By Roger Clegg

Should universities weigh race and ethnicity in deciding whom to hire for their science departments?

The American Association for the Advancement of Science thinks so, according to a recent National Journal article. "Science and engineering should look like the rest of the population," says AAAS's Daryl Chubin, and if hiring decisions don't yield the right numbers, "somebody needs to pull the plug and say this has not been an open and fair search."

Taking steps to ensure that the best possible individuals apply and are hired is fine---indeed, that's precisely what the whole process should be about. Casting your recruiting net far and wide is a good idea, as is reassessing your recruiting policies to make sure that you are not overlooking good sources of candidates. Reevaluating selection criteria from time to time is, likewise, unobjectionable; if some criteria are weighed too heavily or not heavily enough, with the result that the best individuals are not selected, then that needs to be fixed. And, of course, everyone involved in the selection process, from beginning to end, needs to be told that the best individuals, regardless of skin color or national origin, are to be picked.

But it's clear that nondiscrimination is exactly what AAAS does not have in mind. The National Journal article says that it wants to "allocate additional slots to U.S. racial and ethnic minorities" and to protect universities from "likely lawsuits by groups seeking color-blind admissions policies." As the quotes above suggest, it is demanding that schools get their numbers right. It wants quotas, it wants race and ethnicity to be weighed when hiring decisions are made.

By Roger Clegg

Allegations of tenure discrimination have recently been leveled against Emerson College on grounds of race and against DePaul University on grounds of sex.

At Emerson, two black scholars were denied tenure, the local chapter of the NAACP became involved, and an investigation has been launched by the Massachusetts Commission against Discrimination. The school has agreed to give one of the professors another shot next year, in exchange for dropping his complaint with the Commission.

Four women are challenging DePaul's tenure denial. They have a lawyer, have unsuccessfully appealed the denial to the school's president, and have now indicated that they plan to take DePaul to court.

In neither case has direct evidence of discriminatory intent been alleged, such as racist or sexist comments. Instead, statistical disparities of one sort or another are cited.

So, is there anything to these allegations?

By Judith Miller

Fourteen Columbia professors are protesting the university's apparent decision to award tenure to Joseph A. Massad, a controversial anti-Israel professor of Arab studies.

The professors are from the schools of law, business and public health. They expressed their concern in a five-page letter to the incoming Provost, Claude M. Steele. The letter asserts that the university's decision to guarantee Massad a life-time teaching post "appears to have violated" Columbia's own rules, thus raising profound questions about the university's academic integrity. The university's administration, weirdly, still refuses to confirm or deny that Massad won tenure, but yesterday the Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures department let the cat out of the bag---it announced a beginning-of-term party next week congratulating Massad on gaining tenure.

This week Provost Steele belatedly issued a polite, noncommittal response. In a four-paragraph "Dear Colleagues" letter to the fourteen professors, Steele, a former Stanford psychologist, says he would "welcome" a meeting to discuss their concerns. After he learns more about Columbia's tenure process, Steele writes, he may "want to make some changes in our procedures." But nowhere does he state that Massad has, in fact, been awarded tenure. Nor does he acknowledge that the professors raise deeply troubling concerns, that if true, go to the heart of what many regard as the core of a university's integrity.

By KC Johnson

AAUP president Cary Nelson recently e-mailed his membership about an important new venture for the academic union. Proclaiming "this is not your grandparents' AAUP," Nelson celebrated the work of the "Department of Organizing and Services," which had discovered "a faculty band from Ohio performing original songs about the ironies of current academic life."

Perhaps Nelson should spend less time thinking about new songs and focus more on the central task of "your grandparents' AAUP"---upholding the principle of academic freedom. In two recent, high-profile controversies, the self-described "tenured radical" has seemed intent on transforming the AAUP from an organization devoted to promoting academic freedom into a battering ram to perpetuate the groupthink that dominates so many quarters of the contemporary academy.

The first episode occurred in July, after NYU extended a visiting professorship in human rights law to Thio Li-ann, a professor at the National University of Singapore. The appointment generated understandable controversy after revelations that Li-ann, while a member of the Singapore parliament (a body not known for its commitment to human rights in any event), had wanted to continue criminalizing gay sex acts, on the grounds that "diversity is not license for perversity." Li-ann eventually decided not to come to NYU, using as an excuse the poor enrollment of her courses.

As the controversy brewed, Inside Higher Ed's Scott Jaschik drew from Nelson a highly unusual conception of academic freedom:

Nelson also said that in a tenure decision, he would judge a candidate---however offensive his or her views on unrelated subjects---only on a question of whether the person's scholarship and teaching in his or her discipline met appropriate standards. But in a hiring decision (whether for a visiting or permanent position), he said, it is appropriate to consider other factors, and . . . professors can appropriately ask prior to appointments, [Nelson] said, whether hiring someone whose views on certain subjects are "poisonous" could limit "the department's ability to do its business."

By Donald Downs

Forty years ago this week, an armed student insurrection erupted on the Cornell campus. I was a sophomore on campus at the time and later wrote a book on the events, Cornell '69: Liberalism and the Crisis of the American University. To some the drama represented a triumph of social justice, paving the way for a new model of the university based on the ideals of identity politics, diversity, and the university as a transformer of society. To others, it fatefully propelled Cornell, and later much of American higher education, away from the traditional principles of academic freedom, reason, and individual excellence. "Cornell," wrote the famous constitutional scholar Walter Berns, who resigned from Cornell during the denouement of the conflict, "was the prototype of the university as we know it today, having jettisoned every vestige of academic integrity."

In the wee hours of Friday, April 19, 1969, twenty-some members of Cornell's Afro-American Society took over the student center, Willard Straight Hall, removing parents (sometimes forcefully) from their accommodations on the eve of Parents Weekend. The takeover was the culmination of a year-long series of confrontations, during which the AAS had deployed hardball tactics to pressure the administration of President James Perkins into making concessions to their demands. The Perkins administration and many faculty members had made claims of race-based identity politics and social justice leading priorities for the university, marginalizing the traditional missions of truth-seeking and academic freedom.

Two concerns precipitated the takeover: AAS agitation for the establishment of a radical black studies program; and demands of amnesty for some AAS students, who had just been found guilty by the university judicial board of violating university rules. These concerns were linked, for, according to the students, the university lacked the moral authority to judge minority students. They declared that Cornell was no longer a university, but rather an institution divided by racial identities.

By James Miller

This is the text of an open letter about the student occupation and police intervention last weekend at the New School in New York City. It was sent to members of the New School community by James Miller, professor of political science and liberal studies at the school. Miller is a former member of Students for a Democratic Society and author of several books, including "Rousseau: Dreamer of Democracy" and "Democracy in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago." - John Leo

By John Silber

The recent attempts to drive Robert Kerrey from the presidency of The New School are reminiscent of how Larry Summers was driven from the Harvard presidency in 2006 and, further back, how controversies, real and specious, roiled American campuses in the 1960s and 1970s. If the Trustees of the New School are at all tempted to give in to demands for Kerrey's head, these previous academic power struggles ought to send them one clear message of warning: lose a president to a coup and you will fail in the governance of your campus.

The complaints against Kerrey ought to sound familiar to anyone who has watched university reform in action. Kerrey is accused of being an autocrat and of putting fiscal concerns ahead of academic needs. He is lambasted for his politically-incorrect views on America's wars in Vietnam and Iraq.

In December the New School Faculty voted 271-8 to express no confidence in him and his chief financial officer. At the same time radical students occupied Kerrey's office; they have since demanded that Kerrey resign and that they be given a role in picking the next Provost. The students also threaten to shut the campus down if their demands are not met by April 1.

Denis Rancourt, a professor of physics at Ottawa University, an anarchist and a backer of Critical Pedagogy, may be the most dramatic example of a politicized teacher yet seen in North America. He believes that college instruction is an instrument of oppression and that his proper job is to combat this oppression by ignoring what he is supposed to be teaching---physics and the environment---and instead promoting radical political action in his class. Over the weekend, Stanley Fish posted a blog on Rancourt at the New York Times website that attracted a good deal of attention. So we asked several professors to write brief reactions to Rancourt and Fish.

