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If you want to know what really goes on in our public schools, go to a teacher-of-the-year banquet. Here you will see why schools aren't about academics anymore. Educators will never admit it openly, but an event like this reveals so much that outsiders never get to see.

Over the past couple of years, I have been corresponding with and visiting various Colleges and Universities, as part of helping younger folks decide where to attend school. In addition, I have visited a number of College Websites, and discussion groups (e.g. College Prowler and College Confidential) in order to round out my sources of information by relying on the experience of other people for places I didn't have the opportunity to see for myself. This has led to a number of observations about "the way the world works" and how these factors influence people's actions and their path through...

There's no gentle way to put it: People who give in to racism and prejudice may simply be dumb, according to a new study that is bound to stir public controversy. The research finds that children with low intelligence are more likely to hold prejudiced attitudes as adults. These findings point to a vicious cycle, according to lead researcher Gordon Hodson, a psychologist at Brock University in Ontario. Low-intelligence adults tend to gravitate toward socially conservative ideologies, the study found. Those ideologies, in turn, stress hierarchy and resistance to change, attitudes that can contribute to prejudice.......

One of the fascinating little oddities of academic research is the amount of intellectual capital that the best and the brightest spend in order to catch up with the rest of us. “We consider the relationship between collegiate-football success and non-athlete student performance,” three economists from the University of Oregon write in a recent study. “We find that the team’s success significantly reduces male grades relative to female grades.” “This phenomenon is only present in fall quarters, which coincides with the football season. Using survey data, we find that males are more likely than females to increase alcohol consumption, decrease...

There is a horrific injustice lurking in the shadows of academia, turning our college community into a bastion of selfishness and greed. This gross injustice is brought upon by an unfair system that rewards the rich and impoverishes the poor. This disgusting system is our collegiate grading system. It's insane that in this millennium, Texas A&M allows an elite few with 4.0 GPAs to parade around campus while thousands of students live in academic squalor. There is no reason why these few should receive the bulk of academic scholarships, admission into competitive colleges and majors and later receive preferential treatment...

"Gov. Rick Perry’s ‘Seven Breakthrough Solutions’ would make for bad business, undermine meaning of a university" Last week, lawmakers in Texas were embroiled over a series of reforms – boldly named the “Seven Breakthrough Solutions” – proposed by Texas Gov. Rick Perry. The governor’s wildly optimistic proposals seek to implement a business-like model for the Texas state university system to optimize efficiency by measuring student satisfaction, while pinning the blame squarely on professors. The proposals sound great, until you realize the “Seven Breakthrough Solutions” are hardly breakthroughs and barely solutions. In light of rapidly dissipating state support for public higher...

Professors gone wild. That is the only conclusion you can come to when you apply Sherlock Holmes' astute dictum to the striking similarities between the widespread failures of American education and government, institutions universally dominated by a self-proclaimed "educated class." Think about what the great fictional detective said: "Once you eliminate the impossible whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth." And so extracting the truth underlying the dysfunction of what the inimitable James Lewis more correctly terms our national corps of "educated idiots" (or, as our Harvard-educated president puts it more accurately, "corpse") one finds...professors. Professors have...

The University of Nebraska-Lincoln took a hard blow to its academic reputation when it was kicked out of an organization of the nation’s top research universities this week. It was the first time ever that the now 62-member Association of American Universities had voted to remove a member.

'Pet' an insult to animals, academics say Fiona MacRae From: Herald Sun April 29, 2011 12:00AM Increase Text SizeDecrease Text SizePrintEmail Share Add to DiggAdd to del.icio.usAdd to FacebookAdd to KwoffAdd to MyspaceAdd to NewsvineWhat are these? Academics say that rather than being a term of endearment, "pets" is an insult to the animals concerned and their owners, who should be known as "human carers". Source: Herald Sun IN a statement that gives a whole new meaning to animal rights, leading academics have called for pets to be renamed "companion animals". They say that rather than being a term of...

