Zo talks about the USC student Tyler Talgo, who filmed his professor disparaging and insulting Republicans. Was this the right thing to do? Find out what AlfonZo Rachel thinks as he details his recent visit to the USC campus.
Showing posts with label Radical Professors. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Radical Professors. Show all posts
Sunday, May 5, 2013
Alfonzo Rachel - Is It Time for Students to Expose Biased Professors and Biased Republicans?
Zo talks about the USC student Tyler Talgo, who filmed his professor disparaging and insulting Republicans. Was this the right thing to do? Find out what AlfonZo Rachel thinks as he details his recent visit to the USC campus.
Saturday, April 14, 2012
Mary Grabar - Georgia Professors Bribe Students to Lobby Legislators
Why would GALEO (Georgia Association of Latino Elected Officials), which lobbies against enforcement of immigration laws, thank “students” and “educators” (among others) for defeating Georgia bills restricting illegal aliens? Their April 9 newsletter joyfully announces in a headline “ZERO anti-immigrant [sic] legislation from GA passed.”Well, it’s because educators, public school teachers, and professors at Georgia public colleges and universities used their positions to influence students and engaged in lobbying efforts. At the Georgia State University College of Education, during a February 4 “Teach-In,” ostensibly to discuss curricula banned in Arizona, one of those professors pledged to give her students “extra points” for bringing in letters to legislators opposing bills that would enforce immigration laws—therefore bribing students with grades.
You can see the video of Jennifer Esposito, Associate Professor of Education at Georgia State University, making this pledge on my website Dissident Prof here.
On March 19, I testified about this at a House committee hearing on SB 458, a bill that “would have streamlined the process by which public benefits are administered and ended the official acceptance of undocumented foreign passports from illegal aliens as useable ID in Georgia,” according to D.A. King, president of the Georgia-based Dustin Inman Society, a group that advocates for enforcement of immigration laws. At the hearing, one of the many members of the illegal alien lobby present yelled out that she had been at the Teach-In and that I was lying. Chairman Rich Golick replied to her, “We’re not engaging in a dialogue here. . . . We’re not shouting out. That’s not the way the system works here.” It happens towards the end of the eight-minute testimony here.
You can also hear Golick call this information an “extremely disturbing reality” and promise to “explore that on a different track.”
GALEO focused on education benefits and cast SB 458, as “Georgia's Anti-DREAM Act,” because it “would have placed Georgia in the extreme position of being one of three states in the nation that deny access to higher education to undocumented students.” That’s the way the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported it too.
Sponsor Barry Loudermilk’s explanation—made with exceeding logic and patience during debate—however, was all but ignored. The bill was really about public benefits for illegal aliens and the type of documentation needed. PUBLIC education—at public universities—is a public benefit; under the bill, Georgia would enforce federal law and deny illegal aliens access to public universities. One of the points Loudermilk kept repeating, as opponent after opponent played the “children just wanting education” pity card, was that SB 458 did not prohibit access to PRIVATE colleges. But for GALEO higher education is synonymous with public higher education, one that they believe illegal aliens have a right to enjoy.
By the fortieth and last day of the session the by then toxic provision about higher education benefits would have been struck out had the bill been allowed to go to the House floor.
The Speaker of the House, David Ralston, however, did not call the bill up for a vote. There was a “skyrocket high majority” of votes in both houses to pass the bill, according to King. In his latest newsletter, King blames Governor Nathan Deal as the “root cause” for defeat.
But the negative cast on the bill, as affecting innocent children, was promoted by employees of the University System of Georgia, in the classroom and at the “Teach-In,” where the dean of the College of Education opened the day’s events with remarks in Spanish. D.A. King is used to seeing students and educators pack hearing rooms and dominate testimony. He calls most American universities “de facto training camps for future anti-enforcement radicals.”
The Board of Regents has been on the side of admitting illegal aliens to Georgia public universities. Chancellor Hank Huckaby testified AGAINST SB 458 on March 19, 2012. But in 2011, before he was appointed to the position by Governor Nathan Deal--when he was REPRESENTATIVE Huckaby--he voted FOR a similar bill, HB 59. One of the activists at the Teach-In bragged that legislators had “listened” to the many students and educators and tabled HB 59. According to King, at that earlier hearing opponents of HB 59 were allowed to take up far more than their allotted three minutes to speak; the chair, Carl Rogers, would not allow a vote, when it was clear that the bill had the votes to pass out of committee.
