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Post by rick on Nov 6, 2006 11:18:09 GMT -5
Celebrating multiculturalism and diversity By Walter E. Williams January 1, 2003 www.townhall.com/columnists/WalterEWilliams/2003/01/01/celebrating_multiculturalism_and_diversity What I celebrate as a source of pride and self-esteem is the fact that I have brown eyes. You say, "Williams, that goes to prove what we've been saying all along. You're a lunatic! Is having brown eyes some kind of accomplishment?" Such a response is proof positive that you've missed out on an important part of today's college education. Diversity worship and multiculturalism are currency and cause for celebration at just about any college. If one is black, brown, yellow or white, the prevailing thought is that he should take pride and celebrate that fact even though, just as in the case of my eye color, he had nothing to do with it. The multiculturist and diversity crowd see race as an achievement. In my book, race might be an achievement, worthy of considerable celebration, only if a person was born white and through his effort and diligence became black. For the multiculturist/diversity crowd, culture, ideas, customs, arts and skills are a matter of racial membership where one has no more control over his culture than his race. That's a racist idea, but it's politically correct racism. It says that one's convictions, character and values are not determined by personal judgment and choices but genetically determined. In other words, as yesteryear's racists held: race determines identity. The multiculturists are right in saying that in a just society, people of all races and cultures should be equal in the eyes of the law. But their argument borders on idiocy when they argue that one culture cannot be judged superior to another and to do so is Eurocentrism. For them, different cultural values are morally equivalent. That's unbridled nonsense. Ask your multiculturalist friends: Is forcible female genital mutilation, as practiced in nearly 30 sub-Saharan African and Middle Eastern countries, a morally equivalent cultural value? Slavery is practiced in Northern Sudan; is it morally equivalent? In most of the Middle East, there are numerous limits placed on women such as prohibitions on driving, employment and education. Under Islamic law, in some countries, women adulterers face death by stoning, and thieves face the punishment of having their hand severed. Are these cultural values morally equivalent, superior or inferior to ours? Western values are superior to all others. Why? The indispensable achievement of the West was the concept of individual rights. It's the idea that individuals have certain inalienable rights and individuals do not exist to serve government but governments exist to protect these inalienable rights. It took until the 17th century for that idea to arrive on the scene and mostly through the works of English philosophers such as John Locke and David Hume. While Western values are superior to all others, one need not be a Westerner to hold Western values. A person can be Chinese, Japanese, Jewish, African or Arab and hold Western values. It's no accident that Western values of reason and individual rights have produced unprecedented health, life expectancy, wealth and comfort for the ordinary person. There's an indisputable positive relationship between liberty and standards of living. Western values are by no means secure. They're under ruthless attack by the academic elite on college campuses across America. These people want to replace personal liberty with government control; they want to replace equality with entitlement; they want to halt progress in the name of protecting the environment. As such, they pose a much greater threat to our way of life than any terrorist or rogue nation. Multiculturalism and diversity are a cancer on our society, and, ironically, with our tax dollars and charitable donations, we're feeding it. Dr. Williams serves on the faculty of George Mason University as John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics and is the author of More Liberty Means Less Government: Our Founders Knew This Well.
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Post by rick on Nov 6, 2006 11:22:40 GMT -5
Phony diversity By Walter E. Williams Tuesday, August 27, 2002 www.townhall.com/columnists/WalterEWilliams/2002/08/27/phony_diversity You've written a tuition check, carted your son or daughter off to college, given those last minute admonitions and made those tearful good byes. For those thousands of dollars, the anguish of seeing your 17- or 18-year-old pack up and leave home for the first time, and entrusting him to some strangers, what are some of the things you might expect? One thing for sure is that your youngster will encounter and be bombarded with diversity newspeak. Diversity is a big buzzword on college and university campuses. Diversity has fogged and claimed the minds of campus administrators so much so that they've created diversity fiefdoms. Harvard University Medical School has an Office for Diversity and Community Partnership. Brown University has a Diversity Institute. UC Berkeley has a Diversity Committee and a Diversity Officer. At George Mason University, where I teach, there's a Diversity Advisory Board and an Office for Diversity Programs and Services. At most colleges and universities, there's a diversity or multiculturalism agenda to propagandize students. According to Merriam Webster's dictionary, diversity means: diverseness, multifariousness, multiformity, multiplicity and variousness. The opposite of diversity is uniformity or identity. For the bulk of universities and colleges, diversity means race quotas, sex quotas and programs to insure that representative forms of sexual deviancy become an accepted norm. To insure this politically correct vision of campus life, there's one form of diversity that can't be tolerated. That's ideological and political diversity; there must be uniformity and identity. According to Karl Zinsmeister's article "The Shame of America's One-Party Campuses" in The American Enterprise (September 2002), campus