ca assoc of scholars
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website upgrade?
who paid for horo aT ucsc?
2012
The Trap of Minority Studies Programs — Minding The Campus
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http://calscholars.org/
off bs
CAS works to strengthen the integrity of scholarship and teaching, persuaded that only through an informed understanding of the Western intellectual heritage and of the realities of the contemporary world can citizen and scholar be equipped to sustain our civilization's achievements. In light of these objectives, we are deeply concerned about perspectives within the academy that reflexively denigrate the values and institutions of our society. Because such tendencies are often dogmatic in character and indifferent to both logic and evidence, they undermine the basis for coherent scholarly dialogue. We encourage an assertiveness among academics who value reason and an open intellectual life.
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California Association of Scholars seeks to:
* affirm the centrality of academic freedom to the integrity of university life and
strengthen the right to teach and learn in an environment free of politicization
and coercion;
* nourish the free exchange of ideas and the virtues of tolerance as essential to the
pursuit of truth and the maintenance of civility;
* build and sustain an academic leadership dedicated to the idea of reasoned and
responsible scholarship;
* maintain intellectual standards in research and teaching, and resist quotas and other
numerically based formulas as divisive and inequitable strategies for faculty
recruitment and student admissions;
Issues That Concern Us:
* Politicization of scholarship and teaching, and the substitution of social reform for
the pursuit of knowledge;
* Dogmatic hostility to Western civilization, and reflexive use of non-Western
cultures as a means of denouncing American society;
* Inappropriate use of sexual, racial, and other nonscholarly criteria in selecting
works to be studied, and the associated denigration of great literary and artistic
works;
* Absence of core curricula or other requirements ensuring a well-rounded
education, and their replacement by unscholarly curricular innovations that lack
substance and intellectual depth;
* Use of sexual, racial, or other criteria unrelated to merit in hiring, in promotion,
and in student recruitment, and the resulting campus polarization;
* Use of noncurricular resources such as orientations and residential life programs to
impose political and ideological conformity on student life;
* Unfair treatment of teachers and students suspected of holding "politically
incorrect" views, and its obverse, the frequent placation of activists by
administrators who refuse to enforce campus regulations;
* The impact of lowered academic standards in colleges and universities on
education at lower levels, and the resulting inadequate preparation of high school
graduates for college work.
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News and Events
FAILING GRADES:
The Crisis in Teaching on our University Campuses
Conference Sunday June 8 -- Monday, June 9, 2014
to be held at
Davidson Executive Conference Center, University of Southern California
Los Angeles, CA
Conference Web Site
CAS Testimony to UC Regents on Principles Against Intolerance
October 26, 2015
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Academic Questions
June 2011, 24:234 |
Cite as
ReConforming Our Universities: The Campaign for an Academic Bill of Rights by David Horowitz, Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, Inc., 2010, 285 pp., $27.95 hardbound.
Campaign Chronicle
Authors
Authors and affiliations
John M. Ellis
Email author
REVIEWS
First Online: 20 April 2011
45
Downloads
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conf
Introduction
Throughout the Western world, the University, once an institution revered for its openness, transparency and breadth of expression, has become a narrow corner where only views which conform to the politically correct zeitgeist are tolerated. The infusion of ideology into the curriculum, coupled with the unwillingness of university administrations to enforce their own standards of academic excellence, has left many of these institutions as little more than hollow intellectual shells, given over to a monochromatic view of the world, deprived of balance.
Perhaps the most important question that arises from this sad state of affairs is what are the consequences of the collapse of basic academic standards? What are our students actually learning and if students fear to express contrarian views, is there hope for our democratic future which depends upon collective discussion, a plurality of views and the oxygen of broad debate for its survival?
With speakers drawn from academic institutions around the world, this conference will examine the crisis of teaching on our campuses; engage in a discussion about how these imbalances might be addressed both within the University structure and beyond it; and conclude with the presentation of a scathing California Association of Scholars report on the University of California which demonstrates the extent of the crisis and its cost to our future.
This conference has been made possible by a generous grant from the Arthur N. Rupe Foundation.
http://www.americanfreedomalliance.org/microsite/failinggrades/index.html
http://www.americanfreedomalliance.org/microsite/failinggrades/index.html
American Freedom Alliance
11500 W. Olympic Blvd., Suite 400 Los Angeles, California 90064
Phone: (310) 444 3085 Fax: (310) 444 3086 email: adavis@americanfreedomalliance.org www.americanfreedomalliance.org
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American Freedom Alliance
17412 Ventura Blvd., Suite 144
Encino, CA 91316, USA
Phone: (310) 444 3085
Email: karen.siegemund@americanfreedomalliance.org
Web: www.americanfreedomalliance.org
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A CRISIS OF COMPETENCE | 35
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understanding and knowledge, wants to promote social activism for its own political aims by giving
students the “conceptual tools for social change.” On the Santa Cruz campus, the Community Studies
program had several courses that envisioned organizing for social, economic, or environmental justice.
More pervasive than explicit calls to political activism, however, is the imposition of a political ideology
through the course description that we have seen in Berkeley’s History 7AB. For example, instead of
being content to announce the scope of the course, Berkeley’s Political Science 111AC (“The Politics
of Displacement”)preemptively shapes a particular political interpretation: “the revolution against
traditional political authority embodied in Jefferson’s and Thomas Paine’s attack on the British crown,
the rise of slavery, and the conflict with Native America are seen as coherent parts of a cultural and
social development that emerges in the 18th- and 19th-century America.” The decision to focus
attention exclusively on these issues (rather than, say, the debate over the constitution and the crucial
first decades of the unfolding of the new
political system) means that a radical political
interpretation involving a hostile judgment
of the U.S. is frozen into the outline of the
course.3
...
These cases from printed catalogs demonstrate the degree of politicization that is evidently now
considered acceptable by multiple layers of campus review. However, an innocuous printed description
is no guarantee that a course will not be politicized. A fuller syllabus posted online or handed out to
classes often raises the same kind of problem. For example, UC Santa Cruz’s Politics 72 (“The Politics
of the War on Terrorism”) has a bland course description that simply spells out the scope of the course,
but the course syllabus soon gets into extreme ideological prejudgment with the question: “How did
A CRISIS OF COMPETENCE | 37
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Bush and Cheney build the fiction that Al Qaeda was a participant in the 9/11 attacks?” Here the
instructor has dogmatically assumed a great deal that students will have to swallow to enter into the
world of the course and its instructor. He has forgotten that academic discussion ought to begin with
neutral formulations that do not beg all the important questions, for example, “what do we know of Al
Qaeda’s involvement in 9/11 and how do we know it?” Naturally, Al Qaeda’s claim of responsibility will
be one important fact to be taken into account, but only one. When an instructor makes an eccentric
conspiracy theory based in his own political
prejudices into a settled fact that serves
as a bedrock on which his course is to be
built, we recognize the effects of a one-party
atmosphere that lacks the ability to selfcorrect.
