I have been waiting for this for a long time. When I was in college finishing my latest degree here at IUSB I was making many of these very same claims about global warming alarmist nonsense as the IAC report below. Leftist students and faculty pretty much told me that I was nuts, and I wasn’t a climate scientist so how would I know? Well it looks like I knew. It was easy. First of all it doesn’t take a genius to see when the scientific method is being ignored and second of all, what I am an expert on is politics and I know a political movement when I see one.
At the bottom of the article I posted a list of links that I wrote starting in 2007 saying many of the same things the IAC has pointed out below. I have reactivated IUSB Vision just for the purpose of posting this story. All of you PhD. laden academics who doubted me and called me all of those names behind my back should ask yourselves; why was a mere undergrad like me spot on and all of you who are supposed to be teachers wrong? And this isn’t this first time that happened is it? – Chuck Norton
On June 27, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a statement saying it had “complete[d] the process of implementation of a set of recommendations issued in August 2010 by the Inter Academy Council (IAC), the group created by the world’s science academies to provide advice to international bodies.”
Hidden behind this seemingly routine update on bureaucratic processes is an astonishing and entirely unreported story. The IPCC is the world’s most prominent source of alarmist predictions and claims about man-made global warming. Its four reports (a fifth report is scheduled for release in various parts in 2013 and 2014) are cited by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the U.S. and by national academies of science around the world as “proof” that the global warming of the past five or so decades was both man-made and evidence of a mounting crisis.
If the IPCC’s reports were flawed, as a many global warming “skeptics” have long claimed, then the scientific footing of the man-made global warming movement — the environmental movement’s “mother of all environmental scares” — is undermined. The Obama administration’s war on coal may be unnecessary. Billions of dollars in subsidies to solar and wind may have been wasted. Trillions of dollars of personal income may have been squandered worldwide in campaigns to “fix” a problem that didn’t really exist.
The “recommendations” issued by the IAC were not minor adjustments to a fundamentally sound scientific procedure. Here are some of the findings of the IAC’s 2010 report.
Alternative views not considered, claims not properly peer reviewed
The IAC reported that IPCC lead authors fail to give “due consideration … to properly documented alternative views” (p. 20), fail to “provide detailed written responses to the most significant review issues identified by the Review Editors” (p. 21), and are not “consider[ing] review comments carefully and document[ing] their responses” (p. 22). In plain English: the IPCC reports are not peer-reviewed.
No formal criteria for selecting IPCC authors
The IAC found that “the IPCC has no formal process or criteria for selecting authors” and “the selection criteria seemed arbitrary to many respondents” (p. 18). Government officials appoint scientists from their countries and “do not always nominate the best scientists from among those who volunteer, either because they do not know who these scientists are or because political considerations are given more weight than scientific qualifications” (p. 18). In other words: authors are selected from a “club” of scientists and nonscientists who agree with the alarmist perspective favored by politicians.
Too political…
The rewriting of the Summary for Policy Makers by politicians and environmental activists — a problem called out by global warming realists for many years, but with little apparent notice by the media or policymakers — was plainly admitted, perhaps for the first time by an organization in the “mainstream” of alarmist climate change thinking. “[M]any were concerned that reinterpretations of the assessment’s findings, suggested in the final Plenary, might be politically motivated,” the IAC auditors wrote. The scientists they interviewed commonly found the Synthesis Report “too political” (p. 25).
Really? Too political? We were told by everyone — environmentalists, reporters, politicians, even celebrities — that the IPCC reports were science, not politics. Now we are told that even the scientists involved in writing the reports — remember, they are all true believers in man-made global warming themselves — felt the summaries were “too political.”
Here is how the IAC described how the IPCC arrives at the “consensus of scientists”:
Plenary sessions to approve a Summary for Policy Makers last for several days and commonly end with an all-night meeting. Thus, the individuals with the most endurance or the countries that have large delegations can end up having the most influence on the report (p. 25).
How can such a process possibly be said to capture or represent the “true consensus of scientists”?
Phony estimates of certainty
Another problem documented by the IAC is the use of phony “confidence intervals” and estimates of “certainty” in the Summary for Policy Makers (pp. 27-34). Those of us who study the IPCC reports knew this was make-believe when we first saw it in 2007. Work by J. Scott Armstrong on the science of forecasting makes it clear that scientists cannot simply gather around a table and vote on how confident they are about some prediction, and then affix a number to it such as “80% confident.” Yet that is how the IPCC proceeds.
The IAC authors say it is “not an appropriate way to characterize uncertainty” (p. 34), a huge understatement. Unfortunately, the IAC authors recommend an equally fraudulent substitute, called “level of understanding scale,” which is more mush-mouth for “consensus.”
The IAC authors warn, also on page 34, that “conclusions will likely be stated so vaguely as to make them impossible to refute, and therefore statements of ‘very high confidence’ will have little substantive value.” Yes, but that doesn’t keep the media and environmental activists from citing them over and over again as “proof” that global warming is man-made and a crisis…even if that’s not really what the reports’ authors are saying.
IPCC participants had conflicts of interest
Finally, the IAC noted, “the lack of a conflict of interest and disclosure policy for IPCC leaders and Lead Authors was a concern raised by a number of individuals who were interviewed by the Committee or provided written input” as well as “the practice of scientists responsible for writing IPCC assessments reviewing their own work. The Committee did not investigate the basis of these claims, which is beyond the mandate of this review” (p. 46).
Too bad, because these are both big issues in light of recent revelations that a majority of the authors and contributors to some chapters of the IPCC reports are environmental activists, not scientists at all. That’s a structural problem with the IPCC that could dwarf the big problems already reported.
IPCC critics vindicated
So on June 27, nearly two years after these bombshells fell (without so much as a raised eyebrow by the mainstream media in the U.S. — go ahead and try Googling it), the IPCC admits that it was all true and promises to do better for its next report. Nothing to see here…keep on moving.
Well I say, hold on, there! The news release means that the IAC report was right. That, in turn, means that the first four IPCC reports were, in fact, unreliable. Not just “possibly flawed” or “could have been improved,” but likely to be wrong and even fraudulent.
It means that all of the “endorsements” of the climate consensus made by the world’s national academies of science — which invariably refer to the reports of the IPCC as their scientific basis — were based on false or unreliable data and therefore should be disregarded or revised. It means that the EPA’s “endangerment finding” — its claim that carbon dioxide is a pollutant and threat to human health — was wrong and should be overturned.
And what of the next IPCC report, due out in 2013 and 2014? The near-final drafts of that report have been circulating for months already. They were written by scientists chosen by politicians rather than on the basis of merit; many of them were reviewing their own work and were free to ignore the questions and comments of people with whom they disagree. Instead of “confidence,” we will get “level of understanding scales” that are just as meaningless.
And on this basis we should transform the world’s economy to run on breezes and sunbeams?
In 2010, we learned that much of what we thought we knew about global warming was compromised and probably false. On June 27, the culprits confessed and promised to do better. But where do we go to get our money back?
Related from this old college blog:
Inconvenient Questions Global Warming Alarmists Don’t Want You to Ask – February 18, 2007 – LINK
Top Scientists Say: You Are Not the Cause of Global Warming – October 22, 2007 – LINK
Global Cooling Continues; Global Warming Alarmists Still Issuing Death Threats – December 28, 2008 – LINK
UK Telegraph: 2008 was the year man-made global warming was disproved – December 28, 2008 – LINK
National Climatic Data Center: Cooling in Last 10 Years – January 10, 2009 – LINK
The Debate is Over. Global Warming Alarmism is About Achieving Central Control of the Economy and Now They Admit It Openly – March 27, 2009 – LINK
Al Gore: Climate change issue can lead to world government – July 11, 2009 – LINK
EPA Tried to Suppress Global Warming Report Admitting Skeptics Correct – October 23, 2009 – LINK
New AP Article on “Global Cooling Myth” Spins a Bad Study – UPDATED: Look where they put THIS ground station… – October 27, 2009 – LINK
Professors Paid to Plagiarize – UPDATE: Global warming scientists hacked emails show manipulation of data, hiding of other data and conspiring to attack/smear global warming skeptics! – November 19, 2009 – LINK
National Association of Scholars on the “ClimateGate” Scandal – November 28, 2009 – LINK
Examples of the “Climategate” Documents – UPDATE: BBC Had the emails and files for 6 weeks, sat on story. UPDATE II – They carried out their conspiracy threat; much of the raw data from CRU destroyed! – November 28, 2009 – LINK
Scientific American thinks you are stupid: The dissection of a blatant propaganda piece for global warming alarmism. – December 6, 2009 – LINK
The Roundup: IPCC Authors Now Admitting Fault – No Warming Since 1995 – Sea Levels Not Rising. Senator Inhofe: Possible criminal misuse of taxpayer research funds. – February 23, 2010 – LINK
OOPS AGAIN: IPCC scientists screeching about the cataclysmic effects of sea-level rises forgot to consider sedimentary deposits… – April 23, 2010 – LINK
UN IPCC Co-chair: climate policy is redistributing the world’s wealth – November 18, 2010 – LINK
More Hadley Center Global Warming Horror Claims Debunked by Real Science – December 6, 2010 – LINK
ClimateGate One Year Later. Elite Media Still Lying – December 6, 2010 – LINK
More ClimateGate One Year Later – December 7, 2010 – LINK
IPCC Lead Author Dr. Richard Lindzen of MIT: Most global warming models are exaggerated, many scientists in it for the grant money or treat it like a religion – December 7, 2010 – LINK
How Global Warming Propaganda Works – December 8, 2010 – LINK
NASA’s global warming evidence page filled with lies, half truths and suspect data – December 10, 2010 – LINK
Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research: Halt economic growth, start government rationing. Global Warming Alarmists Party Fat in Cancun – December 21, 2010 – LINK
Global Warming Conference Delegates Sign Petitions to Ban Water and “Destabilize U.S. Economy” – February 15, 2011 – LINK
Global Warming Alarmist Quote of the Day – Former Canadian Environment Minister Christine Stewart: No matter if the science is all phony, there are collateral environmental benefits…climate change provides the greatest chance to bring about justice and equality in the world.
AAUP Seeks to Limit Transparency Over Climate Science – September 19, 2011 – LINK
The University of Montana School of Law has agreed to stop discrimination against a Christian group in its allocation of student funds.
Prior to this, the leftist dominated school administration and student government had denied funding to the student chapter of the Christian Legal Society on the basis of its religious and political viewpoints.
In response, the group filed a lawsuit, assisted by the Alliance Defense Fund, a Christian legal aid group.
You would think that a law school would know how to follow clearly established anti-discrimination laws. The truth is that of course U of M Law knew full well what the law was as said law can be looked up in minutes, but their zeal for anti-Christian bigotry was more important to them than the law, as evidenced by the fact that they held out until they faced a lawsuit they had no chance of winning.