- John Leo

Peter Berkowitz

In Save the World on Your Own Time, his 2008 polemic about higher education, Stanley Fish harshly criticized professors who use the classroom to advance political agendas. Professors, he insisted, have a contractual duty to pursue academic purposes in their teaching, to transmit knowledge and refine students' intellectual abilities. Academic freedom was well-defined and narrow: it protected a professor's right to discharge his academic duties without political interference. For professors to use academic freedom as a cover to inculcate in students moral and political doctrines was, in Fish's eyes, a gross abuse.

Or it was in the summer of 2008, when his book came out. Unfortunately, in his exploration of the case of University of Ottawa physics professor Denis Rancourt, Fish indicates that in the winter 2009 the meaning of academic freedom in his judgment is not a matter of right, duty, and the proper understanding of academic life and the university's mission, but rather reflects a clash between narrower and broader views of academic freedom.

To be sure, Fish's relativizing conclusion is in tension with his unflattering portrayal of Professor Rancourt. On the one hand, he concedes that Professor Rancourt's granting an "A+" to each of his students, his refusal to teach courses he has been assigned by his department and for which students sign up, and in the courses he chooses to teach his urging students to engage in political activism represent instances of how "some academics contrive to turn serial irresponsibility into a form of heroism under the banner of academic freedom." On the other hand, Fish treats Rancourt's conception of academic freedom---"the ideal under which professors and students are autonomous and design their own development and interactions"---which Rancourt invokes to justify enlisting students in the quest to transform society and save the world, as a legitimate, if broader, conception of academic freedom that can only be defeated by "an essentially political decision."

Underlying Rancourt's pedagogy, Fish notes, is the "belief that higher education as we know it is simply a delivery system for a regime of oppressors and exploiters." But this moral judgment does not change the parameters of academic freedom. And it is no more a defense against Rancourt's being fired by the university for failing to do the job for which he was hired than it would be for an executive at Exxon Mobil to hold that because oil is polluting the planet, he is entitled to collect his salary while feeding false information to his superiors and encouraging his subordinates to subvert the company from within.

Nor is Rancourt's appeal to Socrates a convincing support for his freedom, against university requirements, to refuse to give students grades. What Rancourt overlooks and Fish fails to point out is that Socrates was not a university professor, did not take money to teach, and taught the obligation to respect, not to subvert, custom and law.

Although there are alternative conceptions of freedom, there is only one conception of academic freedom that is well-grounded in the principles of liberal education and the historic mission of the university. It is the conception forcefully defended by Stanley Fish in Save the World on Your Own Time. Regrettably, by suggesting that Denis Rancourt's rank politicization of the classroom reflects an alternative conception of academic freedom, as opposed to a perversion of academic freedom, Fish lends dignity to a fraudulent claim.

Peter Berkowitz is the Tad and Dianne Taube Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His writings are posted at www.PeterBerkowitz.com.

Jonathan Imber

Cases about academic freedom are bellwethers for larger social and cultural unrest. They always have been, all the way back to the First World War with the founding of the AAUP. When Arthur O. Lovejoy was dismissed from his position at Stanford University for simply defending a colleague's right to criticize the university, he joined with others in making the case that universities have a special responsibility to allow as full and open debate about all things as possible. Of course, Lovejoy and his colleagues would never have confused lack of collegiality or failure to teach one's subject as defensible in terms of academic
freedom.

The problem with Stanley Fish's assessment is that it has very little to do with the everyday indignities that beset colleges and universities as the result of colleagues who do not do their jobs and thus make everything more difficult. Instead, Fish is taken in by the exotic cases to make otherwise ordinary points. The ordinary points are quite clear: the oversight of faculty at most colleges and universities takes for granted a great deal of good will on both the part of faculty and administrators (most of whom have been faculty). When that good will is tested, it is usually about decisions made by administrators, not about anarchist physics professors. It is impressive in its own way that so much time was given to a person who clearly understood that being paid for his insubordination was likely to be challenged at some point. I suppose Fish's point is that there will always be some case where somebody tries to defy gravity.

But the real lesson is how much our institutions of higher learning depend on a basic trust given in particular to those of us fortunate enough to have what others see as "job security." We owe the public an explanation of what we do and why we do it. Most of us cede this responsibility to our presidents and deans, but in the end, it is the faculty who have the power and responsibility to determine this. We should not become a conspiracy against the laity, especially in times like these.

Jonathan Imber is Professor in Ethics and Professor of Sociology at Wellesley College

Daphne Patai

It's hard to see why Stanley Fish is hot and bothered by the Rancourt case at the University of Ottawa. After all, it's merely an extreme example of a routine event - a professor's political grandstanding and exhibitionism of his impeccable leftist credentials. What's unusual is only that Rancourt did suffer the consequences of his professional irresponsibililty. The real story here, however, is that so many professors, especially in the humanities and social sciences, routinely and with far less drama than Rancourt contrive to treat their classrooms as staging grounds for their political commitments. In many cases they announce this without embarrassment - look at the mission statements and job ads for various identity programs, in which activism (of a certain type only, of course) is routinely promoted as an academic goal. This is so much the norm these days that only truly egregious cases, such as Rancourt's, or Ward Churchill's, evoke strong reactions and censure. It's very rare for a professor to be charged with incompetence. There's almost no such thing in higher education these days, least of all over manifesting political biases.

To the contrary, the real threat to education these days is far more likely to come from the shutting down of free speech by means of university policies aimed at inhibiting "harassment" (sexual or racial primarily), which has many professors watching their every word. Look at Brandeis University, which last year found Professor Donald Hindley guilty of "racial harassment" and placed a monitor in his classroom! His offense? To discuss the word "wetback" as a racial slur in his Latin American Politics course! FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, keeps track of the sorry state of free speech on America's campuses, and has had to go to bat for many of the accused (see its website at www.thefire.org). Where political correctness rather than genuine education has become a norm in American universities, why be surprised that professors feel free to indulge their biases? Most of them, of course, are a bit less blatant about their agenda than Rancourt obviously was.

As for the guaranteed grades of A+ -- that too is noteworthy only because it takes to an extreme a pervasive problem in education: grade inflation. The only surprise is that a university administration actually acted in the Rancourt case. Competence seems rarely to be questioned and all kinds of partisan distortions of education are promoted and even celebrated. So we should thank Rancourt for having taken standard professorial actions to an extreme and thus calling attention to a persistent reality that is rarely addressed.

Daphne Patai is Professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Amitai Etzioni

Stan Fish does here what he does so well: he takes one odd case and builds a general theory on its peculiar facts. I wish he would be more of a sociologist. Look at the thousands of tenured professors (a declining number by the way). See how often they are under attack for being too liberal, too anti-Israel, even too conservative. Realize that although most people in society do not have their kind of protection---it serves a free society well to have several thousands who are so privileged, just as it is served by having some judges who have tenure.

True, some abuse their tenure (typically not by outlier behavior but by doing little work). Such abuses are largely handled through informal social pressures which Fish confuses with coercion. And when things get really bad, some of the abusers have their tenure revoked. Given that the world around us is collapsing and we are at war, maybe Professor Fish can use his privileged position to worry about even greater threats to our freedoms, well-being, indeed sanity.

Amitai Etzioni is a University Professor at The George Washington University

Mark Bauerlein

Stanley Fish's ruminations on academic freedom are always stimulating, but in this case his example is a no-brainer. A physics professor whose classroom posture aims to undo the institution and invalidate his own grades doesn't pose difficult questions about duty and freedom. No arguments about oppression and exploitation can turn his dereliction into an academic outlook. The very distance between his expertise, physics, and his subversive role-playing makes the case too easy.

What about fields, though, that close the distance, for instance, the composition instructor who believes that student writing will improve only when students question authority, including the authority of teachers and schools to evaluate them? What about education schools that explicitly profess to convert students into "change agents"?