Why SB 458 failed in the GOP-controlled Georgia Capitol is somewhat of a mystery, although King said he has some theories about why the bill was refused a House vote.
What is not a mystery is that professors and administrators are using public facilities and using students for their own political lobbying purposes.
In addition to revisiting this immigration bill during the next session, legislators need to examine the corruption in education. The balance of power needs to be restored, back to the people who pay for the public institutions.
Mary Grabar
Friday, February 24, 2012
Mike Adams - Marquette Debate Aborted During Late Term
Earlier this semester, Maggie Gervase, of the Marquette College Republicans, managed to get Professor of Theology Dan Maguire to agree to debate me. Later, she sent him this e-mail to confirm the format of the debate:
Hi Dr Maguire, I just want to touch bases and make sure we’re on the same page for the debate on March 1st. It’s coming up fast and we are very excited to be hosting the event! Your opponent will be Dr. Mike Adams from the University of North Carolina-Wilmington. The debate will be a 20-20-10-10 format; each opponent will get twenty minutes to present their argument and ten minutes for a rebuttal followed by a question/answer wrap-up. Please let me know if you will need a room for preparation beforehand and I will see what I can do to get one adjacent to the ballrooms. Also let me know if you will be needing anything else! Thank you again for offering to do this, we really appreciate it and look forward to it!We were all eager to hear back from Professor Maguire. I was especially eager to get his approval of the format. I wanted to get that out of the way so I could then request to speak first at the debate. That would allow professor Maguire to speak last. The order of presentation is important, by the way. It dictates which of two very different debate tactics I will use against any given opponent. Professor Maguire’s response was, therefore, important. When it arrived it was ultimately disappointing:
Maggie Gervase
Maggie, I just looked up Dr. Mike Adams and found he is a psychology-criminology professor. I am a theologian presenting theological arguments. I would not try to debate Dr. Adams in psychology/criminology since it is not my field. Similarly he would not want to debate me in theology since he is not a theologians [sic] and could not argue a theological position with professional competence. We would be skew lines. So when you find a theologian who wants to debate me, as was done at Notre Dame, get back in touch. Dan Maguire.Professor Maguire’s excuse for backing out of his commitment to debate me is dishonest for at least two reasons:
The fact that Professor has no special degree in criminology reveals his mendacity. What degree would specifically qualify him to oppose the death penalty? And why invoke the lack of a criminology degree – selectively, mind you – in order to get out of debating a criminologist on abortion? And, since he has held himself out as an expert on health care why not debate abortion? Isn’t that a health care issue?
- He has previously made, in public, an argument for abortion that is not theological. Specifically, he argued that, even if human, the unborn is not a person, which means the unborn are not citizens deserving of equal protection. This is an argument based on the 14th Amendment. Clearly, he is stepping into the constitutional arena, despite his claims to remain safely on theological ground.
- In the 1990s - at Marquette University, no less – Professor Maguire debated the issue of capital punishment. Unsurprisingly, he took the anti-death penalty side. Later, he was also featured on a Marquette panel arguing specifically in favor of government run-health care. In neither case did he debate a theological issue from a strictly theological position relying strictly upon his theological training.
Of course, Maguire lacks two things that are worth noting. He lacks a degree in any health care related discipline. He also lacks the courage to defend his views against a worthy opponent. Since Professor Maguire obtained his doctorate when I was only four years old, he has had plenty of time to prepare his arguments on abortion. This issue is obviously meaningful to him. That is why he speaks to friendly audiences in support of abortion-choice.
Of course, Professor Maguire has a right to abort a debate we have been planning for nearly nine months. But he does not have a right to be respected for his intellectual honesty and moral consistency. Those traits of his have not yet fully formed. And tenure protects him from presenting viable arguments outside the womb some call the Ivory Tower.
Mike Adams
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Thursday, January 19, 2012
Mike Adams - Postmodern Political Correctness and Christianity II
In January 2009, a pro-life group at Spokane Falls Community College (SFCC) decided to publicize and protest the disproportionate abortion rate among black Americans. They argued that the racist roots of Planned Parenthood were reflected in the organization’s activities in our nation’s inner cities. But before they could hold their event, they had to have their posters approved by the college administration. They were denied approval ostensibly because they presented only one side of the issue. In other words, the administration tried to force them to argue the side of the debate with which they disagreed.
