PRESTOPUNDIT -- "It's a team sport, baby!"

"THE OTHER SICK MAN"

Over-priced universities are shovelling student fees to the Democrat Party for electioneering on the eve of the 2004 vote -- in direct violation of colleges rules. These are corrupt institutions, and you shouldn't be surprised.

"NORTON'S BOOK --

� chock full of factual errors, personal smears and fatuous assertions � is valuable for what it tells you about the debasement of intellectual standards at our leading universities .. ". MORE.

Yes. The OTHER sick man.

"THE OTHER SICK MAN."

Lefty partisan Larry Tribe of Harvard Law -- thief.

What I find interesting is to see law professor Glenn Reynolds head for the 'nuance boy" high-grass of the "go along to get along" academic guild member when it's his own peers who get caught. I first read InstaPundit when he began covering the big academic plagiarism scandals of two years ago. If there was this much nuance in the past, I don't recall it.

UPDATE: Tribe admits he did it, apologizes. Quotable:

University President Lawrence H. Summers told The Crimson in an interview last week � before the allegations against Tribe surfaced � that he did not see �a big trend� of plagiarism problems at the Law School as a result of the charges against Ogletree and Dershowitz, but indicated that a third case would change his mind. �If you had a third one, then I would have said, okay, you get to say this is a special thing, a focused problem at the Law School,� Summers said of the recent academic dishonesty cases ..

But both Ogletree and Dershowitz jumped to defend their colleague from the charges leveled against him ..

More from John Frum on the deep troubles at Harvard Law, "A bright young man or woman could get tenure at Harvard Law School with a publishing record that would not even qualify him for a job interview at the Harvard History Department."

HOW BLEEPIN' STUPID

/ dishonest can a leftist academic get? This bleepin' stupid. Professor Stephen Bainbridge comments.

And why would any self-respecting newspaper print such crayola? Maybe Broder does have a point. Maybe major newspapers are becoming more blog-like -- -- moonbat lefty blog-like. And speaking of the moonbat blogs, read this.

READ

the story of John Yoo the sole conservative on the faculty of the UC-Berkeley School of Law, and the story of Robert Natelson, who was prohibited from teaching Constitutional Law at the U. of Montana because he too was a conservative. And don't forget the story of James D. Miller, the economist who was denied tenure because, guess what, he was a conservative -- and that was unacceptable at Smith. Here's a taste:

Self-described conservative academics .. say they face unique challenges among a sea of hostile [leftists]. They lament the professional opportunities they have missed and the social ostracism they face. The perception that they are "evil" by virtue of being conservative ranks high on their list of grievances. As Mr. McWhorter, a former Berkeley linguistics professor turned pundit, says, "There's nothing I'd like better than if most people who gave me that label didn't mean asshole."

ACADEMIA

is the other sick man of the American "free market of ideas." If you aren't on the left -- most especially if you are not a "libertarian" on social issues -- then you have a very slim chance of having a successful career in most disciplines, no matter how brilliant your work. I take that to be a fact. If you think otherwise, you are welcome to your own opinion. In Montana, the law school fought to prohibit Robert Natelson from teaching constitutional law because he's doesn't take a leftist view of the law and the U.S. Constitution. He's a self-indentified conservative, and he has a generally conservative view of the American Constitution. And at the U. of Montana Law School, that simply is not acceptable.

Anyway, Prof. Natelson took questions today on the Chronicle of Higher Education web site from its readers. The questions and the answers are both eye-opening. When Bernard Goldberg says that there is more diversity of thought among the Taliban than there is among the staff at CBS News, he could say the same of the average American college faculty and be just as on the mark.

I found particularly noteworthy this question from "Jeff", an adjunct at several colleges:

.. many of my colleagues have shunned me because they "discovered" that I am a conservative and that I like G. W. Bush. I am in the music field, and soon after being "outed" as a Republican, I have not been invited to picnics, after-concert gatherings, etc. I have heard this crowd .. openly berate other highly-regarded academics and performers because they were conservative or Republican to other colleagues and students. While we are told that this doesnot exist, it does. It is ugly, and those committing the acts are very often the same ones who take up the cause of other persons who feel discriminted against or otherwise neglected. How do we bring up this topic in our departments without causing even more ire from our colleagues?

More on the Natelson case in this article:"On left-leaning campuses around the country, professors on the right feel disenfranchised."

MICHELLE MALKIN

at Berkeley.

UPDATE: More on Malkin at Berkeley here.

ACADEMICS --

why all the hate?

"A TERRIBLE WASTE OF TAXES".

That's Arnold Kling on the great monkey wrench government subsidies through into the price signals of the market for university credentials. The big loosers? Taxpayers, students and untenured wannabee faculty. The big winners? Tenured faculty and the executive bureaucracy of the university. Worth quoting:

at federally-subsidized colleges and universities, students are enjoying their high-end lifestyles at taxpayers' expense. Since the vast majority of students, even at state universities, come from the top half of the income distribution, this represents a regressive social policy, in which taxes paid by the less-affluent are used to fund the consumption of the more-affluent.

There is a lot more to the article -- a thoughful piece on an important topic.

UPDATE: Duke U. is giving free iPods to all incoming freshmen.

Thomas Sowell shapes up.

"My own moment of truth came when a roommate at Harvard said to me one day: "Tom, when are you going to stop goofing off and get some work done?" Goofing off! I didn't know what he was talking about. I thought I was working hard. But, when the midterm grades came out -- two D's and two F's in my four courses -- it became painfully clear that I was not working hard enough. I was going to have to shape up or ship out -- and I didn't have anywhere to ship out to. I had been on my own for years and had gone into debt in order to go to Harvard. Moreover, there was no Barbara Ehrenreich to defend me. So I got my act together and graduated with honors .. ".

MORE Thomas Sowell, "'Friends' of blacks".

Truer words ..

"A handful of legitimate scholars doesn�t justify the leftist-makework program for failed 1960�s radicals. It�s hard to argue that there is any groundbreaking research left in English departments. The country would be better off if most college English professors were fired and were compelled to teach junior and senior high school students how to write coherent sentences and paragraphs.. ".

MORE Aaron's Rantblog "University English Departments Are Frauds."

The Black Ball.

The U. of Montana school of law has chosen to inforced a 20-year old leftist only teaching policy -- banning Republican law professor Rob Natelson from its Constitutional Law class-room, a post which the overwhelmingly left of center faculty restricts to leftist professors. The post now stands vacant, and Natelson has appealed to the state Board of Regent. Good luck Mr. Natelson.

Your teacher spouts Chomsky.

What to do?

Via Watcher of Weasels.

Larry Summers vs. Leftist Faculty at Harvard

"Summers seemed barely able to contain his disdain as he implicitly accused Palmer and others of seeking to turn the university into a "political institution." "It's not for Harvard to have an opinion on the merits of the Iraq war, or the right to choose versus the right to life," he told the students. Harvard has become "a more conservative place" under Summers, said Palmer, whose three-year contract expires at the end of this month and has not been renewed .. ". MORE -- "Harvard's Leader Keeps Up Push To Remake School for 21st Century".

"One of Summers's recurring themes since becoming president has been the need to break down the traditional barriers between arts and sciences. He complains repeatedly that many students graduate without knowing "the difference between a gene and a chromosome." .. Summers's supporters say he is helping to modernize a venerable institution and raise academic standards that had grown so lax that in 2001 -- the year of his inauguration -- the university awarded honors to 91 percent of its graduating class ..".

The Cornell "English" Department.

AKA the anything but English studies department.

The Fascist roots of the "postmodern" Left.

