“Dinner For Schmucks?”

Judging by recent student reports, it appears that not even foreign language classes on our nation’s campuses are immune to the scourge of radical ideology.

Ohio State student Patrick Seaworthy reported in The College Fix that he signed up for a German II class last fall, expecting to learn some of the finer points of German language and conversation. Instead, he quickly discovered that he was the only conservative in a class where “learning German took a back seat to discussions of the prowess of Barack Obama, American narcissism, the virtues of socialism, the sad plight of Chicago’s teachers, and why the U.S. military is the reason the American education system is broken,” just to name a few of the diversionary tactics used in class.

Seaworthy says his first mistake was taking part in a class discussion during the Chicago teachers union protests. After pointing out that an average Chicago teacher’s salary was already $80,000 a year, his professor reminded him that “that salary was only an average.” But when he responded that the average person with a college degree only makes about $48,000, “it was all downhill from there.”

Since the class was conducted at the height of the presidential election campaign, the professor thought nothing of asking her students to compare their intelligence to that of President Obama. And she also made it a habit to continually “reinforce the Commander in Chief’s wide-ranging vision for America.”

Another topic she favored was pointing out that Germany’s high tax rate made for an orderly state . . . and how the taxation that provided free cradle-to-grave healthcare showed that Germany was a country that “actually does something with their tax dollars,” according to one classmate.

A couple of aspects of his German II class that Seaworthy had looked forward to were learning about the culture and speaking conversational German. Instead, he was treated to a litany of praise for the country’s high taxes, structured state, rich history (Nazism wasn’t mentioned) and their “advanced civil culture,” which included “a hatred of what we in America would refer to as patriotism.”

Perhaps this is why Seaworthy began referring to the four nightly class sessions per week as “Dinner for Schmucks.”

THE ASIAN-AMERICAN ADMISSIONS BIAS

Amid the ongoing saga of real or perceived academic discrimination, one underreported story involves the increasing number of Asian-Amerian students who “believe the admissions procedure is geared against them.”

Two recent stories from the Associated Press and the Chronicle of Higher Education have reported on this unfortunate consequence of race-oriented college admissions. As more Asian American high school students come to grips with these cold, hard facts, an increasing number do not record their race as “Asian” on the application form, according to Mark Bauerlin in Minding the Campus.

Since “Asian students need much higher SAT scores than white students (and much, much more than African American and Hispanic applicants) to secure admission,” they respond by “concealing their racial identity. If they are half-Asian and half-white, they choose white. If they are 100% Asian, they simply leave the race box empty. The irony is thick: being white or being nothing is better than being Asian.”

However, the Chronicle of Higher Education reports that school administrators deny this is happening. For example, while a senior at Wootton High School outside D.C. stated that “Asians are being held to a higher standard by admissions offices,” the college counselor at Wootton expressed “surprise to hear that students sense they are held to a higher standard.’It’s interesting that they believe that,’ she says. ‘I don’t.'” She didn’t know they believe that? And given the numbers, it “surprises” her?

Meanwhile, another Wootton senior justified the procedure that works against her and others like her, saying that “I don’t blame the colleges. I can see it from their point of view. They want to have a diverse college.”

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Deborah Lambert writes the Squeaky Chalk column for Accuracy in Academia.
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