And we are reminded again of Mill’s
dictum, that only an opposition “keeps each
[party] within the limits of reason and sanity.
==
http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=2805
The Worst School in America
:{:{By: David Horowitz and Jacob Laksin}:
FrontPageMagazine.com | Thursday, September 13, 2007}:
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http://www.calscholars.org/images/A_Crisis_of_Competence.pdf
A Report Prepared for the Regents of the University of California By the California Association of Scholars, A Division of the National Association of Scholars A CRISIS OF COMPETENCE JOHN M. ELLIS, PRESIDENT, CAS CHARLES L. GESHEKTER, CHAIRMAN, CAS PETER W. WOOD, PRESIDENT, NAS STEPHEN H. BALCH, CHAIRMAN, NAS
...4 The California Association of Scholars (CAS)is the California state affiliate of the National Association of Scholars.
The Board of Directorsof the CAS includes: Leila Beckwith, Pediatrics, UCLA; Glynn Custred, Anthropology, CSU East Bay; John Ellis, German Literature, UC Santa Cruz (President); Charles Geshekter, History, CSU Chico (Chairman of the Board); Gerald Gillespie, Comparative Literature, Stanford University (Treasurer); Gail Heriot, Law, University of San Diego; Charles Kesler, Government, Claremont McKenna College; Matthew Malkan, Astro
...
Accordingly, when state funds are used either by or in universities to pursue political aims, those funds are used for a purpose for which they were not appropriated, and could never have been appropriated. And that puts at risk the University’s relationship with both the legislature and the general public, and raises the question: how long can the University expect the public to stand by and acquiesce in this misuse of public money? Publicly Funded Resources Used for a Private Purpose Classroom time at a public university presupposes the expenditure of a good deal of public money. There is the construction, equipping, and maintaining of the building; the salary and benefits of the instructor; and the costs involved in multiple layers of campus administration. Though intangible, classroom time thus represents valuable public property created for a specific public use.
An individual’s political beliefs, on the other hand, are a private matter, and his or her wish to promote them is a private, not a public concern. When even five minutes of class time is used to promote an instructor’s political beliefs, public property has essentially been converted to a private use. We have no difficulty in recognizing that this has happened when, say, a piece of university equipment is stolen—that too is the conversion of property paid for with public funds to a private use, which is part of the definition of theft. But when we compare these two cases, it is hard to distinguish them from a moral standpoint. In both, something that belongs to the public is taken by an individual for his or her own use.
1.2 The Effect of Politicization on the Quality of Education and Research
Moral and legal considerations show how the politicization of the classroom damages democratic government and the integrity of public life, but what is most important for the purposes of this report is that politicization has devastating effects on the quality of teaching and research. Put simply, a college education influenced to any significant degree by political activism will inevitably be a greatly inferior education, and the same holds for academic research. Political activism will tend to promote shallow, superficial thinking that falls short of the analytical depth that we expect of the college-educated mind. The habits of thought that it promotes are in every respect the exact opposite of those we expect a college education to develop. There are many reasons why this must be so.
Results Over Process
First, political activism values politically desirable results more than the process by which conclusions are reached. In education, those priorities must be reversed. The core of a college education is disciplined thinking – thinking that responds to evidence and argument while resisting the lure of what we might wish were the conclusion. Disciplined thinking draws conclusions only after it has weighed the facts against all the plausible explanations of those facts. Strong political beliefs will always threaten to break down that discipline and bend the analysis in a direction that political considerations urgently want it to go
...
requires that “University facilities and the name of the University must not be used in ways which will involve the University as an institution in the political, religious, and other controversial issues of the day.” Another by President Charles Hitch in 1970 provides that “There are both educational and legal reasons why the University must remain politically neutral.
Educationally, the pursuit of truth and knowledge is only possible in an atmosphere of freedom, and if the University were to surrender its neutrality, it would jeopardize its freedom.” And the latest version of the University’s Academic Personnel Manual (APM) states that among the examples of unacceptable faculty conduct is “Unauthorized use of University resources or facilities on a significant scale for personal, commercial, political, or religious purposes.” In 2003, the following language (which had been there since 1934) was removed from the APM:
The function of the university is to seek and transmit knowledge and to train students in the process whereby truth is to be made known. To convert or to make converts is alien and hostile to this dispassionate duty. Where it becomes necessary in performing this function of a university, to consider political, social, or sectarian movements, they are dissected and examined – not taught, and the conclusion left with no tipping of the scales, to the logic of the facts. The ostensible reason for this change was that “passionate” teaching was not per se objectionable. The manner or style of the presentation had no necessary relation to its content, it was argued, so that a passionate presentation did not necessarily entail unscholarly one-sided propaganda. However, even as he promoted these changes, then-President Atkinson stressed that “few would disagree with....condemnation of using the classroom to make converts to a particular political view or using the university as ‘a platform for propaganda.’”
And he drew attention to the continuing relevance of theRegents’ 1970 Policy on Academic Freedom,which still provided that: “[The Regents] are responsible to see that the University remain aloof from politics and never function as an instrument for the advance of partisan interest. Misuse of the classroom by, for example, allowing it to be used for political indoctrination...constitutes misuse of the University as an institution.” We should note again that these statements cannot be construed narrowly to refer only to advocacy on behalf of candidates or ballot issues in elections. The Kerr directive refers much more broadly to the “political, religious, and other controversial issues of the day.” It is just as clear that the phrase “political indoctrination” has a much broader reference than mere lobbying for votes in a particular election
...
. College faculty members have become far more likely to admit that activism is a goal of their teaching. 6. The public is alarmed about the professoriate’s radical leftism to a degree that has not been true in the past.14 If we were to take these findings individually, each one would suggest that an important change in the place of politics on campus has occurred during the last forty years. But taken together, they indicate a huge transformation in faculty attitudes, tolerance of politicization, and the entire intellectual quality of academic life. We now take a closer look at the studies that reach these conclusions.