Richard Wolin, The Seduction of Unreason : The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism

Book Description: "Fifteen years ago, revelations about the political misdeeds of Martin Heidegger and Paul de Man sent shock waves throughout European and North American intellectual circles. Ever since, postmodernism has been haunted by the specter of a compromised past. In this intellectual genealogy of the postmodern spirit, Richard Wolin shows that postmodernism's infatuation with fascism has been widespread and not incidental. He calls into question postmodernism's claim to have inherited the mantle of the left--and suggests that postmodern thought has long been smitten with the opposite end of the political spectrum.

In probing chapters on C. G. Jung, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Georges Bataille, and Maurice Blanchot, Wolin discovers an unsettling commonality: during the 1930s, these thinkers leaned to the right and were tainted by a proverbial "fascination with fascism." Frustrated by democracy's shortcomings, they were seduced by fascism's grandiose promises of political regeneration. The dictatorships in Italy and Germany promised redemption from the uncertainties of political liberalism. But, from the beginning, there could be no doubting their brutal methods of racism, violence, and imperial conquest.

Postmodernism's origins among the profascist literati of the 1930s reveal a dark political patrimony. The unspoken affinities between Counter-Enlightenment and postmodernism constitute the guiding thread of Wolin's suggestive narrative. In their mutual hostility toward reason and democracy, postmodernists and the advocates of Counter-Enlightenment betray a telltale strategic alliance -- they cohabit the fraught terrain where far left and far right intersect. Those who take Wolin's conclusions to heart will never view the history of modern thought in quite the same way."

Read the introduction.

Quotable: " For a long time the career of Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002) seemed to be one of the Federal Republic of Germany's unequivocal success stories. Unlike his mentor, Heidegger, Gadamer never joined the Nazi Party. In an era marked by totalitarian extremism, he seemed to possess an uncanny knack for remaining above the political fray. During the Nazi years, Gadamer allegedly sought refuge in "inner emigration." But a closer look at his orientation during this period demonstrates how difficult it was both to achieve professional success and to steer clear of compromises with the reigning dictatorship. During the early 1940s Gadamer proved a willing propagandist on behalf of the regime, traveling to Paris to present a lecture on "Volk and History in Herder's Thought," which explicitly justified the idea of a Nazi-dominated Europe. Enlightenment ideals were bankrupt, argued Gadamer. Germany's battlefield triumphs reflected the superiority of German Kultur. In the New Europe, the Volk-Idea, as set forth by Herder and his successors, would predominate. This dubious chapter of Gadamer's political biography represents a paradigmatic instance of the ideological affinities between Counter-Enlightenment and the forces of political reaction. Philosophically, Gadamer remains one of the leading representatives of hermeneutics, a view that stresses the situated and partial nature of all truth claims as well as the irremediably contextual basis of human knowledge. The traditionalist orientation of Gadamer's thought--his stress on the "happening of tradition"--would seem unambiguously unpostmodern. Yet in American pragmatist circles, his "anti-foundationalism" (his rejection of "first principles" and universal morality � la Kant) has been widely viewed as an important harbinger of the postmodernist rejection of objective truth.36 Thus, the postmodernist embrace of hermeneutics may not be as strange as it might seem on first view. In "Fascism and Hermeneutics: Gadamer and the Ambiguities of 'Inner Emigration,'" I suggest that Gadamer's acquiescence vis-�-vis the Nazi dictatorship possesses a philosophical as well as a biographical basis. Hermeneutics' skepticism about Enlightenment reason made the Nazi celebration of German particularism--the ideology of the German "way"--seem unobjectionable, and, in certain respects, politically attractive. The German mandarin tradition had long held that the sphere of politics was corrupt. From this vantage point, to make a devil's bargain with Hitler and company seemed no worse than the compromises required by other political regimes. At this juncture, relativist conceptions of ethics and politics begin to unravel and cry out for an unmediated dose of cognitive and moral "truth.""

Interview with a professor.

"I was once convinced that the UNC system was leading the country in terms of academic lunacy but now I�m not so sure. When I speak at other campuses I hear the same kinds of horror stories from students, and occasionally from professors. The emails I get from around the country also reveal that the tactics of the academic Left vary little from campus to campus .. ". More Professor Mike Adams interviewed by David Horowitz.

Whites students are minorities -- in schools from coast to coast.

"[White]-minority schools in central cities across the nation are inevitable. Only about a third of California's pupils are white, and whites are a minority of students in Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico and Texas as well. By the end of the decade, Arizona, Florida, Nevada and New York will probably join the list. Cities too have changed. White students are down to an average of 16% in central city districts with school populations of 60,000 or more .. ". MORE "No, Brown Isn't a Bust".

"My authority can beat up your authority."

Enjoy this one.

$65 million goes to subsidize

college for illegal aliens in -- where else -- California. Quotable: "THIS year, nearly7,500 qualified California residents -- who would otherwise be entering California state universities as incoming freshmen -- are likely to be turned away for lack of funds. Meanwhile, approximately7,500 illegal immigrants will receive heavily subsidized university educations .. ".

Advice for students.

"Many professors don�t tolerate dissent, so conservative students have to use their heads. If you�re afraid the professor will grade you down, keep quiet. It isn�t worth sabotaging your grade .. ". MORE An Interview with UCLA grad Ben Shapiro author of the Amazon bestseller Brainwashed: How Universities Indoctrinate America's Youth.

Education -- too important to be left to government.

"Two Americans who aim to change that attitude are T.C. Pinckney, a retired Air Force brigadier general, and Houston attorney Bruce Shortt. Lay leaders in the Baptist church, they have drafted a resolution -- which they hope to bring before the Southern Baptist Convention in Indianapolis next month -- urging the denomination's 16 million members to take their children out of public schools .. To which I say: Amen. I'm not a Southern Baptist or even a Christian -- I'm a religious Jew -- but I vote with Pinckney and Shortt. Parents who take their faith seriously ought to think twice before putting their kids' education in the hands of the state. If war is too important to be left to the generals, the shaping of children's minds and values is surely too important to be left to government educators. More JEFF JACOBY.

It's that time of year again ..

"Bernardine Dohrn is one of America's most notorious homegrown terrorists. She was the head of the Weather Underground in the 1970s. She and her cohorts declared "war" on "AVmerika" and blew up many sites, including a bathroom in the Capitol in an effort to incite others to take up arms this country. Today she is anti-American activist, in full support of global radicals dedicated to overthrowing this democratic government and to aiding and abetting America's enemies. She is also the scheduled commencement speaker at Pitzer College, one of the nation's premier liberal arts schools. All across this country, liberal administrators and radical professors are providing support for terrorist ideas and movements. Indicted terrorists Lynne Stewart (a colleague and comrade of Dohrn's) and Sami al-Arian (head of Palestine Islamic Jihad and a leading "civil libertarian" against the Patriot Act) have been honored speakers at law schools and universities all over America. They are supported by the National Lawyers Guild and the ACLU (Dohrn is on the ACLU advisory board for example). I guarantee you that conservatives who are in the forefront of the battle of ideas defending this country -- Victor Davis Hanson, David Frum, Robert Kagan to name three -- have never been commencement speakers, officially sponsored keynoters and honored guests of any liberal university. This tells you more than you probably care to know about the commitments of our university officials and the state of their campuses .. the other three speakers at the Claremont Colleges (Pitzer is one of them) are Bill Bradley, Gloria Steinem and Walter Cronkite. David Horowitz Blog.

Blogging the Guild System.

