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At Wichita State recently, a college debate coach dropped his trousers after a foul-mouthed argument with the opposing coach in a debating tournament. YouTube shows it for the world to see.  Coach William Shanahan, who sports a caveman beard reaching below his belt, said later that, yes, his reasoning might seem "convoluted," but his trouser-dropping act was intended a sign of respect for the opposing coach.  ""Obviously it got out of control, but to be honest I thought I was in a safe house," Shanahan said. "I thought I was part of a community that handled its problems internally and...

Dear William & Mary Community, As you know, earlier today the Board of Visitors offered me the presidency of the College of William & Mary, without “interim” in the title. I have accepted and am deeply moved by the Board’s confidence in me and by the enormous support that has come my way from all corners of the William & Mary community over the last six and a half months. We share a marvelous institution. I will do my level best for W&M. We are in this together, however, and the College needs the commitment of us all to move...

A Crisis Brewing in the Classrooms 05 September 2008 By Anna Malpas / Staff Writer When economics student Mikhail Popov struggled with a final exam at a regional university, he was offered an alternative — pay $200 and get a good grade. "I wasn't sure of how well I would do, so I agreed in order to avoid any problems," Popov said. It is a common practice at his university, he said: "A lot of people do it — the majority." Once the pride of the Soviet system, the education system helped unite the population, giving millions a similar start...

Churchill’s Ministry of Peace by: Bethany Stotts, September 04, 2008 Ward Churchill, a former ethnic studies professor at the University of Colorado (UC), may have been fired after a UC investigation revealed his plagiarism and poor scholarship, but some anti-war outlets still court the controversial professor’s company. Churchill has shown himself to be more than willing to equate the September 11, 2001 attacks with the death of infants in the Iraq War and to label the victims of the 9/11 attacks as “little Eichmanns.” During a 2006 interview on Hannity & Colmes, Churchill defended his comments, arguing that they were...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A retired professor of electrical engineering at the University of Tennessee was convicted on Wednesday of violating U.S. arms export controls and passing sensitive data to a Chinese national, the U.S. Justice Department said.

George Steiner, 79, said he believed racism was inherent in everyone and that racial tolerance was merely skin deep. The playwright and critic Bonnie Greer labelled him a "cranky old man", while Muslim groups accused him of an "offensive and lazy" racist generalisation. But other academics defended his honesty and right to express such views, saying they were a valuable addition to an important debate. "It's very easy to sit here, in this room, and say 'racism is horrible'," he said from his house in Cambridge, where he has been Extraordinary Fellow at Churchill College since 1969. "But ask me...

For the first time in more than five years, a prominent Palestinian Arab activist, Sami Al-Arian, is free from jail. His respite from jail may not last long: The former college professor faces a second round of criminal charges in his lengthy legal battle with federal prosecutors. Al-Arian had been in government custody since he was charged with being the leader in America of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad more than five years ago. He was not convicted at trial, although he subsequently pleaded guilty to lending aid to that group and received a sentence of 57 months. Al-Arian's incarceration has...

This year 60 percent of the first-year class brought Apple computers to school, bringing the school total to 40 percent Apple and 60 percent computers with Windows based operating system, a Library and Technology Services staff member said. The LTS Web site says that for the 2003 to 2004 academic year, about 79 percent of students had Windows operating systems and 20 percent had Apple computers with one percent of students using the Linux operating system. Information on the proportions of students who had computers with Windows and Apple computers last year is not available. "Apple has a fantastic ad...

"...The Weather Underground placed a bomb in the women’s bathroom in the Air Force wing of The Pentagon..." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weatherman_(organization) "...University Ethics Office...University Code of Conduct...Approved January 22, 2002 by the University Senates Conference...Introduction... This Code of Conduct establishes guidelines for professional conduct by those acting on behalf of the University including executive officers, faculty, staff, and other individuals employed by the University..." http://www.ethics.uillinois.edu/policies/code.cfm

Many people associate property crime and other delinquent behaviors with low social status and a lack of education. But new research has identified a surprising risk factor for bad behavior — college. Men who attend college are more likely to commit property crimes during their college years than their non-college-attending peers, according to research to be presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association in Boston this weekend. Sociologists at Bowling Green State University in Ohio examined data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, which tracks education, crime levels, substance abuse and socializing among adolescents and...

