As many have observed, the humanities (and allied disciplines) at U.S. universities have gotten rather silly, these last few decades. Now they’re also falling from favor among job-conscious students:

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.—The humanities division at Harvard University…is attracting fewer undergraduates…

Universities’ humanities divisions and liberal-arts colleges across the nation are facing similar challenges in the wake of stepped-up global economic competition, a job market that is disproportionately rewarding graduates in the hard sciences, rising tuition and sky-high student-debt levels.

Among recent college graduates who majored in English, the unemployment rate was 9.8%; for philosophy and religious-studies majors, it was 9.5%; and for history majors, it was also 9.5%…By comparison, recent chemistry graduates were unemployed at a rate of just 5.8%; and elementary-education graduates were at 5%.

Coincidence?

But, not to worry: Harvard’s Humanities department is prepared to sneer at anyone who doesn’t see how tremendously valuable they are:

This “is an anti-intellectual moment, and what matters to me is that we, the people in arts and humanities, find creative and affirmative ways of engaging the moment,” said Diana Sorensen, Harvard’s dean of Arts and Humanities…

Homi Bhabha, director of the Humanities Center at Harvard….said he didn’t give much weight to criticism from some elected officials who carp that young people need to go into fields that are supposedly more useful. “I think that’s because they have a very primitive and reductive view of what is essential in society,” he said.

Get it? If the Humanities are in decline – despite this being an age of left-wing triumph, and with university revenues/budgets near all-time highs – it’s not the fault of Humanities professors for too often failing to teach kids how to reason, usefully, about life’s problems. No, no, no. It’s everyone else’s fault for being primitive, reductionist and anti-intellectual.

All I can say is: I have an idea of what’s genuinely intellectual, and Sorensen/Bhabha are not it.

Via Zero Hedge.

UPDATE (from Dan): Jeff addresses a topic near and dear to my heart. There are many reasons the humanities are in decline and a good number of them trace back to the humanities professors themselves who focus on esoterica and offer, in the words of Homi Bhabha (whom Jeff quoted above) a “reductive view of what is essential in society”.

Perhaps were more humanities professors to show a genuine passion for the ideals which had defined their professor until scholars (thinking they were really quite clever) started “deconstructing” it in the 1970s, they would find greater interest among students.  But, professors would then have to make the case why the study of philosophy and great works of literature mattered to those who pursued careers in law, medicine, banking and commerce.

I highly recommend Bruce Bawer’s The Victims’ Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind which explores one aspect of the humanities’ decline in contemporary academia.

Henry David Thoreau once wrote: “There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers.”  I thought of that recently in seeing some of the media pushback against the publicity generated by the opening of the George W. Bush Presidential Library in Texas this week.  Thoreau’s quote is as true as ever about the state of contemporary philosophy, but it is also true about the state of historical inquiry:  these days we have professors of history more than historians.

The professoriate is a class with its own interests and its own agenda, an agenda that largely overlaps with that pursued by the majority of our lamestream media.  That agenda does not include the practice of history in the abstract, insofar as that involves presenting the evidence, weighing the options, employing reason, and drawing conclusions.  To most professors of history and folks in the media these days, history is only useful insofar as it serves their left-wing agenda.  Hence their resistance to the displays in the Bush library.

Consider this article from Yahoo! News:

DALLAS—As former President George W. Bush prepares to officially open his presidential library on Thursday, a question arises as it has for his predecessors: How objective will it be about his time in the White House?
Bush left office five years ago as one of the most unpopular presidents in history, his poll numbers weighed down by public discontent over his handling of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and worries about the economy.
But the former president wanted to take the controversies about his presidency head-on, say several former aides who worked closely with him on the library. One way of addressing the challenge is an interactive exhibit allowing visitors to see what it was like for him to make decisions as leader of the free world. People will hear information Bush was given by aides, then be asked to make their own choices. Afterward, the former president’s image will appear on a screen to explain what decision he ultimately made and why.
“He really wants people to go in there and get a sense of what it was like to be president during that time and to use that to make an informed decision about his presidency,” said Karen Hughes, a longtime Bush adviser.

