liberal prof univ brainwash

old idea, new tag 819= academic

SEE PINKO prof

SEE FOUNDATIONAL MYTHS

see acad suppress

SEE DEI

MERRI OK

see campus free speech BS

// liberal media BS

see rufo CRT

see stanley Kurtz

see hackademics

see koch-ademia

see moral panic for kids bird bird vaxx

bak pinko9 22 endit1

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MMA

Fox News contributor blames DEI for shooting deaths at Brown University

Nicole Parker: “I believe that Brown University's prioritization was not on the safety and security of their students. They were more focused on things like DEI efforts, and that has been catastrophic and led to the death of two students.”

Written by Media Matters Staff

:{Published 12/17/25

Video

Citation

From the December 17, 2025, edition of Fox News' The Faulkner Focus

JULIE BANDERAS (ANCHOR): What does this video say to you, and how shocked are you, first of all, that this video has produced nothing? I mean, nobody has come in, as of this video being released, for questioning.

NICOLE PARKER (FOX NEWS CONTRIBUTOR): I'm actually not shocked at all because I know that Brown University is now trying to defend their posture on their security statements that they have made. But it's been an epic fail, the fact that there is no security footage from the campus and that the justification was it was an older building. Both the attorney general and the police chief of Providence police department have said we have no video surveillance. That is inexcusable. I believe that Brown University's prioritization was not on the safety and security of their students. They were more focused on things like DEI efforts, and that has been catastrophic and led to the death of two students.

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10 25

velshi fasc author TO 40 academics fired (diff fields wapo AA woman?) much worse than maccarthy

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fox bs

e president of the Turning Point USA chapter at the University of Chicago wants repercussions for a faculty member who was arrested for suspected violent crimes on Oct. 3 at an anti-ICE rally.

"Professor Eman Abdelhadi’s history of inflammatory and anti-American rhetoric is deeply concerning. Students deserve a safe and open campus environment where they can express their views without fear of intimidation or retaliation from faculty," Tyler Shasteen told Fox News Digital.

Abdelhadi, an associate professor in the school's Department of Comparative Human Development, was arrested on Oct. 3 and charged with two felony counts of aggravated battery to a government employee and two misdemeanor counts of resisting/obstructing peace stemming from a rally outside the Broadview, Illinois ICE facility.

A mugshot of Eman Adbelhadi from Oct. 3, 2025. (Cook County Sheriff's Office)

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO CONDEMNS VIOLENCE BUT DODGES QUESTIONS ABOUT PROFESSOR ARRESTED IN ANTI-ICE RIOTS

Rallies, some of which have turned violent, have been ongoing there for weeks.

"Professor Abdelhadi’s statements, which clearly endorse violence, are unacceptable and undermine the safety and well-being of our community," said Shasteen. "I call on the University of Chicago to review her position and ensure accountability for any actions that violate university policy or the law."

Last week, the school condemned violence, but has resisted answering questions about whether Abdhelhadi has been disciplined.

Abdelhadi has been largely silent, too. However, she thanked her supporters on Bluesky early last week.

"Thank you so much everyone for the messages of love and support," she said on the platform. "I feel fortified by your presence in my life and in the world. I keep thinking about all our neighbors and siblings—hundreds in Chicago alone—who’ve been detained into the unknown of horrendous facilities. We owe them resistance."

Police clash with demonstrators during a protest outside an immigrant processing and detention center on Oct. 03, 2025 in Broadview, Illinois. The site has been the target of frequent protests as federal law enforcement agents continue Operation Midway Blitz in the Chicago area, an operation designed to apprehend and deport undocumented immigrants living in the area. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)

FAR-LEFT UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PROFESSOR CHARGED WITH VIOLENT FELONIES DURING ANTI-ICE RIOTS IN BROADVIEW

Just a day before her arrest, she accused ICE of "terrorizing our communities" on a far-left podcast.

"I mean, in Broadview, ICE has been setting up shop in our backyard. Just brazenly taking up community resources to terrorize this very same community," she said.

She also put out a call for resistance, and lambasted those who she believes aren't taking extreme enough action.

"At this point, you are either on the side of protecting our neighbors and protecting our community, or you’re on the side of this administration. There is no neutral ground in this moment. There’s no center left. You’re either resisting or you’re complicit," she said.

At the Socialism 2025 conference earlier this year, she also slammed her employer.

"F--- the University of Chicago, it’s evil, you know it’s a colonial landlord. Like, why would I put any of my political energy into this space? I kind of had a little bit of disdain for people who spent their time doing that," she said on a panel during the far-left gathering.

A demonstrator is detained as people protest outside the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Broadview facility in Chicago, Ill., Oct. 3, 2025. (Jim Vondruska/Reuters)

LICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP](//www.foxnews.com/apps-products?pid=AppArticleLink)

"Turns out, I work at one of the biggest employers in the city of Chicago. I work at a place that is a landlord, a healthcare provider, a police force, f--- that s---, but, they are, and a place where I have access to thousands of people that I could potentially organize… actually, this is where I need to build power. That’s possible structural leverage," she said.

The University of Chicago and Abdelhadi did not return comment requests.

Peter D'Abrosca joined Fox News Digital in 2025. Previously, he was a politics reporter at The Tennessee Star.

Follow Peter on X at @pmd_reports. Send story tips to peter.dabrosca@fox.com.

Related Topics

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September 12, 2025, edition of The Megyn Kelly Show

MEGYN KELLY (HOST): This is a leftist narrative about Trump and about Charlie, as his supporter. So I mean, there's just no question this guy was buying the leftist narrative about Charlie and, yes, about Donald Trump. And they said he had become more political in recent years. Now how did that happen? What did he do in recent years? He went to college. Guess what college does? It radicalizes young people. I don't know what happened to this particular man, but that is what college does.

You know, we had Bill Ackman on this program talking about what happened to his daughter who went to Harvard and where they turned her into a Marxist socialist communist, which he was still trying to unwind. This is a liberal New York billionaire. That's what Harvard does to your kid.

It's just, look, I don't know what happened to this kid at the university. I'm just saying if we want to talk about circumstantial evidence on radicalization, there's zero for this kid being MAGA or a Republican or in any way in favor of Donald Trump. There's plenty of him hating Donald Trump.

People are like, oh, you know, he was just a gamer. The fact that he wrote these things on the bullets just show he was nothing but a gamer. Yeah, OK, you missed the part where, again, he wrote them on bullets with which he shot Charlie Kirk. Fuck these people and their revisionism, their unwillingness to see what's obvious.

// mma

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note not xo?

an 8 25

Trump will sign a memorandum ordering colleges and universities to submit information on their admissions to ensure they are complying with a 2023 U.S. Supreme Court order banning affirmative action and gutting race-conscious admissions. The order would expand the current admissions data the government collects.

“Admissions data has increasingly become a focus of the Trump administration as part of its effort to change the ideological balance of the higher education system, which the president views as hostile to conservatives,” The New York Times reported.

Several Ivy League schools have agreed to hand over to the Trump administration certain admissions data, including “standardized test scores and grade point averages of all applicants, as well as information about their race, a measure that could profoundly alter the competitive college admissions process,” according to the Times.

The 2023 6-3 Supreme Court ruling banned public and private colleges and universities from considering race as a factor in its admissions decisions. Schools had said they needed to do so to protect the constitutional guarantee of equal protection, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor said in her dissenting opinion.

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Bloomberg News called Thursday’s order “a new and expansive front” in the Trump administration’s “pressure campaign against colleges.”

Angel Perez, CEO of the National Association for College Admission Counseling, Bloomberg added, “said the data transparency mandate could drive institutions away from the kinds of holistic admissions practices that have helped them increase diversity on campuses.”

“The bottom line,” Perez said, “is that colleges that don’t admit enough White students will be punished.”

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pjt 2025

November 27, 2024, edition of UnHerd, streamed on YouTube

FREDDIE SAYER (HOST): Ivy League colleges. You don't have many nice words to say about the Ivy League schools.

KEVIN ROBERTS (HERITAGE FOUNDATION): Very few.

SAYER: You're very uncompromising about that. It's not that they need radical reform and being turned upside down. You say in terms that you think they should be destroyed.

ROBERTS: I say that unless they end the implementation of the woke mind virus, and if they continue to live off the teats of government -- through research grants, through participating in Title IV federal student loans and grants -- then it's perfectly appropriate, as the Vice President-elect said in his senatorial campaign, for the federal government to seize their endowments. Because they are using that money to fund nonsense. Actually, to empower the Chinese Communist Party's infiltration of our institutions, which is yet another problem that motivates my aggressiveness. And thirdly, educational attainment at those colleges -- those colleges in particular has gone down.

SAYER: So what the federal government, in this scenario, would seize the entire endowment of a college like Harvard University, for example?

ROBERTS: Unless Harvard wants to stop living off the public dole, it would be perfectly appropriate.

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AN 7 25

In its clash with Columbia University, the Trump administration is touting a historic $221 million settlement as a major triumph for conservative ideology—even though it had originally framed the case as a response to antisemitism on college campuses. On Thursday, Education Secretary Linda McMahon hailed the outcome as a “monumental victory for conservatives” while condemning “far-left-leaning professors.”

“Under the terms of the deal to resolve several federal probes into allegations that it had violated anti-discrimination laws,” CNN reported, “Columbia did not admit to wrongdoing but agreed to pay the government a $200 million settlement over three years and an additional $21 million to settle US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission investigations.”

Secretary McMahon, CNN added, “heralded the outcome as a ‘seismic shift in our nation’s fight to hold institutions that accept American taxpayer dollars accountable for antisemitic discrimination and harassment,'” and called it “a roadmap for elite universities that wish to regain the confidence of the American public by renewing their commitment to truth-seeking, merit, and civil debate.”

