Mary's Contraries, December 16, 2011

Conservative professors and students continue to face challenges in the academic industrial complex. 

Paul Derengowski, an adjunct professor at Tarrant County College in Fort Worth, Texas, quit after two Muslim students disrupted and frightened his world religion class and then walked out.

Reports Inside Higher Ed:

The professor said he resigned, in part, because the college administration failed to follow the rules as described in the student handbook when it comes to those disrupting classes.

The problem started, he said, when he was teaching a section on the early life of the Prophet Muhammad. “I was quoting directly from the Koran and yet they objected to that,” Derengowski said. “It was an hour’s worth of disruption.”

On the other hand, UNC, the College Conservative reports, is building "meditation rooms," with foot baths--a new kind of meditative practice that Dissident Prof has not seen before.  (Perhaps students need to relieve all that stress from classroom disrupting and walking out.) All the Christmas trees in the lobby of the library probably stressed them out too, so they were banned in 2008.

At Hamline University, the faculty apparently couldn't bear the thought that a former Republican candidate for governor would be teaching one undergraduate business law course.  The faculty Politburo nixed the appointment of Tom Emmer, according to a report in Inside Higher Ed:

A Dec. 5 article in Hamline's student newspaper quoted David A. Schultz, an adjunct professor at Hamline's law school, as saying that some faculty members had complained to administrators about Emmer's possible hiring, citing two issues: his stance on same-sex marriage and the fact that he was being hired without a hiring committee or faculty review.

 

Of course, today's campus Politburos would come up with reasons for disqualifying someone who disapproves of gay marriage from teaching a business law class, or accounting, or physics. Emmer apparently didn't know how much one dissenting view would disrupt the carefully calibrated ratio that has been built up over the decades.  That is how our instititutions of higher learning are able to operate with such smooth efficiency.

Dissident Prof, who has jumped from campus to campus as an adjunct, however, has never had a "faculty review."  In fact, adjuncts are often hired the way she was at one of the state universities: when she received a call from the department chair on a Friday afternoon she told him yes, sir, she could find the campus and come in and teach on the following Monday morning.

In the meantime, the American Association of University Professors [Holding Correct Ideas] has issued an objection to a private Baptist college's requirement that faculty adhere to Baptist principles and conduct regarding sexual practices and alcohol consumption.  In a letter, the AAUP told Shorter College in Georgia that its requirements might be inconsistent with basic principles of academic freedom.

In another case, the ever-vigilant AAUP is conducting an investigation into the year-long suspension of Arthur Gilbert from his graduate "drug wars" class. Reports Inside Higher Ed:

Gilbert, a tenured professor who has been teaching for 50 years, said that the references in his course come in discussion of the failure of campaigns to impose moral standards on Americans. He compares fear of masturbation in the 19th century to the fear of drugs in recent times. “I have taught this drug war course for over 20 years,” he said.

 

Furthermore,

“My discussions of the links between drugs, alcohol, fear of homosexuality and minorities and yes, self-abuse is what resulted in my abrupt dismissal from my graduate course and three and a half hours of questioning by human resources in order to determine if I was guilty of sexual harassment,” Gilbert said in a blog post.

 

Both AAUP and Gilbert cite the higher cause of "academic freedom."  Gilbert's are "controversial" enough positions to cause students to offer anonymous complaints.  But Dissident Prof, ever on the hunt for signs of Irony on our campuses notes that it was not on the grounds of offensiveness, academic irrelevance, or incompetence (he's been teaching for fifty years!) that the Professor was suspended, but on sexual harassment. 

Zachary Freeman, editor of College Conservative, however, will not likely be able to draw from the short list of allowable complaints for what he experienced in his introductory macroeconomics class at the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga in the fall of 2010.  He quotes two exam questions that he was forced to answer as a student in Professor John Garrett's class:

Yet another report has come out showing that "two-fifths of high school students are unprepared for college or the workforce." 

Maybe it's because the best and the brightest are writing essays on "The Impact of New Media on Peacebulding and Conflict Management," for a contest sponsored by our government's United States Institute of Peace.  Dissident Prof looked through the lesson plans and guidelines and did not notice any options for writing about justified war.

More learning can be obtained sometimes in summer jobs than in a year's worth of group discussions about world peace. Exposure to the real world--like Wal-Mart--can provide valuable lessons in economics, sociology, and government.  She had her claim confirmed by an eye-opening essay by Christine Rousselle, again at College Conservative.

It seems that the best and the brightest are the ones who are not too proud to work at places like Wal-Mart. 

Yet, here in Georgia, where there has been a lot of squawking about cutbacks to Hope scholarships, and where the unemployment rate stands at 9.9%, the Department of Labor reports that employers are having difficulty finding welders and other tradesmen to fill jobs.  Dissident Prof would have sent at least two-thirds of her students, who sauntered into her classrooms at Exit Ramp Community College and the Southside Self-Actualization Research Institute and University, sans books, much less homework assignments, to such trade schools.  If they don't want to do welding they should go help out the farmers who are experiencing a labor shortage.  Call her old-fashioned, but she believes such fellows would be better off in shop than in classes on global peace-building.

