100 arguments against tenure, Part I

 

Drawn from the profiles we’ve done of professors so far this year, we offer these pedagogues as proof that tenure doesn’t work but because they are so numerous, we have to give them to you in installments:

1. Michelle Ann Abate, California State University-Northridge, for deconstructing comic books.
2. Silvia Allegretto of Berkeley, for her failure to recognize that people vote with their feet when moving out of big government states.
3. Brian K. Arbour, John Jay Criminal College, who said, “Sociologists have identified an emerging new ethnic population of ‘unhyphenated Americans,’ those whites who claim an ‘American’ ancestry, or none at all.”
4. Scott Atran, John Jay Criminal College and University of Michigan, for claiming that “Egyptian protestors accomplished in 18 days what Al Qaeda failed to do in more than 18 years: topple a core regime of the Arab world,” about a regime that has made attacks upon Israel typical for the first time in three decades.
5. Sandra Babcock, Northwestern University, for defending terrorists and/or trying to impose international law upon the United States.
6. John Banzhaf, George Washington University, for enlisting his students in his quixotic class-action lawsuits, whether they want to or not.
7. Michael S. Berkman and Eric Plutzer from Penn State University, two political scientists who feel compelled to offer guidelines on how actual science should be taught.
8. Barbara G. Brents, University of Nevada-Las Vegas sociologist, with a consuming interest in Nevada’s legal brothels and an interesting array of visiting speakers to her classroom.
9. Father Stephen Brown of St. Leo University, who urged the university’s Catholic students to fast for Ramadan but not to feel compelled to give something up for Lent.
10. Anthony Carnevale of Georgetown, who predicted jobs from nowhere.
11. Francesco Crocco who teaches creative writing at the City University of New York and guides his class through a class struggle version of the board game Monopoly.
12. Scott Denham of Davidson, who tried to expel a student from the college for his political opinions, and used the school newspaper as his means of communicating that wish.
13. Scott Denning, Colorado State University, who ignores the science, or lack thereof, connected to global warming.
14. John Dinges at Columbia, who brings a career of left-wing journalism at The Washington Post to his current posting in the school of journalism.
15. E. J. Dionne, still at the Post, who covers, or covers for, the Obama Administration on his day job there and his after- hours gig teaching at Georgetown
16. Linda Dittmar, University of Massachusetts-Boston, for her blatant advocacy of art as a political weapon.
17. Bernardine Dohrn, Northwestern—although her husband, Bill Ayers, gave up the daily college grind, the weather girl is still at it.
18. Jennifer Doyle, University of California-Riverside, who theorizes that the problem with women’s sports is that there are not enough lesbians playing them.
19. Peter Edelman, Georgetown Law School, who thinks he’s found the cause of the breakdown of the American family—prison.
20. Christopher Edley of Berkeley, who tries to blame classroom trends on the class struggle.
21. Thomas B. Edsall at the Columbia School of Journalism, for whom media bias is a fait accompli.
22. Terry Eagleton of Notre Dame, who compared the 9/11 attacks upon the United States to the U. S. effort in the Vietnam War.
23. Former surgeon general, Joycelyn Elders, now at the University of Minnesota Medical School, who endorsed teaching masturbation to kids during the Clinton Administration.
24. James Engell of Harvard who showed why English professors should avoid economics when he noted that dropouts caused by rising college costs are “[reinforcing] the widening income gap in the United States” and “[portending] a society which is less democratic.”
25. Joseph Entin, Brooklyn College (see #16, Linda Dittmar)
26. Laurie Essig, University of Vermont, the author of American Plastic: Boob Jobs, Credit Cards, and Our Quest for Perfection, “a critique of neoliberal capitalism through cosmetic surgery,” as her web site puts it, and Queer in Russia: A Story of Sex, Self, and the Other (Duke University Press, 1999).
27. Jack Doppelt of Medill, author of The Journalism of Outrage: Investigative Reporting and Agenda Building in America, who runs three web sites— ImmigrantConnect.org, Immigration Here & There, and On The Docket
28. Howard French, Columbia U, who moonlights at George Soros’s Open Society.
29. Todd Gitlin, Columbia U: From Students for a Democratic Society to the Journalism School there is not so great a leap.
30. Steven Gortmaker, a health sociologist at Harvard, who uses obesity as a reason to call for higher taxes.
31. Columbia professor Jamal Greene, who mangles the story of George Washington’s teeth while dazzling us with his historical expertise.

Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.

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