After my post yesterday about Penn's policy of discouraging the hiring and promoting of men, I received some interesting email.

One telling email was from the co-director of Penn's Women's Studies program (radical egalitarianism dictates that such programs will never have single leaders who are named as such). Addressed "to women faculty" (since men faculty are apparently not affected by or interested in questions of gender equity at Penn), the missive directed recipients to the Daily Pennsylvanian coverage of Penn's recent gender equity meeting, adding that "The reporter did a good job of summarizing Prof. Phoebe Leboy's excellent presentation on the problems in achieving gender equity at Penn." Thus did a Penn administrator blithely confirm Prof. Leboy's striking revelation: that Penn is indeed in the business of giving financial boosts to departments that hire and promote women, while at the same time instituting "disincentives" to hire and promote men. I was hoping the DP had got it wrong. And I was expecting that whether the DP got it wrong or right, the Penn administration would scramble to distance itself from the reporter's representation of their discriminatory tactics. Silly me. It seems that we at Penn are damn proud of our double standards and we don't care who knows it.

Most of the mail I received, though, was from men, and its tone was a far cry from the complacency exhibited by the co-director of Women's Studies. Here's an eloquent extract from a man who hopes one day to pursue an academic career as a historian:

I can't help wondering a few things:

How do women such as Phoebe Leboy expect someone in my position to react to this kind of nonsense? Can any honest person, in truth, actually believe that this kind of discrimination, openly advertised as "progress," fails to crush the hopes and dreams of perfectly able young men at Penn and elsewhere? Having grown up under a constant deluge of media denouncing me for my offending chromosomes, filling me at every turn with self-doubt, I have grown accustomed to shrugging my shoulders and resigning myself to the notion of being resented, even reviled, by minority classmates and colleagues. (It should be noted here that women do not constitute an actual "minority" of my classmates in any meaningful sense of the word.) It is quite another thing, however, when I am confronted with the reality that active steps are being taken, at this very moment, to prevent me from achieving anything like success in academia.

Am I expected to feel differently about this than women of just a couple generations ago felt? Do these people ever consider how heartbreaking and discouraging it is to know that the day I face nigh-insurmountable, institutionalized obstacles is the day we will have achieved "justice" in America? This strikes me as a ghastly perversion of the entire American enterprise.

[...]

I'm tempted to say, "How far we have fallen," but that's not exactly true. A better summary might be, "How little we have risen."

I couldn't agree more. And I await the day when the women who benefit from academe's dirty little secret--that women are not a minority on campus anymore, and that in some fields they have established a dominance that utterly belies the continued disingenuous cry of discrimination--realize that there are boys and men on the wrong end of their vengeful little stick. Some of those boys and men will be their sons, their husbands, their lovers, their friends, and even their fathers. All of them will be living a life wilfully hampered by the coarse retributive logic of a feminism that rejects equal opportunity and insists, illogically and destructively, that unless women constitute 50% or more of the faculty in every field, a dire state of discrimination exists.

For the record, treating men the way women used to be treated is not a means that justifies the end. Privileging sex over qualifications--or, more deconstructively, scrambling the definition of qualifications so that they become inseparable from and contingent on demographics (as in California's post-Prop 209 world of college admissions)--may get a greater variety of bodies onto the faculty. But it does so at the expense of both individuals and education itself. For planned historical change to work--particularly change as radical as that envisioned by the anti-discriminatory language of Title VII and Title IX--it must be given time to work. Race and gender preferences are explicitly imagined as ways of hotwiring historical change. They are impatient policies, centered on short-term gratification and blind to long-term ramifications. They seek to engineer a shift rather than to create the conditions that will enable a shift that the majority of Americans believe is necessary and right. And in so doing, they are eroding our educational system, our Constitution, and our lives.

Policies such as Penn's are not fair or equitable attempts to be true to the letter of Title IX. Title IX has been used to rationalize many such extreme campus policies, particularly in athletics, where it is decimating men's sports in the name of achieving parity for women athletes. There is some fine writing about academic abuse of Title IX--if you are curious, the best places to start are with Wendy McElroy and Jessica Gavora (see this and this).

If you are still meditating on L'Affaire Bellesiles, check out this long and thoughtful post from John Rosenberg over at Discriminations. Unlike many commentators on this issue, Rosenberg is not interested in taking sides so much as in characterizing the nature of the Bellesiles affair itself. The result is an evenhanded analysis that reveals a surprising amount of continuity between Bellesiles' supporters and his detractors.

At Penn, the cause of "gender equity" has become an excuse to institutionalize reverse discrimination. Yesterday, at an open meeting convened by Penn's Association of Women Faculty and Administrators, biochem professor Phoebe Leboy reported on the dismal state of gender equity at Penn. Her evidence? Penn does not have as many women faculty as men, and the ratio of faculty women to men is not changing as quickly as it is at peer institutions. Her gripe? Penn is not seriously committed to the cause to gender equity. Her evidence for that? Penn is not keeping its alleged promise to encourage departments to hire women while at the same time discouraging them from hiring men:

Leboy also referred to promises made by the president and provost to organize incentives for departments to hire and promote women while creating disincentives for them to hire and promote men.

According to Leboy, the administration has created small incentives via a fund through the Provost's Office, which was announced in a letter to deans and department chairs. However, she could not find clear evidence for the creation of disincentives. She supplied anecdotes of discrimination inherent in the selection processes of new faculty members as evidence of that.

[Penn Provost Robert] Barchi said that disincentives are being instituted on an individual departmental basis. He said that he had discussed recruitment policies with all the deans and that they were doing the same with department chairs.

The Daily Pennsylvanian--which is not currently in top student paper form, and has not been for some time--reports this jaw-dropping discussion with the affectless aplomb of perfect ignorance. The reporter knows not what she reports. But readers will. And the honest ones will cry foul as long and hard as their lonely dissenting voices can.

It is no secret that Penn plays demographic games at hiring time. Nor is it a secret that those games come into play full force during tenure review. When I was up for tenure, for example, I was told by a Penn administrator that based on my vital statistics, my chances looked very good. He told me point blank that if I were black, he would be able to guarantee me promotion, but that as a woman, the odds were very much in my favor. Such comments are often classified as harassment, but I was not being harassed. I was being told the truth, as ugly as it was.

Even though I am no stranger to the ugly truth of Penn "affirmative" hiring and promotion practices (practices which, it should be noted, are hardly unique to Penn, and wholly reflect prevailing campus orthodoxy about the importance of diversity and the acceptability of engineering faculty and student populations to reflect multicultural ideals), I confess myself to be thoroughly shocked by the information that Penn is not only creating incentives for departments to hire women, but actively instituting disincentives to hire men. I am shocked, too, that such a practice has become so embedded in the misguided utopian pseudo-morality of higher ed administration that it can be discussed as frankly, unapologetically, and openly as it was in yesterday's public forum.

Two points, for what they are worth:

1) Imagine such a discussion taking place with roles reversed: what would the outcry be if the Penn administration copped to officially discouraging the hiring of women, or minorities? No need to answer the question. We know what the outcry would be, and we know how far-reaching it would be. It would be national news. There would be talk of lawsuits.

2) I hope I speak for more than just myself when I say that to be hired and promoted under such a system verges on absolute meaninglessness. To know that the accident of one's genetic code has played a major--possibly even decisive--role in one's career cheapens the career itself. It renders one's accomplishments hollow, and oppresses one powerfully with the knowledge that the cynical social engineering of others has as much or more to do with one's putative success than one's scholarship or teaching. As a woman (here I invoke the sacred mantra of identity politics), I would rather be judged entirely on my own merits--or lack thereof--than on the basis of my ability to contribute to some corrupt statistical concept of "equity." I would rather fail all by myself than "succeed" because I am female.

I'm betting this DP piece won't be up on line in its present form for long. But I've got a PDF of it that I'll post if the need arises.

UPDATE: From the comment section beneath the article:

I am astonished at two things.

First, that a University receiving public monies would create "disincentives" to hiring men and openly admit it in a newspaper.

Second -- and perhaps more disturbing -- is that the "reporter" did not follow up on this admission. Is she so inured to such bias that she didn't notice it? Or is she demonstrating her agreement with such blatant discrimination?

I can only hope that male candidates for positions at the University aggressively pursue discrimination lawsuits and end this disgusting policy.

Astounded
student
Philadelphia

As long as we are on the subject of students harassing speakers who are on the wrong side of campus orthodoxy regarding the Middle East: a pro-Israel speaker at the University of Albany was heckled last night with shouts of "End the occupation!" This was one of those rare speakers who only become more eloquent in the face of hostility, however. His response: " 'Don't mess with us. Beware. You attempt to provoke us every time,' he told a protester, who stood with a sign that said 'Free Palestine.' 'When we offer you reason ... you offer us the blood trail of suicide bombings and homicide killings .... We are willing to do our share for peace. We are willing to make painful compromises. ... If you really want a state of your own, then you have to turn around to your own people and say, 'We have to come to terms and reconcile with the Jews.'"

