Posted by Dodo David at 05:20 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Can It Be? I Disagree.

A professor of sexuality's contract was not renewed because two female students claimed sexual harrasment because of a discussion regarding the shaving of pubic hair for oral sex.

Um, why were these two ladies taking a class on sexuality? I took Human Sexuality in college and I actually found it to be a more practicable course then, say, Combinatorics (that's math).

You know what the class is about before you sign up. You know that you will see movies and visuals depicting sex. If I took a course on Japanese history, I would expect to see pictures and film of Japanese people. You take a course on sexuality and you're going to see sex.

Granted, I would take issue with visual depictions of child pornography or bestiality--but pubic hair shaving is very basic and something any of these two ladies can read about in Cosmo or GQ.

These are adults. This course is not mandated for graduation. My course actually asked for student voluteers to demonstrate how they masterbate. Entirely appropriate (and yes, I did learn a few things). We are there to learn about sexuality.

Now, if one wants to make a claim that government loans/grants shouldn't fund this course, then I might agree. But if a student is on scholarship or is paying for his/her education, s/he should be able to study the subject of his/her choice.

Videos of me masterbating are available upon request.

Posted by Aaron at 12:52 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

Danegerus' History of Math

Very funny timeline:

Teaching Math In 1950
A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is 4/5 of the price. What is his profit?

Teaching Math In 2005
Un hachero vende una carretada de maderapara $100. El costo de la producción es $80

Posted by Aaron at 01:02 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

John Ruberry Scores Exclusive!

Our buddy the Marathon Pundit has the story before the press:

Thomas Klocek files slander lawsuit against DePaul

John's been covering this story relentlessly from early on. If you want a textbook example in how to blog, John's tireless work on the Klocek case is a prime example. Congratulations, John!

Here's a good backgrounder on the Klocek story, which highlights John's excellent work.

John achieved a small measure of fame last year when he caught onto the fact that John Fraude Kerry had lied about running the Boston Marathon.

Posted by pat at 01:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Results Count

I read an interesting article in the Washington Post today (published on June 5). Written by college professor Alicia C. Shepard, it’s called “A's for Everyone.” Doesn’t that have a nice, feel-good ring to it? Wouldn’t it be great if everyone could get an A in everything?

Shepard has discovered that her students think so too. In a nutshell: students think that hard work automatically translates into top grades.

Hard work is important. Very few of us have the brilliance to put forth little effort yet yield results like Einstein’s theory of relativity. But what is hard work? Who is to judge who works hard and who doesn’t?

Obviously an instructor can see who participates in class, who turns in well-written papers, who performs well on a test. These are what the teacher uses to compute grades. Student claims of “working hard” are subjective at best. How does Shepard know if a student’s concept of “working hard” means starting the paper weeks before the due date or the night before? In the world of academia, results are what count.

Shepard thinks part of the problem is grade inflation in high school, as well as parental expectations of getting what they pay for. “Pure and simple, tuition at a private college runs, on average, nearly $28,000 a year. If parents pay that much, they expect nothing less than A's in return. "Therefore, if the teacher gives you a B, that's not acceptable," says [Arthur ]Levine [Columbia Teacher’s University president], "because the teacher works for you. I expect A's, and if I'm getting B's, I'm not getting my money's worth."”

In the real world, if your performance at work is below par, you don’t get the promotion, bonus or raise. You may even be fired. Higher education is not only supposed to prepare you with the skills to get that dream job, but also life skills regarding realistic expectations and that results, not subjective feelings about “hard work,” prevail.

If everything in life was easy to attain, what would its worth be?

As for Shepard, she’s learned her lesson:

“A few hours after I entered my final grades, I got an e-mail from a student, at 1:44 a.m. She was unhappy with her B. She worked so hard, she told me. This time, though, I was prepared. I had the numbers to back me up, and I wouldn't budge on her grade. No more Professor Softie.”

