Welcome Blog Burst readers! If you are looking for my post on the SFSU incident, scroll down to my entry for May 30. Currently, I'm working up a post or two on grade inflation, which should be available within a day or so. In the meantime, here are a couple of fun articles:

Spiked has a thoughtful and intriguing essay on conceptual similarities between Islamic fundamentalism and radical leftism, one of whose great virtues is to trace how the anti-imperialism of mid-century radical politics has mutated into the sort of virulent anti-Western, anti-American, anti-humanist style of thought that is so disturbingly fashionable among radicals today.

Also worth a look: Stanley Kurtz's current NRO column on the professoriate's hostility to the National Security Education Program. NSEP gives educational grants to college students on condition that after graduation, those students work at a federal agency devoted in some way to national security. Applications for NSEP grants are presently up by 50%--but the problem is that the faculty of the language and area studies departments where NSEP recipients would go to do things like learn Arabic and study the Middle East are trying to kill the program, whose national security service requirement they find objectionably imperialist. The African Studies Association, the Latin American Studies Association, and the Middle East Studies Association are all boycotting NSEP--even though, under Title VI, language and area studies centers receive millions in federal funding for the express purpose of enhancing national security and even though area-studies professors recently argued before Congress that they need huge funding increases in order to advance the cause of American security in the aftermath of 9/11. Kurtz tells you who you can write to if you are sickened by the moneygrubbing hypocrisy and two-timing anti-Americanism of our noble professoriate's behavior.