An appalling story about campus politics at Georgetown, courtesy of NRO's Rod Dreher:

Will Jews and Christians on American college campuses have the freedom ó and more importantly, the courage ó to speak out against oppression of their people in Islamic nations? Not, it seems, at Georgetown University, where Jewish student leaders turned on the leading historian of dhimmitude ó the state of formal discrimination historically imposed on Jews and Christians living under Islamic occupation ó when Muslim students became angry and emotional over her remarks.

What follows is an excruciating account of student spinelessness that may get Georgetown sued for libel. Read and seethe.

UPDATE: The CounterRevolutionary and Asparagirl weigh in.

Harvard's Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian, Transgender and Supportersí Alliance (BGLTSA) has come up with a new method of creating community: Queer Jeopardy. As one who is well-trained in the art of egalitarian academic living, I am shocked and appalled by such a mercenary and divisive approach to outreach. Doesn't the BGLTSA know that competition is a capitalist ruse, that it only drives people apart, that it cannot, by its very nature, ever bring them together?

Gilmore Award Nominee:

I donít know what it is with Dick Cheney, but something about the guy really freaks me out. He has that ěI really like little boysî look in his eyes all the time. This makes him the perfect idea for a Halloween costume, not to mention a repressed pedophile, that would be utterly terrifying.

[...]

Think about it. It is perfectly legal to disguise yourself as the ultimate evil (i.e. Dick Cheney) and terrorize friends, family and local residents. Sure, all applicable laws are still in effect, but no one can recognize you anyway. Not only that, minor acts of vandalism are tolerated, if not tacitly condoned, by the community.

[...]

So, dear students, when planning your evil attire, keep these themes in mind. And, if you see Dick Cheney staggering drunkenly down High Street, fear not. He is harmless to males over 10 years of age.

--Tim Davison, Arts & Entertainment Editor of West Virginia University's Daily Athenaeum

And I thought Dan Fishback was bad.

Reason takes on the academic squawk about Daniel Pipes' Campus Watch. It's a well-balanced and intelligent analysis of both issues and behavior, with the following provocative conclusion:

Like most debates, this one demonstrates the healthy futility of debate. If you were a Pipes partisan before, you're now convinced that Islamo-fascists and pro-Palestinian maniacs are running rampant among America's intellectual class. If you were a Pipes hater before, you're even more persuaded that he's a demagogue now. Fans of political cockfighting will also find enjoyment in the exchange.

More broadly, what has been discredited in this discussion is the practice of shouting McCarthyism whenever somebody criticizes you. It's tempting to rehearse the age-old drama of, on the one hand, anti-American tenured radicals corrupting the nation's youth, and on the other, know-nothing demagogues making a hash of complex philosophy and stamping out honest inquiry. Nothing of the sort is going on here. We may in fact need an update of Mike Godwin's Hitler constant, with a corollary that the first person to use the word "McCarthy" in a debate automatically forfeits the point. Barring such a rule, it's hard to see how this debate will end anytime soon. Thank you, Campus Watch, for engaging a struggle of ideas so intense and nail-biting it deserves its own commemorative chess set.

Last week I wrote a little bit about Vanderbilt's controversial decision to remove the word "Confederate" from "Confederate Memorial Hall," a dormitory that was so named because the United Daughters of the Confederacy footed one third of its $150,000 price tag when it was built 67 years ago. The school's position is that the word "Confederate" is insensitive and should be removed; UDC's position is that it is breach of contract to change the name of the building. UDC is suing Vanderbilt. Vanderbilt waxes unimpressed. In the words of the Vice Chancellor of Public Affairs, "the word Confederate makes many people uncomfortable." Therefore, in order to "create a more positive, inclusive environment," Vanderbilt must ensure that its "symbols reflect our values going forward."

I got a lot of email about that post--mostly from people who were grateful that someone was willing to stand up and decry the idiocy of Vanderbilt's historical revisionism. The notion that erasing the word "confederate" from a building will somehow erase that building's history (and, by extension, the history of the South), thus making the dormitory acceptable to those who presently find it objectionable, seemed patently ridiculous to me, and I said so. But it doesn't to others. Here is a remarkable op-ed piece celebrating Vanderbilt's revisionist intentions:

I applaud and am impressed that Vanderbilt University is dropping the name "Confederate" from Memorial hall, a 70-year-old building only one third financed by the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Seems like there should be a statute of limitations on the claim for a name.

I'm sure they mean no insult to the poor Southern farm boys who fought and died tragically for such a dubious cause but wished simply to remove the reference to that cause out of respect for ALL their students.

The Daughters are trying to intimidate the university with a lawsuit and I hope Vanderbilt will stand and win on principle. The lawyers for the Daughters say it is about history, and they are right, that is why the name is being dropped. Those who claim the Confederacy was not about war to preserve slavery are in denial and forget what Confederate Vice President Alexander H. Stephens said in his famous Cornerstone Speech given in Savannah; Georgia, March 21, 1861, "Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery - subordination to the superior race - is his natural and normal condition." This statement was greeted with great applause by those in attendance.

It is time for that awful and bloody chapter of history to be put to rest folks, we are all Americans now and we say we believe in freedom and justice for ALL. Either we honor that or we are hypocrites.

Howard Switzer, treasurer
Green Party of Tennessee
2411 Elliott Avenue
Nashville, TN 37204

This guy doesn't get it. The issue is not one of putting "that awful and bloody chapter of history" to rest. The issue is one of refusing to whitewash, erase, destroy, or otherwise obliterate the historical record as such. UDC spent decades saving up the $50,000 it contributed to the building (in contemporary dollars, that's somewhere between 7 and 10 million). The building itself was erected with the express purpose of providing free housing to women students of Confederate ancestry who could not otherwise afford to go to college. These are not facts that the media has bothered to report, by the way--I have them from readers who have cared enough about what is happening at Vanderbilt to find out the facts for themselves. In any case, the "hypocrites," to borrow Switzer's term, are not those who insist on calling the dorm by its rightful name, but those who think the world would be a better place if we all pretended the past is something other than it is. Vanderbilt has every right to decide whose donations it will and will not accept. But it does not have the right to disown or disavow the traces of donors whose affiliation with the university has become politically inconvenient.

An irony: a Critical Mass reader notes that if Vanderbilt is serious about expunging uncomfortable reminders of its politically incorrect past, it will have to change its own name as well as the name of Confederate Memorial Hall:

Vanderbilt could be on the slippery slope here with ideologically driven name changes.The school is named for Cornelius Vanderbilt, the 19th C. sail and rail tycoon, an ardent capitalist who became wildly wealthy. Since we know that wealth is baaad, and capitalism is baaad a case could be made for changing the whole joint's name.

PS-Vanderbilt's seal has a profile of Cornelius on it. The tobacco spitting old rogue is wearing a crown of laurels.Really.

I vote for Brave New U.

Ann Coulter spoke at Harvard Saturday--and didn't get taunted and booed like she did this time last year. A new openness to diversity of opinion? A rightward shift among students? You make the call.

Dan Fishback, of Sontag Award fame, rhapsodizes about protesting Cheney's visit to Penn last Friday. Cheney was at Penn to dedicate the Wharton School's new Hunstman Hall; the Vice President is a personal friend of Huntsman's, and the dedication was planned as a private affair. But campus malcontents couldn't seem to grasp this, and instead built an entire micro-movement on the idea that Cheney was expressing contempt for public debate by not appearing in an open forum, that this exemplified Cheney's well-known cronyism and lack of accountability, and that Judith Rodin was a hypocrite for allowing such arrogant behavior on a campus that she represents as a free speech zone dedicated to the unfettered exchange of ideas.

Fishback's editorial exemplifies the contorted illogic that fed Friday's unrest. It's a triumph of nastiness and presumption: the larger-than-life Cheney puppet that formed the centerpiece of resistance morphs, in Fishback's jaundiced imagery, into an "11-foot Dick"; Judith Rodin is depicted as "staring like a deer in the headlights at the protesters" as they shouted "Shame on you! Shame on you!"; and, in a display of positively loathsome condescension, the Huntsman children themselves are depicted as Stepford kids, little blonde robots who are already too saturated with privileged self-satisfaction to be able to comprehend the naked truth of the world as presented by protesters who confuse absurdist street theater with social activism.