Plans by the University of Chicago to establish a research institute named after legendary free-market economist Milton Friedman have caused an uproar at the school on the city's South Side. More than 100 tenured faculty members have signed letters and a petition opposing the institute, which would be paid for by private donations and would conduct research in economics, medicine, public policy and law. Critics say that they are concerned the institute will be a partisan, elitist organization and that it shouldn't be under the auspices of a university.

So, where's the labor? On this particular holiday at this particular time, it's a question that more people are wondering about. Here's why: In a period of severe economic uncertainty, Connecticut's high school graduates still are opting for a college education that costs a record amount and no longer guarantees a good job, while industry is desperate for skilled workers and has jobs to give them. "We offer good-paying and interesting work, training and benefits, while students and their families are still going into debt to pay college bills," said Bernard Rosselli, president of Stewart EFI, an eyelet making company...

Ward Churchill is still in the limelight a year after being fired by the University of Colorado Board of Regents. The ex-professor ...also taught a student-organized, unsanctioned class at CU last year called Revisioning American History.

One-third of graduates are receiving no financial benefit from their degree as young people drawn in by Labour’s mass expansion of universities see the value of studying decline for the first time. A study has identified a widening gulf between the highest-paid graduates, whose degrees have brought them soaring returns over the past decade, and those at the lower end. Among male graduates, 33.2% end up in nongraduate jobs five years after leaving university, from 21.7% in 1992. The proportions for women are similar. These graduates now earn 40% less than if they had found a job where degree was...

Arguing that UCLA admissions policies are being manipulated to circumvent the state's ban on consideration of applicants' race, a professor there has resigned from a faculty committee that he says refused to allow him to study the matter. Political science professor Tim Groseclose resigned Thursday from the Committee on Undergraduate Admissions and Relations with Schools, saying high-ranking university administrators and fellow committee members are engaged in a "coverup" to block illegal activity from being discovered. "A growing body of evidence strongly suggests that UCLA is cheating on admissions," he wrote in an 89-page report posted on a UCLA website. University...

“Most of our students come in as good Republicans, but that’s just because they’re ignorant. We change that.” – A distinguished professor of history For the last decade or so, the general public has been regularly briefed on the fact that our universities, particularly the public ones, aren’t the places of balanced intellectual pursuit that they pretend to be. Yet study after study, report after report, and experience after experience argue the opposite: Intellectual “diversity” is often nothing more than variations on a liberal theme. Go too far away from the main leftist stream, and you aren’t being “professional” and...

Harvard University will launch an examination of the campus Police Department following long-running complaints that officers have unfairly treated black students and professors and, in an incident this month, a black high school student working at Harvard. President Drew Gilpin Faust announced yesterday that she has appointed an independent, six-member committee to review the diversity training, community outreach, and recruitment efforts of Harvard police, the first review of its kind in more than a decade. In recent weeks, black student and faculty leaders have been pressing the university to address what they view as racial profiling by the predominantly white...

Whitewater - Freshmen at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater have always spent their first few days on campus learning college survival - how to join the karate club, cheer like a Warhawk and find English 101. But this year’s orientation added a grim new lesson: how to take out a campus shooter with a book or a backpack. The school is one of about 500 around the country that have purchased “Shots Fired on Campus,” a new video training program with tactics for surviving a mass-casualty shooting. It’s the latest strategy for college officials who are preparing for the worst in...

The Purdue panel said Rusi Taleyarkhan misled the scientific community by claiming his "bubble fusion" findings had been independently replicated.

A professor who said he suspects UCLA is cheating to illegally admit black students resigned Thursday from its admissions committee, saying the university refused to provide him the data he needs to investigate his suspicions. "A growing body of evidence strongly suggests that UCLA is cheating on admissions," political science Professor Tim Groseclose wrote in a report he released Thursday. "Specifically, applicants often reveal their own race on the essay portion of the application."Students typically report their race on their applications, but the people who evaluate their files don't see names, race or ethnicity. If race does come up in...

Just weeks after former presidential candidate John Edwards admitted cheating on his wife, he's not shying away from public speaking engagements -- and his fee has gone up, his agent says. Edwards is due to speak at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on Oct. 14. The agent for the former North Carolina senator has told the university student group organizing the event that Edwards is looking to add to his speaking calendar and that he's charging more, said university spokeswoman Robin Kaler. Edwards is to speak on "The American Dream," Kaler said. Tickets are free, but the student group...

