At LAT : On July 30, Kevin Morrissey printed a note, gathered his identification and called the Charlottesville, Va., police to report a shooting at the coal tower, a local landmark. When they arrived, it was Morrissey they found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, his papers laid out neatly beside him. Morrissey was the 52-year-old managing editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review, an award-winning literary journal published by the University of Virginia. He had worked at the journal since 2004, handling accounting, payments, contracts and other administrative details. “Kevin’s job was his life,” said co-worker Waldo Jaquith. Morrissey’s death might have affected only his small circle of friends and colleagues, but it has also had an unexpected impact, spurring the university to conduct an audit of the finances and management of the VQR. And now, a month after Morrissey’s death, the Virginia Quarterly Review is on indefinite hiatus. The move follows a stream of reports and extended online discussion about Morrissey’s suicide. Those reports have focused on the VQR workplace and have been critical of the magazine’s editor, Ted Genoways. Genoways, who has been locked out of the office by university officials since Morrissey’s death, has been labeled a “workplace bully” in media reports with few actual details. The “Today” show reported that Genoways was “under investigation for allegedly driving one of his employees to suicide.” But although contributing editors, writers and associates found Genoways “professional, tactful and respectful” — as two dozen wrote in an August letter of support — it is clear from comments after Morrissey’s death that most of his five-person staff was, to some degree, unhappy. It is their complaints that have dominated media accounts of Morrissey’s death and the subsequent cloud over the VQR. RTWT.
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Suicide at Virginia Quarterly Review
At FrontPage Magazine , David Horowitz has some background on his new book, Reforming Our Universities : The campaign we launched can only be understood in the context of previous developments in higher education. The modern research university was created in the second half of the 19 th Century during the era of America’s great industrial expansion, its curriculum shaped by two innovations: the adoption of scientific method as the professional standard for knowledge, and the extension of educational opportunity to a democratic public. Before these developments, America’s institutions of higher learning were “primarily religious and moral” schools of instruction. In the words of James Duderstadt, president of the University of Michigan, “colleges trained the ministers of each generation, passing on ‘high culture’ to a very small elite.” The avowed mission of these early collegiate institutions was to instill the doctrines of a particular religious denomination. It was not to foster the analytic skepticism associated with modern science but to pass on the literary and philosophical culture that supported a specific faith. By contrast, “the core mission of the research university,” as recently summarized by one of its leaders, “is … expanding and deepening what we know.” In pursuit of this goal, “the research university relies on various attributes, the most important of which are the processes of rigorous inquiry and reasoned skepticism, which in turn are based on articulated norms that are not fixed and given, but are themselves subject to re-examination and revision. In the best of our universities faculty characteristically subject their own claims and the norms that govern their research to this process of critical reflection.” This has been the credo of American higher education throughout the modern era and is still the norm in the physical and biological sciences and most professional schools throughout the contemporary university. Liberal arts colleges within the university are the divisions through which all undergraduates pass, and have been traditionally viewed as cornerstones of a democratic society, where students are taught how to think rather than told what to think. The curriculum of the modern research university supported these objectives. It was designed to inculcate pragmatic respect for the pluralism of ideas and the test of empirical evidence, and thus to support a society dependent on an informed citizenry. All this began to change when a radical generation of university instructors matriculated onto liberal arts faculties in the 1970s and began altering curricula by creating new inter-disciplinary fields whose inspirations were ideological, and closely linked to political activism. Women’s Studies was one of the earliest of these new fields and remains the most influential, providing an academic model emulated by others. The curricula of Women’s Studies programs are not governed by the principles of disinterested inquiry about a subject but rather by a political mission: to teach students to be radical feminists. The formal Constitution of the Women’s Studies Association makes this political agenda clear: Women’s Studies owes its existence to the movement for the liberation of women; the feminist movement exists because women