Kurtz, Stanley

SEE TWO

off bs hoover: 

An author, journalist, and anthropologist, Stanley Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a contributing editor to National Review Online. His latest book is Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism.

omg

no lnx

https://www.alternet.org/critical-race-theory-2659941137/

twenty or 30 years ago, most consumers of right-wing media didn't know what critical race theory (CRT) was. Many liberals and progressives, for that matter, were unfamiliar with CRT — a college-level African-American studies discipline that, in essence, argues that racism of the past affects present-day institutions.

But in recent years, CRT has become a major boogieman in right-wing media and among MAGA Republicans. MAGA pundits and politicians, according to their liberal critics, have weaponized the term CRT and used it to attack any book or article that makes them uncomfortable — be it "The Autobiography of Malcolm X" or Alice Walker's "The Color Purple."

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Scholar Stanley Kurtz is among the right-wing figures who has been railing against CRT, but his efforts go beyond trying to keep books out of public schools.

READ MORE: Why Texas Republicans’ crusade against 'woke civics' does students a huge disservice: report

Reporter Asher Lehrer-Small, in an article published by The 74 on May 2, emphasizes that Kurtz has "spearheaded a quiet but influential campaign to cleanse classrooms of what he calls 'woke civics.'" According to Lehrer-Small, Kurtz's "advocacy in Texas led to the 2021 passage of an unprecedented state law banning assignments that involve 'direct communication' between students and their federal, state or local lawmakers."

The reporter notes, "At the core of Kurtz's activism is a central idea: that hands-on civics lessons, such as students writing to their legislators, will lead to 'school-sponsored indoctrination and political action in support of progressive policy positions'…. Accurate or not, Kurtz's depiction of 'woke civics' is now being felt in America's classrooms."

Lehrer-Small adds, "When the scholar penned his model legislation in 2021, which said students should be banned from receiving class credit for 'lobbying' or 'advocacy' at the federal, state or local level, lawmakers and advocates across the country pounced."

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The reporter notes some specific examples of Kurtz's influence. In 2022, for instance, Democratic Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware and GOP Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, according to Lehrer-Smalls, proposed a bipartisan bill that called for increasing grants for civics education. But the bill was "stopped in tracks" when Kurtz labeled it CRT. AndFlorida Gov. Ron DeSantis "mimicked" Kurtz's messaging by claiming that the bill would "award grants to indoctrinate students with ideologies like critical race theory."

READ MORE: 'Censorial filters are unconstitutional': DeSantis' aim to control FL colleges' academic freedom worsens

Read Asher Lehrer-Small's full report for The 74 at this link. https://www.the74million.org/article/the-conservative-scholar-who-convinced-gop-lawmakers-civics-conceals-crt/

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/tracing-the-roots-of-city-boy-trumps-racist-suburban-dream-nonsense-all-the-way-to-rush-limbaugh

no lnx twt many

It’s no surprise that the current occupant of the White House is running for reelection on racism. Given his track record, it would be a surprise if he weren’t. Donald Trump’s racist rhetoric has always centered on fearmongering around crime, going back not just to the start of his presidential campaign in 2015, but back to the 1980s. Now he’s at it again, this time with a focus on the suburbs and, in anachronistic language that evokes June Cleaver or Carol Brady, ”suburban housewives.”

Based on his rambling, Trump seems to think the suburbs are still filled with white women in aprons making their kids PB&J on Wonder BreadTM with the crusts cut off, dutifully fixing after-work martinis for their husbands. Trump thinks he can scare those white-lady aprons right off with tales of Black and brown criminals descending upon their neighborhoods, and present himself as the white (orange?) savior who will keep their neighborhoods safe by keeping them white. This particular dog whistle is not one Trump invented, of course. Among others, Rush Limbaugh has been blowing it for years.

Let’s start with Trump’s current campaign. On June 30, President Shitgibbon tweeted that he was “studying the AFFH housing regulation that is having a devastating impact” on the suburbs. He also claimed that his opponent, former vice president Joe Biden, wants to make things “much worse”—correction: “MUCH WORSE.” Trump added that he “may END!” the AFFH.

The AFFH refers to the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule, enacted in 2015, under the Obama-Biden administration. Barack Obama’s AFFH rule updated a previous regulation governing discrimination in housing and real estate, which wasn’t doing what it was supposed to do as required by the Fair Housing Act of 1968.

What Obama did was mandate that local governments that received federal money to build housing must “identify and address patterns of racial segregation outlawed under the Fair Housing Act of 1968 by creating detailed corrective plans.” In other words, he simply wanted to make sure that cities and towns followed existing law. Radical, I know. To clarify, the AFFH would not destroy, abolish, or even fundamentally alter the nature of housing in the suburbs. It’s just a boogeyman Trump’s using because he thinks it will scare the white ladies of Westchester County and beyond into voting for him.

A few weeks after the initial tweet, on July 23, this appeared on Herr Twitler’s feed.

Less than a week later, on July 29, the White House announced that it was revoking the AFFH. This formal revocation came on top of action Trump took in January 2018, which de facto blocked the rule from taking effect by pushing back its effective start date to at least November 1, 2020. The Trump administration has taken numerous other steps to hamstring the federal government’s efforts to enforce fair housing and desegregate neighborhoods.

The same day the rule’s revocation was made public, Trump followed up with a tweet that, as many have noted, said the quiet part out loud.

That same day, Trump echoed his tweet in remarks to an audience in Midland, Texas. “There will be no more low-income housing forced into the suburbs,” he declared, adding that “it’s been going on for years. I’ve seen conflict for years. It’s been hell for suburbia.”

Whereas Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Ben Carson and his minions have portrayed the gutting of Obama’s fair housing rules as merely making things simpler by reducing unnecessary paperwork, President Charlottesville just came right out and revealed the real motivation for these changes. He’s vowing to make sure the people he considers undesirable from “low-income housing” projects can’t move in next door—and assuming it’s an effective strategy.

Apparently, Trump convinced himself that his previous tweets were too subtle. He decided that it would help if he named someone who would supposedly help Joe Biden take aim at the suburbs if he was elected. Since President Barack Obama is no longer on the ticket, the Orange Julius Caesar must have figured he needed a substitute of a similar hue.

[twt]

When pressed on what he meant by that tweet, Trump, as The New York Times put it, “told on himself.”

“They’re going to, in my opinion, destroy suburbia, And just so you understand, 30 percent-plus of the people living in suburbia are minorities,” Trump rambled. “African-American, Asian-American, Hispanic American—they’re minorities. Thirty percent. The number is even higher, it’s—they say 35, but I like to cut it a little bit lower. You know why? That way I can never get myself in too much trouble with the fake news.”

Women of all races have been calling Trump out on this hate-filled nonsense. “I think people may make assumptions,” one white Kentucky stay-at-home mother of three told the Daily Beast. “And I think that’s something the president has done, unfortunately, is make assumptions that all white women are going to support him. And we’re not.”

Writer Ally Henny, on the other hand, was explicit in her explanation of why Trump is choosing his words so carefully.

Most recently, perhaps having decided that race-baiting the suburbs from Trump’s own mouth and tweets needed some fleshing out as a campaign strategy, the impeached president and his HUD secretary “wrote” an op-ed piece, placed behind The Wall Street Journal paywall. It’s a bit more subtle, and makes passing mention of Americans of color also living in the suburbs, but this slick product can’t unsay what the racist-in-chief already put out there.

As Media Matters laid out, Trump’s racist suburban shtick strongly echoes the work of right-wing author and commentator Stanley Kurtz. In 2012, Kurtz published a book called Spreading the Wealth: How Obama is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities. If you’re wondering whether Kurtz has spent a lifetime studying housing policy, don’t bother. His previous book was 2010’s Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism. There is something that is definitely not “expertise in housing policy” running through both tomes.

Back to 2020. On the morning of June 30, Kurtz published a National Review piece claiming that if Biden won the presidency, he would go beyond the AFFH and adopt a policy advocated by Cory (not “Corey”) Booker; he further asserted that Biden’s true intention is to “abolish the suburbs.” Trump’s tweet saying the same went live about 12 hours later. Media Matters’ Bobby Lewis pointed out the connection between Kurtz’s article and the Trump tweet.

Stanley Kurtz leads us to the other right-wing blowhard mentioned at the beginning of this post, namely the man with whom Trump defiled the Medal of Freedom: Rush Limbaugh. In doing research for my recent book, I analyzed multiple examples of Limbaugh slamming Obama over his policies regarding the suburbs—most of the time citing Kurtz. A week before Kurtz’s book came out in 2012, Limbaugh started talking about it, quoting from it, and using it to paint President Obama as anti-suburban and, in so many words, anti-white. This went on for the remainder of Obama’s time in office.

On July 26, 2012, Limbaugh offered lengthy quotations from the Kurtz book, which regaled its readers with lies about Obama’s “lifelong hostility to the suburbs.” The 44th president apparently had it in for suburb dwellers, whom he supposedly believed “were just greedy racists who didn’t want to share their tax money with the urban poor.” We know exactly which group of people Limbaugh means when he talks about “the suburbs,” and who he means when he talks about “the urban poor.” This is the very same dog whistle Trump is blowing now, eight years later, when he’s fighting to keep the presidency.

Limbaugh did this over and over again. The next day he claimed that suburbanites were Obama’s “real enemies,” and six days after that, Limbaugh predicted that the first Black president would “abolish” the suburbs. In September 2013, the racist host said that President Obama would “destroy the suburbs,” and in July 2014, Limbaugh spouted off about “Obama’s war on the suburbs”—during a segment where he specifically went after the AFFH rule Trump so desperately hates, which was then under consideration. In a July 2015 master class on race-baiting, the host tied his suburbia-based attacks on Obama to “forced busing,” as well as to “attacks on the South” and “attacks on the Confederate flag.”

This went on and on. In addition to the examples above, Limbaugh threw out similar suburban dog whistles during the Obama presidency here, here, here, here, here, and here—each “here” represents a different day’s broadcast. And of course, Limbaugh is still at it in 2020. He even blew his dog whistle during his reaction to Rep. John Lewis’s funeral.

Thanks to reporting from New York Magazine’s Gabriel Sherman, we know that Trump got many of the specific topics for his race-baiting rhetoric from talk radio. In the run-up to the 2016 campaign, onetime top Trump aide Sam Nunberg did a “deep dive into talk radio”—listening for “thousands of hours” and then giving “reports” to Trump on what was really motivating the right-wing base. Limbaugh has the largest audience in talk radio, and has for as long as such ratings have been measured. Trump’s recent dog whistles on the suburbs and Biden are wholly unoriginal: They’re virtually a carbon copy of Limbaugh’s language on the suburbs and Obama—language which itself was cribbed from Stanley Kurtz.

When it comes to the suburbs, and other policies that relate to race and economics more broadly, Limbaugh and Trump have sought to win over middle- and working-class white Americans by falsely claiming that former President Obama and future President Biden want nothing more than to take away what they have earned—whether it’s money or safe neighborhoods—and give it to Black and Latino Americans who supposedly don’t deserve it.

Playing to racial anxieties and ginning up fear and hatred are the only ways the Limbaugh-Trump Republican Party can get the support of those voters, given that GOP policies actively work against their economic interests while favoring those of the real elites—the top 1%. To defeat Trump and the Republican Party made in his image, Democrats must help these voters recognize that Republicans are spewing hate in order to keep white Americans and Americans of color from coming together on the basis of shared interests.

One way to do so is to point out what the Trump party actually does when it gains power. The Trump presidency’s singular legislative accomplishment is a multibillion dollar tax giveaway to millionaires and billionaires, that does little to nothing for the average American of any race. The other major legislative effort undertaken by Trump & Co. was repealing the Affordable Care Act, which expanded coverage to tens of millions of Americans. Thankfully, that effort failed, but it too would have mostly helped the wealthy by giving them a tax cut, and harmed the folks—again, Americans of every race—earning around or just below the national median income who had gained coverage.

Republicans can’t sell their economic policies to middle- and working-class white voters, so all they have left to peddle is hate. That’s why Trump is now trying to scare white suburbanites with tall tales about poor people moving in from cities, or, as he did just a few days ago, revisiting some of his worst rhetoric from the 2016 campaign about immigrants and crime.

When thinking about where Trump comes from, most people associate him with the city. Trump Tower, his erstwhile home, sits in midtown Manhattan. He claims to have “built” skyscrapers, but mostly he just got paid to place his name on other people’s buildings. However, he grew up in 1950s Jamaica Estates, a neighborhood that, although it was located in Queens, New York City, much more resembled a wealthy suburban enclave. It was, according to a New York Times article, “an exclusive and nearly all-white place, resistant to outsiders and largely impenetrable to minorities.” Trump himself described it as “safe” and “an oasis” when compared to other parts of Queens, which he viewed as “rough.”

This mindset—the idea of a suburban environment as a place where white people with enough money to escape the inner city’s poor neighborhoods of color, as well as enough power to keep non-whites from moving in—is at the core of Trump’s race-baiting on the suburbs. Trump understands, and hopes to exploit in this year’s election the very racist fears that once motivated the white flight from American cities in the 1950s and ‘60s. So does Rush Limbaugh, whose racist rhetoric throughout the Obama presidency laid out the blueprint that Trump is now using to attack Joe Biden.

Two months before Election Day, it appears that the white suburban women who elected Trump in 2016 (and to whom Trump thinks this hate-filled nonsense will appeal) are not responding to his dog whistle, at least not in large enough numbers to reelect him. Perhaps they’ve evolved in terms of their fears and prejudices. Or perhaps they’ve simply come to realize that The Man Who Lost The Popular Vote poses a far greater danger because of his manifest unfitness to lead our country.

Making sure they remember that and come out to vote for the Biden-Harris ticket is one thing we can all help to make happen.

Ian Reifowitz is the author of The Tribalization of Politics: How Rush Limbaugh’s Race-Baiting Rhetoric on the Obama Presidency Paved the Way for Trump (Foreword by Markos Moulitsas)

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https://eppc.org/publications/ecologism-campus-cult-victimhood/

hifallutin version of agw as religion

Ecologism: The Campus Cult of Victimhood

Published in Academic Questions on March 13, 2014

Stanley Kurtz

BY STANLEY KURTZ

This piece originally appeared in “Inequalities,” a special section of the March 2014 issue of Academic Questions (Volume 27, Issue 1, pp. 18-27).

Campus egalitarians doth protest too much. They seek not equality but the superiority conferred by victimhood. They yearn to be oppressed—or rather, to be perceived as sufferers—so as to take command of the university, the state, and through them, of you. Radical campus egalitarians are the new elect, the chosen, the saved. They are, in short, the new religious, however much, in conventional terms, they may appear to be unchurched.

This applies not simply to victimization’s usual suspects—certain approved minorities—but also to campus climate crusaders, who may at first seem remote from the victim-group model. From the wretched of the earth to Wretched Earth, the planet itself is now the downtrodden. And beneath this delicious descent into climate chaos lurks the urge to dominate—to cleanse the globe, not of carbon dioxide, but of heretics, of deniers, of the new unchurched. Faith, salvation, and superiority, not equality, are at play on campuses today.

The notion that ecology crusaders are faithful followers of a novel secular religion may not be new, yet rarely has it been deployed with such penetration and gusto as inPascal Bruckner’s newly translated 2011 book, The Fanaticism of the Apocalypse: Save the Earth, Punish Human Beings.[1]Bruckner is a French intellectual who, while no conservative, is a dedicated critic of leftist excess. What Fanaticism lacks in systematicness and sociological grounding it more than makes up for in insight and suggestiveness. Bruckner helps take us where we ought to want to go, toward a religious theory of the secular leftist present. Unpacking Bruckner’s gift of a book and building on what it has to teach us repays the effort.

......

doesn't deny climate as much as say any action we want to take is wrong?]

https://grist.org/climate-energy/the-national-reviews-worst-nightmare-climate-activists-might-win/

The activists beginning to push universities and local governments to sell their oil stocks may think they have a tough road ahead of them. Other divestment campaigns, like those involving tobacco, the arms trade, and apartheid in South Africa, have taken decades, if they’ve worked at all. But the climate change divestment movement has one observer who thinks it is capable of moving mountains.

Not that this observer thinks it should move those mountains. In fact, he would rather divestment activists stop trying to move anything, period — which is the story of how the climate movement came to have an ambitious three-part series written by Stanley Kurtz, Harvard PhD and social commentator for The National Review, about how divestment is one of the greatest dangers facing this great country. Published last spring, it remains a noteworthy attempt from across the political spectrum to take this new movement seriously....silly a it might seem we need yo pay attn to yng ppl] Fossil-fuel divestment is economics Lena Dunham-style: an embarrassingly naïve and apparently futile stance by those who nonetheless hold the power to swing elections and shift the culture. When nearly three-quarters of voting Harvard undergraduates elect to treat the companies that power our economy as pariahs, it’s time to take notice. Energy is so fundamental — in a sense, fossil fuels are the economy — that our climate wars increasingly serve as proxies for a battle over the status and even the existence of America’s free-market system. Look carefully at the fossil-fuel divestment campaign and you’ll find a new and potentially more damaging incarnation of Occupy Wall Street.