political, and hence ideological, diversity is all but absent. Mr. Zinsmeister sampled faculty political affiliation obtained from local voter registration records at several universities. He classified faculty who registered as Democratic, Green or Working Families Party as members of the party of the Left and those registered as Republicans or Libertarians as members of the party of the Right. The results were: Brown University, 5 percent of faculty were members of the party of the Right; at Cornell it was 3 percent; Harvard, 4 percent; Penn State, 17 percent; Stanford University, 11 percent; UCLA, 6 percent; and at UC Santa Barbara, 1 percent. There are other universities in the survey; however, the pattern is the same -- a faculty dominated by leftist ideology. In some departments, such as Women's Studies, African-American Studies, Political Science, Sociology, History and English, the entire faculty is leftist. When it came to the 2000 election, 84 percent of Ivy League faculty voted for Al Gore, 6 percent for Ralph Nader and 9 percent for George Bush. In the general electorate, the vote was split at 48 percent for Gore and Bush, and 3 percent for Nader. Zinsmeister concludes that one would find much greater political diversity at a grocery store or on a city bus. So what does all this mean? It means your son or daughter will be taught that the Founders of United States were racists and sexists; capitalism is a tool used to oppress women and minorities; literature and philosophy written by "dead white men" is a tool of exploitation, one person's vision of reality is just as valid as another's, one set of cultural values (maybe the Taliban's) is just as good as another, poverty is caused by rich people, and America is destroying the planet. Americans as taxpayers and donors have been far too generous, and carelessly so, with colleges and universities. It's high time we began to demand accountability, not only in the area of ideological diversity, but in academic honesty and excellence as well. In my opinion, there is nothing that opens the closed minds of academic administrators better than sounds of pocketbooks snapping shut.
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Post by rick on Nov 6, 2006 11:28:01 GMT -5
Snippet: www.townhall.com/columnists/WalterEWilliams/2002/01/16/diversity Diversity implies toleration of differences among people no matter what that difference might be, including those differences that are racial, sexual, ideological or political. Diversity also implies a willingness to permit others who disagree with you to go their separate ways, and form institutions and groups among like-minded friends and associates. In the political arena, diversity implies decentralized decision-making power that in turn requires limited government. What's called for and practiced by college administrators, courts and administrative agencies is anything but a defense of individual rights, freedom from conformity and a doctrine of live-and-let-live. Instead, diversity is an increasingly popular catchword for all kinds of conformity -- conformity in ideas, actions and speech. It calls for re-education programs where diversity managers indoctrinate students, faculty members, employees, managers and executives on what's politically correct thinking. Part of that lesson is non-judgmentalism, where one is taught that one lifestyle is just as worthy as another, or all cultures and their values are morally equivalent. I'm waiting for one of those multicultural/diversity idiots to tell us about the moral equivalency between Western and Taliban treatment of women. Universities, corporations and government offices that do not hire, promote or admit the right number of minorities, women, disabled or other "protected" classes of Americans are seen as politically incorrect. As such, they risk exposure to heavy-handed Equal Employment Opportunity Commission enforcement actions, government and private lawsuits, loss of government grants and contracts, or loss of university accreditation. Diversity is simply the old racism in a new guise, spiced up with a touch of sexism. Diversity is a call for race-conscious decisions in hiring, promotion and college admittance policy. Diversity management success is measured by the numbers: How many minorities or women are employed, promoted or enrolled? Wrong numbers invite the wrath of the state. At colleges, diversity doesn't mean political diversity. It is by no means unusual to find colleges where the bulk of the faculty -- sometimes 80 percent or 90 percent -- is registered Democrat. In some academic departments, such as philosophy, history and political science, it is by no means rare to find 100 percent of the faculty is registered Democrat. Equal treatment, academic standards and meritocracy are the major casualties of the quest for diversity. In fact, equal treatment, academic standards and meritocracy can lead to charges of racism by the diversity elite. Being a 65-year-old, I can remember when blacks demanded that questions about race be removed from job or credit application forms. We said race was irrelevant and demanded color-blindness. In today's racial spoils system, racial designations are required. What might true diversity look like on college campuses? Different colleges might pursue different policies with regard to race and sex. Some might have color- and sex-blind admittance and hiring policies, while others, at least at private colleges, might be race- and sex-conscious. Some colleges would have faculty members who are mostly liberal Democrats or conservative Republicans, as opposed to the current domination by liberal Democrats. There'd be free speech rather than speech codes. Official racism, in the forms of quotas and preferences, has fallen out of public and political favor, and so has some of its agenda's coded words. Large corporations used to have their "urban affairs" office in charge of racial numbers. Later on, it was the corporate or university "affirmative action" office. Now it's the "equity" office, soon maybe to become the office for "diversity management." But racism is racism with or without a smiley face.
