Once again, university researchers have gone to great lengths, and expense, to learn something that less credentialed Americans have known for generations. “Researchers say that some anti-binge drinking public service announcements have an opposite effect,” Sara Schwartz reports in The Washington Examiner. “Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management says that public service ads intended to reduce binge drinking are actually leading to more of it.”

“The university performed a five-part study in which researchers showed anti-alcohol ads to 1,200 undergrads and interviewed them afterward.” They could have saved themselves the trouble.

Once again, we see the wisdom of first studying the masters, in this case,  W. C. Fields.

Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.

Students hankering for that first trip abroad who have been told ad nauseam that other countries hate America need to learn a more accurate and relevant lesson: Perhaps for the first time in American history, natives of other lands hate American currency.

“As for the dollar, I can bear personal testimony to the decline of the dollar’s prestige,” columnist Dennis Prager recently wrote. “I am writing this column in Morocco.”

“In Casablanca, my wife and I and another couple hired a Moroccan driver for the day. And when it came time to pay, the man refused to accept dollars; he wanted to be paid in either Euros or Moroccan dirhams.”

“Yes, dirhams rather than dollars.”

Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.

Creationism is often seen as a non-scientific theory in academia and among their liberal press counterparts, so it is not surprising that a recent Associated Press article takes aim at two homeschooling textbooks. But, for all the talk about home-schooled evangelicals and religious-themed textbooks, the reporter doesn’t let the audience into the true motivations of the academics he quotes.

“I feel fairly strongly about this. These books are promulgating lies to kids,” said Jerry Coyne, University of Chicago “ecology and evolution professor,” reports Dylan Lovan for the AP.

“[Jerry] Coyne and Virginia Tech biology professor Duncan Porter reviewed excerpts from the Apologia and Bob Jones biology textbooks, which are equivalent to ninth- and 10th-grade biology lessons,” he writes this March. “Porter said he would give the books an F.”

Actually, Professor Coyne runs his own blog, “Why Evolution Is True,” but Lovan doesn’t mention that. Instead, he writes that former chemistry professor Jay Wile ‘countered that Coyne ‘feels compelled to lie in order to prop up a failing hypothesis (evolution). We definitely do not lie to the students. We tell them the facts that people like Dr. Coyne would prefer to cover up.’”

“The common thread of many of the emails I’ve received is that evolution is not ‘proven’: that it’s not a fact but a theory,” states Professor Coyne in a March 10 blog entry. “I have tried to instruct one or two of these correspondents in what a scientific theory really is… But, as you might guess from the threads of the past few days, such instruction is futile.”

“I weep for the children who are home-schooled in creationist lies instead of science.” This is the type of unbiased professor to whom AP reporter Lovan apparently gravitates.

Lovan also doesn’t say in his article why Professor Porter gave the books an F; in fact, he doesn’t quote from the Virginia Tech professor at all. A look at his faculty page reveals that his areas of interest include “Charles Darwin’s botanical work.”

Prof. Porter also teaches “Charles Darwin: Myths and Reality,” with required reading from The Portable Darwin or Darwin Loves You.

The author of the latter Princeton University Press special, George Levine, “argues persuasively that an understanding of Darwinism can lead to a secular enchantment of the sort experienced by Darwin himself as he worked to make sense of the world around him…” states the Publishers Weekly description on Amazon.

However, Lovan does point out an interesting interchange: In the “History of Life” section of Bob Jones University’s Biology: Third Edition, Lovan quotes the text as saying “that a ‘Christian worldview … is the only correct view of reality; anyone who rejects it will not only fail to reach heaven but also fail to see the world as it truly is.’”

“When the AP asked about that passage, university spokesman Brian Scoles said the sentence made it into the book because of an editing error and will be removed from future editions,” he writes.

Bob Jones University declined to comment.

Bethany Stotts is a staff writer at Accuracy in Academia.

With their gift for seeing crises the rest of us cannot visualize, colleges and universities continue to believe in global warming, even while naysayers multiply outside of academia swayed merely by the lack of evidence for it. In this spirit of belief, the Bucknell University speaker series task force brought in Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

“Kennedy’s qualifications as an outdoorsman, lawyer, environmental activist, and master falconer—while impressive—do not lead to the conclusion that he is a reputable energy expert or climate scientist,” Scott Henry writes in The Counterweight, the alternative newspaper on campus.

