New College Crest

Conservative Campus Speaker Censored / Case 11205

We don’t actually know it’s case 11205, but you get the point. From the Alliance Defending Freedom:

LOS ANGELES – Alliance Defending Freedom sent a letter Monday on behalf of a student group to California State University, Los Angeles, for charging the group unconstitutional fees in order to exercise its freedom of speech. The university president responded immediately by cancelling the event, having “decided that it will be best” to include the speaker in a “more inclusive event” featuring “a group of speakers with differing viewpoints on diversity.” The student organization, Young Americans for Freedom, is now considering a lawsuit against the university.

University officials charged YAF $621.50 for security officers because it deemed an event that the group is sponsoring “controversial.” The university has broad guidelines for such a designation and leaves it to the whim of officials, a practice that the U.S. Supreme Court has found to be unconstitutional in other cases. After the university received the ADF letter explaining this, CSU–Los Angeles President William Covino sent an e-mail to the student group to inform them that its event has been cancelled.

“Public universities should encourage, not stifle, the free exchange of ideas,” said ADF Senior Counsel David Hacker. “YAF has every bit as much right to hold its event as any other student group does, and the university can’t stop that because it prefers to water down the speaker’s message with other viewpoints that officials find more palatable to their own political views. The courts have made it clear that university officials cannot deem an event ‘controversial’ and then weigh down students with burdensome fees to engage in constitutionally protected free speech just because some people consider it controversial, but it’s even worse to take that a step further and try to silence the speech altogether.”

YAF is a chapter affiliate of Young America’s Foundation and a registered student organization at the university. YAF followed the university’s policies and procedures for planning an event Thursday in the U-SU Theatre on campus with conservative political commentator Ben Shapiro. YAF has been promoting it through social media and fliers for several weeks.

In reaction, some university students and staff commented on the social media posts and called the YAF chapter “intolerant” and “racists.” In particular, University Associate Professor of Sociology Robert Weide called the YAF students “white supremacists” and invited the YAF students to fight him in the U-SU gym. On Feb. 18, the university told YAF that it must hire three security officers and one university police officer for the event at a cost of $621.50 because “Mr. Shapiro’s topics and views are controversial.” ADF attorneys pointed out in their letter that the U.S. Supreme Court has already invalidated that rationale and asked that the university “immediately rescind the security fees assessed to YAF for the February 25 event.”

In an e-mail to YAF late Monday, Covino wrote, “After careful consideration, I have decided that it will be best for our campus community if we reschedule Ben Shapiro’s appearance for a later date, so that we can arrange for him to appear as part of a group of speakers with differing viewpoints on diversity…. We will be happy to work with Mr. Shapiro to schedule the more inclusive event that I have in mind. I have informed the university staff involved in facilitating the February 25 event that it will be rescheduled and reconfigured for a later date.”

“The First Amendment does not require YAF to consolidate its viewpoint with others,” Hacker noted. “The number of events on university campuses with speakers who have different viewpoints from Mr. Shapiro’s and YAF’s are plentiful. No need or legitimate basis exists for cancelling YAF’s event.”

Demanding that a group pay for “security” when they bring a conservative speaker to campus is a common tactic used by university bureaucrats.  The University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee tried it when a speaker was invited to campus whom Palestinian students disliked.

This, of course, gives a “heckler’s veto” to the most intolerant groups on campus, those that will explicitly or implicitly threaten violence and disorder.

And of course, rewarding this kind of behavior results in more of it, as the intolerant campus left learns they can successfully shut up speech they don’t like.

Demanding “differing viewpoints” and an “inclusive event” are likewise merely ploys to burden the expression of speech of which the left doesn’t disapproves. It’s shame the YAF gave in on this. Often, conservative students are simply too nice.

That’s not to say that debates with diverse points of view are a bad idea. They are a very good idea, but the campus left doesn’t seem to understand that until somebody wants to bring a conservative to campus.

Update

The administration at CSU-LA backed down, and allowed the speech. But leftist protesters blocked the entrance to the venue, preventing some students from entering, and tried to disrupt the speech by setting off a fire alarm. Police had to escort Shapiro out to insure his safety.

Indoctrination in a Marquette Theology Class

A student of ours provided this e-mail, sent out by an unnamed professor in a Theology Class the student is taking.

The e-mail above bears a strong resemblance to a recent essay by leftist Theology Prof. Daniel Maguire. Maguire has confirmed to us that he sent the message to students.

Thursday, February 17, 2011 6:30 PM

This fits into the exam question on the triangle of justice.

The Ed Schulz Show on MSNBC, Channel 46 is on at 9:00 pm broadcasting from Madison. I’m not assigning that but you might find it of interest.