On Tuesday, as the Knesset debated a law against boycotts on Israel, a group of radical left Israeli academics turned to the government of Poland (the incoming president of the European Union) and demanded action against what they termed the “crimes of the occupation” perpetrated by Israel. The group is headed by Professor Rachel Giora of Tel Aviv University and is demanding that Poland cancel a cooperation agreement with Israel over production of the Spike missile, which they claim Israeli directs against civilians. The group members are also calling on the Polish government to promote an “arms embargo” on Israel...

...Jim Towey's friendship with Mother Teresa of Calcutta. He served as her legal counsel for twelve years. He offered himself, both in Mexico and Washington, DC, to her work of loving and serving the poor. This is clearly a man who "walks the walk" when it comes to his Catholic faith. As a Catholic lawyer with a commitment to authentic Catholic Social Doctrine, I followed Jim Toweys early work as Director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives and as Assistant to President George W. Bush from 2002 to May 2006... ...President Elect Towey released this statement,...

BERKELEY, Calif.—On the night before we are scheduled to address this conference, the Tea Party experts are treated to a meal at the Faculty Club. It sounds fancy, and it is, with the feel and décor of a Sundance ski lodge. Over craft beers, wine, and cheese, we discuss that favorite topic of liberal academics: What the hell happened to Barack Obama? Why does the right have all the energy that he and the left used to own?

If the Left acknowledged sin, hypocrisy would be one of the most unforgiveable. But that’s exactly what hundreds of university faculty members – many in women’s and gender studies departments – were found guilty of during a recent experiment devised by a University of Illinois economics professor. Prof. Fred Gottheil told Front Page Magazine that he compiled a list of 675 email addresses from 900 signatures on a 2009 petition authored by Dr. David Lloyd, professor of English at the University of Southern California, urging the U.S. to abandon its ally, Israel. Prof. Gottheil discovered that six of the signers,

So what did I learn in the university? I’ll try to be a bit less specific than I was in Who Killed Homer? written over a decade ago. Lies, lies, and more lies First was the false knowledge — odd for an institution devoted to free inquiry. The university runs like a 13th-century church in which the heliocentric maverick is a mortal sinner. So too on campus the Rosenbergs never spied. Alger Hiss was a martyr. Mao killed only a few who needed killing (see Anita Dunn on that one). Che was not a murderous thug, but a hair-in-the-wind carefree...

...I arrived to a packed out restaurant filled with men and women in their twenties with the same kind of commitment to living the Catholic faith that my persistent host showed me. They listened attentively to my talk and when I opened the floor to questions, they would have gone all night! The quality of the questions they asked revealed that they are genuinely trying to live their Catholic faith and share it with others. ...I found many of them were the good fruit of new or renewed Catholic Colleges like Franciscan University, Ave Maria, Belmont Abbey and the growing...

Pope's Q-and-A at End of Priestly Year (Part 2) "True Theology ... Seeks to Enter More Profoundly in Communion With Christ" VATICAN CITY, JUNE 16, 2010 (Zenit.org).- Here is a translation of the second of five questions from the question-and-answer session Benedict XVI held with priests Friday evening at the prayer vigil in St. Peter's Square. The session was part of the International Meeting of Priests that marked the end of the Year for Priests. Part 1 of the session appeared Tuesday. Part 3 will appear Thursday. * * * Africa Q: Holiness, I am Mathias Agnero and I come from Africa,...

If Allegheny County added a tax of 1 cent per ounce on sugary soft drinks, it would cut consumption up to 8 percent. It would also produce an extra $54 million in revenue that could be plowed back into anti-obesity efforts. That's the conclusion reached by 21 undergraduate students at Carnegie Mellon University, mostly seniors in the departments of Engineering and Public Policy or Social and Decision Sciences. (snip)

The life of a college basketball player is tougher than you might think. Yes, they get to travel, play a game they love and be adored by legions of fans. But the tests. The horrific tests. If you were enrolled in Jim Harrick Jr.'s Coaching Principles and Strategies of Basketball course at the University of Georgia in the fall of 2001, you were drilled on such subjects as basketball, basketball and even basketball. How many points for a field goal? What league does Georgia compete in? What color are the uniforms? These are just a few of the piercing questions...

