Quid Nimis

I was very pleased to see this get coverage in the politics blog of the Washington Times:

More than 70 universities across the country will participate in “Islamo Fascism Awareness Day” teach-ins on April 19. Senator John Kyl and former Senator Rick Santorum have agreed to host showings at Arizona State and Georgetown. Former Cincinnati Reds pitcher and current radio talk show host Frank Pastore will host a showing at UCLA, and “Battlelines” talk show host Alan Nathan will do the same at George Washington U. Bay Area radio personality Melanie Morgan will host the showing at San Francisco State University, and Atlanta talk show host Martha Zoller will do the same at the Georgia Tech.

The event will consist of showings of “Obsession,” a documentary about the terrorist threat from Islamic militants. The film uses interviews with authorities on the Middle East, former jihadists, and experts on terrorism to take the viewer inside the worldview and plans for world domination of radical Islam. Following the film, there will be town hall-style dialogues about terrorism, the U.S. response in Iraq and elsewhere, and other issues. Some campuses will mark the event by other activities, including panel discussions by writers and thinkers on the terrorist threat.

Columbia University, Duke, Dartmouth, the University of Colorado, Georgia Tech, University of Texas, Notre Dame, Boston College, Ohio State, and the University of California at Davis are among the campuses that will participate in Islamo-Fascism Awareness Day on April 19.

Obsession was aired on Fox five times the weekend before the November elections, but I'm not sure anyone noticed.  I've only seen a 27 minute version, but it is excellent and chilling.  It should be required viewing in every grade of every high school in the country.

Anyway, I'll go to the UT  event.  They had a Palestinian Awareness Weekend a couple of weeks ago, complete with a performance of "I am Rachel Corrie," know here at Quid as "I am Pancake."  I had the flier here somewhere...workshops on how to get that bomb belt for your body type..."Kefiyehs: Political Statement as Indispensable Fashion Accessory"...."Just Blame the Jews: One Rule for Highly Successful Palestinians,"  and the list goes on.

I like words. I like big words. They tip me off. I can tell a man's point of view by the words he writes or says. I read the first part of Clash of Orthodoxies by Robert George last night. It has lots of big words.

I was about to do an entire post in monosyllables, but I found that the ensuing boredom and frustration were too much. Let's just say that Clash of Orthodoxies is a good read for what it is, which is a very high level discussion of the philosophy and logic behind the dominant orthodoxies, which Prof. George characterizes as secular orthodoxy on the one hand, and Judeo-Christian orthodoxies on the other. I note here that these latter are not religious orthodoxies in that they represent the rigorous views of one religion, but rather the "traditional understanding of human nature, human sexuality, and human decency." In other words, (gasp!) conservatism, a word he has yet to use, and I'm deep into Chapter 2 (page 44, if you must know.)

I will write more about this later, but you all know me: mostly, I can't stand philosophy. My mind is too impatient. I read too slowly. My mother was frightened by a first edition of Das Kapital when she was pregnant with me. I don't know. I'm beginning to realize, however, that my long-standing distaste for that discipline has much to do with being exposed to lots of ideologically-driven thought games being passed off as political theory or philosophy. Intellectual poseurs and tenured profs who justify their existence by fantasizing about the way things should be, and who generally and with considerable abandon, ignore the evidence of their own eyes and the laws of physics. At least when Plato put people in a cave, it was a contrivance that was self-acknowleged and purposeful for the development of his discourse. Anyway, I'm holding my nose and reading this because I know it's good for me. Not that I disagree with Prof. George: I completely agree with him. It's just that this is hard. About mid way through the first chapter, I thought that things would go faster if I made a game out of how many times he used the word "presupposition." Of course, the game I had in mind was a drinking game and I had to rule that out because I only have two cases of Spaten Optimatur in the house (incredibly, it's on sale for $11.99 at Central, so at least in theory I could afford the amount of beer needed to get through the first chapter, but other considerations are obviously at play here.) Also, I had to admit that while the Spaten Optimatur mellows me out to the point where I don't mind reading about the secularist orthodoxy of mind/body duelism, it does nothing to enhance my comprehension of:

No one can rationally deny free choice, or claim as illusory our ordinary experience of freely choosing, without presupposing the possibility of free choice. To deny free choice is to claim that it is more rational to believe tht there is no free choice than to believe that there is. But this, in turn, presupposes that one can identify norms of rationality and really choose to conform one's beliefs to those norms. It presupposes that we are free to affirm the truth or falsity of a proposition, our desires or emotions or preferences to the contrary notwithstanding.