Cornell graduate students have voted 2 to 1 against forming a union. I noted last week that the Cornell administration had made the unusual decision not to oppose a union election (as administrators at Penn, Brown, and Yale have done), and speculated that the administration's refusal to play the role of corporate enforcer might yield some interesting election results. And so it has. Without the galvanizing assistance of a hostile and unyielding administration, the union movement at Cornell fizzled and died by popular mandate.

Quote for the day: Christopher Hitchens on his new book, Why Orwell Matters:

The great point that I try to make is that in fact Orwell isn't a very great writer. He's a very honest and courageous writer and he does a lot of work and he does have a certain gift of phrase, there's no doubt about it. But he's not in the first rank of writers. And that's a good thing, because it shows what average, ordinary people can do if they care to, and it abolishes some of the alibis and excuses for people who aren't brave.

There's lots more where that came from.

Amiri Baraka Award Nominee: Gore Vidal, for accusing the Bush administration of using the 9/11 attacks to enact pre-existing plans to invade Afghanistan and limit civil liberties. In a 7000 word piece called "The Enemy Within," published today in the Guardian Observer, Vidal speaks in uncompromising terms about the "Bush junta":

We still don't know by whom we were struck that infamous Tuesday, or for what true purpose. But it is fairly plain to many civil libertarians that 9/11 put paid not only to much of our fragile Bill of Rights but also to our once-envied system of government which had taken a mortal blow the previous year when the Supreme Court did a little dance in 5/4 time and replaced a popularly elected President with the oil and gas Bush-Cheney junta.

[...]

Osama was chosen on aesthetic grounds to be the frightening logo for our long-contemplated invasion and conquest of Afghanistan ... [because] the administration is convinced that Americans are so simple-minded that they can deal with no scenario more complex than the venerable, lone, crazed killer (this time with zombie helpers) who does evil just for the fun of it 'cause he hates us because we're rich 'n free 'n he's not.

We at Critical Mass are not empowered to dispense Sontag Awards, which are the exclusive provenance of the wise and judicious Andrew Sullivan. We do, however, proudly decorate worthy individuals with Gilmore Awards and Amiri Baraka Awards as our discretion dictates. But we feel, in this instance, that an Amiri Baraka Award does not adequately recognize the supreme achievement of Mr. Vidal, whose vitriol foameth over in truly commendable quantities this fine Sunday morning. It is our hope that Judge Sullivan will honor Vidal's rhetorical feat with the rare and venerable distinction conferred by the Sontag Award.

As Emory professor Michael Bellesiles goes down the tubes, cyber-schadenfreude is running high. But it's important to keep some perspective on what his case means within the larger context of academe.

The tendency throughout the Bellesiles investigation has been to represent him as a sneaking, lying cheat, a historian who deliberately and wilfully falsified his data in order to make it accord with his thesis. More specifically, the tendency has been to vilify Bellesiles as a leftist ideologue whose political commitments led him to produce fraudulently revisionist history. Bellesiles' Arming America, the argument goes, was written in the service of the anti-gun lobby. In "showing" that most antebellum Americans did not own guns, Bellesiles both shattered the conventional wisdom that gun ownership has always been a central component of American culture and produced documentation that would support the efforts of anti-gun lobbyists to argue that the Second Amendment did not refer, in letter or spirit, to individual private citizens. Bellesiles did not do much to counter such accusations when he met them with lies about his research methods and invented reasons--among them the proverbial flood!--why he could not produce copies of his research notes. But even so, the picture here is distorted.

I'm not about to defend Michael Bellesiles. He blew it when he manipulated data in the service of his argument. He got caught. And then, instead of fessing up to his mistakes, he blew it again by crying foul and covering up. He has resigned now, and that is as it should be. But there is a bigger, messier picture here, one that is unhelpfully obscured by the truly obsessive focus that one dead-in-the-water academic has attracted. That picture is, to borrow Randall Jarrell's phrase, a picture of an institution.

Without excusing Bellesiles, I want to emphasize that what went on with him--and what went wrong with him--is more symptomatic of contemporary academic culture than not. Bellesiles is very much to blame. But he is also very much a product of an extraordinarily lax scholarly system, one that does not reliably train its members in either proper research technique or scholarly ethics; one that openly rewards "research" that conforms to the "progressive" agenda of a disproportionately leftwing academy; one that makes it very hard for scholars who do not toe the progressive party line to get degrees, jobs, book contracts, and tenure; one that would rather scapegoat individuals than examine--and change--its own self-serving structure.

There were peer reviewers who did not do their job when Bellesiles first began publishing his work on early American gun ownership, and there were the editors who chose them. There were editors who ignored the attempts of scholars such as Clayton Cramer to alert them to problems with Bellesiles' work and there were publishing houses that did not see past the chance to make a buck and a splash. There were prize committees that decorated Bellesiles with top professional honors.

I cannot speak for the quality of Bellesiles' training, nor do I know any more than anyone else about where in his work methodological carelessness cedes to blatant falsification. But I do know something about what graduate education in the humanities looks like, and I know something, too, about how low on the list of scholarly priorities such non-flashy things as thorough documentation and judicious restraint are. Until we start interrogating our systems of peer review, our patterns of professional reward, and the professional training we do, or don't do, in our Ph.D. programs, we have not yet begun to address the issues the Bellesiles case raises.

From Andrew Sullivan's new Salon piece on Harry Belafonte:

the essence of bigotry is to reduce the complex, varied, human individuality of a human being into a racial cipher. It is to smelt the irreducible complexity of a person into a racial caricature. It is to deny individuality; it is to give someone no space to think for him or herself, to free to be a person, and not a mere member of the group.

To me, this freedom is an irreducible core of what liberalism should be. It is about a person's right to think for herself with dignity and respect. It doesn't mean that you can't disagree vehemently with such a person, subject her views to withering scrutiny, rhetorical barbs or logical dissection. What it does mean is that you do not play the race card or any other card when engaging that person's views. And one of the key signs that much of today's left is actually, demonstrably illiberal, intolerant and reactionary, is the way in which this is now a common feature of leftist discourse.

There's much more.

Arizona State University has taken disciplinary action against a former executive vice president of student government, Brian Buck, for his participation in a sexually explicit film taped on and around ASU's campus. Produced by the company responsible for the Indiana University dorm tapings Erin mentioned earlier, the film's opening scene shows Buck kissing and fondling two naked actresses in a shower while his fraternity brothers look on and cheer. Although Buck did not have sex with the women, and does not appear nude himself, his soft-core scene earned him an array of hard-core punishments from ASU Student Life, which decided that Buck's antics violated the "public sexual indecency" clause in ASU's code of student conduct. Buck is now barred from holding any position in any student organization, a ban that effectively forces him out of student government. He is barred from holding any employment position at ASU, or from residing on university-owned property. As if that weren't enough, Buck has been placed on probation for the rest of his time at ASU; he must compose a twenty-page essay with the pithy title "Reflections on Integrity"; he must perform 100 hours of community service; and he must write four letters of apology. This laundry list of sanctions cannot be appealed. Buck's lawyer, outraged by the extensive punishments and by the denial of due process, intends to sue ASU for breach of his client's constitutional rights.

It's interesting to note that when five female Arizona State students appeared topless or fully nude in Playboy's November 1999 Girls of the PAC 10 issue, explicitly representing their school, the administration took no disciplinary action against them. If it had, campus feminists would doubtless have rallied behind the women, defending their liberated sexuality and their right to exhibit their bodies however they chose. You have to love the double standard....

A dorm at Indiana University became a film set for a porn shoot earlier this month. According to a freshman witness, there was a whole lot more than artistic expression going on: in one public hallway, some of the actresses performed fellatio on dorm residents while their fellow students watched.

Link via The Hoosier Review.

Berkeley students staged a belated protest yesterday, urging the university to hire a professor of Pilipino American studies. Students put on an elaborate three-act performance of guerilla theater, using the much-trafficked open space in front of Dwinelle Hall to "survey a century of discrimination." The aim of the event was to raise consciousness about the need for a specialist in Pilipino American studies at Berkeley by dramatizing how oppressed Filipinos living in America have been. Even if you buy the dubious assumption that discrimination (or accusations of discrimination) somehow produces valid subjects of academic inquiry, and even if you accept the equally dubious premise that identity politics has scholarly validity, there is still a huge problem with this particular line of student activism: there is nothing to protest. Cal has already agreed to hire a Pilipino American studies professor. The ethnic studies department started advertising for a tenure track position earlier this month; the specialist they hire will begin work at Berkeley this June.

