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https://yyy.theguardian.com/law/2022/jan/28/clarence-thomas-supreme-court-affirmative-action-case-ginni-thomas

GUK

Who has more influence on supreme court: Clarence Thomas or his activist wife?

Justice’s wife, Ginni Thomas, sits on the board of conservative group that backs lawsuit seeking to end affirmative action, raising concerns it could present potential conflict of interest

Ed Pilkington

@edpilkington

Fri28 Jan 2022

Clarence Thomas, the hardline conservative supreme court justice, is facing calls for his recusal in the case over race-based affirmative action in college admissions that the court agreed to hear this week.

US supreme court will hear challenge to affirmative action in college admission

Read more

The case, which is being brought against Harvard and the University of North Carolina, is the latest potential conflict of interest involving Thomas and his wife Virginia Thomas. Ginni, as she is known, is a prominent rightwing activist who speaks out on a raft of issues that frequently come before the nation’s highest court.

A one-person conservative powerhouse, she set up her own lobbying company Liberty Consulting in 2010. By her own description, she has “battled for conservative principles in Washington” for over 35 years.

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The challenge to the two universities’ race-conscious admissions policies is being brought by Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA). Its leader Edward Blum has been a relentless opponent of affirmative action and voting rights laws.

His argument that race-based affirmative action is a quota system that discriminates against Asian students is framed with the supreme court’s newly emboldened rightwing majority in mind. A central player in that new six-justice conservative supermajority is Clarence Thomas, who is the longest-serving of the justices and at 73 will be the oldest once Stephen Breyer retires.

Justice Thomas’s influence has soared in recent months with the rightward shift of the court following Donald Trump’s three nominations, to the extent that some pundits now dub him the unofficial chief justice of the court.

SFFA’s lawsuit seeking to strike down affirmative action has received the enthusiastic backing of the conservative National Association of Scholars. It filed an amicus brief in support of the suit, accusing Harvard admissions officials of being prejudiced against Asian students and stereotyping them as “uninteresting, uncreative and one-dimensional”.

Ginni Thomas sits on the advisory board of the National Association of Scholars. Observers are concerned that her position with a group that has intervened in the affirmative action case could present appearances of conflict of interest.

Virginia ‘Ginni’ Thomas, wife of the supreme court Justice Clarence Thomas, watches Amy Coney Barrett take the constitutional oath in the White House on 26 October 2020. Photograph: Patrick Semansky/AP

Noah Bookbinder, president of the government ethics watchdog Crew,told the Guardian that while supreme court regulations may not legally require Thomas to recuse himself, there were serious questions to answer.

“Ginni Thomas is an advisory board member of an organization that has taken a very specific position on a case in front of her husband. That will make it hard for the public to be confident that he’s going to be totally unbiased.”

Bookbinder said that in the circumstances “the better course of action would be for him to recuse or for her to cease her involvement in that organization.”

The potential appearance of a conflict of interest over the Harvard case was noted in a recent investigation by the New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer that takes a deep dive into the overlapping interests of the couple. The article chronicles in devastating detail the many instances where Ginni’s political activism appears to present problems for the image and integrity of the court.

“Ginni Thomas has held so many leadership or advisory positions at conservative pressure groups that it’s hard to keep track of them,” Mayer concluded. “Many, if not all, of these groups have been involved in cases that have come before her husband.”

In the most troubling recent instance, Ginni Thomas lent her voice to Trump’s big lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him. She was vocal on the subject in the buildup to the violent insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6 last year that led to the deaths of five people and left more than 100 police officers injured.

On the morning of the January 6 itself, Mark Joseph Stern of Slate reported, Thomas posted on her Facebook page words of encouragement for the “Stop the Steal” marchers in Washington. “LOVE MAGA people!!!!”, she said., “GOD BLESS EACH OF YOU STANDING UP or PRAYING!”

Soon after the insurrection, Thomas was forced to apologise to her husband’s former supreme court law clerks for comments she made privately to them that appeared to lament Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election. The remarks were sent to a private email list called “Thomas Clerk World”.

In the emails, disclosed by the Washington Post, she wrote: “Many of us are hurting, after leaving it all on the field, to preserve the best of this country. I feel I have failed my parents who did their best and taught me to work to preserve liberties.”

