Free Republic

html> American Association of University Professors Political Intrusions into the Academy In many countries, governments have a larger role in their university affairs than is true of government in the United States. In at least a few other places, the ruling political party controls universities directly, determining the faculty to be hired and promoted, the students to be admitted, the subject matter to be taught, the research to be pursued, and the speakers to be welcomed. In the United States, universities and colleges form an independent sector, accountable to the academic disciplines represented in the institutions, and to the judgments...

Brian BiglinContributing Writer The issue of academic freedom has been brought to the forefront in recent weeks. Apparently academic freedom is being extended so far, in some cases, that a professor in Colorado named Ward Churchill can replace his ethnic studies curriculum with radical, anti-American, anti-capitalist establishment propaganda. Churchill describes with accuracy his feelings regarding the Sept. 11 tragedy. While he says he mourns for the losses of the individuals in the towers and planes, his mourning is coupled with rants on how so many of the victims had it coming, comparing them to Nazis at one point. He spends...

Columbia Unbecoming is on the whole just a series of complaints having to do mainly with manner or etiquette in the classroom, but the real issue has to do with the meager and politicized content that professors choose to teach. As Efraim Karsh, head of the Mediterranean Studies department at King’s College, University of London, implied on March 6 in Uris Hall, Massad’s classroom hysterics are not the real problem. The real problem is a polite and affable man like Professor Khalidi, who nevertheless peddles political propaganda in class, propaganda masquerading as real scholarship.Two articles in the March 23, 2005...

Predictably, as night follows day, the ad hoc faculty committee appointed by Columbia University President Lee Bollinger to examine the behavior of several Columbia faculty towards Israeli or pro-Israel students has concluded that little or nothing of concern occurred. Rather, given the opportunity to produce a report that is sure to receive widespread publicity, the faculty committee concluded that the more disturbing problem is found elsewhere - with pro-Israel students disrupting lectures on Middle Eastern studies, and some faculty members feeling that they were spied on. So the real problem at Columbia is not anti-Semitism, biased and untruthful teaching, or...

College faculties, long assumed to be a liberal bastion, lean further to the left than even the most conspiratorial conservatives might have imagined, a new study says. By their own description, 72 percent of those teaching at American universities and colleges are liberal and 15 percent are conservative, says the study being published this week. The imbalance is almost as striking in partisan terms, with 50 percent of the faculty members surveyed identifying themselves as Democrats and 11 percent as Republicans. The disparity is even more pronounced at the most elite schools, where, according to the study, 87 percent of...

“Conservatives have a hard time in academia,” Mansfield said. “Just look at my department. There are fifty professors, and two or three are Republicans. How is that possible?”....Graduate School of Education professor Julie A. Reuben said that she believed the abundance of liberals in academia could be due to the fact that as people become more educated, they tend to become more liberal. Harvard’s facetious moniker, “The Kremlin on the Charles,” may be more accurate than previously speculated, according to a report released last week. The study, published in The Forum, an online social science journal, concluded that discrimination may...

    Testimony ofRobert David Johnson, Ph.D.Professor of History, Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center of the City University of New YorkBrooklyn, NYTestimony Before theHealth, Education, Labor, & Pensions CommitteeUnited States SenateHearing on Intellectual DiversityOctober 29, 2003 Mr. Chairman, and Members of the Committee: My name is Robert David Johnson. I am a professor of history at Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where I teach courses in U.S. political, diplomatic, and constitutional history. As a historian of the Senate, I am particularly honored to appear before the committee. I have written...

What do colleges really mean by diversity? As the brochures suggest, they generally mean external characteristics: skin color and ethnic background that supposedly make you different, in very important, if ambiguous ways, from your classmates. If you're black, for example, you're assumed to be somehow crucially different from your white roommate--even if you both graduated from Edina High School. This isn't real diversity, and many students sense it--especially people who've traveled to places that have truly different cultures: India, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, or even France. In America there's really one overarching culture in which all citizens participate, though the experience...

It's a fact, documented by two recent studies, that registered Republicans and self-proclaimed conservatives make up only a small minority of professors at elite universities. But what should we conclude from that? Conservatives see it as compelling evidence of liberal bias in university hiring and promotion. And they say that new "academic freedom" laws will simply mitigate the effects of that bias, promoting a diversity of views. But a closer look both at the universities and at the motives of those who would police them suggests a quite different story. Claims that liberal bias keeps conservatives off college faculties almost...

You'd better sit down while reading this shocking news: College faculties are not only mostly liberal, but lean even further to the left than conservatives have imagined. According to a study by professors at Smith College, George Mason University and the University of Toronto (they surveyed 1,643 full-time faculty at 183 four-year schools), 72 percent of professors at American universities labeled themselves liberal, while just 15 percent said they are conservative. 50 percent of faculty members identified themselves as Democrats and only 11 percent Republicans. Political Science professors Robert Lichter of George Mason University, Neil Nevitte of the University of...