Now keep in mind this is the University of Montana where the people there are as traditional and religious as can be and yet look at how detached the university is from the people it is paid to serve. This is an indicator of just how completely the radical left has compromised the public education system. University departments tend to clone themselves. The only place most Americans are likely to encounter neo-Marxists and genuine ‘capital C’ communists is on a university campus. The truth is that even moderate and center/right professors are persecuted at most colleges and that includes IU South Bend.
Would a university such as the University of Montana whose entire administration engaged in obviously illegal view point discrimination and anti-Christian bigotry to the point of having a lawsuit filed against them even hesitate to not hire or drum out a traditional or conservative professor?
Is your group being discriminated against by your administration or student government association? Contact your Regional Field Coordinator to learn about the legal resources you can use to ensure fair treatment for your conservative group on campus.
I have to ask. Is anyone shocked or even surprised by AAUP’s action? AAUP (American Association of University Professors) has demonstrated itself to be just slightly less ideologically corrupt than MSNBC. Politics trumps science, academic freedom, and transparency as a matter of course at AAUP. Such behavior is anti-education and anti-science.
In a letter to University of Virginia President Teresa Sullivan, the AAUP requested that the administration scale back an open-records agreement with a conservative organization seeking documents from UVa climate researchers. They were joined by 3 other climate science advocacy organizations: theAmerican Geophysical Union, Climate Science Watch, and the Union of Concerned Scientists.
The university reached an agreement with the American Tradition Institute (ATI) on May 24, 2011 to hand over documents pertaining to former UVa professor Michael Mann and other climate scientists.
Mann, a current professor at Pennsylvania State University, was widely criticized in 2009 when his global warming research was debunked in the heavily publicized“ClimateGate” scandal.
The AAUP cites academic freedom and the necessity of protecting professors from public scrutiny as reasons for scaling back the agreement. “The university should seek to improve the agreement to better protect scientists from harassment and intimidation,” the letter says.
David Schnare, Director of ATI’s Environmental Law Center, refuted the AAUP’s claim. “There is no adequate means to inspect the ethical standards and behaviors of the faculty of the university without public access to these records,” he said.
Schnare also points out the ATI is under a gag order regarding documents that are exempt from public disclosure according to Virginia open records law. He asserts that ATI and UVa are, “cooperating in a professional manner to insure that the faculty and the scientists are properly protected while meeting the needs of the public.”
This is not the first time that the AAUP has sought to limit transparency in the name of “academic freedom.” In 2009, the organizationopposedthe public posting of course syllabi and faculty curriculum vita in public universities in Texas.
University professors across the country are given free license to espouse their left-wing ideology while under the guise of academic freedom. Are faculty at your university using the classroom to promote a liberal worldview?
La Raza means “The Race”. La Raza calls for communist revolution in the United States, wants much of the Western United States given to Mexico (they call it Aztlan), and are so racist that they are often referred to as “The Klan with a tan”; what would one expect from a group that calls itself “the race”?
A Judicial Watch investigation reveals that federal funding for a Mexican La Raza group that for years has raked in millions of taxpayer dollars has skyrocketed since one of its top officials got a job in the Obama White House.
The influential and politically-connected National Council of La Raza (NCLR) has long benefitted from Uncle Sam’s largess but the group has made a killing since Obama hired its senior vice president (Cecilia Muñoz) in 2009 to be his director of intergovernmental affairs.
Ignored by the mainstream media, Judicial Watch covered the appointment because the president issued a special “ethics waiver” to bring Muñoz aboard since it violated his own lobbyist ban. At the pro illegal immigration NCLR, Muñoz supervised all legislative and advocacy activities on the state and local levels and she was heavily involved in the congressional immigration battles that took place in the George W. Bush Administration.
She also brought in a steady flow of government cash that’s allowed the Washington D.C.-based group to expand nationwide and promote its leftist, open-borders agenda via a network of community organizations dedicated to serving Latinos. Among them are a variety of local groups that provide social services, housing counseling and farm worker assistance as well as publicly-funded charter schools that promote radical Chicano curriculums. Judicial Watch published a special report on this a few years ago.
This week a JW probe has uncovered details of the alarming increase in federal funding that these NCLR groups have received since Muñoz joined the Obama Administration. In fact, the government cash more than doubled the year Muñoz joined the White House, from $4.1 million to $11 million.
Not surprisingly, a big chunk of the money (60%) came from the Department of Labor, which is headed by a former Californiacongresswoman (Hilda Solis) with close ties to the La Raza movement. Since Obama named her Labor Secretary, Solis has launched a nationwide campaign to protect illegal immigrant workers in theU.S. Just this week Solis penned declarations withGuatemala andNicaragua to preserve the rights of their migrants.
The NCLR also received additional taxpayer dollars from other federal agencies in 2010, the JW probe found. The Department of Housing and Urban Development doled out $2.5 million for housing counseling, the Department of Education contributed nearly $800,000 and the Centers for Disease Control a quarter of a million.
Additionally, NCLR affiliates nationwide raked in tens of millions of government grant and recovery dollars last year thanks to the Muñoz factor. An offshoot called Chicanos Por La Causa (CPLC) saw its federal funding nearly double to $18.3 million following Muñoz’ appointment.
A social service and legal assistance organization (Ayuda Inc.) that didn’t receive any federal funding between 2005 and 2008 got $600,000 in 2009 and $548,000 in 2010 from the Department of Justice. The group provides immigration law services and guarantees confidentiality to assure illegal aliens that they won’t be reported to authorities.
Related: The speech below was at a La Raza event in Los Angeles
May 08, 2010 — ”Where we now stand is stolen, occupied Mexico”…La Raza rally at UCLA….More gems: ‘Communist Revolution’, ‘Frail, racist white people’, ‘La Raza’ (the Race), Fidel Castro, ‘Northern Front of Latin Revolution’…”40 million…revolutionaries…in the belly of the beast”. “Our enemy is Capitalism and Imperialism”. Sedition anyone?
Sanchee H.S. history teacher Ron Gochez, La Raza Rally at UCLA
Here is his H.S. Let them know what you think of his comments: http://www.santeefalcons.org/
Phone: (213) 763-1000
Los Angeles Unified School District
Tel: 213-241-7000
superintendent@lausd.net
Los Angeles Board of Education:
Tel: 213-241-6389
Email: steve.zimmer@lausd.net
“We are revolutionary Mexican organization here. We understand that this is not just about Mexico. Its about a global struggle against imperialism and capitalism At the forefront of this revolutionary movement is La Raza. We will no longer fall for these lies called borders. We see America as a northern front of a revolutionary movement Our enemy is capitalism and imperialism.”
Speaking of unhinged administrators from our last post. This story from Saint Augustines College (SAC) makes me wonder if you have to fail the Wal-Mart psych test to get hired and a school administrator.
You are not going to be pleased after you read about this injustice.
Roman Caple is the kind of student that any university would be thrilled to call one of it’s own. He was in the school band, he was in the school choir, he was involved in student government, and he was so supportive of his school’s athletic program that he had the mascot, a falcon, shaved into the side of his head. He even played on the school tennis team for three years.
The Daily Caller has much of the story and be sure to keep reading after because it gets worse.
Facebook and college go hand and hand these days — students read up on each other, share funny videos, send messages, and publicize those embarrassing photos from the night before. At Saint Augustine’s College (SAC), however, posting the wrong thing on Facebook will land you in hot water.
The Raleigh, N.C., college prohibited senior Roman Caple from participating in his class’ graduation because of a “negative social media exchange” he had on Facebook regarding the school’s response to the April 16th tornado damage.
What Caple is being punished for is encouraging his peers on SAC’s Facebook page to go to the school’s public meeting to argue for what he thought was the best way to respond to the tornado damage.
“Here it go!!!!!” he wrote. “Students come correct, be prepared, and have supporting documents to back up your arguments bcuz SAC will come hard!!!! That is all.”
Come correct, be prepared, have documentation. There is your horrible message that must be punished according to SAC Vice President Eric W. Jackson
More – and read carefully:
Several days later, Caple met with SAC Vice President for Student Development and Services Eric W. Jackson, who that same day informed Caple that he would not be allowed to walk with his class. In a letter to Caple, Jackson explained that the reason for his prohibition was the Facebook comments, adding that “[a]ll students enrolled at Saint Augustine’s College are responsible for protecting the reputation of the college and supporting its mission.”
While graduation has already happened, without Caple participating, the student is still fighting the decision. His attorney, Brandon S. Atwater, has sought help from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE).
“While it promises free speech, Saint Augustine’s College has apparently rolled out a brand new, unwritten ‘don’t challenge our decisions on Facebook’ rule that warrants keeping a student out of graduation ceremonies,” FIRE senior vice president Robert Shibley said. “It’s hard to think of a pettier way to punish a loyal, graduating student for publicly disagreeing with administrators.”
In a statement issued in response to concern about Caple’s punishment, the school explained that the decision was due to the fact that they saw Caple’s words as an attempt to stir up trouble.
“At a time when the College staff was working diligently to ensure the well being of all students, Mr. Caple, a senior, chose to attempt to create chaos,” the school wrote in a statement. “It is important to note that Mr. Caple is a student who resides off campus and therefore, was not present on campus throughout the tornado or its aftermath.”
The college added that they had had past troubles with Caple, but were not prepared to share them at this time.
“Throughout his matriculation, there were more incidents involving Mr. Caple that factored into the College’s decision, however, because of FERPA [Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act] constraints, that information cannot be disclosed,” the school added. “The posts to Facebook during this time left the administration with no other choice other than to exclude him from the actual commencement exercise.”
Smear Campaign
Bring documentation and have your facts correct is chaos? Was Caple going to start a riot? Was this statement so bad that the school had to prevent him from attending graduation as a matter of public safety? So urgent that they had to abandon all due process in his “punishment”?
FERPA is not that cut and dry, in every case where a school tries to hide behind FERPA when it trashes a student (Hello IUPUI) it ends up being just what it looks like. If the administrators were really interested in protecting Roman Caple’s privacy they would not even claim the student had past problems (after all it is private right?). This is an assault on his reputation now put out nationwide. In cases such as the famed Keith John Sampson case at IUPUI where the student who was persecuted and trashed in the media by unhinged administrators, when the student waved privacy and asked for the documentation under the law, the school had nothing. For a while IUPUI claimed that it had knowledge of “secret” violations that not even the student could be made aware of. All lies.
ABC News 11 has video and more details. In the video ABC shows that his other Facebook comments were very positive and supportive.
FIRE wrote SAC President Dianne Boardley Suber on May 18, pointing out that SAC’s punishment of Caple violated the college’s extensive promises of freedom of expression. FIRE noted that SAC’s Student Handbook states that “[s]tudents enjoy the same basic rights and are bound by the same responsibilities to respect the rights of others, as are all citizens.” These rights include “freedom of speech.” SAC’s Student Handbook also states that SAC has an “obligation to provide an open forum to present and debate public issues,” and SAC policies further explicitly note that the college is not “a setting described in the concept of in loco parentis” (emphasis in original)—that is, SAC students are to be treated as adults.
