New York Times Graham Spanier Whitewash

The New York Times Magazine carried a paen, July 16, to disgraced former Penn State President Graham Spanier, by Micahel Sokolove.

Sokolove practically acquits him of the charges filed against him stemming from his handling of reports that one-time football coach and retired faculty member Jerry Sandusky was abusing children.

The charges were filed on Nov. 1, 2012 and are one count perjury,  two counts of endangering the welfare of children, two counts of criminal conspiracy, which are all third-degree felonies  punishable by up to seven years in prison and $15,000 fines; one count of obstructing the administration of law or other governmental function and one count of criminal conspiracy, both second-degree misdemeanors punishable by up to two years in prison and $5,000 fines; and one count of failure to report suspected child abuse, a summary offense punishable by up to 90 days in prison and a $300 fine.

“The case against Spanier is at best problematic, at worst fatally flawed,” Sokolove says.

Sokolove writes about how the 66-year-old Spanier’s father flew into a rage at everything and beat him and made him eat everything on his plate and sometimes sent him to bed without dinner.

Sokolove writes that Spanier grew Penn State “from a remote outpost of American higher education into a top-tier public university” and had some of “world’s most decorated architects” design the new buildings on his watch.

He writes that Sokolove “paid his own way through Iowa State.”

Regarding the e-mails that led to the charges, Sokolove says that Spanier says he has no memory of writing it but that using the word “vulnerable” as in “The only downside for us is if the message isn’t ‘heard’ and acted upon, and we then become vulnerable for not having reported it. But that can be assessed down the road” was a bad idea.

And he blames the late Joe Paterno, anyway.

Maybe Sokolove’s biggest journalistic failure was his omission of any reference to the John T. Neisworth matter in which Spanier was told by a young man in 2002 about how Neisworth, a respected Penn State special education professor who literally wrote the book on autism, molested him. Neisworth would make a six-figure cash settlement to the man.

The contact was made with Spanier two weeks after Spanier had been told about Sandusky.

The New York Times whitewash is almost enough to make one take David Icke seriously.

 

New York Times Graham Spanier Whitewash

New York Times Graham Spanier Whitewash

 

 

Conservatives Smarter Than Liberals?

Why back in October 2009,  social scientist Jason Richwine asked “are liberals smarter than conservatives” in an article in The American.

That got us thinking and inspired this response.

Conservatives Smarter Than Liberals?

 

 

Conservatives Smarter Than Liberals?

Bill Tyson Profile

Bill Tyson

Bill Tyson Profile

Bill Tyson, who is the director of marketing and communications for Penn State University, Brandywine Campus is the subject of the July 29 Delaware County News Network’s Profile of the Week by the always interesting Susan L. Serbin.

You can read it here.

 

 

Ivy League Zombies

Ivy League Zombies

Ivy League Zombies — William Deresiewicz has a fascinating article at NewRepublic.com regarding the type of people our elite education system our producing.

“Our system of elite education manufactures young people who are smart and talented and driven, yes, but also anxious, timid, and lost, with little intellectual curiosity and a stunted sense of purpose: trapped in a bubble of privilege, heading meekly in the same direction, great at what they’re doing but with no idea why they’re doing it,” he says.

By elite education system, he means places like the Ivies and Stanford along with what feeds them which he describes as: the private and affluent public high schools; the ever-growing industry of tutors and consultants and test-prep courses; the admissions process itself, squatting like a dragon at the entrance to adulthood; the brand-name graduate schools and employment opportunities that come after the B.A.; and the parents and communities.

He mentions a young woman who wrote to him about her boyfriend at Yale who she describes as someone who spent his time reading and writing short stores before attending college. She told him that after three years he is painfully insecure, worrying about things my public-educated friends don’t give a second thought to, like the stigma of eating lunch alone and whether he’s “networking” enough. No one but me knows he fakes being well-read by thumbing through the first and last chapters of any book he hears about and obsessively devouring reviews in lieu of the real thing.

Deresiewicz said that obscure religious colleges “that no one has ever heard of on the coasts” often provide a better education.

