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Obama is a symbol of everything wrong in higher education today:He has graduated Columbia and Harvard Law School with a head full of a fluff, no substance. He throws around words that are in vogue among the academicians, but it is clear that he (and probably they) have no notion of what they mean. Even Democrat Mickey Kaus catches on today that Obama doesn't know what he's talking about when he's talking about his own health plan ( SEE HERE : http://slate.com/blogs/blogs/kausfiles/archive/2009/07/15/obama-as-health-care-salesman-he-sucks.aspx ) Professor Ann Althouse made a similar observation yesterday re Sotomayor and Obama's use of "empathy" ( SEE...

Walter Kendall Myers, the State Department analyst accused of spying for Havana for 30 years, made me lose my innocence soon after I started working at the department in late 2006. I learned because of him that...there is a substratum of officials whose personal ideology permits them to tolerate the unforgivable... This epiphany came because of remarks Mr. Myers made to an audience at Johns Hopkins University...about our closest ally, the United Kingdom. Mr. Myers' comments were indiscreet, contemptible and may have even broken the law. They should by all rights have gotten Mr. Myers fired and earned him rebuke...Instead,...

Thirty years ago this past week, Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. condemned our nation's selective colleges and universities to live a lie. Writing the deciding opinion in the case Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, he prompted these institutions to justify their use of racial preferences in admissions with a rationale most had never considered and still do not believe – a desire to offer a better education to all students. To this day, few colleges have even tried to establish that their race-conscious admissions policies yield broad educational benefits. The research is so fuzzy and...

CHICAGO — When a research group started tracking what happens to Chicago’s public school graduates after they enter college, it came upon a startling and dispiriting finding: the graduation rates at two of the city’s four-year public universities were among the worst in the country. At Northeastern Illinois University, a tidy commuter campus on the North Side of Chicago, only 17 percent of students who enroll as full-time freshmen graduate within six years, according to data collected by the federal Department of Education. At Chicago State University on the South Side, the overall graduation rate is 16 percent. As dismal...

A year after Harvard's president, Lawrence H. Summers, promised a major effort to make the faculty more diverse amid a controversy about his remarks about women in science, a university report released yesterday indicated that most of the work remained to be done. Women represent considerably less than half of the faculty in all but one of Harvard's schools, and while the number of women in tenure-track positions grew slightly from the last academic year to the current one, women still make up a small fraction of the university's tenured professors. These were among the findings in the first report...

The resignation of Lawrence Summers as president of Harvard University tells us a lot about what is wrong with academia today.When he took office in 2001, Summers seemed like an ideal president of Harvard. He had had a distinguished career in and out of the academic world, including having been a professor at Harvard, so there was no obvious reason why he would not fit in.His fatal flaws were honesty and a desire to do the right thing. That has ruined more than one academic career. Dr. Summers' problems started early on. He called in Cornel West for a private...

Four years after 9/11 the postmortem of that disaster continues to focus on the institutional failures of our intelligence agencies and government bureaucracies. Yet the larger intellectual and cultural corruption that in part made possible many of those misjudgments and mistakes does not receive the public attention it deserves. The politicizing of the academy, for example, that accelerated in the sixties had compromised the study of Islam and the Middle East long before Islamic terrorism appeared on our cultural radar. Because of this ideological distortion, centuries of consensus about the aggressive, intolerant, and expansionist nature of Islam –– an agreement...

The Policy Committee of Guilford Technical Community College's Board of Trustees has voted to recommend the conditional admission of undocumented immigrants with the following limitations, subject to approval by the full board at its June 16, 2005 meeting: * An undocumented immigrant may be considered for admission if he or she attended high school in the United States for at least 3 years and graduated. * Undocumented immigrants may not receive state or federal financial aid in the form of a grant, a loan, or aid from a college source. * An undocumented immigrant will be considered an out-of-state resident...

Christian Law Students Sue Ill. University By Associated Press April 6, 2005, 10:26 PM EDT CARBONDALE, Ill. -- A law school student group that requires members to pledge to adhere to Christian beliefs -- including a prohibition against homosexuality -- has sued Southern Illinois University for refusing to recognize the organization. A chapter of the national Christian Legal Society at the university's law school filed the lawsuit Tuesday in federal court, alleging school officials violated the group's constitutional rights, including the right to free speech, by revoking its status March 25. The revocation means the group can no longer use...

A great piece written by one of my favorite commentators on the Arab-Israeli conflict, and society in general.

Here in Ohio lots of people are in an uproar about State Sen. Larry Mumper's Senate Bill 24 (SB 24), which is based on David Horowitz's "Academic Bill of Rights." I write a weekly column for my school newspaper, and a few weeks ago I wrote a column advocating SB 24's implementation. For the next week I was mauled by liberals who wrote letters to the editor saying I want to strip the entire universe of its freedom of speech, that conservatives are whiny babies, and other friendly reminders that left-wing radicalism is alive and well at my school. Even...

Others may have sympathized on learning that Hamid Dabashi, a professor of Middle East studies at Columbia University, felt threatened by a graduate student at his own university, but not me. The incident began late on Sept. 27, 2004, when Victor Luria, a Ph.D. candidate in genetics and a former soldier in the Israel Defense Forces, wrote Dabashi an e-mail taking strong exception to what Dabashi had written about the IDF in an article, "For a Fistful of Dust: A Passage to Palestine," he published in the Egyptian newspaper, Al-Ahram. In response, Luria wrote to Dabashi: I have rarely seen...