In some respects,  the article strives to be slightly more balanced than I’m giving it credit for being, since it does point out controversies over the presentation of material in both the Clinton library and the LBJ library, as well, but I think it is materially different, too, in that Bush is trying to present the information that influenced his decisions and both the media and some so-called historians are crying foul over the fact that he is doing so.

One reason they don’t want Bush to tell his version of the story is that as the nightmare that is the Obama administration continues to develop, Bush is regaining popularity.  While I don’t often share Dan’s enthusiasm for Peggy Noonan’s writings, I was intrigued to see her recognizing the depth of the differences between the two men in her column this week where she wrote:

But to the point. Mr. Obama was elected because he wasn’t Bush.

Mr. Bush is popular now because he’s not Obama.

The wheel turns, doesn’t it?

Here’s a hunch: The day of the opening of the Bush library was the day Obama fatigue became apparent as a fact of America’s political life.

And she isn’t the only one.  Writing for Politico this week, Keith Koffler complained  about “Obama’s hubris problem,” prompting Neo-Neocon to ask the question that is on many of our minds: “And he thinks it’s only a second-term phenomenon? Where has he been, on planet Xenon?”

It seems like the media is unhappy this week because Bush is getting a fresh chance to tell his story independent of their filter, whereas the public is increasingly growing tired of the combination of arrogance, divisiveness, imperiousness, incompetence, and the need to politicize everything for which President Obama is increasingly known.

Perhaps, to modify Noonan a bit, the opening of the Bush library was uncomfortable for many of his admirers because, in seeing all five living presidents together again, the public got a chance to see them and to size them up, and as Joseph Curl wrote in the Washington Times W. easily outclassed Obama.

Jeff’s post the other day about the questionable workshop at Brown University came to mind recently when I saw a very far-left Facebook friend link to this article by a professor named Warren Blumenfeld who had just retired from a position as a professor of education at Iowa State University.  The article contains the professor’s reflections and gives voice to both his lamentations and his indignity about those students who took his class who were not won over to his worldview and who had the temerity to announce that fact in their final papers.

The course was entitled “Multicultural Foundations in Schools and Society,” and Blumenfeld describes it in the following terms:

I base the course on a number of key concepts and assumptions, including how issues of power, privilege, and domination within the United States center on inequitable social divisions regarding race, ethnicity, socioeconomic class, sex, gender identity, sexual identity, religion, nationality, linguistic background, physical and mental ability/disability, and age. I address how issues around social identities impact generally on life outcomes, and specifically on educational outcomes. Virtually all students registered for this course, which is mandatory for students registered in the Teacher Education program, are pre-service teachers.

In other words, this is a required course in “multicultural studies” indoctrination.  If the course were voluntary, it would be a slightly different situation, but as a required course, it amounts to an example of the sort of thing that conservatives can easily point to as illustrating the left-wing biases of academia.

Professor Blumenfeld is particularly alarmed by the case of two female students who tell him quite boldly that the course has not changed their socially conservative Christian worldview:

On a final course paper, one student wrote that, while she enjoyed the course, and she felt that both myself and my graduate assistant — who had come out to the class earlier as lesbian — were very knowledgeable and good professors with great senses of humor, nonetheless, she felt obliged to inform us that we are still going to Hell for being so-called “practicing homosexuals.” Another student two years later wrote on her course paper that homosexuality and transgenderism are sins in the same category as stealing and murder. This student not only reiterated that I will travel to Hell if I continued to act on my same-sex desires, but she went further in amplifying the first student’s proclamations by self-righteously insisting that I will not receive an invitation to enter Heaven if I do not accept Jesus as my personal savior since I am a Jew, regardless of my sexual behavior. Anyone who doubts this, she concluded, “Only death will tell!”

Now while we might question the wisdom of both students in advertising the heresy represented by their beliefs so boldly in a graded assignment,  I think we might also be heartened by their courage in being true to their faith, even if we do not agree with all of the particulars of their worldview.