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Post by rick on Nov 6, 2006 11:37:40 GMT -5
The left monopoly By Thomas Sowell Friday, January 7, 2005 www.townhall.com/columnists/column.aspx?UrlTitle=the_left_monopoly&ns=ThomasSowell&dt=01/07/2005&page=full&comments=true Recently Albert Hunt's last column for the Wall Street Journal mentioned how he was recruited by the late and great Robert L. Bartley, who made that newspaper's editorial page unsurpassed in quality. What made the hiring of Albert Hunt especially significant was that Bartley was a staunch conservative in the Reagan tradition, while Hunt is a standard issue liberal. It was precisely for that reason that Bartley wanted Hunt to write for the Wall Street Journal, so that readers would be sure to get more than one side of the issues discussed. Many years ago, when I was teaching economics at UCLA, we likewise had a staunchly conservative department. We were sometimes called the west coast branch of the University of Chicago, because so many of us had studied under Milton Friedman and other leaders of "the Chicago school" of economists. Like Bob Bartley, we wanted our students to see more than one way of looking at economics. One young, liberal-minded economist was regarded by some as a possible permanent member of the department, to add variety. He never really measured up to our expectations, but he was probably kept on longer than he would have been if he had been a conservative economist, because of hopes that he would turn out to be better than he did. Even though the word "diversity" has become a mantra on the left, there is no such drive for intellectual diversity in bastions of the left, such as academia or the mainstream media. In recent years, the liberal media have at least added some token conservatives, but our colleges and universities are content with whole departments consisting solely of people ranging from the left to the far left. In academia, "diversity" in practice too often means simply white leftists, black leftists, female leftists and Hispanic leftists. Perhaps it was the remarkable popularity of conservative talk radio and the meteoric rise of the Fox News channel that led liberal TV networks to begin adding some conservatives to their lineups. No such competitive pressures operate in academia. There are a few good small conservative colleges like Hillsdale or Grove City, but Ivy League schools have no conservative rivals of comparable size and prominence, and neither do most state universities. A student can spend four years at many colleges and universities and graduate with no real awareness of any other viewpoints than those on the left. College and university faculties do not simply happen to be leftist. Too often ideological questions are asked at faculty job interviews and ideological litmus tests are applied in hiring. One reason for the prominence of conservative think tanks is that so many top scholars who are not leftists do not find a home in academia and go to work for think tanks instead. Not even visiting speakers with a conservative viewpoint are tolerated on many campuses. It seems incredible that there would be fears that a one-hour lecture would undo years of indoctrination. But perhaps it is just sheer intolerance that creates hostility to anyone expressing ideas contrary to the prevailing notions of the left. Students often report that their professors react against them for stating a viewpoint different from the prevailing orthodoxy of the left. They can be ridiculed in class discussions or given low grades on exams. Dartmouth College has been carrying on a running battle with the conservative student newspaper, the Dartmouth Review, from the moment it was founded many years ago. On some campuses, conservative student newspapers are destroyed by leftist students or even burned publicly, with little or no effort by the college administration to maintain freedom of speech. A student at Lewis College in Colorado was actually kicked by a professor for wearing a sweatshirt proclaiming his Republican views. This happened at a birthday party, of all places, and the professor has been quoted as saying that her only regret was that her kick was not "harder and higher." The American Council of Trustees and Alumni, which monitors campus intolerance, is trying to get some action taken against that professor. Good luck. Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute and author of author of Basic Economics: A Citizens Guide to the Economy.
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Post by rick on Nov 6, 2006 11:53:26 GMT -5
Diversity versus 'diversity' By Thomas Sowell Friday, November 16, 2001 www.townhall.com/columnists/column.aspx?UrlTitle=diversity_versus_diversity&ns=ThomasSowell&dt=11/16/2001&page=full&comments=true Sometimes it seems as if "diversity" is going to replace "the" as the most often used word in the English language. Yet the place where this word has become a holy grail -- academia -- shows less tolerance for genuine diversity of viewpoints than any other American institution. In a book titled "The College Admissions Mystique," an admissions office official at Brown University is quoted as setting ideological litmus tests for applicants. An outstanding high school record would not be enough get admitted, because such records were seen as signs of people who had sold out to traditional ways of thinking -- and who envisaged careers in establishment professions. He called such students "Reptilian." What the admissions official wanted were "with it" kids, socially and politically aware -- "bellwethers" who "would have a following later on." In other words, he did not want pillars of society but politically correct pied pipers who could head ideological movements. In other words, diversity of viewpoints is not welcome. Diversity of physical appearance is the be-all and end-all, but diversity of thought is no more welcome than it has been under the Taliban in Afghanistan. Such narrowness is not confined to Brown University. Nor is it confined to admissions offices. Increasingly, ideological litmus tests are applied to the hiring of professors. Candidates for faculty positions report being asked openly ideological questions. One young scholar who has published very careful and important research that reached politically incorrect conclusions reports being treated with calculated discourtesy and boorishness during job interviews. It was not enough for the cultural commissars to turn him down, they had to try to humiliate him. This particular scholar has now been hired by a conservative think tank on the east coast. But the