On the topic of the intellectual shortfallings of conservatives and Republicans, the material keeps coming in.  Dissident Prof wrote in Townhall about the self-proclaimed public intellectuals who doubt the worthiness of any Republican to receive a Ph.D.  The re-evaluation of Newt Gingrich's dissertation committee's decision to grant him a Ph.D. was launched by the Grand Dame of Intellectualism, Maureen Dowd. 

Professor Gingrich's fellow historians continue the evaluation in one of their forums, the History News Network.  Sheldon Richman shares his scholarly assessment, "Newt Gingrich: Demagogue, Pseudointellectual" by referencing such scholarly sources as Wikipedia and the Washington Post Fact-Checker.

One believes that the latter insult is considered to be the more cutting of the two by the AuthenticIntellectuals.

In her post at Townhall, Dissident Prof attempted to point out that the thing to worry about Newt Gingrich was not his lack of intellectual ability, but rather his past record and penchant to grasp onto wild ideas like those of "futurists" Alvin and Heidi Toffler. 

Not only did Gingrich spend some time with the Tofflers but he made tv advertisements for initiatives with Al Sharpton and Nancy Pelosi.  With Sharpton he worked on education.  Then he appeared sitting cozily on a couch with Nancy Pelosi discussing his concerns about climate change.   

Brian Birdnow has a pretty thorough rundown of Gingrich's history in another Townhall column.

Dissident Prof in the closest experience she has had to watching a game in a sports bar, watched the debate on a big screen tv with some conservative Republicans.  What alarmed her was Gingrich's responses to questions about receiving 1.6 million dollars from Freddie Mac.  He offered, "I did not lobby on behalf of Freddie Mac."  This new version comes after the initial one that he was simply hired to be the house historian for Freddie Mac.  

Professor Gingrich then revealed more of his views as he waxed eloquent about such "public-private" partnerships and all the good they do, like promoting home ownership. 

Then this morning Dissident Prof came across an article in the New York Times where another professor was also praising government-private "partnerships."  University of Maryland professor Gar Alperovitz, in a column titled "Worker-Owners of America, Unite," encouraged public-private partnerships that he called "worker-owned" companies.  (Now where have we heard that phrase before?)  He advocates for a system that combines capitalism and socialism. 

He notes, happily,

we have already seen how, in moments of crisis, the nationalization of auto giants like General Motors and Chrysler can suddenly become a reality. When the next financial breakdown occurs, huge injections of public money may well lead to de facto takeovers of major banks.

Public opinion supports this shift as well.  He points to the 2009 Rasmussen poll that showed that Americans under the age of 30 were evenly divided between supporting capitalism and socialism.  (We should also note that this is a population recently released from institutions of higher learning, like the huge public campus where Professor Alperovitz dispenses his wisdom.)

This seems remarkable to Dissident Prof who was born in a country where workers owned factories yet continually eluded border guards to go into countries where workers did not own their companies. 

Though Dissident Prof is happy that the Gray Lady is still solvent enough to publish such revelatory articles (not to mention providing stand-up material from Maureen Dowd), she always likes to check more than one source.  Some guy in New Zealand, she has learned, has the gotten the skinny on Gar Alperovitz.  You can see his dossier here.

Dissident Prof worries about what she might soon see on her tv screen: a commercial with Professors Gingrich and Alperovitz, this time discussing the new math.  They would both in jolly cooperation be explaining how S (socialism) + C (capitalism) = WP (workers paradise) (or is it NS or F?).

Tis the Christmas season!  And Dissident Prof too will be taking a break from the stresses of the academic life as an undocumented, itinerant worker in the fields of knowlege and truth.  She still has final papers to grade, presents to buy, cookies to bake, a tree to decorate...

But she would like to leave her readers with a happy thought.  A poll shows that younger voters are less enthusiastic about Obama, according to an article in the Daily Caller:

According to the Millenials poll of college-age voters, released Thursday by Harvard University’s Institute of Politics, younger voters are noticeably less enthusiastic at this point in the campaign than they were four years ago.

Obama’s approval rating among college students has dropped below 50 percent for the first time, falling to an all-time low of 48 percent. When the last poll was conducted in late February and early March of 2011, it was at 60 percent.  Perhaps, the youth are pulling away the film of "hope and change."

We must must reach out to them.  Support the Resistance by spreading the word, sending your dispatches (thank you, Scott Herring), and sending contributions.  This week, she thanks Peter Wood, President of the National Association of Scholars, for his generous private donation.

Now she must get into the Christmas spirit!

To help along all the elves making preparations for Christmas she offers some music.

So slice off some of the fruitcake, pour some eggnog and click here.