Campus Backlog

In the he said/she said dialogue I recently entered into with American Federation of Teachers editor Beverly McKenna, I told her that I would post her response to my article in which I quoted her allegations that academia lacked bias. “Sorry it has taken me so long to get back to you,” I wrote. “Come to think of it, if there is so little bias in academia, why am I backlogged?”

She has yet to answer that one. I’ll let you know when she does.

Litigation Explodes on left-wing Prof

Most college administrators have ignored or downplayed the Litigation Explosion in the United States but when they find themselves among the casualties they may change their minds. “Missouri State University recently sided with Emily Brooker in her grievance against a professor who imposed his anti-family views on students,” Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council reports. “Frank Kauffman, an assistant professor of social work, demanded that his class sign a letter supporting the notion that homosexuals make healthy foster parents.”

“When Brooker refused, Kauffman said her beliefs conflicted with the social workers’ code of ethics,” Perkins reports. “She disagreed and sued the school for violating its standards of diversity.”

Incidentally, MSU’s school of social work is not the only such program to adhere to that type of “code of ethics.” Similar controversies have erupted in Rhode Island College and other universities.

“In a university environment, where tolerance is taught but seldom practiced, MSU’s president offered Brooker a generous settlement that included free school tuition, living expenses, and additional financial compensation,” Perkins writes. “Kauffman was removed from the classroom.”

Veterans Day on Campus

Most Americans visit a cemetery on Veterans Day but on college campuses, as we have repeatedly reported, veterans are about the one group that gets no official observance. Students on one California campus managed to add insult to that oversight.

“Student leaders at a California college have touched off a furor by banning the Pledge of Allegiance at their meetings, saying they see no reason to publicly swear loyalty to God and the U.S. government,” Dan Whitcomb reported for Reuters. “The move by Orange Coast College student trustees, the latest clash over patriotism and religion in American schools, has infuriated some of their classmates— prompting one young woman to loudly recite the pledge in front of the board on Wednesday night in defiance of the rule.”

“America is the one thing I’m passionate about and I can’t let them take that away from me,” 18-year-old political science major Christine Zoldos saID. You go, girl!

Student Fee Democracy

For some time now, student funds on campuses have been a means whereby mandatory fees extracted from collegiates bankroll a panoply of left-wing groups the whopping majority of undergraduates have no wish to join. Some of the students at Stanford have come up with a campaign to arrest, if not reverse this trend. “Stanford charges you $90 dollars a quarter for student activities,” Luukas Ilves writes in the Stanford Review. “Of this, $72 goes to a small set of specific groups whose programming supposedly benefits the entire student body.”

“Don’t think you get your money’s worth of programming?” Ilves asks. “You can ask for a refund,” Ilves suggests. Maybe, like many California trends, it will catch on nationwide.

“While some groups really do benefit the entire campus, others’ claims on student money appear more spurious,” Ilves notes. “Compare Stanford News Readership, whose $55,000 budget buys the entire campus 800 copies of the New York Times and the San Jose Mercury News every weekday with the 2% overhead to Volunteers in Latin America, which received $12,000 to buy airfare for fourteen Stanford volunteers to spend two months in Ecuador.”

“Perhaps these volunteers will improve our Karma?”

Party Studies

A new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research may contain some welcome news for party animals. “We estimate the relationship between 10th grade binge drinking in 1990 and labor market outcomes in 2000 among National Educational Longitudinal Survey respondents,” professors Jeffrey DeSimone and Pinka Chatterji state in the abstract of their study. “For females, adolescent drinking and adult wages are unrelated, and negative employment effects disappear once academic achievement is held constant.”

“For males, negative employment effects and, more strikingly, positive wage effects persist after controlling for achievement as well as background characteristics, educational attainment, and adult binge drinking and family and job characteristics.”

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