That's three beers and a notwithstanding chaser. Hic. I think Lucille Ball did this with VitaMeataVegaMin.

Anyway, I read a chapter and then give vent my little cri du coeur:

I am not an intellectual! I am just a housewife and the best blogger in Hays County, Texas!

It came to my attention the other day that a Muslim read from the Koran as a part of the Texas A&M Galveston convocation/commencement exercises this past weekend.  I fired off an email to the interim CEO,  a Mr. Hearn:

I understand that a Muslim was invited to read from the Koran at your recent commencement in Galveston.  This is an outrage.

It is a travesty that in the historic city of Galveston, where thousands and thousands of Christians entered the United States and built a free society based on democratic principles, that a representative of a faith that is frankly antithetical to those values gets the honor of reading from HIS holy book at your commencement.  In the name of Islam

• Women are denied equality under the law, and are in fact deeply oppressed
• Non-Muslims are denied freedom of religion and are discriminated against
• The most barbaric punishments are meted out for crimes, including amputations and beheadings
• Honor killings are condoned and carried out against women and girls who go against their male relatives wishes
• Anti-Semitism is encouraged and promoted, to the extent that suicide terror missions carried out against the State of Israel count as a charitable enterprise that fulfills one of the four pillars of faith for the devout Muslim.

This is really quite sickening.

[bbmoe]

This was the reply:

Ms. Mxxxxx:

We are very sorry that you were disturbed by the delivery of the invocation and benediction by Dr. Ahmed E. Ahmed of the Galveston Islamic Center at our May 13, 2006 commencement.

Texas A&M University at Galveston is a public institution of higher education serving undergraduate and graduate students without regard to their race, gender, ethnicity, or religious affiliation.  Over our 45-year history, we have welcomed members of many religions and ethnicities to present our invocation and benediction as a reflection of the diversity of our students.

Sincerely, 

Bowen Loftin

R. Bowen Loftin ‘71
Vice President and Chief Executive Officer
Professor of Maritime Systems Engineering
Texas A&M University at Galveston
P.O. Box 1675
Galveston, TX 77553-1675
409-740-4403
409-740-4407 (fax)
loftin@tamug.edu
www.tamug.edu

 This elicited a follow-up response from me (I really hate form letters, especially ones that are so condescending in tone that I am inspired to hop in my car and and head for Galvestom to introduce the Professor of Maritime Systems Engineering to some practical applications of his discipline in the form of waterboarding.)

Dear Mr. Loftin:

Thank you for your prompt reply.

Unfortunately, the lovely ideals of plurality and religious tolerance, to which I heartily ascribe, are being eroded by those who wish to obliterate Western civilization.  I wonder if you think that I am some right wing kook?  In my broad acquaintance, I am the only American woman my age who had a Muslim friend in high school.  One of my best friends in college, a woman I still correspond with regularly, is a Muslim, a Shiite in fact, who lives in Karachi, Pakistan.  I speak from the vantage point of knowledge and experience when I tell you that our being broad minded lovers of diversity in these matters is the opening that the radicals are exploiting to expand their influence among moderate Muslims.  I will lay odds that no one on your committee thought that a financial check of the Galveston Islamic Center would be in order, to see what connections it has to Saudi money.  If it has none, if it has kept itself utterly and entirely free of the influence of the Wahhabis, then it is a rarity indeed.

By giving a forum to the  Koran and its adherents in these times, you give shelter to those who would do us harm.  It gives Islam the imprimatur of your very fine institution, but you have carelessly misused your influence by not discriminating as to which Islam you are supporting.

Not all religions are created equal.  I would pose to you that Islam's long history of intellectual backwardness, intolerance and brutality (all of which are inherent to the Koran, by the way, not just fundamentalist interpretations) are reason enough for TA-Galveston to eschew a Muslim presenter.

Sincerely,
[bbmoe]

This is the email of the Chancellor of the Texas A&M System, Robert D. McTeer: Chancellor@tamu.edu.  Just in case you all are moved to express your disgust.