On a quasi-related note Professor James Tour of Rice University, one of the 10 most cited chemists in the world and a pioneer in nanotechnology,  described his experiences after expressing skepticism about Darwinian evolution:

Let me tell you what goes on in the back rooms of science – with National Academy members, with Nobel Prize winners. I have sat with them, and when I get them alone, not in public – because it’s a scary thing, if you say what I just said – I say, “Do you understand all of this, where all of this came from, and how this happens?” Every time that I have sat with people who are synthetic chemists, who understand this, they go “Uh-uh. Nope.” These people are just so far off, on how to believe this stuff came together. I’ve sat with National Academy members, with Nobel Prize winners. Sometimes I will say, “Do you understand this?”And if they’re afraid to say “Yes,” they say nothing. They just stare at me, because they can’t sincerely do it.

I was once brought in by the Dean of the Department, many years ago, and he was a chemist. He was kind of concerned about some things. I said, “Let me ask you something. You’re a chemist. Do you understand this? How do you get DNA without a cell membrane? And how do you get a cell membrane without a DNA? And how does all this come together from this piece of jelly?” We have no idea, we have no idea. I said, “Isn’t it interesting that you, the Dean of science, and I, the chemistry professor, can talk about this quietly in your office, but we can’t go out there and talk about this?”

If those who train our future leaders our cowards and our future leaders are trained to be cowards, this country is in trouble.

Ivy League Zombies

Starving Student Mythical Creature In US

College students are not starving reports eMarketer.com. In fact, they are doing pretty well.

July 2014 polling by Shweiki Media and Study Breaks found that 99 percent of US college students spent money at restaurants at least once per month; 87 percent spent money on travel at least once a month and 70 percent spent money at a bar on a monthly basis.

Who’s paying for it?

About 45 percent of college students said it was their parents footing the bill, 40 percent said they got spending money by working and 15 percent said they relied on loans.

 

Starving Student Mythical Creature In US

Starving Student Mythical Creature In US

Pa College Kids Get Tuition Hike

Tuition will rise 3 percent next year at Pennsylvania’s 14 state-owned universities.

The Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education (PASSHE) Board, today, July 8,  hiked tuition   $99 a semester to $3,410.

Also, the board extended the contracts of 10 university presidents for three more years.

The presidents at California, Cheyney, Kutztown and Shippensburg universities  are serving on an interim basis.

The presidents are just about all pulling in over $200,000 per year not including benefits, at least as of February according to LancasterOnline.com.

PASSHE  does not govern the four “state-related” schools — Penn State, Pitt, Temple and Lincoln — which are run by the Commonwealth System of Higher Education and have different tuition and pay scales.

Pa College Kids Get Tuition Hike

Pa College Kids Get Tuition Hike Of $198 per year

 

 

Academia Faces Hard Times In Obama Era

Ryan Anderson, a graduate student in anthropology, has written a piece bemoaning the fate that looms before him.

“We spent about a decade learning how to become academics, only to realize the dream has already passed,” he said. “We’re all trained for positions that don’t exist. We’ve been prepared for a way of life that is rapidly vanishing before our eyes (the secure, tenured academic).”

Um, did you vote for Obama, Ryan? Most academic types did.

Imagine you’re a small business owner in Seattle who invested his life in his little restaurant and  just got hit with a $15 minimum wage.

Imagine you own a medium size business and are now going be stuck with carrying your employees’ health care?

They are pretty much feeling like you are right now. Mull that around.

By the way, what exactly do you think was the ultimate source of the funding for those anthropology jobs and such? You know the kind of thing that gets kicked down the priority list when dealing with a $17.5 trillion debt?

Academia Faces Hard Times In Obama Era

Academia Faces Hard Times In Obama Era

Swarthmore College Intolerance Blasted

Peter Berkowitz, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, has blasted in an open letter the frightening closed-minded and intolerant group-think at his alma mater, Swarthmore College in Delaware County, Pa.

It is something that needs to be said as the meaning of the word “liberal” has been turned on its head and “progressivism” has been twisted to become synonymous with “fascism“.

Here is the letter:

Dear Members of the Board:

I read with a mixture of anticipation and trepidation the unexpected announcement earlier this month that President Rebecca Chopp is departing Swarthmore to become the chancellor of the University of Denver.