In other words, academic freedom gets fuzzy when adversarial, radical, revolution, and other ideological goals are admitted as legitimate aspects of disciplines themselves. In these cases, we look not to the conduct of wayward instructors hijacking classrooms--a rare enough happening. No, we look to entire fields and subfields and departments that have made political agendas a normal functioning of research, hiring, peer review, graduate training, and undergraduate instruction. And that condition, unfortunately, isn't as rare as it ought to be.

Mark Bauerlein is Professor of English at Emory University

By Robert Weissberg

It is not so much our friends' help that helps us, as the confidence of their help. - Epicurus (Greek Philosopher 341 BC-271 BC)

Though relatively tiny in number PC forces now exercise disproportionate influence across the university, even capturing entire departments. What makes this conquest especially noteworthy is the lack of resistance from academics, liberal and conservative, who know better and should have stood up and shouted, "Enough with this race/class/gender crap, we need people to teach Chinese or Japanese politics, not yet one more course about African Americans." Going one step further, where is the vocal outrage when the PC contingent accuses a fellow professor of "hateful insensitivity" by assigning the Bell Curve or his "heretical" remarks on colonialism? Outside the university this bystander unresponsiveness even has a name---the Kitty Genovese phenomena, named after a repeatedly stabbed woman who lay unattended for hours in an apartment building courtyard while "oblivious" neighbors ignored her screams (she eventually died). But, why would life-time tenured professors go deaf when the ninnies beat up on a colleague who, to be hypothetical, dare hypothesized a biological factor in male/female mathematical distinction? Rallying to his defense is hardly as dangerous as, say, trying to stop a Mafia execution. Callous indifference to the plight of those singled out for PC attack is critical to understanding what bedevils today's academy, and deserves an explanation.

The decline in friendship explains a lot---friends defend friends, even risk death, but without camaraderie, it is all too easy to run and "not notice." Friendship's role in helping others was made crystal clear following World War II when sociologist Morris Janowitz and others interviewed German POWs to assess their extraordinary unit combat cohesiveness. It turns out that small units like tank crews typically came from the same town and were kept together for the entire war. This bonding, plus the realization that cowardice would travel back home encouraged bravery---Hans would risks his life to save his friend, fellow Bad Homburger, Rolf, and this loyalty far outweighed abstract ideology. American units, by contrast, favored shifting personnel and mixed composition (recall WW II "buddy" movies where "Brooklyn" shared a foxhole with "Tex"). But with the war ending, and German units becoming hastily assembled hodge-podges, combat effectiveness collapsed and mass surrenders ensued. Hans would risk death for Rolf but not the newcomer Wolfgang from far distant Rostock.

Today's universities are almost organized conspiracies against such cohesion. Affirmative action consciously rips it apart (recall how in 1984 friendship was sabotaged to atomize society on behalf of Big Brother). The diversity fetish guarantees departments filled with strangers having little in common. Hiring newcomers who "will fit in" has been replaced with "is he or she sufficiently different enough to satisfy the Diversity and Outreach Dean." Departments grow to resemble modern grade- school earth science textbook role model pictures---no two young faces alike, a few disabled to boot, and numerous smiling representatives from "under-represented" groups hardly known for scientific achievement. Indeed, hiring a white male job candidate who will further cement social cohesion may require extra justification beyond "he is the best." Too many white males implies unacceptable "good old boyism."

By Mark Bauerlein

In early December, the Board of Regents of the Kentucky Community and Technical College system agreed to vote in a few months on a proposal that may have far-reaching effects on higher education. The proposal would end the practice of offering tenured or tenure-track posts to new faculty hires. Is this a crack in the tenure dam that will produce a cascade of other schools eradicating tenure from the ranks?

Whether other universities go that far or not, in fact, the tenure system has been deteriorating for years. Administrations haven't directly taken it away. They simply let tenured professors retire and didn't give departments tenured or tenure-track replacement lines. Or, in responding to rising enrollments, they hired more part-time faculty than full-time faculty to fill classrooms. Indeed, according to the U.S. Department of Education, the portions of tenured and tenure-track faculty in the American professorate nose-dived in the last 30 years.

And according to a recent report by the American Federation of Teachers, "contingent faculty members teach 49 percent" all undergraduate courses (Reversing Course: The Troubled State of Academic Staffing and a Path Forward, i). The proportion doesn't include graduate student teachers, either, those doctoral candidates picking up courses as part of their training, which AFT estimates at 16-32 percent of the courses offered.

By Mark Bauerlein

Of the many problems besetting higher education today, perhaps the most intractable is the incentives problem. On hundreds of campuses across the United States, thousands of college professors are being dragged away from their root educational mission. They serve as stewards of knowledge and trainers of citizens to come, but a binding demand makes them act otherwise. And the perverse thing about it is that the pressure comes from within.

Imagine yourself a newly-hired English professor at a university with a research dimension, however minor. You went into the field because you loved to read and a few books hit you hard enough to set a career path. As undergraduate days wound down, you aimed to share the inspiration, to expound and debate and teach the meaning of Dickens and Faulkner, and graduate school was the next step.

But graduate training shifted the focus. Instead of studying with an eye toward undergraduates in class, you came to recognize another audience: professors at conferences, on hiring committees, and in editorial offices. They, not freshmen, would decide your future, offer you a job, publish your work, and grant you tenure. Turning a wayward 19-year-old into a determined thinker might make you feel worthy, but it wouldn't show up on a resume or establish professional contacts. You needed to network and circulate, apply for grants and submit papers to journals, attend symposia. Every minute in office hours with students, you quickly realized, took away from securing a letter of recommendation from a name scholar or writing the final page of a conference talk.

By Daphne Patai

It's hard to say just when universities ceased to believe that education was a worthwhile mission. But that they have done so is beyond question. Among many signs of this reality is the anxiety to redefine the university's task. After all, educators who no longer expect or demand serious intellectual effort from their students are bound to look elsewhere for ways to justify their existence and that of their institutions. Enter the language of "community engagement," "outreach," "social justice," and "equity" (to name just a few of the terms now used as rallying cries on many campuses).

If anyone has doubts that behind these grand terms lies the degradation of academic life, a look at procedures for recruiting new faculty is a good place to observe the university's priorities. At the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where I teach, a document both sublime and ridiculous advises us how to go about determining if applicants have what it takes to work here. Along with the usual lists of questions that may or may not be asked, the Office of Equal Opportunity and Diversity provides some crucial guidelines in a document titled Supplemental Search Instructions. I reproduce the final section of this document below:

By John Leo

If I ran the campus
I'd start out anew
I'd make a few changes
That's just what I'd do

Here's a simple suggestion
(Avoiding all fads)
I'd have some professors
Who teach undergrads

I hear you all snicker
I hear you all scoff
But I've got to believe
That many a prof
Would thrill to be meeting
A freshman or soph

TAs are beloved
They're always the rage
Because they all work
For a minimum wage
(But do students want teachers
Who are just their own age?)

Remedial classes
I'm sure is a must
For teachers who give
Only A or A-plus

They really must practice
At home, if they please,
Traumatically giving
Some Bs and some Cs

There's another idea
I can bring to fruition
I know how to cut
The cost of tuition

I really don't care
Whose waters this muddies
But I'd cancel all courses
Whose names end in "studies."
This could irritate
The fuddies and duddies

That's just a start
I'll do better than that
My curriculum changes
Will cut out the fat

No courses on Buffy
The Vampire Slayer
Or Batman and Robin
Who cares which is gayer?

No bongo or bingo
(Remember I said it)
No study of Yoda
No sex acts for credit

No Star Trek theology
No Matrix psychology
No queer musicology
I give no apology

If I ran the campus
I'd start out anew
I'd make a few changes
That's just what I'd do

------------------------------------------
This originally appeared as part of the National Association of Scholars' "If I Ran The Zoo" series

By Mark Bauerlein

Observing the sparring that has taken place between professors and conservative/libertarian critics outside the academy, many laypersons must wonder why professors grow so indignant over the criticism. They understand why professors disagree and want to defend themselves, but why so defensive? Why get mad? Other professions get chided - lawyers, doctors, politicians - and they respond, sometimes at least, with concessions and reforms, not "How dare you say that to us?" All-too-often, though, academics have acted with thin skins and prickly sensitivities, rarely to their advantage.

