The Columbia Spectator offers a surprising argument for the return of ROTC to Columbia today. Here's a sample of their case:

Opponents of ROTC argue that the program's treatment of gays and lesbians violates the University's anti-discrimination protocols. Those protocols should be enforced against businesses and other institutions, but the U.S. military is in a different category altogether. For all its faults, the military has too integral a role in American culture and society to be summarily banned from campus. Concerns about discrimination are surely legitimate, and any future ROTC program should be designed with the rights of LGBT students in mind. Columbia should look to the example set by MIT, which reimburses the Department of Defense on behalf of students removed from ROTC due to their sexual orientation. But to deny the military access to campus outright disengages Columbia from military issues and renders the University largely irrelevant in discussions of how issues like DADT should be addressed.

Columbia's opposition to ROTC has failed to end DADT. In the meantime, without an ROTC program on campus, there has been little discussion of DADT and little effort to effect change. DADT is an unjust and impractical policy, but it must be fought in a way that does not sideline would-be military officers - or would-be Columbia students who may be dissuaded from applying.

The Spectator's not alone in this position - The Harvard Crimson and several other university papers have advocated much the same thing. Student polls typically indicate an oppenness to the return of ROTC programs. And why is any of this surprising? The Spectator's position is, after all, a very moderate one - it doesn't concede objections to Don't Ask Don't Tell in any measure. It's a sad comment that this very reasonable position constitutes a far-right argument in the eyes of countless university administrations. ROTC's most prominent university advocate is gone, and elite universities show little sign of ending their unremitting hostility to the program. Those Columbia students with an interest in ROTC will continue to have only one option: the bus to Fordham.

Several college papers have come around to the ever-popular (and easy) study of university political donations. The results are no surprise. Here are a few samples

Daily Bruin (UCLA): "Faculty Donors Lean Liberal"

According to the Center for Responsive Politics Web site, which tracks individual and group donations to political parties, UCLA faculty members gave 66,030 in donations to candidates vying for their party's presidential bid. Of the total, $2,150 went to Republicans and the rest to Democrats

Yale Daily News: "In '08 donations, Yale trails Harvard"

The filings, which are from the third quarter of 2007, indicate that 11 members of Yale's faculty and staff gave a total of $9951 between July 1 and Sept. 31, distributed among four Democratic presidential candidates. No University faculty or staff gave money to Republicans.

Duke Chronicle: "Faculty Gifts Overhwelmingly Favor Dems"

A total of 40 Duke faculty, administrators, researchers and staff had contributed $41,358 to nine presidential campaigns as of Sept. 30, 2007, according to data released by the Federal Election Commission.

Of these funds, $37,508, roughly 91 percent, went to the campaigns of Obama, Edwards, Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson and Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., with the remaining $3,850 split between Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan.

Daily Princetonian: "Professors Vote For Obama With Wallets"

In total, donors who listed the University as their employer have given $23,700 to presidential campaigns in the current election cycle. Of that, $21,900 - 92.4 percent - has gone toward Democratic candidates.

Best item - Ron Paul was the one Republican to receive donations from Princeton employees - from a graduate student and a public safety officer. I could go on, but the results are identical in nearly every report I've seen.

Inside Higher Ed's report on the proceedings of the delegate assembly at this year's Modern Language Association conference is titled "A Moderate MLA" - the title seems to have been chosen mainly for its alliterativeness - moderation, by MLA standards, being a quality far from centrism or temperance in the larger world. The MLA, for one, still passed a resolution criticizing the University of Colorado for the manner in which its investigation of Ward Churchill was begun and conducted. One professor asked if the MLA could simply indicate an opposition to politicized investigations and omit direct references to Churchill - his suggestion was not incorporated. And this is moderate? Only for the MLA, whose recent resolutions have, among other things, rejected the scholarly relevance of the "philosophical defense' of any one nation-state", and labeled government language surrounding the Iraq war as an effort "to legitimate aggression, misrepresent policies, conceal aims, stigmatize dissent, and block critical thought."

For once, the MLA radical caucus, accustomed to steamrolling opposition with markedly political resolutions, was halted, with two of their statements watered down substantially. A resolution condemning the firing of Ward Churchill was transmuted into the form above, and another calling for the defense of critics of Israel and Zionism was replaced by much less specific text. For a real sense of the zaniness of the MLA proceedings, take a look at a direct look at the story:

[Grover] Furr [who teaches at Montclair State University] was the author of the original resolution on the campus climate for critics of Israel. The resolution as he wrote it said that some who criticize Zionism and Israel have been "denied tenure, disinvited to speak... [or] fraudulently called 'anti-Semitic.'"The resolution called this a "serious danger to academic study and discussion in the USA today" and then resolved that "the MLA defend the academic freedom and the freedom of speech of faculty and invited speakers to criticize Zionism and Israel." The resolution made no mention of the right of others on campus to embrace Zionism or Israel or to hold middle-of-the-road views or any views other than being critical of Israel and Zionism.

