Wednesday, April 13, 2005

NO DIVERSITY OF THINKING OR FREE SPEECH ALLOWED AT DE PAUL UNIVERSITY

During his 14 years at DePaul University, Thomas Klocek dwelled in adjunct-professor purgatory, quietly coming and going times a week from his Loop classroom and his home on the city's Southwest Side. His evalutions from students in the university's School of New Learning were consistently positive-and that, apparently, was enough for his bosses because nary a supervisor visited his classroom. Klocek's invisibility ran out, however, one day in September when he got caught up in a heated debate at a student activities fair on the school's downtown campus. He stopped at a table where two student groups-Students for Justice in Palestine and United Muslims Moving Ahead-were distributing literature likening the Israelis' current treatment of Palestinians to Hitler's treatment of Jews during the Holocaust.

Klocek recalls telling the eight students present that "technically speaking, there is no such country as Palestine." An impassioned exchanged followed, culminating in Klocek scoffing at the students' literature and thumbing his chin in a way they interpreted as an offensive hand gesture. "I said that the term `Palestinian' was a fairly newer phrase that came into vogue in the 1970s, with Yassar Arafat and the Palestinian Liberation Organization," whereas people from that part of the Middle East previously identified themselves as Arabs, he says.

The students complained to the university, and within 24 hours Kloceck was called into the office of his dean, Susanne Dumbleton, and asked to withdraw from his fall class with pay. Kloceck, who has been working on his PhD at the University of Chicago while teaching, felt his free speech had been violated and sought out a lawyer, John Mauck, who specializes in First Amendment and free-speech issues. Since then, the matter has received attention nationally on conservative talk radio and the New York Post, but not much in the local news.

Mauck said he decided to take the case after reading an October 8 letter from Dumbleton printed in the school's newspaper, The DePaulia, after Dumbleton advised Klocek not to speak to the press. Mauck took particular umbrage at a passage that focused on the content of Klocek's speech rather than his conduct toward the students: "No students anywhere should ever have to be concerned they will be verbally attacked for their religious belief or their ethnicity," Dumbleton wrote. "No one should ever use the role of teacher to demean the ideas of others or insist on the absoluteness of an opinion, much less press erroneous assertions."

Says Mauck, "That's what got me going," he said. "This was about content, not conduct."

More here





POOR BRAINWASHED SODS

It's getting hot in here - on the planet, that is. And anyone who doesn't believe global warming is a serious problem might just as well argue that Earth ends at the horizon line. That's the message from a group of students at Vermont's Middlebury College, who set up the first annual Flat Earth Award during their recent winter-term class on climate change and activism. Visitors to the website (www.flatearthaward.org) can vote to give the mock award to one of three nominees targeted as global-warming naysayers: radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh, scientist Fred Singer, and novelist Michael Crichton. The "winner" will be announced April 18 by the Green House Network in Oregon, the nonprofit group that oversaw the student project.

In this month leading up to Earth Day on April 22, students on campuses across the country are getting in touch with their inner activist - whether it's by "ticketing" SUVs or starting a dialogue with local auto dealers about the need for fuel efficiency.

Middlebury's class tapped into students' intensifying concerns about the environment and was one response to a paper presented last year by two environmentalists - one a pollster and the other the head of a progressive organization - raising the provocative idea that environmentalism is dead. Through hands-on projects, students were challenged to help broaden the movement by reaching out to people who might not consider themselves activists or environmentalists.....

Setting up the award was a refreshing counterpoint to her typical academic work in sociology, Ms. Brown says. "You always talk about Marx's ideas of social movements or kind of abstract ideas ... [but in this class] you actually see people getting involved and getting really excited about changing things."

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THE RACE WARRIORS AT BERKELEY HATE EQUAL OPPORTUNITY

UC Berkeley's new chancellor, Robert Birgeneau, sounded the opening priority for his administration Thursday by issuing a call to action on a student diversity crisis at the highly ranked university. Citing the drop in under-represented minorities on campus, especially African Americans, Birgeneau called for research into refining admissions standards and finding the best ways to create a more multicultural campus. "Part of what I'm trying to accomplish as a new chancellor here is to say this really is a crisis," Birgeneau said in outlining his agenda to reporters at a campus faculty club. Birgeneau's diversity campaign -- including an op-ed column in the Los Angeles Times on March 27 -- represents his first major public initiative since becoming chancellor in September. The former University of Toronto president will have his formal inauguration ceremony on April 15. "We're not meeting our obligation as a public institution because we're underserving in an extreme way a significant and increasingly important part of the population, which actually is going to be the majority population," he said.

Birgeneau blamed the drop in numbers on Proposition 209, the 1996 voter- approved initiative that banned affirmative action based on race and gender for state and local agencies, including the university. The number of African Americans in Cal's 1996-97 freshman class, before Prop. 209 took effect, was 260, while the 2004-05 class has only 108, with fewer than 40 males, he said. "Out of 3,600 freshman students, that's just a shocking number," he said. Even more striking, he said, is that there is not even one African American among the approximately 800 entering students in engineering, whose faculty was ranked best in the world [coincidence, of course] in a recent survey by The Times of London newspaper. He said enrollment numbers for Latino and Native American students were similarly deplorable.

Former UC regent Ward Connerly, who headed the Prop. 209 campaign, sharply criticized Birgeneau in a recent newspaper column. Noting that the initiative won 55 percent to 45 percent, Connerly wrote, "In the private world, Birgeneau would either be fired or taken behind the woodshed for revealing such disregard for the people who pay the bills."

He said he had no intention of flaunting [flouting?] the law but said he wanted to explore whether more could be done under the current "comprehensive review" admissions process, which considers a variety of factors besides test scores.

More here

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

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