To my chagrin the Washington Post Beer Bracket is run by a panel of judges. Your vote doesn’t matter! Not only that, but many of the judges aren’t beer experts. The biggest disgrace so far was when Leinenkugel’s Sunset Wheat rightfully demolished Ommegang Hennepin with 89% to 11% in reader votes and Ommegang advanced anyway!!

I have only tasted 2/8 of the beers left and no longer feel qualified to comment on this contest. The two I have had, Stone Pale Ale and Sam Adams Honey Porter, are far from swill, but they are inferior brews. I plan to try the other six. If any are good I will put up a follow up post.

Oh, the name I post under, Grozet, is a golden ale made with gooseberries from Scotland.

I am getting word that JMU’s Student Government Association is bringing charges against one of its most popular members. Will provide updates as more becomes public!

UPDATE: Adam Hall (JMU CR) has been brought up on charges of missing too many meetings. The charges appear to be bogus and potentially politically motivated. Will keep this post updated.

My last post on Delegate Landes’ academic freedom bill referenced testimony I gave to the House Education Subcommittee on Higher Education in 2007 on behalf of Landes’ bill. Below is my true personal story of liberal bias in the classroom.

Before the subcommittee opened up to public testimony the delegates debated the relevance of Landes’ HB 1643. One Democrat asked if anyone knew of a single example of bias that Landes’ bill would supposedly correct. Answering this question by providing credible stories is important. This is why I share my story below and ask you to email me at CRFVBlog@gmail.com if you have a story of classroom bias.

When the subcommittee’s floor opened I piped up and recounted the story of my freshmen year General Writing 103 course where I was systematically graded down for writing opinion papers with a conservative slant.

Dr. Patrick Wasley [this is his real name, he was an adjunct English professor at JMU], taught my GWRIT 103 course. He was tall, lanky, liberal, and very soft spoken. He was known for assigning numerous papers and being a picky grader. The class was so pointless that we watched films like Michael Moore’s Roger & Me.

Throughout the semester I received low grades on papers where I argued for conservative policies. A classmate of mine suggested I drop my political views when writing papers and adopt Wasley’s. This student had already stopped writing papers from his libertarian angle in lieu of Wasley’s far left perspective. His grades improved.

I found this interesting and wrote my next paper on the FCC and Janet Jackson. I took a center-left view on the issue and wound up with an A on the paper. Wasley humorously commented to me that one often doesn’t get to discuss breasts in academic papers.

I found this pretty funny, but I was just getting involved in College Republicans and didn’t want to continue selling-out. I decided my final paper would be written from my traditional conservative viewpoint. The cornerstone of the paper was my advocacy of the assassination of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. My expert source for this suggestion was Fmr. U.S. Ambassador to Israel Edward Walker (appointed by Clinton).

Knowing this argument would be controversial I took my paper to the Freshmen Writing Center at JMU and asked them to grade my paper. They did so and gave me an A or an A- at worst. I asked for this in writing.

I turned in the paper and received a low C with almost no explanation. Next to my suggestion for assassination Wasley wrote something along the lines of, “this is outlandish and reprehensible”. I cannot provide an accurate quote because of what I did next. I took the graded paper and a copy of the Writing Center’s suggested grade and attached it to my paper. I next slid it under his office door with a note suggesting he re-grade my paper.

I wound up with a B in the course. He revised my grade after I forced him into a corner. A year later I heard a story from a credible source that Dr. Wasley was fired from JMU after telling an ROTC cadet that his comrades were killing babies in Iraq (I will stress I could not verify this information). Don’t mess with JMU ROTC!

If you have as story of academic bias please email me at CRFVBlog@gmail.com.

March is Women’s history month and the University of Mary Washington has a series of lectures and exhibits planned to supposedly celebrate this. While there are several lectures dealing with some historical issues of interest relating to women, the events seem to mainly be an excuse to push the feminist agenda onto our campus. The keynote speaker in the lineup is a blogger for National Abortion Rights Action League’s Pro Choice America (NARAL), there is also a film highlighting the challenges of women running for public office.

Is this what we should be focusing on? Should we be highlighting the victimization of women?

While the movement may have been begun, with the 19^th amendment, to gain legal equality for women, something we all agree on; the movement quickly became perverted by other aspects. This new feminism, what we think of today when we hear the word, is rooted in Betty Friedan’s book, The Feminine Mystique which many view as the manifesto for the movement. This book however is directed against femininity. This new wave, what is the basis of today’s feminist movement encourages the victim mentality, androgyny, as well as the link between the sexual revolution and feminism.

“Nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent,” Eleanor Roosevelt famously stated. When we place ourselves in the role of a victim we see that we end up there. By bemoaning our plights and being angry about our supposed history of inferiority we focus on these negative feelings. We are encouraged to think of motherhood, and being a stay at home mother as somehow lower than the life of a career woman. What if the two can both be first priority? The goal is then to balance the skills it takes to be successful in the working world, such as focus with the skills of being a mother, where distraction to new tasks or to children who believe they ought to be the center of your attention. This should be the goal to be able to do both and yes, that means arguing for more of certain rights.