The administration claimed that “biased” speech could lead to hate speech, which, in turn, could lead to genocide. Think about that for a second: if the pro-life group protested Planned Parenthood’s genocide, then genocide could result unless they also argued in favor of abortion.
Common sense alone should have reigned in the SFCC administration. But it required the intervention of the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) and the Washington Attorney General. In the end, the student pro-life group prevailed.
Later that semester, a student at Los Angeles Community College (LACC) was given a chance to speak on a topic of his own choosing. He chose to speak about the role God has played in his life. During the speech, he mentioned a Bible verse affirming the traditional definition of marriage. His professor was incensed. He abruptly ended the class and refused to grade the student’s speech.
After the ADF intervened, there was a successful federal injunction against the speech code that was used to punish the LACC student for uttering “offensive” speech. The matter should have ended there but it did not. The school appealed to the 9th Circuit, which ruled that the student did not have standing to challenge the speech code. It was a bizarre ruling, given that the student was, in fact, punished with public humiliation and withholding of credit for work he did in a class he paid to take. Then again, this was in the 9th Circuit.
Last year at Vanderbilt University, a homosexual student knowingly joined a student group espousing beliefs which he actively opposed. After he was predictably removed from the group, he complained to the university administration. This resulted in an investigation of several hundred student groups. In the wake of the investigation, Vanderbilt administrators began threatening to derecognize student groups that required members to adhere to specific beliefs. This bizarre belief-ban went even further. Vanderbilt began to threaten de-recognition of Christian groups that required leaders to lead Bible studies. It was so intrusive that it resulted in a letter of condemnation from 23 members of the United States Congress to the administration.
All of these cases show how identity politics, rooted in postmodernism, is destroying the marketplace of ideas at our nation’s colleges and universities. The lack of principle is seen in cases like Georgia Tech (see part one of this series) where feminists pretended to be offended by words they often use themselves. Their assault on “offensiveness” was shown to be contrived when their allies invoked racially offensive language to attack the opponents of the Georgia Tech speech code. Defenders of the speech code even superimposed swastikas on pictures of one of the Jewish plaintiffs.
The postmodern roots of identity politics show through in the cases I mentioned. In none of them was there any attempt to assert that the offending beliefs were untrue. They were simply determined (usually by white liberals) to be offensive to various disenfranchised groups said to lack the power to establish their own beliefs as “true.” At Georgia Tech it was women (feminist women). At SFCC it was blacks. At LACC and Vanderbilt it was homosexuals. In each case, postmodernism fueled a vicious assault on free speech in the name of group-based identity politics. In each case, there was a significant chilling effect on the free exchange of ideas, which no institution of higher learning can long withstand.
Public universities can be sued in federal court whenever they try to enforce overly broad speech codes. They may also be sued when their zeal to control student groups encroaches upon freedom of association. Private schools, on the other hand, are not bound by the First Amendment. But they are bound by moral considerations. If they tell students they promote a diversity of opinion, they should behave as if the First Amendment does, in fact, apply at their university. They should not use false promises of diversity to lure students into paying tens of thousands of dollars tuition per year.
But what are the requirements of a Christian university? I believe they are twofold: First, the Christian university must remain Christian. That means certain core beliefs are taken off the table as un-debatable. Belief in the deity of Christ and His resurrection are among those beliefs.
Second, the Christian university must remain a university. And that requires the maintenance of robust debate on the vast majority of the controversial issues of the day. It also means that student groups must be given wide latitude in writing their own constitutions, selecting their own leaders, and sponsoring their own events.
In John 14:6, Christ claimed that there is but one path to heaven. No greater affirmation of objective truth is needed. Christianity is and will always be a religion predicated upon individual, not group, salvation. In Galatians 3:28, Paul affirms what Christ was saying: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Christianity has no room for postmodernists. They should be left to enjoy their speech code-enforced dominance within the shallow halls of the secular university.
