This Isn’t Important

As Gaius seems to have gone off someplace (possibly to help OJ Simpson track down the real killer), I feel I should post something here.  Unfortunately, most of my blogging of late has involved calling people names (I know, I know…I should know better.)

I do have something fun for some people.  If you enjoy irony and bitter sarcasm combined with statistics and an academic free for all (and who doesn't?), then you will enjoy Roger Pielke's devastating take down of a scientific methodology challenged colleague. 

It begins:

In his latest essay on my stupidity, climate modeler James Annan made the helpful suggestion that I consult a "a numerate undergraduate to explain it to [me]." So I looked outside my office, where things are quiet out on the quad this time of year, but as luck would have it, I did find a young lady named Megan, who just happened to be majoring in mathematics who agreed to help me overcome my considerable ignorance.

From there things get hysterical.

 O.K., hysterical if you are a bit of a dork.

Commencement Advice

Before you pick up that diploma, P.J. O'Rourke has some grand advice before you leave the ivory tower.

So now, it's my job to give you advice. But I'm thinking: You're finishing 16 years of education, and you've heard all the conventional good advice you can stand. So, let me offer some relief:

1. Go out and make a bunch of money!

Here we are living in the world's most prosperous country, surrounded by all the comforts, conveniences and security that money can provide. Yet no American political, intellectual or cultural leader ever says to young people, "Go out and make a bunch of money." Instead, they tell you that money can't buy happiness. Maybe, but money can rent it.

There's nothing the matter with honest moneymaking. Wealth is not a pizza, where if I have too many slices you have to eat the Domino's box. In a free society, with the rule of law and property rights, no one loses when someone else gets rich.

2. Don't be an idealist!

Don't chain yourself to a redwood tree. Instead, be a corporate lawyer and make $500,000 a year. No matter how much you cheat the IRS, you'll still end up paying $100,000 in property, sales and excise taxes. That's $100,000 to schools, sewers, roads, firefighters and police. You'll be doing good for society. Does chaining yourself to a redwood tree do society $100,000 worth of good?

Idealists are also bullies. The idealist says, "I care more about the redwood trees than you do. I care so much I can't eat. I can't sleep. It broke up my marriage. And because I care more than you do, I'm a better person. And because I'm the better person, I have the right to boss you around."

Get a pair of bolt cutters and liberate that tree.

Who does more for the redwoods and society anyway — the guy chained to a tree or the guy who founds the "Green Travel Redwood Tree-Hug Tour Company" and makes a million by turning redwoods into a tourist destination, a valuable resource that people will pay just to go look at?

His advice on fairness is absolutely perfect, by the way. This is one commencement address worth reading all the way through. Many graduates are about to be mugged by reality when they find out that the world does not quite operate the way they think it should. Listening to O'Rouke's advice could help them navigate the stormy waters of reality a bit more easily.

Double Standard

Officials at Colorado College have busily been applying a double standard to free speech. They have "tried" two male students in what amounts to a kangaroo court for daring to publish a satire of a flier put out by the feminist and gender studies group on campus.

A satirical response to a feminist publication at Colorado College has landed the college and two of its students in the middle of a fierce debate over freedom of speech.

Chris Robinson and another student at the Colorado Springs institution decided to print "The Monthly Bag" after seeing copies of a feminist and gender studies newsletter, "The Monthly Rag," in restrooms around campus.

The edition of "The Monthly Rag" that prompted action included an announcement for a talk on feminist pornography, information on gender-bending practices, and a tidbit about a myth involving male castration. According to Robinson, it was representative of what appears every month.

In response, Robinson and a friend created their flier, which provided tips on chainsaw etiquette, detailed a sexual position from Men's Health magazine and provided trivia about a sniper rifle — what Robinson called information for the stereotypical macho man.Staff members removed The Bag within hours of receiving complaints that the publication was threatening.

"It was a serious concern that this thing was posted anonymously and included in bold print the performance characteristics of a sniper rifle," president Richard Celeste said. "I had to take that as a threat."

The authors appeared before a conduct committee in March and were found guilty of violating the campus conduct code. In lieu of punishment, they were ordered to host a public forum on the issues raised in the incident.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education or FIRE has been aggressive in defending the two young men. You can see the actual double standard courtesy of FIRE. Here's the Monthly Rag and here is the satirical Monthly Bag. Frankly, the Monthly Bag is considerably less offensive than the Denver Post's story makes it sound - and that wasn't all that offensive. The "threat" Celeste said he perceived is a bald statement of fact commonly available on the interwebby. Celeste must quake with terror when he reads Wikipedia.

