The Radical Left's Infiltration of Academia Creating Generations of Ideological Robots

Anthony Daoud writes in the Post Millennial about the need for academic reform. He notes that students who identify as anything other than left wing have been silenced and made to feel uncomfortable. The left uses words like "fascist" and "bigot" as weapons to silence anyone who disagrees with its failed theories. The left's motives are control, power, opposition to freedom of speech, and failed socialist nostrums.

Dauod correctly notes that the left's policy menu is in "utter disarray." Despite the incoherence and absurdity of its policy proposals, though, universities have considerable power.  For example, Harvard University is in the top one percent of  contributors to politicians and the top 15 percent of spenders on lobbying. Penn State is in the top seven percent of contributors and the top 17 percent of spenders. Advocates of academic reform face a lobby no less powerful than the tobacco, gun, pharmaceutical, or banking lobbies. How can reform proceed given universities'  political power?

Heretofore, the Republican Party has failed to respond to the Democrats' illegal use of universities for political advocacy, lobbying, and propaganda.  The reason is that universities have been able to intimidate them through lobbying and contributions.  However, the Republicans need to face a hard reality about the academic corner of the deep state: The university system is training America's elite to vote against, to actively oppose, and to hate Republicans. If the Republican Party continues along its current  path of indifference, it will disappear.

Hopefully, Republicans' indifference will change. One way to start will be the validation of college programs.  Validation means that every academic program should be required to prove that it produces valuable results.  Validation is a best practice in the human resource field, and it is outrageous that government (not counting out-of-pocket tuition) spends $200 billion a year on higher education programs that are not validated, i.e., whose effects are unknown. The system is rife with fraud. Many programs promise that degrees will lead to jobs, but the promised jobs do not materialize.  Claims that a subject is being taught when the students learn next to nothing are common.

In this context, proximal validation involves general knowledge and field-specific examinations. Distal validation involves tracking of job and graduate school placement.  Programs that fail to place graduates in program-relevant jobs or admission to graduate school and that produce no or limited gains in general or field-specific knowledge and cognitive skills should not receive public support either in the form of tax exemption or of funding. 

Programs that focus on politics instead of knowledge building will produce graduates with weaker skills who are less able to find good jobs. Under scrutiny these programs will wither away.

As well, it is time for the IRS to start enforcing  existing rules against 501(c)(3) organizations' use of tax exempt money for political purposes.  The IRS ought to set up a qualification review process to determine whether course offerings conform to the requirements of Section 501(c)(3). This would be similar to the review process for pension and 401(k) plans, which leads to a qualification letter. Violation of the terms of the review would be criminalized as tax fraud.Part of the Republican Party's lackadaisical attitude toward anti-Republican discrimination and indoctrination in universities has been its willingness to let the IRS ignore the misuse of 501(c)(3) money. That needs to change.

Star of Andrew Cuomo's SUNY Sentenced to Three Years

 The Albany Times Union reports that Alain Kaloyeros, former head of the SUNY Center for Semiconductor Research and SUNY Polytechnic, has been sentenced to three years.  Kaloyeros was convicted of wire fraud related to bid rigging on an upstate revitalization project.

What are the links among large state universities, their left-wing ideology, and criminality?  First, left-wing ideology supports large state institutions, including universities, even though they are inefficient. Second, because they are inefficient, universities avoid careful accounting for outcomes.  Universities, much like industrial corporations, prefer secrecy.  It is easier to draw students to academic programs if the students mistakenly think that they will be able to find a job after completing the degree. The leftists who sponsor such programs make no effort to determine what the outcomes for their students are because doing so would lead to reduced demand, likely eliminating academic jobs.

Third, secrecy and lack of accountability beget criminality.  Kaloyeros was given financial authority, but he continued to behave like an ordinary professor.  Lying about research findings is not a felony; Kaloyeros was morally unable to transition from the world of academic research to the real world.

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. 

When Colleges Say "Inclusive," What They Really Mean Is "No Conservatives"

The New York Post quotes my liberal arts study in an editorial today.  The editorial notes that speakers invited to campuses like SUNY Albany are overwhelmingly left wing.  At Indiana the rato is 30:9; at GWU the ratio is 9:2; at Alabama the ratio is 9:2, and at Vermont it is 44:2.  

This kind of phenomenon is consistent with the claims of Jonathan Haidt, the founder of Heterodox Academy and a brilliant psychological ethicist.  I am reading through Haidt's book Righteous Mind now, and his point is that moral reasoning is chiefly used to justify emotional moral reactions.  

Moral reasoning is not the way that we come to our chief political conclusions.  Rather, we tend to reason in a way that justifies conclusions at which we have arrived. We arrive at the conclusions in the first place through emotion; we then seek to confirm the emotional reaction by exposing ourselves to people and to reasoning that agrees with our feelings.  

As a result, social science is by nature susceptible to ideological bias as social scientists skew their findings, whether intentionally or unintentionally, in the direction that fits their preconceptions.  That occurs with respect to hiring as well as campus speaker invitations. 

The Subtle Incivility of Political Correctness.

I received the politically correct email copied below from a management listserv. Political correctness has become a standard of acceptable behavior in universities. In a way, it resurrects medieval courtly courtesy.  

According to Debra Kelly on Urban Ghosts, in the Middle Ages and Renaissance courtesy books were popular to help people of different social ranks deal with each other.  Each era has its own interpretation of etiquette and appropriate behavior. According to Tim Nash in The Finer Times, vagrancy was a capital crime during the Middle Ages, and people were suffocated in water, boiled in oil, had their fingers torn off, and had their eyes burned out for this and more serious offenses.

Improving our skill at dealing with others is an important and useful goal, but when rules of etiquette become legally enforceable and punitive, they become authoritarian.   

Among the etiquette issues that were salient in the Middle Ages were avoiding bringing your horse into the house, checking yourself for fleas, and avoiding the attentions of your lord's wife by feigning illness.  In his poem Liber Urbani Daniel of Beccles advises us not to play with our spoons, not to steal a host's spoon, and not to put our used spoons into the serving dish.     

Today, the field of management plays an equivalent role to that of Daniel of Beccles. According to the email, sent by a management professor on behalf of the special issue of a journal, incivility abounds, and it costs firms money.  

In particular, the professor is concerned that insufficient attention has been paid to selective incivility because of gender, race, ethnicity, minority sexual orientation, minority religion, immigrant status, and so on.  The extensive list of workplace regulation on the books, which includes the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1991, the Equal Pay Act, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, the Pregnancy Disability Act, child labor laws, and the Americans with Disabilities Act--not to mention abundant state and local laws--have apparently failed to help. The professor's solution seems to be to extend the academic rules of politically correct etiquette to the workplace. Soon, management professors will be advocating corporate safe spaces.  

Nash points out that in the Middle Ages the poorer classes tended to suffer the worst punishments, and the same is likely true today. The elite etiquette advocated by politically correct professors targets working class prejudices and mostly white males.  A university professor in today's America is at least three times more likely to have been born in a foreign country than to be a Republican. Republicans are marginalized in academia to a greater degree than any class of individuals is marginalized in the private sector.

The professor proposes that identifying sources of slights to a wide range of groups is an important management issue.  My guess is that it is one of two things: (1) one more useless academic study that will do little or nothing to help real world managers but will generate conferences and publications of no importance outside the management field or (2) one more effort to generate laws that target working class men (and to a lesser degree working class women) and to marginalize them, much as the medieval rules of etiquette and criminality targeted and marginalized the lower classes.  

The professor's email reads as follows:

Recent news headlines and political discourse underscore the relevance and salience of incivility in our everyday lives and workplaces. Incivility seems to permeate our work lives, manifesting in experiences such as being ignored or disregarded, being excluded from professional opportunities, or having your judgement unfairly questioned over a matter for which you are responsible ...Research over the past 20 or so years has started to document the prevalence, costs, and correlates of incivility, finding that targets suffer personally and professionally and that organizations face financial and productivity loses...

