Nat'l Assoc of scholars 2
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see main nat ass schol. bad margin
ginni affirmative action amicus
FRED SINGER HAPPER LINDZEN HACKS PAT MICHAELS
see peter wood ~1619 CRT
~ SUSTAINABILITY
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148 pp may 2024
Manufacturing_Backlash_final_0
Manufacturing Backlash Right-Wing Think Tanks and Legislative Attacks on Higher Education, 2021–2023 Isaac Kamola, Director, Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom American Association of University Professors ikamola@aaup.org
:{Introduction
Today higher education is under attack. Since 2021 we have witnessed what one scholar correctly called an “unusually brazen series of challenges to academic freedom,” unleashed by conservative activists and a “national-level political machine” closely aligned with the Republican Party (Brint 2023). Since 2021 more than one hundred and fifty bills have been introduced in state legislatures seeking to actively undermine academic freedom and university governance. This includes nearly one hundred academic gag orders seeking to ban the teaching of “critical race theory” (CRT) or other so-called “divisive concepts.” Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has appointed partisan activists to the Board of Trustees of New College in Florida, }:
who fired the college president, replaced her with a political ally, denied tenure to five professors deemed outside the institutional mission, and began shuttering academic programs, starting with gender studies (Bartlett 2023; Pettit 2023). Tennessee, North Dakota, Texas, Florida, and North Carolina have passed laws dismantling institutional efforts to increase diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) on college campuses. Republican lawmakers in Florida and Texas have sought to weaken tenure protections for faculty, making them more vulnerable to external pressure. Florida and North Carolina have undermined the accreditation process after accreditors raised concerns over the possibility of undue political interference in the states’ university systems.
Bills have passed in Florida and Ohio, and action taken by governing boards in North Carolina and elsewhere, to establish academic programs, centers, and whole schools designed to teach conservative content. Taken together, these bills constitute an evolving, interlocking, and intensifying effort by Republican politicians and well-funded think tanks to undermine academic freedom and university autonomy. This legislation is often understood as an effect of America’s highly polarized politics (see for example: Anderson 2023; Busteed 2023; Mintz 2021).
Since the election of Donald Trump, the argument goes, American politics have become overly partisan, with polarization affecting university campuses and college classrooms. As this white paper demonstrates, however, this legislation is largely the outgrowth of efforts by right-wing and libertarian think tanks, working closely with Republican politicians, to manufacture a culture-war backlash ...
NAS organizes the Civics Alliance, a project premised on the claim that civics education in K-12 and higher education has become a “recruitment tool of the progressive left,” as exemplified in the adoption of the 1619 Project (Civics Alliance n.d. b.). The Civics Alliance brings together educators and policymakers to promote a civics education that presents America as embodying “an exceptional heritage of freedom” (Civics Alliance n.d. a.). In reality, Civics Alliance is populated by members of conservative and libertarian think tanks.
Coalition members include Christopher Rufo (MI), Keith Whitaker (NAS), Ryan Williams (Claremont), Peter Wood (NAS), Jenna Robinson (Martin Center), Stanley Kurtz (EPPC), Scott Yenor (Claremont), George Leef, (Martin Center), and dozens of other individuals affiliated with rightwing publications, think tanks, foundations, or conservative activist organizations.22
The Civics Alliance monitors state-level legislation pertaining to K-12 civics curriculum. In addition to the GEA (described above), the Civics Alliance has written seventeen model bills focused on K-12 and higher education, including legislation giving states greater “accreditation autonomy,” requiring “syllabus transparency,” and mandating “intellectual diversity” (Civics Alliance n.d.).23
Between 2020 and 2022, NAS has received $2.7 million from eleven of the top twentyfive donors listed in Appendix 2, including the Sarah Scaife Foundation ($7.2 million) and the Bradley Foundation ($2.9 million) (DeSmog NAS). In addition to sharing funders, sitting on shared boards, and circulating each other’s content, many of the think tanks explored in this chapter are also institutionally connected through the SPN.
The State Policy Network (SPN)
Seven of the organizations discussed in this report are members of SPN (see Table 2.2). SPN creates strategic coordination between national think tanks—such as the Heritage Foundation and ALEC—and state-level think tanks, such as TPPF and IFF.
Started by ALEC in 1992, SPN originally included only a small handful of think tanks but rapidly expanded during the mid2000s. By 2022, SPN claimed sixty-three state-level think tanks partners (at least one in each state), more than ninety “national partners,” and more than sixty-six “state partners in key capacities like litigation, advocacy, and investigative journalism” (SPN 2023, 5).
The SPN specializes in connecting think tanks with donors and helping state-level think tanks implement local legislative strategies developed at the federal level. At the 2013 annual meeting in Oklahoma City, SPN president Tracie Sharp described SPN as an IKEA catalog of policy proposals and lobbying support. As summarized by Jane Mayer, Sharp told the audience that “instead of pictures of furniture arranged in rooms,” the SPN offers “state policy projects that align with the group’s agenda,” including opposition to “President Obama’s health-care program and climate-change regulations,” the reduction of “union protections and minimum wages,” cuts to “taxes and business regulations,” additional “voting restrictions,” and privatizing education” (Mayer 2013).
While national think tanks work to shape the national conversation, state-level think tanks take up such issues with local media, legislators, and publics. In so doing they produce state-specific content for state-specific audiences in coordination with national think tanks and activist donors. The composition of SPN’s board reflects their primary role of bringing donors together with state and national think tanks. The board includes representatives from conservative megadonors, including DonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund, the Commonwealth
Foundation, the JM Foundation, the John William Pope Foundation, the Adolph Coors Foundation, Philanthropy Roundtable, the Roe Foundation, and Charles Koch’s Stand Together Foundation. The remaining board positions consist of representatives from think tanks, including the American Institute for Full Employment, the Bill of Rights Institute, and the Heritage Foundation (State Policy Network 2023, 30). The SPN also provides financial support
...
toc
:{Part 1: The Context 13 Chapter 1: From Black Lives Matter to Executive Orders 14 Executive Order 13958 16 Executive Order 13950 19
Chapter 2: Culture War, Think Tanks, and the Dark Money that Funds Them 25 National Think Tanks 26 Center for Renewing America and the Conservative Partnership Institute Manhattan Institute for Policy Research American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) Heritage Foundation State-Level Think Tanks 38 James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) Idaho Freedom Foundation (IFF) Cultural Conservative Think Tanks 43 Claremont Institute (CI) Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC) Higher Education Governance Think Tanks 47 American Council on Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) National Association of Scholars (NAS) and the Civics Alliance The State Policy Network (SPN) 51
Part 2: The Legislation 63 Overview 64 Chapter 3: Academic Gag Orders 68 2021 Gag Orders: The Roll Out 70 2022 Gag Orders: The Intensification 73 2023 Gag Orders: Doubling Down 80...}:
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Conclusion: What’s at Stake?
:{ Given that teacher educators comprise the target audience of this journal, the editors naturally expect us to address the ramifications that our analysis holds for teacher education. We :{know that pressures from inside the labyrinth led the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) to remove any mention of “social justice” from its standards (see Powers, 2006). }:Those pressures came from the National Association of Scholars, which is home to some of the major figures in the neoliberal/neoconservative movement, including Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Irving Kristol, and Chester Finn.
Those pressures also came from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, “a major proponent of the ‘intellectual diversity’ movement which aims to dismantle the so-called liberal bias in higher academia.” David Horowitz, of course, serves as the leading figure of this movement from his Center for the Study of Popular Culture at the Hoover Institution. He regularly appears on FoxNews, which functions as the primary propaganda arm for the neoliberal/neoconservative agenda. The pressure on NCATE to drop its commitment to social justice also stemmed from the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), an institution founded by Lynne V. Cheney, wife of Vice-President Dick Cheney.
:{In November of 2001, ACTA issued a report titled “Defending Civilization: How Our Universities Are Failing America and What Can Be Done about It’ that launched what Joel Beinin describes as “The first post-September 11 expression of the link between the neoconservative political agenda and the attack on critical thinking about the Middle East” (Beinin, n.d.) In Beinin’s words,....
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booktv panel 221 hamilton inst peter wood
book 1620 // 1776united of somesuch BS?
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~ ozone CFC Montreal?
2X?
3.4 billion see bak
https://www.nationalreview.com/2015/04/sustainability-trend-costs-students-money-peter-wood/
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ref report
https://www.nas.org/blogs/dicta/sustainability_higher_educations_new_fundamentalism1
[pix po'd middle eastern looking guy; climate tshirt backwards]
“Sustainability” is a key idea on college campuses in the United States and the rest of the Western world. To many, sustainability is just a new name for environmentalism. But the word has come to mean something much larger: an ideology that demands new limits on economic, political, and intellectual freedom as the price that must be paid to ensure the welfare of future generations.
This report is the first in-depth critical examination of the sustainability movement in higher education. The movement, of course, extends well beyond the college campus. But the college campus is where the movement gets its voice of authority, and where it molds the views and commands the attention of young people.
Download the report (pdf): Sustainability: Higher Education':{s New Fundamentalism}:
See also:
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https://www.nas.org/articles/An_Elbow_in_the_Ribs_Prof-Prodding_Toward_Sustainability
https://www.nas.org/articles/Sustainability_is_a_Waste_10_Reasons_to_Oppose_the_Sustainability_Movement
sep 09
- Sustainability is deceptive.
Sustainability is not just about practicing good stewardship of the environment. It is also a tool to advance progressive politics and ideology. The sustainability movement is a way for people with a hugely unpopular political program to get into positions of influence so that they can advance their cause despite lack of public support.[1] On many campuses sustainability is marketed to students as saving energy and improving the environment, but turns out to involve projects that have nothing to do with the environment.
- Sustainability is coercive.
Sustainability advocates assume that no one can legitimately disagree with their message. They therefore have no qualms about imposing their politics on students, faculty, and staff. If someone does disagree, they attack that person’s motives and ignore his actual points.[2]
- Sustainability is closed-minded.
Sustainability advocates put their hands over their ears and refuse to listen to people who point out contrary facts or who have different arguments. Sustainability in this sense is an ideology: it shuts out or explains away whatever doesn’t fit with its premises.[3]
- Sustainability is a pseudo-religion.
Some sustainability advocates tip over the edge of ideology into apocalyptic religion, complete with end-of-the-world scenarios, calls to repent, a new eco-morality, and worship of the Earth.[4] This is a religion that misappropriates the ideas of “ethics,” ‘justice,” “social mandate,” and “the right thing” to shame people into compliance.
- Sustainability distorts higher education.
Sustainability advocates don’t want to just addsustainability to the curriculum; they want to make it “thefoundation of all learning and practice in higher education.”[5] How exactly does sustainability help you learn calculus, read Homer, or score well on the LSAT? College is also about preparing for adult responsibilities. How does making sustainability the foundation of higher education prepare you for those aspects of life not encompassed by recycling, green grocery bags, and compact fluorescent light bulbs?
- Sustainability shrinks freedom.
Sustainability advocates don’t like free markets or personal liberty. They believe markets ignore long-term costs and people typically make bad choices. Instead of liberty, sustainability advocates praise “social justice” and “equitable distribution of resources” as the foundation of a sustainable society. [6] These terms may sound nice but they point to governmental control over everyday life. Ultimately, the sustainability movement is about taking away your right to think and act for yourself.
- Sustainability tries to program you.
The proponents of sustainability aim to have “all students engaged as effective change agents in our sustainability challenges.”[7] This is another way of narrowing your education. Can’t students simply be students? What if your goal is to learn something about the world before attempting to change it?
- Sustainability is anti-rational.
Some sustainability advocates—we call them sustainatopians—want to instill in students an emotional way of knowing the world that is “separate from the rational.”[8] Many of them believe the industrial revolution was a mistake and would like to move beyond reason and science in favor of a combination of intuition and empathy. That runs counter to the basic purpose of higher education.
- Sustainability bypasses the faculty.
Historically, college teachers have made the key decisions about what they teach. The sustainability movement on campus, however, took off when college administrators decided to push it. So far, 650 college presidents have signed a commitment to combat global warming and infuse sustainability into the curriculum.[9]
- Sustainability is wasteful.
Sustainability advocates pride themselves on taking the long view and minimizing waste. In fact the movement has a long history of extravagant and false predictions about natural resources, environmental perils, and the consequences of human actions.[10] These predictions have resulted in vastly wasteful expenditures and diversions of human time and talent. Convincing college students to squander their opportunity for a real education is only the most recent example.
To learn how you can oppose the sustainability movement on your campus, visit the National Association of Scholars website at www.nas.org for articles about sustainability and for suggestions on how to respond to sustainability on your campus.
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https://www.desmog.com/rachelle-peterson/
Rachelle Peterson
Credentials
- B.A., Politics, Philosophy, and Economics, The King’s College (2013).[1]
Background
Rachelle Peterson is a policy advisor for The Heartland Instituteand director of research projects at the National Association of Scholars (:{NAS:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:). [2]
Peterson has been a strong critic of the fossil fuel divestment movement, the sustainability movement, and environmentalist Bill McKibben. She has written the NAS report Inside Divestment: The Illiberal Movement to Turn a Generation Against Fossil Fuels and is co-author of Sustainability: Higher Education’s New Fundamentalism.
Before starting work at NAS in 2013, Petersoninternedat Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank funded largely by conservative foundations including as the Sarah Scaife Foundation, Mercer Family Foundation, and by ExxonMobil. [1]
The NAS has boasted of its own history of criticizing the sustainability and divestment movement. The following is from a November 2015 *Inside Divestment* report, written by Peterson: [3]
“The National Association of Scholars has observed and critiqued the campus sustainability movement over the last seven years, and followed the fossil fuel divestment movement since its emergence at Swarthmore five years ago. We offer the most thorough encyclopedia of collegiate fossil fuel divestment activism published to date. “
Stance on Climate Change
September 24, 2015
According to Peterson, “Scientists who refuse to cow to the orthodoxy of dangerous anthropogenic global warming have had a rough go of it in academia.” She describes the word “denier” as “a derogatory epithet that disrespects climate change skeptics’ legitimate scientific concerns and jumps straight to stigmatization.”
“The National Association of Scholars takes no position on the validity of the various scientific claims made in the dispute over catastrophic anthropogenic global warming, but we applaud the AP for ruling out the inappropriate and disrespectful term “climate change denier,” Peterson wrote at the :{NAS}: blog. [4]
July 5, 2015
Writing at *Minding the Campus*, after several paragraphs criticizing environmentalist Bill McKibben, Peterson promotes the myth of a “pause” in global warming: [5]
“[I]t might be worth noting that even skeptics of global warming and supporters of the Keystone Pipeline have souls. And with an eighteen-year pause in global warming and our planet healthier than it’s been in centuries, this year’s grads might have been better served with some other chestnuts. Don’t believe everything you are told. And the grass isn’t necessarily greener on the other side of the sustainability fence.”
Peterson also wrote about the “pause” at the *:{NAS:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:* blog, citing journalist and prominent climate change denier Christopher Moncktonfor evidence that NOAA‘s analysis of temperature data is flawed.[6]
May 18, 2015
Writing at *National Review**Online*, Peterson declared: [7]
“’Denier’ is a slur aimed at discrediting an opponent without having to engage his points. Virtually none of the traditional ‘deniers’ actually think that the climate has never changed or that it hasn’t been warming gradually over the past few decades. The real debate is whether the warming is dangerous. But activists want to avoid that debate.”
Key Quotes
August 7, 2018
...
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https://yyy.theguardian.com/law/2022/jan/28/clarence-thomas-supreme-court-affirmative-action-case-ginni-thomas
GUK
Who has more influence on supreme court: Clarence Thomas or his activist wife?
Justice’s wife, Ginni Thomas, sits on the board of conservative group that backs lawsuit seeking to end affirmative action, raising concerns it could present potential conflict of interest
Ed Pilkington
@edpilkington
Fri28 Jan 2022
Clarence Thomas, the hardline conservative supreme court justice, is facing calls for his recusal in the case over race-based affirmative action in college admissions that the court agreed to hear this week.
US supreme court will hear challenge to affirmative action in college admission
Read more
The case, which is being brought against Harvard and the University of North Carolina, is the latest potential conflict of interest involving Thomas and his wife Virginia Thomas. Ginni, as she is known, is a prominent rightwing activist who speaks out on a raft of issues that frequently come before the nation’s highest court.
A one-person conservative powerhouse, she set up her own lobbying company Liberty Consulting in 2010. By her own description, she has “battled for conservative principles in Washington” for over 35 years.
:{
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The challenge to the two universities’ race-conscious admissions policies is being brought by Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA). Its leader Edward Blum has been a relentless opponent of affirmative action and voting rights laws.
His argument that race-based affirmative action is a quota system that discriminates against Asian students is framed with the supreme court’s newly emboldened rightwing majority in mind. A central player in that new six-justice conservative supermajority is Clarence Thomas, who is the longest-serving of the justices and at 73 will be the oldest once Stephen Breyer retires.
Justice Thomas’s influence has soared in recent months with the rightward shift of the court following Donald Trump’s three nominations, to the extent that some pundits now dub him the unofficial chief justice of the court.
SFFA’s lawsuit seeking to strike down affirmative action has received the enthusiastic backing of the conservative National Association of Scholars. It filed an amicus brief in support of the suit, accusing Harvard admissions officials of being prejudiced against Asian students and stereotyping them as “uninteresting, uncreative and one-dimensional”.
Ginni Thomas sits on the advisory board of the National Association of Scholars. Observers are concerned that her position with a group that has intervened in the affirmative action case could present appearances of conflict of interest.
Virginia ‘Ginni’ Thomas, wife of the supreme court Justice Clarence Thomas, watches Amy Coney Barrett take the constitutional oath in the White House on 26 October 2020. Photograph: Patrick Semansky/AP
Noah Bookbinder, president of the government ethics watchdog Crew,told the Guardian that while supreme court regulations may not legally require Thomas to recuse himself, there were serious questions to answer.
“Ginni Thomas is an advisory board member of an organization that has taken a very specific position on a case in front of her husband. That will make it hard for the public to be confident that he’s going to be totally unbiased.”
Bookbinder said that in the circumstances “the better course of action would be for him to recuse or for her to cease her involvement in that organization.”