An even more direct intervention in the politics surrounding Trump and the big lie was made last December when Thomas joined 62 other influential conservatives in signing an open letter to the leader of the Republicans in the House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy. It urged him to expel the Congress members Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger from the Republican party.

Their sin, the letter writers opined, was to serve on the House committee investigating the January 6 insurrection. They described the committee as an “overtly partisan political persecution that brings disrespect to our country’s rule of law [and] legal harassment to private citizens who have done nothing wrong”.

Since the Capitol insurrection, the Department of Justice has arrested more than 725 defendants in relation to the storming of the building. Federal prosecutors have charged 225 with assaulting, resisting or impeding police officers, including over 75 charged with using a deadly or dangerous weapon or causing serious bodily harm to an officer.

Last week the supreme court rejected attempts by Trump to block the January 6 committee from acquiring his White House records from the time of the attack. There was only one dissent from the bench to that 8-to-1 decision: it came from Clarence Thomas.

“Ginni Thomas’s activities are unprecedented in supreme court history in terms of a spouse engaging in issues that are constantly before the court,” said Gabe Roth, executive director of Fix the Court, a non-partisan group which advocates supreme court reform. “The appearance of impropriety is in itself impropriety – all the supreme court has is the trust of the public, and once you chip away at that you are in trouble.”

Roth added that Thomas’s comments in the days before January 6 were clearly problematic given her husband’s vote on the Trump documents. “It’s possible that the January 6 committee has emails between Ginni Thomas and administration officials from that day or the days leading up to it given how vocal she was. That’s definitely a place where Justice Thomas should have recused himself.”

Should the rightwing majority around Thomas use its newfound muscle to ban affirmative action, as is widely predicted, it would mark the negation of more than 30 years of settled constitutional law on the matter. What lies ahead bears strong resemblance to Roe v Wade, the landmark 1973 ruling that made abortion legal which the court is probably poised to weaken or even overturn outright.

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Mayer points out in the New Yorker that an amicus brief was filed in the supreme court case challenging Roe by Robert George who also sits on the advisory board of the National Association of Scholars alongside Ginni Thomas.

Roth told the Guardian that a simpler solution to the full recusal of Clarence Thomas from the affirmative action case might exist. That would be to remove the National Association of Scholars’ amicus brief.

“There is an easy way to deal with this perceived conflict of interest – strike the amicus brief,” he said.

It is established practice in all federal appeals courts, though not in the supreme court, that amicus briefs brought by anybody with a connection to a judge hearing a case are routinely thrown out.

The president of the National Association of Scholars, Peter Wood, told the Guardian that he knew of no conflict of interest relating to Thomas’s position on the advisory board. “Ms Thomas’s role is to provide advice to NAS in response to questions I put to her about NAS policy and initiatives. I have never discussed with her any NAS matter that was likely to come before the supreme court,” he said.

ginni Thomas also served as a director of C.N.P. Action, a dark money group that, according to Mayer, “behind closed doors, connects wealthy donors with some of the most radical right-wing figures in America.” She’s also on the advisory board of Turning Point USA, a pro-Trumpstudent group that reportedly sent protestors to the Jan. 6 rally.

She has partnerships with right-wing groups that have other Supreme Court business, including Project Veritas, which is known for making secret videotapes of progressive public officials, and Cleta Mitchell, who was on the call in which Trump urged Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” enough votes to swing the state’s electors to him — ostensibly illegally.

Ginni Thomas was also a paid consultant to a group that filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court in support of Trump’s Muslim travel ban, which was ultimately upheld over the dissenting votes of Justices Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan, Sonya Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsberg.

NAS: And she serves on the board of a conservative group that filed an amicus brief in a Supreme Court case involving race-conscious affirmative action at Harvard. (Although during her Supreme Court confirmation hearings, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson pledged to recuse herself from that case, due to a six-year role on the Harvard Board of Overseers, Thomas has not.)....

ref

nEW YORK, NY, July 30, 2018 - The National Association of Scholars has filed an amicus brief in support of Students for Fair Admissions' (SFFA) motion for summary judgment against the President and Fellows of Harvard College. SFFA’s motion documents Harvard’s racially motivated admissions policies and calls on the college to release admissions data and to adopt race-blind admissions policies.