Several causes are at work here, but one of them is hard to discern if you haven't pursued an academic career, and it's insufficiently appreciated by outsiders.

It stems from a relentless truth of professional life for professors in the humanities and "softer" social sciences. The truth is this: when it comes to your status, you aren't judged by how much money you bring the university or how much your students learn. Instead, you are what others say you are. At each stage in a career, advancement depends on the words and opinions of teachers and colleagues. Entry into graduate school rested on the admissions committee, and every semester afterwards each seminar paper grade indicated whether you had a future or not. Three professors approved your dissertation and granted you a PhD. You went on the job market and a hiring committee liked your dossier, three professors in a hotel room at the annual convention smiled at your interview, and you won a tenure-track job offer. A couple of years later, two expert readers of manuscripts for scholarly presses liked your work and you got a book into print. When the department met to review your record, some senior colleagues in related fields approved of your research, teaching, service, and tenure finally arrived.

Each threshold seemed like life or death, the professors in charge rendering Olympian judgment. Their opinion meant everything, and it happened over and over for 12-15 years from the time you entered graduate school to the golden day of tenure. The scrutiny has a deep and long-term effect. No wonder professors come to think that opinions in public life carry the same weight. They rarely do, but academics have spent so many years in a gauntlet of appraisals that they've become touchy and wary. If a letter from an authority in the field carries so much weight in the cloistered spaces of an academic department, just think what a column on liberal bias by George Will in the Washington Post can do.

This is a mis-estimation of off-campus debate, of course, for public life allows for lots more criticism and raillery than scholarly exchange does. Furthermore, the recourse to "You don't understand what we do" doesn't work. The more academics slide into pique when ACTA issues another report on academic freedom, the more they yield the terrain to the critics. Too much time living in the shadow of judgment freezes them up or ticks them off when outsiders challenge their practice. Years of building a reputation renders them inept in ideological battles outside of professional zones. This is one cause of indignation, and until they overcome it, academics will remain in a rearguard posture in public life. And, in a regrettable corollary, within professional zones they will remain intractable and insular. Peer review was never supposed to work this way.

-------------------------------------------

Mark Baulerlein is a Professor of English at Emory University and former Director of Research and Analysis at the National Endowment for the Arts

By Donald Downs

This past weekend Columbia University held a commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the 1968 Student Strike that shook Columbia and all of higher education. For a week, student activists occupied five buildings in protest of several policies, including ROTC's presence on campus, the university's relationship to the Department of Defense and the war in Vietnam, the intrusion of a new gymnasium into the neighboring African-American community, and a host of student power issues. After violent clashes between police and students brought the university to the precipice, the students won virtually all of their demands. Columbia and higher education in general have never been the same since those climactic events.

The actions of 1968 were of profound importance, calling for a thorough, critical examination in the light of the intervening forty years. Unfortunately, the panels and events over the weekend appear to have fallen short of this hope. Critical viewpoints were not showcased, and a feeling of nostalgia often held sway. Interestingly, this result was as American as apple pie.

We Americans are known for our penchant for nostalgia. We make fun of this sentiment all the time, but few of us are immune to its lures. It's a peculiarly American trait because it is the logical product of combining non-tragic (or anti-tragic) liberal sentimentality with the unavoidable interest in the past. We care about the past, but not enough to let it drag us down with the weight of tragedy. Reinhold Niebuhr, the renowned theologian and foreign policy thinker who taught at Columbia University's Union Theological Seminary from 1930 to 1960 (he even has a street named after him on the campus), captured better than anyone the American peoples' difficulty in fathoming tragedy and evil - including the tragedy and evil in their own hearts. In addressing the Cold War and the drive for social justice, Niebuhr called for a mentality that could face good and evil in oneself and in others, and tragedy and hope, without caving into either naive optimism or dismissive cynicism and Machiavellianism. He called the acolytes of the former mentality the "children of light," the latter the "children of darkness." Charting a middle course, Niebuhr advocated a more enlightened sense of balance that amounted to a more responsible form of civic education.

By Chris Kulawik

If you closed your eyes it sounded like any other college reunion.

Men clamored and women shrieked as old faces called to them from the growing crowd. They were old friends and classmates some four decades removed.

"I can't believe," echoed the voices of the baby-boomer crowd, "it was exactly a hundred years ago today. It's been so long"

"I know," replied one, mechanically, as if she had answered that call so many times before, "everyone changes."

They spoke of lost love and life, "summering spots" in Southampton, top twenty law schools for their kids, stock options and investments. More than one bragged about the new family sedan.

But as you opened your eyes the room changed. As the graying crowd ebbed towards the laughably bourgeoisie wine and cheese bar, name tags flashed against their crisply tailored pink shirts and retro-chic blouses:

"Tom Hurwitz, Math, Planning Committee"

"Jeff Bush, Fayerweather"

The list went on. Few included their year, but not all. There was no need to. This strange coterie of aged radicals had developed their own nomenclature.

Math, Philosophy, Fayerweather, Hamilton, Low.

These were not majors or dorms; they were occupied buildings.

By Robert Weissberg

In the spring of 2008 Baylor University denied tenure to a larger than usual number of Assistant Professors up for promotion, including two-thirds of the women, and while tenure denial is normal at Baylor, the carnage uptick - from 10% to 40% in a single year - drew national attention and outcries of unfairness. No doubt, outsiders may find that awarding life-time employment to 60% of those eligible is a fantastic deal in today's economy where corporations routinely shed entire divisions and even CEO's get the ax. Surely no rational firm could guarantee tenure to 90%, even 60s%, of those initially hired. That harsh economic fact understood, why the sudden indignation? Is something seriously rotten at Baylor? As a veteran spending four decades passing among the natives (I speak fluent numbo-jumbo, passable gibberish, I should add), let me try to explain why what is typical in the "real world" outrages so many academics.

The place to begin is to recognize that winning tenure is customary at American colleges save elite, research-oriented institutions. In fact in a few top departments almost no junior faculty wins tenure, so the review process resembles the annual clubbing of baby seals. Given that rejection runs counter to widespread expectations, it is naturally a bitter pill to swallow. It is not a matter of initial screening being so astute that no mid-course corrections are necessary. Rather, the pathways to tenure abound, standards are pliable, and the ever-present threat of litigation shields protected endangered species faculty, so in many instances a negative outcomes is genuinely surprising, if not shocking.

Truth be told, all the transparency and fairness talk is largely irrelevant administrative boilerplate. Subjectivity is everywhere; as in judging pornography, fuzziness is inherent, and this applies equally to Harvard or Okefenokee Tech. "Original research" or "excellent teaching" are rubber yardsticks far distant from cars sold per month. Apprehensive junior faculty speculate endlessly about thresholds - One or two books? Are five articles enough? How many research grants and of what size? Can mediocre teaching be overcome by outstanding outside letters? - but universities justifiably never operate on piece-work, and it is preposterous to insist that bean counting is even possible. On-the-bubble candidates scrutinized past decisions with Talmudic attentiveness, but the outcomes are always murky - Assistant Professor Alphonse is now an Associate despite his weak publication record while Professor Gaston who followed was booted notwithstanding an outstanding resume. Stories of unexpected failures are told and re-told, embellished and deconstructed, but these hardly calm jangled nerves. In the final analysis, tenure judgments resemble the College of Cardinals electing the Pope - there are usually solid reasons but they may be forever obscure and, critically, no senior faculty is obligated to explain his or her vote. It is a mystery wrapped in a sheepskin encased in a 9 x 12 manila envelop. Up or down reasons can be petty, wrong-headed, misinformed and otherwise flawed, but truth is unknowable. The most vicious personal blackball can be "explained" with "his Bush-as-Hitler research just did not meet the standards for the Benedict Arnold Program in American Studies." Nothing more had to be said. This uncertainty, the knowledge that one's life can be decided by whim, is truly frightening.

