My friend and fellow lawyer (and law clerk and TA at Penn State University’s School of Law) Josh Blackman has put out two new videos with his non-profit, the Harlan Institute. Named after the former justice, the Institutes mission is to facilitate learning about the supreme Court and the Constitution among high school aged students. Among other services, Harlon offers preset curriculums for teachers—great for rainy days! Josh has recently been able to multiply his institutes efforts by partnering with Justice Sandra O’Connor’s outfit dedicated to promoting created civic awareness. Check out Josh’s videos promoting the Harlan Institute and FantasyScotus—yes, a fantasy sports game that allows you to predict just like the justices predict:

From deep, deep inside the bowels of the modern university system:

Baylor alum, Terry Mattingly, at “Get Religion,” quotes Berry Tramell of The Oklahoman:
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Left-wing academia paying a bounty for left-wing “scholarly” ideas? You can’t make this stuff up.

Why they feel the need to pay, who knows? You can’t swing a cat on campus without hitting on some marxist nonsense.

We are writing to ask for your help in an important project in the battle with conservative ideas. Today, as in the past, the fight to transform American politics and policy takes place on a battlefield in which ideas, narratives, and the construction of a politically driven conventional wisdom constitutes a set of highly potent weapons. Too often conservatives in the Congress and the media have captured the rhetorical high ground by asserting that virtually any substantial, progressive change in public policy, especially that involving taxes on the wealthy or regulation of business, will kill jobs, generate a stifling government bureaucracy, or curtail economic growth.

See, when the left gets its ass kicked on the battlefield of ideas [can I say "ass?" Oh, well, if President Obama can, so can I], it’s always because of “narrative” or rhetoric, not because their ideas are stupid.

BTW, the Public Welfare Foundation, the non-profit [untaxed] advocacy group dispensing this lefty largesse, is sitting on over half a billion dollars in endowments. That could buy a helluva lot of “social justice,” instead of soaking the, you know, taxpayers.

Just sayin’.

I know I’ve been on a lot about the academic establishment lately, but my travels have unfortunately taken me there. With each new encounter, I’m more convinced of the truth of Orwell’s dictum, “You must be an intellectual. Only an intellectual could say something so stupid.”

Anywayz, via The AmLaw Daily, a vicious and delicious putdown of the academic regime north of the border by one Robert Martin:

“Each fall, a horde of illiterate, ignorant cretins enters Canada’s universities. A few years later, they move on, just as illiterate, just as ignorant and rather more cretinous, but now armed with bits of paper, which most of them are probably not able to read, called degrees,” Martin writes, courtesy of The Guardian.

“Canadian universities are closed and fearful institutions, which actively enforce uniformity on their members.”

Martin is especially worked up about tuition rates at Canada’s law schools. Pointing to a tuition hike to $20,000 in 2001 at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Law, Martin says the move opened the way for other law schools in Ontario to follow suit, setting prices that he writes are “both extortionate and fraudulent.”

“If tuition fees were to bear any resemblance to the inherent quality of what was being purchased, they would likely be set at the level of $12 per year,” Martin writes. “There are two phrases that can be used to describe every law faculty in Canada. The phrases are ‘feminist seminary’ and ‘psychotic kindergarten.’”

Heheh. Now, I’m not ready to tar America’s law schools with that brush, but as a general point about our own university system, the shoe looks like a tighter fit every day.

Here in the USA, we don’t even know what a “quango” is.

But they’re already here. The Puppet Masters. The Invasion of the Pod People.

I’m still waiting to find out the true story of the Texas curriculum fight [and I don't expect we ever will]. I don’t trust the accounts from the mainstream media, and certainly not blogs who largely took their info from the highly partisan Texas Freedom Network, whatever that is. [Well, not really hard to tell.]

I have no doubt the new standards overstep, but I’ve seen no account of the flaws of the previous regime either, to compare and contrast.

Via historian John Fea’s blog, I found something called The Organization of American Historians, which wrote a letter of protest against the new Texas standards because it

“supports the efforts of the professionally trained educators of Texas to achieve and maintain a history curriculum that reflects the basic consensus of scholarship.”

I do not know what this means. Truth is not necessarily scholarly consensus. I won’t go into the political leanings of the majority of the scholarly academy [which would compose that consensus] except to say it cannot be accused of leaning to the right. (more…)

I thought this must be a joke, but it appears legit. [And I do get that the author seems to realize the absurdity of it all. Sort of.]