“NAS supports the principle that students should be admitted to colleges on the basis of academic achievement, proven ability, ambition, and commitment to learning," said NAS President Peter Wood. "Racial identity should play no role in determining who should or should not be admitted, and the same standards should be applied to all individuals. Judgments about good character may be appropriate, but not when they serve as subterfuges to favor or disfavor whole categories of students.  Harvard is guilty of racially stereotyping Asian students as lacking ‘positive personality,’ likeability, courage, and kindness, and not being ‘widely respected.’ These are not true judgments of character, but ways of disguising an animus against Asian students."

The National Association of Scholars has opposed racial preferences in admissions policies since its founding in 1988. NAS members wrote the text of California Proposition 209, which made race-based admissions policies such as Harvard’s illegal in 1996. NAS previously urged legislation, not litigation, to end race-based preferences, and still desires such an outcome. Transparency in admissions policies is an important step toward that goal.

Wood noted: “By filing this amicus brief, we hope to throw the weight of evidence behind SFFA and sway the court toward transparency so that the public may decide if race-based admissions are for the greater good.”

NAS is a network of scholars and citizens united by a commitment to academic freedom, disinterested scholarship, and excellence in American higher education. Membership in NAS is open to all who share a commitment to these broad principles. NAS publishes a journal and has state and regional affiliates. Visit NAS at www.nas.org.

==

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https://www.desmogblog.com/2020/02/07/dark-moneyed-denialists-fixing-science-symposium-doubt

mashey

The “Fixing Science” symposium, which is hosted by the National Association of Scholars and kicks off today in Oakland, California, includes credible speakers who want to improve some areas of science hurt by the use of poor statistical methods or making irreproducible claims.

Unfortunately, they are outnumbered by people who have often cast doubt on mainstream climate, environmental, and health sciences. For starters, who thinks that long-time fossil fuel–funded Patrick Michaels, a senior fellow with the climate science–denying Competitive Enterprise Institute, will “fix science”?  UPDATE 02/10/20: NAS Brochure at Symposium.

I was first tipped off to the swarm of climate science deniers at this meeting by Lenny Teytelman on Twitter, who said he found seven climate deniers (an undercount), and by Oxford professor Dorothy Bishopin her January 12 blog post, “Should I stay or should I go?…” about this meeting and whether scientists should engage with those with dissenting views in a situation like this.

Both provided useful insight and information, which I've consolidated with other research here.

Professor Bishop summarized well:

“But, I reiterate, the main point is not whether NatAsSchlols is left- or right-wing. It's the weird structuring of the meeting, which juxtaposes a set of experts in the 'reproducibility crisis' with a set of individuals who promote scientific views that are far from mainstream … You know your arguments would not survive scrutiny by experts familiar with evidence in the area, so you don't invite those (and to be fair, it's unlikely that they'd come anyway, as there are diminishing returns in engaging with those whose minds are fixed). But what you can do is to cast doubt on all scientific evidence by inviting along those who are questioning the solidity and credibility of current scientific practices. That's what is happening here.” [emphasis added]

Many speakers at this meeting have been affiliated with groups known for anti-science efforts, either ideologically or financially, funded mostly by dark money. When their funding sources are accessible, they include the usual companies (fossil fuels, tobacco, and chemical) and private conservative foundations, which lines up with 2013 research by sociologist Robert Brulle, summarized in my post “Study Details Dark Money Flowing to Climate Science Denial.”

A few other speakers have often worked in “product defense,” an area covered well byDavid Michaels in Triumph of Doubt(2020) (review). I'm compiling here a list of the speakers and organizations who are more often denying science than trying to fix it. People should be very wary of those listed in red, and I've included links to more information for those who want to do their own research.

The Fixing Science symposium sponsors are the National Association of Scholars (NAS, which should not be confused with the reputable U.S. National Academy of Sciences, which also goes by NAS) and The Independent Institute (TII). The former is led by Peter Wood and the latter by David Theroux, both vocal (but non-technical) climate science deniers.

