Putting the Corrupt University System Out of Our Misery

US college students can end up hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt at the end of their university experience, with very little to show for it. Even middle and lower tier universities are growing exorbitantly priced, without providing students, parents, or society, value for their financial sacrifice.

In fifty years, if not much sooner, half of the roughly 4,500 colleges and universities now operating in the United States will have ceased to exist. The technology driving this change is already at work, and nothing can stop it. The future looks like this: Access to college-level education will be free for everyone; the residential college campus will become largely obsolete; tens of thousands of professors will lose their jobs; the bachelor’s degree will become increasingly irrelevant; and ten years from now Harvard will enroll ten million students.

... universities that have spent the past few decades spending tens or even hundreds of millions to offer students the Disneyland for Geeks experience are going to find themselves in real trouble. Along with luxury dorms and dining halls, vast athletic facilities, state of the art game rooms, theaters and student centers have come layers of staff and non-teaching administrators, all of which drives up the cost of the college degree without enhancing student learning. The biggest mistake a non-ultra-elite university could make today is to spend lavishly to expand its physical space. Buying large swaths of land and erecting vast new buildings is an investment in the past, not the future.

...The biggest obstacle to the rapid adoption of low-cost, open-source education in America is that many of the stakeholders make a very handsome living off the system as is. In 2009, 36 college presidents made more than $1 million. That’s in the middle of a recession, when most campuses were facing severe budget cuts. This makes them rather conservative when it comes to the politics of higher education, in sharp contrast to their usual leftwing political bias in other areas. Reforming themselves out of business by rushing to provide low- and middle-income students credentials for free via open-source courses must be the last thing on those presidents’ minds.

Nevertheless, competitive online offerings from other schools will eventually force these “non-profit” institutions to embrace the online model, even if the public interest alone won’t. And state governments will put pressure on public institutions to adopt the new open-source model, once politicians become aware of the comparable quality, broad access and low cost it offers. _The End of University as We Know It

Modern universities are memorials to mediocre education, corrupt excess, and academic intolerance. The $1 trillion in student loans which hobble young people at the start of their adult lives is being revealed as a dangerous financial bubble. The university system now occupies a central part of the ongoing US financial misery -- and heaven help the US taxpayer if Obama includes universities in his next round of multi- $trillion bailouts.

The system is corrupt and rotting to the core, and cannot last. It is time to build an affordable, trimmed down replacement system that returns value for money spent. It is time to put the rotten and corrupt university system out of our misery.

Abolishing College: No More Academic Lobotomies?

Alternatives to conventional higher education are experiencing explosive growth. Coursera offers free online courses from at least 33 respected universities worldwide. And EdX recently added the entire University of Texas system of institutions, to join Harvard, MIT, and UC Berkeley.

The shift to online college-credit courses is occurring three to five years faster than expected because of demand from students and universities, said Anant Agarwal, president of Cambridge-based EdX and an MIT professor.

The University of Texas System plans to put up $5 million to join the EdX online venture, started by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to help meet demand for low-cost college courses.

...Most universities realize major structural changes are needed, though moving lectures online doesn’t go far enough, said Jeff Sandefer, a Perry adviser who taught entrepreneurship courses at the University of Texas and started the Austin-based Acton School of Business, which offers graduate management degrees. EdX and Coursera, another university group offering free online studies, “will hasten the flight of full-price customers to less-expensive alternatives, accelerating the demise of traditional academia,” Sandefer said by e-mail. _BusinessWeek

Modern universities are known for their antagonism to students' freedom of speech rights, and for an intolerance to diverse points of view. The steep rise in tuition rates over the past few decades has skyrocketed, driving student debt above $1 trillion, and rising. Administrative bloat is out of control, and the quality of education on campus is suffering as a result.

If any institution deserves to be made obsolete -- besides big media and big govenment -- it is the big college bubble. The EdX, Coursera, and Khan Academy approaches to free online education will not result in the actual abolition of college indoctrination and intolerance. Making a destructive institution obsolete is far quicker and cleaner than going to the trouble of abolishing it.

Imagine a world with free speech for everyone, no more academic lobotomies, no more academic intolerance / indoctrination. A world of self-directed learners, with the entire universe of knowledge available to pursue.

It sounds like a very dangerous world! ;-)

And remember: It is never too late for a dangerous childhood.

Oregon State University Center of Political Corruption Scandal

More 8March2011: Jerry Pournelle looks at this issue and concludes that something is very rotten in the state of Oregon. (h/t Instapundit)

Specific members of the Oregon State University administration and fraculty have apparently joined with US Congressman Peter DeFazio (D-Oregon) in what appears to be an act of blatant political payback against DeFazio's opponent in the November 2010 election for US Congress in Oregon's 4th District, Dr. Art Robinson.

Inconceivably -- in an unprecedented act of vindictiveness -- the DeFazio loyalists at OSU appear to have targeted the children of Dr. Robinson -- students in the OSU graduate school -- for prejudicial treatment, including dismissal without cause from their programs, and appropriation of their work without credit or attribution.

Political corruption and ideological bias within state-run educational systems may be widespread, but this level of blatant vindictiveness against children of a political opponent is almost certainly unprecedented. Here is more from Dr. Robinson:

OSU administrators think they can violate ethical academic standards of professional conduct, break formal OSU rules and regulations, and even violate U.S. laws with impunity because, in any resulting litigation, they would be defended by lawyers from the Oregon Department of Justice, assuring that only students with huge sums of money and many years to invest in litigation can oppose them. The Robinsons do not have those huge sums of money, and, moreover, they want to complete their education – not receive money in exchange for the destruction of their education and opportunities.

...As things stand today, Jack Higginbotham and his students and staff, along with Joshua Robinson are in immediate danger. Bethany Robinson is slated for dismissal soon after and without the Ph.D. that she has nearly completed. The dismissal of Matthew Robinson may not be far behind. And the danger to Professor Higginbotham's other students is likewise very high.

Please don't let this happen!