Thursday morning on Fox News Business, Secretary McMahon offered a different explanation.

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“I think that this is a monumental victory for conservatives who’ve wanted to do things in these elite campuses for a long time, because we had such far-left-leaning, you know, professors, and we had 27% of the students that are coming in, you know, are from outside of the United States,” McMahon told host Maria Bartiromo. She noted that the 27% was a statistic from Harvard.

“I’m really pleased with this victory,” McMahon continued. “It wouldn’t have happened if Donald Trump were not president, then I’m really pleased to execute his vision for this, that our campuses are now, what they should be. They are places for debate, they are places for education.”

“They’re not places for left-leaning riots and antisemitism, and I’m really pleased with this result.”

Amy Spitalnick, CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, wrote in response to McMahon’s remarks: “This is about advancing an extreme agenda.”

“This administration,” Spitalnick said, “continues to exploit real concerns about antisemitism to undermine our core democratic norms & institutions. This is not about keeping Jews safe — if it were, they wouldn’t have gutted OCR [Office for Civil Rights] & other key protections.”

Constitutional law professor and political scientist Anthony Michael Kreis warned, “Columbia has now allowed itself to be regulated by a deal. A complete capitulation to the state, yielding their academic freedom to select their students, appoint their faculty, and adopt their curriculum. The Fellows of Magdalen College had more courage against James II in 1687.”

Jordan Acker, who serves on the University of Michigan’s Board of Regents noted:

“Three things can be true here: -Campus faculty, especially in the humanities, needs reform -Antisemitism is a problem on campus -Trump simply cares about destroying higher ed. One and two are fixable. The third is a dire threat to the American way of life and must be fought.”

Watch the video below or at this link.

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HARV BLK WOMan pres resign plag BS stefanik 2 dn 1 to go?

Fox host blames the "spider-like cancer" that is diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives for antisemitism | Media Matters for America

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CONTEXT

yikes an 7 25

critics of far-right Oklahoma Schools Superintendent Ryan Walters often attack him as a highly performative MAGA troll. Walters' antics include purchasing Donald Trump-themed Bibles for classrooms and promoting the false, repeatedly debunked conspiracy theory that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump.

But Slate's Molly Olmstead, in an article published on July 22, emphasizes that Walters' buffoonish qualities don't make him any less dangerous. And she emphasizes that his plan to screen education applicants for MAGA purity shouldn't be taken lightly.

"This month," Olmstead explains, "Oklahoma's education department announced an innovative new approach to screening aspiring teachers in the state: any applicants from 'woke' states would need to first pass an ideology test created by the right-wing group PragerU. It was an announcement that seemed engineered to draw national news coverage and inflame liberal audiences. Under this plan, teachers from states with 'progressive education policies' would be tested on the U.S. Constitution, American exceptionalism, and 'the fundamental biological differences between boys and girls.'"

Olmstead continues, "The screening is guaranteed to test teachers for a deeply MAGA-inflected understanding of U.S. history, government, and society: PragerU, a right-wing group with a stated mission of countering leftism in education, is already known for its white nationalist-adjacent content for schoolchildren."

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PragerU is the brainchild of Dennis Prager, a far-right talk radio host and Trump supporter.

"Walters' proposals for the school system have included a mandate that all public schools teach the Bible; a plan to collect children's immigration status when they register for public school; and new social studies standards proposals that would have high school students 'identify discrepancies in 2020 election results,'" Olmstead observes. "Each of these announcements solidified Walters' reputation as a relentless attention-seeker, calculating every action from his office to appeal to the power players of the MAGA movement…. These stunts have paid off. Walters has been profiled in outlets all over the country, and he has become the face of the Christian nationalist campaigns into public education."

The MAGA Republican's stunts, Olmstead argues, raise the question: "Is Walters all superficiality, a media-obsessive without the stamina or standing for real, transformative politics? Or is he actually capable of remaking Oklahoma's schools — and signaling what MAGA could bring to schools across the country?"

"In sign of just how bizarre American politics have become in this second Trump era," Olmstead warns, "Walters may be a bit of both. As traditional institutions and procedures buckle under MAGA politics, Walters has proven that with the right national climate, slapdash own-the-lib pronouncements can become serious policy. He's a performer, but he also happens to be a major change-maker…. It may be tempting not to take people like Walters seriously, but he has proven that with enough volume, some gimmicks stick."

*Molly Olmstead's full article for Slate is available at this link (subscription required).

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an states n? 5 25

Why are right-wingers so scared of ideas?

Are their minds so weak that mere exposure to certain books will infect them with what Elon Musk calls “the woke mind virus”?

They don’t want you inoculated against measles, but they’re doing their damnedest to inoculate Americans against knowledge.

Novels upset them; poetry upsets them; science upsets them; history upsets them; art upsets them; questioning of authority upsets them.

Universities really, really upset them — all that interrogating norms; all that challenging orthodoxy; all that critical inquiry.

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To that end, Donald Trump’s going to war with Harvard, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, even Penn, his alma mater.

Ron DeSantis beat him to it: The governor’s been trying for years to regulate speech, impose restrictions on what teachers can teach, and decree which books the state of Florida finds “acceptable.”

While he’s had some success in K-12, enabling Moms for Liberty and their ilk in their book-banning crusade and threatening educators with dire consequences if they mention the existence of gay and trans people, some judges, unsurprisingly partial to the First Amendment, have slapped him down.

DeSantis, nothing if not energetic in his rage, is now determined to shield our precious college students from Dangerous Thoughts.

Choose the administrators. Choose the presidents. Control the universities.

The University of Florida needs a new dean of Liberal Arts and Sciences — with 40 majors and more than 10,000 students, it’s the largest college at UF.

They got as far as interviewing four highly qualified candidates: two mathematicians — UF’s own Kevin P. Knudson and Maggy Tomova, dean of UCF’s College of Science; Ryan Schroeder, dean of Georgia Southern’s College of Behavioral and Social Sciences; and Robert Brinkmann, a professor of Geology and dean of Liberal Arts and Science at Northern Illinois University.

‘Radical DEI progressives’

But two weeks ago, the governor blew up the search. Demanded UF stop it.

Seems the finalists, admired scholars and seasoned leaders, are crypto-Marxist, Trump-hating eggheads bent on destroying America.

An anonymous social media account calling itself “Commies on Campus” ran shrieking to Bryan Griffin, DeSantis’ communications director, calling all four “ radical DEI progressives.”

The Commies posted slick, selectively edited videos of candidate interviews, slamming Brinkmann for stating the obvious: “We have people in charge of things in our country that don’t have any business being in charge of those things,” and Knudson for being proud that as head of UF’s Honors Program “we were able to increase the number of African American and Hispanic students in the program.”

As if that’s somehow shameful.

Kent Fuchs, UF’s invertebrate of an interim president, sent out a memo pretending “terminating the search” was the only thing to do, what with the university also in the middle of hiring a permanent president.

Fuchs has never said no to DeSantis.

He does as he’s told, facilitating the hiring of our data-challenged surgeon general at UF’s medical school and trying to stop professorsfrom testifying on voting rights.

Academic freedom doesn’t matter; the professors’ expertise might pose a “conflict of interest to the executive branch of the state of Florida.”

As if serving the interests of the executive branch should somehow be the mission of a university.

UF remains a distinguished institution, though slipping in national rankings of public universities. It was No. 5 a couple of years ago but is now No. 7.

Still pretty good, especially given DeSantis’ obsessive attacks on higher education in the state.

But allowing some trifling X account to dictate policy at Florida’s flagship university won’t exactly burnish UF’s reputation.

All-purpose insult

Whoever the “Commies on Campus” may be, they weren’t paying attention in political science class.

They call anything they don’t like “communist:” LGBTQ, feminism, secularism, programs for the poor, addressing the climate crisis, taxing the rich, giving anyone without one of those useful White Man Cards a fair shot in life.

“Communist” is MAGA’s all-purpose insult.

Read a book, kids: While real live commies like the ones in North Korea, Cuba, or China may think religion is the opiate of the masses and rich folks (except the leaders of these countries) shouldn’t exist, they’re not keen on stuff like feminism, they persecute gay people, and they sure as hell don’t favor DEI.

Ask the Uighurs.

Yet DeSantis, a man educated beyond his intelligence, takes what these nameless chuckleheads say at face value.

There are in fact a number of well-regarded Marxist scholars at American universities. Yale, the governor’s alma mater, has a reading group studying Marxism and Cultural Theory.

Nevertheless, DeSantis emerged from the Red Menace of New Haven untainted.

He’s also unimpeded by understanding what universities are supposed to do.

An academic’s job is to research everything from the Roman Republic to astrophysics to Norse sagas to gene structure to the ideology of slavery to economic and political systems, which requires reading across the spectrum from “Das Kapital” to “ The Road to Serfdom“ and presenting their data and knowledge to students.

We call this “education.”

It’s embarrassing how MAGAs deem Hungarian (or Putinist) authoritarianism OK, even admirable, while “communist” is the gravest of insults and socialism is a mortal sin.

Perhaps they’re unaware socialism is viewed favorably by around 36%of Americans.

That’s almost the same number who say they strongly support Donald Trump.

Ideas are not viruses

The point is, ideas are not viruses: Mere exposure to communist thought doesn’t turn you into a communist, any more than reading James Baldwin’s “Giovanni’s Room” makes you gay, any more than reading “The Wealth of Nations” ensures you’ll become a rabid capitalist.

But MAGAs don’t do high-level thinking: It makes their heads hurt. They simply react.

Loudly. Ignorantly. Irrationally.

Commies on Campus now has a new project: trying to influence who will become the new president of the University of Florida.

UF has announced a finalist.

