Oh My Freakin' God, Yes!

Awesome rant about freedom of speech on the college campuses. It's nothing you haven't read before, but it's done so well, you have to applaud. My favorite bit, set up with standard "UMass Amherst let a convicted terrorist speak on campus in the name of free speech, but me - me? - while the university also allowed me to speak, they also let me be openly heckled. That's right, the demon liberals violated my free speech rights by letting others also speak freely." You know the schitck. As I was saying, my favorite bit:

After the event, I asked several [hired security guards] why they stood by while my First Amendment rights were trampled. They smiled ruefully or shook their heads. It was plain they were ordered not to engage demonstrators.

It's possible these rental guards acted this way because they understood that they were only there to make sure no one killed any one else or did drugs, but I like to believe that they were actually just pitying Don Feder: American Thinker's very tenuous grasp of how the goddamn First Amendment works.

Let's Find Out What They Think About Committee Assignments

With all respect to the work of one of my dearest friends, I'm not sure that it is helpful for articles chronicling the unpopularity of one George W. "W." Bush to cite his low standing with "academics" and "professional historians" as proof that he is/was a God-awful president. Professors are amazing people in their ability to sublimate their personal opinions when teaching classes, but when it comes to deciding how the current president ranks in a completely meaningless survey, one has to imagine that their personal opinions will hold sway. I mean, this is like asking professors if graduate school was harder when they went through it. I think we can predict the results of that poll.

The 10 Most Dangerous College Courses

Boffo crazy and high-larry-us.

FSM’s Second Annual ‘America’s Most Dangerous College Courses’

Jason Rantz

It’s been two years since I’ve begun investigating insipid, scary and yes, downright dangerous college courses – sometimes funded by tax dollars – and unfortunately, little has changed. Arrogant professors, protected by tenure and faint-hearted administrators, use their classrooms to spread their twisted views of America and its allies. Sometimes, entire courses are focused on anti-American views; other times, professors take time from non-political classes, such as math or Kinesiology, to complain about George Bush, the war on terrorism, social justice, and whatever it is that happens to bother them at the time of their rants. Consequently, students are not being taught properly and universities and colleges are robbing their students of the well-rounded educations they are paying for and deserve.

Go ahead and check out the courses. I knew it was good stuff when I read about "far-Left Senator Ted Kennedy" and NBC's recent move to the far Left, led by that noted-Trot Chris Matthews.

Marxism = Intelligent Design

Bob Maranto, a professor at Villanova University wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post where he decried the supposed left-wing bias on the college campus and called for more balance. Yesterday, he did a discussion board where he answered questions, great questions!, and made some semi-shocking statements.

Over the course of the Q&A Professor Maranto reveals that he is perfectly fine with academics having political view points, he just thinks that they should be very close to his own, or they become "fringe." Maranto says he is a middle-of-the-road type guy. "I'm pretty middle of the road...I've seen liberals get some things right (Clinton's tax increases) and conservatives get some things right (Reagan's foreign policy, welfare reform)..." He does argue, however, that the right has been right a bit more often than the left. He also seem to think that certain middle-of-the-road view points have been so well established that differing with them makes one a dreaded ideologue. To one questioner who dared to assert that there are more liberals in higher ed because liberalism equals intelligence, he fired back:

I think your answer may indicate a certain arrogance, and isolation from the real world. If the left is always right and the right always wrong, then you have to think that planned economies work better (the economic equivalent of intelligent design), that school standards and school choice are bad ideas (even though the data indicate they bring improvements), that NYPD's crime fighting strategy has failed, the Reagan foreign policy had nothing to do with the fall of communism, etc.

I think the real world events of the past three decades show that liberals are right about some things (global warming, Clintononics), but that on the whole the conservatives have done bit better. Notice I'm not mentioning our more recent foreign policy adventures which, though Hillary signed on, have mostly come from GWB and the normally sensible Tony Blair.

Reading Maranto, you always end up back at the conclusion that either you agree with him, conservatives are "better" on foreign policy, crime, and schools, or you are not being reasonable or realistic. Not that he minds Democrats. He has no problem with them, as long as they are certain types of Democrats. "I think reasonable people can read the data to support either John McCain or Hillary Clinton, so it seems odd to find either unacceptable at universities."