Mike Adams
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Wednesday, January 18, 2012
Mike Adams - Postmodern Political Correctness and Christianity
I’m often asked how Marxism took root in the American university system. I’ve never been fully satisfied with my standard answer to the question. Given my background in psychology, I sometimes seek psychological explanations to the exclusion of broader historical explanations. But I do believe there is something different about the mind of the man to whom Marxism appeals.
The Marxist is less willing to compete with others. He is content living in a world where everyone is similarly situated. He relinquishes the prospect of success for the assurance that he cannot fail. The same mentality is often found among those who seek refuge in the academy. There is little chance that the academic will find fame or fortune. But a few years of hard work will be rewarded with promotion and tenure and all of the security that comes with it.
Marxism was once the dominant philosophy in higher education – at least within the social sciences and humanities. But one would be hard pressed to make the case that Marxism remains the dominant philosophy on college campuses today. That title now belongs to postmodernism - although the two philosophies cannot be divorced from one another. Marxism is an economic and political philosophy. Postmodernism is a broader worldview. But postmodernism could not have achieved its rapid ascent without Marxism.
The Marxist emphasis on class struggle has fueled the postmodern assault on objective truth. It has led to the idea that truth is simply a byproduct of power struggles between warring factions. That idea has dangerous moral ramifications.
Postmodernism poses a threat to college students and to the very existence higher learning itself. For many students, postmodern education lights a well-paved path that leads directly to moral relativism. The two are not the same thing. But postmodernism eventually compels moral relativism. If there is no objective truth then moral positions cannot be objectively true. When morals become private or subjective, they tend to be built around personal conduct – simply to accommodate personal conduct. That is why many college students find themselves trapped in a downward moral spiral in the wake of abandoning the idea of objective truth. I am speaking from personal experience as well as years of observation.
Sixteen years ago, I had an experience for which I am most grateful. I was in a prison in South America interviewing prisoners and prison guards. I witnessed firsthand a very brutal clubbing of a young prisoner. I heard prison guards admit that they shot prisoners in the back on their way out of the prison. This was just after they tricked them into believing they were free to go. The same prison officials told stories of suspects shocked into giving false confessions. This was after police officers wired the suspects’ testicles to car batteries as they sat locked in police vans undergoing coercive questioning.
I needed to witness that beating and hear those stories in order to be shocked out of my own childish belief system. The day I walked out of that prison, I left behind my faith in moral and cultural relativism. I realized that forced confessions, brutal beatings, and staged escape executions were all objectively wrong. The time and place of such atrocities is irrelevant. They are examples of purely objective evil. But there is good news accompanying this realization. As C.S. Lewis often said, the shadow proves the sunshine. Therefore, the heart is sometimes awakened to a greater appreciation of the truth after witnessing its collision with falsity.
When I returned to my position in the secular university, I realized we were doing something more than simply promoting a worldview that made it easy for students to spiral downward morally. We were also clinging to a philosophy that was threatening the very existence of higher education as we know it. That philosophy was being encoded into campus rules that threatened permanent entrenchment of the very ideas which gave them birth.
I’ve written of many conflicts involving such policies – the most notable cases involving campus speech codes. But I often wonder how many times the reader has taken the time to examine the common themes that run through the many cases. It is worth taking a moment to reflect back upon some of the worst.
In 2006, two young conservative women contacted me for help. They had protested The Vagina Monologues because the play encouraged use of the c-word as a way of describing women. After posting a sign saying “We are not (c-words)” feminists invoked the university speech code. They claimed that they, as feminists, could use the c-word as a term of endearment. They then claimed that their detractors could not use the same word if they did so in a derisive way. In other words, the constitutionality of the c-word hinged upon the thought behind the word at the time of its utterance. This was more than simple thought control. It was state-enforced though control undertaken for the ostensible purpose of protecting fragile feminists from being offended.
These speech code supporters are the same people who advocate abortion. They are also the same people who hurled abusive racial epithets at those two plaintiffs I brought to the Alliance Defense Fund. But we won this case in both the court of law and the court of public opinion. Those will be familiar themes when we dissect the next case in part two of this series.
To be continued …
Mike Adams
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Friday, December 9, 2011
Mary Grabar - Dissident Prof Rants: The Media Bias against Occupy Wall Street!