The claim that the satire is somehow different than the original is ludicrous. Both of the pieces should enjoy equal protection under the colleges published student handbook, which states:

Academic institutions exist for the transmission of knowledge, the quest for truth, the development of students, and the general well-being of society. In the pursuit of these ends, all members of the college community have such basic rights as freedom of speech, freedom of press, freedom of peaceful assembly and association, freedom of personal beliefs, and freedom from personal force and violence, threats of violence and personal abuse.

Of course, the college then continues with a statement that says they can override those rights if they feel like it. There's always fine print.

Diminishing The Universities

Robert Maranto, an associate professor of political science at Villanova University, writes an op-ed in Today's Washington Post that exposes, yet again, the decidedly leftist bias in academia today. He points out, quite reasonably, that the impact of this institutional bias diminishes the universities themselves. He starts out stating plenty of figures showing that there is, in fact, a bias then hits his real point.

Despite that bad job-hunting experience I had, I doubt that legions of leftist professors have set out to purge academia of Republican dissenters. I believe that for the most part the biases conservative academics face are subtle, even unintentional. When making hiring decisions and confronted with several good candidates, we college professors, like anyone else, tend to select people like ourselves.

Unfortunately, subtle biases in how conservative students and professors are treated in the classroom and in the job market have very unsubtle effects on the ideological makeup of the professoriate. The resulting lack of intellectual diversity harms academia by limiting the questions academics ask, the phenomena we study, and ultimately the conclusions we reach.

There are numerous examples of this ideological isolation from society. As political scientist Steven Teles showed in his book "Whose Welfare?," the public had determined by the 1970s that welfare wasn't working — yet many sociology professors even now deny that '70s-style welfare programs were bad for their recipients. Similarly, despite New York City's 15-year-long decline in crime, most criminologists still struggle to attribute the increased safety to demographic shifts or even random statistical variations (which apparently skipped other cities) rather than more effective policing.

In my own area, public administration, it took years for bureaucracy-defending professors to realize that then-Vice President Al Gore's National Performance Review (aka Reinventing Government) was not a reactionary attempt to destroy government agencies, but rather a centrist attempt to revitalize them. Most of the critics of the academy are conservatives or libertarians, but even the left-of-center E.D. Hirsch argues in "The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them" that academics in schools of education have harmed young people by promoting progressive dogma rather than examining what works in real classrooms.

All this is bad for society because academics' ideological blinders make it more difficult to solve domestic problems and to understand foreign challenges. Moreover, a leftist ideological monoculture is bad for universities, rendering them intellectually dull places imbued with careerism rather than the energy of contending ideas, a point made by academic critics across the ideological spectrum from Russell Jacoby on the left to Josiah Bunting III on the right.

He's got this exactly right. The existence of a monoculture presents students with only one point of view. Education becomes indoctrination and the intellectual rigor of the universities suffer. We've seen how awful it can get at the University of Delaware just recently. Maranto may be a little on the optimistic side, though. Some of the bias against conservatives and or Republicans is, I think, quite intentional. Look at how imbued the left is with a driving need to silence critics and stifle dissent (all the while screaming that they are being oppressed). They learned that somewhere, don't you think?

They’re Watching Over You

The debacle of the lost data disks in Britain - where the revenue office lost two disks containing highly personal data of millions of Britons - just took a turn for the worse. A lot worse, in fact. It seems that the real names and new identities of up to 350 people in witness protection programs were part of the data lost.

The missing data discs are understood to contain both the real names and the new identities of up to 350 people who have had their identities changed after giving evidence against major criminals.

The development is one of the most serious so far in the missing data discs scandal, in which the child benefit records of 25 million people - including their names, addresses, birth dates, national insurance numbers and bank account details - were lost by HM Revenue and Customs.

The new identities of protected witnesses would be valuable property on the criminal market and, if they fell into the wrong hands, could place their lives and those of their families in jeopardy.

It will cost taxpayers hundreds of thousands of pounds to provide the witnesses with yet another identity.

The British nanny state is watching over everyone. Unfortunately the nannies are not competent to locate their collective posteriors with both hands. Don't think it can't happen here - it already is:

It should come as no surprise that university’s in America, though bastions of academic learning and grassroots protest, aren’t exactly what one would call “privacy friendly”. In just the latest example Montclair State University (N.J.) is requiring their students purchase special GPS tracking cell phones, whether they already have a personal phone or not:

Two years ago, well before Virginia Tech, Montclair State made the cell phones mandatory for all first-year students living in dorms at the largely commuter school in suburban New York City. Now, all new full-time undergraduates - whether they live on campus or off - are required to buy them. About 6,000 students have them now.

