More Data Theft?

nor of course do we all wear tweed coats.  Liked the message, not so much the medium.  Your graphic on the other hand … awesome Maybe profs should stage a kiss in a giant love-fest of higher education

It’s true that the right often throws barbs at academe but if you pay attention to detail within these occurences, most of these attacks are at “far-left loons” as O’Reilly typically calls them. When I was in the Army, we used to say that we are a microcosm of the society culturally – similar cultural makeup and worldviews as the larger society that it belongs to – just a smaller subset of it. I wonder if we can say the same overall for all of high education? By the very nature of intellectual curiosity, I would think that higher ed corps of faculty is not a Mini-Me of our society. Left or right, academia is full of people with a natural curiosity and thirst for knowledge, in a concentration more significant than the general society.

Claire,

I admit I am a New Historicist literary critic, not a historian like you, so I won’t quibble over your historical record. I will quibble rather with your narrative style.

Let’s retire “War On” as a trope. The cliché is threadbare, and insulting when there are actual wars being led by a Democrat Commander-in-Chief (Burkean though he is) who has escalated the use of drones and opened new theaters of engagement in a half-dozen countries. No more war on women, war on gays, war on [Fill in the Blank]. War, like rape, makes for poor metaphors and degraded discourse.

You need to reread Foucault and warn yourself about false unities of discourse. Buckley, Reagan, corporatized campuses, budget cuts, adjunct labor, and football stadiums are not all part of a coherent “conservative” movement. It’s straining terminology to the point of mangling words to hang all these pet peeves on a mythical right-wing bogeymen. Administrators have made many of the dirty decisions to undermine education, and the vast majority of those folks are Democrats. 

In fact, only about 5-8% of professors and administrators in higher ed are conservative. Higher ed’s screw-ups belong to liberals, radicals, and especially the Democrat Party. Don’t project.

Bush increased education spending a great deal. He has been criticized for overseeing easy loans for both housing and higher education. Under him the number of Latinos with college degrees doubled. Decide what you want, or at least what you want to bash. Are you most outraged by Bush’s profligate generosity for loans (for isn’t he a Republican?) or by his supposed miserly placation of the uppermost 1%?

Jerry Brown is a Democrat governor in California who has devastated the Cal State system beyond anything Schwarzeneggar did. Harvard, swimming in liberals, has its fingerprints all over the financial crisis (go watch Inside Job about Columbia too), and is, lest we forget, an elitist medieval patriarchy going back to 1636, spawned from the inquisitions of early modern religious pedagogy.

This blog brings up some good points but we need to move past finger-pointing and food fights. The radical thing is getting very, very, very old. I’ll concede that the conservative thing is also getting very, very, very old. No more phantoms — deal with the problems and avoid distractions.

Best,
Bobby

That’s what VPs are for, and Biden–insurance industry shill, Iraq warmonger, Alito fan-boy, unswerving acolyte of Israel, and a guy who’s never worked a day in his adult life–didn’t disappoint.   

Some good thoughts at http://changinguniversities.blogspot.com/2012/04/meeting-at-white-house-state-tax.html
“I suggested to the [Obama] administration that they add to their new College Scorecard statistics on how much of a university’s budget is spent on direct instructional costs and what percentage of their student credit hours are taught by full-time faculty. If universities had to report on these factors, they would need to commit more attention and funding to their core mission.” 

Check out the  videolink below, which features the Vice Chancellor of the University of
Canterbury advising faculty to “dob in” (ie, “rat out”) one another in order to make
him better informed about who to fire in making the “hard choices”
“dictated” by the Christchurch earthquakes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vV2ycZDHo4I

College professors are no longer tweedy, but yes, they could do a much better job of organizing: join the AAUP, please! For decades professors considered it a responsibility to join upon graduation, but  membership has dwindled as they’ve become increasingly focused on their own careers at the expense of higher ed. as a whole. The AAUP was there for Bill Cronon in Wisconsin, and it will be there for others as well, as long as enough of us support its very worthy mission.

It is really to politicize higher education, but we should be better than that since we should know the issues we are confronted with in the academy go well beyond whether one is left or right. We simply have to evolve and re-articulate our value. What was acceptable five years ago, or 20, no longer applies. 

Attacks on education also come from the libertarians, who do not profile fully left or right.  The Minerva Project, an “on-line elite alternative to universities” is a good example of the forces we face:
1. It will isolate students from the intellectual action that can occur in an ideal setting with an educator, and offer information as the equivalent of education.
2. Money that, in an earlier age, would have gone to making our leading institutions better is instead, like the $25-million for MInerva, being used to fund likely-to-fail start-ups or lobby against taxes that can support schools.

Of course, I never said, despite Ms. Potter’s deceptive use of quotes, that Lehman “invented”loyalty oaths. But her example of an early loyalty oath, while not actually relevant to US higher education, make my case for me. Pennsylvania’s loyalty oath (which was more a disloyalty oath, actually, and was drafted in 1776, not 1760) was designed to exclude Tories and moderate Whigs, and was a creation of the Radicals. See H.E. Seyler. ‘Pennsylvania’s first loyalty oath’ History of Education Journal, 3, 114-126 (1952)

‘Read it dood’, and then you direct me to Wikipedia? Really? 