Divinity school does Islam: a student's eye view, via The Corner:

This week, the world religions class I'm attending at [a university divinity school] covered Islam. The kind professor spent the class whitewashing well-known beliefs and practices of Islamic Middle Eastern nations. The students, who are almost all Christian, and none Muslim, mostly shared his view. The students angrily denounced any suggestion that the Koran advocated violence any more than the Bible. Most disturbingly, they and the professor passionately defended Islamic culture's treatment of women. The professor gently explained that the women performed genital mutilation on each other, so it couldn't be about men controlling women. The female students, who thought it so bigoted to question Islamic culture's view of women, probably wouldn't toe that line if it was there own tender labia being hacked off. A couple of us raised critical points that were met with stares and mau-mauing. One student asked why only Islamic cultures were practicing suicide bombing. The professor gave the standard Palestinian rationalization that they're the poor, and don't have rich Israel's weapons. ...The clear dominant value in that class group is that the U.S. is evil. No approved victim group may be criticized, since all sensitive and compassionate people show solidarity with these groups. I think these people are out of touch with reality.

Thus does turning the other cheek become turning a blind eye.

Vice President Cheney will be at Penn today to help dedicate the Wharton School's new Huntsman Hall. Protestors have been preparing all week. Some are camping out on College Green--the Scene of Protest--in order not to miss any of the morning's activist festivities (the dedication ceremony begins at the activism-unfriendly hour of 7 am). As one student put it: "We want to continually remind the campus that the most dangerous vice president in history is coming to campus, and it's kind of our duty to speak out against him." To kind of assist that effort of continual reminding, Penn for Peace has acquired a parodic ten foot tall Cheney puppet, which effigy is perhaps intended to convey the notion that Cheney is himself a puppet--albeit a shorter one. The puppet is also intended as a commentary on Cheney's purportedly inflated ego. One student interpreted its larger-than-life scowl thus: "To me, it looks like Cheney's angry at the world and is abusing his power." Counter-protestors will be out in full force today as well. They have no puppets, but they will pass out erasers, which they plan to toss at protesting mathematics lecturer Stephen Preston, whose nasty screed against Cheney was published by the Daily Pennsylvanian as part of the campus' preparation for today.

Updates will be posted as they become available.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Here is George Orwell during the 1940s:

Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writings of the younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States.Ý Moreover they do not as a rule condemn violence as such, but only violence used in defense of the western countries.

Orwell didn't think much of the dangerously uninformed and illogical rationale for the pacifism of the Left during WWII. One imagines that if he could see the moral relativism and anti-Americanism of today's anti-war movement, he would say much what he did then: "One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that:Ý no ordinary man could be such a fool."

Wendy McElroy fisks Battered Women's Syndrome. Then she has some fun with radical feminism's tendency to play fast and loose with statistics.

Cornell grad students are currently voting on whether or not to unionize. If the results are for unionization, Cornell will become the second private university in the country to form a graduate student union. NYU, which unionized last year, was the first. Unlike many of its peer institutions (among them Penn and Yale), Cornell has not tried to block the union movement. It's an interesting administrative move: in sanctioning the vote, Cornell has made it hard for grad students there to shore up the institutional hostility that seems to be so crucial to the success of this particular movement. At Yale and Penn, where administrators have opposed the unionization effort, the anger is palpable. And as such, the administrations at these schools have, ironically, played into the hands of the pro-union agitators in the very act of refusing to cooperate with them. A deep rift between students and administrators is exactly what pro-union activists want. They want their constituents to be angry and outraged, they need that energy to fuel their movement, and they use even the mildest administrative objections to unionization as evidence of an evil exploitative corporatism that must be fought by the oppressed intelligentsia commonly found in Ph.D. programs. Cornell has sidestepped all that. It will be interesting to watch events unfurl in Ithaca, where the opposition finds itself running unopposed.

A new study shows that dogs have taste. They become calm and mellow when listening to classical music. They bark when they listen to Metallica. And they are utterly unmoved by Britney Spears.

Quote for the day:

"I feel like I am in the arms of a beautiful woman."
--Yann Martel, on winning the Booker Prize

President Bush has nominated Dana Gioia to head the National Endowment for the Arts, a decision that is likely to raise a firestorm of protest from poets and academics. Gioia's credentials are impeccable -- he is a published poet and essayist, has taught writing at Johns Hopkins and Wesleyan, and won an American Book Award this year for his collection of poems Interrogations at Noon. However, the academic left will complain loudly about his corporate background (his resume lists an MBA from Stanford alongside a master's in comparative literature from Harvard, and he worked as vice president of General Foods before becoming a full-time writer); they will also point to his Atlantic Monthly article (and book-length essay of the same name) "Can Poetry Matter?" as evidence of Gioia's, and by extension, Bush's, unreconstructed academic conservatism. In that article, Gioia lambasted the insularity of American poetry circles and creative writing programs:

Decades of public and private funding have created a large professional class for the production and reception of new poetry comprising legions of teachers, graduate students, editors, publishers, and administrators. Based mostly in universities, these groups have gradually become the primary audience for contemporary verse. Consequently, the energy of American poetry, which was once directed outward, is now increasingly focused inward. Reputations are made and rewards distributed within the poetry subculture. To adapt Russell Jacoby's definition of contemporary academic renown from The Last Intellectuals, a "famous" poet now means someone famous only to other poets. But there are enough poets to make that local fame relatively meaningful. Not long ago, "only poets read poetry" was meant as damning criticism. Now it is a proven marketing strategy.

Scorning poets' sense of self-importance and questioning the wisdom of funding their insular, self-enclosed fiefdoms, Gioia hints that his NEA chairmanship will pay neither lip service nor public dollars to the pretentious, fashionably inaccessible versifying so popular among today's academic poets. No doubt there will be heated debates about the role of the poet in society and about the aesthetic validity of contemporary poetic production. We can be sure that Gioia will continue to express doubts about the smug insularity of America's academic and literary subcultures. We can also be sure that the high poetic priesthood will resist and protest Gioia's challenges with all its might, refusing above all to make its writing appeal to those whom Wendy Steiner condescendingly calls "the laity." Feels like the culture wars all over again....

Inspired by Erin's post (below) I checked the Not in Our Name petition's "B" section for my own name; I was disappointed to find that nobody has taken the time to sign me up, either. I did discover the following illustrious signatures among the anti-war B's: Gas Bag; Snardius The Bald (Medieval Warrior dedicated to the eradication of leftists); Lickmy Balls; Cee Mye Balls, Phoney Balloney (Gullible Liberal); Fat Bastard (Overweight homicidal Scotsman); Com E Bastards; Anita Bath; Lima Bean; M. Becile (Society for the preservation of psychopathic mass-murdering dictators); Les Behan; Aphra Behn (Guerrilla Girls On Tour); You-must Be-joking; Saul Bellows (Blacksmith); Ilove bin-Laden; Runup N Bitemyass (Department of Fenestration, MIT); James Bond (secret agent); Dusty Bottoms; I Will Not Sign This Bullshit (USA, USA, USA); Adam Bumb; Teroff My Burka; Americans Behind Bush; George I Like Throwing Bombs On Poor People Bush (President of the US of A); Go Bush; Stayout Thuh Bushes; A. Scarlett Butt; Eat My Butt; and Harry Buttocks.

Since we're on the subject of web petitions today, here's the inimitable James Taranto's most recent addition to his ongoing catalogue of signatures on the notorious Not In Our Name petition:

...the antiwar petition over at " Not in Our Name" continue [sic] to attract prestigious signatures from all walks of life. Here's a sample, just from the "A" page: Idi Amin, "Retired from Military"; Marie Antoinette, "Aristocrat, noblewoman, progressive dietician"; Emma Ahstrach, who describes herself as coming "from a long line of peace-loving Ahstriches who deplore all forms of violence"; Trendy W. Annabee, who asks "Will this help me get chicks?"; Ayatollah Assaholla, a "physicist" and "Nobel prize candidate for discovery of subatomic nion particles"; and Kemal Anis, "Director of Misanthropic Studies, STD College."

Since anyone can sign anyone's name to these things, I looked up the "O" section to see if I had signed it yet. As of this writing, I have not. But Artis One Name Only, a.k.a. "the Spoonman"; Axel Otto, of the "Motorradclub Kuhle Wampe; Germany"; and Jack Me Off, who identifies himself as "Mostly hippies," all have.

A rare moment of balance in the academy: Andrew Sullivan is not only speaking at Earlham College (in my beautiful home state of Indiana), but is welcome to speak there. Check out the proud announcement of his talk on the Earlham web site. Here's the blurb for "The Crisis in the Catholic Church":

One the most provocative social and political commentators writing today, Andrew Sullivan offers piercing assessment of the scandal in the Catholic Church. Sullivan, a practicing Catholic, addresses the many challenging issues facing the Church, from celibacy, sexual morality and the role women and homosexuals in the Church to the cloak of secrecy that for so long has shrouded the crimes being committed.