Nelson offered a substitute - which was approved to replace the original by a vote of 63 to 30 - after heated debate. Nelson's substitute noted that the "Middle East is a subject of intense debate," said it was "essential that colleges and universities protect faculty rights to speak forthrightly on all sides of the issue," and urged colleges to "resist" pressure from outside groups about tenure reviews and speakers and to instead uphold academic freedom. Nelson's resolution did not identify one side or the other as victim or villain in the campus debates over the Middle East and said that academic freedom must apply to people "to address the issue of the Middle East in the manner they choose."

In arguing for his version, Nelson - a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and also president of the American Association of University Professors - said that the original version would be "incredibly divisive and quite destructive" to the MLA.

The response? Those advocating the original language faulted the new resolution for being "even-handed." They demanded a resolution targeted at Israeli and Zionist sympathizers. I don't think many would have been surprised had the MLA passed the original resolution. Although it's a wonder where they've been for the last twenty years - while even the New York Times happily mocks their leftist demeanor - it's good to see that some within the organization seem to have finally realized the harm that their political declarations might do to their pretenses of scholarly authority. An obvious solution would be to simply stop issuing these resolutions - but the MLA seems leagues away from that. For the moment, it's encouraging to find any academic moment at which the somewhat left prevailed over the radical left, but it's clear that there are still countless professors for whom any deviation from naked activism is a bit too "even-handed" to stomach.

It is slowly dawning on the public that fake hate crimes, like the one just perpetrated by Princeton student Francisco Nava, are quite common on college campuses. Perhaps some aspiring academic, casting about for a PhD. thesis, will try to explain why these hoaxes - mostly imaginary rapes or fake attacks on black students - have come to seem so routine.

I have been following the phenomenon and writing occasional columns on the subject for ten or twelve years. When my eldest daughter was at Oberlin, the campus was propelled into uproar by anti-Asian graffiti in the campus quad. Someone had written "Death to Chinks" and other racial slurs on the monument to members of the Oberlin community who had died in the Boxer rebellion in China. Anger, various demands and a few scuffles went on for weeks until an Asian-American student announced that she had written the graffiti to make manifest the racism she thought was inherent in the monument. This turns out to be a popular rationale for faking hate crimes - the need to create a fictional outrage adequate to express the feelings of an angry student. The more campus voices are raised against "institutional racism" and the alleged sexual dangerousness of all males, the more fake race crimes and fake rapes there will be. Look into the hoax reports and you will see an endless parade of students painting racist graffiti on their own cars, tearing their clothes and writing hate phrases on their own bodies or sending themselves politically useful death threats.

Many campus hoaxes turn out to be teaching instruments of a sort, conscious lies intended to reveal broad truths about constant victimization of women and minorities. At a "Take Back the Night" rally in Princeton in the 90s, a female student told a graphic story of her rape on campus. When the alleged rapist threatened to sue, she recanted the story and a spokeswoman for the Women's Center said, "Listen we can't hope to find truth in all these stories," meaning that the story line was important, not the truth of any one rape.

The Alice-in-Wonderland view of Duke University received yet another boost: a committee of the board of trustees has affirmed President Richard Brodhead's "compelling vision" for Duke and found "general support, overwhelming support, for the leadership that the president is providing."

The obvious question here is "What leadership?" Brodhead's performance during the Duke non-rape crisis was surely a disgrace large enough to get him fired immediately on any moderately alert campus.

Let's review Brodhead's dismal handling of the case. He fired the lacrosse coach without any hearing or finding that the coach had done anything wrong. He took no action and made no relevant statement when some of the hard-left professors harassed lacrosse players in class, and when one professor punitively reduced the marks of one player. (Imagine how he would have sprung into action if a gay person or a woman had been treated this way.) He refused to look at the overwhelming evidence, offered to him by defense counsel, that the boys were innocent. He made no comment when the racist black professor Houston Baker bitterly and falsely denounced the three white players. He said nothing and did nothing when death threats were made against the three. Instead of offering protection, he and his administration appointed a committee to examine "persistent problems involving the men's lacrosse team, including racist language and a pattern of alcohol abuse and disorderly behavior," a statement clearly implying that the players were racists while an out-of-control prosecutor was issuing the same untruths to voters and jurors.