A Sharp Shift to the Left Still Increasing
A study done in 1999 by the political scientist Stanley Rothman found a decisive shift from historical patterns.15 According to Rothman and his co-authors Robert Lichter and Neil Nevitte: “The results indicate that a sharp shift to the left has taken place among college faculty in recent years.” In 1969, the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education’s survey had found that 45 percent of faculty had political views that were left or liberal, while 27 percent were middle of the road, and 28 percent either moderately or strongly conservative.
By contrast, Rothman now found margins that were much more extreme. Whether the question was posed in terms of liberals versus conservatives or Democrats versus Republicans, the margins favored the former by nearly 5:1 in each case, and in some departments the results were overwhelming. For example, in English departments the margin was 88:3, and in Politics 81:2. A more recent study by Neil Gross and Solon Simmons (2007)16 showed that the situation had continued to deteriorate in the years since Rothman’s 1999 study, as the lop-sidedness became even more extreme. Rothman’s 5:1 had now become 8:1. This result was all the more convincing since Gross and Simmons clearly wanted the reverse to be true and even claimed that what they had found was greater moderation; but they hadn’t.Gross and Simmons asked a large sample of faculty (from 927 different institutions) to self-identify as very liberal, liberal, slightly liberal, middle of the road, slightly conservative, conservative, or very conservative. The results in percentages were 9.4, 34.7, and 18.1 for liberals, and 1.2, 8, and 10.5 for conservatives, going from “very” to “slightly” in each case. Eighteen percent self-identified as middle of the road.
Gross and Simmons then collapsed these seven categories into three (liberal, moderate 14 We set out the details of declining respect for academia in Section 5, below. 15 Stanley Rothman, S. Robert Lichter, and Neil Nevitte, “Politics and Professional Advancement Among College Faculty,” The Forum, 2005:3. 16 “The Social and Political Views of American Professors,” http://www.studentsforacademicfreedom.org/news/1893/ FacultyStudies.htm, working paper by Neil Gross and Solon Simmons, October 24, 2007. Though only posted on the internet as a working paper for comment and suggestions, the study was warmly received and provoked much national discussion before the draft was taken down by the authors. Copies can still be found at various sites on the internet, for example, on the website of “Students for Academic Freedom.”
...
Gross and Simmons actually understate the extent of the left tiltfor four-year and graduate institutions by including data for community colleges. As they and others have found, community colleges tilt left least, probably because of their ties to local communities. If we want conditions in the “ivory tower” to be the focus of our attention, it is best not to include community colleges. 19 “Voter Registration of Berkeley and Stanford Faculty,” Academic Questions, 18:1 (Winter 2004-5), 53-65
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0 The first is again Klein and Western’s “Voter Registration of Berkeley and Stanford Faculty,” the second, “The One-Party Campus” by Karl Zinsmeister, is by the American Enterprise Institute with the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, as reported in the AEI magazine, September 2002.
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This is a study done by UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute, titled “The American College Teacher.” As Robin Wilson summarizes it in “Social Change Tops Classic Books in Professors’ Teaching Priorities” in the Chronicle of Higher Education for March 5, 2009, “57.8 percent of professors believe it is important to encourage undergraduates to become agents of social change.
yancey hire commies over gop?
8 Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case. New York: Dunne Books/St Martin’s Press, 2007, p.401. 29 Compromising Scholarship: Religious and Political Bias in American Higher Education. Baylor University Press: Waco, 2011. 30 Compromising Scholarship, p. 54
...On the Santa Cruz campus the mission statement of the Sociology department also includes an explicit political aim and program. UCSC Sociology “considers how society is organized in relationship to a vision of a just, free, and equal society – a vision that may require fundamental social change.”
Only a certain kind of political thinker will say that we need“fundamental social change” to reach “a vision of a just and equal society.” In political contexts the word “equal” may refer either to equality of opportunity or equality of result, but whenever it is paired with “fundamental social change” the meaning is very likely the latter rather than the former. UCSC Sociology thus has a departmental political ideology. A teaching program in sociology should be concerned with understanding how societies work, but this one is about comparing them to an egalitarian vision and then working to convert them to that vision.
Much the same is found in UC Riverside’s Labor Studies Program, which also addresses “alternative models for organizing for social justice.”
Another example can be seen in the UCLA School of Law, where the stated aim of the Critical Race Studies program is to “transform racial justice advocacy,” and to be a “training ground for a new generation of practitioners, scholars and advocates committed to racial justice theory and practice.” Knowledge and analysis of the law is not enough; UCLA Law wants to make sure that students are committed to using it to advance a particular social agenda. These departmental mission statements are consistent with and are explained by the UCLA study (mentioned above)32 which found that 58 percent of faculty think it important to teach their students “to become agents of social change.”
The mission statements of Women’s Studies programs routinely make social change integral to the department’s work, but they also go beyond this. Instead of defining their field of study as the investigation of the changing place of women in human society, they include in their mission statements heavily emphasized value judgments that prejudge all kinds of controversial issues. For example, the mission statement at UCLA asserts conclusions before study begins when it says that the department provides its students “the opportunity to study the full range of human experience and arrangements of social organization from the perspectives of those whose participation has been traditionally distorted, omitted, neglected, or denied.” The case for these conclusions can easily be imagined, just as it is easy to imagine a quite different one that pointed to those conditions of modern life that have made new opportunities for women more accessible. Activist zeal has prejudged important questions that need to be asked, and that prejudgment as well as the activist program on which it is based is built into the campus catalog
...
Fuller details of this and several following examples are at www.noindoctrination.org, which was active from 2002 until 2011. See http://www.nas.org/images/documents/Noindoctrinationorg_UC_courses.pdf for archived pages from the website specifically relevant to the University of California
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32 | A CRISIS OF COMPETENCE
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The absence of any institutional pushback against these politicized mission statements is striking, but so
is the fact that they are made so openly. This openness suggests a confidence that there is no danger
in making them public, because what they advocate is now widely accepted. National Association of
Scholars (NAS) founder Stephen Balch comments aptly: “I think that one can therefore be confident
that these [printed] endorsements of advocacy and activism are buttips of an academic iceberg, of
which by far the greater part remains hidden beneath the exposed surface.”33
Moving on to individual courses, we find a great deal of evidence that confirms the essential correctness
of Balch’s surmise. Nationally, a study by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni in 2004found
in a survey of 50 selective colleges that 49 percent of students complain of professors frequently
injecting political comments into their courses even if they have nothing to do with the subject, while
46 percent say that professors use their classrooms to promote their own political views.34 Further, 48
percent report that campus presentations on political issues “seem totally one-sided.”35 When almost
half of all students report such things we can be certain that professors feel entitled to use their
classrooms so, and are confident that no consequences to themselves will ensue.