Karen Pennington, vice president for campus life, said she and others on campus wanted to use the phones for instruction - letting professors take instant polls in class, for instance - and for safety as well.

Notice that the introduction of Orwellian surveillance tactics is being done in the name of safety. Funny how the left screeches that George Bush is ushering in a police state. It seems to me it is already here - starting with  heavily leftist academia.

Hate Means Never Having To Say You’re Sorry

Stuart Taylor, Jr. writes a stinging column in the National Journal denouncing the rot of political correctness that infests most colleges and universities - and not a few high schools in the United States. He starts with the example of the Orwellian nightmare just exposed - and shut down - at the University of Delaware. By the rot and stench of decay spreads much, much further than that one totalitarian institution of "higher learning."

Despite a succession of court decisions striking down university speech codes, they re-emerged thinly disguised as rules to prevent and punish "harassment," defined to include any speech deemed offensive by minorities, women, gays, or other preferred groups.

The PC sickness goes far beyond intolerance of dissent. It also has a pervasive effect on course offerings. History departments, for example, offer fewer and fewer traditional courses such as political and diplomatic history, to make room for courses portraying history as a tale of unrelieved oppression of minorities, women, the poor, gays, and everyone else by privileged white males.

Academia's "diversity" obsession is founded on hostility to diversity of opinion. To most academics, "diversity" is a code word for systematic preference of minorities and women over white males in all walks of life. The preferred groups include many faculty members who are manifestly unqualified for their positions and whose websites read like a "Saturday Night Live" parody of wacky professors.

"At least in the humanities and social sciences," Emory University professor Mark Bauerlein wrote in a 2004 essay, "academics shun conservative values and traditions, so their curricula and hiring practices discourage non-leftists from pursuing academic careers…. The quasi-Marxist outlook of cultural studies rules out those who espouse capitalism. If you disapprove of affirmative action, forget pursuing a degree in African-American studies. If you think that the nuclear family proves the best unit of social well-being, stay away from women's studies."

Over the decades, academic extremists have taken over more and more departments, like cancers metastasizing from organ to organ. For example, the 88 Duke professors who signed a disgraceful April 2006 ad in the school paper spearheading the mob rush to judgment against falsely accused lacrosse players included 80 percent of the African-American studies faculty; 72 percent of the women's studies professors; 60 percent of the cultural anthropology department; and lots of professors in romance studies, literature, English, art, and history.

Not one member of that academic lynch mob has ever apologized. As Taylor tells it, most of them are of questionable worth, scholarship-wise. This is a hard takedown, but it only scratches the surface of the hatred, bigotry and thought control being routinely push by the denizens of the corrupt ivory tower. I fear for the young people of this nation.

More Of What’s Under The Rock

Bryan at Hot Air managed to secure an interview with Dr. Linda Gottfredson of the University of Delaware who, along with her colleague Dr. Jan Blits, were instrumental in getting FIRE all fired up about the Orwellian indoctrination program that the university had imposed on students. (My previous posts on that abomination here and here.) Bryan has the audio of the interview and part of a transcript of it. It is pretty shocking just how bad the program really was and how the U of D administration has misrepresented it while trying to distance themselves from it. Go over and listen or read.

The Effect Of Sunlight On The Metropolis

It is amazing what turning over a rock and exposing what is underneath to a bit of sunlight can do. Just a couple of days ago the sun shone down on the Orwellian and frankly racist policies of the University of Delaware's student re-education program. The folks at FIRE raised holy hell about the blatant brainwashing. And lo, the president of the university has suddenly completely shut down the entire program - cold.

Late Thursday, University of Delaware President Patrick Harker released on the school’s website a Message to the University of Delaware Community terminating the university’s ideological reeducation program, which FIRE condemned as an exercise in thought reform. He stated, “I have directed that the program be stopped immediately. No further activities under the current framework will be conducted.” Harker also called for a “full and broad-based review” of the program’s practices and purposes. While concerns remain about the University of Delaware’s commitment to free expression, FIRE commends President Harker for his decision to immediately terminate the Orwellian residence life education program. FIRE will have more on this development tomorrow. President Harker’s message is reproduced in full below.