David Brooks notes that in the last year, something dire has happened: The public has turned decisively against the "educated classes" and all of their works. At the same time, it has also moved against Barack Obama, who began his term with approval ratings that bumped up against 70, and have now sunk to the high to mid-40s, with "strongly disapprove" ratings that rival those of George W. Bush at his worst. It has also moved strongly against his -- and the educated classes' -- ideas. It is more pro-life, more anti-climate change, more free market, less statist, more inclined...

Anti-establishment aging hippies from the 1960s are now the Czars having a field day with a Marxist agenda. In the upside down world that comes with Barack Obama in the White House, everything is a prop—including Old Glory. “One of the 20 finalists in health care video contest run by Barack Obama’s campaign arm features a mural of an American flag splattered with health care graffiti until it’s covered completely by black paint.” (politico.com, Oct. 28, 2009.) “The video is accompanied by the sound of a heart monitor pumping and then flat-lining—words such as “pre-existing conditions”, “homeless” and “death panel”...

Yesterday, the long saga over the clout scandal at the University of Illinois in Urbana Champaign (my alma mater) took it's latest turn. Gov. Pat Quinn announced Wednesday that he won't fire the two University of Illinois trustees who refused to resign amid an admissions scandal, and he started to rebuild the board with new appointees.

Intelligent idiots, smart fools, multi-degreed morons - lots of monikers could describe a category of individuals dismayingly prominent in the ruling elites of the West. They are the people so divorced from reality, so engrossed in bookish pursuits that - for all their undoubted intellectual accomplishments and often as a direct consequence thereof - they invariably end up with egg on their faces whenever they try to engage in practical activities. Worse yet, they idolize each other, sticking up for one another out of class solidarity. Case in point: a few days ago I watched a gathering of noted media...

INDOCTINATE U Our Education. Their Politics.

In this deleted scene, we told the story of how 1960s campus radicals morphed into today's academics. Three of those radicals were Ayers, his now-wife Bernardine Dohrn, and Mark Rudd. Together, they led the Weather Underground, a group committed to the violent overthrow the U.S. Government. To bring about their hoped-for communist utopia, the Weathermen bombed dozens of targets around the country including the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon and military recruiting stations. In executing their various attacks, the Weathermen killed a few of their own and also murdered two police officers and a security guard while robbing an armored car....

More than 3,200 supporters -- most of them educators -- have signed a petition protesting what they say is the "demonization of Professor William Ayers," asserting that his violent actions as the co-founder of the Weather Underground were just "history." Barack Obama's ties to Ayers have been questioned during the presidential campaign by critics who call the professor a "domestic terrorist." Among the people who signed the petition are No. 5, Columbia University professor of Arab studies Rashid Khalidi, and No. 814, former University of Colorado at Boulder professor Ward Churchill. Click here to see the petition. Churchill made headlines...

More than 3,200 supporters -- most of them educators -- have signed a petition protesting what they say is the "demonization of Professor William Ayers," asserting that his violent actions as the co-founder of the Weather Underground were just "history." Barack Obama's ties to Ayers have been questioned during the presidential campaign by critics who call the professor a "domestic terrorist." Among the people who signed the petition are No. 5, Columbia University professor of Arab studies Rashid Khalidi, and No. 814, former University of Colorado at Boulder professor Ward Churchill.

