Accuracy in Academia (AIA), a non-profit research group reporting on bias in education. In that capacity, Kline serves as editor-in-chief of AIA's two web sites
Submitted for your consideration, as Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling used to say, is the honor roll, if you could call it that, of the professors you might call “America’s Least Wanted.”
In a recent critique of Blacklisted By History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies that appeared in National Review, historian Ron Radosh makes numerous assertions about the book by M. Stanton Evans that are completely unsupported by the work itself. We will deal with just one of that multitude in this column.
A couple of years ago, I debated a professor from American University named John Doolittle who, prompted by me, admitted that Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, R-Wisconsin (1909-1957), may have exposed some real communists working in the federal government. “But I saw the Edward R. Murrow broadcasts,” Dr. Doolittle added. “He was a bad man.”
Believe it or not, the Nobel Prize authorities and the academic elite lionize a writer who denounces both communism and feminism. That's because they honor her for the opinions that she held before she changed her mind.
Academics like to cultivate an image of themselves as cutting edge. Actually, while they may be more up-to-date than flat-earth theories, they are frequently not quite as far ahead of the curve as earth shoes. "The issue of climate change has entered its rock concert/college curriculum phase, which is a sure indicator that the issue has peaked and will begin a long, slow fade in the public mind," author Steven F. Hayward writes in a column that appeared in the October Carolina Journal. "Simultaneous 'Live Earth' rock concerts were staged on several continents following the model of 'Live Aid' and 'Farm Aid' in the 1980s--'consciousness-raising events after which public interest quickly waned."
It's always fascinating to watch tenured faculty members leaving their ivory cocoons where they lecture to impressionable teenagers and 20-somethings to come face-to-face with skeptical middle-aged men. Such an encounter occurred last week in one of the few hearings the U. S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee deigned to hold on the Law of the Sea Treaty, the U.N.-generated pact that many fear would cede control of the oceans to that international body.
Everything that is wrong with higher education, and, for that matter, most major media, was on stunning display for the past two years as the district attorney in Durham, North Carolina attempted to prosecute a bogus rape case against three Duke lacrosse players. All of the figures of authority at Duke who could have set the record straight and ended the persecution of a trio of lacrosse players tilted to the side of the ethically challenged DA.
In promoting their latest cause, liberals have managed to enlist a member of a small group getting smaller by the year--conservatives in academia. "Academics did not get anywhere near this," John Norton Moore of the University of Virginia told an audience at the Heritage Foundation on June 22 of the the United Nations' Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST) that would give the UN control over seven-tenths of the earth's surface.
Look for the latest documentary from self-described gadfly Michael Moore to make the rounds of American college campuses in the not-so-distant future. From Roger & Me to Fahrenheit 9-11, college administrators and professors have routinely made Moore's cinematic output available to students, either for their extracurricular edification or, not infrequently, as required viewing.