A Message to the University of Delaware Community
 
Nov. 1, 2007
 
The University of Delaware strives for an environment in which all people feel welcome to learn, and which supports intellectual curiosity, critical thinking, free inquiry and respect for the views and values of an increasingly diverse population. The University is committed to the education of students as citizens, scholars and professionals and their preparation to contribute creatively and with integrity to a global society. The purpose of the residence life educational program is to support these commitments.
 
While I believe that recent press accounts misrepresent the purpose of the residential life program at the University of Delaware, there are questions about its practices that must be addressed and there are reasons for concern that the actual purpose is not being fulfilled. It is not feasible to evaluate these issues without a full and broad-based review.
 
Upon the recommendation of Vice President for Student Life Michael Gilbert and Director of Residence Life Kathleen Kerr, I have directed that the program be stopped immediately. No further activities under the current framework will be conducted.
 
Vice President Gilbert will work with the University Faculty Senate and others to determine the proper means by which residence life programs may support the intellectual, cultural and ethical development of our students.
 
 
Patrick Harker
President

I do not think the reports misrepresented what was being done at Delaware in any way. It was nothing less than re-education - requiring a conformity of thought that is, frankly, anathema to everything America stands for. But the sunlight has proved to be more than the purveyors of that hateful program could stand. Thank God. President Harker, the mission of your university is, indeed, to teach your students to think. The problem with the program was that it taught them what to think. That is no longer education. That is indoctrination.

A major, major victory for FIRE. Thank you for your work here.

UPDATE: Others: Michelle Malkin, Say Anything, The Van Der Galiën Gazette, Hot Air, Riehl World View, Flopping Aces,  Joanne Jacobs,  

Welcome To Metropolis

This is pretty shocking. The University of Delaware is actually indoctrinating students who live in campus housing. It is nothing less than that, in fact, the  university’s own "teaching" materials refers to it as a “treatment” for students’ "incorrect attitudes and beliefs".

The university’s views are forced on students through a comprehensive manipulation of the residence hall environment, from mandatory training sessions to “sustainability” door decorations. Students living in the university’s eight housing complexes are required to attend training sessions, floor meetings, and one-on-one meetings with their Resident Assistants (RAs). The RAs who facilitate these meetings have received their own intensive training from the university, including a “diversity facilitation training” session at which RAs were taught, among other things, that “[a] racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality.”

The university suggests that at one-on-one sessions with students, RAs should ask intrusive personal questions such as “When did you discover your sexual identity?” Students who express discomfort with this type of questioning often meet with disapproval from their RAs, who write reports on these one-on-one sessions and deliver these reports to their superiors. One student identified in a write-up as an RA’s “worst” one-on-one session was a young woman who stated that she was tired of having “diversity shoved down her throat.”

According to the program’s materials, the goal of the residence life education program is for students in the university’s residence halls to achieve certain “competencies” that the university has decreed its students must develop in order to achieve the overall educational goal of “citizenship.” These competencies include: “Students will recognize that systemic oppression exists in our society,” “Students will recognize the benefits of dismantling systems of oppression,” and “Students will be able to utilize their knowledge of sustainability to change their daily habits and consumer mentality.”

At various points in the program, students are also pressured or even required to take actions that outwardly indicate their agreement with the university’s ideology, regardless of their personal beliefs. Such actions include displaying specific door decorations, committing to reduce their ecological footprint by at least 20%, taking action by advocating for an “oppressed” social group, and taking action by advocating for a “sustainable world.”

This is one of the most appalling examples of authoritarian totalitarian brainwashing I have ever heard of in the United States. Read this again:

“[a] racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality.”

Change the race to any other one and see how utterly offensive - and how blatantly racist - that statement is. They're preparing student alright. For a specific place in society. Welcome to Metropolis, workers.

UPDATE: Regular readers had to see this one coming:

Others understandably unhappy with the commisars of the UofD: Joanne Jacobs (aka my Blogmother): "Students weren’t asked if they found the “treatment” intrusive, annoying, a waste of time and/or a violation of their rights."

Right Voices: "You have the right to free speech as long as the liberals approve of the message. You can have free thought, just as long as you think what the liberals want you to think."

Hot Air: "FIRE is calling for the program to be dismantled. That would be a good start."

SCSU Scholars: "I've written years ago about our own student orientations and those given to others and their parents, but this one appears to jump the shark."

Jason Steck (At MVDG Gazette): "1984, it would appear, was not avoided so much as delayed until 2007."

Mac's Mind: "Nevertheless, it’s not so amazing that this type of thought policing happens at our colleges, but it is amazing that the dumbasses at this school are blatant about it."