Dissident Prof is getting whiplash every time she visits the website for the Center for American Progress.Eric Alterman, Senior Fellow and “distinguished professor of English”
at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, asks in his most recent article, “Why Do the Mainstream Media Like the Tea Party More than Occupy Wall Street?”The professor cites that highly esteemed academic journal, The New Yorker, where “Ben McGrath described the Tea Party as a motley collection of ‘goldbugs, evangelicals, Atlas Shruggers, militia-men, strict Constitutionalists, swine-flu skeptics, scattered 9/11 “truthers,” neo-“Birchers,” and, of course, “birthers”—those who remained convinced that [President Barack Obama] was a Muslim double agent born in Kenya,’ intent on turning the United States into an Islamic Republic.”
While Dissident Prof appreciates the display of creative writing skills in the quoted passage, she hardly thinks it fits in well with the high seriousness of the article as attempted by the passage that follows:
Four academics confirmed this telling portrait. They recently presented a study of the views and attitudes of 2,000 voters sympathetic to the Tea Party at the 2011 annual meeting of the American Sociological Association. The study said that these voters ‘reflect four primary cultural and political beliefs more than other voters do: authoritarianism, libertarianism, fear of change, and negative attitudes toward immigrants and immigration.’”
(Funny, these “four academics” never called on Dissident Prof, herself an immigrant, and a tea party supporter, for her opinion.)
But it must be true because it’s from the esteemed American Sociological Association. (Sometimes those of us consigned to perpetual adjunct-hood get an inferiority complex.)
This thought, however, was interrupted by a little birdie chirping on Dissident’s Prof’s shoulder, “Authoritarian Personality, Authoritarian Personality” (or was it the Aflac duck?)
Finally all the chirping and quacking in her head reminded her of the latest, groundbreaking theory from Theodore Adorno, of the Marxist Frankfurt School. This must be the newest, most cutting-edge theory, inspiration to the barefoot, bomb-throwing, monogamy-smashing, lice-and-flea infested long-hairs of the very recent 1960s. These intellectuals too had serious thoughts about the Constitution, which they displayed through their interpretive dances.
The duck quacked, “But it’s fifty years later, it’s fifty years later!”
So why is “distinguished professor” Alterman using the theories of the 1960s? Is such research really au courant?
This requires some deconstruction, a practice to which Dissident Prof was subjected to in graduate school. Dissident Prof suspects some fear of “change” in professor Alterman. She suspects he does not want to do any research after the 1960s. She wonders if his contention that the “Tea Party was simply the old far right dressed up in funny new clothing” is not a projection.
For example, look at his colleague on the opposite coast at the campus that has become most known for “police brutality,” UC-Davis. In sartorial tribute to his intellectual progenitors, English professor Nathan Brown stands on a stage in front of thousands of adoring, cheering students who in the grand tradition of the Occupy Wall Street “human mic” repeat his words, phrase for phrase.
But notice something different? This rock star professor enjoys all the accoutrements of our Wall Street-supported high-tech society. There is a sound system, and a microphone, which Professor Brown brandishes with loving familiarity.
Of course, there is nothing authoritarian in having thousands of young people repeating your every word, right?
After all, these students are independent thinkers, having been schooled in critical thought by their facilitators, who have also guided them in collaborative learning. They have had music lessons in singing Obama praise songs. (Sorry, video disappeared by YouTube.)
Still, the media coverage of OWS was “sheer mockery,” maintains professor/think tank fellow Alterman. They presented none of the “substantive arguments,” he complains.
The professor might be a little too harsh on the less-well-educated folk for not being able to grasp the complexity of the original Adbusters manifesto that outlines the theory and practice of Occupy Wall Street, and from which I quote:
“The beauty of this new formula, and what makes this novel tactic exciting, is its pragmatic simplicity: we talk to each other in various physical gatherings and virtual people's assemblies … we zero in on what our one demand will be, a demand that awakens the imagination and, if achieved, would propel us toward the radical democracy of the future … and then we go out and seize a square of singular symbolic significance and put our asses on the line to make it happen.
“The time has come to deploy this emerging stratagem against the greatest corrupter of our democracy: Wall Street, the financial Gomorrah of America.”