The profits generated by oil and gas companies, Kurtz argues, are an essential part of what has helped America stay America.

Economic growth and the technological innovation that drives it have long been bulwarks of our domestic tranquility and national security. Enlarging the pie for everyone prevents politics from devolving into nasty zero-sum squabbles over redistributing wealth.Growth also keeps us strong enough to hold external threats at bay. Do we really want to surrender this time-tested recipe for social peace and international success?

Divesting holdings in coal and oil, Kurtz argues, would depress economic growth, and depressing economic growth, Kurtz adds, could “very easily cost lives. Refrigerators holding vaccine in rural Africa need power, after all.”

Which is a lovely thought. If only energy use were so noble. If only humans had accidentally warmed the planet because we were trying to keep vaccines cold, not even for us, but for another country entirely. It is as though no has ever told Stanley Kurtz about flat-screen televisions. Or Vegas. And no one should ever tell him, because if he has made it this far without knowing, he should stay this innocent. Also: While he thinks there’s a strong chance that global warming exists, he questions the extent of its effects, and so odds are good he wouldn’t listen to you anyway.

It’s worth reading the whole series, because there’s a whole lot of worthwhile subtext there, including a steady thrum of anxiety that America’s youth are losing faith in capitalism. This seems like a stretch, since the social movement Kurtz is addressing uses primarily capitalist arguments to make its case. But this is an old fear, and one that clearly still has power.

I recommend checking out Kurtz’s other writing, including this nightmarish vision of the future of American urbanism:

The new HUD rule is really about changing the way Americans live. It is part of a broader suite of initiatives designed to block suburban development, press Americans into hyper-dense cities, and force us out of our cars.

As someone who, as a young person, left the suburbs of Detroit for the big city with many dreams — including the one where she would never again have to show up for work covered in grease up to the elbow because her car had gotten stuck in reverse and she had to reach down under the hood and manually reattach the shifting mechanism — I do not think this sounds like the end of the world. Neither does the rest of it.

Young activists, be of good cheer. Someone believes in you!

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Search Results

The Wannabe Oppressed | National Review

https://www.nationalreview.com › wannabe-oppressed-stanley-kurtz

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:{Oct 16, 2013 - By :{Stanley Kurtz:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: ... Today's college students, :{climate:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: change, and the cult of ... When McKibben almost singlehandedly turned :{global warming:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: into a .... :{Stanley Kurtz:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

Fossil-Fuel Divestment — Part 3 | National Review

https://www.nationalreview.com › 2013/03 › fossil-fuel-divestment-part-3-...

:{:(style="border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

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:{Mar 6, 2013 - Yet it is not changing global :{weather:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: patterns but the deteriorating :{climate:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: ... was that unchecked :{global warming:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: would mean death for six out of every .... :{Stanley Kurtz:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

Ecologism: The Campus ... - National Association of Scholars

https://www.nas.org › ecologism_the_campus_cult_of_victimhood

:{:(style="border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

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:{:{Stanley Kurtz:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: ... And beneath this delicious descent into :{climate:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: chaos lurks the urge to dominate—to cleanse the globe, not of ... Implicitly, he accepts the notion that human beings have made some significant contribution to :{global warming:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:.:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

The National Review's worst nightmare: Climate activists ...

https://grist.org › climate-energy › the-national-reviews-worst-nightmare-cl...

:{:(style="border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

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:{Oct 29, 2013 - But the :{climate:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: change divestment movement has one observer who ... have an ambitious three-part series written by :{Stanley Kurtz:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:, Harvard PhD and ... Also: While he thinks there's a strong chance that :{global warming:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: exists, ...:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

Divestment du Jour - Ethics & Public Policy Center

https://eppc.org › publications › divestment-du-jour

:{:(style="border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

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:{Oct 14, 2013 - :{Stanley Kurtz:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:. By :{Stanley Kurtz:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: ... That quick call to divest, followed by a plea to make :{climate:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: change an election issue, was ... the first major account of :{global warming:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: a quarter-century ago, McKibben caused a sensation ...:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

Bill McKibben - Discover the Networks

https://www.discoverthenetworks.org › individuals › bill-mckibben

:{:(style="border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

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:{Emphasizing the threat of an imminent :{global:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:-:{warming:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: catastrophe, the book ... As author :{Stanley Kurtz:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: explains, The End of Nature marked the dawn of an era ... McKibben routinely supplemented his warnings about :{climate:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: change with ...:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

Obama's Coded Climate Politics - The Atlantic

https://www.theatlantic.com › politics › archive › 2014/06 › obamas-coded...

:{:(style="border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

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:{Jun 17, 2014 - President Obama's :{climate:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: speech Saturday got plenty of press for its lengthy assault on :{global:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:-:{warming:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: denial. ... Obama's latest comment drew attack from the right Monday afternoon, when :{Stanley Kurtz:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: wrote on the ...:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

New Obama highway rules consider climate change ...

www.houstontomorrow.org › livability › story › highway-constructions-i...

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:{Mar 29, 2013 - New Obama highway rules consider :{climate:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: change ... the first time that they should consider the impact on :{global warming:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: before approving major ... Columnist :{Stanley Kurtz:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: speculated that Obama could publicly approve the ...:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

The Global Warming Cause – one man's quest for victimhood ...

https://wattsupwiththat.com › 2013/10/17 › the-global-warming-cause-one...

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:{Oct 17, 2013 - The world's most viewed site on :{global warming:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: and :{climate:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: change ... :{Stanley Kurtz:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: examines our old pal Bill McKibben, whose warming obsession ... When McKibben almost single-handedly turned :{global warming:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: into a ...:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

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https://www.facingsouth.org/2017/08/north-carolina-first-enact-controversial-model-bill-sanctioning-campus-protesters

Kurtz had high hopes for North Carolina, and it didn't let him down.

A conservative commentator and senior fellow at the faith-based Ethics and Public Policy Center, Kurtz co-authored sample legislation for the Goldwater Institute, an Arizona-based libertarian think tank, to limit protests on college campuses. He was responding to so-called "shout-downs" where protesters have forced controversial speakers visiting colleges to leave the stage (as in the case of "The Bell Curve" author Charles Murray at Middlebury College in Vermont) or prevented their speaking at all (as happened to conservative political provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos at Berkeley).

Writing in the conservative National Review, Kurtz argued that the last few years have seen a rise in incidents involving leftist students emboldened by sympathetic faculty to shut out conservative voices. But some critics say the Goldwater legislation goes beyond limiting student interference, defining punishable protest too broadly to protect student's free speech rights. Others take issue with thebill's expansion of government control over universities, with its provisions requiring them to remain neutral on public controversies and to create a free-speech oversight board.

North Carolina has not been the site of any high-profile shout-downs, and in fact the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education — a libertarian group that supports the Goldwater bill — recently rated it as the best state for free speech on campus. But back in March, its Republican-controlled General Assembly became the nation's first to bring a version of the Goldwater bill to the floor. [relates to horowitz bill how?]

In fact, North Carolina played a special role in the crafting of the proposal. For more than a year before the model bill's release, Kurtz had worked with the office of Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Forest on campus free speech issues. Kurtz says that Forest's team "provided critical early encouragement and support for the approach that eventuated in the Goldwater proposal."

The version of the "Restore/Preserve Campus Free Speech" bill filed in the N.C. House and Senateon March 29 resembled the Goldwater Institute's model legislation in that it prevented public universities from disinviting controversial speakers and required them to "strive to remain neutral … on the public policy controversies of the day." The bill also called for the creation of a "Committee on Free Expression" to be elected from the majority-Republican UNC Board of Governors to publish an annual report on the state of free speech on UNC campuses.

But it differed from the model in the penalties imposed. Rather than requiring a mandatory one-year suspension or expulsion for students who had twice been found guilty of violations, as Kurtz proposed, the original version of North Carolina's bill charged the state's public universities to develop a range of sanctions that would apply to "protests and demonstrations that infringe upon the rights of others to engage in or listen to expressive activity."

Among those supporting the bill were Jenna Robinson, president of the conservative nonprofit James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, and John Hood, chair of the John Locke Foundation, a conservative think tank. Both Raleigh-based groups were founded and are funded by North Carolina businessman and Republican mega-donor Art Pope, whose influence network has long criticized UNC for discouraging conservative viewpoints. One of the bill's primary sponsors, Rep. Jonathan Jordan, served as the Locke Foundation's research director in the late 1990s.

Concerned about the bill's reach, the North Carolina ACLUworked with its sponsors to make sure the final version didn't infringe on anyone's constitutional rights. Amendments were added that scrapped the requirement that universities remain neutral on controversial issues and replaced it with a clause prohibiting them from requiring students or faculty to publicly express a certain political view. And while the bill still requires universities to come up with disciplinary sanctions for those found to have obstructed free speech, it significantly narrowed the definition of which actions are punishable; now, only someone who "disrupts the functioning of the constituent institution or substantially interferes with the protected free expression rights of others" will face disciplinary action. The general counsel for the UNC system told the House Committee on Education that these changes had alleviated UNC's "major concerns" about the legislation.

The General Assembly passed a final version of the bill in late June and sent it to Gov. Roy Cooper (D). Calling it "much improved," the ACLU did not ask for a veto. But Cooper did receive a joint veto request from the National Coalition Against Censorship and the American Association of University Professors. The groups cited concerns that the Committee on Free Expression, which given the Board of Governors' composition would almost certainly be Republican-dominated, "would inject political considerations into the administration of speech policies and sanctions."

The July 30 signing deadline came and went without word from Cooper's office. The legislation had passed both chambers with a veto-proof majority and would likely have become law no matter Cooper's response. By not taking action by the deadline, he allowed the bill to go into effect without taking a public stance.

Since Kurtz's model bill was first introduced in North Carolina, it's also been taken up by legislatures in California, Illinois, Louisiana, Michigan, Tennessee, Virginia, and Wisconsin.

In Tennessee, the legislature passed a proposal nicknamed the "Milo bill" that was inspired by the Goldwater legislation but neither specified disciplinary sanctions nor set up an oversight committee — changes significant enough that Kurtz said the measure was "not primarily Goldwater based."

The Virginia House passed a resolution that was inspired by Kurtz's bill but was significantly altered. For example, the Virginia legislation does not mandate disciplinary sanctions, instead merely asserting that it is "not proper" for public universities to shield students from offensive speech.

In Louisiana, a version of the bill that Kurtz supported passed the state House and Senate with bipartisan support but was vetoed by Gov. John Bel Edwards (D), who said it was a "solution in search of a problem" and "would only frustrate the goals it purports to achieve." While the procedures required for an override make it unlikely, Rep. Lance Harris (R) said he plans to reintroduce the bill in Louisiana's next legislative session.

When the North Carolina bill became law this week, Kurtz celebrated what he called the first enactment of his proposal — and suggested that its departures from the model could be reversed down the road.

"We are at the beginning of a new state-legislative era, and that beginning is auspicious," he wrote. "The North Carolina Restore Campus Free Speech Act accomplishes the lion's share of what the Goldwater model proposed, including important steps forward on discipline for shout-downs. Goldwater-based bills are under consideration in several states, with more likely to follow next year. And any state bill can be strengthened in a second legislative round if universities continue to abuse their powers.

Tags

• NORTH CAROLINA
• UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA
• UNC BOARD OF GOVERNORS
• NC GENERAL ASSEMBLY
• DAN FOREST
• PROTEST
• ACLU
• ROY COOPER
• STANLEY KURTZ
• GOLDWATER INSTITUTE
• FOUNDATION FOR INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS IN EDUCATION
• JAMES G. MARTIN CENTER FOR ACADEMIC RENEWAL
• JOHN LOCKE FOUNDATION
• ART POPE
• JONATHAN JORDAN
• FREE SPEECH
• NATIONAL COALITION AGAINST CENSORSHIP
• AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF UNIVERSITY PROFESSORS
• LOUISIANA
• TENNESSEE
• VIRGINIA
• JOHN BEL EDWARDS
• MODEL BILLS

==

ethics bs bio

Kurtz is a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. On a wide range of issues, from K-12 and higher education reform, to the challenges of democratization abroad, to urban-suburban policies, to the shaping of the American left’s agenda, Mr. Kurtz is a key contributor to American public debates. Mr. Kurtz has written on these and other issues for various journals, particularly National Review Online (where he is a contributing editor).

Mr. Kurtz has published two influential books on President Obama’s political history and policy agenda: Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism (Threshold) and Spreading the Wealth: How Obama is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities (Sentinel). He has also led the campaign to reform federal subsidies to academic programs of “area studies” under Title VI of the Higher Education Act.

Mr. Kurtz received his undergraduate degree from Haverford College and his Ph.D. in social anthropology from Harvard University. He later taught at Harvard, winning several teaching awards for his work in a Great Books Program. He was also Dewey Prize Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Chicago.

much of this is NR online

cfhttp://www.santacruzsentinel.com/article/NE/20171020/NEWS/171029947

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/453357/campus-shout-down-rate-quadruples-free-speech

campus Shout-Down Rate Nearly Quadruples

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Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/453357/campus-shout-down-rate-quadruples-free-speech

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Beginning with the Berkeley Milo Yiannopoulos riot of February 2, 2017 and continuing through shout-downs of Charles Murray at Middlebury and Heather Mac Donald at UCLA and Claremont, the second semester of last academic year kicked off the latest phase of the campus free-speech crisis. Trying to be as complete as possible, I’ve chronicled 10 shout-downs that took place in the spring semester of the 2016–17 academic year. That doubled the five shout-downs of the previous semester. The spring semester of 2017 will long be known for popularizing this fearsome technique of speech suppression. Remarkably, however, as we approach the halfway mark of the Fall 2017 semester, the rate of shout-downs is now nearly quadruple that of last spring.

I count 19 shout-downs so far this year. At the current rate, that would make for 38 fall-semester shout-downs. This would nearly quadruple the 10 shout-downs of last spring, a semester already infamous for speaker disruptions. To put it another way, about halfway through the current semester we’ve seen close to double the number of shout-downs that occurred during the entire notorious spring semester of last year. That’s more shout-downs in the first two months of this term than we saw during the entire previous academic year. The targets of shout-downs have expanded. Not only visiting speakers but administrators, professors, and fellow students are now subject to shout-downs. The substantial escalation in both the frequency and targeting of shout-downs is largely due to the failure of administrators to discipline last year’s disruptions. Once students realized they could get away with silencing visiting speakers, they turned the technique on internal university opponents as well. I’ve covered many of this fall’s shout-downs in “The Campus Free-Speech Crisis Deepens,” “Campus Shout-downs Spread,” “Campus Chaos: Daily Shout-Downs for a Week,” and two pieces describing single events. In listing this semester’s shout-downs to date, I’ll note only briefly instances I’ve already discussed, spending more time on new cases.

August 28: The first lecture of Reed College’s required freshman course on the origins of Western Civilization is cancelled when students protesting its “Eurocentrism” take over the stage.

September 20: A debate between libertarians and conservatives over President Trump’s immigration policies is disrupted by leftist students at the University of Pittsburgh. Protesters are ejected by police.

September 22: Former FBI director James Comey’s address to a convocation at Howard University is delayed and repeatedly disrupted by students protesting his earlier defense of police against criticism from the Black Lives Matter movement.

September 27: Claire Gastanaga, executive director of the ACLU’s Virginia chapter, is completely shut down just a few minutes into her talk on free speech at William and Mary by students affiliated with the Black Lives Matter movement. Disrupters chant “Liberalism is white supremacy” and “The revolution will not uphold the Constitution.” 

September 29: Virginia Tech president Timothy Sands is met with shouts and chants during his State of the University speech by students calling for the firing of a professor they label a “white supremacist” and “Nazi.” (The identity of the professor and the specific complaints remain unclear.)

October 2: A panel discussion, “Identity Politics: The New Racialism on Campus?” is repeatedly shouted down during the question period by leftist students at Rutgers University. The panel, part of Spiked’s “Unsafe Spaces” tour, features Mark Lilla, the liberal Democratic critic of identity politics, and several others. Panelist Kmele Foster is the target of most of the interruptions. Foster, a libertarian, is black and is accused by the disrupters, many of whom are from Black Lives Matter, of “deracializing” himself. Fearing for Foster’s safety, police escort him out of the building.

October 5: Disrupters break into a class being taught by Suzanne Goldberg, law professor, senior administrator, and Title IX compliance officer at Columbia University, to protest the school’s handling of sexual-assault claims.