The professor, however, is shocked and appalled, and the rest of the essay is his attempt to reconcile–through reference to one leftist theory and tract after another–what he calls “our campus environment, one that emboldens some students to notify their professor and graduate assistant that their final destination will be the depths of Hell.”  Notice his word choice, there.  The problem is with the “campus environment” which “emboldens some students.”  It seems like a foreign idea to this professor to think that a university could be a place for the free and open exchange of ideas, especially those ideas that are unpopular.  I trust we will not find him quoting Voltaire or Jefferson anytime soon.

No, instead what we get is a description of and a reflection on a course that sounds like it could have been lifted straight from  the pages of Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, albeit with a more contemporary reading list.  While the professor uses the (more…)

Back in 2004, James Piereson coined the phrase “Punitive Liberalism” to describe a particular malady common in the days of severe Bush Derangement Syndrome.  James Taranto introduced many of us to the idea when he wrote:

Writing in The Weekly Standard, James Piereson offers a useful addition to the American political glossary: “punitive liberalism.” This “bizarre doctrine,” which found its fullest expression in the presidency of Jimmy Carter, holds that “America had been responsible for numerous crimes and misdeeds through its history for which it deserved punishment and chastisement.” Those who disagree “were written off as ignorant patriots who could not face up to the sins of the past.”  (Hat Tip: Ace; the original version of Taranto’s piece is only available currently at the Wayback Machine)

It is with some trepidation, therefore, that I describe some symptoms I have been experienced with increasing frequency over the last few months.

I first noticed the condition when I read, a few weeks after the election, that the Community College of Allegheny County in Pennsylvania was cutting “the hours of 400 adjunct instructors, support staff, and part-time instructors to dodge paying for Obamacare.”

“It’s kind of a double whammy for us because we are facing a legal requirement [under the new law] to get health care and if the college is reducing our hours, we don’t have the money to pay for it,” said adjunct biology professor Adam Davis.

My reaction?  When I read that, I could hear (to borrow a phrase from Taranto) one of the world’s tiniest violins playing in the background. I actually laughed and felt relieved about something in the political world for what may have been the first time since the disaster known as the 2012 Presidential Election.  Yes, I thought, even the leftists in academia will not manage to avoid paying for the mess that is Obamacare, and it will cost some of them far more than they imagined.

Then just a few days ago, I had an even stronger reaction when I heard that some unions were petitioning the  administration for special subsidies to defray the high cost of insurance under Obamacare.  Rick Ungar writes in Forbes:

Unhappy that important improvements in insurance benefits resulting from the healthcare reform law will now cost employers with union workers a bit more—improvements such as no longer permitting insurance policies to place the yearly and lifetime caps on benefits that leave beneficiaries high, dry and broke should they suffer a serious and expensive illness—some labor unions are now asking the government to change the rules to allow low-earning union workers access to the government subsidies so that their employers will not be disadvantaged when competing with companies who have non-union employees.

Yes, you read that correctly.  Becket Adams at the Blaze elaborates further:

No, really, union heads are acting like no one warned them that costs would go up.

“We are going back to the administration to say that this is not acceptable,” said Ken Hall, general secretary-treasurer for the Teamsters.

“I heard him say, ‘If you like your health plan, you can keep it,’” said John Wilhelm, chairman of Unite Here Health, the insurance plan for 260,000 union workers. “If I’m wrong, and the president does not intend to keep his word, I would have severe second thoughts about the law.”

Why? Why? Why didn’t anyone tell these leaders about the costs associated with “Obamacare”? (more…)

“Perhaps”, wrote Michael Barone Tuesday in the Washington Examiner, President Obama’s inability to “stomach listening to views he does not share” . . .

is to be expected of one who has chosen all his adult life to live in university communities and who made his way upward in the one-party politics of Chicago. Thus on the “fiscal cliff” he left the unpleasant business of listening to others’ views and reaching agreement to Joe Biden.

A sad commentary on higher education in America today that university communities are seen not as places open to diverse points of view, but as akin to the one-party politics of Chicago.  (Read the whole thing.  It’s Barone.)

If the university today were to be the kind of place it should be, then instead of it producing a man like the incumbent president unwilling to negotiate, it would produce a man nearly identical to the one the Obama campaign (with the active assistance of the media) created in 2008, a post-partisan healer able to consider both sides of an issue, able (as well) to offer respectful rebuttals to opposing points of view.

