U. of Chicago failing to protects it students' fragile little feelings

The mean, mean people in the University of Chicago administration are clearly insensitive to the feelings of the weakly-constituted generation of students attending our colleges and universities, who apparently break out in hives whenever they are confronted by anyone voicing an opinion at odds with their own.

Unlike Brown University, "which last year created a room 'with cookies, coloring books, bubbles, Play-Doh, calming music, pillows, blankets and a video of frolicking puppies' because a debate on sexual assault was taking place on campus," the University of Chicago has chosen to place their entering students in the precarious situation of having to confront ideas they might disagree with.

What is the world coming to?

Today's intellectually fragile college students could take a few lessons from the Middle Ages on how to deal with controversy

Bishop Robert Barron has something more to offer today's coddled and fragile college students than safe zones and trigger warnings:

Even great works of literature and philosophy—from Huckleberry Finn and Heart of Darkness to, believe it or not, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason—are now regularly accompanied by “trigger warnings” that alert prospective readers to the racism, sexism, homophobia, or classism contained therein. And popping up more and more at our colleges and universities are “safe spaces” where exquisitely sensitive students can retreat in the wake of jarring confrontations with points of view with which they don’t sympathize. My favorite example of this was at Brown University where school administrators provided retreat centers with play-doh, crayons, and videos of frolicking puppies to calm the nerves of their students even before a controversial debate commenced! 

It's kind of ironic that there was greater tolerance about what you could talk about in the Middle Ages than on a modern college campus:

If we consult Aquinas’s masterpiece, the Summa Theologiae, we find that he poses literally thousands of questions and that not even the most sacred issues are off the table, the best evidence of which is article three of question two of the first part of the Summa: “utrum Deus sit?” (whether there is a God). If a Dominican priest is permitted to ask even that question, everything is fair game; nothing is too dangerous to talk about.

St. Thomas not only listened to other people's arguments but when he responded to them, he gave them the best characterization he could so that he wouldn't be arguing against a straw man;

After stating the issue, Thomas then entertains a series of objections to the position that he will eventually take. In many cases, these represent a distillation of real counter-claims and queries that Aquinas would have heard during quaestiones disputatae. But for our purposes, the point to emphasize is that Thomas presents these objections in their most convincing form, often stating them better and more pithily than their advocates could.

It worked a lot better than today's adult version of day care. Read the rest here.

UK cut extension and health jobs but saved PC positions, says advocacy group

Today's press release from The Family Foundation:

LEXINGTON, KY--The University of Kentucky is putting politics ahead of its mission to serve Kentuckians in its budget cuts, according to one advocacy group. "The University of Kentucky should cut the political correctness and leave the county extension program and the College of Medicine alone," said a spokesman for the group.

 

The Family Foundation criticized the university today for laying off as many as 75 employees while leaving the Office for Institutional Diversity, which gets almost $2.5 million a year, untouched. While touting "diversity," the mission of the Office for Institutional Diversity is to promote politically correct causes such as lesbian and gay issues and abortion on campus.

 

"You have to question the priorities of a university that is cutting important programs like the Kentucky Cooperative Extension Service and the College of Medicine while it is spending $2.5 million on one-sided political activism on campus in the name of diversity," said Martin Cothran, senior policy analyst for the group.

 

"We wonder how many of the 75 jobs UK is eliminating could be saved by ditching the PC and concentrating instead on non-political programs that really matter."

 

Cothran also said that it was hard to tell exactly what UK's Office for Institutional Diversity has actually accomplished, since its goals were vague and ill-defined. "It's very hard to tell exactly what this $2.5 million is buying. Most of the money seems to be going to pay people to repeat the word 'diversity' over and over again in the hopes that people will think that they're actually doing something useful."

 

Cothran said the University could retain the $260,000 in funding for Minority Student Affairs, the MLK Cultural Center, and Student Support Services and still save over $2 million.

 

The group pointed to the university's budget, which indicates that almost $1 million of the $2.5 million of its diversity budget goes for administration. "It appears," said Cothran, "that UK can't even do left-wing politics very efficiently."

###

How bad should we feel about how bad college protesters feel about how inadequately bad the rest of us feel?