. . . can anybody remember a campaign where the negative ads were so detached from even a semblance of reality . . . . My local TV stations are in Philadelphia, and with Pennsylvania a "battleground state", we're getting ALL the ads. I don't think I can take one more ad with a low, whispering [conspiratorial] voice saying that "liberals" caused everything that's wrong with this country, will raise your taxes, and send your jobs overseas. The picures that go with this are a grinning Obama superimposed over a sad-looking woman holding a son, looking something like the classic...

When a group of Joseph Ratzinger's former students congratulated him on the day after his 2005 inauguration as Pope Benedict XVI, the new pope greeted them with a piece of happy news. "The first thing he said to us was, ‘We will continue the Schulerkreis,'" recalled the Rev. D. Vincent Twomey, an Irish theologian who studied under Ratzinger at the University of Regensburg in the 1970s. The Schulerkreis, or "student circle," is a seminar/retreat that Benedict holds with his ex-graduate students every summer. This year's session will be held Aug. 30, at Castel Gandolfo, the papal summer residence southeast of...

His experience reflects a challenge felt in classrooms nationwide. Six years after the No Child Left Behind law was enacted, the lowest-performing students continue to improve while children in the top tier have hit a plateau, according to a report due out Wednesday. The findings renew concerns about how schools challenge their brightest students at a time when federal law, backed by sanctions and financial consequences, forces many districts to focus time and money on students at the bottom rung of the academic ladder.

HERE WE GO AGAIN, with the University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents demonstrating its arrogance and contempt for the taxpayers who foot the bills. The board approved whopping raises for top UW officials. The new UW-Madison chancellor, Biddy Martin, was hired with a salary of $437,000 a year, more than $100,000 higher than her predecessor John Wiley was paid. President Kevin Reilly was granted a raise of nearly $80,000, moving from $342,000 a year to $421,500 nnually by next June. SOME READERS may remember just a few years ago, in 2003, when the regents were ruled in violation of...

In reviewing the maps of the Democratic primary results, in Dave Leip's electoral atlas, I was struck by the narrow geographic base of Barack Obama's candidacy. In state after state, he has carried only a few counties—though, to be sure, in many cases counties with large populations. There are exceptions, particularly in the southern states with large numbers of black voters in both urban and rural counties. But overall, the geographic analysis has pointed up to me a divide between Democratic constituencies—a divide as stark as that between blacks and Latinos or the old and the young—which has not shown...

Former executive spooks some, but not all, faculty By ABRAHAM MAHSHIE of the Tribune’s staff Published Friday, December 21, 2007 Faculty reaction to the naming of Gary Forsee as the new University of Missouri System president yesterday ranged from fear and anger to satisfaction and confidence. "I’m alarmed," said John Kultgen, a retired MU professor of philosophy who wrote a letter to curators when Forsee’s name first surfaced asking to "please, please do not view the university as a corporation that turns out a standardized product or just another bureaucratic structure reaching for a larger share at the public trough."...

...As for the faculty, once portrayed affectionately in fiction and film as bumbling bookworms, today’s professors are more likely to be seen as jet-setting self-promoters. And students don’t fare much better. Think of Tom Wolfe’s college novel, “I Am Charlotte Simmons,” in which students have their mouths fastened perpetually to the spigot of a beer keg except when taking a break to have sex. Some seem capable of doing both simultaneously. Of course, such images of campus life amount to something between satire and slander, but they do expose a problem with the standing of higher education in the public...

Tehran, June 03: Iran Sunday said several US-Iranians detained on accusations linked to spying "have confessed" as it warned the united states not to interfere in their cases. "Regarding the espionage of some Iranians, we have had good results. They have confessed to many issues," the centrist ham Mihan newspaper quoted the Tehran deputy prosecutor for security affairs, Hassan Hadad, as saying. Iran has said it is holding Iranian-American academics Haleh Esfandiari and Kian Tajbakhsh on charges of harming national security, in cases that several officials have linked to alleged US efforts to topple the clerical authorities. Washington and hardline...

