Caveat Emptor

Did you ever wonder why we get those unique studies and courses coming out of legendary colleges and universities? We get them because our tax dollars are at work paying for them.

“My program for training students to think scientifically about everyday issues—like whether herbal supplements really improve one’s health or whether playing violent video games leads to violent behavior—is used in high schools across the United States, including some on American Indian reservations and some with large populations of ethnic minority students and recent immigrants,” Professor Wendy Williams of Cornell writes in The Chronicle of Higher Education. “No sensible person would argue that it is not an important project for our society.”

“Fortunately, it is also intellectually rewarding and eligible for grants that pay high overhead.” Professor Williams co-directs the Cornell Institute for Research on Children. And how high does the overhead get?

“In the past I co-directed a study of the types of practical thinking and reasoning that lead to success in leadership, particularly those skills that do not always accompany a high IQ,” Professor Williams writes. “Clearly that too is an important question, which is why the U. S. Army supported the five-year project with a multimillion-dollar grant, including 60-percent overhead.”

Not that private philanthropists fare much better with their voluntary donations to the college of their choice than the average taxpayer does with levies extracted from him for transfer payments to the Ivory Tower. As Heather McDonald reports in the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, at least one self-made millionaire, Sidney Knafel, is making Radcliffe way too well-endowed.

“Chairman of Insight Communications, the nation’s ninth-largest cable company, with a market value of some $2.1 billion, Knafel has recently forked over a juicy $1.5 million to the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, a font of feminist grievance and left-wing posturing,” McDonald writes. “The Radcliffe Institute supports some of the silliest academic orthodoxies around—a belief that knowledge, gender and race are ‘socially constructed’ rather than based on any reality, a fascination with homosexuality, and an obsession with an endemic American sexism and racism.”

Occasionally, the Institute brings in reinforcements to help get its message out. Recently, both Susan Faludi and Barbara Ehrenreich helped the Institute to secure its feminist bulkhead. The former “claimed preposterously to her Radcliffe audience that 9/11 had triggered yet another ‘backlash against feminism.’” The latter “lectured on ‘Weird Science: Challenging Sexist Ideology since the 1970s.’”

This weekend the John W. Pope Center for Higher Education will hold its annual conference at the Hilton Raleigh-Durham Airport hotel in Durham, N. C., and feature dissident professors from across the country. The theme of this year’s gathering is: Are we getting our money’s worth out of higher education? Conference participants should run into no shortage of material on that topic.

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