birgeneau declares that he intends to reopen the question of Proposition 209, to begin a scholarly and, ultimately, popular campaign for its repeal or effective repeal. He refuses to concede the wisdom, much less the justice, of the voters' deliberate endorsement of it. This unfortunate outcome, he argues, could have been reversed by a change of just five percentage points--what he calls a "quite small percentage of the population." But he is blind to the fact that Proposition 209, far from being an aberration or exception, was part of the deliberate, continuing public disapproval of tribal and ethnic separatism and of deviations from traditional respect for legality, merit selection and national unity--as manifested, for instance, in opposition to bilingualism in schools and to illegal immigration.

Nor does the chancellor entertain the possibility that racial rubrics themselves are increasingly irrelevant, especially in California, where exogamy (marriage proper and cohabitation) among the Asian and Hispanic population runs between 25% and 50% in the younger cohorts. Any faculty member in the California State University system can attest that it is now nearly the norm to teach students who are, to take a few examples, one-quarter Asian, one-half Hispanic, or three-quarters white, many of whom decline to list themselves as official minorities of any sort on state forms.

We are quickly reaching the stage where the chancellor's pie graphs evoke the racial categories of the Old Confederacy, as he tries to ascertain whether Jason Martinez, one-fourth Hispanic, or Na Wilson, half Cambodian, should be counted as a minority.

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Then there is the matter of hypocrisy. As we have seen with Colorado's Chancellor Denton, there is one standard for some and another for the anointed. And as we know from Mr. Birgeneau's rhetoric, racial and ethnic symbolism is paramount; so if there is a statewide imbalance in the number of UC administrators of color, then his own presence is palpably a contribution to it. One of the reasons the people turned against affirmative action in the first place was that they tired of the preening of opportunistic senior white males, who adopted an après moi le deluge attitude toward the younger generation: remonstrating about the need for punitive hiring criteria that they almost certainly never applied to themselves.

For some two decades, I often watched entire departments of 50-something white male philosophy and English professors, themselves often hired ABD ("all but dissertation": a graduate student who hasn't finished his thesis) in the booming job markets of the 1960s--and who subsequently became mostly unpublished and undistinguished classroom teachers--take it upon themselves to hire only minorities and women, lecturing passed-over young white males about the need for diversity. These entrenched and often mediocre senior professors did everything for the cause except take early retirement, though many advised the perennially exploited part-time instructors to "move on" or "get a life."

In the chancellor's defense, it might be said that he realized the liability of being a white-male-Canadian-physicist in the racial cauldron of Berkeley--and grasped that he was hired precisely because he was known as a "diversity" president back at the University of Toronto, one prone to giving soapbox lectures with the same mind-numbing slogans and clichés he tried out right away at Berkeley.

Mr. Birgeneau urges "equity" and "access," but does not apply those inflexible, numbers-based egalitarian strictures to himself. Chancellor Denton, even worse, adopted the very kind of discriminatory insider-dealing policies she denounced in her praise of diversity and its handmaiden, affirmative-action hiring. Prof. Churchill wishes to revolt against our capitalist system but does not reject its furnishing of his ample salary; his deer-in-the-headlights president doesn't know what to do except retreat to the easy slurs of "McCarthyism." And Harvard's President Summers learned the hard way that today's campus gender autocrats will aggressively put down any attempts to question the unfortunate status quo.

No wonder that Mr. Summers's brand of candid common sense--Are race policies what we want? What does account for student success? Do public administrators have any responsibility toward the taxpayers who fund them?--is in short supply, even with Mr. Summers himself. Administrative failure or success is not measured by keeping tuition increases within moderate limits or turning out better-educated graduates, but by conspicuous concern for racial and sexual agendas. Those who pay them lip service, such as Denice Denton, have plenty of leeway in other areas. Those who don't, like poor Larry Summers, do not.

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In the end, why should we care about a few high-flying administrators who feel that diversity is the engine that runs the university? Because the U.S. is struggling in an increasingly competitive world in which Europe, China, Japan and India vie for global talent and national advantage through merit-based higher education. They don't care about the racial make-up of the teams that create breakthrough gene therapies or software programs, but only whether such innovations are valuable and superior to the competition.

As our own industrial, agricultural and manufacturing sectors decline, and as we suffer from increasing national debt, trade deficits, energy dilemmas and weak currency, Americans have maintained relative parity largely through information-based technology and superior research--all predicated on a superb system of higher education. At some point, Mr. Summers, Ms. Denton, Ms. Hoffman and Mr. Birgeneau might have wondered what precisely was the system that produced their lavish salaries and great campuses--and what protocols of merit, transparency, intellectual honesty and scholarly rigor were necessary to maintain them.

More importantly, we have lost sight of what university presidents are supposed to be. Their first allegiance ought to be to honesty and truth, not campus orthodoxy masquerading as intellectual bravery amid a supposedly reactionary society. In a world of intellectual integrity, Robert Birgeneau would ask, "Why are Asians excelling, and what can Berkeley do to encourage emulation of their success by other ethnic groups?" Denice Denton might wonder whether open hiring, monitored by affirmative action officers, applies to university staff or only those who are not associates of the president. President Hoffman would decry Ward Churchill's crass behavior and order a complete review of affirmative action and the politicized nature of hiring, retention, and tenure practices at Colorado. And Larry Summers? In the old world of the campus, he would defend free inquiry and expression, and remind faculty that all questions are up for discussion at Harvard. And if self-appointed censors wished to fire him for that, then he would dare them to go ahead and try.

The signs of erosion on our campuses are undeniable, whether we examine declining test scores, spiraling costs, or college graduates' ignorance of basic facts and ideas. In response, our academic leadership is not talking about a more competitive curriculum, higher standards of academic accomplishment, or the critical need freely to debate important issues. Instead, it remains obsessed with a racial, ideological, and sexual spoils system called "diversity." Even as the airline industry was deregulated in the 1970s, and Wall Street now has come under long-overdue scrutiny, it is time for Americans, if we are to ensure our privileged future, to re-examine our era's politicized university.

Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow in at the Hoover Institution and author of the forthcoming "A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War" (Random House). This essay appears in the Summer issue of the Claremont Review of Books.

from Reuters, 2006-Feb-21, by Jason Szep:

Harvard says Summers resigns as president

BOSTON - Harvard University President Lawrence Summers resigned on Tuesday after a turbulent five years and the most public faculty rebellion against a Harvard president in the Ivy League school's 370 year history.

Summers, a former U.S. Treasury secretary under president Bill Clinton, will step down at the end of the 2005-06 academic year, Harvard said. Derek Bok, who led Harvard from 1971 to 1991, will be interim president from July 1. Summers will stay on as a professor.

The resignation caps an increasingly rancorous stand-off between Summers and disaffected Harvard staff and came just one week before faculty members were to vote in the second no-confidence motion against Summers in 11 months.

Summers, whose brusque management style has won both praise and contempt, sparked controversy last year when he said innate differences between men and women may help explain why so few women work in the academic sciences.

He has since apologized repeatedly for his remarks.

But the abrupt resignation of the arts and sciences dean William Kirby, on January 27 deepened opposition against him. Several faculty have accused Summers of pushing Kirby out and called for his resignation at a faculty meeting this month.

"The university has been in a state of paralysis. I've never seen anything like this before," Farish A. Jenkins Jr., a Harvard zoology professor, told Reuters.

"Harvard can't be run by one man. It is a collaborative enterprise with many fine people," said Jenkins, one of a dozen professors who confronted Summers at a faculty meeting this month and suggested that he step down or be fired.

Following an expected yearlong sabbatical, Summers will return to Harvard as a professor in economics, public policy, and international affairs, the university said.

STUDENT BACKING

The announcement followed a poll showing most Harvard students backed Summers even if, as one student put it, he "can be a little rough around the edges."

In the poll conducted at the weekend by Harvard's Crimson student newspaper, 57 percent of 424 undergraduate students said Summers should not resign.

"I know the faculty hates him, but I think he's kind of running Harvard like a business -- and I respect that," one student, Derek Horton, told the student newspaper.

The confidence vote was to be symbolic because only the seven-member governing board, the Harvard Corporation, has the power to appoint or remove the university's president.

The faculty body first approved a no-confidence measure in March 2005 after Summers's remarks on women. Two no-confidence votes in a Harvard president would have been unprecedented.

Following the uproar over his remarks on women, Summers -- a Harvard alumnus and former faculty member -- pledged to change his tone, better listen to the Harvard community and do more to draw women to science and engineering.

"Believing deeply that complacency is among the greatest risks facing Harvard, I have sought for the last five years to prod and challenge the university to reach for the most ambitious goals in creative ways," Summers said in a statement on Harvard's Web site on Tuesday.

Summers also was embroiled in a public feud with the African-American Studies department that erupted shortly after he became president. The once-vaunted department saw an exodus of top faculty.

Summers's presidency will be Harvard's shortest since Cornelius Felton died after two years in office in 1862.

from the Associated Press, 2006-Mar-3:

20 Calif. Students Suspended Over Web Site

COSTA MESA, Calif. -- A middle school student faces expulsion for allegedly posting graphic threats against a classmate on the popular MySpace.com Web site, and 20 of his classmates were suspended for viewing the posting, school officials said.

Police are investigating the boy's comments about his classmate at TeWinkle Middle School as a possible hate crime, and the district is trying to expel him.

According to three parents of the suspended students, the invitation to join the boy's MySpace group gave no indication of the alleged threat. They said the MySpace social group name's was "I hate (girl's name)" and included an expletive and an anti-Semitic reference.

A later message to group members directed them to a nondescript folder, which included a posting that allegedly asked: "Who here in the (group name) wants to take a shotgun and blast her in the head over a thousand times?"

Because the creator of a posting can change its content at any time, it's unclear how much the students saw.

"With what the students can get into using the technology we are all concerned about it," Bob Metz, the district assistant superintendent of secondary education, said Wednesday.

Metz said the students' suspensions in mid-Febuary were appropriate because the incident involved student safety. Some parents however questioned whether the school overstepped its bounds by disciplining students for actions that occurred on personal computers, at home and after school hours.

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2005-Nov-18, by James Piereson:

Only Encouraging Them
Generous people give money to colleges without restrictions. The money gets misused.

Students at Yale University's School of Music--and aspiring musicians hoping to go there someday--must have been jumping for joy two weeks ago when the school announced that it had received an anonymous $100 million endowment gift that would guarantee them all free tuition. A few days later Tufts University, not to be outdone, announced that it had received its own $100 million gift. This one was from Pierre Omidyar, alumnus and founder of eBay, who did not specify how his money was to be used, only that the principal must be invested in "micro loans" to small business enterprises in poor countries in Asia and Africa.

It all sounds high-minded and worthy. But is it a good idea? Foundations, corporations and rich individuals have long given generously to colleges and universities. Some of our most distinguished--Duke, Vanderbilt, Stanford and the University of Chicago--were originally endowed by entrepreneurs or wealthy families. In a recent study, the Institute for Jewish and Community Research reported that nearly 60% of all gifts of more than $10 million are donated to academic institutions. And the Chronicle of Higher Education reports that Americans last year contributed some $25 billion to colleges and universities. Is it any wonder that many academic institutions are sitting on vast repositories of endowed wealth? Today there are more than 50 institutions with endowments exceeding $1 billion.

---

Yet this explosion of money has been accompanied by a steady erosion in the quality of education, especially in the humanities. Many research organizations, including the Intercollegiate Studies Institute and the National Association of Scholars, have documented the elimination of the traditional core curriculum at most of our leading universities. We can no longer assume that college graduates possess even a rudimentary knowledge of history, for instance, or that they understand basic concepts like federalism or the separation of powers or, indeed, that they know about the ideas and events that have shaped our institutions. All this great wealth, donated with the best of intentions, appears to have had the perverse effect of liberating academic institutions to do a less than admirable job of educating the young.

And what do the young learn when they do learn? Entrepreneurs may give generously, but college faculties are today awash in antibusiness and anti-free-market prejudices, with scholarly publications beating the drum against globalization and the supposed depredations of capitalism. Not many faculty members would agree precisely with Ward Churchill, the University of Colorado professor who said that the victims of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center deserved their fate because they were working on behalf of the capitalist system. But, terrorism aside, his low opinion of America's economic system does not wildly diverge from that of professors everywhere. Meanwhile the diversity ideology so common on campuses today holds that the history of the U.S. is primarily one of exclusion and oppression, another Ward Churchillian theme.

All this is roughly quantifiable. A recent national survey of college faculty showed that 72% of professors held liberal and left-of-center views, while just 15% held conservative ones. This imbalance, surveys show, has grown worse since the early 1980s. It is a strange paradox indeed that academic opinion should have moved so far to the left in a period of unprecedented wealth and prosperity for colleges and universities themselves--let alone in a period of capitalism's triumph and communism's defeat.

Here is where the charitable giving comes in. These trends have taken hold in academia in part because too many donors have failed to exercise appropriate care when signing over their funds. Most donors have little understanding of the intricate workings of academic budgets or of the subterfuges that permit money to be spent on programs unrelated to intended purposes. (A little Economics 101 might help.) The anonymous donor to Yale earmarked the income from his gift to support student tuitions, but of course money is fungible: The gift will have the unintended effect of allowing Yale to move the substantial funds it now devotes to financial aid and to spend them on other purposes, possibly unrelated or antithetical. Many gifts to universities have this money-shifting effect.

Donors are often unaware that they are entitled to set aside their money for purposes of their own choosing, not just established categories. As former Yale provost Frank Turner has said: "Donor restrictions can call institutions of higher education to fulfill their highest ideals." A few diligent philanthropists, like publisher Philip Merrill and investor Sir John Templeton, craft careful agreements with universities before any checks are signed and then monitor their gifts regularly.

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni has published a short book, "The Intelligent Donor's Guide to College Giving," that lays out some basic ground rules for donating to higher education. These include placing clear restrictions on gifts, working with a particular professor (and, if possible, bypassing the development office) and avoiding endowments in perpetuity. As Sir John Templeton wisely said: "If you're giving while you're living, you're knowing where it's going."

---

Obviously, this sort of due diligence does require time and effort on the part of the donor, But if even a few more philanthropists were watching where their funds ended up, college officials would surely monitor their programs more carefully. There have been a few celebrated cases in recent years in which donors have asked for their funds to be returned after discovering that they were misused, and these cases have sent a shudder though the academic community.

In 1991, for example, Lee Bass donated $20 million to Yale to support a curriculum in Western Civilization but asked for (and received) his money back four years later when he discovered that Yale's faculty had little interest in teaching such courses. Princeton University may be ordered to return nearly $600 million to the Robertson family, which endowed a program a generation ago to train students for public service. In recent decades, it is alleged by the family, the university lost interest in this purpose but continued to spend the money anyway.

Just last week, a professor at Florida State University, Robert Holton, sued to get back some of the tens of millions of dollars that he earned from a drug patent and donated to the school for a new synthetic chemistry laboratory. The university simply scrapped plans for the building. "We're filing this lawsuit to save the university from itself," said Mr. Holton in a recent interview. Words for every donor to live by.

Mr. Piereson is executive director of the John M. Olin Foundation.

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2005-Jan-3:

Teachers' Pets
The NEA gave $65 million in its members' dues to left-liberal groups last year.

If we told you that an organization gave away more than $65 million last year to Jesse Jackson's Rainbow PUSH Coalition, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, Amnesty International, AIDS Walk Washington and dozens of other such advocacy groups, you'd probably assume we were describing a liberal philanthropy. In fact, those expenditures have all turned up on the financial disclosure report of the National Education Association, the country's largest teachers union.

Under new federal rules pushed through by Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao, large unions must now disclose in much more detail how they spend members' dues money. Big Labor fought hard (if unsuccessfully) against the new accountability standards, and even a cursory glance at the NEA's recent filings--the first under the new rules--helps explain why. They expose the union as a honey pot for left-wing political causes that have nothing to do with teachers, much less students.

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We already knew that the NEA's top brass lives large. Reg Weaver, the union's president, makes $439,000 a year. The NEA has a $58 million payroll for just over 600 employees, more than half of whom draw six-figure salaries. Last year the average teacher made only $48,000, so it seems you're better off working as a union rep than in the classroom.

Many of the organization's disbursements--$30,000 to the Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association, $122,000 to the Center for Teaching Quality--at least target groups that ostensibly have a direct educational mission. But many others are a stretch, to say the least. The NEA gave $15,000 to the Human Rights Campaign, which lobbies for "lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender equal rights." The National Women's Law Center, whose Web site currently features a "pocket guide" to opposing Supreme Court nominee Sam Alito, received $5,000. And something called the Fund to Protect Social Security got $400,000, presumably to defeat personal investment accounts.

The new disclosure rules mark the first revisions since 1959 and took effect this year. "What wasn't clear before is how much of a part the teachers unions play in the wider liberal movement and the Democratic Party," says Mike Antonucci of the Education Intelligence Agency, a California-based watchdog group. "They're like some philanthropic organization that passes out grant money to interest groups."

There's been a lot in the news recently about published opinion that parallels donor politics. Well, last year the NEA gave $45,000 to the Economic Policy Institute, which regularly issues reports that claim education is underfunded and teachers are underpaid. The partisans at People for the American Way got a $51,000 NEA contribution; PFAW happens to be vehemently anti-voucher.

The extent to which the NEA sends money to states for political agitation is also revealing. For example, Protect Our Public Schools, an anti-charter-school group backed by the NEA's Washington state affiliate, received $500,000 toward its efforts to block school choice for underprivileged children. (Never mind that charter schools are public schools.) And the Floridians for All Committee, which focuses on "the construction of a permanent progressive infrastructure that will help redirect Florida politics in a more progressive, Democratic direction," received a $249,000 donation from NEA headquarters.

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When George Soros does this sort of thing, at least he's spending his own money. The NEA is spending the mandatory dues paid by members who are told their money will be used to gain better wages, benefits and working conditions. According to the latest filing, member dues accounted for $295 million of the NEA's $341 million in total receipts last year. But the union spent $25 million of that on "political activities and lobbying" and another $65.5 million on "contributions, gifts and grants" that seemed designed to further those hyper-liberal political goals.

The good news is that for the first time members can find out how their union chieftains did their political thinking for them, by going to www.union-reports.dol.gov, where the Labor Department has posted the details.