Colossus Of Rhodey: "For all those aghast at George Bush's America supposedly "leading us down the road to fascism," the sad fact is that all you have to do to really find it is just take a trip to Delaware's own Newark (that's pronounced "new ark" for non-Delawareans) campus."

Sister Toldjah: "Put another nail in the coffin on the liberal lie about supporting “free thought.” "

David Thompson: "Presumably, Professor Stanley Fish has no objection to “bridges” being built in this way, or to the term ‘racist’ being applied to “all white people… living in the United States.” And presumably he still believes that students “don’t have to worry” about the spread of campus speech codes and other neurotic sensitivities. Again, I beg to differ. "

Protein Wisdom (Dan Collins): (No words, just a picture or two.)

Mahablog: "….eventually you get to an article about a program at the University of Delaware that really does sound creepy and objectionable. But I’m not seeing a connection to Glenn." (Hint - it's because of the obscenely racist phrase used in the training materials - that are officially sanctioned by UofD. And it is more than objectionable and creepy.)

Fausta: "And it'll cost you $16,098 if you're a Delaware resident, $27,348 if you're from out of state. I guess that part of their "consumer mentality" should not be affected."

Flopping Aces: "This is it.  This is the liberals wet dream.  A perfect world of Socialism/Communism gripping the throats of all who enter their domain.  You must submit and believe what we believe." NOTE: Curt also has the contact information for the UofD president.

Weasel Zippers: "Reminds me of the re-education gulags the Soviets put dissidents in and I'm sure that's where they're drawing their inspiration from."

Sigmund, Carl and Alfred: "The Educational Gulag."

Leaning Straight Up: "Ah yes, white privilege.  That would be the the privilege that keeps me in my apartment, driving my used 1999 car."

Neocon News: "With some of the tripe in their training guides, it’s no wonder that people at the University are comparing it to the North Korean government…."

Oxford Medievalist: "Those far-left nuts who claim that the Bush Administration has us down the path to fascism really ought to take a look at what's going on at our college campuses."

What’s Wrong With George Washington University?

After a scandal earlier this month where a "progressive" student group posted anti-Muslim fliers around campus in an attempt to damage a conservative group you'd think people would tone things down. Not so. Campus authorities are now investigating the appearance of swastikas drawn in various places around the campus, included repeated incident targeting one Jewish student's dorm room.

George Washington University police are trying to determine who is responsible for drawing swastikas on two dormitory doors and at an outdoor site near its hospital during the past week, a university spokeswoman said yesterday.

Four swastikas were drawn on the dorm door dry-erase board of a Jewish freshman over several days; the most recent, and largest, was discovered Sunday morning, said spokeswoman Michelle Sherrard. Another swastika was discovered yesterday on the dry-erase board of a student in a different dorm.

GWU President Steven Knapp denounced the incidents, saying the placement of the swastikas "raises the possibility that this is an expression of hatred toward Jewish students."

University police investigating the incidents yesterday also discovered a few swastikas near George Washington University Hospital. Officials said the swastikas near the hospital were different from those found on campus, but they are continuing to investigate. The swastikas near the hospital were accompanied by political graffiti.

Catch them and expel them. Or will whoever did it claim it was "satirical" as the first group did (and apparently escape punishment)?

No Diversity At All

Mark Moyar writes about his effort to obtain a professorship at the University of Iowa history department. This appears to be a case very much like what George Will wrote about yesterday in the social work field. While the University of Iowa may utilize hiring diversity in terms of racial makeup - one assumes they do - they practice a lockstep uniformity in thought. There are 27 professors who are members of the Democratic party.

There are no Republicans.

27-0 at the University of Iowa 

It’s not the score of a Hawkeye football game. It’s the number of Democrats versus the number of Republicans in the University of Iowa history department, and it has Iowans in an uproar. So, too, do charges published by Mark Bauerlein that left-wing bias has influenced the department’s hiring process. In response to the revelations, department chair Colin Gordon announced that the department had committed no wrongdoing, and neither he nor the university has expressed any concern about the total absence of intellectual diversity. Rarely have the hypocrisy and mendacity of academia been so thoroughly exposed as in the history department’s damage-control campaign.

Professor Gordon contended that the history department cannot discriminate against Republican or conservative job applicants because it does not know the political ideology of applicants. But the University’s own hiring manual states that search committees must “assess ways the applicants will bring rich experiences, diverse backgrounds, and ideology to the university community.” So they are obligated to understand applicants’ ideology, and to make sure not to overlook people with differing ideologies.

