The high-priests of intellectual flotsam win one.

You may have heard by now that Yale has admitted a former senior Taliban official as a student--a story originally broken by the New York Times. Yale is also one of the universities that has banned ROTC on campus--ostensibly for its discriminatory policy on gays.

Yet there is apparently no problem with the Taliban who virtually imprisoned the entire female population of Afghanistan.

Yale is staying mum on this, which indicates that they have some indication that this is a political mess, but what I am curious about is the thought process that leads to such a decision.

Almost no one will now defend Mr. Rahmatullah's presence as a special student, even though a week ago many had no such inhibitions in a splashy New York Times magazine piece, which broke the news that he had been at Yale for eight months. In that piece, Richard Shaw, Yale's dean of undergraduate admissions before he took the same post at Stanford, explained that Yale had missed out on another foreign student of the same caliber as Mr. Rahmatullah but that "we lost him to Harvard," and "I didn't want that to happen again."

I suppose it might be interesting to talk to a literate Taliban guy for a while, just to see what makes him tick, but the insensitivity and arrogance of admitting one as a student to one of this country's elite universities is truly shocking.

Perhaps this is what George Clooney meant by being proud to be out of touch...

I caught an opinion column in the Rocky Mountain news today by the Instapundit, responding to an earlier column by a University of Colorado professor (not Ward Churchill).

I liked the first sentence the best.

Paul Campos has beclowned himself. He did it in the usual way, by arguing loudly about things he does not understand.

I have never seen the word "beclowned" used before, even though I instantly understood its meaning. I looked it up in Merriam-Webster and it ain't there, so perhaps Reynolds invented it

After I read Campos column, I thought it was an inspired verb.

Long story short, Campos thought Reynolds was beyond the pale for advocating assassination of troublesome nuclear scientists and mullahs. I thought the argument was stupid on its face--assuming that diplomatic avenues have been exhausted, isn't assassination a more efficient and thus more moral option than say, lobbing cruise missiles into Baghdad as Clinton did, or actually invading a country?

The legal discussion doesn't interest me much beyond that simple fact.

UPDATE: Apparently Tim Blair deserves the credit for coining the term "beclowned". I'm sure I'll be using that term in the near future.

I'm scanning the news and I saw this headline "Mom accused of driving son to fight boy" and sure enough the police have in custody one mother:

Renee Ann Honnold, 37, of Folsom, was arrested Thursday on suspicion of two felonies, endangering the life or health of a child and criminal conspiracy, as well as contributing to the delinquency of a minor, a misdemeanor.

And charged her 13 year old son as well:

Her son was cited for suspicion of misdemeanor battery.

However, the most bizzare part of the story is this:

Both boys were suspended for five days.

Huh? Granted there is more to this story and maybe the beatee deserved the suspension because of an act prior to the fight but I have a sneaking suspicion that in Pelosiland the school's policy is it takes two to tango fight and by golly two will be suspended. Pay no attention to those folks in the squad car...

Jeb Bush, join the club.
Al Gore, join the club.

I should first mention that the article I'm referring to is extraordinarily fair--a shining example of what I think journalism should look like--it deals with a controversial issue that fairly begs to be demagogued, but which the author treats with balance.

Phil Mitchell is a non-tenured professor at CU who is very popular with his students (he teaches social history...), has nine children and is known as a pleasant guy.

He's also a Christian, which doesn't go over too well with those "tolerant" liberals at CU (or anywhere else for that matter...)

So is he being fired for cause or because he is ideologically non-conformist?

The author doesn't make a judgment, but does call on CU president Hank Brown to make thoroughly investigate the situation. Considering CU's recent travails, that seems like very good advice.

I don't have to be quite that fair-minded. The public controversies over academic hirings and firings have been bolstered by the stories told to me by my many friends in academia. Everything--absolutely everything, is political in academia. Not surprising in an environment that lacks the exigencies of a market economy, the social hierarchy is the predominant driver of who's in and who's out.

Its less a problem in those fields where success can be more objectively defined, which is why all your most strident lefties are in arts and literature.

Last Sunday in the LA Times, I read a guest editorial by Michael Skube about how useless bloggers were compared with "real reporters". It was a piece fairly begging for a response, particularly in light of the recent Beauchamps fabulist controversy at TNR, Agence France Press fauxtography and the seemingly unending series of professional malpractice being foisted on the public by media too lazy, too partisan and too career-focused to "edit" themselves into credibility.