On May 24, a law firm representing SAC wrote FIRE, arguing that SAC had “legitimate reasons” to punish Caple. The firm failed to indicate any of those reasons and did not explain why SAC appeared to act entirely outside of the due process procedures that the school promises its students. [Emphasis IUSB Vision – that folks, is a smear campaign – Editor] Despite the college’s apparent breach of its contractual promises to students, the firm insisted that SAC “did not err or violate Mr. Caple’s rights.”
“If I were Saint Augustine’s College, I would have commended this student for encouraging his peers to provide documentation that supported their arguments about a contentious issue,” FIRE Vice President of Programs Adam Kissel said. “Instead, SAC did the opposite and punished Roman Caple for exercising his rights.”
In my view this looks like a deliberate attempt to sully Roman Caple’s reputation.
Reaction
This injustice has generated outrage all over the internet. At the time of this writing Google is already showing 10,200 hits on the issue.
Here is a video from Hip Hop reviewer who goes by the name “Misanthropik One”. WARNING – ADULT LANGUAGE! The language is “Hip Hop”, but the substance is solid and, in spite of the 30 second music intro that is intolerable (so just skip to the 30 second mark), the clip is strangely charismatic and entertaining.
My personal reaction is to SAC Vice President Eric W. Jackson is this video clip, which I am confident Mr. Jackson has seen many times, and yet shows no ability to grasp of whatsoever:
There are more cases of unhinged school administrators engaging in incredible foolishness than we could ever tell you about. This one is amazing.
School picture time is important for kids. The cheerleaders were all going to wear pink, the jocks were all going to wear tank tops, so another group of friends decided that they would wear white t-shirts so they could easily identify each other in the class photo.
Enter the unhinged school administrator.
He accuses the students of being a part of a white supremacist group and says that he has gotten complaints, of course he cannot substantiate that claim. So he suspends some of the students at finals time so they cannot graduate, including an Asian student. Welcome to yet another lawsuit that a school will have no chance of winning and will cost the taxpayers money.
There is also a libel/slander aspect to this. Accusing someone of being in such a group is almost the worst thing you can say about someone. The school has accused students and named them as white supremacists in the media and on the internet with no evidence to support it. Anyone who does an internet search on these students names will find this. These students have been damaged and their reputations trashed nationwide. I hope they sue the school district and, if California law allows, go after the administrator’s personal assets.
SOQUEL, Calif. – Students banned from a Central Coast school for wearing a white t-shirt. On Wednesday, Soquel High School suspended at least two students. The students say it’s because of allegations, they’re part of a white supremacist group.
“All the girls wore pink, all the sports guys wore tank tops,” says Soquel High Senior Mikey Donnelly. “We were all going to wear white so that was the plan. Just wear white t-shirts to identify ourselves and look back and say that was our group of friends right there.”
Soquel High Senior Mikey Donnelly wore a white t-shirt for his senior class photo Tuesday. About 10 of his friends did the same. That decision may seem harmless. But Soquel High suspended Donnelly for three days because of it.
Donnelly said the school told him people were offended and intimidated by his group, claiming they’re a white supremacist gang.
“I do think this is BS,” says Donnelly. “I’m not a white supremacist in any way shape or form. If I did say white power, I would probably say it just as much as I say black power.”
He’s not the only one upset.
“I feel disrespected,” says Soquel High Senior David Mine.
Mine also wore a white t-shirt and was also suspended. He’s missing out on finals and that could jeopardize his graduation.
“I’m Asian,” says Mine. “I don’t see how I can be a white supremacist. I’m against it completely.”
Soquel High Principal Ken Lawrence-Emanuel was very tight-lipped about it, saying students’ punishments are confidential. But told me the school got several complaints about a white pride group on campus.
“Safety is always first at Soquel High,” says Lawrence-Emanuel. “We want to make sure we do everything we can to keep people from feeling and being safe on campus.”
But, the students don’t agree and are ready to fight it.
“It’s a pretty bad feeling to be labeled something you’re not,” says Donnelly.
Donnelly said nobody’s ever accused him of being a white supremacist before and plans on appealing the schools decision. He’ll even take it to court if he needs to.
Who says that kids aren’t politicized by teachers, the curriculum and the public school environment. Keep in mind that this was a middle school text, meaning that President Bush took office when these kids were two.
Notice no elite media national attention? If this was Obama….
See the video and the rest of the story HERE at The Blaze.
It’s known as the candy-cane case. And it’s all about religious discrimination.
The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals will hear oral arguments today in Morgan v. Swanson. The case demonstrates just how badly political correctness has corrupted our public schools and illustrates the extremes to which radical school administrators will go to impose their ideological, anti-religious views on our children.
The lawsuit was filed by the families of several elementary-school students in Plano, Texas. The suit states that, although the schools hold birthday and “winter break” parties, no Christmas parties are allowed. Moreover, the schools ban all “references to and symbols of the Christian religion and the celebration of the Christian religious holiday, Christmas,” at the winter-break parties. Even “red and green Christmas colors” are banned. And students were explicitly instructed “not to write ‘Merry Christmas’ on greeting cards sent to United States soldiers [or to retirement homes] because that phrase might be offensive.”
Apparently the schools never considered that such rigorous censorship might be offensive. Indeed, they went further. Students were allowed to exchange gift bags at the winter-break parties. However, the suit alleges, “students and parents [were] interrogated by school officials . . . as to whether or not the contents of their gift or ‘goodie’ bags . . . contain any religious viewpoint, religious references or religious message.” If they did, the bags were confiscated by school officials.
One student’s bags were seized because they contained pencils inscribed with the phrase “Jesus is the Reason for the Season.” Another student was banned from giving his friends candy-cane-shaped pens with a laminated card entitled the “Legend of the Candy Cane,” which explained the Christian origin of candy canes. Another student, “during noncurriculum times and with no material and substantial disruption to the operations of the school,” was giving her friends tickets to a free Christian drama production at her church. Principal Jackie Bomchill ordered the tickets confiscated and destroyed because they “expressed a ‘religious’ viewpoint.”
One student’s mother asked for a meeting with Bomchill to get prior approval for her daughter to give her friends two pencils at her own birthday party during lunch recess, one inscribed with the word “moon” and the other with the phrase “Jesus loves me this I know for the Bible tells me so.” Instead of engaging in a calm discussion, the principal handed the mother a letter threatening that “law enforcement officials” would be called to arrest her and told her that the Jesus pencils could only be distributed “outside of the school building.” However, when the daughter attempted to do just that, outside of the school building, Bomchill grabbed her, took the pencils, and berated her. Bomchill told the mother her daughter would be “kicked out of school” if she made any further attempts to distribute religious items. School officials even called the police, who pulled over the mother on her way home.
Since these events, the school district and the principals have only compounded their errors. Rather than acknowledge that they made a mistake, apologize, and change their discriminatory policies, they have spent over a million taxpayer dollars fighting this lawsuit all the way up to the federal appeals court. In fact, they claim that they did nothing wrong and should be granted “qualified immunity” because “the First Amendment does not apply to elementary school students” and the “Constitution does not prohibit viewpoint discrimination against religious speech in elementary schools.” And these are the people teaching civics to our children!
As a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit wrote in its review of the case, “It has been clear for over half a century that the First Amendment protects elementary school students from religious-viewpoint discrimination.” This issue was decided in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, a 1943 decision of the Supreme Court. The Court recognized that school officials are subject to the Constitution and that the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment is no exception. Students do not “shed their constitutional right to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.” As the Court pointed out in Barnette, the fact that school officials “are educating the young for citizenship is reason for scrupulous protection of Constitutional freedoms of the individual, if we are not to strangle the free mind at its source and teach youth to discount important principles of our government as mere platitudes.”
The Texas school district has tried to argue that the Barnette decision really doesn’t say what it says, or that it doesn’t really apply to elementary schools because supposedly there is no evidence that the plaintiffs in that case were elementary-school students. In a delicious irony, former U.S. solicitor general Ken Starr has filed an amicus brief on behalf of the Barnette sisters, the plaintiffs in the 1943 case.
The two sisters, now in their seventies, were elementary-school students in West Virginia at the time. As practicing Jehovah’s Witnesses, they believed that pledging allegiance to the flag was a form of prohibited idol worship. After declining to participate in that ceremony, they were expelled from school. The sisters’ family took their challenge all the way to the Supreme Court and won. As their amicus brief says, the Plano school district is trying to “unravel decades of clearly established law” and to “unwisely turn back the clock to an era in this nation’s history when religious bigotry was often tolerated in the public schools.”
What is worrisome about this case is that the Fifth Circuit granted en banc review after its own three-judge panel clearly reached the correct decision when it ruled against the school district and these intolerant principals. We may hope that the entire court will not overturn this panel decision or grant immunity to the school officials for their biased and inequitable behavior. This case is a clear example of how the extreme liberal view that nothing may be said or done that could somehow, possibly “offend” anyone leads to gutting the First Amendment and destroying our free-speech rights.
This is too crazy to make up folks. Ethnomathmatics…. multiculturalism (The West is evil) combined with social justice math. If a bomb costs $10,000 how many children are denied health care because Donald Rumsfeld bought a bomb?
Ethnomathmatics has its own Wikipedia entry and web sites:
http://www.radicalmath.org/main.php?id=SocialJusticeMath (watch the video as well and does anyone want to say that the left is not turning our schools into indoctrination mills while graduating students with skill levels far below what they should be?
The “Guide for Integrating Issues of Social and Economic Justice into Mathematics Classrooms and Curriculum” has been updated. Download.
Since moonbattery is a totalitarian ideology, nothing escapes from its poisonous lies — not even mathematics. Teachers unsure how to pass off indoctrination in race-based Marxism (a.k.a. “social justice”) as a math class can find resources to assist them at Radical Math:
There are at least two related ideas behind “Social Justice Math”. The first is that you can use mathematics to teach and learn about issues of social and economic justice. The second is that you can learn math through the study of social justice issues….
A subspecies of Social Justice Math is “Ethnomathematics,” defined as:
The study and celebration of mathematical practices from various countries and cultures from both historical and contemporary perspectives, including: symbolic systems, spatial designs, games and puzzles, calculation methods, measurement in time and space, architecture and design, problem solving, etc.
With all this important material to cover, it’s no surprise if teachers don’t get around to boring stuff like multiplication tables.
The Math Skills & Social Justice Topics Chart (Word doc) offers concrete suggestions for dressing up moonbat propaganda as math. For example:
Comparing how money spent on military operations could be used to support other important causes (ex: if a bomb costs $10 million and a it costs $10,000 to provide health care for an entire family for a year, how many families could get health care for the cost of this bomb).