Still Brodhead knows how the game is played and he surely judged his strategy by what happened to President Lawrence Summers at Harvard. Summers told many unwelcome truths and leftist professors forced him out. Brodhead told some welcome untruths and therefore kept his job. Brodhead 's performance was "a moral meltdown" of a cowardly man, in the words of Stuart Taylor Jr. and K C Johnson in their book, Until Proven Innocent. But given the moral climate of the modern university, cowardice was probably his safest course.

Five students drinking Gatorade and water for a week are apparently all it takes to bring a major university to its knees. Columbia has had more than its share of lunatic events this year - the noose, the cancellation of the Minuteman speakers for the second time, inviting and then abusing the Iranian madman, and last week another controversy over a biased comment someone had scrawled into a library book. But the collapse of the university in the face of five student hunger strikers - the number was reduced to two students before the university folded - makes all the previous lunacies seem sane.

The strikers got most of their scattershot agenda. New faculty will now have to endure diversity indoctrination as part of their hiring. Columbia's core curriculum, much too "Eurocentric" for the strikers, will now feature more more required courses on Asia, Africa, and Latin America. More money and staff will be added for ethnic studies. The Office of Multicultural Affairs will be expanded and another high-ranking diversicrat will be named to the administration. The collapse will cost Columbia at least $50 million.

But the university's reputation for weakness and cowardice in the face of PC-mongering is not the key to this story. Columbia has been working for years to expand north into Harlem. It wants to add to its campus four large blocks from 129th Street between Broadway and 12th Avenue as well as three properties east of Broadway. Columbia must run the gantlet of many hearings and approvals, including those of the City Council, which is unusually sensitive to racial complaints about the curriculum and behavior of a historically white institution about to annex a chunk of Harlem. The strikers played the race card by denouncing Columbia's "institutional racism."

Columbia may have feared that one or more of the hunger strikerrs would become seriously ill or die. One abandoned the strike after fainting in the library and two others quit to get medical help. But the real aim was to protect the expansion program. One professor told me it was "a brilliant move" by President Lee Bollinger to buy off the protesters for only $50 million, while at the same time demonstrating some politically useful concern for racial and ethnic studies.

But it's only a brilliant move if it doesn't teach future strikers how easy it is to get concessions from Columbia. Protestors are still trying to kill the expansion into Harlem. Bollinger's decision to buy off the strikers may lead to more protesters and larger demands.

Stuart Taylor's brilliant rant in this week's National Journal ("Academia's Pervasive PC Rot") says "the cancerous spread of ideologically eccentric, intellectually shoddy, phony-diversity-obsessed fanaticism among university faculties and administrators is far, far worse and more inexorable than most alumni, parents, and trustees suspect."

There's an obvious explanation of why so many university watchers don't seem to know what's going on: the news media are extremely reluctant to report on what the increasingly coercive diversity lobby is doing to the campuses.

The brainwashing and indoctrination at the University of Delaware (and anyone who has read the voluminous documents in the case knows that use of these words is surely fair) has been pervasively reported on conservative blogs and right-wing radio. But the left has been silent and the mainstream media have almost universally avoided telling alumni, parents and trustees what is going on. Only a few news outlets covered the story. The Wilmington News Journal ran a piece headlined "Some Made Uneasy by UD Diversity Training", thus reducing indoctrination to discomfort. The Philadelphia Inquirer ran a similarly soft report that used the headline word "unsettled" instead of "uneasy." The story's lead: "When University of Delaware freshmen showed up at their dorms this semester, their orientation included an exercise aimed at bridging cultural

Here's another bit of wisdom from the Columbia Spectator, this time on the repulsive noose incidents. Here's the first sentence of the op-ed. See if anything strikes you as odd.

In the past weeks' furor about nooses and graffiti, which dramatize age-old concerns about our Eurocentric curriculum, paternalistic gentrification efforts, and feelings of marginalization from students and faculty, Columbia has had to defend and confront its legacy of diversity and inclusion more so now than ever before.

The furor dramatizes "age-old concerns about our Eurocentric curriculum"? Really? As there's so much lynching in there? Eurocentrists did hang Tess of the D'Urbervilles, didn't they? One comment at the Spectator site wonders:

What other ills does Eurocentric curriculum, now an 'age-old' concern, cause? Police beatings? Teen age pregnancies? Baldness? Yeast infections?

The author winds the piece up with a sustained call for a robust ethnic studies department, which "would do wonders to elevate and enhance dialogue, understanding, and scholarship when it comes to power and privilege." Ethnic studies departments as universal palliatives. It might prove tempting to dismiss this as mere student op-ed puerility, but her sentiments possess broad and considerable weight in the modern university. To determined critics, any and every instance of individual racial wrongdoing is proof of the core depravity of western society. Just ask the Group of 88.

