We got a chance to meet some fine students at Accuracy in Academia’s annual conservative university conference. Switching the locale from Georgetown University to Capitol Hill proved a mixed blessing. The congressional office where we held the conference was centrally located. Unfortunately, the Capitol Hill interns who would have made up the bulk of our crowd were otherwise occupied as their bosses tried to wind up legislative business and leave town.
Nonetheless, the attendees who did attend gave us high marks on the conference program’s content. “I’d like to congratulate you on your 20th anniversary,” Jason C. Dombrowski of American University wrote. “It is great to have an organization such as yours in existence and available to students.”
What we heard at the conference was both upsetting and inspiring at the same time. When I asked Georgia Tech’s Ruth Malhotra and Catholic University’s Christine Inauen (pictured) how they handled inaccuracies that they encountered in textbooks, both essentially agreed that you have to memorize the wrong answer for the test while reminding yourself that you are not being tested on the right answer.
“In political science, frequently the entire textbook is inaccurate,” Miss Inauen said. Indeed, one textbook Miss Malhotra was assigned was A Little Matter of Genocide. This was the book authored by the University of Colorado’s Ward Churchill, the ethnic studies professor who compared the victims of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 to a notorious Nazi from Hitler’s Third Reich.
Both ladies spoke on CU’s student panel. Miss Malhotra took her tale of political persecution by a professor off campus—to a committee of the Georgia state assembly. Miss Inauen, who served with more than distinction as an AIA intern this summer, gave readers a behind-the-scenes look at her own campus in the last issue of the Campus Report newsletter. But graduates who spoke at the conference showed that students can survive the tinhorn dictators who rule their lives for 4 pivotal years, and even prosper.
At North Carolina State University, about ten years ago a sociology professor called out in front of a class of 300 a young conservative student on a column he had written. She then gave the young man a “C” for the course. She is still teaching at NC State. He is now the youngest member of the U. S. Congress—Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N. C.). “Washington is a tough place but college campuses are tougher,” Rep. McHenry told the audience.
Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.
