Clutching Vipers

Having spent a few years facing the mushy minds of the Community College set, I often find myself defending the “bias” of academia. You know what I’m talking about: the common perception that faculty members at our institutions of higher education are hopelessly liberal. If one tracks back to the early days of this blog, you’ll see several items on that prince of darkness from the University of Colorado, Ward Churchill. You may recall that he was the Master’s degree holding pseudo-Native-American who vaulted into first a professorship and then a department chair based on little or nothing but a deep-seated animosity toward everything American. Only when he got widely posted in the blogosphere where non-students and fellow-traveling academics could read his drivel did he get challenged.

Now, we’ve got a couple of new items in which the intellectual capacity of the nation’s universities must be seriously questioned. How about the Yale choice of a former Taliban propaganda minister as a scholarship student? Diversity at Yale?

Wow, that should really increase the desire for young Americans to strive to get into the Ivy League halls that have educated so many presidents. I know that if I had a promising college-aged kid, I’d be eager for them to learn the advantages of restricting education of women, destroying centuries old archeological treasures, and thrashing anyone who might challenge Islam in public. Why, if and when he graduates, we might want to consider amending our Constitution to allow Mr. Rahmatullah to run for president. If Yale values him so highly, we might really want to consider it.

One might also note in that Opinion Journal article a passing comment regarding the resignation of Harvard President, Larry Summers. Poor guy had to quit because the faculty had lost confidence in him after he mentioned that it was possible that women might not have an intrinsic aptitude for science. Politically incorrect as that statement was, it also is easily supported by evidence that fewer women than men choose educations and careers in the physical sciences. Nowhere did he say that women were incapable of succeeding in those fields, nor did he say that they should not be provided the opportunity to enter those fields. He didn’t even say that their performance was less than their male counterparts. He simply had the gall to suggest that women might not be predisposed to enter fields in which either their nature or their nurture had failed to prepare them to succeed and be happy.

Yep, Larry was a Neanderthal. He also thought the faculty should work at teaching the students and, heaven forbid, there should be ROTC available for those precious little heirs to the thrones of America if they chose a military career. Leadership at Harvard? Can’t have any of that can we?

Graduates of our institutions of higher education have their problems as well. It seems reasonable to ask what was going on for the past four or five years as Mohammed Reza Taheri-azar gobbled up American culture. Apparently the inculcation of American values didn’t take: Alumni at Chapel Hill? Can we really have an individual worthy of award of a college degree that considers driving a car into a crowd of fellow-students as some sort of quid-pro-quo for perceived slights to Muslims in remote areas of the world? Does he really believe that this is the “will of Allah”? C’mon, something is seriously wrong with this picture.

Down in beautiful South Florida, where I thought the big issue was what gaudy color to paint your remodeled South Beach hotel, and how much longer Fidel was going to live, we have Professor Sami Al-Arian. I will admit that in my graduate education I did have a course on terrorism. And, I freely confess to having written a couple of papers on the topic as well as to participating in several academic seminars discussing the global threat. But, this clown was accused of raising funds to support these groups. He was out-spoken and then unrepentant when brought into the public eye. How do these sorts of people get hired?

It’s scary to look at this group of stories. I’ll point out that there are a lot of well-educated, well-grounded, moderate-to-conservative folks on both sides of the podium in classrooms across America. Yet, a collection of outrageous stories like this makes one wonder…