Union officials claim that they favored such transparency all along, but the truth is they fought the new rules hard in both Congress and the courts. Originally, the AFL-CIO said detailed disclosures were too expensive, citing compliance costs in excess of $1 billion. The final bill turned out to be $54,000, or half of what the unions spent on litigation fighting the new requirements. When Secretary Chao refused to back down, the unions took her to court, and lost.

It's well understood that the NEA is an arm of the Democratic National Committee. (Or is it the other way around?) But we wonder if the union's rank-and-file stand in unity behind this laundry list of left-to-liberal recipients of money that comes out of their pockets.

from the Orlando Sentinel, 2005-Jan-6, by Leslie Postal and John Kennedy:

Florida's top court bars vouchers for F schools

The Florida Supreme Court struck down the state's original school-voucher program Thursday, ruling that using taxpayer-funded scholarships to send children to private schools violates the state constitution.

The 5-2 ruling overturns a centerpiece of Gov. Jeb Bush's education-reform plans: a 1999 law that created the nation's first statewide voucher program and let children at failing public schools use state scholarships, or tuition vouchers, to go to private schools.

It also raised questions of whether two larger voucher programs created later during Bush's tenure could now be open to legal attack. More than 700 children benefit from Opportunity Scholarships, but the two other programs combined pay private-school tuition for more than 30,000 children.

Many lawyers had expected Thursday's ruling to hinge on the legality of spending public money on religious schools. Instead, the state's top court said the scholarships violated a constitutional amendment approved by voters in 1998.

That amendment declared education a "fundamental value" and required the state to maintain "uniform, efficient, safe, secure and high quality" public schools.

Diverting public money to private schools "not only reduces money available to free schools, but also funds private schools that are not 'uniform' when compared with each other or other public system," Chief Justice Barbara Pariente wrote in the majority opinion released in Tallahassee. Children using vouchers can stay at their private schools for the rest of this school year, but the program must end after that, justices said.

The 34-page opinion was a victory for those who challenged the program in court the day after Bush signed it into law. They include the Florida PTA and the Florida Education Association, the state's largest teachers union.

"It means that Florida's taxpayers will not have to pay for schools that are unaccountable," said Ron Meyer, lead attorney for the groups that sued.

For Bush, the ruling represented one of the most profound setbacks of his political career. He had championed vouchers in every run for governor, going back to his first, unsuccessful race in 1994.

The governor said he was disappointed by the decision but promised to work on a way to keep the program alive. He said he would explore "legislative fixes" or an effort to amend the constitution.

Clark Neily, an attorney representing parents who sided with Bush in the case, said his group, the Institute for Justice, also would continue its battle for school choice.

"Every parent ought to have the ability to choose where their child goes to school, and it shouldn't depend on how much money they have," Neily said.

Bush and his allies acknowledged that they were unsure how Thursday's ruling could affect Florida's other voucher programs: the McKay Scholarships designed for students with disabilities and the Corporate Tax Credit Scholarships that give businesses credit on state taxes when they give money to educate poor children.

In its ruling, the Supreme Court said attempting to read its decision as having any impact on those other programs would be "mere speculation."

Meyer said the other programs are open to legal challenges, however. He said he hoped Bush and legislative leaders would abandon their attempts to create "unconstitutional voucher programs."

Under the "Opportunity Scholarship" law, students can apply for the vouchers if their public schools earned two F's in four years on Florida's annual school report card. Students also have the option of transferring to better-performing public schools -- a choice Thursday's ruling left untouched.

The voucher is worth what the state pays to educate a child at a public school. Last year, private schools got $3,400 to $5,000 for students in kindergarten through third grade.

Nearly 100 of the scholarship recipients are in Orange County. Elizabeth Walker used the vouchers to get her sons out of Mollie Ray Elementary, which got its second F in 2002, and send them to Lake Rose Christian Academy west of Orlando.

Although Mollie Ray has earned better grades since then, even getting an A last year, students who first took the vouchers are still eligible for them.

Vouchers are a "blessing," Walker said. "We pay taxes as well, and we should be able to choose the schools we want."

Denise Cossom, principal at Vision Educational Learning Center in Orlando, has 10 students using the vouchers. Most come from Jones High, which has earned four F's in a row from the state. Their families cannot afford private school.

Cossom said the children have blossomed at the small Christian school.

"We have students who have done things maybe they didn't think they could do," she said.

Vouchers became a hot topic nationally when Cleveland launched them in 1995. Three other states and Washington, D.C., have voucher policies, while five other states have tax-credit or tax-refund plans that pay for private education, according to the Education Commission of the States.

Since the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Cleveland's efforts in 2002, opponents of vouchers have needed to base their challenges on state constitutions, which often contain more specific language about aid to religion and the funding of public schools.

Thursday's ruling was steeped in political shadings.

Pariente, an appointee of the late Democratic Gov. Lawton Chiles, was joined in the majority by three other justices named by the former governor. The fifth justice was appointed jointly by Bush and Chiles during the transition period between their terms in 1998. Both dissenting justices, however, were Bush appointees.

"I'm certain that a lot of people looking at this ruling are going to feel that it's evidence of a bias against this governor by this court," said Rep. Dennis Baxley, R-Ocala, who chairs the House Education Committee.

Chief Financial Officer Tom Gallagher, a Republican candidate to succeed Bush as governor, went even further, blistering the court for choosing "to create their own law rather than follow the laws of our state."

Jon Mills, a former Democratic House speaker who teaches law at the University of Florida, said he saw no political intrigue. He said the ruling made sense considering the 1998 amendment, which he helped craft.

"I think it was rightly decided," Mills added.

Legal nuances matter little to Angela Mack of Miami, a mother of six using vouchers to send two teens to a private high school. Her daughter is to graduate this spring; her son is in 11th grade.

Now, Mack said, "I am worried."

letter from Professor John Daly of Warren Community College in Washington, New Jersey, to freshman Rebecca Beach, 2005-Nov-13, provided by Young America's Foundation:

[Rebecca had sent out by email an announcement of an appearance by Iraq war veteran Lt. Col. Scott Rutter.]

Dear Rebecca:

I am asking my students to boycott your event. I am also going to ask others to boycott it. Your literature and signs in the entrance lobby look like fascist propaganda and is extremely offensive. Your main poster "Communism killed 100,000,000" is not only untrue, but ignores the fact that CAPITALISM has killed many more and the evidence for that can be seen in the daily news papers. The U.S. government can fly to dominate the people of Iraq in 12 hours, yet it took them five days to assist the people devastated by huricane Katrina. Racism and profits were key to their priorities. Exxon, by the way, made $9 Billion in profits this last quarter -- their highest proft margin ever. Thanks to the students of WCCC and other poor and working class people who are recruited to fight and die for EXXON and other corporations who earning megaprofits from their imperialist plunders. If you want to count the number of deaths based on political systems, you can begin with the more than a million children who have died in Iraq from U.S.-imposed sanctions and war. Or the million African American people who died from lack of access to healthcare in the US over the last 10 years.

I will continue to expose your right-wing, anti-people politics until groups like your won't dare show their face on a college campus. Real freedom will come when soldiers in Iraq turn their guns on their superiors and fight for just causes and for people's needs -- such freedom fighters can be counted throughout American history and they certainly will be counted again.

Prof. Daly resigned on Nov. 22, but stands by the substance of the above message.

from Young America's Foundation, 2005-Dec-23:

The Dirty Dozen
America's Most Bizarre and Politically Correct College Courses

Princeton University's Prostitute, Cross Dressing, and Same-Sex Eroticism Course ranked the most bizarre Class

HERNDON, VA -- As tuition rates climb to an average of over $21,000 per year, today's college students study prostitution, teeth whitening, and Beavis and Butthead. The following Dirty Dozen highlights the most bizarre and troubling instances of leftist activism supplanting traditional scholarship in our nation's colleges and universities.

1. Princeton University's The Cultural Production of Early Modern Women examines “prostitutes,” “cross-dressing,” and “same-sex eroticism” in 16^th - and 17^th - century England, France, Italy and Spain (emphasis added).

2. The Unbearable Whiteness of Barbie: Race and Popular Culture in the United States at Occidental College in California explores ways “which scientific racism has been put to use in the making of Barbie [and] to an interpretation of the film The Matrix as a Marxist critique of capitalism.”

3. At The John Hopkins University, students in the Sex, Drugs, and Rock `n' Roll in Ancient Egypt class view slideshows of women in ancient Egypt “vomiting on each other,” “having intercourse,” and “fixing their hair.”

4. Like something out of a Hugh Hefner film, Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania offers the class Lesbian Novels Since World War II.

5. Alfred University's Nip, Tuck, Perm, Pierce, and Tattoo: Adventures with Embodied Culture, mostly made up of women, encourages students to think about the meaning behind “teeth whitening, tanning, shaving, and hair dyeing.” Special projects include visiting a tattoo-and-piercing studio and watching Arnold Schwarzenegger's bodybuilding film, Pumping Iron.

6. Harvard University's Marxist Concepts of Racism examines “the role of capitalist development and expansion in creating racial inequality” (emphasis added). Although Karl Marx didn't say much on race, leftist professors in this course extrapolate information on “racial oppression” and “racial antagonism."

7. Occidental College—making the Dirty Dozen list twice—offers a course in Stupidity, which compares the American presidency to Beavis and Butthead.

8. Students at the University of California—Los Angeles need not wonder what it means to be a lesbian. The Psychology of the Lesbian Experience reviews “various aspects of lesbian experience” including the “impact of heterosexism/stigma, gender role socialization, minority status of women and lesbians, identity development within a multicultural society, changes in psychological theories about lesbians in sociohistorical context.”

9. Duke University's American Dreams/American Realities course supposedly unearths “such myths as `rags to riches,' `beacon to the world,' and the `frontier,' in defining the American character” (emphasis added).

10. Amherst College in Massachusetts offers the class Taking Marx Seriously: “Should Marx be giving another chance?” Students in this course are asked to question if Marxism still has any “credibility” remaining, while also inquiring if societies can gain new insights by “returning to [Marx's] texts.” Coming to Marx's rescue, this course also states that Lenin, Stalin, and Pol Pot misapplied the concepts of Marxism.

11. Brown University's Black Lavender: A Study of Black Gay & Lesbian Plays “address[es] the identities and issues of Black gay men and lesbians, and offer[s] various points of view from within and without the Black gay and lesbian artistic communities.”

12. Students enrolled in the University of Michigan's Topics in Literary Studies: Ancient Greek/Modern Gay Sexuality have the pleasure of reading a “wide selection of ancient Greek (and a few Roman) texts that deal with same-sex love, desire, gender dissidence, and sexual behavior.”

from the San Jose Mercury News, 2005-Dec-15, by Jessie Mangaliman:

Suit: Tuition law biased
Allowing Illegal Immigrants to Pay Lower Fees Attacked

California's public universities and colleges violate federal law by charging illegal immigrants lower in-state tuition rates, discriminating against U.S. citizens from out of state who are charged a higher rate, according to a class action lawsuit filed Wednesday in Yolo County Superior Court in Woodland.

Lawyers representing dozens of students across the state -- and potentially thousands more who pay out-of-state tuition to attend the state's public colleges and universities -- declared that those students are penalized by the state and denied public benefits given illegal immigrants. The suit names regents of the University of California, trustees of the California State University and governors of the California Community Colleges as defendants.

“They are victims of an illegal policy of discrimination,” said Redwood City lawyer Michael J. Brady, “that has cost them hundreds of millions of dollars collectively.”

At a news conference in Sacramento on Wednesday, lawyers said California's 2002 legislation AB 540 violates federal law because it benefits only illegal immigrants. A 1998 federal law gives states the authority to grant in-state tuition to illegal immigrants, if it extends that same benefit to all out-of-state students.

California's AB 540 allows illegal immigrants who graduated from a California high school and have lived in the state for at least three years to pay in-state tuition at state colleges and universities.

The law was aimed at the minor children of undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as small children and attended and graduated from California public secondary schools.

The lawsuit claims that AB 540 “actively discriminated against tens of thousands of out-of-state students without informing them of their potential rights under federal and state law.” It is seeking tens of thousands of dollars in tuition restitution for each student plaintiff.

Officials and lawyers for the state's vast public university system immediately dismissed and challenged the lawsuit's claims, saying that California, in fact, allows out-of-state students to claim an exemption and pay in-state tuition, the same as undocumented immigrant students, if they meet the requirements of AB 540.

In the University of California system, for example, an estimated 70 percent of students who claim an exemption and pay in-state tuition -- although they are from out of state -- are U.S. citizens.

In addition, to qualify for in-state tuition, anyone can establish residency in California by living in the state one year and a day.

In 2004, there were 208,000 students in the UC system, and 1,340 of them benefited under AB 540, all U.S. citizens or legal residents, according to Christopher Patti, an attorney representing the UC regents.

“The UC policy is consistent with state law,” Patti said, “which both the attorney general and the state Legislature determined is not in violation of federal law.”

Rosa Perez, chancellor at San Jose-Evergreen Community College District, argued that undocumented immigrants have a tougher state residency requirement to fulfill -- three years in the state and a high school diploma. In addition, undocumented students must sign a document saying they are in the process of legalizing their status.

“I don't know what this lawsuit is talking about,” Perez said. “It's inaccurate.”

“It's another attempt to confuse the public,” she said, “and sway people to become anti-immigrant.”

The heart and core of the lawsuit is a simple claim, Brady said: Illegal immigrants, no matter how long they've lived in California, are not “residents” of the state, and are not entitled to in-state tuition rates.

What's more, the state's requirement that a student, in order to qualify for the benefits of AB 540 be “without lawful immigration status” inherently excludes U.S. citizens, the lawsuit said.

The state formulated a discriminatory law to allow illegal immigrants to pay in-state tuition, the lawsuit said.

Herb Castillo, a Bay Area immigrant advocate who supported proposed legislation to give legal status to undocumented students, had a different perspective of the lawsuit.

“The moral imperative of denying young people whose futures are here in the States, to deny them an education is shortsighted beyond belief,” he said.

from the Boston Globe, 2006-Jan-26, by Tracy Jan:

Schoolboy's bias suit
Argues system is favoring girls

At Milton High School, girls outnumber boys by almost 2 to 1 on the honor roll. In Advanced Placement classes, almost 60 percent of the students are female.

It's not that girls are smarter than boys, said Doug Anglin, a 17-year-old senior at the high school.

Girls are outperforming boys because the school system favors them, said Anglin, who has filed a federal civil rights complaint contending that his school discriminates against boys.

Among Anglin's allegations: Girls face fewer restrictions from teachers, like being able to wander the hallways without passes, and girls are rewarded for abiding by the rules, while boys' more rebellious ways are punished.

Grading on homework, which sometimes includes points for decorating a notebook, also favor girls, according to Anglin's complaint, filed last month with the US Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights.

“The system is designed to the disadvantage of males," Anglin said. “From the elementary level, they establish a philosophy that if you sit down, follow orders, and listen to what they say, you'll do well and get good grades. Men naturally rebel against this."

An international group that examines equity in education called the complaint of discrimination against boys rare. And Milton school officials denied that girls get better treatment than boys. But the female student body president, Kelli Little, voiced support for Anglin's views.

Anglin, a soccer and baseball player who wants to go to the College of the Holy Cross, said he brought the complaint in hope that the Education Department would issue national guidelines on how to boost boys' academic achievement.

Research has found that boys nationwide are increasingly falling behind girls, especially in reading and writing, and that they are more likely to be suspended, according to a 2005 report by the Educational Equity Center of the Academy for Educational Development, an international nonprofit group with headquarters in Washington, D.C.

While school officials said their goal is to help all students improve, the Milton High principal, John Drottar, , suggested in an interview that there may be ways to reach out to underachieving boys. Drottar said the high school plans to reinstitute a mentoring program that will pair low-achieving students with teachers.

While it will not specifically recruit male students, boys are likely to make up a large portion of the students served, he said.

“We're aware of it," Drottar said. “We're looking into it. On a school basis, does that mean we should look at each classroom and see if we have to encourage boys a little more than girls now? Yeah, it probably does."

Anglin -- whose complaint was written by his father, who is a lawyer in Boston -- is looking for broader changes. He says that teachers must change their attitudes toward boys and look past boys' poor work habits or rule-breaking to find ways to encourage them academically.

Without such changes, many boys now give up, he said.

The school should also recruit more male teachers to better motivate boys, Anglin said. At the high school, 64 percent of the teachers are women, and 36 percent are men, according to the school system.

Anglin's complaint has set off a buzz among the 1,000 students at the school. Little, the student body president, said she disagrees with students who think Anglin is chauvinistic.

Of the 22 students in her honors Spanish class, only one is a boy, said Little, a senior. She also said that teachers rarely ask her for a hall pass if she is not in class, while they routinely question boys walking behind her.

As for assignments, she said, one teacher expects students to type up class notes and decorate their notebooks with glitter and feathers.

“You can't expect a boy to buy pink paper and frills to decorate their notebooks," Little said.

Larry O'Connor, another Milton High senior who supports Anglin, said teachers should do more to encourage freshmen boys to do well in school, because many lack motivation.

O'Connor, who is taking two honors classes and one Advanced Placement class, said he is surrounded by a sea of girls in his classes.

He said he ended up taking high-level courses because an English teacher had pulled him aside in his freshman year and had told him that he had the potential to succeed, and that the school needed more male scholars.

While some of Anglin's concerns appear to be supported by school statistics and anecdotal evidence, school officials say some of the solutions that he offers are far-fetched.

For example, he proposes that the high school give students credit for playing sports, not just for art and drama courses. He also urges that students be allowed to take classes on a pass/fail basis to encourage more boys to enroll in advanced classes without risking their grade point average. He also wants the school to abolish its community service requirement, saying it's another burden that will just set off resistance from boys, who may skip it and fail to graduate as a result.

School official said they cannot give credit for sports and are unlikely to allow students to take courses without grades.

Superintendent Magdalene Giffune said the school system will not consider changing the community-service requirement. “It's an important part of teaching students to be responsible citizens," she said.

The US Department of Education is evaluating whether Anglin's complaint warrants investigation, said a spokesman, Jim Bradshaw.