Here’s how geometry can be combined with “environmental justice”:
Determine the density of toxic waste facilities, factories, dumps, etc, in the neighborhood.
By now it should be obvious why moonbats cannot be left in control of education. This means prying it out of the fist of Big Government and the unions that bankroll Democrat politicians.
Beck: My daughter goes to college and no one there knows she is my kid. Some of these professors say horrible things about me, none of which are true (and could ever support with evidence). So I called the college and asked how much would I have to donate every semester just so you would stop trying to fill my kid’s head with lies.
I am the chairwoman of the only conservative group at James Madison University, which is named after the father of the constitution, and I had the audacity to bring a conservative speaker, Kate Obenshain, to speak on the Failures of Feminism. I also spent the whole semester expressing my concerns to my professor that is the adviser for the school newspaper about how liberally biased it is. For those reasons I was targeted by this self-proclaimed liberal male professor because I am a conservative woman who will not bend to his beliefs.
For at least a week, I walked around school hanging posters for my event, which school employees admitted that they threw away, and students even bragged about tearing down my posters on a school sponsored feminist blog. I was viciously attacked on feminist websites, in the newspaper, and even on facebook.
In the midst of all this I made a huge mistake. I showed up at the wrong time for an exam. Well my self proclaimed liberal professor who is the head of our liberal school paper got his revenge on me!
As a conservative, I would have accepted my mistake, except my professor told me he wouldn’t allow me to take my exam even though he might allow others to because I didn’t deserve it. He said I was a trouble maker, I had a bad attitude, and I was a bad student, despite having been on the dean’s list every semester. Despite having contact many people in the administration at JMU, no one will give me a reason as to why other students are allowed to take missed exams but I am not!
On the bright side, I was able to go on Glenn Beck and talk about assistant Professor Grundmann!
Having discovered Dr. Chesler’s web site I feel as if I have found a treasure trove of interesting information. Next time I am in New York I am definitely going to offer to buy her lunch along with my good friend the soon to be Dr. Jeffery Cappella, global security consultant (Cappella is a supra-genius. A name you will be hearing you can be sure).
This letter from the CUNY Alumni Association says it all:
As alumni, professors and students of the City University of New York, we wish to comment regarding the character assassination that is now transpiring via email attack and media attacks on Trustee Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, a gifted and serious CUNY Trustee who performed his duty and exercised due diligence regarding the recent vote on CUNY honorary degrees. Many who are presently impugning Mr. Weisenfeld’s character are also responsible for a very unwholesome and dangerous demagoguery that is creeping into mainstream dialogue at CUNY campuses. We are particularly cognizant of a dangerous demagoguery at Brooklyn College where we have most recently been made aware of an anti-Israel and anti-semitic culture that is growing, aided and abetted by the campus administration. Brooklyn College is not alone in this regard, however, and documentation is mounting regarding abuses on other campuses, supported by local CUNY administrations.
On many CUNY campuses, Muslim Student Association (MSA) clubs (sometimes dubbed Palestinian Clubs) are aided, abetted and supported by off-campus “advisors” and Imams from radical Muslim groups. They operate as virtual missionary groups, exercising tactics which are contrary to free inquiry and which seek to foment hatred towards other campus groups. Most are also supported by a professors’ union that promotes rhetoric which encourages and promotes this hatred.
We have also been made aware that professors who are politically pro-Israel are intimidated and prevented from speaking freely, out of fear of retribution when seeking reappointment, tenure and/or promotion. There is little doubt that there are valid bases for this fear.
All this is reflected in the venom that is pouring out of the CUNY professoriate in the attempt to stifle Trustee Wiesenfeld for the simple exercise of his right and responsibility as a member of the Board of Trustees.
We ask that the Board initiate an investigation into the assault on Jews at the City University, disguised as anti-Israelism, which seeks to mask its true agenda: anti-semitism. We ask that a representative task force be established to investigate this phenomenon.
We are grateful that one member of the Board, Mr. Wiesenfeld, has the courage to speak the truth. He is a giant among men and a hero to so many. We shudder to think what will happen when his tenure on the Board is over. We fear the demise of CUNY as an institution of free speech and inquiry.
Should the Board of Trustees continue to ignore the current assault against those of free will who object to the administration’s uninspired and cowardly support of radical liberal orthodoxy and against those who are supporters of the State of Israel, then please be aware that our Association of CUNY Alumni and Retirees will assure:
That CUNY alumni are apprised of recent events and are exhorted to reconsider donations to their alma maters – colleges which are no longer institutions which are protective of all.
That Jewish graduates and others of good will are apprised that the colleges which were once their homes, are no longer welcoming to supporters of Israel.
We will not sit by idly and allow this cancer to continue to grow.
Victims go ignored, some even kill themselves like Phoebe Prince and the story is always the same. The school claims ignorance when the kids and teachers say that everyone knew about it. District Attorney Elizabeth Scheibel demonstrated that the administrators, from the Superintendent on down, were lying about not knowing, as Prince’s mother had multiple meetings with the schools administrators, which proved to be fruitless. Another reason that schools tend to side with the bullies, “Both Phoebe and Tyler were targeted by high-status kids who were well-liked in the community,” said Barbara Coloroso, a prominent anti-bullying consultant. By the way, Prince’s bullies were sentenced last week (expect a civil suit to follow).
A lawsuit that accuses the Cy-Fair school district of intentionally destroying or hiding evidence has detailed the bullying that 13-year-old Asher Brown went through before he took his life, at least according to his mother.
Brown’s death drew national attention as part of a series of incidents where students wee bullied or harassed because they were or were thought to be gay. Brown shot himself one day after school, the same day, his parents told reporters, that he had told them he was gay.
Brown’s mother, Amy Brown Truong, has filed a suit in federal court here in Houston. In it, she says she and her husband called and visited Hamilton Middle School countless times to complain about the bullying of Asher; Cy-Fair ISD, in its only statement on the incident, says no evidence — either security video or documentation — exists of such contacts.
The suit says “School staff destroyed or have hidden the ‘Visitor Log-In Sheets’ and videos, showing [father] David Truong entering the school district to speak with staff about his concerns and the written and oral complaints made by Asher and videos of Asher being bullied in the school bus and on other parts of the school grounds.”
The suit includes numerous descriptions of bullying incidents around the county, and also details what allegedly happened to Asher.
On numerous occasions someone would run up to Asher when he was running track, and a student would stop in front of Asher, so that Asher would run into that boy and simulate anal intercourse. The someone would call out “Hey faggot, quit trying to f@lk me.” “Her guys, Asher is trying too butt f@lk me.” On many occasions these incidents were often observed by Physical Education and coaching staff.
Asher’s religion was also a target, the suit says:
Also on numerous occasions Asher would be tying his shoe lace and D.K., D.H. K.C. and another D.K. would come up behind him, simulate anal sex and yell out “You like this don’t you? You f@lking faggot. Is this what Buddha does to you guys, doesn’t he? Have you f@lked Buddha today, Boodie boy?”
The suit claims one of the main tormentors, who has since left the district “because he was receiving threats from other students,” was punished by being forced to miss one football game.
School administrators and such lying, violating student rights, violating faculty rights, etc is such a huge problem, that our friends at FIRE and ADF cannot hope to help everyone and must focus on just the most egregious cases. Some good news is that it seems the ACLJ is also moving into the campus rights arena in a big way with the hiring of high powered super attorney David French who has made quite a name for himself in the civil rights arena going after schools and universities who violate the law. The more the merrier. Donate to them now!!!
I just wonder, is every school administrator a despicable human being? We publish lots of stories about school administrators who break the law (and there are literally thousands we do not publish because it would be all we would ever do – no that was not even an exaggeration), lie, abandon all ethics etc when scandal hits, but this one amazed even me, and just when I thought I had seen it all.
I noticed this story while browsing. A teacher in Dallas sits there while students are attacked, and in another video he sits there while students make an arena with the chairs, two students casually strip to their shorts and fight while other students film it with a cell phone. The Teacher says that policy prevents him from doing anything, so he just sits there as “fight club” goes on in his class and apparently this is not uncommon.
WFAA has the story and Hotair.com has updates. Click the links to see the video and the story. So much for the effectiveness of the so called “zero tolerance policy”.
[Editor’s Note – The information and video of the “fight club” that went on in the class is at the WFAA link so be sure to watch it]
“Ever constant, never changing, ongoing harassment” is how the victim describes the situation. Of course what did the school do about this?
Now the victim is dropping out of school because he is convinced it is unsafe; which is not unusual for a state run union school and is in fact what they prefer because victims mean that there is trouble in their school that administrators do not want to admit to under their watch, so if the victim goes away, bureaucratically speaking, so does the crime.
The school is also going after the student who recorded it, after all we can’t have the outside world know what is going on in class can we?
Victims go ignored, some even kill themselves like Phoebe Prince and the story is always the same. The school claims ignorance when the kids and teachers say that everyone knew about it. District Attorney Elizabeth Scheibel demonstrated that the administrators, from the Superintendent on down, were lying about not knowing, as Prince’s mother had multiple meetings with the schools administrators, which proved to be fruitless. Another reason that schools tend to side with the bullies, “Both Phoebe and Tyler were targeted by high-status kids who were well-liked in the community,” said Barbara Coloroso, a prominent anti-bullying consultant. By the way, Prince’s bullies were sentenced last week (expect a civil suit to follow).
MORE STUPIDITY – A public school in Maryland had a student dragged off in handcuffs and why? Because he had a two inch folding pocket toolkit that included a pen knife which he used to maintain and repair his Lacrosse stick. He had a lighter to burn off strings and frays. The school said that the folding took kit was a deadly weapon and that the lighter was an “explosive device”. Is being a moron a requirement to getting a school administrator position paying six figures? – LINK with video.
[Note: The video jumps around not just because of editing, the class is taught with two professors video conferencing during the class, so when another professor talks the video jumps to that person]
Chapter 4 – Bring in Communists to lecture about unions and communism.
Chapter 2 – Advanced Thuggery – Fear and Intimidation Tactics
Recently, the University of Missouri-St. Louis (UMSL) and the University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC) sponsored two college courses: Introduction to Labor Studies and Labor Politics and Society, to be taught simultaneously through a video conference between two campuses.
The Professors are Judy Ancel, Director of Labor Studies at UMKC and Don Giljum, business manager for the International Union of Operating Engineers at Ameren UE in St. Louis (Bonus: he is a member of the Communist Party).
This is a good note to read, especially for you pinheads on the Academic Senate who went after Chancellor Reck for not kicking Chick-Fil-A off campus again (that’s right, I am defending Una Mae).
The first thing the “Academic Senate” needs to do is read is the entire IU Code of Conduct, which states that the university will abide by all laws and respect the constitutional rights of all. To economically punish Chick-Fil-A because a franchisee has a Christian point of view (who demonstrated it by donating some sandwiches to a religious activist group) is illegal. It is discrimination on the basis of religion (creed), and viewpoint discrimination against a religious point of view which is a violation of federal First Amendment case law.