Such a leader would work with his partisan adversaries to compromise and arrive at a consensus, much as Bill Clinton did in working with then-Speaker Newt Gingrich and the Republican Congresses of the mid-1990s.

Instead of working with Republicans, however, Obama, Barone observes,

To judge from his surly demeanor and defiant words at his press conference Monday, Barack Obama begins his second term with a strategy to defeat and humiliate Republicans rather than a strategy to govern.

In the thread yesterday to a college classmate’s Facebook post on supposed GOP voter suppression in Florida*, I made the case for voter identification laws.  When I provided evidence of voter fraud, including linking articles, he dismissed such notions as “claptrap,” with another classmate chiming in to tell me to “ Learn to actually think”.  Fascinating how educated liberals oftentimes refuse to acknowledge the facts conservatives present or to address the arguments we make.

And when we don’t agree with their arguments, they accuse us being narrow-minded — or not thinking.  Gee, wonder if he faults former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens for not thinking, given that that liberal jurist defended the constitutionality of voter ID laws in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board.

Almost at the same time that I was reading my classmates’ attempt to dismiss my arguments with quips, I caught an explanation for the behavior of this very bright men who attended a very good college on Instapundit:

I’ve always believed that academia’s liberal bias uniquely advantages conservatives and libertarians because it guarantees that such students do not grow up in an intellectual echo-chamber. Instead, they are challenged every day to communicate clearly, order their thoughts with care and sharpen their arguments.

What is sad is that so many of our liberal peers think they are making the better argument when they’re not making arguments at all.

They’re just so used to their liberal opinion being validated.

(more…)

Just got Glenn Reynolds’s latest book, The Higher Education Bubble, from Amazon. They used quite a big box for such a little book.

Looking forward to reading it!

Surveying the returns on North Carolina’s Amendment One, William Kristol finds that the measure was soundly defeated in two counties with large universities by margins of “5 to 1 and 5 to 2, respectively”, yet passed by margins of 2 to 1 in neighboring “counties like Alamance, Person, and Granville”.

This causes him to “bet there’s more tolerance in Alamance, Person and Granville for those who are proponents of gay marriage than there is at Duke or UNC-Chapel Hill for the opponents.”

I’d made the same wager.  Here’s one piece of evidence that suggests the odds on this wager are better than even.

Even as the “University of California system has been raising tuitions and cutting departments,” as Michael Barone puts it, John Leo reports that the system’s “San Diego campus found the money to create a new post of “vice chancellor for equity, diversity and inclusion”, with Barone adding:

That’s in addition to what the Manhattan Institute’s Heather Mac Donald calls its “already massive diversity apparatus.” It takes Mac Donald 103 words just to list the titles of UCSD’s diversitycrats.

The money for the new vice chancellorship could have supported two of the three cancer researchers that the campus lost to Rice University in Houston, a private school that apparently takes the strange view that hard science is more important than diversity facilitators.

Considering that article, Canadian Rattlesnake quips that “a degree in transgender studies might be beneficial when applying for a job as a vice chancellor for equity, diversity, and inclusion.”

Indeed.

Now nearly fifty years ago, in one of the greatest speeches any American has ever delivered, Martin Luther King, Jr. expressed his vision of how to treat people who differ from ourselves, “I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

It’s not the color of their skin which defines them, but the quality of their character.  So too should it be with sexual orientation.

It seems, alas, that we’ve gone for the vision of a society where we evaluate each individual according to his qualities of character to one where his difference becomes paramount.  Two weeks ago, I blogged about a proposal being floated in the University of California system to ask “incoming freshmen to identify their sexual orientation, a move that might cement such declarations as an emerging topic in the college admissions process.”

That story is getting more legs, with an LA Times report yesterday on the matter:

California’s state colleges and universities are laying plans to ask students about their sexual orientation next year on application or enrollment forms, becoming the largest group of schools in the country to do so. The move has raised the hopes of gay activists for recognition but the concerns of others about privacy.