Such is the national context within which the University of California works. Are UC classrooms an
exception to this pattern of behavior, or do they repeat it? There are tens of thousands of courses taught
on UC campuses each year, and monitoring all of them is a practical impossibility. But it is unnecessary
to do so. We can assume that most courses are properly conducted. The relevant question for this
inquiry is a simple one: is the evidence
of politicized classrooms in UC so
widespread, and so open, that it is now
clear that politicization is acceptable both
to faculty and administration? If so, a
corollary would be that relevant university
regulations prohibiting politicization are
no longer enforced because there is an
institutional consensus that they should
not be. That, in turn, would mean that
deans who went against that consensus
would get a very angry response. The
evidence we now present leaves little
room for doubt that such is the case on
the University of California’s campuses.
33 “Report to the Select Committee of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives,” November 9, 2005.
34 American Council of Trustees and Alumni, “Politics in the Classroom,” 2004, https://www.goacta.org/publications/downloads/
PoliticsintheClassroom_.pdf.
35 Gross and Simmons find that most professors do not do this, but once again they are accepting the protestations of potential
culprits, for they are relying on self-reporting. People who know that they are being asked to admit that they are doing something
wrong are scarcely likely to do so..
...Many more course descriptionsprinted in the catalog make it clear that political activism in Berkeley
classrooms is now routine. For example, the course description of Social Welfare 233 (“Social Work,
Social Change, and Social Justice”) candidly admits that it “incorporates a social change and social
justice perspective….change-focused direct practice, community organizing, legislative action, and other
activities designed to give expression to the professor’s social justice commitments.” Another example
is Sociology 128AC: “Environmental Justice: Race, Class, Equity, and the Environment.” This course, we
read, doesn’t just look at and analyze issues; it is about “future strategies for achieving environmental
and labor justice.” And the description of Ethnic Studies C170 (“Fanon and the Network Society”) tells
us that its aim is “to imagine a more just, democratic, and ‘human’ society.”
Similar printed statements which incorporate political activism into the goals of courses are routinely
found on other campuses.
At UCLA, the Women’s Studies program, not content to develop
37 The inability or unwillingness of the instructors who are the subjects of these complaints to rebut them (even when invited
to do so) is only one of the many reasons to treat this site’s reports as much more than uncorroborated accounts by individual
students. There is also the curious fact that even when they are brought to the attention of department chairs, no investigation
results, nor is anything denied, which suggests that those chairs already know and accept what is going on. Further, whenever
an independent source of information for the same course surfaces (noted above for UCB’s History 7AB, and later in this report
for UCD’s Anthropology 2 and for UCSD’s writing courses) that second account in each case corroborates the account on www.
noindoctrination.org. But the most compelling reason to take these student reports very seriously is that when we take them all
together, they corroborate each other, in that they present a completely consistent account of campus radicalism at work. The issues
they raise, the language they use, and the misbehavior they report are remarkably similar from case to case.
A CRISIS OF COMPETENCE | 35
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understanding and knowledge, wants to promote social activism for its own political aims by giving
students the “conceptual tools for social change.” On the Santa Cruz campus, the Community Studies
program had several courses that envisioned organizing for social, economic, or environmental justice.
More pervasive than explicit calls to political activism, however, is the imposition of a political ideology
through the course description that we have seen in Berkeley’s History 7AB. For example, instead of
being content to announce the scope of the course, Berkeley’s Political Science 111AC (“The Politic of Displacement”)preemptively shapes a particular political interpretation: “the revolution against
traditional political authority embodied in Jefferson’s and Thomas Paine’s attack on the British crown,
the rise of slavery, and the conflict with Native America are seen as coherent parts of a cultural and
social development that emerges in the 18th- and 19th-century America.” The decision to focus
attention exclusively on these issues (rather than, say, the debate over the constitution and the crucial
first decades of the unfolding of the new
political system) means that a radical political
interpretation involving a hostile judgment
of the U.S. is frozen into the outline of the
course.3
...
These cases from printed catalogs demonstrate the degree of politicization that is evidently now
considered acceptable by multiple layers of campus review. However, an innocuous printed description
is no guarantee that a course will not be politicized. A fuller syllabus posted online or handed out to
classes often raises the same kind of problem. For example, UC Santa Cruz’s Politics 72 (“The Politics
of the War on Terrorism”) has a bland course description that simply spells out the scope of the course,
but the course syllabus soon gets into extreme ideological prejudgment with the question: “How did
Bush and Cheney build the fiction that Al Qaeda was a participant in the 9/11 attacks?” Here the
instructor has dogmatically assumed a great deal that students will have to swallow to enter into the
world of the course and its instructor. He has forgotten that academic discussion ought to begin with
neutral formulations that do not beg all the important questions, for example, “what do we know of Al
Qaeda’s involvement in 9/11 and how do we know it?” Naturally, Al Qaeda’s claim of responsibility will
be one important fact to be taken into account, but only one. When an instructor makes an eccentric
conspiracy theory based in his own political
prejudices into a settled fact that serves
as a bedrock on which his course is to be
built, we recognize the effects of a one-party
atmosphere that lacks the ability to selfcorrect.
And we are reminded again of Mill’s
dictum, that only an opposition “keeps each
[party] within the limits of reason and sanity.
==
http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=28053
The Worst School in America
:{:{By: David Horowitz and Jacob Laksin}:
FrontPageMagazine.com | Thursday, September 13, 2007}:
==
coincidence that milo coulter came to ucb?
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http://ww2.kqed.org/news/2011/01/12/uc-berkeley-chancellor-birgeneau-plunges-into-arizona-shooting-debate
With an email sent to the entire campus this week, UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau plunged head first into the painful and by now highly politicized debate over factors that contributed to Jared Loughner’s murderous act in Tucson.
Dear members of our campus community:
This weekend’s shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and the deaths and injuries of many others in the horrific event at Tucson, Arizona have shocked our nation. We here at UC Berkeley offer our sincere condolences to everyone who has been personally affected by this tragedy.
Such a brutal and violent attack on an individual who has devoted herself to public service is deeply regrettable. It calls upon us as an academic community to stop and ponder the climate in which such an act can be contemplated, even by a mind that is profoundly disturbed. A climate in which demonization of others goes unchallenged and hateful speech is tolerated can lead to such a tragedy. I believe that it isnot a coincidence that this calamity has occurred in a state which has legislated discrimination against undocumented persons. This same mean-spirited xenophobia played a major role in the defeat of the Dream Act by legislators in Washington, leaving many exceptionally talented and deserving young people, including our own undocumented students, painfully in limbo with regard to their futures in this country.