October 5: Non-student Trump supporters wearing MAGA hats disrupt and cut short a public question-and-answer session at Whittier College featuring California attorney general Xavier Becerra and California state-assembly leader Ian Calderon. Disrupters shout slogans like “Build that wall,” “Lock him up,” “Respect our president,” and “America first.”

October 6: University of Oregon president Michael Schill is prevented from delivering his State of the University speech when about 45 chanting leftist protesters take over the stage and accuse the university of fascism in its handling of issues from tuition increases to the structure of programs for minorities.

October 9: Republican Texas state representative Briscoe Cain is shouted down before he can begin a talk at Texas Southern University Law School. After disrupters are ejected by police, TSU president Austin Lane calls them back and cancels Cain’s talk, claiming it had not been arranged through proper channels. President Lane’s claim has since been disputed, and Cain has announced plans to sue him and TSU.

October 10: A lecture via Skype by English far-rightist Tommy Robinson is shouted down and largely stopped when shouting protesters at Columbia University storm the stage.

October 10: A talk by Hussam Ayloush, executive director of the Los Angeles chapter of the Council on American–Islamic Relations (CAIR), is disrupted by non-student audience members who repeatedly interrupt the speaker with questions and accusations. Hecklers refuse to stop when repeatedly asked to do so by Professor Hao Huang, director of the Scripps Humanities Institute. Police are called to escort the speaker out. A video of the event was uploaded by Arthur C. Schaper, who appears to have been one of the leading hecklers at both the Becerra shout-down and this one. The Scripps disruption is notable as a second shout-down from the right. Many of the hecklers’ questions were substantive and would have been fine if they’d been asked in proper turn, with the speaker permitted to answer. Instead, hecklers peppered Ayloush with a continual stream of shouted questions and accusations, leading to angry exchanges among audience members and legitimate concern for the speaker’s safety. Afterwards, Scripps College put out a statement condemning the hecklers’ comments and offering “support and resources” to students forced to listen to critiques of Islam. Instead, Scripps should have considered having security eject the hecklers, not for the content of their questions and comments, but for their disruptive behavior.

October 11: Charles Murray’s talk on America’s cultural divide is severely disrupted by students at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, objecting to his controversial earlier book, The Bell Curve.

 October 15: A meeting of College Republicans at the University of California, Santa Cruzis disrupted for two hours by leftist protesters who argue that Republicans have no right to free speech or peaceful assembly since they are racists, fascists, and white supremacists. The protesters force their way into the meeting and call in college officials, expecting them to shut the Republicans down. When officials refuse to do so, the chants continue until three disrupters are arrested by police. I’ve argued that the practice of reporting alleged discrimination to “bias response teams” has encouraged students to stop debating with their opponents, so they can turn them in to the authorities instead. This was confirmed by a new statement from the UC Santa Cruz disrupters noting that prior to their shout-down, they had filed several reports calling for action against the College Republicans through the university’s “hate” reporting system.

October 17: A panel discussion on “civil discourse” at UCLA, co-sponsored by the Los Angeles Times and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and featuring UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh and LA Times deputy editorial-page editor Jon Healey, is successfully disrupted and effectively shut down during the question period by leftist opponents of President Trump.

October 19: Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, a popular conservative organization on many college campuses, is continually disrupted by leftist protesters during a talk at Cleveland State University. Making a vague but disturbing threat, protestors unfurl an Antifa flag and shout, “Does this make you scared?” Although disrupters yell throughout the entire speech, Kirk endures and finishes, to general applause. A campus free-speech bill currently under consideration by the Ohio legislature would apply to public universities such as Cleveland State. Unfortunately, the proposed Ohio bill omits provisions dealing with discipline for shout-downs.Only the model campus free-speech bill I co-authored along with Jim Manley and Jonathan Butcher of Arizona’s Goldwater Institute addresses shout-downs.

October 19: White nationalist Richard Spenceris continuously interrupted by shouting protestors during his speech at the University of Florida, Gainesville. The Spencer shout-down received a great deal of coverage, but some lesser-known points should be emphasized. Technically, Spencer’s Florida talk was not a college event. Although it took place on a campus, Spencer wasn’t sponsored or invited by anyone at U. Florida. He was able to come only because the university rents speaking facilities to all comers and cannot discriminate based on the content of a prospective speaker’s thought. Harvard Law professor Noah Feldman has emphasized that audience members at Spencer’s talk were guests at a private event, and were therefore under no obligation to respect Spencer’s free-speech rights.

In Feldman’s view, then, there was nothing problematic about this shout-down. Feldman takes his point too far. Legal technicalities aside, this was a university shout-down and not a model of good conduct. Free speech is a cultural value as well as a legal principle, and the cultural issue may be the key component in the end. I agree with those who say the best response to Spencer would have been either to ignore him or to protest peacefully outside the venue. That said, the legal status of Spencer’s talk as a private, non-university event is a non-trivial fact. The Goldwater model campus free-speech bill would protect Spencer’s right to speak at a public university only if he was invited by students or faculty. Failing that, the university is under no obligation to host him unless it has a pre-existing policy of renting facilities to all comers.

fter noted free-speech advocate and University of Chicago professor Geoffrey Stone defended Spencer’s right to secure meeting space at public universities that have pre-existing policies of renting to all comers, Spencer asked Stone for an invitation to the University of Chicago. Stone replied that while he would defend the right of others to invite Spencer to speak, he personally sees no reason to encourage or endorse such an event. That strikes the right balance. No-one is obligated to invite Richard Spencer, or anyone else, to speak at a university.

October 20: A public meeting with Morgan Levy, the Title IX coordinator at the University of Rochester, is canceled when student protesters unhappy with Levy’s enforcement policies arrive with noisemakers. The students had earlier promised to disrupt Levy’s talk, which is scheduled near an area where medical exams were being administered. Administrators concerned about the integrity of the exams are forced to cancel Levy’s talk when they see the protesters arrive with noisemakers.

October 26: Ivan Dozier, who from 2010 to 2015 portrayed Chief Illiniwek, the unofficial football mascot of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, is addressing a regular meeting of the Illini Republicans on the controversy over the school’s Native American mascot. Dozier’s talk is disrupted when a woman enters and begins ripping up posters and other material belonging to the Illini Republicans, Dozier, and the Honor the Chief Society (which advocates for the retention of the Chief Illiniwek mascot). The disrupter (identified by the Daily Illini as a university employee) gets into an altercation with a member of the Honor the Chief Society, who tries to restrain her. The disrupter then sits in the presenter’s chair and refuses to leave until campus police escort her out. Dozier’s talk is halted during the entire altercation. (Serious disturbances followed at UI, as protests against Chief Illiniwek continued during the homecoming parade.) The case is interesting for the disruption by an alleged university employee. The Goldwater model campus free-speech bill requires public universities to develop sanctions not only for students who interfere with the expressive rights of others, but for university employees who do so as well. This incident shows why that provision is necessary. No one knows whether this semester’s shout-downs will continue at this rate. In any case, nearly twice as many shout-downs as last semester in only half the time is a striking tally.

Columbia, the only school that’s had multiple shout-downs this semester, is also the only school that’s initiated disciplinary proceedings. The fact that Columbia dropped those proceedings under faculty pressure just yesterday is further proof that universities are incapable of handling this problem on their own. 

At the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where the Board of Regents has adopted a discipline policy drawn from a Goldwater-based bill moving through the legislature, demonstrators explicitly acknowledged that they had decided not to shout down a speaker because of the new penalties. Goldwater-based campus free-speech bills are the best medicine for the shout-down epidemic.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/453357/campus-shout-down-rate-quadruples-free-speech

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Published in National Review Online on November 2, 2017

Campus Chaos: Daily Shout-Downs for a Week

Published in National Review Online on October 12, 2017

The Campus Free-Speech Crisis Deepens

Published in National Review Online on September 27, 2017

In Defense of Campus Free-Speech Legislation

Published in National Review Online on August 10, 2017

Year of the Shout-Down: It Was Worse Than You Think

Published in National Review Online on May 31, 2017

Louisiana Succeeds Where Middlebury Failed

Published in National Review Online on May 25, 2017

Can Deregulation Restore Campus Free Speech?

Published in National Review on April 17, 2017

Peter, thanks for your thoughtful critique of my piece, “Understanding the Campus Free-Speech Crisis.” You call for our elite colleges and universities to be disciplined by the market, rather than by legislation designed to protect freedom of speech. The case I made in my piece is that while market forces are effective in most sectors, the academy is protected from market pressures by massive government financial assistance and by tenure.

People have been talking about the higher-education bubble for some time now. Well, it hasn’t burst yet. And why should it when federal and state governments pump massive amounts of money into the system? In fiscal year 2013, the federal government sent $137 billion into the academy in student loans and other assistance under Title IV of the Higher Education Act. Combined state and federal aid to higher education makes up well over a thirdof public college and university budgets. Rather than make college “more affordable,” schools have used that money to raise their already inflated tuitions. The National Association of Scholars (NAS) is proposing some potentially helpful changes to this system at the federal level. Yet even if these changes are adopted, federal aid is certain to remain massive in scope. That is precisely why NAS has suggested linking Title IV assistance to the protection of campus free speech, an idea I elaborated into a detailed proposal. (And by the way, while it doesn’t constitute a formal endorsement of every element of the NAS’s legislative proposal, over 100 educators, including many prominent conservatives familiar to NRO readers, have signed the NAS letter on amending the Higher Education Act, which includes the proposal on campus free speech.)

So long as that massive federal infusion of money through Title IV of HEA exists, colleges will remain powerfully insulated from market pressures. You note that many alternatives to the elite left-liberal institutions of higher education are available, often at a surprisingly reasonable price. That’s true, and many of those alternative schools are excellent, although quality and commitment to traditional liberal education among some of the alternatives can be uneven. In any case, the alternative menu hasn’t produced an exodus from the dominant schools. And it certainly hasn’t sufficed to secure free speech at the vast majority of colleges and universities. Nor do I believe that your excellent ideas on accreditation reform will escalate market pressures sufficiently even to slow, much less head off our rapidly metastasizing free-speech crisis.

There is a great deal of justified concern about religious liberty these days, not only at private religious colleges but for religious students at public and private secular colleges as well. You may be concerned about the effect of legislation on private religious colleges, but please note that neither my state nor my federal proposals—nor NAS’s—apply to private religious schools.

You’re mistaken when you say that I never mention the role of college and university administrators. I had plenty to say in my piece about administrators: their tendency to cave in to anti-free speech demonstrators; the decreasing pressures on them to defend free speech; and how administrators are nowadays sometimes allied with disruptors. In fact my state proposal is designed to work by bringing pressure to bear on administrators, pressure not primarily from legislators but from trustees.

Although you’re right to point to the growing importance of administrators, this hardly cancels out the role of tenured faculty. Tenured faculty have consistently driven the attacks on campus free speech, both through their teaching and through their ability to hire like-minded non-tenured faculty. After all, the leftist administrators you’re worried about were taught by faculty radicals.

I’ll let the semi-literate and now notorious Wellesley student editorial damning free speech make my point: “We have all said problematic claims, the origins of which were ingrained in us by our discriminatory and biased society. Luckily, most of us have been taught by our peers and mentors at Wellesley in a productive way.” Yes, those tenured Wellesley mentors, and the junior faculty they hire, are “productive” when it comes to churning out students who neither understand nor accept freedom of speech.

The tenure system has been grossly abused to create a de facto intellectual monopoly on campus, and the campus free-speech crisis is simply incomprehensible without understanding the faculty’s central role. Moreover, the tenure system is specifically designed to insulate faculty from market pressures. Abuse of the tenure system not only killed campus free speech and the marketplace of ideas, the resulting tenure-protected intellectual monopoly virtually guarantees that nothing will change in the absence of intervention from the public by way of its elected representatives.

By the way, I don’t agree that the campus free-speech crisis is largely limited to elite campuses. That may have been true some time ago, but the problem has spread to a far wider range of schools. Shout-downs, thefts of student newspapers, free-speech zones and the rest are now regular features at the non-flagship campuses of many state systems. They just don’t get as much publicity. I agree that there are some great alternative schools out there, and at a reasonable price. But the crisis of campus free speech and the broken marketplace of ideas now reach far more widely across the academy than you may think.

The idea that accreditation reform (which I favor)will do anything of significance to stop these campus shout-downs any time soon (or even later) is not credible.

You say that anti-Trump campuses won’t be “intimidated” by reforms backed by Trump and the Republicans. But if contemporary experience of the academy says anything, it’s that administrators will do nothing to jeopardize their Title IV funding. That’s the federal gravy train they cannot do without. Threaten their Title IV eligibility, and you’ll rapidly see a remarkable number of administrators turn aficionados of John Stuart Mill.

You defend the tenure system—the antithesis of the market. Yet you rely on the market in other respects. I don’t believe this contradiction will hold. It would have when the tenure system was a bulwark of the marketplace of ideas. But now that tenure has been abused to create an unbreakable intellectual monopoly, we conservatives have to face the fact that the campus free-speech crisis is largely immune to market pressure. This is not a surrender of conservative principle but simple recognition that market forces have been structurally subverted in this sector. We won’t win until we admit how badly we’re losing.

Again, I agree that there are still some great schools out there and that we should work to buck them up. (And my proposals exempt private religious colleges.) Market forces within the academy also can and should be strengthened. Important exceptions notwithstanding, however, we are losing our most fundamental freedom on a generational level. We’re on the edge of the abyss; the foes of freedom are protected by tenure and ensconced in the seat of cultural power; and tweaking the accreditation system and hoping for the best 20 years from now won’t do. Stronger medicine is required.

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Understanding the Campus Free-Speech Crisis

Published in National Review Online on April 12, 2017

Congressional Testimony: Hearing on First Amendment Protections on Public College and University Campuses

Published in House Judiciary Committee - Subcommittee on the Constitution and Civil Justice on April 4, 2017

Federal Funding and Campus Free Speech: A Proposal

Published in National Review Online on February 21, 2017

The Campus Free Speech Act: A Way to Restore the Marketplace of Ideas

Published inJames G. Martin Center for Academic Renewalon February 1, 2017

Bad History Is Killing Us

Published in National Review Online on June 14, 2016

The times they are a changin’. Atheists are on the march (literally), while the traditionally religious are in a defensive crouch. Bernie Sanders has broken the taboo on socialism, as a new generation questions the legitimacy of free enterprise. Freedom of speech, that most fundamental and cherished American liberty, is endangered in unprecedented ways. And a presidential candidate who wants to make America great again has what even his defenders might concede is a limited grasp of the constitutional underpinnings of that greatness. In sum, America as we’ve known it seems lately to be slipping away. I think I know an important part of the reason why: bad history.

America’s founders understood themselves to be reviving something that had been lost for millennia: republican democracy. Educated in the classics, the founders knew well the fates of Athenian and Roman democracy, and they dreaded another fall. Thomas Jefferson especially, and the other founders as well, believed that education would be the surest safeguard of America’s liberty. The Constitution by itself, they knew, would not be enough. Only knowledge of the history of liberty and the reasons for its periodic loss would inspire the public with the knowledge and desire to protect America’s freedoms.

But what if education itself were to turn against liberty? In that case we would be lost.

An extraordinary new report authored by historian David Randall of the National Association of Scholars (NAS), “*The Disappearing Continent*,” suggests that this is what may be happening to us. At one level, The Disappearing Continentis a devastating critique of the College Board’s newly-issued curriculum for its Advanced Placement European History (APEH) course. That course is the closest most Americans will come to a class in what used to be called Western Civilization. And the new curriculum will shape textbooks, and the way in which all high school and college students are taught about our Western heritage for years to come.

Rightly understood, however, the NAS report also provides a profound explanation for today’s cultural and political headlines: the rise of secularism and the discrediting of religion; debunking hostility toward economic and political liberty; the rise of a soft form of Marxism; and the undermining of Western exceptionalism in a way that leaves even the West’s would-be defenders bereft of resources to make a stand. The contours of our education have become the contours of our politics.

The history of Europe, of course, is particularly important because it is ourhistory. To make sense of American Catholicism, you need to understand the history of medieval, Renaissance, and modern European Christianity. American Protestantism rests on the achievements of Luther, Calvin, Wesley, and a host of other continental reformers. American democracy is rooted in the history of European and especially British liberty, including the long struggle for parliamentary democracy, the writings of Hobbes and Locke, and the tradition of English common law. Economic liberty has roots in the achievements of the Industrial Revolution and the writings of Adam Smith.

Incredibly, however, as the NAS Report establishes in devastating detail, APEH omits, minimizes, or subtly undermines all these core themes of Western history. APEH skips medieval Christianity entirely and “fails to convey the actual content of even the most basic developments in Reformation theology,” while reducing religion to a mere instrument of political power.