Determining a historian’s ideological inclinations is actually very easy in most cases. When I applied to the University of Iowa history department for a professorship in the United States and world affairs, my résumé listed membership in the National Organization of Scholars, which is an organization that everyone in academia knows to be ideologically to the right of the average academic organization. A quick search on Google or Amazon, moreover, reveals that my two books on the Vietnam War have widely been characterized as conservative.

Read it all, the university comes off as tapdancing around a real issue and staunchly defending their ideological uniformity. So much for academic freedom and cultural diversity. American colleges are increasingly diverse in race and gender but are frighteningly uniform in their embedded group-think. That rigid control, increasingly authoritarian and intolerant is the road to a police state.

Here's the article by Mark Bauerlein from the Des Moines Register. (I have no idea why Moyar failed to link it. Thank heavens for search engines.)

But last May the question did arise, and in response an officer in Iowa's Office of Equal Opportunity and Diversity named Jan Waterhouse clarified its meaning: "Associational preference within the University policy has been interpreted to include political affiliation."

So why, then, does the history department in the university have 27 registered Democrats and 0 registered Republicans? The most obvious political affiliation, party membership, falls completely on one side. Despite the sizable Republican population of Iowa, not a single representative has made it into the history faculty ranks.

Think of what would happen if other diversities suffered the same disparate outcome. A department of all men would spark an outcry, and rightly so. But nobody seems to worry about the political skew. Waterhouse's statement appears in a response to a complaint of discrimination on "associational preference" grounds filed by a candidate for a history post.

The real problem, as Bauerlein points out is this:

In hard-science fields, the issue isn't important, but in value-heavy areas of the humanities and history, political diversity is crucial. Students should hear the full range of opinion on open and controversial issues. Furthermore, employees and job candidates need to feel that their politics will not affect their status. That is why the non-discrimination statement includes "associational preference" in its list, and why "associational preference" covers political affiliation.

Humanities and history can be heavily impacted by who is teaching and how facts are interpreted. The lockstep uniformity of the University of Iowa history department practically guarantees that there will be a uniformly rigid interpretation of history in a particular direction. That is no longer instruction. It is indoctrination.

Indoctrination + Suppression = Social Work

George Will has a column out today that really ought to send chills down your spine if you are genuinely concerned with freedom - regardless of your political orientation. The column focuses on the indoctrination of social workers and the suppression of opposing views in American universities. It is an ugly picture.

In 1997, the National Association of Social Workers (NASW) adopted a surreptitious political agenda in the form of a new code of ethics, enjoining social workers to advocate for social justice "from local to global levels." A widely used textbook — "Direct Social Work Practice: Theory and Skill" — declares that promoting "social and economic justice" is especially imperative as a response to "the conservative trends of the past three decades." Clearly, in the social work profession's catechism, whatever social and economic justice are, they are the opposite of conservatism.

The Council on Social Work Education (CSWE), the national accreditor of social work education programs, encourages — not that encouragement is required — the ideological permeation of the curricula, including mandatory student advocacy. The CSWE says students must demonstrate an ability to "understand the forms and mechanisms of oppression and discrimination."

At Arizona State University, social work students must "demonstrate compliance with the NASW Code of Ethics." Berkeley requires compliance as proof of "suitability for the profession." Students at the University of Central Florida "must comply" with the NASW code. At the University of Houston, students must sign a pledge of adherence. At the University of Michigan, failure to comply with the code may be deemed "academic misconduct."

Will points to actual attempts at outright suppression:

In 2005, Emily Brooker, a social-work student at Missouri State University, was enrolled in a class taught by a professor who advertised himself as a liberal and insisted that social work is a liberal profession. At first, a mandatory assignment for his class was to advocate homosexual foster homes and adoption, with all students required to sign an advocacy letter, on university stationery, to the state legislature.

When Brooker objected on religious grounds, the project was made optional. But shortly before the final exam she was charged with a "Level 3," the most serious, violation of professional standards. In a 2 1/2 -hour hearing — which she was forbidden to record and which her parents were barred from attending — the primary subject was her refusal to sign the letter. She was ordered to write a paper ("Written Response about My Awareness") explaining how she could "lessen the gap" between her ethics and those of the social-work profession. When she sued the university, it dropped the charges and made financial and other restitution.

There is more - I would urge you to go read it. Will points out that the indoctrination directly counters the 1915 Declaration of Principles made by the The American Association of University Professors which states:

The teacher ought also to be especially on his guard against taking unfair advantage of the students' immaturity by indoctrinating him with the teacher's own opinions before the student has had an opportunity fairly to examine other opinions upon the matters of question, and before he has sufficient knowledge and ripeness in judgment to be entitled to form any definitive opinion of his own. It is not the least service which a college or university may render to those under its instruction, to habituate them to looking not only patiently but methodically on both sides, before adopting any conclusion upon controverted issues.