The rebuttal seemed obvious to me--I read honest-to-goodness reportage in blogs on a daily basis, much of it being the definitive source. Just this week I read Michael Totten and Michael Yon from Iraq--nothing the MSM has done even comes close. As would be obvious to regular readers, I didn't actually write that rebuttal for reasons related to the blogging dynamic: you can write early or you can write profoundly and later. If you can do either of those, then its best to leave it to others who can.

Well, Jay Rosen can and did.

Rosen provides an extensive but hardly comprehensive list of blogger reportage while subjecting the unfortunate Dr. Skube to a well-earned chastisement for not doing his homework.

The ironic aspect of this is that Skube, unintentionally no doubt, produced a textbook example of why the traditional media is circling the bowl these days. The editorial reflected his prejudice, a lack of intellectual rigor, a sense of entitlement, a poor work ethic and poor ethics in general. Its how you get black and white crap and if the mentors of our journalistic class are this corrupt, its hardly surprising that the public lacks confidence in the traditional sources of news.

Our professionals seem to be getting more amateurish, and our amateurs are getting more professional. People will vote with their cursors.

What is a liberal?

Wikipedia prefaces their article of the topic with this:

This article discusses liberalism as a worldwide political ideology, its roots and development, and some of its many modern-day variations, including American, European, classical, and modern traditions. The local meaning of the term "liberalism" may differ greatly between countries; see the entries listed in Liberalism worldwide.

This is a polite way of saying that non-liberals often steal the term to misrepresent their actual political ideology. Having worn-out the positive associations of the term "progressive", post WWI lefties began calling themselves liberals. Having subsequently worn out the term "liberal", we are now back to "progressive". Regardless of what they call themselves, lofty terms don't manage to cover the stink.

The objective definition of liberal is someone who embraces the concept of individual rights and equality of opportunity.

Do you think we should get out of Iraq regardless of the consequences to Iraq and the region? You're not a liberal. Boycotting Walmart? You're not a liberal. Protesting globalism? You're not a liberal.

Does you're political philosophy consist of freedom to pursue as many new and different ways to orgasm, get stoned and avoid responsibility for your financial and lack of career decisions? You're not a liberal--you're an idiot.

UCLA researchers have come up with this:

Exploring the neurobiology of politics, scientists have found that liberals tolerate ambiguity and conflict better than conservatives because of how their brains work.

Does that sound like the DailyKos to you? I thought not.

Based on the results, he said, liberals could be expected to more readily accept new social, scientific or religious ideas.

Hmm. This might explain why the left-wing stubbornly clings to discredited political ideas like socialism--their brains are calcified.

"There is ample data from the history of science showing that social and political liberals indeed do tend to support major revolutions in science," said Sulloway, who has written about the history of science and has studied behavioral differences between conservatives and liberals.

Lead author David Amodio, an assistant professor of psychology at New York University, cautioned that the study looked at a narrow range of human behavior and that it would be a mistake to conclude that one political orientation was better. The tendency of conservatives to block distracting information could be a good thing depending on the situation, he said.

Political orientation, he noted, occurs along a spectrum, and positions on specific issues, such as taxes, are influenced by many factors, including education and wealth. Some liberals oppose higher taxes and some conservatives favor abortion rights.

Still, he acknowledged that a meeting of the minds between conservatives and liberals looked difficult given the study results.

Actually, history demonstrates that major revolutions in science require the demise of the ancien regime. No one could accuse Albert Einstein of narrow-mindedness, but he nevertheless could not accept the idea of an expanding universe. A new generation of astrophysicists was required to grapple with the concept.

Political "liberals" don't accept new scientific revolutions, they simply seek political advantage in them. Does anyone honestly believe that "information superhighway" Al Gore cares about global warming for its own sake? Is that what prompts him to falsely characterize global warming as a matter of scientific "consensus" second only to gravity? More often than not, scientific ideas are simply stalking horses for ambitious constituencies.

Ironically, the "Big Bang" theory was largely opposed because of its "religious" implications--a political, not scientific objection.

What age and wisdom teach you is that just because an idea is new, doesn't mean its good. A whole-brained person tempers an interest in the new with skepticism born from experience. There are very few things that are truly new, particular when it comes to human behavior.

Any man who is under 30, and is not a liberal, has not heart; and any man who is over 30, and is not a conservative, has no brains. -Sir Winston Churchill.

The Columbia Spectator, the paper of Columbia University – home to Columbia school of Journalism - provides us this breaking news from the first in a four part series titled The Truth About the Academies:

When I looked at the course catalogue, which boasted seminars about leadership and selflessness, they were in fact seminars about weaponry and leading troops into combat. The reality of sending my brother to the Naval Academy began to set in: this was not a school; this was the military. While they boast a first class education, the main goal of this institution was to get my brother “combat ready.”

…However, for anyone else out there considering a career in the academy, let it be known: the U.S. Naval Academy is not an elite college; it is first and foremost a branch of the U.S. military

Whoa! The U.S. Naval Academy is really part of the military and prepares students for war!?

The ignorance the young author displays (and the editors allowed) is only made worse by her smug opening paragraph:

I know why I chose Columbia: the campus is magnificent, the education is top-tier, and my peers are intelligent. I could look at a stranger, tell him or her that I went to Columbia, and hear the predictable, “Wow, you must be smart.”

Ms. Leppela, you may have targeted the Naval Academy but the only “elite” school you exposed as a fraud was Columbia. Consider this stranger unimpressed.

H/T Captains Quarters

I am reading a lot of condemnation of Columbia for inviting Ahmadinejad to address the its students.

I have to respectfully disagree with that condemnation and concur with President Bollinger:

I would like to add a few comments on the principles that underlie this event. Columbia, as a community dedicated to learning and scholarship, is committed to confronting ideas—to understand the world as it is and as it might be. To fulfill this mission we must respect and defend the rights of our schools, our deans and our faculty to create programming for academic purposes. Necessarily, on occasion this will bring us into contact with beliefs many, most, or even all of us will find offensive and even odious. We trust our community, including our students, to be fully capable of dealing with these occasions, through the powers of dialogue and reason.

I would also like to invoke a major theme in the development of freedom of speech as a central value in our society. It should never be thought that merely to listen to ideas we deplore in any way implies our endorsement of those ideas, or the weakness of our resolve to resist those ideas, or our naiveté about the very real dangers inherent in such ideas. It is a critical premise of freedom of speech that we do not honor the dishonorable when we open the public forum to their voices. To hold otherwise would make vigorous debate impossible.

That such a forum could not take place on a university campus in Iran today sharpens the point of what we do here. To commit oneself to a life—and a civil society—prepared to examine critically all ideas arises from a deep faith in the myriad benefits of a long-term process of meeting bad beliefs with better beliefs and hateful words with wiser words. That faith in freedom has always been and remains today our nation's most potent weapon against repressive regimes everywhere in the world. This is America at its best.

Yes it is, unfortunately, this self-laudatory commentary ignores the fact that Columbia believes in free-speech for enemies of freedom, but not for those who fight for it.

Columbia students who want to serve their country cannot enroll in the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) at Columbia. Columbia students who want to enroll in ROTC must travel to other universities to fulfill their obligations. ROTC has been banned from the Columbia campus since 1969. In 2003, a majority of polled Columbia students supported reinstating ROTC on campus. But in 2005, when the Columbia faculty senate debated the issue, President Bollinger joined the opponents in defeating the effort to invite ROTC back on campus.

The real test of Columbia's values would be to apologize to the U.S. military and reinstate the ROTC program on campus

I've been an enthusiastic amateur of various histories for at least 20 years at this point, and in fact I've read enough about some specific topics to reasonable call myself an authority.

Really getting to the bottom of an historical topic, short of reading the original sources, is to read all the secondary sources, which can mean a half-a-dozen books or more on a single subject.

An interesting thing happens when you take the time to do this--you begin to realize that the vast majority of history is "he said, she said". Conclusions depend almost entirely on how someone weights one piece of evidence against another.

Rod Dreher, an editorial columnist for the Dallas Morning News, has posed an interesting question in this blog post on Beliefnet. He begins by offering a passage from a book about local communities in Chicago in the 1950s in which the author, Alan Ehrenhalt, writes about how history is written. It is a commonplace, and therefore a suspect notion, that “history is written by the winners.” Ehrenhalt suggests that, more often than not, it is written by the dissenters.

This is a much more useful insight and one that fits with other things we know or intuit. By “history,” I take Ehrenhalt to be referring not just to academic tomes or schoolbooks but to the public memories and attitudes that evolve with respect to past times and events. For example, we have all learned to think of the 1950s as a time of materialism and conformity and cultural blandness. This has become our shared historical viewpoint. But who told us that? Wasn’t it precisely those who weren’t, or worked very hard not to seem to be, like that?

That's consistent with my own experience for the most part.

The paradox of history is that the closer we are to events, the better the sources and the more intense the bias. The more distant the history, the less bias and poorer source material. The irony is that even if someone could write a completely dispassionate history of the Iraq war (for instance), its unlikely that anyone could actually read it dispassionately.

