Free Republic

GWU Babysteps Right Malcolm A. Kline, July 16, 2010 New Flash: George Washington University has actually hired a Republican, albeit as an adjunct. Yes, the university that has served as a hideout for Clinton Administration officials, training ground for Obama appointees and speaking venue for all of the above actually invited Bush Administration press secretary Dana Perino to one of its lecture halls. “It seems those pesky White House correspondents got her in shape for teaching students enrolled in the Graduate School of Political Management, where she will be teaching a class in political communications on advocacy politics and public...

Sleeping With The Enemy Malcolm A. Kline, July 14, 2010 A large chunk of the blame for the ever-deteriorating state of education goes to some of academia’s favorite targets. “Republicans have been asleep on the schools,” author and activist David Horowitz claimed at a July 9, 2010 breakfast on Capitol Hill sponsored by Hillsdale College. “We don’t have a conservative educational reform movement.” Horowitz authored the Academic Bill of Rights and founded Students for Academic Freedom. “Curricula in virtually every liberal arts college are dedicated precisely to social change,” Horowitz writes in his recent pamphlet Barack Obama’s Rules for Revolution:...

Cradle to — Sex Ed? Bethany Stotts, July 13, 2010 Last month a British agency released draft guidelines for voluntary educational standards where students as young as five years old would learn about “sex and relationships and alcohol.” No longer from far America’s shores, a similar proposal has been made in one Montana school district. Todd Starnes, Fox News Radio reporter, writes that the new sexual education guidelines “under consideration in Helena would,” among other things, * “Teach fifth graders [about various types of sexual intercourse].” * “Teach kindergarteners about ‘basic reproductive body parts [by name]…” * “Teach all grades...

SCOTUS Nominee Won’t Ask, Won’t Tell Bethany Stotts, July 13, 2010 On day two of the Elena Kagan confirmation hearings, ranking Senate Judiciary Subcommittee Member Jeff Sessions, R, Ala., remarked that he was “taken aback” by the tone of the Supreme Court nominee’s account of her decision to deny military recruiters access to Harvard Law School’s Office of Career Services at times during her tenure as Dean, because he thought the tone of her testimony was “unconnected to reality.” “I know what happened at Harvard. I know you were an outspoken leader against the military policy. …” argued Sen. Sessions....

For Hire or Charter Bethany Stotts, July 8, 2010 In their interim report on a National Study of Charter Management Organization Effectiveness, Mathematica and the Center on Reinventing Public Education contrast charter management organizations (CMOs) with coexisting public school districts and explain how the leaders of the former have considerable latitude in terms of hiring, firing and other institutional practices. “In contrast to typical school districts in which school leaders frequently complain about the lack of flexibility in allocating school resources, well over one-third of surveyed CMOs (41 percent) allow their schools to determine the number of teaching positions needed...

Green Grow the Children Malcolm A. Kline, July 8, 2010 Green used to mean young, inexperienced and naïve. Arguably, it still does. “According to a poll by Habitat Heroes, one in three American schoolchildren fears that the earth will not exist when he grows up,” Ashley Thorne writes in the June 2010 issue of The Education Reporter. Thorne is the director of communications for the National Association of Scholars. The Education Reporter is published by Eagle Forum, the group formed by conservative attorney, author and activist Phyllis Schlafly....

History Behind The Scenes Malcolm A. Kline, July 8, 2010 Two events in recent weeks point out the danger of leaving history to the historians. One is the inclusion of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin in a D-Day memorial commemorating an invasion he never took part in. The other is the rating of Stalin ally Franklin D. Roosevelt as America’s greatest president, according to leading academics. “Richard G. Pumphrey, a professor of art at Lynchburg College, in Virginia, spent about a year sculpting the former Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin,” Sophia Li reported in The Chronicle of Higher Education on July 1,...

Progressive History Restored Cliff Kincaid, July 7, 2010 As a student, Obama Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan was so interested in the socialist movement that she wrote a thesis about its history in New York City from 1900-1933. But the history of the Progressive Party, which ran FDR’s former vice president Henry Wallace as its presidential candidate in 1948, helps bring the subject up to date and explains the current direction of the Democratic Party. The Progressive Party was controlled by the Communist Party but efforts to work through the democratic process did not die out with its election defeat...

Another Confirmation Convert Bethany Stotts, July 6, 2010 Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan indicated during her recent Senate confirmation hearings that, if confirmed, she would not give international law “independent precedential weight” in her court rulings. However, at a recent Heritage Foundation event, “Outsourcing Law? International Law and Its Importance in the Kagan Hearing,” held several days earlier, the speakers expressed their concern that, as with Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Kagan might attempt a “confirmation conversion,” making statements which belie her previous actions. “Indeed, during her confirmation process, Judge Sonia Sotomayor assured the Judiciary Committee that in her view, citations to...

Post-Graduate Homeschooling Malcolm A. Kline, July 2, 2010 One of the signs of the increasing popularity of homeschooling is the growing number of Americans who avail themselves of it after graduation. It’s also a sign of the endemic failures of public education today. “Look at the best sellers today,” bestselling author David Barton said in an interview with the July 2010 AFA Journal. “They are things like David McCullough’s book John Adams.” “Americans are willing to pay money to learn what they were supposed to learn in school. All the information in that book used to be in the textbooks.”...

