Posts Tagged ‘ Academia ’

What’s Behind the Materialist Explanation of Political Views?

December 31, 2010
By
What’s Behind the Materialist Explanation of Political Views?

By Daniel Crandall Tip O’Neil famously stated, “All politics is local.” These days, it seems all politics is biological. The latest in the ridiculous pursuit of materialistic explanations for political opinions is this: Political Views Hard-wired Into Your Brain Scientists have found that people with conservative views have brains with larger amygdalas, almond shaped areas in the centre of the brain often associated with anxiety and emotions. On the otherhand, they have a smaller anterior cingulate, an area at the front of the brain associated with courage and looking on the bright side of life. And according to “researchers” at the “University of California” in “Berkeley” some people are imbued with a “Liberal Gene.” Liberals, you see, can’t help themselves from stealing your money and throwing it away in ideological money pits controlled by cold, heartless bureaucrats. That community-destroying behavior, it appears, is hardwired into “liberal” “brains.” This “scientific” foolishness is what leads materialistic wackos on the Left to assert that Ritalin turns kids into conservatives. All politics is biology. Drugs alter biology. Therefore

Read more »

Christians Need Not Apply?

December 18, 2010
By
Christians Need Not Apply?

By Warren S. Moore The institution at which I earned my Masters degree, the University of Kentucky, is in the news today, as e-mails have revealed that a search committee expressed concerns about Prof. Martin Gaskell’s fitness to direct the University of Kentucky’s student observatory. His offense? Being openly Christian, with the aggravating factor of being “potentially evangelical.” Please note: Gaskell is not a creationist, and says in the article that the young-earth folks are engaged in “very poor science.” But he’s been known to think in a manner that might reconcile astronomy with Biblical accounts, so out he goes. As Gaskell’s attorney notes: “Unfortunately too many people get hung up on the idea that you have to be one extreme or the other,” said Manion, who works for American Center for Law & Justice, which focuses on religious freedom cases. They say “you can’t be a religious believer and somebody who accepts evolution, which is clearly not true. And Gaskell’s a perfect example of that.” This is disheartening for so many reasons, not least the fact that Sir Isaac Newton (who was religious, though not an orthodox Christian) apparently wouldn’t have been able to get a gig at UK.

Read more »

Academia’s Phony ‘Diversity’ Prejudices Documented

July 14, 2010
By
Academia’s Phony ‘Diversity’ Prejudices Documented

W. S. Moore III notes that campus diversity stops at the Mason-Dixon line and the white working classes. An essay at Minding the Campus this week, by Russell K. Nieli, reports that a pair of Princeton sociologists took a look at some highly competitive colleges and universities (average SAT: 1360) to see how diversity issues were reflected in admissions. The results didn’t really surprise me, but maybe they should have: On an “other things equal basis,” where adjustments are made for a variety of background factors, being Hispanic conferred an admissions boost over being white (for those who applied in 1997) equivalent to 130 SAT points (out of 1600), while being black rather than white conferred a 310 SAT point advantage. Asians, however, suffered an admissions penalty compared to whites equivalent to 140 SAT points. The fact that colleges stack their admissions process to reach certain demographic profiles is nothing new — just ask folks who were crowded out by the Ivies’ Jewish quotas in past decades. It’s depressing for those of us who believe that so-called elite schools should have elite students (an image these schools eagerly project), but it’s nothing new. Equally unsurprising is the observation that admissions

Read more »

Carnage That College Ignores

April 16, 2010
By
Carnage That College Ignores

Guest writer Malcolm Kline notes that U.S. academia routinely ignores the enormity of the crimes of Communists while harping on the faults of the United States. Storied Soviet dictator Josef Stalin once famously said that one man’s death is a tragedy, a thousand is a statistic. He and his successors compiled so many human statistics that the unfortunately few academics and intellectuals who are trying to ascertain the true number are still working on it. “One cannot discuss the past, present, or future while they lay there unacknowledged,” University of Pennsylvania historian Alan Charles Kors pointed out in a speech to the Atlas Foundation last November. “We are surrounded by slain innocents and the scale is wholly new.” “This is not the thousands of the Inquisition, it is not the thousands of American lynching, this is not the six million dead from Nazi extermination.” Kors is the co-founder of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). “The best scholarship yields numbers that the mind must try to comprehend—scores and scores and scores and scores of millions of bodies, all around us,” Kors said on November 9, 2009. “Martin Malia, author of The Soviet Tragedy, with only partial views of

Read more »

Attend a Tea Party, Support the Arts

April 6, 2010
By
Attend a Tea Party, Support the Arts

Bill Whittle is a clever, erudite and indefatigable proponent ofliberty and limited government. His latest PJTV video, entitled “Support Your Local Tea Party: Vigilance & The Siren Song of the State,” is a must-see, especially if you’re on the fence about attending a Tax Day Tea Party near you. Whittle’s video and the political movement it endorses are incredibly important. At the 2 minute 30 second mark, however, note his list of fields “the enemies of freedom have … taken over.” “Things have gotten this bad because we’ve allowed them to get this bad. We’ve been busy minding our own business for forty years, while the enemies of freedom have slowly and surely taken over academia, newspapers, movie studios, comedy, music, and politics. Now a huge slice of our own people long to escape the responsibilities brought on by the freedoms our forefathers gave their lives for. We can’t let that happen.” As usual, Whittle’s analysis is spot on, but one of those fields doesn’t quite jive with the rest. Everything that Whittle ticks off in his list influences that final item. Politics is a lagging indicator to these cultural influence professions. You can’t change Washington DC and

Read more »

Why Are Conservatives Rare on College Faculties? Blame It on the Conservative Movement

February 12, 2010
By
Why Are Conservatives Rare on College Faculties? Blame It on the Conservative Movement

There has been a bit of internet discussion on this question the last week or so, and a good question it is. It was prompted by a paper by Ethan Fosse of Harvard and Neil Goss of the University of British Columbia entitled “Why Are Professors Liberal?” Their answers are typically self serving in their ignorance and blindness, but what does one expect from leftist academics. Since the beginning of the progressive era in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, such statist liberals have always been convinced of their moral and intellectual superiority, even though there is very little evidence it is deserved. The John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, an excellent organization fighting to improve higher education in North Carolina put together brief responses to this question from a handful of conservative and libertarian academics. Everything they say would be familiar to anyone who has attended a college or university in the United States or knows about them. Before I state my frustration at the right for this situation, let me quote from one respondent who tells of a situation I can relate to. Here is Mark Bauerlein of Emory University commenting on the left wing

Read more »

Who’s to Blame for Dearth of Conservative and Libertarian Professors?

February 3, 2010
By
Who’s to Blame for Dearth of Conservative and Libertarian Professors?

That is a very good question asked by Daniel B. Klein at Minding the Campus. Two researchers offer a new twist on an old question—why do college professors overwhelmingly lean to the left? Bias against conservatives is not the main reason, nor are the allegedly higher IQs of liberals, say Neil Gross of the University of British Columbia and Ethan Fosse of Harvard. Instead they suggest a theory of “path dependence” –few conservatives are attracted to work in scholarly fields dominated by the left, just as few males want to be nurses in a traditionally female field. People tend to giggle when a man wants to become a nurse, they say, and conservatives tend to feel similar embarrassment in entering leftist academe. This giggle theory underrates what leftist domination does to faculties. In the recent book The Politically Correct University: Problems, Scope and Reforms, Charlotta Stern and I discuss groupthink mechanisms. The majoritarian procedure of each department means that once a majority leans left, the department will tend toward leftist uniformity. The pyramidal structure of each discipline means that publication, awards, grants, recommendations will follow the pyramid’s apex, and if the apex goes left it tends to sweep leftists/neuters into

Read more »

"Culture is the expression of the guiding philosophy of the day."—Murray Rothbard
Subscribe to The American Culture.

 

February 2012
S M T W T F S
« Jan    
 1234
567891011
12131415161718
19202122232425
26272829  

Archive

Twitter Feed!

Follow the American Culture and S. T. Karnick on Twitter! Send message "follow stkarnick1" to 40404 on your cell phone or go to twitter.com.

Packages Seo