Anti-science Groups

I've scoured IRS Form 990 data (line 8) for the four organizations affiliated with the most symposium speakers, a search that yielded total grants received each year from 2003-2017, shown in Table A. But such 501(c)(3) “public charities” need not report the sources of those grants. Using the candid.org website, I've compiled the information in the spreadsheet, “Grants To Think Tanks,whose two sheets each contain a Table 1 that lists all 1,528 grants, and a Table 2 that summarizes them.

The first sheet sorts by Recipient-Donor-Year, the second by Donor-Recipient-Year. Donor Advised Funds (DAFs) like Donors Trust and Donors Capital Funddo report grants they make, but their legal structure makes it impossible to know the original sources of the funding. Perhaps that was not dark enough for some donors. The huge Fidelity Charitable DAF started making grants to the same four organizations in 2015. It is impossible to know who got the idea first, but by 2016, Charles Koch was routing millions of dollars through that DAF.

In Table A, the Miss % is the fraction of total grant money given directly by corporations or others, so not reported on 990PF forms, and therefore, invisible to the public. Adding DAF% and Miss % yields Dark %, which shows the extent of dark money. The Heartland Institute's DAF% is high, as it receives roughly a third of its money (32%) via Donors Trust/Capital Fund.

In the tables below, CD indicates promotion of Climate Denial and TD shows persistent Tobacco Defense, with lower case implying a lesser degree. Appearing in red shows clear, well-documented anti-science behavior, generally to create doubt about science that conflicts with business interests.

DeSmog readers are likely familiar with many of the better known groups, or can click on the profiles, so this section will focus on lesser known groups.

Table A - Think Tank Affiliations of Fixing Science Attendees| Abbrev | Organization Name # of affiliated attendees (of 22)==> | #   | 2003-17 $1,000s | DAF % | Miss % | Dark % | C D | T D | DeSmog Profile | SourceWatch Profile | Wikipedia Profile |

NAS has long been funded by the same conservative foundations highlighted in Brulle's 2013 study, including the Charles Koch Foundation, Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, and especially Sarah Scaife Foundation, whose biggest investments were in tobacco and oil (CCC p. 47-48).

NAS was examined in detail in “Bottling Nonsense” Mashey (2011), and the financials are now updated in the spreadsheet NASfinancials. It is not really a membership organization in the same sense as the better-known American Association of University Professors (2017 Form 990). Unlike NAS, AAUP elects leaders and receives most of its income from dues for services.

Table B - AAUP vs NAS from 2017 Form 990s| Group | 8. Contributions & Grants | 9. Program Service Revenue | 10. Investment $ | 11. Other | 12. Total | Dues | Dues % of Total |

The NAS 2018 Annual Report p. 21 is instructive, showing 2,591 (2,778) members at close of 2017 (2018, average $52/member, of whom 65% (71%) carried over into 2018 (2019). Their chart implies no more than 40% of the members (“full-time” and ambiguously “lifetime”) are active academics. Half are retired.

NAS seems to employ the same business model as other small conservative think tanks, although more targeted at conservative academics. It is funded by grants from Koch and allies to attack “the left” and raise doubts about climate change, sustainability, diversity, and even tobacco. Among many articles, NAS published George Leef's “The Push for Tobacco-Free Campuses” (2009). 

“Most schools now compel students and personnel who desire to smoke to do so in designated outside areas, but that isn't enough for a group that wants a complete tobacco ban. Inside Higher Ed has the story. This ought to worry the “diversity” advocates. Smokers are a minority group with some distinct cultural traits. If colleges drive smokers away, as the proposed campus-wide bans would tend to do, won't that deprive other students of the opportunity to learn about them and benefit from the perspective they'd bring to class discussions involving personal freedom and trade-offs? Or do those concerns only apply to certain groups and not others?”

This is a public health issue, but NAS seems to see everything through an ideology lens. Or maybe this is something for its biggest funder, whose foundation has invested heavily in tobacco. It recalls the “smokers' rights” front groups funded by tobacco companies that sprang up during the 1990s.

NAS continually publishes strident, ill-informed articles on climate change, often laced with personal attacks, as DeSmog described in a 2011 article,”NAS President Peter Wood: wrong, dishonest or hopelessly compromised?”