The potential appearance of a conflict of interest over the Harvard case was noted in a recent investigation by the New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer that takes a deep dive into the overlapping interests of the couple. The article chronicles in devastating detail the many instances where Ginni’s political activism appears to present problems for the image and integrity of the court.
“Ginni Thomas has held so many leadership or advisory positions at conservative pressure groups that it’s hard to keep track of them,” Mayer concluded. “Many, if not all, of these groups have been involved in cases that have come before her husband.”
In the most troubling recent instance, Ginni Thomas lent her voice to Trump’s big lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him. She was vocal on the subject in the buildup to the violent insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6 last year that led to the deaths of five people and left more than 100 police officers injured.
On the morning of the January 6 itself, Mark Joseph Stern of Slate reported, Thomas posted on her Facebook page words of encouragement for the “Stop the Steal” marchers in Washington. “LOVE MAGA people!!!!”, she said., “GOD BLESS EACH OF YOU STANDING UP or PRAYING!”
Soon after the insurrection, Thomas was forced to apologise to her husband’s former supreme court law clerks for comments she made privately to them that appeared to lament Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election. The remarks were sent to a private email list called “Thomas Clerk World”.
In the emails, disclosed by the Washington Post, she wrote: “Many of us are hurting, after leaving it all on the field, to preserve the best of this country. I feel I have failed my parents who did their best and taught me to work to preserve liberties.”
An even more direct intervention in the politics surrounding Trump and the big lie was made last December when Thomas joined 62 other influential conservatives in signing an open letter to the leader of the Republicans in the House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy. It urged him to expel the Congress members Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger from the Republican party.
Their sin, the letter writers opined, was to serve on the House committee investigating the January 6 insurrection. They described the committee as an “overtly partisan political persecution that brings disrespect to our country’s rule of law [and] legal harassment to private citizens who have done nothing wrong”.
Since the Capitol insurrection, the Department of Justice has arrested more than 725 defendants in relation to the storming of the building. Federal prosecutors have charged 225 with assaulting, resisting or impeding police officers, including over 75 charged with using a deadly or dangerous weapon or causing serious bodily harm to an officer.
Last week the supreme court rejected attempts by Trump to block the January 6 committee from acquiring his White House records from the time of the attack. There was only one dissent from the bench to that 8-to-1 decision: it came from Clarence Thomas.
“Ginni Thomas’s activities are unprecedented in supreme court history in terms of a spouse engaging in issues that are constantly before the court,” said Gabe Roth, executive director of Fix the Court, a non-partisan group which advocates supreme court reform. “The appearance of impropriety is in itself impropriety – all the supreme court has is the trust of the public, and once you chip away at that you are in trouble.”
Roth added that Thomas’s comments in the days before January 6 were clearly problematic given her husband’s vote on the Trump documents. “It’s possible that the January 6 committee has emails between Ginni Thomas and administration officials from that day or the days leading up to it given how vocal she was. That’s definitely a place where Justice Thomas should have recused himself.”
Should the rightwing majority around Thomas use its newfound muscle to ban affirmative action, as is widely predicted, it would mark the negation of more than 30 years of settled constitutional law on the matter. What lies ahead bears strong resemblance to Roe v Wade, the landmark 1973 ruling that made abortion legal which the court is probably poised to weaken or even overturn outright.
:{
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Mayer points out in the New Yorker that an amicus brief was filed in the supreme court case challenging Roe by Robert George who also sits on the advisory board of the National Association of Scholars alongside Ginni Thomas.
Roth told the Guardian that a simpler solution to the full recusal of Clarence Thomas from the affirmative action case might exist. That would be to remove the National Association of Scholars’ amicus brief.
“There is an easy way to deal with this perceived conflict of interest – strike the amicus brief,” he said.
It is established practice in all federal appeals courts, though not in the supreme court, that amicus briefs brought by anybody with a connection to a judge hearing a case are routinely thrown out.
The president of the National Association of Scholars, Peter Wood, told the Guardian that he knew of no conflict of interest relating to Thomas’s position on the advisory board. “Ms Thomas’s role is to provide advice to NAS in response to questions I put to her about NAS policy and initiatives. I have never discussed with her any NAS matter that was likely to come before the supreme court,” he said.
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2017 NAS threatening letter to two UC profs who object to Happer committee/study [red team?] lose 501(c)3 tax exempt status (pretty far fetched, vs ChamberWatch c4? or Leadership Inst] enstrom?
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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://www.desmogblog.com/2020/02/07/dark-moneyed-denialists-fixing-science-symposium-doubt
The “Fixing Science” symposium, which is hosted by the National Association of Scholars and kicks off today in Oakland, California, includes credible speakers who want to improve some areas of science hurt by the use of poor statistical methods or making irreproducible claims.
Unfortunately, they are outnumbered by people who have often cast doubt on mainstream climate, environmental, and health sciences. For starters, who thinks that long-time fossil fuel–funded Patrick Michaels, a senior fellow with the climate science–denying Competitive Enterprise Institute, will “fix science”? UPDATE 02/10/20: NAS Brochure at Symposium.
I was first tipped off to the swarm of climate science deniers at this meeting by Lenny Teytelman on Twitter, who said he found seven climate deniers (an undercount), and by Oxford professor Dorothy Bishopin her January 12 blog post, “Should I stay or should I go?…” about this meeting and whether scientists should engage with those with dissenting views in a situation like this.
Both provided useful insight and information, which I've consolidated with other research here.
Professor Bishop summarized well:
“But, I reiterate, the main point is not whether NatAsSchlols is left- or right-wing. It's the weird structuring of the meeting, which juxtaposes a set of experts in the 'reproducibility crisis' with a set of individuals who promote scientific views that are far from mainstream … You know your arguments would not survive scrutiny by experts familiar with evidence in the area, so you don't invite those (and to be fair, it's unlikely that they'd come anyway, as there are diminishing returns in engaging with those whose minds are fixed). But what you can do is to cast doubt on all scientific evidence by inviting along those who are questioning the solidity and credibility of current scientific practices. That's what is happening here.” [emphasis added]
Many speakers at this meeting have been affiliated with groups known for anti-science efforts, either ideologically or financially, funded mostly by dark money. When their funding sources are accessible, they include the usual companies (fossil fuels, tobacco, and chemical) and private conservative foundations, which lines up with 2013 research by sociologist Robert Brulle, summarized in my post “Study Details Dark Money Flowing to Climate Science Denial.”
A few other speakers have often worked in “product defense,” an area covered well by David Michaels in Triumph of Doubt(2020) (review). I'm compiling here a list of the speakers and organizations who are more often denying science than trying to fix it. People should be very wary of those listed in red, and I've included links to more information for those who want to do their own research.
The Fixing Science symposium sponsors are the National Association of Scholars (NAS, which should not be confused with the reputable U.S. National Academy of Sciences, which also goes by NAS) and The Independent Institute (TII). The former is led by Peter Wood and the latter by David Theroux, both vocal (but non-technical) climate science deniers.
Anti-science Groups
I've scoured IRS Form 990 data (line 8) for the four organizations affiliated with the most symposium speakers, a search that yielded total grants received each year from 2003-2017, shown in Table A. But such 501(c)(3) “public charities” need not report the sources of those grants. Using the candid.org website, I've compiled the information in the spreadsheet, “Grants To Think Tanks,whose two sheets each contain a Table 1 that lists all 1,528 grants, and a Table 2 that summarizes them.
The first sheet sorts by Recipient-Donor-Year, the second by Donor-Recipient-Year. Donor Advised Funds (DAFs) like Donors Trust and Donors Capital Funddo report grants they make, but their legal structure makes it impossible to know the original sources of the funding. Perhaps that was not dark enough for some donors. The huge Fidelity Charitable DAF started making grants to the same four organizations in 2015. It is impossible to know who got the idea first, but by 2016, Charles Koch was routing millions of dollars through that DAF.
In Table A, the Miss % is the fraction of total grant money given directly by corporations or others, so not reported on 990PF forms, and therefore, invisible to the public. Adding DAF% and Miss % yields Dark %, which shows the extent of dark money. The Heartland Institute's DAF% is high, as it receives roughly a third of its money (32%) via Donors Trust/Capital Fund.
In the tables below, CD indicates promotion of Climate Denial and TD shows persistent Tobacco Defense, with lower case implying a lesser degree. Appearing in red shows clear, well-documented anti-science behavior, generally to create doubt about science that conflicts with business interests.
DeSmog readers are likely familiar with many of the better known groups, or can click on the profiles, so this section will focus on lesser known groups...much more charts, see bak
==
mostly old ppl
http://www.horowitzfreedomcenter.tv/2018/06/22/david-horowitz-at-uc-santa-cruz/
==
National Scholars' Group Turns 25, Showing Its Age.Authors:SCHMIDT, PETERSource:Chronicle of Higher Education. 3/8/2013, Vol. 59 Issue 26, pA3-A4. 2p.Document Type:ArticleSubject Terms:*AFFIRMATIVE action programs in education -- Lawsuits & claims
*COLLEGE curriculum
*WESTERN civilization -- Study & teaching
*MEMBERSHIP in associations, institutions, etc.
*EDUCATION advocacy
UNITED StatesCompany/Entity:NATIONAL Association of Scholars (U.S.)People:BALCH, Stephen H.Abstract:The article discusses the financial standing and effectiveness of the U.S. higher education advocacy group called the National Association of Scholars (NAS). The author looks at the group's legal action in cases involving affirmative action plans for admissions at public colleges, its advocacy for colleges to adopt Western civilizations curricula, and the challenges NAS has in maintaining membership and influence. Topics include comments by Stephen H. Balch, a former NAS president, as well as NAS's challenges in obtaining funding from foundations and philanthropic organizations. Also discussed is its alignment with conservative and traditionalist approaches to higher education.
==
A QUARTER CENTURY Spent fighting change it regards as harmful to higher education, the National Association of Scholars has learned just what a mighty foe change can be.
The group, whose 25th-anniversary conference was set to be held in New York this past weekend, has struggled to keep up with technology and has been hurt by economic downturns. Its membership has dwindled to about 3,000, down by one-third from its height in the late 1990s. It has given up on trying to maintain the health of its state affiliates, several of which have shut down or are dying on the vine. It has found philanthropic support harder to come by as tight times have prompted major donors to give less money, with more strings attached, and a federal program that provided much of its revenue in recent years has stopped awarding grants.
Other national higher-education groups are similarly challenged--forced by a tight economy, an aging professoriate, and the ascendance of online communication to rethink how they take in money, enlist members, and promote their agendas. But most other such groups exist to represent specific constituencies, like admissions officers or language professors, and can alter their messages to keep up with the times.
The NAS cannot change its message because its message is its reason for being.
That message is that colleges should be meritocracies focused on teaching, research, reasoned discourse, and the scientific method, and should resist tailoring their policies and instruction to conform with anyone's political views. It is a message rooted in romanticized recollections of how America's colleges operated in the middle of the 20th century, before the advent of affirmative action, ethnic-studies departments, and other products of the 1960s that the association regards as anathema.
Barring a major resurgence of traditionalist thinking on college campuses, the appeal of that message might not be enough to carry the group another 25 years.
LOOKING AHEAD
The NAS's leaders believe they have taken big steps to reinvigorate their organization, including moving its headquarters from Princeton, N.J., to Manhattan, where they will have easier access to media outlets and major donors.
They see their group as still being more than capable of making a big splash in the news media, as it did last summer with a report arguing that colleges' American-history programs overly emphasize race, class, gender, and ethnicity at the expense of important subjects like military and religious history.
The NAS expects to make headlines again this spring when it releases the results of a two-year study of Bowdoin College. The group says the study will illustrate how selective liberal-arts colleges have abandoned instruction in the traditional liberal arts by eliminating course requirements in that area.
Some of the campaigns the scholars' association helped get under way, and some of the organizations it helped establish, have had a major effect on higher education and continue to do so. The association's California affiliate, for example, mounted the first campaign for a state referendum barring public colleges from using affirmative-actionpreferences, which passed in 1996. Five other states have since approved similar referenda, and the NAS has remained a significant player in legal challenges to race-conscious admissions policies, offering up both legal briefs opposing the policies and critiques of the research supporting them.
In the two decades since the scholars' group undertook a campaign to encourage colleges to establish academic programs on Western civilization, America's founding, and the study of free institutions, more than 60 such programs have emerged, estimates Stephen H. Balch, who served as president of the NAS from its founding, in 1987, until 2009 and remained chairman of its Board of Directors until last year.
The NAS also played a central role in establishing four national groups that have a significant voice in academe: the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, a conservative group that encourages college trustees to assert more influence over their institutions' affairs; the Association for the Study of Free Institutions, a free-market-oriented group; the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers, founded as a traditionalist alternative to the Modern Language Association; and the Historical Society, founded to counter what its members regard as the politicization of that field.
A fifth group that the NAS helped establish, the American Academy for Liberal Education, continues to gives its stamp of approval to institutions and programs that meet its standards, but it gave up seeking the Education Department's recognition as an accreditor after running afoul of federal regulations.
Despite its recent gains, some critics of the NAS dismiss it as a thing of the past.
"If I had to be blunt, I would say the NAS is composed of old men playing a broken record," says Cary Nelson, who often verbally sparred with that group's leaders in his capacity as president of the American Association of University Professors, a post he held from 2006 until last year.
The group appeared to be earning grudging respect from its foes as a voice of dissent in the mid-1990s. But Stanley N. Katz, an expert on higher-education policy at Princeton University and the director of Princeton's Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies, argues that "they haven't been real players in years."
The NAS denies that it lacks influence, although it acknowledges having to make tough choices about where to focus its resources.
For example, the association's central office devotes little attention to its Argus Project, established in 2008 as a way to enlist faculty members and ordinary citizens in reporting incidents of political indoctrination on campuses. Peter W. Wood, a former provost ofKing's College, in New York, who rose from executive director to president of the NAS in 2009, says the group lacks the money and manpower to investigate most complaints it receives.
A few of the association's 46 state affiliates, such as those in California and New York, remain vibrant and vocal due mainly to strong leadership. But the national association has decided not to try to prop up state affiliates that are struggling. Mr. Wood blames the decline of the affiliates largely on the aging of his organization's membership, and says the Internet has alleviated much of the need for his groups members in each state to meet face to face.
Only a few state affiliates have closed their doors, but many are barely hanging on. The Iowa affiliate, for example, has had to scrap recent efforts to hold state meetings because it has been unable to gather an eight-person quorum. The president of the association's Colorado affiliate, Charles L. King, a 91-year-old retired professor of Spanish at the University of Colorado at Boulder, says he has been trying to get someone to take over his leadership post for years.
The NAS also has come to regret a longstanding contractual agreement with Springer, a publisher, that has left most of the group's flagship journal, Academic Questions, behind a paywall, limiting its reach.
Aside from a 2009 decision to open itself up to nonacademics, the association has done little recently to build its membership. Mr. Wood, a frequent contributor to The Chronicle, says he would rather devote his energies to speaking out against developments in higher education that he opposes. Those include the sustainability movement, which he sees as demanding conformity to radical environmentalism, and a White House-backed effort to promote civics education that he criticizes for defining such education in liberal terms. Raising his group's profile by weighing in on such matters, he says, is a far more cost-effective means of attracting members than direct recruitment.
Once able to count on foundations to underwrite whatever activities it chose to engage in, the association now derives its funds mainly from grants for specific research projects its benefactors want carried out. It had found a new source of revenue in the U.S. Department of Education's Teaching American History program, established in 2001 largely in response to a survey by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. That survey found that most seniors at highly selective colleges could not answer basic questions about the nation's past. The NAS became a provider of short-term training for teachers of history, but the federal program is no longer awarding grants.
Mr. Balch says the NAS planned ahead for the loss of such funds, and Mr. Wood says he "won't miss" the association's involvement in the program because "it didn't do a whole lot to enhance other things we were doing." But the NAS's most-recent filing with the Internal Revenue Service, for 2011, shows that federal grants for its training of history teachers accounted for about $2-million of its $2.4-million in revenue that year. That's a large sum to do without, and the association's expenses exceeded its revenues in recent years. The NAS has responded to the loss of the grants by establishing its own in-house fund-raising operation and by temporarily trimming the salaries of its top executives.
As was the case in past years, most of the association's major donors in 2011 were philanthropies with reputations for backing conservative causes, like the Adolph Coors Foundation and the Sarah Scaife Foundation. Its reliance on conservative support has fed arguments that the NAS represents conservative ideology more than any sort of vision of higher education as untainted by politics. Mr. Wood, like Mr. Balch before him, argues that his group should not be labeled conservative because it has liberal members and does not take conservative positions on issues outside academe.
Neil Gross, a professor of sociology at the University of British Columbia, discusses the history of the NAS in his book Why Are Professors Liberal and Why Do Conservatives Care?, scheduled for release this week. He says the NAS has managed to attract the support of some liberals and moderates, even as it "has really carved out a reputation as a critic of the liberal professoriate," because faculty members across the political spectrum are concerned about the politicization of academe.
Looking back on the association's first quarter century, Mr. Balch acknowledges, "we have not converted the academy." His group's chief accomplishment, he says, may have been helping to keep in place a group of scholars who adhere to the traditionalist view that college professors should be treated as individuals and be free to go against political currents. "We have kept that ideal alive."
Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, in Manhattan, where the group moved its headquarters in an effort to reinvigorate itself and be closer to media outlets and major donors.
