Free Republic

The abolition of tenure Mike S. Adams December 27, 2004 After every article I write lamenting the deplorable state of higher education, I get letters from readers that say “thank God for tenure.” I guess that many have concluded that tenure is solely responsible for my continued employment at the institution I so frequently criticize. I don’t see it that way. Over the last couple of years, my columns have been read by millions of people. Fortunately, many of my readers are among the finest lawyers in the United States of America. Some of those lawyers have now become my...

Traditionally, clashes over academic freedom have pitted politicians or administrators against instructors who wanted to express their opinions and teach as they saw fit. But increasingly, it is students who are invoking academic freedom, claiming biased professors are violating their right to a classroom free from indoctrination. For example, at the University of North Carolina, three incoming freshmen sued over a reading assignment they said offended their Christian beliefs. In Colorado and Indiana, a national conservative group publicized student allegations of left-wing bias by professors. Faculty received hate mail and were pictured in mock "wanted" posters; at least one college...

This fall four new studies of professors' political attitudes showed a large tilt to the left: • Daniel Klein, an economics professor and researcher at Santa Clara University and Stockholm University, surveyed more than 1,000 professors around the United States and found Democrats outnumbering Republicans at least 7-1 in the humanities and social sciences, with departments such as anthropology and sociology coming in at about 30-1. • In a separate study of voter registration records, Mr. Klein found professors at Stanford and the University of California-Berkeley tilted Democratic 9-1. Among younger professors at those two universities the imbalance was even...

Patrolling Professors' Politics Conservative activists and students press campaigns against perceived bias on campuses By SARA HEBEL Gerald Wilson, a history professor at Duke University, says a student's question on the first day of class last semester caught him off guard: "Do you have any prejudices?" Unsure what the young man meant, Mr. Wilson decided to reply with a joke. "Yeah, Republicans," he recalls saying. (He found out later that the student was asking about writing styles.) "Everybody laughed," the professor says. Well, not quite everybody. Matt Bettis, a senior in the class, thought the comment among others was inappropriate...

[Chronicle Careers] In but not of Academe by WIlliam Pilger My new tenure-track digs include a large office in a historic building with leaded-pane windows, sills deep enough to stack files on, and shelves on three walls filled with my own books, departmental gems, and junk from years past. All the signs point to it: I'm finally a bona-fide member of academe. Yet I'm gradually coming to realize that my membership card should read "in but not of" -- something the 2004 presidential election set in stark relief. Maybe I should have seen it coming all along. I was just...

Conservatives on college campuses scored a tactical hit when the American Enterprise Institute's magazine published a survey of voter registration among humanities and social-science faculty members several years ago. More than nine out of 10 professors belonged to the Democratic or Green party, an imbalance that contradicted many liberal academics' protestations that diversity and pluralism abound in higher education. Further investigations by people like David Horowitz, president of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, coupled with well-publicized cases of discrimination against conservative professors, reinforced the findings and set "intellectual diversity" on the agenda of state legislators and members...

Ellen Goodman is a lot like conservative pundit Ann Coulter – except that she lacks Coulter’s wit, style and discernment. Okay, the liberal columnist is nothing like Coulter. Still, Goodman is among the best the opposition has to offer. And, if nothing else, her misconceptions usually make an amusing starting point for an exploration of reality. On December 5, Goodman warned her readers of a dangerous development: Conservatives have turned their fanatical gaze on the college campus. "While many of us assume that the right is busily targeting the highest court as their last unoccupied power base, a whole subset...

Senator Morrow has introduced a much-needed Student Bill of Rights into the Senate this year. If we are committed to academic freedom and debate then we should support this bill. Universities all work to obtain diversity except when it comes to conservative ideas and speech. Let's rally behind this bill and see if we can get it passed. SB 5 ...the Trustees of the California State University and the Board of Governors of the California Community Colleges are hereby directed to, develop guidelines and implement the following principles of the Student Bill of Rights: (1) Students shall be graded solely...

George Mason University EXECUTIVE SUMMARY This paper analyzes Fall 2003 admissions data for University of Virginia undergraduates, North Carolina State undergraduates, and William and Mary Law School. Odds ratios indicate that black applicants receive very strong preference over equally qualified white applicants at UVA and W&M Law (and over equally qualified Hispanics and Asians), and moderate preference at NCS. At NCS and W&M Law, white students are preferred over equally-qualified Asian students. At UVA and NCS, Hispanic students are also preferred over white students, but the degree of preference is much less than for black students. The results for UVA...

