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.
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“… 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.
Here’s a new twist on that old cliché “Those who can’t do, teach.” “Last night, former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich returned to his alma mater, Northwestern University, and to a crowd as skeptical as it was curious to hear how he would defend his legacy in a panel discussion dedicated to ethics in politics,” David Vognar reported on The Huffington Post. “The result for both Blagojevich and the audience was more talk, talk, talk.”
“The students, alumni and Evanston residents treated the event as the sideshow his appearances have become.” Maybe Northwestern could book U. S. Representative Charles Rangel, D-New York, on the same subject.
“Days after being admonished by the House ethics committee for accepting corporate-sponsored trips to the Caribbean, Rangel announced that he was taking a ‘leave of absence’ as chairman” of the House Ways and Means Committee, Paul Kane and Perry Bacon Jr. reported in the Washington Post on March 4, 2010. “The move came as Republicans prepared to force a symbolic floor vote on stripping Rangel of his post, and as his fellow Democrats were making it increasingly clear that they lacked the stomach to support him as difficult midterm elections approached.”
“Still pending is the release of a potentially more damning ethics report about Rangel, expected to focus on his failure to declare income and assets and other financial matters in which he appeared to reap personal gain.”
Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.
Students at the University of California at San Diego decided to launch a “ghetto-themed ‘Compton Cookout’’’ which satirizes black culture in celebration of Black History Month, according a February Los Angeles Times article. “Promising a taste of ‘life in the ghetto,’ the [party’s] Facebook invitation contained many racist stereotypes,” reported Larry Gordon. “For example, it urged women to dress as ‘ghetto chicks’ who ‘usually have gold teeth, start fights and drama, and wear cheep clothes.’ It said the menu would include chicken and watermelon.”
UC Irvine’s New University newspaper notes that “This [cookout] was followed by a taping of the school-sponsored ‘Koala T.V.’ featuring the editor of the publication calling the students condemning the event ‘ungrateful n—.’”
A February 20th update on The Koala Online website (nsfw) states,
“The Koala would like to condemn the organizers of the Compton Cookout. If history has shown us anything, you need more black people at your party to have enough black-on-black violence to actually justify the name ‘Compton.’ Shame on you. SHAME.”
According to a Feb. 23 Foundation For Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) letter to the UCSD Chancellor, the Koala broadcast “a defense of the party on UCSD’s Student Run Television (SRTV). …” and “Shortly thereafter, Associated Students President Utsav Gupta shut down the station and froze funding for all student media at UCSD.” FIRE supports both The Koala and the ‘Compton Cookout’ attendees’ right to free speech and says that off-campus speech should not be investigated or prosecuted.
According to a March 2 Associated Press article, the University of California system has encountered several racist incidents since the “Compton Cookout,” including,
- “a white pillowcase fashioned in to a KKK-style hood” at UC San Diego,
- “a noose found hanging from a library bookshelf last week,” also at UCSD, and
- “an image of a noose scribbled on the inside of a bathroom door” at UC Santa Cruz.
However, at UCSD The Koala’s authors don’t limit their race-references to blacks. For example, the “Winter 2009 Issue 03” (not safe for work, pdf) of The Koala contains on its cover the title “Night of the Horny Asians” and references to genitalia.
Inside is a board game, “RAPE. The game of sexual domination. What You Need How You Play” (emphasis original). “RAPE IS NOT A JOKE… IT’S A GAME!” states the publication (formatting original).
According to the UC San Diego website, The Koala was first registered as a student organization in October 1985.
The Associated Press quotes Gupta on Feb. 23 as saying “Some students are drawing the incorrect conclusion that this is muzzling free speech…The right to free speech does not equate to a right to funding.” Perhaps the difference here is between free speech and subsidized speech. The Koala’s writing is meant as a satire, but does that mean it is entitled to campus funding?
Why, then, defund all of the campus media organizations instead of just The Koala?
I have an additional question: Why did UC San Diego decide to fund this in the first place?
Gregory Kane writes for The Examiner Thursday that “America is a much less racist country than it was 50 years ago, 40 years ago and even 10 years ago.” Yet problems with race conflict—and how to properly address this—still plague higher ed.
For example, in February and March:
You said what?
Adjunct art professor Allen Zaruba was fired from Towson University after “characteriz[ing] himself as ‘a n—r on the corporate plantation’ in a classroom discussion last week,” writes Peter Schmidt for the Chronicle of Higher Education on March 2nd. “In an interview on Tuesday, Mr. Zaruba said he deeply regretted using the phrase as soon as he had uttered it, and had apologized to his students when their class met last Wednesday,” writes Schmidt.
“At the same time, however, he also said the university’s decision to dismiss him without a formal hearing illustrated the broader point he was trying to make, about his status as someone who has few workplace rights and can easily be fired,” writes Schmidt.
Tyler Waldman reports for The Towerlight, “an independent student newspaper serving the Towson University community,” on March 1 that the Zaruba told him
“‘I am not a racist. I never have been. I’ve been raised overseas and in other cultures. It just absolutely kills me,’ he said, later adding that he serves in the prison ministry, teaches Sunday school and that his stepfather was a black man and he ‘loved him dearly.’”
