The Chicago Tribune's Ron Grossman writes:

I took a quick survey in the newsroom the other day, something between a Rorschach test and a pop quiz, asking younger colleagues to identify an iconic photograph of World War II.

While some instantly recognized the image, others couldn't quite place it.

"I know I ought to know it," one co-worker said. "It was in the movie, 'Flags of Our Fathers.'" Some, seeing uniforms, realized it must be a war photo. Maybe Vietnam? One got the era right but the battlefield wrong. She guessed it was D-Day, not, as it was, the raising of the American flag on Iwo Jima.

Sunday's Washington Post featured a lengthy op-ed by Jaclyn Friedman, a self-described "writer, performer and activist" who is "a dynamic and powerful performer who performs and agitates with Big Moves, a national size-diverse performance troupe." The column advanced a startling thesis: that "University campuses could easily become labs that innovate effective ways to prevent and prosecute [emphasis added] rape."

Campus judicial proceedings almost always deny to students accused of sexual assault what most people would consider basic procedural protections: legal representation; access to a university equivalent of open-file discovery; or the opportunity to confront his or her accuser. And that's just at a typical university. Consider more extreme versions: Duke opened the 2009-2010 academic year by revising its internal procedures to give all sexual misconduct accusers rights denied to the accused student. Each of these special rights tilts the process in the accuser's favor: to be treated with "sensitivity," to make opening and closing statements before a hearing panel, and to receive all written information, other than material protected by FERPA, regarding their case.

Given this procedural background, only someone eager to create a system transparently tilted toward convictions would envision universities as laboratories to "prosecute rape." It seems, alas, that Friedman falls into this category. She claims that, as a Wesleyan undergraduate, she was sexually assaulted, but that she "never considered going to the police," since no evidence existed to back up her charge. So instead she filed charges "through the on-campus judicial system," after which, she writes, her alleged assailant "agreed to plead no contest" and was suspended from school for a year. This outcome proved insufficient when her alleged assailant's suspension was reduced to one semester; Friedman informed Post readers that her final months on campus were "a haze of fear, hiding and post-traumatic stress."

Continue reading "A Nightmare Proposal" »

AEI recently released a fine compendium volume The Politically Correct University, edited by Robert Maranto, Richard E. Redding, and Frederick M. Hess, featuring an excellent slate of essays and contributors: here's a sampling:

Do take a look; there's much of worth here:

- "The American University: Yesterday, Today - and Tomorrow" James Piereson

- "Linguistics from the Left: The Truth about Black English That the Academy Doesn't Want
You to Know"
John McWhorter

- "Groupthink in Academia: Majoritarian Departmental Politics and the Professional Pyramid"
Daniel Klein & Charlotta Stern

- "Left Pipeline: Why Conservatives Don't Get Doctorates"
Matthew Woessner & April Kelly-Woessner

- "The Vanishing Conservative - Is There a Glass Ceiling?"
Stanley Rothman & S. Robert Lichter

- "Campus Speech Codes: Absurd, Tenacious, and Everywhere"
Greg Lukianoff

- "Why Political Science Is Left But Not PC: Causes of Disunion and Diversity"
James Ceaser

- "Political Correctness in the Science Classroom"
Noretta Koertge

- "Reforming the Politically Correct University: The Role of Alumni and Trustees"
Anne Neal

- "Where We've Come From and Where We Should Go: The Route to Academic Pluralism"
Stephen Balch

- "To Reform the Politically Correct University, Reform the Liberal Arts"
John Agresto

The essays on the political make-up of the faculty are an excellent tonic for recent conversation that there's nothing odd about the absence of conservatives in academia. To provide even greater incentive, here's an excerpt from Jim Piereson's essay:

..As the diversity thrust loses steam, liberals and far-left groups on the campus will not be at a loss for new causes to absorb their attention and energy. The next iteration of liberal reform in the universities is likley to involve further steps to detach these institutions from the American polity in which they are embedded. We have already noted that the intellectual foundations of the modern research university are somewhat at odds with the philosophy of natural rights that shaped our national instiutions. The logic of liberalism points in the direction of the internationalization of the American university. We can already see fragments of this emerging trend in the banning of ROTC and military recruiters from college campuses in order to disassociate universities from American national policies. The enrollment of international students will receive greater emphasis in the coming decades which will further reinforce the trend. Academic programs in American government or in American studies will be increasingly de-emphasized on the grounds that they are parochial, in much the same way as programs in Western Civilization were de-emphasized in the past...

John Derbyshire, a frequent contributor to National Review, has made a surprising discovery: San Francisco State University has a department of Raza studies, and the department has thirteen full-time faculty members.