The Counterweight is published by the Bucknell University Conservatives Club. “Not surprisingly, Kennedy affirmed that the ‘biggest global challenge’ we face today is global warming,” Henry writes. “He failed, however, to mention the fact that there is no consensus in climate science concerning man-made global warming, and that there is legitimate evidence to support that such warming does not exist.”

“Kennedy then maligned those who dissent from the popular global warming mantra by equating them with ‘flat-earthers.’ The irony of Kennedy’s global warming hysteria was not lost on those who made their way to and from the Weis Center [where he spoke] while it was snowing.”

Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.

Former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once said that “Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.” But some in the ivory tower would prefer that the sunlight of transparency not shine too brightly into the classroom.

“An associate professor [at the University of Virginia] who focuses on digital media, Mr. [Siva] Vaidhyanathan regularly teaches and writes enthusiastically about movements to make music, movies, and other creative works free online,” writes Jeffrey R. Young this March for the Chronicle of Higher Education. “I thought he’d be one of the first people to advocate open access to lectures.”

“But no,” Young writes. “‘I find myself playing devil’s advocate all the time’ in class, [Vaidhyanathan] said. ‘I don’t want to be on the record saying something I don’t even believe’ if the lectures go out on the Web.”

“He considers the classroom a ‘sacred space’ that may need to stay private to preserve academic freedom,” writes Young.

“Professors across the country are now wrestling with this issue.”

He gives several explanations for why professors might not want recorded versions of their lectures made publicly available: “Some professors are camera shy—at least when it comes to their teaching. Others say they discuss ideas with their students that are not yet ready for prime time. And some administrators are nervous about giving away too much of their educational content as the cost of college continues to rise” (formatting original).

One might argue that a particular explanation is missing from this list.

“Imagine that all of those lectures, in which the camera is pointed squarely at a professor, were suddenly freely available,” writes Young. “… What if, alongside a [digital] library of all the world’s books, there was a library of tens of thousands of lecture videos?”

He adds,

“Some scholars’ ideas would be stolen. Some professors would face mockery. Some students would try the equivalent of home schooling at the college level, saving money by skipping the campus and watching at home instead. … Ideas would flow, though. …”

Mockery, or exposing transparent classroom indoctrination? Consider, for example, the YouTube videos of public school children singing, rapping and chanting about President Obama. Or, for example, when a documentary revealed that Mary McArthur Elementary teacher Diatha Harris had condemned the Iraq War as a “senseless war” in class. She continued, “And by the way, Cathy, the person that you’re picking for president said that our troops could stay in Iraq for another hundred years if they need to. So that means your daddy could stay in the military for another hundred years.”

(These are, of course, public education examples.) As Accuracy in Academia’s investigations have shown, however, insular peer-to-panels—often not recorded—also yield examples of ivory tower bias. For example, at previous Modern Language Association conventions, professors have:

• characterized the Pope as an “absolute leader” who politicizes religion, along with Osama bin Laden and the Ayatollah Khomeini;
• lectured on Will & Grace and the YouTube video “Shoes;”
• delivered a completely biased account of Norman Finkelstein’s failed bid for tenure;
• celebrated one’s own pro-Obama campaign activities for the 2008 election. ““While I am still more leftist than liberal, more radical than reformer, how did I get here to this big tent of hope with a political hero at the helm?” asked Andrew William Smith in December 2008.
• and so on, and so forth…

Bethany Stotts is a staff writer at Accuracy in Academia.

A number of years ago, former congressman John LeBoutellier wrote a book about his alma mater which he titled Harvard Hates America. The thesis is worth revisiting.

Since then, (1978), a quartet of Harvard grads have run for president, two of them successfully, displaying varying degrees of affection for their native soil.  The last Crimson candidate, who now occupies the White House, matriculated from Harvard Law. “On this faculty, there are around 100 professors or assistant professors, and of that 100, I think you’d have to estimate there would be maybe eight registered Republicans,” Harvard law professor Richard D. Parker said last year. “I’m a registered Independent…and there’s on one else in the 100 who would identify as a populist.”