Please notify OSU of your interest in this matter and urge the university to stop its destructive actions against Joshua, Bethany and Matthew Robinson and against Professor Jack Higginbotham, the remarkable president of the OSU faculty senate who has risked his career to help them!

Contact information for the OSU nuclear engineering department is:

Phone: 541-737-2343
Fax: 541-737-4678
mailto:joan.stueve@oregonstate.edu

Mailing address:
116 Radiation Center,
Corvallis, OR 97331-5902

Please also contact the president of OSU, Edward Ray:

Phone: 541-737-4133
Fax: 541-737-3033
mailto:pres.office@oregonstate.edu

Mailing address:
600 Kerr Administration Building
Corvallis, OR 97331-2128

Here is the e-mail address of the OSU vice president for university relations and marketing, Todd Simmons mailto:todd.simmons@oregonstate.edu.

For more information or to take further action, please visit OregonStateOutrage.com. _ArtRobinson_via_GreenHell

When members of a particular ideology occupy faculty and administrative offices in such overwhelming proportions, the temptation to go beyond the academic mandate -- to exercise greater power than has been authorised by their position -- can become overwhelming. At first glance, this is what seems to have happened to the over-zealous OSU faculty and staff, in their efforts to please Congressman DeFazio -- who helps to determine their budgets and remuneration -- by punishing the children of DeFazio's opponent.

Stay tuned for more details as they become available.

An Overpriced Educational Establishment Becomes Public Enemy 1

More: If you want to know how the educational establishment could drift so far out of touch with reality, the words of Alexis de Toqueville may provide a clue:

"Should members of the lettered class," wrote the Frenchman, "fall into the habit of frequenting only themselves and writing only for one another, they may lose sight of the rest of the world entirely and thereby lapse into affectation and falsity, gradually alienating themselves from common sense...." _DeToqueville_quoted by Fred Siegel

Educational expenses in the US have been rising exponentially, while educational attainment has not even pretended to keep pace. Public sector educators are on the verge of rioting in US state capitols, and universities are cutting vital departments to balance budgets -- while continuing a costly and counter-productive administrative bloat.

In a budgetary situation being played out in other cash-strapped states and municipalities, the legislation requires workers to cover more of their health care premiums and pension contributions, although supporters say local governments will ultimately decide on health care contributions for their employees.

The Wisconsin legislation also requires collective bargaining units to conduct annual votes to maintain certification. Unions would lose the right to have dues deducted from worker paychecks and collective bargaining can only cover wages. _CNN

This type of reform is under-stated in the extreme, and long past due. If public sector unions are prepared to riot in the face of such desperately needed budgetary and policy reforms, imagine what they will do in the face of a genuine collapse -- which they seem to be working so hard to bring about?

At the higher education level, many forces are working together to bring about significant -- perhaps revolutionary change.

Nationally the price of college tuition increased more than 274 percent from 1990 to 2009 -- roughly four times the rate of inflation. That's even more than the brutal rise in health costs that has touched off a near-crisis in that field.

...Technology will change, perhaps cataclysmically, almost all colleges. That's according to Clayton Christensen, a BYU grad turned Harvard professor who is now an acclaimed expert on innovation. He is the lead author of a new paper, "Disrupting College," on what lies ahead, and soon, for higher education.

He has studied how new technologies have disrupted and transformed industry after industry. And often established companies were upended or destroyed in the process.

The same fate could happen to established universities, as technology brings the biggest changes in information dispersal since the invention of the printing press.

Christensen and his co-authors write: "Roughly 10 percent of students in 2003 took at least one online course. That fraction grew to 25 percent in 2008, was nearly 30 percent in the fall of 2009, and we project it will be 50 percent in 2014."

The shocks don't end with technology. "Disrupting College" suggests that "the business model of many traditional colleges and universities is broken." Moreover, this model's collapse is "so fundamental that it cannot be stanched by improving the financial performance of endowment investments, tapping wealthy alumni donors more effectively, or collecting more tax dollars from the public. There needs to be a new model." _DailyHerald

From "Disrupting College:"

America is in crisis. Employers say paradoxically they cannot find the right people to fill jobs even though the country is facing its highest unemployment rates in a generation. Competition with a rising China and India and their vast populations lend urgency to the need for the country as a whole to do a better job of educating its citizens. _DisruptingCollege

As science better understands how students learn, and as educational technologies offer revolutionary possibilities for new teaching paradigns, the mass production assembly line factory-style methods of education will find themselves squeezed from all directions. Those which are unable to change due to fossilised unions or other forms of paralysing groupthinks of entitlement, will ultimately be crushed.

Educators and establishment insiders from K-12 to University are demanding that a recession-plagued US society mortgage its future, in order to provide them tenure and generous benefits. The halo over the head of the educational establishment is slipping badly, as teachers and professors are starting to be seen more as extorting thugs than as wise, honest, and impartial learning coaches and advisors. At the state and local levels, the problem is clearly the public sector unions and a climate of entitlement among public educational workers. At the higher education levels, it is more a problem of administrative bloat and an insane groupthink crisis of a badly decayed leftism which dominates the humanities and administration on most campuses.

U Cinci Don't Do No Computer Science, Man!

But U Cinci does do Africana, Queers y Women, Political Correctness, and all the really cool stuff!

U. Cincinnati Ohio
As university budgets grow ever tighter, institutions of higher learning must make very difficult choices about what to cut, and what to keep. It is unthinkable for a university to cut its administrative staff -- no matter how bloated and unsightly. But academics is another matter, since teaching has always been secondary for politically correct universities. So, what is the University of Cincinnati in Ohio cutting out? Computer Science, man!

The University of Cincinnati will stop accepting undergraduate majors in computer science starting in fall 2012.

About 125 current students in the program will be able to complete their programs.

The move by the College of Engineering and Applied Science is one step toward reducing the college's academic programs to 11 from the current 17, Dean Carlo Montemagno said.

