The latest outrage uncovered by FIRE almost reads like a parody.
Students living in the university’s eight housing complexes are required to attend training sessions, floor meetings, and one-on-one meetings with their Resident Assistants (RAs). The RAs who facilitate these meetings have received their own intensive training from the university, including a “diversity facilitation training” session at which RAs were taught, among other things, that “[a] racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality.”
The university suggests that at one-on-one sessions with students, RAs should ask intrusive personal questions such as “When did you discover your sexual identity?” Students who express discomfort with this type of questioning often meet with disapproval from their RAs, who write reports on these one-on-one sessions and deliver these reports to their superiors. One student identified in a write-up as an RA’s “worst” one-on-one session was a young woman who stated that she was tired of having “diversity shoved down her throat.”
According to the program’s materials, the goal of the residence life education program is for students in the university’s residence halls to achieve certain “competencies” that the university has decreed its students must develop in order to achieve the overall educational goal of “citizenship.” These competencies include: “Students will recognize that systemic oppression exists in our society,” “Students will recognize the benefits of dismantling systems of oppression,” and “Students will be able to utilize their knowledge of sustainability to change their daily habits and consumer mentality.”
In the Office of Residence Life’s internal materials, these programs are described using the harrowing language of ideological reeducation. In documents relating to the assessment of student learning, for example, the residence hall lesson plans are referred to as “treatments.”
Tuesday morning the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (full disclosure: they’re my favorite higher ed nonprofit), help a conference at the National Press Club to release the results of their latest survey of civic literacy and higher education. The title was appropriately blunt, “Failing our Students, Failing America: Holding Colleges Accountable for Teaching America’s History and Institutions.” The basis was a survey ISI commissioned from the University of Connecticut’s Dept. of Public Policy. It was given to over 14,000 college freshmen and seniors, and assessed their knowledge of American history and government, America and the world and the market economy. The basis of analysis was simple: compare the scores of the freshmen at a school to those of the seniors in order to see how four years of undergraduate education has improved their civic knowledge.
You can take the survey yourself here. The questions are hardly esoteric.
The results were grim. No school could claim even a “C” average for its seniors. Harvard, whose senior class performed the best, scraped a “D+.” Even worse, college, on average, hinders the acquisition of civic knowledge , and the most expensive and prestigious schools often decreased their students’ understanding of basic American civics. Of the 50 schools surveyed, the bottom five included Princeton, Duke, Yale, and Cornell, all of which saw seniors post lower scores than their freshmen did. Harvard was the best of the Ivy League, boosting scores from 63.6% to 69.6%.
The top five schools were Eastern Conn. State U (with a gain of 9.7% in scores), Marian College (+9.4%), Murray State U. (+9.1%), Concordia U. (+9%), and St. Cloud State U. (+8.6%). To be sure, the more prestigious schools generally had higher scores from both freshman and seniors. But the evidence is clear that, for example, Yale students outperformed their Pfeiffer U. counterparts because of excellence before college. Yale attendees lost basic civic knowledge (-3.1%), while Pfeiffer U. students gained (+8.25%). What’s the point of the best high school kids in the nation going to Yale when it will take them from a “C-” to a “D” over four years? Pfeiffer might be getting third-rate students, but at least they’re learning.
This study controlled for different course concentrations not by asking about majors, but by asking students how many courses they had taken in civics (American history, economics, and the like). This allowed the researchers to see how scores improved (or didn’t) as a result of civics courses. Once again, Yale, Duke, Princeton, and Cornell took 4 of the 5 lowest spots. Students at Cornell fared the worst, with the average student losing 1.8% on the test for each civics course taken. Concordia U. was the best, with students gaining 3.72% for each civics course.
As dramatic as some of these results are (go to Yale, lose knowledge!), the problem isn’t just in those schools where seniors scored lower than the freshman. College is supposed to draw the best and brightest for further instruction, and schools love to proclaim that they are producing better citizens. But for many schools, the rate of knowledge acquisition in the undergraduate years was slower than it had been previously. At U. Penn., students were barely nudged, from a 62.7% to a 63.5%. Random guessing would score 20% on the multiple choice test. So we can assume that 1st through 12th grades increased student scores by at least 42.7%. Four more years of education at U. Penn. added only another .8%, even though the “D” average of incoming freshman left plenty of room for upward movement.