The nation's colleges and universities have been roiled by demonstrations by minority groups protesting insensitivity toward minorities by college officials who have given inadequate demonstration of how badly they feel about how badly minority students feel about how inadequately bad college officials feel about the feelings of minority students, resulting in the resignations of many college officials who have openly admitted the inadequate level of guilt they feel about the state of the protester's feelings.

Meanwhile, many normal Americans who are watching all of this are feeling bad about the fact that these students are squandering all their time feeling bad about how insufficiently bad other people are feeling, partly because it is making everyone feel bad.

We should all feel very badly about this. In fact, we do, which is really bad.

One of the things that made minority students feel bad at Harvard University recently is the fact that the university was founded by a slaveholder, making Harvard a White supremacist institution which is now, in consequence, under the obligation to feel bad about itself.

Of course, it has never been a secret that Harvard was founded on the basis of a bequest from Isaac Royall. So why it is that none of this has mattered until now?

Some observers (i.e., me) think that it is the result of a whole generation of students who have spent so much of their lives worrying about their feelings that they are completely ignorant of history, about which, if they had known anything, they would be even more upset than they already are.

In fact, other observers (i.e., also me), think that it is probably a good thing that these students are so wrapped up in feeling bad about how inadequately bad other people feel that they don't know very much history.

"What you have to realize," said one expert on the subject (me), "is that history is filled with bad things. And because these things are bad, they make people feel bad. And this, of course, is even worse. So it is perhaps best that people who feel bad about bad things that happened in the past--and who get upset when people in the present don't feel badly enough about them--should be careful about their exposure to what actually happened in the past."

"In fact," he continued, "the past is the last place you want to investigate if you don't want to feel bad."

This particular observer (me) wondered what would be the end result of all the bad feelings if more people knew about their own history. "We would all have to resign," he said.

"And just imagine how bad that would make everyone feel."

Black-shirted gay students disrupt meeting at UCSB

In case you thought the gay rights movement was just wanting a place at the table, you might want to check out another instance of gay rights groups upsetting everyone else's tables.


Check out this video of a meeting of the Anscombe Society at the University of California, Santa Barbara (my alma mater), where black-shirted and pink balloon festooned gay students try to disrupt the meeting.

So let me get this straight: giving gays their rights requires inhibiting the rights of those with which they disagree?

Sure would have been nice to know this before they hijacked the culture.

Just imagine the national condemnation which would have greeted a band of black-shirted socially conservative students disrupting a meeting of gays students.

Should a college degree be required to run for president?

Liberals are attacking Wisconsin Governor and possible Republican presidential candidate Scott Walker because he doesn't have a college degree. Has anyone looked recently at actual educational attainment of any of the people who actually have a college degree and actually been impressed?

Would Walker be more qualified if he had a B.A. from the Ohio College of Clown Arts? (an actual college)? Is a B.A. from many other random college around the country an better than the one from the Clown Tech?

Here's George Leef at the National Review:

Of late, the progressives, who always say that they’re against discriminating against people over irrelevant things, have been having a field day with the fact that Wisconsin’s governor, Scott Walker, never finished his degree at Marquette. Howard Dean tut-tutted that this obviously made Walker unsuitable as president. (Never mind that a majority of voters in Wisconsin have now chosen him over properly credentialed liberals three times.)  

This prompted Glenn Harlan Reynolds to comment on the college degree obsession in his latest USA Today column. “An America that once prided itself on real-world achievement and practical good sense now runs largely on credentials,” he writes. 

I'm thinking of William F. Buckley's comment about preferring to be ruled by the last thirty names in the Boston phone book than the entire faculty of Harvard University.

Like a true Nature's child, we were born, born to be ..., well, apparently it was a mistake

The 60s campus radicals who now run our universities (the ones who did the sit-ins in the administration offices but who now officially occupy them), having apparently given up on improving their students minds, are now engaged in helping them change their gender.

The new idea hatched by the Cult of Diversity: subsidize sex-change operations:

A number of elite private institutions, such as Duke and Yale, have recently added sex-change operations to the list of covered health-care procedures, raising student fees in order to pay for it. The operations and treatments can run higher than $50,000 for a single student.