He certainly is thorough, though. I don’t think he missed any, although a new one might have been invented this morning.

I’m tempted to suggest that for efficiency’s sake, it could all be combined into a Department of Post-Normative Studies.

But the way things are going in academia today, it would be more efficient to just create a department of DWM Studies, give ‘em a little building in a corner of the campus somewheres, and straighten this thing out once and for all.

Following up on a two-part series I published in March on the BioLogos blog, this morning I published a third installment, “Intelligent Design and Me, Part III: A Response to Some Critics.” Here’s how it begins:

On March 19 and 20 of this year I posted two brief essays on the BioLogos blog (Part I and Part II). In them I summarized my own intellectual journey on the issue of Intelligent Design (ID). Since their publication, many responses have been published online in the comment threads of this and other blogs. Dear friends and respectful acquaintances offered some of these critiques.

Given my ontological finitude, my publishing and teaching schedule, as well as my increasingly diminishing interest in the topic, I could not and can not respond to each and every criticism, though I know that virtually all of them were offered with genuine respect. It is my hope that in this brief, and no doubt inadequate, reply that I can replicate my critics’ sincere deference.

Continue reading>>>

A fourth installment will appear tomorrow on the BioLogos blog.

(Originally posted on Return to Rome blog)

We’ll have to add this AP story from Drudge to the long, silly list of recent Confederate setbacks in academia.

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – A college fraternity inspired by Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee has banned members around the country from wearing Confederate uniforms to “Old South” parties and parades after years of complaints that the tradition was racially insensitive.

The Virginia-based Kappa Alpha Order issued new rules to chapters earlier this year saying members aren’t allowed to wear Rebel uniforms to parties or during their parades, which are a staple on campuses across the South.

“A staple on campuses across the South”?  Hmmm…I’ve attended or taught at seven different universities in four southern states, and I can’t remember seeing a single Confederate uniform.

At any rate, I wonder if this guy has gotten the memo?

Speaking of mascots . . . not all Irish-Americans are short and green. I should know. (Recognize the fellow in the hat?) You can watch part 2 by clicking on the link at the end of the video. It’s worth it.

This video does a great job of illustrating the idiocy of political correctness, which is primarily being propagated today by liberals searching for meaning in their lives. Fight the power.

Sorry to post so seldom here, but this is a case right up SA’s alley. Imagine a law school that refuses to recognize a Christian student group because it requires its officers to be… yes, Christian. We at the Washington Times editorialized on it today. More on the case available here.  A key paragraph from the masterful lead brief for the Christian Legal Society by the peerless Michael McConnell is here:

A “variety of viewpoints” is far more likely to be
achieved when students are allowed to sort themselves
out by interest and viewpoint—Republicans in
one club, Democrats in another; Muslims in one organization,
Lutherans in another. Without such sorting,
all viewpoints are blurred. The Democratic Caucus
becomes the Bipartisan Caucus; the Christian,
Jewish, and Muslim clubs become the Ecumenical
Society; and every other group organized around a
belief becomes a Debate Club. Each group becomes
no more than its own diverse forum—writ small. The
all-comers rule thus defeats the very purpose of recognizing
any group as a group in the first place. Preventing
students from organizing around shared beliefs
does not foster a robust or diverse exchange of
views.

This is a crucially important case. Free speech, free religion, and free association all hang in the balance.

This just in:

Baylor University announces that Kenneth Winston Starr, J.D., current dean of the School of Law at Pepperdine University, has been named the 14th president of Baylor University. Judge Starr was the unanimous choice of both the 14-member Presidential Search Committee and the 10-member Presidential Search Advisory Committee, and was elected unanimously by the Baylor Board of Regents on February 12, 2010.

Judge Starr will be introduced to the campus community by Regents Chair R. Dary Stone, J.D. ’77, at a university-wide meeting in the Bill Daniel Student Center on the Baylor campus at 3 p.m., Tuesday, Feb. 16.

If you are not able to attend Tuesday’s gathering, the event will be streamed live at http://www.baylor.edu/president/search/live/. In the event of excessive loads on our systems, on-campus viewers may experience delays or problems with the stream. The entire program will be recorded and archived for viewing on the Presidential Search web site after 3 p.m.
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“Education, after all, is typically described as a core, and possibly the core, state responsibility . . . Homeschooling is now such an entrenched practice, recriminalization is not a viable option in any event.” ~ Robin L. West, Georgetown University Law Center

Not a “viable option?” Well at least I can rest peacefully tonight knowing that jack-booted thugs won’t be knocking my daughter’s door down any time soon to arrest her for teaching “the state’s children.” (My daughter would want to know where the state was when she was going through those labor pains to deliver “their” children. By the way Professor, the youngest one has something stinky in her diaper – could you lend a hand here?) Professor West thinks that more government regulation of homeschooling is a good idea:

As the political philosopher and homeschool critic Robert Reich has persuasively argued, curricular review would give the state a way to ensure that the academic content is such as to protect the children’s interest in both acquiring the necessary skills for active, autonomous, and responsible citizenship in adulthood, and in being exposed to diverse and more liberal ways.