Americans spend billions on higher education. Parents save to pay for their children, state and federal governments spend oodles on universities, Americans owe tens of billions of dollars in student loans, and donors give billions in charitable donations to schools. But this doesn’t produce even a minimally informed citizenry. In fact, the study found that the more tuition cost, the less student scores improved. Clearly, there needs to be accountability, and it is to be hoped that ISI’s study will help provide that. The results have been released to the schools as well as the media, in the hope that interested parties will take action.
At the conference I asked whether part of the problem might not be that the consumers of higher education don’t want civic literacy so much as advanced career prospects. Most students, in my view, go to college so they may earn more money later, not because they are interested in the life of the mind. Many view universities as nothing more than glorified job training firms. Those presenting the report agreed that this was indeed part of the problem (the very idea of “consumers” of education was cited as harmful to the traditional mission of the university), but insisted that those responsible for higher education must stand firm and insist that they have a mission to produce knowledgeable citizens as well as qualified employees.
Contemplating the story I mentioned Monday, I think there’s more of significance than the relative academic merits of a Baptist college’s homemaker curriculum and a secular university’s women’s studies program. The sad reality is that the homemaker curriculum, by including a classic liberal education with vacuuming tips (or whatever), is better than anything available at most American institutions of higher education. In short, it’s not just the feminists’ fault (though the comparison is delicious).
Higher education has been commandeered by two forces, neither of which is conservative. The first is the political and social radicalism we on the Right have been criticizing since God and Man at Yale (before that, really, but Buckley’s book serves as a useful milestone). The second is a consumerist, materialistic, market-driven society, and here the Right has been too hesitant in its condemnation. Sure, plenty of commentators have denounced declining intellectual standards, but not enough have made the connection to the market.
I don’t mean to get into a discussion of conservatism and capitalism now—that would take far too long. It is sufficient here to say that however much we defend free enterprise we must recognize it as only part of a healthy society. And higher education, properly understood, should be kept away from the market, along with other portions of human life, such as religion and family.
Unfortunately, as college became seen as a sure ticket to white-collar prosperity it has become a feeder for the job market. Employers use it as a screening device and majors like exercise and sports science, communications, business management, interior design, journalism, and marketing come to dominate. These are trades, not academic disciplines.
The traditional humanities have been ravaged by political correctness and deconstructionism or pushed out as irrelevant—hence the lack of classics programs at most state schools. Knowing Latin and having a thorough understanding of Plato’s Republic may be an impressive, but it doesn’t provide many marketable skills. And most people go to college so they can get a middle-class job after graduation, not because they are intellectually curious.
Ironically, the great push for egalitarian education in service of market meritocracy has not elevated the masses, but pulled down education. It was complained that everyone should have access to a good education, not just scholars and the moneyed leisure class. That is, only those able to be unconcerned with the market could get a good education. We may be coming full circle, as once again those outside the market, in this case housewives, are the ones getting a good education.
The Reuters storyline seemed so simple: a Baptist seminary in Texas has created a new women-only concentration in homemaking. Just another example of those crazy fundamentalists and their insistence that women be kept barefoot and pregnant, only leaving the kitchen to bring their male overlords supper. I'll admit to cringing a bit at first, mostly because a revitalized home economics major seemed a perversion of the academic ideal: housekeeping shouldn't be the business of higher education.
But then I got to the description of the program and saw this:
It's a ... four-year program. Two years of classical Latin, two years of classical Greek. It requires them to read almost all of the great books of the Western world.
I did my undergraduate work at Oregon State University, a state school with close to 20,000 students, and it was impossible to get such an education there. Latin and Greek weren't offered. Reading the great books of Western civilization was generally discouraged. Even if the teaching at this Baptist seminary is fourth-rate (and it is probably better than that), these poor, oppressed homemakers being groomed to serve the patriarchy will be far more erudite and intellectually informed than any graduate of a women's studies program.
The benighted Baptists are teaching their future housewives the classic intellectual languages and having them read the great literature, and philosophy of our culture. The progressive feminists are teaching their future liberated, independent women to vapidly mouth liberal platitudes and having them read jargon-cluttered banalities.
