The California Association of Scholars report on UC Campuses

A disturbing report about the UC campuses that is not hard to believe,most unfortunately. See especially the downloads of the studies, linked to in the article.

We’re in trouble.

Note: I’ve had someone point out to me that there may be problems with this article in that UC Berkeley appears to have more courses in western civ (at least from the perspective of European history) than purported here. However, check this out. There is something to it. I know that David Horowitz has been noticing this issue for some time, and was ahead of the curve on this problem. He has stated that while there are few conservative professors in the Humanities, that most left wing professors don’t teach in a biased way. He said only around 10% do, but I do think that can be a crucial 10%. Of course, some departments are more heavily biased toward a left-wing perspective than others. In any event, the reports bear looking at and the article is certainly of great interest.

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NEW STUDY SHOWS RADICALS RULE AT UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA by by DAN GAGLIASSO.

The California Association of Scholars, a division of the National Association of Scholars, have just released an incendiary report showing that all nine of the University of California’s campuses have been compromised by too many politicized courses and radical faculty members. CAS members include a number of current or past professors from the UC system who have taught at UC-Berkeley, UCLA, UC-Santa Cruz, and UC-San Diego.

Conservatives have long complained of a strong liberal bias in college classrooms, and this new study shows just how far off track it has gone in one of the most prestigious public university systems in the country. You can read the full CAS 81-page report here.

CAS’s president John Ellis knows very well of what he speaks; he’s a professor emeritus of German Literature from UC Santa Cruz. “The quality of education at the University of California has been jeopardized by political activism,“ Professor Ellis said in a phone interview. “Dogmatism is rapidly displacing open-minded inquiry, especially in the social sciences and humanities, to the severe disadvantage of students.”

A Crisis in Competence: The Corrupting Influence of Political Activism in the University of California isn’t trying to purge the system of differing left of center opinions. The well-documented study just hopes to even the playing field so students get a quality education – an education that has standards and teaches students to look at all sides of the issues. The CAS report emphasizes common sense observations that seem to be beyond the grasp of the assumed intelligent members of the UC Board of Regents.

One observation points out that “a political science department with one half of the spectrum of political thought missing cannot be considered a competent department.” It seems only a Marxist professor with an agenda and no common sense would disagree with that idea from this new study. Unfortunately, as the study shows, there are a lot more Marxists now teaching in the University of California system than you would think.

The CAS report took the time to carefully vet the studies it cites from various institutions, including George Mason University, the Center for the Study of Popular culture, and many others. They even scoured carefully scrutinized and recorded students complaints on the subject, many of which you can read here.

Here a just a few of the conclusions about the University of California system that CAS came to:

There has been a sharp increase in faculty members who self-identify as radicals. This has led to “one party” academic departments, such as at Berkeley, where left-of-center faculty members outnumber their right-of-center colleagues in Political Science by a ratio of 28:2, in English 29:1 and in History 31:1. A number of these professors are openly avowed Marxists! (Has Van Jones applied for one of these positions?)

Many curricula promote political activism, in violation of UC regulations. Critical Race Studies at UCLA’s School of Law, for example, aims to be a “training ground” for advocates committed to racial justice theory and practice (sounds like Harvard during the Professor Derrick Bell/Obama years).

Several departments attempt to erase the study of Western tradition. History majors are now not required to take a survey course in Western civilization on any of the nine University of California campuses. Four more UC campuses have dropped their American History requirements (many UC students cannot even answer basic questions about American or World History).

Suppression of free speech is commonplace. Speakers at UC Berkeley who have been shouted down by protesters include Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Secretary of State Madeline Albright, and Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Conner (but Columbia welcomes Iran’s Ahmadinejad to speak with open arms).

Radical and left-of-center UC professors favor hiring like-minded new academics and block the hiring of new professors who don’t “think the right way.” (Why would a conservative incur the enormous debt and hassles pursuing a Ph. D. if the possibility of a professor’s job is little or nil?)

The advancement of “social justice” is now the open aim of a number of UC faculty members and even whole departments in the system (if a student asks questions or writes answers or papers that challenge these professors and their radical assumptions they can expect a poor grade).