This is a particularly ugly and blatant violation of that principle. It is systematic and it is a real problem.

Backlash

Some conservative bloggers were quite happy when Lee Bollinger, Dean of Columbia University, denounced Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Monday. They thought they owed Bollinger an apology. While I thought Bollinger did a good job of telling Ahmadinejad what he really is, I still maintain that it was a bad idea to invite him at all. Here's another reason why: Bollinger is being denounced by faculty and students for being "rude" to the Iranian president.

A backlash against the president of Columbia University, Lee Bollinger, who on Monday delivered a harsh rebuke to President Ahmadinejad, is coming from faculty members and students who said he struck an "insulting tone" and that his remarks amounted to "schoolyard taunts." The fierceness of Mr. Bollinger's critique bought the Iranian some sympathy on campus that he didn't deserve, the critics said, and amounted to a squandered opportunity to provide a lesson in diplomacy.

Mr. Bollinger opened a two-hour program during which the Iranian president spoke and answered questions at the Roone Arledge Auditorium in Morningside Heights by calling Mr. Ahmadinejad a "petty and cruel dictator." He chastised the Iranian for calling for the destruction of Israel, funding terrorism, persecuting scholars, women, and homosexuals, denying the Holocaust, and for fighting a proxy war against America within the borders of Iraq. Mr. Bollinger also tauntingly predicted that the Iranian would lack the "intellectual courage" to offer real answers to questions from the audience.

"It's odd to invite someone and then deal with the objections to inviting him by insulting him before he gets to talk," a professor of political science at Columbia, Richard Betts, said during an interview in his office yesterday. "He's having it both ways in a sense, honoring the principle of free speech by not choosing speakers on the basis of how nice they are, but being sharp to him before he speaks."

Mr. Betts said a more appropriate introduction would have been to make clear that an invitation to speak at Columbia did not qualify as approval of the content of the speech. He said the message should have been delivered as a "less in-your-face assault."

Keep in mind that many of the people screeching about this found Stephen Colbert's verbal assault on President Bush funny, funny stuff. Many are likely regular viewers of the repulsive Keith Olberman and his deranged rants about Bush. They are more than willing to be very, very tolerant of a man who represents a regime that hangs gays (so efficiently that there may be no more gays in Iran, according to Ahmadinejad). They believe in being polite to him even though women are stoned to death in Iran. Or hanged for killing a man who raped her. They're all about being polite to the worst people on earth and as rude as possible to American leaders.

The left has never found a repulsive, murderous dictator they could not snuggle up to. Or an American president they could not savage. This is just another reason this was a really bad idea. (There are many more.)

Keep in mind that many of the people screeching about this found Stephen Colbert's verbal assault on President Bush funny, funny stuff. Many are likely regular viewers of the repulsive Keith Olberman and his deranged rants about Bush. They are more than willing to be very, very tolerant of a man who represents a regime that hangs gays (so efficiently that there may be no more gays in Iran, according to Ahmadinejad). They believe in being polite to him even though women are stoned to death in Iran. Or hanged for killing a man who raped her. They're all about being polite to the worst people on earth and as rude as possible to American leaders.

The left has never found a repulsive, murderous dictator they could not snuggle up to. Or an American president they could not savage. This is just another reason this was a really bad idea. (There are many more.)

Poking The Tiger In A Cage

Bret Stephens, writing in the Opinion Journal, is not impressed with Columbia University's invitation of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak there. He looks at their justifications and finds them seriously lacking. He imagines what an appearance by Hitler at Columbia would be like, assuming that today's academic standards were in place.

In a March 1952 essay in Commentary magazine on "George Orwell and the Politics of Truth," Trilling observed that "the gist of Orwell's criticism of the liberal intelligentsia was that they refused to understand the conditioned way of life." Orwell, he wrote, really knew what it was like to live under a totalitarian regime–unlike, say, George Bernard Shaw, who had "insisted upon remaining sublimely unaware of the Russian actuality," or H.G. Wells, who had "pooh-poohed the threat of Hitler." By contrast, Orwell "had the simple courage to point out that the pacifists preached their doctrine under condition of the protection of the British navy, and that, against Germany and Russia, Gandhi's passive resistance would have been to no avail."