And this little nugget of profundity:
“The most exciting candidate that we've heard so far is one that gets at the core of why the American political establishment is currently unworthy of being called a democracy: we demand that Barack Obama ordain a Presidential Commission tasked with ending the influence money has over our representatives in Washington. It's time for DEMOCRACY NOT CORPORATOCRACY, we're doomed without it.”
Professor Alterman’s support for the claim of unfair media treatment, evidenced in the lack of their attention to “substantive arguments,” comes from Russia Today, the media arm of Putin’s government. (Mic check! There are no more communists, there are no more communists, there are no more communists. Repeat. Very good. You get an A, and a student loan balance of $80,000.)
Mary Grabar
Mary Grabar is a writer and college English teacher, whose parents escaped from Slovenia in 1959 and spent a year in a refugee camp in Austria. They immigrated to Rochester, New York, when she was two.
Her views have been formed by experiences as an immigrant during the racial violence in Rochester in the 1960s and then at her alma mater, Benjamin Franklin Junior-Senior High School.
She tried to be a liberal, but then quickly realized that it was an exclusive club. Her conversion to conservatism was cinched when she returned to school in the master's program in English in the 1990's.
In spite of the hostility of most of the faculty and the torture of having to wade through postmodern nonsense, she earned her Ph.D. from the University of Georgia in 2002.
Mary Grabar is a frequent Columnist at Town Hall.com and writes articles for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution Newspaper.
Visit Mary's Website and her other Website: The Literate Citizen
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Wednesday, December 7, 2011
Mike Adams - Save the World on Your Own Dime
Here in the Tar Heel state, this year’s budget cut in higher education is nearly 16%. But there was still enough money in the pot to create a new Janet Mason Ellerby Women and Gender Studies Scholarly Award. The award was created to recognize Ellerby’s “significant contributions to feminist scholarship and activism.”
What are those contributions? Let’s start with activism.
Some years ago, Janet Ellerby learned that the
Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders were slated to make an appearance at UNC-Wilmington. Ellerby joined an effort to keep the Cowgirls from coming to our campus. Why? Well, you know the reason. They wear too little clothing and help promote unhealthy (read: sexist) images of what a woman should look like. The Cowgirls were young, thin, and happy. UNCW feminists, on the other hand, place a premium on being old, plump, and angry. The Cowgirls had to go!Of course, anyone who has ever been to UNCW recognizes the futility of banning scantily-clad women from campus. Our co-eds generally make the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders look like nuns. That’s why UNCW is sometimes referred to as UNC-Whorehouse. Personally, I’m offended by those who refer to our young women as “whores.” That’s why I was disappointed when UNCW hired a rapper to come to campus to call women “bitches” and “whores” back in 2003. (Note: He made $130,000 in the process!). But the rapper, unlike the cheerleaders, was not banned from UNCW by the feminists. Some UNCW feminists consider promiscuity to be empowering. So I suppose “whore” is just a term of endearment.
Speaking of whores, another example of Janet Ellerby’s activism would be the fight for free health care for prostitutes. While under the direction of Janet Mason Ellerby, the WRC placed a large display in the lobby of the UNCW library. The display made an argument for free health care for prostitutes with no moral condemnation of prostitution whatsoever. In fact, the display declined to refer to the women as prostitutes. It called them “sex workers.” If you haven’t seen the connection between these first two examples of feminist activism, I’ll just spell it out below (in bold letters):
FEMINISTS DO NOT WANT MEN LOOKING AT CHEERLEADERS. THEY WANT THEM TO HAVE HEALTHIER SEX WITH PROSTITUTES!
None of this should come as a surprise to my readers. Janet Mason Ellerby was the “activist” who placed pictures of naked children in the lobby of the UNCW library as a part of Women’s History Month. Oops! That’s Womyn’s Herstory Month. She did so in connection with her official capacities as director of the Women’s Center. The provost tried to move the naked pictures to another location because pedophiles had previously been caught downloading child pornography right there in the UNCW library. Ellerby had a conniption. And she enlisted the help of the Faculty Senate in the name of academic freedom.
As a result of Janet Mason Ellerby’s activism, faculty members now face no time, place, and manner restrictions on their desire to display pictures of nude post-pubescent minors on public property. But UNCW still refrains from using the term “Christmas Tree” lest they offend the irreligious. Now it’s a holiday tree, wait, no! That’s too holy, now it’s just a tree! And the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders are still banned from the UNCW campus. Man, these bitches and hos are relentless!