The UC curriculum has been gutted because too many professors now show an open preference for promoting a partisan political agenda. These are just a few of the important issues confronting the UC system that the CAS study raises and documents in very credible fashion.

Resident conservative Jennifer Rubin at the Washington Post compared the 25th anniversary of the publication of Allan Bloom’s groundbreaking The Closing of the American Mind to the release of the new CAS report. She astutely pointed out that, “…the left systematically has dumbed its side down, to the point where supposedly well-educated elites are untrained and unaware of our country’s history and constitutional traditions.”

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The rest here and comments of course: New study of UC System proves radical professors rule

London Riots – Coulter and Phillips

I’m not feeling real talkative today. But I have noticed the riots over the past few days in England as well as the stock market swings. I’ve read a good bit of Dr. Dalrymple so the riots are not entirely surprising, even if they are dismaying and larger than life. Since I am not feeling very talkative, here is a column from Ann Coulter, yes – her, about the causes. I think she’s on the right track. Here, from: The Sun Never Sets on the British Welfare System”

Coulter writes:
Those of you following the barbaric rioting in Britain will not have failed to notice that a sizable proportion of the thugs are white, something not often seen in this country.

Not only that, but in a triumph of feminism, a lot of them are girls. Even the “disabled” (according to the British benefits system) seem to have miraculously overcome their infirmities to dash out and steal a few TVs.

Congratulations, Britain! You’ve barbarized your citizenry, without regard to race, gender or physical handicap!

With a welfare system far more advanced than the United States, the British have achieved the remarkable result of turning entire communities of ancestral British people into tattooed, drunken brutes.

I guess we now have the proof of what conservatives have been saying since forever: Looting is a result of liberal welfare policies. And Britain is in the end stages of the welfare state.

In 2008, a 9-year-old British girl, Shannon Matthews​, disappeared on her way home from a school trip. The media leapt on the case — only to discover that Shannon was one of seven children her mother, Karen, had produced with five different men.

The first of these serial sperm-donors explained: “Karen just goes from one bloke to the next, uses them to have a kid, grabs all the child benefits and moves on.”

Poor little Shannon eventually turned up at the home of one of her many step-uncles — whose ex-wife, by the way, was the mother of six children with three different fathers.

(Is Father’s Day celebrated in England? If so, how?)

The Daily Mail (London) traced the family’s proud Anglo ancestry of stable families back hundreds of years. The Nazi war machine couldn’t break the British, but the modern welfare state has.

A year earlier, in 2007, another product of the new order, Fiona MacKeown, took seven of her eight children (by five different fathers) and her then-boyfriend, on a drug-fueled, six-month vacation to the Indian island of Goa. The trip was paid for — like everything else in her life — with government benefits.

(When was the last time you had a free, six-month vacation? I’m drawing a blank, too.)

While in Goa, Fiona took her entourage on a side-trip, leaving her 15-year-old daughter, Scarlett Keeling, in the capable hands of a 25-year-old local whom Scarlett had begun sleeping with, perhaps hoping to get a head-start on her own government benefits. A few weeks later, Scarlett turned up dead, full of drugs, raped and murdered.

Scarlett’s estranged stepfather later drank himself to death, while her brother Silas announced on his social networking page: “My name is Si, n I spend most my life either out wit mates get drunk or at partys, playing rugby or going to da beach (pretty s**t really).”

It’s a wonder that someone like Silas, who has never worked, and belongs to a family in which no one has ever worked, can afford a cellphone for social networking. No, actually, it’s not.

Britain has a far more redistributive welfare system than France, which is why France’s crime problem is mostly a matter of Muslim immigrants, not French nationals. Meanwhile, England’s welfare state is fast returning the native population to its violent 18th-century highwaymen roots.

Needless to say, Britain leads Europe in the proportion of single mothers and, as a consequence, also leads or co-leads the European Union in violent crime, alcohol and drug abuse, obesity and sexually transmitted diseases.