By PETER SCHMIDT
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Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, in Manhattan, where the group moved its headquarters in an effort to reinvigorate itself and be closer to media outlets and major donors.... hunt:
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Arts and Culture Conference to Be Held in MarchJan 14, 2014 by NAS | The Center for American Culture and Ideas at the University of Arizona will hold its first conference March 2014 in Tucson, Arizona. U Arizona Center for American Culture and Ideas to Hold First Arts and Culture ConferenceSep 18, 2013 by NAS | The Center for American Culture and Ideas at the University of Arizona will offer its first conference, on “The Future of (High) Culture in America,” in March 2014. Ruminations at the end of the semesterMay 04, 2012 by Daniel Asia | I have recently returned from a trip abroad. In receiving my peanuts, pretzels and drink during the flight, I also received two napkins. Dollars for Diversity and Equity at U of AzFeb 02, 2012 by Glenn Ricketts | Those agitating for social justice get a financial boost at the University of Arizona Center for the Study of American Ideals and CultureMay 13, 2010 by Daniel Asia | A project I have been imaging for a long time is now actually a reality. The Center for the Study of American Ideals and Culture has received its first funding, from the new Apgar Foundation. With this first seed money, we can… Ward Connerly at the University of ArizonaNov 19, 2009 by Daniel Asia | Ward Connerly spoke at the University of Arizona just a few weeks ago. He was masterly. At five minutes before his talk was to begin there were only five people in the audience. At the start there were between seventy-five and… U Arizona Celebrates Chicano Walk-Out Day with a Teach-InSep 16, 2009 by Ashley Thorne | La Raza studies, teaching students that white America is the enemy, lives on in American public education. Wal-Mart’s Eco-IndexJul 21, 2009 by Ashley Thorne | The retail giant teams up with the University of Arkansas and Arizona State University to find ways to measure products' social and environmental impact. Hey Guys!Mar 27, 2009 by Ashley Thorne | The University of Arizona surveys: do professors and others on campus use "GLBT-inclusive language"? “Gender Identity” Restrooms at U ArizonaFeb 24, 2009 by Catherine Pavlich | It doesn't matter if you are a man or a woman; campus restrooms at UA are categorized by self-image and behavior. Stop the Hate and Celebrate: The University of Arizona PurgesNov 11, 2008 by Ashley Thorne, Peter Wood | After a controversial comic was published in the student newspaper, the campus will "regroup." Weighing the Evidence: New Studies on Racial Preferences at Three UniversitiesOct 16, 2008 by Glenn Ricketts | NAS affiliates helped the Center for Equal Opportunity document discrimination in law school admissions.== ... Dennis Outwater is the new president of the Massachusetts Association of Scholars. Here he tells about his professional career and his vision for the affiliate. He may be contacted at :{:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px"):}::{:{profout@hotmail.com}::{ or 978-546-7324.}:
I graduated from the University of Chicago in 1972, doing a Ph.D. dissertation on "The Problem of Evil" within the context of an Independent Study degree. I began teaching Philosophy at Suffolk University in 1969, and retired from same in 2008. I also opened an entrepreneurship in 1982, called "Perchance Company," focused on land development and advanced architectural home building, ending the company in 2006. I am currently finishing up my first scholarly book, entitled "Grand Canyon Panology: The Psyche of Water and Stone," and have started a second book on the environmental movement, entitled "The Condor's Meat." I am also writing a screenplay based on these two books.
:{I joined NAS about four years ago under the solicitation of Stephen Balch. I was asked to take over the Presidency of the Massachusetts Association of Scholars this year, and we have had our first meeting on February 13th. Since the Boston area has the largest concentration of students of any city its size, and rivals New York City in this regard, I believe that our Association should overcome its quiescence of the last few years and begin to contribute strongly to the overall NAS effort. We discussed, along with Peter Wood, the need to continue NAS efforts to be non-partisan politically and avoid the Leftist stereotype of NAS as a "right-wing reactionary organization." My conviction is that NAS's future depends on a new generation of scholarship, despite the politicization of the universities and most colleges.
In this regard we have discussed, so far, two ways of addressing non-partisanship: }:
(1) Projecting a strong interest in independent scholarship, for, after all, our foremost concern is scholarship and not the nature and destiny of the American academy. If the latter is inimical to scholarship, our scholarly efforts must go on, regardless. We also recognize that within academia there are occasional spaces wherein which independent scholarship can and does take place, and we hope for more of this as well.
(2) Studying the issue of student voting, within the context of widespread election fraudcoming from both parties in the past, although generally concentrated in American cities. I have suggested that our members look at Stealing Elections by John Fund, in this regard, and I feel that it is important that efforts are made for students to not be able to vote in Massachusetts if they are registered in out-of-state home towns or cities. Obviously free and fair elections are a non-partisan issue; no political party should be able to effect elections by either encouraging or discouraging voter participation in illegal ways. This becomes, in my view, a scholarly issue, for if the political parties cannot strongly recognize the necessity of the rule of law—and the need for non-partisan laws, in the first place—democracy will not work. It is our presupposition that democracy is the best political polity within which scholarship can function and flourish.
I have also brought up a third issue for future study and discussion: environmental ethics. This issue also transcends, or ought to do so, that of politics and the academy generally, and is a long-term issue of the deepest scholarly importance. Contemporary universities and colleges most often teach that "nature" is socially constructed, and engage in an assault on the notion of a fixed or fundamental human nature. It seems to me at bottom all scholarship must take its stand in defense of the role of nature, understood "metaphorically or mythically" as well as scientifically, so that the full range of human reason can be applied to human concerns.
2011
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2017
April 26, 2017
"Red Star Over Campus: How China's Confucius Institutes Court Western Colleges and Universities"
Peter Wood, Rebecca Sears, Rachelle Peterson, Mike Gonzalez, and Doris Liu
Alliance Defending Freedom
Washington D.C.
February 22, 2017
"Making citizens: A 'Sputnik moment' for civic education?"
David Randall, Juan Rangel, Robert Pondiscio, Charles Sahm, and Rebecca Burgess
American Enterprise Institute
Washington D.C.
January 21, 2017
"Securing Liberty: Rebuilding American Education in an Era of Illiberal Learning"
Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs
Oklahoma City, OK
January 12, 2017
"Wasted Colleges: The New Civics in Colorado"
Senator Kevin Lundberg, David Randall, and Peter Wood
Independence Institute
Denver, CO
January 10, 2017
"Losing the Republic: The Progressive Hijack of Civics Education"
John Fonte, Stanley Kurtz, David Randall, Peter Wood, and Jack Warren
Anderson House
Washington D.C.
2016
October 5, 2016
"Academic Freedom in the Age of Political Correctness"
Jay Schalin, Peter Wood, and KC Johnson, with moderator Mark Bauerlein
First Things Editorial Offices
New York, NY
September 30, 2016
Peter Wood
The New Criterion
Winchester, England
September 30, 2016
"The Purposes of Academic Freedom"
Ashley Thorne
The Philadelphia Society
Philadelphia, PA
June 14, 2016
Peter Wood
Ronald Reagan Presidential Library
Simi Valley, California
May 21, 2016
Commencement Address
Peter Wood
Veritas Preparatory Academy
Phoenix, AZ
April 12, 2016
"Debate: Opposing Views on Affirmative Action"
Peter Wood and Randall Kennedy
The University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Amherst, MA
:
April 7, 2016
"Safe Spaces or Free Speech?"
Peter Wood and Charles Kesler
The Claremont Institute
Claremont, CA
April 6, 2016
"Drilling Through the Core"
Peter Wood
The Heartland Institute
Chicago, IL
March 1, 2016
"The Crisis in Civic Education"
Ashley Thorne
Conservative Political Action Conference
Oxon Hill, MD
February 26, 2016
"Who Rules the Universities?"
Charles Kesler and Peter Wood
Heritage Foundation
Washington D.C.
February 9, 2016
"Beach Books Report Launch: What Do Colleges and Universities Want Students to Read Outside of the Classroom?"
Peter Wood, Ashley Thorne, and David Randall, with keynote speaker Mark Bauerlein
First Things Editorial Office
New York, NY
==
ripple/echo:
:{:{
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YEARS
2015 | 2014 | 2013 | 2012 | 2011 | 2010 | 2009 | 2008 | 2007
:{
2015
READ THE ANTI-SPEECH AGITATORS' PLAYBOOK
November 18, 2015 | The Federalist
THE ‘ILLIBERAL’ RELIGIOUS CAMPAIGNERS BEHIND FOSSIL-FUEL DIVESTMENT
November 18, 2015 | Acton Institute Power Blog
HOW GREEN MEGADONORS BUILT A BOGUS CAMPUS ANTI-CARBON DRIVE
November 18, 2015 | New York Post
AUTHOR ON COMMON CORE: ‘A COMPREHENSIVE DUMBING DOWN OF AMERICAN EDUCATION AT EVERY LEVEL’
November 17, 2015 | CNS News
BOOK VIRGINS
October 26, 2015 | The Marietta Daily Journal
SCHOLARS: CAMPUS ‘SUSTAINABILITY’ INDOCTRINATES COLLEGE STUDENTS
August 23, 2015 | The Daily Caller
SUSTAINABILITY MOVEMENT FOSTERS HOTBEDS OF LIBERAL INDOCTRINATION (PART 3)
August 23, 2015 | The Heartland Institute
TESTING THE LIMITS
August 21, 2015 | World Magazine
A TOUGH ASSIGNMENT FOR COLLEGES: WHAT SHOULD N.J. FRESHMEN READ?
August 20, 2015 | NJ.com
WHO SHAPES AMERICAN HISTORY?
August 6, 2015 | National Public Radio
DR. PETER WOOD ON THE LARS LARSON SHOW
August 4, 2015 | The Lars Larson Show
COLLEGE BOARD TO REWRITE US HISTORY EXAM AFTER CRITICS BLAST ANTI-AMERICA LANGUAGE
August 4, 2015 | Fox News
CONSERVATIVES CONVINCED COLLEGE BOARD TO REWRITE AMERICAN HISTORY
July 30, 2015 | Washington Post
AFTER FACING BACKLASH, AP U.S. HISTORY COURSE REVISED TO EMPHASIZE AMERICAN IDEALS
July 30, 2015 | Huffington Post
HISTORIANS BLAST ADVANCED PLACEMENT U.S. HISTORY FRAMEWORK
June 11, 2015 | Washington Post
IS AP U.S. HISTORY BIASED?
June 11, 2015 | Huffington Post
BYE, BYE, AMERICAN HISTORY
June 10, 2015 | Wall Street Journal
'PERVASIVE ANTI-PATRIOTISM': 55 SCHOLARS REJECT NEW AP HISTORY LESSONS
June 8, 2015 | Fox News
A FEW COURAGEOUS ACADEMICS FIGHT THE REWRITING OF AP AMERICAN HISTORY
June 3, 2015 | National Review
AMERICA’S HISTORY
June 3, 2015 | National Review Online
EMINENT SCHOLARS BLAST NATIONWIDE U.S. HISTORY PROGRAM
June 3, 2015 | The Federalist
NOTABLE & QUOTABLE: A WARNING ON AP HISTORY STANDARDS
June 2, 2015 | Wall Street Journal
55 SCHOLARS PROTEST AP U.S. HISTORY CHANGES
June 2, 2015 | National Review Online
CIVICS TEST IS A GOOD IDEA
May 31, 2015 | Journal Sentinel
STEM IS FINE, BUT U.S. NEEDS AN INFORMED CITIZENRY
May 20, 2015 | Wall Street Journal
THE COURT SHOULD FINISH WHAT IT STARTED IN THE FISHER CASE
May 14, 2015 | National Review
PROSE BY ANY OTHER NAME
May 7, 2015 |Slate
POWERFUL ANTI-FOSSIL ENERGY LOBBIES TARGET STUDENTS
May 4, 2015 | Newsmax
GEORGE WILL TRASHES THE DOMINANT BUSINESS THEME OF OUR TIME
April 21, 2015 | Bloomburg
HIGHER EDUCATION WEEK IN REVIEW: CATCH-UP EDITION
April 20, 2015 | Forbes
YEARNING FOR NORMAL, &C.
April 20, 2015 | National Review
THINK GLOBAL WARMING IS BAD? WAIT UNTIL YOU MEET SUSTAINABILITY
April 18, 2015 | Breitbart News
WILL: COLLEGES' SUSTAINABILITY DRIVE JUST...UNSUSTAINABLE
April 17, 2015 | Boston Herald
DIVESTMENT AND SUSTAINABILITY MOVEMENTS - ANTI-HIGHER EDUCATION?
April 17, 2015 | Townhall.com
WILL: SUSTAINABILITY GONE WILD
April 16, 2015 | Longview News-Journal
COLLEGES BECOMING CHURCHES OF SUSTAINABILITY
April 16, 2015 | The Register-Guard
GEORGE WILL: SUSTAINABILITY GONE WILD
April 15, 215 | The State Journal-Register
'SUSTAINABILITY' GONE MAD ON COLLEGE CAMPUSES
April 14, 2015 | The Washington Post
DEMOCRAT DIVINITY SCHOOLS
April 13, 2015 | National Review Online
SUSTAINABILITY: A GROWING IDEOLOGY ON COLLEGE CAMPUSES
April 07, 2015 | WNPV
GREEN BILLIONAIRE ACTIVIST TOM STEYER ESCALATES HIS WAR ON SCIENCE, TRUTH AND WESTERN INDUSTRIAL CIVILISATION
April 07, 2015 | Breitbart News
COLLEGES' OBSESSION WITH 'SUSTAINABILITY' IS UNSUSTAINABLE
April 06, 2015 | Investor's Business Daily
NOTABLE & QUOTABLE: 'SUSTAINABILITY' IS THE LATEST INCOHERENT COLLEGE CRAZE
April 03, 2015 | Wall Street Journal
GREENS GONE WILD ON COLLEGE CAMPUSES
March 20, 2015 | New York Post
OPINION JOURNAL: CAMPUS CLIMATE CRUSADE
March 26, 2015 | Wall Street Journal
SUSTAINABILITY IS THE NEW CAMPUS ORTHODOXY, REPORT ARGUES
March 25, 2015 | Chronicle of Higher Education
IS "SUSTAINABILITY" SUSTAINABLE?
March 25, 2015 by Steven Hayward | Powerline
THE GREENING OF THE IVORY TOWERS
March 25, 2015 by James Woudhuysen | spiked
SUSTAINABILITY: SMASHING THE ECO-ORTHODOXY
March 25, 2015 | spiked podcast
CCSU, OTHER UNIVERSITIES SHOULD EDUCATE, NOT INDOCTRINATE, STUDENTS
February 27, 2015 | New Haven Register
IT'S TIME TO MOVE PAST RACE-BASED AFFIRMATIVE ACTION
February 22, 2015 | The Pitt News
OKLAHOMA GOP LAWMAKERS CRITICAL OF AP COURSE FOR MONTHS
February 20, 2015 | Southwest Times Record
ANOTHER WILD, WACKY (WORRISOME) WEEK IN HIGHER EDUCATION
February 20, 2015 | National Review Online
RULE NO. 84: DIANE RAVITCH'S OTHER LETTER TO LAMAR ALEXANDER
February 02, 2015 | Huffington Post
'FINDING COMMON CAUSE'
January 22, 2015 | Inside Higher Ed
COLLEGES TODAY MAKE ACTIVISTS NOT SCHOLARS
January 07, 2015 | Aleteia
}:
==
charting aca freedom:
We hope it will be helpful not only to scholars interested in how the debate has shifted in the 100+ years following the AAUP’s foundational 1915 Statement of Principles, but to legislators, jurists, all participants in the current debates, and members of the general public. Even those of us who follow these debates closely can struggle at times to recall the many different reasons that have been put forward for protecting academic freedom—or for limiting those protections. Our chart, of course, does not take the place of careful reading of the original statements. It is merely a handy way to keep in mind some key distinctions. We intend it as a public service.
Its value lies in part in the highlighting of elements that are missing from some well-known and influential statements. For example, the AAUP’s 1915 Statement of Principles grounded academic freedom in the pursuit of truth, but the AAUP’s even more influential 1940 statement omitted the pursuit of truth, as did seven of the other nine statements analyzed in the chart.
Only four of the ten statements call for sanctions against those who willfully violate the principles of academic freedom. Eight of the ten statements make no mention of tenure for faculty members—a surprising absence in view of how often tenure comes into the public discussion of academic freedom.
We leave to the reader the discovery of other salient patterns and subtle differences.
We release “Charting Academic Freedom: 102 Years of Debate” knowing that it is not complete. We have in hand three other documents that could be added: The John William Pope Center’s 2016 “Academic Freedom in the age of Political Correctness;” the University of Chicago’s 2017 “Report of the Committee on University Discipline for Disruptive Conduct;”and the American Legislative Exchange Council’s “Forming Open and Robust University Minds Act.” Doubtless there are still others we have not found. Our intention is to release a “2.0 version” of the chart that includes such additional items as seem broadly comparable. We also trust that readers will point out to us any errors that have crept into this first version of the chart so that we may correct them.
A word or two on our principles of selection thus far. Debates about academic freedom in the United States have continued for over one years. OCLC’s WorldCat lists nearly 100,000 volumes written on the topic. Some of these have attained the status of classics. Frequently these books include extensive and valuable commentary on some of the statements we have analyzed, but we have focused on the statements themselves, not on the scholarly literature surrounding them. Our criteria for including a statement on the chart are:
- The statement was originally presented as speaking with institutional authority. Thus we exclude statements that represent primarily an individual author’s views.
- The statement stands as an attempt to present a comprehensive view of the topic. Thus we exclude supplementary statements from the AAUP, such as its 1992 statement, “On Freedom of Expression and Campus Speech Codes.”
- The statement is intended to supply or has generally understood to be an articulation of principles that apply to all of higher education. Thus we exclude the statements of individual colleges on academic freedom, except in those cases such as the Kalven Report, the Woodward Report, and the Stone Report, where the university’s statement has been embraced as a model by many institutions.
Even within these boundaries, it seems likely that we have overlooked some important statements, and it might be best to add a fourth criterion:
- The statement has had some lasting historical significance. It is, of course, too soon to tell which of the statements issued in the last several years will pass that test. For recent declarations on academic freedom, we err on the side of inclusion.
Statements on academic freedom are proliferating at a rate far above that of the last century. From 1915 to 2014, we found five. In the last two and a half years, there have been five more we included on the chart and at least three others we have not yet added. This sudden increase in statements on academic freedom clearly is a reflex of new worries and concerns. We hope that our chart will be of some value to those who are wrestling with these issues.
==
Pittsburgh, Not Paris: Explaining the Climate Hysteria
Jun 27, 2017 by Peter Wood | Peter Wood analyzes the vehemence of the global warming movement in conjunction with the weakness of its claims.
Academia is in the New Dark Age
Jan 19, 2017 by Leo Goldstein | Leo Goldstein replies to comments by Bruce Gilley and Edward R. Dougherty.
https://www.nas.org/articles/academia_on_the_verge_of_a_new_dark_age
Editor’s Introduction: It has been widely reported that President-elect Trump is considering cuts to NASA’s Earth division, which is a major source of “climate change” research. Broadly speaking, climate change research has become a cause favored by the political left and dis-favored by the political right.