To Timothy Leary's "Turn on, Tune in, Drop out" we can now add: Transmutate.

Tolerance Police strike again, this time at Tufts University

The Tolerance Police have struck again, this time at Tufts University, where, in the name of Tolerance and Diversity, they are rooting out student groups with which they disagree. We go now to Daniel Halper of the Weekly Standard for a report on this group that was (prepare yourself) requiring that its members actually believe in what the group stands for:

Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts has banned a Christian group from campus because the group requires student leaders to adhere to "basic biblical truths of Christianity." The decision to ban the group, called the Tufts Christian Fellowship, was made by officials from the university's student government, specifically the Tufts Community Union Judiciary.

Members of this group probably drink blood and sacrifice chickens too.

We'll all be better off when every organization has to accept even those who disagree with it. Well, okay, everyone except colleges and universities.

Ever notice which college departments never go on the chopping block?

The recent ouster of Theresa Sullivan from the presidency of the University of Virginia appears to have been at least in part the result of her unwillingness to cut academic programs according the prevailing utilitarian calculus popular among some. Here is part of the Washington Post report:

Besides broad philosophical differences, they had at least one specific quibble: They felt Sullivan lacked the mettle to trim or shut down programs that couldn’t sustain themselves financially, such as obscure academic departments in classics and German.

Classics and German "obscure"? Classics used to be all universities did. No wonder higher education is in the state it is in.


Oh, and did you ever notice that when the Sophisters and Calculators go talking about cutting academic departments that don't pay their way, they always target philosophy or (I'm thinking Florida here) anthropology--and now classics and German? Have you ever heard them talk about cutting, say Black Studies or Women's and Gender Studies?


Funny how that works.

College Quotas for Gays

As the price of higher education continues to skyrocket, the priorities of universities continue to move from academics to other things. Elmhurst College has become the first college to ask applicants about their "sexual orientation."

College diversity quotas favor traditionally low academically performing minorities. There has also been discussion of applying Title IX quotas to math and science programs because of the high percentage of males studying these disciplines. Now we could see quotas for gays in higher education.

In other words, it's a bad time to be a straight Asian male wanting to be a scientist or an engineer.

But this idea could potentially have disastrous consequences for gays. In Sweden, a national gender equity plan to eliminate discrimination against women turned ugly when, instead of helping women, it resulted in discrimination against them when females began applying in larger numbers than males. Just think, if colleges and universities impose sexual orientation quotes at their institutions, what would happen to dance and drama programs.

My op ed on UK's Gaskell Affair in today's Herald-Leader

My article on the Gaskell Affair at University of Kentucky was published in today's Lexington Herald-Leader.

It highlights the university's doublespeak on diversity, as evidenced by its actions toward Gaskell, who was up for the position of observatory director at UK until it was discovered he was "potentially evangelical."

Why is the Kentucky Human Rights Commission sitting on Martin Gaskell's religious discrimination complaint?

Martin Gaskell, who has sued University of Kentucky for religious discrimination, filed a complaint with the Kentucky Commission on Human Rights in May of 2008 and still has heard nothing. Exactly how many years does it take for the Human Rights Commission to process a religious discrimination complaint?

While the Human Rights Commission, which is sponsored by the state and paid for by taxpayer dollars, can't find the time to answer religious discrimination complaints, it seems to have plenty of time on its hands to engage in liberal political advocacy. While Gaskell's complaint gathers dust in the Commission's inbox, they were hard at work fashioning a resolution calling on the Kentucky General Assembly to include sexual orientation in the state’s civil rights statute.

The Kentucky Commission on Human Rights isn’t chartered to lobby state government; it’s chartered to enforce the Kentucky Civil Rights Act. It needs to lose the taxpayer funded political activism and get on the stick.

While the Human Rights Commission was working feverishly to advance a liberal political agenda, cobwebs were forming on this man’s religious discrimination complaint. If the Civil Rights Commission can’t find the time to deal with religious discrimination, which is part of the current civil rights laws, why is it asking for an expansion if its mission?

A court recently gave a green light for Gaskell’s suit to move ahead, and it the suit is expected to come to trial on February 8. The Kentucky Commission on Human Rights is a tax-payer funded organization chartered to combat discrimination.