Anticipation because as a grateful graduate of Swarthmore, I can’t help but view the hiring of a new president as an opportunity for the school to rededicate itself to the true mission of liberal education, which is to prepare students for the rights and responsibilities of freedom by furnishing and refining their minds. Trepidation because I fear that Swarthmore’s next president will lead the college further down the path of politicized research and curriculum that has become the hallmark of our finest colleges and universities.

It is your responsibility to form a search committee and oversee the process by which the college chooses its next president. You would not be serving on the board if you were not men and woman of substantial accomplishments and if you did not love Swarthmore. But I worry that your fond memories of the liberal education you received will thwart your understanding of what liberal education has become. And I fear that you will give inordinate weight to the assessment of today’s professors and administrators in judging Swarthmore’s current condition.

Today’s educators cannot be counted on to provide an accurate evaluation. In February, I saw a dramatic illustration of their obliviousness while attending a Swarthmore symposium on the future of the liberal arts. It was as if I had entered a time warp.

In several rounds of panels, Swarthmore graduates who had gone on to positions of distinction in university teaching and administration spoke about the kind of liberal education that I cherished as an undergraduate. It encouraged questions, spurred students to see issues from a variety of angles, and fostered the mutually respectful exchange of opinions. It was an education for which I will be forever grateful.

The panelists, however, spoke as if this were the sort of education being delivered to today’s undergraduates. That, in large measure, is wishful thinking.

Much ink has been spilt over the last 25 years examining the crisis of liberal education: the hollowing out of the curriculum, the aggressive transmission of a uniformly progressive ideology, the promulgation of speech codes, and the violation of due process in campus disciplinary procedures. Although Swarthmore is not immune from these pathologies, not one speaker at the symposium mentioned them.

In January, a former Swarthmore student who had been expelled in 2013 for alleged sexual misconduct filed a lawsuit against the college in federal court. The student asserts that in administering its disciplinary procedure Swarthmore “failed to follow its own policies and procedural safeguards” in myriad ways and violated his “basic due process and equal protection rights.” The court will adjudicate the claims, but the student’s allegation that the college effectively treated him as guilty until proven innocent is all too plausible.

The contempt for due process of which Swarthmore is accused flows directly from entrenched theories about the pervasiveness of male oppression and female victimization. This dubious conventional wisdom manages to be insulting to both men and women. Nonetheless, it has become embedded in the enormous bureaucracies built in the last few decades on campuses and inside the U.S. Department of Education to deal with women’s issues.

In a recurring pattern during this time, elite colleges and universities convene kangaroo courts to adjudicate accusations of grave crimes that should properly be left to the police and government prosecutors. Although they cannot sentence students to jail time — the cavalier manner in which these proceedings treat evidence would never pass muster in the criminal justice system — the campus bureaucracies nevertheless impose penalties capable of upending students’ lives. The Swarthmore student’s counterpunch — his federal lawsuit — is one of a wave of legal action brought in the last year or so by aggrieved male undergraduates against their schools for allegedly depriving them of fair and impartial procedures.

Liberty of thought and discussion, a close cousin of due process, has also come under a cloud of suspicion at Swarthmore. The college’s Aydelotte Foundation for the Advancement of the Liberal Arts hosted a conversation in February between Princeton professors Robert George (Swarthmore ’77), a renowned conservative public intellectual, and Cornel West, an eminent progressive public intellectual. The laudable purpose in inviting the two educators, who have co-taught seminars at Princeton to great acclaim, was to improve Swarthmore students’ understanding of the possibility and the importance of the civil, and even friendly, exchange of opinions across partisan lines.

A significant number of students opposed the conversation because of Professor George’s public criticism of same-sex marriage. One undergraduate captured the crux of the objection to bringing George to campus. “What really bothered me,” she said, “is the whole idea that at a liberal arts college we need to be hearing a diversity of opinion.”

Where do students learn such intolerance? The week after the event, Swarthmore professor K. David Harrison penned an op-ed in The Phoenix, the school’s student newspaper, endorsing the view expressed by a student the day before that George’s opinions constituted hate speech. Harrison was also moved to “strenuously object that my home institution, Swarthmore College (and the Institute for the Liberal Arts) lent its good name, spent money, and gave of its facilities, resources and credibility” to a conversation that included George.” On an optimistic note, Harrison added that the campus-wide reaction to the conversation provided an occasion for pride because “an upsurge of dissent by students, faculty and staff now reframes the event as being about condoning bigotry versus championing social justice.”