************************************************

Neoliberalism (neoconservatism) is the operating system in the political economy of the Right.

It has these characteristics:

1) “Possessive individualism.” Greedy individualism would describe it better. It embodies the Social Darwinism—survival of the fittest—mentality. It is “Greed is good” theory.

(2) It is anti-government, wanting to minimize the role of the government, and remove regulations. Therefore it stresses “privatization,” taking things out of government hands and giving it to private business. Following the neoliberal script, George W. Bush tried to “privatize” Social Security, handing over retirement benefits to the mercy of the stock market. Water supply has in some places been privatized; airports and roads have been targeted for privatizing.

(3) Neoliberalism is anti-unions. Reagan went after the air traffic controllers union. Governor Walker is going after public worker’s union--teachers, etc.-- denying them the right to collective bargaining.

(4) Neoliberalism asks us to put our trust in the market and in corporations and to allow them to have unfettered freedom.

In England, Maggie Thatcher was an apostle of Neoliberalism. The results were clear: wealth was shifted from the bottom to the top. When she entered office one in ten Britons were listed as below the poverty line. When she finished one in four were in poverty and one in three children.

Ronald Reagan was another devotee of Neoliberalism. As Kevin Phillips, a Republican analysys [sic] and former aide to President Nixon reported in his book The Politics of Rich and Poor: in the 1980s the top 10 percent of American families increased their average family income by 16 percent, the top 5 percent by 23 percent, and the top one percent by 50 percent. The bottom 80 percent of families and workers all lost something and the lower they were on the scale, the more they lost. The bottom 10% lost 15% of their already meager incomes.

Neoliberalism lacks a sense of social justice. It is basically opposed to sharing. Therefore it is wildly opposed to taxes regardless of what taxes do for the common good. It particularly opposes taxes for the wealthy. The billionaire Warren Buffett pays 17%; his secretary pays 30%. It is the opposite of Jesus’ “Blessed are the poor;” it is “Blessed are the rich.”

Remember Aristotle said “Justice holds the city together.” and Thomas Aquinas said “Justice consists in sharing.”

Neoliberalism is basically opposed to justice. It naturally opposes government since government enforces sharing, e.g. in taxes and in curbing monopolies.

The current demonstrations in Madison are in effect protesting neoliberalism.

As is typical with leftist professors, especially those in disciplines far removed from empirical social reality, this message is absurdly ignorant of the facts. For example, during the evil neo-liberal Reagan Administration, the mean income of the poorest 20% of the population increased. It was $10,682 in constant 2009 dollars in 1980, and $11,681 in the same constant dollars in 1989. Of course, the income of the top earners increased faster. But does “social justice” mean that we should envy and want to hurt affluent people?

Poverty rates in the U.K. are misleading, since they are usually measured as the percentage of people below (say) 40% or 50% of the median income. That way if everybody gets equally better off, poverty fails to decline. And if most of society gets better off, and low income groups remain equally well-off, poverty “increases” (notwithstanding that the poor are no worse off).

So this kind of data is perfect for people who want to play games with statistics.

Neo-liberalism

Of course, neo-liberal policies have been all the rage in recent years, and not just in the capitalist USA. European socialist countries have slashed top tax rates, and privatized nationalized industries. And they have done that not because greed has triumphed, but because socialist policies don’t work.

The opposite of neo-liberalism, in fact, is not compassion or social justice, it’s statism.

Indoctrination

All professors, us included, have their biases, and students can usually figure out what they are. But the majority allow views on both sides to be presented, and don’t push one side of contemporary political conflict.

We, for example, have not said a single word to our classes either in support of or opposition to the union protests in Madison.

But this professor tells students that this e-mail “fits into the exam question on the triangle of justice.” Students, apparently, are supposed to write about the evil of greedy neo-liberalism and how social justice demands that they side with union demands.

It would require a very gutsy student to take a different view in this class.

Professor Berates, Attacks Students Who Question Global Warming Policies

From CampusReform.org:

A video about Prof. Bradley Schaefer, an astronomy professor at Louisiana State University who made students seat themselves according to their views on policy toward “global warming.”

Here is the seating chart.

He then began to attack and berate students who failed to endorse liberal policies on the issue.

“You will not want your children, if they live, why you’re sitting on that corner, that you’re part of the the trouble, right?” he says. Then he tells another student, “Too little, too late. Blood will be on your hands.”

Schaefer’s department chair conceded “I will confess that while this film was heavily edited, it looks pretty embarrassing. I think it’s probably fair to say he was not sufficiently sensitive.”

We’ve written Prof. Schaefer asking for comment, and will report his reply.



