Posted on 04/24/2006 3:33:39 PM PDT by DBeers
With last week's stunning revelations that the entire faculty of a Midwestern university campus voted without dissent to investigate a Christian librarian for "sexual harassment" simply because he recommended the bestselling book "The Marketing of Evil," many are asking why not a single faculty member stood up for the librarian.
The question is especially compelling in light of the decision reported Wednesday that the entire faculty had essentially overstepped their own written policies and had wrongly accused the librarian.
The lock-step faculty support for the two openly homosexual professors who led the charge against the librarian might have something to do with the fact that freshmen at the small Mansfield campus of Ohio State University are required, during their first quarter, to undergo what the university calls a "diversity seminar." But critics say the type of "tolerance re-education" OSU mandates uses tactics reminiscent of those of Chinese communist revolutionary leader Mao Tse-Tung.
Battle over the freshmen
As WND first reported, Scott Savage, a devout Quaker, is head of Reference and Instructional Services at the Bromfield Library on Ohio State University's Mansfield campus. As a member of the university's First Year Reading Experience Committee, Savage had suggested four books be considered as required reading for incoming freshmen: "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. Savage made the recommendations after other committee members had suggested a series of books with a left-wing perspective, by authors such as Jimmy Carter and Maria Shriver.
However, three professors – two of them openly homosexual – filed a complaint of discrimination and harassment, contending Kupelian's book was "hate literature" which "threatened" them and made them feel "unsafe" on campus. After a 21-0 faculty vote (with 9 abstentions) on March 13, the school's Office of Human Resources put Savage under "investigation." The full-faculty vote was rescinded two days later for legal reasons, and the three offended professors filed the harassment complaint.
The three professors behind the complaint against Savage are Hannibal Hamlin, Norman Jones and J.F. Buckley. Jones teaches courses in lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender literature, and Buckley has written "The Social Critic: The Rise of Queer Performance Within the Demise of Transcendentalism" as well as "articles on sexual orientation in Hemingway and Melville."
In a March 9 e-mail to the faculty regarding Savage's suggestion of "The Marketing of Evil" as required freshman reading, Buckley wrote: "… I am not shocked, only deeply saddened – and THREATENED – that such mindless folks are on this great campus. … 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."
Stepping up to defend Savage has been the Arizona-based public-interest law firm, the Alliance Defense Fund.
Despite a "Cease and Desist" letter the Alliance Defense Fund sent to OSU Mansfield officials in Savage's defense March 28, the investigation went forward, with the university insisting it takes "any allegation of sexual harassment seriously."
Finally, since WorldNetDaily, Sean Hannity, MSNBC, Fox News' Brit Hume, the New York Post, Human Events, and dozens of bloggers brought the case to national attention, Ohio State University has reversed course and notified Savage the charges had been dropped.
Why no dissenters?
For many, the most disconcerting part of the case is that no faculty members dissented from what eventually was ruled to be an unfair allegation brought by two "gay" professors.
"The fact that there are one or two unhinged professors out there – that's not news," said David French, the lead ADF attorney defending Savage. "But the fact that by a 21-0 vote, with 9 abstentions, the faculty would classify a book recommendation as sexual harassment – that show's there's an illness that has infected the academy."
What some, like French, might call an "illness" is, to others, just a high degree of "tolerance" for differences. Yet, notes French, the only "difference" not tolerated on campus is the belief that there is anything wrong with homosexuality. Indeed, on many campuses across the nation, opposing homosexuality on moral grounds is considered every bit as hateful and intolerable as being a racist, anti-Semitic member of the Ku Klux Klan.
As OSU-Mansfield Professor Hannibal Hamlin said in a March 9 e-mail to Savage, copied to the faculty: "Re Kupelian's book, would you advocate a book that was racist or antisemitic [sic], or are you arguing that homosexuals are not in the same category and that homophobia is not therefore a matter of discrimination but of rational argument?"
Freshman diversity education
Students at OSU-Mansfield are required to take a "diversity seminar" soon after they begin their freshman year.
To prepare for the seminar, students are invited to search online a "dictionary of terms related to diversity," to "Test your knowledge of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender (GLBT)" and to "Take a test at Project Implicit’s website."
"Even though we believe we see and treat people as equals, hidden biases may still influence our perceptions and actions," explains the OSU website. "Psychologists at Harvard, the University of Virginia and the University of Washington created 'Project Implicit' to develop Hidden Bias Tests. After taking a test, read Tolerance.org’s tutorial to learn more about stereotypes and prejudice and the societal effects of bias."
One current freshman, whose name is being withheld for privacy reasons, attended OSU-Mansfield's mandatory diversity seminar last fall. After he told his father about it, the father sat in as an observer for a subsequent seminar session.
"It is required that incoming freshman must attend a diversity seminar," he told WND, "where the homosexual lifestyle is celebrated, and the students are put on a 'guilt trip' for having negative feelings and/or moral judgments about the behavior of these people."
The two- to three-hour seminar, he explained, included "some group-type exercises, where they tried to say you can't judge a person by looking at them." Four facilitators conducted the group exercises, he said, asking the students questions like, "Who do you think I am?" "Am I married?" "What kind of car do I drive"? and "Do I have children?"
At the very end of the seminar, the facilitators revealed for the first time that three out of four were homosexual. The message, said the OSU student's father, was "We're not bad people."
Other exercises consisted of pairing off the youths and "asking them what someone did to you to make you feel bad at some time in your life, playing on psychology," he said.