 

Mount Holyoke College is a bastion of liberalism, as one would expect.  Unfortunately, being a bastion of liberalism these days often is at odds with really high quality academic standards and leadership.  I always pass on opportunities to give money to my alma mater.  When the sweet young things at the student phone bank ask me why, I have two words for them: Joe Ellis.  He is the best-selling author of popular history, Pulitzer prize winner and liar who is a tenured professor at MHC and was when I went there.  I never took a course from him but I remember vividly walking with a friend and seeing an older man on the green holding forth for a rapt audience of students.  It was such an unusual sight and was such a visual cliché (charismatic prof, smitten female students) that I had to ask my friend who he was. "Oh, that's Joe Ellis, he teaches history!" she said admiringly.  She evidently knew enough about him to be impressed but our conversation turned to other things.  Subsequently I noticed his books on the same racks in the campus bookstore with the other celebrity prof, John Irving.  Anyway, I was leery of the direction MHC had taken long before the Joseph Ellis scandal.  When Joanne Creighton failed to fire him for misrepresenting his life and work experience to his employer and his students (lying in a way that had direct bearing on his academic credibility, I hasten to add), I never looked back.

I do, however, look at the alumnae magazine from time to time.  This quarter's installment had two features of note, one of which I found hilarious and, indeed, ironical, as we say in South Austin.   It was an insert written by the president of the college, the aforementioned Joanne, about writing.  Considering my hobby and my enjoyment of the written word, I had to read her thoughts in the little piece called "President Creighton: On Writing."  This is the first paragraph:

It probably won't surprise anyone that writing has been central to my life, first as an English major turned professor and scholar and later as an administrator.   There are few endeavors I find more challenging and satisfying than to attempt through the written word to grapple with the inchoate, to draw undeveloped ideas in a cohesive structure to construct an argument and finally to coax the prose in graceful lucidity and economy.  We've all experienced the Yeatsian "fascination of what's difficult" in some version from our earliest school days onward.

JoJo, you need an editor. Or a really good shag.  I read this and when I'd stopped laughing I started copying it for this post. I wrote the first sentence "It probably won't surprise anyone that writhing has been central to my life..."  Oops.  We should have a new feature at Quid: Can You Save This Essay?  We could, but it is so much more entertaining to make fun of the writhing Frau Doktor Creighton.

It probably won't surprise anyone that writing has been central to my life, first as an English major turned professor and scholar and later as an administrator.  

 Resumé line item: Came in first in the Run On Marathon, Boston, 1982. Surprise!

There are few endeavors I find more challenging and satisfying than to attempt through the written word to grapple with the inchoate, to draw undeveloped ideas in a cohesive structure to construct an argument and finally to coax the prose in graceful lucidity and economy. 

If your mind is off to the Sex races and you can't figure out why, here's a hint: challenging, satisfying, grappling, drawing undeveloped stuff into structure, coaxing, pant pant pant ECONOMY! Yes, yes, yes, yeeess, pant pant pant.   Let me light your cigarette.

Oh, yeah, so much for economy. 

 We've all experienced the Yeatsian "fascination of what's difficult" in some version from our earliest school days onward.

Yes, that has certainly been my experience.  Whenever I open the hood of my car, I get this Yeatsian rush of fascination of what's difficult.  Although Mr. Yeatsian and I have a teensy disagreement of what preposition is supposed to follow fascination.

She goes on, although surprisingly, not forever: 

[...]one of the core premises of a liberal arts education is that discourse- sometimes  oral but often written- and critical thought are intertwined and inseparable.

List this under the everyday delusions of an Ivory Tower academic: Because we are discoursing- sometimes orally but often in writing- we are also thinking critically.  It doesn't matter that we don't foster serious point-counter point discussions in our classes because our opinion and world view continuum begins with Larry Summers on the right and has a jillion stalwarts holding the fort on the left, including the likes of Bob Jensen. [and yes, if you link to that site, it is an outlet for Granma, the Cuba state-owned media corp, and yes, the terrorismo they are anti is American terrorismo. And yes, Bobby is a tenured professor of Journalismo at UT.  I suppose he often discourses in writing and teaches others to discourse in writing, too.]

Not only does writhing [uh, writing.  Sorry.]  serve as a vehicle for our most sophisticated thinking, the process of writing allows us to explore and test the cogency of our ideas when we articulate them as words, sentences, and paragraphs. 

Exploring and testing, exploring and testing... I'm getting that Springtime feeling again...

After all is said and done, we did do lots and lots of writing at MHC and the standard for good writing was upheld across the board.  The first semester freshman year we all had to take a writing  course, mostly given in the English department.  As a little homage to the alma mater I have included in this essay the only real rule that was indelibly imprinted, that is to say, coaxed, cajoled, pounded, teased, caressed into the intricate crenulations of my cranial sanctum which was never to begin a sentence with "however."  The reason for this inviolate rule was that it might impede the inflorescence of graceful and lucid expression and be a blow to women's rights.   I believe that I have never broken that rule.

