My good friend George Leef wrote a piece about a new trend in higher education: Some universities now require professors to take diversity oaths, loyalty oaths about their commitment to diversity ideology. That is neofascism. I contacted Republican congressman John Faso, who represents my district. I am going to a breakfast with him on April 13 in Kingston, NY, and I am hoping to bring this up if I have the opportunity.
American universities have been indoctrinating college students in far-left ideologies for decades. I have been reviewing websites of leading liberal arts colleges for the past few weeks, and the absurdity of the course offerings at places like Amherst has gotten me to thinking that it is time that tax exemption for liberal arts was brought to an end. I do not see a good reason for subsidization of the blatant ideology that masquerades as education at many of the leading liberal arts colleges. They are engaging in fraud and indoctrination--not education.
Meanwhile, I have written the following letter to President Donald Trump.
Dear President Trump:
The James G. Martin Center has this morning published an article by George Leef concerning the recent adoption of diversity oaths, similar to loyalty oaths of the 1940s, at Carnegie Mellon, the University of California, and Virginia Tech. Whereas the campus left objected to loyalty oaths to the United States, they have no trouble with ideological loyalty oaths. Leef’s article is based on a piece that was written by a member of the Oregon Association of Scholars.
According to Leef:
In 2015, Oregon State instituted a required statement from faculty on their “contributions to equity, inclusion, and diversity.” Among other things, individuals are expected to discuss their plans to spend time “advocating for normative and policy change.” The message delivered is quite clear: show that you are an enthusiastic diversity supporter if you value your job.
At Portland State, the school’s Diversity Action Council has a list of 44 questions that are to be asked of faculty applicants including “the role of diversity in shaping your social style,” and how he or she will combat “the pervasive belief that diversity and excellence are somehow in conflict.” Obviously, any candidate who answers that diversity and excellence actually can conflict has painted a target on his back.
The purpose of these statements is to exclude from university faculties Republican scholars and anyone else who is unwilling to conform to left-wing ideologies. I’m certain that these are only the beginning, and eventually the amorphous supposed ethical dimension in the diversity oaths will evolve into oaths of loyalty to procrustean principles of equality. These institutions aim to ban from teaching any of your supporters, any Republican, any libertarian, and anyone who believes in liberalism.
Isn’t it time to end the anti-intellectual intolerance at Carnegie Mellon, UC, Portland State, Oregon State, and Virginia Tech?
Leef suggests an idea that I have advocated since the election of the Republican Congress: The National Association of Scholars, led by Peter Wood, has proposed freedom-to-learn amendments to the Higher Education Act, which require that the First Amendment apply to all universities that sup at the federal trough. The bill requires universities to file First Amendment reports. They also require that rights of invited speakers must be respected. I have personally witnessed the violation of such rights.
I do not see how students taught to be intolerant of those with whom they disagree can participate in democratic processes. Funding to Carnegie Mellon, UC, Virginia Tech, Portland State, Oregon State, and all other institutions with ideological oaths should be brought to a screeching halt.
The full text of the proposals of NAS is at https://www.nas.org/articles/the_freedom_to_learn_amendments_2.0
Mitchell Langbert, Ph.D.
Showing posts with label NAS. Show all posts
Showing posts with label NAS. Show all posts
Saturday, April 1, 2017
Friday, January 15, 2010
200th Blog on New National Association of Scholars Site
Ashley Thorne, the coordinator of the National Association of Scholars blog, to which I have been contributing, just sent this message:
>Hi Professor Langbert,
>Hope your semester is off to a good start. I just wanted to let you know that your blog entry on “The Price of Academic Integrity” was the 200th post of the NAS blog. Thanks for all your good blogging!
- Ashley
Ashley adds that:
>Since creating the blog in late September, we have posted over 200 entries and received nearly 10,000 views. We’ve been linked by Joanne Jacobs, the History News Network, Campus Reform, and Minding the Campus.
>We have touched on many different themes, from student learning outcomes to online education to Climategate. Our most frequently used categories are Diversity, Political Correctness, Sustainability, and Academic Standards. There are now 27 of us signed up as authors, with 8 or 9 contributing regularly.
If you haven't seen the NAS blog yet, please take a look. They've got a great list of contributors, including Candace de Russy. NAS is a wonderful organization.
I've reproduced my blog on "The Price of Academic Integrity".
