here, here...I couldn't have said it better myself.

One of my great disappointments was how left-wing a Jesuit law school was.

However, its time we thought out how to retake academia from the Marxists.

If CU offers Churchill an eight-figure buy-out, the taxpayers oughta just pull the plug on the entire goddamn catastrophe.

"its time we thought out howto retake academia from the Marxists."
Amen! With all the thousands of intelligent bloggers (and readers of blogs) sitting around in their pajamas we should be able to come up with something to supplement what Horowitz is doing. Perhaps if we could hit them where it hurts the most by somehow affecting government and/or alumni funding of universities.

"They already have a John Stossel, and there probably isn't room for a second one – even if I do have better hair."

Not to mention BITCHIN' LATS.

I'm sorry, Stephen.

Academia slowly drives out all conservative/libertarians, especially teaching programs. I'm in the Teacher ED program here at Purdue and between my card-carrying communist history prof and my uber liberal multiculturalism teacher I'm sinking deeper into a liberal stink hole. But in 2 years I'll be a high school history teacher so maybe I'll be able to fix some part of the problem. :)

Rant on Stephen, rant on!

Count me in as another guy who never really wanted to do anything but teach, but who hates political bullshit and wound up leaving that career path.

I graduated from Princeton cum laude (back in 1989 when Ivy League honors hadn't been completely devalued) with a degree in classics. Obviously nobody does classics for any reason other than to prepare for a career in academia. Fortunately for me, I got to spend the summer before my senior year in Greece with an intensive study group composed primarily of graduate students and professors. Talk about an eye-opener...I came back and did some very serious research into what percentage of my time in academia I could expect to spend teaching, and what percentage I could expect to spend playing games.

And that's how I wound up a futures trader and a software consultant. (That's also how I wound up being fluent in English, Latin, Greek, French, and German, and having passable Hebrew, and then moving to Texas...without being able to speak Spanish. A true triumph of planning, that career of mine...)

Not so fast awarding the faux Amerind ten mil. The tyranny of politcal correctness gone mad is over. As a poster above said, the taxpayers will go nuts as they should.

Perhaps, We, the innocents, just don't really understand our institutions of higher learning.

If, as some have posited, we live in a country controled by the fascists, why, then, would we not have detention centers for the more dangerous subversives among us? Wouldn't it be much more desireable to have them grouped in case it actually came to "throw-down" time? I realize that the ACLU would be screaming if we actually used concertina wire to restrain them. True also of ankle bracelets and shock collars. Perhaps we can keep them detained just by granting them tenure.

Burt, great "silver lining", thinking strategically. Then reduce funding by various mechanisms and watch the real fun begin. Might-could happen.

I had a similar experience when I entered college in the early 80’s. I was torn between a career in journalism, or one in engineering (OK, so I have always been confused). I was a science whiz, but I hated math. But I could also write very well for a high school kid. I actually won some scholarship cash for some stuff I wrote.

But after some prodding from my old man (“Major in Engineering, I’ll pay your tuition. Major in English, you’re on your own.”), I decided to major in engineering. I tried to work out some kind of journalism minor, but all I could swing was acceptance into a few honors English classes. I still thought I was going to have the best of both worlds.

But a funny thing happened when I attended the English classes. I didn’t really like any of my classmates or professors. And they absolutely hated me. They were mostly of hard core, left-leaning persuasions which were new and foreign to me. I was actually surprised by this. I was a dope smokin, long haired, dead head hippy type, so I thought I had all the street cred I needed to hang with the lefties. Hell, I thought I was a lefty. But these folks belonged to some kind of super elite “we know what’s best” kind of leftist crowd. And a lot of them were gay….. (not there’s anything wrong with that).

I learned early on which topics where OK to discuss and write about, and I aced my first two classes. But by the third one, the political trend was confirmed in my mind, and I realized I had no future with that group of people.

