Academia Nuts Outed

With three semesters gone, the list of dubious academic achievements of 2008 is a long one but we will try to whittle it down to:

• Lionizing Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers, himself a tenured professor on, among other outlets, the website supportbillayers.org;

• Demanding a federal bailout by the U. S. Congress, the outgoing Bush Administration, the incoming Obama government or any combination of the above while sitting on billion-dollar endowments;

• Insisting on academic freedom for professors while their students fail to answer basic historical questions;

• Denying political biases while using class time to get out the vote for Barack Obama;

• Annual productions of The Vagina Monologues that claim to elevate women while reducing them to body parts;

• Playing the Race Card while still failing to attract black students, leading to, concurrently, an explosion in courses on racial studies and increasingly urgent pleas to boost minority enrollment;

• Birthing plots to bankrupt the nation financially, politically and culturally—from federal bailouts to UN programs and treaties to laws that grant homosexuals the same privileges that married couples enjoy;

• Pushing for nationalized health care despite the well-documented failure of same;

• Maintaining the fiction of global warming in the face of plummeting temperatures; and

• Turning prime academic real estate over to radical Islamic groups under the guise of “tolerance.” (“We are asking all campus groups to repudiate the genocidal passage in the Islamic Hadith which reads: ‘The prophet, prayer and peace be upon him, said: “The time [of judgment] will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews and kill them; until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, come on and kill him!’” author and activist David Horowitz pleaded last year. We’re still waiting for that repudiation, although the Muslim Students Association of the University of Southern California, one of the largest, did wipe the passage off of its web site, according to Jihad Watch. Meanwhile, “Despite the progress made in basic education and schooling in Arab countries, almost 40 % of those over 15 years of age—nearly 70 million people—are illiterate,” Sue Williams of UNESCO reports. “Women and girls who have received no schooling are under-represented in this group, especially those living in rural areas.”).

Indeed, the more that academics talk up their intellect, the more they seem to
take leave of their senses. Here are our nominees for the most senseless scholars of the year just past:

• Franciscan Friar Kenneth Himes for his apparently unilateral decision to have the theology department which he chairs sponsor a performance of The Vagina Monologues at Catholic Boston College;

• Bucknell assistant history professor John Enyeart for his blanket absolution of The Weather Underground for acts of violence, although, as can be seen on the aforementioned supportbillayers.org, he is not alone but joins, literally, a cast of thousands;

• Gerard Anderson of Johns Hopkins for his ingenious proposal to expand the federal government’s nearly bankrupt system of health care for the elderly—Medicare—to, well, just about everyone;

• University of Hartford historian, also a department chair, Warren Goldstein for his heavy breathing column in The Chronicle of Higher Education on Senator Barack Obama’s election to the presidency, an embarrassingly puffy piece that his ratemyprofessor.com ratings indicate was well-rehearsed on class time;

• Connecticut College historian Catherine McNicol Stock, another department chair, who tried to draw a connection between Alaska Governor Sarah Palin and “rural radicals” such as Posse Comitatas because they are all from the “Great White Northwest”;

• Cornell Law School Professor Sherry Colb for suggesting that Governor Palin was contemplating an abortion because she had a diagnostic test for Downs Syndrome done while pregnant that doctors recommend;

• Former CNN Washington bureau chief Frank Sesno, now a professor at George Washington University, who said of his media colleagues “I don’t buy that there is an ideological bias”;

• University of Chicago professor Richard A. Thaler; and

• His UChi colleague Cass R. Sunstein for their compromise idea on the gay-marriage impasse: taking the license-granting authority away from the state “So, for example, a church could decide that it would marry only members of that church, and a scuba-diving club could decide that it would restrict its ceremonies to certified divers”; and

• University of Missouri political scientist Max Skidmore who declared that “Social Security is a tried and true system, popular, successful and highly efficient.” Try telling that to the cashiers and cooks at Wendy’s.

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.

Malcolm A. Kline
Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia. If you would like to comment on this article, e-mail contact@academia.org.