I think this piece on how Arizona's Prop. 300 is keeping illegal immigrant scofflaws from taking advantage of taxpayer-funded social services (like in-state tuition) was meant to make me feel sorry for the criminals. Instead, I just felt warm fuzzies. This is saving taxpayers millions of dollars, and hopefully will induce those here illegally to leave, and others to not come here illegally.
Quoth the lead:
Nearly 5,000 people in Arizona have been denied in-state college tuition, financial aid and adult education classes this year under a new state law banning undocumented immigrants from receiving those state-funded services.
It then provides a breakdown of the numbers and moves into the supposedly tear-jerking personal anecdotes.
Isela Meraz, a Phoenix College student, has been priced out of taking all the classes she wanted. Prices per class shot up to about $600, she said, up from the $250 she was paying pre-Proposition 300. This semester, she will take just one class instead of the four she had planned on.
"I want to learn so many things . . . and become something, and this just puts a limit on me," said Meraz, of west Phoenix. "Our parents have worked this country. And it's incredible to me that people approved this. I just don't understand."
If I may help this lady understand: You and your family broke into this country illegally. You have been taking advantage of programs meant to help Americans. And now you are complaining because the benefits you have de facto stolen by breaking into America are coming to an end. You say of you and your fellow "undocumented immigrants" that "our parents have worked this country." You're right. They have worked America. They've worked it over. They have filled our emergency rooms with people who don't pay for their health care. They have increased the number of unlicensed and uninsured drivers on our roads. They have filled our taxpayer-funded schools with their children, dragging down the quality of education for American children. They have raised our illegitimacy rates. They have committed a disproportionate number of crimes (beginning with the crime of illegally being in our nation) and burdened our police, courts and prisons. They have turned neighborhoods into slums. They have aided drug traffickers. They have increased gangs. They have eroded the cultural cohesion of America. And then they (which is to say, you and yours) have the temerity to demand that you not be punished for your crimes against America, to demand that you continue to receive services meant for Americans and and America's invited guests, and to demand that those services increase.
That is why people approved this. It isn't enough, but it's a start.
Over the past several months, I have had the distinct pleasure of attending several Left-of-Left student events around the country. And as for these Liberals, I have gained serious respect for their movement. I have no respect for their very Clintonesque ideology, but there seems to be a looming power in their numbers. The current generation's radical form of liberalism will be a formidable political force in the near future.
Throughout a calendar year, thousands of students flock to various campuses across America to see how to better enact change for the advancement of radical communism, socialism, and liberalism on individual campuses. Sure these students may be eating out of dumpsters, backpacking across the country, and resting wherever they may fall, but the leaders of the left are serious about changing America for better or worse.
Cracking down on capitalism, opening the borders of the world, and allowing the government to care for those in need all seem to be popular topics for discussion. But, one strand of thought I found among these liberals was the urge for armed struggle to overthrow the government of the United States of America, replace it with an overarching Utopia of government dependence so the individual lives with no consequence or responsibility except to the community. These ideas are frightening, but they are real.
These militantly liberal students have not been taking the advice of the teacher, Karl Marx. He thought these changes can be enacted inside a current political system. In 1848, Marx also laid out his 10 planks of Communism:
1. Abolition of private property and the application of all rent to public purpose.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralization of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralization of the means of communication and transportation in the hands of the State.
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State, the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
8. Equal liability of all to labor. Establishment of Industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the population over the country.
10. Free education for all children in government schools. Abolition of children's factory labor in its present form.
How many of these ideas are currently enacted in some way, shape, or form in the "Land of the Free, and the Home of the Brave?" Actually all 10 are currently at work, today, in the United States of America. Limited government should no longer be a slogan, but yet a platform with a plan.
A week or so back, former Governor Romney said, "Hillary Clinton just gave a speech the other day about her view on the economy. She said we have been an on-your-own society. She said it's time to get rid of that and replace that with shared responsibility and we're-in-it-together society...That's out with Adam Smith and in with Karl Marx."
The students who were once leaders in the local chapter of Students for a Democratic Society and other left-winged groups are now University administration and faculty. In 2007-2008, Conservative students should be challenging these professors who want to end social, individual, and economic liberty.