My 2011 report, “Bottling Nonsense“ (p.11-17), excerpted many NAS articles on climate. Distinguished MIT climate scientist Kerry Emanuel tried valiantly to educate NAS, but to no avail, which is excerpted on p.16.

On p.17, you can find an excerpt from NAS' Ashley Thorne, Director of Communcations, who wrote, “The Father of Global Warming Skepticism: An Interview with S. Fred Singer.”

“S. Fred Singer is a man you should know about. He is a genius in the literal sense and a key figure in one of the biggest policy debates of our day. A pioneer in rocket science, weather satellites, and air traffic control; an expert in oil economics and the Earth’s atmosphere; and the author of numerous scholarly books, Dr. Singer is a distinguished and respected scientist … In addition, he is the founder and president of the Science & Environmental Policy Project (SEPP), an organization that, among other things, seeks to promote scientific integrity in research on global warming. The National Association of Scholars, as we have stated before, takes no position on global warming.“ [emphasis added]

That was a demonstrable falsehood, shown by numerous examples.

I wrote on p. 29: “People are entitled to express their opinions, but not all opinions are equally credible. People sometimes have nonobvious strong backgrounds in topics, but for either Wood or Thorne it is hard to find any trace of significant training or expertise in physics, math, statistics, chemistry, biology, geosciences, computing or climate science itself. Frequent errors on basic facts argue against such.”

Did Thorne know much science? NAS President Peter Wood from 2005-2007 served as provost of a small Christian school, The King's College (see Table D at end), which teaches little or no real science, as seen in its course catalogs. Thorne left a few years ago, but NAS currently employs three more King's graduates: Policy Director Rachelle Peterson (2013 (Desmog, also a Heartland Policy Advisor)), Chief Development Officer Christopher Kendall, and Communications Coordinator Chance Layton, all graduating with a degree in “Politics, philosophy and economics.”

The only science course in the current catalog was first offered around 2012:

“Scientific Reasoning This course is an historically informed introduction to modern physics, astronomy, cosmology, chemistry, and biology, with the goal of attaining a broad conceptual understanding of contemporary science, its empirical basis, and its harmonious relationship with the Christian worldview. Given the intellectual authority of science in modern Western civilization, it is impossible to engage the surrounding culture effectively with the claims of Christ without having a broad-based scientific literacy, a deep understanding of the deleterious effects that naturalistic presuppositions have had on both science and culture, the philosophical and scientific basis on which assumptions may be challenged, and a well-defined understanding that relates the biblical worldview to the world of science. The course will involve lecture, discussion, and laboratory components.  … COURSE CODE: SCI 212”

TII and Fred Singerhave been affiliated for decades. TII published his 1990s book Hot Talk, Cold Science, still publishes numerous climate-denial blog posts, and an occasional video, which I share in later examples.

SourceWatch's profile has good coverage of TII's work on behalf of Big Tobacco:

“in (about) 1992 the Institute under Robert Higgs took over the administration of the tobacco industry's Cash for Comments Economists Network from Robert Tollison, James Savarese, and the Center for the Study of Public Choice.”

Heartland Institute and American Council on Science & Health are well-covered in the profiles above.

Most of George Mason University seems to be a typical university, but the GMU law school and especially the economics department are funded and strongly influenced by Charles Koch and allies. Tracking funding through GMU is challenging, as gifts are often labeled “General support.” However, the Sarah Scaife Foundation regularly donates (2015, 2017), explicitly to the Law and Economics Center and the Center for the Study of Public Choice (CSPC) within the economics department. The law school gave us David Schnare, Ken Cuccinelli, his helper (in pursuing climate scientist Michael Mann, unsuccessfully) Wesley Russell, and his ex-law partner Milton Johns.

“See No Evil, Speak Little Truth, Break Rules, Blame Others” (2012) p. 54-57, covered GMU funding known at the time, and p. 58-61 described many members' involvements with climate denial and/or tobacco defense. The current head of CSPC is Donald Boudreaux (DeSmog), who has spoken for Heartland, and has been affiliated with the Competitive Enterprise Institute, TII, etc. His name will reappear, as will that of Robert Tollison (Sourcewatch), who created and ran the Cash for Comments Economists Network from GMU's Center for the Study of Public Choice.