While we have made great strides in understanding general experiences of incivility, less attention has been paid to how these experiences affect those with stigmatized identities. In 2008, Cortina introduced the concept of selective incivility to describe how subtle, ambiguous acts of rudeness may function as a covert manifestation of bias against devalued, stigmatized, or marginalized people in organizations.  Such biases may be based on one, or multiple, identity groups such as gender, race, ethnicity, minority sexual orientation, minority religion identification, immigrant status, transgender identity, disability status, language, or accent.

Initial research in a test of this theory found disproportionate uncivil treatment may provide an explanatory mechanism for the lower rates of women and racial minorities found in the upper echelons of organizations...However, not all research finds increased risk of incivility for stigmatized groups...

The purpose of this special issue is to foster constructive insights into the selective incivility phenomenon. We welcome papers of an empirical or theoretical nature that investigate questions such as (but certainly not limited to):
•    What are the ways in which selective incivility may act as vehicle to communicate larger organizational and social values and ethical norms?
•    What kinds of cultural considerations should be taken into account when conducting selective incivility research internationally? How do we meaningfully include cultural norms into our work?
•    How do intersections of multiple social identities affect risk of experiencing mistreatment? Do certain identities act as a mitigating factor?
•    What are group and organizational-level factors that might predict experiences of selective incivility?
•    What are individual differences that may explain how targets respond to selective incivility? Incivility, by definition, is ambiguous: Does labeling the experience as discriminatory matter for target outcomes?
•    What factors predict instigation of selective incivility?
•    How might organizations address the issue of interpersonal slights being experienced by some employees more than others? 

University Scientism and American Totalitarianism

Is there a difference between (a) the American pragmatic political approach, a cornerstone of the claim of American exceptionalism, and (b) mere political caprice in the management of the economy and society such as characterized the fascist and national socialist economic policies? Academic research, especially in the fields of economics, sociology, and psychology, supposedly contributes to the public policy making process, differentiating the American third way from the fascist third way by making it rational.

But what if American pragmatism is based on a sham? What if social science is but scientism? Then, American economic and social policy is guided and influenced by the moral whimsies of social scientists whose moral sense has been addled in part by scientistic training, in part by careerist opportunism, and in part by political pandering. In that case, social science higher education can be viewed as any other propaganda device.  Perhaps American pragmatism and American exceptionalism are equivalent to any other authoritarian or totalitarian form.

"University Scientism and American Economic Interests"

My paper "University Scientism and American Economic Interests" iust went online on Peerus in the UK-based journal Industry and Higher Education.  The summary reads:

This article outlines the evolution of the relationship between the emergence of large-scale finance and industry in the American Gilded Age and Progressive eras and the shaping and funding of universities by foundations linked to the emerging industries. Scientism has been a means of gaining and maintaining legitimacy and research funding. Statistics about recent donations reflect the earlier pattern, although the strongly elitist preferences of early funders and shapers of American higher education, such as the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Rockefeller-Funded General Education Board, have moderated.  See  http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0950422218765664

Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Technological Elite

 David Rothkopf makes an interesting point in his 2008 book Superclass.  In Dwight Eisenhower's famous military-industrial-complex speech, he comments not only on the rise of the military-industrial complex but also on the rise of universities as centers of power.  This is what Eisenhower said in January 1961, 53 years ago:

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist...

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades...

 Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite. 

It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system -- ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society.

While, as Rothkopf points out in his 2008 book, the influence of the arms industry and the absolute size of the military have waned since the Cold War, the threat of terrorism poses a new complex that mingle military with civil power.  Also, both the 1960s complex and the 2010s complex have relied on finance, which as an institutionalized power center was old in Eisenhower's day but since 1971 has exponentially expanded in influence.

Universities are crucial to the new power complex, just as they were to the military-industrial complex,  not because universities' research is of crucial importance to technological progress--most important technological innovation comes from for-profit sources--but because university professors, who benefit from university endowments that special interests fund, lend an illusive patina of legitimacy and impartiality to federal policy.

Sadly, and this is the truly tragic development since Eisenhower's speech, the American public has shown itself to be incapable of the alertness to the global elite's acquisition of power that Eisenhower thought would be essential to maintain freedom.  The reasons include apathy and an unwillingness to, as Benjamin Franklin put it, question authority.   Another reason is the eagerness of Americans to conform to the norms that the mass media presents to them, and part of the reason is their indoctrination in elementary school, high school, and college.  Americans are increasingly unwilling to take risks and to think for themselves; the unwillingness is both a cause and effect of the increasing power of the nation's technological elite.

Universities Teach Cheating

Recently there was a minor cheating scandal in one of my courses.  I base part of the students' grades on a test. Rather than create my own questions, I use a test bank that the textbook publisher provides.  This facilitates giving of multiple exams, which has become the norm in some colleges (some students are permitted extra time because they have learning disabilities; as well, make-up exams are often required).

One or more of the students obtained the publisher's test bank, possibly by pretending to be a professor, having the publisher send the textbook to the college under a false name, and then figuring out how to pick up the textbook from the locked storage room where packages of this kind are stored. It is likely easy to do since all the student would have to do is ask an unsuspecting professor entering the room to help him or her find a book or to use the copy machine, which is in the same room.

In any case, I noticed that the grades on the exam this semester were unusually high; about one fourth of the class got grades that were normally above the highest grade any student would get. At first I thought the class was exceptionally good, that is, until a student met with me in person and proved that the test bank had been obtained under fraud or stolen and that some students studied by memorizing it.  The proof was that he e-mailed me a copy of the test bank which another student had sold him for $10. I asked him to identify the student, but he would not.  I forgave him that distaste for "ratting".

I spoke about the situation with two colleagues. One said that the situation is unequivocally cheating and that I should tell the administration that this has gone on. Since I have no evidence concerning any specific student it would not be possible to uncover who was at fault without pursuing investigations that I have no power to pursue and that I doubt very much the college administration would be willing to pursue.  Another colleague said that in his view students who review the test bank are doing nothing wrong since SAT questions and New York State regents questions are often available for practice purposes.  But those questions are not stolen or obtained under fraudulent pretense.  Also, those questions are made available to all students whereas in this circumstance some students refused to use the stolen test bank because they viewed doing so as unethical. 

College seems to be contributing to the more general moral decline in American society. The chief impact is on me as I now have to make up by hand something that was once computerized, turning a one hour project into a one day project.  With 15 exams over the next year that translates into a two day project versus a 15 or 20 day project. So much for my research output.

I failed to pursue any sort of redress to the cheaters, and in this I participate in the tendency of universities to increasingly condone cheating.

Ideology or Economic Interest? Ideology and Academe

Earlier this decade Stanley Rothman and his associates found that the vast majority of university professors are registered Democrats and that the imbalance is greater than had been previously thought. Rather than try to better understand the finding, the American Association of University Professors attempted to smear the research. The finding is unsurprising to anyone who has spent five minutes at college. Not only are university professors "liberal" social democrats but they are virtually universally so. Moreover, there is a vocal minority that is overtly communist. My faculty union, the Professional Staff Congress, is dominated by communist cranks who would be happy to see a repeat of the blood red mass murder that occurred under Chairman Mao and about which the left continually lies.

At the height of the recent discussion about the Bush-Obama "bail out", New York University featured "white papers" by 18 of its economists on its website. I teach at NYU's Stern School of Business as an adjunct and I think very highly of its students, faculty and administration. It is the best run place at which I have worked. My only complaint is that it's hard to find students who don't deserve an "A" and the business school only lets me give one third A's. It is indicative, though, that all 18 of the commentators favored massive wealth transfers to the super rich. None questioned the wisdom of the Bush-Obama policy of socialism for the privileged.

I noticed last night when I was looking for Ayn Rand tapes on Youtube that Michael Moore is coming out with a movie on the bail out in which he is more than willing to take Wall Street to task. There seems to be a division between the populist left represented by Moore and the academic left. While 18 economists are willing to do somersaults to protect Wall Street's interests, Moore lacks the economists' economic motives. No Wall Streeter has contributed to Moore's movies.