College classes taught mostly by liberals, study confirms March 30, 2005 UPDA0330 • Latest: College faculties, long assumed to be a liberal bastion, lean further to the left than even the most conspiratorial conservatives might have imagined, a new study says. • Within those ivy-covered halls: By their own description, 72 percent of those teaching at American universities and colleges are liberal and 15 percent are conservative, says the study being published this week. The imbalance is almost as striking in partisan terms: 50 percent of the faculty members surveyed identified themselves as Democrats and 11 percent as Republicans. The...

Nearly three-quarters of faculty members at U.S. colleges and universities describe themselves as liberals, and at elite schools, the proportion is 87 percent, a survey has found. What's more, half say they are Democrats and 51 percent indicate they seldom or never attend church, according to the survey, published in the March issue of the online political journal Forum. "You would expect the majority of English literature and sociology professors to be liberals, but our survey found that 66 percent of those in physics and 64 percent of those in chemistry are liberals," said S. Robert Lichter, a communications professor...

Academic Freedom: The Latest Challenge Adapted from “On Academic Freedom,” remarks made by AAUP Associate Secretary, Marcus Harvey, at Irvine Valley College, November 13, 2003. Academic Freedom and Political “Balance” More pernicious than direct at- tempts to curb faculty speech is a subtler initiative intended to trans- form the meaning of academic free- dom, itself. Once denoting the faculty’s authority to determine the content and methods of their pro- fessional work, “academic free- dom” is in the process of being re- invented to connote the “right” of students to be taught by a politi- cally “balanced” faculty. The AAUP has...

College faculties, long assumed to be a liberal bastion, lean further to the left than even the most conspiratorial conservatives might have imagined, a new study says. By their own description, 72 percent of those teaching at American universities and colleges are liberal and 15 percent are conservative, says the study being published this week. The imbalance is almost as striking in partisan terms, with 50 percent of the faculty members surveyed identifying themselves as Democrats and 11 percent as Republicans.

My last column, "Forget Free Speech, Liberals Don't Tolerate Campus Conservatives," drew the ire and attention of thousands. Published online by GOPUSA and the Washington Times, it sparked still more debate on the issue of liberal bias on campus. Conservative professors from North Carolina, Wisconsin and across the country e-mailed their support. One celebrity endorsement came from former U.S. House Historian Christina Jeffrey, who currently presides over the South Carolina Association of Scholars. In her words, this past column was my "best ever." Still more students, parents and alumni stepped up, sending e-mails and notes, while weighing in on countless...

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. - More than 70 faculty members at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill are demanding that administrators stop negotiations with a foundation that wants to create a Western cultures program at the school. Chancellor James Moeser said he believes many faculty members are wary of the proposal simply because of the John William Pope Foundation's conservative values. "It will be a major enhancement of our offerings in Western civilizations," he said Wednesday. "And it won't be done at the expense of any other program." The proposed program would include an academic minor in Western cultures,...

The Bluest State: Academia By Daniel B. Klein and Andrew Western Palo Alto Weekly 02/23/05 The popular vote for President went 48 percent Democrat and 51 percent Republican. This nearly one-to-one national diversity is unlike colleges and universities, where a one-party system prevails. We have conducted a scholarly study of voter registration and find that among Berkeley faculty the Republicans are outnumbered 10 to 1. At Stanford the ratio is 7.6 to 1. Lumping both together gives 9 to 1. Talk about a lack of diversity! If this were a gender, race or ethnic-background study it would be considered almost...

Good morning students! Welcome to our “senior seminar for college-bound students” at Springfield High School. My name is Dr. Obvious. I taught at ASU (Any State University) for thirty years until my recent retirement. I am pleased to accept a position teaching young students everything they need to know before they attend college. For most of you, that will be some time within the next year. Springfield High designed this course as a way of preparing next year’s freshmen to function in college. I have decided to take a slightly different approach. I intend to teach you things you will...

I was to be on a panel discussion at the AAAS annual meeting in Washington DC. I mis-remembered the time, though, thinking the event was at 11 A.M., when in fact it was at noon, so I had an hour to kill. Wandering around the conference center idly, looking for something interesting, I came across a meeting hall with an easel outside saying GENDER AND ETHNIC DIVERSITY IN ACADEMIC SCIENCE. Thinking this might be right up my street, I peered inside. About 30 people were listening to a woman lecturer. The people had their backs to me and were clustered...

Ex-professor at Clark rips ‘gender police’ "We’re dealing now with a religion of hard-line feminism While the president of Harvard University continues to engage in marathon mea culpas, Christina Hoff Sommers said she’s not surprised that the poor guy has been pilloried for committing a cardinal sin in academia: suggesting that men and women might indeed be different. “If you even hint that there’s a biological difference between the sexes — which most scientists agree there is — a small coterie of hard-line gender police will get very excited and start shrieking,” Ms. Sommers maintained. “They insist that any suggestion...