One finalist. Chosen in secret.

He is Dr. Santa Ono, a Canadian American immunologist.

The Commies say he’s some kind of woke monster who, as president of the University of Michigan, created “THE LARGEST #DEI EMPIRE in the country.”

Their evidence? Christopher Rufo, the febrile New College trustee last heard claiming immigrants were eating cats and dogs, calls Ono “left-wing” and points to a 2023 commencement address in which he made the unimpeachable statement, “The climate crisis is the existential challenge of our time.”

Florida gubernatorial candidate and Trump acolyte U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds, never losing a chance to ingratiate himself with MAGA voters, demands UF “ go back to the drawing board.”

Donalds’ hair is on fire because Ono once said, “Racism is one of America’s original sins.”

Deep breath, people: 1. Both of Ono’s statements are perfectly true; and 2. Rufo, Donalds, and the Commies need to update their intel.

Ono has changed his tune. No longer a champion of diversity, he’s now singing from the DeSantis Hymnal, declaring himself in “total alignment” with the governor’s anti-woke crusade.

“I have the same views as this governor,” Ono said.

Bend the knee

During his three years at Michigan (the shortest tenure of any president in the university’s history), Ono initially won praise for prioritizing sustainability and anti-racist projects. Students say he was personable and accessible.

Then Trump happened, and, like too many university administrators, he bent the knee, shutting UM’s DEI office, cracking down on student protest, and creating, as one faculty member said, “ a surveillance state.”

Seems he deployed plainclothes officers police to trail and photograph people on UM’s campus.

No wonder DeSantis likes this guy.

Santa is a real scholar, a proper scientist, with academic and administrative qualifications that could have been a great fit at UF. He’s streets ahead of DeSantis’ last hand-picked president, the empty, in-over-his-head Ben Sasse, whose one discernable talent was spendingother people’s money.

In a Trump-free world, Ono might have become the leader who could protect the institution. He might have pushed back against the governor’s determination to reduce Florida’s universities to football factories with libraries curated by the likes of Christopher Rufo and courses insisting on the divine greatness of America.

Alas, Ono has made clear that’s not him, not anymore.

This is what you get when one incurious, anti-intellectual, and perpetually angry man chooses university presidents in secret.

This is what you get when there’s only one finalist.

Yes, the trustees officially make the job offer, but there’s no chance they’d hire someone DeSantis didn’t like.

This is the reality of higher ed in Florida today.

FIU has one finalist for president. No shock that it’s DeSantis’ former lieutenant governor and Interim President Jeannette Nuñez.

In its presidential search, FAU announced three finalists. Maybe this would be a real contest?

Two had Ph.Ds. and solid higher ed experience. One was a Republican political hack.

You can guess who got the gig.

A ‘plant’ at FAMU?

Florida A&M, still in the process of choosing a president, has four finalists.

Promising, right?

There were initially three on the shortlist, all with extensive university experience. Then a fourth candidate, a woman with ties to top Republicans, appeared.

She’s Marva Johnson, a communications company executive, appointed by then-Gov. Rick Scott to the Florida Board of Education and chosen by Ron DeSantis for the Florida Scholars Academy Board of Trustees.

Commies on Campus have not yet weighed in on this one.

FAMU alumni say she’d be a terrible choice, calling her “ a plant” and likening her to a Trojan Horse hostile to the university’s mission.

But what the alumni want, and what the university wants, probably won’t matter.

What DeSantis wants matters.

As everyone in the unfree state of Florida knows, all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

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Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Michael Moline for questions: info@floridaphoenix.com.

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in recent years, more college graduates — especially college-educated women — have been favoring Democrats over Republicans.

Far-right House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) discussed this trend during a conversation with Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas), claiming that college students are being "indoctrinated" by liberals and progressives. But social media users have been pushing back against Johnson's argument, many of them responding that the GOP's extreme policies — not indoctrination — are driving college-educated voters away.

Johnson told Crenshaw, "The reasons that…. the Republican Party is attracting, less and less, more highly educated voters is because they spent so much time in the academy. And the universities are run…. usually by liberals almost entirely. And sometimes, by radical liberals, socialists and others. And so, these students are being indoctrinated instead of educated."

After The Intellectualist retweeted a video of the conversation on X, formerly Twitter, on Christmas Day 2023, many users shot down Johnson's argument.

Former CIA analyst Gail Helt tweeted, "So people who have voted Republican in multiple elections, who finished college decades ago, are just now falling prey to alleged brainwashing? I don't think so."

Deborah Kay, a former Republican, posted, "Wrong.. I'm college educated but that has absolutely nothing to do with me leaving the Republican Party. I left mentally in 2015 when Trump came down that escalator, then the October 2016 recording with Billy Bush pushed me further away, then J6 is what made me leave completely."

Kay also tweeted, "I refused to vote for anyone in the Tea Party but I definitely felt I was seeing the future of the Republican Party, even then. And it's turned out much worse. I was always more middle of the road and voted both sides of the aisle but I've voted straight Democrat since 2016."

Journalist Bette Dangerous posted, "I'm sure this Putinist with the loud closet bones failed to mention Turning Point is the fastest growing group on college campuses — that truth would get in the way of his Russian propaganda."

Pundit Jeri Walker wrote, "My experience in college was one of discovery. I chose my required subjects carefully & based on my personal curiosity. I chose my electives based on my personal curiosity. I chose to expand my knowledge so I could understand my world more. NO ONE ever tried to indoctrinate me."

Another X user, Gayle Dourn Plantz, tweeted, "There's a positive correlation between education levels & being a Democrat or independent. There's a negative correlation between education levels & religion So yeah, more educated folks tend to be less into religion and more into actually improving the lives of average citizens."

Activist Kitty Ann Swink told Johnson, "Actually Mike, they educate them.

*Watch the video below or at this link.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/rachel-campos-duffy/fox-host-claims-teachers-are-all-licensed-through-these-marxist-teaching

8 23 mma

:{CAMPOS-DUFFY (FOX NEWS CO-HOST): It's interesting. This is actually a charter school which claims to be a classical education, and so they've had to do a big, you know, turn around on their point because the parents are really upset. They think, but this a great example -- first, I wanna talk about a couple things. The mom, so calm. I'm impressed. Like, I wouldn't be that calm. Like, you know me. I'm not gonna go in be that nice about it, but kind of very politely educated the teacher who is not very educated, doesn't understand American history, and tried to associate with racism or something like that. So that's one thing. Two, the boy. He's so polite. He's so well-mannered.

There was a subsequent video where he comes back, he had just done some podcasts and, you know, sort of gave his point of view and said, you know, I've come back, a lot of kids are now -- he came back to school and other kids are putting don't tread on me patches all over their lockers and their backpacks, and he said, this the sad part, he said I made some new friends, kids that I didn't know before that are now supportive of me, but the teachers were so mean to me, some of the teachers. How disgusting is that? So that was really bothersome.This is a reminder that you are your child's first and most important teacher. That mother taught that son about what don't tread on me. The rattlesnake was the symbol of America because the rattlesnake, if you try to step on it, it's gonna bite you back, and so this is a symbol of standing up. That's what that boy was doing. He's so -- he's such a patriot, I thought, I think that Brian Kilmeade is gonna adopt him.}:

...

CAMPOS-DUFFY: Well, we see all these scores on how our kids are doing on these, you know, on these national tests and history's very bad. We need to give these tests to the teachers.

STEVE DOOCY (CO-HOST): I thought they did before they got their teaching certificate.

CAMPOS-DUFFY: No, because they all get licensed through these Marxist teaching schools that we have inside of all these universities. That's also why you have teachers that turn out like that, that have no idea about American history. They don't care about it. They get hired by a classical academy, a charter school where parents are supposedly pulling their kids out of public school to get a better education, and here's what they get. So just always be alert.

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an 8 23 no lnx

Texas A&M leaders’ text messages reveal desire to counteract perceived liberal agenda in higher education

Kate McGeeandThe Texas Tribune August 05, 2023

"Texas A&M leaders’ text messages show desire to counteract perceived liberal agenda in higher education" was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.

Two years ago during M. Katherine Banks’ first six months as the president of Texas A&M University, she announced a major academic reorganization of the flagship campus to help it become an internationally recognized top-tier institution. Her plans included dozens of structural changes meant to streamline and better organize the largest public university in the state.

But text messages released by the Texas A&M University System this week revealed another largely unspoken focus among system leaders that might have also been at play as the school reorganized.

“Kathy [Banks] told us multiple times the reason we were going to combine [the colleges of] arts and sciences together was to control the liberal nature that those professors brought to campus,” regent Jay Graham wrote to regent David Baggett in June as they were discussing the university’s plans to hire journalism professor and former New York Times editor Kathleen O. McElroy. “[W]e were going to start a journalism department to get high-quality conservative Aggie students into the journalism world to help direct our message. This won’t happen with this type of hire!”

Those messages were released as part of an internal investigation conducted to review the failed attempt to hire McElroy, which has rattled the Aggie community in recent weeks amid concerns over how political considerations impact A&M’s operations and academic freedom.

The messages show that many board members, who are gubernatorial appointees, had concerns with McElroy’s perceived left-leaning credentials, including that she taught at the University of Texas at Austin and previously worked at the New York Times. At least some of them displayed a desire to promote conservative causes at the flagship campus and a blatant resistance to recruiting someone who they believed would work counter to those goals.

“While it is wonderful for a successful Aggie to want to come back to Texas A&M to be a tenured professor and build something this important from scratch, we must look at her résumé and her statements made an opinion pieces and public interviews,”regent Mike Hernandezwrote to former president Banks and Chancellor John Sharp, expressing disappointment that the board learned of the hire after it had been announced.