Gaskell ran the student observatory at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and is widely published in the field of astronomy. Internal UK e-mails suggest he was the most qualified candidate for the position of Observatory Director at UK until it became known that he was a Christian. When this fact was discovered, a number of staff and faculty conspired to prevent him from getting the position, according to Gaskell.

When Gaskell failed to receive any response from the Kentucky Human Rights Commission, he filed suit.

He shouldn't have had to.

University of Kentucky: Higher ed's poster child for religious discrimination

When the Ben Stein's movie "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed" came out several years ago, Darwinists, critical of the movie's portrayal of several cases in which believers in Intelligent Design were discriminated against by the Darwinist establishment, denied that scientists who differed from the prevailing consensus were discriminated against in academia.

All of a sudden comes the case of Martin Gaskell, who was the top candidate for the position of observatory director at the University of Kentucky until a few professors, mostly in the biology department (New motto: "No Christians need apply"), got it in their heads that he was a creationist--or Intelligent Design advocate, they don't appear to know the difference-- at which point his candidacy was effectively over.

The main argument used by the Darwinists against "Expelled," was that the cases didn't actually constitute discrimination based on Darwinistic dogmatism. In the Gaskell case, their main argument is that they should be discriminated against because of his religion because his religion forces him into something less than Darwinist purism.

The irony of the case is that Gaskell is not a creationist. He has said he thinks creationism is bad science and that he has no problems with the standard theory of evolution. The worst thing he said about the theory of the theory of evolution is that it had some flaws.

But dogmatists brook no dissent, nor do they tolerate anything but complete acquiescence.

Had Gaskell been some sort of secularist, he might have gotten by with the remark and gotten the job. But Sally Shafer, who apparently acts as UK science's heresy hunter, determined, according to an e-mail now made public, that Gaskell was a "potential evangelical."

The University is claiming, in the face of the facts, that it didn't do anything wrong. And, of course, they're getting support from those we could have predicted would stick their heads in the sand, primary among which is P. Z. Meyers:

Of course, Gaskell has a predisposition: he's a devout Christian, so that persecution complex is rooted deeply. He claims he was denied the job because he's an evangelical Christian. I say he's just inventing rationalizations…something else his religion has made him very good at. And the newspapers are helping him out.

Never mind those damning e-mails and the entire discussion attested to by witnesses that it was his religion that did him in. And never mind the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that some of these same people would club you over the head with if the institution had discriminated against a minority.

In fact, one of the arguments used to defend UK's actions in the Gaskell affair is to say that he would have public outreach responsibilities and that his religious views would embarrass the University. Okay, let's just simply apply this to a similar discrimination case against, say, an African American, another group protected under the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Let's say that the University of Kentucky was looking for an agriculture extension officer for a certain part of the state. The job obviously involves public outreach. And let's say that this part of the state had few if any black population and a history of racist sentiment. And let's say an African American man applied for the job and was clearly the most qualified applicant on paper.

And let's also say that at the University there were faculty and staff in the agriculture department who indicated in their e-mails that they didn't think highly of blacks and that there was a concerted effort to torpedo his candidacy for the job, and that one of the reasons they gave for saying he was not qualified--in spite of his expertise and experience--was that they felt that his race would impair his ability to do outreach in this part of the state.

What then? Well, I think we know what would happen then: there would be an outcry the likes of which we have seldom heard.

The case has now gone viral. The New York Times covered it on Saturday, and the Washington Post on Friday.

Now the University that talks a good game about Tolerance and Diversity in its press releases is about to become higher education's poster child for religious discrimination.

Where was the KY Human Rights Commission on the Gaskell Affair?

The Associated Press is on the story of the Scientific Inquisition at the University of Kentucky:

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — University of Kentucky scientists wondered to each other in internal e-mails if an astronomer's Christian faith would interfere with a prestigious job as the director of a new student observatory, according to court records in the man's discrimination case set for trial in February.

Even though Martin Gaskell says he is not a creationist, he claims he was passed over for the job at UK's MacAdam Student Observatory three years ago because of his religion and statements that were perceived to be critical of the theory of evolution.