Many liberal pundits and newspaper letter writers have been bragging about how brilliant they are while bemoaning the supposed stupidity of those who voted to re-elect President Bush earlier this month. So it probably should come as no surprise that two college professors wrote to the New York Times to explain why a recent survey found that Republicans were grossly outnumbered in academia: Republicans simply aren't smart enough to teach at the college level. "Academics are trained to reason using logic, to question evidence and to consider and evaluate several possible interpretations of events," Markus Meister, a professor of biology...

BERKELEY, Calif. - At the birthplace of the free speech movement, campus radicals have a new target: the faculty that came of age in the 60's. They say their professors have been preaching multiculturalism and diversity while creating a political monoculture on campus. Conservatism is becoming more visible at the University of California here, where students put out a feisty magazine called The California Patriot and have made the Berkeley Republicans one of the largest groups on campus. But here, as at schools nationwide, the professors seem to be moving in the other direction, as evidenced by their campaign contributions...

Scholars detail Rangers' violence in a border war against Mexicans WACO - Back east, for social cachet there is nothing like an ancestor on the Mayflower. In Texas, it is a Texas Ranger in the family tree. Here at the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum, some of the most avid visitors come in search of connections to the men who won the West and, it was said, would charge hell with a bucket of water. But Southern Methodist University in Dallas says new historical accounts are casting the long-revered fighters of outlaws and Indians in a decidedly darker...

These days, when college students say they're studying Homer, they as likely mean the Simpsons character as the ancient Greek author of The Iliad. As a field for serious research, popular culture has come of age. It's been a long, slow road to academic acceptance. The subject, once dismissed by professors, was later taken hostage by those with political agendas on both sides of the 1990s Culture Wars, when debate raged as college curriculums shifted away from a Western, classical focus. Today, though it gives some tuition-paying parents heart palpitations, pop culture has taken its place as a mainstream subject...

The class started off innocuously enough. We were in our fifth week of an undergraduate honors seminar, reading Ishmael Reed's 1972 novel, Mumbo Jumbo, and I was starting to explain how the novel is built on a series of deliberate anachronisms, on the way to asking what these tropes from the 1960s were doing in a novel ostensibly set during the Harlem Renaissance. I began in an obvious (though always fun) place, with Abdul Hamid's encounter with PaPa LaBas at a rent party, where Abdul delivers a tirade presaging the rise of the Nation of Islam and protesting U.S. draft...

Summers wants Harvard to regard itself as a single sovereign entity rather than as an archipelago of loosely affiliated institutions. He wants to change the undergraduate curriculum so that students focus less on ''ways of knowing'' and more on actual knowledge. He wants to raise quantitative kinds of knowledge to something like parity with traditionally humanistic kinds of knowledge. He wants to make the university more directly engaged with problems in education and public health, and he wants the professions that deal with those problems to achieve the same status as the more lordly ones of law, business and medicine....

Somewhere along the line, the idea took hold that, to be an intellectual, you have to be against it, whatever it is. The intellectual is a negator. Affirmation is not in his or her vocabulary. It was not always so. Throughout the World War II era, when the stakes were high, American intellectuals signed on for the war effort. Our foreign policy enjoyed bipartisan support: As everyone fought fascism, liberal, conservative, moderate, even radical intellectuals and academics found common ground without fearing that they would be accused of betraying a lofty stance of dissent. The Vietnam era broke this solidarity...

The Felons of Ivory Tower By Garin K. Hovannisian At the start of the 17th century, a prominent astronomer declared that the universe did not revolve around the Earth. For this, Galileo Galilee faced a torrent of societal criticism and his claims were ridiculed. In 1633, he was forced to withdraw his theory. But it was rather Nicholas Copernicus’s identical claim, which was corroborated with innovative astronomical observations that were deficient in Galileo’s, that today is recognized and taught. It is this Copernican model that now serves as the standard and the uncontested truth. The precept of scientific relativism is...

The Felons of Ivory Tower By Garin K. Hovannisian At the start of the 17th century, a prominent astronomer declared that the universe did not revolve around the Earth. For this, Galileo Galilee faced a torrent of societal criticism and his claims were ridiculed. In 1633, he was forced to withdraw his theory. Soon thereafter, allowed by a progressively liberal civilization, Nicholas Copernicus made the same claim, corroborating his assertion with innovative astronomical observations. It is this Copernican model that today serves as the standard and the uncontested truth. The precept of scientific relativism is rooted in the notion that...

TUES, 4 MAR 2003 Lawyers believe agents may have violated students’ rightsInterrogations alarm Saudi Arabian student By Leif Thompson Argonaut Staff The legal rights of international students interrogated last week by the FBI and the Immigration and Naturalization Service may have been violated, a UI law professor said. “I just want people to understand that the tactics that were used, that I observed, and that other lawyers in town have observed, were so beyond what was necessary, and in some ways beyond what was legal; and it served to terrorize a whole lot of innocent people,” said Monica Schurtman, an...

Back to Political · Back to home · EmailThe New StupidityBy Alec Mouhibian(Note: This is a long essay, so it is highly recommended you print and read.) If one wishes to ascertain the force of turpitude that is the most primary and inherent arch-villain of the liberty establishing, capitalist, reason-embracing principles that characterize the foundation and prosperity of the United States of America, one need travel no further than back to kindergarten, where the tell-all question that lies at the philosophical base of the entire boondoggle which is the modern political spectrum, was posed regularly: One plus one equals…?“Two,” would...