“The negatives of this,” writes, Tina Korbe,

. . . vastly outweigh the potential benefits. Not only could the information be improperly used — say to either discriminate against or give preference to LGBT students — but it also suggests sexual orientation is somehow relevant to education. The college admissions process should aim to determine what students would be able to meet the rigorous academic requirements of a university experience.

Read the whole thing.  Knowledge of an individual’s sexual orientation won’t help determine whether or not he has that ability.   (more…)

When, in 1981, the Dartmouth Review published the names of the officers of that college’s “Gay Straight Alliance (GSA) along with material that had been taken from the GSA’s confidential files“, the college was in an uproar over this breach of privacy.  Students protested, incensed that the grandfather of one of those students learned about his (closeted) progeny’s sexuality from the Review.

Three years later, when a Review staffer secretly taped a meeting of the GSA nad published a portion of the transcript, the college was (as well it should have been) up in arms, with its administration only reluctantly choosing not to bring charges.  Then-Dean Shanahan, however, did send a letter to “the Dartmouth community calling on them to ‘censure’ the Review for its ‘insensitivity.’”

Now, such “insensitivity” comes not from conservative campus papers, but from colleges themselves, at least here in politically correct California:  ”Officials of the University of California system have proposed asking incoming freshmen to identify their sexual orientation, a move that might cement such declarations as an emerging topic in the college admissions process.”

Ann Althouse whose post reminded me about the article (had previously seen a link on a Facebook page) quipped:

It’s for their own good. The university has services it wants to provide. All the government’s intrusions into your private life are for your own good. You will be given what is good for you, so come on now, tell us all about everything.

How far we’ve come and how backward we’re moving.

Now, I agree we’re all better off if we come out, but it the business of a university to ask us about our sexual orientation.  Nor to judge us by that difference.

Our reader V the K linked this report about Sandra Fluke’s distaste for opposing points of view:

As a student at Cornell and treasurer of a pro-choice organization at the school, Sandra Fluke, helped shut down a pro-life speech on Cornell’s campus by counter protesting. She argued that a pro-life organization at Cornell was about “manipulating [students'] emotions” with misleading statistics about abortion.

So, if this organization offered misleading statistics, why then didn’t Ms. Fluke take it upon herself to demonstrate their inaccuracy and argue the merits of her own position?  If this story is true [and it appears it may not be*], this woman is not much interested in debating ideas, but in preventing the airing of views with which she disagrees.

In this, she has much in common with her ideological confrères in the Occupy Movement.

Just over a week ago, “unruly Occupy students at American University in Washington, D.C., shouted down Republican governor Jan Brewer of Arizona on Friday, forcing her to flee the room with aid from security guards.”  H/t:  Instapundit.

This week, they disrupted “a panel discussion [at AIPAC] led by Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Miami, FL led a discussion about Stopping Iran: Can the West End Iran’s Nuclear Drive?”

In the fall of 1964, liberal students at the University of California/Berkeley launched the “Free Speech Movement”; they wanted to end the school policy preventing student groups from operating “on campus if they engaged in any kind of off-campus politics, whether electoral, protest or even oratorical.”  Now, liberal students want to prevent their ideological adversaries from expressing their views.

They times, they are a-changing.

* (more…)

Welcome Instapundit Readers!

As part of his “series” on the “higher education bubble,” Glenn today links a post with a title which addresses an issue I focus on (directly and indirectly) for much of the time I’m not reading about politics or writing this blog:  ”Kenneth Anderson: The New Physiocrats, or, Is There Value in the Humanities? There can be, if they’re taught rigorously and seriously. That does happen.”

As I finish up the proofreading of my dissertation, I am also working on creating several myth courses to teach, including a general introduction to Græco-Roman mythology, a course on the hero, another on Near Eastern myth and a fourth comparing the themes of great myths to those of classic films.

I have found the greatest challenge to the first course (the one on Græco-Roman myth) to be not organizing the study of the various myths (the outline I constructed corresponds almost perfectly with the two leading college textbooks on mythology), but organizing the first week:  how to introduce the study of myth to show that it’s relevant to people in our contemporary society.