Posted by at 04:23 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Washington Post's Lie of Omission and Bad News for Mayor O'Malley

Today, the Washington Post reported that test scores--especially those for minorities--are up sharply in the last few years:

Data posted on a Maryland State Department of Education Web site at noon showed the percentage of students statewide that failed to reach proficiency in basic skills shrank across the board in grades three through eight. For example, the ratio of third graders scoring proficient or better in reading rose from 58.1 percent in 2003 to 75.4 percent this year. The ratio of eighth graders reaching proficiency climbed from 39.6 percent in 2003 to 51.5 percent this year.

What is missing from the article? There is no mention anywhere in the article of the No Child Left Behind Act.

In other Maryland news...Baltimore City defies expectations and national trends with violent crime up 4.2%.

Violent crime in Baltimore went up last year, bucking a downward trend in other cities, according to new FBI statistics.

Cities with more than 1 million people had the greatest decrease in violent crime, 5.4 percent, while cities under 10,000 saw the greatest decrease in murder, 12.2 percent.

Democratic Mayor O'Malley pretends he is responsible for all the great news coming out of Maryland using it to discredit our Republican Governor Bob Ehrlich. Guess this sucks for him.

Posted by Aaron at 04:45 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The 10 Most Damaging Books to Civilization

Human Events lists the 10 most damaging books to civilization in the last 200 years judged by 15 conservative figures are as follows:

10. General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, John Maynard Keynes, 1936

09. Beyond Good and Evil, Feidrich Nietzsche, 1886

08. The Course of Positive Philosophy, Auguste Comte, 1830-1843

07. The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedman, 1963

06. Das Kapital, Karl Marx, 1867-1894

05. Democracy and Education, John Dewey, 1916

04. The Kinsey Report, Alfred Kinsey, 1948

03. Quotations from Chairman Mao (Moa's Little Red Book), 1966

02. Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler, 1925-1926

01. The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels, 1848

I agree with the top four. But I would move Nietzsche from 09 to 05 and toss off 08 and replace it with How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America, Manning Marable, 1983

Unlike the article, I encourage everyone to read these books to know thy enemy!

Posted by Aaron at 06:10 PM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

Lil' Kim 101

Syracuse University English professor Greg Thomas...will soon be “teaching a course . . . analyzing Kim’s lyrics on the American judicial system” in the wake of her legal troubles.

This report comes from City Journal. And there's more:

As he told the New York Daily News in November: “It’s about her lyricism and the lyrical persona . . . new notions of sexual consciousness, sexual politics in her rhymes, how she deals with societies based on male domination in her rhymes and societies based on rigid gender categories and constructs.” (Phew!) In other words, Lil’ Kim is a hip-hop Virgil guiding students through the wonderful world of Gender/Womyn’s studies—and her Dante is not some Birkenstock-clad granola prof but rather a cool dude known as “G” to his students...

Should we care about such collapsing of the distinction between “high” and “low” art, between timeless, revered text and flippant pop culture? Does it matter that a university has put King Lear on the same plane as “Suck My D--k,” another Lil’ Kim gem?

Yes we should...especially when tuition at SU costs over $23,000 per year.

Posted by at 02:52 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Republicans Need Not Apply

Once again, the leftwing tilt of our universities is out of control:

On April 11, Jonathan Bean, a professor of history at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale (SIUC), received the college’s “Outstanding Teacher Award.” But just two days later, Bean became the scourge of the campus, abandoned by teaching assistants and vilified as a purveyor of “racist propaganda.”

Behind Bean’s sudden fall from admired academic to campus Enemy Number One was a cabal of eight radical academics in the SIUC history department. Bean's offense was to have assigned as optional reading for his history class a 2001 Frontpagemag report titled “Remembering the Zebra Killings” by James Lubinskas. The class topic was “Civil Rights and Civil Disorder.” Bean's required readings for the class included the writings of Malcolm X, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Ella Baker, and Stokely Carmichael.

Hmmm...he spreads racist propaganda at the same time he requires students to read pieces from prominent black activists?