While nearly 100% of colleges and universities receive financial support from the public, nearly 100% of university professors support an expansive state that would include significant benefits to universities. The relationship is direct. In the past, only those wealthy enough to enjoy free time to devote to scientific discovery could participate in intellectual life; and only those wealthy enough could enjoy a life of leisure. Under the social democratic university professors can devote their lives to scientific discovery and/or enjoy a life of leisure. Therefore, there is little likelihood that university professors would (a) oppose the inheritance tax or (b) support anything other than an expansion of the state. If expansion of the state means expansion of support to the super rich, then that becomes part of the professorial game plan. Sadly, the chief voice criticizing the bailout is the corpulent and uncouth Mr. Moore.

American Universities and Nazism

Carlin Romano of the University of Pennsylvania has an excellent review of Stephen H. Norwood's Third Reich in the Ivory Tower: Complicity and Conflict on American Campuses in the current issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education (paid access).

Romano raves about Norwood's book and points out that with respect to the Nazis in the 1930s:

"students, journalists, labor leaders, and elected officials—at least some of them—are the heroes of Norwood's book, showing more moral courage and activism than university administrators did."

Romano may be right that Iran poses a parallel to Nazi Germany (although one reader has pointed out that the parallel may be weak). But he falls down (and by implication Norwood does as well) in referring to Nazism as "fascism". Nazism is as much a form of socialism as of fascism, "Progressivism" or the more general "corporatism". Whereas Stalin advocated "socialism in one country", Hitler advocated "national socialism". As John Lukacs points out, the two phrases mean the same thing. But academics and journalists have shamefully hidden this by referring to Nazism as "fascism", which was Mussolini's system. Romano follows this disgraceful convention, which is an Orwellian way to lie about socialism. Nazism was not fascism, "Progressivism" or "corporatism". It was more extreme. It was socialism just as Stalinism was.

Hitler elevated race in his ideology, but Stalinism was also anti-Semitic and racist. All four ideologies, corporatism, Nazism, Communism and Fascism, emphasized centralization of authority and centralized economic planning, ideas that both American "Progressives" and Straussian conservatives, who have recently dominated the Republican Party, advocate.

Although some journalists may have been heroes, others have not been. In particular, the pissant New York Times covered Hitler's anti-Semitism but buried the story off the front page. Nor was support for Hitler limited to US universities. The Swedish socialist economist Gunnar Myrdal, who wrote a classic book on American race relations, American Dilemma, supported Nazism in the 1930s at the same time as the presidents of Harvard and Columbia did.

Even if Fascism and National Socialism are as similar as National Socialism and Communism, why do the Democrats and social democratic academics continue to refer to Nazism as "fascism" rather than its true name, "National Socialism"? Why don't they refer to Mussolini's Fascism as "national socialism", which would be a more descriptive and meaningful depiction? "Fascism" is murkier. "National Socialism" accurately describes the facts.

Moreover, while some academics, like Romano and Norwood, (also see Phil Orenstein's Frontpagemag article about the dual origins of the American university and Nazism in the idealism of Fichte) are willing to confront the academic support for Hitler, academics have been unwilling to confront the equivalent support for Mao that continues in the American academy to this day.

The famous linguist Noam Chomsky has been a persistent denier of the Cambodian holocaust and John Kenneth Galbraith had high praise for Maoist China in the pages of the pissant New York Times at a time when Mao had already murdered at least 25 million people. Academics continually criticize Milton Friedman, who helped a Chilean government that ultimately killed about 3,000 people, but praise Castro, who has murdered 100,000 people and imprisoned and tortured many more. Indeed, Michael Moore had high praise for Cuban socialism in his movie Sicko just last year. Both Galbraith and Friedman died two years ago. In Friedman's obituary the Democratic Party propaganda outlets mentioned Friedman's assistance to Chile, but in Galbraith's they did not mention that he had visited China and praised Mao in the Times.

Romano's point that Iran poses a parallel to Hitler is a good one. But academia's response to Maoism and Stalinism deserves careful scrutiny as well. The term "fascism" should not be applied to Nazism. It is an Italian term that refers to Roman history. Nazism and Communism are Roman derivatives, but "state activist liberals" have been apologetic about the mass murder of left wing Romanism and have attributed the mass murder to ideological causes rather than its true cause: centralization of state power.

How Universities Systemically Expand State Power

Bertrand de Jouvenal's argument concerning the relentless expansion of the state since the Middle Ages is based on the unfolding of monarchy from the twelfth to the twentieth centuries. In the nineteenth century monarchy changed its form of sovereignty from the divine right of kings to popular sovereignty, and the realization of sovereignty from the monarch in flesh to a reified "national will" that, of course, becomes the property of elites. De Juvenal points out that Philip Augustus, the king of France from 1180 to 1223, had to live off his own resources. His only army was a small bodyguard. He had no officials. He depended on Church resources for all official business. But by the reign of Louis XIV, the French king's army was 200,000 men. "He gives out laws and sets his dragoons at those who do not worship God in what he considers the right way; an enormous army of officials animates and directs the nation." (p. 141, On Power).

The expansion of the state continued unabated until World War II. Hitler, in 1939, could command the entire German nation to destroy itself and to murder entire ethnic groups. Since then, there has been further growth in state power in many parts of the world. In terms of relative size, the Soviet- and National-Socialist states could not push power further because those societies were 100% socialized. But in terms of absolute size, the creation of technology in the non-socialist states has been used to increase the state's size. In the United States, the process of monarchization of the nation has proceeded unabated. Government today is far larger than ever before.

One of the concomitants of increasing governmental size is political correctness or mono-thought across a large swathe of the population. The famous argument in Davud Riesmann's Lonely Crowd is that a psychological change occurred from inner to other-directedness. But this may be most characteristic of America, where monarchical power in the name of popular will replaced Lockean liberalism, not monarchy. Likely, other-directedness always had been characteristic of aristocratic Venice, London and Paris.

De Jouvenal makes a crucial point--that there is a direct relationship among social theories, mass movements and state expansion. That is, the groupthink of other-directed political movements that generate widespread unison of thought by its own nature generates state expansion. Moreover, universities that advocate simplistic ideological cure-alls for society such as Keynesian economics, social work, government regulation and the like are inevitably generative of state expansion. This is so because of the combination of the egos of government officials, who derive gratification from imposing their ideas and their will on society; and the simplicity of the ideological solutions that universities propose and seldom if ever work. Big egos need simplistic solutions in order to feel good about themselves.

One of the ramifications of this is the derivation of ego-gratification by mass followers of Power. The majority of the population does not have a crack at implementing its own ideas and experiencing the ego-enhancement that power brings to the powerful. Rather, it is through psychological displacement that large numbers of people identify with one or other of the ego-elements in society--Barack Obama or George Bush--and gain ego-fulfillment by identification with a stronger element, father figure or the like. By parroting the half-baked claims of Harvard economists, members of mass society gain ego fulfillment by feeling that they are identified with the media or intellectual elite. For Democrats and RINO Republicans this is the role that the New York Times plays. For Republicans this is the role that Rush Limbaugh and other talk radio announcers play.

Of course, the theories of both Democrats and Republicans are wrong. Simple theories do not generally do well when confronted with reality. Rush Limbaugh claims to be for smaller government, but when his candidates are elected they expand government to a much greater degree than the candidates he opposes. Barack Obama claims to be for the middle class and poor, but when the opportunity arises to hand several trillion dollars to the very wealthy at the expense of the middle class and poor, he leaps at it like a terrier leaps at a Porterhouse steak.

Universities generate not solutions but ideologies. The powerful pick up on the simpletons' ideologies that universities generate and use state power to enhance their egos. Universities benefit from the support that power confers on them.

De Juvenal writes (p. 144, On Power):

"In the realm of nature there is nothing else to satisfy the human spirit's primitive passions. In love with his own experiments, with the simple relationships and direct causations his brain can grasp, and with the artless plans which he is wise enough to construct, man wishes that the whole created world may show itself built not only with the same instruments as he possesses but also by the same turns of skill as he has mastered. Rejoicing as he does in all that can be brought to uniformity, he is forever being disconcerted by the infinite variety which nature herself seems to prefer, as instanced by the chemical structure of organic bodies.