Anglin, who has a 2.88 grade point average, acknowledged that discrimination complaints are not often filed by white, middle-class males like himself.

But he said: “I'm not here to try to lower the rights of women or interfere with the rights of minorities. We just want to fix this one problem that we think is a big deal."

Gerry Anglin, Doug Anglin's father, said the school system should compensate boys for the discrimination by boosting their grades retroactively.

“If you are a victim of discrimination in the workplace, what do they do? They give you more money or they give you a promotion," Gerry Anglin said. “Most of these kids want to go to college, so these records are important to them."

from ABC News, 2006-Jan-26, by Adrienne Mand Lewin:

Can Boys Really Not Sit Still in School?
Experts Say Biology Makes It Harder for Boys to Behave

Doug Anglin complains that his high school makes it easier for girls than for boys to succeed academically, and the Massachusetts teenager is now trying to prove it to the federal government.

It may sound like sour grapes, but some experts believe Anglin has a point.

In the complaint that he lodged with the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights, Anglin, 17, claimed that girls faced fewer restrictions from teachers at Milton High School in Milton, Mass., and that boys were more likely to be punished.

"The system is designed to the disadvantage of males," Anglin told The Boston Globe. "From the elementary level, they establish a philosophy that if you sit down, follow orders and listen to what they say, you'll do well and get good grades. Men naturally rebel against this."

The complaint comes at a time when boys' struggles in school are getting close examination. According to a 2005 report by the Educational Equity Center of the Academy for Educational Development in Washington D.C., boys around the country are increasingly falling behind girls academically, and are more likely to get suspended. And experts told ABC News that Anglin's assessment has merit and describes what prevails in most American classrooms.

"I think he's got it basically right, although I don't believe the system was set up purposely to hurt boys," said William Pollack, director of the Centers for Men and Young Men at McLean Hospital of Harvard Medical School.

Pollack and others noted that in general young boys in kindergarten and first grade are not able to behave as well as girls due to biological and social differences. He said that up until fifth grade, boys require five to seven recesses a day, though most get just one. "With a boy who squirms, you take away his recess," he said, "so then he either acts out and we say he's a discipline problem, or he's very active and we say he has hyperactivity."

Kathy Stevens, co-author of "The Minds of Boys" and director of training at the Michael Gurian Educational Institute, said boys' physical composition makes them learn differently than girls.

"That's a biological predisposition," Stevens said. "Take a little boy who's a year to a year-and-a-half behind developmentally. Sitting down, listening, learning to write the alphabet are going to be more difficult for them in a traditional setting."

Pollack and Stevens acknowledge that many boys excel in school and thrive in the classroom. But they say they may have to overcome their natural urges to do so.

Can Boys Really Not Sit Still?

Boys have a "biological imperative" to move more, Stevens said, because they have 15 percent more spinal fluid. "Their body is really an extension of their brain," she said.

Because they are unable to follow directions as well as girls do, she said, "Boys get identified from the get-go as behavior problems, ADD. Maybe he's just a boy and he can't just sit still."

Anglin's complaint focuses on his high school, where girls outnumber boys almost two to one on the honor roll, and almost 60 percent of the students in advanced placement classes are female, according to information provided by school officials.

A soccer and baseball player who plans to attend college, Anglin hopes the Education Department will react to his complaint by coming up with national guidelines on how to boost the academic achievement of boys.

Teachers must change their attitudes toward boys and look past their poor work habits to find ways to encourage them academically, said Anglin, whose complaint was written by his father, a lawyer. Too many boys give up too soon, he said.

Anglin has several suggestions about how Milton High School can help boys -- it could give credit for playing sports, allow students to take advanced courses pass/fail, and forgo the school's community service requirement -- but school officials say they are unlikely to adopt his ideas.

The Education Department is evaluating whether Anglin's complaint has merit, spokesman Jim Bradshaw said.

But Stevens said national guidelines are an excellent idea. Teachers need to be trained about "how boys' and girls' brains are wired differently and what that means in terms of how we structure our classrooms," she said.

For example, she said, most teachers believe if the children are sitting quietly, good teaching must be happening. "That's absolutely false," she said. "How quiet the classroom is has nothing to do with how much learning is going on."

She said it's important to create more experiential lessons and to make sure kids participate in activities like recess, music and art.

Similarly, Pollack recommends a curriculum for boys that's currently in the pilot stage at 30 California schools. "We have to recognize their behavioral tempo, to let them move around," he said. "We've actually put rolling coasters on the chairs. Kids move around the room [to different activities]. They're not given a demerit; they're given support to get out of their chair and manipulate things."

Changing Times

Critics of these changing methods ask why, if boys have always been predisposed to behavior and learning difficulties, is the issue suddenly becoming apparent now? And shouldn't boys have to learn how to behave appropriately to succeed in life?

Pollack said there are several reasons. First, fewer kids have two-parent families that encourage them to fight against their impulses and conform. In addition, he said, class sizes have grown and teachers deal with many more children with special needs, so boys "who just can't hold it down" are seen as more disruptive.

The increased focus on testing in schools has also ratcheted up pressure on young students, he said. "In kindergarten, I had to learn ... to socialize," he said. "Today they read and write. Some boys can. Most can't. There's a biological component."

There's also an attitude that boys should just learn to behave and follow rules -- period -- just as previous generations did. "That's similar to 'If I have to not cry and show my feelings and get an ulcer, what's wrong with you, a young adult male who wants to be a full person?'" Pollack said. "Can you make them grin and bear it? Yeah, in maybe 50 percent you can. But why would you?"

Pollack stressed that changing teaching methods to accommodate boys does not mean hindering girls. Girls, he said, often enjoy the same hands-on activities.

"We have the data about learning-style differences and behavior-style differences," he said. "This is not a win-lose circumstance. It's not teachers against parents, parents against schools, boys against girls. It's a win-win. We recognize what we now know and use it."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

from City Journal, Spring 2005, by Stanley Kurtz:

Can We Make Boys and Girls Alike?

When Lawrence Summers suggested that biology might be partially responsible for the relative rarity of female mathematics professors, he was provoking an academic giant. Powerful as the president of Harvard may be, his influence is as nothing compared with that of the behemoth that is the women’s studies movement. The field of women’s studies originated in the heady sixties and grew exponentially through the seventies and eighties. By the mid-nineties, when Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge published Professing Feminism, their searing critique of the field, more than 600 undergraduate and several dozen graduate women’s studies programs were up and running at colleges and universities across the country.

The intellectual cornerstone of women’s studies is “gender,” the notion that differences between men and women are not rooted in biology, as Summers had hypothesized some might be, but are cultural artifacts, inculcated by an oppressive patriarchal society. Precisely because the gender idea builds a specific (radical) political orientation into the field, Patai and Koertge point out, women’s studies proved intellectually suspect from the start. You can read that radical politics right in the National Women’s Studies Association constitution: “Women’s Studies . . . is equipping women to transform the world to one that will be free of all oppression . . . [and is] a force which furthers the realization of feminist aims.” True justice for these radical feminists means overcoming gender and establishing an androgynous society. So when Summers asserted that something besides artificial cultural roles—something besides “gender”—might account for the distinct positions of men and women in society, he was undermining the intellectual and political foundation of the entire women’s studies establishment.

The alternatives to feminist orthodoxy don’t end with Summers-style invocations of biology as destiny. Take psychiatrist Leonard Sax’s new book, Why Gender Matters: What Parents and Teachers Need to Know About the Emerging Science of Sex Differences, for example. Sax begins by arguing that variations in how boys and girls learn result from brain biology. But, unlike many believers in hardwired sex differences, he goes on to argue that we can triumph over biology through single-sex education. If we teach boys and girls separately and in sync with their biologically based learning styles, he claims, they will perform equally well in all academics, including math.

There’s also a fourth possible view on the relations between sex and success—one that no one has systematically articulated to date. If those who assert biological differences between the sexes disagree about whether we can overcome them, the same might apply to those who assert the power of cultural differences. Even if we do provisionally hold that virtually all differences between men and women are cultural, might it not also be true that those differences are impossible to overcome? If so, it wouldn’t be “gender” but the feminist effort to eliminate it that is truly oppressive. This fourth view suggests that the very same cultural forces that make feminists desire androgyny may actually prevent us from achieving it. The cultural sources of “gender” difference, properly understood, would then inform us not that our gender identities are infinitely malleable but that they’re effectively impossible to change.

Sociologists have thought long and hard about the cultural “reproduction of society”—the transmission of deeply held cultural attitudes across the generations. Some social thinkers focus on the conscious transmission of cultural messages through religion and custom, while others highlight the influence of deeper social structures, such as economic organization or family forms. The most sophisticated feminist theories of gender—those that offer the most plausible alternatives to biological explanations—take the latter view. To explain the reproduction of gender differences, they zero in on family structure, especially during the first months and years of life, to a time when the way we care for children is far more important than the words we speak.

A case in point is the work of psychoanalytic sociologist Nancy Chodorow, a women’s studies pioneer who gives flesh to a radically “cultural constructivist” idea of gender. Nearly every feminist plan for engineering a new, androgynous society—from the “egalitarian feminism” of political theorist Susan Okin to the “difference feminism” of developmental psychologist Carol Gilligan—offers a variation on Chodorow’s themes, so it’s worth considering them closely.

Chodorow hypothesizes that the differences between the sexes simply derive from the contingent circumstance that women happen to be the primary caretakers of children. The special, “feminine” empathy required for rearing children, she suggests, becomes indelibly associated in our minds with people who just physically happen to be female. Identifying with their daughters, moreover, mothers tend to stay tightly connected with them for years, drawing them into a circle of mutual dependence and empathy that is the essence of femininity. So it’s not television ads or Barbie dolls that turn little girls into caring women, who themselves want to be mothers. It’s the emotional closeness of mothers and daughters that perpetuates the conventional female sexual role for generation after generation.

Boys learn their gender lessons early, too, Chodorow maintains. Since traditional mothers assume that boys are different from girls, early on they tend to encourage their sons to be independent. As mothers begin to push their sons out of the warm circle of empathy, boys get the message that people with Daddy’s kind of body should act differently from the way Mommy acts. If they want to be men, boys learn, they’ve got to overcome the qualities of emotional empathy of people like Mom. Masculinity thus finds its ground in a rejection of “feminine” qualities.

If we could just break the association between gender and child care, thinks Chodorow—if men as well as women could “mother” children—then we might vanquish gender. Men and women would still have a few distinct body parts, of course, but “masculine” and “feminine” personality differences would no longer have anything to do with bodily equipment. No one would assume that only people with a certain kind of body should be caring and empathic. The speed with which a child became independent would no longer depend on whether it was male or female. A new era would dawn.

Yet even if this understanding of gender as learned behavior is right, androgyny proponents quickly run into a problem. As Chodorow herself underscores, mothering by women produces women who themselves want to be mothers. The mechanism at work may be social and psychological, rather than biological, but it’s no less real for that. How, then, do you get women to mother less and men to mother more, especially when, according to Chodorow, everything in a typical male’s early rearing makes him wrong for the job?

Plato faced this dilemma when he drew up history’s first great plan for a perfectly just society in the Republic—a society that required, among other things, androgyny. His solution: send the members of the old, imperfect city into exile, so that the new, just city could be built from scratch. Otherwise, their recalcitrant mental habits would sabotage the creation of the new order. The fact is, attempts to force a society out of its most deeply held cultural values can be every bit as tyrannical as schemes to override our biological nature.

But what if a society actually existed—not just a theoretical utopia—whose inhabitants yearned for androgyny? What if a society existed whose citizens, motivated by a burning passion for perfect justice, committed themselves to a total reorganization of the traditional family system, with the express purpose of eliminating gender? Such a society has existed, of course: the early Israeli kibbutz movement. The movement wasn’t just a precursor to modern feminism, it’s important to add. The kibbutzniks were utopian socialists who wanted to construct a society where the ideal of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” would govern the production and distribution of goods. It was as part of this larger socialist vision that the kibbutzniks set out to wipe away gender.

Kibbutz parents agreed to see their own children only two hours a day, and for the remaining 22 hours to surrender them to the collective, which would raise them androgynously (trying more to “masculinize” women than “feminize” men). Boys and girls would henceforth do the same kind of work and wear the same kind of clothes. Girls would learn to be soldiers, just like boys. Signs of “bourgeois” femininity—makeup, say—would now be taboo. As if they had stepped out of Plato’s Republic, the children would dress and undress together and even use the same showers.

The experiment collapsed within a generation, and a traditional family and gender system reasserted itself. Why? Those who believe in hardwired natural differences obviously would say that cultural conditioning couldn’t remove the sexes’ genetic programming. Indeed, in his now-infamous conference remarks, Lawrence Summers invoked the history of the kibbutz movement to help make his case that biology might partially explain sex roles.

Feminists, though, say that the kibbutz experiment didn’t get a fair chance. However committed to gender justice the kibbutzniks might have been, they were all traditional Europeans by upbringing. Somehow they must have transmitted the old cultural messages about gender to the children. Perhaps, too, those messages came from the larger Israeli society, from which it was impossible to shelter the boys and girls entirely. What’s more—and Chodorow would doubtless emphasize this fact—the kibbutz child-care nurses were all women. A 50/50 male-female mix might have done the trick.

Yet American androgyny proponents rarely refer to the kibbutz experiment—for understandable reasons. Its failure—even if you accept their own cultural explanation for it—puts a serious damper on the idea of androgynizing America. In the U.S., after all, there’s nothing remotely approaching the level of commitment to surmounting gender found among the early kibbutzniks. If androgyny proved unattainable in a small socialist society whose citizens self-selected for radical feminist convictions, how could one bring it about in contemporary America, where most people don’t want it? It would take a massive amount of coercion—unacceptable in any democracy—to get us even to the point where the kibbutzniks were when they failed to build a post-gender society.

The best account of the experiment’s breakdown, offered by anthropologist Melford Spiro in his books Gender and Culture and Children of the Kibbutz, points out an even bigger obstacle to androgyny. Ultimately, Spiro argues, the kibbutzniks didn’t succeed because the mothers wanted their kids back. They wanted to take care of their young children in the old-fashioned way, themselves. Two hours a day with their kids wasn’t enough. Even among the kibbutz founders, Spiro notes, women often agonized over the sacrifice of maternal pleasure that their egalitarian ideology demanded. He quotes from one mother’s autobiography: “Is it right to make the child return for the night to the children’s home, to say goodnight to it and send it back to sleep among the fifteen or twenty others? This parting from the child before sleep is so unjust!” Such feelings persisted and intensified, until collective pressure forced the kibbutz to let parents spend extra time with their kids.

Spiro holds that a pre-cultural form of maternal instinct subverted the kibbutz’s child-rearing approach. But a plausible cultural explanation is even more devastating to feminist hopes for a gender-free America. What really defeated androgyny on the kibbutz, this interpretation posits, was the profound tension built in to the very culture of modern democratic individualism that the kibbutzniks embraced—the tension between liberty and equality. As part of their insistence on their unique individuality, the kibbutzniks recognized the unabridgeable unique individuality of everyone else. Hence, their insistence on radical equality. Full equality meant that everyone had to treat everyone else the same way. Even the differences between my children and the neighbors’ kids would have to go. They pretended that their children belonged to the collective—“child of the kibbutz,” they would say, not “my child.”

But the other side of democratic individualism is the idea that each of us is uniquely individual. And inseparable from this individualism are certain aspirations—to express yourself personally, and to treat yourself, your possessions, and your family differently from how you treat everyone else. Child rearing doesn’t escape these aspirations. In fact, in modern societies people pay far greater attention to the unique characters of their children than people do in traditional, group-oriented societies. Lavishing intense, personal attention on their kids is a favorite way for modern individuals to exercise personal liberty.

Kibbutz mothers who hoped to treat everyone the same thus also wanted to express their individual characters by molding their own kids. The two goals—reflecting the two sides of modern democratic individualism—were finally incommensurable. Eventually, the desire for personal expression trumped the quest for radical equality. The parents decided to raise their own kids in their own way. No one ever got the chance to find out if further tinkering might have eliminated their children’s gender differences.

The culture of democratic individualism characterizes contemporary America, too, of course, and it still cuts two ways. Feminists insist on radical equality, and androgyny is the logical outcome of that drive for equality. Yet at the same time, especially since the baby boomers came on the scene, many American women have treated the experience of motherhood as an exercise in self-expression—indeed, they do so more fervently than the kibbutzniks.

A modern, self-expressive, committed-to-full-equality American mother might know that her child is getting quality care from a relative, a nanny, or a nursery, but she’ll often feel dissatisfied, since the care isn’t hers. Part of the point of being a parent, she’ll feel, is to express one’s unique personality through how one cares for and shapes one’s children. In practical terms, she’ll be reluctant to give up her kids long enough to break the cycle of “gender reproduction.”

True, the last 40 years have seen tremendous changes in the social roles of men and women—changes that could never have happened were there not significant flexibility in gender roles. From the standpoint of feminism’s ideal of androgyny, though, the shift is still very partial. Until the link between women and child rearing completely breaks down, neither corporate boardrooms nor Harvard professorships of mathematics will see numerical parity between men and women. In the meantime, in disproportionate numbers, at critical points in their careers, women will continue to choose mothering over professional work.

From either a biological or cultural point of view, then, the feminist project of androgyny is ultimately doomed. But that doesn’t mean that it can’t do harm in the meantime. In America, many boys are slipping behind in school; their sisters are significantly more likely to go on to college. Yet thanks largely to the influence of academic feminists, legal and educational resources still flow disproportionately to supposedly victimized girls. In the end, gender won’t disappear, whatever the mavens of women’s studies hope, but the careers of some bright young men probably will.

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2006-Jan-12, by Melanie Kirkpatrick:

The Sisterhood, Defrocked
Kate O'Beirne provides a reality check for anyone who thinks "feminist" means "pro-woman."

Kate O'Beirne is ill-served by the lurid cover of her new book, which features unflattering caricatures of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Hillary Clinton, Jane Fonda and Sarah Jessica Parker (a k a Carrie Bradshaw of "Sex and the City"). The Ann Coulter-ish title--"Women Who Make the World Worse"--is almost as off-putting. Uh-oh, is this going to be another one of those right-wing rants?