Such attitudes, I shouldn’t have to mention, reflect a profound failure of the liberal imagination. Professor Harrison cannot conceive of the possibility of learning from George — who supports freedom and equality for gays but argues that the traditional and inherent definition of marriage cannot coherently be extended to include same-sex couples — or of George learning from him, or more generally of living together in a community of inquiry where members are enriched by exposure to conflicting perspectives on the great moral and political questions of the day.

Few and far between are the instances at Swarthmore in which faculty or administration forthrightly defend the principles of freedom, even when the violation of those principles occurs right in front of their eyes. In May 2013, members of Mountain Justice, an environmentalist club at the school, took over an open Board of Managers meeting intended for the airing of opinions about whether Swarthmore’s $1.5 billion endowment should divest from companies that produce or transport fossil fuels.

As more than 100 students disrupted the meeting, seized control, and shouted down others, the moderator as well as President Chopp and Dean of Students Elizabeth Braun stood silently by. However, according to Swarthmore student Danielle Charette (writing in the Wall Street Journal), the college administration did promptly acquiesce to the protesters’ call for “teach-ins” at which the activists presented demands for requiring for graduation “courses in ethnic studies and gender and sexuality” and for removing the confidentiality that surrounds sexual assault cases, by which they almost certainly meant confidentiality protections for the accused.

The repudiation of due process, the determination to recast opposing opinions and those who hold them as evil, the refusal to vigorously defend the free exchange of ideas — these are signs that one of the nation’s great liberal arts colleges, like many of its peers, has lost sight of the aim and operation of liberal education.

I urge the board to appoint to the search committee for Swarthmore’s next president men and women who grasp that liberal education can only fulfill its vital political mission in a free society by resisting the politicization of scholarship and learning.

Sincerely,

Peter Berkowitz ’81

Swarthmore College Intolerance Blasted
Swarthmore College Intolerance Blasted

 

Hat tips RealClearPolitics.com and PJMedia.com

Democrats Dumber

Democrats DumberDemocrats Dumber

 

A paper by James Lindgren of Northwestern University School of Law revels that more than a third of Republicans don’t know that the Earth orbits the Sun in one year.

That’s right, only 61.1 percent of the GOP know the fact. Why to go public schools.

But that’s not the really scary part. The really scary part is that less than half of Democrats know this. Yes, less than half — 48.4 percent.

And they vote for president which explains why “You Can Keep Your Doctor” got elected twice

Conservative Republican had the highest scientific literacy at 67.3 percent which explains why they vote the way the do.

The lowest? Conservative Democrats at 27.1 percent. That certainly explains why they vote like they do.

Liberal Republican came in at 46. 4 percent and moderate Republican at 44.1 percent. That pretty much explains their voting habits as well.

By the way, conservative Republicans were also least likely to believe that astrology is scientific.

 

 

Liberals Scrutiny Exempt

Courtesy of National Review

By Victor Davis Hanson

It doesn’t matter if you belong to the 0.1 percent as long as you say the right things.

The qualifications of a Tommy “Dude” Vietor or Ben Rhodes that placed them in the Situation Room during Obama-administration crises were not years of distinguished public service, military service, prior elected office, a string of impressive publications, an academic career, previous diplomatic postings, or any of the usual criteria that have placed others at the nerve center of America in times of crisis. Their trajectory was based on yeoman partisan PR work, and largely on being young, hip, and well connected politically. I don’t think either of these operatives has a particular worldview or competency that would promote the interests of the United States. But they do talk well, know the right people, and are hip. Again, they have no real expertise or even ideology other than that.

Al Gore is said to be our leading green activist, and the Steyer brothers the most preeminent green political donors. But do they really believe in reducing carbon emissions to cool down the planet?

Not really. The latter made much of their fortune in the sort of high-stakes speculations that the Left supposedly despises. Many of their financial payoffs derived from promoting coal burning abroad, of the sort most liberals wish to stop.

