Tag: bias on campus

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Forced Support for Partisan causes

The disreputable practice of forcing voters and taxpayers to pay for political and ideological causes they disagree with is finally under attack.

The most blatant part of this abuse ended in June, when the Department of  Justice (DOJ) ended  the Obama-era policy that diverted about $3 billion in third-party settlements to left-wing causes. A DOJ statement  noted that:

“When the federal government settles a case against a corporate wrongdoer, any settlement funds should go first to the victims and then to the American people— not to bankroll third-party special interest groups or the political friends of whoever is in power,” said Attorney General Jeff Sessions.  “Unfortunately, in recent years the Department of Justice has sometimes required or encouraged defendants to make these payments to third parties as a condition of settlement.  With this directive, we are ending this practice and ensuring that settlement funds are only used to compensate victims, redress harm, and punish and deter unlawful conduct.”

Under the last Administration, the Department repeatedly required settling parties to pay settlement funds to third party community organizations that were not directly involved in the litigation or harmed by the defendant’s conduct.  Pursuant to the Attorney General’s memorandum, this practice will immediately stop.”

A Competitive Enterprise Institute study by Hans Bader  noted that “By enabling government officials to reward and financially strengthen their political allies, diversions of settlement funds created a political imbalance that undermined democracy. State attorneys general have also diverted government settlement funds to political allies. ‘With control over big money flows,’ [the CATO Institute’s Walter] Olson noted in 2015, ‘smart AGs can populate a political landscape with grateful allies.’ The Obama administration similarly ‘came under justified criticism for using the mortgage settlement to funnel tens of millions of dollars’ to predominantly ‘left-leaning community-organizing groups.’

“As [CEI]  noted in 2011, the Obama administration sued many banks for discrimination (including banks accused of “racially disparate impact” for using commonplace, colorblind lending policies), and then diverted settlement funds to left-wing groups allied with it: Fearing bad publicity from being accused of ‘racism’, banks have paid out millions in settlements after being sued by the Justice Department, even though they would probably prevail before most judges if they aggressively fought such charges (although doing so would probably cost them millions in legal fees).  A Michigan judge called one proposed settlement ‘extortion.’ These settlements provide cash for ‘politically favored ‘community groups’ allied with the Obama Administration, and the [Wall Street] Journal’s Mary Kissel predicts that ‘many’ of the loans mandated by these settlements ‘will eventually go bad.’”

The forced contributions weren’t restricted to the federal government.  A salient example comes from Maine, as reported by Mainewire  in 2012. “Efficiency Maine, the quasi-governmental agency that pushes to increase the use of ‘alternative energy,’ has used taxpayer funds to buy advertising on Maine Insights, the ultra-liberal website…that regularly advocates for extreme liberal positions and causes …[the website]  also regularly features interviews and profiles of prominent Democrat leaders…[it] does not publish profiles of Republicans, but criticizes them regularly.

In just a few years, Kamagra became successful winning hearts of numerous users. viagra 25 mg slovak-republic.org Regular indulgence in physical activities, sports or doing exercises of generico viagra on line pelvic muscles in specific may also improve the condition of their penis. viagra without prescription uk A lot of companies are now producing the medicine. brand cialis price You can purchase your favorite flavor jelly so you can cheerfully appreciate your night with your accomplice. Current examples abound. An Independent Journal Review report earlier this month disclosed that “Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh [has] announced the city will be providing free buses to students who wish to attend the March For Our Lives [a gun control event] rally in Washington, D.C., that is scheduled to take place March 24. In addition to the buses, the city will provide T-shirts and lunches for the students.”

One prominent current arena in which taxpayer dollars are misused for partisan political purposes is in public-financed state universities.  A significant number of these institutions have a track record of both advocating for left-wing candidates and causes while harassing and censoring moderate and conservative students and faculty. This becomes particularly acute during presidential election years.