Well, gee whiz, that approach certainly has worked wonders in the public schools, hasn’t it? Diverse and more liberal – that’s what this is really all about. Professor West doesn’t like the fact that “the state” is losing the opportunity to indoctrinate OUR children.  Maybe she’s bucking for Secretary of Education in the Obama administration. More here.

He writes at NRO’s the Corner:

When we do know for a fact that Mutallab tried to blow up a plane, we get a presidential “allegedly” (“a passenger allegedly tried to ignite an explosive device on his body, setting off a fire”), and yet when we don’t know all the facts, as in the Professor Gates mess, we get instantaneous certainty (“the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home.”)

The perils of political correctness are especially pernicious when the emperor has no clues.

See here.

An old friend named “Winston Smith” stopped by our comments section the other day with this zinger:

“…is it merely coincidence that folks like Rush (Big Pharma) Limbaugh have flourished in a medium that doesn’t require its audience to know how to read?”

Hehe. Good one. Of course, it was pointed out that Limbaugh’s audience scored significantly higher than presumably more literate NPR listeners in a common political knowledge quiz.

And from over at Harvard, that ivory tower of knowledge and books and reading and progressive politics and other brilliant stuff, we get this report:

“Students at many of the country’s most prestigious colleges and universities are graduating with less knowledge of American history, government, and economics than they had as incoming freshmen, with Harvard University seniors scoring a “D+” average on a 60-question multiple-choice exam about civic literacy.

“At the most expensive colleges, they actually graduate knowing less,” the executive director of the Jack Miller Center at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Michael Ratliff, said.

Either it’s all the bonghits and watching The Daily Show, or places like Harvard, which serves as the Democrat establishment’s farm team, just make you more ignorant than when you started.

That would explain a lot…

This video was recently shown to elementary schoolchildren in Farmington, Utah. So pledge your service to the President and don’t flush after you pee-pee.

HuffPo managed to find a spectacular piece of postmodern asininity at Obama’s alma mater, Occidental College.  From the course descriptions of the Critical Theory and Social Justice program:

180. STUPIDITY.

Stupidity is neither ignorance nor organicity, but rather, a corollary of knowing and an element of normalcy, the double of intelligence rather than its opposite. It is an artifact of our nature as finite beings and one of the most powerful determinants of human destiny. Stupidity is always the name of the Other, and it is the sign of the feminine. This course in Critical Psychology follows the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, Gilles Deleuze, and most recently, Avital Ronell, in a philosophical examination of those operations and technologies that we conduct in order to render ourselves uncomprehending. Stupidity, which has been evicted from the philosophical premises and dumbed down by psychometric psychology, has returned in the postmodern discourse against Nation, Self, and Truth and makes itself felt in political life ranging from the presidency to Beavis and Butthead. This course examines stupidity.

CORE REQUIREMENT MET: UNITED STATES

Congresswoman Diane Watson (D) California. Good Lord Almighty.

. . . it wasn’t until 1988 that a group of U.N. ambassadors was able to visit Cuba for 11 days and documented “137 cases of torture, 7 disappearances, political assassinations and thousands of violations” of human rights. This trip was summarized “in a 400-page report, which was the longest report ever to appear on the agenda of the U.N.”

This report provided irrefutable proof of what Valladares had recounted in “Against All Hope.” But academia and the media successfully passed over both the book and the report.

This 1988 report included “locking political prisoners in refrigerated rooms; blindfolded immersions in pools; intimidation by dogs; firing squad simulations; beatings, forced labor; confinement for years in dungeons called gavetas; the use of loudspeakers with deafening sounds during hunger strikes; degradation of prisoners by forced nudity in punishment cells; withholding water during hunger strikes; forcing prisoners to present themselves in the nude before their families (to force them to accept plans for political rehabilitation); denial of medical assistance for the sick; and forcing those condemned to die to carry their own coffins and dig their own graves prior to being shot.”