Due to restrictions can only post link. College president to resign, collect $400,000

FORT DODGE, Iowa - An Iowa community college president resigned less than a week after a photo was published appearing to show him pouring beer into a young woman's mouth...

We all know if Nancy Pelosi gets an Obama Administration, we'll probably get some version of a Fairness Doctrine for broadcasting. I would hope if John McCain is elected, we get some kind of Fairness Doctrine for education. The same arguments apply. The left argues that both ideological sides should be equally represented on the public airwaves. I counter that both ideological sides should be equally represented in education where public funds subsidize tuition. The blatant pitch by Eli Pariser of MoveOn.org illustrates an almost braggadocio when it comes to what the left loves when it comes to their constituents:...

An article in Georgetown University's newspaper The Hoya welcomes the new director of its Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Questioning (LGBTQ) Resource Center and does some end zone celebration for our benefit. Georgetown, you may remember, is a university in the Jesuit Tradition.   You'll be edified by the following details:Jack Harrison (SFS '09), co-chair of GU Pride, also said he hopes to work closely with the new director in developing programming for the year. … Harrison said GU Pride is looking to launch efforts this year to make the campus more "trans-friendly" by working to provide bathrooms and better housing options for...

IOWA CITY, Iowa — A body found in an Iowa City park has been identified as a missing University of Iowa professor accused of offering higher grades to female students in exchange for sexual favors.

As parents pack their youngsters off to college, they might ask themselves whether it's worth both the money they will spend and their children's time. Dr. Marty Nemko has researched that question in an article aptly titled "America's Most Over-rated Product: Higher Education (www.martynemko.com/articles/americas-most-overrated-product-higher-education_id1539)." The U.S. Department of Education statistics show that 76 out of 100 students who graduate in the bottom 40 percent of their high school class do not graduate from college, even if they spend eight and a half years in college. That's even with colleges having dumbed down classes to accommodate such students. Only 23 percent...

AUSTIN -- Faculty members at the University of Texas are objecting to plans to create an endowed chair in Pakistan studies in honor of former U.S. Rep. Charlie Wilson, the colorful Democrat who was portrayed in last year's movie ``Charlie Wilson's War.''

Harvard will launch an investigation into the campus police department after complaints that officers have unfairly stopped black students, professors, and other university community members because of their race. In an email to senior university administrators and faculty today, President Drew Gilpin Faust announced the creation of a six-member committee to review the police department's diversity training, community outreach, and recruitment efforts. It will be led by Ralph Martin, former Suffolk County district attorney and managing partner of the Boston office of Bingham McCutchen.

The Young and the Rightward by: Malcolm A. Kline, August 26, 2008 Buoyed by their success in persuading students to “get involved,” left-leaning college professors have overlooked a fundamental law of physics that can apply to human relations as well: For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. “I realized I was conservative in college, and that I was a Republican just after graduating (when I cashed my first paycheck and saw so much of it go to the government),” S. E. Cupp, the co-author of Why You’re Wrong About The Right, recalls. “I became what I’d politely...

Children who kill are called "super predators," "people with no conscience," "feral pre-social beings" -- and "adults." William Ayers, author of A Kind and Just Parent: The Children of Juvenile Court (Beacon Press, 1997), says "We should call a child a child. A 13-year-old who picks up a gun isn't suddenly an adult. We have to ask other questions: How did he get the gun? Where did it come from?" Ayers, who spent a year observing the Cook County Temporary Juvenile Detention Center in Chicago, is one of four panelists who will speak on juvenile justice at 6 p.m. Thursday,...

Put On Your Happy Face by: Bethany Stotts, August 26, 2008 Less than one quarter of high school graduates who took the ACT have a 50% probability of getting a B in all four college-level subject areas of math, English, reading, and science, test results from the American College Testing Program (ACT) show. “This year’s results, released Wednesday, reveal that more than three in four test-takers will likely need remedial help in at least one subject to succeed in college,” wrote the Associated Press on August 13. Previous statistics, released this July, indicated that about 60% of America’s community college...