real harm that has been done has been done to students who will never learn that there is a factual and reasoned alternative to the one-sided propaganda they will hear in their classrooms. Incidentally, there is a reason why most of the top-rated think tanks in the world are conservative. When a liberal think tank wants to hire a top scholar in some field, they have to compete with Ivy League universities, Berkeley, Duke, and the like. But conservative think tanks don't have that problem, because the ideological litmus tests in academia bar many conservative scholars from an academic career. Conservative think tanks have little competition when hiring people like the outstanding young man who was dissed at job interviews in places where he was, if anything, over-qualified. What is remarkable -- and appalling -- is that so many businessmen keep writing donation checks, some in the millions of dollars, for places where businessmen are demonized by academics who know nothing about business, and where the very possibility that a student applicant might become a businessman is enough reason to blackball him, despite his academic achievements. Recently, a college student wrote to me that a professor was shocked to see a book of mine accidentally fall out of his book bag. However, the prof was visibly relieved when the student said that it was just a book that he bought for himself. What this ideological academic had feared was that this book was assigned reading in some course. In other words, four years of steady indoctrination with the left viewpoint might be jeopardized by one little book of essays. Who knows? It could even lead to diversity. All this ideological intolerance might seem funny, but it is very serious for those who are true believers on the left and ought to be for those of us who are not. Even if the academic Talibans of the left were correct in all their beliefs about all current issues, it would still be dangerous to leave students unable to weigh and analyze alternatives for themselves, because the issues in the years ahead of them are almost certain to be different. What they were taught will become progressively less relevant and the mental skills that they have not been taught can become a crippling handicap for them "DIVERSITY" -- and for our society. Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute and author of author of Basic Economics: A Citizens Guide to the Economy.
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Post by rick on Nov 6, 2006 12:05:20 GMT -5
My recent speech on ideological diversity By Mike S. Adams Friday, November 14, 2003 www.townhall.com/columnists/MikeSAdams/2003/11/14/my_recent_speech_on_ideological_diversity It is a pleasure to be here at North Carolina State University for the annual conference of the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy. I want to thank the John Locke Foundation ( www.johnlocke.org ) for sponsoring this event. I would also like to thank one of my fellow speakers for agreeing to discuss the issue of diversity among university faculty with regard to political affiliation. Because I do not wish my speech to overlap with others, I will not mention the fact that there were no Republicans in UNC-Wilmington's Department of Sociology, Anthropology, Social Work, and Criminal Justice when I joined them back in 1993. But since a previous speaker remarked that most university English Departments have only one token Republican faculty member, I must point out that such a policy is not in place at UNC-Wilmington where there are no Republicans to be found among 31 full-time professors. I will, however, refrain from commenting on the fact that the Political Science Department at UNCW has no Republicans among their full-time faculty. Instead, I will ask you all to join me in a round of applause for the Political Science department right here at N.C. State. They have only 27 Democrats and are truly celebrating diversity by allowing one Republican to teach political science. Since I don't have to talk about political affiliation, let me turn my attention to the manner in which the diversity movement began to stifle intellectual diversity by launching a number of "multicultural centers" and diversity centers" during the 1990s. My university is but one of many examples. Many people supported the idea of initiating an African American Center and an Office of Campus Diversity on our campus in the 1990s. Part of the reason for that support was the long history of racism in the city of Wilmington, which some also believed was a part of the legacy of the university. Supporters also made frequent mention of the fact that only 6% of the student population was black. Unfortunately, after several years and over $1,000,000 spending by the Office of Campus Diversity, the black student population dropped to only 4%. Some wonder how the diversity movement spent so much money while the problem of black student under-representation was getting worse. The answer can be found by visiting the university website, specifically the B-Glad portion of the website. In fact, I would urge those of you listening to this speech to later type in www.uncw.edu/bglad to learn how the diversity movement has largely abandoned the idea of working on the problem of black student under-representation, by instead focusing on gay politics. If you do visit that site, you will notice that former Chancellor James Leutze signed a gay sensitivity awareness project into effect on September 11, 2001. Clearly, the gay activists would not allow a little thing like the terrorist attacks on the United States to interfere with their constant political activism at taxpayer expense. Thank God UNC-Wilmington has a new and more businesslike Chancellor in Rosemary DePaolo. Perhaps things will get better during her tenure. Of course, few people realize that the diversity office has been a failure thanks in part to Wilmington's local New York Times affiliate. After the black student population dropped from 6% to 4%, the university spent more money on diversity to raise it back up to 6%. Afterwards, the local newspaper reported that there had been a 50% increase (from 4% to 6%) in the black student population at the university. University administrators argued that this proved that the diversity movement was working. The reporter allowed the university to get away with that unbelievable assertion without mentioning the fact that over a million dollars had been spend with no improvement in the overall black population since the inception of the Office of Diversity. I'm considering nominating that reporter for a Pulitzer Prize in investigative