However, there is always a first time.

 

Sometimes a subject cries out to be articulated. Last year Lawrence Summers wondered out loud of there was an innate reason that women weren't reaching the pinnacle of scholarly achievement in the sciences in the same proportions that men were. That they don't is an observable fact. But after a generation and a half of feminism and affirmative action and
Would you be reading this if it weren't for her?*scholarships and "Take Your Daughter to Work" days, women still aren't at the top in equal numbers with the guys.  I appreciate what Dr. Summers had to say because, in my experience, he was exactly right.  I had been accepted to some very fine graduate schools in my field (botany) but chose to go to one that was close to home because I wanted to live with my soon-to-be husband.  I then interrupted my so-called career to take care of my own baby.  This choice was roundly ridiculed by everyone in the graduate school, with one notable exception.  The other female, American (we were just two) who had transferred to that school's program from a far better program to be with her fiancé.  So basically, we were Lawrence Summer's Exhibit A and enemies of the Liberal Agenda [please see "roundly ridiculed," above.]

Does gender and ethnic diversity in the sciences matter? When we pull the camera back and take in the whole picture, the answer is no. In fact, at this point, the focus on the importance of having women in the sciences is distracting from the real problem, which is that sciences are not being taught even modestly well at the elementary and middle school level, to males or females.   Go to any graduate program in the sciences and you'll see the effects of crappy science education in American schools: low application rates and graduate students who don't speak good English.   Not that they don't speak some language really well, they just don't have a handle on spoken English because that isn't the language they grew up with.  So for those intrepid souls who take up science in college, you may have the most enthusiastic lab instructor on earth, you just won't be able to understand him.  Or her.

In my capacity as sometime substitute middle school science teacher, I have had the opportunity to discover first hand the effects of the political correctness agenda in the sciences (there are other elements to this besides diversity, most notably environmentalism.)  Girls are just as capable of understanding middle school science as boys.  But when text books are littered with lesson plans meant to educate the little darlings about the contributions of members of this gender or that ethnic group, they do so  to the exclusion of other, dare I say, more important material.  In the textbook that I became familiar with, published by Glencoe and approved by the state of Texas (don't get me started,) every chapter in the teacher's edition had a lesson plan about women and minorities in the sciences.  Knowing as I did that the qualifications of the average middle school science teacher in Texas (don't get me started) consisted of a science "unit" in an elementary education course, I knew that the General Ed types would gravitate to the soft lesson plan: so much easier than actually having to teach kids methodology, observation, logic and analysis, which is what science requires and which, frankly, the vast majority of middle school kids are capable of learning at some rudimentary and necessary level.

The shame of it is that science can be very fun for kids.  It is a wonderful change of pace from their other studies.  They get to use their hands.  They get to play in dirt.  They get to make foul smelling concoctions and things that smoke mysteriously, and most kids appreciate learning about elementary physics because it describes stuff they already have seen many, many times.  My favorite, favorite lesson plan was a geology "laboratory" where we went outside and picked up rocks and "observed" their properties.  The kids had to come up with ways to describe the rocks, had to find out if they were magnetic, if they could draw with them, what they tasted like. All that stuff.  And of course, at some point someone would throw a rock at someone else and the whole thing would become fraught with danger, like real science.  But somewhat less dangerous than daring to question the Leftist agenda.

For a rather depressing assessment of middle school science texts please see Educational CyberPlayground: Science Book Errors about the results of a study funded by the David and Lucille Packard Foundation.  It included this observation:

The study's reviewers tried to contact textbook authors with questions, Hubisz said, but in many cases the people listed said they didn't write the book, and some didn't even know their names had been listed. Some of the authors of a physical science book, for example, were biologists.

Hubisz said educators need to pressure publishers to get ``real authors'' for textbooks.

``They get people to check for political correctness ... they try to get in as much cultural diversity as possible,'' he said. ``They just don't seem to understand what science is about.''

Inasmuch as I found five (5!) errors on the first two pages of the textbook I used in the first lesson  I taught to a middle school class, I can fully believe the findings of this study.

*In case you are unfamiliar with the lady in the thumbnail. 