Sharad Karkhanis, professor emeritus at Kingsborough Community College, is a vitriolic critic of the faculty union at the City University of New York. He's accused Susan O'Malley, another professor at Kingsborough, of seeking to "recruit terrorists" to teach at CUNY. O'Malley has responded with a two million dollar libel suit, reports the New York Post:

In papers filed in Manhattan Supreme Court, Susan O'Malley charges that professor emeritus Sharad Karkhanis defamed her by accusing her of having an "obsession with finding jobs for terrorists" in recent issues of a newsletter he's been e-mailing to CUNY faculty members for 15 years.

Citing O'Malley's efforts to land jobs for convicted activist lawyer Lynne Stewart's co-defendant Mohammed Yousry and former Weather Underground member Susan Rosenberg, Karkhanis wrote:

"Has Queen O'Malley ever made a 'Job Wanted' announcement like this for a nonconvicted, nonviolent, peace-loving American educator for a job in CUNY? . . . Why does she prefer convicted terrorists bent on harming our people and our nation over peace-loving Americans?"

Karkhanis considers his writing to be satire. It's not particularly civil language; but then again, as KC Johnson has pointed out, two of O'Malley's prospective hires were terrorists, or quite near to being ones - Susan Rosenberg "was a member of a terrorist organization" and Mohammed Yousry "was accused and convicted of aiding a convicted terrorist." Not all, predictably, agree on the substance of the comments: John K. Wilson, for one, has called them "idiotic" but he does dub the idea of a two million dollar libel suit in response as "frivolous and absurd." Fortunately, others agree; a new blog, "Free Speech At CUNY" has ably taken up Karkhanis' case.

"Free Speech At CUNY" offers some delightful background on Karkhanis' assailant. O'Malley, former university faculty senate chair, former faculty representative on the CUNY board of trustees, and an all-around perennial in CUNY union posts, was the arranger of a 2004 CUNY conference on "Defining and Defending Academic Freedom"; the site provides the text of numerous faculty union statements on "dissent" and "academic freedom" in which O'Malley, as part of the union leadership, seems to have had a hand. The current case is useful in clarifying what she actually meant; freedom for her, libel suits for her opponent.

Many universities try to indoctrinate students, but the all-time champion in this category is surely the University of Delaware. With no guile at all the university has laid out a brutally specific program for "treatment" of incorrect attitudes of the 7,000 students in its residence halls. The program is close enough to North Korean brainwashing that students and professors have been making "made in North Korea" jokes about the plan. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has called for the program to be dismantled.

Residential assistants charged with imposing the "treatments" have undergone intensive training from the university. The training makes clear that white people are to be considered racists - at least those who have not yet undergone training and confessed their racism. The RAs have been taught that a "racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture, or sexuality."

By John Leo

Beware the words "social justice" and "dispositions" when used by schools of education and the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE). These apparently harmless terms lay the groundwork for politicizing the training of teachers and giving the ed schools an excuse to eliminate conservatives from their programs. The news this week is that NCATE is backing down a bit from its use of "dispositions" and "social justice" while denying the political use of these words and calling its new policy a "clarification."

"Dispositions" refers to the correct mindset that would-be teachers must have. "Social justice" is the most controversial of the dispositions sought. In its benign sense, "social justice" means a sense of fairness, honesty and a belief that all children can learn. In its politicized sense, it can refer to endorsement of affirmative action and a formal (often written) endorsement of policies favored by the political and cultural left.

"NCATE never required a 'social justice' disposition", NCATE said on its web site. True, but the statement is a slippery one. In fact, the group had ruled that education departments could "include some measure of a candidate's commitment to social justice" - in effect ruling that public school teachers could be evaluated on their perceptions of what social justice requires. So the ed schools, basically a liberal monoculture, could rule that a student flunked "social justice" by displaying a negative view of multicultural theory and other policies of the left. At Washington State University, where the college of education tried to expel a conservative student for flunking "dispositions," the dean was asked whether Justice Antonin Scalia could pass a dispositions test at her school. "I don't know how to answer that," she replied.

As NCATE tells it, "the term 'social justice,' though well understood by NCATE's institutions, was widely and wildy misinterpreted by commentators not familiar with the working of NCATE." The group now defines professional dispositions as "professional attitudes, values and beliefs demonstrated through both verbal and non-verbal behaviors. The two professional dispositions that NCATE expects institutions to assess are fairness and the belief that all students can learn. Based on their missions and conceptual framework, professional education units can identify, define and operationalize additional professional dispositions."

This is a mild improvement. Still, one wonders about those "non-verbal behaviors" and how they will be judged. The word "fairness" remains a linguistic sinkhole and the phrase "additional professional dispositions" keeps the door open for more politicization. NCATE's "clarification" doesn't clarify much.