Wednesday, December 1, 2004 BRAVE NEW SCHOOLSStudents: Professors inject politics in classPoll finds 29% of collegians feel compelled to agree with teachers Posted: December 1, 20041:00 a.m. Eastern © 2004 WorldNetDaily.com A new poll finds that nearly half of students at 50 leading American colleges say professors frequently inject political comments into classroom discussions, even if those comments have nothing to do with the subject being taught. Commissioned by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, the survey also found 29 percent of students feel they have to agree with a professor's politics to get a good grade. According to the survey:...

JONATHAN CHAIT: Why Academia Shuns Republicans A few weeks ago, a pair of studies found that Democrats vastly outnumbered Republicans among professors at leading universities. Conservatives gleefully seized upon this to once again flagellate academia for its liberal bias. Am I the only person who fails to understand why conservatives see this finding as vindication? After all, these studies show that some of the best-educated, most-informed people in the country overwhelmingly reject the GOP. Why is this seen as an indictment of academia, rather than as an indictment of the Republican Party? Conservatives have a ready answer. The only reason...

Many students at top schools, like the University say that not only are they exposed to liberal viewpoints during lectures, but also that they must agree with their professors’ political views to succeed in classes, according to a new study. Forty-six percent of students at the top 50 universities and liberal arts colleges say professors use the classroom to present their political views, and 62 percent reported that professors praised John Kerry during the presidential campaign, according to a survey released Nov. 30 by the Washington-based American Council of Trustees and Alumni. The University is ranked 22nd on this list....

College costs have risen dramatically over the last several decades. In many cases, it's difficult to find a college where per-student costs are under $20,000 each year. Most often, tuition doesn't measure the true cost because taxpayer and donor subsidies pay part of the expenses. While costs are rising, education quality is in precipitous decline, particularly at the undergraduate level. Part of the reason is the political climate on college campuses, where professors use their classrooms for proselytizing and indoctrination and teach classes that have little or no academic content. Let's look at some of it.

However, when campus speech codes go beyond the Hillsdale model, they reduce higher education to nothing more than a robotic assembly line cranking out prefabricated ideas in a factory of left-wing political correctness. Today, the speech codes on most of America's campuses are nothing more than carefully-designed thought-control mechanisms, created by America's "progressive" social engineers, for turning today's college students into mindless, soulless, left-thinking automatons.......

http://academicbias.com/bw101-wmv.html This documentary is awesome! From Brain Terminal and Evan Maloney.

No Republican need apply by Bruce Bartlett December 7, 2004 Although conservatives complain loudly and often about liberal bias in the mass media, the truth is that one is far more likely to read a conservative perspective in The New York Times than hear it from a college professor. At least the Times publishes an occasional conservative on its op-ed page. At many universities, just finding a Republican anywhere on the faculty is problematic. Two recent studies by Santa Clara University economist Daniel B. Klein prove my point. In one study, he looked at party registration of the faculty at...

"A sound education presents students with multiple perspectives and equips students to make up their own minds." Indeed. By Jay Ambrose College students are telling on their professors, and what they say is that some cheating is going on, at least if you think it's cheating to teach just one side of political issues and use your classroom authority for purposes of indoctrination. This information comes by way of a survey sponsored by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. Researchers interviewed 658 students at 50 of the nation's most highly ranked colleges and universities and discovered the following: Seventy-four...

SURVEY REVEALS PERVASIVE POLITICAL PRESSURE IN THE CLASSROOM Students: 49% Report Professors Preach Rather Than Teach Washington, DC (November 30, 2004) -- 49% of the students at the top 50 colleges and universities say professors frequently inject political comments into their courses, even if they have nothing to do with the subject. Almost one-third—29%—feel they have to agree with the professor’s political views to get a good grade. A survey commissioned by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni reveals the politicization of the classroom and the intellectual intolerance of faculty. According to the survey: * 48% report campus presentations...

The ACTA survey was conducted this fall by the Center for Survey Research & Analysis at the University of Connecticut, among students at 50 top U.S. universities and colleges. It sought to ascertain the perceived levels of classroom politicization and of intellectual intolerance among faculty members. The results were striking. -snip- My teacher came into class the day after the election proclaiming, 'That's it. This is the death of America.' The rest of the class was eager to agree, and twenty minutes of Bush-bashing ensued. At one point, one student asked our teacher whether she should be so vocal, lest...

The left-wing takeover of American universities is an old story. As far back as the 1930s, Irving Kristol recalled in "Memoirs of a Trotskyist," City College of New York was so radical that "if there were any Republicans at City -- and there must have been some -- I never met them, or even heard of their existence." Soon the virus had spread to the nation's most elite institutions. In 1951, William F. Buckley Jr. created a sensation with "God and Man at Yale," which documented the socialist and atheist worldview that even then prevailed in the classrooms of the...