On our own campus, and throughout all the campuses of the University of California, we must continue to work toward a climate of equity and inclusion for all. We must be vigilant to condemn hate speech and acts of vandalism on our campuses by those wanting to promote enmity. We must work to support dialogue about our differences and eschew expressions of demonization of others, including virulent attacks on Israel,anti-Muslim graffiti, racism towards African-Americans, Chicano/Latinos and other underrepresented minority groups, and homophobic acts. Continuing to support our principles of community will ensure a better and safer campus. We must do this now so that our students, as future leaders of this great country, will continue to set the standard for a better and safer nation.
Robert J. Birgeneau
Chancellor, UC Berkeley
Well, no words minced there. Reaction from the right, as one might expect, has been swift and not so complimentary. Fox News has picked up on the story, and the right-leaning blogosphere is having a field day. Some examples:}:
From Adam Kissel of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education:
Chancellor Birgeneau’s e-mail is very ill-considered for a variety of reasons.
First of all, there is so farno evidence that a “climate of demonization,” “mean-spririted xenophobia,” or “hateful speech” had anything to do with alleged killer Jared Loughner’s apparent decision to try to assassinate Giffords and kill or injure many others. The supposition that political expression created a climate that led Loughner to his choice is an idea that seems to have sprung from whole cloth out of the minds of people who likely were upset beforehand about “rhetoric” and “hateful” speech, including, apparently, Chancellor Birgeneau. Nevertheless, it has quickly become the driving force in the national discussion about the shooting…
Birgeneau’s e-mail, if taken to its logical conclusion, seems to imply that minority groups and undocumented students at UC Berkeley might become violent if people in the campus community do not support the DREAM Act and if other examples of “hateful speech” go unchallenged on campus. While he avoids an outright call for censorship of certain opinions–such as opposition to the DREAM Act–he makes it clear that he would not be surprised if the voicing of these opinions led to another incident like that in Arizona. Birgenau thus implies that such expression is therefore both morally wrong and likely to endanger people’s lives through its very utterance.
From the David HorowitzFreedom Center’s NewsReal Blog:
Genius California Educator Explains the Arizona Shooting
Another alleged educator, on the payroll of the beleaguered California taxpayer, has weighed in with Solomon-like wisdom on the matter of the Arizona shooting. Although why the chancellor of the University of California, one Robert J. Birgeneau, feels the need to pontificate on the issue remains a mystery. Perhaps his taxpayer-funded use of office time could have been better spent considering how to extricate his campus from the clutches ofunion-represented professors who are angry at having to wait until age 55 to retire, instead of 50… or the myriad of other problems facing the UC system.
But no, he used his time, office, and taxpayer money to produce this letter, addressed to all members of the campus community at Berkeley, in which he goes on a nasty political rant even while condemning – you guessed it – nasty political rants! Of course, he doesn’t quote any Right-wing “rants” – he just snidely condemns anyone who disagrees with him…
What even makes this worth commenting upon is the fact that it is not a partisan politician, a media pundit, or even a so-called objective journalist spewing this nonsense. It is a paid government employee, using his power and position to make statements to those under his authority (employees and students) that are (a) vile in their own hatefulness [IRONY ALERT!] and (b) politically exclusive – in other words, conservatives (or those who disagree with him in any way) are not really welcome at the UC. Oh, and (c): He butts in to another state’s business, which is particularly rich, since California’s in a far bigger craphole than Arizona in just about every way.
From The Daily Plunge:
Why is it that whenever something goes awry the first instinct of “progressives” is to look for ways to infringe on our liberties? The tragic shooting in Arizona perpetrated by a lunatic has become the opportunity du jour for a raft of leftists to call for a clamp-down on free speech.
One of my favorites comes from UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert J. Birgeneau in his statement on the Arizona shooting…
Where to begin? Well, let’s start with the climate in which the “demonization of others goes unchallenged and hateful speech is tolerated.” That “climate” is called “free speech,” protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. It’s the law of the land and I’m sorry that Mr. Birgeneau doesn’t appreciate the fact that citizens have every right to demonize and offend.
My simple message to Mr. Birgeneau and others of his ilk who would love to, by force of law, tell me what I can and cannot say or believe.
Ironic, isn’t it, that Mr. Birgeneau bemoans the climate of demonization in America, and then demonizes those who believe that illegal immigration is illegal, even though illegal immigration is, in fact, illegal. The law abiders, for lack of a better term, are mean-spirited xenophobes! According to Mr. Birgeneau, open and rigorous debate equals hateful speech.
So let me get this straight… We’re supposed to be tolerant, but there are certain things we shouldn’t tolerate (a.k.a., any political position with which Mr. Birgeneau disagrees). I get it. It reminds me of a childhood friend who used to make up the rules as we went along to whatever game we were playing to ensure his victory. “Okay, that’s HORSE,” I’d say as the ball swished through the net. “That’s great,” he’d reply. “But we’re playing that the first person to HORSE loses.” Okay then.
It’s not hard to imagine many denizens of this part of the blogosphere having the same reaction as one commenter on Weasel Zippers:
“UC at Berkeley. That’s where I quit reading.”
On the other hand, reaction closer to home isn’t necessarily glowing either. NBC Bay Area put it this way today:
UC Berkeley Chancellor Interjects Politics Into Arizona Tragedy
Leave it to a city known nationally more for protesting Marines and debating whether to honor a WikiLeaks’ leaker than being home to a world class public university to turn the tragedy in Arizona into a political issue.
The UC watchdog site Cloudminder, written by university alumni, also criticized the missive:
Cal Chancellor Birgeneau’s recent press release tying the Arizona shootings to the Dream Act made us cringe a little, here’s why:
It felt like he was attempting to exploit a national tragedy for the sake of political posturing about the Dream Act for popularity/publicity sake- and it was not necessary. ..
Birgeneau also would be more credible on the Dream Act issue and his statements like: “we must continue to work toward a climate of equity and inclusion for all” if he also directly addressed current demographics on faculty and staff in light of recent and upcoming lay offs, terminations. Where are the numbers on that right now, what is the current state of diversity for faculty and staff at Cal? Why isn’t he addressing it directly as Operation Exodus rolls along? Why hasn’t this page or this page been updated with current numbers on all race and gender demographics related to workforce diversity? That is the press release he should be distributing regularly and widely. If that info exists – one has to dig pretty hard to find it.