[Update]

A commenter on the web page we linked to claimed that Schaefer is the victim of selective editing. Specifically:

The truth of the matter is that this was an intellectual exercise. The professor did seperate [sic] the class by their self reported political beliefs, but then he attacked the views of both sides. The folks who run this site left that part out though because it doesn’t fit the story they are trying to spin.

And further, quoting Schaefer:

“You want to get rid of the internal combustion engine,” he said mockingly to self-identified liberals. “How many people are going to die with that? How are you going to feed the people in the cities?”

The problem with this argument is that all the “middle” positions he did not attack were in fact liberal positions.

See the seating chart below (and you can click on the graphic and see it full size).


So the exercise was a bit like putting Communists on one side of the room, and Republicans on the other, and “even-handedly” attacking both, leaving the liberals unmolested.

CampusReform.org has posted the full, unedited video. If anything, it’s worse that the edited version they originally posted.

[Further Update]

Another version of the video shows Schaefer suggesting that India and Pakistan, both of which have nuclear weapons, might use them to attack the U.S. because of our failure to adopt the policies he favors.

Obama is Not Hard to Understand

James Taranto, in the Wall Street Journal, mentions a couple of professors who have provided a laudatory analysis of Barack Obama.

Barack Obama is a pragmatist, James Kloppenberg tells the New York Times. No, he doesn’t mean Obama is practical-minded; no one thinks that anymore. In fact, Kloppenberg, a Harvard historian, disparages the “vulgar pragmatism” of Bill Clinton while praising Obama’s “philosophical pragmatism.”

Of course, another professor climes in with an equally laudatory comment:

Those who heard Mr. Kloppenberg present his argument at a conference on intellectual history at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center responded with prolonged applause. “The way he traced Obama’s intellectual influences was fascinating for us, given that Obama’s academic background seems so similar to ours,” said Andrew Hartman, a historian at Illinois State University who helped organize the conference.

Taranto is unimpressed that professors like Obama.

One assumes that Andrew Hartman is a serious scholar, although one doesn’t know for sure because one has never heard of him. Barack Obama, by contrast, is a scholarly dilettante, a professional politician who has moonlighted as a university instructor.

Yet Hartman’s remark about Obama’s “academic background” is revealing. Professors imagine Obama is one of them because he shares their attitudes: their politically correct opinions, their condescending view of ordinary Americans, their belief in their own authority as an intellectual elite. He is the ideal product of the homogeneous world of contemporary academia. In his importance, they see a reflection of their self-importance.

Kloppenberg’s thesis reminds us of another elaborate attempt at explaining Obama: Dinesh D’Souza’s “The Roots of Obama’s Rage.” D’Souza, like Kloppenberg, imputes to Obama a coherent philosophy, in D’Souza’s case “anticolonialism.” It is a needlessly elaborate explanation for an unremarkable set of facts.

Occam’s razor suggests that Obama is a mere conformist — someone who absorbed every left-wing platitude he encountered in college and never seems to have seriously questioned any of them. Kloppenberg characterizes Obama as a skeptic, not a true believer. We’re not sure he has an active enough mind to be either one.

Hate America Sociology Exam

Happily, this was not at Marquette, but it probably could have been.

An example from “an introductory sociology class found lying in a room at a public college in the east.” Obviously, the identification has to be vague, due to the likelihood of retaliation. The provenance is clear, however.

Question: How does the United States “steal” the resources of other (third world) countries?

Answer: We steal through exploitation. Our multinationals are aware that indigenous people in developing nations have been coaxed off their plots and forced into slums. Because it is lucrative, our multinationals offer them extremely low wage labor that cannot be turned down.

Question: Why is the U.S. on shaky moral ground when it comes to preventing illegal immigration?

Answer: Some say that it is wrong of the United States to prevent illegal immigration because the same people we are denying entry to, we have exploited for the purpose of keeping the American wheel spinning.

Question: Why is it necessary to examine the theory of cumulative advantage when it comes to affirmative action?

Answer: Because it is unfair to discredit the many members of minority groups that have been offered more life chances through the program.

Question: What is the interactionist approach to gender?

Answer: The majority of multi-gender encounters are male-dominated. for example, while involved in conversation, the male is much more likely to interrupt. Most likely because the male believes the female’s expressed thoughts are inferior to his own.

Question: Please briefly explain the matrix of domination.

Answer: the belief that domination has more than one dimension. For example, Males are dominant over females, whites over blacks, and affluent over impoverished.

The exam received a grade of 100%.