"It is an agreeable game, imagining how man, if he had the power, would reconstruct the universe--the simple and uniform lines on which he would do it. He has not that power, but he has, or thinks he has, the power of reconstructing the social order. This is a sphere in which he reckons that the laws of nature do not run for him, and there he tries to plant the simplicity which is his ruling passion and which he mistakes for perfection."

America Died while The New York Times Lied

I just wrote the following e-mail to my old friend, Richard, who sent me an e-mail on Facebook about universities.

>Dear Richard: Universities have failed but they are irredeemable. The problem is that government is a violent institution and I abhor violence. To end the violence we must end government, as Henry David Thoreau urged in the 1840s. The fraud that universities perpetrate on graduate students is but one more product of governmental compulsion. Without government, the university scam would not exist.

Universities' dysfunction goes back to 1810's when Nazism's earliest origins appeared in the German university via Fichte and the hep hep riots at the University of Berlin. It was only a matter of time before the reinvention of medieval communism under Bismarck would transform into racial categories and mass murder. The US chose to adopt the German form of university and ideology and so has been marching toward totalitarianism since the early 20th century. The outcome won't be as bad here because America has no history of tribal unity, although the advocacy of unity under Barack Obama is indeed reminiscent of the rise of Nazism--"change" in German was one of Hitler's slogans--"alles muss ander sein"-- and extension of universal health care was one of Hitler's chief platforms.

I am in favor of ending the cultural hegemony of higher education by ending the discriminatory practice of requiring advanced degrees for jobs that require a fourth grade education in fields ranging from human resource management to investment banking. Store managers in malls now have MBAs. Once universities are debunked as authoritarian shams, then we can move on to government.

The hue and cry for regulation is a subset of the greater effort to institutionalize the power of investment banks and the military industrial complex. The mouthpiece of this systemic effort by the Demopublican Party is of course the New York Times, including Krugman and all the rest of the Times's apologists for the bailout and state power on behalf of the Ochs Sulzbergers' cronies-- Goldman Sachs and its clients.

Regulation is but a manifestation of state violence. All who advocate regulation advocate violence. Goldman Sachs and the banking system would end without government support, and America would become a free country for the first time since 1913.

The mainstream of popular opinion cannot avoid the consequences of a move toward greater regulation. The consequences are slowed intellectual and economic progress; declining living standards and increased suppression of ideas. America has become poorer because of regulation---especially the abolition of the gold standard in 1971 which allowed the commercial banking community unfettered power to transfer capital into its hands via the Federal Reserve Bank. This has been done at the expense of the productive sector of the economy. The investment banking community's favored candidate, Barack Obama, was elected to facilitate ever greater transfers of wealth into their hands. America died while the New York Times lied.

America has become increasingly divided and so must be broken up into parts. There is no longer a viable America. The country has turned into a United States of Goldman Sachs, a tyranny run by violent thugs in Washington and the state capitols.

The election of the bankers' marionette, Barack Obama, is but one more step toward institutionalization of totalitarianism here. Universities have done their job. But let us start with root causes, not with their ridiculous manifestation--universities.

Universities Cause Reversion to Emphasis on Ascribed Status

American society has become increasingly stratified and the reason is increasing regulation, universities' domination of the labor market and the Federal Reserve Bank. Max von Weber argued that the Protestant ethic engendered capitalism. Talcott Parsons argued that social norms that are fundamental to economic development include universalistic versus particularistic; specificity versus diffuseness of role relations; achieved versus ascribed status; and collectivity versus self orientation.

The idea of universalistic versus particularistic social norms is that in order for a society to develop, laws must apply universally. Resources must be allocated on the basis of universal criteria that reflect objective achievement such as competence rather than by social class, race or other ascribed characteristics. Relations should not be based on general considerations such as family connections, but rather on specific achievements.

America has increasingly become a society where status counts more than achievement. We can see this in the recent proposal to appoint Caroline Kennedy to the US Senate. To see how far we have fallen from America's past achievement orientation, let us compare a Senator from the early 1820s, Andrew Jackson, with the proposed appointee from New York, Caroline Kennedy.

Andrew Jackson, assisted by Davy Crockett who was under Jackson's command, defeated the Red Stick Creek Indians at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in 1814. In the Battle of New Orleans in the War of 1812, according to Wikipedia:

"on January 8, 1815, Jackson's 5,000 soldiers won a victory over 7,500 British. The British had more than 2,000 casualties to Jackson's 13 killed and 58 wounded or missing."

In 1817 Jackson led a campaign against the Seminole and Creek Indians. Having been ordered to prevent runaway slaves from going to Florida, Jackson invaded Florida, resulting in calls for his censure. Using the invasion as a pretext, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams negotiated the Adams-Onis treaty with Spain, whereby Spain ceded Florida to the US. Jackson served as the first US governor of Florida in 1821.

In 1822 the State of Tennessee elected Jackson to the US Senate. He ran for president in 1824, and although he won the most votes he did not win a majority, and John Quincy Adams was selected by special vote of Congress. Of course, Jackson was elected to the presidency in 1828, and in his second term abolished the then-central bank, the Second Bank of the United States.

Now, let's compare Caroline Kennedy's resume to Jackson's. Caroline Kennedy's grandfather was a wealthy bootlegger who managed to get himself appointed to several government sinecures, to include the first chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission and Ambassador to Britain. Her father was president. Kennedy attended Harvard and Columbia. She is a mother and wife. She has coauthored and edited several books. She has no other important achievements.

Americans are increasingly insensitive to the lack of emphasis on achievement in their culture. The reason is that universities have intruded into the allocation of labor. Universities masquerade as a form of selection-by-achievement, but they are nothing of the sort. The reason people get into a selective college is a test score that is independent of achievement and/or family connections or other status criteria. Few if any college students can boast of important achievements, and the few who do achieve important things in college like Bill Gates or Michael Dell, do so in spite of the college curriculum, not because of it.

The emphasis on attending a selective college would not in itself render American society ascription as opposed to achievement-based without a second factor: the increasing dominance of Wall Street over American business life. In the nineteenth century Wall Street was a neutral actor that served to finance American business in light of small-scale banks and scarce credit (scarce because of the gold standard). However, that changed in 1913 when the Federal Reserve bank was established and given the power to expand and contract the money supply. In 1933 the gold standard was abolished, and in 1971 its final remnant was cleared away. Since 1971 Wall Street has expanded dramatically because of the massive support it has received from the Fed.

The beneficiaries of the massive expansion of credit have of course been Wall Street executives. They have benefited at the expense of the public and of other businesses, which have not had equal access to credit and to resources that they would have in the absence of the Fed's credit monopoly. This is because of the income tax, the inheritance tax and the inflation tax.

Given the allocation of the public's wealth into Wall Street's hands, the question needs to be asked: who gets to be the recipient of the Fed's beneficence? The answer, of course, is that selection is made on the basis of family background and academic credentials.

Thus, universities serve as the selection device by which a privileged aristocracy, handed wealth by the Fed, gains entry. Universities are the post-World War II form of primogeniture.

Achievement no longer matters for much in American culture. Rather, you get into a good school and then hope you get a job on Wall Street. You try your hand at the markets, and if you're lucky you become a billionaire. This trend of allocation of wealth on the basis of status rather than achievement has brought us Caroline Kennedy. What is new about Kennedy is the arrogance of our politicians. They are willing to put forward a candidate who lacks any competence whatsoever, and whose only claim to the post is aristocratic family background.

America is reverting to the 17th century before our eyes.

WHAT's IN A NAME?

Howard S. Katz wrote this blog here.
8-18-08

In commenting upon the recent (July-August) decline in commodity prices, Bloomberg news service recently reported:

"Commodities, measured by the CRB, are down 20 percent….”