But liberal elites here and in Britain will blame anything but the welfare state they adore. They drone on about the strict British class system or the lack of jobs or the nation’s history of racism.

None of that explains the sad lives of young Shannon Matthews and Scarlett Keeling, with their long English ancestry and perfect Anglo features.

Democrats would be delighted if violent mobs like those in Britain arose here — perhaps in Wisconsin! That would allow them to introduce yet more government programs staffed by unionized public employees, as happened after the 1992 L.A. riots and the 1960s race riots, following the recommendations of the Kerner Commission.

MSNBC might even do the unthinkable and offer Al Sharpton​ his own TV show. (Excuse me — someone’s trying to get my attention … WHAT?)

Inciting violent mobs is the essence of the left’s agenda: Promote class warfare, illegitimate children and an utterly debased citizenry.

Like the British riot girls interviewed by the BBC, the Democrats tell us “all of this happened because of the rich people.”

We’re beginning to see the final result of that idea in Britain. The welfare state creates a society of beasts. Meanwhile, nonjudgmental elites don’t dare condemn the animals their programs have created.

Rioters in England are burning century-old family businesses to the ground, stealing from injured children lying on the sidewalks and forcing Britons to strip to their underwear on the street.

I keep reading that it’s because they don’t have jobs — which they’re obviously anxious to hold. Or someone called them a “kaffir.” Or their social services have been reduced. Or their Blackberries made them do it. Or they disapprove of a referee’s call in a Manchester United game.

A few well-placed rifle rounds, and the rioting would end in an instant. A more sustained attack on the rampaging mob might save England from itself, finally removing shaved-head, drunken parasites from the benefits rolls that Britain can’t find the will to abolish on moral or utilitarian grounds. We can be sure there’s no danger of killing off the next Winston Churchill​ or Edmund Burke​ in these crowds.

But like Louis XVI, British authorities are paralyzed by their indifference to their own civilization. A half-century of berating themselves for the crime of being British has left them morally defenseless. They see nothing about England worth saving, certainly not worth fighting for — which is fortunate since most of their cops don’t have guns.

This is how civilizations die. It can happen overnight, as it did in Revolutionary France​. If Britain of 1939 were composed of the current British population, the entirety of Europe would today be doing the “Heil Hitler” salute and singing the “Horst Wessel Song.”

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Melanie Phillips from the UK also opines here:

An illuminating report on BBC Radio Four’s Today programme (0810) this morning said it all about the British riots. Some teenage thugs who were hooding up to go looting were asked why they were doing it. Maybe they couldn’t afford the trainers and other goods they were setting out to steal? Yeah, we can afford them, came the reply; but since the goods were there to be robbed, it was an opportunity that couldn’t be passed up. What about their parents? Did they know where they were? Yeah, came the reply, but the most they do is shout at me. And as for the police, well the worse that can happen is that I’ll get as ASBO (antisocial behaviour order).

Some of the rioters and looters are as young as eight or nine. I then listened to a spokesman for Manchester city council appealing to parents to ensure that their children are not on the streets tonight. Why can’t people see what is staring us all in the face? We are not up against merely feral children. We are up against feral parents. Of course the parents know their children are out on the streets. Of course they see them staggering back with what they have looted. But either they are too drunk or drugged or otherwise out of it to care, or they are helping themselves to the proceeds too.

The parents are the problem; as are, almost certainly, their parents and their parents too. Not that any of them necessarily even know who their parents, in the plural, are. For the single most crucial factor behind all this mayhem, behind the total breakdown of any control or self-control amongst the rampaging gangs of children and teenagers who are rioting, burning, robbing, stealing, attacking and murdering, is the willed removal of the most important thing that socialises children and turns them from feral savages into civilised citizens: a fully committed, hands-on, there-every-day father.

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Take note of that last line about the lack of a father. A “fully committed, hands-on, there-every-day father”, or even yes, two parents period – a family unit. I guess some of these people don’t even know their grandparents. This dissolution has been going on for some time. This is what the breakdown of the family looks like — murder and mayhem.

