Thursday, August 09, 2007

Alabama: Religious group sues school board

The Child Evangelism Fellowship of Alabama has sued the Gadsden Board of Education, alleging the board is discriminating against the Christian organization by not allowing it to use school property as secular groups do.

Liberty Council, a public interest religious liberties law firm, filed the suit in federal court Thursday. The suit said the school district is violating the fellowship's right to freedom of speech, equal protection and free exercise of religion. The CEF made several written and oral requests to Gadsden Superintendent Bob Russell for a meeting about the club using board property for meetings after school, according to the suit. But the suit said Russell refused to discuss the group using board property. The CEF is a national interdenominational group that sponsors Good News Clubs for elementary school children.

An attorney for the school board, Ralph Strawn, told The Gadsden Times in a story Friday that the board hadn't been served and declined comment. Liberty Council founder Mathew Staver told the newspaper he hopes the court will set a hearing soon and grant a preliminary injunction so CEF can begin holding meetings this fall. The CEF began seeking permission to use board facilities in 2004 and efforts continued through this year.

The suit said the board is creating a "limited public forum" by allowing other groups to use school facilities. It cited a 2001 Supreme Court decision that ruled a public school may not discriminate against a Good News Club because of the club's religious viewpoint

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Ideology degrades quality in American academe

You don't have to be a crusading right-winger to recognize that University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill, who compared the victims of the Sept. 11 World Trade Center attack to Nazis, is an extremist, an ideologue whose scholarship is less than objective. Nor do you have to be a flame-throwing left-winger to agree that the university where he was once director of the ethnic-studies department shouldn't have ditched him the way it did. It needed to do much, much more.

Two short years ago, Mr. Churchill's labeling of WTC victims as "little Eichmanns," a reference to Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi in charge of sending Jews to death camps, provoked a heated yet necessary national debate on the state of scholarship at American universities. By last month, however, that deliberation had degraded into a mealy-mouthed academic discussion over one man's firing. The University of Colorado's trial and punishment of Churchill, in other words, was a little like the federal government prosecuting Al Capone for tax evasion and then calling its pursuit of gangsters complete.

Technically, the regents of the University of Colorado got rid of Churchill not for his outrageous political views but because of three faculty committees' findings that he had committed plagiarism and conducted fraudulent research in other writings. Too bad they hadn't subjected him to that much scrutiny before they hired him. Rather than targeting Churchill and making him a martyr for academic freedom, university officials should have been more self-reflective and asked themselves how someone as intellectually irresponsible as Churchill got to be head of a department at their esteemed institution in the first place. Sure, Churchill might be gone, but that doesn't solve the problem that his notoriety brought to public attention: the presence of activists posing as scholars on college campuses, particularly in colleges supported by taxpayers' money.

For years now, conservatives have been railing against what they consider the leftist takeover of elite US universities. And many of their complaints are not without merit. What should concern us all, however, is academia's nurturance of professors such as the hate-filled Churchill. No, they are not many, but they shout louder than their numbers would suggest. Although their influence is minor in American higher education overall, they can be very influential in particular fields, such as comparative literature and gender and ethnic studies. That's because the problem on campuses isn't rigorous Marxist materialists, as conservative stereotypes would have you believe, but craven emotional warriors in the arena of identity politics.

Ethnic-studies departments, such as Churchill's, may be the worst offenders. Created in the wake of the ethnic-pride movement in the early 1970s, many simply never had the same kind of academic oversight as more established and prestigious fields. Their scholarship wasn't tested in the high-stakes, high-profile competition that hones other academics and other fields. They earned their "psychic income" trying to turn minority undergraduates into activists. Meanwhile, the quality work on ethnicity was being done in more traditional disciplines.

But by many accounts, today's undergraduates of all backgrounds tend to be in search of good jobs rather than ideological causes. If anything, ethnic studies are part of the accepted last stage of American education, the puncturing of myths. Still, just because an academic field is relatively harmless and even irrelevant (in the eyes of many fellow academics) doesn't mean that shoddy professors who can't sort fact from ideology should be tolerated, particularly at taxpayer expense.

The Churchill case might be closed, but university officials nationwide have an obligation to bring scrutiny and the ideal of objectivity to these below-par departments – perhaps by dismantling and absorbing them into more rigorous disciplines and insisting, not on any one set of views or conclusions, but on the high standards of scholarship that we expect from the best of academia.

Source






Australia: Schools in push for Catholic-only rule

Cardinal Pell is waging an heroic fight to save his religion from degenerating into just a splodge of conventional secular pieties



THE Catholic Church wants to discourage non-Catholic families from enrolling their children in its schools under a return to strict religious values. Church leaders headed by Cardinal George Pell yesterday issued an edict to all Catholic schools, demanding that students and their parents be more devout and outlining a plan to lure back thousands of poorer families who have left the system. The Church will not ban non-Catholic students from enrolment - it says it considered, but rejected, plans for a formal "downsizing to accommodate only those who are committed to the faith". But it wants to introduce a new four-way selection test to give preference first to children from the school's local parish, then to other Catholics, other Christians and finally children from other religions.

The state's 585 Catholic schools have been urged to "re-examine how they might maximise enrolment of Catholic students". The edict also tells Catholic schools to increase the proportion of school staff who are "practising and knowledgeable Catholics". Catholic families will be urged to "maximise their participation". Students and younger teaching staff will be encouraged to take part in religious events such as World Youth Day.

Church leaders want more people at Sunday Mass and deeper involvement in the life of the local church by students and ex-students. Fears that the drift of Catholics away from the Church's schools is seriously "watering down" numbers of the faithful has forced Cardinal Pell and other Catholic leaders to take action in a bid to reverse the trend. Enrolment of students from a non-Catholic background in Catholic schools across the State has more than doubled to 20 per cent over the last two decades.

In a rare pastoral letter, "Catholic Schools at a Crossroads", the Bishops of NSW and the ACT admit changes in enrolment patterns have "radically affected the composition and roles of the Catholic school..." The letter, with Cardinal Pell as head signatory, said: "Half the students of Catholic families are enrolled in state schools and a growing proportion go to non-Catholic independent schools. "Another enrolment trend of particular concern has been the decline in representation in our schools of students from both poorer and wealthier families."

The letter reveals church leaders faced pressure to "downsize" the Catholic school system to include only students and staff who embraced the religion. But the bishops decided against such a radical change. Catholic schools educate about 240,000 students and employ 15,500 teachers across the state. Cardinal Pell was not available to comment yesterday, directing inquiries to the Bishop of Broken Bay, David Walker. Speaking at the launch of the pastoral letter at the Mary MacKillop Memorial Chapel, Bishop Walker said it was time to reassess the future of Catholic schools

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