Anyone who falls out of the McCain-Hillary spectrum is an ideologue. Maranto has a particular distaste for the Marxists. He fails to grasp how anyone could still be a Marxist.

I must say I myself have students read some Marx in public policy. He did get some things right, and in any event set forth some interesting theories (as do the Intelligent Design types) that seemed logical even though they were later found wanting (again like Intel Design).

But I think overall Marxism has not fared well in the real world. I find it troubling when certain disciplines see Marxism as a guiding light, as if the 80 million or so deaths (See Courtois et al Black Book of Communism, published by Harvard in 2000) and general collapse of planned economies never happened!

While he doesn't say so explicitly, it seems clear from the way he writes that anyone to the left of Clinton (choose your favorite) is a Marxist. And it is the Marxists who are destroying higher education.

In the end, it is clear that Maranto isn't really in favor of "balance" in higher ed so much as he is in favor of everyone being mainstream.

Discontent

I have been reading Gary Wills' Nixon Agonistes, which I cannot recommend to everyone more highly. I can only read a chapter a night because my mind is blown and then I have to put it down.

He has a chapter on "Liberals" which is really a devastating look at the university system in the US circa 1969 and the many failings of the academy. Like so much else in the book, what was Wills was recording in 1969 has not changed much and his perceptions of trend/movements/ideologies is so spot-on that the book in entirely relevant today. Nothing more so than the chapter on academia. He takes the academy to the woodshed and gives it a sound thrashing. Hell, he takes everything I believe in and have been working on and shows that the liberal project of "freedom" in all its facets is not only hollow, but so self-contradictory that it cannot stand. While Wills may have over-estimated the tranformative nature of 1960s student opposition, he still identifies all the same issues about academia we are discussing today. He even takes a swipe at AFT.

I thought I'd share with you a single paragraph in pages of paragraphs just like it that I thought was particularly good:

Despite the aristocratic code of the university, in which professors address an elite, the academy must yield, in any showdown with the mass electorate, to what Schlesinger calls the discipline of consent. There are two reasons for this, one theoretical (majority rule in the political market) and one practical (the universities' economic support comes from the political community, national, state, and local). Two contradictory feelings grow, therefore, in the academy -- the sense of superior knowledge and the sense of ultimate powerlessness, a combination that makes for resentment. And resentment, according to Scheler and Camus, leads to intellectual asphyxiation, the constant breathing of one's own thoughts in a closed room.

As I read this chapter, I couldn't help but agree with Wills. I couldn't but think he was right, that the academy is built upon a fiction and it must be attacked. At the same time, I also couldn't help but realize that these arguments were leading me dangerously close to agreeing with DHo and the like (I'm aware of the DHo-as-student-radical to DHo-as-right-wing-crazy connection, but don't have time to develop it). I kept waiting for the "but, this is the best system we got" or some such saving grace, but it never came. This being the 1960s, "alternatives" were still very much alive and not everyone had settled into comfortable middle-classness (I recognize my resemblance to that remark).

Without going into too much more detail, else I will stray into a book report and I need to re-read this chapter several times, I did want to pose a couple of questions to my friends, especially one in particular. Can we agree that there is something wrong with the academy as it functions today? If so, how do we use the tools at our disposal to make the academy better?

Our union should be such a tool, but it is not. If anything, our union works hard to protect the status quo against attacks from the outside. Maybe this is just another example of the "left" being on the defensive from the far right, so that we have to bunker. But I begin to wonder what we actually win by bunkering. I think we all recognize that there are significant problems with the tenure system in the US, just to pick one example. I don't have time to go into them all...I'm sure you can think of five off the top of your head. But instead of fighting to reform the flawed system, we respond to right-wing critiques of tenure by trying to strengthen and re-expand tenure on the college campus. Moreover, because we are at "war" with the right, we are all supposed to pretend like tenure (and its companion, academic freedom) are unassailable goods and that anyone who critiques them must be either misguided or evil. Worse, we are made to ignore all the inherent contradictions within the academy, which Wills does a great job spotlighting and I am unfairly playing on without explaining. We have stopped improving that which we hold dear, in order to "defend" it from "attack." The right-wing questions and critiques, so we stop questioning and critiquing. Instead of fighting for a future, we are constantly looking back to the past. And that doesn't seem to be getting us anywhere.