are oppressed. Women’s studies, diverse as its components are, has at its best shared a vision of a world free not only from sexism but also from racism, class-bias, ageism, heterosexual bias–from all the ideologies and institutions that have consciously or unconsciously oppressed and exploited some for the advantage of others….Women’s Studies, then, is equipping women not only to enter the society as whole, as productive human beings, but to transform the world to one that will be free of all oppression. Thirty years later, the academic landscape had undergone a sea change as a result of the political pressures from feminists, ethnic nationalists, and “anti-war” activists, and the curricular innovations they were able to institute. In 2006, state legislators in Pennsylvania gathered at Philadelphia’s Temple University to hold hearings on academic freedom. Among the witnesses was Stephen Zelnick, a former Vice Provost for Undergraduate Studies and a member of the Temple faculty for 36 years. Zelnick told the legislators of his concern that Temple faculty had grown increasingly monolithic and politically partisan in the years he had been there: “The one-sidedness of the faculty in their ideological commitments and a growing intolerance of competing views [has] resulted in abuse of students, occasionally overt and reported, but most often hidden and normalized, and the degrading of the strong traditions of intellectual inquiry and free expression.” Zelnick then spelled out what this meant in terms of the instruction he had personally reviewed: “As director of two undergraduate programs, I have had many opportunities to sit in and watch instructors. I have sat in on more than a hundred different teachers’ classes and seen excellent, indifferent, and miserable teaching… In these visits, I have rarely heard a kind word for the United States, for the riches of our marketplace, for the vast economic and creative opportunities made available for energetic and creative people (that is, for our students); for family life, for marriage, for love, or for religion.” I think I was lucky, especially as an undergraduate, but in graduate school as well, to have taken courses with very few of the radical, anti-Americanists that Horowitz’s discusses. In fact, I’d be perfectly willing to confess that I wasn’t much affected by hard-left activism in college, only inasmuch as I was a registered Democrat myself, sympathetic to civil rights, anti-poverty and other issues often central to the progressive agenda. It’s when I became a professor, and especially my experience at my college since the Iraq war in 2003, that I’ve come to fully appreciate how institutionalized is the radical left’s program of anti-Americanism and indoctrination. As some readers might recall, I’ve recently adopted a new textbook, American Government and Politics: Deliberation, Democracy, and Citizenship , and I’m thrilled that the text offers an uncommonly robust cultural approach while remaining objectively respectful of other nations and their unique historical and political trajectories. And in shifting my approach along with the book, I’m more frequently having students attempt to defend their more anti-American positions during discussions, and there’s been a couple of highly critical students who’ve been unable to acquit themselves when faced with some Socratic questioning. (And that’s interesting from a learning perspective, if it’s the case that ideology is crowding out critical thinking, which sounds obvious upon reflection.) And I know that my college has some hardline historians and sociologists pushing basically a neo-communist, post-materialist curriculum — heavy on the antiwar and racist/sexist oppression junk — although my political science colleagues are pretty balanced overall. I’ve had my run-ins with leftists over a lot of these issues, for example when I covered the campus screening of Michael Moore’s “Capitalism: A Love Story,” which excoriated the U.S. market system as “evil.” My experience — and my recommendations — at the institutional level is to stand firm against the leftist backlash, which will include allegations of “hate speech” and so forth, while upholding values of rigorous engagement with the facts over ideology; and of course professionalism in interactions with others. And I’m happy to report that I’ve beat back attempts at censorship, and of course outside attacks — from folks like E.D. Kain and The Swashzone communists — that have been dismissed as gratuitous attempts at harassment. In any case, I encourage folks to read Restoring Our Universities , and also check in regularly at FrontPage Magazine and NewsReal Blog , where I’m now a contributing writer.
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Reforming Our Universities: The Campaign For An Academic Bill of Rights
-By Warner Todd Huston Well if this isn’t a fitting addition to the story of the stimulus what is? The University of Notre Dame in Indiana recently fired an electrical engineering professor over allegations that the prof used $190,000 in federal grant money and matching university funds to buy cameras and other equipment to make homemade
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That Stimulating Stimulus Paid for Homemade Porno?
Claire Berlinski lives in Istanbul . She’s got an interesting blog post, ” Is Islam Itself the Enemy? “, and there’s a raging debate on her Facebook page . This comment struck me as profound: I’ve just walked down a street filled literally with thousands of Moslems of exactly the kind many people are seriously arguing do not exist. I saw them with my own eyes, as I have every day for the past five years. With so many other questions in the world, why waste time debating this? Book a ticket to Istanbul, spend an afternoon here, have a lovely time, drink some tea, meet friendly, tolerant, warm, welcoming Moslems (mostly), and see for yourself. They exist! They’re my neighbors and my friends! Babür, is there anyone at our gym, for example, who would not describe himself as a Moslem? Would any member of our gym endorse terrorism, honor killing, forcing me to wear the hijab, or subjecting me to a dhimmi tax? The idea is so absurd it’s beyond discussion — and yet we’re discussing it. Yes, this is good. And I think it’s important. Every once in a while I have Muslim students in class, and we have thoughtful discussions. But they are such a small minority that we don’t get a critical mass of opinion to sort out variations in opinion within the Islamic community. So, call me agnostic on the kind of experience Claire Berlinski’s having. More immediate to me is David Horowitz’s experience. I’ve had a few similiar to this, in my engagement with the ANSWER Coalition. And this kind of experience is a good test. When Muslims come out to denounce Hezbollah, that’ll be a good step toward identifying and working with the moderates Claire champions. Meanwhile, see, ” The War Against the Jews at UC San Diego “: There are whole departments of this university that are sponsoring this hate week and thus the war against the Jews it encourages, including the Visual Arts Department, the Literature Department and the Ethnic Studies Department. The Thurgood Marshall College is another official entity sponsoring these incitements and lies. If you look at the codes this university claims to live by, you will see that chief among them is respect for diversity – for the ethnicities of students who attend this school. There is no respect for Jewish students at this campus when a week of hate like this is thrust in their faces courtesy of university faculties and administrators. There are thirty campuses across the nation hosting Israel Apartheid Weeks this spring, including the University of California — Irvine, UC Berkeley, Boston University, Brandeis. Brown, University of Wisconsin, University of Houston, Brooklyn College, University of Chicago, UC Santa Barbara, UC Santa Cruz, UCLA, DePaul, Columbia, University of Illinois, University of Minnesota, University of Washington and others. Behind each and every one of these hate weeks against the Jews is the Muslim Students Association. Many people on this and other campuses mistake the Muslim Students Association for a cultural organization that represents all Muslims. It is no such thing. The Muslim Students Association is a sister organization of the terrorist organization Hamas, and like Hamas, is part of the Muslim Brotherhood network. Hasan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood and the architect of terrorist jihad was an admirer of Adolf Hitler, whose organization translated Mein Kampf into Arabic. The father of Palestinian nationalism, Haj Amin al-Husseini, was one of Al-Banna’s heroes and is revered to this day by the Palestinian Authority and Hamas as the father of Palestinian nationalism. Haj Amin al-Husseini was a Nazi. In the twenties and the thirties he preached the extermination of the Jews and inspired two celebrated massacres of Jewish settlers. During the Second World War he went to Berlin to work with Hitler to recruit Arabs to Nazism . He devised his own plan to create an Auschwitz in the Middle East and was thwarted in setting up his death camps only because Rommel was defeated at El-Alamein. After the war, he and al-Banna led the Arab crusade against the creation of the Jewish state. Why is the Muslim Students Association that violates the diversity principles and ethical codes of every one of these universities allowed to sponsor hate weeks against Israel and the Jews on these campuses? Where is the outrage over the lies the Muslim Students Association spreads along with its incitements against the Jewish state? Shame on the University of California for its role in this event. Shame on Thurgood Marshall College and the faculties that sponsored it. And shame on the Muslim students who use the shield of their religion to advance the Islamic war against the Jews. And continue reading for the text of Horowitz’s exchange with Jumanah Imad Albahri , the UCSD MSA activist who refused to denounce Hezbollah , the fanatical Islamist militant organization committed to the extermination of the Jews. RELATED : ” Tolerance and Suicide .”
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Claire Berlinski on Moderate Islam
Michigan State University seems to have a problem. It has failed to teach its student agitators how to engage in civil discourse with opponents. Flashback: December 1, 2006 – Mob rule at Michigan State University Flashback: January 26, 2009 – 3 students arrested in Gaza protest Two of those students, who were charged with trespassing during an anti-Israel protest at Michigan Democrat Sen. Carl Levin’s office in the incident last year, have now been implicated in an appalling assault on Levin today, via the Detroit Free Press: U.S. Sen. Carl Levin got an apple pie – no whipped cream or ice cream on top either – in the face this morning during a question-and-answer session for the Mecosta County Democrats at a Big Rapids deli after being criticized by a young man for his stance on foreign policy and defense of Israel. Witnesses at Pepper’s Café and Deli said as the Detroit Democrat who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee asked the audience to let the man have his say, a young woman circled behind him and squashed a pie into the 76-year-old Levin’s face. …Big Rapids police said the woman, 22-year-old Ahlam Mohsen of Coldwater was arrested not far from the deli and charged with assault and disorderly conduct. It was not immediately clear this afternoon if she was still being held. Nico Rubello, a reporter for the Big Rapids Pioneer, said Levin stuck around and answered more questions after the incident. His newspaper reported that the man who asked the question was Max Kantar, 23, of Big Rapids. It also quoted Mohsen as saying, “We wanted to target Levin today to send a message that liberals and Democrats are just as implicated in the violence (of war) as the Republicans.” Pathetic. Levin issued a statement noting that these punks only hurt themselves — a point I’ve made for years after repeated physical assaults by the Left on conservative speakers and public figures. But don’t look for any hysterical columns from Krugman or Rich on the “insane rage” of campus Israel-haters any time soon. *** Flashback: Tomato Man: Another addition to the Unhinged mugshot collection
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Unhinged: Anti-Israel college student throws pie at Democrat Sen. Carl Levin
AFP – The former US commander in Afghanistan who was forced to retire after making scathing comments to a magazine about the Barack Obama administration will take a teaching position at Yale, the university announced Monday.