Okay, so Earlham needs an editor. But this time, I say it's the thought that counts.

Yesterday, I posted a little notice about a sensitivity workshop at Berkeley. Sage McLaughlin writes in with some excellent observations about the logic of the seminar, which was devoted to the project of sensitizing men to "gender violence" by promoting the creation of "a male peer culture, an atmosphere whereby the abuse of women by some men will be seen as completely unacceptable by the male peer culture." I quote:

I'm not sure to what extent it is possible to artificially create a "male peer culture," so I have to admit I have no idea what these people think they're accomplishing. Now, I have given to all of two charities in my day: self-defense training classes for women, and FIRE. So I'm not a knuckle-dragging paleo-con with a bone to pick with the opposite sex.

But the statement that, "The goal is to create a male peer culture, an atmosphere whereby the abuse of women by some men will be seen as completely unacceptable by the male peer culture," is insulting. It implies that in fact, the abuse of women by some men is widely accepted by "the" male peer culture (whatever that is). Obviously, there are pockets of peer groups wherein this is the case. But because there is no "male peer culture" in the singular, the whole project is silly.

And another thing. What's with the constant references to "male"? Why not "men"? We talk about "women's health" and "women workers." It's a small thing, but I notice that the clinical, zoological-sounding "male" is always used by the types who run this stuff. It's a small thing, but it pesters me nonetheless.

Touche. It sounds like a crock. But it's a crock with an awful lot of momentum.

Sensitivity trainers are a dime a dozen on the college lecture circuit. The speaker in this instance is a well-known gender violence educator who specializes in the burgeoning field of man-to-man sensitivity training. He's a former college football player who was also the first man to minor in Women's Studies at UMass-Amherst. On his website, he bills himself as "one of America's leading anti-sexist male activists" and a quick click around his site shows he's all he claims to be. He's got a company, he's got an educational video, he is the U.S. Marine Corps' official gender violence educator, he's a member of the U.S. Secretary of Defense's task force on Domestic Violence in the Military. The list goes on. What launched Mr. Katz on a career that combines so much claptrap with so much influence? Why a Master's in Education from Harvard.

In an interview with the French literary magazine Lire, bestselling French novelist Michel Houellebecq vented his distaste for Islam, calling it "the stupidest religion." That remark landed Houellebecq in the dock: Incensed Muslim groups accused him of "inciting religious hatred," and the government dutifully tried him for his thought-crimes. Although a Paris court yesterday acquitted Houellebecq, the very fact that the French are now putting writers on trial for their opinions is indicative of that country's ominous turn toward politically correct policing. Further evidence can be found in the 93% tax recently imposed on "any French-made film deemed pornographic or an incitement to violence" (parliament deputy Charles de Courson explained bluntly: "We want to destroy their profitability to discourage further investments") and in the French interior ministry's move to ban Rose Bonbon, a novel that portrays a paedophile murderer. It seems that in France, liberte, egalite, fraternite is fast becoming histoire.

Visit Vegard Valberg's blog to see some anti-war spam shredded Mystery Science Theater-style. (Found on Instapundit.)

Before using your email account as a vehicle for protest, read this Salon article on electronic activism; see, too, Michael Bluejay's cautionary advice on e-mail petitions.

I get a lot of anti-war spam--it comes with the academic territory. With that spam comes petitions, petitions, and more petitions. We academics have not yet worked out that electronic petitions are an entirely bankrupt means of registering protest. Anyone can start a petition about anything, in anyone's name. Anyone can sign anyone's name to such petitions, and anyone can sign as many names as he wants as many times as he wants. It goes without saying that no one verifies the "signatures" that find their way on to such petitions. And yet, they keep circulating. Here's one that landed in my inbox this morning:

If you are against the probability of war against Iraq, please sign this list and pass along.

The U.N. is gathering signatures in an effort to avoid a tragic world event.

Then came the usual instructions about how to pass the petition along. Nearly 500 people had "signed" the version that came to me (at 500, it is slated to be forwarded to Petition Headquarters, which is located at the United Nations Information Centre).

The petition is illiterate (you can be against war, but you can't be against the "probability of war"--unless, of course, you are also against statistics). It's also a hoax. If you actually go to the UNIC website, instead of mindlessly signing a petition whose authenticity is obviously suspect because, in the heat of activism, you wish it were real, you will find the following notice:

Note:Ý We have learned that there is a new petition circulating that claims to have been started by our office -- we have not, nor have we ever, initiated any petition.Ý

You will then be offered a link to this notice:

The UN is NOT involved in soliciting or collecting such petitions. We would suggest that since it is member governments of the UN who will decide on whatever action occurs in various situations, citizens should contact their own government.

Member states of the United Nations decide on the policies and programs of the organization. Citizens wishing to express their views or concerns on any issue, such as international peace and security should consider addressing their views first to the officials of their own government. The General Assembly is the main deliberative body of the UN, where all member states have one vote, and where issues relating to peace and security, admission of new Members and budgetary measures are decided by a two-third's vote. The Security Council with 5 permanent and ten rotating member states has primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security and has the power to make decisions binding on all members of the organization. Security Council Decisions on major issues require nine votes, including the concurring votes of all the permanent members: China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States. The 10 other current members of the Security Council are: Bulgaria, Cameroon, Colombia, Guinea, Ireland, Mauritius, Mexico, Norway, Singapore and Syria.

Your inquiry and interest in the work of the United Nations are appreciated.

Note to the gullible: you do not shore up credibility for your views by affixing your name to bogus virtual protests. Nor do you make a political statement. You do, however, make a powerful statement about where logic fits into your personal political schema. And as such, you do damage to the viewpoint you are trying to support.

The history and philosophy of campus hate groups remain to be written in full. But in the meantime, Boundless.org has traced the origins and progress of one of the most hateful student groups of all, MEChA:

Radical politics have been part of the game on American campuses since at least the mid-1960s but have recently taken a new and disturbing turn. At colleges and universities across the country, the Movimiento Estudiantil de Chicanos de Aztlan (The Student Movement of Aztlan Chicanos) ó better known by its acronym, MEChA ó is calling for the surrender of wide swaths of American territory to Mexico. Worse yet, in doing so, it has the support of university administrators, elected officials, and ó thanks to the mandatory student activity fees on which the organization depends ó tuition-paying students.

Founded in the late 1960s, MEChA has spent the last three decades indoctrinating Latino students on American campuses in the ideology of reconquista (reconquest). According to MEChA propaganda, the Southwestern United States ó including California, Arizona, Texas, New Mexico, as well as parts of Nevada, Utah, and Colorado ó sits on the territory of the ancient (and mythical) ěNation of Aztlan.î Supposedly the cradle of Aztec civilization, MEChA charges that Aztlan was unjustly seized by the United States following the Mexican-American War. Now MEChA wants this territory given back to its alleged rightful owners: the people and government of Mexico.

As a matter of fact, the American Southwest was not, as MEChA claims, ěstolenî from Mexico. Following the Mexican-American War, the government of Mexico legally ceded this territory to the United States (by the Treaty of Guadalupe de Hidalgo, 1848). Nor has there ever been any place called ěAztlanî on American soil, much less a ěNation of Aztlan.î Invented 30 years ago by radical Latino activists, the Nation of Atzlan has more in common with Atlantis than with Israel.

But MEChA is not a group to let facts get in the way. There are today more than 300 MEChA unions in existence, with more than 100 in California alone. While the group is concentrated in the Southwest and along the West Coast, it can also be found farther East: Itís got chapters at MIT, Yale, Cornell, George Washington University, and Brown, among other East Coast universities. On the West Coast, where MEChA is to be found in nearly every institution of higher education, the movement is spreading so quickly that it has set its sights on the public school system, establishing high school chapters and encouraging its young supporters to participate in its numerous (and sometimes violent) protests and marches.

There's lots more, including a rundown of MEChA's tender feelings toward "gringos," Jews, and the U.S. Constitution.

Link via Campus Nonsense.

The Daily Pennsylvanian agonizes about Penn's low "yield rate" when it comes to attracting black students. Maurice aptly observes that it sounds as though the DP is talking about crops, not people. Can it be that publicly discussing black students as a commercial quantity--one whose annual yield makes Penn look more or less good in comparison with other institutions--may have something to do with the fact that 60% of blacks who are admitted to Penn go elsewhere? The DP explores many reasons why Penn is not cultivating black students as successfully as it would like. But the mercenary objectification that comes with such "concerned" rhetoric is not among them.

Daily Cal readers express their dismay that the paper falsely reported UC Berkeley professors as saying the Bali bombing was engineered by the U.S.