The offending Frontpagemag article which Bean made optional recounts what have come to be known as the Zebra Killings, a series of murders that took place in the San Francisco Bay area between 1972 and 1974, which left 71 people dead. The crimes shared a distinctive pattern: all the victims were white. The article, which contains facts first exposed in the 1979 book Zebra by crime writer Clark Howard, and subsequent reviews of the book in Time Magazine, reveals that five members the “Death Angels,” a sub-group of the Nation of Islam, carried out the majority of the attacks.

His "colleagues," Marxists and Communists, are conducting a vicious smear campaign that would make those who defamed Larry Summers blush.

However, Bean has his defenders, including other professors, the ACLU (I'm surprised!), photographer and former student D. Gorton (a former New York Times employee), and many of his current students:

For instance, in an April 20 letter to the Daily Egyptian, Bethany C. Peters, a SIUC senior and history major, writes:

“I would also challenge each of those professors [who have defamed Bean] to examine their own literature and see exactly what stances and images are being professed and created. If it is not acceptable for Dr. Bean to push an agenda (which he DOES not), then perhaps they also should refrain from handing out materials that include an agenda, be it racist, liberal, inappropriate in regards to religion.”

It's interesting that the American Association of University Professors, which is against the Academic Bill of Rights because it believes universities can "take care of their own," has been silent on this issue.

The Front Page Magazine article on this subject is lengthy; peruse it when you have time to see what's happening on our college campuses today.

Posted by at 10:06 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Hans-Hermann Hoppe Speaks Out

Who is Hans-Hermann Hoppe? He's the economics professor at the University of Las Vegas Nevada who came under fire after he commented about the lifestyles of gays in a lecture relating to time preference, interest and capital.

A gay student complained (not during class but afterward, to the university affirmative action point person), saying the lecture made him "feel bad."

Hoppe eventually became the subject of a year-long investigation by the university because he was accused of hosting a "hostile learning environment." It wasn't until the ACLU took on his case (wonder of wonders!) and the media got wind of it that Hoppe began to have some hope as to the outcome of his case. It seems the bad publicity caused the university to take a fresh look at the case.

Finally speaking out, Hoppe has written an article on Front Page Magazine, detailing his treatment at the hands of university officials (whom he gives the title "thought police"). You can read it here.

Free speech for me but not for thee...this is what's going on in our universities. But don't take my word for it...read Hoppe's words.

Posted by at 01:22 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

A Must-Read List for Young Americans

Mike Adams, a criminology professor at UNC-Wilmington and a columnist handy with wit and sarcasm has put together a reading list that he says "should help any high school student understand the reality of socialism long before setting foot on a college campus. It will help abort any professor's attempt to advance his agenda by rewriting socialism's disgraceful history."

The entire list is here.

Among the ones I would like to read are Ayn Rand's Anthem and George Orwell's 1984 (which I read in high school, but don't remember much about).

While you're at it, be sure to read more of Adams' writings if you are not already familiar with them. His columns appear regularly on Town Hall, and he has his own site, Dr. Adams.

Posted by at 09:16 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Calling All Conservative Students...

Are you, or were you, a college student who is tired of your Leftwing professors dishing out what you don't want to partake of? Front Page Magazine has just what the doctor ordered! If you submit a winning essay describing the professor you had who deserves the Front Page Magazine Churchill Twin award, you could win $500! The winning entry will also be published on Front Page Magazine.

Check it out...what have you got to lose?

Posted by at 01:48 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Thought Police Lynch Larry Summers

Harvard passes a no confidence vote on Dr. Larry Summers--the man who said there might be innate differences between men and women.

Posted by Aaron at 06:36 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Ward Churchill Advocates Violence!

Jackson Junction has the video of Ward Churchill assaulting a FOXNews reporter. It's PRICELESS!

Posted by Aaron at 06:24 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

Brilliant Analogy for School Choice

I love it when I read about analogies that make some arguments crystal clear. The Boston Globe published an article about No Child Left Behind discussing the importance of school choice for poor, inner-city, and/or minority schools. In this analysis, they compare the idea of vouchers to the GI BIll. This is absolutely brilliant! I never thought of it in this context before.