"At the end of the meeting, everyone stands in a circle and they ask questions of the group. If it's true, you step out. Other students stepped out, trying to get you to accept this nonsense in a public setting."
According to a report in World magazine by Lynn Vincent, such "diversity seminars" are very common on college campuses today.
"Freshman orientation used to be about teaching new students how to find their classes, the cafeteria, and the campus bookstore," said the report. "But today, left-liberal 'diversity' trainers have found in orientation programs a ready-made crop of captive and impressionable audiences ripe for reeducation on issues of sex, race, and gender. The basic messages: People of color are victims; whites are their tormentors. Homosexuality is normal; abhorring the behavior is bigotry."
Using the Milwaukee School of Engineering, or MSOE, as an example, the World report identifies the "exercise" the OSU dad described. It's called "Across the Line" or "Crossing the Line," "a diversity-awareness exercise that has also been used at Stanford University and Loyola University of Chicago," says the report:
Groups of about 25 students line up shoulder-to-shoulder along a line on the floor. A facilitator then reads a series of about 50 statements. Every student who feels a statement is true of him or her is supposed to step "across the line," leaving the group behind. Statements start off mildly enough: "You are from a large city or town." Then they get personal: "You have participated in racial, sexual, or cultural jokes."
"You are pro-choice."
"You would feel comfortable entering into a relationship with a person of a different race."
"You feel comfortable around persons with a gay, lesbian, or bisexual orientation."
While such introspection is certainly not inappropriate for college-age students, "Across the Line" forces a public "outing" among strangers. The exercise adds an unsubtle layer of group pressure to an MSOE strategy that might well be described as "divide and conquer." To ensure freshmen are isolated from any friends they might have come to school with, orientation personnel computer-sort them into random groups.
"Sometimes if students are hanging out with two or three friends, they might feel their attitudes are not so readily challenged," MSOE Director of Student Activities Rick Gagliano told World. "This way they're in a different environment, forced to expose themselves to somebody else … This is done without parents around – sort of in a 'safer' environment." The strategy is not new: Mao Tse-Tung used it "re-educate" Chinese university students and pry them loose from their parents' political moorings.
Marketing evil?
"What Ohio State University has been doing to Scott Savage by attacking him as a sexual harasser – and to a far lesser degree doing to me by calling 'The Marketing of Evil' 'hate literature' and so on – is precisely what I write about in my book," says Kupelian.
"It is literally the 'marketing of evil' in action. First they desensitize these youngsters in highly manipulative, emotionally charged re-education sessions. If anybody challenges the pro-gay orthodoxy on campus, they are subjected to merciless 'jamming,' as we see with their threatening the reputation and livelihood of the librarian, Scott Savage. For people who are sufficiently confused, the college experience can bring about a total conversion. I explain these three devastating steps – Desensitization, Jamming and Conversion – in detail in chapter one of 'The Marketing of Evil.'"
Released in August, "The Marketing of Evil" has become one of the nation's most talked-about books, widely praised by Dr. Laura, David Limbaugh, Michelle Malkin, D. James Kennedy and many others and garnering over 100 five-star reader reviews on Amazon.com. For the past week it has held down the top spot in Amazon's "Current Events" bestseller list.
bump
"Turn your head and cough" takes on a whole new meaning at that university.
this may be a good thing, since when do students listen to authority..................they tend to rebel against it.
The Homosexual Agenda = The Marketing of Evil
Hidden biases? That's right... you could be a racist, misogynistic, gay-beating, cross-burning, swastika-wearing, death-dragging psychopath, and not even know it! Hate crimes don't even require conscious thought anymore!
Abraham Lincoln's Vice-President for his first term in office.
Some might call it "bigotry" training.
I don't care.
Some would call it survival training.
And when you call them on it, they'll deny what they are.
"Hannibal Hamlin"
He's still got an office in Ellsworth.
Look to the UK to see where this is going. According to some recent articles, the police are basically abandoning regular criminal investigation and instead focus on "important" PC issues like hate crimes.
Officers have been given the suggestion to let "first offenders" off with a caution for crimes like burglary. But a drunk young man in Oxford, who told an officer his horse was gay, was promptly pulled into the police station.
Our future?
One of the impacts of this type of action (by the faculty) is that academics are no longer heard very much. When I was much younger, they commanded much more respect. Many now regard academics as intellectually and practically unfit, like animals raised in a zoo, who upon being released into the wild (the world of business and the world in general) are eaten immediately by the first predator who sees the fat prey sitting on a log wondering what to do next.
They need to reconnect with the real world, but with tenure, it seems unlikely to happen.
Tax money is funding this man's career.
My personal opinion is that the librarian should sue, IN CIVIL COURT, and also enter an action with the EEOC against these tenured (probably) &^%*&$%^!@#$*^\*&%*&^ [censored!!!!]
Not familiar with this book so I can't talk of the merits of it but there's no way this was sexual harrassment. That professor claiming to suddenly no longer feel safe was playing a ideological game to furthre an agenda.
Some measure of "diversity exposure" can be helpful for college freshman but it won't keep certain groups from self-segregating. On the homosexual question, it may be necessary to help avoid cases of physical assault on "out" or suspected homosexual students. On that level it's worth a university doing from a CYA viewpoint. It's probably worthwhile to include some instruction on 'date rape', substance abuse, etc.
The description of this seminar gives me little confidence in its merits however.
He probably requires his students to buy copies too!
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