journalism. If we had her around in the 70s, I'm sure that the Watergate story would have broken much sooner. So, what happens at a public university when a diversity office spends over a million dollars and does not do what it was originally intended to do? That's simple. We open another one. Enter the UNC-Wilmington Women's Resource Center. Before it was launched, students were given a survey on their possible interest in a Women's Resource Center. Of course, the survey did not ask whether students wanted such a center. All they were asked was whether they agreed with thirty different activities and programs suggested by campus feminists. Among those options, "defense training" was the only one approved by a solid majority (two-thirds) of students surveyed. Since they initiated the center, the self-defense classes have been offered instead by the UNCW police, just as they were before the Women's Center came along. So what has the Women's Center been up to over the last couple of years? It's all been very predictable. They have sponsored The Vagina Monologues, even putting up posters reading "pu**ies unite!" in front of the campus cafeteria. Recently, the Center's director accused me of falsely stating that the posters were paid for with the Center's budget, instead blaming the poster on a student. Now I have learned that the center did, in fact, pay for the posters. As a result of a public records request, I have obtained a copy of the receipt used to pay for the obscene advertisements. In fact, it bears the director's signature. I should point out that the aforementioned posters cost less than twelve dollars. However, the Women's Resource Center recently spent $231 on chocolate candies for "Love Your Body" day. These candies were distributed in order to persuade young feminists that they shouldn't try to be skinny to please men. Another $271 was spent by the Center to pay a professional artist to draw a design of two women sipping coffee to be used for the Women's Center stationary. No wonder they went thousands of dollars over budget last year during Women's History Month (WHM). WHM started off last year with an exciting speech called "How Bush's Attack on the International Family Hurts Us All." A woman in her early twenties who had been out of college for less than one year gave the speech. This was followed with a speech by a self-described "Queer Muslim." That one only cost $2000. I am certain that her speech convinced a lot of listeners that the gay rights and feminist movements are alive and well in the Middle East. This is, of course, in marked contrast to the considerable oppression for women and gays here in America. Finally, a speaker was hired during WHM to talk about "collective living." I've noticed that a lot of these diversity initiatives and programs are designed to support socialist policies. Unfortunately, my request to fund a speech called "Explaining the fall of the Berlin Wall within the Marxist dialectic" was denied. This year, the Women's Center is at it again, sponsoring a speech by Arianna Huffington for the low price of $12,500. That is a nice round figure so I guess it didn't include her travel expenses. Maybe she flew in on her private jet to tell us that we shouldn't own SUVs because they consume too much gas. She's a political force to be reckoned with, no doubt. I think that she was tied with Gary Coleman for 1% of the vote in the recent California governor's race. Rumor has it that she even beat out porn king Larry Flynt by several hundred votes. The visit by Huffington was complimented by a showing of "Bowling for Columbine" by Michael Moore. This goes to show that our diversity movement will listen to anyone speak; even college dropouts. And we don't care if the documentaries we show are actually fictional. In mean, the Motion Picture Academy doesn't care, so why should we? Of course, one may wonder what an anti-gun movie has to do with women's issues. Personally, I think our female students need guns, since the Women Center won't offer those self-defense classes they wanted. Next year during WHM, I understand that the "guerilla girls" will be paying us a visit (see http://www.guerillagirls.com). These women try to avoid the stereotype of feminists as wearing combat boots and camouflage by instead dressing as apes. I think they wear boots too, but I'm afraid to ask. I know they don't have guns because they're feminists. By now some of you are wondering what we can do about all of this non-sense. Columnist Walter Williams suggests that we should close our pocketbooks and stop sending checks to universities with such diversity centers. I recently suggested writing checks for zero dollars and zero cents to let the universities know we are boycotting them. I think instead that I am going to follow the advice of one of my readers who said that we should write a really big check to our local university and then write "Void for Diversity" before tearing it in two. Then we should mail both pieces of the check to the university public relations office. I can see that I am running out of time, so let me turn to something I fear to be a new national trend, which constitutes a grave threat to the First Amendment on college campuses. In fact, it may be the greatest threat to the First Amendment in the history of higher education in America. The issue concerns the autonomy of student organizations. Many in this audience will remember the incident with Intervarsity Christian Fellowship (IVCF) earlier this year. UNC-Chapel Hill received a well-deserved black eye from the media after it threatened IVCF with de-recognition for having the audacity to require that its leaders subscribe to orthodox Christian doctrine. With the help of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), they were able to have that threat rescinded. But the situation at UNC-CH was worse than most realized. Other religious groups were threatened with de-recognition for such egregious violations as requiring their members to "believe in God." And most of the organizations gave in to the university instead of threatening litigation. The combination of two factors; the refusal of student groups to threaten litigation, and the willingness of UNC administrators to lie to cover up the scope and nature of their threats against student groups, has caused the problem to become even worse. Now, at UNC-Wilmington, the College Republicans are being told that they must adopt a pair of non-discrimination statements so broad that, if enforced, they will require them to admit Democrats as members of their organization. And, of course, Democrats will have to admit Republicans. I