[Indoctrinate U, a documentary by Evan Coyne Maloney on the state of intellectual freedom at American universities, premiered at the Kennedy Center in September 2007 and has screened in multiple locations since. Peter Berkowitz, writing in The Wall Street Journal, called Indoctrinate U a "riveting documentary about the war on free speech and individual rights waged by university faculty and administrators..." John K. Wilson, founder of The Institute for College Freedom, doesn't think the film's quite fair. He provided us a critique of Indoctrinate U and invited us to solicit Maloney's response. You can read Wilson's original review, and Maloney's response here. Below is their second round of comments. Indoctrinate U is screening at select campuses and theaters in the near future; check the film's website for more information (and read our original review here.)]

No.
By John K. Wilson

Maloney objects to my claim that liberty on campus is far better protected today than it's ever been. To disprove this, he writes that FIRE "receives hundreds upon hundreds of reports each year in which those rights have been trampled." But that doesn't prove anything. For example, the ACLU didn't exist until after World War I. The fact that the ACLU publicized violations of civil liberties after 1918 does not show that civil liberties were better protected during World War I, it only shows that we lacked organizations to publicize these violations. For example, virtually all of the speech codes FIRE objects to (and usually with good reason) today were typically far worse in the past, when administrators usually had arbitrary power to punish students without due process, without rules, and without appeal.

As for Ward Churchill, Maloney says that he defended his free speech. He did, but none of that is mentioned in the movie, nor is the fact that Churchill was banned from speaking at some campuses (which is separate from the controversy over his firing). That's a key point considering how Maloney tries to show in the movie that only conservative views are silenced in academia.

Citing the fact that Ignatiev hasn't been censored is a rather odd analysis by Maloney, considering that he ignores the counterexample of Churchill. Maloney, after all, doesn't put on film all of the conservatives who haven't been censored, nor any of the liberals who have. At some point, if you only discuss liberals who haven't been censored and conservatives who have been censored, and ignore the counterevidence, you're twisting the data.

On the Clemens case, Maloney claims that "professors were required to inject into their courses political topics." Clemens called it an "ideological loyalty oath." The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that faculty on campus said it wasn't a requirement to inject political topics in class; it was a requirement that faculty proposing a new class had to answer a dumb question on the form about the role of race, class, and gender in the proposed class. After Clemens objected, he was allowed to leave the question blank and had his course approved. He never had his job threatened in any way, so I dismissed this as rather unimportant compared to the far worse penalties suffered by liberals and conservatives in many colleges. (Contrast that with a case this year where a pacifist Quaker professor was fired under a real loyalty oath.)

By Mark Bauerlein

In recent years, conservative critics of academia have had few better friends than Ward Churchill, the Group of 88, MIT biology professor Nancy Hopkins (who fled Larry Summers talk about variations in intelligence between genders), and a few other hot-headed leftists on campus who made headlines. They proved the point about ideological bias every time they opened their mouths or printed their opinions. They were the slam dunk cases, and their high standing proved an embarrassment to their colleagues.

Beyond those outspoken circles, though, the evidence appears to grow thin. For the truth is that the majority of academics are not fiery, intolerant people railing against Bush in class or berating a conservative sophomore in office hours. They fall on the left side of the spectrum and wouldn't dream of voting for a Republican, yes, but they pretty much stick to their jobs of teaching a field and pursuing more or less apolitical topics. Churchill et al discredited the profession with their partisan heat, but mainstream professors restore credibility precisely by their dutiful, everyday manner.

It is all the more regrettable and exasperating, then, that when they make fundamental choices in their work these moderate professors harbor some of the same biases, although in softer form and more judiciously expressed, and they produce equally discriminatory effects.

By Stephen Balch

Trustees face a quandary in trying to figure out their role in academic governance. As a matter of law, institutional responsibility is squarely in their hands. On the other hand, while few challenge their oversight in matters managerial and financial, they are routinely warned that when it comes to intellectual content, the heart of university life, they should keep their distance.

Trustees should generally avoid getting involved in judgments about intellectual specifics such as individual personnel decisions, the content of courses, and the structure of particular programs, etc. Usually they will be out of their depth here. But they should be actively engaged in matters pertaining to overall intellectual climate, especially the degree to which such core principles of rational discourse as objectivity, disengagement, meritocracy, civility, and pluralism are honored and institutionalized. Here trustee fair-mindedness, ideological coolness, and intellectual distance, can help keep the ideological passions of academics from running discourse off reason's rails.

Like judges, trustees should see themselves as having a responsibility to ensure that the rules of sound intellectual discourse are recognized, that the academic cultures of the institutions they supervise are "lawful" in a manner that preserves the free and effective exercise of reason. This, of course, is a matter of faculty responsibility too, but since the nature of these rules, in many essentials, simply follow the operating principles of a liberal social order, citizens of that order should be able to understand them well enough to backstop compliance. Trustees need not be scholarly experts to participate meaningfully in the university's intellectual governance. They need only be intelligent and watchful products of a free society.

What types of rules are we speaking of and why should members of a liberal society be able to recognize and help enforce them?

By Mark Bauerlein

Against repeated accusations of leftwing bias on campus, professors have mounted many rejoinders disputing one or another item in the indictment. They claim that the disproportion isn't as high as reports say. Or that reports focus on small pockets (women's studies, etc.). Or that party registration is a crude indicator. Or that conservatives are too greedy and obtuse to undergo academic training.

The denials go on, and sometimes it's hard to tell whether professors really believe in their own neutrality or whether they just hope to brazen out the attacks. One response, however, stands apart, precisely because it doesn't deny a darn thing in the bias charge. Indeed, it concedes every empirical point - "Yes, left-wing people, left-wing ideas, and left-wing texts dominate," but it adds, "And that's exactly as it should be."

It's a refreshingly straightforward assertion. I heard it at an MLA Convention session awhile back when a young man in the audience talked about getting shot down by his professor when he voiced in class a conservative opinion. One of the panelists replied by telling him to quit complaining, then enlarged the rebuke to all conservative critics. "Look," he grumbled, "conservatives have taken over every where else [this was before the 2006 election], and now they want the campus, too, the one place where liberal values can still prevail."

By Donald Downs

In my last essay for Minding the Campus, I discussed how faculty indifference may have contributed indirectly to the establishment of the University of Delaware's now notorious residence hall re-education program. If so, we should consider this a crime of omission rather than a crime of commission. This perspective on the problem either differs from or supplements the claims of many critics of higher education, who blame ideological agendas among faculty as the major cause of campus politicization.

A panel discussion/debate in October between Stephen Balch and Harry Lewis at the Pope Center in North Carolina highlighted this disagreement. The panel dealt with the problems besetting liberal education, focusing on education's aimlessness and failure to instill knowledge and respect for free institutions. Balch and Lewis agreed on several things, but offered two different slants on the ills of higher education. Comparing the views of Balch and Lewis can help us to clarify and refine the problem of politics in higher education today.

Balch, the distinguished president of the National Association of Scholars who recently was awarded the National Humanities Medal in the Oval Office, blamed the ills of liberal education on politicized faculty. According to Jay Schalin's report of the panel, Balch argued that higher education is failing "because it has adopted a left-wing ideology that is at odds with our traditions. The university system, with its population of impressionable young people, is naturally attractive to people with 'an inclination toward visionary and utopian thinking,' and these utopians feel that the purpose of education is to 'move people toward their visions."

By Donald Downs

A lot has been written about the details of the residential life program at the University of Delaware, and the ways in which it has bullied students and residential assistants to accept regnant orthodoxy. The nation's collective hat should go off to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education for exposing this program, and for compelling the university to back down - at least temporarily. The episode brings to mind last spring's heated debate in the Chronicle of Higher Education over whether FIRE was too extreme in its attacks on higher education, and whether FIRE had outlived its usefulness. One case is not statistical proof, but the fact remains that without FIRE, this remarkably repressive program would still be in effect.