The Price of Academic Integrity
>News Busters, the blog of the Media Research Center, reports that the National Center for Public Policy Research (NCPPR) has stated that Michael Mann, a Penn State climatological researcher involved in the recent e-mail scandal, received “$541,184 in economic stimulus funds last June to conduct climate change research.”
NCPPR has issued a press release criticizing the Obama administration “for awarding a half million dollar grant from the economic stimulus package to Penn State professor Michael Mann, a key figure in the Climategate controversy.” The release states that Professor Mann is currently under investigation by Penn State Univesity “because of activities related to a closed circle of climate scientists who appear to have been engaged in agenda-driven science.”
>Hi Professor Langbert,
>Hope your semester is off to a good start. I just wanted to let you know that your blog entry on “The Price of Academic Integrity” was the 200th post of the NAS blog. Thanks for all your good blogging!
- Ashley
Ashley adds that:
>Since creating the blog in late September, we have posted over 200 entries and received nearly 10,000 views. We’ve been linked by Joanne Jacobs, the History News Network, Campus Reform, and Minding the Campus.
>We have touched on many different themes, from student learning outcomes to online education to Climategate. Our most frequently used categories are Diversity, Political Correctness, Sustainability, and Academic Standards. There are now 27 of us signed up as authors, with 8 or 9 contributing regularly.
If you haven't seen the NAS blog yet, please take a look. They've got a great list of contributors, including Candace de Russy. NAS is a wonderful organization.
I've reproduced my blog on "The Price of Academic Integrity".
The Price of Academic Integrity
>News Busters, the blog of the Media Research Center, reports that the National Center for Public Policy Research (NCPPR) has stated that Michael Mann, a Penn State climatological researcher involved in the recent e-mail scandal, received “$541,184 in economic stimulus funds last June to conduct climate change research.”
NCPPR has issued a press release criticizing the Obama administration “for awarding a half million dollar grant from the economic stimulus package to Penn State professor Michael Mann, a key figure in the Climategate controversy.” The release states that Professor Mann is currently under investigation by Penn State Univesity “because of activities related to a closed circle of climate scientists who appear to have been engaged in agenda-driven science.”
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
The NAS, ISI and Student Therapy
I was able to attend the twelfth conference of the National Association of Scholars only on Friday, November 17 because I teach on Saturday and Sunday. The part of the conference that I was able to attend was among the best academic conferences that I have ever attended. On Friday, the keynote speaker was Senator Hank Brown, who is now the president of the University of Colorado. Senator Brown talked about strategies that he has employed in cleaning up Ward Churchill's mess. Churchill had been promoted to department chair even though he lacked a Ph.D. and had not produced a meaningful body of research. As chair, he claimed that the victims of the 9/11 attacks were "little Eichmanns", implying that their murders were justified. Hearing about some of the steps that Mr. Brown and Colorado are taking to improve things suggested hope.
Other Friday speakers included included Candace de Russy (SUNY), Anne Neal (ACTA), Tom Lucero (Colorado), Mike Ratliff (Intercollegiate Studies Institute) and Todd Zywicki (Dartmouth). Neal is the head of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni; Rafliff is vice president of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute; and de Russy, Lucero and Zywicki are trustees. On Saturday, de Russy was awarded the Barry R. Gross Memorial award.
The day before the NAS conference I had addressed a group of students who have established an Intercollegiate Studies Institute club at my college. I am the club's faculty advisor, so they suggested that I lead the first meeting's discussion. The students had read Roger Scruton's excellent book The West and the Rest, which I discussed. After a brief lecture, I asked the students to each describe their thoughts on Scruton's ideas and I also asked them what brought them to the meeting.
Attendance at the ISI event was excellent. Many full-time students also work full time, so it is difficult to get good attendance at extra-curricular events. Nevertheless, 30 students attended.
As each student discussed his or her views, one mentioned that an English professor at the college had sent around an e-mail saying that ISI should be prevented from meeting and that the students should not be permitted to set up an ISI group at the college. At the college, the "collegiality" of conservatives has been fetishized while intolerance is reflexive from the campus's left wing. The left's intolerance recrudesces when anyone, student or faculty, has the temerity to question its tired theories.
Several students at the meeting mentioned that all of their professors espouse extreme left wing views and that the assumptions of all class discussions in the social sciences and humanities are steeped in Marxist theory. Given the fixation on Marxism, it would appear that much social science has become, like pharoah worship, a fossilized religion.