APEH also barely mentions the history of European liberty, and minimizes the history of Britain in particular, although Britain is the traditional focus of American interest in Europe’s history. When discussed at all, British parliamentary democracy is treated as little more than a tool of class interests. APEH also “minimizes the role that Britain’s political, economic, and social liberty played in fostering the Industrial Revolution.” The new curriculum likewise plays up the alleged failings of free enterprise at every turn, and has virtually nothing to say of Europe’s great inventors and entrepreneurs.

What is going on here? I’ll give you a hint. The College Board’s new AP European History curriculum minimizes both the revolutionary violence of the Socialist tradition and the brutality of the Soviet regime. While APEH strains to make free enterprise look as bad as possible and rightly condemns the cruelties of slavery, it obscures the evil and dysfunctionality of Communism. While APEH offers a debunking class-based analysis of English Parliamentary democracy, it embraces the most questionable self-descriptions of Marxism and adopts a troubling stance of moral equivalence toward the Western and Soviet blocks of the Cold War. While APEH paints religion in a negative light, it minimizes or passes over not only the Soviet Union’s atheistic hostility to religion, but also the broader and often murderous European tradition of leftist anti-clericalism.

In short, as the NAS puts it, “APEH follows modern progressive historians’ soft-Marxist interpretation of the history of Europe, which works to justify modern progressivism’s soft-Marxist political action in the present…APEH shreds European history to serve today’s progressive agenda.”

It’s often said that millennials support Bernie Sanders because they don’t really know what socialism is and haven’t been properly taught its frightening history. That’s true insofar as it goes, but we need to say more.

Through the new AP European History framework and its other AP curricula, the College Board is providing theleftist professoriatewith the means to gain control of our high-schools. Yet it’s important to realize that this “new” high school curriculum merely enshrines an orthodoxy that’s been taught at the college level for decades. If students don’t know the truth about socialism, it’s not because they’re lazy but because their teachers don’t want them to know. And although APEH avoids clear explanations of what socialism is and has done, the entire framework operates on “soft-Marxist” premises. This is what the debunking analyses of religion and liberal democracy as tools of power and class interest are all about. So the millennials have been primed to accept neo-Marxist attacks on “systemicoppression” and the free speech of the “privileged,” even without having been taught very much about socialism per se. Millennials, in other words, have been trained to view past and present through a soft-Marxist lens.

The damage goes far beyond socialism-infatuated millennials. The core liberal democratic idea that individual rights do and should trump race, ethnicity, and sex has been under assault for some time by the sort of left-multiculturalism enshrined in the College Board’s new curricula.

And what of those who resist the leftist pull? The Tea Party was inspired by respect for our constitutional system, but where does anyone go to learn about that now? Even the least progressive AP U.S. History textbooks are somewhere on the left side of the political spectrum. The strongest adherents of traditional American history and constitutionalism have taken to private- or home-schooling, excellent-but-outlier colleges, and teaching techniques that eschew textbooks in favor of reading presidential speeches and other original documents from American history.

These are excellent alternatives, yet the greater part of high school and college students have been without proper resources for the study of American history for some time. Even in “red states,” many American history teachers tend to favor leftists like Howard Zinn, and the new progressive orthodoxies. Is it any wonder, then, that even for voters who want to restore American greatness, the Constitution seems less central to the project than before?

Is anyone—right or left—now learning the history of liberty’s rise and fall in a way that Jefferson and the founders might recognize? And will even that remnant survive the College Board’s curriculum takeover? Multiple AP classes are now expected of any student hoping to attend top-ranked colleges.

Yet there is a way around the College Board’s ideological monopoly, and it’s not mysterious. As The Disappearing Continentputs it, America needs a choice. The remedy for the College Board’s curricular bias, says NAS, is “to restore variety, choice, and accountability to secondary education in America by developing one or more competitive alternatives to the College Board’s AP testing program.”

Last year the College Board attempted to forestall such competition by producing a revised version of its controversial, hyper-leftist 2014 AP U.S. History curriculum framework. I’ve argued at length that this supposed fix was illusory: that American exceptionalism has not in fact been incorporated into the new AP U.S. History framework, that even the revised framework is deeply flawed, and that in any case none of the textbooks or other course materials for AP U.S. History have been changed since they turned so sharply left. In short, the AP U.S. History revision was little more than a publicity stunt designed to parry criticism without making substantial changes.

The NAS has been the leading force in the national debate over the College Board’s new curriculum, firmly but fairly pressing the case for the importance of core Western values. In keeping with that, NAS set out to test the sincerity of the College Board’s professed efforts to meet its traditionalist critics halfway by evaluating the new AP European History curriculum. The result is the withering critique of The Disappearing Continent. As the NAS report puts it: “The College Board’s persisting progressive distortion of history substantiates concerns that the 2015 APUSH revisions do not represent a genuine change of direction, but only a temporary detour in the College Board’s long march to impose leftist history on the half a million American high school students each year who prepare themselves for college by taking APUSH or APEH.”

Once the College Board has finished producing detailed curricula for all of its AP courses, we will have arrived at the endpoint no-one openly admits to wanting: a leftist national curriculum. The only way to block this is by creating a competing educational testing company advised by the best traditionalist scholars and capable of authorizing alternative curricula and textbooks. For those dissatisfied with America’s current direction, there is no better way to begin the task of cultural reconstruction than this.

I’ve only been able to summarize the fascinating takedown of the College Board’s new AP European History curriculum by The Disappearing Continent’sauthor, historian David Randall, but do yourself a favor. For fun, and for the kind of enlightenment the Founders would have appreciated, try reading The Disappearing Continentyourself.

Will California’s Leftist K-12 Curriculum Go National?

Published in National Review Online on June 1, 2016

AFFH Has No Basis in the Fair Housing Act

Published in National Review Online on May 17, 2016

Judge Rejects Brief Defending Astorino’s Free Speech

Published in National Review Online on May 11, 2016

Federal Tyranny Gags GOP in Hillary’s Backyard

Published in National Review Online on March 30, 2016

How Socialists from the ’60s Primed Millennials to Feel the Bern

Published in Washington Post on March 22, 2016

Ted Cruz Can Win It All

Published in National Review Online on March 10, 2016

Against Defeatism, Against Trump

Published in National Review Online on January 22, 2016

How Obama Stole Dubuque

Published in National Review Online on January 13, 2016

Don’t Take HUD Money: Feds Will Swallow You Whole

Published in National Review Online on January 11, 2016

A Plan to Restore Free Speech on Campus

Published in National Review Online on December 7, 2015

AP U.S. History Bias Still Runs Deep

Published in National Review Online on September 22, 2015

The Next Great Education Debate

Published in Washington Post on September 11, 2015

How Zinn Gets In: Road to a National Curriculum

Published in National Review on August 17, 2015

APUSH Teacher Rebels, Goes Public

Published in National Review Online on August 6, 2015

Sorry, Still No American Exceptionalism in APUSH

Published in National Review Online on August 3, 2015

APUSH Revisions Won’t Do: College Board Needs Competition

Published in National Review Online on July 30, 2015

Attention America’s Suburbs: You Have Just Been Annexed

Published in National Review Online on July 20, 2015

Washington Takes on the Zoning Board

Published in National Review - July 20, 2015 issue on July 20, 2015

Massive Government Overreach: Obama’s AFFH Rule Is Out

Published in National Review Online on July 8, 2015

AFFH: Admission of Stealth Caught on Video

Published in National Review Online on June 15, 2015

Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing: Sleeper Presidential Campaign Issue

Published in National Review Online on June 10, 2015

55 Scholars Protest AP U.S. History Changes

Published in National Review Online on June 2, 2015

...neutrality on this statement. In fact, several of the statement’s signatories consulted me on the issue, and I helped alert several others to the project.

I’ll have plenty more to say about the APUSH battle in the coming weeks, since the controversy is going to come to a boil this summer. For now, I want to take a closer look at the scholars who signed this statement. If you want a quick tour of American historical scholarship that runs against the progressive grain (along with links to some important historical work that deserves to be better known), read on.

So who signed the scholars’ statement? There are plenty of prominent public intellectuals, including National Association of Scholars founder, Stephen Balch, Notre Dame’s Gerard Bradley, UVA’s James Ceaser, Princeton’s Robert George, Stanford’s Victor Davis Hanson, Brooklyn College’s Robert Davis (KC) Johnson, U. of Chicago’s Leon and Amy Kass, Claremont McKenna’s Charles Kesler, my EPPC colleague, Yuval Levin, NYU’s Herb London, U. of Oklahoma’s Wilfred McClay, the Manhattan Institute’s Myron Magnet, Harvard’s Harvey Mansfield, City University’s Ron Radosh, Hillsdale’s Paul Rahe, Loyola Maryland’s Diana Schaub, U. of Arkansas’ Sandra Stotsky, and Harvard’s Stephan Thernstrom.

Two former Chairs of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Lynne Cheneyand Bruce Cole, also signed the statement, along with former NEH Deputy Chair and former St. John’s College Santa Fe president, John Agresto. Cheney, of course, kicked off the predecessor to the APUSH controversy, the clash over the National History Standards issued in 1994. At Cheney’s urging, those standards were condemned by the U.S. Senate by a vote of 99 to 1 (the lone dissenter was holding out for an even stronger condemnation).  Cheney jumped into the AP U.S. History controversy this past April with a powerful follow-up to the famous 1994 Op-Ed that launched the previous history war.

Without covering all of the remaining signatories, let’s have a look at a few of the scholars you might be less familiar with. In many cases, their specialties tell us a lot about why they condemned the framework.

Given the framework’s anti-military bias and its near-total neglect of the actual conduct of America’s wars, it’s no surprise that the scholars’ statement includes a number of military historians. Victor Davis Hanson, famous as a classicist, has written extensively on American military history, from Sherman’s March, to Patton’s German campaign, to Ridgway in Korea, and more. Ohio State’s Peter Mansoor served as executive officer to General David Petraeus during the surge in Iraq and authored a highly-regarded history of his experience, as well as an award-winning book on American infantry in World War II. Mark Moyar, a Senior Fellow at the Joint Special Operations University, is respected historian of Vietnam. James Jay Carafano is an expert in the Post-World War II military occupations.

Consistent with its leftist, anti-military bias and its tendency to classify any preference for American values as a lamentable belief in “cultural superiority,” the framework fails to take the Cold War communist threat seriously. This helps explain why two prominent historians of American and international communism, Ron Radosh and Emory’s Harvey Klehr became signatories.

The College Board’s revisionist framework shorts religion as well, so it makes sense that Baylor’s Philip Jenkins would sign on. Jenkins writes the sort of “bottom up” cultural history the framework supposedly favors. Yet his account of America’s story focuses on the way in which successive waves of outsider religious groups have been bearers of America’s diversity. Jenkins’ history also shows an interest in American distinctiveness that the framework utterly lacks. Notre Dame’s George Marsden, known as a biographer of Jonathan Edwards and an expert on Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism, has also written brilliantly on history of Christianity in American higher education and, most recently, on American culture in the 1950s.

The scholars’ statement was also signed by several political theorists with an interest in exactly the sort of themes the framework underplays. For example, Alexis de Tocqueville, the first and still the greatest theorist of American exceptionalism, is the subject not only of Harvey Mansfield’s powerful new translation and commentary, but also of an excellent study by Georgetown’s Joshua Mitchell. Bowdoin’s Jean Yarbrough brings a deep understanding of American political thought to studies of presidents like Thomas Jefferson and Teddy Roosevelt, precisely the sort of connection the framework neglects.

With the younger generation of academic historians sharing an almost uniform progressive bias, it has often fallen to non-academics to challenge the leftist consensus. Robert Merry’s book on James K. Polk and the Mexican War does this admirably. Polk won that war and vastly expanded America’s territory. Once considered a major success, his presidency has been excoriated by post-Vietnam historians. Merry’s book squarely challenges the anti-Polk scholarly consensus, and in doing so earned a surprisingly positive review by historian Sean Wilentz in the New York Times. Author and former City Journaleditor Myron Magnet’s most recent book, *The Founders at Home* takes exactly the sort of original approach to the Founding unlikely to be conceived by our largely leftist crop of young American historians.

There are certainly signatories who specialize in the core themes of American history as traditionally understood, from U. of Maryland’s Herman Belz, an expert in the Constitution and the Founding, to Boston College’s Robert Faulkner, who writes on Chief Justice John Marshall, to James Madison biographer Ralph Ketcham, to James Stoner, a specialist in English Common Law and American constitutionalism.

Yet there are also signatories whose specialties run contrary to the stereotype some may hold of critics of revisionist history. Emory’s Patrick Allitt has a specialty in environmental history. Joseph Kett is a cultural historian with an interest in American adolescence. Oklahoma’s Wilfred McClay is a cultural historian of American individualism and its discontents. And Hamilton College’s Robert Paquette and U. of South Carolina’s Mark Smith are both experts onslavery. (I’ll have something on the remaining signatories in a future post.)

...

Hillary Clinton’s Common Core Problem

Published in National Review Online on April 15, 2015

Democrat Divinity Schools

Published in National Review Online on April 13, 2015

AP U.S. History Battle Hits Georgia

Published in National Review Online on March 23, 2015

When Hillary’s Server Meets Obama’s Pen

Published in National Review Online on March 11, 2015

Hillary Clinton’s Poor Judgment

Published in National Review Online on March 5, 2015

The Lessons of Hillary Clinton’s Secrecy

Published in National Review Online on March 3, 2015

Let’s Embrace Competition In Advanced-Placement Testing

Published in Washington Post on March 1, 2015

Testimony Before the Georgia State Legislature On AP U.S. History

Published in Testimony on February 18, 2015

I Dare You to Impeach Me

Published in National Review Online on November 21, 2014

A Hard Left for High-School History

Published in National Review on October 30, 2014

Racist Telephone Poles

Published in National Review Online on October 21, 2014

Time to Break the College Board’s AP Testing Monopoly

Published in National Review Online on October 2, 2014

Why Hillary’s Alinsky Letters Matter

Published in National Review Online on September 22, 2014

Time to Oppose the AP U.S. History Exam is Now

Published in Dallas Morning News on September 15, 2014

Why the College Board Demoted the Founders

Published in National Review Online on September 9, 2014

Déjà Two

Published in Claremont Review of Books - Summer 2014 issue on September 3, 2014

How the College Board Politicized U.S. History

Published in National Review Online on August 25, 2014

D’Souza’s America and Our Schools

Published in National Review Online on July 7, 2014

Time for Congressional Hearings On Common Core

Published in National Review Online on June 9, 2014

The Commencement Speech That Could: Mary Eberstadt at Seton Hall

Published in National Review Online on May 19, 2014

The Truth About Obama’s ‘Catholic Roots’

Published in National Review Online on March 23, 2014

Ecologism: The Campus Cult of Victimhood

Published in Academic Questions on March 13, 2014

D’Souza’s Case and My Role in His Film

Published in National Review Online on February 3, 2014

The Wannabe Oppressed

Published in National Review Online on October 16, 2013

Divestment du Jour

Published in National Review on October 14, 2013

The Radicalism of Bill de Blasio

Published in National Review Online on September 23, 2013

Theory of Evolution

Published in Claremont Review of Books on September 16, 2013

This Was a Samantha Power Speech

Published in National Review Online on September 10, 2013

Public Opinion and the Syria Strike

Published in National Review Online on September 7, 2013

The Frightening Truth About Syria’s WMDs

Published in National Review Online on September 3, 2013

The Wrong Red Line

Published in National Review Online on August 28, 2013

Obama’s Secret Weapon: Henrietta Lacks

Published in National Review Online on August 19, 2013

Meet TOD: The Way Obama Wants You to Live

Published in National Review Online on August 12, 2013

Regionalism: Obama’s Quiet Anti-Suburban Revolution

Published in National Review Online on July 30, 2013

Conservative Media Predicted Obama’s First-Amendment Scandals

Published in National Review Online on May 29, 2013

Swarthmore Spinning Out of Control

Published in National Review Online on May 13, 2013

Acculturation Without Assimilation

Published in National Review on May 20, 2013

Boston and Immigration Reform: Yes, It’s Relevant

Published in National Review Online on April 20, 2013

What’s the Matter With Vassar?

Published in National Review Online on April 4, 2013

Fossil-Fuel Divestment

Published in National Review Online on March 4, 2013

Obama’s Plan for Ohio

Published in National Review Online on October 8, 2012

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Search Results

Campus Free Speech: A Legislative Proposal – Goldwater Institute

https://goldwaterinstitute.org/article/campus-free-speech-a-legislative-proposal/

Jan 30, 2017 - Executive Summary. In her 2016 convocation speech, Brown University President Christina Paxson explained that a reporter had recently asked school officials if Brown had established any “safe spaces” on campus. “What on earth are they referring to?” Paxson said. “Idea-free zones staffed by thought ...