Your Opinion, Solicited

Everyone knows that I am a cynical son-of-a-bitch (how dare you talk about my dead mother that way!). So I need a ruling. In announcing a committee to investigate how Oregon colleges are staffed, Governor Kulonoski said this:

[The Commission will] Study the impact of the use of part-time faculty and graduate student employees on program quality and student success, and recommend a consistent definition to describe adjunct, contingent and part-time faculty.

How should we be reading "the impact of the use of part-time faculty and graduate student employees on program quality and student success"?

Positive toward part-time faculty and graduate student employees?
Neutral toward part-time faculty and graduate student employees?
Negative toward part-time faculty and graduate student employees?

Help a (union) brother out here.

R-G to Eggheads: We Weren't Kidding the First Time

Two hot paragraphs were included in an editorial that appeared in today's Register Guard. It is an otherwise innocuous article about Oregon law governing diploma-mill degrees. Then, for no reason, here's Apu:

But should coaches be required to hold degrees at all? Of course not, because athletic "departments" are not really parts of universities, at least not at top-level schools. The UO athletic department is an ancillary business that is allowed by our cultural norms to use the university's name and trademarks to operate a large-scale entertainment business. The more private money it gets (thereby freeing other actual and potential funds for academic uses) the better.

That is why someone such as Pat Kilkenny is a good choice to lead such an enterprise. He's an experienced businessman with the ability to attract and manage money. The fact that Kilkenny has no degree is a who-cares. The problem he faces is that he is unaccustomed to operating within the slow, talkative process of academe, in which his actions will be publicly trashed by low-income people he has no choice but to work with. He is accustomed to doing things in private with people in his own economic stratum.

I don't have much more to say, other than "wow." What do you got?

Register Guard to Eggheads: Fuck You

Picture on the front page of the Register Guard:


A University of Oregon athlete soaks in one of the heated pools at the athletic department's expanded medical treatment center at the Casanova Center. Among the features are nutritionist and X-ray stations, multiple pools and flat-screen televisions aplenty.

The article that goes with the picture includes this gem, "The first thing that jumps out to visitors, and this is no surprise because it's an Oregon trademark, is that there are flat-screen TVs everywhere." Yes, this has become quite the trademark here at Oregon. I remember when the UO first offered us a flat-screen in every office. i thought they were joking! The article goes on, "In the expanded space, spread out over 14,580 square feet, a recovering athlete will seemingly never be out of range of a flat-screen tuned to some type of sporting event."

Then we get this column from the R-G's new sports columnist. The shorter version is that you don't really need a college degree to be successful, whether you want to be a sports columnist, multi-millionaire, athletic director, or baseball coach. It is this column we are informed/reminded that the UO waived it's requirement to hold a BA to be the athletic director in order to hire AD Kilkenny. Of course, since we were waiving the requirement about any relevant experience, waiving the degree requirement is no big deal.

Boy the R-G hates the UO.

This Is Why We Don't Let Conservatives Into the Academy (Just Kidding, David)

Via Lawyers, Guns, and Money:

Conservative commentator/gadfly/scholar wannabe Myron Magnet has an explanation for why African Americans are finding themselves in jail and in poverty all these years after racism was ended in the United States. Can you guess what it is? It's the same reason Michael Vick raised dogs to kill each other. That's right, hip hop.

For those of you without the time to read it, let me summarize.

We know that racism isn't the problem because blacks flourished in the US during Reconstruction and in the north where there was no Jim Crow. Because we have Clarance Thomas, Condi Rice, Barack Obama, and three (three!) CEOs of Fortune 500 companies who are all black, we can say for sure that racism is over! Nope, the roots of the sufferings of the black community can be traced to that cocksucker Lyndon Baines Johnson and his Great Society. Welfare made blacks lazy. Oh, and the Civil Rights movement, led by "elites." Here you have all these happy-go-lucky Negroes and then these liberals come along and tell them there oppressed and that they don't have to respect massah no more and then you've got discontent.