:{:{}:

“The New York Times is one of the leading main stream media sources in our country. It is common knowledge that they are biased and progressive leaning. The same exact thing can be said about the university of Texas,” he continued.

Those perspectives are consistent with Texas conservatives’ recent attempts to counteract what they view as a liberal agenda within Texas’ public universities.

“People on the right think that the left controls education and they've been trying to wrestle that control away,” said Jennifer Mercieca, a communications professor at Texas A&M who focuses on the intersection of democracy and communication. “Unfortunately, our journalism program got caught in the middle of that.”

In Texas, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick has largely led that crusade within the state’s public universities. A few years ago, he was part of initial discussions with UT-Austin leaders and donors to create a conservative-leaning think tank that would bring “intellectual diversity” to the school. This year, he championed legislation that eliminates diversity, equity and inclusion offices on college campuses, offices that are largely viewed by conservatives as pushing left-leaning ideologies onto students. Patrick also tried to eliminate tenure for faculty, a longstanding tenet meant to bolster academic freedom on campuses.

“People have had it with the intolerance of any ideas but progressive, DEI, propaganda-ish kinds of ideas on campus,” said Sherry Sylvester, a former aide for Patrick who now works as a public policy fellow at the conservative-leaningTexas Public Policy Foundation and was an ardent supporter of the legislation to eliminate DEI programs this past session. “That is a big effort, a big movement.”

The impact of that movement was on display in the records Texas A&M released this week surrounding the failed effort to recruit McElroy.

Soon after making an initial offer to McElroy, Banks communicated that she wanted to push the announcement until after the most recent legislative session ended. At the time, university leaders, including those at Texas A&M, were negotiating with lawmakers over the DEI legislation, as well as state funding for public universities.

“Bottom line is that the NYT connection is poor optics during this particular legislative session,” Jose Bermúdez, interim dean of the college of arts and science, said to Hart Blanton, chair of the communications and journalism department, via text message on May 11.

Meanwhile, regents expressed disdain for media and academics they saw as liberal leaning. While regents approve tenure, it is typically unusual for them to get involved in university-level hires. The Texas A&M regents oversee 11 public universities and eight state agencies that employ more than 26,000 faculty across the state.

Higher education experts say that education has long been characterized as political. Recent efforts in places likeTexas, North Carolina and Florida have picked up partially due to how well the Republican base responds to the accusations.

:{:{}:

“The notion of woke ideology, and how it supposedly has done all this damage to things has just risen as a political talking point,” said Holden Thorp, former chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a current professor at George Washington University. “It's easy to say the universities are the places that you want to attack this,” citing that the argument has increasingly shown to poll well among conservatives.

According to the internal report A&M released Thursday, Banks received calls from six to seven regents after Texas Scorecard, a conservative website, wrote an article about McElroy that painted her as a “DEI proponent” for her prior research to improve diversity in newsrooms. Board member Sam Torn emailed a quote from the article to Board Chair Bill Mahomes stating he wanted an explanation before he could approve McElroy’s tenure.

The internal report revealed that Banks was heavily involved in behind-the-scenes discussions to walk back the original offer given to McElroy, contradicting Banks’ previous public statements that she had no knowledge of changes to the offer. Banks resigned two weeks before her text messages were made public.

The internal report showed that regents also raised questions about whether they could approve tenure for McElroy, even though she already had been selected through the university’s standard hiring process.

:{:{}:

“Granting tenure to somebody with this background is going to be a difficult sell for many on the [board of regents],” Hernandez said in an email to Banks and Sharp. “My sincere hope is that you both will figure out a way to completely put the brakes on this, so we all can discuss this further. If it’s truly too far down the road for you all to agree to that, the board majority can decide how to proceed and take the heat for the final call.”

Thorp said the regents’ meddling in the university’s hiring process overstepped their role.

“When they approve tenure, what they're doing is saying that they have confidence in the administration to carry out the process that they said,” Thorp said. “The role of the board is to rule against it, if for some reason they think the process wasn't followed. Well, in this case, the process wasn't followed, not because of the content or anything, but because [Banks] didn't put the case forward because of politics.”

Some of the regents also took issue with what they perceived as McElroy’s bias toward conservative viewpoints.

“We can’t just give people a set of facts anymore,” McElroy said in an interview on the public radio program "Here & Now” in 2021. “I think we know that and we have to tell our students that. This is not about getting two sides of a story or three sides of a story, if one side is illegitimate. I think now you cannot cover education, you cannot cover criminal justice, you can’t cover all of these institutions without recognizing how all these institutions were built.”

Sylvester with TPPF pointed to that quote as the reason she was against McElroy’s hiring for the journalism program. She declined to comment on the regents’ text messages but said her organization wants to see more free inquiry within higher education.

“No one is looking for a conservative ideology to drive higher ed,” she said. “But taxpayers and conservative leaders no longer want to underride a left wing divisive ideology that permeates so much of the curriculum.”

Thorp said as the politicization of higher education increases and decisions are made based on politics over policy and procedure, it makes universities “ungovernable.”

“I'm certainly not defending Kathy Banks and her dishonest actions in this, but part of the reason why she resorted to that, probably, is that she didn't have many other choices,” said Thorp, referring to her role in watering down McElroy’s job offer. “Every time you have to do something you're facing this intractable situation where you're either going to get the campus against you or get the board against you. And that's how not functional organizations work.”

Mercieca at Texas A&M said the internal report revealed how McElroy’s hiring was a victim of intervention that creates distrust within what are supposed to be democratic processes within universities.

“What we learned yesterday is that all of those institutional processes and procedures can be overruled by fiat, by powerful others,” she said. “It's not democratic.”

Disclosure: Texas A&M University, Texas Public Policy Foundation, New York Times, Texas A&M University System and University of Texas at Austin have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2023/08/04/texas-am-mcelroy-texts/.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

'It all came flooding back': Trump indictment hard on lawmakers left in House Gallery on January 6

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proxy for pinko prof? strict fr?

mma 3 23

As the Biden administration defends the president’s policy of canceling up to $20,000 of student debt for millions of Americans against a Republican-backed challenge before the Supreme Court, some right-wing commentators are going beyond their old arguments against the policy to make truly outrageous claims about it.

When President Joe Biden first announced his administration’s plan in August to address the very real problem of student debt doubling in the past decade, which affects tens of millions of Americans, conservatives tried arguing that the policy was unfair, would raise inflation, would favor the rich, and had no legal basis.

But when arguments about the policy reached the Supreme Court yesterday, some right-wing media figures went far beyond their previous opposition to the policy and levied some egregious new attacks:

Fox News host Mark Levin called Biden’s student loan cancellation policy “a fascistic act by an out-of-control man” who is “cheered by the Marxists in the country.”
OutKick founder Clay Travis: “This was a transparent political attempt by Joe Biden to rig in his favor the 2022 election.”
Travis again portrayed the student debt cancellation policy as a voter turnout scheme: Biden “wanted to drive up young voters’ turnout as much as he could.”
Fox contributor Liz Peek: “You can't just dole out $400 billion to get votes, which is basically what this is all about.”
Media Research Center’s Stephanie Hamill said “it’s almost like a bribery” of voters.
Newsmax host Rob Schmitt said it’s a “vote-buying scheme” to get people “on the narcotic of social welfare.”
Schmitt later portrayed student debt cancellation as Biden wanting “to dump hundreds of billions of dollars that we don't have on 8-balls, Jack Daniels, and flights to Mexico.”
Fox contributor Marc Thiessen claimed student debt cancellation is “an act of stolen valor,” and that Biden is “turning millions of Americans into people who are engaged in stolen valor.”
Turning Point USA President Charlie Kirk used student debt cancellation to attack college education in general, claiming he might not be so opposed if colleges were “producing fruit that loved America.” Instead, he said, they’re the “Wuhan Institute of Virology equivalent of idea pathogens in our country” and asked, “Is this a alleged money laundering scheme to pay off colleges for their Marxist indoctrination?”
Kirk also wrote on Twitter that “college is a scam!”

---

yikes

https://www.mediamatters.org/ron-desantis/hungarys-viktor-orban-targeted-central-european-university-gov-ron-desantis-following

florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and anti-civil rights activist Christopher Rufo are waging a campaign against New College of Florida that strongly resembles actions taken by Hungary’s authoritarian prime minister Viktor Orbán in 2017 and 2018 to shut down Central European University.

DeSantis appointed Rufo, known for his anti-Black and anti-LGBTQ messaging propaganda, to the board of trustees at New College of Florida in early January. Since then, Rufo has engaged in what amounts to a hostile takeover of the school, forcing the president out and attempting to reinvent the school as a conservative institution. The scheme echoes Orbán’s plot to force CEU out of Hungary just years earlier.

Right-wing media personalities and activists in the United States have extensively praised Orbán in recent years, including after he gave what his own adviser called a “pure Nazi speech” in which he decried “race mixing” among Hungarians. During a May 2022 Conservative Political Action Conference event in Hungary, Orbán referred to Fox News star Tucker Carlson as a “friend” whose show should be “broadcasted day and night.” (Carlson passionately defended Orbán in 2021, characterizing his views as “moderate and conventional.”) A separate event known as the National Conservatism Conference also served to strengthen the ties between the illiberal Hungarian leader and his stateside admirers.

Whether DeSantis and Rufo are deliberately modeling their efforts on Orbán’s — or the similarities have arisen naturally from the authoritarian ideologies all three men share — isn’t clear. Regardless, Rufo himself appeared to endorse Orbán’s targeting of CEU in a tweet to conservative writer and Orbán fanboy Rod Dreher.

[twts]

other members of DeSantis’ inner circle have praised Orbán’s administration. During the National Conservatism Conference in Miami last September,Christina Pushaw,a longtime DeSantis aide, “told the audience that Orbán’s government gave her inspiration” for icing out mainstream journalists, as reported in New York magazine.