(IsraelNN.com) Dr. Uri Davis, who has often termed Israel an "apartheid state" and refused to serve in the IDF, converted to Islam about a week ago and married a Fatah activist in Ramallah. The conversion ceremony involved two oaths in which Davis recognized Allah and the Muslim prophet Mohammed. Davis said he plans to follow the laws of Islam, but not devoutly. The conversion took place in a Moslem religious court in Baka el-Garbiye, an Israeli-Arab town just outside northwestern Samaria (Shomron). Davis's lawyer explained that the Arabs of the Palestinian Authority know him for his great sacrifices on behalf...

Free to Choose? by: Deborah Lambert, August 25, 2008 In these days of rapidly escalating college tuition costs, the very mention of an institution like Berea College can make the heads of pricey schools a bit defensive. After all, Berea, located in Kentucky, educates only low-income students, and stands apart from almost every college by offering free tuition, according to the New York Times. “It’s difficult to find a college that balances thrift and altruism as deftly as Berea,” noted Anthony Paletta in a recent posting on mindingthecampus.com. While high-profile Ivies with their megabucks endowments attract the super-rich and offer...

Am I Diverse Enough? by: Deborah Lambert, August 25, 2008 When Andrew Quinio graduated from Berkeley in May 2008, one of his proudest achievements had to be serving as editor-in-chief of the California Patriot, the conservative campus magazine. However, in a recent column on mindingthecampus.com, Andrew noted that it was impossible to reflect on his four years at Berkeley without thinking of the word “diversity.” While the goal was supposedly a climate of “cultural tolerance and understanding,” Berkeley “appeared to encourage a divisive culture of victimhood and entitlement.” For example, “housing students by race seemed . . . an odd...

STATE CAPITOL - Security at an anti-war rally outside the state Capitol this morning allegedly had to break up a confrontation between a Fox News reporter and Ward Churchill, a former University of Colorado professor who caused an uproar when he called victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks "little Eichmanns." Churchill, who was thrust into the national spotlight after writing a controversial essay in which he compared the victims of the 9/11 terror attacks to Nazi bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann, was hounded by the persistent reporter, who allegedly put his hands on Churchill, organizer Glenn Spagnuolo said.

A Good Book About Bad Books by Logan Gage 8/23/08 10 Books that Screwed Up the World: And 5 Others that Didn't Help Benjamin Wiker, Regnery, 260 pages, $27.95 If ever there were a book designed specifically for the enjoyment of InsideCatholic readers, surely it is Benjamin Wiker's new 10 Books that Screwed Up the World: And 5 Others that Didn't Help. Wiker should be renowned (if he is not already) for Moral Darwinism: How We Became Hedonists -- a book that at once exposes both the ancient philosophical antecedents and modern cultural consequences of Darwinism. In the present book,...

Academics Fear the Human Rights Commissions A group of U. S. professors launched a campaign this week protesting plans by a prominent political science organization to hold its annual conference in Toronto next year, claiming that Canada’s restrictions on certain forms of speech puts controversial academics at risk of being prosecuted.Bradley Watson, professor of American and Western political thought at Pennsylvania’s St. Vincent College, said he will present a petition calling for the American Political Science Association (APSA) to re-evaluate its selection of Toronto for its 2009 conference at this year’s annual meeting, taking place over the Labour Day weekend...

WICHITA, Kan. — Fort Hays State University has fired its debate coach for losing his temper at a tournament, engaging in a videotaped shouting match that included pulling down his shorts to expose his underwear. University President Edward H. Hammond also announced Friday that the school was immediately suspending its debate program until problems are addressed at the national level. He said it was important to take a stand against the declining standards of college debate.

When a group of Joseph Ratzinger's former students congratulated him on the day after his 2005 inauguration as Pope Benedict XVI, the new pope greeted them with a piece of happy news. "The first thing he said to us was, ‘We will continue the Schulerkreis,'" recalled the Rev. D. Vincent Twomey, an Irish theologian who studied under Ratzinger at the University of Regensburg in the 1970s. The Schulerkreis, or "student circle," is a seminar/retreat that Benedict holds with his ex-graduate students every summer. This year's session will be held Aug. 30, at Castel Gandolfo, the papal summer residence southeast of...

My friend just called me to tell me how outraged she is that her daughter's school, Metropolitan State College of Denver, a PUBLIC institution, is shutting down for two weeks so the Teachers can volunteer at the Convention. Does this sound right to you guys? She said her daughter wants to know if she gets two weeks tuition back.

JAKARTA, Indonesia — Hundreds of Christian theology students have been living in tents since a mob of angry Muslim neighbors stormed their campus last month wielding bamboo spears and hurling Molotov cocktails.

    Coulterism — It Doesn’t Take a PhD August 20, 2008   Two PhD’s from Swansea University in Wales (UK) are sharpening their executioner’s axe in a jumbled stratagem to behead the greatest threat to their secular world of “radical multi-dimensional pluralism”, aka Ann Coulter. It’s been rumored that professors Samuel A. Chambers and Alan Finlayson are planning a course (counter-insurgency?) in “Coulterism” at Johns Hopkins University.  The course announcements are linked to a paper, “Ann Coulter and the Problem of Pluralism: From Values to Politics” that Chambers and Finlayson presented at the 2007 annual meeting of the...

“Hadith of Hate” Banned at USC   By Reut R. CohenFrontPageMagazine.com | Friday, August 22, 2008 As Muslim Student Association (MSA) chapters have become increasingly influential at universities and colleges around the country, critics have charged that it is a hate group that sympathizes with the international jihad and promulgates an anti-American and anti-Semitic ideology in its campus actions. In response, the MSA has claimed that it is merely another religious and cultural group similar to Hillel, a club for Jewish students, or the Newman Club for Catholics. That deception has been now unmasked at the University of Southern...

A university student who challenged his school's "speech code" and won a ruling in federal court that it was vague, overbroad and stifled student speech, including his Christian views, is continuing his battle with Temple University because the school has – three years after he completed it – declined to provide a grade on his master's thesis, thus effectively denying him his degree. The Alliance Defense Fund recently announced that the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had affirmed the district court victory by Christian DeJohn, who is a sergeant in the Pennsylvania Army National Guard. The ADF handled DeJohn's...

I encourage you to watch the Glenn Beck Program this next Friday, August 22, at either 7 pm, 9 pm or midnight, Eastern Standard Time. The program will consist of an interview with four students and Prof. George to discuss the work that has been going on at Princeton over the last 10 years or so to create a climate that is more supportive for students interested in a college education that includes the development of moral convictions and practices. As you know Universities have years ago decided they are no longer going to instruct students on what is right...

There is really NOTHING I can add to this, so I am opting just to offer this post with the hopes our handful of regular readers will sign this petition! From Thomas Peters at American Papist: Please Sign the Petition to Support USD! Brian McDaniel took up my challenge to collect 4,000 signatures supporting the University of San Diego’s recent decision to rescind a prestigious position to heretical theologian Rosemary Radford Reuther. If ever there was someone who clearly deserves no place of honor in a Catholic school of Theology - she’s it. Beyond her long membership in the...

When school starts in the fall, many college students will be paying exorbitant tuition to universities that offer a silver platter of worthless courses: classes in Marxism, prostitution (Sociology of the Sex Industry is all the rage), “queer theory,” pornography, and rock and rap music. While some of these classes are easy to spot as non-educational, others masquerade under legitimate-sounding names in mainstream academic departments. As an Ohio University senior who has sat through plenty of college junk courses—many of which were required for graduation—I’ve compiled a list classes for incoming freshmen to avoid.

For those still unfamiliar with the “mainstream” William Ayers, as Barack Obama described him on his campaign web site, this 2006 interview with Venezuelan socialist Luis Bonilla-Molina, founder of the Centro Internacional Miranda (CIM). In this clip, Ayers speaks about how the Vietnam War forced an escalation of tactics to violence and notes the terrorist Weather Underground as a “great teaching moment” — a telling description for this professor of education:

[A]s a public service, the Surrounded by Reality Welcome Team has put together a very brief supplement to last week's Newcomers Guide. No guarantees that you'll be able to pass as a bona fide Ithacan, but it might spare you some small measure of embarrassment: **** Politics - When I voted downtown in February for the primary, the line for the Democratic booth snaked out of the building and it took over an hour to vote. During that time, a single Republican skulked in, looking like he'd just punched out the home team mascot. The concern in Ithaca is that...