Free Republic

March 23, 2005 OPERATION ACADEMIC FREEDOM Capitol Rally for Academic Freedom to Highlight College Republicans’ annual Convention "We have the distinct privilege to be joined by an long list of leading Republican figures who will address us at various events throughout the weekend," said Mason Harrison, a sophomore at UC Davis and the Convention Director. Speakers include Sen. Tom McClintock, Bill Simon, Rosario Marin, David Horowitz, Ward Connerly, Assemblyman Mark Wyland, Senator Bill Morrow, former congressman Jim Rogan, actor/comedian John O’Hurley and possibly even Gov. Schwarzenegger. The highlight of the weekend will be a bipartisan rally hosted by CCR on...

Politicizing of schools continues By: RICK REISS - For The Californian Parents, keep the Pepto-Bismal nearby. Today while your children attend college, high school and even middle school, they will be subjected to more political indoctrination courtesy of another left-wing pressure group. Today's topic of indoctrination is homosexuality. This is brought to you by the activists at the "Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network." The GLSEN has declared today a "Day of Silence" to advance their homosexual agenda.

My Battle with the Thought Police By Hans-Hermann Hoppe Mises Media April 14, 2005 Readers of [Mises Economics Blog] probably know about my ordeal at my university, which has been covered quite extensively on this site and by the major mainstream press. Now that major combat operations have ended (to employ a phrase used by Bush in reference to Iraq...two years ago), I've had some time to reflect on what happened, why, and whether and to what extent I responded properly. And so here are my thoughts on this incident that took my career as a professor of economics in...

Liberals enjoy claiming that they are intellectuals, thrilled to engage in a battle of wits. This, they believe, distinguishes them from conservatives, who are religious fanatics who react with impotent rage to opposing ideas. As one liberal, Jonathan Chait, put the cliche in The New Republic: Bush is an "instinctive anti-intellectual" and his administration hostile to "fact-driven debate." In a favorable contrast, Clinton is "the former Rhodes scholar who relished academic debates." Showing his usual reverence for fact-checking, The New York Times' Paul Krugman says the Republican Party is "dominated by people who believe truth should be determined by revelation,...

If you've ever wondered how American universities can continue to allow political advocacy and indoctrination to flourish in their classrooms, consider the recent controversy over Columbia University's department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures (MEALAC). In a documentary called Columbia Unbecoming, 14 Columbia students describe what they considered expressions of anti-Israel bias and intimidation in some MEALAC department courses. In response, Columbia's President Lee Bollinger last winter appointed a faculty committee to investigate the matter. This was the second committee the president appointed, the students and others having rejected the first committee's obvious attempt to brush aside the...

There’s a real demand out there for alternative programs and points of view on college campuses. If Steven Roy Goodman is right, the implications for the academy are immense. According to Goodman, who makes his living advising students who are applying to college, many families are now so fed up with campus p.c. that they’ve started to avoid the most egregiously left-wing schools. That means students are beginning to shun big-name colleges — where politicization is at its worst — in favor of less prestigious, but also less prejudiced, schools. For example, Columbia University seems to be losing applicants in...

ABIGAIL THERNSTROM once described the American college campus as an island of repression in a sea of freedom. The report of Columbia University's ad hoc grievance committee suggests that Columbia is such an island. On its face, the report presents findings and recommendations concerning allegations by Columbia students that they were subjected to intimidation and abuse by members of the university's department of Middle East and Asian Language and Cultures (MEALAC). However, the report is better understood as a directive to Columbia students to take without protest the poisonous medicine being administered by the anti-Israel, anti-American radicals who dominate MEALAC....

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...

As the just-resigned president of the University of Colorado said, there’s a “new McCarthyism” alive in America. But it’s hardly what was gnawing at her. Her expressed fear was that critics of Ward Churchill, a professor of sorts at her institution, now feel “empowered.” Wow. Churchill, in case you forgot, is the guy who as much as said that all of those killed in the Pentagon and most of those killed in the World Trade Center on 9/11 had it coming. He hates America. He advocates violence or whatever it takes to change things. He seems to have received tenure...

Liberal college students have once again illustrated their never-ending quest for tolerance and their vast ability to think critically about ideas in opposition to their own. Yes, I’m talking about yet another pie-throwing incident involving a conservative speaker on a college campus. The latest chapter in this pathetic story took place at Butler University on Wednesday, April 6. Conservative activist and President of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture David Horowitz was early in his lecture at Butler when he was struck with a pie. “There’s a wave of violence on college campuses, committed by what I’d call...

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...