When the Berlin Wall came crashing down, Communism did not fall with it, but yet, internationally, it only stumbled. I agree with the Governor. Along with the uphill battle of liberal indoctrination, those who sugar cote the community message as a power grab, and the subtle movements of a transient American bell curve, this socialist agenda is closer than we may want to believe. It is time we open our eyes to see the pending danger of Big Brother's government before it is too late.
David Ferguson serves as President of the American Conservative Student Union. He can be reached at President@ConservativeStudent.org.
So Ward Churchill, the infamous agitator and academic fraud, has been axed for his many violations of academic standards. But as you can see from the comments, he isn't without his defenders. The most common defense seems to be that he was only caught because his political views drew scrutiny to his academic work, and therefore should be let off. Apparently academic misconduct shouldn't be punished if the misdeeds are discovered because the culprit is a noxious political radical who likes attention. Of course, as is noted, Churchill's hiring and promotion were also political. He gained his position not on academic merit but on his political and social radicalism. Liberal academics have no just cause to complain about the reach of politics into the academy, because they're the ones who politicized it.
Did they really expect that they could transform academia into a cauldron of radical political and social liberalism without any repercussions from those paying their wages (parents and taxpayers)? Such naiveté is born from a remarkable degree of arrogance and self-delusion. Even when they, say, mock Christianity it a health class or rail against the President in an English course, they are convinced that they are scholars deserving the protections of "academic freedom."
But live by the politicized academy, die by the politicized academy. This isn't about professors writing op-eds in their spare time, it's about an academic climate that is extremely liberal--about politics injected into the classroom, the faculty senate, the hiring process, etc... It's about academics who view it as their job to ferment political and social upheaval.
Churchill's academic career existed because he was a political agitator and ethnic grievance-monger. Tenure was not created to protect such. And so long as the academy tries to have it both ways by being political but eschewing the consequences, I hope for many more firings.
Winston Churchill has been dropped from the list of required figures of study in Britain's history curriculum. Now, I'm not much for national government ministries setting the syllabus, but if Britain is going to have such, it had better ensure that it includes the man who saved Britain (and the world) from Hitler.
But Churchill wasn't very politically correct. He was a Zionist, an imperialist, a patriot, a firm believer in military might, a smoker, etc... Thus, he must go. Quietly, of course, since Britain's civil service lords and masters don't want the rabble to know what's afoot. We should hope that this provokes a backlash, and Winston is reinstated, but the destruction of Britain will continue under the reformed socialists of the Labor party. And even during his life, the British people tended to dump Winston as soon as he had saved their skins.
And do not suppose that this is the end. This is only the beginning of the reckoning.This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year unless by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigor, we arise again and take our stand for freedom as in the olden time.
Conservatives have long been irked by John Stuart Mill's description of them--Russell Kirk opened his seminal book The Conservative Mind with Mill's comment. Much of the modern conservative movement has been dedicated to debunking that slur by demonstrating that conservatives can go synapse to synapse with liberals and win (see Buckley, Jr., William F.).
There have been pressures against this, of course. As the movement allied with Republican politics, the populist portion grew, often beneficially (the relation between conservative elitism and conservative populism is far to complicated to explain here, suffice it to say that my opinion is that the latter is not an oxymoron, a point Edmund Burke would have agreed with, I think).
Recently, I commented on a Washington Times blog item bemoaning the dearth of intellectual young conservatives by observing that things weren’t quite so bleak at that. A columnist at the--apparently ironically named--American Thinker site also commented on the item, to the effect that it's just wonderful that young conservatives haven't any intellectual patrimony.
That is the reason for young people. Not knowing any better they rashly enter upon careers and marriages, start churches, magazines, think tanks, and foment revolution.
...
Fifty years ago, twenty-something Bill Buckley rashly started National Review. In 1973 Paul Weyrich became founding president the Heritage Foundation at the tender age of 30. Phyllis Schlafly was once a young activist and conservative ghost writer. That's how today's conservative movement first got traction: from reckless youngsters that didn't know their place.
The emerging conservative movement of the twenty-first century is probably forming around us right now. Reckless twenty-somethings are thinking reckless thoughts and planning reckless deeds. Soon enough we'll know all about them.