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Former US commander in Afghanistan to teach at Yale
(AFP)
Team Obama is playing the “private citizen” card again to create a bubble of political protection around the profligate, policy activist First Lady. We’ve seen it before. When conservatives challenged Mrs. O’s caustic 2008 campaign trail statements disparaging America and fear-mongering for votes , her hubby invoked the “civilian” shield . He threatened Republicans to “lay off his wife” , arguing that political spouses should not be subject to public scrutiny because they didn’t choose public life. Horse-hockey. Obama’s outspoken bitter half conscientiously and deliberately inserted herself into the public square long before the family moved to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue — whether it was organizing a Woods Fund panel with her husband and Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers , taking a publicly-subsidized government job with Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, parlaying her relationship with political mentor Valerie Jarrett into a cushy public job at the University of Chicago Medical Center , where she oversaw a patient-dumping scheme that benefited her political cronies , leveraging her hubby’s Senate victory to snag a lucrative seat on the corporate Board of Directors of TreeHouse Foods, Inc. despite having zero experience in the industry, publicly begrudging other Americans’ choices in how they earn their money, using her East Wing power to push Obamacare , or exploiting the bully pulpit to restrict food advertisers’ speech and serve the SEIU’s legislative agenda under the guise of fighting child obesity (more on this in the paperback version of Culture of Corruption). She wants all of the cake of public and political life — and all the unfettered entitlement to stuff her face in front of us while we sit silently, respecting her “rights” as a “private citizen” to immunity from criticism. When Michelle Obama stops using her public office to push new Big Government power grabs and redistribute wealth to her cronies (flashback: Chicago Obama-lympics ), stoke racial grievances , and meddle in Obama administration personnel decisions that lead to whistleblower firings , I’ll leave her alone. Until then, if she can’t stand the heat, perhaps the globe-trotting, paparazzi-magnet doyenne should avoid luxury foreign beach resorts in the dog days of August and cool her haute couture heels closer to home. *** Tom Maguire on the jet-setting friends of Michelle O and the grief card: AN EXPLANATION THAT DOESN’T EXPLAIN MUCH: Here we go : Michelle Obama returned to Washington on Sunday from five days on Spain’s Mediterranean coast, taking a mother-daughter trip with Sasha, 9, that stirred controversy. A White House source told me, however, that Mrs. Obama traveled to Spain to help a grieving friend deal with the death of her father. …Mrs. Obama met two friends in Spain, who flew there on their own. The three women were joined by a total of four daughters. (Some news outlets reported Mrs. Obama was on vacation with 40 friends; that was not true.) One of the women is a longtime Obama friend, Anita Blanchard, an obstetrician who delivered Sasha and big sister Malia, 12. Her husband is Marty Nesbitt , a close Obama friend and treasurer of Obama’s presidential campaign fund. A White House source told me the Mrs. Obama was not able to attend the funeral for Blanchard’s father at the beginning of July. Blanchard, who was taking her daughter on a promised trip to Spain, asked the first lady and Sasha to come to Spain with her. (Malia is at overnight camp.) “She felt it was important as a dear friend to do this,” I was told. Because nothing says “healing” like an international media circus with dozens of Secret Service agents, policeman and reporters around. I accept that she could not dictate the venue to her friend. However, Ms. Obama could have politely declined, suggested an alternative site or time, or gone ahead and demonstrated that she both vacations and grieves in ways quite unfamiliar to most of us. MORE: There is no question Ms. Blanchard and Michelle spend a lot of time together: LYNN SWEET CHICAGO-CENTRIC FOOTNOTES: 1. Jarrett, the Whitakers, Nesbitt, Blanchard vacationed over the holidays with the Obama family in Hawaii. The same group also traveled to Oslo in December to see Obama pick up the Nobel Peace Prize. The same group was also at the Nov. 24 State Dinner. That was in addition to celebrating Michelle’s 46th together. *** Anita Blanchard is a doctor at the University of Chicago Medical Center , where Mrs. Obama collected her hefty p.r. salary and engineered the patient-dumping scheme. Her hubby Marty Nesbitt chairs the Chicago Housing Authority, served on the Chicago failed Olympics bid , was a top fundraising chairman for Obama, and worked as an executive at one of subprime queen Penny Pritzker ‘s companies.
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Michelle Obama: “Private” citizen with piles of public perks
The Hot Joints has it, and also Chicago Tribune, “Ayers set to retire from UIC”: For leaders at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the planned retirement from teaching of former Vietnam War-era radical William Ayers will be a great loss. Never mind that, in hopes of quelling a political storm two years ago, UIC was compelled to release more than 1,000 files detailing the activities of an education reform group that brought together Ayers and then-presidential candidate Barack Obama. Or that the university was inundated with questions in 2001 after the release of Ayers’ memoir, “Fugitive Days,” where he wrote about helping with bombings of the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon and other government sites. While controversial and even hated by some, Ayers, who has served as an education professor at UIC since 1987, is celebrated on campus for his academic contributions, particularly in the area of school reforms, said UIC education Dean Vicki Chou. Ayers was unavailable for comment Thursday. But Chou confirmed Thursday that he will retire at the end of the summer. RTWT . Also at Founding Bloggers .
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Bill Ayers, Unrepentant Domestic Terrorist, Announces Retirement From University of Illinois at Chicago
The latest jobless numbers are out. Unemployment remains stuck at 9.5 percent — with employers shedding 131,000 jobs in July. Private sector employers added 71,000 (less than the private sector payroll additions in June); 143,000 Census workers were let go. The WSJ reports: The jobless rate, which is calculated using a separate household survey, held steady at 9.5% in July. Economists were expecting it to edge higher to 9.6%. After the worst recession in decades, the recovery that began in July 2009 has recently been losing momentum, but it’s hard to say if it’s just a temporary slowdown or if the economy could start to contract again. The Federal Reserve may consider taking steps to support the economy when officials meet next Tuesday. Some worry that with unemployment still so high and consumer prices recently dropping, the U.S. economy runs the risk of falling into a Japan-like deflationary trap of very slow growth and falling prices. …in a sign of the labor market’s continued weakness, Friday’s report showed that 45% of unemployed Americans, or 6.6 million people, were out of work for more than six months in July. The longer someone is without a job, the harder it is to find work. With time, people lose skills — and employers are often loathe to hire someone who hasn’t been working for long periods. More downward-revised numbers: The June data was revised down significantly. Payrolls fell 221,000 that month, more than the 125,000 drop previously reported, as only 31,000 jobs were added in the private sector. Taking into account revisions to prior months this year, the U.S. economy added an average of less than 100,000 jobs a month in the first seven months, a level that’s not strong enough to bring unemployment down. The eve before the numbers came out, yet another Obama economic adviser is abandoning ship: President Obama must grapple with the economy without another key adviser, given the departure of Christina Romer. Romer, who chairs the Council of Economic Advisers, announced Thursday night that she is returning to her previous job as economics professor at the University of California at Berkeley. Her resignation follows that of budget director Peter Orszag. Rumors about who pushed her out: …the scuttlebutt, apparently, is that she had run-ins with Larry Summers, who had a lot more access to The President. There’s also gossip — completely unsubstantiated, we just know that people are chattering about this — that Summers wanted Romer out. Meanwhile, back in Spain … Spanish police have cleared off a stretch of beach for U.S. first lady Michelle Obama and daughter Sasha to relax by the Mediterranean after a busy day of sightseeing. Police used palm trees Friday to mark off the boundaries of a 100-meter (100-yard) expanse for the American delegation. On either side, onlookers gawked. As the first lady rested inside a canvas hut by the shore, her 9-year-old daughter splashed around in the sea and a security guard swam with her.
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Unemployment at 9.5%; another Obama econ adviser bails; Mrs. Obama hits the beach