The IU Code of Conduct and its nondiscrimination policy must be interpreted within the bounds of the law, and the fact is that the law does not recognize a right for anyone to get married and that includes gays. Just because some may want the non-discrimination policy to apply to the marraige issue does not mean it does. IU is NOT in the marraige business and it does not discriminate against gays in hiring or who gets approved as a student etc. The non-discrimination policy cannot be construed as to be used as a weapon to censor, nor can it be used to punish people (Chick-Fil-A) for innocent associations and/or a religious/cultural point of view that is 100% constitutionally protected.
The fact that the Academic Senate took the action it did tells us several things. The most obvious is what history has shown us time and time again, like most faculty and administrators, they do not know the IU Code of Conduct worth a darn and/or simply do not care what it says and wish to push their agenda because of malignant narcissism or blind hate for Christians (until one has spent some time on campus and realized what a warped and often subversive culture it is do not discount what I just said); or they are simply intellectually incapable of reading it for context and have taken a position that cannot withstand 10 minutes of intellectual scrutiny out of ignorance amplified by an unwillingness to challenge ones own assumptions (do not discount that one either as while many professors are well educated, many are rather poor critical thinkers).
Read carefully, and that goes double for you in Student Government, who are abusing it by utilizing it as a platform for partisan/divisive ideological ends, in a complete reversal of what student government’s mission is (and where is the student life director who should be helping student government protect itself from its own foolishness).
The Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) reports today that Indiana University-Bloomington (IUB) has eliminated a policy that had prevented the Christian student group Impact Movement from receiving student activity fee funds to help pay for its attendance at a national conference. Previously, groups at IUB had been excluded from receiving funds for activities that involve “religious proselytizing” or for “sectarian events.”
In December of last year, Impact Movement sought activity funding to send some of its members to its national conference. The university permits partial funding of conference attendance for members of registered student groups and had approved funding for Impact Movement in previous years. Nevertheless, the IU Student Association Funding Board denied Impact Movement’s request for 2010, citing the university’s Student Organization Funding Guidelines. The director of student activities upheld the decision.
ADF wrote to the university pointing out that such discrimination is unconstitutional, citing a recent United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit decision in favor of a group at the University of Wisconsin-Madison that had been similarly discriminated against.
We’re glad to see this reversal at IUB.
FIRE, meanwhile, continues to fight another unconstitutional funding policy in force at Northern Illinois University, which also falls under the Seventh Circuit’s jurisdiction. At NIU, all groups classified as “religious” or “political” in nature are prevented from receiving funds from student activity fees, while groups committed to “social justice” or “advocacy” are not. In light of the Supreme Court cases Rosenberger v. University of Virginia (1995) and Board of Regents v. Southworth (2000), and especially in light of the Seventh Circuit’s recent ruling in this area, NIU’s unconstitutional position on student group rights is thoroughly untenable, and the university would be wise to follow IUB’s example immediately.
Anti Israeli-ism and anti-Zionism often goes too far on campus. This is no secret. When you have professors who are PLO/Hamas sympathizers and professors who are so outrageously biased that they use Jimmy Carter’s mistake ridden anti-Israeli screed as a textbook it creates a hostile environment for Jews and supporters of Israel’s right to exist. And when I was in student government I got complaints from Jewish students about these professors but none would go on the record out of fear of grade retaliation.
So what to do? Campus Watch does a great job of outing bigoted academics, but many academics are very comfortable in their bigotry. This is also about academic freedom. Many bigots use academic freedom as a shield for bigoted indoctrination and harassment of Jews. Antisemitism is quite fashionable among the far left so many academics and administrators provide cover for each other. The excuse is always the same “You just oppose any critique of Israel”. Of course this is a canard because those who say that provide nothing even close to a balanced view of the issue and only make a token gesture at it when investigated.
The course could be taught from the Hamas perspective for half a semester and from the Israeli perspective the other half. Or it could be a two semester course.
Eventually the Department of Education Office of Civil Rights (OCR) came out with a policy that very imbalanced anti-Israeli-ism is antisemitism and is actionable. While freedom of speech and academic freedom issues should prevent close cases from being acted upon, which is a good thing because one should tilt the scales toward freedom, this policy could be effective at going after the more egregious cases, which is long over due.
The U.S. Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights has announced plans to investigate the University of California at Santa Cruz for anti-Semitism, based on a lecturer’s complaint that administrators there had turned a deaf ear to her concerns that critics of Israel were creating a hostile climate for Jewish people on the campus.
The case marks the first major investigation of anti-Semitism on a college campus by the civil-rights office, known as OCR, since its decision last fall to step up its efforts against such discrimination in a manner that some civil-rights experts saw as likely to pull the agency into debates over campus speech critical of Israel or Zionism. The University of California system is now defending itself against allegations of anti-Semitism on several fronts, as its Irvine campus remains the subject of a separate OCR investigation, undertaken in 2008, and its Berkeley campus and system administration were named in a discrimination lawsuit filed by a Jewish student this month.
Kenneth L. Marcus, who was the Education Department’s assistant secretary for civil rights from 2002 to 2004 and now directs the Institute for Jewish and Community Research’s efforts to fight anti-Semitism, said on Tuesday that the investigation of Santa Cruz “would have been a nonstarter” if the OCR had not adopted the harder line against anti-Semitism urged by his organization and other Jewish groups.
Under the agency’s changed approach toward such complaints, announced in October as part of a broader effort to crack down on forms of student bullying and harassment seen as violating antidiscrimination laws, the OCR made clear that it intends to investigate charges of anti-Semitism where the discrimination might be based partly on ethnicity, and will be less likely to assume that anti-Semitic incidents are the result of religious discrimination, which falls outside its purview.
The Santa Cruz investigation “is a really important signal from OCR that they may be taking their new approach to anti-Semitism as seriously as we wanted them to,” Mr. Marcus said. “There is still a big question as to how vigorously they will pursue cases that involve a mix of anti-Israelism and anti-Semitism. This suggests a willingness to go forward.”
‘Harassment and Intimidation’
The new investigation is in response to a June 2009 complaint sent to the OCR by Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, a lecturer in Hebrew on the campus. In her letter, she describes several incidents in recent years in which administrators there rejected demands that the university drop its sponsorship of events focused on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that she regarded as one-sided attacks on Israel and Zionism. In some cases, she said, all that resulted from such complaints was that the people who brought them were villified by faculty members as threatening academic freedom.
“The anti-Israel discourse and behavior in classrooms and at departmentally and college-sponsored events at [Santa Cruz] is tantamount to institutional discrimination against Jewish students, which has resulted in their intellectual and emotional harassment and intimidation, and has adversely affected their educational experience at the university,” Ms. Rossman-Benjamin’ letter said. [This is exactly the goal of the Muslim Brotherhood sponsored chapters of the MSA and their far left allies – Editor]
In a letter sent to Ms. Rossman-Benjamin on March 7, Arthur Zeidman, director of the OCR’s enforcement office in San Francisco, said his agency would investigate whether the university had failed to fufill its obligations under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to respond to her concerns. He noted that the OCR’s decision to open such an investigation “in no way implies” that it has made a determination as to the merits of her complaint to the agency.
In a written statement, Santa Cruz’s campus counsel, Carole Rossi, said the university would “fully cooperate” with the OCR’s investigation.
The separate lawsuit against the University of California system was filed in U.S. District Court this month by Jessica Felber, a former Berkeley student who now works as a campus liaison for Hasbara Fellowships, an organization established by the Jewish organization Aish International. It argues that the university tolerated an anti-Semitic climate on the campus and failed to deal with complaints of “campus terrrorist incitements” by two student groups, the Muslim Students Union and Students for Justice in Palestine.
The lawsuit accuses the university of failing to have provided Ms. Felber with adequate protection against anti-Semitic violence in a March 2010 incident in which a student involved with Students for Justice in Palestine “intentionally rammed” a shopping cart into her on the campus, causing her an injury for which she received medical attention.
The Berkelely campus on Tuesday issued a statement that said it “is committed to maintaining an inclusive and respectful campus environment that is safe and welcoming for everyone, without regard to religion, race, ethnicity, or ideology,” and rejects “any allegation or implication that bias or prejudice plays any role” in how the administration deals with students or student groups.
Imagine, for a moment, you’re sitting next to your child and video of a class reciting the Pledge of Allegiance flashes across the TV. Your child tugs on your shirt and innocently asks, “Mom, what are they doing? What are they saying?” Shocking, you might say. It would never happen. Guess what? It happened in New York City.
Joe and Winnie Fleischer of Brooklyn, NY were flabbergasted when they realized recently their daughter Brianna, 8, had no idea what the Pledge of Allegiance was. They thought it was common knowledge, especially in the classroom.
“I was shocked that she didn’t know the pledge,” Joe, a NYC firefighter, told the New York Daily News. “I thought she’d been doing it in school.”
They thought wrong.
So they went to the school, PS29, to change that. After spirited meetings with parents, teachers, and an “educational unit for kids,” the principal agreed to have the Pledge broadcast over the school’s loud speaker “for the first time in years.”
But here‘s what’s interesting. In New York, reciting the Pledge daily in schools is the law. The principal, then, isn’t doing anything revolutionary — she‘s just complying with what’s been mandated since just after 9/11.
This is why FIRE is working to get the laws and case law changed on issues like this to strip immunity form public officials who know darn well they are breaking the law and just dig in their heals because they know the taxpayer is flipping the bill.
Nutty administrators who do this should lose a few years salary when they do something this foolish and then maybe more would have respect for the law.
ADF is international now. In the next case the German government jailed parents for pulling their child out of a graphic sex ed class. This is a violation of human rights conventions and treaties Germany has signed onto and promised to uphold.
Remember when we wrote about this case from U. C. Davis? In this case they actually wrote in their campus speech code that it is not OK to religiously discriminate against anyone, except Christians as they are the dominant culture oppressors. Only on a college campus can you find people this stupid.
Now UC Davis will have to go back to selectively enforcing and breaking the rules to discriminate against Christians, how sad for them.
On Nov. 4, 2010, as soon as the election results were in and they were sure their candidate had won, faculty administrators at Oregon State University gave new meaning to the term “political payback.”
They initiated an attack on my three children – Joshua, Bethany and Matthew – for the purpose of throwing them all out of the OSU graduate school, despite their outstanding academic and research accomplishments. OSU is a liberal socialist Democrat stronghold in Oregon that received a reported $27 million in earmark funding from my opponent, Peter DeFazio, and his Democrat colleagues during the last legislative session.