Luke Sheahan has already responded in an eloquent essay (besides making a good argument, he also says something nice about me, making it especially worth reading). Luke points out that those young conservatives most likely to succeed in bold ventures (or even to attempt them) are those who rest on the past. On average, clueless young conservatives end up phone banking and making coffee for Republicans, intellectual young conservatives end up in positions of some influence. Furthermore, if the "Conservatism of the Future faces different challenges. It will probably be a lot less about economics and a lot more about religion and social breakdown," then a study of the past becomes especially important. Economics is simple compared to the fundamental questions of religion and family.
"Reckless thoughts" and "reckless deeds" by ignorant barbarians who joined the College Republicans out of a fondness for firearms and antipathy toward taxes aren't going to help conservatism because those are not conservative. Good God, how is it possible to be a conservative without knowledge of what is worth conserving? Such won't even make counterrevolutionaries because they don't know that modernity was a revolution.
Mr. Chantrill's proposal is profoundly un-conservative. Conservatism seeks to preserve and impart the wisdom of the past, which is found in tradition and taboo, as well as the great works of history, philosophy, theology, art, literature, poetry, music, etc... Modernity has sought to lay waste to all of these, should conservatives abandon them to the depredations of the deconstructionists of art and society? Should we trade our patrimony for a potage of "reckless thoughts" and "reckless deeds"? In short, should we cease to be conservative?
I shall not, even if I may only bury the fingernail of a saint in a flowerpot to preserve some token of light and truth for posterity. And part of that shall be to remind others of the great man who wrote such words before me.
Over at the Washington Times' Fishwrap, Robert Stacy McCain has some gloomy words on the intellectual state of young conservatives. He relates a snippet of a conversation he had with a friend of mine last night:
Thursday evening at Fado, I found myself talking to Luke Sheahan of FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) and mentioned Mr. Keene's point.
Are young conservatives really so lacking in "philosophical underpinnings"? Mr. Sheahan answered by telling about meeting with conservative students at one campus who wanted to form a club. Mr. Sheahan said he suggested calling the club the Friedrich Hayek Society or the Milton Friedman Society.
The reaction? Blank stares. "They had no idea who they were," Mr. Sheahan said.
I was also there last night, but I missed this exchange, so I'm not sure what surrounded it. Still, while I agree that many young conservatives are woefully ignorant of their intellectual forebears, I would like to inject an uncharacteristic note of hope. This gathering was, after all, organized by ISI, which has done more than anyone else to spread conservative intellectual theory on campuses. And Luke Sheahan is a great example of its effectiveness. He's 23, has been out of college for a year, and is passionate about conservative philosophy, as well as an able activist. ISI did a lot to help nurture his gifts; it gave him free books by conservative intellectuals, invited him to seminars and conferences to discuss philosophy and politics, helped fund the conservative newspaper he oversaw in college, etc. So yes, there is a great need for young conservatives to engage with serious thinkers, but the movement is not devoid of those who do.
Not long after sending in my review of Cry Havoc!, I meandered over to City Journal again, where there is an article about a "radical math" conference focusing on using math to propagandize against the free market and Western civilization.
over 400 high school math teachers and education professors gathered in Brooklyn for a three-day conference, titled “Creating Balance in an Unjust World: Math Education and Social Justice.” Prominently displayed on the official program’s first page was a passage from Paulo Freire, the Brazilian Marxist educator and icon of the teaching-for-social-justice movement.
Cry Havoc! focuses on the radical critical theory of the Frankfurt School and not the classic economic Marxism of this conference, but the two go hand in hand. As de Toledano notes, "from the start, the Frankfurt School had preached that revolutions of the past had failed because those who made them still clung to an 'authoritarianism bred by the patriarchal family.'" Marx himself called for the destruction of the family in the Communist Manifesto. Even Plato in The Republic recognized that family and private property go together, and eliminated them from the lives of his Guardians.
Thanks to the legacy of John Dewey, the Frankfurt School and their allies, the educational establishment remains the last great redoubt of Marxism (neo and otherwise) in America.