One might be tempted to believe that the internet will change all that, but its becoming clear that even though we are journaling more now than at any time since the 19th century (when it was common for literate people to leave volumes of correspondence upon their deaths...), human nature hasn't changed a whit and bits and bytes are certainly more ephemeral than paper (half of UNCoRRELATED's archive has been lost as we've had to transition through different blogging platforms and hosts...).

What will be nice is the ability to search millions of documents--now historians simply have to read and collate tens of thousands of paper pages. The real question is what the effect of open access, probably over the internet, to the entire body of source material is going to have on the writing of histories and their quality?

I suspect that as with the blogging phenomenon, we'll get a flood of amateur histories, and like blogging again, much of it will be crap and a lot will be as good as anything ever produced. There will of course, still be professional historians digging in restricted archives to produce exclusive material, but by and large, I think the future lies with the amateurs.

Ultimately the question of quality is unanswerable--the same dynamics exist for future historians as exist now--flawed source material and unexamined prejudice.

H/T Ed Driscoll

An old friend who has embarked on a successful academic career, recently took a position at Brigham Young University, where he ran into the lovely bunny and precipitated our reunion. He transferred from another university that was desperate to keep him and as part of their campaign, warned him about the "oppressive academic environment" at BYU. My friend found this amusing since his personal experience at another university was with tyrannical feminists who denigrated his work and attempted to hobble his career for no other reason than his white maleness.

The point of course is that the various "isms" that afflict academic are indefatigable defenders of academic freedom for their points of view--not so much for others.

None of this is news for readers of this blog, but I bring it up because I want to promote Indoctrinate U, a kind of funny horror show dealing with the the sad state of academia in our nation. The producers are of course, locked out of the traditional channels, but have come up with an innovative internet-based campaign to bypass this and deal directly with local theaters.

If enough people from your area sign up at the site, the producers have the leverage to arrange a local screening.

...must mean you are one.

A student at Hamline University in Minnesota has been suspended and ordered to undergo a mental health evaluation for advocating the carrying of legal concealed weapons on campus.

TownHall.com reports Troy Scheffler made the case in an e-mail to a school official that licensed gun owners could stop or prevent the kind of violence that struck Virginia Tech earlier this year. He pointed out that research has indicated the possibility of armed resistance discourages potential criminals. And he noted that many Virginia Tech students have said the massacre there would not have happened if the school had not banned concealed weapons.

But even though the school has a policy that guarantees students will be free to discuss all questions of interest and express their opinions openly, the dean of students says Scheffler's e-mail was deemed to be threatening. Scheffler was placed on interim suspension, which will only be lifted after he agrees to a psychological evaluation.

Next they will be prescribing lobotomies.

One more sign of academic decline - Professors no longer require students to stretch:

A University of Maine student alleges her former professor offered extra credit to class members if they burned the American flag or the U.S. Constitution or were arrested defending free speech.

Who gets arrested for burning the U.S flag anymore? The professor is out of touch or a softy. For real excitement he ought to give extra credit for desecrating a Hezbollah flag:

...At a small anti-terrorism rally in October 2006, several members of the College Republicans stomped on pieces of paper they had painted to look like flags of the radical Islamic organizations Hezbollah and Hamas, copying the designs from images on the Internet. A few days later, a Muslim student filed a complaint, on the grounds that the Arabic script on the Hezbollah and Hamas flags contained the word “Allah.” The university pressed charges, accusing the blasphemers of “incivility” and creating “a hostile environment.”

You don't even have to wait for the police or the terrorists to get you; your own university will prosecute you. For extra thrills, try doing this with a flag actually owned by the terrorists.

H/T Liberty Pundit via Don Surber

Note: I modified the first sentence to make it read better.

If you link to Evan Coyne Maloney's Indoctrinate-u web site here is what you find today:

Due to threatened legal action from a major taxpayer-funded university, we've temporarily taken down the Indoctrinate U homepage while we assess our options.

Evan Coyne Maloney states here the film will not be derailed, however, he doesn't provide any more details.
This should be interesting.

Norfolk State University is an historically black university providing education opportunities to the disadvantaged, which of course is a noble and useful mission.

Unfortunately, "educating" is a problematic concept at NSU.

Steven D. Aird his job teaching biology at Norfolk State University. Today is his last day of work, but on his way out, he has started to tell his story — one that he suggests points to large educational problems at the university and in society. The university isn’t talking publicly about his case, but because Aird has released numerous documents prepared by the university about his performance — including the key negative tenure decisions by administrators — it is clear that he was denied tenure for one reason: failing too many students. The university documents portray Aird as unwilling to compromise to pass more students.

Apparently, the administration equivocates between the terms "educating" and "passing"