GOP takes on 'leftist' education - CO Recently Separated Gov. & Horowitz

[otohara]

want's to regulate CO colleges, so that more "conservatives" work at the schools. Living in Denver isn't protecting me from the onslaught of friendly facisim any longer. Help!!!

GOP takes on 'leftist' education
By Peggy Lowe, Rocky Mountain News
September 6, 2003

Top Republican legislators are working on a plan that would require Colorado colleges and universities to seek more conservatives in faculty hiring, more classics in the curriculum and more "intellectual pluralism" among campus speakers.

Next year, the GOP leadership hopes to implement the "Academic Bill of Rights," which sets out "to secure the intellectual independence of faculty and students and to protect the principle of intellectual diversity."

In hatching the idea, Gov. Bill Owens and Republican legislators quietly met in June with David Horowitz, a controversial and outspoken Los Angeles conservative who is leading the national effort with his group called Students for Academic Freedom.

"Universities should not be indoctrination centers for the political left," Horowitz wrote in a letter to supporters.

http://insidedenver.com/drmn/state/article/0,1299,DRMN_21_2238507,00.html

[Occulus]

1. seems to me

they're all too willing to make those places indoctrination centers for the right. Pot, meet kettle? Think so.....

[poskonig]

2. ideological tests for staff?

This is complete bs.

Economics professors tend to be libertarian, sociologists tend to be liberal, the Straussians have the PolSci departments, blah blah blah. So what? It goes with the turf.

In addition, having political tests in areas like physics or mathematics is a complete joke.

[Monte Carlo]

4. Absolutely; I would love to see Horowitz try to regulate the hard sciences

... like math, physics, chemistry, engineering, etc. I'd like to see how long those people would tolerate his big nose in their work.

[DBoon]

13. We'd have "Conservative Science"

Similar to past regimes that have tried to make political loyalty a test for academic positions, and in more extreme cases eliminated whole scientific doctrines because they were politically unacceptible (e.g., Nazis got rid of "Jewish" physics, etc.)

That a state governor is listening to a nut case ex-Stalinist like Horowitz should be all over the place.

The one thing consistent about these ex-Stalinists is their contempt for "bourgeois democracy". I think Orwell made this observation.

[Monte Carlo]

3. Research before conclusions, Mr. Horowitz...

... this is the defining trait of good academia. We would be foolish to reverse the rule just because you don't like their answers.

David Horowitz is a child. He has the intellectual maturity of a grade-schooler. This measure will never pass - any school that would institute such policies would have it's professors slaughtered in the research journals in which they'd have to publish their papers, stigmatizing the university. East and West coast schools don't tolerate such bullshit.

[LittleApple81]

5. You are not supposed to hire faculty based on their political/religious

beliefs!
One of the reasons why you have more liberals in the faculty at non-religious, or non-special-interest sponsored institutions, is because many of the people attracted to academia (not all, mind you) are thinking, caring humans, usually concerned about human rights and the advancement of scientifically based knowledge.
Many of them are less influenced by propaganda and fundamentalist believes because they read and do research.

[alphafemale]

6. Point the freeps in the direction of BJU and Liberty University...

if they need to be kept safe from learning 'how" to think instead of being told "what" to think.

There are plenty of brainwashing centers where they can get a degree.

Why must they contaminate everything?

:grr:

And OH the irony...wouldn't this be a..."Quota system?"

Phuckers! :mad:

[asjr]

12. education

Please correct me if I am wrong, but did'nt Kenneth Starr's daughter go to Libery Univ.? I thought I read it somewhere or heard it on the boob tube.

[durutti]

28. While we're at it...

Let's hire some more liberals and leftists in economics. The right would scream...

In my experience, the only subject in which liberals and leftists are overwhelmingly predominant is sociology -- and that's just because the field of sociology itself relies on some pretty liberal assumptions.

[hedda_foil]

7. "More classics in the curriculum" .....

Sounds innocent but it's a dead giveaway to their intention to indoctrinate the Straussian worldview (neocon interpretation of the Greek classics)into college kids.

[gratuitous]

8. Nothing to worry about here

Money-grubbing greedy conservatives wouldn't dream of working for a college professor's salary. Not when they can get six-figure salaries for bloviating about nothing on national TV.

[Mikimouse]

10. Kudos on your post

I love working in the field. After all, where else could one apply 20+ years of one's life to earning an advanced degree, only to receive minimum wage (well, not really, but the point is made). You aer absolutely correct in stating that the RW types would never work for academic salaries, however, they would work for the types of salaries in administration (the numbers of whom increase exponentially, while faculty increase arithmatically). Remember also, that in the 'power tree' that is academia, faculty are at the bottom, about a step and a half above the undergraduate students.:hi:

[LittleApple81]

11. Oh, so depressingly true... n/t

[DBoon]

14. Being a prof would be a part-time job for them

They'd make their money on the side bloviating. The "Professor" stuff would be purely for the sake of the title (seeming to legitimize their opinionating).

This is consistent with the approach of privitizing other public resources. Take the credibility of academia (built by centuries of rigourous methodology and impartial research) and make it a brand name to exploit for profit.

[otohara]

9. Owens Doesn't Like Affirmative Action Either - Urging End to AA

Owens, won by huge numbers in 02, which means many a democrats voted for this jerk.

NAACP blasts Owens
Affirmative action at colleges not a 'quota issue,' group says

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Wednesday became the latest group to criticize Gov. Bill Owens for urging an end to affirmative action programs for enrollment in Colorado higher education.

"The governor either has failed to realize that this is not and has not ever been a quota issue or clearly has no desire to address the long-standing issues that have kept minorities out of state colleges and universities," said NAACP leader Bea Madison.