None of this should be taken to imply that all of those working in these departments are anti-science, but there is a long history of defending companies that “privatize profits and socialize the damages” and writing articles and reports to cast doubt on science, which is unsurprising given the funding sources. Others need to be very cautious in accepting claims about science from these parts of GMU.

Given space constraints and lower frequency, Table C's Other column just uses one letter codes for the following organizations:

{C}_EI, _{T}_ASSC, _{C}_O2 Coalition (CO2CO)  and {G}_WPF should be well-known to DeSmog readers, but links are provided.

_{A}_PS2009 was a silly petition by Will Happer (a key player in climate science denial: DeSmog, SourceWatch, WIkipedia), Fred Singer (DeSmog), and others to weaken the American Physical Society's statement on climate. Happer and Singer were angry about my exposureof it in 2009. James Enstrom signed it, although he was a particle physicist-turned-epidemiologist.

_{H}_apper2016 was my name for a letter from Happer to Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) to hassle and obstuct the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), a letter signed by a long list of people, including Peter Wood, Stanley Young, and James Enstrom.  NOAA does great data quality work.

_{I}_DL Is  the University of California-San Francisco Industry Documents Library, which started with the tobacco industry, but has growing collections of chemical, drug, food, and fossil fuel documents. It is a great source for historical research.

The Program and its Speakers

This lists _{S}_peakers and _{m}_oderators (all also Speakers), in order by first appearance, but listed only once. LT and DB mark those discussed by Lenny Teytelman (LT) onTwitter and Dorothy Bishop (DB)in “Should I stay or should I go?…”

Stanford postdoc Noah Haberattended most of the first day, esxcept dinner and posted an informative 60-tweet thread.

Table C - Fixing Science Attendees ({S}_peakers/{m}_oderators) Feb 7-8, 2020| Time | Role | Name | Affiliation(s) in Program (unsaid) | TII | NAS | HI | ACSH | GMU, CSPC | Oth er | C D | T D | LT | DB |

The following covers those who are clearly problematic when it comes to anti-science efforts, or who might have been but for which evidence was not strong.

01. David Theroux founded and runs TII, which has promoted anti-climate science efforts for decades and ran Big Tobacco's Cash for Economists Network starting in 1996. Nicotine addiction really only works for most people during adolescent brain development (roughly 10-24) and youth are especially deterred by higher prices, so this was an effort to help Big Tobacco addict adolescents and kill them slowly. An Industry Documents Library search for “David Theroux” returns 13 hits, such as this letter, from Philip Morris to Theroux in 1994:

“On behalf of Philip Morris USA, I am pleased to enclose a check in the amount of $5,000 to officially maintain our company as a patron sponsor of the Institute ($1,000) for 1995 and to support the Institute's research activities ($4,000)….”

William F. Shughart II wrote a 1995 book against “sin taxes” like those on cigarettes:

“Hence, when David Theroux of the Independent Institute contacted me to ask whether I might be interested in putting together a volume that would explore the purposes and effects of tax policy in regulating consumption choices, I eagerly accepted. Let me here acknowledge the Independent Institute's financial sponsorship and David Theroux' encouragement along the way.”

02. Peter Wood got a PhD in anthropology, but seems to have published little if any peer-reviewed research. He has written several books via Encounter Books, which has published three books for Roy Spencer (DeSmog). Do they publish science?

For a sample of his style, read his two Chronicle of Higher Education articles cited in our reply, “Bottling Nonsense, Misusing a Civil Platform.”He was apparently upset by a 2011 profile of me in Science as defending climate scientists, so he wrote personal attacks against me and his more frequent target, Michael Mann. Wood persists in this style, as in his October 2019 blog post, ”Polar Bear Researcher is Unbearable According to the University of Victoria: Controversial Scientist Deserves Academic Freedom”:

“Among Crockford’s enemies numbers Penn State 'climatologist' Michael Mann, who has a troubled history with facts but a celebrity status among warmists. Mann characterized Crockford’s website as a 'denier blog.' … Crockford’s dismissal is a striking example of how the academy attempts to police scientific opinions on climate change. Scientists — including very well-known figures such as Crockford, William Happer, and Judith Curry — are subject to a constant barrage of ad hominem attack.”