Peter Wood, in a 2012 Chronicle of Higher Education article, reported: “A senior [Ohio State] English professor invited his colleagues to open their classrooms…to organizers in the Obama campaign. They would first encourage students to register to vote and then, if the instructors were willing, encourage students to volunteer for the Obama campaign…My hunch that there is more to this is based on what happened in 2008, when the Obama campaign rather openly pitched the idea that colleges and universities should award academic credit to students who volunteered for the campaign. I blew the whistle on an instance of that at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, which abruptly canceled a campaign-for-credit offer by some academics at the college. But it turned out that the same thing was going on at other universities.”

Advocating for a particular leftist cause or candidate is only half the problem. The other part concerns the censorship of centrists and conservative students, who are frequently confined to small “free speech zones” while left-wing ideas are openly advocated within classrooms.

There is movement on this front, as well.  Andrew Blake reported in the March 6 Washington Times that “Florida lawmakers have passed a bill that eliminates “free speech zones” at public universities and allows schools to be sued for restricting campus protests, a practice predominately employed against conservative students.  The Florida Excellence in Higher Education Act of 2018 passed in the House and Senate by votes of 84-28 and 33-5, respectively, sending it to Governor Rick Scott’s desk where it awaits his approval… Last-minute efforts waged by Democrats in both the House and Senate on Monday failed to strip Mr. Rommel’s language from the bill.”

Not content with inappropriately using taxpayer dollars for partisan politics at home, Fox News reports that “Republican lawmakers in Washington started asking questions about whether U.S. tax dollars also were being used to fund Soros projects in the small, conservative-led country of Macedonia. Rep. Christopher Smith, R-N.J., led a group of House lawmakers in writing to Ambassador Jess Baily — an Obama appointee — demanding answers. Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, also expressed concerns about USAID money going to Soros’ Open Society Foundations as part of a broader concern that the U.S. Embassy has been taking sides in party politics.”

 

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Academic Bias Worsens Part 2

Writing in The College Fix, Neetu Chandak, a communications major at Cornell, reported that being an open conservative on college campuses will make life difficult for student. She described her personal experience: “Many found it acceptable to be hateful toward me because they perceived me as ‘hateful.’ The worst came after I appeared on Fox News in May to voice alarm over a new course at my Ivy League institution that deeply criticized Donald Trump while venerating Barack Obama…Being a conservative, or even being a moderate, is a very difficult lifestyle here.” Ms. Chandak was pressured into  stepping down as an RA after her superiors “bristled at my right-leaning politics and my insistence that RA meetings present students with both sides of any issue.”

CNS  provides a disturbing report from the University of Hawaii:

“’We need to think very, very clearly about who the enemy is. The enemy is the United States of America and everyone who supports it.’ That’s taught to University of Hawaii students by Professor Haunani-Kay Trask. Richard Falk, professor emeritus at Princeton University and the U.N. Human Rights Council’s Palestine monitor, believes stated that President George W. Bush ordered the destruction of the twin towers.’ … Then there’s Georgetown law professor Louis Michael Seidman, who explained our national problems by saying, ‘But almost no one blames the culprit: our insistence on obedience to the Constitution, with all its archaic, idiosyncratic and downright evil provisions.’”

The Daily Wire reports that  Karl Marx’s ‘Communist Manifesto’ has been found to be the most taught text by economists on college campuses…“’The Communist Manifesto’ was most frequently taught by economists, receiving a total count of 3189 and a ‘teaching score’ of 99.7. The overall data from all professors revealed that only ‘The Elements of Style,’ a common writing guide by William Strunk and ‘The Republic’ by Plato were more assigned than the Karl Marx classic. And if if that’s not frightening enough, per Market Watch, the Bible did not show up in the data at all but Adolf Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ received ‘a count of 697 and a score of 75.7’ and Vladimir Lenin’s ‘What Is To Be Done’ received a count of 361 and a teaching score of 45.9.”
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When U.S. history is taught, even on the lower school level, it is frequently from an extreme anti-American bias. The Federalist reported that in 2014, when award-winning history professor Larry Krieger reviewed Common Core’s AP American history curriculum, he was appalled.  “Krieger… conducted a meticulous dissection of the anti-American themes and anti-knowledge gaps in the extensive new curriculum framework. These include emphasizing exploitation, racial conflict, and economic determinism, and omitting the Pilgrims, all Revolutionary War battles, Alexis de Tocqueville, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and much more. Their analysis and Wood’s also make it quite clear that the new curriculum is nowhere near objective, or even even-handed, philosophically, and is, moreover, organizationally incoherent.”