All too many scholars in the humanities (alas!) focus on esoteric and obscure theories, trying to “deconstruct” literature or define its structure while losing sight of its meaning — or even speculating why it is that humans tell stories.  When I was an undergraduate, I sometimes wanted to challenge some of the humanities professors (those whose classes I learned to avoid), asking them why they were pursuing a career teaching language, literature and philosophy to young men and women who were looking forward to careers in banking, law, medicine, industry and other entrepreneurial endeavors.

It is a question I regularly ask myself as I look forward to teaching.

Not quite sure why, but haven’t really been in much of a mood to blog about politics lately. If you think some of my recent posts seem forced, then perhaps it’s because they are. This is not to say I haven’t been thinking about politics; I have scribbled out a few ideas for posts — particularly the more “essayistic” ones which I prefer to craft.

It may be just that other things are on my mind, including the possible purchase of a condo and the preparation of a curriculum to teach mythology at the college/community college level.

That said, one big issue has been on my mind, brought to the fore, in recent days, by Steve Jobs’s commentary on the president’s record. In a nutshell, I wonder why so many on the cultural left who “get” that the Democratic Party is bad for business, including those industries fostering technological innovation and enterprises catering to a, well, more or less countercultural crowd (i.e., certain small businesses in big cities and university towns), continue to support Democrats and spurn Republicans.

This morning, while sipping my coffee and reading a thoughtful piece (via Instapundit) on the Duke “Group of 88″ (professors who signed a letter effectively accusing the Duke lacrosse players of rape despite a paucity of evidence), I caught this:

But, even though I was an Obama supporter in 2008 and will remain so for 2012, Harris-Perry doubtless would dismiss me, too, as an insidiously racist white liberal. After all, I have publicly expressed horror with the Obama administration’s hostility to due process in higher education and my deep disappointment with the President’s indifference to the 2009 plebiscite that annulled the marriage equality law in my home state of Maine.

Emphasis added.  The entire piece merits your time.  It is a devastating critique of an academic’s obsessive focus on race, where “feelings” become subordinate to facts.  That said, the main reason I quote the blog post is for those words I emphasized above.

Now, maybe Dr. Johnson does support the president’s interventionist domestic policies and has to bite the bullet on the differences he identifies above (as we gay conservatives do when it comes to our party’s stand on DADT repeal), but those words did get me thinking about the idea that has been much on my mind of late:

Why do some people (mostly cultural liberals) continue to support Democrats (and oppose Republicans) when they know the economic policies of the president’s party make it increasingly difficult for individuals to establish enterprises while preventing more establish entrepreneurs from innovating and expanding.

I’m back at my alma mater, once again named America’s top liberal arts college. I had come out here for the fall meeting of the executive committee of our Society of Alumni to which I was elected last year, and stayed for a few days in order to address the club I founded when I was an undergraduate, the Garfield Republican Club.

If you’re in western Massachusetts, please feel to stop by tonight at 8:30 PM in Williams College’s Griffin Hall Room 6 to hear me address the question, “Was the Bush Administration the Golden Age for Gays in America?”

As I visit the campus, talking to professors and students, preparing my remarks, I recall so many things, but notably the conversations I had here, not just with my philosophical confrères, but also with my ideological adversaries.  I recall the respect that most showed for my ideas, how we each strove to respect the other’s arguments.  My favorite political science professor here was a Marxist who taught a course in conservative  political theory.  It remains to this day the best class I ever had where I perhaps worked the hardest and certainly learned the most.

And I recall how after Phyllis Schlafly spoke, students asked her tough questions, then engaged each other in thoughtful, though sometimes, heated exchanges about the arguments she made and the conclusions she reached.  My fellow Ephs offered a civil response to a controversial speaker.

I believe my concern for civil discourse begun here, beneath the peaceful shadows of these purple mountains.  As I recall the conversations that took place — and apparently still take place here — I wonder if this medium (blogging) sometimes compromises our ability to comment in a civil manner.  I note how my own tone has become snarkier since I first started blogging.

Now, to be sure, some of our critics, do respond to our points, but all too often they merely attack us not for what we say, but for what they believe conservatives would say.  And, alas, some of our defenders respond in kind.