Susan Crockford (DeSmog)  has been an (untenured) Adjunct Professor at University of Victoria, has never studied polar bears in the field, or published any peer-reviewed papers on them, but she has strong opinions, a website, speaks at Heartland Institute conferences and has been on their payroll.

DeSmog readers may be familiar with Curry (DeSmog) and Happer, but for more, this thread includes personal experience with him, including being attacked as a “destrucive force” in the same 2011Science article that upset Wood.

Wood attended a 2011 climate denial conference and was on a panel with Steve Milloy (DeSmog) and Christopher Monckton (DeSmog), whose talk (which displayed a swastika) he praised for “wry delivery,” described in Mashey (2011), p.12,18.

3. Nathan Schactman is a lawyer who has published muchon evidence. Product liability lawsuits can range from bogus to strongly merited and either may have good or bad lawyers. He may or may not be a “product defense lawyer” (akin to Louis Anthony Cox) defending companies against legitimate complaints.

David Michaels in Triumph of Doubt(2020) (review) devotes a whole chapter, p.117-140 to “Deadly Dust (silica).” Hence, it is somewhat worrying to see this in Schactman's blog:

“Contesting An Erroneous Diagnosis of Silicosis,” for Harris Martin Seminars, in New Orleans, Louisiana (March 26, 2004) “Should an ILO 1/0 Be Compensated in Silica Litigation,” for Harris Martin Seminars, in New York, New York (January 29, 2003)

“State-of-the-Art Defense in Silica Litigation,” Chair and presenter at Mealey’s Silica Litigation Conference, in Atlanta, Georgia (October 13 and 14, 2003)

“Silicosis Litigation,” to Merrill-Lynch Institutional Investors, in Philadelphia, PA (October 7, 2003)

“Stop Silicosis Litigation – Now,” at Industrial Minerals Association – North America’s Semiannual Meeting, in Washington, D.C. (September 25, 2003)”

Also concerning are articles like The Trials and Tribulations of Two Historians: Adjudicating Responsibility for Pollution and Personal Harm (2009), by Columbia's David Rosner and CUNY's Gerald Markowitz, who wrote Deadly Dust(1991):

“For most of the 1990s the attempts to undermine our work were done in depositions, generally private meetings where we could defend our reputations by presenting the documents we had uncovered. While the depositions were trying, in fact we had the materials available and often provided thousands of pages to defence attorneys. But that began to change shortly after the turn of the new century. The first shot across the bow occurred at a meeting of lawyers sponsored by LexisNexis in Washington at which Nathan Schachtman, an attorney with McCarter & English in Philadelphia, gave a lengthy address attacking us and our book. In Mealey's Litigation Report: Silica, published in 2003, he castigated us for writing a “jeremiad” that “resonates to the passions and prejudices of the last century”. He took us to task for our “prejudice” that “silicosis results from the valuation of profits over people and for not pointing out that in Communist countries silicosis rates were much higher. “They fairly consistently excuse or justify the actions of labor … They excoriate the motives and actions of industry …”. Later on the same page, Schachtman argued that our “thesis ignores the practical … problem of motivating or mandating workers to take appropriate measures to protect themselves”.17 Schachtman saw no problem with accusing us of sloppy scholarship, arguing that we are little more than propagandists, all in the first page of his piece. … (much more).” [emphasis added]

This seems akin to Wood's style of attack.

05. David Levy is a part of the GMU CSPC (his page). He coauthored a 1989 paper with Gary M. Anderson and Robert Tollison, admid their involvement with the Cash for Comments Economists Network effort for Big Tobacco.

He was on the committee for this PhD defense led by Donald Boudreaux (DeSmog), a firm climate science denier.