You should be reading Little Green Footballs on a daily basis; it's one of the most important anti-jihad blogs around. A few months ago LGF had a video of radical Muslim students disrupting a speech by Daniel Pipes. As I wrote at the time,
The savages chant "anti-Israel, anti-occupation" and "Allah akbar" while marching out. Lest there by any mistaking their genocidal hopes, at the end one of the leaders gives a pep talk in which he looks eagerly to the day when "the state of Israel will be wiped off the face of the earth." This is greeted with rousing shouts of "Allah akbar!" This fellow continues by telling the crowd that their weapon in jihad is their tongues and speaking out, and that's the best they can do right now. Other Muslims around the world are struggling in their own ways, may Allah give them strength. Etc...
Today LGF reports on new Islamic outrages at UC-Irvine. Muslim students are bringing in Ward Churchill and a notorious Holocaust denier in what LGF calls a "perverted 'Holocaust Memorial Week.'"
After the Islamic supremacists finish denying Hitler's holocaust, they're going to start planning a new one.
The left-wing insanity of America's higher education establishment is on full display right now.
First, a tenured professor is about to be fired for e-mailing his colleagues George Washington's Thanksgiving address. The professor, it seems, is conservative, or at least not holding to the liberal line on immigration, diversity, etc... Sending this e-mail was a tweak of liberal faculty, but hardly harassment, and certainly not a firing offense. The faculty who complained, and the administrators who are trying to fire the professor, are remarkable for their cowardice (something this trivial offended them?!?), viciousness (they tried to fire the guy when they thought they could get away with it) and stupidity (they though no one would notice or complain when they tried to wreck a career over a ridiculously petty pretext).
Meanwhile, Muslims have been busily bullying their way to a state-supplied mosque at George Mason University. They took over the non-specific prayer and meditation room supplied by the university (imposing rules like a ban on shoes and segregation of the sexes), and are lobbying for their own space, in a primo campus location, of course.
Finally, a new survey shows that a majority of faculty at American colleges and universities don't like evangelical Christians.
Duke has a class on rap appreciation. If they were commenting, I’m sure Mark Steyn would compose some clever wordplay tying in the false rape rap the lacrosse players got charged with and Michelle Malkin would start quoting rap lyrics and slang, but I’m too bored to make the effort; reports on ridiculous college classes are Joe Biden’s speeches, after a while one gets too bored to even make fun of them.
Still, how do classes like Rap 101 come about? They actually have a long and somewhat honorable history. To illustrate, as a grad student this fall, in addition to standards like Latin and Political Theory 1, I’ll be taking a seminar on politics and the moral imagination. When I was an undergrad, I took some excellent honors colloquiums like The Manhattan Project: The Making of the Atomic Bomb and C.S. Lewis: God, Pain, and the Problem of Evil (my favorite undergrad course).
These sorts of seminar courses have been around for quite some time, and when done right, are good for students and professors. The problem is that the more there are, the worse they get. Ideally they provide an interesting supplement to the core curriculum, and also allow professors to teach on areas they have a special interest in. But as they expand and elective options are increasingly open, they push out the core. Students are sometimes able to avoid any of the basic knowledge in fields and instead fill their schedule with offbeat and quirky specialties.
And thanks to the degradation of education (for more on this, see my forthcoming review of Cry Havoc!) administrators are finding it increasingly hard to say no when worthless classes are proposed. College is now about credentialing for the job market, so why should it matter if students are writing papers about Sex and the City instead of Dostoyevsky? More to the point, why does it matter that students are writing rap lyrics instead of sonnets? So long as they can hand in semi-literate papers or rhyme something, they’re good enough.
Another part of the problem is that students aren’t expected to study and learn outside of class. Formerly, students were expected to find intellectual interests apart from classes, and study and discuss them among themselves and professors, all in an unofficial capacity. This still happens, but it is much rarer than it used to be.
Academics don’t sit down and decide to hold the most ridiculous classes possible, they just can’t say no, at least to a class on minority culture. Besides, who’s to say that 50 Cent isn’t the equal of Bach, you judgmental, ethnocentric reactionary?
Yale is slowly climbing down from its ridiculous ban on all realistic stage weapons in plays, Inside Higher Ed reports. "Weapons will be permitted on a case-by-case basis with the approval of the dean of students’ office. When a gun, sword or dagger is used on stage, the audience will be notified in advance." One might think this rather harms the drama, but ah well, such is the price to be paid for...something. To quote from Blackadder, "Look behind you, Mr. Caesar!"