[PDF]Testimony of Stanley Kurtz Senior Fellow, Ethics - House Judiciary ...

https://judiciary.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/.../Testimony-Kurtz-04.04.2017.pdf

Apr 4, 2017 - Testimony of Stanley Kurtz. Senior Fellow, Ethics and ... protect freedom of speech in our public university systems, and perhaps even at private secular colleges and universities as .... Along with James Manley and Jonathan Butcher of Arizona's Goldwater Institute, I recently co-authored a report that offers ...

Campus Shout-Down Rate Quadruples: Free Speech | National Review

www.nationalreview.com/corner/.../campus-shout-down-rate-quadruples-free-speech

by Stanley Kurtz November 2, 2017 10:19 AM. Beginning with the Berkeley Milo ... Trying to be as complete as possible, I've chronicled 10 shout-downs that took place in the spring semester of the 2016–17 academic year. .... Goldwater-based campus free-speech bills are the best medicine for the shout-down epidemic.

Campus Chaos: Daily Shout-Downs for a Week, Free Speech Charles ...

www.nationalreview.com/.../campus-chaos-daily-shout-downs-week-free-speech-char...

Oct 12, 2017 - by Stanley Kurtz October 12, 2017 9:38 AM ... Last night's disruption of Charles Murray's speech at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor means that every working day for the past week has seen a ... Disruptions are coming at a substantially higher rate than in the second semester of last academic year.

In Defense of Campus Free-Speech Legislation - Ethics & Public ...

https://eppc.org/publications/in-defense-of-campus-free-speech-legislation/

Aug 10, 2017 - But the Goldwater proposal adds nothing to these powers. Instead it utilizes sunlight and persuasion to prod the existing system of university governance into protecting and preserving our freedom of speech. Stanley Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He can be reached at ...

The Campus Free Speech Act: A Way to Restore the Marketplace of ...

https://eppc.org/.../the-campus-free-speech-act-a-way-to-restore-the-marketplace-of-id...

Published in James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal on February 1, 2017. Stanley Kurtz. By Stanley Kurtz. Share. Between the rise of safe spaces, trigger warnings, speaker disinvitations, and the often illiberal conduct of campus demonstrators over the past few years, it's clear that the core constitutional value of free ...

Stanley Kurtz, Author at Ethics & Public Policy Center

https://eppc.org/author/stanley_kurtz/

He has also led the campaign to reform federal subsidies to academic programs of “area studies” under Title VI of the Higher Education Act. Mr. Kurtz received his undergraduate degree from Haverford College and his Ph.D. in social anthropology from Harvard University. He later taught at Harvard, winning several teaching ...

North Carolina first to enact controversial model bill sanctioning ...

https://www.facingsouth.org/.../north-carolina-first-enact-controversial-model-bill-san...

Aug 2, 2017 - Stanley Kurtz had high hopes for North Carolina, and it didn't let him down. A conservative commentator and senior fellow at the faith-based Ethics and Public Policy Center, Kurtz co-authored sample legislation for the Goldwater Institute, an Arizona-based libertarian think tank, to limit protests on college ...

Washington Journal Stanley Kurtz Discusses Freedom Speech ...

Video for stanley kurtz academic goldwater university? 5:48

https://www.c-span.org/video/?...stanley-kurtz...campuses

Feb 21, 2017

Timothy Sands on College Campus Freedom of Speech. Virginia Tech University President Timothy Sands ...

Why Conservative Lawmakers Are Turning to Free-Speech Bills as a ...

https://www.alec.org/.../why-conservative-lawmakers-are-turning-to-free-speech-bills-...

Jun 8, 2017 - These legislative efforts are encouraged by a number of national organizations promoting campus free-speech laws. ... Stanley Kurtz, co-author of the Goldwater model and a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, traces the problem back to a decades-long encroachment of radical orthodoxy.

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politico

Obama camp blasts National Review writer as "slimy character assassin"

By BEN SMITH 08/27/2008 09:41 PM EDT

Barack Obama's campaign hasn't advertised this a great deal this week, but the campaign's "Action Wire" has been waging large-scale campaigns against critics. That includes tens of thousands of e-mails to television stations running Harold Simmons' Bill Ayers ad, and to their advertisers — including a list of major automobile and telecommunications companies.

And tonight, the campaign launched a more specific campaign: an effort to disrupt the appearance by a writer for National Review, Stanley Kurtz, on a Chicago radio program. Kurtz has been writing about Obama's relationship with Bill Ayers, and has suggested that papers housed at the University of Illinois at Chicago would reveal new details of that relationship.

The campaign e-mailed Chicago supporters who had signed up for the Obama Action Wire with detailed instructions including the station's telephone number and the show's extension, as well as a research file on Kurtz, which seems to prove that he's a conservative, which isn't in dispute. The file cites a couple of his more controversial pieces, notably his much-maligned claim that same-sex unions have undermined marriage in Scandinavia.

"Tell WGN that by providing Kurtz with airtime, they are legitimizing baseless attacks from a smear-merchant and lowering the standards of political discourse," says the email, which picks up a form of pressure on the press pioneered by conservative talk radio hosts and activists in the 1990s, and since adopted by Media Matters and other liberal groups.

"It is absolutely unacceptable that WGN would give a slimy character assassin like Kurtz time for his divisive, destructive ranting on our public airwaves. At the very least, they should offer sane, honest rebuttal to every one of Kurtz's lies," it continues.

The campaign mentions, and objects to, one specific claim of Kurtz's, for which I've never seen hard evidence:

Just last night on Fox News, Kurtz drastically exaggerated Barack's connection with Ayers by claiming Ayers had recruited Barack to the board of the Annenberg Challenge. That is completely false and has been disproved in numerous press accounts.

The full email is after the jump, and it marks a coordinated battle with the conservative media on a scale rarely seen from a political campaign.

---------- Forwarded message ----------

From: Obama Action Wire

Date: Wed, Aug 27, 2008

Subject: Chicago: CALL TONIGHT to fight the latest smear

[Name] —

In the next few hours, we have a crucial opportunity to fight one of

the most cynical and offensive smears ever launched against Barack.

Tonight, WGN radio is giving right-wing hatchet man Stanley Kurtz a

forum to air his baseless, fear-mongering terrorist smears. He's

currently scheduled to spend a solid two-hour block from 9:00 to 11:00

p.m. pushing lies, distortions, and manipulations about Barack and

University of Illinois professor William Ayers.

Tell WGN that by providing Kurtz with airtime, they are legitimizing

baseless attacks from a smear-merchant and lowering the standards of

political discourse.

Call into the "Extension 720" show with Milt Rosenberg at (312) 591-7200

(Show airs from 9:00 p.m. to 11:00 p.m. tonight)

Then report back on your call at http://my.barackobama.com/WGNstandards

Kurtz has been using his absurd TV appearances in an awkward and

dishonest attempt to play the terrorism card. His current ploy is to

embellish the relationship between Barack and Ayers.

Just last night on Fox News, Kurtz drastically exaggerated Barack's

connection with Ayers by claiming Ayers had recruited Barack to the

board of the Annenberg Challenge. That is completely false and has

been disproved in numerous press accounts.

It is absolutely unacceptable that WGN would give a slimy character

assassin like Kurtz time for his divisive, destructive ranting on our

public airwaves. At the very least, they should offer sane, honest

rebuttal to every one of Kurtz's lies.

Kurtz is scheduled to appear from 9:00 p.m. to 11:00 p.m. in the Chicago market.

Calling will only take a minute, and it will make a huge difference if

we nip this smear in the bud. Confront Kurtz tonight before this goes

any further:

http://my.barackobama.com/WGNstandards

Please forward this email to everyone you know who can make a call tonight.

Keep fighting the good fight,

Obama Action Wire

The Facts on Barack and William Ayers:

William Ayers was involved with the Weather Underground when Barack

Obama was eight years old, and Barack has roundly condemned their

actions.

Last night on Fox News, Kurtz tried to radicalize an education reform

program in Chicago called the Annenberg Challenge. The Challenge was

funded by Republican Walter Annenberg, introduced by Mayor Daley and

Republican Governor Jim Edgar, and one of its initiatives was even

praised by John McCain.

Kurtz claimed on Fox News that William Ayers recruited Obama to the

Annenberg Challenge -- a flat out lie. Ayers did not serve on the

board of the Challenge, and he had nothing to do with Barack's

recruitment.

Some more background on Stanley Kurtz:

Stanley Kurtz Is Tied To Bill Kristol's Conservative Think Tank. Kurtz

is a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. The Policy

Advisory Board includes: William Kristol. [Bio, policy advisory board,

EPPC website, accessed 8/27/08]

Stanley Kurtz Was A Research Fellow At The Hoover Institution. In

2004, Stanley Kurtz was a research fellow at the Hoover Institution.

[Boston Globe, 3/10/04]

Stanley Kurtz Claimed That Same Sex Marriage In Denmark Led To A

Decline In Marriage Resulting In 60 Percent Of Children Being Born Out

Of Wedlock. Stanley Kurtz stated: "Data from European demographers and

statistical bureaus show that a majority of children in Sweden and

Norway are now born out of wedlock, as are 60 percent of first-born

children in Denmark. In socially liberal districts of Norway, where

the idea of same-sex registered partnerships is widely accepted,

marriage itself has almost entirely disappeared. [Boston Globe,

3/10/04]

Analysis Of Statistics On Marriage In Scandinavia Was Debunked.

"Kurtz's argument — which O'Reilly embraces — is that when legal

rights are accorded to gays, through some unspecified process

heterosexual couples begin bearing children out of wedlock and refuse

to marry when they otherwise would. There are many government policies

that alter the incentives to get and stay married, and thus have

direct and unsurprising effects on marriage; for instance, the

availability of no-fault divorce leads to more divorces, and laws

providing the same rights for cohabitating heterosexual couples as

married couples lead to fewer marriages, as couples make private

commitments to each other without seeking the imprimatur of the state.

But neither Kurtz nor O'Reilly has provided a plausible justification

for their belief that extending rights to gay couples harms

heterosexual marriage." [Media Matters For America, 6/3/05]

Claimed That The National Nursing Shortage Was The "Fault Of

Feminism." In 2002, the Los Angeles Times reported, "Back at National

Review Online, contributing editor Stanley Kurtz makes the same point!

He, too, says women shouldn't be trying to play by men's rules. Of

course he has a slightly different take. According to Kurtz, the

national nurse shortage is the fault of feminism, for bringing about

"the replacement of a traditional ethic of sacrifice by a post-'60s

ethos of self-fulfillment." Kurtz stated at the time "Nursing was once

built around a spirit of feminine compassion and sacrifice. In the

new, feminist world, that is unacceptable." [Los Angeles Times,

7/21/2002]

Stanley Kurtz Stated That The Harvard Faculty No Confidence Vote In

Lawrence Summers Would Cause "Lasting Damage To The Cultural Left." On

March 19, 2005, Stanley Kurtz stated on the National Review Online

website, "I think the vote of no confidence in Lawrence Summers is a

wonderful thing. Harvard continues to discredit itself with the

American public. The faculty is trapped. If Summers resigns, this

extraordinary example of political correctness will come back to haunt

Harvard, and the entire academy, for years. But if Summers hangs on,

the faculty itself will have been humiliated — checked by the very

fact of public scrutiny. Either way, Harvard is tearing itself apart.

So long as the public simply writes of the academy, the mice can play.

But the intense public scrutiny in this case puts the captains of

political correctness into a no-win situation. Like the closely

watched Susan Estrich fiasco, this battle is doing lasting damage to

the cultural left. As they say, sunlight is the best disinfectant."

[National Review Online, 3/19/05]

The Obama Action Wire is a grassroots rapid response group for

supporters to fight smears, spread the truth, push back on misleading

media, and take positive action.

Forward this email to everyone you know or sign up for the Obama

Action Wire now.

Paid for by Obama for America

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wrong on scand gay marriage

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http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Publicity-shy-critic-at-center-of-storm-2735396.php

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Stanley Kurtz is an American conservative commentator.

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Career

Kurtz was born to a Jewish family^[1] and graduated from Haverford College and holds a Ph.D. in social anthropologyfrom Harvard University. He did his field work in India and taught at Harvard and the University of Chicago.

Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a former Adjunct fellow with HudsonInstitute, with a special interest in America's "culture wars." He has published extensively on family life, child rearing, religion, and psychology in various parts of the world.^[2]

Works

His writings on the family, feminism, homosexuality, affirmative action, and campus "political correctness" have appeared regularly for publications such as National Review, Policy Review, The Weekly Standard, The Wall Street Journal, and Commentary.^[2][3]

References

1. :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Jewish Daily Forward: "Peaceful, Gradualist ... and Radical?" By Gene Koprowski January 12, 2011
2. ^ :{Jump up to::(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^a ^b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Kurtz#cite_ref-aboutHudson_2-1) "Stanley Kurtz". Hudson Institute. Retrieved 2008-11-02.
3. :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ "Stanley Kurtz". Ethics and Public Policy Center. Retrieved 2008-11-02.

External links

• Column archives at the National Review
• Column archives at The Weekly Standard
• Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center
• Adjunct Fellow at the Hudson Institute
• Author profile at Simon & Schuster
• Appearances on C-SPAN

Categories: 

• Living people
• National Review people
• The Weekly Standard people
• American political writers
• American male writers
• American Jews
• Haverford College alumni
• Harvard University alumni
• University of Chicago faculty
• Harvard University faculty
• American non-fiction writer stubs

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Professor Thomas Reeves. When Reeves writes in strong support of Horowitz’s proposals on the History News Network,he fails to note that he is a spokesman for the California Association of Scholars, a branch of the National Association of Scholars (see funding sources above) and that he is director of the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, which was, again, brought into being by the Olin and Bradley Foundations.

This manufactured drumbeat against “academic bias” is amplified by Stanley Kurtz of the Hoover Institution (see funding sources above), Heather MacDonald, a John M. Olin fellow at the Manhattan Institute (see funding sources above), and Brian C. Anderson, editor of the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal and a former research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (see funding sources above).

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http://www.alternet.org/education/right-wing-billionaires-are-funding-cynical-plot-destroy-dissent-and-protest-colleges

As s far-right speakers face loud student opposition at their university speaking gigs, conservative lawmakers in several states are introducing legislation that cracks down on protesters. As uncovered by UnKoch My Campus’ Ralph Wilson, numerous states have borrowed their so-called “campus free speech” bills from the rightwing Goldwater Institute, which is funded by conservative plutocrats including Charles Koch and the Mercer family.

The intent of these bills isn’t to protect student speech; it’s actually to suppress it in favor of guest speakers who, at times, support white nationalism, LGBTQ discrimination and other hateful worldviews. By funding the Phoenix-based Goldwater Institute, wealthy conservatives are enabling the promotion of hate speech while stifling student dissent. Whether or not Koch, for example, agrees with the hate speech he indirectly sponsors, he certainly benefits from a more friendly academic environment for far-right ideologues who often deny climate change and praise his extreme brand of tax- and regulation-free capitalism.

The Goldwater Institute’s model bill allegedly ensures “the fullest degree of…free expression,” but it explicitly states that “protests and demonstrations that infringe upon the rights of others to engage in or listen to expressive activity shall not be permitted and shall be subject to sanction.”

It goes on to say, “Any student who has twice been found responsible for infringing the expressive rights of others will be suspended for a minimum of one year, or expelled.”

Under this code, imagine that a student protests a climate change denier and gets a brief suspension. Then the College Republicans group brings in a full-on white nationalist. Will this student do what she thinks is right and protest a racist who’s given a platform at a respected university, or stay home because she's risking expulsion? This campus "free speech” legislation is essentially an attack on student speech and an elevation of ultra-conservative ideas that many people in university communities think have no place in American society.

“These laws would create a chilling effect on students who reject the idea that white supremacists or climate deniers are simply representing an ‘opposing viewpoint’ that should be tolerated, and who are rightfully relying on their first amendment freedoms to stop the rise of fascism and prevent global climate catastrophe,” Wilson, UnKoch’s senior researcher, told AlterNet. The group has been conducting research into Charles Koch’s considerable ideological donations to higher education, most of which goes toward free-market programs.

Charles Koch Foundation representatives say that conservative views are underrepresented in higher education, and the foundation’s massive university donations—which fund free-market academic centers, professorships, grad students and lecture series—are necessary for academic freedom. This view is shared by other conservative billionaires and higher ed donors including Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who recently said to the crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference, “The education establishment [tells you] what to think…the real threat is silencing the First Amendment rights of people with whom you disagree.”

What the Kochs and their allies really want, by amplifying the voices of far-right professors and guest speakers, is to steer society towards a tax- and regulation-free plutocracy. Charles and David Koch, who together are worth nearly $97 billion, have been working toward this goal for over 40 years.

In 2014, Virginia passed the nation’s first law banning so-called “free speech zones,” which restrict protected speech to designated areas often far away from events that students want to protest. The following year, Missouri enacted a Campus Free Expression Act forbidding “free speech zones” without imposing punitive measures.