Trilling took the point a step further, assailing the intelligentsia's habit of treating politics as a "nightmare abstraction" and "pointing to the fearfulness of the nightmare as evidence of their sense of reality." To put this in the context of Mr. Coatsworth's hypothetical, Trilling might have said that in hosting and perhaps debating Hitler, Columbia's faculty and students would not have been "confronting" him, much as they might have gulled themselves into believing they were. Hitler at Columbia would merely have been a man at a podium, offering his "ideas" on this or that, and not the master of a huge terror apparatus bearing down on you. To suggest that such an event amounts to a confrontation, or offers a perspective on reality, is a bit like suggesting that one "confronts" a wild animal by staring at it through its cage at a zoo.

If you were walking about in a jungle, came across a tiger and poked it with a stick, some people might put aside obvious questions about your lack of sense (or sanity) and think you were brave. Past tense, of course, since the praise would likely be posthumous. If you were walking through a zoo, came across that same tiger in a cage and poked it with a stick, you'd be up on felony animal abuse charges - if the crowd at the zoo let you live long enough. Longtime readers might recognize that analogy, I have used it before when discussing the "comedy" routine Stephen Colbert used at the White House Correspondents Dinner in 2006.

We have already seen how this all is playing out in the world press. Yeah, Bollinger either rope-a-doped Ahmadinejad or ambushed him, depending on your interpretation. Yeah, he spoke truth to power and called Ahamdinejad what he indeed is, a petty tyrant. But the point is that Hitler in 1939 was not much more than a petty tyrant, either. As Stephens puts it after imagining that hypothetical 1939 talk by Adolph at Columbia:

So there is Adolf Hitler on our imagined stage, ranting about the soon-to-be-fulfilled destiny of the Aryan race. And his audience of outstanding Columbia men are mostly appalled, as they should be. But they are also engrossed, and curious, and if it occurs to some of them that the man should be arrested on the spot they don't say it. Nor do they ask, "How will we come to terms with his world?" Instead, they wonder how to make him see "reason," as reasonable people do.

In just a few years, some of these men will be rushing a beach at Normandy or caught in a firefight in the Ardennes. And the fact that their ideas were finer and better than Hitler's will have done nothing to keep them and millions of their countrymen from harm, and nothing to get them out of its way.

You do not give evil a soapbox. Poking a tiger in a cage is not confronting evil.

One Reason I Think Columbia Made A Mistake

Yes, Lee Bollinger did a masterful smackdown of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Yes, he exposed a lot of the mad ravings of Iran's president for what they are - mad ravings. All to the good, in the great scheme of things. Bollinger spoke truth to power, to use the left's favorite phrase. And here is what reached the people of Iran:

Despite entire US media objections, negative propagation and hue and cry in recent days over IRI President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's scheduled address at Colombia University, he gave his lecture and answered students questions here on Monday afternoon.

On second day of his entry in New York, and amid standing ovation of the audience that had attended the hall where the Iranian President was to give his lecture as of early hours of the day, Ahmadinejad said that Iran is not going to attack any country in the world.

Before President Ahamadinejad's address, Colombia University Chancellor in a brief address told the audience that they would have the chance to hear Iran's stands as the Iranian President would put them forth.

He said that the Iranians are a peace loving nation, they hate war, and all types of aggression.

Referring to the technological achievements of the Iranian nation in the course of recent years, the president considered them as a sign for the Iranians' resolute will for achieving sustainable development and rapid advancement.

The audience on repeated occasion applauded Ahmadinejad when he touched on international crises.

At the end of his address President Ahmadinejad answered the students' questions on such issues as Israel, Palestine, Iran's nuclear program, the status of women in Iran and a number of other matters.

The defenders of free speech neglect to understand a basic fact - it does not work in a country that stomps on it. (And for all the Koz Kidz who rant incessantly - this country isn't the one that silences people.) All that happened at Columbia was that a mad dwarf was given a really, really tall soapbox to stand on. Regardless of what Bollinger said or did. Because if you speak truth to power and nobody is allowed to hear you,, did you really ever speak at all?

There are some people I genuinely respect who think that Mad Mahmoud's appearance at Columbia was an objectively good thing. I respect that. If we all thought alike and echoed one another's words we'd be thoughtless automatons. Or Koz Kidz. But I really, honestly, think this was a bad thing overall. Have at it disagreeing with me.

UPDATE: Others: Captain's Quarters, The Corner, QandO, ScrappleFace, Jammie Wearing Fool, PW Pub, Small Dead Animals, Belmont Club, Sundries Shack (who has a roundup of world headlines. Hint: Bollinger is mentioned once.)