Thus, Democrat activist David Hamby and militant feminist and chairman of the nuclear engineering department Kathryn Higley are expelling four-year Ph.D. student Joshua Robinson from OSU at the end of the current academic quarter and turning over the prompt neutron activation analysis facility Joshua built for his thesis work and all of his work in progress to Higley’s husband, Steven Reese. Reese, an instructor in the department, has stated that he will use these things for his own professional gain. Joshua’s apparatus, which he built and added to the OSU nuclear reactor with the guidance and ideas of his mentor, Michael Hartman, earned Joshua the award for best Masters of Nuclear Engineering thesis at OSU and has been widely complimented by scientists at prominent U.S. nuclear facilities.
Meanwhile, faculty member Todd Palmer notified four-year Ph.D. student Bethany Robinson (OSU grade point average 3.89) that he was terminating her thesis work and taking all of her work in progress for himself. Some of Bethany’s graduate work has already been used, withoutcreditto Bethany, in the thesis of another favored student now recently hired on the department faculty.
My children and I attempted to counter all these actions against us as they unfolded, but were initially uncertain as to their ultimate intent. All became clear, however, when OSU faculty administrators abruptly took a further and very serious prejudicial action toward Joshua. At that point, OSU Professor of Nuclear Engineering Jack Higginbotham, who was privy to all of the meetings and actions, warned us and came to our defense.
Professor Higginbotham, who also serves as president of the OSU Faculty Senate anddirectorof the Oregon NASA Space Science Consortium, has been a member of the OSU faculty for 24 years. He has held many responsible positions in the university and has received numerous professional awards. Moreover, he is very widely admired for the many instances in which he has given special help to students at OSU. This is a man who thinks always of his students and never of himself.
Professor Higginbotham warned us that faculty administrators at OSU were working to make certain that Joshua, his sister Bethany and, if possible, his brother Matthew never receive Ph.D. degrees in nuclear engineering from OSU, regardless of their examination, academic and research performance. Professor Higginbotham then reviewed with us the details of the plan to destroy the education of these students and advised me to do anything I could to protect my children.
Since November, a remarkable battle has been raging within OSU. I considered an immediate public exposure of this plot and warned the faculty of this possibility, but instead my family and I decided to try to prevent a scandal at OSU and save the students within the confines of OSU. We fought these unprincipled academics on their own ground and held them off for four months. That effort is, however, now failing, and Joshua and Bethany are both slated for dismissal from the department of nuclear engineering very soon. Also, unless action is taken immediately, Professor Higginbotham’s career will be completely destroyed.
How many times have you heard that public school teachers are sorely underpaid, under-appreciated public servants with hearts of gold who love your kids more than you do? There is a myth out there that every person who enters into the sacred field of education has the heart of a servant, a love of children and no desire for personal gain or satisfaction. And certainly, there are teachers that fit that description (I’ve had a few myself.)
But I’ve also had teachers who should never have been allowed within fifty feet of children. A 2004 study by Hofstra University scholar Charol Shakeshaft on the sexual misconduct of public school teachers is a shocking wake-up call that was widely ignored by the public union-friendly press. And even worse, the public teachers unions protected many of the offending teachers and allowed them to quietly transfer to other schools where they victimized more children. “Examples include touching breasts or genitals of students; oral, anal, and vaginal penetration; showing students pictures of a sexual nature; and sexually-related conversations, jokes, or questions directed at students.”
Everyone agrees that the sex scandal in the Catholic Church is a tragedy of immense proportions and the media has done a good job at uncovering the network of cover-ups and lies that harmed children irreparably. But what would you say if I told you that the public school system, which is about the same size as the Catholic Church in America with a school in every parish, has more sexual abuse cases in ten years than the Catholic Church has had in fifty? The mishandling of sex offenders in the public school system has cost hundreds of millions of dollars in legal fees to the taxpayers and unmeasurable damage to the victims. The following are among the worst offenders in the public school system.
Something similar happened to Ruth Malhotra at Georgia Tech except she was persecuted by far left students, faculty, and administrators. A professor told Ruth that if she attended the Conservative Political Action Conference that it would mean an automatic fail in the class. The professor carried out the threat and when Ruth complained the university exonerated the professor. The threats against Ruth were so bad that local police had to escort her form class to class because university police refused to respond to the threats against her. Ruth and fellow student Orit Sklar, in conjunction with our friend David French at the Alliance Defense Fund, filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against Georgia Tech. It gets better, after Georgia Tech lost the first ruling, they put out a press release claiming victory. After the second ruling George Tech suffered a large payout and revocation of their illegal speech codes
Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Neal Sher, an attorney practicing in New York City. He, along with San Francisco attorney Joel Siegal, is presently representing Jessica Felber, a Jewish UC Berkeley student who is suing the university over being physically attacked by Muslim Students.
Previously, Sher was the Director the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations, which investigated and prosecuted Nazi criminals in the U.S. In that capacity, he was responsible for bringing many dozens of prosecutions and for barring former UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim from coming to this country. He also served as the National Executive Director of AIPAC and was the President of the American Section of the International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists.
FP: Neal Sher, welcome to Frontpage Interview. Tell us about this suit that you are filing on behalf of Jessica Felber. What happened exactly?
Sher: On March 5, 2010, Jessica Felber, a twenty-year-old Jewish student at Berkeley, was attacked and injured on campus during a pro-Israel event while she was holding a sign stating “Israel wants Peace.” Her assailant, Husam Zakharia, also a UC Berkeley student, was the leader of Students for Justice in Palestine at Berkeley. There is no doubt that she was attacked because of her religion and Jewish ancestry.
Defendants – UC Berkeley, the Regents of the University of California and their ranking officials – were fully aware that Zakharia, the SJP and similar student groups had been involved in other incidents on campus to incite violence against and intimidate Jewish and other students. Nevertheless, in clear dereliction of their legal responsibilities, Defendants took no reasonable steps to protect Ms. Felber and others.
The Complaint further describes how the SJP conspires and coordinates with the Muslim Student Association, which has a publicly documented history of affiliation with and support of organizations deemed “terror organizations” by the United States Department of State. That they have resorted to intimidation and harassment is evidenced most recently by the fact that the District Attorney of Orange County, California, has indicted eleven students from these groups for inciting and disrupting a speech given by the Israeli Ambassador to the United States at the University of California, Irvine.
Ignoring complaints from students about the poisonous climate on campus, defendants condoned, allowed and enabled groups such as the Muslim Student Association and the SJP to threaten, harass and intimidate Jewish students and to endanger their health and safety. Their tolerance of the growing cancer of a dangerous anti-Semitic climate on its campuses, and their failure to take adequate measures to quell it, violated the rights of Ms. Felber and other students to enjoy a peaceful campus environment free from threats and intimidation.
FP: Tell us in what ways this is a very significant and important lawsuit. It can be seen in many ways as turning point right?
Sher: This is, to our knowledge, a precedent complaint demanding that the university honor its legal obligations to protect the rights of its students. It is also important because, as people who follow and monitor events on campuses around the country well know, universities and colleges are major battlegrounds for those who are pressing the campaign to delegitimize and denigrate Israel. They have created an atmosphere of intimidation and harassment for Jewish and pro-Israel students which has been condoned and allowed to fester by university officials.
FP: Why did UC Berkeley fail to provide security to Felber?
Sher: It’s also difficult to pinpoint motives. Perhaps officials themselves were intimidated or, perhaps, they were simply hostile to students like Jessica and their causes. But, the central point is that the officials were fully aware of the threats posed by the SJP, MSA and their followers and they failed to respond adequately as they were legally obligated to do.
FP: Your thoughts on the growing Muslim extremism on campuses putting Jewish students in danger?
Sher: Clearly, this is a very serious problem as there has been a growing number of incidents on campuses, not just within the University of California system but throughout the country, where groups like the SJP and MSA have intimidated and harassed students and faculty members. Moreover, this campaign appears to be highly organized and thoroughly planned.
It is also very troubling that the on-campus activities of the SJP and MSA against Jessica and other students – and the university’s failure to confront them – present a disturbing echo of the darkest period in history: the incitement, intimidation, harassment and violence carried out under the Nazi regime and those of its allies in Europe against Jewish students and scholars in the leading universities of those countries during the turbulent years leading up to and including the Holocaust.
I can tell you that there is a genuine fear by Jessica and other students of Jewish ancestry on campuses throughout the University of California system that the tragic lessons of history have not yet been learned by these defendants. They fear that the University of California campuses are no longer places of hope and dignity, of academic and personal freedom, or of peaceful life and personal safety.
FP: What do you hope this lawsuit will help achieve?
Sher: First, we are demanding damages for Jessica injuries she suffered, physical and otherwise, due to defendant’s failure to honor its legal obligations. And, we would all like to see a sea change in the attitudes and actions on the part of the university and officials. As it now stands, students such as Jessica have been deprived of their constitutional rights and their ability to live and learn in a campus environment free of intimidation, threats and bullying.
FP: The thought of the roles reversed here, and with Berkeley having the same disposition toward the events, is simply unfathomable. What I mean is this: I can’t even imagine (1) Jewish students physically attacking Muslim students on a campus and (2) that if this hypothetically happened, that Berkeley would respond in the same way. First, if Muslim students sensed they were in danger from Jewish students, I am sure Berkeley would have made security arrangements – to say the least. And if Jewish students attacked a Muslim student, while the entire country’s media would be up in arms, Berkeley would be engaged in all kinds of disciplinary action. What are your thoughts on this observation?
Sher: You’ve hit the nail on the head. There is no question that if the shoe was on the other foot, immediate and decisive action would be taken by the powers that be. It’s time that we demand an end to the hypocrisy and double standards which have gone on far too long and which will be exposed in this lawsuit. The silent majority should remain silent no longer!
FP: Neal Sher, thank you for joining Frontpage Interview and thank you for coming to the defense of those who are no longer safe from violence on our campuses.
Too many journalists like to smear, too may far left activists like to smear, too may far left academics like to smear. Put it all together and you get Columbia Journalism Review (CJR).
An example is this story that came out accusing Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and Glenn Beck of secretly hiring actors to call in.
FM “Morning Zoo” shows often use a service to have an actor call in with a crazy story everyone can laugh at. Anyone who has worked in radio knows this. FM “zoo” shows have to because those people who they call up for those great laughs have to be actors due to FCC rules. You see it is illegal to put someone on the air unless you can be reasonably sure they know who they are talking to.
So a CJR “reporter” decided to take such a known service and accuse them of calling political news/talk shows with no evidence whatsoever. Said reporter never even called the company who has the service for comment, nor did the reporter call Limbaugh or Hannity to even ask the question. Instead the reporter just made the allegation.
The story gets worse, the story is from Columbia Journalism Review (CJR), allegedly from the finest teaching journalism professors in the country. Journalism teachers who cannot follow the basic ethics rules found in any j-school textbook. CJR is partially funded by George Soros.