There is some good news to be had, as more schools are climbing onto the family-friendly bandwagon for grad students and young faculty. To be sure, their proposals aren't perfect, but we should hope this trend continues.
MOSCOW (AP) - Boris Yeltsin, who engineered the final collapse of the Soviet Union and pushed Russia to embrace democracy and a market economy as the country's first post-Communist president, has died, a Kremlin official said Monday. He was 76.
Boris Yeltsin, then President of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR), is seen above in August of 1991 standing on a tank during a coup against Mikhail Gorbachev and the Russian parliament. He led the counter-resistance on the Russian White House to keep it from being destroyed by convincing KGB special forces and a tank unit to turn their guns around in a defensive position rather than in an offensive position pointing inward. The above image was seen in Russia as a sign of strength, but broadcast around the world as a sign of a new era in Russian politics.
Yeltsin became Russia's first democratically elected president after Gorbachev resigned as leader of the USSR in December of 1991. Much of Russian continued to decline in the 9 years he served as President. He served to champion a time of reform from Communism into a time of of capitalism and privatization. The drastic changes from the most planned economy in the world led to a depression throughout Russia. The radical reforms were not enacted without resistance.
He was re-elected in 1996 with 35% of the vote, and resigned on December 31, 1999, allowing Vladamir Putin, at the time Prime Minister, act as President until elections could be held. Only time will tell the future of politics in Russia. Although times were difficult for Yeltsin, he did his very best to enact reforms of freedom and democracy in a country ripped apart by Communism and Cold War politics.
David A. Ferguson serves as President of the American Conservative Student Union
Imagine my surprise, shock and jaw hitting the floor when I discovered that my Catholic school Boston College was actually going to invite a Catholic politician that actually upholds Catholic values - Senator Sam Brownback!
Tim Russert will be moderating a debate between Senator Brownback and Senator Dodd this Monday, April 20 at BC, to register click here.
If anything it is an indicator that all is not lost for my beloved alma mater, Boston College. I first had the privilege of hearing Senator Brownback speak three years ago at Harvard Law School on the issue of embryonic stem cell research.
As a conservative who grew up in a high risk environment, the People's Republic of Massachusetts, I have grown used to politicians who talk a good game and deliver nothing. I am excited that students, faculty and people in and around the Boston area will hear from a true Conservative and Catholic to boot!!!!
I won the silver in Keith Olbermann's "Worst Person in the World" contest Tuesday (being an honorable journalist, he of course massaged my words), and lefty blogs have been sending nasty comments my way for days.
All I have to say in response is: read this account by one of the survivors, an apparently able-bodied young man who did nothing but huddle under his desk and wait to die as the gunman methodically went around the room murdering his classmates. He reports this with no apparent shame, and seemingly has no idea that anything more could have and should have been done by him.
I’m sorry, but if we’re going to debate gun control, the police response, and the rest, a discussion of courage and manliness is hardly off-limits.
True, I've never had someone come into my classroom and start shooting. But I've never been married, and I'm pretty sure that doesn't disqualify me from saying that adultery and wife-beating are wrong, and criticizing those who commit adultery and beat their wives. If, in the future, I commit adultery or beat my wife, I would be guilty, condemned by the moral standard I am trying to follow, and should be ashamed. The same applies to courage and cowardice.
But this isn’t about me, or John Derbyshire, or Mark Steyn, or any of the others who have voiced these sentiments. It’s about the liberal need to find a conservative to hate at every opportunity. And since the murderer wasn’t conservative, the liberal “netroots” turns its ire toward those who think that less gun control might have lowered the body count, or that more courage and fighting back would have done that.
Conservatives believe that there is evil in this world, that it will intrude into our lives and that we should be ready and willing to fight against it. We also know that evil lurks in every human heart and that we will not always meet the moral standard we claim to believe in. On some points we will fail (mea culpa, mea maxima culpa), on some we shall succeed, and on some we will never be tested. But we will not abandon our belief in that standard, and will resist all attempts to pretend it doesn’t exist.
Courage is real and it is good; cowardice is real and it is bad. And that remains true, and I will believe it, even if I prove to be cowardly and not courageous when the time comes.