Jim Rhodes was noted for his massive expansion of Ohio’s public higher education system; so much for a war on professors. He was by most lights a liberal Republican. He didn’t like student radicals; but then, almost no establishment politicians, left or right, did.

Goldwater was opposed by liberal and moderate east coast Republicans, but backed by the conservative intelligentsia. Potter is evidently unaware the parties in 1964 were not divided along ideological lines the way they are today. 

I may be a dabbler in history. Ms. Potter, despite her title, seems unwilling to get her toes wet at all.

I agree that Churchill was targeted because of what he said after 9/11, which was entirely within his first amendment rights to say. I also think he was vulnerable to an investigation because of dishonesty and misrepresentation. I am quite sure that the things I repeated are true: they were whispered about for years by younger academics in his fields and on the left who did not want to be targeted by *him* in reprisal.  Just because conservatives say something does not automatically mean they are incorrect, and Churchill was not popular among many who might have been his political allies because of self representations that were dishonest,and several instances in which it was well known that he had represented the work of others as his own. Would a similarly dishonest person who was not in a politically charged field have been fired?  Perhaps not, but that strikes me as a claim that doesn’t reflect well on progressives.

Jerry Brown is “the Democrat governor in California” and, for sure the Cal State system has been “devastated,” but the responsibility for the devastation isn’t Brown’s.  The problem is anti-tax reactionaries like Howard Jarvis and his ammendments to the State Constitution which require a 2/3 majority in both the Senate and Assembly to pass a budget.  A dozen anti-public-education Tea Party Republicans can block any proposed State budget.  That’s what’s been happening in California.  To blame all of this on Brown is a fine example of ”shoddy partisan propaganda masquerading as scholarship [if you consider reading the damn newspaper "scholarship'].

GAH. Want to know why I didn’t pursue my PhD in history but instead stopped at my master’s degree in history? Because of the overwhelming liberal agenda in universities. I can still remember one of my professors who taught European Colonialism going off on a screed about Bush. Seriously? Teach your damn class and leave your personal politics out of it. Conservative, liberal, socialist, communist, I don’t care – don’t try and sway me to your political side of the game. If it was an overwhelming conservative agenda in universities, I’d feel the same way. If I’m going to send my child to college, it’s not going to be to a university – I think she’ll get a better education at a community college.

Who the hell wants conservative professors? Did you read my comments? Apparently not. But I’ll repeat it for you: “If it was an overwhelming conservative agenda in universities, I’d feel the same way.” There. That any clearer? I want professors who don’t shove their agenda – conservative OR liberal – down my throat. That’s not their job and I refuse to pay thousands of dollars to hear their drivel. And I can learn just fine by myself, thank you very much – it’s called books.

BTW, community colleges are cheaper and they provide a real-world education, something not many who graduate from an ivory tower institution can say – and I speak from experience.

Since I can’t reply to your comment below (on purpose?), I’ll reply here.

I find your refusal to address my points about politics in universities quite telling. And I also find it incredibly short-sighted of you to think that I can’t learn by myself using academic journals, peer reviews, lectures, and the like. Wow. I’m not a nitwit. How do you think people continue to learn outside of universities AFTER they’ve received their degrees? The same way, I imagine.

And I love the jab about patterning my life on that model. I wouldn’t expect anything less than a comment like this from ye of the ivory tower mentality. To lower yourself and make this “personal” is quite the attitude, and if it is this type of criticism, guidance, help, or interference that I am missing out on by not learning in the hallowed halls of higher education, then I’m thankful beyond thankful for “missing out.” 

To readers: his comment above has been flagged for removal. We await its expungement.

“I am willing to have a debate on how liberal and conservative agendas in academia are definitely at play.”

Yes, but not here:  this post did not address such a debate.  Perhaps a future post will, however, and you are invited to return at that time and participate in it.

NEVADA HAS DONE AWAY WITH WRITE-IN BALLOTS WHICH IS JUST A VERSION OF VOTERIGGING.  HALF OF OUR STATES HAVE FOLLOWED SUIT.  CONTACT YOUR REPS TO RECTIFY THIS SITUATION.  THIS IS WHAT I’M TELLING MINE:
Dear State Senator/State Assemblyperson:
I demand that you propose legislation that allows Nevadans to write in a presidential candidate.
Let’s get this voting system changed (back) by November so we can write in Ron Paul’s name for President. It’s absolutely deplorable that we’re forced to vote for CFR Candidate A or CFR Candidate B. This is not democracy. Nor republicanism. Change this system now.
I’ll be contacting all my counterparts in other states to make the same change. For years, we could write in the candidate of our choice should his name not appear on the ballot. If it’s too inconvenient for the vote counters, that’s too bad – freedom isn’t free.
I – like all PATRIOTIC AMERICANS – want Nevada’s voting system changed so, come next November, I can write in Ron Paul’s name for President. I don’t want to hear any excuses. The system we have now is just glorified vote rigging. We’ve had enough junk as “president”, we’re taking America back.
And we don’t want Diebold voting machines. They’re owned by the very questionable George Soros who’s openly stated the destruction of America will culminate his life’s work. Nor do we want – THIS IS A NO-BRAINER! – voting machines MANUFACTURED BY AN ISRAELI DEFENSE COMPANY, ELRON/VOXEO. An Israeli defense company has NO GOOD REASON to be involved in America’s elections. Read about it: http://www.gnosticliberationfront.com/israel_controls_iowa_caucus.htm