Thursday, November 22, 2007

BOLLINGER'S BACKBONE

It speaks well of the Columbia president, Lee Bollinger, that a group of left-wing or anti-Israel faculty members is now petitioning against him. In a letter obtained by The New York Sun 's Annie Karni, 70 Columbia faculty members speak of a "crisis of confidence" in Mr. Bollinger, faulting him for his harsh introduction of President Ahmadinejad, which, they said, "were not only uncivil and bad pedagogy, they allied the University with the Bush administration's war in Iraq, a position anathema to many in the University community." The Bush administration is apparently more of an anathema to these faculty members than is the Holocaust-denying, American soldier-killing, terrorist supporting, nuclear bomb-building administration of Iran.

The nub of the matter is the petition's reference to "the autonomy of the University in the face of outside threats and pressures," and "a determining role for faculty in the governance of the University." When the professors say "autonomy," they mean a total lack of responsibility or accountability to trustees, students, parents, alumni, or America. When they say "outside threats and pressures," they mean Jewish students and alumni, but not the Arab potentate that funds the professorship of one of the petitioners, Rashid Khalidi.

A similar putsch by leftist and anti-Israel professors ousted Lawrence Summers last year from the presidency of Harvard. Mr. Bollinger's enemies are a sign of his character. How he handles them will be a test of his backbone, and will determine whether Columbia sinks back into the troubled mediocrity that afflicted it after the 1968 strike, or rises above it into the very first rank of American universities.

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FEVER AT COLUMBIA

Columbia University is boiling. Professors find swastikas and nooses on their office doors and strenuous denials not withstanding Columbia president Lee Bollinger may soon be following in the footsteps Larry Summers. Why? Because he stepped into the maelstrom that is Middle East politics on campus. First, he invited Ahmadinejad to speak and then chastised him prior to his speech.

It was a truly disastrously performance which is currently exploited by Islamist/leftist faculty members to secure tenure for two of their members. They secured one for Nadia Abu El-Haj at Barnard. Now, they are well on their way to secure another Joseph Massad at Columbia. How? With the help of a public letter signed by 109 professors. 69 professors responded with a letter expressing their support for the president. For the first time the post Sixties steady take over of the campuses by proponents of a radical leftist/Islamist anti-Semitic, anti-American relativistic agenda is seriously challenged. Why?

Because 9/11 demonstrated the vile consequences Western education has when offered to Third World students has not only to the Third World but also to the First world. Al Qaeda achieved what the Kmer Rouge failed to do. It convinced increasing number of intellectuals to challenge the academic consensus which blamed everything on Western imperialism and nothing on indigenous Third World forces.

Democracy, Capitalism and technological innovation thrive on critical thinking. In that sense far from breaking the back of Democratic Capitalism, even tenured radicals ultimately served to strengthen it by teaching students that it is good to rebel, i.e., challenge established verities. Here and there a student such as Theodore Kaczynski took the critics seriously and became a unabomber, but those instances were too few and far between to justify a costly challenge to the system.

The trouble is that the system which worked well for the developed world has been truly harmful to the developed world by misleading its best and brightest. Not all Third World tyrants were necessarily educated in the great Western universities but their educated elites did swallowed the radical critic of Democratic Capitalism whole hog and it helped them justify their mismanagement of their home countries. The same can be said of the leading Islamists, Maoists and various National liberation commanders. If the academia had a tough time turning against the Kmer Rouge, it was because Pol Pot was "one of them." He merely put to practice what he learn in the Sorbonne. Voices trying to direct attention to the phenomenon were either silenced or marginalized. Moreover, these ideas were widely distributed in the Third World.

9/11 focused attention on the effect of education on Third World students. At first, few challenged academics directing attention to the usual suspects or root causes such as poverty, hopelessness and racism. Then came the serious research and revealed that terrorists tended to be well educated young people who bought into the fashionable Post Colonial critic and became determined to punish their "oppressors" for destroying their veritable "havens" that their homelands used to be and, indeed, bring about a return to those old time paradises. Princeton University economist Alan Krueger writes:
Pakistan, and Turkey, involving about 1,000 respondents in each country. One of the questions asked was, "What about suicide bombing carried out against Americans and other Westerners in Iraq? Do you personally believe that this is justifiable or not justifiable?" Pew kindly provided me with tab-ulations of these data by respondents' personal characteristics.

The clear finding was that people with a higher level of education are in general more likely to say that suicide attacks against Westerners in Iraq are justified. I have also broken this pattern down by income level. There is no indication that people with higher incomes are less likely to say that sui-cide-bombing attacks are justified.

Another source of opinion data is the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, headquar-tered in Ramallah. The center collects data in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. One question, asked in December 2001 of 1,300 adults, addressed attitudes toward armed attacks on Israeli tar-gets. Options were "strongly support," "support," "oppose," "strongly oppose," or "no opinion."

Support turned out to be stronger among those with a higher level of education. For exam-ple, while 26 percent of illiterates and 18 per-cent of those with only an elementary education opposed or strongly opposed armed attacks, the figure for those with a high school education was just 12 percent. The least supportive group turned out to be the unemployed, 74 percent of whom said they support or strongly back armed attacks. By comparison, the support level for merchants and professionals was 87 percent.

Clearly terrorism is being taught and, therefore, to stop it the teaching of the reasons terror is justified must stop. How? First and foremost by challenging the scholarship of the those teaching it. Second, by making their propagators face public scrutiny. When such scrutiny leads to demands for sanctions against irresponsible professors, their colleagues often rush to their defense crying foul in the name of academic freedom. This is what is happening in Columbia and this is what happened at Harvard. We must realize that this battle has only just been joined and it is not going to be short, easy or pretty.

Still, nothing less than the survival of the developed world and the defeat of totalitarianism in the Developing world is at stake. For what 9/11 ultimately taught us is that the two are ultimately connected. To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, the world cannot forever continue to be half free and half slave and the young cannot forever be taught that there is no difference between the two.

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Crazy "safety" censorship of British childrens' books

A leading children's author was told to drop a fire-breathing dragon shown in a new book - because the publishers feared they could be sued under health and safety regulations. It is just one of the politically correct cuts Lindsey Gardiner says she has been told to make in case youngsters act out the stories. As well as the scene showing her dragon toasting marshmallows with his breath, illustrations of an electric cooker with one element glowing red and of a boy on a ladder have had to go.

Ms Gardiner, 36, who has written and illustrated 15 internationally successful children's books, featuring her popular characters Lola, Poppy and Max, says such editing decisions are now common

In Who Wants A Dragon? - published by Orchard Books last year - Ms Gardiner says: "I was told, 'You can't have the dragon breathing fire because it goes against health and safety.' "It doesn't really make any sense. "Sales and marketing departments are worried something might offend somebody, or that a child might copy something in a book and their parents will sue the publisher." Pointing out that classic fairy tales such as Hansel And Gretel or Little Red Riding Hood would not get published today, Ms Gardiner said: 'It's a sad reflection of modern society."

In When Poppy And Max Grow Up, published by Orchard Books in 2001, Max was originally shown on a ladder "They didn't allow that because they thought it was precarious," said Ms Gardiner. "Then I had to change the element on a cooker from glowing red to green. "It is crazy. When I go to book signings, I sometimes take with me some colouring pictures, and the kids draw the elements as red because the cooker is on and it's hot. They are not stupid. "I've had books published in Japan, France, Spain and Holland and they don't ask for the same changes. "It seems to be in Britain and the U.S. that there are problems."

Nobody from Orchard Books was available for comment but a spokesman for the Publishers Association said: "We are aware of some concerns by authors and it is something we can talk about in the industry."

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