Feminist Professors Don’t Get the Facts Straight

From the woman the feminists love to hate, Christina Hoff Sommers, an article that begins with an e-mail she sent to Berkeley feminist professor Nancy K.D. Lemon pointing out factual errors in her (unfortunately) widely used textbook:

Lemon’s Domestic Violence Law is organized as a conventional law-school casebook — a collection of judicial opinions, statutes, and articles selected, edited, and commented upon by the author. The first selection, written by Cheryl Ward Smith (no institutional affiliation is given), offers students a historical perspective on domestic-violence law. According to Ward:

The history of women’s abuse began over 2,700 years ago in the year 753 BC. It was during the reign of Romulus of Rome that wife abuse was accepted and condoned under the Laws of Chastisement. ... The laws permitted a man to beat his wife with a rod or switch so long as its circumference was no greater than the girth of the base of the man’s right thumb. The law became commonly know as ‘The Rule of Thumb.’ These laws established a tradition which was perpetuated in English Common Law in most of Europe.

Where to begin? How about with the fact that Romulus of Rome never existed. He is a figure in Roman mythology — the son of Mars, nursed by a wolf. Problem 2: The phrase “rule of thumb” did not originate with any law about wife beating, nor has anyone ever been able to locate any such law. It is now widely regarded as a myth, even among feminist professors.

A few pages later, in a selection by Joan Zorza, a domestic-violence expert, students read, “The March of Dimes found that women battered during pregnancy have more than twice the rate of miscarriages and give birth to more babies with more defects than women who may suffer from any immunizable illness or disease.” Not true. When I recently read Zorza’s assertion to Richard P. Leavitt, director of science information at the March of Dimes, he replied, “That is a total error on the part of the author. There was no such study.” The myth started in the early 1990s, he explained, and resurfaces every few years.

Zorza also informs readers that “between 20 and 35 percent of women seeking medical care in emergency rooms in America are there because of domestic violence.” Studies by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Bureau of Justice Statistics, an agency of the U.S. Department of Justice, indicate that the figure is closer to 1 percent.

Feminist misinformation is pervasive. In their eye-opening book, Professing Feminism: Education and Indoctrination in Women’s Studies (Lexington Books, 2003), the professors Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge describe the “sea of propaganda” that overwhelms the contemporary feminist classroom. The formidable Christine Rosen (formerly Stolba), in her 2002 report on the five leading women’s-studies textbooks, found them rife with falsehoods, half-truths, and “deliberately misleading sisterly sophistries.”

Consider The Penguin Atlas of Women in the World (2008), by the feminist scholar Joni Seager, chair of the Hunter College geography department. Now in its fourth edition, Seager’s atlas was named “reference book of the year” by the American Library Association when it was published. “Nobody should be without this book,” says the feminist icon Gloria Steinem. “A wealth of fascinating information,” enthuses The Washington Post. Fascinating, maybe. But the information is misleading and, at least in one instance, flat-out false.

One color-coded map illustrates how women are kept “in their place” by restrictions on their mobility, dress, and behavior. Somehow the United States comes out looking as bad in this respect as Somalia, Uganda, Yemen, Niger, and Libya. All are coded with the same shade of green to indicate places where “patriarchal assumptions” operate in “potent combination with fundamentalist religious interpretations.” Seager’s logic? She notes that in parts of Uganda, a man can claim an unmarried woman as his wife by raping her. The United States gets the same low rating on Seager’s charts because, she notes, “State legislators enacted 301 anti-abortion measures between 1995 and 2001.” Never mind that the Ugandan practice is barbaric, that U.S. abortion law is exceptionally liberal among the nations of the world, and that the activism and controversy surrounding the issue of abortion in the United States is a sign of a vigorous free democracy working out its disagreements.

On another map, the United States gets the same rating for domestic violence as Uganda and Haiti. Seager backs up that verdict with that erroneous and ubiquitous emergency-room factoid: “22 percent-35 percent of women who visit a hospital emergency room do so because of domestic violence.”

The critical work of 21st-century feminism will be to help women in the developing world, especially in Muslim societies, in their struggle for basic rights. False depictions of the United States as an oppressive “patriarchy” are a ludicrous distraction. If American women are as oppressed as Ugandan women, then American feminists would be right to focus on their domestic travails and let the Ugandan women fend for themselves.

All books have mistakes, so why pick on the feminists? My complaint with feminist research is not so much that the authors make mistakes; it is that the mistakes are impervious to reasoned criticism. They do not get corrected. The authors are passionately committed to the proposition that American women are oppressed and under siege. The scholars seize and hold on for dear life to any piece of data that appears to corroborate their dire worldview. At the same time, any critic who attempts to correct the false assumptions is dismissed as a backlasher and an anti-feminist crank.

Bottom line: feminist professors are to be treated with extreme skepticism, the skepticism that should always prevail when people start with a conclusion (women as an oppressed class) and then try to find statistics to support it.