Happily, it is anything but. Mrs. O'Beirne's book is a serious examination of 30-plus years of feminist folly and the conservative counter-approach. And while the National Review columnist and TV commentator is not shy about saying what she thinks, the only rants that appear in her pages here are those she quotes from some well-known feminist icons.

In fact, one of the most striking features of "Women Who Make the World Worse" is its "I can't believe she said that" quality. Mrs. O'Beirne informs her chapters on the family, day care, education, politics, the military and sports with a review of the radical feminist dogma on her subject. Anyone still operating under the delusion that "feminist" is synonymous with "pro-woman" should find this a useful reality check.

---

Where to begin? There's Robin Morgan, one of the founders of Ms. magazine, saying in 1970 that marriage is "a slavery-like practice" and arguing that "we can't destroy the inequities between men and women until we destroy marriage." Or move forward a couple of decades to the 1990s, when University of Texas professor Gretchen Ritter, who favored then-First Lady Hillary Clinton's plan to "liberate" women by putting children in federally funded day care, expresses the view that stay-at-home mothers are shirking their duty "to contribute as professionals and community activists."

Also from the Clinton era is Duke University law professor Marilyn Morris, who in her role as an adviser to the secretary of the Army urges the elimination of the "masculinist attitudes" of the military, such as "dominance, assertiveness, aggressiveness, independence, self-sufficiency, and willingness to take risks." Another Clinton adviser complains that the Little League encourages "aggressive violent behavior."

A line that should go down in political history comes courtesy of the late Democratic Rep. Bella Abzug, who in 1984 confidently predicted the victory of the Walter Mondale-Geraldine Ferraro ticket as "women . . . join across all racial, social, and regional lines in stark opposition to President Reagan and his policies." Women went for Reagan by a margin of 56% to 44%.

One of the contributions of Mrs. O'Beirne's book is that she marshals data that effectively shatter the demeaning liberal myth that women vote on "women's issues." She notes, for instance, that when the Gallup organization polled voters monthly during the 2004 presidential election year about the subjects they cared most deeply about, "not even 1% mentioned issues like pay equity, child care, or discrimination and violence against women." Men and women polled equally in their concern about race relations, health care, military strength and so forth.

Also in the realm of politics, Mrs. O'Beirne recounts the hypocrisy of feminist leaders during the Clinton years, comparing them to battered spouses willing to endure any humiliation so long as they don't lose their man. "As long as Bill Clinton supported abortion rights, affirmative action, and federal child care," she writes, "it didn't matter that he was a sexual predator."

Then there's the feminist myth that women are denied equal pay for equal work. No one doubts that this was the case several decades ago--and isolated cases persist--but today women's pay overall is on a par with men's. Discrepancies are generally explained by the personal-employment choices that many women make, such as flexible hours, part-time work or other family-friendly options. She lists 39 occupations--aerospace engineer, speech pathologist, financial analyst--where women earn at least 5% more than men.

Mrs. O'Beirne's assessment of the effect of the feminist agenda on women in the military is especially relevant. There are 213,000 women on active duty, including more than 24,000 single mothers and 29,000 married women with children. The first female casualty in Iraq was Army Pfc. Lori Piestewa, a 24-year-old single mother of a 4-year-old son and a 3-year-old daughter.

The Pentagon's "risk rule," which used to prohibit assigning women to units that were at risk of attack or capture, was repealed in 1994. Mrs. O'Beirne believes that women in the military--especially mothers--belong well behind the front lines. I'm not sure I agree, but I know her analysis has made me think harder about what's at stake not just for the military or women but for our society.

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One of the values of this volume is that it reviews the antifeminist research on the family, education, abortion and more. Mrs. O'Beirne is generous in citing the work of scholars such as Mary Ann Glendon, Diana Furchtgott-Roth, Elaine Donnelly, Karlyn Bowman and others. Radical feminists may have the loudest megaphones, but they aren't the only voices. "Women Who Make the World Worse" is a brief history of how wrong the gender warriors have been about virtually every aspect of American life. But it offers hope for the future in highlighting the scholarship of many women who have made the world better.

Ms. Kirkpatrick is associate editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. You can buy "Women Who Make the World Worse" from the OpinionJournal bookstore.

from the Weekly Standard, 2005-Oct-17, by Heather Mac Donald:

God and (Wo)man at Yale
Feminist hysteria (cont.).

IN THE WAKE OF THE embarrassing Harriet Miers nomination, it is time to ask: Shouldn't feminists--the source of the mandate for a female Supreme Court justice--be disqualified from any influence on public affairs? An exchange in the Yale alumni magazine provides the perfect vehicle for analyzing the lunacy of feminist ideology and its unfitness for the real world.

In May, the magazine ran several articles on religion at Yale, provoked by the university's decision to sever ties between its chapel and the Congregationalist Church (now known as the United Church of Christ). The magazine's cover showed a close-up of four smiling clergymen sharing a laugh against the backdrop of Yale's neo-Gothic arches. The caption read: "So, a minister, a priest, a Buddhist, and a rabbi walk into a university . . . no joke: religion at Yale."

This image was more than two female Yale graduates could bear. "I was ashamed at the cover of last month's alumni magazine," wrote Danielle Elizabeth Tumminio in a letter to the editor. Demonstrating the deconstructive interpretive skills she undoubtedly picked up as an undergraduate, Tumminio went on: "[T]his image sends the message that Yale as an academic and spiritual center has not progressed far from the days when only men could take books out of the library, enroll in classes, and graduate with diplomas that gave them the privilege to lead congregations. . . . [I]t waters down religion at Yale to a patriarchy in which students are asked to conform to the God of the old boys' network."

The Rev. Clare Robert, a divinity school graduate, was equally distraught: "I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw the latest issue of your magazine," she wrote. "I believe an apology is in order." To the Rev. Robert, Yale's cover shows the failure of "30-plus years of feminism and feminist theology." She asks incredulously: "Didn't anyone look at that front cover of four clergymen and see how unrepresentative it is of Yale, of the people in the pews, and even the campus ministries these men supposedly represent?" Inevitably, Robert also took offense at the article's title: "Gods and Man at Yale." A more "sensitive" editor, she admonished, would have amended the title to "Gods and (Wo)Man at Yale"--and literary style be damned.

The world learned last January that the neurasthenic streak in today's feminists has become so strong that they collapse at the mere mention of scientific hypotheses that displease them (as befell MIT biologist Nancy Hopkins upon hearing Harvard president Larry Summers aver to possible sex differences in mathematical ability). Now it turns out that the neo-Victorians cannot even tolerate the sight of men together without breaking out into shame and dismay.

Tumminio and Robert's elicitation of the "patriarchy" from the magazine's cover is a heavy burden to place on one light-hearted photo--especially since the photo happens to be true. It depicts Yale's four university chaplains--Protestant, Jewish, Buddhist, and Catholic--who just happen to be men. Contrary to Robert's assertion that the picture is "unrepresentative" of Yale, it is perfectly representative of the leaders of Yale's main religious communities and is a wholly unremarkable way of introducing the topic at hand.

The irony is that despite their gripe about the cover, Tumminio and Robert implicitly acknowledge that there is nothing remotely "patriarchal" about Yale. Women have a "prominent role" in spiritually nurturing Yale students, Tumminio notes, and serve in large numbers on the divinity school faculty. "Womanist and feminist theology" features prominently in Yale's "religious traditions," says Robert.

The suggestion that the alumni magazine's editors are insensitive to women is equally delusional. This is the same magazine that enthusiastically follows every latest development in Yale's women's and gender studies program, as well as in its queer studies initiatives. In the issue in which Tumminio's and Robert's letters appear, the renowned-alumnus slot goes to Debbie Stoller, the editor of Bust magazine ("For Women With Something to Get Off Their Chests") and author of Stitch 'n Bitch Nation, which inspired an international network of women's knitting groups.

But feminism is above all else insanely narcissistic and hermetically sealed off from reality. The truth doesn't matter. The fact that the university chaplains are male is irrelevant. Feminists such as Tumminio and Robert insist that they must see the female image everywhere, and if they don't, they find solace in something far more satisfying: perpetual injury and rage. Actual equality and access to every social institution count for nothing; one lousy picture, however accurate, triggers an eruption of grievance.

So what is a poor photo editor to do? He has a pleasant image of Yale's university chaplains for a series about the range of religious experience at the college. His problem: The chaplains are men. He knows that this will cause a furor. But what is the proper ratio of male to female that will prevent a feminist wound? If fifty-fifty is always required, does he keep the four chaplains and add four female associate chaplains? If so, the picture will be impossibly crowded. If, on the other hand, he starts jettisoning a chaplain here and a chaplain there in order to reduce the male population, who goes first? The editor's instinct, of course, will be to throw out the Catholic and the Protestant, since they are most associated with the oppressive Western tradition. But here, the sensitive photo editor breaches another mandate: racial representation. Turns out Yale's Protestant chaplain is black. Note that the racial "inclusiveness" of the magazine's cover photo mattered not one iota to the censors, demonstrating that feminists will kick their "people of color" allies in the chops in an instant in their pursuit of female hegemony.

The easiest solution, obviously, is to get rid of the university chaplains entirely and find an all-female photo. And if this picture runs, the editor will receive not one letter from an incensed male reader complaining that he did not see himself "represented" on the cover. Until the feminists can develop a similar degree of immunity to the terrible traumas that daily life inflicts, they should nurse their fragile egos at home and not even think of engagement in anything as bruising as Supreme Court politics.

Heather Mac Donald is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute's City Journal.

from USA Today, 2005-Oct-19, by Mary Beth Marklein, with Anthony DeBarros, Breanne Gilpatrick and Susan O'Brian contributing:

College gender gap widens: 57% are women

In May, the Minnesota Office of Higher Education posted the inevitable culmination of a trend: Last year for the first time, women earned more than half the degrees granted statewide in every category, be it associate, bachelor, master, doctoral or professional.

Cause for celebration — or for concern?

Before you answer, consider the perspective of Jim McCorkell, founder of Admission Possible, a St. Paul program to help low-income high school kids prepare for college. Last year, 30% of the students were boys. This fall, that has inched up to 34%, but only because "we actually did a little affirmative action," McCorkell says. "If we had a tie (between a male and a female applicant), we gave it to a boy."

As women march forward, more boys seem to be falling by the wayside, McCorkell says. Not only do national statistics forecast a continued decline in the percentage of males on college campuses, but the drops are seen in all races, income groups and fields of study, says policy analyst Thomas Mortenson, publisher of the influential Postsecondary Education Opportunity newsletter in Oskaloosa, Iowa. Since 1995, he has been tracking — and sounding the alarm about — the dwindling presence of men in colleges.

College administrators shy away from the term "affirmative action," a murky concept rooted in redressing historic inequities and loaded with legal implications. Yet the imbalances do trouble some admissions officials.

So just as they might consider race or geographical diversity in building freshman classes, they similarly look for gender parity.

There are more men than women ages 18-24 in the USA — 15 million vs. 14.2 million, according to a Census Bureau estimate last year. But nationally, the male/female ratio on campus today is 43/57, a reversal from the late 1960s and well beyond the nearly even splits of the mid-1970s.

The trends have developed in plain view — not ignored exactly, but typically accompanied by some version of the question: Isn't this a sign of women's progress?

Today, though, the blue-collar jobs that once attracted male high school graduates are drying up. More boys are dropping out of high school and out of college. And as the gender gap widens, concern about the educational aspirations of young men appears to be gaining traction, albeit cautiously.

But even as evidence of a problem — a crisis, some say — mounts, "there's a complacency about this topic," McCorkell says.

There has been no outcry, for example, on the scale of a highly publicized 1992 report by the American Association of University Women, How Schools Short-Change Girls, which compiled reams of research on gender inequities.

That study "really ... got people to focus on girls ... (but) there is no big network that protects the needs of boys," says family therapist Michael Gurian, author of the just-published The Minds of Boys: Saving Our Sons from Falling Behind in School and Life, which argues that elementary and secondary schools aren't meeting the developmental needs of boys.

The minefields ahead

And the needs of boys and girls are different, says Kimberly Tsaousis, a college-prep adviser who works mostly with low-income minorities at Cleveland High School in Seattle. "Girls are way more likely to just pay attention" during advising sessions, she says. "It's almost less cool" for boys to show interest in college.

Talk of gender is fraught with social, legal and political minefields. Witness the outcry after Harvard President Lawrence Summers remarked in January that women might be underrepresented in sciences because of innate differences in abilities. For one thing, female inequities persist. There's still a pay gap. According to the Census Bureau, women on average earned 77 cents to each dollar paid to male counterparts in 2004.

So it's perhaps no surprise that most educators exploring the issue have an eye toward equilibrium.

Maine's Department of Education, for example, created a task force to look closely at boys' poor academic performance and found a ratio of 154 women for every 100 men in the state's colleges and universities in 2000, the greatest gap of any state. But the final report, to be released this fall, will recommend strategies to promote gender-equitable education.

"We very quickly decided ... we wanted to make sure we did not neglect" girls even while exploring obstacles facing boys, says deputy commissioner Patrick Phillips.

The University of Washington recently started a college-prep program for boys, but administrator Thomas J. Calhoun Jr. notes the university also supports girls-only programs, including one aimed at increasing women in engineering.

And though President Bush in his State of the Union address singled out boys when he unveiled a$150 million initiative, led by Laura Bush, to dissuade kids from joining gangs, a conference hosted by the first lady Oct. 27 is called "Helping America's Youth."

Federal laws pose additional challenges. Under No Child Left Behind, for example, schools must track data by race and gender, which helps educators pinpoint vulnerable populations.

Yet because of potential conflicts with federal laws created to ensure gender and racial equity, educators "can't target resources to where they see the need," says Deborah Wilds of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which finances college scholarships for underrepresented kids. "You know that the kids least likely to graduate are a particular gender or ethnic background, but then you have to walk a fine line in how you serve them."

'Value in. .. equal numbers'

Most of those tracking the issue agree that getting males into the college pipeline is best addressed in elementary and secondary schools.

Even so, the disparities on campuses worry some admissions officials, particularly at liberal arts colleges where gaps are widest.

"We think there's value in having equal numbers," says Jim Bock, admissions dean at Pennsylvania's Swarthmore College. Last year, the school admitted more women than men, but it admitted a greater percentage of the male applicants than female. The student body's male/female breakdown is about 48/52.

In interviews, several college administrators, including Bock, said they would not admit a male over a better qualified female. But they do try to build a diverse class — an idea that echoes the Supreme Court's 2003 ruling on race-based affirmative action. That ruling struck down a University of Michigan formula that gave extra points to minorities because of their race. But the justices also ruled that schools could consider race as one of many factors because achieving diversity on college campuses is an important goal. In 2000, a federal judge told the University of Georgia to stop awarding bonus points to males (and minorities) in admissions.

A study this year of admissions processes at 13 liberal arts schools, most with a predominantly female applicant pool, found that gender was "not a significant determinant" in admissions decisions. When a gender preference for men emerged, it occurred at historically female campuses where the share of female applicants had reached 55% or more, authors Sandy Baum and Eban Goodstein say.

The authors neither advocate nor oppose affirmative action, but as men grow shorter in supply, "we should be talking about whether it's reasonable to give preferences to men," says Baum, a Skidmore College professor.

UCLA higher education professor Linda Sax says such a discussion should address what effect, if any, the gender composition of a college has on men and women. To find out, she examined data from more than 17,000 students at 204 four-year colleges.

Preliminary results show that on campuses that were predominantly female, both men and women got higher grades. Predominantly female campuses also led to a "significant increase" in men's commitment to promoting racial understanding and led males to more liberal views on abortion, homosexuality and other social issues, her research found.

"What we're talking about here is the impact of women's attitudes and values," Sax says.

For his part, author Gurian says one reason colleges may fail to attract more men is precisely because they are more geared to female learning styles and interests. Colleges that want to compete for the dwindling pool of men should emphasize male interests, such as sports, he says, and offer more male role models.

But meaningful change must take place well before the college years, says Gurian, who acknowledges a personal interest in the subject: He has two daughters. "We all know a boy that's struggling," he says. "If we create a generation of men who aren't getting an education, that's bad for women."

About 9.9 million women (57.4%) and 7.4 million men (42.6%) were enrolled in colleges eligible for federal student aid in 2003-04. The percentage of undergrads (18-24) who are male, by race and income: Low-income (Less than $30,000) Middle-income ($30,000 to $69,999) Upper Income ($70,000 or more) 1995-96 1999-00 2003-04 1995-96 1999-00 2003-04 1995-96 1999-00 2003-04 White 46 42 42 50 46 43 52 48 49 Black 32 36 36 48 42 42 41 48 48 Hispanic 43 43 39 46 51 42 50 52 49 Asian 53 51 47 57 48 50 52 54 51 All 44 42 40 50 47 44 51 48 49 Data: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, National Postsecondary Student Aid Studies, 1995-96, 1999-2000, 2003-04 Income ranges adjusted for inflation to 1995-96 dollars; Source: ACE Center for Policy Analysis

from USA Today, 2005-Oct-19, by Mary Beth Marklein:

Colleges remain cautious in handling gender diversity

As the numbers of college-going males dwindle, gender is a consideration in maintaining diversity. But admissions officials are cautious in their approach.

At Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa., admissions officials gave a nudge to males on the margin for several years, which helped increase the male share from 36% in 1999 to 45% in recent years, says Robert Massa, vice president for enrollment. At the same time, it tried to boost its male applicant pool by marketing to males, playing up sports opportunities and even choosing bolder colors in recruitment brochures.

Now, with enrollments reflecting national trends, preferences are less common, he says.

At Swarthmore College near Philadelphia, where the male/female ratio is roughly 48/52, admissions dean Jim Bock says he doesn't admit less qualified males over female applicants, although female applicants outnumber male applicants. But if the freshman class looks lopsided, he might turn to males on the wait list to help balance the class, he says.

Other schools put less emphasis on all applicants' ninth-grade academic performance as a way to give boys a better chance.

"A lot of boys, they just bloom a little bit later," says Bruce Poch, admissions dean at Pomona College in Claremont, Calif., which last year received three applications from girls for every two from boys. It admitted a smaller share of females — 17% vs. 24% for boys — which helped it maintain a student-body ratio of roughly 50/50.

