Free Republic

NORFOLK At the end of this semester, Steven Aird will lose his job as an associate professor of biology at Norfolk State University for giving out too many F's. He is not going quietly. Aird says his termination is part of a dumbing-down of academic standards at NSU - a move by administrators to intimidate faculty members into passing undeserving students and rewarding inferior work. Other faculty members in NSU's School of Science and Technology say they, too, have experienced pressure to bend their standards to pass more students, and more than a dozen current and former students in the...

College students and their families are rightly outraged about the bankrupting costs of textbooks that have nearly tripled since the 1980s, mainly because of marginally useful CD-ROMs and other supplements. A bill pending in Congress would require publishers to sell “unbundled” versions of the books — minus the pricey add-ons. Even more important, it would require publishers to reveal book prices in marketing material so that professors could choose less-expensive titles. The bill is a good first step. But colleges and universities will need to embrace new methods of textbook development and distribution if they want to rein in runaway...

A community college in New York has been presented with a demand letter from the American Center for Law and Justice to halt a professor's classroom practices that allegedly have damaged at least one student – so far. The letter from the ACLJ targets Suffolk County Community College and will be the prelude to a federal lawsuit if the issue isn't resolved, the organization said. At issue is a professor's demand that students "change their own personal viewpoints or state that they are unsure of whether their own personal beliefs are correct" on religious issues, according to the letter. That...

Conservatives complain that college professors lean left when it comes to politics — and the data mostly show that's true. But new research suggests the personal politics of academics have little effect on what their students think. The research, to be published this year in the journal PS: Political Science and Politics, analyzes separate surveys on the attitudes of about 6,800 students at 38 universities and how they changed between their freshman and senior years. Then it examines whether those results are affected by the political attitudes of the faculty at their particular schools. The short answer is no, according...

Iraq War Spending Deconstructed by: Malcolm A. Kline, March 31, 2008 ...Two professors have actually made an earnest, exhaustive attempt to calculate the cost of the Iraq War but they look at it as two academics who have been through the revolving door to government jobs and back again to the Ivory Tower. “Defense comes to four percent of the Gross Domestic Product [GDP] but how much has GDP increased?” Linda J. Blimes said at the Center for American Progress (CAP) last week. “We are a wealthy country and in one sense can afford it but you have to look...

"In a lawsuit Van der Hooning filed against the U of I, he claims top administrators of the business school indicated there were too many "jarheads" in the program. Van der Hooning says he was ordered to reduce MBA scholarships from 110 to 17, and told to concoct "technical reasons" to dump veterans from the program." "In other words, he claims that the U of I ordered a cover-up."

In 2006, nearly 60 percent of Wisconsin voters passed a referendum banning same-sex marriage and civil unions. UW-Oshkosh political science instructor Bill McConkey challenged the new amendment in court, asserting he was denied the right to vote on the question of marriage and civil unions separately. A Dane County judge recently concurred, allowing McConkey’s suit to move forward. McConkey, a self-described “Christian, straight, married father of seven,” one of whom is a lesbian, recently stated, “People have asked me, ‘Would you have filed this suit if it wasn’t for your daughter?’ To be real honest, maybe not. Maybe I would...

Striking Out by: Bethany Stotts, January 28, 2008 The popular online professor ratings site, ratemyprofessors.com, has been eliciting some fiery responses to what professors see as the accountability-undermining anonymity of online technology. The subsidiary mtvU of MTV Networks, owner of ratemyprofessors.com, hosts the “Professors Strike Back” series in which professors “rebut” the anonymous and often insulting comments left on the ratings website. A 24-hour channel, mtvU broadcasts to 750 campuses and over 7.5 million students. Throughout the series, many professors decried the ratings website as promoting non-constructive venting which often occurs in the heat of the moment and reflects the...

USC Takes Left Turn by: Don Irvine, January 18, 2008 In the 2000 election cycle USC professors and staff members donated slightly more money to George Bush’s presidential campaign than to Al Gore. What a difference eight years make. According to a report by the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Responsive Politics for the current election cycle have given a total of $66,250 to presidential candidates with 98 percent of that amount going to Democrats making the university one of the most pro-democratic party campuses in the nation. This has led USC political science professor Anthony Kammas to question the role...

Scholars of the Year by: Malcolm A. Kline, January 10, 2008 Because of the nature of our work, we don’t often get to do “best of” lists. By definition, almost, we are chronicling professors of questionable scholarship in our often vain search for accuracy in academia. What we have assembled, then, is something of a bottom 10 list, sort of a reverse U. S. News & World Report ranking. Indeed, it was hard to narrow down such a selection from the more than 100 professors a year whose antics we cover. Arguably, and we would argue the point, our own...