I want to address a broader issue in the Delaware case that has not attracted enough attention thus far: the role of non-faculty members in promoting the politicization of higher education. Kathleen Kerr, a mastermind of the Delaware program, is director of residential life for the University of Delaware. Interestingly, as John Leo has recently pointed out, she is also the chairperson of the American College Personnel Association's Commission for Housing and Residential Life - a group with connections to universities across the country.

By Candace deRussy

At a conference on November 14, the American Enterprise Institute released two important new studies by Daniel Klein of George Mason University and Charlotta Stern of Stockholm University. Their research, part of a forthcoming book titled Reforming the Politically Correct University, verifies even further that liberals and progressives outnumber conservatives and libertarians on campuses, overwhelmingly so in certain disciplines.

The authors also find that socially conservative professors must publish more than their liberal colleagues to obtain the same positions (a conclusion bolstered by earlier statistical evidence accumulated by Stanley Rothman of Smith College and S. Robert Lichter of George Mason University). Exploring relatively undocumented but equally compelling demonstration of bias, Klein and Stern show too that conservative students are steered away from pursuing Ph.D.s because of fewer research offers from their professors.

By John Leo

The Chronicle of Higher Education, the voice of liberal academia, says that an important new study shows that liberal dominance among professors is much less than commonly believed. Not really. The study, by sociologists Neil Gross of Harvard and Solon Simmons of George Mason University, found that in 2004, 78 percent of faculty voted for John Kerry (77percent) or Ralph Nader (1 percent), while only 20.4 percent voted for President Bush. Among social science professors, Ralph Nader and "other" received a percentage of the 2004 vote as large as that of President Bush.

Other findings:

* Liberals outnumber conservatives by 11-1 among social scientists and 13-1 among humanities professors.

* 25.5 percent of those who teach sociology identify themselves as Marxist. Self-identified radicals accounted for 19 percent of humanities professors and 24 percent of social scientists.

* Although business school professors are believed to be predominantly conservative, professors of business voted 2-1 for Kerry. These professors were barely more conservative than liberal.

* Only 19.7 percent of respondents identify themselves as any type of conservative, compared to 62.2 percent who say they are any type of liberal.

* At elite, Ph.D-granting schools in general, 60.4 percent of faculty members are Democrats, 30.1 percent are independents and 9.5 percent are Republicans.

* Gross and Simmons believe that liberals are losing ground to moderates among faculty, though conservatives are not gaining at all. Faculty members who are 35 or younger are less likely that their elders to be left-wing, and less likely to be conservative as well.

By Erin O'Connor

Last summer, AAUP president Cary Nelson announced that the AAUP would be issuing a back to school statement on academic freedom in the classroom. Now that statement has gone public - and it makes for very interesting and informative reading.

Written by a subcommittee of the AAUP's Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure, "Freedom in the Classroom" acknowledges that professors have been accused in recent years of indoctrinating rather than educating, of failing to provide balanced perspectives on controversial issues, of creating a hostile learning environment for conservative or religious students, and of injecting irrelevant political asides into class discussion. And as such the statement is ostensibly meant to address the very real issues surrounding faculty classroom conduct that have arisen of late. As anyone who follows higher ed news knows, concerns about whether professors are abusing their pedagogical prerogatives have been repeatedly voiced; and, as the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) and other groups have repeatedly noted, those concerns should be addressed in a manner that is simultaneously respectful of students' rights to learn and professors' academic freedom to teach as they see fit. The AAUP is right to take up the issue of classroom speech, and it is right to seek to parse exactly where faculty academic freedom begins and ends.

The trouble, though, is that the AAUP's statement does not take seriously the questions and complaints to which it purports to respond. A small but telling indicator of the larger problem: When interviewed about the statement by The Chronicle of Higher Education, Nelson said that it is ultimately designed to encourage professors to say to outside critics, "Don't mess with me." In other words - by Nelson's own admission- it's less a rigorously reasoned policy statement than it is a confrontational ultimatum disguised as a policy statement. This maneuver was not at all lost on The Chronicle's Robin Wilson, who wrote that while the statement "is billed as a tool to help professors decide what they can and cannot safely say in the classroom - particularly when it comes to hot-button cultural and political issues," it comes across "more like a defense of the professoriate in the face of heavy criticism" coming from outside the academy.

By Robert Weissberg

It's easy to think of Universities as a circus for wacky professors; their semi-monthly comparisons of Bush to Hitler or indictments of inherent American racism are hard to miss. Universities' deviations from traditional education are far more serious than a few zany radicals, though. Something far more significant overshadows this ranting, namely how PC invisibly sanitizes instruction to avoid "offending" certain easy-to-anger students. This is the dog that does not bark - "safe lecturing" to use the STD vocabulary - and seldom recognized since it concerns what is not taught, and as such deprives students of a genuine education.

Let me offer some observations from my 35-year academic career but these undoubtedly apply more generally. Some facts. First, today's students, especially in lecture courses, display rather desultory academic habits. Many arrive late, leave early, doze off, regularly skip classes, eat, drink or listen to iPods, gossip and otherwise ignore the dispensed pearls of wisdom. Even stellar teachers cast pearls. Dreary test results confirm that lectures are disregarded and assignments go unread. Sad to say, many African-American students who should be expending extra efforts to surmount academic deficiencies are particularly guilty though expressing this plain-to-see reality is verboten.

By John Leo

In 1997, the National Association of Social Work (NASW) altered its ethics code, ruling that all social workers must promote social justice "from local to global level." This call for mandatory advocacy raised the question: what kind of political action did the highly liberal field of social work have in mind? The answer wasn't long in coming. The Council on Social Work Education, the national accreditor of social work education programs, says candidates must fight "oppression," and sees American society as pervaded by the "global interconnections of oppression." Now aspiring social workers must commit themselves, usually in writing, to a culturally left agenda, often including diversity programs, state-sponsored redistribution of income, and a readiness to combat heterosexism, ableism, and classism.

This was all too much for the National Association of Scholars. The NAS has just released a six-month study of social work education, examining the ten largest programs at public universities for which information was available. The report, "The Scandal of Social Work," says these programs "have lost sight of the difference between instruction and indoctrination to a scandalous extent. They have, for the most part, adopted an official ideological line, closing off debate on many questions that serious students of public policy would admit to be open to the play of contending viewpoints."

By Jay P. Greene

[This also appeared in National Review Online]

There was a time when Harvard stood for the Union. Almost 600 of its sons fought for the North in the Civil War, nearly one-quarter of whom gave their lives. Only the names of those Union dead are inscribed in the transept of Memorial Hall; the smaller number of Harvard affiliates who died for the cause of secession were not similarly honored.

But times have changed. In the current issue of the Harvard alumni magazine there is a profile of education professor, Howard Gardner, in which he declares: "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."

Keep in mind that these were not comments that spilled from Professor Gardner's lips in an unguarded moment that were then exposed by "gotchya" journalism. They were in the University's own publication that is used for promotional purposes. The profiles of faculty in alumni magazines are meant to portray the faculty and the University in a flattering light to generate support from alumni. Clearly, Gardner and at least some University officials believe that threatening secession conveys a positive picture of the institution.

By Mark Bauerlein

"Reclaim Your Rights as a Liberal Educator." That's the title of a short essay in this month's Academe, organ of the American Association of University Professors. The phrase has all the imagination of a slogan unfurled at countless marches, but what it lacks in wit it makes up for in fortitude of the uniquely academic kind. Author Julie Kilmer, women's studies and religion professor at Olivet College, sounds the standard "they're-out-to-get-us" call and rallies her brethren to take back the classroom. We have, too, a vicious aggressor: conservative student groups that confront professors of perceived liberal bias, and they form a national network out to undermine the faculty, who come off as vulnerable and innocent professionals. While the professors uphold "freedom of inquiry to examine the worth of controversial ideas" and "teach college students to use analytical thinking in the development of new ideas," groups such as Students for Academic Freedom do their best to subvert the process. Worst of all, they "encourage students to bring complaints against faculty to administrators." To Kilmer, they are no better than spies, and they prompt her to wonder, "Each time a student is resistant to feminist theories and ideas, should I ask if he or she has been placed in my class to question my teaching? How is my teaching affected if I enter the classroom each day asking, 'Is today the day I will be called to the president's office?"