I made a point of asking these students whether the constant repitition of left wing ideas has affected them intellectually, and several replied that it has. Even though they know that the left's ideas are erroneous, the constant propagandizing that occurs at universities has had a brainwashing effect, according to the students. In effect, the students imply that university attendance serves not to open the mind intellectually, but to create psychological imbalance.
One issue that the NAS program did not address is whether the political correctness that the NAS has combatted for twenty years has influenced America's ability to defend itself, for example against terrorism. Based on my students' responses, I suspect that it has. Responding to a quote often attributed to the Duke of Wellington, George Orwell wrote in his 1941 essay "England Your England" that "probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there."
Since the left supports terrorism and allies itself with America's foes, the left's dominance on college campus seems likely to have crippled our ability to think coherently about defending our nation. That diverse disciplines, journalism, inteligence, and political, have been incapable of thinking coherently about how to eliminate terrorism, suggests some common ground for the intellectual vacuity. The common ground is the poor job that universities have done.
There are two psychological effects of university brainwashing: narcissism and sociopathy. I have previously posted about the Shrinkwrapped blog's discussion of the liberal borg's narcissism. The left is sociopathic, or lacking in conscience, as well as narcissistic.
Let's review some of the characteristics of sociopathy:
I. Grandiose, deceitful
2- Lack of remorse and empathy
3- Lack of goals*
4- Poor behavioral controls; antisocial behavior (anti-social personality disorder is a component of sociopathy).
It seems to me that although Robert Godwin's point about the narcissism of the left is totally right, it needs to be supplemented with a separate sociopathic complex. The left amply demonstrates each of these sociopathic traits. Its practitioners imagine themseleves smarter than others; they are proud of their manipulative skills; and they are often highly emotional and disruptive.
For example, Saul Alinsky, a radical activist, wrote Rules for Radicals in 1971 in which he argues that deception is a characteristic strategy of left-wing radicals. Likewise, left wingers often lack behavioral controls and are highly disruptive, as we have seen in the antics of Ward Churchill and numerous similar cases. The left may be characterized as the sociopathic movement of the twentieth century, and for that reason I would characterize Nazism as a left wing ideology.
The chief trait of sociopaths is lack of remorse or conscience. It is here that the views of the left come into clearest sociopathic focus. The left has been responsible for more murder than any religious or ideological movement in history. More than the Romans, more than the Ku Klux Klan, more than radical Islam, and more than Nazism. Yet, unlike the Germans, who have mostly disowned Nazism, the left continues to advocate its murderous, bloodthirsty ideology without apology. The tens of millions whom Mao and Stalin killed are meaningless statistics to the conscienceless left.
Hence, The Intercollegiate Studies Institute can be viewed as a form of therapy. During the meeting, a student said that he supported alternative approaches to financing public higher education. I mentioned that Milton Friedman had suggested the idea of tuition vouchers in his popular classic Capitalism and Freedom. The students said that they might be interested in a meeting to discuss this book. Friedman, who had been born in Brooklyn in 1912, had died the same day, November 16, 2006, at age 94. But his spirit is very much alive.
Let the therapy begin.
*The left's lack of goals can be seen in its willingness to ally itself with radical Islam without grasping the implications of such an alliance. Similarly, the American labor movement allied itself with slave owners in the 19th century; and the American communist party allied itself with Hitler in 1939. Now that communism has completely failed and only buffoons can advocate centralized economic planning, the left has no goal or model to advocate. Its only role is disruptive and critical. It has nothing to construct. It is at this point in history that the sociopathic nature of the left comes most clearly into focus, and the role it has played in the mass murders of the twentieth century comes into sharp relief.
Other Friday speakers included included Candace de Russy (SUNY), Anne Neal (ACTA), Tom Lucero (Colorado), Mike Ratliff (Intercollegiate Studies Institute) and Todd Zywicki (Dartmouth). Neal is the head of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni; Rafliff is vice president of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute; and de Russy, Lucero and Zywicki are trustees. On Saturday, de Russy was awarded the Barry R. Gross Memorial award.
The day before the NAS conference I had addressed a group of students who have established an Intercollegiate Studies Institute club at my college. I am the club's faculty advisor, so they suggested that I lead the first meeting's discussion. The students had read Roger Scruton's excellent book The West and the Rest, which I discussed. After a brief lecture, I asked the students to each describe their thoughts on Scruton's ideas and I also asked them what brought them to the meeting.