But while more recent legislation bans free speech zones as well, it also restricts student free speech in scenarios where, lawmakers claim, free speech is protected.

The protest crackdown

Legislators in some states including Illinois and Tennessee have introduced bills in 2017 that explicitly mention sanctions on student protesters. Illinois’ bill, proposed by two Republicans, lifts this language, and additional passages, nearly verbatim from the Goldwater model. Also sponsored by Republicans, the bill in Tennessee—nicknamed the “Milo Bill” after an event at the University of California at Berkeley featuring the racist “alt-right” icon Milo Yiannopolous was canceled due to protests—directs universities to enact free speech policies that include “sanctions for anyone under the jurisdiction of the institution who interferes with the free expression of others,” and it gives faculty “the right to regulate class speech.”

In North Carolina, Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Forest intends to work with legislators on a Restore Campus Free Speech Act, which would create “a discipline policy that would punish students who shout down visiting speakers or deprive others of their right to free expression, a tactic commonly known as the ‘hecklers’ veto.'"

Last year, Forest floated a measure calling on the University of North Carolina’s board of governors to create a system-wide policy that would impose harsh penalties, including expulsion, on students, staff and faculty members who disrupt classes, public meetings or events. The Koch-funded Generation Opportunity lauded the effort at the time. Forest has said that yelling at a guest speaker “has never been free speech,” and he’s called campus protest methods “terrorist tactics.” No one introduced a free speech bill that year.

Other proposed laws, like North Dakota’s, which was introduced by six Republicans, omit sanctions provisions but state that a university may restrict student speech if it blocks entrances to buildings, obstructs traffic or interferes with events. Much of the North Dakota bill comes directly from the text of the Goldwater model legislation. A large group of most Republican legislators in Virginia has a new bill in play that includes much of the Goldwater language but stays away from restrictions on students.

Additional campus free speech bills have been introduced this year in Colorado (sponsored by two Republicans and one Democrat) and Utah (sponsored by 14 Republican state representatives). Florida could be next. Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin has a "free speech" provision in his proposed budget.

Big money driving campus 'free speech’ efforts

One of the model bill’s authors, Stanley Kurtz, is a longtime fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based Ethics and Public Policy Center, which applies “the Judeo-Christian moral tradition to critical issues of public policy,” according to its website. The center has received millions of dollars in donations from the foundations of the conservative Bradley, Scaife, Olin and Earhart families, as well as hundreds of thousands from two vehicles for wealthy right-wing donors, Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund.

Billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch are responsible for more than $9 million in contributions to the two groups from 2006 to 2015, according to the website Conservative Transparency and additional research by this author. Much of the $6.3 million that went to Donors Trust came in 2015. A now-defunct Koch nonprofit, the Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation, donated $190,000 to the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and the Charles Koch Foundation has given over $9,000.

The Goldwater Institute’s James Manley, senior attorney, and Jonathan Butcher, education director, also co-authored the “campus free speech” model legislation. The institute took in nearly $2.5 million from Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund from 2002-2015, according Conservative Transparency and additional research. The Charles Koch Foundation has pitched in $75,000. Manley formerly worked at the Mountain States Legal Foundation, which has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the two Donors funds. Butcher was a research assistant at the heavily Koch-funded Heritage Foundation from 2002 to 2006.

Says Wilson, “These bills take Koch's academic presence to the next level, creating protected space to reveal the white supremacist roots of Koch's free market crusade, like Koch's close friend and white nationalist Charles Murray who has taken to campuses to espouse the genetic superiority of white males.”

Another Koch-funded think tank, the American Enterprise Institute, reportedly has student groups at nearly 80 colleges and universities. These groups bring in AEI fellows like the eugenicist Murray to speak on their campuses. Recently, Murray attempted to give a lecture at Middlebury College in Vermont but was stymied by vociferous protests. He had to end his speech early, and he and a liberal professor were attacked on their way out.

Students at UC Berkeley and area residents protested Yiannopoulos, whom the College Republicans had invited to speak. The protests led to fires, vandalism, and reportedly, fights. Until recently, Yiannopoulos was an editor at Breitbart News, known as the online “platform of the alt-right,” which happens to be funded by Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah, the far-right mega-donors who are major Donald Trump backers and whose family foundation has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Goldwater Institute. The younger Mercer was even a member of Trump’s transition team. Violence against a speaker, a professor or an onlooker is certainly unacceptable. So is inviting a white supremacist to speak at an institution of higher learning, and so is preventing students and faculty from protesting such a speaker.

Plenty of right-wing billionaires likely don’t agree with white nationalist ideas, and by funding these so-called campus free speech bills they’re trying to advance free-market principles. But regardless of motivation, this campus "free speech" movement is spreading the hate of white nationalism, the racist “alt-right,” Islamophobia and homophobia—not to mention climate change denial and economic policies that benefit only the very wealthy—on campuses filled with young students. Conservative, corporate millionaires and billionaires are at fault.

==

National Association of Scholars

221 Witherspoon Street, Second Floor

Princeton, New Jersey 08542-3215

www.nas.org

Founded: 1985

President: Stephen H. Balch

Publications: NAS Update quarterly newsletter, Academic Questions quarterly journal, and Science Insights; and occasional reports

Finances: Has an income of less than $25,000 per year.

NAS Principle Issues:

NAS was founded to bring together conservatives in academia to fight the "liberal bias" on college and university campuses and to target multiculturalism and affirmative-action policies.

NAS organizes professors, graduate students, college administrators and trustees, and scholars who believe that there is a "[d]ogmatic hostility to Western civilization, and turning the study of non-Western cultures into an instrument for denouncing American society" on college campuses.

Fights against the "[d]ecline in civility on college and university campuses."

NAS Principle Activities:

NAS builds scholar networks, organizes panels, conferences, and lectures and creates NAS campus communities. NAS organizes outreach programs to recruit new members.

Major Right Wing Donors:

Sarah Scaife Foundation

The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Inc

Castle Rock Foundation

John M. Olin Foundation

NAS's Board of Advisors:

John H. Bunzel, Hoover Institution

Edwin J. Delattre, American Enterprise Institute

Chester E. Finn, Fordham Foundation

Gertrude Himmelfarb, Independent Women's Forum

Paul Hollander, National Review, Front Page Magazine

Harry V. Jaffa, Claremont Institute

Donald Kagan, Project for the New American Century

Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, UN Ambassador under President Reagan, American Enterprise Institute

Irving Kristol, American Enterprise Institute

Richard D. Lamm, American Reform Party

Leslie Lenkowsky, National Review

Seymour Martin Lipset, Hoover Institution

Christina Hoff Sommers, Independent Women's Forum

Shelby Steele, Hoover Institution, Manhattan Institute

Stephan Thernstrom, Manhattan Institute

James Q. Wilson, Manhattan Institute

Updated July 2004

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In addition, a recent article in Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting is highly critical of Lichter’s research methodology. Another example of such conflicted interests is provided by Professor Thomas Reeves. When Reeves writes in strong support of Horowitz’s proposals on the History News Network,he fails to note that he is a spokesman for the California Association of Scholars, a branch of the National Association of Scholars (see funding sources above) and that he is director of the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, which was, again, brought into being by the Olin and Bradley Foundations.

This manufactured drumbeat against “academic bias” is amplified by Stanley Kurtz of the Hoover Institution (see funding sources above), Heather MacDonald, a John M. Olin fellow at the Manhattan Institute (see funding sources above), and Brian C. Anderson, editor of the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal and a former research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (see funding sources above).

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/312807/burn-down-suburbs-stanley-kurtz

It is a telling marker of the ideological cohesiveness and extremism of this core group of philanthropies that three of the five founding members, Joseph Coors, David Koch and Harry Bradley, were members and financial supporters [14] of the John Birch Society. The Scaife foundations, headed by Richard Mellon Scaife, are also involved, [15] albeit in less direct ways.

In the past 20 years this core group of funders has, by many reports, built and strategically linked an impressive array of almost 500 think tanks, centers, institutes and "concerned citizens groups" both within and outside of the academy. It is particularly telling to observe the funding sources of these organizations during the first 10-15 years of their existence, when their ideological identities were being established. A small sampling of these entities include the Cato Institute, [16] the Heritage Foundation, [17] the American Enterprise Institute, [18] the Manhattan Institute, [19] the Hoover Institution,[20] the Claremont Institute, [21] the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, [22] Middle East Forum, [23]Accuracy in Media, [24] and theNational Association of Scholars, [25] as well as Horowitz's Center of the Study of Popular Culture. [26]

The absence of formal organizational linkages between the entities within these networks creates an illusion of independent analytical voices reaching similar conclusions about strategic policy issues, a technique known in the public relations industry as “astroturfing.” This network has developed an enormous capacity to generate “data” consistent with the targeted political agenda and world views of its core group of funders to quickly and redundantly represent these issues in the mainstream press by what appear to be the voices of independent analysts and to translate these viewpoints into public policy that serves the focused ideological agenda of this core group of funders. The Bradley Foundation under Michael Joyce's leadership has even established a publishing house, Encounter Books, [27] to ensure that grantees like Horowitz have a quasi-academic outlet for their viewpoints.

The degree of interconnectedness within this network of organizations is considerable but almost invisible to the casual observer. For example, when ACTA’s president, Anne Neal, introduced herself to the Select Committee on Academic Freedom in Higher Education in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, she presented ACTA as “a bipartisan network of college and university trustees and alumni across the country dedicated to academic freedom.”

Full disclosure should have required some mention of the fact that ACTA(see funding sources above), which changed its name from the National Alumni Forum [28] in 1998, was established by theIntercollegiate Studies Institute [29] in 1994. The Intercollegiate Studies Institute in turn evolved from William Bennett’s Madison Center for Educational Affairs [30] and the Institute for Educational Affairs founded by Irving Kristol, Michael Joyce’s mentor, and William Simon, the first president of the John M. Olin Foundation. Bennett and Kristol also sit on ACTA’s Board of Directors. The remarkably consistent record of funding across all of the incarnations of this organization and the high degree of redundancy with Horowitz’s own, highly partisan Center for the Study of Popular Culture is not consistent with Neal’s definition of ACTA as an independent, non-partisan organization.

Another example illustrative of the quietly incestuous nature of this network is presented by an article by the Boston Globe columnist Cathy Young. The article is entitled “Liberal bias in the ivory tower” [31]and by all appearances is an independent opinion piece written by a regular Globe columnist. At the end of the article Young identifies herself as “a contributing editor at Reason Magazine.” What is undisclosed in the article is that Reason Magazine is the publication of the Reason Foundation, whose funding sources [32] are virtually the same as those funding Horowitz’s "Academic Bill of Rights" project and Neal’s ACTA.

Young’s premise for the article is stated in her opening sentence: “Yet another study has come out documenting what most conservatives consider to be blindingly obvious: the leftwing tilt of the American professoriate.” The study that she references [33] was conducted by Stanley Rothman, now emeritus professor at Smith College; S. Robert Lichter, emeritus professor at George Mason University; and Neil Nevitte of the University of Toronto, and was published in the online journal Forum. This study was also cited by Neal in her testimony in Pennsylvania. Young does not inform her readers that Rothman is director of the Center for the Study of Social and Political Change, [34] a center with funding sources that are remarkably redundant with Horowitz’s Center for the Study of Popular Culture. Lichter is also president of the Center for Media and Public Affairs, [35] which again has funding sources that are redundant with those referenced earlier.

In addition, a recent article in Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting [36] is highly critical of Lichter’s research methodology. Another example of such conflicted interests is provided by Professor Thomas Reeves. When Reeves writes in strong support of Horowitz’s proposals on the History News Network,[37] he fails to note that he is a spokesman for the California Association of Scholars, a branch of the National Association of Scholars (see funding sources above) and that he is director of the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, [38] which was, again, brought into being by the Olin and Bradley Foundations.

This manufactured drumbeat against “academic bias” is amplified by Stanley Kurtz [39] of the Hoover Institution (see funding sources above), Heather MacDonald, [40] a John M. Olin fellow at the Manhattan Institute (see funding sources above), and Brian C. Anderson, [41] editor of the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal and a former research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (see funding sources above).

The relentlessness with which columnists and experts with direct funding relationships with Olin, Scaife, Bradley, Koch and Coors level charges of academic bias and assert the need for legislative reform of higher education is remarkable. The goal of this narrowly focused and ideologically driven public relations campaign can only be understood in terms of its fostering of a political climate in which federal regulatory “reform” of what is universally recognized as the finest system of higher education in the world, will be tolerated.

Indeed, as has been discussed, such regulatory oversight may already be in the offing. The academy stands today as one of the last spaces in America where the democratic ideas that shape the social, economic and political fabric of the nation can be openly and independently debated on the basis of their merits and without coercion or distortion from vested economic and political interests. It is certainly in the national interest that it remain such.

Author/s:

Alan Jones

Author's email:

info@insidehighered.com

Alan Jones is dean of the faculty and professor of psychology and neuroscience at Pitzer College.

Source URL: https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/06/16/jones?width=775&height=500&iframe=true

newsbusters

Writing in today’s Wall Street Journal and National Review Online, Ethics and Public Policy Center senior fellow Stanley Kurtz traces Barack Obama’s partnership with former domestic terrorist William Ayers when the two collaborated at the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a charity established to help Chicago’s public schools that was commandeered by Ayers to promote his radical agenda.

The association between Obama and Ayers has received virtually no attention from the three broadcast networks, with the conspicuous exception of a primary-season debate sponsored by ABC when George Stephanopoulos asked Obama about his relationship with Ayers. Out of 1,365 broadcast evening news stories about Obama prior to the end of the primaries, only two mentioned Ayers — one a brief mention of the debate question on the April 17 Nightly News, and the other a World News Sunday story about McCain raising the Ayers issue on This Week.

With just 42 days left until Election Day, the broadcast networks have not presented a single in-depth report on Obama’s relationship with Ayers. But Kurtz’s review of the documents at the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC) shows the two “worked as a team to advance the CAC agenda,” which “flowed from Mr. Ayers’s educational philosophy, which called for infusing students and their parents with a radical political commitment, and which downplayed achievement tests in favor of activism.”

For a flavor of Ayers’ continuing radicalism, the New York Times profiled the 1960s radical back on September 11, 2001, the same day as the al-Qaeda attack that killed thousands of New Yorkers at the World Trade Center. The piece by Dinitia Smith began: “‘I don’t regret setting bombs,’ Bill Ayers said. ‘I feel we didn’t do enough.’”

A short excerpt from that piece:

Mr. Ayers, who in 1970 was said to have summed up the Weatherman philosophy as: ''Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that's where it's really at,'' is today distinguished professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. And he says he doesn't actually remember suggesting that rich people be killed or that people kill their parents, but ''it's been quoted so many times I'm beginning to think I did,'' he said. ''It was a joke about the distribution of wealth.''

He went underground in 1970, after his girlfriend, Diana Oughton, and two other people were killed when bombs they were making exploded in a Greenwich Village town house. With him in the Weather Underground was Bernardine Dohrn, who was put on the F.B.I.'s 10 Most Wanted List. J. Edgar Hoover called her ''the most dangerous woman in America'' and ''la Pasionara of the Lunatic Left.'' Mr. Ayers and Ms. Dohrn later married. ...

In 1969, after the Manson family murders in Beverly Hills, Ms. Dohrn told an S.D.S. audience: ''Dig it! Manson killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they shoved a fork into a victim's stomach.''

A month earlier, a profile of Ayers in Chicago Magazine included a picture of Ayers stomping on the American flag. Marcia Froelke Coburn wrote the accompanying article: “Talk to him for any length of time and some rhetoric of the past slips into the conversation. ‘I think there will be another mass political movement,’ he predicts, ‘because I believe that the kind of injustice that is built into our world will not go quietly into the night.’”

In the mid-1990s, Obama was hired to be the chairman of Ayers’ “brainchild,” the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. Here are the key excerpts from Kurtz's op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal; the entire must-read article can be found here.

Despite having authored two autobiographies, Barack Obama has never written about his most important executive experience. From 1995 to 1999, he led an education foundation called the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC), and remained on the board until 2001. The group poured more than $100 million into the hands of community organizers and radical education activists.

The CAC was the brainchild of Bill Ayers, a founder of the Weather Underground in the 1960s. Among other feats, Mr. Ayers and his cohorts bombed the Pentagon, and he has never expressed regret for his actions. Barack Obama's first run for the Illinois State Senate was launched at a 1995 gathering at Mr. Ayers's home.

The Obama campaign has struggled to downplay that association. Last April, Sen. Obama dismissed Mr. Ayers as just "a guy who lives in my neighborhood," and "not somebody who I exchange ideas with on a regular basis." Yet documents in the CAC archives make clear that Mr. Ayers and Mr. Obama were partners in the CAC. Those archives are housed in the Richard J. Daley Library at the University of Illinois at Chicago and I've recently spent days looking through them....

