U of L rescinds professor's contract

The University of Louisville said in a statement released over the weekend that it has withdrawn the contract of sociology lecturer Dr. John McTighe for at least the spring semester.

McTighe was quoted by student columnist Brian Yates as saying "It was the religious zealots who say they were voting on morals. I think we should all buy AK47's and shoot them all! That's what I would suggest, if it were allowed." [Full disclosure: Mr. Yates is the publisher of the Louisville Patriot.]

Following Yates' commentary, U of L received 1,600 e-mail messages, many from members of the American Family Association, who had sent an e-mail to members and posted an item on its website.

McTighe said in a statement that there was "absolutely no attempt to advocate violence."

He told the Courier-Journal last week that Yates misquoted him and that his remarks were taken out of context. He did acknowledge making comments similar to those cited in the Louisville Patriot's December issue.

U of L President James Ramsey said in a statement, "We strongly support academic freedom. The quote attributed to Professor McTighe is unacceptable and not an issue of academic freedom."

Dr. Shirley Willihnganz, U of L provost, said that the investigation would be completed when students returned from Christmas break.

"Students are leaving the campus for the holiday break and the review will be completed as soon as we can meet with students," Willihnganz said in a statement. "Our goal is to determine the facts in this matter and to act responsibly to both the students and faculty."

McTighe said he agreed to withdraw the contract because "he has confidence in the university review process."

Intellectual Morons: How Ideology Makes Smart People Fall for Stupid Ideas

Why do well-educated antiwar activists argue that the U.S. government orchestrated the September 11 attacks, and is on the way to replicating the horrors of Nazi Germany? How can Al Gore really believe that cars pose "a mortal threat to the security of every nations"? How can Yale professor Lamont Cole assert with a straight face that "to feed a starving child is to exacerbate the world population problem"? Why does the Princeton professor known as the father of the animal rights movement object to humans eating animals but not to humans having sex with them -- and why does PETA defend that position?

It is startling how many Americans -- and particularly how many among the Leftist media, academic, and political elites -- fall for cockamamie ideas that a child can see through. The trouble is, their lies become institutionalized as truth, and we all suffer as a result. Why are liberals such easy prey for stupid ideas? Daniel J. Flynn reveals the answer in Intellectual Morons.

Flynn, author of Why the Left Hates America, shows how people (mostly Leftists, but also a few on the Right) can be so blinded to reality by the causes they serve that they espouse bizarre, sometimes ridiculous, and often dangerous positions. Even the most influential social movements have spawned ideologues who don't care whether an idea is good or bad, true or false -- but only whether it can serve their cause.

In Intellectual Morons, Flynn catalogues an amazing number of jaw- dropping lapses in common sense from even our most celebrated liberal opinion leaders. This book is a welcome reality check for the glaring excesses of what passes today for intellectual analysis among Leftists.

Stupid ideas put forth by liars, hypocrites, and perverts - - and their harmful consequences:

How abortion rights activists ignore (or cover up) the fact that their matron saint advocated eugenics and concentration camps
The university professor who claims that Beethoven's music perpetuates rape
The environmental movement: spawned by a "scientist" whose doomsday predictions are almost always wrong
How the hero of the animal rights crowd is a crank who promotes infanticide and euthanasia
The respected animal rights activist and professor who actually compared barnyard conditions for animals to concentration camps for humans
The sexual revolution: launched by Alfred Kinsey, a scientific fraud -- and pervert
How the banning of DDT has led to the deaths of millions (plus other disastrous effects of kowtowing to environmentalist fearmongering)
How historians and journalists have airbrushed history to turn a racial separatist into a civil rights icon
How the founder of Planned Parenthood actually condemned abortion repeatedly in public forums -- while privately helping to provide it
How the Kinsey Reports contains clear evidence that children were molested in order to provide data for their findings
The history textbook, vastly popular among American liberals, that pushes watered-down Marxism and smears the Founding Fathers as motivated by greed
W. E. B. Du Bois: the unsavory truth about this civil rights hero's involvement with Communist ideologues who actually opposed his stated principles
The fifty-year delusion: why liberals continue to believe, against a growing mountain of evidence, that Alger Hiss was not in fact a Communist spy
Gore Vidal's paranoid fantasies and evidence-free "analyses" of how U.S. officials were involved in 9/11 and the Oklahoma City bombing in order to increase government power
How rabid anti-Americans today simply parrot the delusional claims of a few whacked-out Leftist gurus
The "uncontrollable hysteria and physical violence" that marked the behavior of a revered feminist icon
How Alfred Kinsey used child molesters, including a former member of the Nazi SS, to gather the data about sex he used to help break down society's mores
The bizarre private and public life of intellectual cult figure Ayn Rand
The icon of the Left who praised Hitler's Germany as a prosperous, orderly, efficient, and peaceful place
Betty Friedan: how she distorted and covered up inconvenient facts about her personal life when writing The Feminine Mystique
Noam Chomsky: apologist for the Khmer Rouge, champion of Fidel, predictor of American-led genocide in Afghanistan -- and still the world's most cited scholar
The state-funded Massachusetts conference that instructed high school students how to engage in a variety of sexual perversions
Leo Strauss: his bizarre numerological "key" for understanding philosophy - and his baneful influence in high places
How the picture of Alfred Kinsey that has been passed on by college texts and popular historians is the polar opposite of the truth
Kinsey: how he sought out homosexuals and other sexual deviants for his studies of sex, both to confirm his predrawn conclusions and to provide himself with sexual liaisons
The respected animal rights theorist who declared: "Human beings, as a species, have no more value than slugs" -- and the Greenpeace founder who believes that "earthworms are far more valuable than people"
Eight absurd and erroneous predictions made by Paul Ehrlich, the author of The Population Bomb (which didn't stop the book from having enormous influence over liberal policymakers)
The entire philosophical school, beloved and revered by liberals, that glorifies inconsistency and incoherence
The New York college that actually boasts an Alger Hiss Professor of Social Studies

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