A Cal press release tying the Arizona shooting with the Dream Act today seems ill timed as victims are still in hospital fighting for their lives and the dead have yet to be memorialized or buried.
Make the case – but not in this way.
Much more about this, I’m fairly certain, to come…
Related:
- Chancellor Birgeneau denounces Arizona immigration bill (UC Berkeley press release, May 7, 2010
==
ref
sfgate
UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneauhas come out swinging over the shooting spree that wounded Rep. Gabrielle Giffordsand killed six people, linking it to Arizona's "discrimination against undocumented persons" and a "climate in which demonization of others goes unchallenged and hateful speech is tolerated."
In a campus-wide e-mail message, Birgeneau said: "It is not a coincidence that this calamity has occurred in a state which has legislated discrimination against undocumented persons."
He added that "this same mean-spirited xenophobia played a major role in the defeat of the Dream Act by our legislators in Washington, leaving many exceptionally talented and deserving young people, including our undocumented students, painfully in limbo."
The Dream Act would have provided a path to legal residency for undocumented immigrants brought to this country as children.
Birgeneau's office said Tuesday that the statement spoke for itself and he would have no further comment.
This isn't the first time Birgeneau has offered up social commentary.
A couple of years back, the chancellor argued that Berkeley's tree-sitter protests against a new sports training center were based on "racism against our underrepresented minority student athletes."
==
UC hit job
JOHN M.ELLIS, PRESIDENT, CAS
CHARLES L. GESHEKTER, CHAIRMAN, CAS
PETER W. WOOD, PRESIDENT, NAS
STEPHEN H. BALCH, CHAIRMAN, NAS
Arthur N. Rupe Foundation and the Barnes Family Foundation for their generous support
press release:
John Ellis, President, CAS 831-476-1144; johnellis2608@att.net
http://web.mac.com/calscholars/Site/Whats_New.html
October 10, 2011.
CAS CongratulatesOrange County District Attorney
One of the most distressing signs of the deterioration of higher education is the increasingly common shouting down of visiting speakers, which often leads to cancellation of a lecture. At the University of California, campus administrations have generally done little to stop this abuse. In February of 2010 at UC Irvine a well organized group of Muslim students attempted to prevent the Israeli ambassador from giving his scheduled talk on the campus. But in this case, not only did the campus administration take action against the students—the local DA also prosecuted them, and he obtained a conviction.
Actions like these are long overdue, and accordingly, the board of the CAS wrote to Orange County DA Anthony Rackauckas to congratulate him on a much needed prosecution. We wrote (in part): “We have watched in dismay as the practice of shouting down visiting speakers has become a common one on University of California campuses. Contrary to the claims made by the disrupters and their many supporters, there can be no valid conception of free speech which includes the right to prevent others from speaking at a lawful forum. University campuses are nothing if they are not free and peaceful testing grounds of rational arguments. Yet administrative action against this increasingly common abuse has been rare, and prosecution until now non-existent. Your courageous action in pursuing this case has earned our respect and thanks.”
charges filed: http://www.wiesenthal.com/site/apps/nlnet/content2.aspx?c=lsKWLbPJLnF&b=4441467&ct=9109985
---
wikifluff
In 1972, Rackauckas left the Los Angeles County Department of Public Social Services to become a Deputy District Attorney in the Orange County District Attorney's Office, where he served until leaving in 1988 to enter private practice. While in private practice, Rackauckas authored Proposition 115, which appeared on the June 1990 ballot.
Rackauckas left private practice in 1990 when he was appointed by California Governor George Deukmejian to be a municipal court judge. Rackauckas served as a municipal court judge until March 1993, when Governor Pete Wilson appointed him a Superior Court judge, a post in which he served until becoming District Attorney[2] of Orange County. ???
Rackauckas won the support of 59% of Orange County voters in the June 1998 election[3] for District Attorney against Deputy District Attorney Wally Wade and took office in January 1999. He won the support of 62% of the voters in a March 2002 rematch with Wade.[4] He was unopposed in his June 2006[5] and 2010[6] bids for a third and fourth consecutive term, winning 100% of the vote in each year.
In February 2014, Rackauckas filed documents required to seek a fifth term in office. He raised $419,000 during a fundraiser at the Balboa Bay Resort in Newport Beach for his re-election campaign.[7] He won re-election in 2014 with support from 73.3% of the voters.[8] Rackauckas has indicated that he intends to run for re-election in 2018.[9]
Rackauckas has been criticized by Public Defender Scott Sanders for his office's purported mishandling of jailhouse informants which has created difficulties in convicting and sentencing defendants due to the violations of defendants' constitutional rights. This resulted in the "taking off the table" of the death penalty for Scott Dekraai, who had pleaded guilty to murdering eight people and wounding another in a Seal Beach massacre.[10][11][12][13][14] Dekraai was sentenced on September 22, 2017 by Goethals to eight terms of life in prison without the possibility of parole, one term for each of his victims and to seven years to life for attempted murder.[15][16]
The summary statement of Proposition 115 said, "Amends state Constitution regarding criminal and juvenile cases: affords accused no greater constitutional rights than federal Constitution affords nullified in ct]; prohibits post-indictment preliminary hearings; establishes People's right to due process and speedy, public trials; provides reciprocal discovery; allows hearsay in preliminary hearings. Makes statutory changes, including: expands first degree murder definition; increases penalty for specified murders; expands special circumstance murders subject to capital punishment; increases penalty for minors convicted of first degree murder to life imprisonment without parole; permits probable cause finding based on hearsay; requires court to conduct jury examination.
raven v dukmejian sp 7-0 struck down , rest upheld but scary?
https://books.google.com/books?id=ReAOrPo3p20C p 23 hearsay?
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===
:{:{}:
}:
yacht goldwater aug 1964
Sen. Barry Goldwater arrived Saturday night at the Balboa Bay Club where he is expected to remain in seclusion from the press and public until Wednesday.
In June 2012, the BBC was sold to Richard H. Pickup and his family members,[9] Eagle Four Partners and Pacific Hospitality Group, LLC ^[10]
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... John Wortmann, chairman of the club's Board of Governors, and Governors Catherine Thyen and Noel Hamilton,...
These included the annual Balboa Bay Club Gentleman's Smoker and Lobster Clambake on the beach, which traditionally takes place in July and raises upward of $50,000 from a live auction with proceeds earmarked for the scholarship fund.