As for Gore, he cannot really believe in big green government or he would not have tried to beat the capital-gains tax hike when he peddled his failed cable network to a petrodollar-rich Al Jazeera, whose cash comes from the very sources of energy that Gore claims he hates. Do you make millions, and then in eleventh-century fashion repent so that you can enjoy them all the more? Gore certainly in the past has not lived modestly; the carbon footprint of keeping Al Gore going — housing, travel, and tastes — is quite stunning. Both the Steyers and the Gores of our human comedy know that it is lucrative business to appear green, and that by doing so one can keep one’s personal life largely exempt from scrutiny in general and charges of hypocrisy in particular. For them, 21st-century liberalism is a useful badge, a fashion not unlike wearing good shades or having the right sort of cell phone.

The 1 percent fetish is also not really ideological. Elizabeth Warren, one of its greatest supporters, is not just a 1 percent but a 0.1 percent grandee. Her house, habits, household income, past corporate consulting, and net worth all reflect a desire for profits and refinement not accorded to most Americans. Her life is about as much a part of the 99.9 percent as she is Native American. She is not worried about welders getting some work on the Keystone Pipeline or farmworkers put out of their jobs in Mendota, Calif., over a baitfish.

Ditto Paul Krugman. He is eloquent about inequality and about the sort of insider privileges that give so much to so few. But nothing about his own circumstances suggests that he lives the life he professes, as opposed to professing abstractions that psychologically make the quite different life he lives more palatable. Certainly, Krugman’s liberalism means that few care that he once worked in the Reagan administration, that he was a paid adviser to Enron, or that he has just taken a part-time $225,000 post-retirement job at City University of New York — one that, at least initially, requires no teaching. Given what CUNY is said to pay its exploited part-timers, the university could have offered 75 courses with the salary it will be paying Krugman. Or, put another way, Professor Krugman will make the same as do 75 part-timers who each teach one class — and thus one class more than Krugman will teach. Bravo for Professor Krugman to have marketed himself so well and to have earned all the compensation that the market will bear — and too bad for the part-timers, who don’t understand market-based economics, where there are winners like Krugman and losers like themselves who can’t earn commensurate hanging-around money. One last question: Is part-time teacher Krugman going to study the inequality inherent in the modern university’s exploitation of part-time teachers?

Such hypocrisy taxes Krugman’s supporters to find ingenious arguments for the idea that noble ends justify almost any means, and so they argue that Krugman’s advocacy for research into income equality trumps this minor embarrassment, or that he can be very rich and still fight the 1 percent, or that the salary in the metrosexual world of the Boston–New York–Washington corridor is not all that high. Of course, the CUNY billet is likely just a small stream that feeds into Krugman’s other sizable income rivers. Indeed, he more likely belongs not just to the 1 percent, but to the same 0.1 percent as Senator Warren, which he so castigates. When President Obama exclaimed that at some point one needs to know when one has made enough money, Krugman would have agreed. He could now put that agreement into action by donating his salary to double the meager wages of 75 part-timers, who, unlike himself, are contracted professors who really do teach and are not “generously” compensated.

Does the NAACP stand as our watchdog over racism? In theory, yes; in fact, not so much. The L.A. branch was quite content to overlook Donald Sterling’s sterling racialism, given his donations. Sterling apparently thought that supporting the local NAACP either was not antithetical to his racist sloppy talk and rental practices, or was a wise investment in progressive insurance.

Al Sharpton receiving a “person of the year” award from the same branch of the NAACP is no less absurd than Donald Sterling’s “lifetime-achievement award” — given that Sharpton is on record as an anti-Semite, homophobe, inciter of riot, former FBI informant, tax delinquent, and convicted defamer of a district attorney. But the NAACP brand nowadays functions much like our green culture, as a sort of way to display correct coolness. It surely would not go after Joe Biden, Harry Reid, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonya Sotomayor — or Barack Obama — for either using racialist speech or denigrating others on the basis of race or tribe. Such a fact is widely accepted because it is just as widely assumed that the NAACP has become something fossilized, like Betamax in its waning days, as it existed for a bit longer because it had once thrived.

Too many modern liberal fetishes are predicated on the medieval notion of exemption, and should not be taken as anything much other than useful pretensions or smart career moves — something like joining the Masonic lodge in the 1920s in small-town America. Charter schools are bad, and troubled public schools are noble, but the coastal elites, whether at Sidwell Friends or the Menlo School, assume that they should not sacrifice their children on the altar of their own ideology.