Courtesy of the Harvard Crimson, the worst justification for a class I've ever seen:

I understand that there are a number of students on this campus who think that FemSex is unnecessary, but what class or organization isn't? Extracurriculars aren't built out of necessity; they are created out of desires - to do what we love, to find common ground, to help others. If a student doesn't like it, she doesn't have to take it, but the need for it on this campus is no lesser because it's not for her.

FemSex is unnecessary in the same way as an African-American studies class is unnecessary; it's easy for us to look at this campus, at our seemingly liberal society and say there are no problems left to fix. It's easy to say that the solution lies in finding a better boyfriend or just shutting up and learning to live with it. But some people see study and exploration as a stronger way to approach the problem. The more we learn about ourselves and others, the more likely we are to feel happy and safe. And in a world of meaningless drunken hook-ups, perhaps it's time we started getting more of what we wanted out of sex.

Here Here! All that floundering about the purpose of the modern academy could be cleared up so easily if it simply honed its focus on sex. "FemSex" was a female sexuality class on offer last semester. A prior Crimson op-ed pointed out that eight of the ten class sessions focused on "sexual and/or anatomical exploration." They're not even bothering with theoretical trappings for hedonism anymore.

Finally, take a look at the close:

We are all consistently changing throughout college, and Harvard is not always the most warm and supportive place to do so. Now, as a senior (dear God), I would describe my overall experience at Harvard as a positive one. I love the friends I have made and the extracurriculars I have taken part in, but I have found no place where I have felt more welcome, respected, safe, and open than I have in FemSex. Why anyone would want to deny another student of that is beyond me.

From Veritas to "Warm and Supported."

Drew Faust's inauguration as Harvard President last Friday featured a surprising presence: the Harvard ROTC. The ROTC, which has been banned from the Harvard campus since 1969, formed a closing color guard composed of Army, Navy, Marine, and Air Force students. Most wouldn't have expected Faust to invite the ROTC - and they'd be right - she didn't invite them. Their appearance was arranged through a request from the cadets themselves. And they were far from sure of the response; the Harvard Crimson, writing on the topic, noted that "ROTC members did not originally plan to propose the idea to Faust because they did not expect her to be interested." Faust was receptive, however, and the closing color guard was arranged.

This appearance struck against fears that, after significant outreach to the ROTC during the Summers years, the organization would again be marginalized. Summers' stance was hardly popular. Harvey Mansfield observed that "Summers made it clear that one of his desires on becoming President was to return ROTC to campus." He was the first President in decades to attend ROTC commissioning ceremonies each year, where he conveyed unambiguous messages of support for the cadets. He "spoke strongly and clearly wanted things to change" a stance, Mansfield observes, that did not endear him to many at Harvard.

After the Summers experience, it was widely expected that Harvard would resume a more uniformly hostile stance towards ROTC. Neither incoming President Faust nor interim President Derek Bok attended this year's ROTC commissioning ceremony. Stephen Rosen, the Kaneb Professor of National Security and Military Affairs, expressed a widely-recognized truth about the university at that gathering: "Harvard.. is uneasy with national military service, because it is uneasy with war, and with warriors, and it is no longer comfortable with the idea of Harvard as an American university, as opposed to an international university."

Scott Jaschik of Inside Higher Ed has a long and excellent article on the Gross-Simmons study on the political and social views of professors, as well as on the Harvard symposium last Saturday that discussed the findings. The study concluded that the professoriate is more moderate than many believe, with younger instructors less activist and less liberal than older ones, though there has been no rise in the percentage of conservatives (I discussed this study here on October 10th.)

If you are pressed for time and have already read an account of the Gross-Simmons conclusions, skip down to the second half of the Jaschik report, which features comments by Harvard's former president Lawrence Summers and other faculty members. Summers says the percentage of conservative professors is distressingly small, but thinks it would be "extraordinarily unwise and dangerous" to try forcing more balance in hiring.

Jonathan Zimmerman, a historian at New York University, said the experience of growing up in the 80s and 90s amid the rise of the political right has had a profound effect on professors, including an "erosion of faith in citizens." He said, "the story we need to tell is about the alienation of professors from the publics." At the end of the Jaschik report is a collection of unusually interesting reader comments on Gross-Simmons and the issues it raises.