The following article by Leo Goldstein is a strongly-stated criticism of global warming theory that focuses on the political left’s support for the theory. We publish it in the spirit of opening the door to discussion of an important topic, and we welcome contrasting views. One such contrasting view is presented by Bruce Gilley in "The Lack of Prudence of Fossil Fuel Supporters."
To be clear, the National Association of Scholars does not take a position on catastrophic man-made global warming. We are, rather, champions of scientific integrity, including skeptical examination of hypotheses and careful consideration of alternative hypotheses. To this end we uphold the importance of allowing dissenters in the scientific community reasonable space to make their arguments and to advance evidence that supports their critiques.
The closing off of debate in several areas of legitimate scientific inquiry concerns us. The most conspicuous example is the claim that climate science has reached a “consensus” of CO2-forced climate change and that those scientists who continue to dissent from the “consensus” do so in bad-faith. The attacks on so-called “climate deniers,” however, are far from the only instance in which contemporary academe has circled the wagons around a favored view and prevented the more robust debates that would, in the long run, lead to more solidly grounded science.
Science is only a collection of methods, and scientists themselves are human, with all the vulnerabilities of humans. Among those vulnerabilities are susceptibility to groupthink, psychological overinvestment in one’s opinions, confirmation bias, and unconscious self-interest. These are inevitably factors that influence all scientists to varying degrees, and the pursuit of science requires a constant effort to neutralize that influence. The most effective check on human fallibility is open debate in which each contributor must be ready to meet well-informed objections to his ideas.
Some areas of science, however, have found themselves in a whirlpool of circular reasoning to the effect that any and all doubts about a favored theory are to be seen as ill-informed, ignorant, or deceptive. The whirlpool provides a rationalization for refusing to give any real consideration to dissenting views which, merely because they express dissent, are treated as illegitimate.
There is such a thing as frivolous dissent that does not deserve much if any response from the scientific community. It is late in the day to contest the value of the Planck constant. But a great deal of non-frivolous dissent is often brushed into the same bin that serves as the resting place for crank formulations.
The gate of contemporary academic science is also guarded by those who insist that any would-be challenger has to meet a very high threshold of evidence to warrant a hearing. The principle is analogous to a boxing championship: to challenge a champion, the challenger must work his way up the ranks. This is a reasonable safeguard—provided the challenger is allowed to have those preliminary fights. A system that forecloses the possibility of a serious challenge has a deep flaw.
ACADEMIA ON THE VERGE OF A NEW DARK AGE
by Leo Goldstein
One of the strongest and most longstanding political/social prejudices has been that Liberals represent Science and Reason, while Conservatives oppose them. This opinion was probably imported from Europe, where it had some ground in the Enlightenment period. But it has never been the case in America. The fact that overwhelming majority of post-WWII scientists held liberal beliefs is not evidence, because scientists comprised only a tiny minority of Liberal or Conservative supporters.
Over the last thirty years, in fact, Liberalism has been taken over by the hard Left, abandoned science and reason, and become a hotbed of obscurantism and oppression. The myth that Democrats were the party of science but Republicans were anti-science played a significant role in this downfall. One notable phenomenon is the rise of the so-called “postmodern science,” a product of cultural studies.
AL GORE’S WAR ON SCIENCE
Al Gore played a unique role in corrupting and degrading the American scientific enterprise. He belonged to the group of “Atari Democrats” who made an early alliance with the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, but Gore had neither aptitude not training in science. He was no friend of science. Gore compared science to the Faustian bargain:
“[W]e have chosen to escape the Malthusian dilemma by making a set of dangerous bargains with the future worthy of the theatrical legend that haunted the birth of the scientific revolution: Doctor Faustus. Some of these bargains have already been exposed …”(Al Gore, Earth in the Balance, 1992, pp. 127-128)
In 1993-2000, Vice President Gore removed many distinguished, independent-minded scientists from the leadership of the American scientific community, replacing them with his political allies—especially from the environmentalist movement. For example, he fired Will Happer from the position of the Director of Science in the DOE, after Professor Happer suggested measuring the UV radiation impact of the alleged ozone layer depletion. This and other symptomatic cases are described in Michael Gough’s excellent book *Politicizing Science: The Alchemy of Policymaking* (2003). Gore’s staff further demanded that distinguished oceanographer Roger Revelle’s name be removed from an article against global warming alarmism that Revelle had co-authored. Gore’s unsuccessful attempts to intimidate Professor Fred Singer and to manipulate Ted Koppel, then an ABC anchor, were well-publicized as well.
But the media and academics believed that science had no enemies on the left, so these misdeeds were largely ignored. The publication of *Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science* (1994) by Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt, the Sokal affair (in which physicist Alan Sokal submitted an article of deliberate gibberish phrased in politically correct cant to Social Text, and got it published), and similar expressions of academic dissent were too little and too late. Other processes leading to the corruption of National Academy of Sciences and scientific societies are outside the scope of this article.
“POSTMODERN SCIENCE” AND CLIMATE CHANGE
...
Debating Scientific Epistemology
Dec 19, 2016 by Edward R. Dougherty | Professor Dougherty discusses the dangers of modeling complex systems in response to Professors Gilley and Goldstein.
The Lack of Prudence of Fossil Fuel Supporters
Dec 13, 2016 by Bruce Gilley | Bruce Gilley replies to Leo Goldstein arguing that humility and discretion are needed in the climate change debate.
Academia on the Verge of a New Dark Age
Dec 13, 2016 by Leo Goldstein | Guest author Leo Goldstein offers a criticism of "climate alarmism" and "postmodern science."
Sustainability: Higher Education’s New Fundamentalism Released by Polaris Books
Dec 09, 2016 NAS | PRESS RELEASE: Sustainability: Higher Education’s New Fundamentalism, co-written by Rachelle Peterson and NAS president Peter Wood, is now available at Amazon.com and bookstores nationwide.
?
The Environmentalists Versus Trump
Nov 17, 2016 by Rachelle Peterson | Rachelle Peterson discusses Trump's possible environmental policies and what where the college environmentalist movement goes next.
https://www.nas.org/articles/the_environmentalists_versus_trump
Canada’s Crusade Against Fossil Fuels
Jul 20, 2016 by Rachelle Peterson | Frontier Centre for Public Policy releases a report illuminating the failed agenda of fossil fuel divestment.
Exposing Climate Alarmism in 90 Minutes
May 10, 2016 by Rachelle Peterson | Rachelle Peterson writes for the National Review about an important new documentary, Climate Hustle.
Ask a Scholar: What are the Effects of Carbon Dioxide on the Earth’s Atmosphere?
Mar 23, 2016 by Glenn Ricketts | Climatologist David Legates explains why the influence of atmospheric gasses does not necessarily reflect their proportion in the atmosphere.
Concerns about National Academy of Sciences and Scientific Dissent
Dec 15, 2015 by Peter Wood | Peter Wood writes to members of the National Academy of Sciences with three concerns about how the scientific establishment has responded to serious dissent.
This Changes Everything?
Oct 09, 2015 by Rachelle Peterson | Naomi Klein's new movie admits conservative critics of the environmental left were right.
AP Denies the “Denier” Label
Sep 24, 2015 by Rachelle Peterson | The Associated Press asks news writers to quit calling scientists "climate change deniers."
The Pressure of Group Thought
Aug 31, 2015 by Peter Wood | NAS president Peter Wood questions the legitimacy of always seeking academic consensus.
Bill McKibben Responds to NAS Questions on Divestment
Jul 13, 2015 by Rachelle Peterson | Prominent sustainability activist Bill McKibben offers some answers to questions posed by NAS.
==
==
RP
Censorship: Another Cheap Chinese Import We Don’t Need
Aug 30, 2017 by Rachelle Peterson | Efforts to censor Cambridge University Press show how far the Chinese government will go to stifle intellectual freedom.
Dead: Fossil Fuel Divestment
Aug 14, 2017 by Rachelle Peterson | Rachelle Peterson describes the steps that led to the closing of the Divestment Student Network (DSN).
Will the Other Claremont Colleges Defend Free Speech?
Aug 10, 2017 by Rachelle Peterson | Other Claremont schools are still investigating the student protests at Claremont McKenna college that obstructed speaker Heather Mac Donald.
One-and-a-Half Cheers for Claremont McKenna
Jul 31, 2017 by Rachelle Peterson | Rachelle Peterson applauds the school's decision to discipline several students who obstructed free speech and calls for increased vigilance from all college administrators to protect free speech.
Outsourced to China
Jul 12, 2017 by Rachelle Peterson | Rachelle Peterson warns of the dangers inherent in allowing a foreign government to exert influence on classrooms and university administrators.
NAS Sends Letter to SUNY Trustees
Jun 27, 2017 by Peter Wood, Rachelle Peterson | Peter Wood and Rachelle Peterson ask the SUNY Board of Trustees to investigate the Confucius Institutes in their system.
American Universities Are Welcoming China’s Trojan Horse
May 15, 2017 by Rachelle Peterson | Rachelle Peterson writes on China's use of soft power to influence students at American universities.
Disinvited, Re-invited, Still Slighted
Apr 05, 2017 by Rachelle Peterson | Virginia Tech staged a public putdown of Jason Riley's BB&T Distinguished Lecture.
Middlebury Admissions Tells Alumni How to Talk About the Protest Over Charles Murray
Mar 09, 2017 by Rachelle Peterson | A new document tries to guide conversations about Charles Murray's visit to campus.
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Securing Liberty
Jan 26, 2017 by Rachelle Peterson | NAS members and friends gathered in Oklahoma City for NAS’s 30th anniversary conference.
?
The Environmentalists Versus Trump
Nov 17, 2016 by Rachelle Peterson | Rachelle Peterson discusses Trump's possible environmental policies and what where the college environmentalist movement goes next.
?
Election Reflections
Nov 07, 2016 by Ashley Thorne, David Randall, Peter Wood, Rachelle Peterson | On this election eve, a few of the staff at the National Association of Scholars have written reflections on citizenship in America.
Federalist Universities
Oct 17, 2016 by Rachelle Peterson | To what extent is the university a microcosm of the political party system?
On Reading Old Books
Sep 21, 2016 by Rachelle Peterson | Are the classics outdated? Four reasons support the reading of old—even flawed—books.
Free Speech v. Free Speech
Aug 04, 2016 by Rachelle Peterson | Many of the opponents of free speech believe they are its champions.
==
ggl suggests climate change:
Climate Change - National Association of Scholars
https://www.nas.org/topics/climate_change
2.
Estimated 40 Percent of Scientists Doubt Manmade Global Warming ...
https://www.nas.org/.../Estimated_40_Percent_of_Scientists_Doubt_Manmade_Global...
2.
National Association of Scholars - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Association_of_Scholars
2.
History and organization · Positions and activities · Academic Questions
National Association of Scholars - SourceWatch
https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/National_Association_of_Scholars
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Mission · Funding · Personnel · Actions
TIL: There is an organization called National Association of ...
https://www.reddit.com/r/skeptic/.../til_there_is_an_organization_called_national/
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NAS President Peter Wood: wrong, dishonest or hopelessly ...
https://www.desmogblog.com/nas-president-peter-wood-wrong-dishonest-or-hopeless...
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National Association of Scholars calls out threats to the 'Integrity of ...
https://wattsupwiththat.com/.../national-association-of-scholars-calls-out-threats-to-the-...
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Climate change used to be a bipartisan issue — until the fossil fuel ...
www.businessinsider.com/climate-change-used-to-be-a-bipartisan-issue-until-the-fossi...
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National Association of Scholars - Fossil Free
https://gofossilfree.org/national-association-of-oil/
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Canadian rhapsody for “Climate Hustle” - cfact
www.cfact.org › All Posts
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==off bshttps://www.nas.org/topics/climate_changep8 1 of 8, 12/17==
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/04/26/report-confucius-institutes-finds-no-smoking-guns-enough-concerns-recommend-closure
More than 100 American colleges and universities house Confucius Institutes, centers of Chinese language and cultural teaching funded and staffed in part with instructors screened by a Chinese government-affiliated entity known as Hanban. The Confucius Institutes may seem to many to be benign outposts offering cultural events programming and noncredit courses in introductory Chinese, calligraphy or Tai Chi, but for nearly as long as the Confucius Institutes have been around -- more than 10 years now -- they’ve been controversial.
Advocates for the institutes say they’ve brought welcome new resources for Chinese language study and study abroad at a time when financial support for the humanities has been shrinking, while critics question whether American universities sacrifice some degree of academic freedom and autonomy in hosting the Chinese government-backed institutes, which in some cases are involved in delivering for-credit classes. Many Confucius Institutes are also involved in teaching or teacher training for local K-12 schools.
One U.S.-based Confucius Institute, at the University of Chicago, closed in 2014 after more than 100 faculty signed a petition that cited, among other things, concerns that Hanban's role in the hiring and training of teachers “subjects the university’s academic program to the political constraints on free speech and belief that are specific to the People’s Republic of China.” Ontario's McMaster University closed its Confucius Institute a year earlier after a former instructor filed a complaint alleging that the university was “giving legitimization to discrimination” because her contract with Hanban prohibited her participation in the spiritual practice Falun Gong. Over the years, Confucius Institutes have been dogged by allegations that they self-censor when it comes to sensitive subjects in China such as Taiwan, Tiananmen Square, Tibet and Falun Gong; the institute's supporters frequently reply that these topics are largely outside the confines of the Confucius Institutes' narrow cultural and language education mandates. In 2014, organizers of a Chinese studies conference in Europe accused Hanban, a sponsor of the conference, of outright censorship of conference materials related to Taiwan.
The latest take on this contentious topic, a **183-page report**on Confucius Institutes from the National Association of Scholars, by the author’s account finds “few smoking guns, and no evidence of outright policies banning certain topics from discussion” -- but reasons for concern nonetheless. The report, which examines hiring policies, course offerings and textbooks, funding structures, academic freedom protections, and what the author describes as “formal and informal speech codes” at 12 Confucius Institutes in New Jersey and New York, concludes that “to a large extent, universities have made improper concessions that jeopardize academic freedom and institutional autonomy. Sometimes these concessions are official and in writing; more often they operate as implicit policies.”
The report from NAS recommends that universities close their Confucius Institutes. “Confucius Institutes permit an agency of a foreign government to have access to university courses, and on principle that is a university function,” Rachelle Peterson, the author of the report, said in an interview. “Institutions should have full control over who they hire, over what they teach, and Confucius Institutes basically act like class-in-a-box kits that come ready-made for universities to use.”
Short of closing the institutes -- NAS’s primary recommendation -- the report makes a series of recommendations for changes that faculty and administrators should push for. Those recommendations include: increased transparency and public disclosure of contractual and funding agreements, and the renegotiation of contracts “to remove constraints against ‘tarnishing the reputation’ of the Hanban” and “to clarify that legal disputes should be settled only in the jurisdiction of the host institution (in our cases, American courts).”
Other recommendations in the report call on universities to “cease outsourcing for-credit courses to the Hanban,” to “formally ask the Hanban if its hiring process complies with American nondiscrimination policies,” and to “require that all Confucius Institutes offer at least one public lecture or class each year on topics that are important to Chinese history but are currently neglected, such as the Tiananmen Square protests or the Dalai Lama’s views on Tibet.”
NAS, which promotes liberal arts-style education and intellectual freedom, is perceived in higher education as something of a contrarian scholarly organization with a politically conservative bent, though the organization maintains it has no partisan affiliation (its website quotes the organization’s president, Peter Wood, saying, “Both the left and the right produce their share of intellectual obtuseness. The NAS is not a partner with either”). Much of the prior criticism of the institutes has come from scholars associated with the left.
While NAS may be an organization that prides itself on “challenging campus orthodoxies,” on Confucius Institutes its recommendations are to a large extent in step with that of the American Association of University Professors. In 2014, the AAUP came out with a statement “recommending that universities cease their involvement in Confucius Institutes unless the agreement between the university and Hanban is renegotiated so that (1) the university has unilateral control, consistent with principles articulated in the AAUP’s Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities, over all academic matters, including recruitment of teachers, determination of curriculum and choice of texts; (2) the university affords Confucius Institute teachers the same academic freedom rights, as defined in the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, that it affords all other faculty in the university; and (3) the university-Hanban agreement is made available to all members of the university community.”
One theme of the NAS report is the lack of transparency on the part of the universities in the sample. Although NAS’s researcher obtained contracts through Freedom of Information Act requests for eight public universities in her sample -- as well as an unsigned draft contract shared by one private university -- Peterson found what she called “significant resistance” on the part of many university officials to answer questions about their Confucius Institutes. She reported that only two of the 12 Confucius Institute directors in her sample consented to interviews.
The most secretive institution, Peterson reported, was Alfred University, a private institution located about 80 miles south of Rochester, N.Y. She writes that Alfred's provost personally ejected her partway through a Confucius Institute class she'd received advance permission from the instructor to observe.
Reached by phone, the instructor of the class, Lanfang “Haley” Gao, referred questions to the university. Alfred's provost, Rick Stephens, said he asked Peterson to leave the class and escorted her to her car after receiving worried messages from students about a strange person in the class. He disputed that Peterson received permission to visit the class -- he said she was told that her proposed dates were not suitable -- and said in her outreach to Confucius Institute staff she initially misrepresented herself as an interested Chinese student rather than a journalist or researcher.
Peterson, in turn, disputed this. She said Gao gave her permission over the phone to observe her class and that she identified herself clearly. "I asked Professor Gao two questions: 1) if classes were open to members of the public to visit and 2) if I could visit her class as a researcher from the National Association of Scholars doing some research on Confucius Institutes. She answered yes to both questions. I did not represent myself as a prospective student of Chinese. Professor Gao did not say anything about the dates not being a good time to sit in on her class," Peterson said. "I arrived at the class early, having located it with the help of another person for whom I did not get a name (this person spoke limited English, and told me as much). When Professor Gao arrived I introduced myself as Rachelle Peterson from the National Association of Scholars, and mentioned again that we had spoken by phone about the possibility of my visiting her class. She did not object to my presence at the beginning of class or ask me to leave, or in any other way indicate that I misunderstood our phone call regarding my proposed visit."