Yesterday afternoon, I logged on to the "Global War" blog (global-war.bloghi.com) of Associate Professor Julio Pino – a Muslim convert who teaches at Kent State University. The heading for the site used to read "The Worldwide Web of Jihad: Daily News from the Most Dangerous Muslim in America." Now it reads "Are You Prepared for Jihad?" IN THE NAME OF OBL. 2007: THE YEAR OF ISLAMIC VICTORY!" Hardly able to believe what I was reading, I called Pino at his office in Ohio around 4 p.m. According to his secretary, he had not been at work that day (he...

The easiest way to tell the difference between a liberal and a leftist is that a liberal cheers against his country only when a Republican is in the White House, while a leftist cheers against his country all of the time. Take the 1999 Kosovo War, for example. If you'll remember correctly, the man in the White House at the time was Bill Clinton, a man who liberals believed could do no wrong. The Clinton State Department was unable to rally the UN Security Council to support the operation, so Cinton simply went ahead with it over international objections. The...

A 15-year-old girl and her parents recently came in for a chat with Dr. James Perrin, a Boston pediatrician, because they were concerned about the girl's grades. Previously an A student, she was slipping to B's, and the family was convinced attention deficit hyperactivity disorder was at fault — and that a prescription for Ritalin would boost her brainpower. After examining the girl, Perrin determined she didn't have ADHD. The parents, who had come in demanding a prescription, left empty-handed. Perrin, a professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and spokesperson for the American Academy of Pediatrics, and other physicians...

Addressing British Secretary of State for Education, Alan Johnson, and Universities UK President Drummond Bone, the Simon Wiesenthal Centers Director for International Relations, Dr. Shimon Samuels, called for their action against the British academic boycott of Israeli universities. “The ongoing campaign, last year at the Association of University Teachers (AUT) and this year at the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education (NATFHE) to incite to a British academic boycott of Israeli universities - is redolent of the Nazi 1930's 'Kaufen Nicht Bei Juden' boycott of Jewish professionals and enterprises,” Samuels said in a letter to the British...

New college ranking weighting academic, football and basketball excellence, respectively at 50%, 25% and 25% are: 1) Michigan 2) Notre Dame 3) UCLA 4) Northwestern 5) Stanford 6) Boston College 7) University of Virginia 8) University of Texas 9) University of Florida 10)California (Berkeley) To be considered: Washington, Duke, Syracuse, Michigan State, Indiana, Nebraska, Iowa, Alabama, Georgia Tech, Virginia Tech, Auburn, Wisconsin, Oklahoma, Kansas, Air Force, Brigham Young...now you go.

Kevin J. Mullen. _Dangerous Strangers: Minority Newcomers and Criminal Violence in the Urban West, 1850-2000_. New York: Palgrave, 2005. xii + 203 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. $69.95 (cloth), ISBN 1-4039-6978-7. Reviewed for H-Law by Michael Bellesiles Dangerous Profiles When Raymond Kelly became head of the U.S. Customs Service in 1998 he ordered a halt to ethnic profiling and replaced their list of forty-three traits to watch for with a simplified list of six general categories. Searches by the Customs Service dropped 75 percent while successful seizures increased 25 percent. Kelly instituted the same reform when he became Commissioner of New...

SAN FRANCISCO — California school textbooks would highlight the role gays have played in the history of the nation’s most populous state if a new proposal that has angered conservatives passes the state legislature.

Radical History Review Queer Futures: The Homonormativity Issue Much has changed since the RHR’s special “Queer” issue (No. 62, Spring 1995), in which historians and their allies explored “new visions of America’s gay and lesbian past.” Queers now unabashedly eye straight guys on cable television; films featuring gay characters and themes are celebrated by mainstream audiences, breaking box office records and winning major industry awards; “gay marriage” has emerged as the central civil rights cause for powerful organizations like the Human Rights Campaign; urban activists and civic boosters promote “gay business districts” as a means for achieving visibility and equality;...

