[Little_shoe]

"liberally slanted education community is a ship that ship is listing so hard to port all it can do is sail to the left."

haha great comment.... Ship of Fools is more like it

port wine is red.... a clensing of the American Academia is in order.

[talleyman]

Bump!

[Rudder]

George Carlin, not Cosby, did the bit about the rock.

[ken21]

it used to be prior to ww2 that college instructors were not as visible in american life. no one cared much what they did, nor interacted with them. colleges were islands.

college graduates went into business, government the military, etc. and those from "normal schools" or teaching colleges went on to teach at public schools. the latter had more interactions with the public than the former.

the post-ww2 economic boom changed that. in the 1960s a college education increasingly became a necessity, as our reliance on manufacturing lessened and our dependence on information began and steadily increased.

a college degree promoted social mobility. the degreed became consumers of various levels, some higher up on the food chain than others. successful graduates shopped at up-scale clothiers, shopped for imported autos (rebelling against their parents' cadillacs and lincolns), and shopped for organic food. it's no accident that ads for trader joe's sound like npr.

what one ate became an indicator of social class. those at the top of the food chain drank french wines and ate french cheeses.

meanwhile, colleges promoted the idea that those associated with them were better than others.

now for the mind-blowing idea--mostly democrats, college faculties promoted themselves as "for the working classes" and "for the po'".

i grew up on a dairy farm. my college friends used to come out and look at the cows and laugh at the smell of the manure. this fact dictated that i never stray too far from my origins.

[TruthConquers]

I love this:

But then, they don’t fire teachers for not teaching these days, now do they.

Absolutely LOVE it.

[gitmo]

Salvato makes a good point about the conundrum of the left. They want Summers' head and they want protection for Churchill.

But do conservatives have the same problems?

I don't understand how the university can justify keeping Churchill on board. He is teaching lunacy. Yes, he can be dismissed for lying on his job application, for violating nepotism rules, and other infractions. But his real offense is his uselessness as a teacher or a thinker. He has resided outside the bounds of propriety. There is no intellectual justification for his teachings, and he should be dismissed.

Summers, on the other hand, made a logical supposition based on empirical observations. The left is attacking him because his deductions do not agree with their religious beliefs. Their priests are persecuting him because he has come to logical conclusions that are heresy.

[Tolerance Sucks Rocks]

PING!

[dog breath]

I think that it is important to keep in mind that not all colleges are hotbeds of socialism. There are many small and large colleges that are fairly conservative. There are also many that are religious in nature. Unfortunately Harvard has gone too far down the road of unbalanced liberalism and has damaged it's reputation. I think the trend on many campuses started in the early twentieth century with the infatuation many intellectuals developed with socialism and communism. They saw a connection between the criticisms of social injustice which runs in so much literature and the new political philosophy. Everything in American literature seemed to support and build upon the liberal ideal from Nathanial Hawthorne to John Steinbeck. All of America's ills and the world were due to capitalism, greed and rigid right wing thinking. Even when the inherent problems of communism and socialism became apparent it was ignored. The professors saw vindication for their views in social events, they saw the Nazis as right wingers, they saw McCarthyism as a evil, the resistance to civil rights as right wing, the Vietnam War was the result of some military industrial complex. It did not matter that they were wrong, because a whole liberal culture had arisen on many college campuses that said they were right. Once the ideas became established they were passed on and embellished by new generations. I believe that many colleges have this liberal culture that perpetuates itself despite any logic or reason that presents itself to refute it. It will in the end perhaps be the ruin of many colleges. A college should be a place of critical thought, learning and intellectual development. If they have a liberal belief system that they wish to indoctrinate their students with they should make it clear in their literature. /p>

[HowlinglyMind-BendingAbsurdity]

The higher up in academia you go, the sillier and goofier it gets.

It might not be a bad idea every few years or so to throw most of the main characters out on the street and start all over again from scratch.