Though we consider ourselves to have made progress about gender and sexuality, there are still only two public categories to which one can belong.—Jeffrey J. Williams, professor of English and literary and cultural studies at Carnegie Mellon University.

“Dartmouth College professor Brendan Nyhan asserted in May — while Operation Fast and Furious subpoenas were flying on Capitol Hill — that ‘one of the least remarked upon aspects of the Obama presidency has been the lack of scandals.’ Conveniently, he defines scandal as a ‘widespread elite perception of wrongdoing.’”

Michelle Malkin, December 28, 2011

“Paul Krugman​ , the former Enron advisor whose work in the media-academia-government nexus puts him as far away from normal Americans as one can be while still living in America.” .”—

Former Accuracy in Academia executive director Dan Flynn

“The University of Central Florida is one of more than 30 colleges the Internal Revenue Service has been auditing to see whether they have paid enough taxes on profits earned through advertising, special events and other commercial activities.”— Denise-Marie Balona, Orlando Sentinel,  December 10, 2011

“Should teenagers who are too young to drink be allowed to take out five-figure loans?”— Eric Hoover in The Chronicle of Higher Education, December 2, 2011.

“In my law school, we had begun to defend the enemy combatants [in the war on terror] to the point where they had more protections than most Americans do.”—Charles Hill, senior lecturer at Yale in remarks at the Heritage Foundation on November 17, 2011.

“Within a discipline, professors count rather than read the publications of their colleagues who are up for tenure; and once one gets outside one’s field, no one dares quarrel with a record that contains enough articles in good enough journals that are widely enough cited.”—James R. Stoner, Jr., political science professor at Louisiana State University in the Fall 2011 issue of the Claremont Review of Books.

“Nine of 10 major educational software products on the market have no effect on test scores, the federal Department of Education found in 2009.”—Heather McDonald of the Manhattan Institute.

“Those who find it comfortable going into high ethical strictures go into politics, those who don’t do into academia.”—Michigan State University economist Steven Waldman noted wryly at the fifth anniversary of the Free State Foundation.

“We live in a society where you can lose your job for making a racist joke but where there are usually no consequences for making regional slurs.”—Althea Webb, assistant professor of education, Berea College, in The Chronicle Review, October 7, 2011.