Bloomberg, 8-15-08

This would seem to be an unobjectionable statement, mathematical in its precision. There is, alas, one problem. What is the CRB?

The Commodity Research Bureau was an organization founded in the 1930s by a group of economic types to study the commodity markets. In the mid-1950s, they started to compile an index of the most prominent commodities to do for commodity traders what the Dow Jones Index had done for stock traders. This index was called the Commodity Research Bureau (CRB) Index, and for half a century it served its function well. It told commodity traders what commodities as a whole were doing.

But in 2004, with the founding generation gone, the CRB, now a successful and established organization, had passed into the hands of a new generation. A generation educated in the new way of gathering knowledge. The new generation sought knowledge by hiring a group of authority figures with long and impressive titles to rework the CRB.

I will save you a lot of complicated mathematics and say that the new index they came up with was half crude oil. Each commodity was given a special weighting, and when all the calculations were in, crude oil and its associated commodities (heating oil, unleaded gasoline and natural gas) had a weighting of close to 50%. Since there was a high probability that the other commodities in the index would cancel each other out, the new index pretty much moved up and down with crude oil. The authority figures with their impressive titles had taken away the CRB index and in its place put in its place one commodity. It would have been like taking away the Dow Jones Index and substituting a new index based on GM. GM may be an important stock, but it isn’t a proxy for the market.

Fortunately, the new Commodity Research Bureau knew that they could not just throw out the old CRB Index. That would risk another group picking it up and taking their business away from them. So they kept the CRB Index and changed its name to the Continuous Commodity Index. The new index they called the Reuters/Jeffries CRB Index (hoping that it would be abbreviated to CRB Index and thus confused with the old index).

Of course, if one wants an objective record of what commodities have been doing for the past half century, then one needs to track the same index over that period. It would not be valid to track the DJI from 1956 to 2004 and then switch to GM all the while calling the whole thing the DJI.

In short, the new Reuters/Jeffries CRB is a worthless piece of garbage, and any commodities trader with half a brain will give it no further thought. It was to head off this kind of thinking that the modern CRB gave the new index the name of the old one and changed the old one’s name.

Now perhaps you might say, “Well, these people originated the index. They named it in the first place. They have the right to change the name to anything they want.” The problem, however, is that a name stands for an object. If a young couple has a child, they have the right to call him “Bill.” But if they have a second child 20 years later, they do not have the right to call this second child Bill and rename the first. The character of the first child has become associated with the name “Bill.” People who know him will become confused, and his reputation may (undeservedly) suffer. This is the kind of confusion inherent in the idea that definitions are arbitrary.

Let me take another example. Ever since there has been a science of economics, economists have known what money is. Money was the economic good with which you could buy things. For example, if you want to buy a car and go to the dealer, the dealer will only accept one thing in exchange. If you bring a famous painting to exchange for the car, you will be refused. They will tell you, “Sell the painting for money, and come back and give us money for the car.”

But in the 1980s, Milton Friedman announced a new “money” (which he called M-2), which included short term loans (bank certificates of deposit). This has the same problem as the painting above. It cannot be used to buy things. If you take a bank CD to the car dealer, he will tell you politely to turn it in for money and come back. Soon M-2 had spawned a dozen brothers, up to M-13.

To come up with something like this takes a Nobel Prize winner. Oh, excuse me. I forgot that there is no such thing as the Nobel Prize in economics. It was not one of the 6 prizes described in Alfred Nobel’s will. Indeed, it came along more than 70 years later. Somebody just announced that they were giving a prize in honor of Alfred Nobel. By calling their prize by this name, they were trying to give it the distinction and honor which the prize had acquired over the years. The world press fell for it hook, line and sinker.

The creation of M-2 is a serious problem because in trying to predict a rise in prices, one must take account of any rise in the money supply. If two people cannot agree on what money is, then they cannot predict when prices will rise. Prices only rise as a result of an increase in the economic good which is used to buy things.

Another of my favorite examples is the concept of capitalism. This concept was first used by Karl Marx, and he never defined what capitalism was. For the next century, Marx’s followers would call anything they did not like “capitalism.” For example, Hitler called himself a socialist (as in National Socialist – NAZI), but his leftist enemies called him a capitalist. Adam Smith never used the word. Neither did the classical economists (including Herbert Spencer). I have learned from bitter experience that whenever I hear the word, I am sure to be served up a pastry of confused gobbledegook.

The advantage of simply making up one’s own definition is that you can prove pretty much anything you want. But this is a big disadvantage in the honest search for truth. If you want your ideas to correspond to reality, then you must have accurate definitions of the concepts you use. And since any society has intuitive definitions for all its concepts, intuitive definitions which capture our minds and in terms of which we think, your explicit definitions have to correspond to these intuitive definitions. Otherwise you will confuse the two. Pretty soon you have won the argument and lost the search for truth. (The intellectual world is full of people who “cleverly” start out with formal definitions they know will lead to the conclusion they wish to reach. But these definitions do not correspond to the concept. For example, some sound money types, with whom I am in basic sympathy, defined inflation as an increase in the money supply. They did this so that they could “prove” that inflation is caused by an increase in the money supply. They have been hammering away at this point for over half a century and have still not convinced any of their opponents. If they define inflation as a general rise in prices, they will have a bit more success.)

For example, I define a witch as a woman who has magical powers used for evil. I don’t believe that witches exist. But when I define the concept, I have to put into words the (intuitive) idea of the people in my culture even if they do believe in witches. If I don’t do that much, then I will never be able to convince them that witches don’t exist.

The problem is that modern intellectuals support the arbitrary nature of definitions. It creeps into our culture, and it makes (most) people stupid. For example, do you remember being told early in the year 2000 that the DJI was going to 35,000? It was in all the papers. The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal cooperated in shoving that idea down our throat. Did you buy stocks just before the horrific bear market of 2000-2002? Well, you are allowed a few mistakes, but you are expected to learn from them.

When I first took philosophy courses at Harvard, I was told that all they could teach me was that they didn’t know anything. Hey, wait a minute. The reason I went there in the first place was that they told me they knew more than anyone else. If they couldn’t teach me anything, then what was I paying them money for? How about a class action suit to get my tuition money back?

One of the things I learned about Harvard was that of all the things I learned there, nothing worked. I couldn’t do anything with my “knowledge.” Fortunately, I studied on my own before going to college, and this gave me some ability to question my professors. After college, I continued to study on my own, and now I realize that they are nothing but a collection of frauds.

Unfortunately, this collection of frauds continues to corrupt our youth and dominate our society. They make everybody dumb. We are so dumb that we even buy Books for Dummies. In a previous generation, any book reader would have been offended by such a title, and a book with such a title would not have sold. Today’s book buyer meekly accepts it because he feels himself to be a dummy.

Unlike my college professors, readers of this blog are expected to admit and learn from their mistakes. If it doesn’t work, then it isn’t true.

If you do nothing more than read The Federalist Papers or some of the other works of the Founding Fathers, you realize that the intellectual level has collapsed over the past 2 centuries. We are now seeing the cultural and economic collapses which are the result of this. And if nothing is done to stop it, we will eventually follow the path of ancient Rome.

# # #

Howard S. Katz can be visited at http://www.thegoldbug.net.

The Left As Teen-Age Rebellion

The programs that the left advocates have done little to help and instead have harmed the poor. American inner cities deteriorated in response to urban renewal and welfare programs. The socialist revolution in Russia resulted in the starvation of millions of peasants and a wide range of ethnic hatreds. The Chinese socialists have oppressed and murdered Tibetans and the religious as well as millions of politically incorrect businessmen and bourgeoisie. More people have been slaughtered by the left and by socialism than by the advocates of any other creed or belief system. There has not been a socialist economy that has produced economic progress, and the general result of socialism as in Cuba and North Korea have been violent suppression and impoverishment of the poor. Yet, sociopathically, the academic left continues to justify, rationalize and lie about the effects of its programs.