Have you have ever wondered why I refer to “feminist scholarship” as an oxymoron on a par with “jumbo shrimp?” Just read Intimate Reading, the personal memoir of Janet Mason Ellerby. It will help you better understand her desire to post pictures of naked children in public libraries. In a soft pornographic romance novel sort of way, Ellerby gives a graphic account of losing her virginity at age 16. She talks in great detail about the experience – including her effort to clean the blood off the couch where she had that first sexual experience. From there, she proceeds to write about blood running from her vagina in the shower afterwards. And, regrettably, the graphic account is required reading for many students in Women’s Studies classes.
The Ellerby sex scene might not be true scholarship. But it does have some symbolic value. Whenever feminist scholarship is taken seriously, we all lose a measure of our innocence. And someone is stuck cleaning up a big mess in the aftermath.
Mike Adams
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Thursday, December 1, 2011
Mike Adams - Chancellor Miller Tear Down This Wall
Let me first express my great satisfaction over your selection as our new chancellor at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. I am delighted to have a former Mississippi State Bulldog in charge of our university. I am also impressed by your qualifications. Unlike your predecessor, you were not selected on the basis of your gender or any other irrelevant demographic characteristics. You were selected on the basis of your qualifications. You deserved the position you were awarded. And you’ve been doing an outstanding job so far.
Unfortunately, some of the actions of your predecessor have damaged the climate for free expression at UNC-Wilmington. Among those actions was a decision to post our Seahawk Respect Compact on the wall of every classroom at the university. My purpose in raising this issue is fourfold. I want to 1) highlight (by underlining) a portion of the respect compact that I believe to be problematic, 2) explain how I think it could be misinterpreted, 3) relate a recent classroom incident that shows how it is, in fact, being abused, and 4) propose a solution to the problem.
The Seahawk Respect Compact is indented below. Note that the bold portions are not my emphasis. I have underlined only one small portion for emphasis:
In the pursuit of excellence, UNC Wilmington actively fosters, encourages, and promotes inclusiveness, mutual respect, acceptance, and open-mindedness among students, faculty, staff and the broader community.As you can see, Chancellor Miller, I have a problem with the suggestion that there is some sort of “right” that extends to “every person” and which entitles him to be the recipient of “respect.” Let me explain why this is wrongheaded by sharing a few examples:
- We affirm the dignity of all persons.
- We promote the right of every person to participate in the free exchange of thoughts and opinions within a climate of civility and mutual respect.
- We strive for openness and mutual understanding to learn from differences in people, ideas and opinions.
- We foster an environment of respect for each individual, even where differences exist, by eliminating prejudice and discrimination through education and interaction with others.
- Therefore, we expect members of the campus community to honor these principles as fundamental to our ongoing efforts to increase access to and inclusion in a community that nurtures learning and growth for all.
I hope you see the danger in granting a “right” to be respected. Once students begin to believe that respect is an entitlement they are granted - and not a privilege they must earn - the academic work product suffers. Bad ideas are placed on equal footing with good ideas and eventually the pursuit of truth suffers as a whole. But the pursuit of truth is already suffering here at UNCW. Earlier this semester, there was a vigorous discussion in one of our social science classes. Ideas were exchanged and disagreement was articulated. But, following the conversation, something unfortunate happened. The professor sent an email to all of his students reminding them that they were required by the Seahawk Respect Compact to maintain a climate of mutual respect and civility. An important question follows: Is there any chance that the professor’s email will not adversely affect future discussions by creating a chilling effect on free speech?
- Several years ago, an N.C. State visiting professor expressed the view that all white people needed to be “exterminated” from the face of the earth. He was invited to debate me on Fox News and he declined. When I went on Fox to denounce him, I was not concerned about “civility.” He was not entitled to it. He’s a violent racist. Nor was he entitled to “respect” for his violent racist views. In fact, given his advocacy of violence and fear of debate he was not even entitled to respect as a human being. He just needed a good public shaming.
- Around that time, a professor here in North Carolina wrote to me saying that the Holocaust was the greatest “hoax” perpetrated in modern history. I went on national television to rebuke her. She was also invited to debate me on Fox News. Like the other racist at N.C. State, she declined. I did not - nor do I now - respect her views. I do not even respect her as a person. Put simply, nothing can make me respect an anti-Semitic Holocaust denier.