October 12: University of Pennsylvania senior Dan Fishback is quoted thus in the New York Times:

Campus activism at Penn is a bit frustrating because it seems like most people agree with us. ... I'll talk about the various reasons we shouldn't go to war, and they'll be, like, `Yeah, I'm totally with you.' But they're not, because they're not involved. They're so used to feeling helpless that it doesn't occur to them to be outraged.

October 21: Dan's dream comes true. Campus activism becomes a joy again because most people don't agree with him. He talks about the various reasons we shouldn't go to war, and they're like, "You're delusional" (comment #26 of 29). They're not with him, and yet they are involved. They're so outraged by his callow reasoning that they give him a Sontag Award and fisk him royally in the comments under his article.

A former Daily Pennsylvanian editor weighs in on Dan Fishback's Sontag Award-winning editorial.

For the record: it was Critical Mass' very own Maurice Black who spotted the prizeworthy piece and brought it to Judge Sullivan's attention.

Free sensitivity training at Berkeley tonight: as part of Relationship Violence Awareness Week, Jackson Katz, a leading figure in the field of sensitizing men to "gender violence," will speak at 7 pm in 2050 LSB. There he will challenge each member of the audience to become "empowered bystanders." In his own words: "The goal is to create a male peer culture, an atmosphere whereby the abuse of women by some men will be seen as completely unacceptable by the male peer culture." Someone at Berkeley, please go and report back. I am dying to know what an "empowered bystander" is. How, for instance, does an empowered bystander differ from an innocent one? What is the nature of his or her power? Does an empowered bystander feel good about standing idly by rather than getting involved? Is an empowered bystander endowed with special interpretive abilities, so that the act of doing nothing becomes the condition of understanding what others are doing? Inquiring minds are standing by, waiting to be empowered.

Mother Jones magazine has ranked UC Berkeley 4th in the nation for activism. Wesleyan, the University of Michigan, and Florida State took the top three spots. The high approval rating is largely due to last spring's pro-Palestinian sit-in at Wheeler Hall. I'm guessing Cal got extra points for staging a "peaceful" protest that disrupted classes, resulted in arrests, and led to suspension for the organizing group, Students for Justice in Palestine.

David Brooks takes self-esteem down a notch. In the process, he has a lot to tell us about how our classless society is actually all about equal-opportunity elitism.

Campus Watch, Daniel Pipes' Middle East Studies watchdog website, has created a new "Solidarity With Apologists" page to honor those academics who demanded to be listed alongside the eight academics the site originally singled out as egregious abusers of their professorial positions. So outraged were certain academics at the putatively "McCarthyite" tactics of Pipes' creative use of the public domain, so incensed were they by the manner in which his attempt to challenge the academy's hard left stance toward Middle East affairs "chilled" their own expression, that they joined symbolic hands with their oppressed colleagues, flooded Pipes with nasty mail, and sanctimoniously urged him to single them out, too. (Readers of Critical Mass will recall that Berkeley queer theorist Judith Butler led the pious charge). Ever the gentleman, Pipes has obliged. In his own words:

After we launched www.campus-watch.org, academics deluged us with emails; some of them requested inclusion with the original eight professors cited. ... Most of them are academics from other fields and I suspect that few of them actually read our statement of purpose, for very few of them understand what issues Campus Watch was created to address. Still, if they insist on declaring public solidarity with Palestinian or Islamist violence, this is important information for university stakeholders to be aware of, so we are posting their names.

I know a number of these martyrs to justice. I even own some of their books. I'm so proud.

Andrew Sullivan nominates the Daily Pennsylvanian for a Sontag Award today.

The Daily Californian has reported that a panel of U.C. Berkeley professors thinks the U.S. may have engineered the Bali bombing. The report was in turn reported at Angry Clam and Instapundit. Meanwhile, deep in the growing comments section on Angry Clam's blog, a correction has been posted by one Tom Villars. Here it is in full:

Oct 21 2002, 12:23 pm
Seems there has been a mistake. I just received an email from Prof. Jeffrey Hadler denying everything. Here it is:

Erin O'Connor, 8:53 PM | Permalink

Amiri Baraka Award Nominee: Louis

Amiri Baraka Award Nominee: Louis Farrakhan, for accusing Bush of allowing the September 11 attacks: "He couldnít seem to get on track on September 10th. But on September 11th, 12th, 13th, the country suddenly united behind its president. Who benefited from the coming down of the World Trade Center? It wasnít you; it wasnít me."

Erin O'Connor, 5:35 PM | Permalink

"We have a major national

"We have a major national security problem on our hands. There's a man -- a deceitful man -- who has consistently lied to the world, jeopardizing the safety of Americans. As long as he stays in power, we are at a greater risk of terrorist attack. As long as he continues to disregard the truth, spouting lies into the air, this international bully will threaten our safety. This man must be stopped: George Bush."
-- University of Pennsylvania senior Dan Fishback partakes of some leftist moral relativism.

Erin O'Connor, 4:38 PM | Permalink

Quote of the day: "I

Quote of the day:

"I don't need Harry Belafonte to tell me what it means to be black." --Condoleezza Rice

UPDATE: Connoisseurs of cant will recall that in addition to advising the national security advisor to get some spine, Belafonte accused Colin Powell of being the Bush administration's subservient "house slave." Scott Mc. writes that Belafonte has historical ignorance to add to his other stellar qualities:

Belafonte needs to get his facts straight about house slaves.Many ex-house slaves testified as to how they hated being under the constant eye and thumb of "massa" and "missus" and envied in a way the other bondsmen's lack of that contact. House slaves turned vehemently on their ex-masters at liberation,to the shock of the latter; the former were by no means merely
cringing sycophants.

Doh! Or should I say, "Dayo!"

Erin O'Connor, 3:11 PM | Permalink

Twelve thousand professors have signed

Twelve thousand professors have signed a petition opposing war with Iraq. David Horowitz has written a blog excoriating the stupidity of the petitioners.

Two points of stupidity Horowitz misses: the report he links to does not give the name of the petition, and the petition itself is online. Online petitions have a tendency to be signed by Santa Claus and I. P. Freely; unnamed petitions can neither be signed nor properly critiqued.

Erin O'Connor, 9:06 AM | Permalink

October 20, 2002
For the first time in

For the first time in a decade, Harvard has slipped to second place in a national diversity survey. Yes, there is such a thing as a national diversity survey. And no, it is not concerned with how many points of view are represented on a given campus. What is it concerned with? Why, the number of black students who enroll, of course. The survey is conducted by the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, so it's easy to see where its bias--I mean focus--comes from.

Last year, Harvard admitted 184 black students and 113 accepted the offer. The year before, 118 of 185 admitted black students enrolled. Harvard's slip is being blamed on the fallout from last year's clash between President Lawrence Summers and the rappin' philosopher Cornel West. When Summers challenged West about his priorities, suggesting he was spending too much time on the road giving talks, making CDs, and campaigning for his friends, West yelled racism and hightailed it to Princeton. The chairman of Harvard's Afro-American Studies department, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., sees a causal connection between the scandal and the numbers:

For a prospective black student, nothing is more important than their [sic] idea of the racial atmosphere at their [sic] prospective colleges .... With that dispute, a dark cloud descended over Harvard's public image of race relations, which had been nothing but stellar under President [Neil] Rudenstine.

Never mind the grammatical errors. Let's concentrate on the inadvertantly revealing phrase "Harvard's public image of race relations." Gates isn't concerned with the actual state of race relations at Harvard. He is concerned with the public image of race relations at Harvard. In the competition to see which school can celebrate diversity loudest and longest, actual race relations on campus are less important than what race relations appear to be. It's all about show. It's not about reality, but about pageantry. Diversity is ultimately about display.

Looked at this way, it's easier to see why such a stupid criterion as the number of black freshman can carry such weight in national assessments of schools' commitments to diversity. Admitting a lot of black students, rather than admitting only remarkable black students, becomes the goal. Numbers matter more than qualifications; quantity is more important than quality. It is probably also for this reason that the survey is not based on a more telling statistic--such as the percentage of black students who go on to earn their degrees from the prestigious schools that take such pride in admitting them. Those numbers would not look nearly as good.

Erin O'Connor, 6:22 PM | Permalink

Amiri Baraka isn't the only

Amiri Baraka isn't the only dud Poet Laureate in the U.S. California's resident Laureate of four months, Quincy Troupe, has resigned after the state Senate Rules Committee discovered that he lied on his resume. A routine background check revealed that the 62-year-old Poet Troupe did not graduate from college as he had claimed. The revelation may jeopardize Troupe's tenured position at UC San Diego, where he has taught creative writing and Caribbean literature since 1991. You can download an MP3 of Troupe reading from his work here.