While we're all marveling at the intolerance of a university that preaches Tolerance and Diversity but practices Intolerance and enforces Uniformity, let us take a moment ask where Kentucky Human Rights Commission was during all this.

According to the deposition of Gaskell, it was revealed that, on the advice of his attorneys, he had filed a complaint with the Human Rights Commission, but never heard anything back. Why does the Human Rights Commission have plenty of time to use its statutory status to lobby for left wing social causes but has no time to bother with religious discrimination complaints from people like Gaskell?

More on UK's Gaskell Affair: What a tangled web they're weaving

Well, the defenders of Scientific Correctness have themselves into another fine logical mess.

They are claiming once again that Intelligent Design is a religious, rather than a scientific position. So far the claim has served them well. It allows them to simply dismiss it without actually doing any intellectual heavy lifting. They can simply raise their noses high, sniff audibly, and utter, in a dismissing tone, vague things about the integrity of science.

But the Gaskell affair at the University of Kentucky has got them all tied up in logical knots. Gaskell was the best qualified of seven candidates for the post of observatory director at UK until one member of the search committee got wind that he was a Christian, at which point some members of the committee--and apparently some faculty in the biology department--began a campaign to smear his reputation in order to deny him employment. They ended up hiring the third best candidate for the position rather than have a Christian on staff in one of their science departments.

It started when Sally Shafer, a UK staffer apparently in charge of keeping the university religion-free, Googled information on Gaskell and discovered he had given a lecture at UK in 1997 on science and religion, in which he went over the long list of Christian scientists in history and said that he adhered to the majority position in science that the universe--and the earth--were very old. He went on to say that, although he accepted natural selection, there were some unanswered questions about it.

Shafer, apparently appalled that Gaskell would discuss religion and science in the same lecture, and clearly disturbed that he had used the two words anywhere in the same vicinity, swung into action and reported Gaskell to the search committee as (brace yourself, this is strong language) a "potential evangelical."

Several other appalled committee members began calling him a "creationist" and "Intelligent Design" advocate, although the first is certainly untrue, and the second is not entirely clear from the record. In any case, the consequence was that he was passed over, even though, according to court documents, he was clearly the most qualified candidate. Gaskell then sued the university for religious discrimination under the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

But what is interesting is the reasons now being given to justify his treatment at the hands of UK's Scientific Inquisition.

According to the critics of Intelligent Design, ID is a religious position, not a scientific one. But if it is a religious position, then those who hold it cannot be discriminated against on the basis that they hold it under the Civil Rights Act. If ID is a religious position, then its advocates should not be allowed in university science departments. But if it is a religious position, then it is discrimination not to hire them on that basis.

Oooh. Not a good dilemma to be in. But the critics--on this blog anyway--just go on blindly ignoring the inconsistency.

Again, it is not clear that Gaskell holds to an Intelligent Design position. We're just granting it for the sake of argument here.

If Intelligent Design is a religious position, then Gaskell cannot be denied employment on the basis of holding believing it. And if it is scientific, then he should not be denied employment for holding it.

Go ahead Maniacs, tell me how you get out of this one.

The University of Kentucky's "Gaskell Affair": Further adventures in intellectual "Diversity" at UK

Expect anytime now to see the following lines chiseled in stone on the wall outside the University of Kentucky's Ministry of Truth building:

Uniformity is Diversity
Favoritism is Equality
Bigotry is Tolerance

If you are a left-wing ideologue applying for a faculty position at the University of Kentucky, you have a comfortable and welcoming place awaiting you in the "Gender and Women's Studies" department. But if you have what the University of Kentucky thinks look suspiciously like, ... ahem, a religion, you might just be refused a job.

At the university that preaches "Diversity" at every available opportunity, a leading candidate was turned down for the position of Observatory Director at UK when, after seeing a discussion on a personal website, UK officials determined he was "potentially evangelical." The University was sued for religious discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

UK denies it discriminated based on religion, but the judge points out that the "record contains substantial evidence," said the judge, "that Gaskell was a leading candidate for the position until the issue of his religion (as Gaskell calls it) or his scientific position (as UK calls it) became an issue." And it is pretty clear, from the evidence, which of the two--religion or his scientific position--it is.