But my engineering classes were the polar opposite. I actually liked to hang out with many of my profs and fellow classmates there. Sure, their fashion sense and hygiene habits were a bit peculiar. But the profs tried to teach us true critical thinking and logical analysis skills, and they practiced what they preached. Think about it: its not like you can design a safe bridge using a certain pet theory that you just know is right. No politics were ever mentioned, anywhere, at any time, and it was a damn near perfect meritocracy. So I dropped my illusions of journalistic greatness, and focused on the geek stuff.

I have never regretted that decision for one second. I get my writing urges satisfied with magazine articles, technical papers, patent applications (a real favorite!), and the occasional blog comment. And when I see people lining up to buy a shiny new product that I designed, I know that I really am changing the world.

Of course, my writing is not a polished as it could be. And maybe I need to work on my editing skills a bit. But I am having a blast. And I’m probably making more moola than 99% of those English classmates and professors. So its not only been their loss, its been my gain.

F’em all.

As the Churchill and Sgrena affairs demonstrate, and as the experiences of other commenters underscore, Marxism’s reality-warping relationship with the truth means all events must be interpreted within a pre-determined theoretical narrative.

That the world's finest universities are in the hands of these people is disturbing, indeed.

Objectivity, or truth, as we might know it, is impossible for true communists, because nothing can challenge the narrative – perhaps the closest thing there is to what post-modernists call a construct.

It’s not just a quaint, alternative way of looking at the world; it’s an intellectual hall of mirrors into which honest discourse, and along with it, any possibility of knowing the truth, disappears.

How many caring, intelligent, well reasoned people have also fled from environmental sciences for similar reasons?

My partner for nearly 30 years was a professor at a major university (now retired). Having gotten a Masters myself, I was uniquely positioned to both observe the game from the inside and appreciate its significance.

The problem is that higher education in the humanities is a pyramid scam. Every year the system turns out scads of brand new Ph.D.s, each dreaming of a professorship somewhere, while the available faculty positions will accomodate maybe 2% of them. This means that once a philosophy or political viewpoint -- any viewpoint -- becomes entrenched, its practitioners have the luxury of accepting as candidates for teaching posts only those who already agree with them. If the system turned out candidates for faculty posts only at the replacement rate, schools would have to accept a wider range of viewpoints. But that isn't going to happen.

Stephen:

Thanks for sharing your Mizzou experience. I was similarly shocked out of academia and the writing life by my experience at the University of Southern California where, during the first Gulf War, I was literally threatened with expulsion for suggesting that the British decision to leave Iraq was, in light of the then-current situation, questionable.

I tried, really tried, to fit into the Alice-through-the-looking-glass world in which all whites are imperialist running dogs and all men are sexist oppressors and all capitalism is slavery. But, like you, I just couldn't completely disengage my brain.

The hyper-leftist academics at USC (including not only a CBS network broadcast alumna, but also an actual Communist Party member who was blacklisted -- and still bitter forty years later) were all about *feeling*, and if you are thinking, they just don't want to have anything to do with you. It was an incredibly frustrating experience, and, combined with the pathetic response of L.A.'s elite to the Rodney King riots that capped off my two years in the city, it paved the way for me to become a conservative.

So I left academia (where I had grown up, as my dad was a linguistics professor) and went out to the real world. I'm a happy lawyer now, but I am also bitterly disappointed by the ideological and anti-intellectual bigotry of the academy. And I am concerned about how my children will get a decent education with those clowns in charge.

David Rogers

Perhaps these folks could provide an alternative model.

http://www.hillsdale.edu/

Don't miss sending for Imprimis.

Happily, I had a better experience at Mizzou than Stephen did (a connection I wasn't aware of until now); I was mostly able to steer clear of much liberal interference from professors in my time there ('93-'98, philosophy and computer science.) Then again, I stayed away from the J-school and tended to mock those who lived their life there. (We did manage to convert one of them, though; he thought he was a liberal, but we set him straight. Former roommate of mine.)