Suspended for “hate crimes.”
Two Navy ROTC students at the University of Missouri were arrested on Tuesday, March 2, and charged with “tampering in the second degree” after cotton balls were scattered in front of the University’s Black Culture Center, reports The Missourian on March 3. “The incident was classified as a hate crime, which carries harsher penalties.”
“Both students have been temporarily suspended pending the result of the university conduct process, according to a statement released Wednesday morning and emailed to students from the MU Chancellor.”
Bethany Stotts is a staff writer at Accuracy in Academia.
A Utah Republican legislator has proposed scrapping senior year of high school to save state funds. “According to the unwritten constitution that governs ordinary American life and makes possible a shared pop culture that even new immigrants can jump right into after a few movies and a trip to the mall, the senior year of public high school is less a climactic academic experience than an occasion for oafish goofing off, chronic truancy, random bullying, sloppy dancing in rented formalwear and interludes of moody, wan philosophizing (often at sunrise while still half-drunk and staring off at a misty river or the high-school parking lot) about the looming bummer of adulthood,” Walter Kirn writes in the February 28, 2010 issue of The New York Times magazine. “In films like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Dazed and Confused and High School Musical 3, senior year is a do-little sabbatical from what is presented as the long dull labor of acquiring knowledge, honing skills and internalizing social norms.”
“It’s a spree, senior year, that discharges built-up tensions.” Kirn, author of Lost in the Meritocracy, likes the Utah plan.
“My hunch is that nothing will happen,” he writes. “Nothing much.”
“Just the loss of a year when nothing much happens anyhow.” He might be onto something.
Conservative scholar and scribe Russell Kirk once suggested three-year colleges because most of them can’t offer four years of productive study. On the other hand, maybe some seniors could use that time for remedial coursework to cut down on the remediation rate in college today.
Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.
Ooops. “What was supposed to be a school wide assembly featuring a motivational pep talk turned into an impromptu and explicit discussion on sex acts at Crosby Middle School in Texas,” the National Abstinence Education Association reports. “Parents were outraged to learn that their young girls were given how-to type information on oral and anal sex.”
Meanwhile, across the pond, our British cousins who have been where we are going are looking for an exit ramp. “School children in England are to be given advice designed to protect them from feeling pressurized into becoming sexually active at too early an age,” the NAEA reports. “The updated curriculum for sex education emphasizes the need to protect children from being ‘bullied’ by a sexualized culture.”
“The guidance promotes ‘the value of delaying sexual experiences.’”
Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.
With literacy on all levels (i.e., without adjectives or with—scientific, historical, civic, etc.) on the wane, public officials everywhere scratch their heads over what to do about it while concocting schemes such as the one devised by the school board in the city Tony Bennett sings about.
“San Francisco high school students, just months out of middle school, can start earning San Francisco State college credit this fall through a ninth-grade ethnic studies course,” Jill Tucker reported in the San Francisco Chronicle on March 1, 2010. “Currently, five ethnic studies courses are offered at three high schools, but they offer only high school credits.”
“The school board voted to expand the ethnic studies program last week, increasing the number of courses to at least 10 sections at five high schools,” Tucker writes. “To help with the added costs associated with expanding the program, San Francisco State offered to help train district teachers and assist with developing curriculum.”
There’s tax dollars working overtime for you. “At a school board meeting last week, the head of the university’s Ethnic Studies program also promised that students would earn up to six college course credits for the high school freshman course—a rare opportunity for a 14-year-old,” Tucker reports. “The courses will become part of the California State University’s Step to College program, which has offered college credit for high school students across the state since 1985.”
“Most of those courses require students to be juniors or seniors.”
“We’re not really looking for the 4.4 (grade point average) students,” Jacob Perea, dean of the School of Education, who runs the Step to College program at San Francisco State said. “We’re looking for the 2.1 or 2.2 students.” Betcha they find ‘em.
Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.
While academics lecture the rest of us about diversity, all is not well in their own temples of tolerance. “There has been a recent upsurge of public attacks upon, and disruptions of, Israeli diplomats and scholars, as they seek to present their views in the ‘marketplace of ideas’ and at institutions traditionally committed to the preservation of free speech,” PR newswire reports. “Recent events at the University of California-Irvine, University of California-Los Angeles, Oxford University, and Cambridge University have targeted these speakers in the most racist and hostile terms, and have seriously damaged these universities’ right to call themselves ‘institutions of higher learning.’”
“We believe that the failure to prevent such disruptions and the feeble response to them after the fact is cause for deep concern,” the scholars argue. “Speaking for academics worldwide, the Board of Directors of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (representing nearly 30,000 faculty worldwide) strongly condemns these calculated and venomous acts.”
“The SPME Board also urges the presidents and leadership of these universities (and all others) to strongly condemn these actions and to prosecute offenders to the full extent that their institutional policies and community legal standards will allow for. The SPME Board believes that such incitement deserves indictment.”
Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.