If leftist views and free speech restrictions sound like something from Communist China, that may not be coincidental.

Politico  reports that “Last year, the University of North Carolina at Charlotte made an announcement…The university would soon open a branch of the Confucius Institute, the Chinese government-funded educational institutions that teach Chinese language, culture and history…But the Confucius Institutes’ goals are a little less wholesome and edifying than they sound—and this is by the Chinese government’s own account. A 2011 speech by a standing member of the Politburo in Beijing laid out the case: ‘The Confucius Institute is an appealing brand for expanding our culture abroad…It has made an important contribution toward improving our soft power…’ More than a decade after they were created, Confucius Institutes have sprouted up at more than 500 college campuses worldwide, with more than 100 of them in the United States…Overseen by a branch of the Chinese Ministry of Education known colloquially as Hanban, the institutes are part of a broader propaganda initiative that the Chinese government is pumping an estimated $10 billion into annually…”

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Academic Bias Worsens

Academia has, for many decades, been a bastion of leftist orthodoxy.  But the current extremity of its actions and beliefs have reached a level that should trouble the majority of Americans, and call into question the wisdom of funding, through taxes, tuition, grants or donations, of institutions that may be doing the nation far more harm than good.

Hillsdale College President Larry P. Arnn notes that in a survey of young Americans, “one in two ‘millennials’ say they would rather live under Socialism or Communism than a capitalist democracy. This follows trends from the 2016 elections, in which more millennials in the primaries voted for avowed Socialist Bernie Sanders than for Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump combined.”

The reasons for that preference become abundantly clear upon examining the educational experience they have been subjected to.

A survey of reported incidents and academic attitudes across the nation indicate that it’s not a liberal perspective that is purveyed, promulgated, and forced upon students, but something significantly more extreme, including attitudes that oppose the very founding principles of the United States.

Writing in Commentary,  Sohrab Ahmari  worries that , “the most  celebrated education-reform organization in the U.S.” has  “transformed itself into an arm of the progressive movement? Teach for America, or TFA, the national corps of recent graduates who commit two years to teaching in underserved classrooms across the country, was founded to help close the achievement gap between rich and poor students. But now it increasingly functions as a platform for radical identity politics and the anti-Trump “resistance…In remaking itself, TFA has subtly downgraded the principles that had won it allies across the spectrum…TFA’s message seems to be that until numerous other social ills are cured—until immigration is less restricted, policing becomes more gentle, and poverty is eliminated—an excellent education will elude the poor. That was the status-quo defeatism TFA originally set out to challenge…TFA’s leaders have now fully enlisted the organization in the culture war—to the detriment of its mission and the high-minded civic sensibility that used to animate its work.”

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Those lonely non-leftist professors face significant challenges.

An article in the leftist magazine Mother Jones by Chris Mooney notes that “sociologist Neil Gross of the University of British Columbia proves through extensive data analysis on the politics of professors that conservatives are right that academia leans to the left.”

Emma Green, writing in The Atlantic, notes: “The assumption that most college campuses lean left is so widespread in American culture that it has almost become a caricature: Studies about professors’ political beliefs and voting behavior suggest this assumption is at least somewhat correct…For the minority of professors who are cultural and political conservatives, what’s life actually like? Finding out wasn’t easy, in part because so many conservative professors are—as they put it—closeted. Some of the people they interviewed explicitly said they identify with the experience of gays and lesbians in having to hide who they are. One tenure-track sociology professor even asked to meet Shields and Dunn in a park a mile away from his university.”

Conservative students face significant discrimination on college campuses.  Intimidation in classrooms is just part of the problem.  Students who seek to express their views outside of those classrooms frequently find their voices silenced by massive restrictions on campus free speech.