Poch says Pomona doesn't hold males to a lesser standard, but he says an admissions preference at some point for males is not unthinkable. "If (enrollments) were to suddenly be 65/35, one way or another (a preference) would be a very reasonable question."

Not all schools say gender imbalance is a concern. "I don't want to say people don't notice," says Sanford Ungar, president of Goucher College in Baltimore, where the male/female breakdown is roughly 32/68. "We're just not hung up about it."

While the imbalances are most pronounced on liberal arts campuses, they also show up at large public flagship schools. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has a male/female ratio of 42/58, while the ratio at the universities of Delaware, Georgia and New Mexico hover around 43/57.

Echoing the words of other admissions officials, University of Delaware admissions director Louis Hirsh says, "We're not about to take an unqualified male over a qualified woman."

But he would take notice of males showing interest in majors such as teaching or nursing, where they are underrepresented. Similarly, females applying to engineering programs would grab his attention.

"I think people would say there really is a compelling social interest in having both genders equally represented in those disciplines," he says.

from the New York Times, 2005-Sep-20, by Louise Story:

Many Women at Elite Colleges Set Career Path to Motherhood

Cynthia Liu is precisely the kind of high achiever Yale wants: smart (1510 SAT), disciplined (4.0 grade point average), competitive (finalist in Texas oratory competition), musical (pianist), athletic (runner) and altruistic (hospital volunteer). And at the start of her sophomore year at Yale, Ms. Liu is full of ambition, planning to go to law school.

So will she join the long tradition of famous Ivy League graduates? Not likely. By the time she is 30, this accomplished 19-year-old expects to be a stay-at-home mom.

"My mother's always told me you can't be the best career woman and the best mother at the same time," Ms. Liu said matter-of-factly. "You always have to choose one over the other."

At Yale and other top colleges, women are being groomed to take their place in an ever more diverse professional elite. It is almost taken for granted that, just as they make up half the students at these institutions, they will move into leadership roles on an equal basis with their male classmates.

There is just one problem with this scenario: many of these women say that is not what they want.

Many women at the nation's most elite colleges say they have already decided that they will put aside their careers in favor of raising children. Though some of these students are not planning to have children and some hope to have a family and work full time, many others, like Ms. Liu, say they will happily play a traditional female role, with motherhood their main commitment.

Much attention has been focused on career women who leave the work force to rear children. What seems to be changing is that while many women in college two or three decades ago expected to have full-time careers, their daughters, while still in college, say they have already decided to suspend or end their careers when they have children.

"At the height of the women's movement and shortly thereafter, women were much more firm in their expectation that they could somehow combine full-time work with child rearing," said Cynthia E. Russett, a professor of American history who has taught at Yale since 1967. "The women today are, in effect, turning realistic."

Dr. Russett is among more than a dozen faculty members and administrators at the most exclusive institutions who have been on campus for decades and who said in interviews that they had noticed the changing attitude.

Many students say staying home is not a shocking idea among their friends. Shannon Flynn, an 18-year-old from Guilford, Conn., who is a freshman at Harvard, says many of her girlfriends do not want to work full time.

"Most probably do feel like me, maybe even tending toward wanting to not work at all," said Ms. Flynn, who plans to work part time after having children, though she is torn because she has worked so hard in school.

"Men really aren't put in that position," she said.

Uzezi Abugo, a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania who hopes to become a lawyer, says she, too, wants to be home with her children at least until they are in school.

"I've seen the difference between kids who did have their mother stay at home and kids who didn't, and it's kind of like an obvious difference when you look at it," said Ms. Abugo, whose mother, a nurse, stayed home until Ms. Abugo was in first grade.

While the changing attitudes are difficult to quantify, the shift emerges repeatedly in interviews with Ivy League students, including 138 freshman and senior females at Yale who replied to e-mail questions sent to members of two residential colleges over the last school year.

The interviews found that 85 of the students, or roughly 60 percent, said that when they had children, they planned to cut back on work or stop working entirely. About half of those women said they planned to work part time, and about half wanted to stop work for at least a few years.

Two of the women interviewed said they expected their husbands to stay home with the children while they pursued their careers. Two others said either they or their husbands would stay home, depending on whose career was furthest along.

The women said that pursuing a rigorous college education was worth the time and money because it would help position them to work in meaningful part-time jobs when their children are young or to attain good jobs when their children leave home.

In recent years, elite colleges have emphasized the important roles they expect their alumni - both men and women - to play in society.

For example, earlier this month, Shirley M. Tilghman, the president of Princeton University, welcomed new freshmen, saying: "The goal of a Princeton education is to prepare young men and women to take up positions of leadership in the 21st century. Of course, the word 'leadership' conjures up images of presidents and C.E.O.'s, but I want to stress that my idea of a leader is much broader than that."

She listed education, medicine and engineering as other areas where students could become leaders.

In an e-mail response to a question, Dr. Tilghman added: "There is nothing inconsistent with being a leader and a stay-at-home parent. Some women (and a handful of men) whom I have known who have done this have had a powerful impact on their communities."

Yet the likelihood that so many young women plan to opt out of high-powered careers presents a conundrum.

"It really does raise this question for all of us and for the country: when we work so hard to open academics and other opportunities for women, what kind of return do we expect to get for that?" said Marlyn McGrath Lewis, director of undergraduate admissions at Harvard, who served as dean for coeducation in the late 1970's and early 1980's.

It is a complicated issue and one that most schools have not addressed. The women they are counting on to lead society are likely to marry men who will make enough money to give them a real choice about whether to be full-time mothers, unlike those women who must work out of economic necessity.

It is less than clear what universities should, or could, do about it. For one, a person's expectations at age 18 are less than perfect predictors of their life choices 10 years later. And in any case, admissions officers are not likely to ask applicants whether they plan to become stay-at-home moms.

University officials said that success meant different things to different people and that universities were trying to broaden students' minds, not simply prepare them for jobs.

"What does concern me," said Peter Salovey, the dean of Yale College, "is that so few students seem to be able to think outside the box; so few students seem to be able to imagine a life for themselves that isn't constructed along traditional gender roles."

There is, of course, nothing new about women being more likely than men to stay home to rear children.

According to a 2000 survey of Yale alumni from the classes of 1979, 1984, 1989 and 1994, conducted by the Yale Office of Institutional Research, more men from each of those classes than women said that work was their primary activity - a gap that was small among alumni in their 20's but widened as women moved into their prime child-rearing years. Among the alumni surveyed who had reached their 40's, only 56 percent of the women still worked, compared with 90 percent of the men.

A 2005 study of comparable Yale alumni classes found that the pattern had not changed. Among the alumni who had reached their early 40's, just over half said work was their primary activity, compared with 90 percent of the men. Among the women who had reached their late 40's, some said they had returned to work, but the percentage of women working was still far behind the percentage of men.

A 2001 survey of Harvard Business School graduates found that 31 percent of the women from the classes of 1981, 1985 and 1991 who answered the survey worked only part time or on contract, and another 31 percent did not work at all, levels strikingly similar to the percentages of the Yale students interviewed who predicted they would stay at home or work part time in their 30's and 40's.

What seems new is that while many of their mothers expected to have hard-charging careers, then scaled back their professional plans only after having children, the women of this generation expect their careers to take second place to child rearing.

"It never occurred to me," Rebecca W. Bushnell, dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania, said about working versus raising children. "Thirty years ago when I was heading out, I guess I was just taking it one step at a time."

Dr. Bushnell said young women today, in contrast, are thinking and talking about part-time or flexible work options for when they have children. "People have a heightened awareness of trying to get the right balance between work and family."

Sarah Currie, a senior at Harvard, said many of the men in her American Family class last fall approved of women's plans to stay home with their children.

"A lot of the guys were like, 'I think that's really great,' " Ms. Currie said. "One of the guys was like, 'I think that's sexy.' Staying at home with your children isn't as polarizing of an issue as I envision it is for women who are in their 30's now."

For most of the young women who responded to e-mail questions, a major factor shaping their attitudes seemed to be their experience with their own mothers, about three out of five of whom did not work at all, took several years off or worked only part time.

"My stepmom's very proud of my choice because it makes her feel more valuable," said Kellie Zesch, a Texan who graduated from the University of North Carolina two years ago and who said that once she had children, she intended to stay home for at least five years and then consider working part time. "It justified it to her, that I don't look down on her for not having a career."

Similarly, students who are committed to full-time careers, without breaks, also cited their mothers as influences. Laura Sullivan, a sophomore at Yale who wants to be a lawyer, called her mother's choice to work full time the "greatest gift."

"She showed me what it meant to be an amazing mother and maintain a career," Ms. Sullivan said.

Some of these women's mothers, who said they did not think about these issues so early in their lives, said they were surprised to hear that their college-age daughters had already formed their plans.

Emily Lechner, one of Ms. Liu's roommates, hopes to stay home a few years, then work part time as a lawyer once her children are in school.

Her mother, Carol, who once thought she would have a full-time career but gave it up when her children were born, was pleasantly surprised to hear that. "I do have this bias that the parents can do it best," she said. "I see a lot of women in their 30's who have full-time nannies, and I just question if their kids are getting the best."

For many feminists, it may come as a shock to hear how unbothered many young women at the nation's top schools are by the strictures of traditional roles.

"They are still thinking of this as a private issue; they're accepting it," said Laura Wexler, a professor of American studies and women's and gender studies at Yale. "Women have been given full-time working career opportunities and encouragement with no social changes to support it.

"I really believed 25 years ago," Dr. Wexler added, "that this would be solved by now."

Angie Ku, another of Ms. Liu's roommates who had a stay-at-home mom, talks nonchalantly about attending law or business school, having perhaps a 10-year career and then staying home with her children.

"Parents have such an influence on their children," Ms. Ku said. "I want to have that influence. Me!"

She said she did not mind if that limited her career potential.

"I'll have a career until I have two kids," she said. "It doesn't necessarily matter how far you get. It's kind of like the experience: I have tried what I wanted to do."

Ms. Ku added that she did not think it was a problem that women usually do most of the work raising kids.

"I accept things how they are," she said. "I don't mind the status quo. I don't see why I have to go against it."

After all, she added, those roles got her where she is.

"It worked so well for me," she said, "and I don't see in my life why it wouldn't work."

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2005-Jul-22, by Naomi Schaefer Riley:

How to Get Into College? Watch TV
Finally reality TV lives up to its name.

On Monday night, reality TV finally lived up to its name. Millions of ABC viewers were treated to the finale of a dramatic contest--not to see who could eat the most insects but to see who would win a $250,000 college scholarship. Though the 10 high-school seniors who made it onto "The Scholar" had already been admitted to top colleges, the announcer's voice promised that the show's financial competition would mirror the admissions process. And it did.

The first thing you notice about the show's candidates is their race--four are black, one is Native American and one is Vietnamese. Sadly, that identification may be the first thing that college admissions officers are likely to notice too, in real life. Just in case viewers missed the idea behind such group membership, Melissa, who is half Bahamian and half Austrian-Jewish, is described on the show's Web site as being "sensitive to the plight of the minority." Of course in the aftermath of the Supreme Court's Gratz v. Bollinger decision, college admissions officers are unlikely to keep a racial tally on paper--just in the back of their heads.

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For the most part, the kids on "The Scholar" seem academically qualified, although it's hard to tell. It may just be a sign of rampant grade inflation that Alyssa from Yuba City, Calif., has a 4.67 GPA and Davis from Memphis, Tenn., has a 4.6. Scot from New Freedom, Pa., had only a 4.0, but then again he was home-schooled.

As viewers learned during the show's six episodes, skin color and grades are not enough to make you a winner in the college lottery, on TV or in real life. You also need a hard-luck story. Like real admissions officers, the judges on the show say they like to see not just where a kid ends up but where he starts too. (And you thought that your "Most Improved" softball-player trophy was just going to gather dust.)

Melissa had to cut short her gymnastics career at the age of 13 because of scoliosis. Jeremy's parents came from Vietnam and spent seven days on a boat with only a cup of water between them. Gerald experiences "occasional brushes with overt racism." There is no reason to belittle such hardship tales, but they have little to do with the students' actual accomplishments. As "The Scholar" shows, the college-admissions process has become a kind of victim pageant.

The students on the show are portrayed as financial victims, too--as if, according to that ominous announcer's voice, the "price of admission is threatening the American dream." This claim is the show's one glaring inaccuracy. Show me a black girl with a single mother, early admission to Harvard, near perfect SATs and a 4.0 GPA with AP classes in her schedule and I'll show you a girl on a full scholarship. Thanks to financial aid, for-profit colleges and public universities, everyone these days can afford some college. And poor students who get into elite colleges can count on financial help.

Still, there is nothing more heart-warming to a college administrator than a kid who comes from a poor background and who wants to succeed so that he can "give back to the community," a desire that just about all the contestants on "The Scholar" mention in one way or another. And the service imperative goes beyond the credentializing of high-school applicants. Indeed, community service has become a staple on every college campus. And it's easy to see why. Most college kids prefer ladling soup for the homeless to writing philosophy papers.

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Where community service is popular, liberal politics can't be far behind. When one student on "The Scholar" is asked what global problem keeps her up at night, she explains that she is tormented by the ignorant people in our country who try to prevent stem-cell research from going forward. Another answers, "the Patriot Act," because it threatens our democracy. Arguably, both answers are defensible, but it is hard not to think of them, in this case, as reflexive platitudes.

"The Scholar" does feature contests that require students to know real facts, but the producers of the show have also picked up on another education mantra. "It's not what you know but how you use what you know," the host explains as the competitors are sent off to solve puzzles in teams. The kids who win the show's "Jeopardy"-like tests on literature or science advance to the next round, of course, but the judges also give the losers another shot if they demonstrate "teamwork" or "creativity."

Judging college admissions--or scholarships--by such fuzzy standards is absurd, not just because it destroys any notion of a meritocracy but also because it leads to a certain narcissism. Thus the contestants on "The Scholar" routinely say that they plan to change the world--really.

The level of self-obsession reaches its height, though, when Melissa is asked what famous person, dead or alive, she'd like to have dinner with. "Plato," she answers, noting that she has read his story about the cave and wants to discuss her own "process of self-discovery" with him. I'm sure Plato would have been fascinated.

from the New York Times, 2005-Dec-16, by Sam Dillon:

Literacy Falls for Graduates From College, Testing Finds

The average American college graduate's literacy in English declined significantly over the past decade, according to results of a nationwide test released yesterday.

The National Assessment of Adult Literacy, given in 2003 by the Department of Education, is the nation's most important test of how well adult Americans can read.

The test also found steep declines in the English literacy of Hispanics in the United States, and significant increases among blacks and Asians.

When the test was last administered, in 1992, 40 percent of the nation's college graduates scored at the proficient level, meaning that they were able to read lengthy, complex English texts and draw complicated inferences. But on the 2003 test, only 31 percent of the graduates demonstrated those high-level skills. There were 26.4 million college graduates.

The college graduates who in 2003 failed to demonstrate proficiency included 53 percent who scored at the intermediate level and 14 percent who scored at the basic level, meaning they could read and understand short, commonplace prose texts.

Three percent of college graduates who took the test in 2003, representing some 800,000 Americans, demonstrated "below basic" literacy, meaning that they could not perform more than the simplest skills, like locating easily identifiable information in short prose.

Grover J. Whitehurst, director of an institute within the Department of Education that helped to oversee the test, said he believed that the literacy of college graduates had dropped because a rising number of young Americans in recent years had spent their free time watching television and surfing the Internet.

"We're seeing substantial declines in reading for pleasure, and it's showing up in our literacy levels," he said.

Among blacks and Asians, English literacy increased from 1992 to 2003.

About 29 percent of blacks scored at either the intermediate or proficient levels in 1992, but in 2003, those rose to 33 percent. The percentage of blacks demonstrating "below basic" literacy declined to 24 percent from 30 percent.

Asians scoring at either the intermediate or proficient levels rose to 54 percent from 45 percent in 1992.

The same period saw big declines in Hispanics' English reading skills. In 1992, 35 percent of Hispanics demonstrated "below basic" English literacy, but by 2003 that segment had swelled to 44 percent. And at the higher-performing end of the literacy scale, the proportion of Hispanics demonstrating intermediate or proficient English skills dropped to 27 percent from 33 percent in 1992.

"These are big shifts," said Mark Schneider, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, the arm of the Department of Education that gave the test.

"The Hispanic population in 2003 is radically different than in 1992, and many of the factors that have changed for Spanish-language immigrants make learning English more difficult," Mr. Schneider said. "They are arriving later, staying in the U.S. for a shorter period, and fewer are speaking English at home."

The 2003 test was administered to 19,000 people 16 and older, in homes, college housing and in prisons.

A test conducted in homes across New York State in conjunction with the 2003 national test found that New Yorkers were less literate in English than their national counterparts. Eleven percent of New Yorkers performed at the proficient level in reading prose texts, compared with 13 percent nationally. And 19 percent of New Yorkers scored "below basic," while only 14 percent performed that poorly across the nation.

from Inside Higher Ed, 2005-May-23, by KC Johnson:

Disposition for Bias

Little doubt exists that the nation’s college faculty has become less intellectually diverse over the past generation. According to one recent study, self-described liberals or leftists increased from 39 percent in 1984 to 72 percent now, with even higher percentages among the ranks of humanities and social science professors. Speaking for the educational establishment, Jonathan Knight of the American Association of University Professors doubted “that these liberal views cut very deeply into the education of students.”

Knight might have looked at teacher-training programs before issuing his comment. There, the faculty’s ideological imbalance has allowed three factors — a new accreditation policy, changes in how students are evaluated and curricular orientation around a theme of “social justice” — to impose a de facto political litmus test on the next cohort of public school teachers.

There would seem little or no reason why academic departments would seek to promote social justice, which is essentially a political goal. Though the concept derives from religious thought, “social justice” in contemporary society is guided primarily by a person’s political beliefs: on abortion, or the Middle East, or affirmative action, partisans on both sides deem their position socially just. Literally and theoretically, though never in practice, education programs could define a number of causes as demonstrating a commitment to social justice — perhaps championing Israel’s right to self-defense, so as to defend innocent civilians against suicide murderers; or celebrating a Roman Catholic anti-abortion initiative, so as to promote justice by preventing the destruction of innocent life; or opposing affirmative action, so as to achieve a socially just, color-blind, legal code. Yet, as surveys like those criticized by Knight suggest, adherents of such views are scarce in the academy.