Yale is in a dilemma. It made a huge, indefensible blunder when it admitted the senior advisor to Mullah Omar as a special student, and now it’s taking hits from students, from alumni, and from the media. How can Yale spin its way out of this one? They have at their fingertips an invaluable resource, someone who made a career of defending the indefensible. In fact, this PR flack extraordinaire was so successful that he was reportedly on the fast track to become the Taliban’s next foreign minister. Unfortunately for Yale, Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi isn’t talking. Others are taking up...

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Sami al-Muthafar, a former chemistry professor at Baghdad University, survived a car bomb attack in early February, walking away unscathed although several of his guards were wounded. He knows many other scientists and academics who were not so fortunate. "It is a big loss when we lose a professor or a scientist because they are the elite of society," said Muthafar, now minister of higher education. "It is too hard to replace those we lose." Some 182 Iraqi university professors and academics have been killed in violence since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. Another 85 senior academics...

The Professors: The 101 most dangerous academics in America by David Horowitz Coming to a Campus Near You: Terrorists, racists, and communists— you know them as The Professors. We all know that left-wing radicals from the 1960s have hung around academia and hired people like themselves. But if you thought they were all harmless, antiquated hippies, you’d be wrong. Today’s radical academics aren’t the exception—they’re legion. And far from being harmless, they spew violent anti-Americanism, preach anti-Semitism, and cheer on the killing of American soldiers and civilians—all the while collecting tax dollars and tuition fees to indoctrinate our children. Remember...

Ok, Freepers: As some of you know I occassionally work with films. This "review" of King Kong was posted to H-AMSTUDY, the main list serve for professionals in American Studies. Many, many academics wrote in agreement. If, after reading this, you want to know what it is like for your sons and daughters in college, go to the following web site and type King Coon into the search engine. You will get maybe two dozen responses which, with one exception, are supportive of this statement. McVey http://www.h-net.org/ H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online about search site map editors donate contact...

Providing new evidence of the academic Left’s hardened anti-Americanism and sympathy for jihad terror, Khalil Shikaki has been appointed a senior fellow at Brandeis University’s Crown Center for Middle East Studies. On February 24, 1998, terrorism expert Steven Emerson testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that Shikaki ferried “information, messages and even operational materials to his brother Fathi in Damascus, head of Islamic Jihad. When publicly asked however, Khalil always maintained he had no contact with his brother.” On May 23, 2000, Emerson gave additional information about Khalil Shikaki when testifying about the World & Islam Studies Enterprise before the...

Tomorrow (22 September) the Christian Science Monitor has a story by Alexandra Marks entitled “A louder drumbeat for independent Katrina probe.” The Monitor is one of the nation’s ten best papers. But the article entirely misses the point. Senators Harry Reid and Hillary Clinton also missed the same point. The article featured a photograph of them with a caption referencing their “calls” for such a “commission.” Why do we have a Congress. Let’s review. When the First Congress met in 1789, it had certain obvious duties. Write the first laws. Provide for the first officials and judges. Pass the first...

What do you think of posing this question to the group of left-wing academics on the Constitution Day panel I am sitting on. "If a state, through its normal legislative and executive processes, decided that it would not obey Roe v. Wade nor heed Federal Court injunctions, should the Federal government send in troops to enforce Roe?" It seems like a question that would leave people with no place to hide, but maybe I am missing something. I would appreciate any advice you might give me.

For years, "diversity" has been a driving goal for college administrators, but only when tied to racial diversity, which itself is usually attained through affirmative action. But now, influential members of the establishment — led by the American Council on Education — have actually recognized the crucial "diversity" needed in all levels of education — diversity of ideas. Eureka! The present domination by liberal opinion on many college faculties — often verging on this majority's intolerant orthodoxies — was revealed in a recent study, "Politics and Professional Advancement among Faculty," by Stanley Rothman, emeritus professor of government at Smith College;...