Republicans Need to Start Asking Questions about Higher Ed

Martin Knight of the RedState Blog proposes that Republican state legislators should probe the hiring practices, curriculum, faculty, and extra-curricular programs of colleges that receive public funds.  I agree. 

Knight is right that institutions of higher learning will frame an attempt to deflect this effort in the language of academic freedom.  However such institutions have not objected to and have enthusiastically supported Democratic Party attacks on academic freedom, especially associated with Title IX.  

Conservative monitoring of left wing subversion of universities has a long history.  Prior to the 1950s elected officials routinely intervened in the politically extremist, intolerant tendencies of higher education. McCarthyism went overboard, and the result was a subsequent reluctance by conservatives to question the ideology posing as research and the junk social science that has evolved in universities since the 1960s. The aim should not be the silencing of leftists but rather ensuring that their views do not dominate discourse. 

With the lifting of the right wing intolerance in the 1960s, equally or more intolerant left wing academics such as Herbert Marcuse began to advocate a McCarthyism of the left. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 offered a set of tools to left-wing extremists because, indeed, it prohibits certain, albeit limited, forms of speech. The task for the left was to expand the scope of the Civil Rights Act to incorporate any and all speech under the strictures of the Civil Rights Act.  The right should have been quick to draw the line on limitations on speech, research, and hiring. Instead, Republican officials dropped the ball, leaving the field to leftists. 

The result of conservative reluctance to manage badly run universities is documented in books like Lee Jussim et al.’s Politics of Social Psychology  and George Yancey’s Compromising Scholarship: Religious and Political Bias in American Higher Education.    

As Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt show in their recently published Coddling of the American Mind , excessive coddling of youngsters led to further attempts to prevent speech with which the left disagrees. 

The end result is a university that is more intolerant than was McCarthyism. As well, universities have discriminated against conservatives and harmed more conservative careers by an order of magnitude than McCarthyism harmed left-wing careers.   

The concept of academic freedom is ideologically rooted and is a left-wing pretense.  To most academics, McCarthyism is unfair because it silences leftists, but political correctness is fair because it silences libertarians and conservatives. 

Republican officials need to reconsider the place of the university in American life and the harm done by indoctrination in both K-12 and higher education.  I have in the past proposed rationalization of hiring practices using validation and orthodox human resource management methods, but the publications in the higher education field have refused to publish such ideas. 

McCarthyism at the American Federation of Teachers

Dear President Trump:

I am reading a report by the American Legislative Exchange Council on inefficient pension fund practices. The report is entitled Keeping the Promise: Getting Politics Out of Pensions. I was disturbed to learn that the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) is using its financial power to attack pension fund managers whose private political views diverge from the views of the leadership of the AFT. This is authoritarian and fascistic, and I find it disturbing that a union that is supposed to support education, which requires the free exchange of ideas,  attempts to use its economic power to silence and suppress individuals whose views diverge from theirs.  The American left has whined about McCarthyism for the past sixty years, but the AFT’s actions are no different from Senator Joe McCarthy’s.

I ask that you investigate the American Federation of Teachers.  An organization that engages in suppressive political behavior should not be entitled to a tax exemption.  As a member of a union that unfairly diverts a large share of our dues to the fascistic bigots of the AFT, I urge you to look into taxation of labor unions and a rethinking of the privileges public sector labor unions have enjoyed. 

The report says this:

Another form of divestment is the effort by some interest groups to pressure pension funds to divest from certain fund managers on account of their personal political beliefs. Perhaps the most notable example of this effort has been led by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT).  In recent years, the AFT has promoted a divestment campaign targeting hedge-fund managers who have supported initiatives with which they disagree. The AFT has targeted some hedge-fund managers for their actions supporting school choice and favoring defined-contribution  public pension systems. This is particularly threatening given AFT’s influence over an estimated $1 trillion in public defined-benefit plans, many of which hold investments in hedge funds as part of their portfolio.

Sincerely,

Mitchell Langbert

Just Say No to Perez Hilton

I have written the following e-mail to the Miss USA Beauty Pageant. I have been subjected to the kind of harassment in academia that now raises its head in Miss USA and Kitco. It is critical that Americans voice their opposition to the offensive harrassment of heterosexuals in which the left is engaging.

I am personally offended by Perez Hilton's question to Carrie Prejean, Miss California. I firmly believe in beauty pageants, as most supporters of gay marriage probably do not. But I oppose ideological litmus tests, which most supporters of gay marriage seem to support. Perez Hilton saw fit to impose an ideology on contestants: the ideology of homosexual marriage. This is offensive. If everything offensive is a form of discrimination, then Hilton discriminated against Prejean and your pageant is unfair. The leftists in Hollywood might think themselves clever, but their ugly discrimination against conservatives puts them on the same level as those who formulated blacklists in the 1950s. Perez Hilton is an ugly thug, and you should be ashamed of yourselves for allowing a bigot to be one of your judges. I have stopped paying to watch movies because of Hollywood's moronic, left-wing views. The thought that anyone who disagrees with the moronic, left-wing ideas of Spielberg and Hilton cannot find work disgusts me. You need to clean house.