Donors in the crowd applauding the presentation included Donna Anderson, Myrna Blalock, Patricia Gehl, Loretta Haugen, Donna Brantman, Terry Kerley, Virginia and Bob Robins, Mary Roosevelt, and Marilyn and Dave Wooten. Also front and center for the awards were Anne and Devon Wortmann, Virginia Savage, Carla Wyffels, Carolyn Olsen, Jaclyn Kessler, Anita Lawson, Steven Matherand Kathy Hamilton.
The scholarship reception also occurred on the evening of ownership transition of the Balboa Bay Club. The former chairwoman of the iconic property for the past 41 years, Beverly Ray Parkhurst, was on hand with husband Arlis Parkhurst to welcome the new stewards of the Balboa Bay Club.
Members of the Richard H. Pickup family, representing Eagle Four Partners and Pacific Hospitality Group LLC, the parent company of the Balboa Bay Club and the Newport Beach County Club, were in attendance.
===
https://web.archive.org/web/20100713201925/http://web.mac.com/calscholars/Site/Officers_and_Directors.html
cal scholars
OFFICERS AND BOARD OF DIRECTORS
Charles Geshekter, Chairman. Professor of African History, California State University, Chico. B.A. in History, University of Richmond, 1965. M.A. in African History, Howard University, 1966. Ph.D. in African History, University of California, Los Angeles, 1968. Developed curriculum in African History, Chico. Interests and publications: Somalia, African languages, diseases of poverty.
John M. Ellis,President. Professor emeritus of German Literature, University of California, Santa Cruz. Dean of the Graduate Division, 1977-1986. Ph.D. in German Literature, London University, 1965; B.A. in German Literature
and Philosophy, 1959. Interests and publications: Theory of language and literature, German literature. Founding secretary of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. 75 years old?
:{:{}:
}:
Gerald E. P. Gillespie, Treasurer. Professor emeritus of Literatures, Cultures, Languages, Stanford University. University of Munich, postgraduate, 1960-61; Ohio State University, M.A., 1958, Ph.D., 1961; University of Tübingen, postgraduate, 1956-57; A.B., Harvard University, 1956. President of the International Comparative Literature Association, 1994-1997; he is lead editor in its international project Romantic Prose Fiction. Fulbright, Mellon, Guggenheim, and National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships. Professor at the University of Southern California, 1961-1964) and SUNY Binghamton, 1965-1974. Research fellow at the Universities of Pittsburgh and Cambridge and a guest professor at the Universities of Pennsylvania, New York, Minnesota, Peking, East Anglia, Munich, and the Fern-University, Hagen. Honorary Professor of International Studies at Liaoning University (China). Interests and publications: European and New World literature from the
Renaissance to the present; interrelationship among the arts; principles of narrative; literature and science; practice and theory of international comparative literature.
:{:{Matt Malkan, :(style="background-color:#ffff66ff"):}::{Secretary. }::{ Professor of Astronomy, University of }:
California, Los Angeles. Ph.D. in Astronomy, CalTech 1983. C.P.G.S., Cambridge University, 1978. M.A. in Physics, Harvard, 1977. B.A. in Astrophysics, Harvard, 1977. Interests and publications: galaxies in their early stages, utilization and evaluation of advanced astrophysical instrumentation.
}:
Leila Beckwith. Professor emeritus of Pediatrics, University of California, Los Angeles. B.S., College of the University of Chicago, 1950. Ph.D. in Psychology, University of Chicago, 1959. Interests and publications: Parenting practices, infant and toddler development, attachment theory.
:{Jack Citrin:{. Heller }::{Professor of Political Science and Director, Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California, Berkeley }::{where he has been on the faculty since 1970. His research interests center on the relations of public opinion and public policy and he has written widely on political trust, direct democracy, affirmative action, immigration, and American national identity. He is the co-author of two new books in press Constitutional Controversies: The Supreme Court and Public Opinion (Oxford University Press 2008) and }::{American Identity and the Politics of Multiculturalism(Cambridge University Press 2008). He presently is a member of the California Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.}::{}:
}:
:{:{Glynn Custred. }::{ Professor of Anthropology (Linguistics), }:
California State University, East Bay. Ph.D., Indiana University, Anthropology, 1973; M. A. Latin American History, 1965; B.A. European History, 1962. Interests and publications: language change, peoples of the High Andes, frontiers between nationalities and cultures. Co-Author, California Civil Rights Initiative,Proposition 209 (banning racial preferences).}:
Gail Heriot. :{:{ Professor of Law, University of San Diego. J.D. }:
cum laude, University of Chicago Law School, 1981. B.A. in Political Science, with highest distinction, Northwestern University, 1978. Commisioner, United States Commission on Civil Rights, 2007 - present. Counsel, Senate Judiciary Committee, 1998. Associate, Hogan & Hartson LLP, Washington, DC, 1984-1989. Law Clerk, Illinois Supreme Court. Interests and publications: civil rights law, election reform, tort reform. Professor Heriot has written extensively on higher education issues, including race-based admissions policies,in the popular press, including the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the San Diego Union-Tribune, the Washington Times, the National Review and the Weekly Standard. She has testified concerning race-based admissions policies at hearings before both houses of the U.S. Congress.
}:
Charles R. Kesler. Senior Fellow, Claremont Institute, and Editor, Claremont Review of Books. Associate Director, Henry Salvatori Center at Claremont McKenna College. Ph.D. in Government, Harvard. Interests and publications: contemporary American politics, the US Constitution, the American founding.
Hal Pashler. Professor of Psychology, University of California, San Diego. Ph.D. in Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, 1985. A.B. Brown University, Logic and Philosophy of Science and Sc.B. Magna Cum Laude, 1980. Troland Research Award, National Academy of Sciences. Interests and publications: cognitive psychology, vision, learning.
Sylvia J. Wasson. Professor of German and English as a Second Language, Santa Rosa Junior College. Ed.D., University of San Francisco, 1993. M.A. (summa cum laude) in German Language and Literature, San Francisco State University, 1979. M.A., B.A. Education and English, Paedagogische Hochschule Esslingen, Germany, 1970. Interests and research: Cold War politics, Critical Theory and the Frankfurt School, the politicization of the contemporary American campus.