“I’ve been here almost 35 years, so it’s not as if I’m suddenly coming into a situation.” Parker described himself in a June 2009 interview with American Legion magazine as “a populist, which in a way is more troubling than being a conservative.”

“There are many friendships I’ve built on the faculty,” Parker said. “I think if you wanted to ask who is more irritated by my views or their views, I would say they regard my views as sort of quirky.”

“But on political and certain political and certain legal dimensions, I’m so outnumbered that I don’t think they’re troubled.” The feeling is not mutual.

“I, on the other hand, sometimes find it hard to take what they simply assume about politics,” Parker explains. “For example, in the (2008 presidential election), the ferocity of the denigration of Gov. (Sarah) Palin is quite irritating to me.”

“When you break it down, it’s really just bringing out the prejudices against ordinary Americans that I’ve been trying to oppose for a long time.” Some might conclude that, at the very least, Harvard Law hates Americans.

Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.

My column today deals with media coverage of the recent Keep America Safe (KAS) ad and the connections between the Little Rock, Fort Hood and Christmas Day attacks.

For an alternate perspective, Pepperdine University’s Ken Starr recently appeared on Keith Olbermann’s Countdown (with a guest host).

Author of the Starr Report and Dean of Pepperdine’s Law School, Starr said that it’s very important “for lawyers to be willing to take on unpopular causes,” making sure that power is checked and that there are arguments  “advanced on behalf of those who’ve been subjected to governmental power.”

“So this is in the finest traditions of our country,” he argued. This February Baylor University announced that Starr will be its 14th President.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

“… I hope school children still learn about the example of John Adams—because we certainly teach it in law school—John Adams taking on the British Redcoats who of course were charged with the Boston Massacre and some colonialists were killed, some patriots were killed, and so Boston was inflamed by this in terms of popular opinion, but John Adams considered that one of his finest hours to take on that representation and he successfully defended seven of the British troops who were charged with this very serious crimes. …”

As Malcolm Kline notes in “Modernization or Memory Hole,” North Carolina is considering removing anything before 1877 from its high school curriculum. Yes, that would necessarily abrogate any mention of John Adams from the state’s high schools.

HT Allahpundit

Bethany Stotts is a staff writer at Accuracy in Academia.

The last Republican president and his Democratic successor both graduated from schools within Harvard University and that should probably be a literal red flag. “Understanding Harvard Law School is very important to understanding our president, Barack Obama,” Texas attorney Ted Cruz said in an interview with scholar Marvin Olasky that appeared in the November 7, 2009 issue of World magazine. “He is very much a creature of Harvard Law.”

“To understand what that means you have to understand that there were more self-declared communists on the Harvard faculty that there were Republicans,” Cruz avers. “Every single idea this president has proposed in the nine months he’s been in office has been orthodox wisdom in the Harvard faculty lounge.”

Like the current commander-in-chief, a Harvard Law grad himself, Cruz served as solicitor general in the lone star state, the youngest in history to hold that office. “The communists on the Harvard faculty are generally not malevolent; they generally were raised in privilege, have never worked very hard in their lives, don’t understand where jobs and opportunity come from.”

“If you asked the Harvard faculty to vote on whether this nation should become a socialist nation, 80 percent of the faculty would vote yes and 10 percent would think that was too conservative.”

Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.

While the Obama Administration and Democratic Congressional leadership consider using reconciliation as a means to pass their health care bill, multiple sources suggest that this procedure could also be used to push through the student loan bill in conjunction with ObamaCare.

“The [Congressional Budget Office] included its estimate of the savings from the student-loan bill in a letter Friday to the Senate Appropriations Committee, setting out its assessments of President Obama’s budget recommendation for the 2011 fiscal year,” reports Paul Basken for The Chronicle of Higher Education on March 7.

In the letter, the CBO estimated the 10-year “savings” of the student-loan bill at $67 billion, “more than 20 percent than less than the previous year’s estimate,” of $87 billion, notes Basken.  (Actually, $67 billion is a more optimistic number provided by the CBO than the letter they sent Senator Judd Gregg last July which estimated the actual “savings” of the bill closer to $47 billion over 10 years).