In America, the left advocates a Kafkaesque program of large institutions, big government and centralized control. Its program includes not only the bureaucratization of medicine but also of investment, self-defense, business and political speech. The failure of its programs do not deter its commitment to rigid, large scale enterprises. For instance, the left remains obsessively attached to social security and the Federal Reserve Bank despite dismal benefit/contribution ratios from the former and inflation and corruption from the latter.

The left's recidivist advocacy of failed ideas can be explained in three ways. One, the left might be depicted as religiously obsessed with its ideas, and riddled with power needs, and so habituated to its love of government and centralized power despite seventy years of repeated failure. Two, the left is cognitively limited. Although many on the left are not smart, many are smart enough to grasp the pragmatic implications of its program. So this is at best a partial explanation. Three, the left is economically motivated.

There is a recurrent theme that goes something like, "Oh, isn't it amazing that George Soros or this or that businessman is a billionaire and yet he favors our (left-wing) positions". Conversely, many Libertarians and conservatives conceive of businessmen as supportive of the free market position, and then are astounded when businessmen do not support that view. In reality, the left's views coincide fairly neatly with the views of big business. Big business believes in big government because without it it would not be so big. The political scientist Charles Lindblom in his book on market economies remarks on the "privileged" position of big business, and indeed, since the days of Hamilton big business has relied on centralized government. There is no evidence that government support of big business helps the public in any way. Rather, subsidization makes firms less efficient and less customer oriented. For instance, cable television, telephone, public utilities, health care, banking and insurance firms are subsidized and they are among the least customer-responsive firms. The reason is that government regulation reduces competition.

Chief among government subsidies to big business is first the Fed, which provides interest rate and loan subsidies to business, and second, higher education, which provides training to large firms, to a degree at public expense. Thus, professors' livelihoods are linked to the welfare of big business and they themselves enjoy subsidies just like the ones big business enjoys. Without big business demand for graduates, there would be no demand for universities. So why are academics so often critical of big business?

In fact, university professors are NOT critical of big business where it counts, and their criticisms are not adverse to big business's interests. Big business is not adverse to enhanced central control, socialism, regulation and the mixed economy because such control eliminates competition. Universities have, as well, been the chief advocate of central banking through economics and business programs. Big business would not be so big without the Fed, and without the regulation that historians and sociologists advocate. There are few economists who question central banking, and of all the issues this is the one that big business cares about most.

University professors depend on big business much as teen-agers depend on their parents. Without big business demand for graduates, there would be no demand for universities. Thus, like teen-agers, university professors rebel by criticizing big business's hypocrisy, its lack of "social responsibility", and its selfishness, even as the professors themselves are equally hypocritical, equally irresponsible socially and even more selfish than business executives. But, like teen-agers, the university professors return home to be fed at the end of the day, and find the possibility that they will be thrown out and sent to work unthinkable. Moreover, the upshot of their criticisms, like teen-agers', is a psychological replica of the institutions and habits that they criticize. In other words, they claim to criticize big business even as they advocate systems that are necessary to it. In the end, the university professors are the chief proponents of big business capitalism, helping it by diverting attention to shrill issues like diversity and global warming.

Is This Education (and is it entitled to a section 501(c)(3) tax examption)?

Or is it political lobbying?

You be the judge....

>Dear Colleagues,

>Come join us! ---- College's sociology department is taking part in a nation wide teach-in addressing climate change on January 31st, 2008. Over 1300 universities, schools and civic organizations are participating in this historic event. Because the date is so early in the semester, it may not be the best date for ----- College, but by focusing our activity around January 31st, our efforts will link with Focus the Nation's campaign. They have organized what may end up being the largest teach-in ever in U.S. history-reminding us of the fantastic reception to the first Earth Day in 1970.

>What can you do? (if viewed previously please note room change!)

>1. Save the date! On January 31st, From 11 until 1 the sociology department will host a short program in ---- Lounge Student Center involving local politicians, citizen groups, and a Frontline documentary, Hot Politics, on the history of climate change policies in the U.S.

>2. Take your class to view Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. There will be multiple screenings in the xxxxx Auditorium on January 30th and 31st. Show times at: 9:30 a.m., 12:15, 2:00, 3:45 and 6:30 p.m. No 12:15 showing on the 31st! Please RSVP to xxxx@xxxx.xxxx.edu.

>3. Plan to teach about climate change in your regular courses on (or around) January 31st. Our goal is to expand our attention to how climate change can be understood and addressed through our many disciplines. Climate change touches on issues as diverse as poverty, power, media discourses, politics, philosophy, human rights, social infrastructure, religion and more every discipline has something to add to the conversation.

>What can you do now?

>1. Let us know that you are joining our project. We will add your name, your course title, and your department to our list of participants. When you join our project, we will put you on a distribution list for additional materials and other updates.

>2. You can visit the website www.focusthenation.org for discipline specific teaching suggestions. Or for a social science focus try ASA's teach-in website http://www.linfield.edu/soan/et/teachin.html.

>3. If you have course material (readings, assignments, projects) share them with us and we will share them with all who participate.

>4. On Jan. 31st come to our teach-in focusing on climate change policies.

>5. Organize your own event and let us know.

>Please send your intention to participate and suggestions for materials to Professor xxx, xxx@----.xxx.edu.

-----------
Visiting Assistant Professor

Selected Blogs of Candace de Russy

Candace de Russy blogs at Phi Beta Cons at National Review.com and she has been productive of late. De Russy uncovers, courageously and without prejudice, scams, shams, swindles, stings, and sucker games that are essential to the postmodern university. The "cons" in phi beta cons are the universities themselves, as a review of de Russy's blogs reveals.

Item: Michael Bloomberg, the INO (independent in name only) presidential candidate, contributed $200 million to the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, which has just produced a fraudulent report concerning the Iraqi War. Undoubtedly, the Mayor's affiliation with the public health school contributes to his interest in progressive-liberal health fascism. De Russy notes that Bloomberg remarked that the Johns Hopkins researchers “are just some of the great, honest academics, the most talented academics around". Rumor has it that Mayor Bloomberg made similar remarks when he awarded a large pay and retirement bonus to a school principal who, it turned out, had falsified the test results for which he had rewarded her.

As well, de Russy notes that George Soros may have funded the bogus Johns Hopkins story.

(Also see discussion in Dan Stover's Northern Alliance Wannabe Blog.)

Item: de Russy deconstructs the motives of Columbia University, the politically correct institution that refuses to pay taxes on the large number of New York City properties and the the trust fund that it owns, even as its left-wing faculty argues for higher taxes. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, in 2006 Columbia's tax-exempt endowment totaled $5.9 billion and earned a return of 14.4% or $840 million, enough to provide all of its students with free tuition (24,000 students x $35,000 tuition = $840 million).

Academics claim that they care about the poor, minorities' rights and the oppressed. But instead of using its endowment to provide education to its students, or to provide much needed job training and remedial education to the large number of minority poor people in its community, Columbia utilizes the services of Mayor Bloomberg to indulge in private use eminent domain, aiming to loot land from the people of Harlem, throwing the poor on the streets to benefit its progressive-liberal faculty, which advocates taxing others to benefit themselves.

De Russy quotes the New York Sun, which notes that Columbia is busily reinforcing its progressive-liberal credentials:

"'Virtual empires benefiting private interests — secured through government force — are springing up especially across New York City,'” notably, at Columbia University, which 'seeks land that rightfully belongs to its West Harlem neighbors so it can expand its campus.'"

I can't wait until Mayor Bloomberg becomes president so that politically connected swindlers will have access to land from Peoria to Pennsylvania.

Item: de Russy blogs about Major Stephen Coughlin, the Pentagon analyst who has been fired "for his politically incorrect but “hard-to-refute views on the relationship between Islamic law and Islamist jihad doctrine." Let us hope that the Pentagon's resort to political correctness will be rectified.

Item: de Russy notes that:

"The president of Al-Quds University in Jerusalem, Sari Nusseibeh, made anti-Semitic remarks during a rant against the presence of Jews in any future Palestinian state. Al-Quds has partnered with several American and Canadian universities to offer programs, classes, and research opportunities. These schools include the University of Michigan at Dearborn, Northeastern University, York University in Ontario, Brandeis, and George Washington University. Al-Quds also receives U.S. government support."