suppose that the Jewish Student Association will have to admit Nazis, all in the name of tolerance, diversity, and inclusion. This student group issue is not complex, legally speaking. The First Amendment grants individuals the right to peaceably assemble and to freely exercise their religion. But the university handbook says that the groups must let in anyone, regardless of religious beliefs, political affiliation, and a host of other factors. So UNC administrators have concluded that their handbooks trump the United States Constitution. Clearly, these PhDs are not so ignorant that they actually believe that their handbooks are the supreme law of the land. They just pretend to be ignorant to advance their agenda illegally. In light of these new developments, I am asking the John Locke Foundation as well as everyone in this room to dedicate some time in the coming year to combating this new assault on student liberties by doing one of two things. First, we must educate students about the limitations of the state's authority to force them to adopt views alien to their conscience and to force them to associate with individuals who are hostile towards their beliefs. Indeed, we are seeing a new generation of students whose core rights can be easily violated because no one ever told them what those rights were. Second, we need to make sure that students know that there are organizations and attorneys who will represent them if they should choose to litigate. If there is one thing we have learned in the past year, it is that administrators in this system will do the right thing only when threatened with litigation. I can see that I am out of time. Looking at the back of the room and all of the students in attendance today, I think it can safely be said that they face greater threats to their fundamental rights than any of us ever faced in our educational experience. I hope that we all dedicate ourselves to doing something about it in the coming year. Thank you. Dr. Mike Adams ( adams_mike@hotmail.com ) could not remember the exact wording of this speech when he wrote it down several days after it was delivered. In places where he couldn't remember what he said, he wrote down things he thought he should have said in order to make the speech sound better than it really was. Mike Adams is a criminology professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and author of Welcome to the Ivory Tower of Babel: Confessions of a Conservative College Professor.
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Post by rick on Nov 6, 2006 15:33:51 GMT -5
Diversity vs. civility Hans Zeiger Hans Zeiger February 20, 2004 www.renewamerica.us/columns/zeiger/040220 After a six-year legal battle, a school district near San Jose has settled a lawsuit brought by six homosexual students and the American Civil Liberties Union alleging anti-homosexual discrimination by paying out $1.1 million and beginning new mandatory diversity training programs for all students and staff in the school district. The district will also designate a "compliance coordinator" to investigate reports of anti-homosexual bias and to ensure that schools demonstrate favorable attitudes toward homosexuals. In Colorado, state university students are required to undergo diversity courses and comply with diversity standards in order to maintain student group funding. The stifling of free speech and traditional morality that has ensued caught the attention of state legislators who are now demanding an end to campus diversity programs that violate the First Amendment and infringe on the right to "speak disapprovingly against certain sexual behaviors." Diversity training, diversity monitoring, diversity policy enforcement, diversity weeks and assemblies and conferences — all of it has become a burgeoning multi-million dollar growth industry. Besides that, it is rapidly dividing America. The intentions of diversity program advocates are quite good — they seek the final salvation of human beings from the discomfort of discrimination. But they've gone about it all in a pathetically foolish way. Instead of talking about civility and character as did Martin Luther King, diversity trainers talk about sensitivity — toward racial, ethnic, gender, or sexual minorities only. And in place of the Golden Rule, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," it is as if we're told to say, "Do unto minorities as they would have them do unto you," even if our only account of a minority group's expectations comes from the mouth of the diversity trainer. Several years ago, a Pacific Lutheran University professor named Gregory Guldin formulated what I called the Guldin Rule. Guldin drafted a report for the Puyallup (Washington State) School District (from which I graduated) recommending that it reject the idea of treating all people equally. Minorities, he asseverated, deserve special rights and treatment. After a long lawsuit battle in the Puyallup School District featuring such dissimulations as the Guldin Report, the Puyallup Schools decided last year to pay out $7.5 million to black families who alleged that the district discriminated against racial minorities. The district also began a new half million dollar per year "Diversity Office" aimed at investigating alleged discrimination, requiring diversity curricula and diversity assemblies in schools, and mandating staff diversity training. One diversity film called "Journey to a Hate Free Millennium" was shown at Puyallup High School my junior year with the goal of eradicating discrimination. But instead of a positive message about love and dignity, the film negatively linked three isolated "hate crimes" to widespread homophobia and racism. And instead of criticizing the Columbine killers as hate criminals, it was their peers who became the bad guys for not being tolerant of Klebold and Harris' Satanic lifestyle. From the time I was in ninth grade until I graduated from high school, I fought against the proliferation of my school district's diversity program, which now is a suppurating effort, whether intentional or not, to dismantle traditional codes of respect and civility. The new codes that ooze from the mouths of diversity trainers have little to nothing to do with kindness and courtesy and much to do with divisiveness and bigotry. My purpose in fighting diversity programs is that I care deeply about civility, character, and the dignity of my fellow human beings; and I care nothing for the opposite of civility: political correctness. Diversity is nothing more than a code word for extreme political correctness, which, in its typical forms these days, means that everyone must tolerate and accept and even celebrate any and every behavior under the sun. Convincing several thousand diversity program-saturated industries and institutions that their politically correct ways are actually dangerous is no small task. But it can and must be done. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hans Zeiger is a student at Hillsdale College in Michigan, and is the author of "Reagan's Children: Taking Back the City on the Hill" and "Get Off My Honor: The Assault on the Boy Scouts of America." Hans writes a column that appears in WorldNetDaily.com, the Seattle Sentinel, GOPUSA.com, OpinionEditorials.com, Sierra Times, American Daily, America's Voices, The Right Report, and other publications, and has been a guest on numerous radio and television programs. A dynamic public speaker, he has preached in churches, keynoted civic organization conventions and rallies, and debated Left-wing activists in colleges. His website is www.hanszeiger.net, and he blogs at www.reaganchildren.com.
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Post by rick on Nov 7, 2006 14:24:58 GMT -5
This lady did not give in to the PC diversity insanity. These are the fruits of diversity programs. Parents are often unaware of this kind of thing going on at the universities they send their children to. The student was bullied by the PC police employed by the university. www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=25301 Student Says MSU Violated Her Rights By Steve Koehler News-Leader.com | November 7, 2006 A former Missouri State University student alleges in a federal lawsuit that her First Amendment rights were violated when she refused to agree to endorse homosexual adoption for a class project. The suit, filed on behalf of Emily Brooker, could be one of the first of its kind in the country, said David French, director of the Alliance Defense Fund's Center for Academic Freedom, which filed the suit Monday. "It's part of an increasing trend," he said of Christian students speaking out against ideological teachings in college classrooms. "The university is supposed to be the marketplace of ideas, and professors should be tolerant of the opinions of Christian students as well as those of non-Christian students," French said. [ AMEN!] "Missouri State University officials have singled out a student for punishment simply because she refused to write and sign a letter to the state legislature supporting homosexual adoption." A statement released by the school Tuesday afternoon said the university, which first learned of the suit Monday afternoon, would immediately begin investigating the allegations and what exactly transpired. University officials would have more to say after the investigation, according to the statement. "Missouri State University has been and is committed to protecting the rights of its students, as well as its faculty and staff, including free speech and expression, and freedom of religion," the statement read. In the complaint, MSU student Brooker alleges she faced a college ethics committee after school officials informed her that she stood accused of violating the School of Social Works' "Standards of Essential Functioning in Social Work Education." According to the lawsuit, Frank G. Kauffman, Brooker's professor, accused her of the violation after he assigned to his students a project promoting homosexual foster homes and adoption. The complaint alleges the project required the entire class to write and each sign a letter on MSU letterhead to the Missouri legislature in support of homosexual adoption. Brooker refused to sign because of her religious objections. Brooker said that on Dec. 16 she faced a 21/2-hour interrogation by faculty members, who, according to the complaint, asked her personally invasive questions such as: "Do you think gays and lesbians are sinners?" and "Do you think I am a sinner?" The lawsuit alleges that "instead of encouraging debate and discourse, (MSU) stifled and silenced Ms. Brooker's speech. (MSU) is engaged in indoctrination, not education. "When Ms. Brooker took an independent and brave stance on particular issues, (MSU) trumped up grievance charges in retaliation ... forced her to speak in favor of matters that are vile to her religious beliefs and treated her differently than similarly situated students." Brooker was allowed to continue in class and received a grade after she signed a new contract with the department pledging to follow the National Association of Social Works' code of ethics. There are no references to homosexuality in the code. Allison Nadelhaft with the national office of NASW said nowhere in the code does it ask anyone to give up their religious beliefs in order to be a social worker. "We understand social workers come to their professions with various perspectives," she said. "Maybe the faculty was interpreting the code differently. There are plenty of conservative social workers. There's even a Christian social workers association." Workers are asked in the code to recognize and respect people of diverse backgrounds including sexual orientation. Brooker alleges the contract called for her to "change her religious beliefs to conform to social work standards as a condition of her continued enrollment in the School of Social Work." French said Brooker was called before an ethics committee because she complained of Kauffman to her adviser and challenged a grade she had received in another Kauffman class. Kauffman allegedly complained that Brooker was tardy to class and didn't participate in class discussions. The complaint alleges that Brooker was told by faculty that she would have to "lessen the gap" between her personal beliefs and professional obligations to the national ethics code. Nadelhaft said the association would "absolutely not" ask someone to do that. French said requiring her to pledge to the code assumes she will be a public social worker. "There are Christian social programs. Not everyone goes to work for the state. If you were pro-war and had a peace protester in your class, would you force them to endorse the war?" French asked. "The professor said (Brooker) must take a position that you find morally objectionable and tell the government." French said Brooker signed the contract in order to get through the program. "She was bullied into signing the contract. She was fearful of her ability to graduate. She was given an ultimatum," French said. "Students are not lawyers. They don't know where their rights begin or end." French said Brooker had been dealing with the public, including "people with homosexual behavior, and did her job very well."
