“Pride: If it does nothing else, the process of becoming a professor should involve the recognition of how little one knows. Even in the smallest subfield, there are always new questions, and revolutions in thought arrive with the regularity of new generations of scholars. Perhaps the evident pride of professors is based upon a secret […]
Archive for the 'Academia' Category
Jun1st2006
May31st2006
“Greed: Professors often say that they didn’t become teachers out of a desire to get rich, but it’s hard to believe that most professors chose their careers solely out of a desire to foster “social justice” or some other fashionable form of ostentatious altruism. More often, I think people become professors out of a lack […]
May6th2006
“Does it tell you something about our times when a representative of the Taliban is welcome on the Yale University campus but representatives of our own military forces are not?” –Thomas Sowell, listing his “Random Thoughts”
Apr24th2006
The Double Standards Of Liberal Academia
Published by in (modern day) Liberalism, Academia and General. 0 CommentsBen Stein writes in the American Spectator:
As everyone has seen, Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government has published a scathing anti-Semitic attack on Israel and its friends in the U.S. — Jews, Evangelicals, anyone who believes the most persecuted minority in history deserves a home. Naturally, this article has drawn criticism for factual errors […]
Apr24th2006
Quote Of The Day
Published by in Academia, Books, General and Hispanics (Minority Issues). 2 Comments“Facts that go against preconceived notions are likely to be ignored, even by many scholars. For example, slavery is an issue that is widely discussed as if it were something peculiar to Africans enslaved by Europeans, instead of something suffered and inflicted around the world by people of every race, color, and religion. Two books […]
Apr6th2006
Quote Of The Day
Published by in (modern day) Liberalism, Academia, Economics, General and Unions. 5 Comments“Minimum wage laws are like protective tariffs insulating unionized workers from the competition of other workers. It is robbing a less affluent Peter to pay a more affluent Paul — all the while using noble rhetoric that appeals to the uninformed and the unthinking, which includes many people with fancy degrees and even fancier illusions […]
Mar11th2006
“There are other, more subtle problems in writing business history. For one thing, you probably won’t have anyone to talk to in your history department. The academy — unlike the country — is overwhelmingly liberal or left/radical and most faculty members don’t really want to understand any aspect of business. That’s why the history course […]
Mar4th2006
“In the minds of at least some vocal members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, expressing such politically incorrect views is the academic equivalent of provoking Islamic extremists by depicting Prophet Mohammed in a political cartoon. Radical academics do not, of course, burn down buildings, at least not since the 1970s. Instead they introduce […]
Mar2nd2006
“A PLURALITY of one faculty has brought about an academic coup d’etat against not only Harvard University president Lawrence Summers but also against the majority of students, faculty, and alumni. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences, which forced Summers’s resignation by voting a lack of confidence in him last March and threatening to do so […]
Feb23rd2006
In Praise Of Larry Summers
Published by in (modern day) Liberalism, Academia, Education, General and Hispanics (Minority Issues). 6 CommentsHispanic Business reports:
Until recently, Harvard University has been perhaps the most glaring example of an elite college’s failure to welcome low-income students. With an endowment of $25.9 billion — far larger than that of any other university in the U.S. or abroad — Harvard clearly has the resources to educate the poor.
Yet only about 10% […]
Feb23rd2006
“As Professor Dershowitz rightly reminds us, Summers’ resignation is a heavy blow for academic freedom in the university. Summers’ downfall was engineered by a hard-left faction of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, whose hatred for him reached mythic proportions with only minute fodder. “Only at an American university campus could Mr. Summers, […]
Feb21st2006
Quote Of The Day
Published by in (modern day) Liberalism, Academia, Economics and General. 2 Comments“I am afraid that “happiness research” amounts to nothing but a flimsy excuse for left-wing academics to claim that they should be given control over how the rest of us live”. –Economist Arnold Kling, in an article titled, The Happiness Police
Feb9th2006
“I’m not a conservative, have never been a conservative, and don’t ever expect to become a conservative. So it spooks me how accurate all those old-time McCarthyite rants about Communist subversion turned out to be now that we have the Venona transcripts and ex-KGB generals telling all to historians. Back in the ’60s and ’70s […]
Feb8th2006
Quote Of The Day
Published by in (modern day) Liberalism, Academia, Education and General. 1 Comment“More generally, the political culture of the West is only now beginning to recover from the memetic damage done to it from 1920 on by Soviet propaganda and Soviet agents of influence (see, for example, Stephen Koch’s Double Lives : Stalin, Willi Munzenberg and the Seduction of the Intellectuals). This memetic attack followed the prescriptions […]
Feb7th2006
Quote Of The Day
Published by in (modern day) Liberalism, Academia, Communism, Economics and General. 0 Comments“No real-world market is perfect. But market failure is only grounds to deprecate markets when we have reason to believe non-market allocation mechanisms can do better. Otherwise, the only aim and effect of the deprecation can be to replace an imperfect market with something worse. (Usually the “something worse” is a committee of bureaucrats.) Can […]
Oct24th2005
“Perhaps President Bush was conflating liberal dominion over constitutional law and activist courts since the New Deal with intellectualism. That is easy to do, given the pervasiveness of liberal ideology in legal scholarship and academia more broadly. It is tempting to blame the root for the branch. If the liberal jurisprudential establishment emerged from elite […]