At the Saturday conference on the Gross-Simmons study, Lawrence Summers compared the meager number of conservative professors to the startling decline in the number of black players in major league baseball (now down to 8.4 percent). Blacks are well-represented among the best players, "but it appeared that there were not any African-American .250 hitters." Alas, the implication here - that baseball deliberately cuts the percentage of blacks by discriminating against all but the best African-Americans - is wrong. The main reason for black decline is the structure of the amateur draft. Since the draft does not apply to foreign-born players, teams can circumvent the draft by aggressively seeking promising players outside the U.S., most commonly in Caribbean countries. Every major league team now has a training camp in the Dominican Republic. Vince Gennaro, a consultant to many major league teams, says the international market "is the place where the high-revenue teams can leverage their economic advantage." Another factor is that the draft has shifted sharply toward players in college, where there are fewer blacks and a dwindling number of athletic scholarships. Polls also show that black youths are much less interested in baseball than they are in basketball and football. One reason may be that black culture puts a high premium on improvisation (jazz, hip hop, the transformation of modern basketball). Baseball may be the sport most resistant to improvisation.

The University of St. Thomas has now, predictably, re-invited Desmond Tutu to speak, after revoking his invitation over earlier concerns about his thoughts on Israel.

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports:

Rev. Dennis J. Dease, president of the university, sent a letter to students and members of the faculty and staff on Wednesday, saying he had changed his mind about the archbishop's appearance and would now like to formally invite him to visit the university, in St. Paul.

In the contemporary academy, no speaking invitation is ever secure, nor, it seems, is one ever really canceled. Yet another proof of the gossamer public stances of university administrations.

Bored of reading? Want something to hear?

See John Leo and Peter Berkowitz discuss the afflictions of the modern academy in our new podcast.

Variety reports that HBO has acquired the rights to Stuart Taylor Jr. and KC Johnson's Until Proven Innocent. After our featuring the authors here in New York, we're surprised it took this long for a screen deal. Our prodigious influence aside, the Duke case fully merits a fuller media treatment, and there's no better account to use than Until Proven Innocent.

I'm curious as to what exactly HBO is going to do with the story. The story notes that they "will develop a movie exploring the dynamics of racism and class issues that made the case a national story." There's obvious cracking legal/political thriller material here, but the "dynamics of racism and class issues" here run so thoroughly contrary to the usual television themes, it's a wonder how HBO will possibly handle it. Will they put the group of 88 in?

Inside Higher Ed today reports on yet another canceled college speech:

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who won the prize for his nonviolent opposition to South Africa's apartheid regime, was deemed unworthy of appearing at St. Thomas because of comments he made criticizing Israel - comments the university says were "hurtful" to some Jewish people. Further, the university demoted the director of the program that invited Tutu after she wrote a letter to him and others complaining about the revocation of the invitation...

Will colleges ever get tired of this? Summers invited, then disinvited. Ahmadinejad invited, then disinvited, then invited again. Chemerinsky hired, fired, then re-hired. Gilchrist invited, interrupted, re-invited, disinvited. Tutu invited, disinvited. Who's next to be slighted?

As if we needed any more proof of the essential spinelessness of university administrations. Trying to discern some larger principle in their policies is impossible, as they contort themselves to fit every changing wind.

I'd quote Michael Palin and ask "What do we mean by no, what do we mean by yes, what do we mean by no, no, no." For Universities, not much.

Senator Grassley, the Chronicle of Higher Education reports, has turned his attention to the tax status of collegiate athletic programs - wondering "what gives the IRS comfort that they have met the requirements of being a charity."

The Chronicle furnishes Grassely abundant cause to wonder, reporting that athletics donations now amount to more than a quater of funds received by some universities:

The fresh concerns came in response to a Chronicle article, published online last week, suggesting that contributions to sports programs are eating up an ever-larger share of donations to colleges, and that some athletics programs entice donors with perquisites like free seats on teams' charter flights.

"When I hear stories about top donors to college athletic programs getting a free seat on the team plane," Mr. Grassley said in a written statement, "I wonder what the public gets out of that. We need to make sure that taxpayer subsidies for college athletics-program donations benefit the public at large."

Grassley's very right to wonder about this. The second Chronicle article is sure cause for alarm, detailing sophisticated athletics fundraising operations operating independently of University development departments. Its unclear what if any benefit these increasingly self-contained operations are providing schools, and good cause to examine their tax status accordingly.

You can read a passel of editorials on Ahmadinejad above, and if you're enterprising, you can easily find another, oh, thirty of so op-eds on the topic of his appearance. None of these, except for one, address any substantive findings from Ahmadinejad's speech, because there weren't any.

That one exception, The Columbia Spectator now urges that "students, professors and administrators must think critically about what we have learned from him - particularly his provocative thoughts on the plight of the Palestinians, Iran's nuclear program, and how Western imperialism has helped shape the Middle East." Provocative thoughts? Is there a single person who wasn't aware of his precise views on these topics?