Not so good, no. As for me, I’m fine. Still in-between places but I do transitions well. I have a few now, and so – I am attempting to regain and keep my balance. And, have fun at least some of the time!

I’m not updating as much as I’d like in other words, since I am in the midst of a move, but I’m still here. Thanks to all who read.

Sometimes, it feels like there is no way out and there isn’t

School choice is a thorny issue in this country. If you are poor or a member of an ethnic or racial minority, your choices are usually limited, and they are not always good. Even in schools that are well-funded with gleaming computer equipment and multiple tutors for struggling students, there can be an atmosphere of degradation and social dysfunction that is overwhelming. This article just about broke my heart when I read it last night. From a teacher and writer, Gerry Garibaldi this testimony in his article, “Nobody Gets Married Any More, Mister”:

“At my school, we pay five teachers to tutor kids after school and on Saturdays. They sit in classrooms waiting for kids who never show up. We don’t want for books—or for any of the cutting-edge gizmos that non–Title I schools can’t afford: computerized whiteboards, Elmo projectors, the works. Our facility is state-of-the-art, thanks to a recent $40 million face-lift, with gleaming new hallways and bathrooms and a fully computerized library.

Here’s my prediction: the money, the reforms, the gleaming porcelain, the hopeful rhetoric about saving our children—all of it will have a limited impact, at best, on most city schoolchildren. Urban teachers face an intractable problem, one that we cannot spend or even teach our way out of: teen pregnancy. This year, all of my favorite girls are pregnant, four in all, future unwed mothers every one. There will be no innovation in this quarter, no race to the top. Personal moral accountability is the electrified rail that no politician wants to touch. “

Here: Nobody Gets Married Any more Mister”

Personal moral responsibility, and the “M” word, the word “moral” is nearly taboo in these postmodern times, not only do politicians often not want to speak of moral responsibility, no else does either. If I was a parent, I can easily see wanting to get out of a situation like the one described, where my kids might feel pressured to have sex before they were ready, or to even — get pregnant. Certainly homeschooling might present a good option.

But, if you skip the public option, and homeschool, you actually risk having your kids taken away! Well, I guess it could happen, see this instance where an African American family had their kids yanked because they homeschooled them. Reminiscent of a recent case in Sweden where homeschooling also got the kids yanked away. In the past, my lefty past, I was suspicious of homeschooling but recent reports of higher test results for homeschooled kids and a good long hard look at what is available for kids otherwise out there, changed my mind. Here, the story:

“It’s every parent’s nightmare.

Army Major John Jackson and his wife Carolyn, devout Christian homeschoolers with a history of serving as adoptive and foster parents, had their five children taken away in April 2010 by the New Jersey Division of Youth and Family Services – and despite the collapse of the evidence against the Jacksons, DYFS hasn’t returned the children to their parents.

During the course of a nine-month legal battle to regain custody of their children, the Jacksons say they have encountered prejudice against their religion and homeschooling as they fight a state agency determined to see the children adopted by strangers no matter what the evidence says.”

Read more:
Father: ‘My children are being held hostage’

There are other options, like finding a better environment – well, one would hope. But, getting your children into a better school district is not an easy thing. Kelley Williams-Bolar, an African American woman determined to get her kids into a safer school with an environment more conducive to learning and with a high academic ranking – was convicted of lying about her residency to get her daughters into a better school district.

“It’s overwhelming. I’m exhausted,” she said. “I did this for them, so there it is. I did this for them.

Williams-Bolar decided four years ago to send her daughters to a highly ranked school in neighboring Copley-Fairlawn School District.

But it wasn’t her Akron district of residence, so her children were ineligible to attend school there, even though her father lived within the district’s boundaries.

The school district accused Williams-Bolar of lying about her address, falsifying records and, when confronted, having her father file false court papers to get around the system.

Williams-Bolar said she did it to keep her children safe and that she lived part-time with her dad.

“When my home got broken into, I felt it was my duty to do something else,” Williams-Bolar said.”

Here: Ohio Mom jailed for sending kids to a better school district

Sounds like real school choice has got to on the table one way or another. And parents shouldn’t be penalized for making a choice.