What if the federal government, with increases for locality, gave every child in America a voucher for primary and secondary education that they could bargain with? If they went to a public school, the public school would receive the federal funds. If they chose to go to a private school, it would receive the funds.

Think of all the "mini-schools" that would pop up across the country by "evil corporate types" that would actually educate our children though for a profit. I look at it like the chain of "Patient Firsts" we have here in Maryland. It's a private clinic where you can go for less-serious medical needs and just pay for it out of pocket. If you have an infection, instead of waiting hours in the emergency room and paying a $50 copay plus the $20 copay for the antibiotics, you can go in and out for $120 in less than 20 minutes for an infection at Patient First--the community college version of a huge, monolithic hospital.

What if we had such a system for education based on the community college model? Small towns could have from 10 to 30 "schools" (with some pooling together for sports). If your child can't read, you can just yank them from the school and put them in another one that will teach him/her how to read. Class sizes would be small--and bad teachers would be fired!

What do you think?

Posted by Aaron at 07:08 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

The Ivory Towers Meet Frodo Baggins

Success! A student at Cal State-Long Beach actually succeeded in exposing left-wing indoctrination in the halls of our nation's Ivory Towers. Look at what she found in THE SYLLABUS FOR HER ENGLISH COMPOSITION CLASS:

The first paragraph of the syllabus states that the professor’s goal for the course was to "promote tolerance and open-mindedness" through "the open discussion of controversial issues." However, instead of any attempt to be "open-minded," the syllabus was entirely stacked in favor of Dr. Snider’s leftist ideologies.

Perhaps the most shocking segments of Dr. Snider’s syllabus can be found under the "argument topics" section. The purpose of the argument paper is “to persuade or to at least create tolerance for your point of view on a controversial issue." The following are a few examples of the "suggested" topics that Dr. Snider has listed to help us out:

• "Should Justice Sandra Day O’Connor be impeached for her partisan political actions in the Bush v. Gore case?
• "It is no secret that the Bush administration and many Republicans have taken steps to undo the progress in environmental protection made before they took office. Now that they control the presidency and the Congress, they have better opportunities to carry out their agenda. Narrow this topic to a particular issue that you can argue in your paper (e.g. oil drilling in Alaska, building roads on formerly protected Federal lands, and logging)
• "Breaking a campaign promise, Bush has reversed rules to limit industrial carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere
• "Civil Liberties: The Bush administration has used the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 to erode the civil rights of citizens and non-citizens alike; for example, it got Congress to pass the so-called "Patriot Act," which allows the government "to seize the records of bookstores and libraries to find out what people have been reading" Personal computers can also be seized by the federal government. What can be done to stop this erosion of liberties or can you logically defend it?
• "What evidence do we have that Mr. Bush and his cronies lied to the American people and the world in promoting the war with Iraq? Do you agree that America has lost its "moral authority" in the world because of this immoral war?
• "Energy: (nuclear, solar, fossil, synthetic fuels, etc.). A related topic is Dick Cheney's secret conference on energy policy. Why hasn't the administration revealed who participated and should it reveal this information? Also important is the fact that, as Kevin Phillips writes, "four generations of the [Bush] dynasty have chased [oil] profits through cozy ties with Mideast leaders, spinning webs of conflicts of interest"
• "Birth Control: Should the so-called "morning-after" contraceptive pills (pills that prevent fertilized eggs from implantation) be more readily available to all, whether they can afford them or not and regardless of age? (You cannot argue that such pills amount to an abortion.)"

Along with his list of "suggested topics," Dr. Snider also included a list of topics that he forbade his students to write abou,t because they are "topics on which there is, in my opinion, no other side apart from chauvinistic, religious, or bigoted opinions and pseudo-science." I was absolutely outraged when I read the "topics to avoid." This list includes: Abortion, religion, same sex marriage, and prayer in public schools. These are all issues that have two reasonable points of view, yet this professor's bigotry suppressed every view but his own. That's hardly "open discussion."

Not so long ago (I am only 27), my parents told me that people judge you by the company you keep. Someone should point this out to people getting ready to vote.