There is a desire to be treated like men and reject fully or belittle the sex differences. In another of the exalted books of the feminist movement, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, Beauvior implies that men are better than women and speaks of masculinity as somehow above femininity. She asserts that women are capable of manliness, and attempts to create a gender neutral society. Women however have not been liberated by this gender neutral environment, but have in fact been trapped by it. Instead of being held back from careers they may have aspired to, they are now pushed further than they may want to go.

In their fight against the ‘double standard,’ there is the mistaken idea that autonomy is linked to being just as sexually promiscuous as men. While earlier feminist movements in the 19^th and early 20^th century argued for men’s sexual behavior to be raised to that of women’s, the new wave argued to lower the standard of women to that of men. While we may acknowledge the double standard, we need to be wary of throwing it away too haphazardly. Women have three main disadvantages when we attempt to play this game of promiscuity; there is the issue of pregnancy, the fact that women contact STD’s much easier and the generally more heartache prone nature of women. By women’s view of empowerment being linked to sexual promiscuity we in fact undermine the very foundations of femininity. This promiscuity devalues women by men seeing them as something that can be used for their own ends and women accepting this status as the tools of men.

Feminists threw away the moral superiority of women, a beautiful counteraction to the physical superiority of men. There is an obvious void in what we call the feminist movement today and a need for a new movement that can do justice not only to the similarities between the sexes but also to the differences. While the state should continue to be gender neutral, it is important that society recognize gender differences. The slogan of the personal as political need to be revamped, because wouldn’t it be better for all of us if the personal wasn’t political?

The media coverage about confronting liberal bias in the classroom has mainly centered on David Horowitz’s Academic Bill of Rights. Fortunately or unfortunately, the ABOR has successfully been branded as a heavy handed attempt at reform that would harm free speech. Conservatives need not reflexively support it just because the press gives it the lion’s share of coverage. Right here in Virginia Delegate Steve Landes (R-25) has introduced an academic freedom bill in ’07 and ‘08. Below I provide a little history of each bill as well as what it hopes to achieve.

Del. Landes’ 2007 bill HB 1643 failed in a House Education subcommittee last year. I had the opportunity to speak to the bill and share my personal story of liberal bias in the classroom. My next post will be on this very subject.

Del. Landes’ 2008 bill HB 118 passed the House by a unanimous vote, but Landes withdrew the bill from consideration when it made it to the Senate. When asked for comment Landes office stated that they will probably introduce a new and “improved version of the bill” next year. I encourage you to email him and tell him how important his bill is: DelSLandes@house.state.va.us

Both versions of the bill have a focus on creating transparency by requiring a biennial report on the status of academic freedom in Virginia’s public higher education system. The benefit of a report is that it would be inexpensive and perhaps compel colleges to self-correct instead of forcing the General Assembly to institute top down reforms. I will review what the 2008 version of the bill’s report would have included as well as look at the essential flaw in the bill.

2008’s HB 118 asked for six questions to be answered in the report. 1) Has the college followed academic freedom guidelines stated in said college’s institutional statements? 2) Were speakers allowed to come on the basis of interest, not political acceptability? 3) Did aforementioned speakers have events that went on without unruly interruption? 4) Did hiring and tenure policies contain political discrimination? 5) Did campus publications have freedom of the press? 6) Were speech codes existent at said college?

This bill addresses many of the questions I would like to see answered. Bloggers would have a field day with the report, and I applaud Del. Landes’ efforts. My problem with the bill is that it assumes Virginia’s colleges already have acceptable policies in place, or that they are even in existence. James Madison’s phrase “If men were angels” comes to mind. Corruption is ripe in collegiate definitions. Malevolent liberals could have written the colleges rules and skewed them to their benefit. In that case the report would read like a propaganda statement. On the other hand, the threat of transparency may force correction/addition of these rules.

“Years of relativism, during which Danes felt they “had no right to ask anyone else to live like us,” ended with the [Muhammad caricature] cartoons“.

~Danish Newspaper Editor/Cartoonist Flemming Rose

In my last post I defined the problem of liberal activist professors. In this post I show how ideological activism affects higher education. All research cited below comes from papers submitted for the symposium Reforming the Politically Correct University put on by the American Enterprise Institute in November of 2007. At a later post I will provide personal accounts of bias.