"There's too much being read into this," Stephens, the provost, said, "but I will tell you that when you are approached in secret and you discover that, you are not inclined to be transparent in every which way" -- especially, he said, speaking of NAS, when that person "comes from an organization that also has a clear agenda."
"We don’t have anything to hide," Stephens said, "but they certainly didn’t approach Alfred University in a professional way."
The NAS report includes detailed looks at the governance, leadership and funding agreements for the institutes, which are managed by the host American universities in conjunction with Chinese partner universities. The financial terms vary somewhat, but various contracts obtained by Peterson -- and shared with Inside Higher Ed -- show that Hanban typically commits to provide around $150,000 in start-up funding for the institutes, followed by annual sustaining operating grants (generally, Peterson found, in the $100,000 range), plus 3,000 volumes of textbooks and teaching materials. Hanban also commits to pay for the salaries and airfares of the Chinese language teachers it sends. The American host university is expected to match Hanban's support, a requirement that Peterson reports is typically met through in-kind contributions such as office and classroom space and faculty/staff time.
The NAS report includes an extended discussion of the content and quality of Hanban-supplied textbooks. It also raises concerns about Hanban’s role in prescreening Chinese language teachers -- Peterson writes that universities select instructors from a pool of candidates proposed by the Chinese partner university or Hanban -- and the relationship of those instructors to the American host university at which they teach.
“Almost no teachers within Confucius Institutes are hired as employees of the host university with standard protections for academic freedom,” Peterson writes. “Most are hired by, paid by and report to the Hanban, which reserves the right to remove teachers who violate Chinese law -- including speech codes. There is some evidence that the Hanban may provide teachers with stock answers to questions it wishes to avoid. When we asked Chinese teachers and directors what they would say to a student who asked about Tiananmen Square, several replied that they would talk about the square’s historic architecture.”
The report continues, “We also found that some professors within the university felt pressured to self-censor. Those affiliated with the Confucius Institute sensed the need to maintain a friendly relationship with the Hanban. Those outside the Confucius Institute felt pressure from the university -- most immediately from their department -- to protect the Confucius Institute’s reputation.”
"Throughout this report there are, I think, unsupported insinuations and allegations without concrete evidence," said Stephen C. Dunnett, the vice provost for international education at the State University of New York at Buffalo and the chair of the advisory board for the Confucius Institute there. Dunnett, a key source cited in the NAS report, said the case study about Buffalo was largely accurate. But he was troubled by the preface, authored by NAS President Peter Wood, in which Wood cites off-the-record stories in granting himself "license to go beyond what we can fully verify" (Wood contrasts this to the remainder of the report, authored by Peterson, where, Wood writes, NAS limits itself "to what we know for sure." *Inside Higher Ed is not repeating the unverified statements from the preface.)*
More broadly, Dunnett said, "I have not witnessed nor have we experienced any of these practices that they sometimes hint at and sometimes come right out and accuse us of."
"The teachers that come here are young, they’re well-meaning, they’re teaching basic Chinese. They're pretty free to do what they like. We pick the textbooks. Hanban doesn’t force anything on us, and they never have. They’ve never interfered. We select the teachers, but of course they’re selected from a list that they present, just like, for example, Fulbright scholars are selected from a list. They're vetted here, and the list is sent to home countries and they pick. There’s nothing sinister in that, and they make it sound that way, and I think it’s kind of regrettable." (Buffalo may be somewhat of a model in how it treats the visiting instructors: the NAS report singles out Buffalo as having negotiated "more authority in hiring CI staff and teachers than any other Confucius Institute among our case studies.")
Dunnett added that he thinks it's unfortunate that the Chinese government doesn't get more credit for the resources it's providing. "In Western New York, this is a depressed area, and our schools are struggling to cover the things that they need to cover. They just don’t have the money that they need to hire Chinese language teachers, and also there are no local teachers certified to teach Chinese. So along come the Chinese and they offer us these teachers. That was one of the reasons we did this. We thought this could be community service for Buffalo. We could help the local schools," he said.
Qing Gao, the director of the Confucius Institute U.S. Center, which is listed on Hanban's website as an overseas representative, likened Confucius Institute funding to any external grant funding universities receive. "To me, the best way to explain the Confucius Institute, it’s simply a grant program," said Gao, who's also an assistant professor of arts management atGeorge Mason University and director of the Confucius Institute there. "We apply for a grant from China, from the headquarters, and that grant also provides us a partnership with a Chinese university."
Qing Gao said that while the Confucius Institute U.S. Center receives funding from Hanban, it is an independent nonprofit and he cannot speak for the headquarters organization. He said, however, that the long-standing concerns about intellectual and academic freedom at Confucius Institutes are in his view unfounded.
"In terms of the intellectual freedom or academic freedom, I think that’s something that we have to always pay attention to, to make sure that these programs do not interfere with academic freedom," Qing Gao said. "When we receive individuals from China, the very first day we will have orientation. The very first message we deliver is to make sure everybody understands the value of academic freedom and freedom of speech. What we’ve found here is there's no such evidence whatsoever from the very first Confucius Institute opening in the United States until today that any individual case can prove that Confucius Institutes interfered with academic freedom. This has no factual basis."
==
off bs
https://www.nas.org/resources/recommended_books
not heart of d:
*JOSEPH CONRAD – UNDER WESTERN EYES
This novel, set in St. Petersburg and Geneva, is Conrad’s answer to Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. We chose it because the narrator observes a non-Western mindset through “Western eyes”—a skill Western students should learn; it depicts both the allure and the repugnance of terrorism (to which Conrad in his introduction to the book referred as “senseless desperation provoked by senseless tyranny”); and it shows the truth as being worth defending despite the cost.*
...
RALPH ELLISON–INVISIBLE MAN
his novel presents the memory of an unnamed African-American character who is currently living as a hermit in the basement of a New York City apartment building. In his youth in a small southern town he was school valedictorian and went on to college but was expelled. As he struggles to make a life for himself, he encounters a succession of people—most of whom see him not as the individual that he is but only in relation to their particular take on race—promoting various responses to white oppression: accommodation, Communism, black nationalism, and cynicism. We picked it because it is a powerful evocation of the deadening quality of ideological responses to racism, and because it depicts the struggle for individuality in circumstances that strongly reinforce the claims of group identity. These are very much living questions on most college campuses.
...
WILLIAM LEAST HEAT-MOON – BLUE HIGHWAYS
...
*SINCLAIR LEWIS –BABBITT
Babbitt is a partner in an upper Midwest real estate firm in this satiric novel. His life is devoted to social climbing until in a moment of crisis he realizes the vapidity of his materialism. At that point he plunges headlong into flouting social conventions, but eventually becomes disillusioned with the emptiness of rebellion as well. We picked this book because it is the classic indictment of American middle-class complacency, and students deserve the chance to think this through. Is American life the sum of culturally-dead self-seeking Babbitts who conform even in their non-conformity? How true is this picture?*
...
not 1984 but GEORGE ORWELL–HOMAGE TO CATALONIA (1938)
Orwell, a journalist, reflects on his experiences during the Spanish Civil War from December 1936 to June 1937, where he had the misfortune to enlist in a non-Stalinist Marxist militia that Soviet-controlled Communists had secretly determined to liquidate. Betrayed by people he mistook as allies, Orwell began a painful reconsideration of his views. He remained a socialist but had grown wise to the lawless nature of totalitarian regimes, and he came to loathe Stalinism.We picked this book because it represents a genuine act of personal courage, it vividly depicts the human reality of the great contest of political ideals that defined the twentieth century, and it exemplifies lucid political writing.
...
==
==
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/266816/national-association-scholars-beach-books-report-jack-kerwick
no link
THE NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF SCHOLARS’ “BEACH BOOKS REPORT”
College “Common Reading Programs” are as “progressive” as you think.
May 26, 2017 Jack Kerwick 18
Depending on the institution of one’s choice, those who are planning to enter college for the first time in the fall may be expected to read an assigned book over the summer. That is, many schools have a “common reading program,” a program designed to insure that incoming students read the same book before embarking upon their college career.
As the National Association of Scholars has amply demonstrated in its recent “Beach Books Report (BBR),” the ideological indoctrination of college students can’t begin quickly enough.
The BBR is a study of 348 institutions of higher learning. This includes 171 public four-year schools, 81 private sectarian schools, 70 private nonsectarian institutions, and 26 community colleges. Fifty-eight of these schools were identified by U.S. News & World Report as among the top 100 universities in the country, while 25 are among the top 100 liberal arts colleges. The colleges and universities covered by the BBR report are located in 46 states and Washington D.C.
What the study found is that colleges “rarely assign” classic texts, making “the common reading genre…parochial, contemporary, and progressive.” In fact, 75% (271) of the common reading books were published between 2010 and 2016 while 94% (327) were published between 2000 and 2016.
The books were all published during the lifetime of the students.
As for the most popular subjects and themes, anyone who knows anything at all about contemporary academia won’t be surprised by the BBR’s findings.
:{
}:
For the academic year 2016-2017, the study’s authors ascribed to the common readings 576 subject labels that are divided into 30 subject categories. “The most popular subject categories,” it states, “wereCivil Rights/Racism/Slavery (74 readings), Crime and Punishment (67 readings), Media/Silence/Technology (34 readings), Immigration (32 readings), and Family Dysfunction/Separation (31 readings).”
The BBC also broke the readings down into 251 theme labels and 18 theme categories. That most of these “register the common reading committees’ persisting interest in ‘diversity,’ defined by non-white ethnicity at home and abroad,” is hardly unexpected to readers of this column. Some other findings, though, while anything but shocking, are nevertheless telling.
:{
}:
“Many common readings discuss books of which a film or television version exists, an increasing number are graphic novels [what used to be called “comic books”] or memoirs, many have a protagonist under 18 or simply young-adult novels, and asignificant number have an association with National Public Radio (NPR).”
Comic books; young-adult novels; books based on popular films and TV shows and associated with NPR—this is much of the stuff of common reading programs.
The BBR summarizes its findings: “The themes register most strongly the common reading genre’s continuing obsession with race, as well as the infantilization of its students, its middlebrow taste, and its progressive politics.”
Indeed. This past academic year, “the most popular themes were African-American (103), Latin American (25), Protagonist Under 18 (25), African (15), and Islamic World (13).”
For the last three consecutive years, “Racism/Civil Rights/Slavery and Crime and Punishment were the two most popular subject categories,” and “African-American themes were…the most popular theme [.]” These subjects and themes became even more popular this past year than they had been in the two preceding years.
The “top books” for common reading illustrate this trend. The most routinely assigned text is Bryan Stevenson’s, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption. This is a work of nonfiction. The theme is “African-American” and the subject categories are “Civil Rights/Racism/Slavery” and “Crime and Punishment.”
Then there is Ta-Nehisi Coates’ memoir, Between the World and Me. The theme is “African-American,” and the subject categories are “Civil Rights/Racism/Slavery” and “Crime and Punishment.”
Wes Moore’s memoir, The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates, is another hit. Its theme is “African-American” and its subject categories are “Crime and Punishment” and “Poverty.”
Malala Yousafzai’s memoir, as written by Christina Lamb, is quite popular. I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban has an “Islamic World theme.” Its subject categories are “Education” and “Feminism/Sex Discrimination/Women.”
Of the six remaining most popular books in the common reading genre, the themes are: “African-American,” “Muslim-American,” “Asian American,” “Latin American,” and “Protagonist Under 18.” One book, a fictional novel, doesn’t have a specifically designated theme.
The BBR laments that the “ideologically-constrained common reading genre has become so homogenous that common reading selections have become predictable.” These reading programs are designed to advance a “progressive message” or “dogma through discussion guides, question prompts, and cooperation with ‘social justice’ programs.”They are also meant to “promote activism,” thus neglecting “the virtues of the disengaged life of the mind.”
This preference for inculcating activism over the love of knowledge for its own sake, ideology over education, has resulted in an intellectual flaccidity that has become an all too salient feature on college campuses. “Common reading programs make new students’ first experience in college ‘co-curricular,’ and so tell students that the heart of college is not the regular academic coursework but the ‘co-curriculum.’” Their mission statements “usually direct committees to fulfill non-academic goals, such as building community or inclusivity” (emphases original).
For parents who plan upon remortgaging their homes so as to subsidize their children’s four-year (or more) excursion to the university, the National Association of Scholars’ “Beach Books Report” is must reading.
===
==
https://gofossilfree.org/national-association-of-oil/
Update: After posting this piece yesterday, the National Association of Scholars got in touch with us to push back on some of the assertions I made below, especially on the structure of NAS and its funding.
The (admittedly short) research I’d done on NAS pulled up a description from SourceWatch that said “according to its 2009 IRS Form 990 (Part VI Section A), the Association doesn’t have members (line 6), members don’t elect the officers (line 7a), and the decisions of the governing body are not subject to members’ approval (line 7b).” NAS clarified that they have “several thousand faculty members, administrators, students, and citizens, who hold meetings with state affiliate chapters, receive copies of our quarterly journal, and in other ways interact as an association.” Fair enough , that counts an association in my book.
NAS also pushed back on the assertion that they’re “industry” funded. According to NAS, the Scaife Foundation is a donor, but that “funding had nothing to do with and was in no way conditional on our work on sustainability or divestment.” I’ll take them at their word on that one, although it remains a valid point that the other recipients of Scaife funding (Hoover, AEI, Heritage, etc.) are indeed a who’s who of climate misinformation.
The NAS didn’t push back on its record of going after sustainabilityin higher education (their president did in fact publish a book referring to it as higher education’s “new fundamentalism”). That history doesn’t disqualify them from commenting on divestment, but it does give you a useful sense of their ideological bent . An honest thanks to NAS for the clarifications. At this point, we can agree to disagree–and keep making a forceful case for our side.
-----
Today the New York Times is hosting another “Room for Debate” on the efficacy of the fossil fuel divestment movement. Here at Go Fossil Free, we love seeing a healthy discussion about divestment. Debates about the carbon bubble, the moral responsibility of institutions to act, the financial and political impact of divestment, etc. all help spur the campaign forward, hone our strategies, and generate a key ingredient for all social change: heat.
But good debate needs to be honest and transparent. Today the Times stumbled by not making it clear that one of the contributors to its debate, the National Association of Scholars, is in fact neither an association, nor a group of scholars: it’s an industry funded right wing think tank.
According to SourceWatch, the NAS is a “non-profit organization in the United States that opposes multiculturalism and affirmative action and seeks to counter what it considers a ‘liberal bias’ in academia.” The group’s primary funder is the Sarah Scaife Foundation, an offshoot of the Mellon industrial, oil, aluminum and banking fortune. Other groups supported by Scaife foundation funding in include the Heritage Foundation, The Hoover Institute, and the American Enterprise Institute, all prominent right-wing think tanks who’ve been at the forefront of spreading misinformation about the climate crisis and opposing action to address it.
The NAS has its own nasty track record of intolerance and anti-environmental advocacy. The “association” has been a long time opponent of multiculturalism and affirmative action. Back in 2012, for example, a writer associated with the group argued in the *Wall Street Journal*that “activist” professors at the University of California were “indoctrinating” students and having a “corrupting” effect on the university.
More recently, the NAS has lobbied against the “broad imposition of the ‘sustainability’ agenda on university activity and campus life,” (they’ve also opposed the “neglect of character education” at colleges, but who really knows what’s that’s all about). The President of NAS, Peter W. Wood, wrote a book called Sustainability: Higher Education’s New Fundamentalism, which admittedly I haven’t read, but judging from the title I’m assuming he’s not a fan of the concept. In a blog for theHuffington Postlast April, Wood wrote that universities that warned their students about climate crisis were “dangerously intemperate” and were likely under the influence of “enviro-radicals” like 350.org founder Bill McKibben.
Little surprise then that the association is on the attack against the divestment movement. As the movement has grown in size, the fossil fuel industry has increasingly gone on the offensive, trying everything from launching animations criticizing the effort (look up, 
” it’s worth a good laugh) to trying to make divestment illegal in Australia.
Methinks the industry protests too much. When fossil fuel front groups are so quick to point out how divestment isn’t working, you can be pretty sure it’s having an impact. As we continue to debate the importance of the growing divestment campaign, let’s make sure to be clear about where each party is coming from.
===
12 | SUSTAINABILITY
NAS
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
“Sustainability” is a key idea on college campuses in the United States and the rest of the Western world. To the unsuspecting, sustainability is just a new name for environmentalism. But the word really marks out a new and larger ideological territory in which curtailing economic, political, and intellectual liberty is the price that must be paid now to ensure the welfare of future generations.
This report is the first in-depth critical study of the sustainability movement in higher education. The movement, of course, extends well beyond the college campus. It affects party politics, government bureaucracy, the energy industry,Hollywood, schools, and consumers. But the college campus is where the movement gets its voice of authority, and where it molds the views and commands the attention of young people.
While we take no position in the climate change debate, we focus in this study on how the sustainabilitymovement has distorted higher education. We examine the harm it has done to college curricula and the limits it has imposed on the freedom of students to inquire and to make their own decisions. Our report also offers an anatomy of the campus sustainability movement in the United States. We explain how it came to prominence and how it is organized.
We also examine the financial costs to colleges and universities in their efforts to achieve some of the
movement’s goals. Often the movement presents its program as saving these institutions money. But
we have found that American colleges and universities currently spend more than $3.4 billion per year
pursuing their dreams of “sustainability” at a time when college tuitions are soaring and 7.5 percent of
recent college graduates are unemployed and another 46 percent underemployed.1 In addition to the
direct costs of the movement, we examine the growing demands by sustainability advocates that colleges
and universities divest their holdings in carbon-based energy companies without regard to forgone income
or growth in their endowments. What makes “sustainability” so important that institutions facing financial
distress are willing to prioritize spending on it? In this report, we examine that question.