"This is an issue of under-representation of African Americans and other minorities in post-secondary institutions due to past and present practices of discrimination."

Madison, president of the Colorado, Montana and Wyoming NAACP state conference, called Owens' comments disappointing.

http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/state/article/0,1299,DRMN_21_2098577,00.html

[F.Gordon]

15. They control everything else, why not........

..the schools?? It's interesting to look at the "data" they use for pointing out how "leftists" control our Schools.

Data:

Total Schools Surveyed: 32
Total Democrats: 1397
Total Republicans: 134
Total Unaffiliated: 1891
Total TM : 790
Total Miscellaneous: 43


http://www.studentsforacademicfreedom.org/articles/lackdiversity.htm

They seem to have left out that annoying "unaffiliated" portion. Only compared "democrats" and "republicans". What does it say when only 3% of the faculty surveyed are republicans? And because 33% are Democrats that means the "leftists" are taking over?? WTF!!??

It blows me away that Gov "Family Values" Owens is so concerned with this crap. When did Colorado become a "proving ground" for every right wing program?

[otohara]

17. My Colorado

I remember when we voted not to have the Olympics here for enviormental reasons. Democrats voting for Bill Owens??? WTF is up with that?

[F.Gordon]

18. I'm not sure.......

Democrats voting for Bill Owens??? WTF is up with that?

He was my neighbor for 4 years. Think his "estranged" wife is still living there. We got ran out by the stepford wifes because we didn't have any children. Seriously! My wife use to joke that they would break in our house and inseminate her. I was working in the yard one day and a neighbor girl came over and started talking with me. Her father yelled at her to "get away from him....get over here!!" They all knew we were Democrats. I guess if you are a Democrat and don't have children that means you are a pedophile??!!

Democrats voting for Owens? Not THIS Democrat! This sure aint the same state I moved to in the early 70's.

[otohara]

22. He Won By Such A Wide Margin

What other reason would there be, besides Dems voting for the guy?

[Touchdown]

27. Maybe because the Democratic Party

gave up on Colorado, and gave no money, support, or political help to Rollie Heath in 2002. Heath had no TV commercials, and his war chest was a fraction of Owens', since Owens is in Bush's back pocket (they're both Texas oil men, Owens only pretends to be from Colorado Springs, which is theocratic enough!).

So... NOW the Repugs want Affirmative Action for political ideology. Hypocrites. :eyes:
Oh' and wanting to tie their "proposal" to state school funding is real cute as well....sounds like...what's that? Quotas??? Yeah they say "Oh' we don't want that...or, I didn't engage in any talk about THAT" but the seeds have been planted, and that's all that matters, isn't it?

[Generic Other]

16. Political bell curve

GOP seldom make the grade? Boo Hoo. So let's blame the tests, shall we?

Academics think for themselves; therefore, they don't tend to be Republican.

[kentuck]

19. Governor Bill Owens is originally from Waco....

Just down the road from the pig farm in Crawford... He and Dubya are good friends.

[Yupster]

20. Just personal story, but

I was a history major in college, a small private college.

There were only about 6 professors in the history department. I took classes with all of them. They were all six Marxists. The chair ran for office often n the Socialist Worker's Ticket.

Maybe this is okay? I sure got a different view of the world, but after a while it wasn't a different view. It was the same view. Still most of them were okay. One screeching Maoist I couldn't take. I graduated a Marxist of course.

The biggest problem I see with this is that the professors are hired by peer committee, so a professor who was not a Marxist would have no reason to even be interviewed for the job. This group of professors was not going to hire outside of their worldview. They had proven that by their unanimity.

Just from my own limited experience, there is a problem there.

[Cocoa]

21. sounds like they're proposing a quota system

maybe there's a reason for the lack of conservatives in academia, maybe it's because conservatism today has become basically anti-intellectual?

[Generic Other]

24. Conservatives are over-represented in some professions

I see them all the time flying their flags from the antennas of their SUVs with radios tuned to Rush. Working the graveyard shift at 7-11.

[ithacan]

23. here's the problem:

what these "conservatives" mean when they say education is indoctrination.

The last thing they want is for students to learn to think critically!!!

And this seems like they'd be requiring professors to teach the lies that are currently passing as "views" on the right as if they were factual, rather than what responsible teachers should do, which is point out each and every lie that comes out of Washington no matter who's running the show.

This smacks so much of what right-wing extremists do around the world that it is just one more piece of evidence confirming that there is little if any difference between these self-proclaimed "conservatives" in the US and right wing neofascist forces in other countries...

[kodi]

25. yet these same peckerheads are against an FCC fairness doctrine

it is the gross stunning hypocrisy of these clowns that is amazing.

if there is a better example of a sophist gene inherent in the make-up of these people i have not seen it.

[durutti]

26. Conservatives need to prove this "problem" actually exists

This is just another ploy (along with attacking the "liberal media") to make sure conservatives eventually are overrepresented in institutions.

Studies have shown that liberalism increases with education, while conservatism increases with income. It's only natural that people who are highly-educated but don't necessarily earn that much would be more liberal than the general population.

Yes, most college professors are liberals. That doesn't mean they're fiery-eyed, radical left-wingers; and it doesn't mean that they necessarily repress opposing points of view.

And there are a small but significant number of universities that go against this trend -- Grove City, for example, which is a very conservative but very respected and academically excellent liberal arts college.

[Yupster]

29. Let's not be so smug

from CNN exit polls of 2000 election

Voters who didn't graduate from high school

Gore 59 %
Bush 39 %

[MrPrax]

30. Isn' this what Commies do ?

Is the free market of choice in academia needing a little 'regulation' to correct the 'imbalance'...

"and more "intellectual pluralism" among campus speakers. "

What the hell does this mean?