Why is the reduction significant? Because it could cap congressional education spending. Basken writes,

“Along with confronting the political difficulties raised by the new estimate, Mr. Obama and his fellow Democrats face the possibility the number could pose a real legislative obstacle to their education-spending agenda. That’s because Congressional rules make passage easier for a bill, such as the student-aid overhaul, that is judged by the budget office to spend less money than it generates. …

… The Senate is expected to begin its consideration of the bill within the next few weeks” (emphasis added).

“Senate Democrats could still attempt to pass their robust student lending overhaul using a 51-vote budget maneuver called reconciliation,” wrote Tony Romm for The Hill’s Blog Briefing Room this February, citing unnamed “top Democratic aides close to the process.” He writes,

“Basically, Democratic leaders could combine both their healthcare reforms and their student lending rules into one measure for consideration, and then pass the resulting package using reconciliation, those aides said.

However, it remains unclear whether such a move would improve the education bill’s chances, a version of which passed the House last September” (emphasis added).

The bill, as passed by the House:

• ties Pell Grants to “increases in the Consumer Price Index, plus 1%”
• eliminates federal subsidies to private student lenders, instead lending money directly to students,
• sets up the Early Learning Challenge Fund, promoted by groups such as Mission: Readiness, and
• the Defund Acorn Act,
• among other provisions.

Basken also promoted the idea that Democratic leadership might use reconciliation to circumvent a Republican filibuster.  “Senate Democrats, however, have been waiting to act on the student-loan bill until they reach an agreement on health-care legislation,” he writes. That’s because reconciliation is a tool that can be used only once during the yearlong budget cycle, and Democrats needing votes for both health care and student-loan overhaul may want to draft a reconciliation bill that combines both measures.”

The Obama Administration has previously highlighted its intention to convert Pell Grants awards into mandatory spending.  In other words, the Administration desires to create a new entitlement program. “The current Pell Grant program includes both discretionary and mandatory components,” states the CBO letter.

Basken writes that

“The cost of Mr. Obama’s plan to expand Pell–increasing its maximum per-student value each year by the rate of inflation plus one percentage point–would cost $200-billion over 10 years, far more than the amount obtained from the entire student-loan overhaul measure, the budget office said in its analysis.”

To put this in context, the CBO letter outlined this measure as one among three major Presidential initiatives adding to the deficit. They write,

“Mandatory outlays under the President’s proposals would be above CBO’s baseline projections by $1.9 trillion (or 8 percent) over the 2011-2020-period, about one-third of which would stem form net additional spending related to proposed changes to the health insurance system and health care programs. Much of the rest of the increase in mandatory spending would result from increased spending for refundable tax credits and for the Pell Grant program for postsecondary students” (emphasis added).

Bethany Stotts is staff writer at Accuracy in Academia.

Campus Progress is bent out of shape over the mere prospect of federal and state budget cuts in higher education programs. “Today students are taking bold action to highlight the crisis in college affordability and access,” Pedro de la Torre III, Campus Progress’s Advocacy Senior Associate, stated on March 4, 2010. “We can no longer afford to ignore our shortcomings in these areas: the average student debt for graduates has reached more than $23,000, and at least 37 states are slashing higher education budgets which will lead to increasing tuition and less student aid.”

“State legislatures, college administrators and Congress have a responsibility to the next generation to find solutions to this crisis,” de la Torre averred. “The Senate, for example, should pass legislation modeled after the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act, which would cut wasteful subsidies to student loan companies and use the $87 billion in savings to increase Pell grants, invest in community colleges and minority serving institutions, and fund modernization and repair programs on campuses.”

Perhaps these angry young men and women should direct their ire at the public schools which feed students to colleges and universities. “Remedial classes are taken by students who are not prepared for entrance level courses taken by most college students,” Rubria Jessica Hintz of the Platte Institute writes. “These young scholars and their parents fully expect that successful graduation from an accredited high school has prepared them for success; however, 21% of all post secondary students were enrolled in at least one remedial class in 2003-04.”

“Although this is an alarming statistic, a significant number of these students may be older adults returning to college.” Two years ago, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported that “Most Students in Remedial Classes in College Had Solid Grades in High School.”

Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.