Because the idea of “anthropogenic global warming”—or “climate change”—is so closely interwoven with the sustainability movement, we devote a chapter early in the report to laying out the arguments on both
1 The basis of the $3.4 billion estimate is given in Chapter 5 of this report. For the unemployment rate see:
Heidi Shierholz, Alyssa Davis, and Will Kimball, “The Class of 2014: The Weak Economy Is Idling Too Many Young Graduates,”
Economic Policy Institute, EPI Briefing Paper #377, May 1, 2014. The Shierholz study uses the term “underemployed” to mean
“working part-time” and calculates that 16.8 percent of recent college graduates fit that description. The more common definition
of “underemployed” is “working in jobs that generally don’t require one to have a college degree.” By that definition, 46 percent
of recent college graduates are underemployed. See also Catherine Dunn, “Are College Grads Destined For Jobs As Baristas And
Clerks? Federal Reserve Economists Explain,” International Business Times, September 4, 2014. http://www.ibtimes.com/arecollege-grads-destined-jobs-baristas-clerks-federal-reserve-economists-explain-1679120
sides of this debate. The appeal of the sustainability movement depends to a great extent on the belief that the world is experiencing catastrophic warming as a result of human activities that are increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Is this belief warranted? We are neutral on this proposition, but we stand by the principle that all important
ideas ought to be open to reasoned debate and careful examination of the evidence. This puts us and
others at odds with many in the sustainability movement whose declared position is that the time for
debate is over and that those who persist in raising basic questions are “climate deniers.” The “debate-is-over”
position is itself at odds with intellectual freedom and is why the campus sustainability movement
should be examined skeptically.
We support good stewardship of natural resources, but we see in the sustainability movement a hardening
of irrational demands to suspend free inquiry in favor of unproven theories of imminent catastrophe.
And we see, under the aegis of sustainability, a movement that often takes its bearings from its hostility
towards material prosperity, consumerism, free markets, and even democratic self-government.
We offer ten recommendations under three categories:
Respect Intellectual Freedom
- Create neutral ground. Colleges and universities should be neutral in important and unresolved
scientific debates, such as the debate over dangerous anthropogenic global warming. Claims made on
the authority of “science” must be made on the basis of transparent evidence and openness to good
arguments regardless of their source.
2. Cut the apocalyptic rhetoric. Presenting students with a steady diet of doomsday scenarios undermines
liberal education.
:{
}:
- Maintain civility. Some student sustainability protests have aimed at preventing opponents from
speaking.
4. Stop “nudging.”Leave students the space to make their own decisions about sustainability, and free
faculty members from the implied pressure to embed sustainability into the curricula of unrelated courses.
Uphold Institutional Integrity
- Withdraw from the ACUPCC. Colleges that have signed the American College and University Presidents’
Climate Commitment should withdraw in favor of open-minded debate on the subject.
- Open the books and pull back the sustainability hires. Make the pursuit of sustainability by colleges
financially transparent. The growth of administrative and staff positions in sustainability drives up costs
HIGHER EDUCATION’S NEW FUNDAMENTALISM| 13
NAS
and wrongly institutionalizes advocacy at the expense of education.
7. Uphold environmental stewardship. Campuses need to recover the distinction between real
environmental stewardship and a movement that uses the term as a springboard for a much broader
agenda.
- Credential wisely. Curtail the aggrandizement of sustainability as a subject. Sustainability is not a
discipline or even a subject area. It is an ideology.
Be Even-Handed
- Equalize treatment for advocates. Treat sustainability groups on campus under the same rubric as
other advocacy groups. They should not enjoy privileged immunity from ordinary rules and special access
to institutional resources.
- Examine motives. College and university boards of trustees should examine demands for divestment
from fossil fuels skeptically and with full awareness of the ideological context in which these demands
are made.
The sustainability movement has become a major force in American life that has largely escaped serious
critical scrutiny. The goal of this report is to change that by examining for the first time the movement’s
ideological, economic, and practical effects on institutions of higher education.
==
CONFIDENTIAL
December 5, 2017
CROWN COLLEGE, Provost
COWELL COLLEGE, Provost
MERRILL COLLEGE, Provost
OAKES COLLEGE, Provost
PORTER COLLEGE, Provost
RACHEL CARSON COLLEGE, Provost
STEVENSON COLLEGE, Provost
Re: Request for Information under the California Public Records Act
Dear Colleagues:
As you may be aware and to document our process, I write to inform you that the University received the following request for information under the California Public Records Act (CPRA) from David Randall of National Association of Scholars. You need only produce records from your department; I will contact other units for any records they hold. If your unit possesses no responsive records, kindly confirm via reply email.
"[...] the common/summer reading programs at various of the UCSC Colleges, [...] what books were assigned each year."
Clarified 11/17/2017:
"Cowell; Crown; Kresge; Merrill; Oakes; Porter; Rachel Carson; Stevenson. 2007 - present."
Please ensure that the appropriate documents are located. During the search for records1, keep in mind the CPRA does not require us to create data or generate new documents in order to respond to a request. However, if the required information is contained within a database please contact my office for guidance.
...
April Exner Nycum
Information Practices Analyst
Office of Campus Counsel
University of California, Santa Cruz
1156 High Street
Santa Cruz, CA 95064
Phone: (831) 459-3788
Fax: (831) 459-2760
Email: aprile@ucsc.edu
Web: www.ucsc.edu
===
I am delighted to announce the appointment of Lorena Peñaloza as chief campus counsel.
Lorena's impressive background includes experience in public higher education, as well as city and federal government.
Lorena joins us from the California State University system's Office of General Counsel, where she has worked since 2008, most recently as University Counsel for Sonoma State University and Humboldt State University. She previously served on the office's litigation team, where she handled a variety of systemwide and campus-based matters in state and federal courts. She also served as a resource attorney on matters including residency, police, and student discipline.
Prior to joining CSU, Lorena was an assistant city attorney for the City of Santa Ana. She began her legal career with the Social Security Administration’s Office of the General Counsel in Maryland. She worked in various federal departments, including the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, and served two years in the administration's Office of General Law, litigating employment law matters before the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Federal Labor Relations Authority, and the Merit Systems Protection Board.
Lorena earned her B.A. in sociology and political economies of industrial societies from the University of California, Berkeley, and her J.D. from the University of California, Hastings College of the Law.
Lorena succeeds Michael Troncoso, who joined the UC Office of the President last April. I want to thank Associate Campus Counsel Liv Hassett for the excellent support she provided as interim chief campus counsel during the recruitment.
Email Lorena Peñaloza
Phone: (831) 459-3126
Fax: (831) 459-1910
==
David Randall - National Association of Scholars
https://www.nas.org/authors/david_randall/
2.
Video: Education and the Federal Government. Oct 17, 2017 by David Randall |. NAS Director of Communications David Randall presents steps the Federal government should take to guarantee individual liberty on college campuses.
NAS Welcomes David Randall as Director of Communications ...
https://www.nas.org/.../nas_welcomes_david_randall_as_director_of_communications
2.
Oct 13, 2015 - NAS Welcomes David Randall as Director of Communications. National Association of Scholars.
National Association of Scholars
https://www.nas.org/
2.
Churchill In, Columbus Still Out: A Half-Loaf from the College Board. Dec 05, 2017 by David Randall |. The College Board makes a superficial response to NAS' critique of their AP European history standards.
David Randall | Professional Profile - LinkedIn
https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-randall-226341115
New York, New York - Director of Communications - National Association of Scholars
View David Randall's profile on LinkedIn, the world's largest professional community. David has 3 jobs listed on their profile. See the complete profile on LinkedIn and discover David's connections and jobs at similar companies. ... David Randall. Director of Communications at National Association of Scholars. Location ...
David Randall | Minding The Campus
www.mindingthecampus.org/author/david-randall/
1.
Jun 15, 2016 - 9) Americans should restore choice and accountability to secondary education in America by developing competitive alternatives to the College Board's AP testing program. David Randall is director of communications at the National Association of Scholars. He writes on early modern European history and ...
David Randall | C-SPAN.org
https://www.c-span.org/person/?davidrandall
1.
... of 'The Universal Journalist', a textbook on journalism. Wikipedia*. On the C-SPAN Networks: David Randall has one video in the C-SPAN Video Library; the first appearance was a 2016 Speech. Appearances by Title:c. October 1, 2015 - c. Present Director, Communications, National Association of Scholars Videos: 1 ...
Citizen Crazed: Civic Derangement and the NAS Attack on Academic ...
https://academeblog.org/.../citizen-crazed-civic-derangement-and-the-nas-attack-on-ac...
1.
Jan 10, 2017 - The National Association of Scholars (NAS) has issued a new report, “Making Citizens: How American Universities Teach Civics” (pdf) that is absolutely breathtaking ... The 302-page NAS Report (525 pages with appendices), written by director of communications David Randall, is mostly dull and repetitive.
David Randall - PJ Media
https://pjmedia.com/columnist/david-randall/
1.
Nov 21, 2016 - David Randall, Director of Communications at the National Association of Scholars, is the author of Making Citizens: How American Universities Teach Civics (January 2017). WRITTEN BYDavid Randall. Paying Students to Protest Trump. Parenting ...
David Randall, Author at The James G. Martin Center for Academic ...
https://www.jamesgmartin.center/author/davidrandall/
1.
Author Profile. David Randall. David Randall is Director of Communications at the National Association of Scholars. He has taken part in both sides of the accreditation process—working to prepare his own institution (New York Studio School) for an accreditation examination, and serving on an accreditation committee to ...
David Randall, Author at The Federalist
https://thefederalist.com/author/davidrandall/
2.
davidrandall. David Randall is director of communications at the National Association of Scholars. His academic writing includes work on early modern British history. Why Gov. Cuomo's 'Free College' Plan Will Fail Miserably. Gov. Andrew Cuomo's Excelsior Scholarship will likely cost the moon, and could have catastrophic ...
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defends ball but does not chide Singer ~ Oreskes
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bs uc licter
4.1 The Political Orientation of the Faculty
A month ago I posted on Innovations a brief item,“Bottling Up Global Warming Skepticism,”about the machinations of one of Professor Michael Mann’s ardent defenders, Dr. John Mashey, who has taken a no-holds-barred approach to silencing Mann’s critics. Mann himself has deployed nuisance lawsuits in a similar fashion. He has sued Tim Ball—a Canadian global-warming skeptic, an environmentalist, and former professor of geography—for libel for writing that Mann “should be in the State Pen, not Penn State,” for his role in Climategate. Mann also threatened a lawsuit [on watts up, no doc for claim] against Minnesotans for Global Warming for a satiric YouTube video titled “Hide the Decline.” (YouTube suppressed the original video. There is now a “Hide the Decline II.”)
The tactic of suing critics of AGW theory to silence them isn’t Mann’s alone, and it isn’t the only extracurricular means the global warmists use in attempts to shut up dissenters. The BBC recently announced that in an effort to be more attuned to the scientific “consensus,” it would no longer strive to provide balanced coverage of climate issues. Its decision followed a report by the BBCTrust, “Review of impartiality and accuracy of the BBC’s coverage of science.”
In 2007, Weather Channel meteorologist Dr. Heidi Cullen seemed to call for the firing of meteorologists who expressed doubt about AGW. She later clarified toThe New York Times that “I didn’t exactly say that. I was talking about the American Meteorological Society’s seal of approval. I was saying the A.M.S. should test applicants on climate change as part of their certification process. They test on other aspects of weather science.” In 2009, Environmental Protection Agencyeconomist Alan Carlin was subjected to a gag order by an EPA administrator after submitting a report that was critical of the role of CO2 in recent global warming.
The techniques vary. The results, however, are similar: What cannot be established by transparent science can be imposed by coercion and intimidation.
John Mashey, who was the subject of my initial criticism, exercised his right to post replies on Innovationsand elsewhere to my initial article. He is welcome to express his opinions, but the pretense that he is defending science or academic due process wears thin. His replies posted to The Chronicle and elsewhere come in the company of some very irate people. Many of them seem to think that only those who accept the premises of their own sectarian version of climate modeling have a right to speak in this debate. Anyone else is fair game for—what shall I call it? It goes well beyond scolding.
For example, one of Mashey and Mann’s supporters has made it her business to contact by telephone and e-mail NAS trustees, members, employees, and others with leading questions about my views on climate change and sustainability. Her questions have insinuated that two former employees of NAS who died in 1995 were murdered, perhaps at the behest of Richard Mellon Scaife! (As it happened both died of heart attacks; and both had suffered previous heart attacks.) This woman has similarly attacked other people and organizations that express views on climate change that she disagrees with.
Her targets have sometimes spoken up, but as far as I can tell she is accepted by AGW proponents as a welcome contributor to the effort.
Let me go back to what started all this. On June 30, I wrote:
Science reports that retired computer scientist Dr. John Mashey is attempting to patch the tattered reputation of “hide the decline” Michael Mann, the climate scientist whose famous “hockey stick” chart shows exponentially increasing global temperatures in the near term. Mashey has been, as he puts it, “trying to take the offense” against global warming skeptics by flyspecking their publications. “You hope they make a mistake,” he says, and when they do, he pounces with demands that journals retract whole articles. Some journals indeed have. As Science puts it, “His critics say Mashey is more interested in destroying his foes than in debating the issues.” Professor Mann is extolling his efforts at “exploring the underbelly of climate denial.”
The issue of Science I referred to is Vol. 332, No, 6035, 10 June 2011, pp. 1250-1251.
The only mentions of Michael Mann in my article are in the two sentences quoted above. This provoked not only the long string of mostly hostile comments (over 60) on the original article but also threads of vehement commentary on other sites. Since I had said next to nothing about Mann himself, his scientific contributions, or the controversies surrounding him, it was up to those posting comments to focus their anger by inventing through creative inference things that I did not say.
Thus, for example, several respondents introduced the idea that I had somehow endorsed the behavior of a George Mason University economist and statistician, Edward Wegman, who was forced to retract a 2008 paper critical of Mann that he had published in the journal Computational Statistics & Data Analysis after Mashey published a 250-page online analysis of it identifying “portions of other authors’ writings” in Wegman’s article “without sufficient attribution.” Wegman defends himself as “innocently unaware” that a George Mason student had cut and pasted the paragraphs that he included in the report. George Mason University is investigating whether Wegman is guilty of plagiarism.
I, of course, said nothing about Wegman. I don’t know his work.
Rhetorical excess seems endemic to these defenders of Mannian climate orthodoxy. Scott A. Mandia declares in all caps, “DR. MANN’S WORK HAS BEEN VERIFIED BY MANY OTHER SCIENTISTS,” and that to doubt the hockey stick graph is “to also believe in magic.” Naumer and Mandia are among several correspondents who posted repeated declarations, in a crescendo of agitation. Mostly they seemed to want to drag me into a discussion of the scientific details. That wasn’t my topic and I declined, which brought out still more Mann enthusiasts. Ted Kirkpatrick observes “Dr. Mann’s reputation is extremely good, as his fellow climate scientists regard both him and his work highly.”
Mann’s reputation is “good?” Well, indeed, after Climategate, Mann’s work was subject to a series of extraordinary committee reviews—three that I know of. In each case, the committee found no particular fault with his work. I pass no judgment on those committees and I don’t presume to know Mann’s work well enough to venture an independent assessment of the quality of his science. But to rest the case, as Kirkpatrick does, on what “his fellow climate scientists” think is a doubtful proposition. I know of several climate scientists (e.g., Will Happer, Richard Lindzen, Fred Singer, Stan Trimble) who certainly don’t join in that endorsement, and some in the academy and among the general public judge Mann’s scientific contributions as suspect and his behavior as deplorable.
The hardball approach of his defenders is in large part a reflex of this loss of prestige and authority. The proponents of AGW, however, have chosen a very foolish tactic. Bullying skeptics and sneering at those who raise questions is no way to regain public trust.
The sharp practices of the warmists also damage the tenor of academic, scientific, and public debate. Frivolous lawsuits, intimidation, mobbing are not the flying buttresses of modern science. They are the rot that undermines the intellectual authority of science. Can you trust anything said by someone who engages in such tactics?
This warning can be turned against some of the global warming skeptics as well. There is, for example, a blogger who writes as “The Hockey Schtick” who refers to Mann’s 1998 article in Nature (which introduced the hockey stick graph) as “the most thoroughly discredited paper of the modern age.” Rhetorical excess for rhetorical excess. Some of Mann’s defenders, however, much as they preen themselves as defenders of scientific rigor, are skating in the same rink.
The science will, in due course, be sorted out. Shoddy hypotheses will be discarded. Data massaged to accommodate models will prove discrepant with better observations. It could be that anthropogenic global warming will win out as a valid theory; it could be otherwise. I’m not taking sides on the science. But when it comes to efforts to silence debate and intimidate critics, I very much take the side of those who want to see science rid of such mischief.
This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged AGW, Alan Carlin,Edward Wegman, Heidi Cullen, John Mashey, Michael Mann, Tim Ball. Bookmark the permalink.
http://chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/guest-post-bottling-nonsense-mis-using-a-civil-platform
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deltoid:
At The Chronicle of Higher Education‘s blog Peter Wood excuses Wegman’s plagiarism, calling it a flyspeck:
Mashey has been, as he puts it, “trying to take the offense” against global warming skeptics by flyspecking their publications. “You hope they make a mistake,” he says, and when they do, he pounces with demands that journals retract whole articles. Some journals indeed have.
Compare with Wood’s comments on Wade Churchill’s dismissal for plagiarism:
Yesterday Denver District Court Judge Larry J. Naves turned down Ward Churchill’s motion to be reinstated in his professorial position. The former University of Colorado Ethnic Studies professor walks away from his celebrated trial with his jury award of one dollar, the prospect of enduring popularity on the academic left, but not much more–for now. … Here is why I think Judge Naves decided the case correctly. …
The jury in the Churchill trial came in with a verdict that almost perfectly captured the diffidence American feel about the matter. It recognized that Churchill’s firing was in some wise connected to his provocative speech, but it didn’t deny the plain evidence of Churchill’s plagiarism, academic misconduct, and falsified credentials. The one-dollar award was the minimum that Judge Naves told the jury it could award in the event that it found in favor of Churchill.
For Peter Wood, whether plagiarism is grounds for dismissal or a flyspeck seems to depend on whether they are on his side or not.
Wood also libels Michael Mann, accusing him of “academic dishonsesty”. His proof: “a few minutes of googling”. Who is this man who writes with such a reckless disregard for the truth?
John Mashey provides some background:
1) Peter Wood runs NAS*, which was originally funded by folks like Richard Mellon Scaife and others listed on pp.93-95 of CCC. For some reason, there is a long gap in their 990-form funding records.
2) If you rummage in the NAS* website, you may get as sense of its viewpoints. Look for Mann, climategate or sustainability and you will be rewarded.
It happens that (well-respected) climate scientist, NAS* member Kerry Emmanuel, has different views, although apparently Wood was not convinced.