Here is one more nail in the coffin of Alan Colmes's argument that progressive-liberals aren't really Nazis. Of course, they are, Jonah Goldberg. Of course they are.

Item: de Russy notes that the Anti-Racist Blog has:

"obtained a series of e-mails promoting a despicable campaign to de-legitimize Israel on college campuses across the United States that will be waged in the coming months. As you will see, anti-Zionist conspirators from student groups such as MSA, and SJP are preparing for a coordinated and unprecedented nationwide assault on the Jewish State and its supporters."

Here is yet one more nail in the coffin of Alan Colmes's argument that progressive-liberals aren't really Nazis.

Item: de Russy notes that there has been a proposal for a Russell Kirk University.

I hope that they have a business school!

Item: de Russy notes that:

"John Yoo, a Yale Law School graduate who served at the Justice Department, has been sued by convicted terrorist Jose Padilla, who is being represented by lawyers at Yale. As the editors of the Wall Street Journal observe, “Perhaps if Mr. Yoo had decided to pursue a life of terrorism, he too could be represented by his alma mater.”

I guess when they're not stealing land from poor African Americans, universities keep themselves busy by harming their alumni!

Item: de Russy notes an Anti-Racist Blog recount of a Chicago Tribune story by Jim Tankersley which mentions that:

"U.S. government officials authorized giving nearly $1 million in foreign aid to a Palestinian university with links to the terrorist group Hamas, despite vetting the school eight times for ties to terrorism, according to a government audit."

Item: de Russy provides still more evidence of the progressive-liberal/Nazi link:

"Norman Finkelstein, a critic of Israel who resigned last year as a political science professor at DePaul University, met this week with a senior official of Hezbollah in south Lebanon.

"Although the U.S. government has labeled Hezbollah a terrorist organization, Finkelstein portrays the group as standing for “hope.”

"...In the past, Finkelstein has maintained that some Jewish groups have exploited the Holocaust for political and financial gain.(AP)"

De Russy consistently demonstrates excellence in blogging. Please, please keep up the good work, Candace. We love you even if our drooling governor showed you the door.

Candace de Russy Blogs Latest Developments in O'Malley v. Karkhanis

Candace de Russy blogs the latest developments in O'Malley v. Karkhanis on NRO online.

>"O’Malley v. Karkhanis, John Doe and Jane Doe [Candace de Russy]

"CUNY Professor Susan O’Malley recently filed a formal defamation complaint against Emeritus Professor Sharad Karkhanis. Professor Mitchell Langbert has recorded the entire complaint in his blog, noting three aspects of the case that merit public scrutiny:

"One involves the scope of academic freedom. A second involves freedom of speech in a collective bargaining unit and the interaction of labor law with defamation and First Amendment rights. A third involves the extent to which the courts and public dispute resolution processes interact with collegial academic processes.

O'Malley v. Karkhanis: In Pursuit of the Acadmic Alfred E. Neuman

Professor Susan O’Malley’s attorney, Joseph Martin Carasso of New York City, filed her formal defamation complaint against Emeritus Professor Sharad Karkhanis 11 days ago. The complaint is well-written and Attorney Carasso deserves credit for clear, no-holds-barred writing. I have recorded the entire complaint in my blog.

There are several issues in O’Malley v. Karkhanis, John Doe and Jane Doe that deserve public scrutiny. One involves the scope of academic freedom. A second involves freedom of speech in a collective bargaining unit and the interaction of labor law with defamation and First Amendment rights. A third involves the extent to which the courts and public dispute resolution processes interact with collegial academic processes. After mentioning these points, I review the blogger and media coverage of the O’Malley case. Then, I mention a couple of the key points in Professor O’Malley's complaint and offer some comments.

The O’Malley case is consistent with the long-observed deterioration of universities’ willingness to tolerate dissent. It may suggest an extension of this deterioration to universities’ use of the courts to suppress external criticism. Much as Singapore’s dictator Lee Kuan Yew and Saudi billionaire Sheikh Khalid Bin Mahfouz have used litigation to silence Chee Soon Juan and Rachel Ehrenfeld, so universities may have begun to use tax-exempt and publicly financed assets to bring politically motivated law suits.

Another potential implication of the O’Malley case is that Professor O'Malley implicitly argues that academic freedom is more limited than the freedom of speech associated with public political discourse. In other words, academic freedom may be more rather than less constrained than public freedom with respect to discourse concerning public figures. Whether O’Malley is a public figure is debatable. The courts may choose to fashion a different standard of speech for academic discourse than for public discourse.

A third point is that there are potential labor issues. In union certification elections the National Labor Relations Board has attempted to establish the concept that there must be laboratory conditions whereby employers and unions cannot threaten or cajole bargaining unit members to vote for or against a union. The PSC is a creature of New York’s Taylor Law, not the National Labor Relations Act. The question in this case is whether an elected union officer, who shares interests in common with the union president (Barbara Bowen) and other officers, should have the right to suppress dissident speech and opinion through the transactions costs associated with law suits. The pro-union New York courts may well consider that this is acceptable.

A fourth point pertains to collegiality. Several officers of the faculty union, the Professional Staff Congress (PSC), to include President Bowen and Professor O’Malley, have previously publicly attacked another member of the faculty, Professor KC Johnson, in part claiming that he lacked collegiality. Now, Professor O’Malley sues Professor Karkhanis, sidestepping collegial processes and turning her dispute with him into a matter of public record. Can law suits be viewed as part of academic governance processes? If so, can the public continue to support the expense of collegial processes given that academics cause additional dispute resolution costs also at the public's expense?

Media and Blogger coverage of O’Malley v. Karkhanis, John Doe and Jane Doe

On October 31, Annie Karni of the New York Sun noted that Professor O’Malley said of her case that "it's all very, very silly". Karni also quotes Professor Karkhanis as saying that the law suit is “an attempt to infringe on his freedom of speech” and that all of his comments were meant as “satire”. The two statements are parallel. Professor O’Malley characterizes her case as “silly” because Professor Karkhanis’s statements about her were satirical.

As well, the Sun quotes Professor Karkhanis:

"She's a public figure, and I have a right to say that, based on the evidence I have and the pattern I've seen of this woman…Why would someone try to assist the terrorist people when you have good Americans who are looking for the job?"

The Sun notes that Professor Karkhanis criticized Professor O’Malley for defending the right of Susan Rosenberg to teach. Rosenberg had spent 16 years in prison for explosives possession. As well, Professor Karkhanis criticized Professor O’Malley’s statement in a University Faculty Senate (UFS) meeting that Mohammed Yousry, convicted of terrorist-related activity, ought to be given a job.

In the New York Post, Dareh Gregorian notes that much of Professor O’Malley’s complaint revolves around Professor Karkhanis’s statements concerning her “obsession with finding jobs for terrorists" and her support for Lynne Stewart, Mohammed Yousry and Susan Rosenberg. Gregorian also notes that Professor Karkhanis believes that what he wrote was satire and that his statements were “appropriate."

Candace de Russy notes that Professor Karkhanis made several accusations about Professor O'Malley after she proposed to rehire Mohamed Yousry, an Arabic-language translator convicted of supporting terrorist activities. He was fired from York College.

In FIRE’s the Torch, Luke Sheahan points out that Professor Karkhanis has been a critic of Professor O’Malley and that he had stated that she was trying to “bring in all her indicted, convicted, and freed-on-bail terrorist friends to the university”.

In Frontpagemag, Phil Orenstein notes that the PSC has a history of aiding and abetting terrorists. Phil also notes that the PSC has focused on left-wing political activity while bread and butter issues have languished and “welfare fund reserves fell by 97%”.