"She's the Invisible Adjunct. Or at least, she used to be. After five years of being an adjunct and a year after starting one of the most popular academic Weblogs, she is giving up and getting out. More than a decade after entering graduate school with great promise, she hasn't landed that full-time, tenure-track spot she dreamed of. So although she's unsure what comes next, she is quitting the academy and shutting the blog down .. About 45 percent of all faculty members are now part-timers. Each year thousands of people with new doctorates in fields like history and English fail to find the tenure-track jobs they are chasing .. She believes that academe's cheerleaders should stop pretending that the Ph.D. is good preparation for other types of careers. It's not, she says. Being smart and stubborn enough to get through a Ph.D. program may mean you're smart and stubborn enough for lots of other things, but the actual Ph.D. is peculiar to an academic career. (She would, however, support redesigning master's programs to create practical graduate education for nonacademics.)

Speaking of programs, the Invisible Adjunct says there are simply way too many of them. Many graduate programs in many fields -- even beyond the humanities -- should be curtailed, and some should be eliminated entirely. "There's certainly a supply component to the problem," she says. "It's doing incredible damage to the profession. ... An undersupply of English literature Ph.D.'s would be the best thing to give them leverage."

She speaks passionately about the issues facing the academic profession, a profession she believes has allowed itself to fall into decline. Can't professors see that a system producing so many people who can't get jobs is not an indictment of the aspiring faculty members, but of the system itself? Or if you really think that these adjuncts aren't of high enough caliber to hire, then the graduate schools are failures, not the students.

The Invisible Adjunct, while sympathetic to those who demand labor unions for adjuncts, never embraced the role of activist. Sure, she says, anyone at the bottom of the economic system, like adjuncts, would be better off joining in collective action. But using that union to go from $2,500 per course to $3,000 is an incremental change that does not tackle the flawed structure.

"For all practical intents and purposes, the adjunct is a low-wage worker without benefits who can be hired and fired at will," she once wrote. "So in what way can the adjunct be an entrepreneur, except in his or her own mind?"

The trials and despair of the Internet's most famous run-of-the-mill adjunct highlight the vagaries of the two-tiered academic job system. (Whatever you do, don't call it a "market," the Invisible Adjunct would say.)

"We know that there are many, many good people chasing a shrinking pool of great jobs," Mr. Burke says. "There's no way to make room in the contemporary academy for all the people who would make great academics."

Perhaps seeing the failure of people like Ms. Adjunct might prompt the lucky tenured ones to get off their rhetorical high horses, he says. "One of my consistent feelings is that there shouldn't be anybody in academia that is too quick to regard their own position as a result of a meritocratic system," says Mr. Burke. "Anybody with a modicum of self-awareness knows there's a tremendous amount of luck involved. But that sits ill with our prevailing mythologies." More "Invisible Adjunct".

Free speech under attack.

Again. This time at Cornell, where the NAACP is attempting to shut down student newspapers.

California University Spending.

"We don't need no stinkin' engineers". Debra Saunders on the California University which would like to "cut academic meat, while sparing junk-food scholarship".

PC Police.

Columbia University, founded in 1754, has removed the Christian cross from it's official Columbia Univerity logo.

John Kekes.

"This coercive stifling of opinion permeates daily life, not just our campuses. It is very hard to think of an area of life that is free of the exhortation of intrusive moralizing .. ". more JOHN KEKES.

Leftist Tufts vs. Academic Freedom.

"You don't have to be at Tufts for too long before you notice one thing: there is not a whole lot of diversity here .. Sure, Tufts can boast of an ethnically diverse faculty .. If you look more than skin-deep, however, you'll notice that this place resembles more closely a political party .. ". more Philipp Tsipman, Tufts Daily

Area Studies Scholars vs. America.

"Many of the professors who benefit from Title VI subsidies are actively hostile to the idea of training students who might serve in our defense or intelligence agencies .. ". more Stanley Kurtz.

Dropouts & Joblessness.

"Each year, about 4 million 18-year-olds should graduate from high school. Of those, 1.2 million drop out without a degree. .. And unemployment among dropouts is growing. In 2003, 2.4 million young people ages 16-24 who didn't finish high school were jobless .. ". more on dropouts and joblessness.

It's Happened Again ..

"A professor who claimed she was targeted in a hate crime that stirred student protests at the Claremont colleges is suspected of staging the vandalism herself .. ". more.

Blogging Hate.

It's merely personal explains a professor at St. Lawrence U. -- even when his profanity laced hate is targetted directly at his own students. But it's all ok and of course perfectly understandable, isn't it? I mean, we're talking about Republican students here, you know ..

Arson & Academia.

Cal-Tech student implicated in SUV torching. The student named looks to be the same one described in this story on troubled teens.

This is a sad equation: anti-social youth + university education = terrorist.

The students undergraduate education was at the U. of Chicago. Hmmm. Wonder if they have a tuition funded branch of the Earth Liberation Front there.

The Earth Liberation Font has a picture of a burnt out Hummer on its front page. Nice.

Who funds the ELF anyway? The Ford Foundation? Bill Moyers? Mrs. Kerry? Just asking ..

UPDATE: Ben & Jerry and lefty Rockefeller money bankroll an ELF linked group. How wonderful.

UPDATE II: It is the same messed up kid mentioned in the story above.

Academia.

What's it like to be a non-lefty at Smith College. Well, the first rule is, steer clear of politics ..

Academia. "Let's have a look at the record, shall we? Daniel Pipes, taunted and booed at Berkeley. Antonin Scalia, denied "endorsement" by sixteen professors at Amherst. Former terrorist, welcomed with open arms at Dartmouth. And still they ask, "What [leftist] faculty? .. ". more ARMAVIRUMQUE.

Academia. Challenge the left, lose your job. This time at SF State U., a place where Marxist faculty actually address each other as "comrade".

Steering Left. Jim Henley explains why academia lists Left -- it imagines itself the vanguard of a society managed like a ship --with academics as captains and its own trainees as the elite officer corp. Quotable:

Under communism, the ruling class has to do even the scut work of planning - running the factories, deciding where every box of pencils gets shipped and so on. In American managerialism .. the Vanguard only has to do the cool jobs. The boring stuff .. is outsourced to Republicans, Chamber of Commerce types who .. must, when the government speaks, obey.

And this:

.. departments of political science and public administration will be happiest with a world view that maximizes the amount of politics and bureaucracy. Conservatism figures we already know how society should be run. Conservatives don't need managers, they need police. Libertarians figure society can largely run itself. Libertarians need all kinds of things, but not a lot of politicians or civil servants. [The academic Left's two main] rivals lose by default .. [hat tip InstaPundit]

And on the same topic, don't miss this.

Leftist Academia. Prof. Edward Feser mixes it up with some truly nasty leftist profs. I'm not sure why Ed is wasting his time on these tenured thugs. These folks aren't in Ed's league as either scholars or gentlemen, and when you wrestle in the mud with vipers, all you'll get is bit.

But let me say that my experience at several universities provides only confirmation of Ed's example of academic bias in the classroom:

If, for example, a course in political philosophy is offered in which the readings comprise selections from the likes of the liberal philosopher John Rawls, the libertarian Robert Nozick, and various feminist and left-of-center communitarian critics of Rawls, with no conservative writers assigned at all and with Nozick treated as an easily-refuted eccentric whose views are not shared by any other contemporary philosopher worth reading, then students will -- obviously -- get the impression that the left-of-center views are the only realistic options. And this sort of thing is, I submit, extremely common in the contemporary university.

Duke Watch. George Soros & Duke faculty denounce America's war effort.

Leftist Academia. "Nick Muzin said he did not consider himself to be particularly conservative before coming to [Yale] Law School; he said he even worked for the Gore/Lieberman Presidential Campaign in 2000. But he said he feels far to the right of the politics of many Law School students. 'I would say I'm a centrist, but when I got to law school I found myself to be conservative [by comparison],' Muzin said. 'I find that the student body here is ultra-liberal and extremely intolerant; I realized it shortly after I started here .. ' .. ". MORE.