“The New Yorker wrote to Orbán and asked for comment on their hit piece, and they received a response that was just perfect. It said, ‘We are not going to participate in the validation process for liberal propaganda,’ ” she recounted, “and I don’t think we need to participate in that validation process either.” Instead, she noted, DeSantis gives access to conservative sites, which then get quotes and scooplets they can use to build their audience.

At the same conference, an Orbán adviser praised DeSantis and used the governor’s policies to justify and normalize Hungary’s own. From New York magazine:

At one panel, The Federalist’s Sean Davis asked Balázs Orbán, an adviser (no relation) to Viktor Orbán, how his government is preventing the fake-news media from poisoning the minds of the youth. “Just as is done in Florida,” Orbán replied, explaining that the Hungarian regime used state power to prevent the left from indoctrinating the country in its ideology. (His spokesperson explained that he was referring specifically to “gender propaganda.”) He mocked the idea that the regime was behaving autocratically: “You can say I am autocratic, pro-Putin, pro-everything that is bad, but look, in Florida, in the United States, the Republicans are doing the same.”

The similarities in the campaigns that DeSantis and Rufo in Florida, and Orbán in Hungary, have waged against a particular institution of higher learning are striking. Beginning in 2017, Orbán set his sights onCEU, one of Budapest’s top universities. Founded in 1991 by liberal philanthropist George Soros, who was born in Hungary, the school was meant to serve as a model of post-Cold War openness and cosmopolitanism. Orbán saw it as a threat — a bastion of liberalism that threatened his far-right regime.

Orbán, who studied law at István Bibó, a college in Budapest, moved to impose requirements on CEU that appeared to be impossible to meet by design. As The Atlantic reported:

Although the legislation didn’t mention CEU by name, the school was its obvious—and only—target. The bill would suddenly make CEU’s existence in the country dependent on quickly meeting a series of impossible-seeming requirements. As a foreign university, it would have to operate a campus in its country of origin. (CEU was chartered in the state of New York, but it didn’t have any faculty or facilities there.) Its national government would need to enter into a bilateral accreditation agreement with Hungary. (In the U.S., accreditation agreements are the jurisdiction of the states, not the federal government.)

The law passed, ultimately forcing CEU to close its campus and relocate to Vienna, Austria.

Orbán’s broader intrusions into school curricula also anticipate DeSantis’ own attempts to exert control over classroom instruction. The Atlantic writes:

Textbooks and curricula, once the domain of municipalities, have been centralized and now inculcate the regime’s politics. “The government is quite clear that patriotic education is as important as transferring knowledge,” Péter Kréko, the political analyst, told me. An eighth-grade history book praises Orbán as a “foundational figure.” A high-school textbook opens a section on “multiculturalism” with an image of refugees huddled at the Budapest train station, accompanied by a quotation from the prime minister: “We consider it a value that Hungary is a homogeneous country.”

Rufo has been alternately open and cryptic about his plans for New College. He sometimes describes his efforts almost modestly, as in a closing paragraph on his blog at City Journal:

My proposals include redesigning the curriculum to align with the classical model; abolishing DEI programs and replacing them with “equality, merit, and colorblindness” principles; adopting the Kalven statement on institutional neutrality; restructuring the administration and academic departments; recruiting new faculty with expertise in the classical liberal arts tradition; and establishing a graduate school for training teachers in classical education.

But in the same post, he endorsed DeSantis’ chief-of-staff’s comment that the goal is to remake New College into a “Hillsdale of the South,” referencing the far-right Christian college in Michigan.

As New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg wrote (emphasis in original):

The new majority’s plan, Rufo told me just after his appointment was announced, is to transform New College into a public version of Hillsdale. “We want to provide an alternative for conservative families in the state of Florida to say there is a public university that reflects your values,” he said.

Rufo has made clear that New College is just the beginning. “If we are successful, the effort can serve as a model for other states,” he wrote at City Journal.

Orbán was successful in driving CEU out of Hungary. Whether DeSantis and Rufo can remake New College remains to be seen, much less whether their actions are scalable. Regardless, Rufo has stated that his ambitions do not end with the DeSantis administration. In a recent video titled “The Strategy Behind the Campaign to Abolish DEI Bureaucracies in Public Universities” posted to his YouTube page, he that his goal is to “get it done in one state, in the state of Florida, and then see a domino effect of other states following suit.”

But it would be wise to take warning from CEU’s president, Shalini Randeria.

“We are a textbook case because what we need to realise is that all of these ‘soft authoritarian’ regimes, as I call them, are learning from one another. There is a playbook they are carefully watching to see what works in one case or another,” she said in an interview with University World News. “We need to study this carefully to see there is a certain toolbox they’re using, and no university is safe.”

---

fox stepford mat'l

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-keeps-booking-pharmaceutical-heir-whose-mom-paid-specialist-deprogram-her-wokism

no lnx vid

Fox News keeps booking a pharmaceutical heir whose mom paid a specialist to “deprogram” her from “wokeism”

Mount Holyoke alum Annabella Rockwell works for conservative edutainment organization PragerU, which she credits with freeing her from liberal indoctrination

WRITTEN BY JOHN KNEFEL

PUBLISHED 11/29/22

A spectre is haunting college campuses — the spectre of wokeism. It is an ideology and a cult that separates children from parents, rendering each unknowable to the other. Misery and alienation: This is the goal of these indoctrination centers. But all is not lost. A small band of rebels stand in their way. They are the ragtag freedom fighters at PragerU.

That, at least, is the story the producers and talent at Fox News are telling their viewers.

Leading the charge for liberation is pharmaceutical heir and PragerU director of development for Palm Beach Annabella Rockwell, who can trace her lineage back to the Mayflower, thank you very much. Rockwell fell victim to the siren song of wokeism her first year at Mount Holyoke, a historically women’s college in Massachusetts.

“I studied history and politics at Mount Holyoke,” Rockwell said in a November 15 interview with her boss, Dennis Prager. “Every class was, you know, history, but history with race, history with gender.”

By the time Rockwell graduated in 2015, she was “totally indoctrinated,” she said in a recent interview with the New York Post. Her mom, Melinda, “enlisted the help of a deprogrammer who charged $300 a day as well as Annabella’s old tennis coach, Scott Williams,” to overcome her daughter’s “brainwashing.”

Rockwell had the support of her family’s personal fortune, but she needed something else: a light in the darkness. As she told Fox News’ top star and white nationalist Tucker Carlson on Monday evening, her salvation came at the hands of PragerU, where she now works, when one of its videos came up on a social media feed. This heartwarming story shows how PragerU funnels young people into reactionary politics – and just so happens to be a great branding opportunity to further spread that organization’s propaganda.

“I had to unlearn my four years of wokeism by watching five-minute PragerU videos online for free,” she said.

“Amazing,” Carlson responded. “It is a cult. Its aim is to separate you from the people who love you most.”

Video CitationFrom the November 28, 2022, edition of Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight

Teaching history without race or gender is obviously better, which is exactly the type of top-notch scholarship you can get from Prager and his absolutely real university.

Fox News’ Outnumbered analyzed Rockwell's hero’s journey on Monday afternoon, prior to her debut on Tucker Carlson Tonight. Co-host Emily Compagno, a paragon of intellectual rigor — who also knows more than a little about learning history without regard to race or gender — weighed in with the insight and precision that’s become her trademark.

College students are “being taught to hate their country; they’re also being taught to hate their families,” Compagno argued. “And that is step one of true indoctrination.”

Video CitationFrom the November 28, 2022, edition of Fox News' Outnumbered

But, like the totalitarian cult of wokeness itself, Rockwell wasn’t yet satisfied with her conquest. She pushed forward, appearing Tuesday morning on Fox & Friendsto share her tale of woe and redemption, explaining how she finally broke free of her ideological prison.

In 2020, at the height of what has been referred to as the largest protest movement in the history of the United States, Rockwell saw the light.

:{:{}:

VideoCitationFrom the November 29, 2022, edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends

:{:{}:

“It wasn't until seeing the riots happening that I realized, OK, this is so hypocritical. Like, why are we fighting for equality and empowerment by burning down people's [PVT PROPERTY = > HU RIGHTS] businesses?” Rockwell explained. “It just doesn't make sense to me.” (One way to make sense of the George Floyd uprisings is to study “history with race.”)

Rockwell closed out the interview with another plug for PragerU. Whatever else the organization’s shortcomings, it appears that marketing is not one of them.

---

mirror? real am do not belong in church? pinko prof recycled BS

an 922 david badash

Ron Johnson (R-WI) is angered Democratic voters are allowed to go to church, college, and be employed by those institutions and even the federal government, saying they have “infiltrated”these essential areas of American life and many others.

An elections and COVID conspiracy theory promotor, Senator Johnson, appearing on far-right-wing talk show host Mark Levin’s Sunday night Fox News show, declared, “what this entire election is about is fighting for freedom.”

It’s a common refrain for the Wisconsin Republican who infamously spent the Fourth of July in 2018 in Moscow, “posing for propaganda photos with Russian officials” as The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank noted at the time, while posting a tweet for his American constituents proclaiming, “What does July 4th mean to me? Freedom.”

Milbank observed Johnson’s Moscow visit came on “the same day it was reported in Britain that two more people had been poisoned by a Russian nerve agent British officials say came from Vladimir Putin’s regime. On the day after the Senate Intelligence Committeeaffirmed the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia interfered in the election to help Donald Trump.”

Johnson, facing a tight re-election race for a third term despite having promised to retire after his second, is running against Democratic Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes.