Attendance at the ISI event was excellent. Many full-time students also work full time, so it is difficult to get good attendance at extra-curricular events. Nevertheless, 30 students attended.
As each student discussed his or her views, one mentioned that an English professor at the college had sent around an e-mail saying that ISI should be prevented from meeting and that the students should not be permitted to set up an ISI group at the college. At the college, the "collegiality" of conservatives has been fetishized while intolerance is reflexive from the campus's left wing. The left's intolerance recrudesces when anyone, student or faculty, has the temerity to question its tired theories.
Several students at the meeting mentioned that all of their professors espouse extreme left wing views and that the assumptions of all class discussions in the social sciences and humanities are steeped in Marxist theory. Given the fixation on Marxism, it would appear that much social science has become, like pharoah worship, a fossilized religion.
I made a point of asking these students whether the constant repitition of left wing ideas has affected them intellectually, and several replied that it has. Even though they know that the left's ideas are erroneous, the constant propagandizing that occurs at universities has had a brainwashing effect, according to the students. In effect, the students imply that university attendance serves not to open the mind intellectually, but to create psychological imbalance.
One issue that the NAS program did not address is whether the political correctness that the NAS has combatted for twenty years has influenced America's ability to defend itself, for example against terrorism. Based on my students' responses, I suspect that it has. Responding to a quote often attributed to the Duke of Wellington, George Orwell wrote in his 1941 essay "England Your England" that "probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there."
Since the left supports terrorism and allies itself with America's foes, the left's dominance on college campus seems likely to have crippled our ability to think coherently about defending our nation. That diverse disciplines, journalism, inteligence, and political, have been incapable of thinking coherently about how to eliminate terrorism, suggests some common ground for the intellectual vacuity. The common ground is the poor job that universities have done.
There are two psychological effects of university brainwashing: narcissism and sociopathy. I have previously posted about the Shrinkwrapped blog's discussion of the liberal borg's narcissism. The left is sociopathic, or lacking in conscience, as well as narcissistic.
Let's review some of the characteristics of sociopathy:
I. Grandiose, deceitful
2- Lack of remorse and empathy
3- Lack of goals*
4- Poor behavioral controls; antisocial behavior (anti-social personality disorder is a component of sociopathy).
It seems to me that although Robert Godwin's point about the narcissism of the left is totally right, it needs to be supplemented with a separate sociopathic complex. The left amply demonstrates each of these sociopathic traits. Its practitioners imagine themseleves smarter than others; they are proud of their manipulative skills; and they are often highly emotional and disruptive.
For example, Saul Alinsky, a radical activist, wrote Rules for Radicals in 1971 in which he argues that deception is a characteristic strategy of left-wing radicals. Likewise, left wingers often lack behavioral controls and are highly disruptive, as we have seen in the antics of Ward Churchill and numerous similar cases. The left may be characterized as the sociopathic movement of the twentieth century, and for that reason I would characterize Nazism as a left wing ideology.
The chief trait of sociopaths is lack of remorse or conscience. It is here that the views of the left come into clearest sociopathic focus. The left has been responsible for more murder than any religious or ideological movement in history. More than the Romans, more than the Ku Klux Klan, more than radical Islam, and more than Nazism. Yet, unlike the Germans, who have mostly disowned Nazism, the left continues to advocate its murderous, bloodthirsty ideology without apology. The tens of millions whom Mao and Stalin killed are meaningless statistics to the conscienceless left.
Hence, The Intercollegiate Studies Institute can be viewed as a form of therapy. During the meeting, a student said that he supported alternative approaches to financing public higher education. I mentioned that Milton Friedman had suggested the idea of tuition vouchers in his popular classic Capitalism and Freedom. The students said that they might be interested in a meeting to discuss this book. Friedman, who had been born in Brooklyn in 1912, had died the same day, November 16, 2006, at age 94. But his spirit is very much alive.
Let the therapy begin.
*The left's lack of goals can be seen in its willingness to ally itself with radical Islam without grasping the implications of such an alliance. Similarly, the American labor movement allied itself with slave owners in the 19th century; and the American communist party allied itself with Hitler in 1939. Now that communism has completely failed and only buffoons can advocate centralized economic planning, the left has no goal or model to advocate. Its only role is disruptive and critical. It has nothing to construct. It is at this point in history that the sociopathic nature of the left comes most clearly into focus, and the role it has played in the mass murders of the twentieth century comes into sharp relief.
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