This Tuesday night is caucus night in Minnesota. While much attention will be focused on the DFL and on its delegates' support for various presidential candidates, expect also to see a wave of higher-education resolutions put forward - especially in Republican caucuses. Here's but one example of a resolution that will be discussed in a precinct in the Twin Cities.

Whereas our party strongly supports Minnesota's tradition of excellence and opportunity in our publicly supported institutions of higher learning, and

Whereas we seek to restrain the rate of growth in tuition increases, while at the same time improving our state's ability to attract, retain, and motivate outstanding professors, and

Whereas philosophically we favor competition over collectivism as an economic model for optimizing quality as well as efficiency, and

Whereas we value decentralized, autonomous decision-making rather than centralized bureaucratic control in our organizational efforts to maximize accountability to Minnesotans for returns on their tax-dollar investments,

Be it resolved, therefore, that our statewide party calls on all of our legislative candidates for Minnesota House and Senate seats (and especially on those who seek to serve on either the House Higher Education Finance Committee or the Higher Education Budget Division of the Senate's Finance Committee) to:

1) Request that Minnesota's Office of the Legislative Auditor conduct a new study designed to compare our state's ratio of direct instructional costs to administrative costs (expended by both the Office of MnSCU's Chancellor and by campus administrations) with comparable ratios calculated in neighboring states including Illinois (which by that state's Senate Bill 241, did in 1995, establish autonomous governing boards for each of its seven state universities);

2) Support the efforts of Senator Dave Kleis of St. Cloud to enact legislation that would allow Minnesota's state universities to withdraw from MnSCU and establish their own local governing boards;

3) Work with the Citizens League to help assess current offerings, develop a new vision for higher education in Minnesota, and support initiatives that will reward those campuses and programs that can document quantitatively their excellence of outcomes and that close those programs and campuses that are either unwilling or unable to demonstrate such excellence; and

4) Enact new legislation that would prohibit anyone covered by the Personnel Plan for Minnesota State Colleges and Universities Administrators from receiving any promotional, positional-review, exceptional-performance, salary-review, merit, step-up, or any other kind of compensation increases during all times when any of the bargaining units who negotiate with MnSCU are working without a current contract.

Don't be surprised if similar resolutions are debated within both major parties' caucuses around the state. It's now virtually impossible to overstate the depth of frustration felt by professors at our state universities with the office of the Chancellor of Minnesota's State Colleges and Universities (MnSCU).

The Irascible Professor writes today about whether or not research is done, or should be done, at state universities that are paid for by the state mainly to teach. IP says yes, because

...most of the really great teachers in the system are faculty members who have had a long and abiding interest in scholarship. The reason, which should be obvious, is that knowledge is not static. Those faculty members who have active research programs are far more likely to keep up both with new discoveries and with new interpretations of old knowledge. Even if their own research impacts only tangentially on the courses that they teach, they are far more likely to attend professional meetings and engage in spirited discussions with colleagues than those who have no program of scholarship. All of this feeds back into the insight with which the faculty member teaches even introductory courses.

Which allows me to tell you that I will be engaging in research at another fine institution Monday and Tuesday, so posting will be light-to-nonexistent for a few days. Meanwhile I encourage you to read the rest of the Irascible Professor's outstanding post and the link below to AEQ. Have a great weekend.

Missed this the first time, but Critical Mass has a story from Bates College in my old backyard of Maine, where its media relations office both chose not to publicize an event by the Bates College Republicans, but had one of its staff send a letter to his supervisor that was mistakenly routed to the CRs instead. Here's the letter.

Oli Wolf has drafted a press release for a GOP training institute his bunch of thugs is hosting at Bates next week. It follows. This really seems pretty far afield for an event that we would publicize, but that may just be my socialist tendencies talking.

Mr. Wolf of the CRs, who got this by mistake, turns out to be much better at publicity than Douglas Hubley, the sender of that email. You can find this story on a lot of the academic blogs. So yesterday, Mr. Hubley wrote an apology letter, mostly apologizing for having been caught.

Please know that I do not in any way regard the Bates Republicans as "a bunch of thugs." I am very sorry for having misspoken, and that my words were presented to you in such a hurtful way. Feb. 23 was my return to work after a week's vacation, and it was a very busy and difficult day. As sometimes happens, my anxiety with events led to my flying off the handle in what was intended as a private communication from me to my supervisor.

People who know me well know that my sense of humor tends, sometimes unfortunately, to take the form of sarcasm and irony, impacting all in sight regardless of political affiliation. My comment was intended only in that sense.

Ch'yeahright. It's hard to imagine how referring to someone as a "bunch of thugs" could be taken in any way other than an insult. And covering for it by being stressed out over coming back from vacation to find, surprise!, that you have work to do, is weak. Compared to this apology, though, it's not a bad effort.

The new edition of the American Experiment Quarterly has a symposium of 44 people discussing whether political discourse in Minnesota has become uncivil. The fact that it is published in AEQ might cause those to disagree with libertarians or conservatives to dismiss it, but I urge them to read through for comments by Mark Dayton or Tim Penny. I'll see if I can find time to write something more about this next week.

A reader with a child in the teacher development program here writes me:

She doesn't fall for all the indoctrination, but I have to keep my eye on her. Her husband is Army National Guard... She sometimes wears an Army sweatshirt to school, and catches flack for that.

Anyway, earlier this week she had an assignment to find the "official" definition of "social justice". Well, dang if I didn't have your post from a week or two ago quoting Sowell on social/cosmic justice. She got a copy of it, but I doubt if she used it. Have to keep that GPA up!

Links are mine. Thanks for this; these are the types of mail that let me think we're hitting the mark, somewhere.

Do you believe that the Left is its own worst enemy? The Academic Bill of Rights passed the Colorado House's Education committee after a professor threatened a student in front of the panel.

"The very reason why this bill is necessary is what we just witnessed," said Rep. Keith King, R-Colorado Springs. "A professor intimidated a student for his comments in a forceful, harassing manner - exactly the reason for this bill to move forward."

"I am representing students who are ostracized and ridiculed daily by their liberal professors," VanBuskirk, the last of two dozen people to testify, said.

"I also represent students who have been told, 'This is my classroom. I've got my Ph.D., therefore I decide what views are appropriate. I do not want your right-wing views in my class.' Clearly we have seen that the grievance process does not work. Why not send a chilling effect to these teachers so other students aren't told this?"

As he left the podium, Gould, who had just testified himself, got face-to-face with the student and said, "I got my Ph.D at Harvard. I'll see your (expletive) in court. Then we'll see a chilling effect," according to VanBuskirk. VanBuskirk was immediately called back before the committee to recount the exchange. Gould was not allowed to explain.

Prof. Gould appears to have also told off an ROTC student who complained about her professor calling the military "baby killers" while she was in uniform. Again, the state of academia is such that I do not find this outrageous or even surprising. Happens. All. The. Time.

Yes, thinks Joanne Jacobs. Reporting on this story by Jill Stewart from the San Francisco Chronicle suggests that student teachers are being graduated who cannot do long division.

. . . One problem is that skills such as arithmetic are rejected by many teachers as "drill." Professor (David) Klein blames UC and CSU teacher colleges who hammered that view into teachers.

At Cal State Northridge, Klein is required to allow the use of calculators during finals. "My students who are going to become middle-school teachers leave Cal State Northridge unable to do long division or to multiply. ... Then they go off to teach math to teenagers -- but can't do it."