Erin O'Connor, 4:56 PM | Permalink

This was predictable: Vanderbilt is

This was predictable: Vanderbilt is being sued by the United Daughters of the Confederacy for its decision to change the name of the campus dormitory that group helped finance 67 years ago. The building cost $150,000 to build, one third of which was paid by UDC. It is called "Confederate Memorial Hall," a name that raises all the usual hackles of politically correct faculty and students. Some black students have even refused to set foot in the building since it was renovated in 1988. Recently, university administrators caved in to pressure to change the building's name to "Memorial Hall" and to remove the word "Confederate" from the stone inscription over the entrance. In response, UDC claims that Vanderbilt is committing breach of contract.

When I read a while back that Vanderbilt was effectively rubbing out the building's history, and that this involved formally erasing its financial ties to a Confederate-affiliated organization, I thought to myself that this would not be the end of the story. And so it has not been. In the interim, I have had time to meditate on compromises that should satisfy all parties, and I offer them herewith in the hope that a balance can be struck between the rights of UDC and the moral obligation of Vanderbilt to pander to the petty political pressure exercised by radical student groups.

I begin by noting that the problem does not seem to be the fact the UDC helped pay for the dorm. What irks people is that the word "Confederate" is written in stone on the dorm. This explains why the university is seeking to allay student grievances simply by changing the building's name. It's a classic instance of the consumerist mentality of even the most politicized of today's youth. Change the label, and you change the substance. Get the word "Confederate" off the building, and the building will no longer have a historical connection to Confederate descendants or their money. It's all about brand-name recognition. Get the word "Confederate" off the building, and you'll be left with a generic substitute for offensive specifics; you'll have "Memorial Hall," in memory of nothing in particular, a memorial to the moment when its past was deliberately effaced.

With that in mind, solutions begin to appear.

1) Vanderbilt can buy UDC out--simply pay back the 50 grand (with interest) the UDC sunk into the building and then they can call the building whatever the hell they want. I vote for "Historical Revisionism Memorial Hall," or, perhaps, for "Frankly, My Dear, I Don't Give A Damn About History Memorial Hall." If Vanderbilt goes this route, it would be a nice touch if they were to whitewash the building.

2) Vanderbilt can become contractual sticklers. Since UDC paid for 1/3 of the building, they should be able to put 1/3 of the word "Confederate" on it. The options are many, but I would personally favor either "Con Memorial Hall" (to commemorate the con job that Vanderbilt is currently spearheading) or "Deface Memorial Hall" (that's more than a third, I know--but maybe Vanderbilt is feeling generous).

3) Vanderbilt can destroy 1/3 of the building, and declare that the ruined part was the part financed by UDC. Then UDC would have no claim on a name change.

4) Vanderbilt can close the dorm down and turn it into a museum dedicated to the place of hypocrisy in the history of the American South. The building itself could be Exhibit A.

Erin O'Connor, 2:29 PM | Permalink

Speaking of historical revisionism, Russian

Speaking of historical revisionism, Russian researchers are currently unearthing a mass grave just outside St. Petersburg. The grave, which researchers believe contains thousands of the nearly 40,000 people Stalin was said to have executed between 1937 and 1938, is seen as additional proof of Stalin's legendary "Great Terror." The New York Times reports that it is also proof of the Russian government's unwillingness to acknowledge the depths of its degraded past. The Russian security service issued a dismissive statement saying their archives contain no records of graves at the site, while military bulldozers have torn up the roads researchers need to use to get to the excavation. It's a good article about historical repression, about the longterm consequences of governmental failure to acknowledge past atrocities, and about the difficulty of remembering atrocity as such when it is kept buried beneath the surface of a nation's desire to move on.

Erin O'Connor, 10:00 AM | Permalink

You'd think that with all

You'd think that with all the talk of Hitler that has been circulating lately--I refer particularly to those happy analogies between Sharon and der Fuhrer and between Israel and Nazi Germany--that people would have some idea what they are saying. You might think that because so much of this talk is coming from inside universities, out of the mouths of scholars and into the heads of radicalized students hungry for a cause, that it would be accompanied by some degree of historical and philosophical comprehension. Even if you find such comparisons repellent and morally bankrupt, you might still think that there is an element of deliberate strategy to them, that on some twisted level the crazy invocation of Nazism to describe contemporary Israel is an informed one. Think again.

Twenty per cent of high school seniors think Germany was our ally during WWII. More than 33% of seniors graduating from America's top fifty colleges and universities can't name the Axis nations. This means several things:

1) Historical education in this country sucks, and it sucks all the way through the B.A. We should not be surprised. As multiculturalism takes over historical education, students are much more likely to study--and celebrate!--"diversity" than they are to learn about actual historical events. Even top colleges are more likely to require students to take a course dealing with diversity (more than 60% do, and the number is rising) than to take a straightforward course in U.S. or European history.

2) Many pro-Palestinian and anti-war protesters do not have the foggiest idea what they are talking about when they resort to that most evocative and rabble-rousing of comparisons between Israel and a Nazi state. They know such a comparison is rabble-rousing, which is why they use it. But can they develop that comparison? Can they explain what fascism is? Can they either describe how German national socialism evolved into genocidal totalitarianism or explain how Israel's democratic government can be seen as a fascist state? No, no, and no.

3) Colleges and universities are failing students in unconscionable, possibly actionable, ways. The push to see Israel as an essentially Nazi-type regime is coming from the faculty, particularly those who teach in Middle East studies departments.

4) We are, as a country, collectively forgetting not only the most significant moments in recent Western history (thus making it possible for the worst moments of that history to repeat themselves), but we are also losing touch with the founding principles of this country. We are so busy massaging the notion that America is terrible, awful, racist-classist-sexist-imperialist--sending this message has become a mission in our schools--that we are not taking time to appreciate, or even comprehend, what this country is founded upon, and why that matters.

Read what the government is doing to try to reverse this scary trend toward massive national forgetfulness in this NRO piece.

Erin O'Connor, 9:37 AM | Permalink

October 19, 2002
Commenting on Judith Rodin's refusal

Commenting on Judith Rodin's refusal to divest Penn from Israel, Sean Lee writes:

Rodin should have responded:

"We will continue to do business with Israel because they are a DEMOCRACY that encourages Capitalism." END OF STORY.

[...]

We must continue to fight those who push big government and higher taxes here in the USA. We must reduce poverty through education and job training. Our nation's founders never envisioned an America with cradle to grave entitlements.

We must have University Presidents who embrace the concepts of:
1. small limited government,
2. low taxes (taxes only used for national defense, infrastructure, scientific research grants and essential services only),
3. school vouchers to help the disadvantaged kids and improve all schools.
4. support Capitalism and have Charitable organizations handle those who need temporary assistance (no more Socialism that the Communists and Clintons endorse).

Libertarian university presidents? I hope I live to see the day....

Erin O'Connor, 12:18 AM | Permalink

October 18, 2002
NYU law student Aaron Nagano

NYU law student Aaron Nagano has an update on the law school faculty's unwillingness to debate the issue of whether the military should be allowed to recruit on campus. If Nagano's summary of University of Chicago professor Richard Epstein's comments on anti-discrimination law and the proper role of the university is any indicator of how forceful the man is in person, it isn't hard to see why no one on NYU's law faculty wanted to debate him. The good news is that students attended the event and asked questions. The questions themselves reveal a disturbing attachment to the notion that the right thing to do with objectionable ideas is to ban them, but students' willingness to subject that notion to public scrutiny shows a commitment to reasoned debate that puts the faculty's comparative anti-intellectual arrogance to shame.

Erin O'Connor, 10:46 PM | Permalink

You'll find living proof of

You'll find living proof of Erin's points about ed school in this Daily Pennsylvanian op-ed piece by Hilal Nakiboglu, a second-year U. Penn doctoral student in higher education management. Thanking her parents for their foresight in sending her to an all-female high school, Nakiboglu reflects ironically on the opportunities she missed by not going co-ed:

I miss[ed] out on the pompomed-sporting events, I also missed a prime chance to develop an eating disorder. I missed out on being subjected to imbalanced classroom dynamics and sexist teachers. I missed out on the chance to decide that I was inept at math or science. And on the opportunity to realize that I wasn't beautiful, curvy, thin or fill-in-the-blank enough.

Given her single-sex educational experience, one wonders how Nakiboglu can state with such certainty that America's co-ed schools are bastions of anorexia, sexism, and plummeting female self-esteem. It turns out that she's read (and has most likely been taught) the American Association of University Women's report "How Schools Shortchange Girls," which she proceeds to cite liberally:

According to the AAUW, transitioning from adolescence to adulthood is especially rough on girls. The report chronicles a serious loss of overall self-confidence with an especially marked drop in perceived ability to perform well in science and math.

Adolescence is the time when girls learn to be dangerously critical of their appearance and their bodies. They decide they are not smart enough and become increasingly silent in class. For them, it's a time of self-censorship and is discerned by a sad shift away from a positive self-image.

Young girls especially leave their adolescent years behind with low expectations of themselves. They, according to the AAUW report, are more depressed than their male counterparts and are four times more likely than them to attempt suicide.

The adolescent girls captured in the study overwhelmingly said they felt "not good enough" or "not smart enough" to be successful. Not surprisingly, they tended to underscore the importance of their physical attributes. Most offered a component of their appearance as their best trait. Meanwhile the boys stressed their "talents," be they athletic or intellectual.

Nakiboglu would do well to read more about this AAUW report before reciting it like hallowed doctrine. In particular, Nakiboglu should read Christina Hoff Sommers' Who Stole Feminism? and The War Against Boys, books that meticulously itemize the enormous methodological flaws and ideological distortions in this study (and others like it). As Hoff Sommers puts it in her Atlantic Monthly article "The War Against Boys": "The research commonly cited to support the claims of male privilege and sinfulness is riddled with errors. Almost none of it has been published in professional peer-reviewed journals. Some of the data are mysteriously missing. Yet the false picture remains and is dutifully passed along in schools of education, in 'gender-equity' workshops, and increasingly to children themselves."

Nakiboglu and her peers received this "research" through their participation in a prestigous Ivy League doctoral program. Because it came from an authoritative, trusted source, they unthinkingly integrated it into their writing, their politics, and their teaching. I don't directly blame Nakiboglu for her presumption that "How Schools Shortchange Girls" is an objective, fair, and well-intentioned report: It is intended to come across as such, especially to the naive and receptive feminist doctoral student. I blame established feminist academics (such as Carol Gilligan) who perpetuate the myth that America's school system is a patriarchal conspiracy designed to systematically ruin girls' health, lower their self-esteem, and minimize their career prospects; I blame the ed school professors who pointedly ignore articles and books that challenge and counter such mythmaking, professors who choose instead to present biased feminist ideology as objective, impartial truth.

At the end of her editorial, Nakiboglu congratulates herself and other Penn women for "beating the odds" and making it to college. Feminist self-congratulation all round. However, when one looks at nationwide undergraduate demographics one finds that it is actually Penn men who are beating the odds. In 1997, 55% of America's full-time enrolled undergraduate students were female, 45% were male. Studies predict that the proportion of women in college will continue to rise throughout this decade; by the year 2010, a whopping 66% of America's undergraduate students will be female. This means that in eight more years, women will outnumber men on campuses by a ratio of two to one. This means that if you have a a young son and daughter, your daughter is twice as likely to get a college education. Her future is safe in the hands of upcoming school administrators such as Nakiboglu, who concludes her op-ed by encouraging women to be "mindful of ourselves and attuned to each other." You might ask who will be mindful of and attuned to your son as he makes his way through school. Who will help him beat the odds? Nobody, it seems, but a handful of "right-wing reactionaries" whose sacreligious books will never see the light of day on an ed school syllabus.

Erin O'Connor, 5:37 PM | Permalink

Truly progressive thinkers about the

Truly progressive thinkers about the sorry state of American education will tell you that ed schools should not be gateways to the classroom. Radical thinkers about the sorry state of American education will tell you that ed schools should be banned from the planet. Ed schools are corrupt and pointless professional holding pens; they take your money, they teach you to spout platitudes about diversity and self-esteem, and they send you out into the schools, credentialled, incompetent, and responsible for the intellectual future of the country. Most people who ought to be teachers can't stomach the thought of ed school. Those who go to ed school--it has been shown--are below average students themselves. Care to fume a bit more on a quiet Friday afternoon? Check out this NRO column by Peter Wood.

UPDATE: Things aren't looking too good in Scotland, either. It seems that nearly half the students training to be teachers at Aberdeen have inadequate writing skills. Thanks to Mike Z. for the link.

Erin O'Connor, 4:33 PM | Permalink

One small step for creationism,

One small step for creationism, one giant step backward for science education. Caving in to the pressure of--let's be frank--an uninformed and wilfully obtuse public, the Ohio Department of Education has voted unanimously to require evolution not to be taught as fact, but as a controversy in which there are many competing, equally valid views. Apparently 82% of Ohioans think that curricular treatment of the origins of life should not be confined to evolutionary theory. The numbers reflect a national consensus--one that in turn reflects an overwhelming and troubling disconnect between the general education level of the American people and the current state of science. Evolution is only controversial to people who are more inclined to superstition than reason; our schools are catering to the public's desire to believe in magic when it passes measures such as these. Despite what postmodernism and multiculturalism want us to believe, there is such a thing as truth, and there are such things as facts. Truth can be differentiated from falsehood, and we can tell the difference between facts and fallacies. Evolution is a fact. Creationism--or "intelligent design" as the current newspeak has it--is a fallacy.

Erin O'Connor, 4:21 PM | Permalink

John Leo writes on creative

John Leo writes on creative coercion in the law, at school, in the home, and especially in speech. Lots of stuff on censorship and on schools.

Erin O'Connor, 12:48 PM | Permalink

University of Pennsylvania President Judith

University of Pennsylvania President Judith Rodin opposes divestment. In a detailed piece in today's Daily Pennsylvanian, Rodin explains:

Because Penn defends freedom of expression as a core academic and societal value, we will not use the power of the University either to stifle political debates or to endorse hostile measures against any country or its citizens.

Divestiture is an extreme measure to be adopted rarely and only under the most unusual circumstances. Certainly, many countries involved in the current Middle East dispute have been aggressors and calls for divestment against them have been notably absent.

Divestment also runs counter to the University of Pennsylvania's long-held position that investment decisions are best guided by the University's fiduciary responsibilities to its donors, students and employees, and by its overarching institutional responsibility as an educational and research institution to remain unbiased and non-partisan in the pursuit of knowledge. The policy, "Response by the University as an Institution to External Issues," itself can be found in the Feb. 3, 1998, edition of the Almanac.

Therefore, the University of Pennsylvania will not support divestment from Israel, boycotts of Israeli scholars and scientists, or any effort to stifle the free expression of diverse ideas and opinions about the Middle East conflict by our faculty and students.

There she is, practical and principled. Love the way she reads the divestment campaign as a giant attempt at censorship, the pot of repression at the end of the speech-code rainbow. She's right that the people who support the one do tend to support the other. Rodin also explains why she was not one of the university administrators who signed the October 7 New York Times ad denouncing anti-Semitism on campus:

While I personally endorse the substance of the American Jewish Committee statement against intimidation of Jewish and Zionist students and faculty, I and many other current presidents refused to add our names to the statement because we felt the ad was unbalanced -- particularly after a year in which Arab and Muslim students on Penn's campus have been subjected to at least as much harassment and intimidation as Jewish students. Reportedly, despite requests from several presidents, the authors of the statement refused to broaden its language to recognize this fact.

My overriding responsibility as Penn's president is to protect all of our students from intimidation and threats of violence. I believe the best way to do this is to expose the haters and intimidators to the public scrutiny of their peers.

Safety and security are prerequisites of academic life -- and universities and colleges go to great lengths to protect our students from harm -- but that is not the same as assuring that they always feel comfortable. As we learned during the era of campus speech codes, the fastest way to empower and embolden hatred and intimidation is to try to suppress it. Learning how to bring hatred and intolerance into the light of day and to engage its emotions, arguments and rhetoric with reason and evidence may involve confrontation and discomfort, but it inevitably strengthens our students and institutions for the responsibilities of citizenship and civic engagement we all share. Invariably, hateful ideas will crumble under the weight of relentless scrutiny and informed debate.

There's more, all wise. Rodin came to Penn in the wake of what is probably this country's most infamous episode of politically correct intolerance, the Water Buffalo Affair. Her presence at Penn is predicated on her belief in academic freedom and her willingness to uphold the principles of free speech and open expression. She has taken a lot of heat for that, as there are still plenty of would-be censors among Penn faculty and students. But she stands firm in the face of pressure to protect the wounded sensibilities of various outspoken campus groups; she has consistently recognized, and consistently said, that the best way to combat hate is not through suppression, but through public discrediting. And so she does again this morning:

We certainly do not remain aloof from the pain felt by groups and individuals who are the targets of threats or hate speech, or from their deeply felt concerns for their own safety. But I will not respond to intimidation with more intimidation. Others may do as their own sense of professional responsibility dictates, but I will stay the course of encouraging, rather than discouraging, the most robust and engaged debate possible -- even, and especially, with those who would seek to intimidate or threaten their opponents. Public confrontation is their greatest enemy, not presidential statements.

Finally, we all should recogn