UPDATE – MSNBC lefty talker Ed Schultz admits he used hired actors coached by Congressional Democrats as callers. (H/T The Blaze)
His excuse is lame. When my radio show started we had nothing and I built it up with hard work and talent to beat the competition. I never used staged ringers as callers. A good host should be ready to go an entire show filled with great content and never have to take a call. The most obvious reason why is that at times technical difficulties will prevent you form taking calls. People do not listen to a show to hear callers so quite frankly callers are not that important. That is why I never took very many calls on my show.
This of course is Charlie Sheen. Wow he looks satanic or something doesn’t he? The photo has a nasty narrative all its own doesn’t it?
Now let me tell you just how one gets such a photo. Take a film of yourself giving a short speech with some animation or telling a short story. Now go through it frame by frame. You are going to find frames that make you look like a complete dork. You will find the strangest looks on your face while in mid word or gesture.
The New York Times and a few others use this technique frequently. When I was writing for The Preface I ran a photo essay constructed of political snapshots collected in the weeks before an election from a biased elite media newspaper. The pictures of Republicans were largely like what you see above. The pictures of Democrats looked prepared and great. If you want to be taken seriously, don’t participate in this kind of nonsense.
This video is a great teaching aid for journalism students.
The South Bend Tribune once snapped a picture of a strip joint just to have a file picture. In the picture were two people walking on the sidewalk innocently. The picture implied, not with intent, but with carelessness, that the two ladies were going to the strip club. The ladies got upset and the Tribune, to their credit, made it right with them.
In this case, Fox News did a similar thing. Watch the video and before you read below see if you can spot what their producer who put this clip together did wrong.
At the 45 second mark Fox shows several clips of people on YouTube asking people to donate. Notice the word “scam” is under the clips. One of the clips belonged to the man below. His full clip can be seen HERE. His link went to the United Nations World Food Program at http://www.wfp.org/ which is legit.
One can honestly say that Fox News painted him in the light of a scam artist, a criminal. It is doubtful that they had intent and the language they used in talking about it does mitigate any claim of intent. What likely happened here is that a producer or an intern just did a search on YouTube for “donate Haiti” and pasted in the first three clips he could find.
As a result this man was made to suffer. Needless to say he was very upset and he is right to be upset.
Now before the campus crazies go all nuts trashing Fox News it is important to remember that unintentional smears like this are not uncommon. In fact every news organization who has been in business for a while can likely point to such a gaffe they have made. This is why journalism text books usually point this kind of mistake out. If you do make this kind of mistake apologize and run a visible retraction ASAP.
As a journalist, you are going to screw up sometimes. When you do just apologize and make it right. No one expects you to be a saint, they just expect you to make a best effort to be fair.
Too many journalists like to smear. An example is this story that came out accusing Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh of secretly hiring actors to call in. FM “Morning Zoo” shows often use a service to have an actor call in with a crazy story everyone can laugh at. Anyone who has worked in radio knows this. So a reporter decided to take this known service and accuse them of calling political news/talk shows with no evidence whatsoever. Said reporter never even called the company who has the service for comment, nor did the reporter call Limbaugh or Hannity to even ask the question. Instead the reporter just made the allegation.
The story gets worse, the story is from Columbia Journalism Review (CJR), allegedly from the finest teaching journalism professors in the country; journalism teachers who cannot follow the basic ethics rules found in any j-school textbook. CJR is partially funded by George Soros.
While this may make your editor’s day in a highly ideological news room, as most are, be careful. If a reporter ever pulled a stunt like that on one of my clients I would have that reporters face on 100 blogs, make them the butt of jokes and make their dishonesty a viral blog story. Many publicists and press secretaries make a list of what reporters are honest and who is not. If you aren’t you will find that people will stop talking to you.
Politico.com is finding this out the hard way. Lately the quality of the journalism there has been going down and it has become more tabloid/smear like Slate. People on the inside have told us that Politico is aware of this problem. Now it seems that Politico’s planned first presidential debate on May 2, 2011 is not going to happen as Palin and Bachmann have both made it clear that they have no interest in helping Politico’s business model or in helping them regain their credibility. Now that Hotair.com seems to be taking a similar editorial view it appears that the debate is not going to happen, or will have so few candidates there that it will be irrelevant. You brought it on yourselves guys.
UPDATE – MSNBC lefty talker admits he used hired actors coached by Congressional Democrats as callers.
His excuse is lame. When my radio show started we had nothing and I built it up with hard work and talent to beat the competition. I never used staged ringers as callers. A good host should be ready to go an entire show filled with great content and never have to take a call. The most obvious reason why is that at times technical difficulties will prevent you form taking calls. People do not listen to a show to hear callers, so callers are not that important. That is why I never took very many calls on my show.
Evanston, Ill. – More than 100 Northwestern students watched as a naked woman was penetrated by a sex toy wielded by her boyfriend during an after-class session of the school’s popular “Human Sexuality” class.
The demo, which was optional, was part of the popular class taught by Prof. John Michael Bailey, the Sun-Times is reporting. More than 600 students take the class, which the course description says “will treat human sexuality as a subject for scientific inquiry.”
The woman involved in the demonstration was not a student, according to the Daily Northwestern, NU’s student newspaper.
“Her boyfriend did the penetration on her,” said Ken Melvoin-Berg, who narrated what was happening for the class. He operates the “Weird Chicago Red Light District Sex Tour.”
In an email, Northwestern defended the class and its professor.
“Northwestern University faculty members engage in teaching and research on a wide variety of topics, some of them controversial and at the leading edge of their respective disciplines,” said spokesman Alan Cubbage. “The University supports the efforts of its faculty to further the advancement of knowledge.”
Watch what this student has to say. Where did he learn such anti-common sense Marxist drivel? How did he become, quite frankly, so dumb? I would bet $1000 that he was indoctrinated by unionized public school teachers and some Marxist professors. Some of you might not be aware of this, but at many universities, if you are not far left you will not get tenure and other academics will try and suppress you. There are thousands of examples of this and some of them are right here at IUSB and others are listed right here on this web site.
Parents, you need to watch this and you need to teach your children to resist Indoctrinate U.
Oh what ever you do don’t stop watching now, it gets even better:
Normally I do not like name-calling or mocking someone unless one has tried to use substance and genuine argument first. There are some cases where what is spoken by some far left academics is so painfully dumb and foolish in the worst extreme, that it does not merit serious refutation (although we are going to give you some). This is such a case.
Parents and student’s need to know that pin-heads like this guy are praised on campus. They are given access to your kids without any attempt to balance the conversation in almost all cases.
Allow me to introduce you to Colman McCarthy. The Washington Post describes him thusly:
Colman McCarthy, a former Post columnist, directs the Center for Teaching Peace in Washington and teaches courses on nonviolence at four area universities and two high schools.
Frightening.
Here is a sample of McCarthy’s work:
I sat down with Theodore Hesburgh, the priest who had retired two years earlier after serving 35 years as the university’s president. Graciously, he invited me to lunch at the campus inn. During our discussion, he took modest pride at having raised more than a billion dollars for Notre Dame, and expressed similar feelings about the university’s ROTC program. More than 700 student-cadets were in the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines. Few universities, public or private, had a larger percentage of students in uniform then. The school could have been renamed Fort Hesburgh.
When I suggested that Notre Dame’s hosting of ROTC was a large negative among the school’s many positives, Hesburgh disagreed. Notre Dame was a model of patriotism, he said, by training future officers who were churchgoers, who had taken courses in ethics, and who loved God and country. Notre Dame’s ROTC program was a way to “Christianize the military,” he stated firmly.
I asked if he actually believed there could be a Christian method of slaughtering people in combat, or a Christian way of firebombing cities, or a way to kill civilians in the name of Jesus. Did he think that if enough Notre Dame graduates became soldiers that the military would eventually embrace Christ’s teaching of loving one’s enemies?
Colman McCarthy obviously knows little about Christianity as well. There is such a thing as a just war doctrine. It is a neighborly thing to rescue people from a brutal dictator and if he had read his prophecy he would know that Jesus is returning with a sword and its no more Mr. Nice Savior:
“Do not think that I came to bring peace on the earth; I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I came to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and a man’s enemies will be the members of his household. He who loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me; and he who loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me. And he who does not take his cross and follow after Me is not worthy of Me. He who has found his life will lose it, and he who has lost his life for My sake will find it.” (Matthew 10:34-39 NASB)
And
American King James Version Then said he to them, But now, he that has a purse, let him take it, and likewise his money: and he that has no sword, let him sell his garment, and buy one.
Jesus does not advocate violence, but recognizes that at times it is necessary. Jesus said that if you live by the sword you die by the sword, but also said that it is better to be naked than unarmed, defenseless. Clearly Jesus is making the just use of violence clear, self-defense, just war, bearing arms as a deterrent are justified. Brutality makes right is not.
Let us face the facts, in many states trying to get rid of a bad teachers is as difficult as the appeals process for giving someone the death penalty. Many people on death row die of natural causes before their sentence is carried out.
In states like New York, the school districts have rubber rooms for teachers who are deemed unsafe to be with the kids. These teachers get paid up to 83,000 a year plus benefits to sit in a room and do nothing. Why? Because it is cheaper to just pay them than fire them.
But tenure is not the only problem. The unwillingness to deal with kids who are there to disrupt and not learn and the school boards which are often controlled by the teachers unions because they have so much money.
This results in inferior, politically correct text books and curriculums. As parent who has had children in private schools, home schooled, and eventually sent a child to public school, the difference in the text books are night and day. In eighth grade social studies home schoolers and many private schoolers are learning the Greek philosophers who played such a large roll in founding Western Civilization. These children do not learn just a few useless names and dates. They learned what those philosophers believed, read what they wrote and are taught why they believed that way. Ask any public high school graduate who Xenophanes was and you will get a blank stare. Ask any home schooled eight grader and you are likely to get a lecture.
Seizing on a national anxiety over poor student performance, many governors are taking aim at a bedrock tradition of public schools: teacher tenure.
The momentum began over a year ago with President Obama’s call to measure and reward effective teaching, a challenge he repeated in last week’s State of the Union address.
Now several Republican governors have concluded that removing ineffective teachers requires undoing the century-old protections of tenure.
Governors in Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Nevada and New Jersey have called for the elimination or dismantling of tenure. As state legislatures convene this winter, anti-tenure bills are being written in those states and others. Their chances of passing have risen because of crushing state budget deficits that have put teachers’ unions on the defensive.
“It’s practically impossible to remove an underperforming teacher under the system we have now,” said Gov. Brian Sandoval of Nevada, lamenting that his state has the lowest high school graduation rate in the nation.
Eliminating tenure, Mr. Sandoval said, would allow school districts to dismiss teachers based on competence, not seniority, in the event of layoffs.
Politics also play a role.
“These new Republican governors are all trying to outreform one another,” said Michael Petrilli, an education official under President George W. Bush.
In New York City, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has campaigned aggressively for the state to end “last in, first out” protections for teachers. Warning that thousands of young educators face layoffs, Mr. Bloomberg is demanding that Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo scrap the seniority law if the budget he will unveil Tuesday includes state cuts to education.