 

Harvard gives Larry the gate

I find The New Republic most interesting when it criticizes its own side. While it is faithful to its Liberal ideals, it generally has enough intellectual honesty to comment with great insight on the goings on over yonder, to the Left. Yes, it certainly publishes its fair share of Bush-bashing stuff and often resorts to a formulaic editorial style to make articles sound like they are considering all of the arguments and coming to a logic-based conclusion. But I've read a couple of things by Peter Beinart that I respect. This piece about the Lawrence Summers debacle is one. Liberals should be outraged about the arrogance of the Harvard faculty: they are little despots taking money for their tenured-in-perpetuity posts and giving back sod all.

Mr. Beinart expresses admiration for Lawrence Summers and so should we all, but sadly, he will be known by most for the ridiculous flap over gender differences. Read this article and learn a few more reasons to mourn his departure from Harvard.

We here at Quid Nimis are getting quite an education in the inner workings of the young leftist mind.  You hear about it. but you never think you will actually meet someone who can say, perfectly seriously, "I have rejected  Communism, Socialism, and Capitalism."   You hear that there are people in the world who think that getting paid to do something makes that activity suspect, dirty, ignoble and corrupt, per se.  These same people see the need to completely redefine human interaction to make it more pure and virtuous, according to their lights.  And yet, as my humble blog will attest,  these same people can't read, can't spell and can't count to three.  They are self-important, ignorant and unhappy, traits that make them easy marks for the cynical manipulators that coax their anti-social leanings to a full glorious flower of cliche-ed  protests over "injustice." Invariably the societal ills that these semi-adults are purporting to address are poorly defined, vaguely articulated and never, ever personally observed or experienced.  The protests are just loud, not coherent.  Gone are the glory days when actual victims of oppression showed up to protest.  Nowadays, the oppression, the injustice, the infringement on civil liberties must be trumped up to give bored youth an opportunity to bitch and misbehave. They are too silly and stupid to argue or debate; they just interrupt.

When we were at Mr. Horowitz' lecture, we were called Fascists.  We were the ones who wanted to hear him speak, ergo we were Fascists, evidence on its face that the name-callers either had no respect for language or little knowledge of what they were saying. The favorite verbal interruption was "What about free speech? Mr. Horowitz is a hypocrite because he won't let us speak! Mr. Horowitz is getting paid, so it isn't free speech!"  Yes, and getting paid by big corporations, to boot. That gets you to the seventh ring of hell direct, do not pass go, do not collect $200.  It just doesn't get any worse than that on the Leftist sin scale.  In the outcry, we thought we detected an attempt at wordplay, using the word "free" in its commercial connotation, as opposed to  its constitutional sense, meaning unhampered.  But, alas, the preponderance of evidence suggests that even this rudimentary  cleverness is beyond the intellectual scope of the average anarchist.

For the record and for the edification of our radical readers,  free speech isn't freedom to interrupt, as we explained  to one of our commenters:

Be advised: any other commenter who doesn't understand the "right to free speech" will be deleted from this thread. There is no right to free speech as a general societal concept. The Constitution of the United States protects us from THE GOVERNMENT controlling our speech. As for Mr. Horowitz' lecture: he was invited to speak, we were invited to listen and ask questions and that is a civilized and organized way for one person to pass information on to a group of people. The hosts get to lay out the rules and the rule breakers get to face the consequences of their actions.

There were, to be sure, those Leftists who were polite, i.e., followed the rules.  The rules were explicit and what should be considered generally accepted social norms. That's good, but we are disinclined to pin medals on them for behaving like civilized people.  They sat by while their co-religionists infringed on THEIR rights and created an atmosphere that intimidated THEM.  It was very clear from the interaction in that hall that Mr. Horowitz and a bunch of middle-aged ladies fought back and it was young people of all political stripes who were intimidated by the miscreants  As afraid as a young conservative would be if he spoke out, at least he would still have friends afterwards.  The  most powerful tool the Leftists have to keep everyone in line is the brutal treatment they dish out to the turncoat.  Deviation from the party line is punished with name-calling shunning, and worse.  And this is the atmosphere where intellects are are supposed to flourish?  This is thought control and its handmaiden, Political Correctness, in action.

Which gets us back to the point.  We need real diversity of thought, opinion, ideas in our universities, not the kind of diversity that is measured by a melanin quotient.  We need an Academic Bill of Rights that restores real liberality to the university environment.  And we need  more civilized people to fight back for  the prnciple of true intellectual freedom.

Learn more about  David Horowitz' Academic Bill of Rights here and contribute to this cause here.  Please!

Brian C. Anderson writes a prescient piece about conservatives fighting back on campus.