Does it make sense to spend an extra $7000-$10000 per student to send them to a state university or land-grant university instead of a community college? Do we need Ph.D.s in math to teach ninth-grade algebra to those that didn't learn it the first time? I agree with Jacobs; it also makes me wonder whether the forced integration of MnSCU is a good idea.

As I noted in the Sunday's St. Olaf discussion, Douglas at Belief Seeking Understanding had taken a more critical view than most of the article about the teach-in written by Kevin Duchschere. Duchschere responded to Douglas about Duchschere's article and Douglas' critique.

You seem to suggest that I should be drawing overt conclusions from what's happening. Reporters who cover a subject over and over again can write with such authority, but in this instance I spent a couple days talking to people I've never met about a situation I've never addressed. For me to draw conclusions in the story itself would have been foolish and wrong-headed. In such cases our job is to lay out the facts as we find them, and assemble them in such a way as to allow you to do the judging.

Much of what you find lacking in the story is what we call 'inside baseball' -- interesting and intriguing to you, of course, but you must remember I'm writing 30 inches for a wide, general audience. Getting into Horowitz would require another story.

I think in part that's correct, assuming Duchschere was new to this. It does make you wonder why they put him on this story -- I don't know what area he normally covers, but he's not the usual person they put on higher education stories. He may have fallen onto a much better story than was believed when he was assigned to it.

I don't know if he's judging what part of the story is "inside baseball" and which is not. If he's really new to this, I don't know why I'd trust that judgment. But I do agree with his judgment on this point.

...how is reporting what St. Olaf officials told me 'uncritically accepting' of it? The story itself is proof that we didn't accept what they were saying -- otherwise, we never would have run it. You don't believe we ought to offer the college's reaction in their defense? Again, this wasn't a commentary based on my analysis, it was a news story.

I agree with that; I can't see any facts pertinent to the story that Duchschere omitted, which is why I said he did a good job. That doesn't mean that I think he grasps the full import of the event. I don't think that's necessary. He went, he saw, he interviewed, and he reported what he saw and interviewed, structured in a way to suggest that there were two sides to the story but not slanted towards either one. For that, we hope he gets more higher ed assignments.

We truly appreciate all the traffic SCSU Scholars has gotten over the St. Olaf story (and a special thanks to someone who will remain nameless for the help getting correspondence!), but we've decided that the Students for Intellectual Diversity at that school need a homework assignment. It comes from one of our frequent links, Prof. Mike Adams: Apparently the dust-up over the College Republicans there came after the CRs documented how much was spent on speakers to campus who were liberals versus that spent on conservatives out of their student activity dollars. (You probably can guess the latter number.) I propose that the students of St. Olaf undertake the same study. Results can be mailed to us, and forwarded to your Board of Regents for further instruction on what is happening on their campus. Grading is strictly 90-80-70-60.

And no, not this one.

This one.

"We single out potential adversaries who might disagree with U.S. government policy, and almost the first resort, it seems, is a military response," Carter said. "The completely unwarranted, almost unilateral war that we started in Iraq is a typical example of this, and it's not the only one. We brand people [the] 'axis of evil,' and it alienates them. Sometimes their leaders obviously deserve condemnation. But it arouses within their people -- quite often people who are suffering under a despotic leader -- a sense of fear, intimidation, aggravation and even hatred of the United States."
Acknowledging his own military service, Carter defended the concept of a strong U.S. military but said it should be used to
push people toward peace, not war.

I love that, "Acknowledging his own military service." A page out of the John Kerry playbook.

Bowing before a preliminary injunction against its speech code, Shippensburg State University has decided to scrap the code altogether.

Shippensburg has agreed to remove the unconstitutional provisions from its Code of Conduct and to replace them with a simple statement requiring students to comply with applicable federal and state antidiscrimination laws. The university has also agreed to pay attorneys' fees and to rewrite its "Racism and Cultural Diversity Policy" in order to make it explicitly clear that the policy is an unenforceable university statement of values and does not bind student conduct or expression in any way. "A public university is free to express the values it holds dear, but it may not require students to adopt those values, and it may not punish students because their opinion and speech dissent from some official university view," said [Foundation for Individual Rights in Education president Alan Charles] Kors. He added, "Shippensburg President Anthony Ceddia made the taxpayers of Pennsylvania pay for his discomfort with the Bill of Rights."

FIRE has more details.

Big Trunk's article on PowerLine about the St. Olaf teach-in is reprinted at FrontPage magazine this morning, and includes a link to this article of ours with the letters between the students and St. Olaf administrators. Almost as good as an Instalanche. Thanks, Scott!

I seem to be forever reading Mike Adams, but only because his school could be more dysfunctional than mine. UNC-Wilmington (which he notes stands for the University of Numerous Christians at Wilmington) is considering a quota on the number of Christian student groups on its campus, which had risen since September 11. This comes in addition to the story of decertifying their College Republicans chapter for not admitting Democrats, a story to which Prof. Adams has added some disturbing details.

Perhaps the most disgraceful aspect of this controversy was the university's misrepresentation of the reasons for the CRs' de-recognition. One of my readers from Monmouth College asked the chair of the SOC the following: "Is it true that the CRs at UNCW lost accreditation because they would not admit Democrats?" The chair responded by saying that the CRs had violated a policy like the one at Monmouth, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of "race, creed, national origin, sexual orientation or religious affiliation." The chair knew that the CRs did not want to discriminate on the basis of any of those factors. Their sole issue was political affiliation, and she knew it. Internal memoranda indicate that she had known it since October 20th.

Even worse was the decision of another committee member to write an editorial to the local New York Times affiliate accusing the CRs of fighting for "the right to discriminate." Yet another professor accusing the CRs of trying to exclude "blacks" and "Jews" from their organization topped all this off. This accusation was also published in the local paper. Put simply, the university conducted a smear campaign against its own students, all in the name of tolerance and diversity. ...

Even after wading through all of the stupidity and malice proffered by these forked tongues of academic idiocy, there is still no direct answer to the fundamental question: Do the diversity policies of UNCW trump the United States Constitution?

I do not have names yet of these administrators, but I believe The Superintendent should be put on the case. Notification has been sent.

Cold Spring Shops taunts us for a hockey win by his Badgers Saturday. I confess to paying next to no attention to hockey. Not that it's a bad sport, but after rotisserie baseball and fantasy football, I have to re-introduce myself to the family every January. By March they're ready to have me go back to my Baseball Prospectus.

Big Trunk of PowerLine has recorded his thoughts on his lecture at St. Olaf, and Hindrocket adds some thoughts and photos of the event. Notes the Trunk:

I was struck after the talk by how many of the students, mostly guys, stayed around to express appreciation. Appreciation for what? My impression was that they appreciated hearing someone articulate a point of view that expressed their own instinctive respect for the guardians of freedom.

Also noteworthy is our friend Douglas at Belief Seeking Understanding, who has paid admission to a round of "Whack the Star-Tribune pinata, and feast on the tasty treats inside." (His words, not mine.) The opinion of most of the others was that the S-T piece was pretty good, but he makes some good points. Worth a read.

Someone noted in the comments on the North Carolina story last week that the instructor was a fixed-term faculty member. You wonder if the administration woulc come down like the ton of bricks that have buried this instructor?

Crystall [the instructor] apologized to the class Monday, and university officials said they're monitoring the class to ensure students' free speech.

...On Thursday, U.S. Rep. Walter B. Jones, a Farmville Republican, called for state Attorney General Roy Cooper to look into whether the professor broke any state laws. Jones also is asking the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights to investigate.

"Had Ms. Crystall substituted the word 'black' for 'white,' 'homosexual' for 'heterosexual' or 'Muslim' for 'Christian,' she would have been suspended or fired immediately," Jones wrote in a letter to UNC-CH Chancellor James Moeser. "Instead, the student in question was forced to go to an online message board to defend himself to his classmates, his academic future left in the hands of the likes of Ms. Crystall."

...On Monday, Crystall sent an e-mail apology to her students. "I regret that my e-mail to you last week crossed a line and inhibited free discussion," she wrote. "And I am sorry if anyone was offended by my e-mail; my intention was to promote respectful conversation among us, not to censor anyone. We should not make specific examples of anyone, and I should not have named anyone."

Via Best of the Web.

Frater St. Paul has exposed a writer at MPR who labeled only conservatives in the story on the third draft of the standards that we covered before. He questioned why Parents United for Public Education (Tax Dollars) was not labeled as a liberal group, and he got answers: The reporter knew of EdWatch but not PUPE so reported the first as conservative and didn't report the latter as liberal. St. Paul responds,

If I may offer you some unsolicited advice, next time you decide to call a group "conservative" based on your preconceptions, take a look at your story and see if there are any other groups referenced. If so, how should they be politically characterized? If you've never heard of them before and don't know, do a quick Internet search. It took approximately 1 minute on Google to find everything on Parents United for Public Education.

Furthermore, if you're in the business of reporting education news, I would think it would be important to know a little something about the types of groups that are testifying before an education committee. Especially ones you choose to quote as having something important to say on the matter. Instead, it seems you consciously realized you didn't know anything about them, so you just took them at face value. Is that the standard you apply to all your sources?

Thanks to a reader, we have received a series of letters between the St. Olaf Student Committee for Intellectual Diversity and its administration regarding the Nobel Conference. The students have tried as best they can to get a speaker on the conference schedule that would discuss whether appeasement is always preferable to confrontation in prolonging peace. They first tried to persuade the program committee to change its decision.

In fact, the American electorate has consistently reaffirmed the position of preserving peace through military strength and preparedness throughout the 20th century. Consider our involvement in the Second World War and the Cold War. Every president from FDR to the end of the Cold War has adopted this position, as has our current President and Congress in the war on terror. In sum, it is completely inappropriate to have a conference on peace that includes 40 speakers and yet completely ignores the position that has dominated American foreign policy thinking over the last 60 years. Such a conference cannot really be relevant to student decision-making, because it totally omits a vital - indeed the dominant - perspective.

But the committee was not persuaded.

It would be inappropriate for me to discuss specifically the reasons for accepting or rejecting any particular seminar. But I can tell you more about the review process our selection committee used, and the spirit of the Nobel Peace Prize perspective that guided us.

...we sought seminars that focus on contemporary grassroots peacemaking and the underlying social conditions that give rise to conflict in the world today. Each year the Peace Prize Forum also gives preference to proposals from the students, staff and faculty of the five sponsoring colleges, other things being equal...

They then proceed to list Nobel Peace Prize winners. Yasser Arafat was a notable omission. The committee concluded that they had no obligation to invite people from the other side. In a sense that is true: It's their conference, and they can invite who they want. But among people who often call for diversity, we yet again have a case where the very diversity that would invigorate debate is stifled.

Undaunted, the students took their case to the president. The Nobel conference, they argue, is part of a continuing pattern:

In the span of a year, St. Olaf has hosted conferences such as the Globalization and Social Responsibility Conference (February 2003), portions of which many professors required students to attend, and the Knutson Conference on Sexuality, Spirituality, and the Church (April 2003). Both of these conferences like the Nobel Peace Prize Forum, were highly one-sided in nature. As students frustrated with the lack of intellectual dialogue permitted on this campus, we ask the college to cease its sponsorship of such biased forums. We also call upon the college regents to sponsor a special forum to address the critical need for a renewed commitment to intellectual diversity at St. Olaf.

I don't know that they meant to stop sponsorship; I hope not. I would not oppose the statements made by those I disagree with as long as the viewpoints I wish to offer are given equal opportunity to be heard. But I think they are frustrated with the lack of concern for balance in the viewpoints of their speakers. President Thomforde responded with a rather pompous tone (though I envy his ability to work in the word "undergird" twice in the same letter.) He quotes from a speech he gave thus:

St. Olaf College can serve the Church, and through the Church the world, by issuing an invitation to men and women of faith and to men and women who long to believe to come to the campus in order to reflect upon the questions of the day, to speak forthrightly with one another, to listen attentively to each other, and to seek the way of the Spirit together. The point in gathering together will be to reflect, to speak, to listen, and to seek but not to pronounce, to attack, and to discredit.

But, the students may rightly ask, has not the Nobel conference committee pronounced on the content of the views offered by Mr. Johnson? So the question is: Should a campus-wide conference on peace be content-neutral? Not if it can -- we all agree that it violates no law -- but should it? If you think the president of your school has made a mistake answering that question, where else do you go but the Board of Regents? So they did.

We were puzzled that Pres. Thomforde praised the forum on grounds that St. Olaf should be a place for “debate of those subjects that are of greatest concern to our nation and the world.” (The college, Dr. Thomforde said, should offer “a public place” for “informed and purposeful conversation,” where students and faculty can “reflect upon the questions of the day.”) In fact, our letter made clear that we object to the forum precisely because it is not a debate or dialogue...

I don't find myself shocked and outraged by this behavior any more, because it is happening at universities around the country. Again, I respect the right of St. Olaf's administration and faculty to create the programs that best fit its mission. Preaching peace is certainly a mission befitting a Lutheran college. You can even argue that preaching pacifism fits if you wish -- I disagree as a fellow Lutheran, but I can see how one can arrive at that position. What is disturbing is the rather callous manner in which the Committee for Intellectual Diversity has been treated. If one wished to educate why pacifism works, even if you think putting them on the Nobel program diminishes that program's educational mission, then I would think you would create a separate forum for these other views. Instead, alternative views are shoved into a dorm lounge.

UPDATE: I'm told there was a meeting between the students and the Board of Regents. Details to come next week. Drudge-developing...

Governor Pawlenty has responded to the fight over Education Commissioner Yecke's confirmation thus:

Not liking somebody's policy direction isn't a good reason to tube a confirmation. If they don't like the policy direction, they should maybe win an election. That might be a new idea for them.

Sounds right to me. He should start by getting fully behind the social science standards; the battle over No Child Left Behind was fought in the U.S. Congress, not Minnesota, and those against NCLB lost. Taking it out on Yecke is sheer spite; Borking is the last refuge of an ideology that has spent its raison d'etre. I've covered this issue plenty, and if you read this and are in agreement you need to do something. Sen. Steve Kelley (DFL-Declaration of Independence) is the chairman of the education committee that will hear her confirmation.

[H]e described her confirmation as "problematic" because many other senators, as well as members of the public, have expressed opposition. "I get e-mails and phone calls every day saying: 'Don't confirm her,' " Kelley said. "Her supporters have not contacted me."

Time to let him know that we will not have her held hostage by misEducation Minne$ota. Be brief, polite and pointed in saying to him you want her confirmed.

Call: 651-297-8065 or send email. If you would rather use paper,
Senator Steve Kelley
321 State Capitol Building
75 Constitution Avenue
St. Paul, MN 55155
Fax: 651-296-6511

Other members of the committee can be reached through this page.

The first home run of the season has been hit by Mike Adams, professor at UNC-Wilmington and contributor at TownHall.org. On Monday he displayed a letter by an instructor of English at UNC-Chapel Hill to her students that took extreme offense to a Christian's expressing "disgust" (the student's word) about homosexuality. She labeled this "hate speech", though it was apparently expressed in the context of classroom discussion (i.e., homosexuality was the topic offered by the instructor.) Prof. Adams wondered if the student had First Amendment privileges in the classroom or not? Today Adams writes that the chair of the English Dept. at UNC-Chapel Hill has repudiated the email from the instructor and that this will be monitored. Adams hits a laser over the wall with this observation:

I also hope that Professor Crystall will continue to discuss controversial topics in the courses she teaches at UNC-Chapel Hill. The topics she appears to cover should not be neglected altogether. However, if the discussion of such topics becomes excessive in the opinion of some participants, or if the discussion of the topics becomes one-sided, people are bound to be offended.

... Make no mistake about it; if we bring people together who have different ideas and perspectives, some will be offended. There is simply no constitutional right to ?freedom from offense.? And there is certainly no compatibility between the real provisions of the First Amendment and the ?speech codes? that universities such as UNC-Chapel Hill are beginning to employ, presumably to thwart the inevitable tension between the two incompatible goals of the diversity movement.

Our speech code at UNC-Wilmington prohibits ?offensive speech or behavior of a biased or prejudiced nature related to one?s personal characteristics, such as race, color, national origin, sex, religion, handicap, age or sexual orientation.?

To take seriously such an absurd code would place even mild expressions on either side of debates involving sexual orientation in jeopardy. It is far better that such debates take place where people are offended than that they never take place at all.

At SCSU, there is at least "due consideration" given to speech rights (see third paragraph) but the betting here is that due consideration is something done just before blasting ahead to the harassment charges.

On February 21st, there will be a teach-in at St. Olaf College to discuss "appeasement". St. Olaf is having a Nobel Peace Prize Forum on the 20th and 21st, but apparently not all are invited.

The forum -- entitled “Striving for Peace, Roots of Change” -- will feature former president Jimmy Carter, along with 50 seminars and “peace skills workshops.” The forum (sponsored by five Lutheran colleges) will draw hundreds of students from across the Midwest. The Nobel forum presents views from the far left of the political spectrum, excludes dissenting perspectives, and then issues repeated “calls to action” to students, many of whom will know little about international affairs but what they’ve heard at the conference.

Forum organizers have refused to allow any speaker to raise the vital question of whether pacifism actually promotes peace. Scott Johnson, a Twin Cities lawyer and adjunct professor, proposed a seminar entitled “Facts Are Better than Dreams: The Statesmanship of Winston Churchill in the 1930’s.” The program committee rejected his proposal, on grounds that it did not fit the forum’s “guiding spirit.”

Instead, the forum will feature seminars like the following:

• “Being Peace,” a dance seminar: “Understanding peacefulness requires, in part, having experienced it oneself. This session will explore a variety of body-mind activities geared toward generating an inner state of peace. We will work with the movement principle of ‘yield,’… which propel adults toward physical, mental emotional and spiritual change.”
• “Making Music, Making Peace: Common Purposes and Shared Skills”, a choral workshop: “Many of the skills essential to peace-making are also essential to music-making: listening, envisioning, mutual trust, repair, cooperation, collaboration. People who build their capacities as music-makers are also building their capacities for grassroots peace-making.”
• “Peace and Change through Public Art”: This project “imagines a fictitious and yet believable National Historic Site sparking both controversy and healing. Amid a massacre site it tells the 500-year story from the perspective of native peoples and culminates with an apology….”

The list goes on: “Peace-Making and Eco-Justice,” Fair trade Coffee and You,” ... During the conference, the St. Olaf food service will provide an “all-vegetarian menu.” (How meatless dining will stop Osama bin Laden is not explained.)

The teach-in is sponsored by the Students of St. Olaf Committee for Intellectual Diversity, a group that appears dearly needed on the campus in Northfield to work on its "guiding spirit". Reporters, photographers and those interested in viewpoint diversity on our college campuses in the area are encouraged to attend. There will be at least one member of the Northern Alliance in attendance.

The Pioneer Press runs a story today on the latest draft of the social science standards. Both sides are unhappy: EdWatch is upset about passing some of these changes off as technical when they appear to be more than that, while Parents United for Public Tax Dollars Schools seems to think still that only teachers can write the standards.

Some of the standards removed that upset EdWatch, I think, would not be missed greatly. I note the first one, however, as being part of this long bugaboo between Sen. Kelley and his critics over the meaning of the Declaration of Independence. The following standard was removed:

"Students will explain that Lincoln's understanding of the founders' principles includes that the principles of the Declaration of Independence are universal and applicable to all people at all times."

In isolation, given the other places the Declaration is mentioned, you wouldn't make a big deal about losing that standard in return for getting it passed. But that issue is not going to go away -- all you've done here is embolden Kelley to get other mentions of the Declaration out of the standards. Scholar the Owl has this to say,

This is a big deal because the Declaration of Independence says that certain rights are inalienable, meaning that the government can't ever take them away. Why would anyone object to this benchmark, unless perhaps they believe that the rights to life, national sovereignty, and property rights are not so inalienable after all?

Good question, though one can answer that those concepts are covered elsewhere in the document, which they are. My concern is more over tactics than substance. Between the first and second drafts there was a closing of the area of disagreement. Some benchmarks were added and others deleted, in return for which the MDE received much more favorable reviews from a range of people, including some critics. The biggest remaining criticism has been length rather than whether these are the right standards, MinnWORST and the Dozens notwithstanding. So why write a third draft unless you are going to again narrow the range of disagreement? Whatever the merits of the changes or whether they are technical or substantive, if the new draft does not get you more votes for passage, it goes backwards because it emboldens your enemies to wait for even more changes. Perhaps we will have to wait for the evidence that it does get more votes, but I don't see it yet.

The Owl wonders if and when Governor Pawlenty will come to the defense of the standards. It may come to that.

The blogosphere has had a series of posts on whether academia has a left-wing bias that actively stops conservative faculty from speaking, advancing or even deciding to be academics. Even Brit Hume is reading stories about the dust-up at Duke. My co-blogger at Liberty and Power Steven Horwitz has been raising some very interesting points, of which I want to give three clips. First,

I have no doubt that there is classroom bias that is real, but I also believe that conservative students too often adopt the very victim mentality that they complain about in other venues. If the CRs came to me for advice, I'd tell them to forget about bringing guest speakers and to spend their time in some reading groups that can help them learn what they need to know to at least try to level the intellectual playing field with leftist students and faculty. I know I'd much rather teach a room full of smart, well-read lefty students than one full of anti-intellectual country club conservatives.

Second,

Thinking back to my days at Michigan, if I wanted to prove some faculty member wrong, it would have required some serious research at the library. Today, a student can just Google up a bunch of material in 30 seconds. Part of me would like to think that left-leaning faculty are more frequently being challenged in substantive ways by well-informed conservative students. I'm not sure though. If not, there's no excuse for conservative students not trying. The information is out there for the taking.

These are both true, and if one visits NoIndoctrination.org you will see both students who have decided that the teacher used the wrong books -- whose arguments are susceptible to Steven's critique that they should read other authors and challenge -- and those who claim to have suffered lower grades for not parroting the professor's viewpoint. If you said half the complaints on NoIndoctination are things students should handle themselves, I'd guess that's about right.

Steven also points to Tim Burke's post on how collegiality tempers intemperate outbursts from the left or right:

On the other hand, collegiality is a powerful cultural force in many colleges and universities, and its stultifying or comforting effects (take your pick) often have nothing to do with politics in any sense. A conservative or libertarian who is a mensch about his or her views and research may well be admired, even beloved, by liberal or left colleagues, and fondly regarded as valuable because of their views. On the other hand, someone like Daniel Pipes who is running around picking broad-brush fights with everyone whom he perceives as a bad academic, usually based on a paper-thin reading of their syllabi or even just the titles of their research, is going to be loathed, but as much for his behavior as his political views. A liberal or leftist who plays Stalinist Truth Squad in the same way is going to be equally loathed and avoided. I?ve seen departments where everyone treats a particular person as a ?politicized? pariah even though the political views of that person are exactly the same as the general distribution in the department, and it?s entirely about strident, personally confrontational, abrasive, self-aggrandizing behavior. Now it may be that conservatives, having been sneered at, are more inclined, almost out of necessity, to go on the offensive, and create a feedback loop in the process. But the mode of action is more important than the views.

But where does collegiality become self-censorship? Andrew Sullivan received a very interesting mail in return for his request for stories of overt exclusion of the right in academia.

Most of my criticisms of Democrats or veiled praise of Republicans are couched in terms that suggest personal distance from conservative points of view. Last year, I came up for tenure, and I realized then how thoroughly I self-censor. I was in the car with a close long-time friend and fellow academic (at another institution), and I told her how difficult it was for me to overcome this compulsion not to speak. I then spent half an hour telling her what I'd bottled up for thirteen years - that I voted for Bush, that I watch Fox News, etc. At the end of it, she said, "I knew your husband was a conservative, but I never realized you are, too." In fact, I'm fairly confident that this self-censorship is not necessary; my department has a live-and-let-live attitude on many things. But I continue to self-censor, largely out of habit, but partly because there are a few people in the department who could never get over it.

The advice one reads from all this: Be smart, be judicious, and be firm.

How can I rationalize the irrational? How can I justify indiscriminate discrimination? Is my advocacy of inclusion by exclusion no different from addition by subtraction? What does that mean? Help me, please! My head hurts.

You see, this evening I’m imagining that I serve as an elected Faculty Association (FA) senator at St. Cloud State University; and today I’ve been challenged by a colleague in our Herberger College of Business to consider the merits of a long-standing policy. That policy specifically excludes “fair-share” members of the Inter-Faculty Association from serving on university-wide (or even intra-collegiate) committees that deal with a wide range of governance issues - from curriculum development, to pedagogical improvement, to research grants, to deans’ searches.

But today I read a posting to the SCSU-discuss list that was written by a PhD-ed professor of Management who has a wealth of business experience and academic expertise in the field of Labor Relations. That scholar writes:

The current SCSU FA (faculty association) policy is seriously mistaken and should be replaced with an appropriate policy such as:

“Full IFO membership is required for election or appointment to any FA position involving the representation of the faculty bargaining unit for the terms and conditions of employment. Union membership is not required for any other elected or appointed faculty governance, service, or professional position. Full IFO membership is required only to vote in any election for a position that must be filled by a full IFO member.”

1) The FA is not a union. It is basically a standing committee of the IFO. Every university has its equivalent of an FA and senate whether unionized or not. Such bodies are necessary for university governance. Faculty rights in university governance were well established long before university faculty ever unionized.

2) The IFO was right to fight for faculty control of governance processes that properly belong to faculty because of their professional qualifications. It is doubtful that the IFO could have won had it fought to limit participation in university governance and professional issues to [“full-share”] union members.

3) Instead of advocating for and supporting university faculty rights and prerogatives, the FA has chosen to support the interests of [“full-share”] union members at the expense of non-union [“fair-share”] members and the institution and faculty as a whole.

4) Few university governance processes concern union issues (i.e., the terms and conditions of employment). Rather, governance processes concern professional issues, academic issues, management issues, and a host of other issues which university faculty are uniquely qualified to administer because of their professional qualifications.

5) Under the FA policy, [“full-share”] union members who lack appropriate professional qualifications would be permitted to participate in governance whereas non-union [“fair-share”] members with appropriate qualification would not. The FA has no policy or process for ensuring that union members have appropriate professional qualifications before they are appointed or elected to positions in which they engage in university governance. Hence, the FA policy has simply replaced professional qualifications with another qualification, namely [“full-share”] union membership.

6) It is interesting that the FA policy of excluding non-union [“fair-share”] members from governance involvement was adopted using a process that did not include participation from non-union [“fair-share”] members. Indeed, it is still being discussed as though it is a labor relations issue rather than a university governance issue. This reveals that the FA policy represents little more than a power grab by [“full-share”] union members seeking to concentrate their influence by eliminating the influence of non-union [“fair-share”] members. If SCSU had real university governance, then the issue would be decided by qualified faculty, not by unionists.

7) This substitution of [“full”] union membership for professional qualifications undermines the status of university faculty and may explain why many professional faculty will not join the union. They wish to maintain their professional status. Their objection [may be] to the subordination of professionalism to labor relations. The union is supposed to fight for faculty rights to engage university governance issues, not to take over university governance issues and attempt to turn them into labor relations issues.

8) The FA policy simply reduces the resources available for university governance work and thereby shifts work from non-union members to union members. Under the policy all that one must do to reduce his or her workload is to refuse to join the union. Then one is not permitted to engage in one of the most important of the service components of faculty jobs regardless of one's qualifications, and as a bonus one saves money. It is difficult to see how this advances the interests of faculty or the institution.

9) The ironic element is that such a strategy cannot work. Non-union [“fair-share”] members still have the right to advise the administration and, under the current system, and [“full-share”] union members may never even know about this advice. In a university, administrators must consider qualified professional input. Hence, all that the FA policy has done is create an underground processes by which non-union [“fair-share”] members participate in university governance, but do so without the workload burdens of [“full-share”] union members.

Yikes, how can I respond to such logic? Can I find rational rationale for continuing to defend our current union policy; and if not, how can I rationalize my stance? I could say things like, “we and other campuses in Minnesota have always been inclusively exclusive”. . . or is the phrase I meant to say, “exclusively inclusive”? Hmm. Either way, that’s not a very strong argument, is it?

Well, I could argue that there’s not a great difference in the annual dues between those paid by a “full-share” member and those assessed against a “fair-share” member: $652.50 vs.$554.50. That $98 difference isn’t much of a hardship, really, for those who seek to serve on our committees. Or is it? I know that there’s a small bunch among those so-called “SCSU-Scholars” who say that they refuse “on principle” to become “full-share” members because our IFO union negotiators will not negotiate in favor of the concept of merit or excellence of performance being included in our contracts. But forget them. Since some of their political positions are apparently more philosophically aligned with individualistic exclusivity, they must not be collectively inclusive enough to join our exclusively inclusive committees. Oh, but is it really "fair" to exclude "fair-share" members because their viewpoints might be different? I thought we were supposed to value and embrace all kinds of diversity on our campus. Hmm.

Well, let me try another line of thinking. If we senators on the FA allowed “fair-share” members to serve on our committees, then some might argue that the $98 difference would amount to an illegal poll tax levied against those who choose to vote in our elections. No, wait, that wouldn’t make sense as an argument, since only about a third of our faculty voted for our current president, even though almost 80% were eligible to vote as “full-share” members.

Aha, now I’ve got the argument. Let’s rely on the phrase, “terms and conditions of employment” to retain our policy of exclusive inclusivity. After all, almost every committee touches on some facet of our “conditions” of employment, doesn’t it? Oh, damn, I’m wrong again. Another SCSU-scholar just pointed out on our discuss-list that Minnesota Statutes 179A. 03, Subd. 19 defines “terms and conditions of employment” as “the hours of employment, the compensation therefore including fringe benefits except retirement contributions or benefits other than employer payment of, or contributions to, premiums for group insurance coverage of retired employees or severance pay, and the employer's personnel policies affecting the working conditions of the employees.” And only a couple of our more than 30 university committees on campus deal with compensation and employee benefits. Oh, heck with it, I still feel like excluding that annoying “fair-share-scholar” Dave, even his primary area of expertise is employee benefits. He’s just not inclusive enough for my tastes, so I feel like excluding him.

Let's face it, we senators just haven't been challenged to find in either our state's statutes or in judicial rulings precisely where "full-share" members are allowed to exclude "fair-share" members from committees. We've only just interpreted the law to meet our own needs for power and control.

Well then, maybe I should propose my own new policy. To determine if “fair-share” members are inclusive enough to join any of our exclusive committees, let them first serve a year of penance on one of our most prestigious and exclusively inclusive committees. :

- INDEPENDENT REVIEW COMMITTEE ON CAMPUS CULTURE
- FEMINIST ISSUES COMMITTEE
- MULTICULTURAL ISSUES COMMITTEE
- AFFIRMATIVE ACTION COMMITTEE
- COMMITTEE ON DIVERSITY EDUCATION
- COMMITTEE ON DIVERSITY, ANTI-SEMITISM AND SOCIAL JUSTICE

There, now how’s that for being exclusively inclusive? Or was it inclusively exclusive? Or am I still indiscriminately discriminating? Oh, but my head still hurts. Please help by offering your comments.

The teacher who answered questions before now has a full rebuttal up. She continues her Balkanization of standards committees, claiming that there are only 7000 students in Catholic schools. This seems quite unlikely. Nationally, about 55% of students in private schools are in Catholic schools, and there are about 85,000 students in private schools in Minnesota (along with 14,000 homeschoolers, as Ms. Skrentner acknowledges.) So she's badly undercounted those students, and hasn't reserved a place for other religious schools, such as our many Lutheran schools up here in Minnesota. But I'm not an expert in education like she is, so what do I know?

The Minnesota Daily opines 'yes', as it relates to the debate at the University of Minnesota over funding its Campus Republicans group. The student fees commitee declared their CRs a "partisan group" and rejected funding for them. The question is whether this violates the "viewpoint-neutral funding" requirements of Southworth. As Eugene Volokh points out, though, they are not REQUIRED to fund speech. And since the student fees committee doesn't fund the University DFL either, one can hardly say they are censoring. Angry Clam agrees with this.

But the larger question is whether they SHOULD, not whether they are required. The MN Daily editorial concludes that the CRs are beneficial to the University's mission.

the fees committee does fund the Minnesota Student Association as well as various religious groups. Because part of the University’s mission is to foster a free exchange of ideas, it should not matter whether a group is partisan or political.

Often unconsciously, says Cold Spring Shops:

Consider, for example, the treatment of the Welfare Economics Paradigm in economics. It is easy enough to introduce market "failures" that "warrant" government corrective action. It is easy enough to design the optimal corrective action on a whiteboard. A student might easily leave a basic economics course with an understanding of economic policy that looks exactly like the Democratic Party talking points. The bias arises in the introduction of the "failure" and in the incomplete specification of "warrant." But to treat these topics properly takes time, more time than many basic courses permit, which often means these topics go only to upper-division economics students. A substantial proportion of the student body gets a vulgar and incomplete presentation of the Welfare Economics Paradigm.

Yup.

An article reprinted in our campus newspaper proclaims that universities push academic integrity, but perhaps it's a losing battle. This is an excellent article in my view, and I want to clip about five paragraphs here. If you're not interested, scroll on down. A couple of comments below:

...about three-fourths of all college students cheat, either on tests or on written assignments, according to his 1999 survey of 2,100 students on 21 campuses. The greatest offenders, he has found, are business majors, fraternity and sorority members, male students, younger students and those with low grades.

But bright students cheat too, said Vincent Jacabazi, a senior and academic integrity panelist at [Saint Louis University]. "They want the grade," he said. "That's what they're primarily concerned about. ... They need to get into medical school, law school."

[Rutgers Prof. Donald] McCabe agrees that many students are in college "just to get their credentials." On top of that, with many employers insisting that graduates have practice in working with others, professors are assigning more group work these days. The more students grow accustomed to it, the more they may conveniently lose sight of where permissible collaboration ends and cahoots begin. "I think technically (students) know where to draw the line, but they think they shouldn't have to," McCabe said.

Experts say academic integrity requires the commitment of teachers as well as students.

Consider, for example, the case of a professor who sits reading a magazine during a test, ignoring students who whisper to one another and oblivious to one in particular who copies answers from another student. Who is more at fault here, the inattentive professor or the cheating student? This is one of several hypothetical cases posted on the Web site of the Center for Academic Integrity at Duke University.

I think one is expected to behave with integrity even when people aren't looking at you. When I was a graduate student, most of the students in my class were foreign-born, many from the Middle East. A professor's absence from the room there was taken as an invitation to cheat, but this was not accepted. One wonders whatever happened to honor codes that bound students to report on cheating they observe among others (upon penalty of the same punishment as the cheater)?

Margaret Soltan sends a Valentine's day greeting to the fellow who thinks faculty should naturally come from the Left. I'm not going to clip it -- you need to read it all to get the flavor of her humor. Cracking good. The fellow is naturally miffed and says so. Erin O'Connor responds, and the beat goes on. Others are covering this better than me, and I need meanwhile to write some papers...

I received an email answer from Lonni Skrentner to the questions I posted in relation to the Chalberg letter. I am posting the answer in full, but I will make a few editorial comments.

I'm not sure you deserve a response, and yes I'm busy - I work full time! "Shouted"? Give me a break - and I said Catholic once! And remember, I am one! By the way, thanks for correcting the spelling of my name!

I think exclamation points are over-represented in your letter. This punctuational apartheid is an insult to semi-colons everywhere.

The word "shouted" was to paraphrase the metaphor "shouting 'fire' in a crowded theater". More of my deadpan humor, I guess. Sorry. I know you didn't shout.

And you're welcome for the name spelling. You should see my mail; I'm still getting Bananas Gorilla's fan mail.

1. "At the DFL forum at NCC, did you identify Dr. Flanders as Catholic? If so, why?" After 12 years of Catholic education, it was actually out of respect! Or, it's simply a label.

Respect? OK, I'll try that. "Hiya, Muslim! How's it going, Lutheran?" Umm, you know what, Lonni? I don't think that works. "It's simply a label" doesn't work either, because we use labels to identify, and you've only begged the question, why did you want a label?

"2. How many members of the academic standards committee were there? Of that, how many were classroom teachers, and how many were K-12 administrators?" I think there were 32. To the best of my knowledge there were 0 K-12 administrators. The number of teachers is moot, because it depends who is counting. The commissioner was willing to label just about anyone as a teacher. I would only count licensed people, active or retired - not people who taught two years twenty years ago. Sorry, but teaching has changed enormously in the 36 years I've been in the profession and someone without recent experience - pretty worthless!

Ms. Skrentner revised that in an email a little later to 44 members of the committee, which is correct. Interestingly, the list of members is public, and from that list I see 18 K-12 teachers. There's only one that I can see that has spent most of his/her time out of K-12 education. There are a couple of K-12 administrators -- more of the school administration people were school board types.

3. "What proportion of the classroom teachers on the committee signed the minority report?" Again I'm not sure - but the six who signed are well respected in their local communities, and statewide for both their content knowledge and their teaching.

The answer would be 6 of 18. That is, not even a majority of your teaching peers supported the minority report. I suppose you should start looking to strike down the credentials of seven.

4. "In your view, what would be the correct proportions? Should someone whose
children are grown and out of school be denied a seat on the committee? Should someone with only preschoolers? By the logic you seem to use, would a childless gay couple ever get to help write the standards?" This is a stupid question - I've already answered it. If the gay couple has experience and position, they can get appointed. I hope no one would let me write standards for the medical or law professions. Why should we let every Tom, Dick and Susie write school standards? Just because someone has attended school does not make them an expert!

If it's a stupid question, why did you answer it?

We wouldn't let you write the standards alone, Ms. Skrentner, because that really would be silly. But if you were a nurse, I might invite you to help with the medical exam, yes? If you were a paralegal of high quality, wouldn't we benefit with having you on a committee helping to write the bar exam? Maybe.

You are in charge of children, "Tom, Dick and Susie's" children. They may not be experts on constructivism, but they are experts on their children and they should be treated as such. Parents are on that committee because they are the principals in a principal-agent problem that is in no small part of your own making. Because enough parents are concerned that their children are not prepared for life in America because they don't know enough facts for all those critical thinking skills to operate on, they elect people to office who are charged with re-doing the standards which is why the bill to repeal the Profiles was HF 2.

Your answer shows an elitism of breathtaking scope, unfortunately on a par with fellow teacher Mr. Seeba's letter from a week ago. Such statements make calls for accountability all the more urgent. I won't generalize from this to an attitude about teachers, because there were 12 of 18 who supported these standards, to whom your answer is the back of your hand.

A roundup of articles about the standards:

• Most importantly, the StarTribune is reporting that a set of revisions to the social science standards is forthcoming after reviews from a second set of national readers. The comments are available from the Department of Education's website. Some are positive, some are negative. Read for yourself and see. You would hope that there would be a set of changes, but the House Committee has made it clear that they are taking a bill to the floor, so it's absurd to think that these reviews would lead to wholesale changes.
• There are letters from a math standards writer and a social science standards writer. Money quote from the latter on the opponents of the standards:

  According to these negative nabobs of academia, facts don't count, memorization is evil and the heads of students will explode if we dare introduce such "advanced" topics as classical Greece, ancient Egypt or the Declaration of Independence to children in grades K-3. Our students need to think critically, which to opponents means the teacher telling students that oil companies are bad, Castro's Cuba is good and Christopher Columbus was the leader of a planned mass genocide of native peoples because he sneezed on them...

• This morning's paper has more on Commissioner Yecke's confirmation hearings. Norm Draper lists her accomplishments as

  * Churned out new knowledge-based academic requirements for language arts, math, social studies and science.
  
  * Unveiled color-coded report cards that rank schools in several areas on a scale of one to five stars.
  
  * Gotten the state on track to implement the federal No Child Left Behind law, aimed at holding schools responsible for every student's academic performance, and she has gotten the U.S. Department of Education to make adjustments that prevented many schools from being branded as low-performing.

  So of course she shouldn't get to keep her job, says the DFL.
  
  Robert Bork says "hi."

Last week I thought that Kerry's Vietnam record wasn't much of an issue. Mark Steyn might change my mind:

In 2002, the Dems had no ideas and they ran on biography: [list of Dem losers edited] ... Yet here we are two years later, and they're running on biography all over again. But this time their chosen biography is Vietnam, and for many Americans, and especially boomer Democrats, that's far more psychologically complicated. Look at Kerry's stump speech: ''We band of brothers,'' he says, indicating his fellow veterans. ''We're a little older, we're a little grayer, but we still know how to fight for this country.'' Thirty years ago, he came back from Vietnam and denounced his ''band of brothers'' as a gang of drug-fueled torturers, rapists and murderers.

These versions are not reconcilable. When he was palling around with Jane Fonda in the '70s, he hated the military. It wasn't just that he opposed the war but that he accused his ''band of brothers'' of a level of participation in war crimes and civilian atrocities unmatched by the Japanese, the Nazis and the Soviets. ...

So one John Kerry is a fake. Which is it?

You remember the letter to the Chronicle that said the Hometown Proud calendar objectified women? This student seems to have made it a crusade, given her letter in the local city newspaper.

...rape and other abuses toward women in the military is an ongoing crisis. There are many American women, as well as men, who are serving in Iraq. By sending out this calendar, we are putting the women serving in Iraq at even greater risk of abuse.

This is a common statement I've heard, but I'm not sure it's borne out by the facts. Conclusive Evidence has reported on rape statistics from the scandal at the Air Force Academy, for instance, and found that the rate was less than at other colleges and universities.

...I still fail to understand how a calendar of barely clothed women boosts morale.

The short answer is, it depends on the women.

The long answer is that the calendar competes with Playboy and tons of other things sold in the military stores at any rate, so why is it a big deal. And as one woman wrote in the posts commenting on the letter, " The women in MN really do love and miss you (soldiers). We are all here waiting for your return - Moms, sisters, girlfriends, friends..." Just as it ever was.

Frpm Scott McLemee, who has earned blogroll love for this:

Workers and Oppressed People, Unite to Make Comrade Valentine's Day a Joyous Holiday of Proletarian Class Love and Militant Struggle! Decisively Defeat the Sinister Schemes of the Bush/Cheney Gangster Clique to Thwart the Romantic Aspirations of the L/G/B/T/Q masses! Eternal Glory to Comrade Valentine!

Official slogans for Valentine's Day 2004, courtesy of
the Freedom Road Socialist Organization.
That's FRSO (Red Star), not to be confused with
the dogmatist-sectarian renegade clique
over at FRSO (Fight Back!), who probably see romantic love as
false consciousness propagated by Hallmark, or something.

Hilarious! Hat tip: Ralph Luker, who also offers some interesting notes on people who write their own Amazon reviews. Worth a look around.

The Secretary of the NA Navy, Captain's Quarters, has new digs. Change your links and blogrolls and give him a look. Aye aye!

The negotiations over faculty contracts in the MnSCU system are still at a standstill, and the union is calling for action, which in his view is letter-writing. So our Scholar Dave wrote a letter, though not perhaps what was expected. Here it is:

I share with you my dismay at the stance taken by (and even the existence of) MnSCU. Since its inception I have noted:

• a serious "dumbing down" of academic standards toward mediocrity at what used to be our flagship state university here in St. Cloud,
• a growing siphoning of taxpayers' dollars away from our students to fund a largely redundant and ever burgeoning administrative bureaucracy in St. Paul,
• evidence of finger-pointing between the Chancellor's office and SCSU's Administration with respect to accountability for the settlement of lawsuits,
  
• a failure to establish quantitative goals against which progress can be assessed,
  
• an alarming and growing collectivist bias toward micro-managing our local affairs (down even to the level of seeking to design our university's transcripts),
  
• an apparent lack of respect for the unique talents and efforts that university professors bring to our profession, and
  
• an apparent unwillingness to bargain in good faith.

Over the past two weeks I have expressed these feelings in two separate e-mails that I sent to the IFO (action@ifo.org). My hope was that they would be added to you website's list of comments ...

My first question, Mr. Brown, is why have my comments not yet been posted? In my first e-mail to the IFO I identified myself as a "fair-share" member of the IFO. Is it possible that your office is choosing not to post opinions from those of us who, for various reasons, decline to become "full-share" members of your union? I note on the IFO's audited financials for FY 2003 that of the roughly $1.55 million in dues collected last year, almost 18% represented "fair-share" collections and that fair-share dues are 85% of those for "full-share" members. That means that there must be a "fair" percentage (> 20%?) of your members who are being assessed a "fair share." Will all "fair-share" members be allowed to post their opinions on your site? I would assume so . . . and yet I had naively also assumed that those of us who choose to be "fair-share" members of the IFO would not be estopped from serving on university committees whose work is not even tangentially related to potential issues of contract negotiation.

My second question deals with the IFO's net assets of more than $1.1 million as of June 30, 2003. Do you have plans for the more than $300,000 of that total that is designated as a "crisis fund?" Should a new 2003-05 contract not be finalized by this June 30, would the IFO consider waiving its collection of dues from us at least until a settlement is reached?

Lastly I would ask whether or not the IFO might ever entertain the radical notion of attempting to negotiate a contract that included the concept of "merit." Until and unless efforts are made to measure, recognize, and reward individual excellence, I must decline on principle to become a "full-share" member of the IFO, choosing instead to be taxed at 85% of your $652.50 annual assessment.

Thank you in advance for responding to these questions...

If a picture is worth a thousand words, why doesn't more education money help people read this? (WSJ subscribers only)

After viewing, please read Joanne Jacobs' note that the costs of meeting NCLB are not that large.

We reported yesterday that the resumption of affirmative action bake sales at Colorado University trumpeted as a success for FIRE has led to a resumption of protests at CU. The university took an interesting tack:

CU Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs, Ronald Stump told the Colorado Daily Tuesday the bake sale was in violation of the 1964 Civil Rights act and mandated it be stopped.

"According to federal law, state statute, and University policy, we believe it is illegal to sell goods or services with differentiated prices based on race or ethnicity," said Stump. "It's not a free speech issue. They need to find another means which is legal to make their point."

The CRs changed the wording to "donation" and made payment optional.

Now this is rather hypocritical of any university. A financial aid package changes the price for college faced by different students. Use of minority scholarships, then, would be a violation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Wouldn't CU be obligated first to throw out those programs before pursuing the discriminatory cookie sellers?

From one site of the opponents of the standards:

What is a "corporate patriot", and why should s/he not be educated?

Worth noting that that site also has a picture of the teacher who was reported to have shouted "Catholic" in a crowded DFL forum, who visited this site but hasn't answered my questions. Must be busy.

Hugh Hewitt gave a question for the NA on whether Kerry's behavior in his 1971 testimony, which just about everybody and his mother-in-law has read by now. I dunno; in my view the way Kerry should handle this is pretty simple. A one-sentence answer:

"When I was young and foolish I was young and foolish."

Bam! He disavows the position -- something he seems quite willing to do whenever his previous position is inconvenient -- and at the same time he recalls Bush's less than perfect past in a way that doesn't sully him as it did this Ohio congresscritter. This won't appease Vietnam Vets that are furious with him, but that's unlikely to be a bridge he can build anyway, so why worry?

A key in any long campaign it seems to me is to turn your weakness into a strength. There is no doubt this is a weakness for Kerry, but not one that is going to cost him that many votes. I don't disagree that he should be held accountable, as both PowerLine and JB Doubtless contend, but it requires people to care about that. To make them care Bush has to make it an issue, and this puts one extra barb that Bush would have to grab to do so. It would be better for Bush to focus on Kerry's weaknesses on Iraq and al-Qaeda, where he has both an advantage and issue saliency. On that, I think the Captain agrees.

Again, at Colorado.

After the packed UMC gathering, at least 50 students supporting affirmative action marched from the rally through the snow, carrying protest signs with colorful slogans. Many taped their mouths shut to promote what they called their "silent voices" on the issue.

The pro-affirmative action students announced that they wanted to keep the protest march "100 percent respectful" and then marched to and surrounded the GOP and EOA bake sale table, which was stationed at a kiosk outside the Hellems building.

"We didn't want to make conflict," said freshman Shantel Campos, an affirmative action supporter who marched through the snow with her mouth taped. "This is a publicity stunt [for the College Republicans and EOA]. It's not the right place for a dialogue."

College Republican Chair Brad Jones disagreed with the students' description of their intentions.

"[They call it] open dialogue if it's sponsored by their group," he said, arguing that campus liberals only want free speech when they condone it.

Pro-affirmative action students arrived at the bake sale at about 12:45, with some removing the tape from their mouths to join the verbal conflict.

A shouting match ensued amid TV cameras, reporters, bystanders and members of each group who had gathered in a cluster near the EOA table.

"This is mob activity..." said Jones. "Why is [UCSU diversity director] Kerry Kite ripping down a sign for a sanctioned event?"

For some reason this leads me to recall a P.J. O'Rourke quote:

"How come," I asked Andy, "whenever something upsets the Left, you see immediate marches and parades and rallies with signs already printed and rhyming slogans already composed, whereas whenever something upsets the Right, you see two members of the Young Americans for Freedom waving a six-inch American flag?"

"We have jobs," said Andy.

I'll bet this doesn't generate nearly so many hits as before (over 700 visitors yesterday alone, a record!) but two servicemen respond to the University Chronicle on the calendar from here that PowerLine covered a couple of days ago.

1. Those of you who have never served in the United States military could not possibly understand what it means to get news from home or pictures from home. When I received the calendar it made my week and probably my cruise. It's nice to see the smiling faces of some of my old high school and college friends.

2. I am a soldier who is deployed overseas, and I would like to thank the people who have put so much time and effort into the Hometown Proud calender. I can safely speak on behalf of my fellow soldiers when I say that it is quite appreciated.

We thank Chad and Dan for their service to our country. We'll also toss a link to the calendar's homepage if you'd like to order one and help another serviceman.

I'm not going to be the only edublogger in the NA for much longer, at the rate Mitch is going. He continues his latest trend to day with a look at where schools are closing in Minneapolis. A school system built for 50,000 students expects to have only 38,000 next year, so some have to be shuttered. According to the school district's own report, the district would save $2.8 million in the short run and $9.7mm in the long run. But that's not all, Mitch notes:

notice the number of closing or merged schools in areas where real estate values are booming - downtown, around Northeast, along the Hiawatha Corridor, in the gentrifying parts of the North Side. This is prime real estate that's earning the city, and the school district, nothing right now.

So here's what you have:

1. Minneapolis has 12,000 seats more than it needs. It has to consolidate.
   
2. All of that prime underutilized real estate is a potential cash cow for the district.
   
3. Perhaps most importantly, publicising the pain of the school closings as a response to state budget cuts is a great way for the DFL-controlled Minneapolis school board to shift the blame to the Republican-dominated legislature (with the full connivance of professional guilt-mongers like Nick Coleman),even as the closings perfectly fit their need to consolidate.
   
4. It's a political attack on both the charter school systems - which are becoming vastly more popular as the MPS's academic record atrophies - and "white flight". Don't underestimate the connection the DFL will make using these two issues during the upcoming legislative session.

What, public schools attack charter schools? I don't believe it! [ /deadpan>