---
January 18, 2011
CAS statement on UCB Chancellor Birgeneau’s message on the Tucson shootings
Chancellor Robert Birgeneau of UC’s Berkeley campus issued a message to his campus on the occasion of the Tucson shootings which was clearly an attempt to promote his personal political ideology and condemn those who don’t share it. CAS issued a statement condemning this abuse of the Chancellor’s office: “Robert Birgeneau, Chancellor of the Berkeley campus of the University of California, has issued a statement on the shootings in Tucson.The California Association of Scholarsfinds this statement improper and incompetent. It demeans the office which Birgeneau holds and the institution which he serves. (More) 404
https://www.nas.org/articles/Statement_by_the_California_Association_of_Scholars_Regarding_Chancellor_Bi
...Robert Birgeneau, Chancellor of the Berkeley campus of the University of California, has issued a statement on the shootings in Tucson. The California Association of Scholars finds this statement improper and incompetent. It demeans the office which Birgeneau holds and the institution which he serves.
In his statement Birgeneau is more concerned with political advocacy than with educational policy. He argues for the DREAM Act, which was recently defeated in the U.S. Congress, and opposes Arizona’s SB 1070, which passed both houses of the Arizona legislature by large margins and was signed into law by the Governor on April 23, 2010.
Reasonable people can disagree on the merits of the DREAM Act and of Arizona SB 1070; in each case, there are principled arguments on both sides. But Birgeneau insists that all those who disagree with him are motivated not by any reasoned argument but instead only by “mean-spirited xenophobia.” We find this reprehensible for several reasons.
First, and simplest,university regulations forbid the use of university resources for political purposes.State law also forbids it, and two presidential directives that are still in force give more concrete form to that general prohibition: “University facilities and the name of the University must not be used in ways which will involve the University as an institution in the political, religious, and other controversial issues of the day,” and “There are both educational and legal reasons why the University must remain politically neutral….if the University were to surrender its neutrality, it would jeopardize its freedom.” In contravention of all these prohibitions, Birgeneau openly uses his office to promote his own political views, and associates his campus with them by using his title and letterhead without disclaimer. This is an official message from Chancellor to the campus which purports to speak for “we at UC Berkeley.”
Second, Birgeneau attacks “demonization of others” and yet, astonishingly, goes on to demonize those who disagree with him, and to attack their character and motives in a particularly ugly way. The Regents must now face squarely the question: is it appropriate for the leader of a great educational institution to use his office to insult all those citizens of this nation whose political views differ from his own? Or, perhaps even more pertinently, to insult those of his own faculty, staff, and students who differ with him politically?
Yet important as these first two considerations are, they pale in comparison to the importance of the third, which strikes at the heart of the university’s mission and purpose. A university is a place where complex issues are analyzed carefully, with judicious attention to arguments on the one side and the other, and with all the relevant evidence scrutinized without prejudice before judgments are made. That makes the campus a very different place than the everyday political street, where invective and ad hominem slurs drown out reason and evidence, and prejudice precludes careful attention to the full spectrum of arguments. The most disturbing aspect of Birgeneau’s statement is that it is an example of the rancorous, intellectually lazy, ill-informed and undisciplined thought which the university exists to transcend.It presents the worst possible example to the students who come to his campus to learn to think in a disciplined way, and to the campus faculty whose job it is to work toward that end. And it must undermine public support for the university when the people of this state see the leader of its most distinguished educational institution speaking in a way that is so completely deficient in the careful thought and measured analysis that they expect of the educated mind.
The Board of Directors of the California Association of Scholars believes that Chancellor Birgeneau’s statement falls so far short of what should be expected of a leader of a great educational institution that his continuing to lead the Berkeleycampus should now be in question.
Contact: John Ellis, President, California Association of Scholars...
Charles Geshekter, Chairman, CAS 530-343-7097; chollygee@earthlink.net
Peter Wood, President, NAS 609-683-7878; pwood@nas.org
Stephen Balch, Chairman, NAS 609-683-7878; balch@nas.org
---
==
Wayback Machine
http://web.mac.com/calscholars/Site/Home.html
Recent News
*CAS releases Report on Political Activism at UC
(More)
* Brown vetoes SB185: NAS press release (More)
*CAS congratulates Orange Co DA on prosecution
of campus speaker disruption. (More)
* CAS opposes bill that tries to end run Proposition
- (More)
*CAS President writes on corruption of the Humanities. (More)
Who We Are
The California Association of Scholars is an organization devoted to reform in higher
education. An affiliate of the National Association of Scholars, it is composed of
professors, graduate students, college administrators and trustees, and independent
scholars committed to rational discourse as the foundation of academic life in a free
and democratic society. The CAS works to strengthen the integrity of scholarship
and teaching, persuaded that only through an informed understanding of the Western
intellectual heritage and of the realities of the contemporary world can citizen and
scholar be equipped to sustain our civilization's achievements. In light of these
objectives, we are deeply concerned about perspectives within the academy that
reflexively denigrate the values and institutions of our society. Because such
tendencies are often dogmatic in character and indifferent to both logic and evidence,
they undermine the basis for coherent scholarly dialogue. We encourage an
assertiveness among academics who value reason and an open intellectual life.
The California Association of Scholars seeks to:
* affirm the centrality of academic freedom to the integrity of university life and
strengthen the right to teach and learn in an environment free of politicization
and coercion;
* nourish the free exchange of ideas and the virtues of tolerance as essential to the
pursuit of truth and the maintenance of civility;
* build and sustain an academic leadership dedicated to the idea of reasoned and
responsible scholarship;
* maintain intellectual standards in research and teaching, and resist quotas and other
numerically based formulas as divisive and inequitable strategies for faculty
recruitment and student admissions;
Issues That Concern Us:
* Politicization of scholarship and teaching, and the substitution of social reform for
the pursuit of knowledge;
* Dogmatic hostility to Western civilization, and reflexive use of non-Western
cultures as a means of denouncing American society;
* Inappropriate use of sexual, racial, and other nonscholarly criteria in selecting
works to be studied, and the associated denigration of great literary and artistic
works;
* Absence of core curricula or other requirements ensuring a well-rounded
education, and their replacement by unscholarly curricular innovations that lack
substance and intellectual depth;
* Use of sexual, racial, or other criteria unrelated to merit in hiring, in promotion,
and in student recruitment, and the resulting campus polarization;
* Use of noncurricular resources such asorientations and residential life programs to
impose political and ideological conformity on student life;
* Unfair treatment of teachers and students suspected of holding "politically
incorrect" views, and its obverse, the frequent placation of activists by
administrators who refuse to enforce campus regulations;
*The impact of lowered academic standards in colleges and universities on
education at lower levels, and the resulting inadequate preparation of high school
graduates for college work.
144 Bay Heights
Soquel, CA 95073
Tel (831) 476-1144
Fax (831) 476-1188
calscholars@mac.com
CAS California Association of Scholars