Against All Hope

Also via Rod Dreher,  the EEOC has evidently decided the best use of its time and resources to go after Catholic colleges not funding abortion and contraception. The EEOC has found Belmont Abbey College, a small Catholic school near Charlotte, NC, in violation of federal anti-discrimination laws because its health plan does not pay for oral contraception.  They are discriminating against women, saith the EEOC, since only women take birth control pills.

The real problem, of course, is not paying for contraception and elective sterilzation–this has nothing to do with discrimination against women.  The focus on birth-control pills is simply a way to justify the intervention of the EEOC, much like the ever-elastic ‘interstate commerce’ clause covering federal intervention in most anything.   Since Belmont Abbey is a Catholic insitution, they can’t simply charge religious discrimination outright, although I’m sure they would love to.

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Now we can sit back and await the outcry.  Henry Louis Gates, Jr., has managed to get himself arrested at his own home in Cambridge after neighbors reported a suspected break-in.  He spent several years at Duke complaining of his treatment on a regular basis, in spite of being lionized at Duke and in academia generally.

Call me cynical, but this feels manufactured.  Just ask yourself:  white, black, or latino, how hard is it to keep from being arrested for breaking into your own house?  Cops just love filing that extra paperwork, don’t you know.

A must for recent college graduates to give their input on their education, fruitful or otherwise.

I recently accepted an invitation to participate in the annual Penner Debate at Wheaton College in Illinois. Sponsored by Wheaton’s Center for Applied Christian Ethics, it will be held on September 3, 2009 on Wheaton’s campus. You can find more information about the event here. The topic of my public dialogue with Timothy George will be “A Question of Christian Identity: Evangelical and Catholic?”

Timothy George is the Dean of the Beeson Divinity School at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. He is a wonderful Christian man and an outstanding scholar. In January 2008 we engaged in a similar dialogue at Palm Beach Atlantic University in West Palm Beach, Florida. And we are set to do it yet again on April 22, 2010 on the Beeson campus.

Moderating the Wheaton event is Chris Castaldo, pastor of community outreach at the College of Church of Wheaton. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Holy Ground: Walking With Jesus as a Former Catholic (Zondervan, 2009), for which I wrote an endorsement.

(Originally posted on the Return to Rome blog)

Most of Obama’s op-ed today in the Washington Post defending the stimulus read precisely as expected (you can find Stephen Spruiell’s annotated version in The Corner) with more misdirection on fiscal responsibility, reducing health care costs, and so forth.  I was surprised, however, to find myself agreeing with his comments regarding college education.  He begins badly enough, with the absurd goal of “leading the world in college degrees by 2020.”  If he wants to lead the world in the devaluation of an already questionable credential, that’s the way to go.

His focus in the next paragraph, though, is on an expanded role for community colleges.  Herding more apathetic, ill-prepared students into four-year programs makes no sense.  Giving many of those students the opportunity to acquire a set of specific skills in a two-year setting is a far better alternative.

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According to a tenured faculty member who once sat on the admission board at the Naval Academy, the answer is yes: (more…)

At Houston Baptist University, we’ve started up a really nice partnership with John Mark Reynolds and Wheatstone Academy to offer Christian worldview programming for high school students during the summer. If you live in or around Houston and have a student who could use (or would enjoy!) an intellectual boot camp for the faith, this is it. The program goes from July 26 to August 1. The cost is $850 and is all inclusive of food, lodging, events, etc.

This is exactly what your student needs before going to college, especially if you will be sending them off to a state school. 

(Posted last week on What’s Wrong With the World)

Professor Brian Leiter of the University of Chicago has, again, misrepresented my point of view on Christian academic institutions that forbid their faculty and students to engage in extra-marital acts of intimacy including homosexual ones. I do not attribute this to malicious intent on Professor Leiter’s part. But rather, I think it is a consequence of a general lack of serious and respectful study and reflection on the philosophical beliefs that undergird theological traditions with which he disagrees.
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Liberty University has banned the Democratic club from campus.  I’m rather relieved, as this gives me a rare chance to defend the donkeys.  The impulse here–to oppose abortion and the redefinition of marriage–is laudable, but this is the wrong way to go about it.  Too often, in evangelical colleges (which I know well), there is a tendency to believe that “Christian World View” translates directly and simply into a set of political positions and demands allegiance to a specific party. It’s not about the parties, it’s about the principles.

It would be healthier for the Democratic club to be brought back to Liberty and the Republican club to be banned forthwith.

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