Bollinger's bromides against Ahmadinejad made clear that there was no real exchange or debate, or honesty expected, from the start, and that was exactly the case. Did we learn anything from him that we didn't know already - aside from the fact that Iran doesn't have homosexuals like this country? Bollinger's new rhetoric of boundless free speech clouded another important scale; that of academic worth. Columbia provided a spectacle to the public, and a jolt to op-ed pages, but it's still not clear what academic benefit it provided its students.

President Bollinger is displaying a new-found talent for confounding expectations. After barring Ahmadinejad from Columbia last year, he suddenly invited him back on Wednesday, to widespread criticism, for offering a platform to a despot. Then, Bollinger further surprised with a caustic introduction and a roundup of pointed questions about Iranian nuclear ambitions, persecution of women and homosexuals, Holocaust denial, the jailing of scholars, aid to insurgents in Iraq, and the execution of minors. At this point, Bollinger did not simply wait to hear Ahmadinejad, but summed up a blistering (that seems to be everyone's word for it) statement:

Today I feel all the weight of the modern civilized world yearning to express the revulsion at what you stand for. I only wish I could do better.

Bollinger, continues his shock-the-world week in displaying a heretofore unknown capacity for indictment. Suffice it to say that Ahmadinejad was not much of a sparring partner. Bollinger is now basking in a well-deserved tide of compliments for his comments. His worthy broadsides haven't swept aside any of the larger questions concerning Ahmadinejad's apperance, though. The event took a form that was far from everyone's expectations - to Bollinger's considerable credit. Ahmadinejad was not accorded the place of respect that many feared he would enjoy, but instead roundly condemned. That's good.

There's still something very odd about Bollinger's attitude towards the event, though. If he viewed it as a conditional occasion to barb Ahmadinejad, then good for him - but he seemed to think that hosting the Iranian President was now a duty.

This is the right thing to do and indeed, it is required by the existing norms of free speech, of Columbia University and of academic institutions.

This is not the Bollinger of last year, who canceled Ahmadinejad's speaking appearance - and was well within his rights in doing that. But now Columbia must host him? There's no doubt that universities tend to be far more censorious and inattentive to free speech than they should, but Bollinger's free speech epiphany doesn't shed a single bit of light on the topic of campus free speech. What exactly is "required?" To receive Ahmadinejad now? To receive world leaders? To receive vulpine Iranians? Bollinger displayed admirable clarity in condemning Ahmadinejad today, but that shouldn't cloud the fact that otherwise he has continued on his usual path, as the most confusing "first amendment scholar" of our day.

You might have seen John Coatsworth, the acting dean of Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs posing questions to Ahmadinejad today. It was Coatsworth who declared that he would invite Hitler to speak at Columbia.

He was also a signatory to a "Joint Harvard-MIT Petition for Divestment from Israel" when he was a professor at Harvard. See his name here. That petition begins: "We, the undersigned are appalled by the human rights abuses against Palestinians at the hands of the Israeli government, the continual military occupation and colonization of Palestinian territory by Israeli armed forces and settlers, and the forcible eviction from and demolition of Palestinian homes, towns and cities."

Apparently, it is fine to host dictators but not to invest in democracies.

K C Johnson, on his web site Durham-in-Wonderland, has written about 850,000 words over the past 18 months on the Duke lacrosse scandal. It has been an astonishing, brilliant effort -graceful, accurate, penetrating and fair. Because of the terrible performance of the mainstream press, Johnson's blogging quickly became the gold standard of reporting on the case. As one blogger said last January, nobody would think of writing about the subject without checking with KC first. If bloggers were eligible for the Pulitzer Prize, Johnson would have won hands down. (Asterisk here: of course those voting for the Pulitzers represent the papers that failed so miserably in covering the non-rape case.)

Every now and then, Johnson supplies a list of worst performances, such as the ten worst columns or the ten worst editorials on the case. Now he has produced, over three days, his list of the 32 worst statements made by anyone.

Wendy Murphy, an adjunct law professor and an unsually appalling talking head for MSNBC, surprised many of us by making the list only twice, getting as high an Number 11 for saying "I bet one or more of the players was, you know, molested or something as a child." (Several winners assumed guilt and speculated on why the accused were such monsters.) Another surprise is that New York Times writers achieved only two listings - one by sports columnist Selena Roberts, the other by the worst of all reporters to cover the case, sportswriter Duff Wilson.

Rabid professor Grant Farred (Number 5) argued that white Duke students who registered to vote in Durham were engaged in "secret racism," because the X made by voters on the ballot is "the sign of the white male franchise, itself overridden with the mark of privilege, oppression, slavery, racism, utter contempt for black and native bodies."