Perhaps, the difference is that at Williams College, we looked our interlocutors in the eye when we took issue with their points, but in this medium, we don’t see the faces of those with whose arguments we take issue. (more…)

Elmhurst College, Nathan Harden reports in the National Review’s Phi Beta Cons,

. . . has become the first college in the nation to directly ask applicants if they are gay. The question, “Would you consider yourself to be a member of the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered) community?” appears on the school’s new admissions application.

Students who self-identify as could could even “qualify for a scholarship worth one-third of tuition at the private, liberal arts school”.

Guess this helps promote the notion of sexuality as a protected victim class entitled to all rights, privileges and honors pertaining thereto.

This is absurd.  Colleges shouldn’t ask about such things on their applications and focus instead on the student’s merits, his accomplishments.

At least since I was an undergraduate, I have noticed that some of the most intolerant leftists I have come across hold tenured positions on university faculties. Those who should be best equipped to wrestle with ideas at odds with their own often show the greatest outrage when students present such ideas.  The latest example comes from the Hawkeye State:

University of Iowa professor who studies same-sex relationships was so upset by an email from a campus Republican group promoting “Conservative Coming Out Week” that she fired off a vulgarity aimed at all Republicans, according to messages released by the school Wednesday.

“F— you, Republicans” was professor Ellen Lewin’s response Monday to the recruiting pitch from UI College Republicans. She sent the email from her school account, drawing outrage from conservative students and one Republican lawmaker.

UI President Sally Mason responded to the incident Wednesday by condemning intolerant political speech.

The university president may have condemned intolerant political speech in broad terms,* but she did not single out, as she should have, the professor nor even identify her political views, as if such intolerance were not legion on the left.  The university should be questioning why a scholar who reacts as Ms. Lewin did was doing on its faculty.

A conservative who spoke out as did she would likely be subject to sensitivity training.  Instead of grappling with her prejudice, this academic used her apology to lash out against Republicans.  In an ”email to the leaders of the College Republicans,” Ms. Lewin explained “that she had just finished reading about ‘fresh outrages committed by Republicans in government’ when she received the pitch”:

“I admit the language was inappropriate, and apologize for any affront to anyone’s delicate sensibilities,” Lewin wrote.

But she said the group’s email contained several statements that were “extremely offensive, nearly rising to the level of obscenity.” She said she was upset that Republicans used the “coming out” language to describe the week given what she called their general disdain for gay rights. She said the email also mocked labor protesters in Wisconsin and animal rights.

This woman just can’t let go of her prejudices and even includes a jibe against those critical of her angry riposte — dubbing their sensibilities “delicate”.  Would she consider a gay man’s sensibilities delicate if he were outraged that a professor replied to his invitation to a talk on anti-gay bigotry with, “F*** you f****t”? (more…)

As many of you may know, I have been very active in the alumni association of my alma mater, Williams College, currently serving on the Society of Alumni’s executive committee.  Whenever we discuss the problems of drinking on campus and ways to promote responsible consumption of alcohol, we learn how the drinking age hamstrings the college, making it difficult to develop a sensible policy.

Such discussion have been ongoing at least since I was an undergraduate.

Rather than discouraging the irrational consumption of alcohol, the drinking age actually promotes it.  It turns the types of beverages human beings have been drinking in ritual celebrations as well as social gatherings for as long as we have recorded our history into a kind of forbidden fruit.

Euripides records how the prissy Pentheus was punished for failing to honor Dionysus, the Olympian whose bailiwick included wine (among other things).

When people see wine, beer and other (potentially) intoxicating spirits as beverages to enjoy with their elders, rather than those to consume on the sly, they will be more likely to drink responsibly, particularly by learning about drinking from those who have been drinking responsibly for a generation (at least).  If you start drinking among a group of adolescents, the age at which we are the most irresponsible, you will likely drink more irresponsibly as you’ll be drinking among those with the least capacity to control their actions and with a spirit inclined to excess.