Phil also notes that past issues of Karkhanis’s newsletter, Patriot Returns, have attacked Professor O’Malley for supporting Professor Timothy Shortell, who claimed that all religious people are “moral retards”. Professor Karkhanis has also attacked Professor O’Malley for attempting to find Susan Rosenberg a job and her public statement that Mohammed Yousry was seeking a job at a faculty senate meeting. Phil argues that Professor Karkhanis’s newsletter is a check against abuses of power by the PSC and that the law suit is a free speech issue.

The United Federation of Teachers, Phil points out, has seen considerable internal rancor but has never seen a law suit by a union officer against a member, with the union openly taking the officer’s side. Phil also argues that O’Malley is a public figure and so is fair game for criticism.

In a recent blog in Democracy Project Phil Orenstein also notes that the Queens Village Republican Club in New York has named Professor Karkhanis “Educator of the Year” and will hand him an award for his ongoing struggle for freedom of speech and his refusal to be silenced by the PSC’s program of suppression of conservatives.

An example of the PSC's suppression of conservatives appears in History News Network. KC Johnson notes that Dorothee Benz,a PSC spokesperson argues that

“Free speech has limits, as any first year law student knows. O’Malley’s case concerns one of those limits, where the right to free speech comes up against the harm caused by libelous statements. Whether accusing someone of aiding and training terrorists, in a post-9/11 world, rises to meet the legal standards.”

The PSC sees conviction for explosives possession or conviction for colluding with terrorists as protected speech, but it views criticism of its officers as falling outside the limits of free speech, even when those accusations have factual basis.

Johnson adds that although Karkhanis’s rhetoric can be “over the top”, it played a key role in last year’s union election. Karkhanis’s newsletter has called O’Malley “Queen of Released time” and has criticized O’Malley for multiple office holding and “non-accomplishment” Johnson points out that

“unless O’Malley is going to claim that Yousry and Rosenberg were not convicted terrorists, Karkhanis’ statements about her urging CUNY colleges to hire terrorists were factually true. Rosenberg was a member of a terrorist organization; Yousry was accused and convicted of aiding a convicted terrorist. So what would motivate such a suit?"

Scott Jaschik of Inside Higher Ed notes that while “Karkhanis said that he does not believe O’Malley to be a terrorist (or a queen, which he calls her frequently)", Professor O’Malley’s attorney said that “falsely accusing or alleging someone is a terrorist or is aiding terrorists in the current year, post-9/11, is a serious charge”. Professor Karkhanis replies that “the factual basis behind the terrorism jabs — that O’Malley went to bat for these individuals — has been demonstrated by e-mail messages he posted on his Web site.”

The O’Malley Complaint

I blog the O’Malley complaint in its virtual entirety here. A few of the points are that Professor Karkhanis said that Professor Susan O’Malley comes from a wealthy background, which Professor O’Malley denies. He also said that she used “intimidation” and joining “radical groups” to become leader of the University Faculty Senate to avoid “dirtying her hands with chalk”. He said that O’Malley tried to help Susan Rosenberg, a convicted criminal. He said that O’Malley tried to pressure departmental chairs to help Yousry, who was convicted of abetting terrorism. He said that the “Queen of Released Time” (Professor O’Malley) was jockeying to have Lynn Stewart hired to the staff of the PSC union. In a second cause of action, Professor O’Malley complains that Professor Karkhanis’s newsletter used a headline:

“O'MALLEY-QUEDA TRAINING CAMP: FINDING JOBS FOR TERRORISTS A KCC EXCLUSIVE”

and that Professor Karkhanis called the New Caucus, the left-wing group that dominates the Professional Staff Congress, the “Never-Any-Action Caucus”. Professor Karkhanis states that:

“Her major goal is to establish a Training Camp to recruit and train, at Kingsborough, people like herself who are misguided, misdirected, misinformed. O'Malley seeks to find jobs at KCC and other CUNY colleges for Mohammed Yousry. 'O'Malley doesn't care about us--her only concern is that Yousry should teach at CUNY. O'Malley has also been job-searching for Susan Rosenberg…O'Malley, though, doesn't care about us--her only concern is that Rosenberg should teach at CUNY…We believe that the above mentioned KCC individuals [Susan Farrell, Robert Singer, Jack Arnow, Robert Putz, Patrick Lloyd] were selected for the O'Malley-Queda Recruitment Camp because she thinks that (1) they all are naive and gullible and (2) she can infiltrate the Department and College-wide P&Bs at KCC and at other CUNY colleges to push her PERSONAL AGENDA of finding jobs for Yousry, Rosenberg and other terrorists...Meanwhile remember: the Queen of Released Time is a devious, dangerous and More to come on the Queen."

There are eight additional causes of action, for a total of ten. Each of them refers to this sort of silly diatribe about Professor O’Malley. The entire complaint is here and it is evident that all of these statements were satirical. I would have referred any CUNY faculty member who said to me that they really thought that Professor O’Malley wore a crown and held a scepter as “Queen of Released Time” or actually ran an al-Queda Recruitment Camp to the university's counseling center.

Analysis

There are potential dangers to freedom of speech emanating from Professor O’Malley’s decision to bring this case, so although it seems likely that she will lose, it is important to take it seriously. Arguably, the case is frivolous. However courts are not always predictable.

It is evident that Patriot Returns is and always was considered to CUNY’s own Mad Magazine. It is funny, and although I disagree with the “New Caucus” union leadership, I and likely no one else ever concluded that the Patriot's satirical claims were true. On a few occasions, based on statements in the newsletter, I contacted the union leadership such as Steve London and Barbara Bowen for further details, and they did not choose to reply.

College professors don’t always have common sense, but they are not complete idiots. An audience of college professors is able to discern satire from fact. Also, the PSC has far more resources than Professor Karkhanis, while Professor O'Malley has the same, and both the PSC and Professor O'Malley could have responded openly through ordinary internal communication processes to any accusations. I do not recall receiving any communications from Professor O'Malley, although I have met her several times.

Along these lines, Professor O’Malley openly stated to the Sun's Annie Karni (kudos, Annie) that this is a “silly” case. As well, Karkhanis presents evidence in the form of minutes of the senate meeting that Professor O’Malley in fact made the comments he alleges. There is little debate about the underlying fact that Professor O’Malley has repeatedly and openly supported left wing kooks. The questions that the complaint raise focus on satirical hyperbole. In political discourse, should free speech be infringed? The New Caucus and the Professional Staff Congress think so. I disagree with them.

Arguably, by virtue of her becoming an ex-officio member of the Board of Trustees of CUNY, Chair of the University Faculty Senate, Executive Director of the Radical Caucus of the Modern Language Association, contributor and Editor of Radical Teacher and member of the CUNY union's Executive Committee, Professor O'Malley became a public figure. I am not sure of the definition of “public figure”. I have contacted a respected labor and fiduciary duty attorney I have known for many years and posed him the question whether a union officer and/or faculty senate officer who runs for office is considered a public figure in the same sense that a public politician is. I suspect that this is an open question, and that Professor O’Malley’s case might do serious damage to the cause of free speech if it is not viewed as frivolous.

As well, there is a serious question whether the kind of freedom of speech that applies to public discourse applies to private universities. As a public university CUNY is subject to the same First Amendment rules as apply to public discourse, in which case officials ought to be treated the same as they are ordinarily, although this is not certain. As a union officer and head of the faculty senate Professor O’Malley might be construed as a public official, but are these roles really public? I would hope that the answer is yes, but if Professor O’Malley has intended to institute additional avenues for suppression in American universities, she has been creative in selecting this avenue.

My opinion about the “John and Jane Doe’ defendants is that Professor O’Malley is reaching. In my conversations with Professor Karkhanis he never once mentioned a coauthor. In fact, the very use of the “John and Jane Doe” are a kind of legal slur. Perhaps Professor O’Malley is thinking that other satirist, Alfred E. Neuman, is John Doe.

In summary, Professor O’Malley probably has no case. If she does, it is one more stake in the heart of academic freedom and of universities. Clearly, she attempts to use the legal system to intimidate Professor Karkhanis. She does not want Professor Karkhanis to continue his writing of the Patriot to benefit of the PSC’s radical leadership.