The CAC's agenda flowed from Mr. Ayers's educational philosophy, which called for infusing students and their parents with a radical political commitment, and which downplayed achievement tests in favor of activism. In the mid-1960s, Mr. Ayers taught at a radical alternative school, and served as a community organizer in Cleveland's ghetto....

CAC translated Mr. Ayers's radicalism into practice. Instead of funding schools directly, it required schools to affiliate with "external partners," which actually got the money. Proposals from groups focused on math/science achievement were turned down. Instead CAC disbursed money through various far-left community organizers, such as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (or Acorn).

Mr. Obama once conducted "leadership training" seminars with Acorn, and Acorn members also served as volunteers in Mr. Obama's early campaigns. External partners like the South Shore African Village Collaborative and the Dual Language Exchange focused more on political consciousness, Afrocentricity and bilingualism than traditional education. CAC's in-house evaluators comprehensively studied the effects of its grants on the test scores of Chicago public-school students. They found no evidence of educational improvement....

Mr. Ayers's defenders claim that he has redeemed himself with public-spirited education work. That claim is hard to swallow if you understand that he views his education work as an effort to stoke resistance to an oppressive American system. He likes to stress that he learned of his first teaching job while in jail for a draft-board sit-in. For Mr. Ayers, teaching and his 1960s radicalism are two sides of the same coin....

The Obama campaign has cried foul when Bill Ayers comes up, claiming "guilt by association." Yet the issue here isn't guilt by association; it's guilt by participation. As CAC chairman, Mr. Obama was lending moral and financial support to Mr. Ayers and his radical circle. That is a story even if Mr. Ayers had never planted a single bomb 40 years ago.

In his National Review Online piece, Kurtz adds a valuable point about how the radical left dominated the CAC despite the fact that the funding originated with Republican powerhouse Walter Annenberg:

The Obama camp denies CAC’s radicalism by pointing to the fact that this foundation was funded by Nixon Ambassador and Reagan friend, Walter Annenberg. Moderates and Republicans often support Annenberg activities, it’s true. Yet the story of modern philanthropy is largely the story of moderate and conservative donors finding their funds “captured” by far more liberal, often radical, beneficiaries. CAC’s story is a classic of the genre. Ayers and Obama guided CAC money to community organizers, like ACORN(the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) and the Developing Communities Project (Part of the Gamaliel Foundation network), groups self-consciously working in the radical tradition of Saul Alinsky. Walter Annenberg’s personal politics don’t change that one iota.

The fact that Ayers and other tenured radicals hold power at our universities is in no way negated by the presence of Republican appointees on university boards of trustees. Ayers’s radicalism is undeniable. He remains unapologetic for his bombings of the 1960s. Even now, he refuses to rule out violence as a resort. His education writings are deeply politicized and filled with exhortations to “resist” America’s racist and oppressive social system. In 2006 — along with his wife and fellow former-terrorist, Bernardine Dohrn, and Jeff Jones — Ayers released, Sing A Battle Song, a collection of intensely radical writings from the Weather Underground. Ayers makes it clear in that book that, while he is embarrassed by some of the Weather Underground’s rhetoric, he still adheres to the same ideas. Beyond its strictly historical interest, Ayers and his co-editors make a point of hoping that their old writings would be “of use to new generations of militant activists and organizers.” By directing CAC funds to groups like ACORN and the Developing Communities Project of the Gamaliel Foundation, Ayers was supporting just such militant activists and organizers....

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The Chicago Annenberg Challenge stands as Barack Obama’s most important executive experience to date. By its own account, CAC was a largely a failure. And a series of critical evaluations point to reasons for that failure, including a poor strategy, to which the foundation over-committed in 1995, and over-reliance on community organizers with insufficient education expertise. The failure of CAC thus raises entirely legitimate questions, both about Obama’s competence, his alliances with radical community organizers, and about Ayers’s continuing influence over CAC and its board, headed by Obama. Above all, by continuing to fund Ayers’s personal projects, and those of his political-educational allies, Obama was lending moral and material support to Ayers’s profoundly radical efforts. Ayers’s terrorist history aside, that makes the Ayers-Obama relationship a perfectly legitimate issue in this campaign.

Kurtz has painstakingly documented the connections between Barack Obama and the radical left. The only question is, will the so-called mainstream media find any of this worth reporting between now and Election Day?

About the Author

Rich Noyes is Research Director at the Media Research Center. Click here to follow Rich Noyes on Twitter.