On Sunday Johnson suggested to Levin that liberals, Democrats, and anyone on “the left” as he put it, do not have an inherent right to participate in American life on an equal footing as Republicans.

And he accused Democrats of “infiltrating” American life four times.

“The press is so unbelievably powerful and the left has infiltrated every institution of this country,” Johnson told Levin.

“They started with the college and university system. So they control college of education and journalism and law. And they’ve infiltrated every agency. They’ve infiltrated religions. They’ve infiltrated everything and now we’re seeing the results of that.”

“That’s why our nation is literally on a precipice. We’re at a hinge point in history,” Johnson declared.

“We have to win this election and we have to win many more because we’ve got to push them out of these institutions and return some normalcy, return the values that made this country great,” Johnson, echoing the trumpist mantra, concluded.

While there is little public polling, the last four polls show Barnes up over Johnson by an average of 4.3 points.

Saying it “could be one of the uglier races of 2022,” Politico lists it as a “tossup.” As of Monday FiveThirtyEight puts the Johnson vote ahead of Barnes by 0.2 percentage points.

Watch below or at this link.

---

mma 6 22

sTEVE DOOCY(CO-HOST): Battle for the American Mind, Uprooting a Century of Miseducation, a brand new book that hits the shelves today. In it, Pete Hegseth and David Goodwin discuss how American education has been destroyed and what we can do to restore it. Here's an excerpt. "Make no mistake about it the historical singularity that was America's founding was a result of classical Christian education. Full stop. Our founders did not stumble their way to brilliance of 1776. They were forged in the foundry of the education of their time." And Pete and David join us live right now. And they've got the number one book in the world. Who's who?

PETE HEGSETH (AUTHOR, FOX AND FRIENDS WEEKEND CO-HOST): Pete. David.

DOOCY: Thank you very much. David, it's very nice to meet you. We were talking to Pete about this yesterday. This is part of a master plan that a lot of people don't have any idea has been going on for decades.

DAVID GOODWIN (AUTHOR): Right.

DOOCY: Regarding education in the country.

GOODWIN: Yes. Well, you know, that's when I was doing the research, some of the research through the original book, which The New Republic in the early part of the 20th century. I thought I would find a lot about labor unions and a lot about minimum wage, a lot about, you know, the things that we know that the progressives were talking about at the time. But education was in every issue. And I was wondering, why.

DOOCY: Right. And Pete who would –who drew up this master plan?

HEGSETH: Well, there were a lot of – there wasn't one master architect, John Dewey's the father of the progressive educational system.

DOOCY: But they were like-minded.

HEGSETH: Very like-minded. Almost all atheists. Almost all socialists. Eventually, almost all Marxists.And they had a plan to capture the minds of our youngest kids. And we're not talking about the lunacy of higher education. This is K through 12. They knew the affections of young people. Elementary school students would shape the way they view America, their faith, for the rest of their life. And so they set it out on a course. They didn't know exactly where it would lead, Steve. All of these architects of progressives, but they knew where it wouldn't lead: Not toward Biblical wisdom, not toward appreciation for our founding documents.And people say to David I all the time, How do I not know this history?

DOOCY: Right.

HEGSETH: 100-year history. You know why? Because the progressives write the history. They write the textbooks.

DOOCY: Right.

HEGSETH: So, David and I had to dig underneath everything that's hidden to find out the real story of how they captured K through 12.

DOOCY: You know, and David, we've known for a long time that America's colleges, for the most part. are way to the left, very progressive. But I don't think a lot of people realized until the last decade or so when they started looking in America'stextbooks,how far to the left aome are trying to drag K through 12.

GOODWIN: Well, they've had the advantage. When you have the college system, you control the instruments of education all the way down to the kindergarten. Right. Because you train the teachers, you train the administrators, you train the curriculum providers. You're the ones doing the accreditation, the college – at the college level. All of that flows right from the, you know, kind of nodes of control that the progressives had.

DOOCY: And, you know Pete, so many parents got a good look at what their kids were doing during COVID-19. Your first chapter is our COVID 1619 moment.

HEGSETH: It's exactly right. You're at home looking at your kid's curriculum through your laptop, and suddenly there's a new founding date on their screen, 1619 or they're talking about gender pronouns for seven or eight-year-olds.[note no eg] So we start with the problem, and the first step to any recovery is understanding the depth of your problem. And we outline that. But the best part of the book, in our opinion is those five chapters at the end that are about the solution. AndDavid runs the Association of Classical Christian Schools.

DOOCY: Right.

HEGSETH: Classical Christian Dot Org. There are hundreds of wonderful brick-and-mortar schools across the country that are the exact opposite of what our government schools provide right now. There are online options, there arehomeschoolcurriculum options. The insurgency to take our classroom back has begun, and that's the preferred form of ideological warfare of the weak against the small. You do not have to default to progressive public schools, because otherwise, you're going to war with an educational complex that has 40 hours a week to capture your kid's mind. And that's why we call it a battle. It really is for parents and grandparents.

---

aha of course goes back to powell memo but right constant cries of victimhood, oppressed by big tech, big gubmint etc etc etc etc

but recall they have to explain why they fail to win the the much vaunted marketplace of idea / polls

sinecure?

11 21 no lnx

'Thought criminals': Aggrieved conservative elites announce new university dedicated to 'truth' — but who’s funding Ii?

David Badash and The New Civil Rights Movement November 08, 2021

Bari Weiss. Andrew Sullivan. Jonathan Rauch. Larry Summers.

Those are some of the more recognizable names a new university launched Monday lists on the front page of its website.

Its founder says some of them have been "treated like thought criminals."

The University of Austin (which sounds remarkably like The University of Texas at Austin, founded in 1883,) in an announcement says it is "dedicated to the fearless pursuit of truth." It is not currently accredited and offers no degrees.

But some of the people it is attracting have highly-controversial backgrounds. Indeed, some, like Weiss and Sullivan, seem to thrive on creating controversy.

It's clear, from its founder's message, that this is an enterprise dedicated to protect those who use their huge platforms to decry being "canceled."

"Nearly a quarter of American academics in the social sciences or humanities endorse ousting a colleague for having a wrong opinion about hot-button issues such as immigration or gender differences,"Pano Kanelos, the former president of St. John's University and apparently the founder of The University of Austin, writes Monday at Bari Weiss' Substack. "Over a third of conservative academics and PhD students say they had been threatened with disciplinary action for their views. Four out of five American PhD students are willing to discriminate against right-leaning scholars, according to a report by the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology."

Kanelos discusses some of the University's founding faculty – a prerequisite appears to be having been subjected to criticism.

"On our quads, faculty are being treated like thought criminals. Dorian Abbot, a University of Chicago scientist who has objected to aspects of affirmative action, was recently disinvited from delivering a prominent public lecture on planetary climate at MIT. Peter Boghossian, a philosophy professor at Portland State University, finally quit in September after years of harassment by faculty and administrators. Kathleen Stock, a professor at University of Sussex, just resigned after mobs threatened her over her research on sex and gender."

Its FAQ answers the question "Why Austin?" by jokingly replying: "If it's good enough for Elon Musk and Joe Rogan, it's good enough for us."

The big question of course is who is funding this endeavor? The "University" says it will have a physical campus.

That's expensive, as is paying top names.

"We have secured the seed money necessary to launch the university. But we are in the process of securing $250 million, which will enable us to grow into a comprehensive university," it says.

"UATX has requested and is awaiting a tax-exempt determination from the IRS. At present, UATX is fiscally sponsored by Cicero Research, a tax-exempt entity organized under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code."

An online search for "Cicero Research" nets almost nothing, except a one page listing on Cause IQ, a company to help nonprofits grow.

According to that filing for the year ending December 2020, Cicero Research has no full-time employees, no assets, but under "characteristics" is tagged "political advocacy."

Who's actually funding this is currently unknown.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

The Christian right is behind the GOP's new attack on public education ›

Far-right social conservatives are attacking sex education material ... ›

The critical race theory panic is a new weapon in the right-wing war ... ›

Author Discussion on the President and the Media

Author and ABC News chief legal analyst Dan Abrams; Los Angeles Times executive editor Norman Pearlstine; and former Fox and CBS News president Van Gordon Sauterexamined the relationship between the executive branch and the media.

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https://www.:(style="background-color:#ffffffff"):}::{insidehighered.:(style="background-color:#ffff66ff"):}::{com/news/2005/03/30/politics

...American professors are overwhelmingly liberal, according to a new report on faculty political attitudes.

Previous surveys have reached similar conclusions, but this one suggests that the ideological divide on campuses may be greater than has previously been thought. And the authors of this survey say that their evidence suggests say that conservatives, practicing Christians and women are less likely than others to get faculty jobs at top colleges.

The research, published in The Forum, is being praised as path-breaking by some scholars and as garbage by others. But since the study is being released at a time of heightened debate over charges of classroom bias, the report is likely to be closely examined and critiqued.

The findings are based on a survey of 1,643 faculty members at 183 four-year colleges and universities, and the results were analyzed by three political scientists: StanleyRothman of Smith College, S. Robert Lichter of George Mason University and Neil Nevitte of the University of Toronto. In the abstract to their report, they say that the research "suggests that complaints of ideologically based discrimination in academic advancement deserve serious consideration and further study."

Rosemary G. Feal, executive director of the Modern Language Association, said that the implication that liberal faculty members were keeping conservative scholars out was "rubbish," and said that anyone who has been on dozens of search committees, as she has, knows that. "It boggles my mind the degree to which this is rubbish."

The Findings

Faculty members in the study were asked to place themselves on the political spectrum, and 72 percent identified as liberal while only 15 percent identified as conservative, with the remainder in the middle. The professors were also asked about party affiliation, and here the breakdown was 50 percent Democrats, 11 percent Republicans, and the rest independent and third parties.

