Here are a half dozen myths that circulate in higher education as well as in primary schools that only seem to get healthier with the retelling no matter how much the factual record stacks up against them:
The military is on the march through America’s high schools. You can find
the Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps (JROTC) program in about 8 percent of American high schools, according to information provided by the U. S. Senate Armed Services Committee. The way that teacher union activists carp on this one, you would think that the junior-junior cadets were on the move in 92 percent of American high schools.
Sex education is really educational. In the land of Lincoln, it can be downright explicit. “With students rallying outside and parents debating within, a Suburban Chicago school board decided to remove a teacher whose sex-ed class was a little too spicy for some members of the community to stomach,” Emil Steiner reported on the WashingtonPost.com on March 14. “It all began last week, when Scott Groff, a second-year health instructor at Wolcott School in Thornton, Illinois, gave his 8th-graders “sexually explicit” question and answer sheets downloaded from a British charity that fights HIV and AIDS.”
“These salacious study aides included information about how to masturbate, find the g-spot and perform oral sex, along with vivid descriptions and helpful tips which students then read aloud.”
America’s economy could not survive without immigrants. “The consensus
among labor economists is that from the influx of immigrants [to the United States] since the 1960s there has been no benefit to the native-born,” Peter Brimelow, author of Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster, said at the National Press Club on March 20.
The veteran journalist had another pearl of wisdom. “In academic life, one school of thought does not replace another,” Brimelow explained. “What happens is that the old guys die off.”
Here’s a surprise. “Right now, nearly 40 percent of all students enrolled in
degree-granting institutions are 25 years or older,” according to Lori Mitchell of UCEAdirectory.org. Let’s hope that they learned something before they got there.
Despite the widespread belief that conservative critics of academia are anti-intellectual, a look at the output of most universities might lead you to the opposite conclusion. We’ve had several nationwide surveys showing the appalling historical literacy of many college graduates but now we have a school-specific one.
“The types of questions to which one would learn the answers on an ‘E True Hollywood Story’ did not fool students at this ‘elite’ university,” Dominic Rupprecht of Bucknell writes in the February issue of The Counterweight. “Instead, questions about America’s founding, the Civil War, and Lyndon Johnson left students scratching their heads.
“While 100 percent of individuals in the survey correctly identified Beavis and Butthead, a mere nine percent believed the correct answer was Thomas Jefferson.” Rupprecht is editor-at-large of The Counterweight, which is published by the Bucknell University Conservative Club.
Then there’s the myth of faculty diversity on American college campuses. Studies show that Democrats outnumber Republicans in most departments by ratios of at least two-to-one. For example, a survey in the March/April issue of Foreign Policy shows that 70 percent of International Relations professors classify themselves as liberal compared to 13 percent who accept the label conservative.
Additionally, Accuracy in Academia has been keeping tabs on the roster of retired Democratic politicians going back to school in comparison to their Republican opposites. We learned recently that:
• Former U. S. Representative Eric D. Fingerhut, D-Ohio, was named chancellor of the Ohio state university system, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. In Fingerhut’s last job, he was the director of economic development education and entrepreneurship at Baldwin-Wallace College in Berea, the Chronicle reveals.
• Former Clinton Administration official Jason Furman is now a visiting scholar at NYU’s Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, according to the Prosperity Caucus. Furman spoke to the Caucus on March 21.
Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.
