A few weeks ago, Mark Lilla had an article in The Chronicle on the high-handed way in which conservatives and conservatism are treated in academe in general and the Center for the Comparative Study of Right-Wing Movements at Berkeley in particular.

A month later the Chronicle published a "Counterpoint" by Lawrence Rosenthal, executive director of the Berkeley center. It is a symptomatic reply, and it deserves further comment.

Lilla's main contention is that the academic understanding of conservatism tends toward flat narratives and smooth summations, such as the placement of anti-communism at the center of conservative thought and the identification of conservatism with right-wing extremism.

Rosenthal appeals to the Center's Web site to prove him wrong. "Our Web site distinguishes the current right from its predecessors by noting that before the fall of Communism, anti-Communism...

With C-SPAN's BookNotes, various local cable shows such as Connie Martinson's interviews, and author appearances on national shows such as Charlie Rose and Colbert (which are preserved on the Web--see this appearance, for instance, by Andrew Keen), there is, in fact, more screen exposure for authors and books than ever before.

It's a fact that cultural conservatives mistakenly overlook, and when they speak of culture going down the drain, they are vulnerable to example after example of literary and bookish material out there on multiple channels all the time. A better conservative argument is that while book culture has spread across TV, non-book culture has proliferated at a faster rate, making books appear less and less a force in culture at large. Yes, you can find an author here and there, but you have to plow through more and more non-book stuff to get there.

Just think of what...

Pew Research Center for the People & the Press put out a report two weeks ago entitled "What Does the Public Know?" (see here).  The results come from its "News IQ" quiz, which asks people about current events and conditions such as the unemployment rate and Max Baucus. As usual, folks under 30 come up at the bottom of the age-based groups, but another score will surprise many Chronicle readers.

It appears under the heading "Partisan Knowledge Gap." Republicans, it turns out, score higher than Democrats. Here is a chart of numbers for several questions.

In the current controversy over whether Rush Limbaugh is a racist, he and his supporters have based their denials on what they claim are inaccurate accounts of radio and TV broadcasts. A more verifiable source, however, is the text of his two mega-best-selling books published in the early 1990s.
            
The following passage from pages 117-18 of The Way Things Ought to Be (1992) reads sickeningly like a Ku Klux Klan tract.

The civil rights coalition in this country has had its way with the Democratic party since 1957. That was the last time the coalition, as a liberal constituency, was defeated. The coalition includes the ACLU and the leaders of such civil rights organizations as People for the American Way and the National Association for the Advancement of (Liberal) Colored People.

How have the leaders of these civil rights organizations become so empowered? They do not have...

With students doing so much of their reading assignments through the screen instead of on book or paper formats, it's important for educators to determine how the shift is altering their habits and learning. The research is just beginning, but it's getting deeper, and one recent article worthy of note appears in the Journal of Research in Reading (2008, pp. 404-419). It's by Anne Mangen, and it has the title "Hypertext fiction reading: haptics and immersion."

Mangen notes the growing sub-field of screen reading studies, but finds that the "intangibility and volatility of the digital text" remain under-examined.  She focuses first, then, on the material nature of digital and non-digital reading experiences. "Unlike print texts," she writes, "digital texts are ontologically intangible and detached from the physical and mechanical dimension of their material support, namely, their computer...

It isn't just the politics.  If it were, Fox News wouldn't enjoy the cable news dominance that it has for some time now. Back in July, for instance, Fox had nine of the top 10 cable news shows, with Bill O'Reilly sitting on top for more than 100 months in a row. Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck and Greta Van Susteren dominate their times as well, with Beck having a huge rise in recent weeks as the scourge of White House personnel. Here's an August listing of shows that notes, "We call your attention to the Glenn Beck ratings. Considering his time slot is during work and drive-home hours for the vast majority of America, his numbers are astounding."

For a detailed breakdown of viewers and their political orientation, here's an informative report from Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, which compiles ongoing data on everything from online/print breakdowns to public confidence in...

Here we have a story on a study that informs us that digital natives are "are fundamentally different to previous generations, living 'hybrid lives', communicating and networking in a more advanced way than their parents and grandparents, and have 'highly developed visual-spatial skills.'"

It's out of the United Kingdom, and a government advisor "welcomes the report." The report highlights the opportunity the Web provides young people to make embarrassing and difficult queries about things affecting their life and health. A good thing, to be sure.

But it would be easy to read the results as equally disturbing. For instance, the report found that 75 percent of young people claim that "they couldn't live without the Internet." Another 45 percent say that "they felt happiest online."

The story also reports that the survey "describes them as the 'ever on' group, demanding immediate access...

The Rush Limbaugh/St. Louis Rams story is all over the sports pages and blogs right now. (See here and here and here.)

 It's entirely up to the owners to decide the matter, and they can do whatever they want.  But some of the justifications for voting "nay" are starting to look sinister.

In addressing Limbaugh's comments about race and sports, here is the implication Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay drew:  "'I come from a different era where Marvin Gaye and John Lennon were speaking about [certain things] and we've been doing a slow crawl to some of the things they talked about. We don't need to go the other way,' Irsay added. 'We can't go the other way where there isn't forgiveness and understanding but we gotta watch our words in this world and our thoughts because they can do damage.'"

Note the phrase, "we gotta watch our words in this world and our thoughts because they can do...

Some of the commenters on previous posts on ideological bias in higher education have asked for more research evidence on the issue.  It's a fair request, of course, but several studies of the problem are easily found with a quick Google search.  Type in "ideological bias 'higher education'" and 35,000 hits come up.  I scanned the first several pages of search results and found lots of research links.

A handy compendium of the evidence appears in one volume entitled The Politically Correct University edted by Robert Maranto, Richard E. Redding, and Frederick Hess. It comes from American Enterprise Institute, a think tank whose conservative orientation may automatically discredit the volume to many in higher education.  But the chapters contained in it strive for grounding in sound empirical studies, not in ideological premises.

Included are important surveys of faculty members by...

One of the reasons why the liberal-bias-in-higher-education argument has continued over the years in spite of various denials by college professors is because too many of those denials appear squishy and loose and smug and dubious. 

A revealing case occurred a few years ago at Duke University after the Duke Conservative Union published the results of a survey of political affiliation among the Duke faculty. The expected numbers came up, an extraordinary lean of Democrat over Republican.  No surprise there, of course.  Still, Duke University responded by hosting a symposium on the issue, with full transcripts appearing here. 

Michael Munger's speech is witty and incisive, and deserves a close hearing, but Cathy Davidson's is the focus here. It marks a signal moment in faculty thinking.  

Davidson concludes her response to the survey with some mocking advice to get more conservatives in...