The study also broke down the findings by academic discipline, and found that humanities faculty members were the most likely (81 percent) to be liberal. The liberal percentage was at its highest in English literature (88 percent), followed by performing arts and psychology (both 84 percent), fine arts (83 percent), political science (81 percent).

Other fields have more balance. The liberal-conservative split is 61-29 in education, 55-39 in economics, 53-47 in nursing, 51-19 in engineering, and 49-39 in business.

Beyond general political identification, the professors were asked for views on specific issues, and here too, the authors find faculty backing for positions associated with liberal politics. Of professors, 84 percent somewhat or strongly agree that women should have the right to have abortions, and88 percent agree that policies should favor environmental protection even if those policies result in higher prices and fewer jobs.

The report's authors say that their findings suggest a "sharp shift to the left" from earlier studies, which found more ideological balance. But in fact numerous studies have made similar findings (although in many cases less detailed) in recent years.

"The American College Teacher" is a major study by the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles that features some questions on politics. The last survey, in 2001, found that 5.3 percent of faculty members were far left, 42.3 percent were liberal, 34.3 percent were middle of the road, 17.7 percent were conservative, and 0.3 percent were far right. Those figures are only marginally different from the previous survey, in 1998.

Unlike the survey released this week, the UCLA survey includes faculty members at community colleges, and those faculty members are more evenly split than their four-year counterparts, with 33.3 percent identifying as liberal, 41.1 percent as middle of the road, and 22 percent as conservative.

The new study published in The Forum also attempts to look at the impact of the ideological split on college faculties.

So the authors devised an "academic achievement index" of faculty members by looking at such factors as books written, journal articles and service on editorial boards. Then the authors looked at certain factors, such as political views, whether someone was religious (defined as attending services "at least once or twice a month"), and gender. The authors then tracked where scholars ended up to see whether there was a relationship between various factors in their backgrounds and whether they ended up at top colleges.

The authors report that among scholars with equivalent academic achievements, liberals are more likely than conservatives to be at top colleges. The scholars also found a negative correlation for being a practicing Christian to getting positions at top colleges (but not for observant Jews) and for women.

In the conclusion to the report, the authors acknowledge that their findings on possible discrimination against conservatives, Christians and women are "preliminary." But they go on to say that "these results suggest that conservative complaints of the presence and effects of liberal homogeneity in academia deserve to be taken seriously, despite their self-interested quality and the anecdotal nature of the evidence previously presented."

What It All Means

Stephen H. Balch, president of the National Association of Scholars, said that "the big news here is the first social science confirmation of the existence of discrimination in hiring and the personnel process." While previous studies have demonstrated the breadth of liberal support in the academy, he said, they have not made as direct a link to hiring and advancement.

Balch said there is now "very strong evidence" that there is bias in the hiring process against conservatives, whereas before this study, there was just "an enormous amount of anecdotal evidence."

College faculty members and presidents, "given their interest in diversity of all other kinds, and their professed desire to overcome discrimination, need to grapple with this."

Many academic leaders, however, say that the lopsided political identification totals are entirely predictable, and do not indicate discrimination of any kind. Feal, the MLA executive director, said that when humanities professors say that they are liberals, "the majority of us understand it to be not a narrow political ideology, but a conception of the world."

"We profess the liberal arts," she said. "That comes from freedom that we hold as a high value, from the pursuit of the truth, the pursuit of academic freedom, the belief that the learning and teaching of values will make us better citizens."

Prior to coming to the MLA, Feal was a professor and department chair in modern languages at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and she says that searches never focused on questions of religion or politics. "These things are irrelevant in a search."

"When all was said and done, we had conservative Christians, we had liberal atheists, we had everyone," Feal said.

The study is part of a broader campaign, she said, to question the qualifications and rights of faculty members, especially in the humanities. "This is such a dangerous moment," she said. "We are facing the kind of scrutiny on politics and religion that truly signals danger."

Cary Nelson, author of Manifesto of a Tenured Radical, said that he wasn't surprised that some disciplines were largely liberal. Nelson, an English professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said that in his field, "which has devoted itself significantly to expanding the canon over the last 25 years, it's most likely that the people who are coming into the disciplines are going to have a liberal sentiment rather than a reactionary sentiment."

Nelson said, however, that even if most professors in some fields are liberal, you wouldn't know it from what goes on in classrooms, where he said most scholars are "bloody cowards about letting their politics out." Nelson said that he always tells his students that he is a liberal, and that conservative students will do well in his class as long as they speak up and challenge him.

When it comes to hiring, he says that some departments do engage in "PC hiring," which he defined as the kind of hiring "where a search committee will say, 'We need more women so we're going to give this slot to a woman' or 'We don't have enough gay people so we've got to hire a gay person.' " Nelson said this kind of hiring was wrong -- and foolish in the humanities -- where there is enough diversity in the total pool that "if you go for the very best people, you'll still end up with diversity."

In his department, he said, hiring is quality based, and even though many of his colleagues focus on issues of race and gender, "we hire people who work only on traditional authors, most of whom are dead white men." The question in hiring, he says, is are you excited by a person's work and its potential, not do you agree with it.

In the Minority

Not all scholars accept the premise that the ideological split is necessarily hurting higher education -- or at least not in a black-and-white way.

...

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cited by FIRE boys:

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/la-op-shermer-lukianoff14apr14-story.html

Marxist professors or sensitive students?

Today, Shermer and Lukianoffweigh allegations of widespread political bias at American colleges. Later in the week, they'll debate ideological diversity in curricula, lifetime tenure for professors and more.

Faculty bias, by the numbers

By Michael Shermer

Students should complain about professorial indoctrination, because it is real and it is loaded heavily on the left, most notably in the social sciences and the humanities.

A 2005 study by George Mason University economist Daniel Klein found that Democrats outnumbered Republicans among the faculty by a staggering ratio of nearly 10 to 1 at UC Berkeley and 7.6 to 1 at Stanford. Measuring political attitudes through voter registration among faculty in 20 different departments, in the humanities and social sciences the ratio was 16 to 1 at both campuses (30 to 1 among assistant and associate professors), and in some departments, such as anthropology and journalism, there wasn't a single Republican to be found.

Another 2005 study by Stanley Rothman, S. Robert Lichter and Neil Nevitte discovered that only 15% of those teaching at American colleges and universities describe themselves as conservative, while 72% said they were liberal. That figure climbed to 80% in departments such as English literature, philosophy, political science and religious studies, with only 5% labeling themselves as conservative.

The bias exists even in law schools. In a 2005 article in the Georgetown Law Journal, Northwestern University law Professor John McGinnis reviewed the faculties of the top 21 law schools rated by the 2002 U.S. News & World Report graduate school rankings. He found that politically active professors at these top law schools overwhelmingly tend to be Democrats -- 81% contributed "wholly or predominantly" to Democratic campaigns while just 15% did the same for Republicans.

Given this reality, is it any wonder the academy has the reputation of being a bastion for bleeding-heart liberals? Unless they are openly teaching a course entitled, in effect, "Why Liberals Should Rule the World," professors have no business introducing their political bias to students. Their job is to teach the curriculum of their subject, not churn out a bunch of Marx-worshiping, Bush-hating, Che Guevara-loving, pinko graduates who will go out into the world woefully ignorant that most Americans think entirely differently from the way they do.

As for those mamby-pamby professors who whine about students who have the audacity to tell people on the outside what is actually going on in American classrooms, now you know what it's like to be in the real world where consumers are bosses and producers take orders. You've got the cushiest job on the planet, so buck up and take a little criticism like the rest of us have to on Planet Reality. Professors are like cloistered monks who spend their entire lives protected from the buffeting of the marketplace of ideas, where the rest of us work. Think about it: K-12, four years of undergraduate schooling, four to six years of graduate education, maybe a post-doctoral appointment or two, then assistant professor, associate professor, and finally full professor with tenure. It's womb-to-tomb socialized security. No wonder professors are paranoid about public disclosure of their work.

But thanks to the Internet, the gig is up!

Michael Shermer is the publisher of Skeptic magazine (skeptic.com), a monthly columnist for Scientific American, an adjunct professor in the School of Economics and Politics at Claremont Graduate University and the author of 10 books.

Being offended vs. being indoctrinated

By Greg Lukianoff

Hello Michael,

I think you make a lot of important points in your post, but you tend to conflate the evidence of bias in academia with indoctrination. A better statistic can be found in a recent Chronicle of Higher Education-Gallup Poll. According to this poll, 29% of 25- to 34-year-olds, 41% of 45- and 54-year-olds, and 60% of those over age 65 responded that professors "often" use their classrooms to espouse their own political views. Whether the real number is closer to 29% or 60%, these are powerful statistics when you are dealing with millions of students.

But is having an opinionated professor really the same as indoctrination? I have seen claims -- often from conservative students -- that students have a right not to be "harassed" by the left-leaning opinions of their professors. This drives me nuts because if there is one thing conservatives should not be doing, it is legitimizing the idea that merely being exposed to different points of view is the same thing as harassment. Harassment rationales are used to shut down people with dissenting opinions (often the socially conservative, the un-PC, or the merely unlucky) far too often.

Certainly, there are gross abuses committed by university professors against the right of private conscience of their students. California had one spectacular example back in 2003, when an adjunct professor at Citrus College gave an extra-credit assignment in which students had to write and mail letters to President Bush (pdf) opposing the Iraq war. Students were not allowed to take any other stance. This was wrong on multiple levels: It was an abuse of power, it was coerced speech, and it was arguably indoctrination.