A paper he wrote religion and scientific issues and a similar talk he gave at UK started a discussion among search committee members about how his religious beliefs might affect his scientific views. Even though Gaskell nowhere indicates he is a creationist (and in fact gives indications that he at least believes the commonly accepted scientific evidence about the age of the earth), several committee members and other staff decided, on the mere basis of talking about science in the context of religion, decided he was.

Sally Shafer, one of the committee members sent colleagues a set of websites and links having to do with Gaskell, concluding, "clearly this man is complex and likely fascinating to talk with--but potentially evangelical." Several others admitted that it was factor or a "theme" in the decision, which is prohibited in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In fact, even the search committee chair was exercised over this. Here is the text of an e-mail sent by Professor Thomas Troland, to Professor Michael Cavagnero, the chair of UK's department of physics and astronomy, before the decision was made:

It has become clear to me that there is virtually no way Gaskell will be offered the job despite his qualifications which stand far above those of any other applicant. Other reasons will be given for this choice when we meet Tuesday. In the end, however, the real reason why we will not offer him the job is because of his religious beliefs in matters that are unrelated to astronomy or to any of the duties specified for this position ... If Martin were not so superbly qualified, so breathtakingly above the other applicants in background and experience, then our decision would be much simper. We could easily choose another applicant, and we could content ourselves with the idea that Martin's religious beliefs played little role in our decision. However, this is not the case. As it is, no objective observer could possibly believe that we excluded Martin on any other basis than religious.

The judge mentions that Troland "subsequently retracted these comments to some extent," although he doesn't explain in detail. But he does say that these comments "remain direct evidence if religious discrimination." And, anyway, the remaining evidence would probabloy be sufficient to prove it in court.

That's how "Diversity" works at the University of Kentucky. If has Gaskell had only had posts on his website about "Queer Theory" or "Black male-bodied drag queens" (a particular favorite down the road at the University of Louisville), he could have passed the Diversity test at UK.

Another higher education institution lowers itself: SUNY's Faustian bargain

The State University of New York (SUNY) recently joined the growing list of universities that are eliminating humanities and fine arts departments for budgetary reasons. It decided to dispense with French, Italian, Russian, classics, and theater arts programs. These departments are vulnerable when the Hollow Men who largely make up university administrations are unwisely given a budget-cutting knife because they want to excise programs with low enrollments, and many of these departments are having this problem.

Why do these disciplines often suffer from low enrollment in our colleges and universities? Part of it is just cyclical: they go in and out of fashion. In the 1960s for example, philosophy departments had relatively high enrollments. But when I arrived on campus in the late seventies, my philosophy department was not as popular as it once was. I am told that it has enjoyed a resurgence or two since I graduated.

Another reason for low enrollment in humanities and fine arts has to do with the fact that many universities have eliminated their academic core programs. Universities once at least gave lip service to the importance of giving students a broad education, and many of them placed specific emphasis--or, we should probably say, a general emphasis--on a basic grounding in Western civilization. But the concern with giving students a generally education is being abandoned in favor of other priorities.

The dominant priority of the soulless bureaucrats who run these institutions is "Diversity," by which they mean exactly the opposite. What they really mean is ideological uniformity. Every time I receive a piece of correspondence--any correspondence--from the University of Kentucky having to do with my son, who graduated and is now in law school there, the letterhead indicates it is from the "Multicultural Department." The University apparently is the Multicultural Department, and the Multicultural Department is the University. That's part of Diversity, you see: making everything the same.

Notice that "women's studies," or "gender studies," or what used to be called "black studies never seem to have to go under the budgetary knife. These places are hives of special interest politics that enjoy favorable treatment in all things. I'm willing to bet cash money that these programs don't have any higher enrollment at SUNY than Italian, French, classics, and theater arts.

Can you imagine the outrage from the political left if a women's studies department were cut for budgetary reasons? Never happen. Why? Because these programs run university administrations, not vice-versa.