3) Wood got his PhD in anthropology in 1987, his history includes a stint at Boston University, apparently spending most of his time as Assoc. Provost for Pres. John Silber.
Here is a 2001 BU Faculty page, which points at his page, which says:
“Peter Wood graduated from the University of Rochester, earning his doctorate with field research on American religious movements. He is an Associate Professor of Anthropology while also serving as Associate Provost of the University. His interests are in religion, art and aesthetics, Catholicism, and the culture of the United States. While administrative duties limit his teaching in the Department, he is responsible for the graduate pro-seminar in theory.”
Now, of course, he may have studied substantial physics, math, statistics, climate science sometime, but this is not instantly apparent. He certainly is certain.
From simple descriptions, it is easy to miss strong, bu non-obvious background. Better to ask.
4) From there, he became Provost of this ~500(?) person college in NYC.
5) After a few years, he started at NAS*, rising to become President, see 2009 990 Form. Interesting information may be found therein.
Other interesting information will emerge, I’m certain.
6) A useful bio is here, and on last page of recent testimony for Congress.
Testimony to the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology Subcommittee on Research and Science Education June 2, 2011 Peter W. Wood President, National Association of Scholars Table of Contents 1 Introduction 2 2 Bottling, CHE 06/30/11 3 3 Bottling Annotated 4 4 Bottling Comments Annotated 8 5 Conclusion Bottling Nonsense 10 A.1 CHE Innovations – Wood Articles 11 A.2 NAS Blog - Peter Wood and Others, One Expert 13 A.3 Wood at American Freedom Alliance‘s Big Footprint 18 A.4 Follow The Money –Scaife and L&H Bradley 19 A.5 Follow The Money: NAS 23 A.6 Key People 29 A.7 TAH –Teaching American History 31 1
Introduction Dr Peter Wood recently published ―Bottling Up Global Warming Skepticism‖ (Bottling) in a blog at Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE).
Anthropologist Wood is President of The National Association of Scholars, (NAS), which describes itself thus:1 ―NAS is an independent membership association of academics working to foster intellectual freedom and to sustain the tradition of reasoned scholarship and civil debate in America‘s colleges and universities. The NAS today is higher education‘s most vigilant watchdog. We stand for intellectual integrity in the curriculum, in the classroom, and across the campus. …‖
Bottling appeared the day after the AAAS Board strongly decried attacks on climate scientists, continuing its long support for reality of anthropogenic global warming (AGW). 2 Bottling mentioned a 3-week-old Science profile (about me) and was later republished at NAS, leaving unanswered many questions raised at CHE. The chronology was:
....
Anthropologist Peter Wood is President of The National Association of Scholars and he recently published ―Bottling Up Global Warming Skepticism‖ (Bottling) in a Chronicle of Higher Education blog.
Bottling mentioned a 3-week-old Science profile (about me) and was later republished at NAS. This seemed a very strange post to appear under the credible umbrella of CHE. It not only lacked substance and relevance to CHE concerns, but seemed written only to damage reputations of myself and Michael Mann, using well-known false association tactics from politics. Wood devoted 60% of the article to scam artist P. T. Barnum, but then dismissed that as ―vacant thoughts,‖ and shifted to the Science profile.
He quote-mined short phrases, losing context. He termed my reporting of serious plagiarism as ―flyspecking.‖ He tried to conflate me, Mann and climate science with Barnum and Bruno Latour. Mann has been attacked incessantly for years. I mostly get attacked in certain blogs and ignore them, but I was surprised to find an article at CHE that many might consider libel.
Wood had strong opinions, often erred on simple facts and displayed little obvious expertise. I had never even heard of Wood or NAS. So how did this attack arise? What was NAS about? Since I study the machinery of climate science and the ways in which people get science wrong, I was stirred to investigate, as I have before. Mirabile dictu, a fascinating story appeared, analyzed here in detail.
Since 2009, Wood has run articles at NAS attacking climate science and Mann. He has supported Ken Cuccinelli‘s attack on Mann. He called Steve Milloy ―an informed observer.‖ Kerry Emmanuel, a NAS member and fine climate scientist objected eloquently, but was ignored. .‖ Fred Singer was feted. Wood recently spoke twice at a fringe antiscience conference dominated by the Viscount Christopher Monckton (keynote, 4 panels).
Wood wrote favorably of Monckton at CHE, ignoring the swastikas in the keynote. The pattern was pervasive. So why? As usual, it pays to follow the money. NAS has been core –funded by Richard Mellon Scaife and the L&H Bradley Foundation, the key backers of the two key thinktanks that organized attacks on climate science, the hockey stick, and Mann.
NAS membership dues declined 40% from 2002 to 2009. NAS lobbied and managed to get the majority of its revenues from Federal grants for Teaching American History, i.e.. training high school teachers. It is unclear how that fit NAS‘ own mission statement, and the funding paths are somewhat murky, but no new grants are being made. It was good money while it lasted.
Perhaps Wood is trying reinvigorate the organization with new ideas. In any case, some of Wood‘s comments might be considered even more libelous than the original article, and he has upped the ante with ―Climate Thuggery‖ a few days ago, to be covered later. The main story is followed by the usual large appendices, including detailed financials. Hopefully, more NAS members will join the discussions and offer their own viewpoint
...
{C4}‖hide the decline‖this is at best serious error on Wood‘s part, at worst something worse. Does Wood have the slightest knowledge of this, or is this a slogan he picked up from blogs? Kerry Emmanuel explained this and other issues on the NAS blog a year ago.10 Wood ignored him. In any case, Mann did not write this, Phil Jones wrote about a study by Keith Briffa. 11 In context, no one was hiding anything, as the topic has been widely published, as in Nature, and removing known bad data is quite appropriate. So why is Mann tarred w
...
Conclusion Bottling Nonsense
CHE of course has every right to offer its highly-respected imprimatur to anyone they choose, but Wood seems a strange choice. He repeatedly refuses to engage in serious or even civil dialog, preferring to insult readers. I had mentioned CHE on several blogs, imploring people to be polite, but some said they found it difficult, for reasons that may be clear.
Although Wood is obviously the strongest voice of NAS, he wants to claim that NAS has no position on climate change. When NAS lauds Fred Singer or Wood applauds Viscount Christopher Monckton44 , anyone familiar with this topic might think differently. See examples in A.1 – A.3. It is common for people to claim to have no position, then show repeatedly that they reject mainstream science, often found in Wegman Report. 45
Scientists gain great respect if able to competently challenge mainstream views and change them, but incompetent complaints are worthless. Do NAS members vote on positions, or does Wood just say what he wants?46 Wood posts as President of NAS, a useful platform. Finally, Wood seems to want to claim that “opinion pieces” allow people to say anything about anyone without ever having to provide citations or evidence. Recall the NAS description: ―NAS is an independent membership association of academics working to foster intellectual freedom and to sustain the tradition of reasoned scholarship and civil debate in America‘s colleges and universities. The NAS today is higher education‘s most vigilant watchdog. We stand for intellectual integrity in the curriculum, in the classroom, and across the campus. …‖ Perhaps these rules apply only on-campus, but bottling nonsense is silly wherever it is done.
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indoc u
Snitch Studies at Cal Poly: We Snare Because We Care
May 05, 2009 | Peter Wood
Cal Poly is back. It is reclaiming its place on the frontier of political correctness with a new program aimed at encouraging students to turn in their teachers and fellow students for deviating from officially approved thought patterns.
California Polytechnic State University, in San Luis Obispo, may be best known these days for its starring role in Indoctrinate U, Evan Coyne Maloney’s riveting documentary about the suppression of free speech on America’s campuses.
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In an extended sequence in the film, Maloney seeks an explanation from campus authorities as to why a student, Steven Hinkle, got in serious trouble in November 2002 for posting flyers that announced a talk by C. Mason Weaver, author of It’s OK to Leave the Plantation, who is a black conservative. Hinkle was charged by campus police for posting “offensive racial material” in the Multicultural Center, and he was sent up to Director of Judicial Affairs. Hinkle ended up with a seven-hour hearing, during which he was denied access to legal counsel. The judicial board found him guilty and demanded he write a public letter of apology. Hinkle instead went to FIRE and the Center for Individual Rights. Eventually Cal Poly, watching its case collapse in court, agreed to settle with Hinkle and paid his $40,000 legal bill.
The movie includes Maloney’s attempt to see the president of Cal Poly, which results in an amusing display of bureaucratic power by a pompous little man who intensely dislikes the idea that his actions are being filmed. Catch it if you can.
Cal Poly got itself into this trouble by means of an extended and rather relentless campaign of political correctness. It encouraged the idea that students were frail creatures who might suffer untold damage if exposed to ideas or images they deemed “offensive.” And a great many Cal Poly students in Steven Hinkle’s era drank in the concept that they were all potential victims of the “hate speech” that malignant people were just waiting to unleash.
So did Cal Poly learn its lesson when it settled with Hinkle? Not hardly. According to the student newspaper, The Daily Mustang, Cal Poly is launching a new “outlet for students to report grievances,” called CARE-Net. “It is essentially a forum for students to report discriminatory incidents.”
The “CARE” in CARE-Net stands for “Community Advocating REspect.” The University initiative already has its own website, a page for the new identity-group-grievance-snitch system. The student newspaper account quotes special assistant to the vice provost and CARE-Net organizer Patricia Ponce expressing Cal Poly’s interest “in hearing about students’ experiences at Cal Poly,” which she reminds us, “is committed to be an inclusive community.” The webpage goes further. It declares that “Cal Poly is an ardent supporter of free speech.” That ardor, however, will not stand in the way of Cal Poly’s attempt to ensure that all members of the community "live and work free from bias, harassment, abuse, mockery, and discrimination.”
CARE-Net encourages students to report, “any speech, act, or harassing incident or action taken by a person or group that is perceived to be malicious or discriminatory toward another person or group based on bias or prejudice relating to such characteristics as race, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, ancestry, ethnicity, religion, age or mental or physical disability.”
According to the website, the Cal Poly community seems to face a grave risk from unnamed but extremely ill-intentioned forces: “Incidents that are motivated by bias, prejudice, intolerance, and hatred pose a unique danger to society and undermine the fundamental fabric of our campus community.” The website links to other valuable tools, such as the Cal Poly personnel office’s great grid of grievances.
CARE-Net will start with a staff of twelve “campus advocates” to vet the reports from the University’s 18,000 or so students. Students will also be able to report online through a system called EthicsPoint, which describes itself as “a leading provider of ethics hotline and case management solutions, [and] a strategic partner with the Association of College and University Auditors (ACUA).” EthicsPoint situates itself as a compliance tool for institutions seeking to keep up with Sarbannes-Oxley regulations, but it also provides “Whistleblower Hotline Solutions” to over 2000 organizations! We might think of EthicsPoint as Big Brother’s little nephew.
What more could or should we say about Cal Poly’s new venture? It is, of course, rooted in an alleged bias incident. Last October, some students during Halloween hung a Confederate flag, a noose, and an offensive sign outside the campus residence in which they were living, “Crops House.” This occasioned much soul-searching and many meetings. Cal Poly administrators apologized (apparently for their inability to overrule the First Amendment) and students protested the apology as insufficient. Cal Poly president, Warren Baker, said the incident was “unacceptable” and that in thirty years as president, nothing had saddened him as much. The upshot was that the flag-displaying, noose-hanging students (they denied putting up the sign) were moved out of Crops House and the University announced its decision to tear down the building.
It isn’t entirely clear what the louts in Crop House thought they were doing, but in any case, the “bias incident” got reported easily enough without the help of EthicsPoint or the dozen new CARE-netters. Cal Poly’s new policy thus doesn’t exactly track the event that the administration cites as evidence for the need—unless we accept the logic that the Cal Poly is rife with ethnic hatred and bias that has just gone unreported for lack of a safe means to turn in the culprits.
Cal Poly is, of course, not the first college or university down this path. Last fall, we reported in Williams Chokes Up, on a similar system called Williams Speaks Up at Williams College in Massachusetts. Williams Speaks Up was, at the time, a bias reporting system with a frustrating dearth of bias reports. Perhaps it is time to check in with Williams again. At the end of the academic year has the bias-reporting business picked up? Or are we in a bias recession?
I suppose a larger question is whether systems such as the one Williams created last year and Cal Poly has just instituted make campuses more wholesome? I am skeptical. As I wrote last week in American Character, the Remix: How College is Shaping Us Now, the ethos of American higher education has shifted towards encouraging psychological dependency. A portion of this involves identity politics and the careful nurturance of grievances, and an even larger portion involves fostering a whiney irritability in students—an irritability that is directed towards everything. Life is unfair; people insult me; I’m going to tell.
This world of resentful passivity is fed by the university that increasingly tells students that a major part of their education is coming to recognize the grievances they didn’t know they had. To help them come to that awareness, more and more university resources are devoted to the therapeutic side of the university. Cal Poly calls its new system, naturally, CARE-Net. Cal Poly cares enough to help you snare in its net the imaginary tormentors that make your life imperfect.
Cal Poly’s motto, incidentally, is “learn by doing.” Doing, apparently, includes dropping a dime to little nephew at EthicsPoint when your professor says something that crosses your threshold of racial sensitivity or calling the inclusivity police at CARE-Net if someone like Steven Hinkle mentions a lecture on a topic you don’t approve.
In his thirty years at Cal Poly, President Baker may have built some educational programs that deserve broad respect. Be that as it may, he also helped to make Cal Poly a place of intellectual repression and cringing acceptance of ideological fashion. He has favored a style of education that ill prepares students for morally responsible adulthood by training them to think that complaining to a bureaucracy or calling the police will cure their dissatisfactions.
People who complain about the reign of political correctness on campus often think mainly of the hardship inflicted on those who disagree or who attempt to dissent, such as Steve Hinkle. But that’s only the most visible cost to political correctness. It also a system of rewards to those who comply with its edicts. And those rewards are far more insidious than the punishments meted out to dissenters. They are tickets to a lifetime of unappeasable grievance.
UPDATE 5/12/09 - After this article was published and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education sent a letter to Cal Poly, CARE-Net removed all the information [?] from its website, leaving only a promise that "new text will be available soon" and that interested parties can send the program an email for more information. Stay tuned for further developments.
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http://mustangnews.net/hundredsprotestcollegeclaimsactsprotected/
Hundreds protest, college claims acts protected
by jon
When news came out about a noose, a confederate flag and allegations of a sign that read racial and gay slurs, hundreds of Cal Poly students and faculty joined together wearing black shirts in response to the on-campus crop science house members who allegedly committed the offenses at recent weekend parties.
The crop house is a subsidized house for crop science students to live while they work for the campus crop unit.
Brad Pupura, a student leader of the protest at University Union Hour on Thursday, addressed the crowd before a band played, informing everyone about the incident and the reasoning behind the protest.
“This is on-school property and it is hate speech,” said Pupura, a graphic communication senior. “They are just getting a slap on the wrist and issuing an apology. It’s absurd and I’m dumbfounded.”
He said that Cal Poly should foster an environment of acceptance.
“Cal Poly should have been proactive and not reactive. This is completely uncalled for. It’s 2008.”
Peter Wade, city and regional planning and chapter president for the Society of Black Engineers and Scientists, said that those protesting want a town hall meeting with Cal Poly President Warren Baker and faculty to share and brainstorm solutions.
During the hour of protest, a petition accumulated about 150 signatures for the expulsion of the students living in the crop science house and those involved with the disputed materials.
“We think that what they did was a threat and we do not consider it free speech,” Wade said.
Camille O’Bryant, associate professor and department chair of kinesiology, held a sign that read “End Racism Now.”
“I wasn’t there, but I absolutely condemn the idea that anyone feels it is OK to write derogatory terms and post them in public,” Bryant said. “People are unaware of the multiplicity to the symbols without awareness to them. That’s a problem for me.”
For now, Cal Poly is standing by the decision that this is a free speech issue.
Provost Robert Koobfirst learned about the incident with the noose and flag on Tuesday evening after a reporter for The New Times called John Peterson, Cal Poly department head of horticulture and crop science, for comments on the incident.
Koob said that an unknown female student visiting the crop science house felt uncomfortable about what she saw and described and gave information to the New Times, a San Luis Obispo weekly paper.
“(The incident) appears to be true and we don’t approve of it,” Koob said. “My first reaction was: What are we going to do to punish them?”
But the Cal Poly administration will not be taking any legal action against those students involved since the First Amendment supports their right to voice their opinions.
“We learned that it’s a protective element of free speech so we aren’t able to take any punitive actions,” Koob said. “So what we are doing is to work with those students to first, understand their motivation and second, to help them understand how hurtful that is to a large number of people.”
Koob said that the students have also broken the trust of the university by using the house that they are allowed to reside in for such an event.
Peterson, who visited the crop science house after he learned about the event, talked to the students about what exactly happened.
“The students admitted that it was not good, stupid and wrong,” Peterson said, adding that thehanging skeleton, he was told, was a Halloween decoration. “They said it was a foolish rebellion and ruthless behavior.”
Peterson said that the students living at the house were unsupervised at the time, but that is going to change.
“We absolutely need to be on an enhanced level of oversight,” he added, emphasizing that the students’ actions do not reflect the values of the department.
“We have a high level of respect and regard for diversity in its fullest scope.”
Rachel Glas contributed
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President, National Association of Scholars Dr. Peter Wood can be reached at pwood@nas.org.
Chasing Eels
Jun 10, 2016 by Peter Wood | The new book The Closing of the Liberal Mind helps us get a better grasp on the slippery modern academic Left.
Students Are Not Customers
Jun 10, 2016 by Peter Wood | Peter Wood argues that higher education entails a hierarchical relationship between students who seeks knowledge and others who teach knowledge, as opposed to a consumer relationship.
Time and Beauty: Commencement Address at Veritas Academy
Jun 02, 2016 by Peter Wood | Last week, NAS president Peter Wood spoke to students of Veritas Preparatory Academy as they move into America's universities.
NAS Welcomes Spencer Kashmanian as Development Associate
Jun 02, 2016 by Peter Wood | Join us in welcoming Spencer Kashmanian to the NAS team! If you appreciate Edmund Burke, Spencer may interest you with his studies of the Burkean.