You Bet Your BP James F. Davis, July 2, 2010 It has been 2.5 months since BP’s subcontracted deepwater, floating drilling unit exploded, discharging oil ever since. Public opinion says BP should be punished. And so they have. President Obama extorted $20 billion from BP to distribute to the victims of this disaster by an “independent third party.’’ ‘Independent’ to the President is his personal czar, accountable only to him. Such dishonest chutzpah! Obama also extorted another $100 million from BP to pay the salaries of the tens of thousands of workers who are being forced into unemployment by Obama...

Columbia: Anatomy of Anarchy Malcolm A. Kline, July 1, 2010 For most of the past half century, Columbia University has provided endless fodder for news outlets such as ours. Indeed, as Accuracy in Academia discovered, the campus left has veto power over not just the curriculum but extracurricular activities as well. Actually, left-wing student groups have been active at the crown of the Ivy League for about the past century. What changed is the attitude of the administration there: from indulgence to surrender. From the turn of the last century to the end of World War II, Columbia practiced peaceful...

Czarist America Bethany Stotts, July 1, 2010 At Accuracy in Academia’s June 21 Author’s Night Ken Blackwell and Ken Klukowski discussed the premises of their book The Blueprint: Obama’s Plan to Subvert the Constitution and Build an Imperial Presidency. “That is a very provocative title,” noted Blackwell, the former Ohio Secretary of State. The book does not, he cautioned, say that President Barack Obama is a “tyrant” or “evil,” but that his actions have undermined the principles of the U.S. Constitution and that “…Team Obama is determined to change the balance of power achieved through the separations of power and...

Deconstructing One Night Stands Bethany Stotts, June 30, 2010 Casual sex, common on many college campuses, leaves many female students dissatisfied and with hurt feelings, according to the authors of a recent column for The Chronicle Review, a publication of the Chronicle of Higher Education. “For the past 12 years, I have taught a course on sex differences to college juniors and seniors,” writes University of Virginia professor Steven E. Rhoades in his co-authored article “The Emotional Costs of Hooking Up.” “When we talk about relationships and sex itself, most of the men, sometimes sheepishly, indicate that they enjoy hookups—but...

Group Rights Without Responsibilities Malcolm A. Kline, June 29, 2010 Academics rarely try to explain why the human condition has not improved while they are busily trying to archive the U. S. Constitution and introduce us to a panoply of “rights.” Take any barometer you care to—the trend line in out-of-wedlock births, divorce rates or homicides. Add in more recent phenomenon such as drive-by shootings and serial killings to say nothing of the poverty rate before and after such spasms of government activity as the New Deal and the Great Society. “These new group rights were conspicuously not attached to...

Confirmation Messes: New Bethany Stotts, June 28, 2010 As Elena Kagan’s confirmation hearings opened today, Senators repeatedly reminded her about her previous criticisms of the vacuity of Supreme Court confirmation hearings and encouraged her to set a precedent for a more frank confirmation process. In her 1995 article for the University of Chicago Law Review,“Confirmation Messes: Old and New,” Kagan writes that she believes “…the President and Senate themselves have a constitutional obligation to consider how an individual, as a judge, will read the Constitution: that is one part of what it means to preserve and protect the founding instrument.”...

Raising Arizona Bethany Stotts, June 29, 2010 Earlier this month the Los Angeles Unified School District’s Board of Education requested that the district Superintendent integrate discussions of Arizona’s recently-passed laws on immigration and ethnic studies into the public school curriculum. The LAUSD “school board wants all public school students in the city to be taught that Arizona’s new immigration law is un-American,” wrote Jana Winter for Fox News on June 2. In response to Winter’s article, the board stated that they had “directed the Superintendent to ensure that LAUSD civics and history classes discuss the recent laws enacted in Arizona...

Psychologist Analyzes Liberals James F. Davis, June 28, 2010 Recently I attended a lecture explaining the “Liberal Mind” by PhD. psychologist, Timothy C. Daughtry. He gave his explanation as to how such a minority (30%) in the United States has been able to impose its politics on the majority. When using the word Liberal below we are talking about the political Liberal. Liberals dominate our institutions, i.e., the schools, universities, media, arts, cinema, nonprofits, government bureaucracies, etc. Anyone challenging their monolithic views is ruthlessly attacked to be silenced. Daughtry stated there are two types of liberals. First are the hard...

Critical Thinking Without Knowledge Maureen Tabor, June 25, 2010 I had a student last year who wrote me his life story. When he was a little boy, he knew he could do anything. His parents loved him, he loved life, and when he grew up he knew he wanted to “be a CEO.” Then he got to the University. There he learned that he could not be a CEO because he was “a minority.” He learned that the whole world would be against him, that he was a victim, and that he had to devote his life to “helping others.”...

Get Paid to Trash Right Deborah Lambert, June 25, 2010 While conservatives are fighting an uphill battle on most liberal American campuses these days, their beleaguered minority status is still a threat to some well entrenched interest groups. One project, launched by Peter Dreier, a distinguished professor of politics at Occidental College along with Nelson Lichtenstein, a U.C. Santa Barbara 20th century historian, plans to pay for academic research that can “service in the battle with conservative ideas,” says author John Leo. Known as the “Cry Wolf” project, it is sponsored by the Center on Policy Initiatives, and will offer...