Anyway if you want to read the ultimate takedown of SUNY and its ilk, check out Brandeis University's Gregory Petsko's open letter to George M. Phillip, President of SUNY. Here's the very end, but don't miss the rest. There are stingers throughout:

No, I think you were simply trying to balance your budget at the expense of what you believe to be weak, outdated and powerless departments. I think you will find, in time, that you made a Faustian bargain. Faust is the title character in a play by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. It was written around 1800 but still attracts the largest audiences of any play in Germany whenever it's performed. Faust is the story of a scholar who makes a deal with the devil. The devil promises him anything he wants as long as he lives. In return, the devil will get - well, I'm sure you can guess how these sorts of deals usually go. If only you had a Theater department, which now, of course, you don't, you could ask them to perform the play so you could see what happens. It's awfully relevant to your situation. You see, Goethe believed that it profits a man nothing to give up his soul for the whole world. That's the whole world, President Philip, not just a balanced budget. Although, I guess, to be fair, you haven't given up your soul. Just the soul of your institution.

Disrespectfully yours,

Gregory A Petsko

HT: Why Evolution is True

Yale sex letter to students

Looks like refugees from Woodstock are running Yale University now. Students wanting to attend an institution of higher learning run by responsible adults should be looking elsewhere.

Witch discovered at the University of Kentucky

Back in 2007, The Family Foundation of Kentucky brought public attention the lack of political diversity at the University of Kentucky. UK now has whole departments devoted to left-wing political and social activism with no balance in sight. So-called "Women's Studies" and "Queer Theory" now grace the supposedly "Diverse" curriculum of a university that wants the public to take it seriously--and the legislature to continue to give it taxpayer money.

Anyway, the Foundation published several publications that featured members of the UK staff. They recounted the university's own website rhetoric about their staff's involvement in Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, and their cutting edge scholarship in faux academic disciplines. The publications were characterized in a Lexington Herald-Leader editorial as an "academic witch hunt."

Well, we are happy to report that a witch has been uncovered.

More precisely, one of the professor's featured as examples of left-wing political activists disguised as teachers was a man by the name of Robert S. Tannenbaum, director of the undergraduate research office in the University of Kentucky's undergraduate education office. At the time, Tannenbaum was a board member of the Kentucky ACLU and was teaching a course called "I Know My Rights," which was a course about civil rights law taught by a guy who apparently specialized in computer IT services and who holds an Ed.D.

What a gig.

Well, Tannenbaum may know his rights, but he apparently doesn't know his wrongs. He was charged last Tuesday with four counts of incest with an 8th grader.

No word yet from Lee Todd about whether incest too is covered under academic freedom.

"Transgender" athletes, and other oddities colleges have to deal with

Another step in the decline of Western civilization: colleges must now accommodate "transgender" athletes:

Transgender is a broad term used to describe the experiences of people whose gender identity and expression do not match the sex they were assigned at birth. Some people transition to live as their preferred gender by changing their names and the pronouns they use to refer to themselves. They express their preferred gender through choice of clothes, hairstyles and other manifestations of gender expression and identity. Some transgender people undergo reconstructive surgery or take hormones to make their bodies more congruent with their internal sense of themselves. Others do not.

Since the increased visibility of a transgender rights movement in the 1980s and a school-based LGBT "safe schools" movement in the 1990s, more young people have the language and information they need to identify the gender dissonance they experience between the sex they were assigned at birth and the gender identity that they know to be true for them. They are increasingly identifying themselves as transgender and they are doing it at earlier ages.

...Many of these young people want to play on their schools' or colleges' sports teams. As a result, athletic directors and coaches increasingly find themselves unprepared to make decisions about what team a transgender student is eligible to play for. As the number of transgender students who want to play on school sports teams increases, school athletic leaders must identify effective and fair policies to ensure their right to participate.

Read more here.

So who is it that is mistakenly "assigning" their gender at birth? Nature? In the postmodernist world, we get to simply decide what we are. We are nothing by nature. We can decide whether we're male or female. Can we decide whether we're humans too? I mean if X and Y chromosomes are not determinative of gender, then why should we pay any attention to the DNA that tell us we're human?

Transhuman. I can see it now. Can I be a plant? I can think of some people that are not terribly unlike vegetables.

There's nothing to stop people from denying reality, but are the rest of us really obligated to play along?