Coin trays in Texas cars may actually get to see the faces of dead presidents. The much-discussed and controversial Trans-Texas Corridor, or TTC, has breathed life into the debate of toll roads in Texas. Plans for the Trans-Texas Corridor include TTC-Instate 35, which starts in Laredo and extends north to Gainesville, running along the eastern part of Texas; and Interstate 69/TCC, which has three openings in Laredo, McAllen and Brownsville and follows the coast to Texarkana. Much of the TTC will be privately operated toll roads, run by the Spanish firm Cintra. The TTC will not run through San Antonio,...

...In a shift of historic importance, America's colleges and universities have largely abandoned the idea that life's most important question is an appropriate subject for the classroom. In doing so, they have betrayed their students by depriving them of the chance to explore it in an organized way, before they are caught up in their careers and preoccupied with the urgent business of living itself. This abandonment has also helped create a society in which deeper questions of values are left in the hands of those motivated by religious conviction - a disturbing and dangerous development. ...Over the past century...

In 1997, the National Association of Social Work (NASW) altered its ethics code, ruling that all social workers must promote social justice "from local to global level." This call for mandatory advocacy raised the question: what kind of political action did the highly liberal field of social work have in mind? The answer wasn't long in coming. The Council on Social Work Education, the national accreditor of social work education programs, says candidates must fight "oppression," and sees American society as pervaded by the "global interconnections of oppression." Now aspiring social workers must commit themselves, usually in writing, to a...

Even though he didn't get a majority for re-election last year, Gov. Rick Perry's 39 percent was ahead of everybody else. And so he's now in a term that lasts into 2011. In the eyes of some of his detractors in the blogosphere, that's too long. Political activist Linda Curtis has started a website calling on legislators in 2009 to impeach the governor (www.impeachperry.indytexans.org/). That's a pretty rash idea. But since Texas doesn't allow for recall elections, like the one that nailed California Democratic Gov. Gray Davis in 2003, Texans' only way to toss Perry out before the 2010 election...

Fired Professor Ward Churchill to Sue University Last Edited: Wednesday, 25 Jul 2007, 1:26 PM MDT Created: Wednesday, 25 Jul 2007, 12:50 PM MDT (Credit: MyFox) SideBar Related Items Stories Colorado Prof Fired After 9-11 Remarks LAKE CHARLES -- DENVER -- Ward Churchill will file a lawsuit against the University of Colorado on Wednesday. He is challenging his dismissal as a professor from the institution. University of Colorado regents voted 8-1 Tuesday to accept school president Hank Brown's recommendation to fire him. CU Regent Cindy Carlisle had the lone dissenting vote. Ward Churchill and his attorney, David Lane, plan to...

University Expected to Fire Controversial Professor Today By Susan Jones CNSNews.com Senior Editor July 24, 2007 (CNSNews.com) - Ward Churchill's own lawyer expects the tenured University of Colorado professor to be fired on Tuesday. "Ward Churchill will be fired, and Wednesday, I'll be filing a lawsuit" over free-speech rights," the Denver Post quoted attorney David Lane as saying. The university's governing board plans to hold a closed session on the Boulder campus today, and a decision on Churchill is expected in the middle of the afternoon. According to the Denver Post, Churchill's supporters are planning to show their support at...

ACLU urges CU regents not to fire Ward Churchill July 20, 2007 The American Civil Liberties Union sent a letter to the University of Colorado's Board of Regents on Thursday, urging them not to fire professor Ward Churchill. "I think that the protection of the First Amendment rights is vital in the university and in the general public," said Cathy Hazouri, executive director of ACLU of Colorado.

Seemingly arcane historical disputes can often cast a powerful light on the state of our collective soul. It is for that reason that I like to read books on obscure subjects: they are often more illuminating than books that at first sight are more immediately relevant to our current situation. For, as Emily Dickinson put it, success in indirection lies. In 2002, the Australian free-lance historian and journalist, Keith Windschuttle, published a book that created a controversy that has still not died down. Entitled ‘The Fabrication of Aboriginal History,’ it sets out to destroy the idea that there had been...

Sarge Speaks: The Duke 88 June 21, 2007 by Bob Parks Every now and then I get an email from a reader that puts a topic into words as good, if not better than I. This is one of those occasions. Sarge57 sent me an account of a message sent to the "Concerned Duke Faculty", now affectionately known as the "Gang of 88". His letter was impassioned, but never rude or obscene. The response he received was telling…. "I wish to offer my personal encounter with one of the Duke 88 after I sent them a group email. It is...

Duke deal shields faculty Some spoke out after rape claims Anne Blythe and Eric Ferreri, Staff Writers DURHAM - Duke University's settlement with exonerated lacrosse players gives legal protection to faculty members, some of whom have been under siege for speaking out in the wake of the gang-rape allegations. Neither side would disclose the terms of the agreement, announced Monday, but Duke's faculty chairman, Paul Haagen, informed professors that one provision is that all faculty members have been released from liability related to the lacrosse case. That news sparked another round of vitriolic messages from e-mailers and bloggers still exercised...