What I cannot understand is how droves of PhD’d professors (who are supposed to be the smartest people on earth) share their political candidates with Hollywood celebrities and the children they teach. How do you explain what you’ve done with your life if, after all this time, your ability to make decisions and judge character is identical to that of children, drop-outs, drug addicts and sexual miscreants? So instead of spending all that time reading, I should have joined a band and got high my entire life…

To use words I learned in college: American liberalism is an egalitarian construct that’s sole purpose is to offer an alternative to wisdom. The very second you step on campus the educrats demand you “unlearn” everything your parents, family and faith taught you. Four years later you leave with more questions than answers; and unless your parents taught you something that survived all that “learning” your life is doomed to confusion.

Do I need to reinvent the wheel to know how to drive a car? How many more millions need to die before people understand communism is evil and will never work? Does someone need to know the process of combustion to know that he/she should run from fire? We've watched Madonna—I mean Esther—"learning" her entire life in front of our eyes and, to date, she is still an idiot.

I say things work because they work. Democracy works, capitalism works, morals work, God works. I guess if education was actually about not having to relearn the past, but accepting its outcome as a lesson, then a lot of professors would be out of work. So when you go to vote for a Democrat, please wonder why your voting for someone who’s supported by people who will live their lives without ever knowing one fact or one true thing.

They are still debating the definition of the word is.

"For the time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear" (2 Timothy 4:3).

Amen

Posted by Aaron at 07:50 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Under the Manure Pile of Tenure

Seems everyone from O'Reilly, to Glenn Reynolds to Billy Jack are twisted tighter than a mayonnaise lid about Ward Churchill. What he says in public is the tip of the academic anthill, in reality. Buried beneath the surface, in every higher-ed burrow, you'll find owl pellets like him and worse. Lefty intellectual babble like Churchill's has been allowed to germinate, fester and grow in the fertile soil of tenured academia for generations, unchallenged and unthreatened. You pile tenure deep enough, this is what grows in its darkness. It's time to drive it out into the light.

I want a multitude of these wingnuts to step from their academic offices and man the ramparts. Since Bush won 2004, the leftist majority where I teach has been even more vocal, strident, petty and mean-spirited. It has become invective in place of debate, where conservatism is not tolerated. I want them to get louder. I want everyone in America to see and hear them, to witness and remember their faces and the vile, uncosmetic hatred many of them have for democracy, America and anyone who does not agree with their far-left POV.

Glenn Reynolds argues we're seeing the true face of the Left. The true face of leftism? There is no face any longer in many offices in higher education. In academia it's been etched, eroded and eaten away by hate, vindictiveness and bigotry. Yes, the academic left is deeply bigoted.

Bottom line: give me more Churchills. Let him embolden every self-loathing intellectual in the nation. Let the wingnuts speak. Turn 'em loose on the country like a pack of howling, alcoholic, and abusive uncles.

Please, encourage them to speak. And heed carefully the shocked silence that follows...

...from tuition-paying parents and taxpayers.

Posted by at 12:22 AM | Comments (13) | TrackBack

If You Lose Your Lunch, Stop the Research

"When he [Harvard president Lawrence Summers] started talking about innate differences in aptitude between men and women," Hopkins told The New York Times, "I just couldn't breathe because this kind of bias makes me physically ill." Had she remained in the room, she explained to The Boston Globe, "I would've either blacked out or thrown up."¹

"A variety of data collected throughout the 1990s show that gonadal hormones...have demonstrable effects on the cognitive abilities of women and men," wrote psychologists Diane Halpern of California State University in San Bernardino and Mary LaMay of Loma Linda University in a 2000 Educational Psychology Review article. "Converging evidence from a variety of sources supports the idea that prenatal hormone levels affect patterns of cognition in sex-typical ways."

Wouldn't it be grand if we could examine these and other intriguing investigations into the nature of prenatal development without knee-jerk, PC sermonizing or, say, projectile vomiting?

1. On a related yet highly extrapolated note, I know that Michael Moore succumbs to bouts of flatulence whenever he hears 'only women should have breasts.'

Posted by at 12:08 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack