COLLEGE AVENUE: Choosing the Right Outrages
Zmirak, John
COLLEGE AVENUE JOHN ZMIRAK Choosing the t ght Outrages ~C N 1998, THE PHENOMENON political correctness on of campus was still news. The outrages that journalists, faculty members, and...
...Yale pursued Hashemi's admission in the name of that sacred cow, diversity, which now appears to extend not only to people of various sexes, creeds, races, ethnicities, and sexual preferences and practices, but also to those who make war upon the United States...
...The rationale for these courses was something they took for granted-that American universities required every one of their graduates to have a mastery of a particular set of skills and a set body ofknowledge about their culture, their country, and their world...
...First, the university suspended-without a hearing and without pay-a veteran adjunct professor for daring to debate students handing out pro-Palestinian literature on campus...
...MAY 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 53...
...Officials of the UC system, representing ten campuses with 200,000 students in the state, don't like diversity-at least, of the intellectual variety...
...Meanwhile, Canisius College deems nothing more dangerous to campus safety than the creation of a simple memorial commemorating Americans killed on 9/11...
...In 1998, two organizations, the Collegiate Network (CN) and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI), began doing just this...
...Finally, college officials shut down an affirmative action bake-sale sponsored by the campus conservative club and charged the club member who organized the event with harassment...
...Every year on the anniversary of the attacks, YoungAmerica's Foundation's students commemorate the victims by participating in the foundation's 9/11: Never Forget Project...
...Third place was a tie between Stanford University and Holy Cross college, where officials are trying to silence the independent voices of their conservative alternative newspapers...
...k John Zmirak is editor of Choosing the Right College and the forthcoming All-American Schools...
...It didn't matter whether administrators were Republicans or Democrats-they still believed that their students should know the Constitution and the history of our country, should read some Shakespeare plays, should take courses in the history of philosophy, become acquainted with the core books of the Bible, learn about the cathedrals of the Middle Ages and the paintings of the Renaissance...
...To make people believe the unbelievable required the systematic chronicling of outrages on campus...
...Next, the administration branded as "propaganda" a College Republican protest of a speech on campus by Native American pretender Ward Churchill...
...The Fenwick Review's unpardonable sin was its satire ofthe campus homosexual group's "Gay...
...COLLEGE AVENUE JOHN ZMIRAK Choosing the t ght Outrages ~C N 1998, THE PHENOMENON political correctness on of campus was still news...
...most importantly, whether the classrooms at a given school are open to free intellectual debate, or pervaded by an unspoken, unexamined orthodoxy guarded by an intolerant regime that punishes dissent...
...Fine by me" campaign...
...They might eve n recall that the re was a Marxist or two in the political science departmentprobably some likable fellow with a beard, three children, and a house in the suburbs, whom they thought of as a misguided idealist...
...Yes, believe it or not, there was a time that college administrators agreed that all students ought to understand the Western culture that they inherited...
...None of this had anything to do with whether one preferred Franklin Roosevelt to Robert Taft or favored containing Communism rather than trying to roll it back...
...The first runner-up was DePaul University, which has essentially declared war on free speech on campus...
...This celebration was sponsored by several radical groups, including the International Socialist Organization, War Resisters League of Iowa City, Iowa Socialist Party, Iowans For Peace, University of Iowa Antiwar Committee, the University of Iowa College Greens, and the Women for Peace Iowa...
...In the case of the Stanford Review, it was an investigative piece on the campus Latino group that led to the group's being de-funded by the student government...
...Apparently, free speech is allowed at DePaul only as long as it accords with the political views of the university administration...
...The California State University system, which is twice as large as UC, also follows UC admission guidelines...
...First prize in the CN's Polly Awards went to my alma mater, Yale University-which admitted as a student a former Taliban official with a 4th grade education...
...Fourth place in the Polly Awards went to the University of California...
...52 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 2006 JOHN ZMIRAK And the crown for Miss Congeniality was shared by two colleges, both of which wish that jingoistic Americans would simply let bygones be bygones and stop talking about the terrorist attacks of 9/11...
...whether those famous scholars spend any time with students, or fob them off on overworked graduate students...
...The Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools Committee (BOARS) of the UC Faculty Senate is refusing to award credit to high school students in Christian schools who take courses using certain textbooks, primarily those published by A Beka Book and other conservative Christian presses...
...Officials at both schools have harassed the staffs of these publications and have resurrected long-dormant rules about distributing materials on campus in an effort to suppress the dissemination of the papers...
...This is the same university that bars ROTC from its main campus...
...Before that, most alumni, parents, and donors who cared about liberal arts education still carried in the back of their minds their own memories of college and assumed that despite the turmoil of the late 1960s and early 1970s, things had pretty much carried on at their campuses much the way they remembered...
...Sure, they remembered that their English professors were generally on the liberal side, that history teachers in college encouraged them to ask skeptical questions about the civics-class pieties they had learned in high school and adopt a self-critical attitude about the policies of our gove rnme nt...
...The assumption that there was such a thing as an "educated" man or woman-and that this l'rn the luckiest person in the world,"' gushed Sayed Ra h matulla h I ., Deputy .qashnmi, thefora er . , Secretary of the Ta!iban was different from someone who had simply taken technical training-was deeply engrained in American life before the 1970s, and it didn't cut left or right...
...TNTIL THE INTERCOLLEGIATE STUDIES INSTITUTE i and the Collegiate Network started docu- | ~,~,," menting campus abuses like these, nobody wanted to believe how bad the situation had become...
...That year saw the CN's first annual Campus Outrage (or"Polly") Awards and the publication of the first edition of ISI Books' Choosing the Right College (ofwhich I am the editor...
...In fact, people often refused to acept that their alma maters had radically changed in their absence...
...Instead I ended up at Yale...
...whether they focus o n teaching rather than research...
...The outrages that journalists, faculty members, and students reported still had the capacity to shock...
...I could have ended up in Guantanamo Bay...
...In effect, this small group of elites seeks to discriminate in the admissions process of nearly all California schools, proscribing a certain type of education it deems dangerous to the state...
...When the College Republicans of Canisius College asked the college administration for permission to place 3,000 small American flags on the quad as part of this effort, a college official nixed the idea, claiming that the display would damage the college's expensive sprinkler system...
...I'm the luckiest person in the world," gushed Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, the former Deputy Foreign Secretary of the Taliban...
...In the new book I am working on, All-American Schools, which will appear later this year, our team of reporters judge schools by the quality of their faculty and their selectiveness, yes, but also by whether they offer a real curriculum centered on Western culture, or a ragged set of options...
...Most importantly, they would remember that at nearly every decent liberal arts college in the country there was something called a core curriculum, a set of specific courses or subject matters which every student, regardless of major, had to take...
...They remembered college administrators as paternalistic and easy to outwitthe kind of people who might shake their heads at a harmless prank and urge the students to hunker down to their books...
...The University of Iowa chose not to honor the 3,000 Americans killed that tragic day and instead held a "Peacefest" on September 11, 2005...
...Some of the most outrageous, absurd expressions of on-campus intolerance of which we've ever heard happened during the academic year 2005-2006, which is just now mercifully drawing to a close...
...Both the Stanford Review and Holy Cross's Fenwick Review got in trouble with leftist administrators for criticizing the holy tenents of liberalism...
Vol. 39 • May 2006 • No. 4