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Post by rick on Nov 15, 2006 14:01:14 GMT -5
Racism By Any Other Name Not nice. By Jonah Goldberg article.nationalreview.com/?q=NTNhM2JiMTU5MDZkOTUxYzA0MzU1ODUxZTM3MTk3MzI= It’s time to admit that “diversity” is code for racism. If it makes you feel better, we can call it “nice” racism or “well-intentioned” racism or “racism that’s good for you.” Except that’s the rub: It’s racism that may be good for you if “you” are a diversity guru, a rich white liberal, a college administrator or one of sundry other types. But the question of whether diversity is good for “them” is a different question altogether, and much more difficult to answer. If by “them” you mean minorities such as Jews, Chinese Americans, Indian Americans and other people of Asian descent, then the ongoing national obsession with diversity probably isn’t good. Indeed, that’s why Jian Li, a freshman at Yale, filed a civil-rights complaint against Princeton University for rejecting him. Li had nigh-upon perfect test scores and grades, yet Princeton turned him down. He’ll probably get nowhere with his complaint — he did get into Yale after all — but it shines a light on an uncomfortable reality. “Theoretically, affirmative action is supposed to take spots away from white applicants and redistribute them to underrepresented minorities,” Li told the Daily Princetonian. “What’s happening is one segment of the minority population is losing places to another segment of minorities, namely Asians to underrepresented minorities.” Li points to a study conducted by two Princeton academics last year which concluded that if you got rid of racial preferences in higher education, the number of whites admitted to schools would remain fairly constant. However, without racial preferences, Asians would take roughly 80 percent of the positions now allotted to Hispanic and black students. In other words, there is a quota — though none dare call it that — keeping Asians out of elite schools in numbers disproportionate to their merit. This is the same sort of quota once used to keep Jews out of the Ivy League — not because of their lack of qualifications, but because having too many Jews would change the “feel” of, say, Harvard or Yale. Today, it’s the same thing, only we’ve given that feeling a name: diversity. The greater irony is that it is far from clear that diversity is good for black students either. Peter Kirsanow, a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, notes that there is now ample empirical data showing that the supposed benefits of diversity in education are fleeting when real and often are simply nonexistent. Black students admitted to universities above their skill level often do poorly and fail to graduate in high numbers. UCLA law professor Richard Sander found that nearly half of black law students reside in the bottom ten percent of their law-school classes. If they went to schools one notch down, they might do far better. Kirsanow asks: “Would college administrators continue to mouth platitudes about affirmative action if their students knew that preferential admissions cause black law students to flunk out at two-and-a-half times the rate of whites? Or that black law students are six times less likely to pass the bar? Or that half of black law students never become lawyers?” But all this misses the point. Today’s diversity doctrine was contrived as a means of making racial preferences permanent. After all, affirmative action was intended as a temporary remedy for the tragic mistreatment of blacks. But as affirmative action drifted into racial preferences, it became constitutionally suspect because racial preferences are by definition discriminatory. If I give extra credit to Joe because he’s black, I’m making things just that much harder for Tom because he’s white. The brilliance of the diversity doctrine is that it does an end-run around all of this by saying that diversity isn’t so much about helping the underprivileged, it’s about providing a rich educational experience for everyone. When the University of Michigan’s admissions policies were being reviewed by the Supreme Court, former school president Lee Bollinger explained that diversity was as “as essential as the study of the Middle Ages, of international politics and of Shakespeare” because exposure to people of different hues lies at the core of the educational experience. That’s another way of saying that racial preferences are forever, just like the timeless works of the immortal bard. That business about redressing past discrimination against blacks is no longer the name of the game. It’s difficult to put into words how condescending this is in that it renders black students into props, show-and-tell objects for the other kids’ educational benefit. There was a time when condescension, discrimination, arrogant social engineering along racial lines and the like were dubbed racism. And, to paraphrase Shakespeare, racism by any other name still stinks. (C) 2006 Tribune Media Services, Inc.
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