Academic Quackery. "Freud is truly in a class of his own. Arguably no other notable figure in history was so fantastically wrong about nearly every important thing he had to say. But, luckily for him, academics have been � and still are � infinitely creative in their efforts to whitewash his errors, even as lay readers grow increasingly dumbfounded by the entire mess .. ". MORE Todd Dufresne, author of Killing Freud: 20th Century Culture & the Death of Psychoanalysis.

Academia. A constant problem with lefty academics is that many refuse to play with an honest deck. Et, tu DeLong?.

More Communists, Please. Actual letter in today's Duke Chronicle:

While my take on the word freedom may be slightly different than those of the Duke Conservative Union .. I do appreciate their efforts to call to our attention the lack of diversity in party affiliation among some Duke faculty .. I also want to know, where is the diversity? Where are the Greens, Labour, the Christian Democrats, the Socialists, the Communists, the Workers Party, the Black Panthers, Puerto Rican independistas, etc...? Where is the truly wide range of partisan organizing that, across the globe, offers diversity in imagining options for the future?

Diane Nelson
Associate Professor, Department of Cultural Anthropology

Duke Bias Watch. Here's a shocker. Anti-American lefty George Soros to speak at lefty dominated Duke U. The university Provost and several Democrat Party members (i.e. PoliSci department professors) will participate in the event. Don't expect a conservative, libertarian, Republican or non-Democrat on the panel. Duke, essentially, won't hire any. The Soros event is sponsored and financed by a host of Duke academic departments & centers and the Provost himself. I'm shocked, shocked.

Academia. West Texans and the students at Sul Ross State U. are "ignorant, irrational, anti-intellectual, and, well, . . . just plain stupid". More NY Times & Larry Sechrest.

Academia. "If your temperament favors freedom without responsibility, then there are certain occupations that are a good fit. Academic life is one of them .. ". More Arnold Kling. Quotable:

The libertarian critique of Freedom Without Responsibility is that taking away responsibility leads to taking away freedom. The only way to provide collective benefits is by taxing those who work, save, and innovate. The more you try to alter market outcomes, the more you have to take away people's freedom. Friedrich Hayek warned that this was The Road to Serfdom. What he saw was that under both Communist Socialism in Russia and National Socialism in Germany, the loss of individual responsibility was accompanied by the eradication of freedom ..

Freedom Without Responsibility does not scale up to the level of society. As government takes over more responsibility from the individual, rewards start to accrue to the most ruthless and effective political operators .. As government tries to second-guess market processes, it makes matters worse instead of better. A remote central government is not suited to playing the role of what George Lakoff calls a nurturant parent ..

Freedom Without Responsibility may feel like a natural ideology for a cloistered academic. That does not make it an intelligent approach for public policy. Academics should correct for their natural biases by broadening their understanding of alternative points of view and by understanding the larger economic system. Adherence to any ideology, including liberalism, without question or re-examination, is what is really stupid ..

Academia. Edward Feser on "The Opium of the Professors". Quotable:

One would expect .. that a curriculum designed to impart to the young a sophisticated understanding of the intellectual foundations of this civilization would emphasize, for example: Plato and Aristotle, the Old and New Testaments, Augustine and Aquinas, Locke and Smith, Burke and Tocqueville, Oakeshott and Hayek. But of course, it is extremely easy to acquire a bachelor's degree from a modern university without having encountered a single one of these figures or texts. It is also extremely easy for the student's sole encounter with the issues dealt with in such serious sources to be mediated instead by a steady diet of such spiritual poison as the shrill screeds of Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky, works which amount to little more than vulgar political pamphlets devoid of intellectual heft, third-rate even by left-wing standards.

Academia. "When is the word �diversity� not tolerated on campus? When someone tries to put the word �intellectual� in front of it .. ". MORE John Leo.

Academia. Why Are Universities Dominated by the Left? by Edward Feser, Loyola Marymount U. Quotable:

The hegemony of the Left over the universities is so overwhelming that not even Leftists deny it. Whether the institution is public or private, a community college or an Ivy League campus, you can with absolute confidence predict .. the [leftist] curriculum .. What is surprising is how little attention is paid to the question of why the university has come to be so dominated by the Left .. There have been various theories presented, and many of them no doubt contain part of the answer. But none has gotten to the nub of the matter .. The present essay will survey the theories that have been proposed so far ..

1. The "survival of the left-est" theory ..

2. The "society as classroom" theory ..

3. The resentment theory ..

4. The "philosopher kings" theory .. As F.A. Hayek suggests in his essay "The Intellectuals and Socialism," for the average intellectual, it just stands to reason that the most intelligent people ought to be the ones running things. Of course, this assumes they are in general capable of running things better than others are, an assumption many of these purportedly always-questioning minds seem surprisingly unwilling to question. Yet there are very good reasons for questioning it, some of which are related to the failure of socialism discussed above. As Hayek himself has famously argued, large-scale social institutions are simply too complex for any human mind, however intelligent, to grasp in the amount of detail necessary to create them from scratch or redesign them from top to bottom in the manner of the socialist economic planner or political or cultural revolutionary. The collapse of the French Revolution into bloody chaos, its immediate Napoleonic sequel, the long decay and sudden collapse of the Soviet empire, and the institutionalized lunacy that was communism in general are only the most vivid and undeniable confirmations of this basic insight. Still, the intellectual is forever a sucker for the idea that things would be much better if only everyone would just go along with the vision of the world he and his colleagues have hashed out over coffee in the faculty lounge and in the pages of the academic journals. As Hayek put it in The Fatal Conceit, "intelligent people will tend to overvalue intelligence," and they will even find it scandalous to suggest that intelligence is the sort of thing that can be overvalued. But of course it can be, as long as it has limits, which even the most brilliant human being's intelligence does. To see this requires nothing more, though also nothing less, than simple humility -- something intellectuals tend to have in short supply, especially if their intellectual accomplishments are great.

5. The "head in the clouds" theory ..

6. The "class interest" theory ..

.. these theories .. seem to me to fail, even when taken collectively, to tell the whole story. For none of them accounts for a noteworthy fact about the views often taken by left-of-center intellectuals: the sheer perversity of those views -- the manner in which they not only differ from common sense, but positively thumb their nose at it with contempt.

And this:

Suffice it for now to note that there are clear counterexamples to the claim that academic opinion is a reliable guide to the truth -- the most glaring of which is the popularity of socialism, as an economic doctrine, among intellectuals for much of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Socialism as a vague kind of moral vision is, to be sure, very much alive among contemporary intellectuals; but, outside of the lightweight academic "disciplines," and particularly those completely innocent of empirical testing or theoretical rigor (contemporary literary theory, huge swaths of sociology, and much of what is done in highly politicized ethnic- and women's studies departments), no one takes socialist economics seriously anymore. The reason is not that intellectuals have gotten smarter, but rather that cold hard empirical reality has so decisively falsified socialism as an economic doctrine that even the otherworldly inhabitants of the Ivory Tower have had to take notice.

But -- and this is the point -- it shouldn't have taken a nightmarish seventy-year experiment in real-world socialism to break its grip over the intelligentsia. For it is not as if the theoretical arguments for the socialist economy were ever anywhere close to decisive in the first place: as a worked-out theoretical edifice, socialism never had much to be said for it, and was always more sentiment and bluff than serious, rigorous analysis, a way of expressing one's disapproval of capitalism rather than a realistic alternative.