It's driven by impending budget cuts that could slice $4.9 million off this year's $24 million budget, he said. _news.cincinnati.com

Dwindling resources must be focused upon what is central to the currents' flow. Science and engineering are not nearly so important in the age of Obama as are queer ethnic women's studies, and the crucial indoctrination of students by administrative staffing. Consequently, the money must be spent on administration and departments which provide the type of student considered desirable in this age.

H/T Instapundit.com

Social Sciences in US a Hotbed of Politically Correct Bias?

“If a group circles around sacred values, they will evolve into a tribal-moral community,” he said. “They’ll embrace science whenever it supports their sacred values, but they’ll ditch it or distort it as soon as it threatens a sacred value.” _NYT

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt spoke at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology’s conference last month. Professor Haidt mad a lot of waves when he came right out and called the US social sciences bigoted and quasi-religious in its biases and dogmatisms. Will Haidt become the next target of hate for having spoken his mind honestly? More about Haidt's talk:

He polled his audience at the San Antonio Convention Center, starting by asking how many considered themselves politically liberal. A sea of hands appeared, and Dr. Haidt estimated that liberals made up 80 percent of the 1,000 psychologists in the ballroom. When he asked for centrists and libertarians, he spotted fewer than three dozen hands. And then, when he asked for conservatives, he counted a grand total of three.

“This is a statistically impossible lack of diversity,” Dr. Haidt concluded, noting polls showing that 40 percent of Americans are conservative and 20 percent are liberal. In his speech and in an interview, Dr. Haidt argued that social psychologists are a “tribal-moral community” united by “sacred values” that hinder research and damage their credibility — and blind them to the hostile climate they’ve created for non-liberals.

“Anywhere in the world that social psychologists see women or minorities underrepresented by a factor of two or three, our minds jump to discrimination as the explanation,” said Dr. Haidt, who called himself a longtime liberal turned centrist. “But when we find out that conservatives are underrepresented among us by a factor of more than 100, suddenly everyone finds it quite easy to generate alternate explanations.”

Dr. Haidt (pronounced height) told the audience that he had been corresponding with a couple of non-liberal graduate students in social psychology whose experiences reminded him of closeted gay students in the 1980s. He quoted — anonymously — from their e-mails describing how they hid their feelings when colleagues made political small talk and jokes predicated on the assumption that everyone was a liberal.

“I consider myself very middle-of-the-road politically: a social liberal but fiscal conservative. Nonetheless, I avoid the topic of politics around work,” one student wrote. “Given what I’ve read of the literature, I am certain any research I conducted in political psychology would provide contrary findings and, therefore, go unpublished. Although I think I could make a substantial contribution to the knowledge base, and would be excited to do so, I will not.”

The politics of the professoriate has been studied by the economists Christopher Cardiff and Daniel Klein and the sociologists Neil Gross and Solon Simmons. They’ve independently found that Democrats typically outnumber Republicans at elite universities by at least six to one among the general faculty, and by higher ratios in the humanities and social sciences. In a 2007 study of both elite and non-elite universities, Dr. Gross and Dr. Simmons reported that nearly 80 percent of psychology professors are Democrats, outnumbering Republicans by nearly 12 to 1.

The fields of psychology, sociology and anthropology have long attracted liberals, but they became more exclusive after the 1960s, according to Dr. Haidt. “The fight for civil rights and against racism became the sacred cause unifying the left throughout American society, and within the academy,” he said, arguing that this shared morality both “binds and blinds.” _NYT

Unfortunately this is a widespread phenomenon in the humanities and social sciences faculties, and in administrative staffing at universities. To the victor go the spoils. In this case what is being spoiled are the futures of students and entire societies.

Higher education in the US is overpriced and of decreasing quality. As faulty assumptions get incorporated into mainstream academic thought -- and into the thinking of research funding institutions -- the outcome of multi-billions of dollars worth of scholarship and research comes into question.

Affirmative action for libertarians, conservatives, and white males is not the answer. The answer is a complete housecleaning in higher education staffing and research funding to get rid of the ideologues and riff-raff who have managed to clog the system. Such a housecleaning of personnel is necessary at all levels, from K-12 to the highest levels of education. The stink of bigotry, indoctrination, and dogma throughout the educational system is too great to ignore any longer.

Jonathan Haidt's TED Talks page

More: The same phenomenon has been observed among economics professors as well
H/T Powerline

Are You One of the Atholes Offended by a Cartoon? Then What Are You Doing Here?

There are plenty of left wing and Muslim insane asylums where such perpetually offended atholes would feel more at home than at this blog. Cartoon riots are common in the Muslim world, and now under Barak Obama we are seeing cartoon riots in the US. Do these morons actually believe that they have the right not to be offended?

In protests this week, students at a New York college urged boycotts, began burning newspapers (a hop, skip and jump away from burning books) and demanding that anyone involved with the cartoon be fired. Fair enough.

But now the Reverend Al has ordered a meeting with the Federal Communications Commission so he — a man who has set off more chaos, loathing and racism in New York than any cartoonist — can discuss the ownership of The New York Post. The FCC, according to Sharpton, has acquiesced to meet in Washington.

As an antiquated government entity, the FCC controls the public airwaves and ownership of media companies. What if it meets with Sharpton and then moves against the New York Post's owner?

We've largely avoided the corrosive trend of chilling free speech — though discussions about the "Fairness Doctrine" (and its derivatives), which allows government to dictate what opinions Americans should hear on the public airwaves, remains a hobbyhorse for some lefties.

...Recently, Geert Wilders, a Dutch politician who produced the film "Fitna" — which asserts that Islam is a threat to enlightened Western values — was refused entry into England because of that nation's policy to "stop those who want to spread extremism, hatred and violent messages."

The Brits proved Wilders' point about Islam's influence by suppressing his right to free expression. Wilders, who is in the U.S. right now, offers a cautionary lesson: Feel free to be indignant and hurt. Feel free to boycott and to cast nasty aspersions on the decency of those who offend you. But let's keep government out of it.

The war against offensive speech can, if we're not careful, morph into a war against free speech. _DenverPost_via_Instapundit

The war against free speech has been on ever since the leftists took over the university. Leftist faculty and staff prevent non-leftists from speaking on campus. Leftist professors prevent non-leftist academics from obtaining tenure, and give non-leftist students poor grades if they dare to contradict the professor's viewpoint. These academic indoctrination camps have been going full steam for decades now.

Under D'oh-bama is it so surprising that the war against free speech would escalate to take in the entire news and entertainment media, all of popular culture, and every aspect of public (and soon private) life in America?

So if you are offended by a cartoon that makes fun of Nancy Pelosi, and takes crude advantage of a real life "chimp gone mad" that had to be put down, then go ahead and be offended, athole. But do it somewhere else.

Making Zombies

Human history is full of examples of ambitious people who discovered the "back door password" into human minds. Using this key, turning human beings into zombie followers was not so difficult.

Throughout history, it seems as though individuals had the ability to sway others to follow them no matter where they [led]. In the las[t] century, both Hitler and Mussolini had the ability to bend millions of people to their fascist will.

...Scott Wiltermuth of Stanford University in California and colleagues have found that activities performed in unison, such as marching or dancing, increase loyalty to the group.

"It makes us feel as though we're part of a larger entity, so we see the group's welfare as being as important as our own," he says.

...Psychologist Jonathan Haidt at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville thinks this research helps explain why fascist leaders, amongst others, use organised marching and chanting to whip crowds into a frenzy of devotion to their cause....

...our brains are geared to mimic our peers.

"We are set up for 'auto-copy'," says Haidt.

Neurological evidence seems to back this idea. Vasily Klucharev, at the Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, found that the brain releases more of the reward chemical dopamine when we fall in line with the group consensus. _Source

Populist leaders who have learned the secret can seemingly come out of nowhere to control an entire population. While it appears that they have turned thinking humans into complete zombies, the true situation is more complex. The potential for zombification always existed, waiting for the proper key to fit the lock.

Far more interesting to me are the "skeptics", the "resisters". Independent thinking persons who generate their own goals and stoke their own energies to create their own lives, are the starting material for the next level. Zombies and would-be zombies are flimsy, too subject to the changing winds and tides. To create a next-level human, one must start with the best materials.

It is instructive to observe the history of the American colonies, as they evolved over time. Stubborn and strong minded persons tended to flock together and created one environment, while more pliable and group-minded persons flocked to create a different environment. As settlements of even the strongest-minded individuals evolved, natural flocking tendencies began to predominate, and the more independent persons migrated out to more open territory that required a tougher-minded sort.

There is little question but that the relative strength of independence vs. conformity lies at least partially in genetic factors. Environment no doubt plays a strong part in strengthening innate tendencies toward either group-think or independence. Executive function combined with IQ and other personality and character traits, all are both largely heritable and strongly influenced by environment. Why should zombie-potential be any different?

And perhaps we do not need to go back in history at all, to see successful examples of zombification?

Academic Lobotomies Performed Daily

North American academia has fallen on intellectually hard times. A blatant lack of ideological diversity on campus--intentional or not--is leaving students unable to deal with the real world as it exists outside the pixie dust atmosphere on campus. What has happened to turn universities into indoctrination camps--and what can be done to make a more universal university?

At a Harvard symposium in October, former Harvard president and Clinton Treasury secretary Larry Summers argued that among liberal arts and social science professors at elite graduate universities, Republicans are "the third group," far behind Democrats and even Ralph Nader supporters. Summers mused that in Washington he was "the right half of the left," while at Harvard he found himself "on the right half of the right."

I know how he feels. I spent four years in the 1990s working at the centrist Brookings Institution and for the Clinton administration and felt right at home ideologically. Yet during much of my two decades in academia, I've been on the "far right" as one who thinks that welfare reform helped the poor, that the United States was right to fight and win the Cold War, and that environmental regulations should be balanced against property rights.

...I think my political views hurt my career some years back when I was interviewing for a job at a prestigious research university. Everything seemed to be going well until I mentioned, in a casual conversation with department members over dinner, that I planned to vote Republican in the upcoming presidential election. Conversation came to a halt, and someone quickly changed the subject. The next day, I thought my final interview went fairly well. But the department ended up hiring someone who had published far less, but apparently "fit" better than I did. At least that's what I was told when I called a month later to learn the outcome of the job search, having never received any further communication from the school. (A friend at the same university later told me he didn't believe that particular department would ever hire a Republican.)

...Daniel Klein of George Mason University and Charlotta Stern of Stockholm University looked at all the reliable published studies of professors' political and ideological attachments. They found that conservatives and libertarians are outnumbered by liberals and Marxists by roughly two to one in economics, more than five to one in political science, and by 20 to one or more in anthropology and sociology....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.

WaPo

We find discriminatory hiring far more commonly practised by leftists on-campus than in the private sector. Hiring on the basis of ideology w/gender, ideology w/sexual orientation, ideology w/race. The common bias here is ideology. The daily practise of academic lobotomies (presentation of a single point of view) on campuses across North America is the result.

It is easy to blame this disatrous state of academia on political correctness run amok, or multiculturalism gone mad. In truth, falling into academic brain death for many university departments was incremental, evolutionary, and quite easy. Ideological nepotism breeds more of itself until the bias becomes instinctive and inbred.

More on how to dig out of this ideological stagnancy in a later post.

via Instapundit

The Decline of US Universities

American Universities suffer from a momentous decline in functionality. Academia suffers from a deep rot that has spilled over into the media and popular culture. Stuart Taylor explains:

the cancerous spread of ideologically eccentric, intellectually shoddy, phony-diversity-obsessed fanaticism among university faculties and administrators is far, far worse and more inexorable than most alumni, parents, and trustees suspect.

Another hyperbolic, conservative rant about liberals in academia? Perhaps I should confess my biases. I do dislike extremism of the Left and of the Right. But I have never been conservative enough to vote for a Republican presidential nominee. And the academics whose growing power and abuses of power concern me are far to the left of almost all congressional Democrats.

...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.

...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.

...Only in American academia could still another elite university -- Cornell -- proudly hire away and tenure a character such as Farred after he had proved himself a malicious buffoon. "We are very enthusiastic about Professor Farred, whose work everyone in this department has long admired," remarked Cornell English Department Chairwoman Molly Hite.

In academia today, a professor who falsely smears his university's students as racists is a hot commodity. And hate means never having to say you're sorry.

National Journal


The dysfunctional intolerance of opinion diversity and dissent by professors and administrators on US campuses requires a firm response. FIRE provides an extremely useful "within the system" response to the monkeys of academia. But merely reminding the perverted princes and princesses of intolerance that their actions and policies must conform to the US Constitution seems too mild a reply to the monkeys. Something more memorable seems called for.

Anyway, there is something about the absolute job security of tenure that appears to make the monkeys reckless and intolerant. Ben Franklin stated that those who trade liberty for security deserve neither. Intolerance should not be provided to professors and administrators who prey on young minds--before their brains have fully matured, and before they have been able to incorporate enough life experience to weigh the ideas of their brainwashers.

We are exposing these intolerant academic monkeys to the public eye, but are their enough effectual persons extant in the public to take proper action?

American Universities Running Scared--Academic Monkeys Don't Want You to Watch This Film!

Why are American Universities trying to prevent the public from looking behind the scenes into campus suppression of free speech? Indoctrinate U. is an indy film produced by young filmmaker Evan Coyne Maloney. But Maloney has been sued by a major US university to prevent him from providing "Indoctrinate U." online. What is it about "free speech" that these academic monkeys cannot understand?

For now, Maloney's earlier film on free speech on campus is available online at Google Video. I will keep the film at the above link as long as Google keeps it online. If you have not seen Indoctrinate U., you can request a viewing at this link.

THEFIRE.ORG is a legal organisation dedicated to defending students' free speech rights. Attorneys at FIRE are accustomed to confronting academics and administrators who are seemingly unaware that the US Constitution applies on campuses. The recent U. Delaware attempt to run concentration/indoctrination camps from within its own student recidence halls is just one example of the egregious abuse of students' rights that universities seem to feel is within their power.



American universities have become bastions of intolerance and indoctrination. Parents who lovingly spend their life savings for a child's education should demand much more from a university than an academic lobotomy and brainwashing. Society should do the same.

The one-sidedness of university administrations and faculty in terms of political/philosophical points of view and financing of extra-curricular activities, lectures, films etc. to students, has crippled the modern students' ability to see more than point of view, or to persuasively argue his own perspective to intelligent and informed persons.

This is the opposite approach to that which universities should adopt. The diversity of ideas is the only form of diversity that is meaningful in education. By restricting students to one perspective, the students have been lobotomised. Too, too bad.

Academic Monkeys Defend Their Turf

Nothing is funnier than sinecured monkeys defending their turf. Greg Mankiw comments on Larry Summers' observations about the lack of ideological diversity on campus.

Question to think about: If right-wingers are underrepresented in universities relative to the population and discriminated against by the left-wing majority, as Larry suggests, should there be affirmative action for right-leaning academics? It seems that, on principle, those on the left (who favor affirmative action to promote diversity and correct past injustice) should endorse such a university policy, and those on the right (who more often oppose affirmative action) would be against.

Source

I am against affirmative action discrimination whether in hires, school admissions, government contracts, or whatever, and I am a libertarian leaning independent. But Greg is wrong about leftists. They are militantly against any process or procedure that would force them to release their monkey's grip on any peanut of power whatsoever. If you do not believe me, go and read the comments here.

The comments illustrate a point I have made many times: if students do not grow up with experience dealing with diverse ideologies and points of view, they become incompetent parrots repeating a single tedious point of view. Larger numbers of university graduates are becoming incompetent to argue simple points, beyond repeating rote phrases. This is disheartening to anyone who was hoping to see education raising the general state of thinking in the western world.

Rather than calling for affirmative action for conservative and libertarian professors, simply requiring that academic hires and tenure be based upon merit rather than good old boy and girl insiderism, would probably be sufficient.

Political Orientation of Faculty Members — 7 Categories

• Extremely liberal 9.4%
• Liberal 34.7%
• Slightly liberal 18.1%
• Middle of the road 18.0%
• Slightly conservative 10.5%
• Conservative 8.0%
• Very conservative 1.2%

But there is hope for the future in this table:

Percentage of Faculty Members, by Age, Identifying as Left Radicals or Activists

Age	Left Radicals	Left Activists
26-35	3.8%	1.3%
36-49	9.9%	11.5%
50-64	14.3%	17.2%

from The Social and Political Views of American Professors

The dying out of the extremists may eventually allow more thoughtful and inclusive hiring to take place. Students who go directly from their parents authority to today's campuses will need time to find themselves. They do not need to be pressed into autocratic classrooms presenting carbon-copy talking points regardless of the professor.

Academic Lobotomy and the Suppression of Ideas

Academic intolerance refuses to hear other points of view. What is worse, academic intolerance refuses to allow anyone else within its power to hear other points of view.

Former President of Harvard Lawrence H. Summers was set to speak in California this week at a dinner meeting of the Regents of the University of California (UC). That is, until his invitation was abruptly cancelled.

Over 150 professors in the UC system, led by Maureen Stanton, a professor in the Department of Evolution and Ecology at UC-Davis, started an online petition drive to put the kibosh on Summers’ impending speech. Their preposterous claim was that “inviting a keynote speaker who has come to symbolize gender and racial prejudice in academia conveys the wrong message to the university community and to the people of California.”

Instead, the UC’s regents have sent an altogether different message—the University of California has ceased to value academic freedom.

More generally, the quashing of Summers’ speech points to a troubling trend in academia. Increasingly, the unrestricted marketplace of ideas that must form the heart of any university worth the name is being poisoned by a perverse pressure to conform truth to political agenda and stifle any speaker who espouses uncomfortable or invonveneint opinions. In the present case, the culprits are academics who fashion themselves as progressives eager for social justice and tolerance, but the other side of the political spectrum is no less guilty in others. This situation is alarming and dangerous. If academic freedom cannot exist in the university, our society is in trouble.

...Maureen Stanton and company represent the worst of academia. The side that politicizes its classrooms and refuses to hear, or let others hear ideas that they find distasteful or uncomfortable, no matter their merit.

Crinmson

When tenured faculty seize the platform of ideas, and refuse to allow a diversity of ideas to be presented to the university environment--including the regents--it is clear that a tyranny has sprouted on the very ground where tyranny does the most harm to the minds of new generations of youth. The university exists to provide a rich garden of ideas from which young minds may sample and choose. Without that richness of intellectual choice, the youthful mind becomes academically lobotomised.

Maureen Stanton and her ilk reveal an insecurity within themselves which bodes ill for the future of North American academics.

Dangerous Ideas--Bring Them On!

What are some of the dangerous ideas that you are afraid may be true? You are so afraid that these things may be true that you are willing to suppress them--stamp them out?

In modern intellectual circles, there are many such "dangerous ideas."

Do women, on average, have a different profile of aptitudes and emotions than men?

Were the events in the Bible fictitious -- not just the miracles, but those involving kings and empires?

Has the state of the environment improved in the last 50 years?

Do most victims of sexual abuse suffer no lifelong damage?

Did Native Americans engage in genocide and despoil the landscape?

Do men have an innate tendency to rape?

Did the crime rate go down in the 1990s because two decades earlier poor women aborted children who would have been prone to violence?

Are suicide terrorists well-educated, mentally healthy and morally driven?

Would the incidence of rape go down if prostitution were legalized?

Do African-American men have higher levels of testosterone, on average, than white men?

Is morality just a product of the evolution of our brains, with no inherent reality?

Would society be better off if heroin and cocaine were legalized?

Is homosexuality the symptom of an infectious disease?

Would it be consistent with our moral principles to give parents the option of euthanizing newborns with birth defects that would consign them to a life of pain and disability?

Do parents have any effect on the character or intelligence of their children?

Have religions killed a greater proportion of people than Nazism?

Would damage from terrorism be reduced if the police could torture suspects in special circumstances?

Would Africa have a better chance of rising out of poverty if it hosted more polluting industries or accepted Europe's nuclear waste?

Is the average intelligence of Western nations declining because duller people are having more children than smarter people?

Would unwanted children be better off if there were a market in adoption rights, with babies going to the highest bidder?

Would lives be saved if we instituted a free market in organs for transplantation?

Should people have the right to clone themselves, or enhance the genetic traits of their children?

....Though academics owe the extraordinary perquisite of tenure to the ideal of encouraging free inquiry and the evaluation of unpopular ideas, all too often academics are the first to try to quash them. The most famous recent example is the outburst of fury and disinformation that resulted when Harvard president Lawrence Summers gave a measured analysis of the multiple causes of women's underrepresentation in science and math departments in elite universities and tentatively broached the possibility that discrimination and hidden barriers were not the only cause.

But intolerance of unpopular ideas among academics is an old story. Books like Morton Hunt's The New Know-Nothings and Alan Kors and Harvey Silverglate's The Shadow University have depressingly shown that universities cannot be counted on to defend the rights of their own heretics and that it's often the court system or the press that has to drag them into policies of tolerance. In government, the intolerance is even more frightening, because the ideas considered there are not just matters of intellectual sport but have immediate and sweeping consequences.

More at Source

Pinker is quite right about that last part. Academics will defend their own dogma all the way to the death of free inquiry. Such academic and societal intolerance dates back to Socrates and beyond.

Universities as mental cookie cutters? Perhaps that is not so unusual, historically. What is unusual, perhaps, is that so many children are pushed toward a university education, without a careful analysis of the intellectually stifling atmosphere on campus toward free inquiry. For that, parents come in for most of the blame.

The modern social sciences, ethnic and women's studies, language studies, political sciences, and liberal arts departments are the academic areas most likely to be supremely brittle in terms of dealing with dangerous ideas. The university is rife with "insider mentality," bent on exclusion of the "other," the dangerous idea.

Given the western leanings toward freedom of expression and inquiry, combined with an ascendancy of scientific research and technological innovation, the ingredients for conflict are present in large portions.

Academic Lobotomy: The Public Slowly Becomes Aware

Freedom of speech has grown rare on university campuses, over the past two or three decades. Until recently, however, the general public seemed unaware of the academic crusade against intellectual freedom. The secret scandal of widespread academic lobotomy may finally be leaking to the public at large.

a majority of Americans believe the political bias of college professors is a serious problem, a new Zogby Interactive poll shows.

Nearly six in 10 - 58% - said they see it as a serious problem, with 39% saying it was a "very serious" problem.

....Men were much more likely than women to see the bias of professors as a problem - 64% of men agreed, while 53% of women said the same.

Whites were twice as likely to call it a "serious problem" as African Americans, the survey showed.

The survey also showed that an overwhelming majority also believe that job security for college professors leaves them less motivated to do a good job than those professors who do not enjoy a tenured status - 65% said they believe non-tenured professors are more motivated to do a good job in the classroom.

Asked whether they think the quality of a college education today is better or worse than it was 25 years ago, 46% said they think it is worse, while 29% said it is better. Another 16% said the quality now is about the same as it was a generation ago.

Source

When you combine psychological neoteny, academic lobotomy, and runaway narcissism, today's university student has hardly a chance to learn to think for him/herself, and mature into an independent person of solid judgment. It is a shame to lose an entire generation. But if members of the public--including parents and financial supporters of academia--can wise up at last, intellectual freedom may be allowed back on campus.

Leftist Intolerance Running Rampant At Universities

The University experience has become more about enforcing ideological purity than about teaching students to think clearly and independently.

The latest conflict in the academy between freedom of expression and ethnic and sexual diversity took place at Vassar College recently when minority students called for the banning of a school newspaper called "The Imperialist" because it criticized the creation of special social centers for minority and gay students.

...As is commonly known, events of this kind have been multiplying at universities over the last decades. The New York Times article that reported the incident reminds us of a low moment in 1997 at Cornell when university administrators defended as "symbolic" speech "the burning of conservative newspapers that printed a provocative article." There have been so many instances of this kind in recent years that an organization called the Foundation for Individual Right in Education (FIRE) was established in the nineties to watchdog campus freedoms.

....the same temperament that issues a fatwa on Salman Rushdie for his Satanic Verses, or threatens Danish cartoonists with death for insulting Islam, animates the American passion, on behalf of political or religious pressure groups, for suppressing offensive speech. People who believe their feelings have been hurt share the same DNA as those who believe their faith has been insulted. Both groups demand or inflict punishment considerably in excess of the original offense.

....But there has also been a continuing tension between the need to speak what is perceived as the truth and the need to protect minority feelings--between the need to achieve excellence (now known as "elitism") and the need to maintain an illusion of egalitarianism (now known as "political correctness")--and this has inevitably led to some kind of speech suppression.

....Given the history of dissent in the academy, one would have expected that university students and university professors would also have cherished these freedoms, and would also have fought to protect them, but that seems to be less and less the case. In the fifties, the liberties of many universities were suspended under pressure of McCarthyism. Today, they are under siege from their own faculties, administrations, and student bodies.

Source

Those who question the frequency and importance of academic intolerance need to spend some time at the FIRE website. Go through the archives and read the details of the many cases FIRE has undertaken.

At one time, academic freedom and free speech on campus were important to leftists. Now it seems more important to leftists to shut down free speech on campus--in an attempt to create groupthink, clone think--the type of thinking that grew and typified the monstrous genocides of Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, Hitler, and the other social engineers responsible for forced deaths of tens and hundreds of millions.

Given time to grow, leftist intolerance as is seen on modern university campuses would tend to become like those examples. This becomes particularly clear when one observes the growing alliance between leftist groups and islamist groups that support muslim terror. The fact that such alliances appear on the surface to be contradictory and unworkable does not erase their existence. Expediency is a powerful motive, when two apparently conflicting groups share a common enemy.

Academic Bill of Rights--Where to Go from Here

Yesterday I presented the problem of the "indoctrination university"--a place for students to go to be brainwashed rather than to be taught different styles of thinking and viewing the world, so as to be able to forge their own unique style.

The Students for Academic Freedom have published on their site the Academic Bill of Rights, as a guideline for universities who seek to bring open-mindedness back to universities, to replace the politically and philosophically one-sided hyper-bias of current universities in North America.

.....Academic freedom consists in protecting the intellectual independence of professors, researchers and students in the pursuit of knowledge and the expression of ideas from interference by legislators or authorities within the institution itself. This means that no political, ideological or religious orthodoxy will be imposed on professors and researchers through the hiring or tenure or termination process, or through any other administrative means by the academic institution. Nor shall legislatures impose any such orthodoxy through their control of the university budget.

This protection includes students. From the first statement on academic freedom, it has been recognized that intellectual independence means the protection of students – as well as faculty – from the imposition of any orthodoxy of a political, religious or ideological nature. The 1915 General Report admonished faculty to avoid “taking unfair advantage of the student’s 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 in question, and before he has sufficient knowledge and ripeness of judgment to be entitled to form any definitive opinion of his own.” In 1967, the AAUP’s Joint Statement on Rights and Freedoms of Students reinforced and amplified this injunction by affirming the inseparability of “the freedom to teach and freedom to learn.” In the words of the report, “Students should be free to take reasoned exception to the data or views offered in any course of study and to reserve judgment about matters of opinion.” ....

Source.

If you read the ABR carefully at the link above, you will see that it does not call for any type of faculty quota. I will quote from the ABR below so that you can see exactly what is being called for:

1. All faculty shall be hired, fired, promoted and granted tenure on the basis of their competence and appropriate knowledge in the field of their expertise and, in the humanities, the social sciences, and the arts, with a view toward fostering a plurality of methodologies and perspectives. No faculty shall be hired or fired or denied promotion or tenure on the basis of his or her political or religious beliefs.

2. No faculty member will be excluded from tenure, search and hiring committees on the basis of their political or religious beliefs.

3. Students will be graded solely on the basis of their reasoned answers and appropriate knowledge of the subjects and disciplines they study, not on the basis of their political or religious beliefs.

4. Curricula and reading lists in the humanities and social sciences should reflect the uncertainty and unsettled character of all human knowledge in these areas by providing students with dissenting sources and viewpoints where appropriate. While teachers are and should be free to pursue their own findings and perspectives in presenting their views, they should consider and make their students aware of other viewpoints. Academic disciplines should welcome a diversity of approaches to unsettled questions.


5. Exposing students to the spectrum of significant scholarly viewpoints on the subjects examined in their courses is a major responsibility of faculty. Faculty will not use their courses for the purpose of political, ideological, religious or anti-religious indoctrination.



6. Selection of speakers, allocation of funds for speakers programs and other student activities will observe the principles of academic freedom and promote intellectual pluralism.



7. An environment conducive to the civil exchange of ideas being an essential component of a free university, the obstruction of invited campus speakers, destruction of campus literature or other effort to obstruct this exchange will not be tolerated.



8. Knowledge advances when individual scholars are left free to reach their own conclusions about which methods, facts, and theories have been validated by research. Academic institutions and professional societies formed to advance knowledge within an area of research, maintain the integrity of the research process, and organize the professional lives of related researchers serve as indispensable venues within which scholars circulate research findings and debate their interpretation. To perform these functions adequately, academic institutions and professional societies should maintain a posture of organizational neutrality with respect to the substantive disagreements that divide researchers on questions within, or outside, their fields of inquiry.

Many people when first exposed to the concept of intellectual diversity, assume that those who are ideologically being actively excluded from faculties would naturally call for an affirmative action or quota policy, to ensure the inclusion of their own political point of view on faculties. As you can see by reading the Academic Bill of Rights, that is not the case.

Unfortunately, going from the present absurdly skewed and biased system, to a more principled and inclusivist, and less biased, system, will not be easy. The faculty stands ready at the barricades to repel all invaders to their sacred ground of power and indoctrination.

Rationality does not signify here, for these faculty defenders live in the post-modern world, the post-rational world as it were. These will be interesting times on the battlefields of academic freedom. You have to watch the definitions, because in the post modern world, words no longer mean what you think they mean.
:-)See also the website for FIRE--the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.

Intellectual Diversity on Campus--What Went Wrong?

Universities were never meant to be the indoctrination centers for political correctness they have become. In "The Elusive Goal of Intellectual Diversity," award winning science fiction author Orson Scott Card discusses the current pathetic state of intellectual restrictiveness that is almost universally present on North American university campuses.

....As a friend of mine on the faculty of a western university wrote not long ago, "higher education may have other litmus tests for ideological conformity, but the you-better-believe-in-diversity test is the only one that isn't hidden."

Ironically, the result of this absolute insistence on a commitment to diversity is ... a lack of diversity.

When the administration and faculty have all had to make the same affirmation in order to get their jobs, how likely is it that anyone will use their "academic freedom" to question a doctrine that they have already declared they believe in?

....Here and there, however, students are beginning to rebel against the pious cant that they hear from their relentlessly establishment teachers.

For instance, at Utah State University, student officers voted for an "Academic Bill of Rights." The goal was to "support intellectual diversity" on campus, and it called for such things as:

"Faculty will not use their courses for the purpose of political, ideological, religious, or non-religious indoctrination."

"Selection of speakers, allocation of funds for speakers programs and other student activities will observe the principles of academic freedom and promote intellectual pluralism."

More at Source.

Or take this Chronicle.com oped discussing the Academic Bill of Rights, promoting Intellectual Diversity.

By adopting the Academic Bill of Rights, an institution would recognize scholarship rather than ideology as an appropriate academic enterprise. It would strengthen educational values that have been eroded by the unwarranted intrusion of faculty members' political views into the classroom. That corrosive trend has caused some academics to focus merely on their own partisan agendas and to abandon their responsibilities as professional educators with obligations to students of all political persuasions. Such professors have lost sight of the vital distinction between education and indoctrination, which -- as the AAUP recognized in its first report on academic freedom, in 1915 -- is not a legitimate educational function

Source.

When "search committees" look for new faculty members, they are actually looking for more faculty members who think the same way as the search committe thinks. This leads to monolithic intellectual conformism in a faculty, which harms students' ability to function in the real world.

Former leftist radical turned conservative rabble-rouser David Horowitz has made a cause of intellectual diversity on campus. Recently Horowitz visited Duke University to give a talk on intellectual diversity among faculties. But a professor of women's studies had a surprise waiting for him--a bevy of women students prepared to laugh, heckle, and take off their shirts to distract attendees from Horowitz topic. I wish young women students would do that for me when I give a lecture or talk. That type of distraction I could deal with.

This CFIF commentary gives even more insight into the sad lack of range of intellectual challenge provided for students on the modern PC campus.

College students love to complain about how campuses are removed from "reality," which is generally defined as living in subsidized housing, sleeping on a park bench, or working in a makeshift medical clinic in Africa. But these same students seem completely oblivious to how far removed their campuses are from the rest of the nation’s political discourse. In the country as a whole, Democrats and Republicans are almost evenly split, but studies indicate that academic faculties are often skewed at least 10 to 1 in Democrats’ favor. My law school’s faculty of more than 100 includes only one registered Republican. On many campuses, students are more likely to find a Marxist professor than a conservative professor. It’s not unusual to hear a professor assert that Ronald Reagan systematically and deliberately spread AIDS to homosexuals, or that George W. Bush is not legitimately our president; many professors at my law school quite convincingly contend there is no such thing as a free-market economy and that law itself is completely indeterminate.

The most disturbing aspect of this phenomenon is how students on both sides of the political spectrum — most paying astronomical tuition — are being shortchanged. Schools often structure their curricula around professors’ specialties; thus when liberal thought is so drastically overrepresented, it is bound to overshadow necessary curricula. During most of my terms as an undergraduate, the journalism school I attended offered at least three advanced courses on race, poverty, gender or the evils of the death penalty, but not a single class on editorial writing.

Although many classes attempt to examine issues from both sides, conservative arguments are bound to be less convincing when rarely advanced by anyone who believes them. This is regrettable for both conservative and liberal students — for conservatives because they are not taught the most defensible form of their arguments and for liberals because their own views are not adequately challenged. Sure, students can make an effort to push the envelope themselves, but shouldn’t the bulk of that burden belong on the faculty? After all, they are the ones paid to foster diversity of thought.

Professors with a point of view are not incapable of teaching two sides of an issue — in my experience, many do a remarkable job. But not all professors are so open-minded; some blatantly intend to inculcate students with their political views. For example, last year a Citrus College professor required students to write anti-war letters to President Bush, and a Colorado professor asked students to write an essay explaining why the President was a war criminal. Students who refused or expressed different opinions received no credit. Sometimes professors offer such assignments for extra credit, but is that really a proper option — those who think like me get extra credit, and those who don’t, please keep it to yourself?

Maybe one Berkeley professor had it right in adding to a course description: "conservative thinkers are encouraged to seek other sections." Although the professor later apologized, one can almost appreciate the initial honesty in admitting up front that a course is designed in furtherance of a professor’s point of view.

Source.

This is a fascinating topic that is playing itself out on campuses across america. It is obvious to me that the leftist end of the spectrum has overwhelming control of most university campuses--and intends to consolidate and increase that control. It is up to more level headed minds who are actually concerned about the quality of education modern North American students receive, to attempt to provide more balanced offerings on more and more campuses.

Visit Students for Academic Freedom for more information. Another good resource is FIRE--Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.