By John M. Ellis

The welcome news that Ward Churchill has been removed from the University of Colorado faculty is blighted by the fact that the means used has allowed the university to avoid the much larger problem that Churchill's conduct pointed to. It was in early 2005 that the public learned of, and was appalled by, excerpts from an essay that had been posted on the web by Churchill, a full Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado, on the subject of 9/11 terrorist attacks. Now, over two years later, Churchill has been fired after due process within the university for plagiarism and falsification of research. But what the public heard and responded to was not fabrication and plagiarism. Though these are certainly legitimate grounds for a dismissal, they could never have attracted the attention of the public, still less caused a widespread sense that something must be horribly wrong with a university that employed such a man as a professor.

The ACLU, basing itself on this undeniable discrepancy between the furor of the public's response and the narrow grounds of the decision, has charged that the firing is illegitimate because the real motive is nothing to do with the ostensible reason that has been given for the university's action. But that charge makes no sense. Al Capone may have been jailed for tax evasion when his far more serious offense was racketeering, but he was certainly guilty as charged, and so is Ward Churchill. Yet in both cases the limited grounds had the effect of removing one man from the scene while leaving a larger systemic problem untouched.

The manner of Churchill's dismissal clearly sidestepped the issues that the public was so disturbed by. The ACLU maintains that the public furor was caused only by Churchill's unpopular political opinions. Again, it is wrong. Far left political expression by professors is nothing new to the American public - Noam Chomsky's views are just as extreme and unpopular, but they do not lead to calls for his dismissal. What the public reacted to was something much more than this. All of their own experience of what their teachers and professors had sounded like told them that the man they heard should never under any circumstances have been a professor at a major university.

By KC Johnson

This week, as expected, the University of Colorado regents dismissed Professor Ward Churchill from his tenured position in the Ethnic Studies Department. (A university committee had found that Churchill committed plagiarism and misused sources.) And, as expected, Churchill has filed suit, alleging First Amendment violations.

The move against Churchill - who first attracted attention after describing those who perished (except for the terrorists) in the World Trade Center attack as "Little Eichmanns" - came over the opposition of the ACLU, which charged that the "poisoned atmosphere" of the inquiry into Churchill's scholarship rendered meaningless the committee's findings. ACTA president Anne Neal, on the other hand, welcomed the dismissal as "a very positive message that higher education is cleaning up its own."

The viewpoints of both organizations raise additional questions. The ACLU's position, if established as a precedent, would invite academics who (like Churchill) had engaged in research misconduct to issue inflammatory public statements, in the hopes that a public outcry (preferably from "right-wingers") could then provide a First Amendment shield for their academic misdeeds.

By Mark Bauerlein

If you browse through the list of dissertations filed in American literary and cultural studies last year, you will find many conventional and sober projects that fit well with traditional notions of humanistic study. Here are a few sample titles:

- "Rethinking Arthur Miller: Symbol and structure"
- "Tragic investigations: The value of tragedy in American political and ethical life"
- "Reading and writing African American travel narrative"
- "From demons to dependents: American-Japanese social relations during the occupation, 1945-1952"
- "The culture club: A study of the Boston Athenaeum, 1807-1860 (Massachusetts)"

But amidst these works, you also find a fair portion of projects with titles that border on the bizarre.

- "The fluviographic poetics of Charles Warren Stoddard: An emergence of a modern gay male American textuality"
- "Transperformance: Transgendered reading strategies, contemporary American literature"
- "Cruising and queer counterpublics: Theories and fictions"
- "'Skirts must be girded high': Spaces of subjectivity and transgression in post-suffrage American women's travel writing"
- "Roddenberry's faith in 'Star Trek': 'Star Trek''s humanism as an American apocalyptic vision of the future"
- "Exhibiting domesticity: The home, the museum, and queer space in American literature, 1914-1937"
- "From sodomy to Indian death: Sexuality, race and structures of feeling in early American execution narratives"
- "The sentimental touch: Hands in American novels during the rise of managerial capitalism"

By Louis Bolce and Gerald De Maio

A report by Gary Shapiro in yesterday's New York Sun carried some surprising information about the religiosity of college professors: though less religious than the general population, the majority believe in God. Randall Balmer, a professor of religion at Barnard, was quoted as saying that the new data helps to refute the notion that academics are mostly atheists and agnostics.

But let's turn on the caution light. The study of 1500 college professors at twenty top institutions that grant bachelors degrees, conducted by Neil Gross (Harvard) and Solon Simmons (George Mason), did indeed find that a slight majority claims to be religious. The numbers, not listed in the Sun, showed that 35.7 percent say "I know God really exists and I have no doubt about it," while 16.9 percent reported "while I have my doubts, I feel I do believe in God." Atheists and agnostics accounted for 23.4 percent of professors reporting.

The most heavily religious professors in the study teach accounting, followed by professors of elementary education, finance, marketing, art and criminal justice. The least religious professors were in biology, psychology, economics, political science and computer science. Research-oriented professors and faculty at elite institutions are significantly less religious than other academics. Only twenty percent of these academics "have no doubt that God exists." The implications for the larger culture of these findings are crucial. Professors who are the least religious and most hostile to religion are the ones most likely to be writing textbooks, articles and monographs, and the ones whose opinions are most sought after by the media. It is these ideas of irreligious professors that carry the most prestige among the punditocracy, dominate elite discourse, and filter down to the general public. Liberal arts professors are much less likely than accounting professors to believe in God. The liberal arts and social science professors are the ones who most often express opinions on religion and deal with issues involving religion and morality in the classroom.

By Anthony Paletta

It's difficult to be anything but pleased by the failure of Norman Finkelstein's DePaul tenure bid. He's a figure of repulsive opinions, given to frequent invective and doubtful scholarship. Yet all should look more carefully at DePaul University's explanation of the step before celebrating. The logical foregrounding for their tenure decision would have been problems with his published scholarship; instead, DePaul justified their decision chiefly with talk of "respect for colleagues." There's little doubt that Finkelstein is a jerk, but DePaul's grounding of its refusal in that fact - instead of holes in his academic work - leaves it open to justified criticism. "Collegiality" is a potentially insidious concept - just ask Walter Kehowski, a professor at Glendale Community College, who was just released from a forced administrative leave for the crime of emailing George Washington's Thanksgiving address to fellow professors. The crime? Creating a "hostile environment." Finkelstein's faults are clearly of a higher order than this, but all should be wary of arguments premised upon a professor's sociability, instead of his scholarship.

By Mark Bauerlein

Last week, a faculty committee at the University of Colorado released its recommendation as to the fate of Ward Churchill, and it's a disgraceful outcome. Despite the earlier finding that Churchill had committed research fraud - "multiple acts of plagiarism, fabrication and falsification"- the committee advised only a one-year suspension, not termination, for he engaged in "misbehavior, but not the worst possible misbehavior." The rationale is a cheap example of rationalization. According to the Associated Press, which received a copy of the report, the authors observed that Churchill "did not fabricate data to obtain grant money, did not endanger people's lives by ignoring research standards and did not damage the progress of important research."

By K.C. Johnson

[Robert "K.C." Johnson is the indefatigable chronicler of the Duke non-rape case, turning out a thousand words of brilliant reportage and analysis a day for more than a year on his Durham-in-Wonderland site. On the Volokh Conspiracy, Jim Lindgren writes" "If bloggers were eligible for Pulitizer Prize... I would nominate Brooklyn Professor K.C. Johnson... No self-respecting journalist would think of writing anything long and evaluative on the Duke case without first checking "the blog of record," Durham-in-Wonderland."]