Michael Nifong accounted for 8 of the 32 listings., including Number 1: "If I were one of those (defense) attorneys, I wouldn't really want to try a case against me either." Johnson may have been unfair to include Nifong in the competition. Expecting amateur quotemongers to compete with a pro like Nifong is like telling a Little Leaguer to go strike out Babe Ruth.

Number 2 was the always-wrong Duke president Richard Brodhead, who said a month after the story broke: "If (Finnerty and Seligmann) did what is alleged, it is appalling to the worst degree. If they didn't do it, whatever they did is bad enough." Johnson comments: "We know now that 'whatever' Finnerty and Seligmann did: they attended a party they had no role in organizing and they drank some beer."

Johnson is, of course, co-author of the brilliant new book on the case, Until Proven Innocent co-written with Stuart Taylor, Jr., one of the best columnists and legal writers in the country. To order the book, go to Amazon and be patient - the publisher has been slow in supplying more copies.

Donald Lazere offers a breezy and factless hatchet job on Allan Bloom today at Inside Higher Ed.

At first he seems about to offer a detailed critique of his works, asserting that they are "lofty-sounding ideological rationalizations for the policies of the Republican Party from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush." Stern words; Lazere follows them with examples from the text? No, just a dscriptive paragraph - wait, actually, a mere sentence: "Bloom rages against the movements of the 60s - campus protest, black power, feminism, affirmative action, and the counterculture - while glossing over every injustice in American society and foreign policy (he scarcely mentions the Vietnam War)."

The books are not mentioned again - Lazere blithely skips on to build his case on the basis of Bloom's friendships and professional connections: "Bloom's personal affiliations further belied his boast of being above "attachment to a party" and captivity to "the spirit of party." His writing for Commentary, association with the John M. Olin center at the University of Chicago, and - of course, role as instructor for Paul Wolfowitz all place him ireedemably within a neo-con cabal.

It's on the tour of Bloom's iniquitous friends and bastard progeny that Lazere expands his aim from damning the man to damning, well, about anyone who knew him or now cites him. Bloom, to Lazere, seems first among many right-wing hacks who "vaunt their dedication to intellectual disinterestedness while acting as propagandists for the Republican Party and its satellite political foundations." Lazere builds his subsequent argument less-than-convincingly. Consider his take-down of Commentary:

The news about Harvard never stops. Jay Greene wrote last week on Harvard professor Howard Gardner's hopes of secession. Gardner's words, in the Harvard alumni magazine, were:

The right wing isn't just taking over the country, it's shanghaiing all our values. If there's a Republican administration after the next election, I would join in efforts for some sort of secession. It's not the same country anymore.

Jay suggested, pretty reasonably, that these sentiments were unpatriotic. He's just alerted us to follow-up on Gardner's point on Richard Bradley's blog Shots In The Dark. A reader starts the thread off suggesting that criticism of "allegiance" sidestepped the substantive point, complaining that "Instead this empty talk about 'allegiance' and grumbling about seditiousness -- and an implicit concession that the 'shanghaiing' charge sticks. Pathetic."

Bradley then weighed in:

Yes, I agree. To be fair, though, I think that Professor Gardner opened the door with the word "secession." It seemed a casual remark, a manifestation of frustration, but clearly these things are watched by people looking for Harvard bias.

Merely a casual remark! But no.. Howard Gardner himself appeared on the thread to clarify (it's not certain that it is Gardner, but it's also unclear why anyone would want to masquerade as him on a blog):

Harvard seems to be chugging in all the right directions as of late. Now that Harvard has escaped the nightmare-state of Summers apartheid the University is free to.. improve its standing in the field of hip-hop studies. The Crimson reports:

Marcyliena Morgan, a scholar of global hip-hop culture who was denied tenure under former University President Lawrence H. Summers, will be returning to Harvard in January with her husband, Lawrence D. Bobo, a prominent sociologist of race.

The couple left Harvard's African and African American Studies Department in 2005 for Stanford, where they have both held tenure-level positions. At Harvard, Bobo was a full professor, while Morgan held an untenured associate professorship.

"Since the day they left, it has been my dream to get them back," said Henry Louis "Skip" Gates Jr., the former chair of the African and African American Studies Department and the Fletcher University Professor.

Af-Am Chair Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham said that the change of leadership in the University was one factor that made Morgan and Bobo's return possible.

University President Drew G. Faust contacted the couple in person to urge them to return to Harvard, Gates said....

Good to see President Faust hard at work for a modern Harvard. While the President is wheedling hip-hop scholars, it's surreal to see that it remains to The Crimson , in an editorial today, to note that military studies are woefully slight at the university: