Liberals Miffed As Canine Cultural Studies Wins Course-of-the-Month

Liberals like to say that university faculties are overwhelmingly liberal because liberals are just more intelligent. Naturally you would find more liberal professors than conservative ones, they tell us.

It is certainly true that no conservative could write a fictional parody of liberal academic antics that could beat the real thing. Truth is stranger than fiction, especially at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

The folks at John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy have decided unilaterally that they have a public duty to audit the goings-on at UNC-Chapel Hill. So they billed “Canine Cultural Studies” on their web site as Course of the Month, according to Jane Stancill.

Professor Alice Kuzniar was shocked to be lampooned by the conservative think tank.



"I feel it's such an incredible misrepresentation of what we're doing in the classroom," she said. "We're reading Virginia Woolf. We're reading Franz Kafka."

That is pretty amazing. You’d think that the modern college student would be hardly up to the challenge of Woolf and Kafka. In any case, the UNC-CH community of students and faculty are really riled up about the Pope Center.

Emotions are so strong that some want the university to refuse a potential multimillion-dollar grant by the related John William Pope Foundation.

Well, you see, the Pope Center wants to give money with strings attached. This year it gave money to the university to develop courses “that explore relationships between economics and politics in free societies.” Now they are mulling a grant to fund “a minor in Western culture studies.” No wonder that Professor Judith Bennett fears that if the money goes through she will feel that:

"Art Pope is sitting in the back of the classroom."



"If this program goes through, I would feel vulnerable to a whole new level of hostile surveillance," she said.

There’s no question that these tough hard-nosed feminist profs really know how to turn the clock back and act just like fluttering Victorian debutantes—when it serves their purposes.

Missile Defense Train Has Left the Station

On the Fourth of July as North Korea launched six rockets into the skies of eastern Asia American liberals at their dinner tables were still trotting out their talking points about missile defense being a waste of resources.

But really, the train has left the station. All the guff about “Star Wars” with which liberals have persuaded themselves of their superior understanding about the impossibility of missile defense is now, as the saying goes, “inoperative.” Eventually the word will get down the political food chain to the liberal dinner table.

Japan is moving as quickly as possible to join the US missile defense system and European nations like Poland and the Czech Republic are competing for the privilege of getting a missile defense radar built in their country.

As Martin Sieff writes, after participating a a missile defense war game:

The question is no longer: “Why couldn’t all this money have been spent on more bilingual education programs or deficit reduction?” It becomes: “Why do I only have 10 anti-ballistic missile interceptors deployed to face a threat of seven intercontinental ballistic missiles coming in from the Northeast Asian nation of 'Midland.'”

The answer to that question is: Democrats. It is fair to tell that to the American people? Or would it amount to questioning the Democrats’ patriotism?

Interestingly, Sieff writes, Japanese Prime Minister Koizumi is not just a fan of Elvis. He keeps a portrait of Winston Churchill in his study. Koizumi is a firm supporter of “Star Wars,” er, missile defense. Presumably his successor will be no less.

Theocracy and the Religious Right

I listened to Randall Balmer today on the Michael Medved Show talking about his book Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America: An Evangelical's Lament. The religious right, he complained, is turning the United States into a theocracy.

What about back in the 1950s, asked Medved? Was the US a theocracy then? Almost, replied Balmer.

Leaving aside the idea that the term “religious right” is a political pejorative, let us think about what this man is saying. Can he really suggest that religious people associated with the Republican Party are any more influential in the public square than religious people on the left are in influencing the Democratic Party?

Georges Lemaitre, the great twentieth century physicist who invented the Big Bang theory, once noted that psychology is the closest science to religion. Given that practitioners of modern psychology are employed by the government in every school in the land, is not the closeness of their science to religion a greater threat to the separation of church and state than the political influence of conservative Christians?

So's Your Liberal Mother

Bloomberg and the Los Angeles Times are out with a poll today about a Mormon as president. In the poll, 35 percent of registered voters say they would not vote for a Mormon for president. What a bunch of bigots, you say.

So’s your liberal mother, I say. Let’s look at the numbers.

Among political groups, the highest opposition to a Mormon candidacy comes from people who describe themselves as liberal Democrats, 50 percent of whom say they wouldn't vote for a Mormon.

As they say about bigotry, you’ve got to be carefully taught. And one thing that liberal parents teach their children, it seems from the figures, is to mistrust Mormons.

Because it couldn’t be the media that is teaching liberals to be bigoted towards Mormons, surely? And it couldn’t be the schools. It couldn’t be the Democratic Party, which is committed to diversity. So who else is left but the parents?