Still, there were some odd moments that were indicative of a foreign mindset. Like the professor who tried to tell me (with all sincerity) that I couldn't appreciate my white privilege because I was white. Or the philosophy professor--a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat--who seemed shocked that I might vote for Ashcroft over Carnahan in the Senate race. And the dreck that often appeared on the editorial pages in the student newspaper The Maneater (my first experience where I noticed the minority conservative.) And the vicious hippy who taught me agenda-driven freshmen English--that was a trip. And the soft-headedness that emanated from the English majors I sometimes took classes with.

Wow, now that I'm thinking about it, there were lots of episodes.

I did enjoy my classes for the most part, though, and earned the respect (although not always the understanding) of some of the best professors in the humanities at Mizzou. Funny thing, though--I thought the professorial life would appeal to me more than a workaday life would. But there were computer jobs in the wide world, and my wife was in grad school. Now that I am where I am, university life no longer has the appeal it once did. Bit of a pity, that.

I actually came back to academia from the corporate world and, even though politically I'm viewed as some strange beast, this beats the heck out of a cube farm.

I do worry about the pablum that many of my colleagues are feeding my students; I had a colleague tell me the other day that if we could just get students to acknowledge the other side of the arugment that would be great....problem was, he was insisting that so many of our students are conservative (true) that they have no appreciation for liberal values and thus it falls to the heroic struggles of the faculty to "educate" them. In my interactions with students I've found that those who identify as conservatives know perfectly well what the lefties think. In addition, the lefty students on campus for the most part appreciate their conservative fellow-students. Most of them view the faculty as curious abberations. It's quite refreshing. The funny part is that most of my faculty colleagues don't know that they're viewed in this way by the students.

I haven't given up hope yet. Except for the education students and that's an whole 'nother issue.

Change the years, change Missouri to Florida and History to linguistics (and sort of anthropology) and it's kind of similar to my experience (though I found the real world a lot more alarming than anything on campus and stayed in).

And the marxists I knew weren't soviets or other vulgar varieties (they generally thought his blueprint for society was horribly wrong and flawed and doomed to failure/catastrophe) rather they thought he had some perceptive ways of looking at history and power relations, some of which were worth examining. (IME linguistics faculty are all over the place politically but anthros are lefties in the mostly good sense).

Steve Teeter - it seems to me that you're agruing that because leftist professors dominate and because they're in charge of hiring from a huge selection, that they will continue to hire left leaning professors. You say that to combat that, you should produce "fewer candidates" so that schools would have to accept a "wider range of viewpoints."

I don't think I quite understand your argument. It assumes that all the candidates turned out would reflect a balance in viewpoints. If you're first claim - that hiring is based on beliefs - then wouldn't it be logical to then say that the candidates for teaching jobs may also reflect the beliefs of those who taught?

---

I've had a professor that was borderline anarchist, and I've had a teacher that compared George W. to Jesus. I haven't experienced any discrimination on my work one way or another.

Strawman, Jason. Teeter didn't say that.

The way to take back universities is to end the grant mill, quit using higher education education as a prerequisite to remunerative employment, and to let the market reduce the compensation to its real value.

The rats wouldn't have filled up the ship if they weren't living so well on the crew's stores.

Went to Mizzou from Joplin in '76--same story. I had to be restrained from beating my honors English teacher, a ridiculous bastard.

I hope his prostate gives him trouble, the hairy ass-bandit.

I wasn't trying to misquote or misinterpret what Teeter was saying. If there's any confusion as to what I or he said, bring it up, Robrob.

I'm going to MU right now (masters in engineering) and I went here as an undergrad. You don't see so much left-wing bias in the engineering school, thank goodness, but every time I had to take a general ed class I got a glimpse.

There was the soc class I took on social problems. The teacher attempted to be sort of balanced. For instance, when he asked why Bush wanted to raise taxes, and some idiot said it was because he wanted more money for him and his friends, the teacher said no, it was to stimulate the economy. But on the other hand he had us read a book about the naysayers of social security, which mostly trashed Ronald Regan.

Then I had an intro philosophy class. The professor during the class was quite hostile to any of the christian or traditional ethical systems. Imagine my suprise when he took me aside and told me that he was a Christian. Seems like it's not too hard to figure out what the attitude is in that department.