Derbyshire writes on NRO's The Corner:

What goes on in a Raza Studies Department? Let them tell us.

"Roberto [Rivera] is presently finishing a book on Liberation Discourse which examines the semantics of counter-hegemony in the philosophies of Gustavo Gutierrez and Paulo Freire."

[Prof. Tomas Almaguer] is currently completing work on a book manuscript entitled Border Men: Gender and Sexuality in the Life Histories of Chicano Gay Men, which will be published by the University of California Press.

[Prof. Teresa Carrillo]'s teaching and research interests reflect her fascination with Latinos as political actors in a constant interaction with local, national and transnational political forces ...

In Systems of Elections, Latino Representation, and Student Outcomes in Central California and Faculty, Managers, and Administrators in the University of California, 1996 to 2002,[Assistant Professor Belinda] Reyes explores ethnic diversity in higher ed and k-12 and the potential consequences of under-representation.

[Writing Specialist Alejandro Murguia]'s memoir The Medicine of Memory: A Mexica Clan in California, University of Texas Press, has been nominated for the Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing.

[Dr. Nancy Raquel Mirabal] teaches courses in the history of Latina/os, Caribbean diasporas, Afro-Latina/o diasporas, theory and methods, gender and sexuality, and oral history.

Continue reading " A Thriving Department" »

A February 26 debate on the subject is online here. The event was sponsored by the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia. Former secretary of education Margaret Spellings and Michael Lomax, president and C.E.O. of the United Negro College Fund, are on the pro side of the topic, "To remain a world-class economic power, the U.S. workforce needs more college graduates." On the anti side are Richard Vedder, economics professor at Ohio University and director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, and George Leef of the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy. The moderator is PBS correspondent Paul Solomon.

Edward Albee, Woody Allen, Maya Angelou, Wally Amos, Jane Austen, Dan Aykroyd, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Joan Baez, Warren Beatty, David Ben-Gurion, Sonny Bono, Rick Bragg, Richard Branson, Albert Brooks, David Byrne, James Cameron, Raymond Chandler, Coco Chanel, John Cheever, Sean Connery, Walter Cronkite, Daniel Day-Lewis, Michael Dell, Princess Diana, Leonardo DiCaprio, Bob Dylan, Clint Eastwood, Thomas Edison, Harvey Weinstein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jane Fonda, Benjamin Franklin, David Geffen, John Glenn, Richard Grasso, Ernest Hemingway, Dustin Hoffman, Ralph Lauren, Alex Haley, Peter Jennings, Doris Lessing, Rush Limbaugh, Abraham Lincoln, Charles Lindbergh, Madonna, Malcolm X, Steve Martin, H.L. Mencken, S.I. Newhouse, Jack Nicholson, Neil Simon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Bob Pittman, Edgar Allan Poe, Wolfgang Puck, Robert Redford, John D. Rockefeller, J.D. Salinger, Margaret Sanger, Dawn Steel, Barbra Streisand, William Howard Taft, Nina Totenberg, Harry S Truman, Ted Turner, Mark Twain, Governor Jesse Ventura, Thomas J. Watson, Walt Whitman, August Wilson, Anna Wintour, Frank Lloyd Wright, Wilbur and Orville Wright.

---from The Faster Times

On March 5th in the Wall Street Journal, Peter Robinson penned an op-ed on the California higher education budget crisis entitled "The Golden State's Me Generation". Robinson begins not with the finances behind the tuition hikes and protests, but rather with the framing of the reaction. He cites participants in the "Strike and Day of Action to Defend Education" casting their efforts in terms of "Freedom Riders," "farmworkers," and the fight for justice in the 60s and 70s. Berkeley urban studies professor Ananya Roy provided a racial angle as well, announcing "We have all become students of color now."

"Evoking protests against the Vietnam War," Robinson observes, "one banner carried by students at San Francisco State University read, 'Shut It Down like '68.' 'Today we strike!' shouted a Berkeley student, 'Today we march! Today we show solidarity with the workers!'"

This is the vocabulary of the peace movement and civil rights and labor protections of migrant workers. It demonstrates, among other things, the continuing moral authority of those causes, even though they took place 40 and 50 years ago. But there is a giant problem with invoking the movements: if you want to align yourself with the Selma marchers, Cesar Chavez et al, then you better experience some of the same sufferings and indignities that they did. If not, then the citation of such honored and sometimes martyred precursors starts to look a lot more like vanity than politics.

This is, indeed, Robinson's conclusion: "Yet what did the protesters demand? Peace? Human rights? No. Money. And for whom? For the downtrodden and oppressed? No. For themselves."

Continue reading "Ideals and Realities in Student Protests" »