Teachers’ unions have responded to the assault on the status quo by arguing that all the ire directed at bad teachers distorts the issue.
“Why aren’t governors standing up and saying, ‘In our state, we’ll devise a system where nobody will ever get into a classroom who isn’t competent’?” said Dennis Van Roekel, president of the National Education Association. “Instead they are saying, ‘Let’s make it easy to fire teachers.’ That’s the wrong goal.”
Tenure laws were originally passed — New Jersey was first in 1909 — to protect teachers from being fired because of race, sex, political views or cronyism.
Public-school teachers typically earn tenure after two or three years on probation. Once they receive it, they have a right to due-process hearings before dismissal, which in many districts makes it expensive and time-consuming to fire teachers considered ineffective. Tenure also brings seniority protections in many districts.
In recent years, research on the importance of teacher quality has sparked a movement to evaluate teachers on how well students are learning — with implications that undermine tenure.
The movement gained momentum with the Obama administration’s Race to the Top grant contest last year. Eleven states enacted laws to link student achievement to teacher evaluations and, in some cases, to pay and job security, according to the American Enterprise Institute.
Now some politicians and policy makers have concluded that if teachers owe their jobs to professional performance, then tenure protections are obsolete.
The former school chancellor of Washington, D.C., Michelle Rhee, who campaigned against tenure as early as 2007, has made abolishing it a cornerstone of a new advocacy group, Students First, which has advised the governors of Florida, Nevada and New Jersey.
All are Republicans, but Ms. Rhee, a Democrat, insisted that the movement was bipartisan.
“There’s a willingness to confront these issues that has never before been in play,” she said, noting that some influential Democratic mayors, including Cory A. Booker in Newark and Antonio R. Villaraigosa in Los Angeles, have also called for making it easier to dismiss ineffective teachers.
In a speech in December, Mr. Villaraigosa — who once worked as a teachers union organizer — said, “Tenure and seniority must be reformed or we will be left with only one option: eliminating it entirely.”
Just as we have been demonstrating in our Academic Misconduct category, like many universities, most elite media news rooms are creatures of ideological group think. It is just as Juan Williams says, at NPR if you don’t tow the bosses political line you are out. Then they start to suggest that you need a shrink.
This post is a part of our new Academic Misconduct category. Global warming alarmists insist that there cannot be a conspiracy of academics to advocate or censor for other than scientific reasons. Well actually not only does this happen, but there are thousands of verifiable examples from FIRE, the ADF and the ACLU where academics and administrators actively conspire to violate academic freedom, punish dissent, punish solid science that they do not approve of, censor others etc.
This bogus study was peer reviewed and published in a prestigious publication, but so was the manipulated findings of the new disgraced ClimateGate scientists.
CNN (Yes we know its CNN but we double checked and this story is true):
(CNN) — A now-retracted British study that linked autism to childhood vaccines was an “elaborate fraud” that has done long-lasting damage to public health, a leading medical publication reported Wednesday.
An investigation published by the British medical journal BMJ concludes the study’s author, Dr. Andrew Wakefield, misrepresented or altered the medical histories of all 12 of the patients whose cases formed the basis of the 1998 study — and that there was “no doubt” Wakefield was responsible.
“It’s one thing to have a bad study, a study full of error, and for the authors then to admit that they made errors,” Fiona Godlee, BMJ’s editor-in-chief, told CNN. “But in this case, we have a very different picture of what seems to be a deliberate attempt to create an impression that there was a link by falsifying the data.”
Britain stripped Wakefield of his medical license in May. “Meanwhile, the damage to public health continues, fueled by unbalanced media reporting and an ineffective response from government, researchers, journals and the medical profession,” BMJ states in an editorial accompanying the work.
See our previous post where we dissected it HERE. The link also has a great video from our friend Lee Doren of How the World Works who also dissects the study.
While Doren and myself are well versed in economics, we are not famed PhD’s in the field so it is great to have a man of Dr. Lott’s stature to not only verify our critiques, but add more substance and detail to them in only the way he can.
I encourage all students and faculty to read this piece.
Does watching Fox News rot your brain? According to a report released last month by WorldPublicOpinion.org at the University of Maryland, “Misinformation and the 2010 Election,” the more people watch Fox News, the more they are “misinformed.”
The allegation rapidly became a favorite topic for leading mainstream news outlets including The New York Times, U.S. News and World Report, CBS News, Slate, The Atlantic. Even major newspapers in Canada and the U.K.covered the report. Of course, left-wing websites — the Talking Point Memo, Media Matters, and the Daily Kos — reveled in the findings.
The report asserted that Fox News viewers getting political survey questions wrong was not just the result of already wrongheaded Republicans watching Fox News: “The effect was also not simply a function of partisan bias, as people who voted Democratic and watched Fox News were also more likely to have such misinformation than those who did not watch it–though by a lesser margin than those who voted Republican.”
But the researchers themselves were clearly misinformed and frequently picked incorrect or left-wing biased answers as the “correct” ones, something the uncritical mainstream media apparently never examined. Take the first four questions of the eleven the report focused on.
Question # 1: “Is it your impression that most ECONOMISTS who have studied it estimate that the stimulus legislation caused job losses, saved or created a few jobs, or saved or created several million jobs?” (emphasis is in the original). The WorldPublicOpinion.org claims that the stimulus “saved or created several million jobs,” citing a report from the Democratically controlled Congressional Budget Office (CBO) that said the increase in jobs was at least 2 million. Any other answer give put the viewer as being “misinformed.”
To back up their claim that “most economists” agreed with this statement, they referenced a March 2010 Wall Street Journal survey: 38 of 54 forecasting economists thought that the stimulus helped. Nonetheless, the University of Maryland researchers — intentionally or unintentionally — exaggerated the claim: the average economist in the survey estimated that the stimulus reduced the unemployment rate in February from 10.4 to 9.7 percent, about one million jobs, not “several million jobs.”
In addition, they avoided acknowledging that there were other surveys where the majority of economists dramatically disagree. One such survey was by the National Association of Business Economics, with 50 of 68 economists concluding that the stimulus had no beneficial impact of the recovery.
Question # 2: “What effect do you think the health reform law will have on the federal budget deficit over the next ten years?” The “correct” answer was that Obamacare would reduce the deficit, and the report cites a March estimate by the CBO that the health care savings would be $124 billion. But this is an old, vastly optimistic left-wing prediction touted by the CBO to get Obamacare passed. Even the Obama administration now admits that their plan will add to the deficit. The CBO itself now acknowledges that they double-counted projected Medicare spending cuts. Correcting that error adds $89 billion to the health care costs over the decade. Another CBO error also underestimated discretionary spending in the new health care law by $60 billion. These errors by themselves, not even counting other problems, flips the math around and shows that Obamacare will increase the deficit.
Question #3: “Do you think that now the American economy is still getting worse or starting to recover?” This question, like the others in the survey, were asked from November 6th to 15th.
The “right” answer was supposed to be that the economy was “starting to recover.” But whether things were getting “worse” depends a lot on what numbers were considered, and the question failed to make it clear precisely what numbers were being refereed to.
In terms of GDP growth, the recession did end in June 2009. Yet, since June 2009, unemployment kept on rising from 9.5 to 9.8 percent. Four million more Americans became unemployed or simply gave up looking for work and left the labor force. Furthermore, with uncertainty over the future rising, temporary jobs have started replacing permanent jobs, with 561,000 permanent jobs disappearing since the recovery started.
Question #4: “Do you think that MOST SCIENTISTS believe that climate change is occurring, not occurring, or views are evenly divided?” (emphasis in the original). Of course, the answer WorldPublicOpinion.org wants was that most scientists believe that climate change is occurring. Again, the question is poorly worded. In particular, it fails to specify what time period is relevant. Have temperatures risen since the end of The Little Ice Age in 1850? Surely, no one disagrees with that. Have temperatures changed much since 1998? Few scientists would claim so. Judging from the WorldPublicOpinion.org’s report, the authors are clearly pushing the man-made global warming viewpoint. But on that score, there is little unanimity. For example, a 2010 survey of American weather forecasters found only 17 percent to believe in man-made global warming. And, as for scientists in general, 9,029 Ph.D.s signed a petition this year disputing man-made global warming claims.
Still other questions were fraught with problems. For instance, “Since January 2009 have your Federal income taxes gone down, stayed the same, or gone up?” That was not a smart formulation when the researchers intended an answer for overall tax rates rather than for each individual’s taxes. And then there are problems with their question about the TARP financial bailout, where the researchers ask about whether most Congressional Republicans supported it. But they can’t even add up the total votes in the House or Senate on the bill which shows that Republicans were literally split 50-50, while 75 percent of Democrats supported it. On their own, House Republicans would never have supported the bill.
The WorldPublicOpinion.org survey is a mess. At best, the survey shows that liberals who conducted the survey simply were not smart or careful enough. If any conclusion can be drawn, it is that those who watched Fox News almost every day had not fallen for left-wing myths to the same extent as other Americans.
With this post we are announcing a new category called Academic Misconduct. While this may seem redundant with our Campus Freedom, Indoctrination & Censorship category the new Academic Misconduct category will focus on instances where those in authority actively conspire to violate the rights of, or smear, or suppress a student, faculty member, or citizen.
This is NOT about conspiracy theories so lets make that clear at the get go. This category is about cases, for example, where multiple members of the faculty and/or administration actively work together to engage in the type of misconduct described above and got caught.
But why make an entire category about something that just happens from time to time? That is the problem, it just not just happen from time to time. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education has actively fought countless cases of just such behavior at universities both large and small scattered across the country. So has the Alliance Defense Fund, the Student Press Law Center, the ACLU and the Rutherford Institute. Even here at IUSB we have reported multiple cases of just such behavior and as I type this a faculty member is having his academic freedom violated in flagrant violation of the IU Academic Handbook. Which likely we will be reporting on soon.
Indeed several new cases a week almost very week become known. These are also just a tiny fraction of the violations because so many students either do not know their rights, do not know that thereis help out there, or a faculty member/student is successfully intimidated.
This new category has been long overdue, but the catalyst to create it came from a challenge from a global warming alarmist when he told me (in spite of the ClimateGate emails that demonstrate just such behavior as large as life) that he does not believe that academics would conspire in such a way. The truth is that not only does it happen, but it is a fairly common occurrence (and these are just the examples that get exposed). There so many fully documented examples of just such behavior that when given such an objection again I will merely need to point them to this category.
The video’s below are just a few examples. To examine our other categories please scroll down on the left hand bar of the page.
The IUPUI case below is one that I actively participated in defending the student. Part 1 of our investigation is HERE and part 2 is HERE. Commentary on this video is HERE.
“No responsible public official could possibly have gone overboard as they appeared to do at Voldosta State”
The IUSB Vision Weblog 