1) Liberals have taken over academia and will often only hire other liberals. The results of this groupthink are that “conservatives and libertarians are outnumbered by liberals and Marxists by roughly two to one in economics, more than five to one in political science, and by 20 to one or more in anthropology and sociology”. [Klein, Stern]

2) The large number of liberals has a negative impact on research opportunities for conservative students. Research has found “strong statistical evidence that talented conservative undergraduates in the humanities, social sciences and sciences are less likely to pursue a PhD than their liberal peers . . .in part because they are offered fewer opportunities to do research with their professors”. [Kelly-Woessner, Woessner]

3) Conservative PhDs must work harder than liberals. There is “strong statistical evidence that socially conservative academics must publish substantially more books and articles to get the same jobs as liberal peers“. [Lichter, Rothman]

4) Speech codes have increased even though they have been declared unconstitutional. These codes often come packaged in language of diversity, personal respect, and speech zones. [Lukianoff]

5) Other notable findings from the AEI symposium include studies concluding that A) the traditional emphasis on the “classical liberal ideal of free thought” . . . are “being displaced by other priorities” [Piereson] B) literature departments are less diverse than those in the 1950′s due to the “study of works only through the lens of race, class, and gender oppression” [Cantor] C) the dominant method of training teachers “provides an ideologically motivated interpretation and inaccurate representation of history” [Stotsky].

Like I said in my post yesterday, this Wednesday a lecturer at JMU will be discussing how the Academic Bill of Rights is totalitarian. I will not be addressing this issue. Instead over five posts in the next two days I will be discussing why there is a need for legislative reforms to stop liberal professorial bias.

Longtime UVA Philosophy Professor Richard Rorty - paraphrased from Universality and Truth, in Robert B. Brandom, ed., Rorty and his Critics (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 21‑2

One purpose of post-Enlightenment education is to have students “outgrow their primitive fear, hatreds, and superstitions. . . . It is a concept which I, like most Americans who teach humanities or social science in colleges and universities, invoke when we try to arrange things so that students who enter as bigoted, homophobic, religious fundamentalists will leave college with views more like our own. . . . We assign first‑person accounts of growing up homosexual to our homophobic students for the same reasons that German schoolteachers in the postwar period assigned The Diary of Anne Frank. . . So we are going to go right on trying to discredit [parents of fundamentalist students] in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist religious community of dignity, trying to make your views seem silly rather than discussable . . . I am just as provincial and contextualist as the Nazi teachers who made their students read Der Stürmer; the only difference is that I serve a better cause“.

Liberal education is re-education. Rorty firmly believes he holds the absolute truth. Rorty sees his role as a teacher not as a Millian guide, but as a stern father who teaches his students exactly what is right and wrong. This activist view of education is the liberal academic view I believe must be stamped out.

Now contrast the above statement with a quote from Adolf Hitler – William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), Chapter 8, pp.248-249.

“When an opponent declares, ‘I will not come over to your side,’ ” Hitler said in a speech on November 6, 1933, “I calmly say, ‘Your child belongs to us already . . . What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community.’ ” And on May 1, 1937, he declared, “This new Reich will give its youth to no one, but will itself take youth and give to youth its own education and its own upbringing.”

As a violin student at JMU, I teach two days a week at the Madison String Academy, a government-funded strings program for children in elementary school. We wear your average college-student clothes for this teaching position – jeans and t-shirts – with the permission of our faculty supervisor.

Monday, I wore my new Rock for Life T-shirt, which you can see at www.nationalprolifetshirtday.com. When the faculty member saw my shirt, she got very upset and told me I had to wear a jacket over the shirt. I was shocked and told her I didn’t have one, and one of the other student teachers suggested I turn the shirt inside out – the professor said that was fine, but I refused.

I mean, really. Fifteen kids will be thinking I’m nineteen and can’t dress myself. So the professor says, “You’ll have to leave before the kids get here. That’s inappropriate for children and you should have thought about that! This isn’t the place for political statements!”

So apparently saying murder is wrong is now inappropriate for children. But other students have worn Corona t-shirts and those are perfectly appropriate. The inconsistency is just stunning. I find it slightly more than ironic that the university named for the “father of the Constitution” is encroaching on what the Supreme Court termed “freedom of expression;” which according to them, falls under freedom of speech. Yes, that’s right – they said students have Constitutional rights at school. Imagine that. So why can’t I have a gun?

Bulldog

Dr. Bill Scheuerman, the former President of the United University Professions, will present a symposium talk entitled: “Stealth Totalitarianism: Questioning the Academic Bill of Rights” this Wednesday, March 19, 2008 at JMU’s ISAT 159 from 5:00-6:15pm.

I have class and cannot attend, but would encourage others to go and give this liberal some grief. Dr. Scheuerman sees the Academic Bill of Rights, “as a Trojan horse that claims to protect free speech in the classrooms but in fact functions to silence debate”.

While there are parts of David Horowtiz’s ABOR that I disagree with, most of the liberals who argue against it also argue that liberal professorial abuse in academia is minimal at best. Over the next few days I will be presenting explicit accounts of abuse as well as an argument for policy changes.