The Week in Academe

 

Here are the highlights so far:

• SAT scores went down.
• Oklahoma Wesleyan held a 9/11 memorial and was ranked by U. S. News & World Report
• Thomas Aquinas College got a high U. S. News ranking too.
• Harvard, founded as a religious college, has come full circle to secular devotion: It is making freshmen sign an ideological pledge to “diversity.”  I was in a parish like that once: The priest actually began a prayer by intoning, “Diverse God, friend of the disabled.”
• Evan Goldstein, in a profile on Alan Wolfe which appears in the Chronicle of Higher Education, makes a reference to “right-wing dictatorships.” Evan, if it’s right-wing, it’s not a dictatorship and if it’s a dictatorship,  it can’t be right wing.  Dictators can’t function on the small governments conservatives advocate. Over the past decade some, putatively on the right, ruminated that no one knew what conservatism meant anymore and some talked of “big government conservatism.” Big government conservatives are not conservative, whether they are Republican or not. Taking the advocacy of small government out of conservatism is like taking abstinence out of virginity.

Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.

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