The Feds Make a Mess of Sex and Gender
May 18, 2016 by Peter Wood | NAS president Peter Wood explains how the Office of Civil Rights is creating more problems for universities.
Springfield College’s Reply to NAS Letter
May 09, 2016 by Peter Wood | NAS presents a new case of bias against a faculty member over his course "Men in Literature."
NAS President Peter Wood’s Letter to Springfield College President Mary-Beth…
May 09, 2016 by Peter Wood | NAS presents a new case of bias against a faculty member over his course "Men in Literature."
Springfield College Purges Men in Literature
May 09, 2016 by Peter Wood | NAS presents a new case of bias against a faculty member over his course "Men in Literature."
Virginia Tech Relents and Re-Invites Jason Riley to Speak on Campus
May 09, 2016 by Peter Wood, Rachelle Peterson | Virginia Tech felt the pressure and re-invited Jason Riley to the podium.
An Open Letter to Virginia Tech’s Dean Sumichrast
May 04, 2016 by Peter Wood | NAS president Peter Wood calls on Virginia Tech to acknowledge and uphold its invitation to Jason Riley.
You Are Cordially Disinvited
May 03, 2016 by Peter Wood, Rachelle Peterson | Jason Riley is the most recent conservative speaker to recieve a disinvitation.
How Anthropology Was Corrupted and Killed
May 03, 2016 by Peter Wood | NAS President Peter Wood writes on how the American Anthropology Association's bandwagon vote toboycott Israeliacademic institutions is a step toward toward the death of another academic discipline.
War, What Is It Good For? Sometimes, Absolutely Everything
Apr 20, 2016 by Peter Wood | Wars have significantly contributed to our identity as a nation.
Mizzou Wipes Out Respect and Excellence
Apr 18, 2016 by Peter Wood | Enrollments at the University of Missouri are plummeting.
Safe Spaces or Free Speech? Intellectual Freedom and the Modern Campus
Apr 15, 2016 by Peter Wood | NAS President Peter Wood discusses the tension between safe spaces and free speech, clarifying the importance of intellectual freedom.
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New Mashey Report Disrobes Climate Disinformer
What would cause a senior anthropologist such as Peter Wood to stagger outside his field of expertise and launch a bitchy, personal and error-ridden attack on a climate scientist and his defender? Wrong-headedness? Ideological blindess? Great wads of Richard Mellon Scaife’s cash? What?
Well, the question must be rhetorical, unless the President of the National Association of Scholars chooses to answer it himself. According to his fields of study, Wood is an “expert” in art, aesthetics, Catholocism and culture. He neither claims nor can demonstrate the tiniest academic mastery of atmospheric physics or any other aspect of climatology.
Yet he has used his launching pad as president of the NAS (suspiciously rendered with the same acronym as the National Academy of Sciences) and a podium at the **Chronicle of Higher Education**to try to dismiss both **Michael Mann**and**John Mashey** as huckster fellow travellers of P.T. Barnum.
As the attached report demonstrates, that was a mistake. Because Wood doesn’t fare at all well when someone turns the investigatory camera on him. Wood has long had a tendency to question climate science or to laud whacky climate change deniers such as **Christopher Monckton**or**Fred Singer**,but his most recent outburst followed an excellent short feature of John Mashey by the journal Science. As Wood says, “Science reports that retired computer scientist Dr. John Mashey is attempting to patch the tattered reputation of ‘hide the decline’ Michael Mann, the climate scientist whose famous ‘hockey stick’ chart shows exponentially increasing global temperatures in the near term.”
Beyond correctly identifying Mashey as a computer scientist, Wood appears to be wrong on all fronts. Far from being “tattered,” Mike Mann’s reputation has been hardened in the fires of hell. Despite a pitched attack on his character and scientific output going back nearly a decade, every inquiry appears toexonerate his personal behavior and reaffirm the quality of his science. I suspect Mann’s work has been cited more in the last six months than Wood’s has in his entire career.
Neither was it Mann who penned the famous (and famously misquoted) “hide the decline” line from the stolen East Anglia emails. And the important part of Mann’s hockey-stick chart was not the exponential increase in global temperature: you can see that in any rendering of the actual instrumental record. The defining work in Mann’s graph (and in every other climate reconstruction that has been done since) is the demonstration that, before humans started pouring carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, we had enjoyed at least a thousand years of remarkable climate stability (constituting the shaft of the hockey stick that came before the exponential blade).
So Wood either doesn’t understand any of this or doesn’t want us to. And Mashey, a ferociously energetic researcher, has created a 34-page reportpondering Wood’s own frailties and setting forth some possible explanations of why the (less credible) NAS president could be so far off the rails.
There is, of course, ideology. Although the NAS declines to identify itself as a bastion of “conservative” thought, it seems to spend a surprising amount of time digging its nose into issues that are more of interest to its well-healed conservative funders than those that are centrally reflected in the organization’s own mission statement. (I dare you to find much “reasoned scholarship” or “civil debate” in Wood’s original salvo or in any of the back-and-forth commentary that followed.)
Mashey also points to the coincidence that the big donors to the (less credible) NAS are also suspiciously generous to organizations such as the**Competitive Enterprise Institute**and the**George C. Marshall Institute**-two of the most prominent climate science denying think tanks in the country. Now, it could be purest chance that all these organizations share a passion for spreading climate confusion. Just as it could be possible that the devastating weather events that have marred America so far this year are entirely unrelated to climate change ….
You also have to admit the possibility that Dr. Wood just isn’t that smart - that he is doing all this work in purest good faith, but that he has the terrible misfortune to have consistently and repeatedly got all the details wrong.
Certainly, it was a case of misfortune that he attacked Mashey, or else the encyclopedic evidence of Wood’s connections and previous protestations would not have been gathered in this handy reference.
Alas, when you look at the clownish Monckton, the discredited Singer or Steve Milloy and, now, the unfortunate Peter Wood, you have to wonder that the oily barons can’t afford more impressive champions for their increasingly incredible cause.
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Peter W. Wood is President of the National Association of Scholars. He has a PhD in Anthropology and is listed as the author of two books published by Encounter Books.[Bradley]
In the role of National Association of Scholars President he has espoused climate contrarianism, but it is unclear that he has any background in the climate science field.
Background and experience
"He is a graduate of Haverford College, Rutgers University, and the University of Rochester, from which he received a Ph.D. in anthropology in 1987. He previously served as provost of The King’s College in New York City, and as associate provost and the president [John Silber ]’s chief of staff at Boston University, where he was also a tenured member of the anthropology department."[1]
Climate science and policy
Expertise is unclear
It is unclear whether Dr. Wood has any academic background or experience that would qualify him to hold informed views about the field of climate science.[2]
Writings are dismissive
In June 2011, in the Chronicle of Higher Education weblog, posts appearing under Wood's byline included a 3-part attack on sustainability[3],[4],[5] and a post[6] casting doubt on human-caused climate change and dismissing the work by John Mashey and others to expose and counter the climate denial PR effort.[7]
Articles and resources
References
- ↑ Peter Wood. Carolina Journal. Retrieved on 2011-07-12.
- ↑ Dr. Wood has declined to provide this information so far, saying he will take the request "under advisement." - Ahaynes, 2011-07-14; no further information, two weeks later
- ↑ Peter Wood (2011-06-16). Tyranny or Theft? Part 1 - Innovations. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved on 2011-07-10. “Tyranny or Theft? Part 1”
- ↑ Peter Wood (2011-06-16). Tyranny or Theft? Part 2. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved on 2011-07-10. “Tyranny or Theft? Part 3”
- ↑ Peter Wood (2011-06-16). Tyranny or Theft? Part 3. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved on 2011-07-10.
- ↑ Peter W. Wood (2011-06-30). Bottling Up Global Warming Skepticism. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved on 2011-07-10. “"At 15, P.T. Barnum showed what he was made of...Of course, man-made global warming is just one exhibit in the contemporary higher-education circus."”
- ↑ Tim Lambert. Peter Wood's double standard on plagiarism. Deltoid. Retrieved on 2011-07-10.
Related SourceWatch articles
External resources
- Bottling Nonsense – Peter Wood and the National Association of Scholars, 34pp report by John Mashey, 2011-08-01
External articles
Categories: Climate change | Stubs
Stephen H. Balch is the chairman and was the founding president of the National Association of Scholars.
He was previously involved in founding the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics, and the Association for the Study of Free Institutions.
He holds a Ph.D. in political science from the University of California.[1]
Contents[hide] |
Articles and resources
References
- ↑ NAS - The National Association of Scholars :: People. ?. Retrieved on 2011-07-13.
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NAS616
===
Peter Wyatt Wood
President
pwood@nas.org
Peter Wood is an anthropologist and former provost. He was appointed president of the NAS in January 2009. Before that he served as NAS’s executive director (2007-2008), and as provost of The King’s College in New York City (2005-2007).
Dr. Wood was a tenured member of the Anthropology Department at Boston University, where he also held a variety of administrative positions, including associate provost and president’s chief of staff. He also oversaw the university’s scholarly publications and served as acting university librarian.
He received his Ph.D. in anthropology in 1987 from the University of Rochester. His dissertation, Quoting Heaven, examined the emergence of an American folk religion and pilgrimage center in rural Wisconsin. His undergraduate degree is from Haverford College (1975) and he has a master’s degree in library science from Rutgers University (1977).
Dr. Wood is the author of A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America Now (Encounter Books, 2007) and of Diversity: The Invention of a Concept (Encounter Books, 2003) which won the Caldwell Award for Leadership in Higher Education from theJohn Locke Foundation. These books extend his anthropological interest in examining emergent themes in modern American culture.
In addition to his scholarly work, Dr. Wood has published several hundred articles in print and online journals, such as Partisan Review and National Review Online, and the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Ashley Thorne
Executive Director
thorne@nas.org
Ashley joined the NAS staff as director of communications in 2008, became director of the Center for the Study of the Curriculum in 2012, and became executive director in 2014. She received her master's degree in linguistics from the CUNY Graduate Center in 2014, and her undergraduate degree in politics, philosophy, and economics from The King’s College in 2007. In 2010 she published a chapter, “Ducking the Coffins: How I Became an Edu-Con,” in an anthology edited by Jonah Goldberg, Proud to Be Right.
Glenn M. Ricketts
Public Affairs Director
ricketts@nas.org
Public Affairs Director Glenn Ricketts joined the NAS staff in 1989. He was the founding president of the NAS New Jersey state affiliate, and served for 20 years on the NAS board of directors. A graduate of Temple University in Philadelphia, he received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago. He is also professor of political science and U.S. history at Raritan Valley Community College in Somerville New Jersey, where he has taught since 1982.
Rachelle Peterson
Director of Research Projects
peterson@nas.org
Rachelle Peterson joined NAS in 2013 as a research associate analyzing the campus sustainability movement. She graduated from The King’s College in May 2013 with a bachelor’s degree in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics.
David Randall
Director of Communications
randall@nas.org
David Randall joined NAS in 2015 as director of communications. He earned a Ph.D. in history from Rutgers University, an M.F.A. in fiction writing from Columbia University, a master’s degree in library science from the Palmer School at Long Island University, and a B.A. from Swarthmore College. Prior to working at NAS he was the sole librarian at the John McEnroe Library at New York Studio School.
Ivan Vajdle
Controller
vajdle@nas.org
Ivan joined NAS in 2015 after graduating from Passaic County Community College with a degree in accounting. He also serves as an associate pastor at Christian Fellowship Church of God in Rockaway, NJ. A graduate of Baptist Theological Seminary (Novi Sad, Serbia), he received his M. A. in Theology from Tyndale Theological Seminary (Badhoevedorp, The Netherlands). Prior to moving to the United States, he taught in theological institutions and church ministry in his home country, Serbia. He is the father of two girls, Rebeka and Tara.
Spencer Kashmanian
Development Associate
kashmanian@nas.org
Spencer joined NAS as development associate in May 2016 after graduating from The King’s College with a Bachelor of Arts degree in politics, philosophy, and economics.
Carol Iannone
Editor-at-Large, Academic Questions
Felicia Sanzari Chernesky
Managing Editor, Academic Questions
chernesky@nas.org
Felicia Sanzari Chernesky returned to the position of managing editor of Academic Questions in October 2007. She graduated magna cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania with a BA in English, majoring in American poetry, with a minor in French literature and a concentration in Latin. She began working for the National Association of Scholars in 1987, and served as an assistant director, editor of the NAS newsletter, NAS Update, and managing editor of Academic Questions. In 1993 she left full-time employment to begin raising a family. While remaining an independent consultant to the NAS, she also freelanced as an editor and writer. A published poet, she is pursuing an MFA in Poetry with an Emphasis in Formal Verse at Western State College of Colorado. She is also active in the New Jersey chapter of the Society for Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, and is represented by The Bent Agency.
BOARD OF DIRECTORS
HERBERT LONDON
Chairman
hlondon@londoncenter.org
Herbert I. London is president of the London Center for Policy Research and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. He is the former president of the Hudson Institute. He is professor emeritus and the former John M. Olin Professor of Humanities at New York University. He was responsible for creating the Gallatin School of Individualized Study in 1972 and was its dean until 1992. This school was organized to promote the study of “great books” and classic texts. Herbert London is a graduate of Columbia University, 1960, and the recipient of a Ph.D. from New York University, 1966.
STEVE BALCH
Founder
steve.balch@ttu.edu
Stephen H. Balch is director of The Institute for the Study of Western Civilization at Texas Tech University. He previously served for twenty-five years as the founding president and then the chairman of the National Association of Scholars. He holds a Ph.D. in political science from the University of California at Berkeley and was for fourteen years a member of the faculty of the Department of Government and Public Administration of John Jay College of Criminal Justice, part of the City University of New York. In 2007 he received the National Humanities Medal from President George W. Bush. In 2009 he was the recipient of the Jeane Jordan Kirkpatrick Academic Freedom Award from the American Conservative Union Foundation and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation.
DANIEL ASIA
Professor of Music, University of Arizona, whose compositions include five symphonies, an opera, and numerous other works.
EVELYN AVERY
Associate Professor of English and former director of Jewish Studies, Towson State University.
JAY A. BERGMAN
Professor of History, Central Connecticut State University, whose research focuses on modern Russian history.
PETER BERKOWITZ
Tad and Dianne Taube Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where he chairs the National Security and Law Task Force.
WARD CONNERLY
Founder and President of the American Civil Rights Institute, former President and CEO of Connerly & Associates, Inc., a land developing consulting firm, and a former Regent of the University of California.
MIDGE DECTER
Founder, Committee for the Free World, and widely published writer.
GEORGE W. DENT, JR.
Professor of Law, Case Western Reserve University, where he is the Associate Director of the Law School's Center for Business Law and Regulation.
CANDACE DE RUSSY
Regent, Ave Maria University; member of advisory boards of FIRE, the Independent Women's Forum, the International Institute of Classical Humanities, and the Cardinal Newman Society; former trustee of SUNY and member of Board of Visitors of the U.S. Air Force Academy.
DAVID GORDON
Professor of History, City University of New York, where he focuses on the economic history of France and French investments in East Asia.
GAIL L. HERIOT
Professor of Law, University of San Diego and member of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission.
THOMAS KLINGENSTEIN
Founder and Principal of Cohen Klingenstein LLC, a New York City investment firm; Chairman of Claremont Institute; and playwright.
ROBERT C. KOONS
Professor of Philosophy, University of Texas at Austin, where he specializes in the application of logic to metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, political philosophy, and philosophy of religion.
BARRY LATZER
Professor of Criminal Justice at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY, who has published widely on criminal procedure, the death penalty, and the history of crime.
THOMAS K. LINDSAY
Former president of Shimer College, and former provost of the University of Dallas, Director of the Center for Higher Education at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, and former deputy chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. His research focuses on Aristotle’s teaching on the relation between education and democracy in the Politics.
WIGHT MARTINDALE
Former journalist and Wall Street businessman who worked at Lehman Brothers for 17 years as a Senior Vice President in the bond department and later as a managing director with Guggenheim Capital Markets. He has taught at Lehigh University, Temple University, and Villanova University.
ANNE D. NEAL
Co-Founder and President, American Council of Trustees and Alumni, which protects liberal arts education and high academic standards.
B. NELSON ONG
Associate Professor of Political Science, College of New Rochelle, focusing his research in the foundations of American constitutionalism.
NORM ROGERS
Founder and former CEO of Rabbit Semiconductor, a California manufacturer of embedded microprocessors and software for embedded programming; volunteer senior policy advisor, The Heartland Institute, Chicago. He writes about global warming from a skeptical point of view.
BARRY SMITH
Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, University at Buffalo and Director, National Center for Ontological Research.
SANDRA STOTSKY
Chair, Department of Education Reform, University of Arkansas and nationally-known expert in English language arts content standards.
RICHARD VEDDER
Distinguished Professor of Economics Emeritus, Ohio University; founder, Center for College Affordability and Productivity.
BRADLEY C.S. WATSON
Department Chair, Philip M. McKenna Professor of Politics, and Co-Director of the Center for Political and Economic Thought at St. Vincent College, Latrobe, PA.
AMY L. WAX
Robert Mundheim Professor of Law, University of Pennsylvania, and an expert in civil procedure, appellate litigation, social welfare law and policy, and the law and economics of work and family.
KEITH WHITAKER
Founding Associate, Wise Counsel Research Associates; formerly a philosophy professor, Boston College, and writing instructor, Boston University.
CURRENT BOARD OF ADVISORS
John Agresto
Edwin J. Delattre
Chester E. Finn, Jr.
Robert P. George
Gertrude Himmelfarb
Paul Hollander
Donald Kagan
Richard D. Lamm
Leslie Lenkowsky
Harvey C. Mansfield
Milton J. Rosenberg
Christina Hoff Sommers
Shelby Steele
Stephan Thernstrom
FORMER MEMBERS OF THE BOARD OF ADVISORS
Jacques Barzun
James David Barber
Walter Berns
Eugene D. Genovese
Irving Louis Horowitz
Harry V. Jaffa
Robert Jastrow
Jeane J. Kirkpatrick
Irving Kristol
Seymour Martin Lipset
Sir Hugh Lloyd-Jones
Nelson W. Polsby
Willard V. Quine
Leo Raditsa
Stanley Rothman
John R. Silber
Ernest van den Haag
James Q. Wilson
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