- Finally, there is a professor here at UNCW who has reportedly articulated the view – in class, mind you – that 911 was the result of a planned conspiracy between Bush and “the Jews.” Because she has tenure, UNCW is stuck with the 911 conspiracy theorist as well as her anti-Semitic views. But what about the occasional Jewish student in her classroom? Should she be required to “respect” her professor’s anti-Semitic views?
You know as well as I do that student discussions are not bound by the Seahawk Respect Compact. At this public university, they are bound by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. Therefore, I ask that you order the Seahawk Respect Compact to be removed from every classroom at UNCW. I furthermore ask you to replace it with a copy of the First Amendment so students will be reminded daily that the right to be unoffended is to be found nowhere in our constitution.
This action will also remind our students that the UNCW handbook is not the law of the land. The U.S. Constitution is the law of the law. It has not been preserved by the blood and sacrifice of the easily offended.
With all due respect and civility,
Mike S. Adams
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Friday, November 4, 2011
Mike Adams - New Charges Surface Against Muslim Professor
It has been awhile since we talked about the case of
Julio Pino – a tenured member of the faculty of Kent State University. Shortly after I last wrote to you there was a Secret Service raid on his home. The raid was meant to ensure that certain veiled threats directed to the Obama White House were not a prelude to some planned act of violence. I thank you for any role you may have played in helping alert the federal authorities.As you may know, Pino is continuing to cause substantial problems in Ohio. I recently received a letter from a Jewish student at Kent State who was concerned after Pino created a scene at an event cosponsored by Hillel. (You may have heard of the incident in question but please read this letter in its entirety. It contains new allegations you may find disturbing).
Student members of Hillel have elected to take action with the help of some other leaders on campus. They are not satisfied with the way the University appears to be handling the situation. Not enough is being done to deal with a professor who has resorted to using intimidation to advance his own personal jihad against others including Jewish students.
Some examples of anti-Semitic intimidation of students include the following:
This second allegation is particularly problematic because it allegedly occurred in class with a student under his supervision. It is also particularly problematic because the university refuses to investigate the incident. The targeted Jewish student has reported the incident to officials at Kent State. But no investigation has been launched. Nor do Kent State officials seem to know the status of the report filed by the student.
- Professor Pino calling a Jewish student who had served in the Israeli Army “his favorite war criminal” and;
- Telling another Jewish student that “because you are Jewish, you will burn in hell.”
It bears repeating: Kent State knows Julio Pino has been accused of telling a Jewish student – in class, mind you – that he will “burn in hell” simply because he is Jewish. And they refuse to investigate Pino.Governor Kasich, I am asking for your help. I want your office to order the investigation of Pino to begin immediately. If action is not taken against Professor Pino, this will not only set the bar for the acceptance of anti-Semitism on campus, but it also will open the door for others at Kent State and around the country to abuse their positions as educators to whom students open their minds.
In other words, we can ignore what Professor Pino does outside the classroom but not what he does inside the classroom. That is not to dismiss the severity of Pino’s off-campus conduct. After all, he posted bomb-making instructions on a terrorist website during a time of war. And he specifically called for the weapons to be used against U.S. troops. But that is an issue for the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. Ohio taxpayers have specific interests the federal government does not – such as combating religious harassment in state-supported classrooms.
Indeed, many members of the Kent State student body want to make sure Professor Pino is held accountable in accordance with the severity of his words and deeds. Students are enraged at this situation, and so are many Ohio taxpayers who are funding this Professor’s in-class bigotry. I hope that you can offer your insight and support, given your knowledge of Professor Pino’s previous actions.
Thank you so much,
Mike S. Adams
p.s. It has now been eighteen months since Professor Pino was investigated on allegations that he sent an email from his office using his university account (jpino@kent.edu) saying the following: “I (expletive) your mother up her greasy (expletive) and (expletive) when you aren’t looking.” Pino’s defense is that his computer account was hacked. The university has not yet concluded the investigation. In other words, it appears that they really did not investigate Pino.
p.p.s. I was the recipient of the aforementioned email and can provide a copy to the Governor’s Office upon request.
Mike Adams
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