By the way. If you prefer not to use a perjorative, the Mormons call themselves the Church of Latter Day Saints. Their church has been growing steadily since Joseph Smith had his vision back in the Burned Over District in New York State back in the nineteenth century.

Celebrating Our Nation State

As we mark another anniversary of our great Declaration of Independence in joyous celebration let us also celebrate the importance of the nation state.

It is important for conservatives to do this because for upwards of a century the fashionables have been sneering at the nation state. They look forward to a global, pan-human society, led by themselves.

The future global society, when it comes about, and assuming it can actually succeed, will doubtless be a glorious thing. But we must never forget the remarkable achievement of the nation state.

Before the nation state, people could only imagine political institutions based on blood. They could not imagine trusting people who were not of their own kin.

The nation state, on the other hand, is a political unit based on the abstract ties of language and culture. In the nation state we transcend the limits of blood and kinship and learn to associate with and trust people who share much less in common than the physical ties of clan and tribe.

The day may come when we will consign the nation state to the dust heap of history; but that day is not yet. Indeed, the likelihood is that we have many lessons to learn before we can imagine, let alone build, trans-national political institutions that actually work.

Indeed, the appetite in our educated elites for divisive national politics and for political programs that utterly ignore the lessons of the past indicate that we ought to stick pretty close to our present democratic, federal, nation state.

So let’s hear it for the last best hope of manking: The good old U. S. of A.

The Internet is Amazing

It’s the little things that matter. That is what women have been telling men for ages. And it is the little things on the Internet that matter, too.

Over the weekend, Lady Marjorie was trying to save some JPEGs emailed to her by a friend. Only the computer would get jammed up trying to save the files from her email browser. What to do?

It turned out that if you tried to browse to the affected directory with Windows Explorer it would hang too. What could be wrong?

After a day of foolishness, I finally decided to Google "windows explorer crashes jpeg" and here is what I found.

The problem is caused when you have Adobe’s Photoshop or Elements on your machine. If you have the “generate thumbnails” option set, then if you have too many JPEGs in the directory Windows Explorer will crash as it generates all the thumbnails. Writes John Inzer from Picture It!

right click on a .jpg file and choose
Properties. Click the Photoshop Image tab
and uncheck the "Generate Thumbnails" button,
then click OK.

Voila! Problem solved.

I’m sorry, but after an experience like that I just sit back in wonder. How is it possible, I ask. To have all that knowledge and technique and troubleshooting help available for free.

It is mind-boggling.

Conservatives Take Academic Freedom from Liberals

If you listen to liberals—and I do, very carefully—you sense that “academic freedom” is a concept that has high totemic value for them.

Academic freedom is something that liberals are for, and they know that their support for it defines them as a force for reason and enlightenment. It is all that is noble and decent, and it defines the courageous researcher beavering away on the frontiers of knowledge beset by the forces of darkness and superstition. He knows that, but for academic freedom, yahoos and fundamentalists would put him out of a job.

In consequence, the Academic Bill of Rights campaign of radical-turned-conservative David Horowitz makes liberals very angry. For Horowitz is speaking truth to academic power and he is saying that college professors abuse their power damnably.

Horowitz’s campaign is now three years old, and Valerie Richardson reviews the progress. Eighteen states have passed academic freedom laws, and a couple of state university systems have passed academic freedom policies to avoid legislation. Princeton university students passed “a version of the Student Bill of Rights by a vote of the entire student body.”

And that is the point of the movement. Academics have a right to academic freedom, but student have a right to an education, not an indoctrination. And that seems very hard for some professors to understand, so convinced are they of their sacred right to academic freedom.

Not that anyone should be surprised. When you give people tenure and rights then they will start to abuse it. One man’s freedom is another man’s servitude.

As kings learned to understand their powers as a Divine Right, so professors, without court jesters to bring them back to earth, have discerned in the heavens a Divine Right to academic freedom. And God forbid that any jester should make fun of college professors.

I don’t really understand all this business about academic freedom. If you can’t find someone to fund your research then you are out of luck. If you don’t do the job teaching your student then you should be out of a job.

And if you are a dedicated left-wing activist longing to bring peace and justice to the world, then surely there is some left-wing foundation that is willing to pony up the cash to keep you in business.

Of course, if you are just a run-of-the-mill lefty academic without any distinguishing talent or original work product... Sorry. Academic freedom was never intended to give you a sinecure.

If it was, then I’m against it. Get a job, pal.