I must emphasize, however, that the worst abuses are not coming from the professoriate; they are coming from the ever-expanding army of college administrators. One recent ghastly example that received woefully inadequate press attention was a true thought reform program at the University of Delaware. In this program, all 7,000 residents of the university's dormitories were required to attend coercive and unabashedly ideological "treatments" (the actual term administrators used) with the explicit goal of getting students to adopt specific points of view with regard to issues such as morality, environmentalism and sexuality. Resident assistants were required to give students questionnaires on what races and genders they would date with the goal of getting students to be more open to dating other races or genders. One student, who in one of these exceedingly creepy "one on one" sessions answered "none of your damn business" to the question "When did you discover your sexual identity?" was written up by an RA and reported to the administration (pdf). That's only the tip of the iceberg and, shockingly, the Residence Life program at the University of Delaware still seems to believe this was a good program. It is chilling that we are raising a generation of citizens who believe it is their right to mandate the appropriate views that other citizens should have. It's a formula for totalitarianism.

You really must check out some of these other programs, too, Michael. The Michigan State University "Student Accountability in Community" punishment system is equally terrifying, as it required students who demonstrated aggressiveness (one example given was a girl who slammed a door in a fight with her boyfriend) to sit down for four mandatory sessions with a pseudo-psychologist in order to make them speak "correctly" about what they had supposedly done wrong. No wonder students over the last two decades have come to believe that they have the right to destroy -- and in some cases even burn -- student newspapers that have opinions they dislike. I shudder for the republic if the next generation of leaders brings such fundamentally anti-democratic thinking to America's institutions of power.

Greg Lukianoff is a constitutional lawyer and the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (thefire.org). He is a frequent guest on national TV news programs and a blogger at the Huffington Post.

Vanishing Conservative—Is There a Glass Ceiling?

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The radical personality: Social psychological correlates of new left ideology

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This paper describes and tests a model of radical personality based upon social psychological correlates of New Left ideology. Following methodological criticism of studies that portrayed radicals as psychologically liberated, a model of psychopolitical rebellion is described as an inverted form of authoritarian personality. This model was ..

The Vanishing Conservative—Is There a Glass Ceiling?

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Brainwashed: How Universities Indoctrinate America's Youth (review)
Evan Baum, Laura W. Perna
The Review of Higher Education
Johns Hopkins University Press
Volume 28, Number 3, Spring 2005
pp. 423-425
10.1353/rhe.2005.0004
REVIEW
View Citation
Additional Information

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:

Evan Baum (bio) and Laura Perna (bio)

Ben Shapiro. Brainwashed: How Universities Indoctrinate America's Youth. Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2004. 256 pp. Cloth: $22.99. ISBN: 0-78526-1486.

In the words of the author, Brainwashed is meant to "rip the cover off of [sic] a system that for too long has claimed diplomatic immunity while simultaneously feeding students a steady diet of leftism" (p. xviii). Underneath the poorly written substance of the book, much of which seems to be a personal vendetta against UCLA Professor Robert Watson, is a devout hatred of higher education that typifies the arguments of such [End Page 423] neo-conservatives as Dinesh D'Souza, Diane Ravitch, and David Horowitz. A recent graduate of UCLA, 20-year old Ben Shapiro is a nationally syndicated columnist with Creators Syndicate, an international distributor of features to newspapers and internet sites. He is perhaps best known for his conservative and controversial columns in UCLA's Daily Bruin and the social lore surrounding his dismissal from the paper, the focus of Chapter 11.

Shapiro's central thesis is that the academy is overwhelmingly comprised of people who are anti-Republican, anti-Israel, and anti-American, against capitalism, religion, war, and God, while being pro-Democrat, pro-Islam, and pro-Iraq, in favor of socialism and communism, affirmative action and multiculturalism, homosexuality, abortion, euthanasia, radical environmentalism, and moral relativism. Despite the book's title, the text is often more an indictment of social policy and liberal ideology than an attack on higher education. Shapiro organizes his discussion of these themes into 12 chapters and concludes by outlining recommendations for conservatives in a brief (six-page) chapter entitled "Solutions."

A critique of his arguments is warranted, at least in part, by the fervor underlying his categorization of the typical American faculty member. The book has serious methodological limitations, as the author consistently provides no, incomplete, or biased support for his assertions. To "document" the ways in which the academy brainwashes students, Shapiro relies on one-sentence quotations from faculty members without providing any additional information, including the extent to which one faculty's view was representative of all faculty, whether the statement was related to the faculty's area of expertise, whether it was based on any research, or whether it had instructional purposes beyond indoctrination. Shapiro also inappropriately generalizes from his experiences at UCLA to the experiences of all students at all institutions. When included, sources supporting his perspective are drawn from conservative organizations, talk radio, and online reactionary media outlets. The irony in Shapiro's presentation is that, while his concluding recommendation to students is, "Please, think for yourselves" (p. 182), his own conservative brainwashing seems little different from the left-wing version he so vigorously opposes.

It is tempting to critique the book line-by-line, not only because of the methodological flaws but also because of the pervasiveness of inflammatory language. Two of the more outrageous examples are: "Many professors excuse and even encourage pedophilia" (p. 62) and "Professors are willing to go out on a limb to kill babies" (p. 95). We stopped counting the number of times that he used the word "idiot."

The general style and structure of the argument may be illustrated by a representative example. In Chapter 2, "Partisan Politics," Shapiro summarizes opposition to legislation that he favors, the 1996 Welfare Reform Act, by stating that professors advocate for a "big, expensive, useless form of welfare that keeps teen pregnancy high, work ethic low, and the upper class paying massive taxes" (p. 13). He then quotes Professor Shelia Kamerman of Columbia University: "There is a fantasy that these changes are going to significantly reduce out-of-wedlock childbirth and teenage pregnancy. But very little attention is being paid to the consequences for the children" (p. 13). Shapiro fails to mention that Dr. Kamerman is the Compton Foundation Centennial Professor of Social Work and a nationally and internationally recognized expert on child and family policy. He also does not critique the basis for her statement but trivializes it: "Kamerman knows the trick: When you have no grounds for a real argument, weep for...

...

https://theconversation.com/does-college-turn-people-into-liberals-90905

oes going to college make students into political liberals?

Conservative activists have claimed that universities brainwash students and indoctrinatethem into believing a liberal ideology. The line of reasoning goes like this: Liberal college professors tell students “what to think,” and “what to think” is that conservatives and their positions are to be dismissed. A state lawmaker in Iowa has even suggested universities consider political affiliation in connection with hiring practices in order to balance out the distribution of political representation on the faculty.

Conservatives on campus feel outnumbered, given that about 60 percent of faculty identify as politically liberal. This imbalance supposedly hurts research, stifles open discourse and impairs overall education. Missing in this debate, however, is large-scale empirical evidence on how going to college actually impacts students’ attitudes.

Our findings

We are a group of academics interested in understanding how people of different religious, political and philosophical views interact. We are gathering data in a national study of college students called IDEALS.

Although we have partnered with the Interfaith Youth Core, a Chicago-based national nonprofit that partners with colleges and universities to promote interfaith cooperation, our work in this area predates the organization and serves as the basis for the current IDEALS project.

The IDEALS study started following students when they entered college in 2015. Data on many topics, including tracking how students’ attitudes toward liberals and conservatives changed, were then gathered from the same students during their second year of college.

We measured how students viewed each political group separately along four dimensions. Specifically, we asked respondents the extent to which they thought liberals and conservatives were ethical, made positive contributions to society, and were people the student had something in common with. We also asked students if they had a positive attitude toward each group. The same questions were asked at the beginning of each student’s freshman and sophomore years.

These four attitudes are a great place to start gathering empirical support to test whether colleges are turning students against conservatives. If faculty were “telling students what to think” and students were internalizing these ideas, we’d expect to see evidence during the students’ impressionable first year.

Gains across the spectrum

The result? In our nationally representative sample of over 7,000 undergraduates at more than 120 colleges who answered both the first-year and sophomore questionnaire, students did demonstrate an increase in appreciative attitudes toward liberals after a year of schooling.

Among all students, 48 percent viewed liberals more favorably in their second year of college than when they arrived on campus. However, among the same students, 50 percent also viewed conservatives more favorably. In other words, college attendance is associated, on average, with gains in appreciating political viewpoints across the spectrum, not just favoring liberals.

The data show 31 percent of students did develop more negative attitudes toward conservatives. However, just about the same amount, 30 percent, developed more negative attitudes toward liberals.

Moreover, the data show us that the most growth in appreciation happened among people who were initially least appreciative of either liberals or conservatives. In simple terms, first-year students who begin college really disliking liberals or conservatives have their attitudes soften in college.

Turning to institutional type, students who attend a private college had a higher initial appreciative rating of liberals than their counterparts at public universities. However, overall views changed at both private and public colleges in the same way. Appreciative attitudes toward conservatives increased between the first and second year of college at both private and public to approximately the same degree.

Also, students trend toward appreciating liberal ideologies – both when they first come to college and after their first year. So, while students still favor liberal ideologies over conservative ones, this gap does not widen over the first year. ...Why? We don’t know the answer. However, our best guess is this finding might ultimately have little to do with faculty directly and instead relate to the climate that campuses strive to create for the expression of diverse viewpoints, political and otherwise. While students may come to college never having met someone on the political “other side,” it is hard to avoid doing so in college. One central aim of higher education is to encourage contact, debate, discussion and exposure to persuasion from different kinds of people.

After a year of college, in other words, it might be more challenging for students to brand all liberals or conservatives as wrongheaded when they are studying, eating and learning alongside them. These experiences might even help students appreciate others as people with diverse histories and shared interests in working toward common goals.

One takeaway is clear: It appears as though the first year of college is doing what it should, exposing students to experiences that teach them how to think rather than what to think. endit1Political views

https://theconversation.com/topics/liberals-36271}:

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