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see also stanley overwrite at bottom, capt and text othr node === === http://www.alternet.org/education/right-wing-billionaires-are-funding-cynical-plot-destroy-dissent-and-protest-colleges As s far-right speakers face loud student opposition at their university speaking gigs, conservative lawmakers in several states are introducing legislation that cracks down on protesters. As uncovered by UnKoch My Campus’ Ralph Wilson, numerous states have borrowed their so-called “campus free speech” bills from the rightwing Goldwater Institute, which is funded by conservative plutocrats including Charles Koch and the Mercer family. The intent of these bills isn’t to protect student speech; it’s actually to suppress it in favor of guest speakers who, at times, support white nationalism, LGBTQ discrimination and other hateful worldviews. By funding the Phoenix-based Goldwater Institute, wealthy conservatives are enabling the promotion of hate speech while stifling student dissent. Whether or not Koch, for example, agrees with the hate speech he indirectly sponsors, he certainly benefits from a more friendly academic environment for far-right ideologues who often deny climate change and praise his extreme brand of tax- and regulation-free capitalism. The Goldwater Institute’s model bill allegedly ensures “the fullest degree of…free expression,” but it explicitly states that “protests and demonstrations that infringe upon the rights of others to engage in or listen to expressive activity shall not be permitted and shall be subject to sanction.” It goes on to say, “Any student who has twice been found responsible for infringing the expressive rights of others will be suspended for a minimum of one year, or expelled.” Under this code, imagine that a student protests a climate change denier and gets a brief suspension. Then the College Republicans group brings in a full-on white nationalist. Will this student do what she thinks is right and protest a racist who’s given a platform at a respected university, or stay home because she's risking expulsion? This campus "free speech” legislation is essentially an attack on student speech and an elevation of ultra-conservative ideas that many people in university communities think have no place in American society. “These laws would create a chilling effect on students who reject the idea that white supremacists or climate deniers are simply representing an ‘opposing viewpoint’ that should be tolerated, and who are rightfully relying on their first amendment freedoms to stop the rise of fascism and prevent global climate catastrophe,” Wilson, UnKoch’s senior researcher, told AlterNet. The group has been conducting research into Charles Koch’s considerable ideological donations to higher education, most of which goes toward free-market programs. Charles Koch Foundation representatives say that conservative views are underrepresented in higher education, and the foundation’s massive university donations—which fund free-market academic centers, professorships, grad students and lecture series—are necessary for academic freedom. This view is shared by other conservative billionaires and higher ed donors including Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who recently said to the crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference, “The education establishment [tells you] what to think…the real threat is silencing the First Amendment rights of people with whom you disagree.” What the Kochs and their allies really want, by amplifying the voices of far-right professors and guest speakers, is to steer society towards a tax- and regulation-free plutocracy. Charles and David Koch, who together are worth nearly $97 billion, have been working toward this goal for over 40 years. In 2014, Virginia passed the nation’s first law banning so-called “free speech zones,” which restrict protected speech to designated areas often far away from events that students want to protest. The following year, Missouri enacted a Campus Free Expression Act forbidding “free speech zones” without imposing punitive measures. But while more recent legislation bans free speech zones as well, it also restricts student free speech in scenarios where, lawmakers claim, free speech is protected. The protest crackdown Legislators in some states including Illinois and Tennessee have introduced bills in 2017 that explicitly mention sanctions on student protesters. Illinois’ bill, proposed by two Republicans, lifts this language, and additional passages, nearly verbatim from the Goldwater model. Also sponsored by Republicans, the bill in Tennessee—nicknamed the “Milo Bill” after an event at the University of California at Berkeley featuring the racist “alt-right” icon Milo Yiannopolous was canceled due to protests—directs universities to enact free speech policies that include “sanctions for anyone under the jurisdiction of the institution who interferes with the free expression of others,” and it gives faculty “the right to regulate class speech.” In North Carolina, Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Forest intends to work with legislators on a Restore Campus Free Speech Act, which would create “a discipline policy that would punish students who shout down visiting speakers or deprive others of their right to free expression, a tactic commonly known as the ‘hecklers’ veto.'" Last year, Forest floated a measure calling on the University of North Carolina’s board of governors to create a system-wide policy that would impose harsh penalties, including expulsion, on students, staff and faculty members who disrupt classes, public meetings or events. The Koch-funded Generation Opportunity lauded the effort at the time. Forest has said that yelling at a guest speaker “has never been free speech,” and he’s called campus protest methods “terrorist tactics.” No one introduced a free speech bill that year. Other proposed laws, like North Dakota’s, which was introduced by six Republicans, omit sanctions provisions but state that a university may restrict student speech if it blocks entrances to buildings, obstructs traffic or interferes with events. Much of the North Dakota bill comes directly from the text of the Goldwater model legislation. A large group of most Republican legislators in Virginia has a new bill in play that includes much of the Goldwater language but stays away from restrictions on students. Additional campus free speech bills have been introduced this year in Colorado (sponsored by two Republicans and one Democrat) and Utah (sponsored by 14 Republican state representatives). Florida could be next. Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin has a "free speech" provision in his proposed budget. Big money driving campus 'free speech’ efforts One of the model bill’s authors, Stanley Kurtz, is a longtime fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based Ethics and Public Policy Center, which applies “the Judeo-Christian moral tradition to critical issues of public policy,” according to its website. The center has received millions of dollars in donations from the foundations of the conservative Bradley, Scaife, Olin and Earhart families, as well as hundreds of thousands from two vehicles for wealthy right-wing donors, Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund. Billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch are responsible for more than $9 million in contributions to the two groups from 2006 to 2015, according to the website Conservative Transparency and additional research by this author. Much of the $6.3 million that went to Donors Trust came in 2015. A now-defunct Koch nonprofit, the Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation, donated $190,000 to the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and the Charles Koch Foundation has given over $9,000. The Goldwater Institute’s James Manley, senior attorney, and Jonathan Butcher, education director, also co-authored the “campus free speech” model legislation. The institute took in nearly $2.5 million from Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund from 2002-2015, according Conservative Transparency and additional research. The Charles Koch Foundation has pitched in $75,000. Manley formerly worked at the Mountain States Legal Foundation, which has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the two Donors funds. Butcher was a research assistant at the heavily Koch-funded Heritage Foundation from 2002 to 2006. Says Wilson, “These bills take Koch's academic presence to the next level, creating protected space to reveal the white supremacist roots of Koch's free market crusade, like Koch's close friend and white nationalist Charles Murray who has taken to campuses to espouse the genetic superiority of white males.” Another Koch-funded think tank, the American Enterprise Institute, reportedly has student groups at nearly 80 colleges and universities. These groups bring in AEI fellows like the eugenicist Murray to speak on their campuses. Recently, Murray attempted to give a lecture at Middlebury College in Vermont but was stymied by vociferous protests. He had to end his speech early, and he and a liberal professor were attacked on their way out. Students at UC Berkeley and area residents protested Yiannopoulos, whom the College Republicans had invited to speak. The protests led to fires, vandalism, and reportedly, fights. Until recently, Yiannopoulos was an editor at Breitbart News, known as the online “platform of the alt-right,” which happens to be funded by Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah, the far-right mega-donors who are major Donald Trump backers and whose family foundation has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Goldwater Institute. The younger Mercer was even a member of Trump’s transition team. Violence against a speaker, a professor or an onlooker is certainly unacceptable. So is inviting a white supremacist to speak at an institution of higher learning, and so is preventing students and faculty from protesting such a speaker. Plenty of right-wing billionaires likely don’t agree with white nationalist ideas, and by funding these so-called campus free speech bills they’re trying to advance free-market principles. But regardless of motivation, this campus "free speech" movement is spreading the hate of white nationalism, the racist “alt-right,” Islamophobia and homophobia—not to mention climate change denial and economic policies that benefit only the very wealthy—on campuses filled with young students. Conservative, corporate millionaires and billionaires are at fault. == ... In 2004, I was a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, covering television. In January of that year, I began looking into a story about political donations made by reporters, editors, anchors, executives and other employees at media companies. This is, of course, an evergreen story. All the information you need is available online at databases of Federal Election Commission records. Just plug "Fox News," or "NBC," or "Tribune Company" into the Employer field, and you get a list of names of employees of those firms who've donated to various candidates or political committees. Scan the list for names of editorial employees—as opposed to, say, an advertising sales staffer—and you have yourself a story about reporters crossing lines into political advocacy. Any reporter with an internet connection can do it at any time. So I was doing it. And I came up with a few names, including someone called Bert Solivan, who described himself on FEC records as a vice president for news information at Fox News Channel and general manager of Foxnews.com. Solivan had made two $240 donations to the National Republican Senatorial Committee. (Fox News' Neil Cavuto and Griff Jenkins, who was Oliver North's producer at the time, had also donated to Republicans. There were names from a bunch of other outlets, as well.) I called Bert Solivan to ask him why, as someone who appeared to exercise editorial control over the "news information" that Fox News purveyed, he felt it was appropriate to throw in with the Republican Party in the run-up to a presidential election campaign. The call was returned by Irena Briganti, a Fox News flack who can be exceedingly unpleasant when she wants to. She often wants to. Fox News Flack Irena Briganti Tried to Scrub Her Bad Online Reputation In New York magazine this week, Graeme Wood explores the world of paid online "reputation… Read more Briganti insisted to me, emphatically, that Solivan was not an editorial employee. His job, she said, was entirely technical in nature. He ran information systems. He had zero impact on Fox News' newsgathering. He was free to donate as he pleased, she said, and it would be unfair to criticize him, or Fox News, for his political affiliations. In the course of our conversation, in order to rebut Briganti's accusation that I was singling out Fox News for criticism, I told her about the various other editorial employees at other news outlets that I had identified as donors. I argued with Briganti for quite a while about Solivan. My position, as I recall it, was that irrespective of her claims about his actual duties, the fact that someone with the title of "vice president for news information" at a cable news outlet was donating to political campaigns was a story—or part of a larger one about donations from news staffers—and that I intended to write it. As for Jenkins and Cavuto, I didn't really care. They were obviously partisan Republicans on the air and off. So I continued to reach out to people at the other news outlets I had turned up. A few days later—in my recollection it was two days after my conversation with Briganti, but this is a while ago—I saw this headline on a story by the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz: "Journalists Not Loath to Donate To Politicians; Media Companies' Policies Vary Widely". More than 100 journalists and executives at major media companies, from NBC's top executive to a Fox News anchor to reporters or editors for the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, USA Today, CBS and ABC, have made political contributions in recent years. Like I said, the story was available to any reporter with an internet connection. There was no particular time peg for it. Maybe Kurtz just had the same idea at precisely the same time that I did. Or maybe someone gave him the idea. I don't know. There was one curious thing about Kurtz's story, though: The name Bert Solivan didn't appear in it. Cavuto did, as did Jenkins. The last sentence of the story—which is preserved online here—read, "Many of the other media employees in the FEC records worked in business or technical jobs or are no longer employed by those outlets." Kurtz must have concluded that Solivan's was, as Briganti surely told him, a "technical job." I dropped my story. I didn't see much of a point in replicating Kurtz's piece with the addition of one employee that Fox claimed worked in a technical capacity. About a year-and-a-half later, Bert Solivan got a promotion at Fox News. The press release announcing it said this about his previous duties as vice president for news information: "Solivan’s other responsibilities included overseeing FOX News’ 24-hour news research department and its on-air fact writing operations." That was, of course, directly at odds with Briganti's claims to me. "On-air fact writing" included, I was later told, the news ticker or "crawl" at the bottom of the screen, as well as information presented in graphics and captions. (I wrote about it at the time on my blog.) So as it turns out, I had been preparing a story indicating that the man responsible for the factual information in all of Fox News' graphics and news ticker was a GOP donor. I had called Briganti about it, and in doing so relayed to her the names of several other reporters who had made similar donations. Briganti had demonstrated a strong desire to keep Solivan's name out of my story. Roughly two days later, the Washington Post published a story by Howard Kurtz featuring all of the names I had relayed to Briganti—but no Bert Solivan. A few months after his story about political donations, Kurtz wrote a negative review of Robert Greenwald's anti-Roger Ailes film Outfoxed. He also wrote a related item, quoting Briganti, accusing the New York Times Magazine of "ambushing" Fox News in a feature about the movie. More recently, Ailes turned to Kurtz for an exclusive interview in June 2011 after two damaging stories in Rolling Stone and New York magazine portrayed him as a paranoid lunatic. A few months after that, Kurtz wrote an influential story claiming that Fox News had become more "moderate" under Ailes' strategic guidance. Several months after that, a "senior Fox News executive" turned to Kurtz to express "regret" after (the now moderate!) Ailes called the New York Times "lying scum." Kurtz transmitted the apology, as well as Ailes' "respect" for Times editor Jill Abramson, but did not note that Ailes had called her "lying scum" in the course of telling a bald-faced lie himself. Roger Ailes Wants You to Throw a Rock Through His Window Roger Ailes, the totally paranoid chairman of Fox News, called up Newsweek/The Daily Beast's… Read more Anyway, Fox News just hired Howard Kurtz to host a Sunday morning show about the media. === National Association of Scholars 221 Witherspoon Street, Second Floor Princeton, New Jersey 08542-3215 www.nas.org Founded: 1985 President: Stephen H. Balch Publications: NAS Update quarterly newsletter, Academic Questions quarterly journal, and Science Insights; and occasional reports Finances: Has an income of less than $25,000 per year. NAS Principle Issues: NAS was founded to bring together conservatives in academia to fight the "liberal bias" on college and university campuses and to target multiculturalism and affirmative-action policies. NAS organizes professors, graduate students, college administrators and trustees, and scholars who believe that there is a "[d]ogmatic hostility to Western civilization, and turning the study of non-Western cultures into an instrument for denouncing American society" on college campuses. Fights against the "[d]ecline in civility on college and university campuses." NAS Principle Activities: NAS builds scholar networks, organizes panels, conferences, and lectures and creates NAS campus communities. NAS organizes outreach programs to recruit new members. Major Right Wing Donors: Sarah Scaife Foundation The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Inc Castle Rock Foundation John M. Olin Foundation NAS's Board of Advisors: John H. Bunzel, Hoover Institution Edwin J. Delattre, American Enterprise Institute Chester E. Finn, Fordham Foundation Gertrude Himmelfarb, Independent Women's Forum Paul Hollander, National Review, Front Page Magazine Harry V. Jaffa, Claremont Institute Donald Kagan, Project for the New American Century Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, UN Ambassador under President Reagan, American Enterprise Institute Irving Kristol, American Enterprise Institute Richard D. Lamm, American Reform Party Leslie Lenkowsky, National Review Seymour Martin Lipset, Hoover Institution Christina Hoff Sommers, Independent Women's Forum Shelby Steele, Hoover Institution, Manhattan Institute Stephan Thernstrom, Manhattan Institute James Q. Wilson, Manhattan Institute Updated July 2004 == == In addition, a recent article in Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting is highly critical of Lichter’s research methodology. Another example of such conflicted interests is provided by Professor Thomas Reeves. When Reeves writes in strong support of Horowitz’s proposals on the History News Network,he fails to note that he is a spokesman for the California Association of Scholars, a branch of the National Association of Scholars (see funding sources above) and that he is director of the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, which was, again, brought into being by the Olin and Bradley Foundations. This manufactured drumbeat against “academic bias” is amplified by Stanley Kurtz of the Hoover Institution (see funding sources above), Heather MacDonald, a John M. Olin fellow at the Manhattan Institute (see funding sources above), and Brian C. Anderson, editor of the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal and a former research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (see funding sources above). === http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/312807/burn-down-suburbs-stanley-kurtz === It is a telling marker of the ideological cohesiveness and extremism of this core group of philanthropies that three of the five founding members, Joseph Coors, David Koch and Harry Bradley, were members and financial supporters [14] of the John Birch Society. The Scaife foundations, headed by Richard Mellon Scaife, are also involved, [15] albeit in less direct ways. In the past 20 years this core group of funders has, by many reports, built and strategically linked an impressive array of almost 500 think tanks, centers, institutes and "concerned citizens groups" both within and outside of the academy. It is particularly telling to observe the funding sources of these organizations during the first 10-15 years of their existence, when their ideological identities were being established. A small sampling of these entities include the Cato Institute, [16] the Heritage Foundation, [17] the American Enterprise Institute, [18] the Manhattan Institute, [19] the Hoover Institution,[20] the Claremont Institute, [21] the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, [22] Middle East Forum, [23]Accuracy in Media, [24] and the National Association of Scholars, [25] as well as Horowitz's Center of the Study of Popular Culture. [26] The absence of formal organizational linkages between the entities within these networks creates an illusion of independent analytical voices reaching similar conclusions about strategic policy issues, a technique known in the public relations industry as “astroturfing.” This network has developed an enormous capacity to generate “data” consistent with the targeted political agenda and world views of its core group of funders to quickly and redundantly represent these issues in the mainstream press by what appear to be the voices of independent analysts and to translate these viewpoints into public policy that serves the focused ideological agenda of this core group of funders. The Bradley Foundation under Michael Joyce's leadership has even established a publishing house, Encounter Books, [27] to ensure that grantees like Horowitz have a quasi-academic outlet for their viewpoints. The degree of interconnectedness within this network of organizations is considerable but almost invisible to the casual observer. For example, when ACTA’s president, Anne Neal, introduced herself to the Select Committee on Academic Freedom in Higher Education in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, she presented ACTA as “a bipartisan network of college and university trustees and alumni across the country dedicated to academic freedom.” Full disclosure should have required some mention of the fact that ACTA (see funding sources above), which changed its name from the National Alumni Forum [28] in 1998, was established by theIntercollegiate Studies Institute [29] in 1994. The Intercollegiate Studies Institute in turn evolved from William Bennett’s Madison Center for Educational Affairs [30] and the Institute for Educational Affairs founded by Irving Kristol, Michael Joyce’s mentor, and William Simon, the first president of the John M. Olin Foundation. Bennett and Kristol also sit on ACTA’s Board of Directors. The remarkably consistent record of funding across all of the incarnations of this organization and the high degree of redundancy with Horowitz’s own, highly partisan Center for the Study of Popular Culture is not consistent with Neal’s definition of ACTA as an independent, non-partisan organization. Another example illustrative of the quietly incestuous nature of this network is presented by an article by the Boston Globe columnist Cathy Young. The article is entitled “Liberal bias in the ivory tower” [31]and by all appearances is an independent opinion piece written by a regular Globe columnist. At the end of the article Young identifies herself as “a contributing editor at Reason Magazine.” What is undisclosed in the article is that Reason Magazine is the publication of the Reason Foundation, whose funding sources [32] are virtually the same as those funding Horowitz’s "Academic Bill of Rights" project and Neal’s ACTA. Young’s premise for the article is stated in her opening sentence: “Yet another study has come out documenting what most conservatives consider to be blindingly obvious: the leftwing tilt of the American professoriate.” The study that she references [33] was conducted by Stanley Rothman, now emeritus professor at Smith College; S. Robert Lichter, emeritus professor at George Mason University; and Neil Nevitte of the University of Toronto, and was published in the online journal Forum. This study was also cited by Neal in her testimony in Pennsylvania. Young does not inform her readers that Rothman is director of the Center for the Study of Social and Political Change, [34] a center with funding sources that are remarkably redundant with Horowitz’s Center for the Study of Popular Culture. Lichter is also president of the Center for Media and Public Affairs, [35] which again has funding sources that are redundant with those referenced earlier. In addition, a recent article in Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting [36] is highly critical of Lichter’s research methodology. Another example of such conflicted interests is provided by Professor Thomas Reeves. When Reeves writes in strong support of Horowitz’s proposals on the History News Network,[37] he fails to note that he is a spokesman for the California Association of Scholars, a branch of the National Association of Scholars (see funding sources above) and that he is director of the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, [38] which was, again, brought into being by the Olin and Bradley Foundations. This manufactured drumbeat against “academic bias” is amplified by Stanley Kurtz [39] of the Hoover Institution (see funding sources above), Heather MacDonald, [40] a John M. Olin fellow at the Manhattan Institute (see funding sources above), and Brian C. Anderson, [41] editor of the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal and a former research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (see funding sources above). The relentlessness with which columnists and experts with direct funding relationships with Olin, Scaife, Bradley, Koch and Coors level charges of academic bias and assert the need for legislative reform of higher education is remarkable. The goal of this narrowly focused and ideologically driven public relations campaign can only be understood in terms of its fostering of a political climate in which federal regulatory “reform” of what is universally recognized as the finest system of higher education in the world, will be tolerated. Indeed, as has been discussed, such regulatory oversight may already be in the offing. The academy stands today as one of the last spaces in America where the democratic ideas that shape the social, economic and political fabric of the nation can be openly and independently debated on the basis of their merits and without coercion or distortion from vested economic and political interests. It is certainly in the national interest that it remain such. Author/s: Alan Jones Author's email: info@insidehighered.com Alan Jones is dean of the faculty and professor of psychology and neuroscience at Pitzer College. Source URL: https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/06/16/jones?width=775&height=500&iframe=true === newsbusters Writing in today’s Wall Street Journal and National Review Online, Ethics and Public Policy Center senior fellow Stanley Kurtz traces Barack Obama’s partnership with former domestic terrorist William Ayers when the two collaborated at the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a charity established to help Chicago’s public schools that was commandeered by Ayers to promote his radical agenda. The association between Obama and Ayers has received virtually no attention from the three broadcast networks, with the conspicuous exception of a primary-season debate sponsored by ABC when George Stephanopoulos asked Obama about his relationship with Ayers. Out of 1,365 broadcast evening news stories about Obama prior to the end of the primaries, only two mentioned Ayers — one a brief mention of the debate question on the April 17 Nightly News, and the other a World News Sunday story about McCain raising the Ayers issue on This Week. With just 42 days left until Election Day, the broadcast networks have not presented a single in-depth report on Obama’s relationship with Ayers. But Kurtz’s review of the documents at the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC) shows the two “worked as a team to advance the CAC agenda,” which “flowed from Mr. Ayers’s educational philosophy, which called for infusing students and their parents with a radical political commitment, and which downplayed achievement tests in favor of activism.” For a flavor of Ayers’ continuing radicalism, the New York Times profiled the 1960s radical back on September 11, 2001, the same day as the al-Qaeda attack that killed thousands of New Yorkers at the World Trade Center. The piece by Dinitia Smith began: “‘I don’t regret setting bombs,’ Bill Ayers said. ‘I feel we didn’t do enough.’” A short excerpt from that piece: Mr. Ayers, who in 1970 was said to have summed up the Weatherman philosophy as: ''Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that's where it's really at,'' is today distinguished professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. And he says he doesn't actually remember suggesting that rich people be killed or that people kill their parents, but ''it's been quoted so many times I'm beginning to think I did,'' he said. ''It was a joke about the distribution of wealth.'' He went underground in 1970, after his girlfriend, Diana Oughton, and two other people were killed when bombs they were making exploded in a Greenwich Village town house. With him in the Weather Underground was Bernardine Dohrn, who was put on the F.B.I.'s 10 Most Wanted List. J. Edgar Hoover called her ''the most dangerous woman in America'' and ''la Pasionara of the Lunatic Left.'' Mr. Ayers and Ms. Dohrn later married. ... In 1969, after the Manson family murders in Beverly Hills, Ms. Dohrn told an S.D.S. audience: ''Dig it! Manson killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they shoved a fork into a victim's stomach.'' A month earlier, a profile of Ayers in Chicago Magazine included a picture of Ayers stomping on the American flag. Marcia Froelke Coburn wrote the accompanying article: “Talk to him for any length of time and some rhetoric of the past slips into the conversation. ‘I think there will be another mass political movement,’ he predicts, ‘because I believe that the kind of injustice that is built into our world will not go quietly into the night.’” In the mid-1990s, Obama was hired to be the chairman of Ayers’ “brainchild,” the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. Here are the key excerpts from Kurtz's op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal; the entire must-read article can be found here. Despite having authored two autobiographies, Barack Obama has never written about his most important executive experience. From 1995 to 1999, he led an education foundation called the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC), and remained on the board until 2001. The group poured more than $100 million into the hands of community organizers and radical education activists. The CAC was the brainchild of Bill Ayers, a founder of the Weather Underground in the 1960s. Among other feats, Mr. Ayers and his cohorts bombed the Pentagon, and he has never expressed regret for his actions. Barack Obama's first run for the Illinois State Senate was launched at a 1995 gathering at Mr. Ayers's home. The Obama campaign has struggled to downplay that association. Last April, Sen. Obama dismissed Mr. Ayers as just "a guy who lives in my neighborhood," and "not somebody who I exchange ideas with on a regular basis." Yet documents in the CAC archives make clear that Mr. Ayers and Mr. Obama were partners in the CAC. Those archives are housed in the Richard J. Daley Library at the University of Illinois at Chicago and I've recently spent days looking through them.... The CAC's agenda flowed from Mr. Ayers's educational philosophy, which called for infusing students and their parents with a radical political commitment, and which downplayed achievement tests in favor of activism. In the mid-1960s, Mr. Ayers taught at a radical alternative school, and served as a community organizer in Cleveland's ghetto.... CAC translated Mr. Ayers's radicalism into practice. Instead of funding schools directly, it required schools to affiliate with "external partners," which actually got the money. Proposals from groups focused on math/science achievement were turned down. Instead CAC disbursed money through various far-left community organizers, such as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (or Acorn). Mr. Obama once conducted "leadership training" seminars with Acorn, and Acorn members also served as volunteers in Mr. Obama's early campaigns. External partners like the South Shore African Village Collaborative and the Dual Language Exchange focused more on political consciousness, Afrocentricity and bilingualism than traditional education. CAC's in-house evaluators comprehensively studied the effects of its grants on the test scores of Chicago public-school students. They found no evidence of educational improvement.... Mr. Ayers's defenders claim that he has redeemed himself with public-spirited education work. That claim is hard to swallow if you understand that he views his education work as an effort to stoke resistance to an oppressive American system. He likes to stress that he learned of his first teaching job while in jail for a draft-board sit-in. For Mr. Ayers, teaching and his 1960s radicalism are two sides of the same coin.... The Obama campaign has cried foul when Bill Ayers comes up, claiming "guilt by association." Yet the issue here isn't guilt by association; it's guilt by participation. As CAC chairman, Mr. Obama was lending moral and financial support to Mr. Ayers and his radical circle. That is a story even if Mr. Ayers had never planted a single bomb 40 years ago. In his National Review Online piece, Kurtz adds a valuable point about how the radical left dominated the CAC despite the fact that the funding originated with Republican powerhouse Walter Annenberg: The Obama camp denies CAC’s radicalism by pointing to the fact that this foundation was funded by Nixon Ambassador and Reagan friend, Walter Annenberg. Moderates and Republicans often support Annenberg activities, it’s true. Yet the story of modern philanthropy is largely the story of moderate and conservative donors finding their funds “captured” by far more liberal, often radical, beneficiaries. CAC’s story is a classic of the genre. Ayers and Obama guided CAC money to community organizers, like ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) and the Developing Communities Project (Part of the Gamaliel Foundation network), groups self-consciously working in the radical tradition of Saul Alinsky. Walter Annenberg’s personal politics don’t change that one iota. The fact that Ayers and other tenured radicals hold power at our universities is in no way negated by the presence of Republican appointees on university boards of trustees. Ayers’s radicalism is undeniable. He remains unapologetic for his bombings of the 1960s. Even now, he refuses to rule out violence as a resort. His education writings are deeply politicized and filled with exhortations to “resist” America’s racist and oppressive social system. In 2006 — along with his wife and fellow former-terrorist, Bernardine Dohrn, and Jeff Jones — Ayers released, Sing A Battle Song, a collection of intensely radical writings from the Weather Underground. Ayers makes it clear in that book that, while he is embarrassed by some of the Weather Underground’s rhetoric, he still adheres to the same ideas. Beyond its strictly historical interest, Ayers and his co-editors make a point of hoping that their old writings would be “of use to new generations of militant activists and organizers.” By directing CAC funds to groups like ACORN and the Developing Communities Project of the Gamaliel Foundation, Ayers was supporting just such militant activists and organizers.... The Chicago Annenberg Challenge stands as Barack Obama’s most important executive experience to date. By its own account, CAC was a largely a failure. And a series of critical evaluations point to reasons for that failure, including a poor strategy, to which the foundation over-committed in 1995, and over-reliance on community organizers with insufficient education expertise. The failure of CAC thus raises entirely legitimate questions, both about Obama’s competence, his alliances with radical community organizers, and about Ayers’s continuing influence over CAC and its board, headed by Obama. Above all, by continuing to fund Ayers’s personal projects, and those of his political-educational allies, Obama was lending moral and material support to Ayers’s profoundly radical efforts. Ayers’s terrorist history aside, that makes the Ayers-Obama relationship a perfectly legitimate issue in this campaign. Kurtz has painstakingly documented the connections between Barack Obama and the radical left. The only question is, will the so-called mainstream media find any of this worth reporting between now and Election Day? About the Author Rich Noyes is Research Director at the Media Research Center. Click here to follow Rich Noyes on Twitter. ===