Moreover, critics of socialism had always predicted the tyranny and economic incompetence that it turned out to exhibit when implemented, on the basis not only of common sense (which should have been enough) but also of sophisticated theory -- including the arguments of Mises and Hayek, who had, beginning in the 1920's, presented objections so powerful that it is difficult to see how any honest man could thereafter take socialism to be the rational default position in economics and politics.

In short, had neutral, dispassionately evaluated intellectual considerations alone ever been most intellectuals' motivation for adopting socialism, it would have been a minority view at best decades before the fall of communism. Here we have a vivid example of how emotion and fashion can, to the detriment of cool analysis, have as much of a hold over the mind of the intellectual as over that of the "ordinary" man -- albeit that, in this case, we are dealing with emotions and fashions that have .. more of a pull on intellectuals than on others.

Bias in Academia. "Robert Munger, chairman of the [Duke U.] political science department .. recalled a recent meeting in which he heard a fellow department chairman say it was Duke's job to confront conservative students with their hypocrisies and that they didn't need to say much to liberal students because they already understood the world.

"There was no big protest [at the meeting], and that was wrong," Munger said. Munger said the history department's political makeup surprised him, however. "Thirty-five Democrats and no Republicans? If you flip a coin 35 times, and it ends up heads every time, that's not a fair coin," he said. The people who say, 'I don't think ideology is appropriate in hiring would have to look at the process that provides such a skewed outcome," he said . . ". MORE.

Academia. "It would be good .. to have systematic evidence [of bais against conservatives in universities]. Gathering it, though, strikes me as a difficult proposition, because there is an unusually large amount of noise in the system. The problem is that although academics may be vicious and spiteful towards other academics with the wrong politics, there are so many other reasons for that sort of behavior .. ". -- MORE Atlantic Blog.

Academia. The fight to restore academic freedom on America's one-party campuses. And here is David Horowitz on academic diversity and the fight for academic freedom. Important stuff folks.

Academia. "Democrats outnumber Republicans in the departments of History, Literature, Sociology, and English [at Duke U.] by 32-to-0, 11-to-0, 9-to-0, and 18-to-1 margins." MORE.

Why are there so few non-left professors on campus? Here's one reason:

Every day, she used the classroom as a sounding board and she insulted the president whose policies are those of Republican lawmakers. One day she got up in front of the class and told us that the president could not be an historian and be a Republican. This hurt me very much because I am a conservative and I want to be a historian. Another time, she got up in front of the class and said that President Bush started the Iraqi war because he got a hard-on. I thought this was a very inappropriate way to be talking about the president. Instead of spending on history, my professor spends a significant amount of time lecturing on current programs of the Republicans and the president. When my peers or I tried arguing and tried to question or argue against her ideas, she ridiculed them, leaving the person feeling humiliated in front of the class. One of my more outspoken conservative peers began skipping classes because as she told the teacher, she was afraid to come to class ..

I am deeply discouraged about the idea of becoming a college professor because of what I see on campus. The severe lack of conservative faculty at my college and the way the conservative faculty is treated have led me to believe that I will have a hard time finding a position if I do decide to become a college professor. I have given serious thought about teaching at the collegiate level, but currently I do not see this as a realistic possibility until hiring and firing practices is free from discrimination.

And this:

My name is Kelly Wiest. I am an adjunct instructor in the political science department at Metro State .. I am finding that there are many students at our colleges, especially at my college, who are made to feel isolated and intimidated regarding their political opinions .. more

.

UPDATE: Patterico reacts: "The part that amazed me was a student describing required reading at his school: Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, and Michael Moore."

Have a degree in economics? Want to go to grad school? Like the work of Hayek? Sympathetic with classical liberalism? Where the hell to go to grad school then? -- well, Walter Block has some suggestions. Be sure to scroll all of the way down to reader comments.

Drezner has an interesting piece on grad school dropouts which references this Chicago Tribune story. Research indicates that most grad students drop out because faculty advisors have little involvement with them. Tenured faculty bring in grad students to teach their classes and do their research -- but commonly their interest in grad students doesn't extend much beyond that. The drop out rate for grad students is 50 percent.

See also this and this. Then, of course, there's this factor:

[Marge, Bart, and Lisa go to their local "Bookaccino" superbookstore.]
LISA: I'm going up to the fourth floor, where the books are!
BART: I'm going to taunt the Ph.Ds!
[Bart approaches the three workers at the espresso bar, all of whom wear glasses and bored expressions.]
BART: Hey guys! I heard a new assistant professorship just opened up!
[Ph.D'd baristas gasp and lean forward eagerly.]
BART: Yes, that's right. At the University of ... PSYCH!

-- The Simpsons.

A professor takes you inside the U. of Oregon -- which comes across as something like a Cuban re-education camp. You've got to read this to believe it.

Academics fight for the freedom to hate America -- at taxpayer expense.

Democrat Tammy Bruce speaking from experience as a college campus lecturer:

.. the intellectual and personal harassment conservative students and faculty face is beginning to mirror to oppression of Jewish students and academics in 1930�s Germany

What led her to say that? Well -- among other things -- this:

My speaking experience at Roger Williams University in Rhode Island was classic. The College Republicans there, led by Jason Mattera, Jedediah Jones, and Monique Stuart had awakened the campus to real political and intellectual diversity with the publication of their conservative newspaper, The Hawk�s Right Eye. Prior to inviting me to campus, the club had been called a �hate group� by members of the administration, funds for their newspaper had been frozen, graffiti on the campus compared them to the Hitler Youth (of course) and at least one member has had to deal with threats to her personal safety.

All in all, not unusual experiences for campus conservatives. There was the typical harassment by the campus police against students trying to promote my speech. In a coordinated effort to stop promotion of the event, two young men who were chalking a speech announcement on a walkway were stopped and interrogated by campus police. In a clever move, after being told by the police that they had orders to stop any activity of the College Republicans, the young men said they were with the Gay Pride group on campus. Only then were they allowed to continue.

The appalling Paul Krugman of Princeton now gives us VP of the U.S. Richard Cheney as Adolf Hitler. Thanks Paul.

UPDATE: The picture of the cover has just been yanked from Amazon's web page for Krugman's book.

The facts vs. lefty historians on FDR's dismal economic performance as President -- by Jim Powell, author of FDR's Folly: How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression.

Linda Chavez is bringing down the hammer on racist segregationists across the country. Who are these folks? Did you guess the academics in charge of America's leading colleges and universities?

The truth about academia, part II. Quotable:

State Sen. John Andrews .. has begun a formal probe into whether Colorado's 29 colleges and universities have policies to protect academic freedom. In a letter to the presidents of each institution, Andrews asked for responses by Dec. 1 to four questions, including what steps are being taken to promote intellectual diversity in the classroom and in the recruitment of faculty ..

"I would like to believe that the necessary protections are in place," Andrews said in the letter. "I must admit, however, that in light of a stream of recent communications I've received from individuals on various campuses across the state, I am not so sure." Andrews said students and faculty have told him they fear for their grades or their careers "if they don't keep a lid on their patriotism or their faith."

Anyone who's spent much time in the bowels of academia can't doubt these letters are both authentic and chillingly accurate representations of realities on campus.

Why is the U.S. government in the business of stamping humanities professors with a $1 million dollar official government seal of approval? It's a rotten idea, but someone's going to receive it, so it might as well be Leszek Kolakowski, the historian of Marxist thought.

There are large hoards of academics who love few things more than the ability to control the thoughts and speech of others. The latest victim of the attempt to eliminate diversity of thought on campus is blogging economist Eric Rasmusen at the U. of Indiana. Rasmusen has yet to be effectively silenced -- although his blog was forced to move here.