Despite this clear threat of politicization, however, dozens of prominent education programs demand that their students promote social justice. For example:

• At the State University of New York at Oneonta, prospective teachers must “provide evidence of their understanding of social justice in teaching activities, journals, and portfolios. . . and identify social action as the most advanced level.”

• The program at the University of Kansas expects students to be “more global than national and concerned with ideals such as world peace, social justice, respect for diversity and preservation of the environment.”

• The University of Vermont’s department envisions creating “a more humane and just society, free from oppression, that fosters respect for ethnic and cultural diversity.”

• Marquette’s program “has a commitment to social justice in schools and society,” producing teachers who will use the classroom “to transcend the negative effects of the dominant culture.”

• According to the University of Toledo, “Education is our prime vehicle for creating the ‘just’ society,” since “we are preparing citizens to lead productive lives in a democratic society characterized by social justice.”

This rhetoric is admirable. Yet, as the hotly contested campaigns of 2000 and 2004 amply demonstrated, people of good faith disagree on the components of a “just society,” or what constitutes the “negative effects of the dominant culture,” or how best to achieve “world peace. . . and preservation of the environment.”

An intellectually diverse academic culture would ensure that these vague sentiments did not yield one-sided policy prescriptions for students. But the professoriate cannot dismiss its ideological and political imbalance as meaningless while simultaneously implementing initiatives based on a fundamentally partisan agenda.

Instead of downplaying the issue, education programs have adjusted their evaluation criteria to increase its importance. Traditionally, prospective teachers needed to demonstrate knowledge of their subject field and mastery of essential educational skills. In recent years, however, an amorphous third criterion called “dispositions” has emerged. As one conference devoted to the concept explained, using this standard would produce “teachers who possess knowledge and discernment of what is good or virtuous.” Advocates leave ideologically one-sided education departments to determine “what is good or virtuous” in the world.

In 2002, the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education explicitly linked dispositions theory to ensuring ideological conformity among education students. Rather than asking why teachers’ political beliefs are in any way relevant to their ability to perform well in the classroom, NCATE issued new guidelines requiring education departments that listed social justice as a goal to “include some measure of a candidate’s commitment to social justice” when evaluating the “dispositions” of their students. As neither traditional morality nor social justice commitment in any way guarantee high-quality teachers, this strategy only deflects attention away from the all-important goal of training educators who have command of content and the ability to instruct.

The program at my own institution, Brooklyn College, exemplifies how application of NCATE’s new approach can easily be used to screen out potential public school teachers who hold undesirable political beliefs. Brooklyn’s education faculty, which assumes as fact that “an education centered on social justice prepares the highest quality of future teachers,” recently launched a pilot initiative to assess all education students on whether they are “knowledgeable about, sensitive to and responsive to issues of diversity and social justice as these influence curriculum and pedagogy, school culture, relationships with colleagues and members of the school community, and candidates’ analysis of student work and behavior.”

At the undergraduate level, these high-sounding principles have been translated into practice through a required class called “Language and Literacy Development in Secondary Education.” According to numerous students, the course’s instructor demanded that they recognize “white English” as the “oppressors’ language.” Without explanation, the class spent its session before Election Day screening Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. When several students complained to the professor about the course’s politicized content, they were informed that their previous education had left them “brainwashed” on matters relating to race and social justice.

Troubled by this response, at least five students filed written complaints with the department chair last December. They received no formal reply, but soon discovered that their coming forward had negative consequences. One senior was told to leave Brooklyn and take an equivalent course at a community college. Two other students were accused of violating the college’s “academic integrity” policy and refused permission to bring a witness, a tape recorder, or an attorney to a meeting with the dean of undergraduate studies to discuss the allegation. Despite the unseemly nature of retaliating against student whistleblowers, Brooklyn’s overall manner of assessing commitment to “social justice” conforms to NCATE’s recommendations, previewing what we can expect as other education programs more aggressively scrutinize their students’ “dispositions” on the matter.

Must prospective public school teachers accept a professor’s argument that “white English” is the “oppressors’ language” in order to enter the profession? In our ideologically imbalanced academic climate, the combination of dispositions theory and the new NCATE guidelines risk producing a new generation of educators certified not because they mastered their subject but because they expressed fealty to the professoriate’s conception of “social justice.”

KC Johnson is a professor of history at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center.

from FrontPageMagazine.com, 2005-Aug-10:

Indian Hunt In Indiana

William Bradford is a Chiricahua Apache Indian who served 10 years in the army (1990-2001), taught at the National War College and was on the staff of Chief of Joint Chief of Staff Shalikashvili. He has a Ph.D. from Northwestern University and a law degree summa cum laude from the University of Miami. His legal philosophy takes a patriotic bent, most noticeably in his recent article for the Notre Dame Law Review, "The Duty to Defend Them: A Natural Legal Justification of the Bush Doctrine of Preventative War." He recently conducted the training for the JAG attorneys of the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) on the Laws of Armed Conflict. Yet he has also defended a Saudi student in Idaho whom he thought falsely accused of using a website to support terrorism. His specialties are national security and foreign-relations law, international law, law of armed conflict, and federal Indian law.

Bradford was hired as an Assistant Professor of Law (no tenure) at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis School of Law in autumn semester 2002. He was promoted by unanimous vote to associate professor of law without tenure in autumn semester 2004. He has an outstanding record of publication, with already enough legal-scholarly publications--a book and more than 20 articles in law reviews or chapters in books--to be a tenured full professor at IUPUI.

In March 2005 he formally applied for tenure. The application was denied by the Vice Chancellor of the university on the grounds that the normal period of pre-tenure probation is six years, not three. (Technically this is true. But there is no university rule preventing such early promotions and in the case of extraordinary resumes, they are in order.) There was then a “straw poll” vote in the Law Faculty regarding Bradford's possible future tenure: the vote was 10-5 in favor, which in academic terms is not a strong vote, astounding in the case of a candidate with such strong credentials. There was also a vote taken on whether to rehire him merely in untenured status for three more years: this also passed, but again only by a 10-5 vote.

Bradford is convinced that his patriotic political stance on the War on Terror and his refusal to sign a petition in behalf of Ward Churchill which was sponsored by his chief antagonist on the law faculty (and its leading leftwing activist), Professor Florence Roisman, is the proximate cause of this grotesque situation. When Bradford refused to sign her petition for Churchill, Roisman said “What kind of a native American are you?”

There is no other plausible explanation why someone with the scholarly publications to be a full professor, and indeed with a quantity and quality of scholarly publications that compare favorably with those already holding prestigious endowed Chairs in Law at Indiana, did not receive a unanimous or near unanimous vote which is normally the case.

Professor Roisman, who holds an endowed Chair, has led a campaign to vilify Professor Bradford. She has called him a “liar,” and referred to him as “Clarence Tomahawk” (a charge she denies); she has refused to provide any reasons for her opposition to his tenure request, and to merely rehiring him untenured for the next three years, while denying that her opposition is political. It appears that at least three members of the Law School's Progressive Faculty and Staff Coalition voted to deny tenure and a renewed appointment to Bradford.

The five votes against even allowing Bradford to continue for three years as an untenured professor is really astounding, given that he has out-published many full professors in the department, including several with endowed Chairs. He also has stellar service and teaching performance records. It is cruelly ironic that Bradford, an authentic American Indian and a real American patriot, is being punished for having refused to support Ward Churchill, the infamous Indian impostor, academic fraud and American traitor from the University of Colorado.

This case came to our attention at FrontPage after our sister site, www.studentsforacademicfreedom.org published an article about the case that was written by Ruth Holladay and that appeared in the Indianapolis Star. We then received a letter from Professor Roisman, demanding that we retract the claims made in the Indianapolis Star article. We refused. She replied and we answered her reply. The correspondence follows, at the end of which there is an analysis of the entire caes by an academic expert who is a full professor at a major state university and who voted for John Kerry.

[For the accompanying text go here.]

from the San Francisco Chronicle, 2005-May-8, by Dave Murphy:

STRESSED OUT
Experts search for balance as students face intense parental pressure to excel

Darcie Kent is constantly trying to find balance between ... Stanford School of Education Lecturer Dr. Denise Pope has... David Kent, mother Darcie Kent, Amanda Kent, 14, (White S...

As the boy played behind the bushes at his Redwood City school, his obviously agitated mother grabbed him, abruptly escorting him to her car.

"She asked him what he thought he was doing and proceeded to tell him all in one breath that he would never get into a good university or have a good job if he spent all his time playing and goofing around," said Jim Dassise, a parent who watched the episode unfold. "He should be more like one of his friends, who spent his time studying and having good grades."

The boy was about 9 years old.

Moraga resident Cynthia Brian, an acting and media coach who works with children all over the country, has seen the same sort of pressure -- sometimes self-imposed. "At 7 or 8 or 9," she said, "they're already talking about, 'This is going to look good on my resume.' "

Harried schedules, international competition and unrealistic expectations aren't just for adults anymore. The pressure on students to get exceptional grades and build Harvard-quality resumes has gotten so bad that Stanford University has an annual Stressed Out Students conference this week to help intermediate and high school parents, teachers, administrators and -- most of all -- students.

"They're making themselves sick," said Denise Pope, a Stanford School of Education lecturer and founder of Stressed Out Students. "And we're complicit in that."

Pope, author of "Doing School: How We Are Creating a Generation of Stressed Out, Materialistic and Miseducated Students," said even young students quickly understand that the real parental pressure is for grades, not knowledge, so sometimes cheating is the simplest path. Teachers cheat, too, inflating grades because it's easier than fighting with parents.

"A lot of these behaviors start when grades start being given," Pope said. In other words, in third or fourth grade.

The pressure comes from adult anxiety and competitiveness, said Dr. Alvin Rosenfeld, co-author with Nicole Wise of "The Over-Scheduled Child" and the former head of the child psychiatry training program at Stanford's medical school. Top colleges demand great grades. School funding demands good test scores. Both place demands on students.

"It's not about parents who are over the top," said Rosenfeld, who practices adult and child psychiatry in New York and New Jersey. "It's about a cultural pressure that's endemic."

Pope said she and her husband, Mike, limit each of their three children -- ages 8, 6 and 3 -- to one or two extracurricular activities. "I think kids are overscheduled in school and out of school," she said, "and both of those contribute to stress.

"There is severe parent peer pressure out there. There are more resources than ever before that are available to our children, but that doesn't mean you have to use all those resources."

Rosenfeld said harried schedules also take away the free time that is essential for children to be able to fantasize and create.

"If Einstein's parents were alive today, poor little Albert would get a comprehensive evaluation and end up on Ritalin," he said. "Deprived of his daydreams, he might not discover the theory of relativity, but he certainly would focus more fully on the complex demands of fourth-grade math."

Concerns about childhood pressure are hardly new. One popular book from 1981 was David Elkind's "The Hurried Child." But if children were hurried then, they're frenetic now.

A University of Michigan Institute for Social Research study of 3- to 11-year-olds compared the children of 1997 with those of 1981. The ones from 1997 had 12 fewer hours of free time a week, less frequent family dinners and vacations, and virtually no conversations that involved the entire household.

A 2003 survey of 460 parents of 9- to 13-year-olds by the Lucile Packard Foundation for Children's Health, one of the Stanford conference's sponsors, shows how torn parents from San Mateo and Santa Clara counties can be. When asked to list items that made them moderately or very concerned about their children, the most common responses were school performance and feeling stressed.

Often the children's schedules and parental anxieties mirror what is happening in the parents' careers, said UC Berkeley Sociology Professor Arlie Hochschild, who has studied and written books about family dynamics and workplaces. Intense competition and technological advancements have made jobs less secure, and as parents work longer hours, they put their kids in more scheduled activities.

Brian, the acting coach, said that exposing children to a variety of activities -- even offering a gentle nudge -- can be healthy, but too many parents expect their kids to excel. "If they're not everything to all people, they're nothing."

Parents also face unrealistic expectations, she said. "Every single organization or extracurricular meeting believes it's the most important thing on the planet."

Her son and daughter are in college now, but Brian got off the extracurricular parental treadmill years ago.

"At one point, I was gone every night of the week," she said. "Finally, I thought to myself, 'This is absolutely crazy. I'm doing all this so my kids can be part of XYZ, yet I don't have any time to spend with my kids.' "

Even one activity that has been around for generations -- after-school sports -- has gotten more intense and time-consuming, said Jim Thompson, executive director of the Positive Coaching Alliance, a nationwide nonprofit agency based at Stanford. Many California schools cut back on sports after Proposition 13 passed in 1978, meaning that kids have to be shuttled elsewhere.

There are also fewer opportunities for children who aren't top athletes, as the number of baseball teams, for example, dwindles by the teen years, Thompson said.

"Rather than youth sports being an educational function," he said, "it becomes a screening function."

The level of competition inside the classroom has stepped up as well. Rosenfeld said many parents push for perfect grades so their children might qualify for Stanford or an Ivy League university.

Stanford lecturer Pope said the pressures often lead students to cheat. And if their teachers don't look the other way, their parents will.

"Even in the face of hard, cold evidence," Pope said, "the parents will be in denial."

Research in 1999 by Donald McCabe, founder of the Center for Academic Integrity, found that cheating is common at many universities. In his survey of 2,100 students on 21 campuses, one-third admitted to serious cheating on tests, and half admitted to cheating on written assignments.

"A lot of these kids who cheated their way through high school are cheating their way through college," Pope said. "And it doesn't work."

from WorldAndI.com, 2003-Sep, by Laurie Morrow and Edward Morrow:

The Search and Seizure of Textbooks
A leading historian of education offers a chilling picture of textbook publishers, test writers, and sensitivity committees.

The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn
Diane Ravitch
New York: Knopf, 2003 272 pp., $24.00

Bookworm. Cover girl. Snowman! These words strike terror in the hearts of politically correct textbook publishers, who replace such damaging diction with bland, "gender-neutral" terms such as intellectual, model, and snowperson. Also banned are yachts (elitist), Mount Rushmore (offensive to Lakota Indians), and mountains (disconcerting to flatlanders).

In The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn, Diane Ravitch offers a chilling picture of the Newspeak demanded by textbook publishers, test writers, and state and federal bias and sensitivity committees. These eliminate every word, phrase, or idea that challenges their vision of an ideal world, in which girls are unconcerned about their physical appearance, boys are passive and nurturing, and no one celebrates Christmas. Ravitch, a historian of education, served during the first Bush administration as assistant secretary in charge of research in the U.S. Department of Education. She is currently Research Professor of Education at New York University and a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.

Today's language police--the members of bias and sensitivity committees who serve as censors of educational materials such as textbooks and standardized texts--have their origin in the 1960s. However, back in those more innocent times, when feminists quaintly burned their bras and scolded any man who dared "condescend" to them by opening a door for them, the then new, politically correct adjustments to our language seemed silly and comical. When a cigar-chomping comic in a plaid suit joked about manhole covers becoming "personhole" covers and history becoming "herstory," most people politely laughed after the punchline-popping rim shot. How absurd the politically correct word games seemed. Surely this fad would fade away, just as bell-bottoms and granny glasses disappeared into thrift shops and attics.

It didn't. Humor didn't disarm the language police, who, lacking a sense of humor, are incapable of recognizing why they are ridiculous. Herstory, for example, actually became a word in academic circles; a Google search of this term pulls up over fifty-one thousand hits.

Why are the language police so eager to wage war on words? It's because they see this war as a means to power. Control the words people use, and you influence the way they think. While the avowed target is "bias" or "insensitivity," the greater objective is incorrect thought.

The Furies of sensitivity

The lengths to which the language police are willing to go to eradicate such thought are chilling. Pursuing bias relentlessly, the Furies of sensitivity are unencumbered by any reservation regarding whether it is right for them to revise history or to constrict thought to conform to their own wishes and interests--wishes and interests that often run counter to those of ordinary Americans. The censors take a commonsensical idea--for example, that women shouldn't always be depicted as wives and mothers--and radicalize it into never showing women in traditional roles. The language police forbid the word mothering, lest this suggest men are not nurturing. The censors' demands are also often contradictory: a male mustn't be deemed either manly or womanish; a female shouldn't be called either a lady or a tomboy.

The ever-expanding empire of the bias and sensitivity police includes more than purported gender bias. The word old, for example, they deem demeaning. The Sensitivity and Bias Review of New York State

Assessment (Albany, 2000), a document presenting New York State sensitivity guidelines, derides old as "an adjective that implies helplessness, dependency, or other negative conceptions." Houghton-Mifflin demands that old be botoxed into the vague "persons who are older," which begs the impolite question, older than what? the national average? the oldest member of the Bias and Sensitivity committee? dirt? The term minority group is an "offensive reference to cultural differences," for it suggests that minorities are in, well, the minority. Although the Japanese proudly consider themselves eastern--from the Land of the Rising Sun (remember that World War II flag?)--don't call them "Oriental," for this is Eurocentric, and one should have no center in the happy world of cultural equivalence. (One wonders whether the language police would object to a Tokyo resident's using the term Occidental?)

Voracious in their appetite for exposing linguistic evildoing, the language police search and seize not just words but phrases and usages, and the historical or philosophical truths these reflect. Good-bye, "great men in history": henceforth, there are only "people who made history." The Founding Fathers must be rechristened (whoops! renamed) the framers. No more Mother Russia ("replace with 'Russia, land of rich harvests,' " which, given Russia's reliance on American wheat imports, also reflects textbook writers' ignorance of the realities of economics and history). In the unlikely event logical reasoning is taught, don't bother looking for "straw man" arguments; you are permitted to find only "unreal issues."

Stereotyped images regarding occupations, emotions, and activities are to be avoided, even if they reflect obvious truth. Don't depict Mother vacuuming, cooking, or cleaning, despite feminists' complaints in other contexts that women still perform the vast majority of household tasks. A woman is never to be portrayed as a nurse, a mother, a secretary, or--with consummate insensitivity, given that the book is to be used by teachers--as a teacher.

Even stereotypes a normal person would consider positive or just neutral are verboten. Boys are not to be depicted as "curious, ingenious, [or] able to overcome obstacles," nor as "intelligent, logical, [or] mechanical" (though all these positive traits may be assigned to girls). Don't allow an Asian-American student to be depicted as a valedictorian. Don't show an African-American woman as a "powerful 'black matriarch' " (an absurd prohibition eliminating much first-rate African-American literature). Jews can no longer be depicted as doctors, dentists, or lawyers.

During the Iraq war, patriotic Americans were mocked for renaming french fries "freedom fries." The language police want to go even further. With the micromanagement typical of nanny-state advocates, the censors ban the mention of many foods. Lose any allusion to bacon, lest its presence offend Muslims. Other troublesome items are butter, sour cream, cream cheese (clearly, the dairy industry needs to start lobbying textbook publishers), candy, coffee, tea, corn chips, soda pop, potato chips, and pretzels. Ketchup, pickles, and mayonnaise are also banned for being nutritionally incorrect.

Tampering with textbooks

More serious is the prohibition of entire topics. Textbooks are directed to avoid depicting conflicts with parents (good-bye, Pride and Prejudice) or with the law (ta-ta, Robin Hood); crime (arrividerci, Dostoevsky); ethnic groups in desperate situations (lck up Anne Frank's Diary); slavery (sorry, Miss Tubman); suicide (auf Wiedersehen, Romeo and Juliet), or physical violence (we can now only irritate a Mockingbird).

Ravitch argues that censorship comes from both the Left and the Right. Her chapter on censorship by the Right, however, focuses largely on the past, and her long lists of forbidden words and ideas offer very few examples coming from the Right (e.g., the reluctance to mention dinosaurs, lest creationists be offended). The preponderance of her evidence makes it unmistakably clear that the most vigorous forces of censorship today reflect the multicultarist, antireligious agenda on the left.

Once, school textbooks focused on communicating factual, useful information about mathematics, literature, history, and science. Now, however, their purpose is not informational, but ideological.

Thus, according to Ravitch, in mathematics, "what matters most is not whether textbooks effectively teach mathematics, but whether they incorporate multicultural themes and biographies into the math curriculum." Similarly, Ravitch tells us, science textbooks must "point out the scientific contributions that Europeans falsely claimed as their own. There is no recognition that scientific principles are the same in every culture, regardless of 'who did it first.' "

Ravitch asserts that even illustrations must advance the censors' agenda: "When illustrators show historical events where women were not full participants, they must include a caption that calls attention to this inequity; for example a picture of men lined up to vote in the nineteenth century would be accompanied by a caption that said: 'The right to participate in the electoral process was restricted to men until the success of the women's suffrage movement in 1920.' "

The caption is not, however, required to state that neither men nor women voted in Asia, Africa, or in any number of nondemocratic countries elsewhere in the world during the nineteenth century. No harsh truth is to be avoided when it comes to European Americans--and no harsh truth is be acknowledged when it comes to any other people. Bigotry is depicted not as a human evil but as a European one.

Most parents assume that textbooks reflect the best thought by the foremost authorities in any given field. They are wrong.

Textbooks are composed not by individuals but by committees and consultants more race-conscious than the imperial wizard of a Ku Klux Klan chapter. The skin color of an author trumps every other qualification. As Ravitch tells us, "Editors are directed to seek out selections by authors who are of the same ethnic group they are describing." The bias guidelines for Scott-Foresman--Addison-Wesley fill 161 pages, in which people are presented not as individuals but, consistent with identity politics, as representing groups. Even worse than this oppressive race consciousness is its crudity. The bias and sensitivity consultants who determine both language and content typically have little or no expertise in the subject area they are scrutinizing.

By changing the language and censoring thought, the language police hope to control children's thoughts and thus, eventually, society as a whole. "The goal of the language police is not just to stop us from using objectionable words but to stop us from having objectionable thoughts," says Ravitch. "The language police believe that reality follows language usage. If they can stop people from ever seeing offensive words and ideas, they can prevent them from having the thought or committing the act that the words signify." This attitude is reminiscent of those Victorians who struck leg from print or speech, in an effort to promote chastity. Similarly, the censorship of the language police ignores a fundamental truth--the phoniness of the textbook never-never land they construct is readily apparent to children, who live in the complex and troubling real world. As Ravitch observes, "The guideline writers seem to assume that children have never seen a newscast, never seen MTV, never seen anything on television or in the movies that violated the rules of this perfect, if boring, world."

Transforming history and literature

One of the marks of a second-rate mind is a lack of flexibility; such an intellect sees the world through the tiny peephole of its own preexisting opinions. Rather than encourage students to enter imaginatively into worlds unlike their own, the language police have transformed the study of literature and history into a forced march toward their political and social goals. Textbooks no longer focus on aesthetic, intellectual, or spiritual inquiry but treat great literature reductively, as works not of imagination but as mere political or social treatises.

The sensitivity police are also at work eradicating "bias" from standardized tests. Ravitch explains how, for test publishers like Riverside (which produces the famous Iowa Test of Basic Skills), a potential test item is discarded as biased if it "might cause any student to be distracted or upset." The key words here are "might cause," not "will probably cause," and "any student," not the "typical student." Sensitivity pressure groups screen exams with the apparent assumption of widespread and extreme emotional fragility on the part of students. Examples of "negative material" that prevents children from performing on exams include any mention of arguing parents, badly behaving children, or troubling events such as fires, floods, and firings from jobs.

It is nearly miraculous that tests are written at all, given the constraints upon standardized testing by the language police. According to Ravitch, "Test developers are told to avoid value judgments that favor the society in which we live; to avoid controversial or sensitive topics; to be wary of passages written before 1970; to omit references to any specific region; to keep all questions as neutral and minimalist as possible, and to insert positive material about minorities, the aged, the handicapped, women, and other groups into test questions, regardless of its relevance to the subject being assessed."

One might assume that extensive research has been done demonstrating that the items to be excluded have actually been shown to prevent children from performing well, but this is not the case. What we have is, at best, guesswork on the part of the sensitivity fascists.

An especially insidious tactic employed by the language police is silent editing, a technique taken to new heights of offensiveness by New York State Regents exam officials. Exam writers wanted to quote Nobel Prize winner and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel's observation that "man, who was created in God's image, wants to be free as God is free: free to choose between good and evil, love and vengeance, life and death." The exam officials decided it was necessary to carefully excise Wiesel's Jewish faith, lest others find it offensive. Wiesel's statement, sanitized from any appearance of religious faith, appeared on the Regents language arts exam as "Man wants to be free: free to choose between good and evil, love and vengeance, life and death." Wiesel is not the only victim of brutality at the hands of the language police. Perfectly good stories are often rewritten by the censors to meet multicultural goals. Thus, the editors of Holt's high school textbook Concepts in Literature changed Judy Blume's "Freddie in the Middle" into "Maggie in the Middle," and, for good measure, transformed Mrs. Jay into Mrs. Chang.

The language police feel free to change literature to suit their will, for to them literature is nothing but a propaganda tool to promote their agendas. They pretend that there is no such thing as a great literary tradition and discourage teaching children how to make aesthetic judgments. Students are instructed to seek narcissistically their own reflection in what they read, with a reductivistic interpretation of reader-response theory offered as justification. For the language police, literature textbooks are a slightly more sophisticated version of the computer-generated storybooks well-meaning grandparents buy toddlers, in which the child's name and salient details of his life are inserted into the story to encourage the tot's interest: "Then Jeremy told Santa he hoped that there would be a puppy under the Christmas tree at 27 Willowtree Lane." Textbooks encourage students to evaluate literature only according to the subjective and quasi-therapeutic criteria of how a work makes them "feel."

Subjecting children to bad literature textbooks is unfortunate. Subjecting them to bad history textbooks, however, has even greater consequences. Rearing citizens who neither understand nor value American history imperils the nation.

More than in other disciplines, history teachers rely on textbooks for their classroom presentations. According to Ravitch, "Most teachers of history in grades 7-12 have neither a major nor a minor in history; instead they have a degree in social studies education, some other branch of pedagogy, a social science , or a completely unreleated field. Even those who do have a major or minor in history are unlikely to have a solid knowledge of every aspect of American or world history. Consequently, most lteachers in this incredibly broad subject must rely of necessity on their textbooks to supply the organization and basic information for the course." Because of this lack of background in the field, even the best-intended teachers may be unaware how selective and biased textbooks are, and trust the textbook authors and editors to know better than they.

Such trust is sadly misplaced. Rather than be introduced to history, students are subjected to false cultural equivalence. No one civilization is to be considered superior to any other--a shocking assertion, given the varying levels of economic opportunity, degrees of individual freedom, and treatment of women across cultures. Textbook writers present the shortcomings of Christian Europe with vigor but are resolutely blind to the failings of non-Western cultures--or, as Ravitch succinctly puts it: "Christian Europe invades; Islam spreads." Horrors such as Aztec human sacrifice are presented as just part of an alternative belief system. Murderous dictators like Mao are lauded for their efforts at "education," reflecting the censors' ignorance of the particularly horrible fate of teachers at the hands of the Red Guard. World War II is presented in terms of the struggle for women's rights at home rather than as a war against fascism abroad.

No longer do history textbooks present history in coherent, sequential narratives. Rather, what is taught are "themes," such as "oppression," in broad, superficial clumps that conceal historical causality and make it easier to promote the censors' multiculturalist agenda. American nationalism is discarded contemptuously and replaced with globalism. Students reading these textbooks come away with little understanding of the moral (much less the capitalist) foundations of democracy and are ill equipped to respond intelligently to present or future crises.

Ravitch's recommendations

Through their quarter-century of effort, the censors have produced an education establishment that, at all levels, punishes those with traditional values or who question their authority. What is rewarded is cringing compliance--the very antithesis of what education should be about. It should go without saying that it is wrong for teachers and textbooks to compel students to mirror their agenda.

Even for those who share the censors' views, the bias and sensitivity criteria are problematical, for the definition of bias is simultaneously too broad and too proscriptive. It is extremely difficult to write something that cannot be criticized by the language police. Consider, for example, violence. When practiced by men in the American military, violence is often bad; violence in the name of Mao or Quetzalcoatl or the United Mine Workers union, however, is excusable, even laudable. Indeed, almost every kind of behavior is criticized, unless expressed in a way they find appropriate and in terms of their choosing. What this tells us is that the actual goal of the language police is not the cultivation of virtue so much as the exercise of power.

How, then, do we take power away from the language police, and return it to the hands of teachers and parents?

Ravitch explains that textbooks are chosen by state school systems, which buy in enormous quantities. Consequently, textbook publishers don't need to please parents or teachers but state education agencies--specifically, the agencies' bias and sensitivity committees. In trying to satisfy the demands of the marketplace, textbook publishers strive to omit anything remotely controversial that might negatively impact sales. They thus produce as bland a product as possible.

Textbook authors are also releuctant to incur the wrath of bias and sensitivity extremists. Because the largest textbook orders are placed by Texas and California, textbooks are tailored to meet the demands of pressure groups in those states.

Right now, pressure groups need target only four publishing houses to dominate the entire textbook market for millions of teachers. Because publishers use nearly identical bias and sensitivity guidelines, there is little difference among their products. Teachers and schools currently have little real choice among textbooks, no matter how frustrated they are with the miserable offerings before them. Thus, Ravitch recommends that textbooks be chosen not at the state level but at the school district level, the better to address local needs. These needs may well be better met with trade paperbacks--biographies, histories, literary anthologies--and/or computer software.

Ravitch also suggests that textbook publishers be compelled to publish their bias guidelines and the credentials of those they hire as sensitivity consultants. The same should hold true for those producing state examinations. Exam writers, she argues, should be compelled to disclose what items have been excluded from examinations on the grounds of bias and sensitivity, and the basis for the exclusion. As Ravitch points out, "If questions about geometry are excluded, for example, because blind children can't answer them, then the public should be told."

Most importantly, Ravitch emphasizes teachers should have significant expertise in the fields they teach, so they can recognize and correct the shortcomings of any text. This is the best defense against those who would ban words and distort truth.

The language police seek to eliminate anything that might cause students discomfort or distress. The world is, however, a difficult and trying place, full of ideas that must be resisted and fought. What students need to learn are courage and perseverance in the face of difficulty, so that they can confront what should be resisted--including censorship by the language police.

Laurie Morrow, a former Salvatori Fellow of the Heritage Foundation and professor of English, hosts the radio show True North with Laurie Morrow, airing in Burlington, Vermont. Edward Morrow is the author and illustrator of numerous books, most recently The Halloween Handbook (Citadel Press, 2001).

from the Observer, 2005-Jun-26, Henry McDonald, Ireland editor:

Now brainstorms are off the agenda

David Brent would never approve. 'Brainstorming', the buzzword used by executives to generate ideas among their staff, has been deemed politically incorrect by civil servants because it is thought to be offensive to people with brain disorders.

Instead staff at the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment (DETI) in Belfast will use the term 'thought-showers' when they get together to think creatively. A spokeswoman said: 'The DETI does not use the term brainstorming on its training courses on the grounds that it may be deemed pejorative.'

Sources inside the department said there was concern that the term would cause offence to people with epilepsy as well those with brain tumours or brain injuries.

But the Campaign for Plain English complained that the decision had 'reached the point of real ridicule'.

'You do sometimes wonder if some people haven't got anything better to do with their time,' said spokesman John Wild. 'Do they just sit down and search out enough words until eventually they can say: "I can make that out to be politically incorrect"?

'Of course there are certain terms that should be deemed out of bounds, but then sometimes things go too far. I am certain that those who dreamt this up are not suffering from any brain disease or injury. They just want to find offence anywhere they can stumble across it'.

The move follows that of the Welsh Development Agency, set up to promote business in Wales, which ran a series of courses last year to teach staff to be more politically correct. 'Brainstorming' was on its list of banned words, as well as 'nit-picking' and 'manila', because of their origins in the slave trade.

from National Review Online, 2005-Feb-9, by Mark Goldblatt:

W. Churchill
A sad look at a sick academic bubble.

The recent controversy over the writings of Ward Churchill, radical activist, faux Indian, and tenured professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado, raises a number of serious academic issues -- which, let me underscore, does not mean that Churchill himself is in any way serious. On the contrary, Churchill is as unserious as anyone ever paid to stand in front of a classroom, an intellectual featherweight whose ideas are less politically scandalous than buffoonishly wrongheaded. Case in point is his assertion that the victims of the World Trade Center attack got what was coming to them: "If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I'd really be interested in hearing about it."

Churchill's own attempt to clarify what he meant by this is telling: "I have never characterized all the September 11 victims as 'Nazis.' What I said was that the 'technocrats of empire' working in the World Trade Center were the equivalent of 'little Eichmanns.' Adolf Eichmann was not charged with direct killing but with ensuring the smooth running of the infrastructure that enabled the Nazi genocide. Similarly, German industrialists were legitimately targeted by the Allies."

To make sense of Churchill's clarification, a reader has to accept the following premises: 1) the United States government is actively and intentionally engaged in genocide; 2) the hijackers, contrary to their own claims, were attempting to defend individual freedom rather than advance a totalitarian spiritual regime; 3) the ideological agenda of the hijackers represents the true aspirations of the people on whose behalf they claim to act.

Each of these premises is false based on a preponderance of evidence. But that understates the point; all three are so utterly false that failure to recognize their falsehood, in effect, betrays a cognitive disability. Yet I'd estimate ten percent of American college professors -- and I'm low-balling that figure -- would accept them as probably or at least partially true. (If you substitute "corporate capitalists" for "the United States government" in the first premise -- i.e. "Corporate capitalists are actively and intentionally engaged in genocide" -- assent among college faculty probably rises to 25 percent.) These are credentialed adults who are initially hired to instruct, and who are eventually tenured to profess...yet they're professionally, stupendously, tenaciously, defiantly, demonstrably wrong.

That is the gist of the problem.

If we take as axiomatic the principle that colleges exist in order to pursue and disseminate the truth, it follows that no accredited mathematics department would employ a teacher who denied, say, that base angles of an isosceles triangle are equal; that no physics department would employ a teacher who denied the force of gravity; that no chemistry department would employ a teacher who denied that protons and neutrons are found in the nuclei of atoms; that no biology department would employ a teacher who denied that green plants convert light energy into chemical energy by photosynthesis. The hard sciences, in other words, are bound in their fidelity to truth not only by traditional logic and empirical evidence but by a demand for coherence within a framework of what is already known. Faculty in hard sciences seek to push the envelope of knowledge, not to "deconstruct" it. (Deconstruct v.t. To affect intellectual depth by teasing out secondary and tertiary senses of a term until it belies its original meaning.) It is exceedingly rare, therefore, to find a professor in a hard science espousing irrational, unsupportable theories.

Not so in the social sciences. To be sure, no history department would, in the current academic climate, employ a teacher who openly argued that the Holocaust never happened. But this is a matter of political expediency, not material certainty. On the contrary, many history departments employ teachers steeped in postmodern thinking, who hold, for example, that the perception of a reality existing independently of thought and language is illusory, that "reality" is in fact a linguistic construct of the phenomena of subjective experience which is continually adjusted in response to a fluid social consensus. But if there's no such thing as an independent reality, then there can be no reality check. There's no test for truth. And that, my friends, is Holocaust denial -- one step removed. Postmodern thought has taken root across the social sciences, spawning all manner of loopy theoretical posturing in history, psychology, sociology, anthropology, linguistics, political science, and even philosophy itself.

Still further down the epistemological food chain come literature and art, pseudo-disciplines hoist on the ouija-board wonkery of aesthetic judgment. The truth value of a work is gauged neither by correspondence with an independent reality nor even, for the last quarter century, by it coherence within a canonical framework; rather, truth value is a function of whether the work pleases the teacher. Subjectivity, therefore, rules. Literature and art departments often employ faculty members whose theories are not just at variance with one another but are mutually exclusive. It is not unusual, nowadays, for two students at the same college to sign up for the same survey course the same semester with two different professors and discover they're learning nothing in common.

But the epistemological nadir of any university is found in the wacky world of ethnic and gender studies: black studies, Africana studies, Chicano studies, Latino studies, Puerto Rican studies, Middle Eastern studies, Native American studies, women's studies, gay and lesbian studies, et al. The suggestion that "studying" is involved in any of these subjects is laughable; they are quasi-religious advocacy groups whose curricula run the gamut from historical wish fulfillment (the ancient Egyptians were black; the U.S. Constitution was derived from the Iroquois Nation) to political axe grinding (the Israelis are committing genocide against the Palestinians; the U.S. is committing genocide against the people of Cuba) to gynocentric self-help (reasoning from verifiable data is a tool of male domination, to which the experiential impressions of women are a necessary antidote) to circumstantial special pleading (Lincoln was gay because, well, he was a nice guy; Hitler, not so nice, therefore not gay). Contesting the status quo is the raison d'etre [être -AMPP Ed.] of these departments. No idea is beyond the pale -- except, of course, the suggestion that the status quo might somehow be valid.

Which returns us to Ward Churchill, professor of ethnic studies, University of Colorado. In one sense, he's like a thousand other burnt-out refugees from the 1960s who avoided a full-time job long enough to acquire multiple university degrees. Along the way, however, he convinced lots of people that he was a Cherokee Indian -- apparently on the basis of an honorary tribal membership -- and thus tapped into the vast reservoir of white liberal guilt flowing through the halls of academia. Most critically, he found outlets to publish crypto-Marxist rants and thereby distinguished himself from the vast majority of his invincibly ignorant peers. That publishing record, in turn, allowed him to command not only his tenured professorship, but activist committee posts and lucrative speaking engagements at campuses nationwide.

So who published Ward Churchill?

Well, there's AK Press. Publisher's mission statement:

AK Press is a worker run book publisher and distributor organized around anarchist principles. . . . Our goal is to make available radical books and other materials, titles that are published by independent presses, not the corporate giants, titles with which you can make a positive change in the world.

Then there's South End Press. Publisher's mission statement:

Since our founding in 1977, we have tried to meet the needs of readers who are exploring, or are already committed to, the politics of radical social change. . . . In this way, we hope to give expression to a wide diversity of democratic social movements and to provide an alternative to the products of corporate publishing.

Finally, there's City Lights Books. Manuscript submission guidelines:

City Lights Books is a publisher of fiction, essays, memoirs, translations, poetry, and books on social and political issues. We publish a dozen new books a year and are committed to providing the finest works of vanguard literature and oppositional politics.

In other words, Churchill hooked up with like-minded lefties, networked himself into book contracts, parlayed these into academic prestige and political name recognition -- and thus a wholly unserious man who says wholly unserious things wound up being taken very seriously. In a more rational world, Churchill would be an amateur conspiracy theorist with a chip on his shoulder, the type who spends an hour on hold with CSPAN to spew 15 seconds of venom before Brian Lamb cuts him off.

In our world, Churchill is a cause célébre [célèbre -AMPP Ed.].

So what's to be done with him?

The fact that he has tenure must, I'm afraid, be taken into account. Firing him, or forcing him to resign, might be morally satisfying but would be a tactical error. It would confer martyr status on him, and it would be interpreted by his students, and by Churchill himself, as punishment for speaking the truth to power. Besides, the fault here does not lie with Churchill; he's a symptom, not a disease. The fault lies, generally, with the sick academic culture in which he has thrived, and, specifically, with the administrative weasels at the University of Colorado who have repeatedly rewarded his dubious critical achievements. What should be done with Churchill, therefore, is...nothing. His notoriety should stand as an ongoing monument to the decay of intellectual standards in higher education, and his professorship as an ongoing monument to the intellectual cowardice of the school which hired and tenured him.

Thus, inadvertently, Ward Churchill might teach us all a lesson.

Mark Goldblatt's novel, Africa Speaks, is a satire of black hip-hop culture.

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2005-Feb-18:

Hockey Stick on Ice
Politicizing the science of global warming.

On Wednesday National Hockey League Commissioner Gary Bettman canceled the season, and we guess that's a loss. But this week also brought news of something else that's been put on ice. We're talking about the "hockey stick."

Just so we're clear, this hockey stick isn't a sports implement; it's a scientific graph. Back in the late 1990s, American geoscientist Michael Mann published a chart that purported to show average surface temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere over the past 1,000 years. The chart showed relatively minor fluctuations in temperature over the first 900 years, then a sharp and continuous rise over the past century, giving it a hockey-stick shape.

Mr. Mann's chart was both a scientific and political sensation. It contradicted a body of scientific work suggesting a warm period early in the second millennium, followed by a "Little Ice Age" starting in the 14th century. It also provided some visually arresting scientific support for the contention that fossil-fuel emissions were the cause of higher temperatures. Little wonder, then, that Mr. Mann's hockey stick appears five times in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's landmark 2001 report on global warming, which paved the way to this week's global ratification--sans the U.S., Australia and China--of the Kyoto Protocol.

---

Yet there were doubts about Mr. Mann's methods and analysis from the start. In 1998, Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics published a paper in the journal Climate Research, arguing that there really had been a Medieval warm period. The result: Messrs. Soon and Baliunas were treated as heretics and six editors at Climate Research were made to resign.

Still, questions persisted. In 2003, Stephen McIntyre, a Toronto minerals consultant and amateur mathematician, and Ross McKitrick, an economist at Canada's University of Guelph, jointly published a critique of the hockey stick analysis. Their conclusion: Mr. Mann's work was riddled with "collation errors, unjustifiable truncations of extrapolation of source data, obsolete data, geographical location errors, incorrect calculations of principal components, and other quality control defects." Once these were corrected, the Medieval warm period showed up again in the data.

This should have produced a healthy scientific debate. Instead, as the Journal's Antonio Regalado reported Monday, Mr. Mann tried to shut down debate by refusing to disclose the mathematical algorithm by which he arrived at his conclusions. All the same, Mr. Mann was forced to publish a retraction of some of his initial data, and doubts about his statistical methods have since grown. Statistician Francis Zwiers of Environment Canada (a government agency) notes that Mr. Mann's method "preferentially produces hockey sticks when there are none in the data." Other reputable scientists such as Berkeley's Richard Muller and Hans von Storch of Germany's GKSS Center essentially agree.

We realize this may all seem like so much academic nonsense. Yet if there really was a Medieval warm period (we draw no conclusions), it would cast some doubt on the contention that our SUVs and air conditioners, rather than natural causes, are to blame for apparent global warming.

There is also the not-so-small matter of the politicization of science: If climate scientists feel their careers might be put at risk by questioning some orthodoxy, the inevitable result will be bad science. It says something that it took two non-climate scientists to bring Mr. Mann's errors to light.

But the important point is this: The world is being lobbied to place a huge economic bet--as much as $150 billion a year--on the notion that man-made global warming is real. Businesses are gearing up, at considerable cost, to deal with a new regulatory environment; complex carbon-trading schemes are in the making. Shouldn't everyone look very carefully, and honestly, at the science before we jump off this particular cliff?

from the New York Post, 2005-Feb-21, by David Andreatta:

SOLDIER STUNNED BY LETTER KIDS' RANTS

An American soldier overseas is fuming over letters he received from Brooklyn middle-school children accusing GIs of destroying mosques and killing civilians in Iraq.

Pfc. Rob Jacobs of New Jersey said he was initially ecstatic to get a package of letters from sixth-graders at JHS 51 in Park Slope last month at his base 10 miles from the North Korea border.

That changed when he opened the envelope and found missives strewn with politically charged rhetoric, vicious accusations and demoralizing predictions that only a handful of soldiers would leave the Iraq war alive.

"It's hard enough for soldiers to deal with being away from their families, they don't need to be getting letters like this," Jacobs, 20, said in a phone interview from his base at Camp Casey.

"If they don't have anything nice to say, they might as well not say anything at all."

One Muslim boy wrote: "Even thoe [sic] you are risking your life for our country, have you seen how many civilians you or some other soldier killed?"

His letter, which was stamped with a smiley face, went on: "I know your [sic] trying to save our country and kill the terrorists but you are also destroying holy places like Mosques."

Most of the 21 letters Jacobs provided to The Post mentioned some support for the armed forces, if not the Iraq war, and thanked him for his service. But nine of the students made clear their distaste for the president or the war.

The letters were written as a social-studies assignment.

The JHS 51 teacher, Alex Kunhardt, did not return phone calls, but the school principal, Xavier Costello, responded with a statement:

"While we would never censor anything that our children write, we sincerely apologize for forwarding letters that were in any way inappropriate to Pfc. Jacobs. This assignment was not intended to be insensitive, but to be supportive of the men and women in service to our nation."

In the following two items, compare the administrative punishment for the teacher who fired a pellet gun at a student in his classroom (four day suspension), with the punishment for a student who thoughtlessly transported a pellet gun (expulsion). In the teacher's case, at least the county prosecutor has stepped in to set things right.

from the Associated Press, 2005-Feb-26:

Prosecutors: Teacher fired air-powered toy gun at students

ROCHESTER HILLS, Mich. -- A teacher has been charged with assault and battery after authorities say he fired an air-powered toy gun at students, prompting one to dive for cover behind a desk.

According to prosecutors, Lewis Burch, 49, of Utica, told a disruptive class at Rochester Hills Christian in December: "I'll have peace in my classroom if I have to kill everyone to get it," The Daily Oakland Press of Pontiac reported.

An argument in the classroom sparked the incident, said Chief Deputy Oakland County Prosecutor Deborah Carley. She said Burch pulled out the gun and fired it about a half dozen times toward students, targeting a 17-year-old boy who dove for cover.

"Thankfully, he wasn't hurt," Carley told the newspaper for a Saturday story.

The gun fires plastic pellets.

An arrest warrant charges Burch with the misdemeanor, which is punishable by up to 93 days in jail. Carley said Burch was suspended by school officials for four days after the incident was reported.

There was no telephone listing for Burch in Utica.

A message seeking comment was left Saturday at the school.

------

Information from: The Daily Oakland Press, http://www.theoaklandpress.com

from the Curry Coastal Pilot of Brookings Oregon, 2005-Feb-19, by Andrea Barkan:

BOARD OKs EXPULSION OF STUDENT WHO BROUGHT GUN TO SCHOOL

The Brookings-Harbor School Board Wednesday upheld the district's recent decision to expel Brookings-Harbor High School senior James Miller after he brought an air pellet gun to school Jan. 27.

Board members agreed to allow the 18-year-old to participate in graduation ceremonies with his class this June, provided he finishes all the required coursework in night school.

They also agreed to remove the weapons violation from Miller's disciplinary record.

But Miller, who plays varsity baseball, football and basketball, won't be allowed back in school, squelching his last opportunity to impress college baseball scouts during the upcoming season.

Miller, who's been visited by college scouts in seasons past, told the board without a baseball scholarship he wouldn't be able to afford tuition to a four-year college next year.

"If I don't play baseball this year ... I don't see me making it to any college," Miller said.

Miller was an All-Far West League first-team designated hitter last year.

Board members said they used federal law, board policy and the recommendations of their hearings officer, an independent local attorney, to guide their decision-making process.

Under the district's zero-tolerance policy, even bringing a replica of a weapon on school property one time warrants expulsion for any student.

In expulsion cases, the hearings officer always makes the initial decision based on facts of the case.

Every expelled student has the option to appeal that decision.

Miller and his parents made a rare request for a public appeal hearing — most student expulsion appeals are closed to the public and decided in executive session.

About 50 people attended Wednesday's hearing at Kalmiopsis Elementary School to show support for Miller, including family, friends and school staff.

Miller's parents and his former BHHS teacher Greg Jones spoke in his defense before the board made its final decision.

"My son clearly made a mistake," James' father, Chris Miller, said. "But I know he never intended to hurt anyone.

"This is his senior year," Chris said. "This particular time in his life has a lot of importance."

James' mother, Dannette Gwin, made a similar plea to board members.

"He didn't intend to create any problems," Gwin said, her eyes tearful and red-rimmed.

"I'm asking you to look at the situation as an individual case and understand that James as an individual is a good kid," she said.

Miller admitted that bringing the Crosman air pistol to school was stupid.

Apparently, Miller had left the gun in a friend's car before Jan. 27, when he went to lunch with that friend.

His mother called him that day requesting he do an errand for her, so Miller's friend dropped him back at BHHS.

Before Miller headed through school to his own car, he took his air gun out of his friend's vehicle.

With the air gun in his waistband, he walked through the high school. A student saw the partially-concealed gun and reported it immediately to Principal George Park.

"I didn't even consider the ramifications," Miller said. "I didn't consider it a weapon. It's strictly recreational."

School Board Chair Bill Ferry verified with local police that the gun in question was a Crosman RepeatAir CO2 Pistol.

The manufacturer's Web site includes a warning for the air gun stating it is "not a toy.

"Misuse or careless use may cause serious injury or death," the Web site says.

Miller and his supporters were not happy with the board's final decision.

"I'm really angry," Chris said. "I thought they made a mistake. They clearly didn't evaluate the circumstances.

"They took a hard stance and my son ends up taking the brunt of it," he added.

Chris spoke aggressively with board members Wednesday night after they announced their decision and the room had cleared.

Board Chair Bill Ferry reminded Chris that James' actions caused the expulsion.

"He put us here tonight," Ferry said.

"It tugs on your heart strings, we can't deny that," he said.

"I wish we could turn back the clock for your son," Ferry told Chris. "We can't do it.

"This is not the end of the line," Ferry added. "He has other options."

from the Las Vegas Review-Journal, 2005-Feb-5, by Richard Lake:

Lecture causes dispute
UNLV accused of limiting free speech

A UNLV professor under fire for comments he made about homosexuals during a class lecture last year demanded Friday that the university stop threatening to punish him.

"I have done absolutely nothing wrong," said the professor, Hans Hoppe, a conservative libertarian economist with almost 20 years teaching experience at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada, on Hoppe's behalf, sent a letter to UNLV officials alleging that the university violated Hoppe's free speech rights and his right to academic freedom.

"The charge against professor Hoppe is totally specious and without merit," reads the letter from ACLU attorney Allen Lichtenstein.

He said they would sue the university if necessary, though they hope to avoid it.

UNLV officials would not comment on the case, saying they cannot talk publicly about personnel matters.

Hoppe, 55, a world-renowned economist, author and speaker, said he was giving a lecture to his money and banking class in March when the incident occurred.

The subject of the lecture was economic planning for the future. Hoppe said he gave several examples to the class of about 30 upper-level undergraduate students on groups who tend to plan for the future and groups who do not.

Very young and very old people, for example, tend not to plan for the future, he said. Couples with children tend to plan more than couples without.

As in all social sciences, he said, he was speaking in generalities.

Another example he gave the class was that homosexuals tend to plan less for the future than heterosexuals.

Reasons for the phenomenon include the fact that homosexuals tend not to have children, he said. They also tend to live riskier lifestyles than heterosexuals, Hoppe said.

He said there is a belief among some economists that one of the 20th century's most influential economists, John Maynard Keynes, was influenced in his beliefs by his homosexuality. Keynes espoused a "spend it now" philosophy to keep an economy strong, much as President Bush did after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Hoppe said the portion of the lecture on homosexuals lasted perhaps 90 seconds, while the entire lecture took up his 75-minute class.

There were no questions or any discussion from the students about the homosexual comments, he said.

"I have given lectures like this for 18 years," said Hoppe, a native of Germany who joined UNLV's faculty in 1986. "I have given this lecture all over the world and never had any complaints about it."

But within days of the lecture, he was notified by school officials that a student had lodged an informal complaint. The student said Hoppe's comments offended him.

A series of formal hearings ensued.

Hoppe said that, at the request of university officials, he clarified in his next class that he was speaking in generalities only and did not mean to offend anyone.

As an example of what he meant, he offered this: Italians tend to eat more spaghetti than Germans, and Germans tend to eat more sauerkraut than Italians. It is not universally true, he said, but it is generally true.

The student then filed a formal complaint, Hoppe said, alleging that Hoppe did not take the complaint seriously.

He said university officials first said they would issue him a letter of reprimand and dock him a week's pay.

That option was rejected by Hoppe's dean and by the university provost, Hoppe said.

More hearings ensued, he said. In the end, the university gave him until Friday to accept its latest offer of punishment: It would issue him a letter of reprimand and he would give up his next pay increase.

Hoppe, a tenured full professor, contacted the ACLU on the recommendation of an attorney friend of his. Hoppe is now their client.

"I felt like I was the victim," he said, "not the student."

ACLU officials said the validity of Hoppe's economic theories does not matter. It is his right to espouse them in class.

"We don't subscribe to Hans' theories and certainly understand why some students find them offensive," said Gary Peck, the ACLU of Nevada's executive director.

"But academic freedom means nothing if it doesn't protect the right of professors to present scholarly ideas that are relevant to their curricula, even if they are controversial and rub people the wrong way."

Hoppe said he is dumbfounded by the university's response to the student's complaint. It is not his job, he said, to consider how a student might feel about economic theories.

"Our task is to teach what we consider to be right," he said. The offended student, he said, should have been told to "grow up."

Hoppe protested that university officials declined to speak to other students in the class to find out what actually happened and even rejected letters he solicited from a half-dozen students.

UNLV's general counsel, Richard Linstrom, would not talk about Hoppe's case, but said the university values free speech.

"The administration of UNLV is fully committed to academic freedom in all respects," he said. Linstrom said he was in a Board of Regents meeting most of Friday and had not seen the ACLU's letter.

Lichtenstein, the ACLU lawyer, said the university's response to Hoppe's situation might stifle free speech on the campus.

"If he can be silenced, that's going to create self-censorship among other faculty members who won't say anything controversial," he said. "Who's going to lose in all this? The students."

from the Washington Times, 2005-Jan-16, by George Archibald:

California professor flunks Kuwaiti's pro-U.S. essay

A 17-year-old Kuwaiti student whose uncles were kidnapped and tortured by Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's invaders more than a decade ago said his California college political science professor failed him for praising the United States in a final-exam essay last month.

Ahmad Al-Qloushi, a foreign student at Foothill College near San Jose, Calif., said he was told by professor Joseph A. Woolcock to get psychological treatment because of the pro-American views expressed in his essay.

"Apparently, if you are an Arab Muslim who loves America, you must be deranged," said Mr. Al-Qloushi, who feared the failing grade could cost him his student visa.

"I didn't want to be deported for hav