Studying in Germany, I saw many of my Teutonic peers drinking on regularly basis, yet encountered none of the binge drinking I had observed on American campuses.   They grew up drinking beer.  They did not see consumption of their national beverage as something to do just with your peers, but also as an activity to enjoy with your parents–and their peers as well.

In a piece for the Wall Street Journal essay that he links on his blog, Glenn Reynolds addresses this very topic, where he reminds us that

. . . over 130 college presidents, as part of something called the Amethyst Initiative, have called for an end to the drinking age of 21. (more…)

Just about a year ago this time, I was intensely working on my dissertation, re-reading (and re-re-re-reading) several key passages in the Iliad and the Odyssey, even delighting in some of the scholarly work on these epics.  As I read about Achilles, Telemachus and Odysseus, I often thought I was reading about people I know, in some cases, I felt I was reading about myself.

I saw in the way Athene manipulated her father in the first book of the Odyssey techniques my sisters used to manipulate our father — and my teenage nieces to manipulate theirs.  These stories may have been set in the Bronze Age where supernatural beings intervened on a regular basis in the lives of mortal men and women, but they addressed themes and related experiences similar to those we face today in a world where we’ve banished deities and developed technology that the ancients couldn’t even conceive.

And just as the Olympians have been banished from our stories, all too often those who wield power in academia seek to banish the works once called the “Great Books.”  They replace stories put to paper by dead white males with current accounts by more contemporary authors who address themes these scholars believe more “relevant” in a world of rapid technological progress and instant communication.

In reality, however, students assigned such “relevant” stories find themselves bored and sometimes even cheated, as David Clemens relates:

My former student Joshua, now ambivalently quartered at UC Santa Cruz . . . has an article in Literary Matters about cheating.  Not students cheating; students who feel cheated.  He’s found a couple of excellent literature classes (Cervantes) but most just use books as a vector for stone-cold political ideology.

When he was at Monterey Peninsula College, Josh was the midwife who helped deliver a great books program to a college that had been out to axe all its literature courses.  In my Intro. to Lit., class he heard me refer to Robert Hutchins’s metaphor for Western literature as a “Great Conversation,” and in Literary Matters he writes

“Within weeks other members of the class and I were meeting on our own time to discuss the Great Books. We read Aristophanes’ Lysistrata. We read Sappho. We felt and spoke as if we had rediscovered some long-forgotten treasure abandoned by the generation before [my emphasis].” (more…)

Earlier today, Glenn Reynolds linked a blog post today which helps explain why some of the most intelligent of liberals, particularly on university campuses, but also in the halls of Congress tend to be so narrow-minded. Over at National Review‘s Phi Beta Cons, David French offers an explanation of why it has “been so easy” for James O’Keefe to obtain footage exposing the prejudiced attitudes and disregard for inconvenient laws (i.e, ., in the Planned Parenthood sting, those restricting abortion) of individuals working for left-leaning organizations:

Because until now Planned Parenthood, ACORN, and NPR have not experienced real media accountability or real journalistic scrutiny — at least not to the extent that conservative politicians and organizations do. The mainstream media (and NPR is obviously part of the MSM) is sympathetic to their goals and purposes, and reporter calls tend to come from friendly voices seeking talking points rather than skeptical reporters demanding answers. In the MSM’s eyes, those organizations were the good guys, part of the home team. So millions upon millions of public dollars flow into their treasuries, while they bask in the goodwill of the cultural establishment.

Emphasis added.  Read the whole thing.

For further proof of reporters as friendly voices, take a gander at how Katie Couric treated the vice-presidential nominees of the two major political parities in the 2008 campaign.  With the Republican, she was confrontational as if determined to take vengeance on her high school rival after that more attractive, charismatic and popular girl beat her out from prom queen.  With the Democrat, she was adoring as if doting on the kindly next door neighbor who always gave her flowers when she returned home from school.

Many on the left just aren’t accustomed to dealing with confrontational questions.  (Take a gander at how Barney walked off the set when a CNBC reporter asked him a question he wasn’t prepared to face.)  They think everyone they meet shares their worldview and looks down on conservative.  It’s what they come to expect since they were in college.

Perhaps, the problem begins the paucity of conservatives on university faculties.