You can tell "elites" have run our education system into the ground by the fact that they believed the Duke rape story and Tawana Brawley. We've lost our reasoning skills. Because the elites believe that everything, including social order, is "man-made" (that's socially constructed to you and me, Russ), they can't handle the thought that maybe not all whites are racists and then they fire Larry Summers. That the Duke lacrosse players, apparently, didn't rape anyone that night, all liberal "hyperventilating" about race issues has been proved false. Or, "Emmett Till outrages are long over in America," as Myron tells us. Then the elites go and drive a good man like Don Imus off the air, but ignore the cause of all that ails the black community and Don Imus...hip hop.

(Yes, the article is this rambling, but not this smart-ass)

It all started with the Black Panthers. They posed at being liberators, but were really just criminals (not unlike your hip-hoppers today). Then came Ice T and his cop killer song and the elites told us he was just reflecting what was being said in the streets, but you and I know that until then no black man had ever thought about killing a cop, but now that's all they think about. Then you've got all these rappers raping about how racist society is and how the cops are profiling them (my man Chamillionaire gets an extensive mention for his song "Ridin'"). Except that you and I know that racism was ended in 1864 (North) and 1964 (South), so these rappers cannot be reflecting black experience in America. Instead, they are creating it. This is why blacks are poor, because Ice T, Chamillionaire, Jay Z, and Came'ron told them that being a gangsta was cool. So they deal drugs and don't get jobs, resulting in high rates of incarceration and low employment. It's really all pretty easy to understand. If you're not an elite.

Oh yeah, and hip hop speaks of sex in terms of porn, not love. Music and literature is supposed to be about love and marriage (ah, Frank), but this hip hop stuff is just about "fucking" and this breaks down the bonds of marriage, which is the foundation of civilization. And Wynton Marsalis and Bill Cosby agree, so there you have it.

Close to Home

I gotta admit, this describes more than just a few of us, by way of Kos:

I bet at least half of the netleft are failed professors, over-educated literary theory PHDs, who make themselves appear more numerous than they are through their anonymity and deliberate manipulation of google. What if the netleft, that has created the impression that there is a rising plurality that would like to abandon Iraqis to Qaeda, Quds and the Ba'ath, are just a few thousand committed Marxists in their pajamas? What if the Dems have strategically miscalculated? What if their over-compensation is to appease a vocal 1 percent of the electorate that actually draws contempt from the rest of the country?

Wanna be a Dean?

We've got a funny little situation here at the UO. It started a couple of years ago when our track team didn't do so well. Phil Knight (Nike. For those not from Eugene, Knight ran track at Oregon and that is where he got involved with Bowerman and the shoes) wanted the track coach fired. For whatever reason, Athletic Director Bill Moos didn't fire him (right away, He was fired a year later). Knight, apparently, decided that Moos needed to be fired. Scuttlebutt is that to get Moos fired, Knight pledged not to donate toward the building of a new basketball arena. A couple of months ago Moos announced he was retiring. A couple days later, the UO announced that they were going to buy a security clause for Moos. Essentially, if Moos didn't take another AD job for 5 years (I think), they'd give him $2 million. Anticipating criticism about the golden parachute, the UO got a donor to give the entire buyout cost. This donor, Kilkenny, just happens to be second biggest donor to the UO and a friend of Knight. Got it so far? A friend of Knight paid the Oregon AD $2 million to "retire."

Whatever, right. Of course athletics is run by money and don't give a shit about the larger institution. This is news? Is the Pope still Catholic?

The new twist, the new Nike flash that Oregon is always bringing to the party came when Oregon announced their new AD. How 'bout AD Kilkenny. Yep, the donor took over. He, quite literally, bought the Athletic Director's job at a major sports university. The kicker, of course, is that no one seems to care. The move is largely seen as acceptable. It occurred to me that if they had name Knight the AD, then there'd be outrage. Instead, they just hired the second largest donor and good friend of Knight. Oh well, that's okay, then. As long as you didn't hire Knight. That would be wrong.