J Edgar Hoover Was Half Right

Comment by a British policeman

I had the misfortune to attend one of our less academic local schools a week or so back. I won't bore you with the details, save to say that, while it wasn't the crime of the century, it had left a young girl quite distressed; on balance, I suppose, it was worth attending, though in my day it would have resulted in six of the best from the headmaster and no 'outside agency' would have been required. (My day is only 20 years ago, but it increasingly seems to have been in another era altogether, and possibly in another country).

Teachers (honest ones), parents (intelligent ones) and police officers now know that a significant minority of the schools in our cities offer almost nothing in the way of education. In the worst 10 per cent, it's far more serious than a simple lack of schooling: drugs are openly sold and consumed, pupils are often drunk and/or pregnant, hardcore pornography is widely available and eagerly swapped, casual sexual assaults and threats of serious violence are commonplace and there is very little, if anything, that the teaching staff can do about any of it. It's heartbreaking, actually.

I looked around. All I could see were lost souls destined for the scrapheap. At 13 years of age, they had literally no hope of ever achieving anything in their lives, without the intervention of a lottery win or some other piece of outstanding good fortune. I thought about my own grandfather. He was one of seven, and grew up in a slum dwelling with an outside standpipe for water. In his 90s now, he still reads avidly, lobs bits and pieces of Shakespeare about and can talk you through you Partition, the Beatles and the Falklands with equal clarity.

I saw a young lad I vaguely knew. His hair had been shaved at the back into an approximation of the letters 'MUFC' and he had a gold stud in one ear. 'What's happening in Afghanistan at the mo, mate?' I said, conversationally. 'You what?' he said. 'Afwhat?'

I happen to know that this lad's father is doing time for murder, and that his mother is an alcoholic and occasional prostitute. I hate to sound like a bleeding heart, but is it his fault he doesn't know what's happening around him? Is it the teachers' faults they can't educate him? What is going on in this country?

J Edgar Hoover was half right when he said, 'The cure for crime is not the electric chair, but the high chair.' To my mind, we need a bit of both.

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Dr. Sharad Karkhanis Educator of the Year

Dr. Sharad Karkhanis, Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Library Science at Kingsborough Community College, will be the esteemed recipient of the annual Educator of the Year award at the upcoming Lincoln Day Dinner sponsored by the Queens Village Republican Club, America's oldest and proudest GOP group. His most distinguished service concerns his on-going struggle for freedom of speech, conscience and the press, which began as an outspoken critic of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's authoritarian rule and censorship of the press in India in the 1970's. His battle for free speech continues today as he refuses to be silenced by a $2 million defamation lawsuit filed by a faculty union official of City University of New York in order to shut down his on-line newsletter The Patriot Returns. We are proud to be honoring him at the history making dinner and fully support his battle for First Amendment rights in an urban academic climate of repression and censorship that harkens back to Mrs. Gandhi's oppressive rule in India....

Dr. Karkhanis started publication of The Patriot Returns in 1992. Written in a satirical tone, it performed a critical function informing the CUNY community of the incompetent and self-serving faculty union leadership that was more concerned with political revolution in America than securing good contracts and benefits for faculty members. He collected useful information, reported and wrote the monthly newsletter, and printed, labeled and distributed over 12,000 issues to 21 CUNY campuses. Since its inception, the ruling radical professors of the CUNY faculty union have been trying to censor TPR, suppress free speech and shut down on-line forums that were critical of their leadership. In 1996, faculty union official and former chair of the CUNY Faculty Senate, Professor Susan O'Malley ordered Karkhanis to stop publication of TPR. Fearing repercussions to their careers, other critics bowed to O'Malley's repressive exploits but Karkhanis refused to be silenced. She recently sent a threatening lawyer's letter and finally filed a lawsuit charging Karkhanis with making defamatory statements in TPR, accusing her of trying to land jobs for terrorists on CUNY campuses. TPR exposed her tireless efforts to secure teaching positions for convicted terrorist conspirator, Mohammad Yousry, and imprisoned Weather Underground terrorist Susan Rosenberg. The lawsuit alleges that by spilling the beans on her malfeasance and radical proclivities, Karkhanis has damaged O'Malley's reputation.

With a lifetime history of standing up against repression and censorship, Dr. Karkhanis will not be silenced now, and friends and colleagues of good conscience are coming to his aid including the Queens Village Republicans. A legal fund for Dr. Karkhanis's defense is being set up and part of the proceeds of each ticket sold for the Lincoln Day Dinner will be donated to the fund. We will also be treated to a speech on the condition of our urban universities by CUNY Trustee Jeffrey S. Wiesenfeld, one of the keynoters, and one of the principle heroes famed for restoring higher academic standards to CUNY and fighting against political indoctrination in the classroom. This will be an historical event not only for defending freedom of speech and the press, but also reforming the intolerant status quo of higher education today. The combination of Dr. Karkhanis and Trustee Wiesenfeld in addition to the return engagement of last year's Educator of the Year honoree, History Professor Gerald Matacotta, to deliver the Lincoln Day address at one of the major annual Queens GOP functions, signifies the last act of the garish drama by the radical faculty regime now in control of the CUNY system.

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Australia: Shakespearean Marxism axed

DESPITE his humiliating electoral defeat, former Prime Minister John Howard has won a final battle against some of his greatest foes - the left-wing forces of political correctness. Postmodernism, under which senior high school students were controversially asked to interpret Shakespeare from Marxist, feminist and racial perspectives, has been quietly dumped by the NSW Board of Studies.

The board is adamant it is just a "normal turnover" of the list of elective subjects offered to HSC candidates in the English Extension 1 course - rather than a reaction to critics who savaged postmodernism as subverting the classics by failing to help students appreciate them or gain full meaning of the texts.

But students who opted for the postmodern elective in previous years are horrified at its passing, among them outstanding all-rounder Mikah Pajaczkowska-Russell. The former Sydney Girls High School student, who has just scored a UAI of 99.75, said critics misunderstood the value of postmodernism for HSC English. "It is so easy to criticise texts . . . but they are not about undermining Shakespeare or traditional texts," she said. "They look at truth and reality . . . I find it invigorating." Ms Pajaczkowska-Russell, who will take an arts/law degree at Sydney University this year, singled out the postmodernism elective for special praise among her 11 HSC units.

But to Mr Howard, who campaigned long and hard to reinstate traditional values in school curriculums, postmodernism was "anything I don't like". His government threatened to cut education funding to states that did not fall into line on a raft of Commonwealth demands. Postmodernism will be dropped from the list of electives available to students in HSC English Extension 1 from 2009.

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