On April 6, 2006, 88 members of Duke's arts and sciences faculty endorsed a full-page ad published in the campus newspaper, the Chronicle. The professors suggested that men's lacrosse players had triggered a "social disaster" by holding a spring-break party. The faculty members unequivocally asserted that something "happened to this young woman," accuser Crystal Mangum. And, in the aftermath of anti-lacrosse rallies featuring banners reading "Castrate" and "Time to Confess," the Group of 88 said "thank you" to the protesters "for not waiting and for making yourselves heard."

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.

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.

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?

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.

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:

Jay Bergman has a fine new piece up at the NAS Forum, puncturing the sanctimony that surrounds the ever-expanding sphere of "academic freedom" in the minds of many professors (see "Ward Churchill, sober research scholar, victim")

In response to the increasing contention that "academic freedom protects professorial speech in any circumstance Bergman cites the 1940 AAUP Statement of Principles, and its statement that "teachers are entitled to freedom in the classroom in discussing their subject, but should be careful not to introduce into their teaching controversial matter which has no relation to their subject."

At Central Connecticut State University where I am a professor, this distinction is sometimes ignored. Last fall, a professor sent the students in one of her courses more than 100 e-mails containing articles advocating the professor's opinions on matters entirely extraneous to the course -- for example, that Israel committed war crimes while fighting Hamas in Gaza last summer, and that comparisons between the Bush administration and Nazi Germany are reasonable. She also invited students to join her in attending seminars, such as Workshops on Peace, that were designed to advance the professor's political agenda.

What is even worse, during one class, as a way of demonstrating how the American colonists stole Indian land, the same professor took a student's backpack without permission and in front of all the students emptied its contents onto the floor, naming each item one by one. It is hard to imagine a more egregious violation of a student's privacy, or a more flagrant abuse of the power professors have over students by virtue of their grading them and writing recommendations for them for jobs after they graduate.

Unfortunately, this is not uncommon. In my 17 years at CCSU, about half of my students have told me, on their own initiative or in response to my asking them, that one or more of their professors not only interjected their political opinions in class on a regular basis, but did so in an effort to convert their students to their point of view.

Read on.

The Regents of the University of Colorado are meeting to determine Ward Churchill's fate tomorrow, July 24th. The ACLU has written the University of Colorado arguing against Ward Churchill's firing. This isn't surprising - its letter repeats a central canard in the case - that the Churchill investigation was merely a pretext for larger, sinister pressures:

It is undisputed, however, that Professor Churchill's views are protected by the First Amendment, and cannot serve as a legal basis for any adverse employment action. Nevertheless the University soon launched the investigation of Professor Churchill's scholarship in an effort to find more defensible grounds for sanctioning him.

Churchill defenders willfully conflate all elements of the proceedings against Churchill - "the University" you notice, is here presented as judge, jury, and (perhaps) executioner. No difference is admitted in agency or person between the submission of a complaint as to Churchill's work, and the creation of a University panel looking into the question; the processes are looked upon as one and the same. The timing of the complaint about Churchill's research is viewed as an ineradicable taint, no matter what they unearth or how often they address the question directly of the reason for inquiry. Consider the Standing Committee on Research and Misconduct's statement here:

A new Zogby poll confirms what everyone suspected:

58% of respondents found political bias on the part of college professors a "serious" problem. That's encouraging. Who was concered? 91% of those self-described as "very conservative" found bias a problem while a scant 3% of liberals believed so. None of this is very surprising.

Somewhat more interestingly, 46% of respondents indicated that they believed that the quality of a college education was worse than it was 25 years ago. Only 29% believed that it had improved.

A stirring vote of confidence in American higher education.

A colleague forwarded the following to me, found in The New York Times

Re "Young Americans Are Leaning Left, New Poll Finds" (front page, June 27):

As a professor who for years has spoken on the virtues of liberalism, I find it extremely pleasing to know that young Americans are once again beginning to lean on the left.

It gives me great hope that this new generation will go on to restore what has been taken away from us in the last seven years of the ultraconservative Bush administration and its collaborators in Congress.

While your conservative readers will accuse me of being yet another liberal professor indoctrinating students, it is more important to have voters who support universal health coverage for all, believe that gay marriage and abortion should be legal and that global warming is a serious problem, and finally, willing to vote for a presidential candidate who smoked marijuana, who is a woman or African-American.

In short, these voters will turn our nation into a kinder and gentler place and that is so much better than the current divisive, religion-suffocating, anti-science and war-filled living conditions.

Michael Hadjiargyrou
Stony Brook, N.Y., June 27, 2007

Well, if it makes the students kinder and gentler...

According to a 2007 poll, 95% of Sweden's young people between the ages of fifteen and twenty know what Auschwitz was, yet 90% don't know what the word 'Gulag' refers to, despite the Russians having dispatched to these infamous labor camps thousands of innocent people.

This lack of knowledge is not the fault of the young, but of the media and of other social institutions, whose proper role is the capturing and transmission of truth. Sweden is a Socialist country, and one suspects that the failure to accurately portray Communism is a consequence of the sense of kinship the Swedish Left feels for Socialism's rabid brother. Because of this betrayal of the truth, the generation about to assume leadership in Sweden will face that grave responsibility stuffed with false information. For example, some 43% of those polled believe that Communism has spread prosperity - not famine - wherever its chill grip has extended. Although they realize Communism has cost some innocent lives, 20% of these young people estimate that loss of life at 10,000. 43% come slightly closer to the mark, with an estimate of 1 million. Few, however, realize that the actual total exceeds, by 50%, the combined total deaths of the two World Wars. The correct estimate of lives destroyed by Communism already exceeds 100 million, a tally that continues to mount today.

Henry Lewis Gates, renowned Harvard professor of African-American Studies - which is to say, someone about as deep as can be gotten in the belly of the diversity-obsessed academic beast - said something quite remarkable the other day. Invited to address the graduates of Kentucky's Berea College, founded in 1855 as the first integrated college in the South, from the speakers platform Gates trod very familiar territory. He lauded the benefits of affirmative action, and instructed the grads that it isn't enough to "pay lip service" to diversity. But in an interview he gave an enterprising reporter for the Lexington Herald-Leader, things got interesting. Gates allowed that while he, the son of a janitor, had needed affirmative action to get ahead, his own privileged children did not; nor should they benefit from it. But poor white children should. "We need to get more black people into the middle class," he concluded. "We need to get more white people into the middle class."

One cannot help but wonder whether the learned professor realizes that such a position -support for economic affirmative action, but opposition to the kind based merely on skin color - is identical to that held by the nation's leading crusader against racial preferences (and a man much detested by campus liberals and leftists), Ward Connerly. Indeed, in his successful fights on behalf of state initiatives to end race-based college admissions and government hiring in California, Washington and Michigan, Connerly has been bitterly denounced as a race traitor and worse for saying the very same thing; demanding, for instance, how affirmative action supporters can fail to see the elemental unfairness of a college admissions officer giving preference to the child of a black surgeon over the child of a white coal miner who would be the first in his family to go to college.

Faculty at American colleges and universities are more religious than many of us believe-65 percent say they believe in God and 46 percent claim a personal relationship with God. Still, they are far less religious than the general population, some 93 percent of which believes in God, with 66 percent reporting a personal relationship. While 80 percent of the public identify themselves as Christian, the comparable percentage of faculty is much lower-56 percent-primarily because Evangelical Christians account for 33 percent of the general population but only 11 percent of college faculty. These numbers show up in "Religious Beliefs and Behavior of College Faculty," a report by the Institute for Jewish and Community Research. Some 6,600 faculty were surveyed.

One of the strongest findings is that political ideology is highly associated with attendance at religious services. Those who go to services every week, or almost every week: 24 percent of liberals, 44 percent of moderates, and 66 percent of conservatives. Non-religious faculty tend to be the most negative about U.S. policies in the Middle East and most positive about the United Nations and institutions such as the International Court of Justice. The vast majority of faculty listed North Korea, followed by the U.S., as the greatest threats to international stability.