Hope & Spare Change

In our bid to win the USA Today award for best investigative paragraph, we offer up some news items that run about that long.*

Obama U

Google the phrase “college and university courses in community organizing” and you get 9,990,000 entries, at least as of today.

Half-Baked Forecasts Rule

The Associated Press reports that “community colleges across the country are reporting a surge of unemployed workers enrolling in courses that offer training for ‘green collar’ jobs.’” Perhaps these idealistic students would like to buy a time-share that is every bit as real as the world that they live in.

Extremely AIA

If the U. S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), in its quest to find “right-wing extremists” targets Accuracy in Academia, these intrepid investigators might find that our website, as of April 14, 2009, posted 158 stories on Barack Obama and 43 on Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz, President Obama’s opponent in the last presidential campaign. Although none of the above were favorable, the reason for the numerical disparity is simple: Obama won.

Universities of Interest

Meanwhile, while DHS pursues conservative extremists—surely an oxymoronic term—the agency may be missing some real ones who don’t wear Adam Smith ties. “A terrorist assessment from the Virginia Fusion Center characterizes the state’s colleges and universities as ‘nodes of radicalization’ and breeding grounds for extremist groups,” Scott McCabe reported in The Washington Examiner on April 8, 2009.

Obama Hits CINO circuit

The Vatican may not approve of his emissaries to the Holy See but that doesn’t stop Notre Dame and Georgetown from inviting the President to its Catholic in Name Only (CINO) campuses.

Foreign Policy Fantasy

Iran “is a religious state that abridges the freedom of worship and does not allow people to speak and write freely,” Arthur Goldsmith, a professor of management from the University of Massachusetts at Boston, writes in the Spring 2008 issue of the Cornell International Affairs Review. “Yet within the bounds set by spiritual leaders there is lively political participation and vigorous competition for office.” Dr. Goldsmith graduated from Cornell in 1981.

Behind every dark cloud…

…is an even darker cloud. “The average salary of a full-time faculty member rose 3.4 percent in 2008-9…a rate well above inflation,” Audrey Williams June reported in The Chronicle of Higher Education April 17, 2009 issue.

Beware of academics…

We could just end the sentence there, but won’t. Here’s the rest: …who offer causes of current crises. They tend to be representative of the mindset that got us into the jams to begin with. In The Chronicle Review on April 17, 2009, economists George A. Akerloff (Berkeley) and Robert J. Schiller (Yale) blame the current economic meltdown on “animal spirits” as defined by John Maynard Keynes while U. S. Circuit Court Judge Richard Posner (a regular lecturer at the University of Chicago law school) concludes that it is A Failure of Capitalism, the title of his latest book.

Grammar By Gimmick

In the March 2009 issue of the Middle School Journal, a team of education professionals offer their thoughts on “Assessment-Driven Improvements in Middle School Students’ Writing”: “Peer and self-assessment are key elements because they involve students in thinking about the quality of their own and each others’ work, rather than relying on their teachers as the sole source of evaluative judgment.” The team of authors include Heidi Andrade, an assistant professor of education at The State University of New York at Albany and three teachers and a principal from the nearby Knickerbacker Middle School. It should be noted that most of Andrade’s ratemyprofessors.com ratings are positive with a couple of notable exceptions. One reviewer alleges that she “passes inconsiderate ‘personal’ comments under the guise of ‘feedback’” while another claims that she “states a lot of opinions as facts that ‘we all know’ and gets frustrated with dissenters.”

Civil Literacy

“When my own students pursue the essential question, ‘What are my civil rights, and how can I best protect them?’ the study of civil rights becomes personal and engaging,” Jeffrey D. Wilhelm writes in the April 2009 issue of Middle Ground: The Magazine of Middle Level Education. That would be inspiring if he were not a professor of English Education at Boise State University. Don’t expect the Great Books to come back to his class anytime soon, or grammar, for that matter.

Everything that you never wanted to know about homosexuality…

…education professors will probably want to teach you, or your children. Norma J. Bailey, a professor of Middle School Education at Central Michigan University, gave a talk on “Strategies and Resources of Meeting the Needs of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Youth in Middle Level Schools” at the National Middle School Association conference in Denver last Fall.

*We’re kidding. As far as we know, there is no such prize.

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.