A letter from professor Walter Block:

Dear Colleagues:

Below see a letter I am putting together for my senior students who are thinking of going to graduate school to get a phd. All of them are interested in going to a university where the professors are sympathetic to free enterprise.

I list several options for them. There are no doubt several errors both of commission and omission in this list. Could you please correct these mistakes, so that I can give my students the most accurate information possible? ...

The letter:

Dear Students:

Here are my recommendations re grad schools.

I have three separate lists. In A, you can get a phd in economics, and Austrian economics is part of the official program.

In B, you can not get a phd in economics, and Austrian economics is not part of the official program, but there are Austrian economists on the faculty.

In C you can get a phd in economics, and Austrian economics is not part of the official program (but there are libertarians on the faculty).

A1. George Mason.
There are quite a few Austrian economics on the faculty: Don Boudreaux, Karen Vaughn (who is retiring soon), Richard Wagner, Jack High, Tyler Cowen, Alex Tabbarok. In addition, James Buchanan has some Austrian leanings, but only on subjective costs, and Bryan Caplan and Gordon Tullock are knowledgeable about Austrianism, albeit critical. Plus there are an additional, dozen or so libertarian but non Austrian profs, several in the law school; for example, Walter Williams, James Bennett, Ron Heiner, Charles Rowley, Vernon Smith, John Hasnas, Michael Krauss. Buchanan and Smith are Nobel Prize winners in economics. Contact: "Peter Boettke" pboettke@gmu.edu .

A2. New York University.
Mario Rizzo and Steven Harper are Austrian economists. NYU features an informal weekly Austrian seminar attended by several New York City area Austro libertarians, including Joe Salerno, ... Contact: mario.rizzo@nyu.edu

A3. Florida State, Tallahassee.
Bruce Benson and Randy Holcombe have interests in Austrianism; James Gwartney, is a free enterpriser. Contacts: "Prof. James D. Gwartney" jdgwart@aol.com , jgwartne@garnet.acns.fsu.edu
"Bruce Benson" bbenson@garnet.acns.fsu.edu holcombe@garnet.acns.fsu.edu

B1. Auburn University.
There is no phd in economics. The agricultural school has a phd program in agricultural economics. It is flexible so students can write dissertations with people from the economics department. You can also get a "resource"
economics phd from the forestry department which is similarly flexible. Most students take most of their core courses in the economics department. Professors sympathetic to free enterprise include John Jackson in economics,
David Laband (formerly of econ. department) now in forestry, Henry Thompson (formerly of econ. department) now in agriculture. Mark Thornton (an Austro libertarian) serves on a few dissertation committees. Contact: "Prof. Roger
W. Garrison" rgarrisn@business.auburn.edu

B2. University of Nevada at Law Vegas.
There is available a phd in Political Science and Sociology. Hans Hoppe can be member of either of these dissertation committees. Contact:
hoppeh@nevada.edu

B3. University of Missouri at Columbia.
Offers a phd in agricultural economics. Peter Klein is a libertarian Austrian. Contact: Peter Klein pklein@missouri.edu

B4. Guelph University.
Glenn Fox is an Austro libertarian. Only the phd in agricultural economics is available. However, Canada is even more socialistic than the U.S., hard as that is to believe. Contact: Glenn C. Fox Gfox@agec.uoguelph.ca

C1. University of Chicago. There are lots of free enterprise but non Austrian professors here. Almost all Nobel Prizes awarded to free enterprise oriented economists have had some contact with Chicago.

C2. University of Georgia, Athens.
George Selgin is highly knowledgeable about Austrian economics. Dwight Lee is a libertarian. I think there are two or three other libertarian non Austrian profs there. Contact: "Prof. Dwight R. Lee" DLEE@cbacc.cba.uga.edu
; "selgin@terry.uga.edu" selgin@terry.uga.edu
.

C3. Washington University, St. Louis
Murray Weidenbaum is a free market oriented professor, and Douglass North is a Nobel Laureate in Economics with a free market orientation. To the best of my knowledge, Wash U has more libertarian students than at any other school, virtually none of whom are econ majors. Contact: Art Carden, carden@wueconc.wustl.edu a graduate
student in economics.

Dr. Walter Block
Harold E. Wirth Eminent Scholar Endowed Chair in Economics
College of Business Administration
Loyola University New Orleans
6363 St. Charles Ave., Box 15
New Orleans, LA 70118
www.cba.loyno.edu/faculty/block/index.html
Office location: Miller Hall 321
work: (504)864-7934
secy: (504)864-7944
fax: (504)864-7970
wblock@loyno.edu

Academic "Star Wars" with its "me, myself and I" entrepreneurship vs. the development of a community of teachers and scholars "engage with colleagues of differing views of expertise". Don't bet on community or cross-disciplinary conversation.

British lefty philosopher Ted Honderich justifies terrorism in the name of humanity -- and aimed at the West. Is he an anti-semite also?

Congressional legislation calls for the end to discrimination on America's college campuses.

The truth about academia begins to leak out:

[DAVID] BROOKS IS GETTING BETTER Yesterday's column was not only strong, it was one Safire would never have written and the Times would never have run by a guest writer. Brook's highlight's what is common knowledge to every conservative journalist I know: post-grad academia is horrendously bigoted against conservatives. I have at least half dozen friends who either have PhDs but couldn't possibly find work in academia or who gave up seeking them for the same reason. One friend of mine whose credentials and scholarship are outstanding is toiling in a fifth-tier school precisely because he's a conservative. Other PhD'd friends of mine are in the administration, at think tanks or in journalism because they'd never have a chance to teach. And, as Brooks notes, it's not merely a straightforward political bias, the barrier also has to do with how loopy academia has become in general. Most conservative would-be academics aren't interested in partisan politics, but they are interested in the classics, the canon, mainstream history, etc -- and that stuff is knuckle-dragging nonsense to the folks who peddle post-colonial studies and the like.

-- Jonah Goldberg

And MORE from ProfessorBainbridge.com:

All too often, applicants [to law school faculties] with conservative lines on their resume -- an Olin fellowship, Federalist Society membership, or, heaven help you, a Scalia clerkship -- are passed over no matter how sterling the rest of their credentials may be. The problem is that at most law schools there is no critical mass of conservatives to act as "champions" for such candidates ...

Law school hiring tends to be driven by the self-perpetuating network of left-leaning senior faculty. Nobody pulls the conservative candidate's AALS form out of the slushpile, while the latest left-leaning prodigy gets the benefit of phone calls from their mentors to buddies of the mentors and having their AALS form flagged or even hand carried around the building. It may not be deliberate bias, but there still is a disparate impact.

My advice to aspiring conservative legal academics? Stick to private law topics (business law is especially safe) and follow Juan's advice: "there are reasons some untenured professors blog under pseudonyms."

(via InstaPundit.com) Who also has this from Juan Non-Volokh.

Today�s David Brooks column struck a chord. When I was an undergraduate at Yale, I had several long discussions with my senior essay advisor about whether to pursue my PhD. My advisor, who was himself quite liberal, cautioned against it, largely because of my emerging, right-of-center political views. As he described it, succeeding in the liberal arts academy is tough enough as it is without the added burden of holding unpopular views. To illustrate the risk, he noted that one of his colleagues on the graduate admissions committee explicitly blackballed each and every candidate who had ever received financial support (scholarships, fellowships, etc.) from the John M. Olin Foundation because, his colleague insisted, the Olin Foundation only funded people who thought like they did, and Yale did not want any graduate students who thought that way. If I truly wanted to be an academic, he counseled, I was better off going to law school. While he didn�t know much about the politics of the legal academy, a law degree would provide a better safety net than a history PhD. In the end, that�s what I did.