Diversions of Central Valley canal water from agriculture to fish are good, but diversions of Hetch Hetchy canal water from San Francisco to fish are bad. Dreaming about salmon jumping in a hot Central Valley river is a lot easier than bathing with recycled grey water three times a week.

Concern for the Sierra toad and frog should stop logging-road and mountain development, but incinerating fauna with solar mirrors or grinding up eagles and hawks in wind turbines is the necessary price of green membership.

The Koch brothers have allegedly polluted politics with their ill-gotten cash; the Steyer brothers have not with their coal money. The revolving door is what right-wing operators do, not what a Tommy Vietor or Peter Orszag does. Affirmative action is necessary to stop “old boy” hiring and power wielding, but the sort of incestuous D.C. relationships that the Carneys or the Rhodes brothers have (Jay Carney’s wife, Claire Shipman, is a senior correspondent for ABC News; Ben Rhodes’s brother, David, is the president of CBS News) are not what we are talking about.

The issues per se are not so important. No prominent progressive really believes that his children belong in a public school with the “other.” He does not wish to live in an integrated neighborhood in order to promote his notion of high-density, non-suburban racial assimilation. A Che poster does not mean you want to live somewhere like Venezuela and wait in line for toilet paper.

The liberal is not immune from the material allurements of the 1 percent. Whizzing off on a private jet or climbing into a huge black ten-mile-a-gallon SUV limo is no problem. You do not necessarily denounce all racist stereotyping, given that sometimes attacking friendly bigots could be a headache. Taking the Google bus with like kind instead of the messy public bus or the uncertainties of the commuter train does not mean you are against mass transit for “them.” You surely don’t want the Coastal Commission enforcing beach-access rights for hoi polloi when who knows how many of the 99 percent wish to walk right by your deck in Malibu. It would be like ruining your beach view with a wind farm.

Liberalism offers a wise investment for a politician, a celebrity, an academic, or a journalist, by letting him take out inexpensive insurance against a politically incorrect slip of the tongue. Donald Sterling almost achieved exemption by his donations to Democratic candidates and the NAACP and his trial-lawyer billions; he lost it by keeping his ossified Republican registration while being an old, sick white guy who said the sort of reprehensible racist things that one hears sometimes in bits and pieces from some NBA players.

So, in medieval fashion, liberalism serves as a powerful psychological crutch: You can be noble in the abstract to assuage worries of not being so at all in the concrete. It adds a hip flourish to the otherwise mundane pursuit of power, lucre, and influence that plays out on the golf course, at the Malibu party, in front-row seats at NBA games, or in the tony Martha’s Vineyard summer home. About three decades ago, sipping a fine wine at a Napa bed and breakfast, or getting the right Italian-granite and teak flooring, became a force multiplier of being loudly liberal.

If a liberal has a really nice Chevy Chase estate or Upper West Side brownstone or Tahoe summer home, it is important to sound all the more liberal. Or maybe it is just the opposite: You cannot sound credibly liberal unless you first have the correct liberal address and square footage. The joke is on us. Having lots of stuff and lots of money, while deriding the system that provides it, is perverse, but perverse in a postmodern sense: You fools love the free market, where you didn’t do too well; we whose parents or selves did very well in it don’t like it all that much. How postmodern — like guffawing that lots of smoke came out of that Gulfstream ride, or lecturing about inequality from Rancho Mirage or the back nine at Augusta.

We are told that the Kennedys, the Pelosis, the Kerrys, and others like them are noble because they vote against their class interests. But they really do not; they vote for them. Liberalism is now the domain of the elite, and antithetical to the aspirations of the upper middle class that lacks the capital and tastes of the 0.1 percent. The higher the taxes, the more numerous the regulations, the greater the redistribution, so all the more the elite liberal distances himself from those less cool who breathe down his neck, and the less guilty he feels about the growing divide between him and the poor he worries about, but never worries about enough to associate with.

Liberalism professes a leftwing ideology, but these days it has absolutely no effect on the lives of those who most vehemently embrace it. In other words, being liberal is professionally useful and psychologically better than Xanax, but we need not assume any more that it is a serious belief.

NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author, most recently, of The Savior Generals.

 

 

Liberals Scrutiny Exempt

 

Liberals Scrutiny Exempt