Ann Coulter on a tale of two teachers. One is a break-through historian of communist spying in America. The other wrote a book explaining how anti-communism is a mental condition. Guess which one is employable in America's universities -- and which one isn't.

"How to write a texbook". (via Jeff Tucker and the Mises Econ Blog)

Labor historian Philip Foner is immune from criticism, despite a record of plagiarism, unreliable footnotes, and phony archive references. Why? Because he's a hero to the Leftist who dominate labor history, says John Haynes, host of the H-HOAC elist. Read the article if your interested in how the internet continues to wreck havoc with old hierarchies built upon entrenched interests and closed conversational communities. Let the sunlight in!

It's still 1930 in the world of academic labor history.

UPDATE: Lisa Mary Wichowski sends the following to the LIB/CON list:

As my placard in the academic freakshow reads I am the "world's only conservative/libertarian labor historian," I often find myself defending persons and ideas from those on the far opposite end of the spectrum (George Bush and Martha Stewart most recently). Now however I feel that I must defend labor historians from similar attack. Mr Lewis makes two mistakes in his essay 1) tarring with a very wide brush, 2)misreading the fundamental flaw of most labor historians. Discussion lists like H-Labor are generally have a pretty diverse readership. The main posters to any discussion are those with the most radical positions. Those who feel most passionately are those that make the most noise. Posting in this discussion were McCartin and Dubofsky, and they certainly are on the far left. For every David Roediger however, there is an Eric Arnesen. Most of the labor historians I have met are not Communists, they are instead New Deal Liberals-bad enough, but certainly nothing to be damned for. ILWICH does not attempt to hide it's politics, but neither does Labor History a more mainstream but certainly still quite liberal journal. Mr Lewis misses what may be a more important problem in labor history. It's not that labor historians are Marxists but that most Marxists have never labored. This is the same in any area there are self appointed spokesmen for a group, such as feminists supporting women's empowerment in third world countries. The middle class academics believe that they would feel deprived if they were working class. They feel that all the world should have safe, cushy, lifetime employment just like they do, after all, look how happy they are.

The very public dishonesty of Paul Krugman begins to enter the cringe territory. And it should make us all think a little bit harder about what goes on in academia -- because this man is out of the academic world, and his dishonesty stretches beyond the editorial pages of the NY Times. Among other things, Krugman has grossly and repeatedly misrepresented the ideas of Friedrich Hayek -- and he has repeatedly failed to correct his misrepresentations when informed about them. It's all about "ideology" and partisan politics for Krugman, and this isn't so unusual in academia -- especially for those of a certain age. And the big problem in most of the humanities and "social sciences" is that there is little or no critical check -- beyond pure formalism for its own sake. (And note well, a great deal of the stuff that gives you credit for "empirical" work is privileged just because its allows for a display of formalism, and not because it provides any decisive or even telling critical utility.)

A student reports from inside the re-education camps at Cornell.

The fear that has a name -- how the Left enforces the party line. Worth quoting:

After all, these [Leftists] at the party were people with the equivalent of tenure, living in a free country with all sorts of protection of speech - not like the communist party or totalitarian racist South Africa in the old days. What were they afraid of? The fear, as I began to examine it, had two flavors. One was the same as the fear I had experienced in South Africa, in the communist party, in Hungary. It was fear for one's future, one's career. Even tenured faculty have lost their jobs and been disgraced because of an impolitic remark during the height of political correctness - I have known some of the hapless victims. One man, a friend whose health was poor, had been hounded, completely innocent, to his death by a whole conspiracy of gossip, secret caucuses and official administrative action.

Repeat after me, "I -- state your race -- ". More and more, college applicants are simply declining to state.

Is there hope for free speech at the U. of Wisconsin?

"Whenever I go to conservative events on campus and tell people I'm gay, no one seems to mind. But whenever I go to gay events on campus and tell people I'm conservative, everyone throws a hissy fit."

Read more here.

Institutional Economics pulls out this great quote from the Chronical article on academic bloggers:

"I've certainly changed my picture of what libertarians are like," says Chris Bertram, a senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of Bristol, in England, whose blog persona is "Junius." Mr. Bertram, a social democrat, says that he and his fellow political philosophers sometimes suffer from a constricted field of vision, with "all kinds of received opinions that just aren't shared by most other people." Mr. Bertram says that debates with other bloggers have taught him that many libertarians do not follow Robert Nozick's philosophical principles, but instead favor markets "for other, basically more pragmatic, reasons." He adds, "There's been a mildly rightward pressure on my politics."

Is blogging the CB radio of the 00s? Or the future of academic discourse? The Chronicle of Higher Ed investigates. And don't miss a blogger's rise to greatness and the CHE's academic bloggers of note.

Victor Davis Hanson .. Unabomber suspect? Prof. Judith Hallett fingered Hanson as the Unabomber in reaction to his books on Greek warfare and the leftist academy. No wonder Hanson says, ''the university is a really rotten institution.'' From a Boston Globe profile.

The New Liberals. Inexplicably, the New York Times calls them "conservatives".

the paradox was obvious: the administration's reaction to the Counterweight stories underlined the very point the editors were trying to make: namely, that the university, in its zeal to ameliorate any possible friction among students, is stifling the open, vigorous, nontimorous exchange of ideas. ''To me, it's sheltering and patronizing,'' Charles Mitchell says. ''I just believe with every fiber of my being that our speech code is wrong, and it has to go. It's completely against everything that this university ought to stand for.''

Is the U. of Chicago edging ever Leftward? John Fund reports from the School of Law. Worth quoting:

And while the country is becoming more conservative, it seems that the law school's long resistance to trendy campus fashions is weakening. During the reunion, the heads of several legal clinics sponsored by the law school met with alumni. After a spokesman for the MacArthur Justice Center explained how it files appeals for convicted criminals in death penalty and drug cases, he was challenged by an alumnus who wondered if their time could be better spent. The student sheepishly admitted that most of the appeals were filed on hyper-technical grounds on behalf of "clearly guilty" defendants but that they presented a wonderful opportunity for students to practice law under the supervision of an attorney. The alumni I spoke to were clearly more interested in a university clinic designed to aid local entrepreneurs, supported by the Washington-based Institute for Justice.

John Tabin has a commencement watch going. Snippet:

Administrators justify these speeches -- and condemn the walk-outs and boos that they are now drawing -- by saying that its their job to "challenge" students- - but by an amazing coincidence, these "challenging" speakers sure tend to reflect the bias of the administration. Funny how that works.

Just don't make the mistake of "challenging" the power elite of the University. David Horowitz can tell you chapter and verse how the Leftist academic world will have no truck with those who would challenge the party line group think which substitutes for intellectual reflection among so many of those within the humanities and social sciences.

Dog bites man. Commencement speakers are mostly Democrats and Leftists.

David Horowitz flags this bit of pith from Roger Scruton:

"A single theme runs through the humanities as they are taught in European and American universities: the illegitimacy of Western civilization, and the artificiality of the distinctions on which it has been based. All distinctions are "cultural," therefore "constructed," therefore "ideological" in the sense defined by Marx -- manufactured by the ruling classes in order to serve their interests and bolster their power. Western civilization is simply the record of that oppressive process, and the principal purpose of studying it is to deconstruct its claim to our membership. This is the core belief that a great many students in the humanities are required to ingest, preferably before they have the intellectual discipline to question it, or to set it against the literature that shows it to be untenable. To put the point in another way: the Enlightenment displaced theology from the heart of the curriculum in order to put the disinterested pursuit of truth in its place. Within a very short time, however, we find the university dominated by theology of another kind -- a godless theology to be sure, but no less insistent on unquestioning submission to doctrine, and no less strident in its pursuit of heretics,... The project is ... to sever young people from [their] historic loyalties..." Roger Scruton, The West an the Rest: Globalization and the Terrorist Threat, ISI Books, 2003 pp. 80-81.

Brad DeLong is Fisking National Review for intellectual incompetence and bad manners towards one's betters. I'm with him to the extent that DeLong has identified poor arguments or the failure to provide any good arguments. But I'm against him if he thinks that Krugman or anyone else should be immune from intellectual scrutiny simply on the basis of "scholarly reputation". To begin with, the scholarly reputation of economics is itself deeply contested by folks with scholarly reputations as well earned as any DeLong and his associates can summon. And because the scientific status and reputation of economics itself is contested at the highest reaches and by the best minds among those thinking hard about what economics has or has not achieved -- so too must there be doubt about the credentials of those claiming authority under the banner of this not untroubled discipline. Economists seem to think they get a credentials pass because they play the "I'm smart" game so well when that game involves -- often rather empty -- math games. (Math games which professional mathematicians often view as 2nd or 3rd rate stuff on the "I'm smart" chart of academic mathematicians). What I would like to suggest is that anyone with the goods when it comes to solid arguments should go right ahead happily "trashing people", as DeLong puts it, "with much better scholarly reputations than theirs" -- as long as their solids arguments give them the full right to the Fisking. (This is what DeLong in fact says the National Review folks are really lacking -- good arguments). As any good philosopher will tell you, it's the arguments which count -- and as long as folks are able to make and judge those, they shouldn't be relying upon "scholarly reputations" to carry the day for them when their own arguments won't. Especially when these (pop econ) arguments are only connected somewhat tenuously to the specialized publish-or-perish stuff that gave them their scholarly bonafidies.

Former Hayek-L'er Brad DeLong knocks one out of the park on Cuba:

The hideously depressing thing is that Cuba under Battista--Cuba in 1957--was a developed country. Cuba in 1957 had lower infant mortality than France, Belgium, West Germany, Israel, Japan, Austria, Italy, Spain, and Portugal. Cuba in 1957 had doctors and nurses: as many doctors and nurses per capita as the Netherlands, and more than Britain or Finland. Cuba in 1957 had as many vehicles per capita as Uruguay, Italy, or Portugal. Cuba in 1957 had 45 TVs per 1000 people--fifth highest in the world. Cuba today has fewer telephones per capita than it had TVs in 1957.

You take a look at the standard Human Development Indicator variables--GDP per capita, infant mortality, education--and you try to throw together an HDI for Cuba in the late 1950s, and you come out in the range of Japan, Ireland, Italy, Spain, Israel. Today? Today the UN puts Cuba's HDI in the range of Lithuania, Trinidad, and Mexico. (And Carmelo Mesa-Lago thinks the UN's calculations are seriously flawed: that Cuba's right HDI peers today are places like China, Tunisia, Iran, and South Africa.)

Thus I don't understand lefties who talk about the achievements of the Cuban Revolution: "...to have better health care, housing, education, and general social relations than virtually all other comparably developed countries." Yes, Cuba today has a GDP per capita level roughly that of--is "comparably developed"--Bolivia or Honduras or Zimbabwe, but given where Cuba was in 1957 we ought to be talking about how it is as developed as Italy or Spain.

What is up with "progressives" flying off to their beloved Cuba? I don't get it. (Or is it just all about a submerged childhood quest for a dream palace of fantasies?)

David Bernstein is backing off his Fisking of the Hapsburgs. Interesting. Elsewhere David wonders if being "one of the leading libertarian law professors in the country .. isn't a bit like .. being one of the leading Jewish athletes of all time".

Dennis Prager has an interesting piece on his recent week long visit to Stanford. This line made me wince:

If you have gone from kindergarten to graduate school to teaching in college without serious time in the non-academic world, it takes a major effort to be an adult. Spending your entire life with minors is a recipe for permanent immaturity.

The problem? Publisher guidelines require that textbook, "passages may not show certain socially sensitive features of the world as it was or is. That includes prohibitions against depictions of mothers in the mid-19th-century West teaching their daughters to make quilts for their dowries because this characterizes females as soft and submissive; and against the story of Mary McLeod Bethune, who in the early 20th century raised money from wealthy whites to open a school for black girls, partly because the appeal to white philanthropists was judged to be patronizing. A story about a young blind man's heroic hike up Mount McKinley was rejected because it is considered biased to suggest that blind people can have a harder time doing particular tasks than sighted people."

The solution? "Eliminate the statewide textbooks adoption process, and substitute a competitive market, with school districts choosing their own books and materials. And let the sun shine in by compelling all states and publishers to reveal their bias guidelines and by placing on the Internet all the deliberations of bias and sensitivity panels, including what they reject."

Daniel Kevles on Diane Ravitch's The Language Police:How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn. Read Chapter 1.

Remember how Americans returned to their lives after WWII, no longer satisfied with some of the injustices at home which they had helped erradicate abroad? Victor Hanson recently returned to his farm in Califorina after a year at the Naval Academy and has reflections of a similiar sort:

On a personal note, this column marks the end of my year-long tenure as Shifrin professor of military history at the U.S. Naval Academy, and a return to a rather isolated farm in Selma, California. My first memory upon arrival in Annapolis on August 8, 2002 � a time of Washington doom and gloom � was picking up a copy of Foreign Policy and reading the cover story, "The Incredible Shrinking Eagle. The End of Pax America," in which readers were assured by Immanuel Wallerstein that "Saddam Hussein's army is not that of the Taliban, and his internal military control is far more coherent. A U.S. invasion would necessarily involve a serious land force, one that would have to fight its way to Baghdad and would likely suffer significant casualties."

As an outsider, the most notable impressions I have had since arriving are the surprising degree of self-criticism of the U.S. military and its willingness to welcome both internal and outside audit � and thus its abject contrast with two equally formidable institutions, the media and the universities, which really are shrinking and have indeed suffered "significant casualties" to their reputations. Again, it is far easier to be a liberal in the supposedly authoritarian military than to be a moderate or conservative on a college campus; students are more likely to be segregated by race in the lounges and cafeterias of "progressive" universities than they are in the mess halls of aircraft carriers.

In the past year I have met midshipmen, Air Force cadets, colonels at the Army War College, officers in the Pentagon, air and naval crews at sea, reserve and retired officers, and a variety of civilian defense analysts. Very few were triumphalists about their singular victories in Afghanistan and Iraq; instead, they were eager to dissect past plans, identify lapses, and encourage candid criticism � both operational and ethical.

Rather different from all that are the New York and Washington press corps and the culture of most universities. Many elites in these two latter institutions have throughout this crisis revealed lapses in both ethics and common sense. There is a general lack of contrition (much less apology) by prominent columnists and talking heads about being so wrong so often in editorializing about the war. Partnerships with fascist regimes were embraced by major American networks � and at home, elite critics got into bed with pretty awful antiwar organizations whose true agenda went well beyond Iraq to involve subverting the very values of the United States.

The media needs to ask itself some tough questions about its own rules of engagement abroad, the use of bribe money, and the ethical and voluntary responsibility of its pundits and writers to account to their readers, when they have for so long consistently fed them nonsense and error. Universities, in turn, must ask themselves fundamental questions about tenure and teaching loads: Why does tuition consistently rise faster than inflation; why is free speech so often curbed and regulated; and why did so many prominent professors, during the past two years, in a time of war, say so many dreadful things about their own military � from general untruths about "millions" of starving, refugees, and dead to come, to the occasional provocateur applauding the destruction of the Pentagon and wishing for more Mogadishus?