“Uncertainty and Bias in Global Warming Ronald J. Baty

Major Professor: Donald J Boudreaux, PhD, Department of Economics

Committee Members: David Levy, Lloyd Cohen November 28, 2012

“Why did the scientific debate about Anthropogenic Global Warming or Climate Change devolve into a political and quasi-religious issue over the past two decades?  The primary mechanism behind this process was the interplay of uncertainty and publication bias, and its effect on the government’s and non-governmental organizations’ research funding practices. That is, it produced a misallocation of monies for research, in addition to, impeding the policy-making process. This study examines the Essential Science Indicator’s Top 10 most often cited journals and Library of Congress books on global warming. The study concludes that the insufficient number of articles raising questions about anthropogenic causes of climate change in science journals is evidence of bias. In addition, it finds that non-academic publishers predominately publish the books by academic skeptics. At the same time books by either academic or non-academics supporting climate change are more likely published by an academic publisher resulting in greater professional stature, which fuels the process over and over. The final sections of the study discuss the methods by which publication bias, uncertainty and research funding produced the current contentious level of debate about and current quasi-religious status of Anthropogenic Global Warming. The contentious debate and contested results from climate research allows for the misallocation of funding and hampers the policy making process.” [emphasis added]

I've skimmed the accepted dissertation, whose sources are often as poor as those in the Wegman Report. Baty relies on George C. Marshall Institute, Ronald Bailey, CEI, Freeman Dyson, Chris Horner's “Red Hot Lies,” Donna LaFramboise, Richard Lindzen, Bjorn Lomborg, Stephen McIntyre & Ross McKitrick (2003), four books by Patrick Michaels, Fred Singer (twice), Lawrence Solomon, and Anthony Watts, for example, while denigrating many mainstream scientists.

06. Richard K. Vedder is an emeritus economist, a Senior Fellow at TII, a Member of the Board of directors at NAS (2012-current, 2017 as example), a Policy Advisor at Heartland, and was an active member of Robert Tollision's GMU CSPC-based Cash for Comments Economists Network. An Industry Documents Library search gets 393 hits, too many to examine in detail here. He makes numerous complaints about universities, ignoring the fact he got paid to help Big Tobacco addict adolescents (done by keeping taxes low).

“The Politicization of Higher Education: College Presidents and Global Warming” (2011)

07. Elliott Bloom was a researcher at SLAC, has a webpage at TII that promotes his video done with Willie Soon, Global Warming: Fact or Fiction?, which once again proclaims “It's the Sun” with a big event that promoted them as well as Fred Singer's 20-year-old Hot Talk, Cold Science.

09. Anastasios Tsonis is an emeritus professor of atmospheric sciences, with many publications, but is a member of the academic advisory council for the UK's main climate denial group, the Global Warming Policy Foundation (DeSmog),  and writes articles or is quoted:

Ocean Cycles, Not Humans, May Be Behind Most Observed Climate Change(2017)

Anastasios Tsonis: The Overblown And Misleading Issue Of Global Warming (2019)

Business Insider (2013)

Global Temperature Standstill May Last 30 Years, Climate Scientist Predicts(2013)

“One problem with that conclusion, according to some climate scientists, is that the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has limited the hiatus to 10-15 years. Anastasios Tsonis, distinguished professor at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee, believes the pause will last much longer than that. He points to repeated periods of warming and cooling in the 20th century.

“Each one of those regimes lasts about 30 years … I would assume something like another 15 years of leveling off or cooling,” he told Fox News.”

Many climate scientists thought the “hiatus” was noise, 2014-2019 were the six hottest years on record, and Tsonis was wrong, which can happen, but most scientists do not go to denialist groups to write for them.

He has also written for Heartland Insitute, DO YOU BELIEVE IN GLOBAL WARMING?

10. Barry Smith was a Member of the Board of Directors for NAS from at least 2011-2017, but not 2018. He is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, but perhaps was not really very involved with NAS, so is not shaded red.

13. Patrick Michaels started doing paid climate denial work for coal companies about 30 years ago (DeSmog) and is one of the most visible people, now at the Competitive Enterprise Institute after years at the Cato Institute. He was involved with TASSC, which was originally funded by Philip Morris. He often complains about “Pal review” of papers, but in fact “Skeptics Prefer Pal Review Over Peer Review: Chris de Freitas, Pat Michaels And Their Pals, 1997-2003.” He published the most papers via a complicit editor.

14. David Randall is a HI Policy Advisor and  NAS Research Director, but seems to have little background in science:

“David earned a Ph.D. in history from Rutgers University, an M.F.A. in fiction writing from Columbia University, a master’s degree in library science from the Palmer School at Long Island University, and a B.A. from Swarthmore College. Prior to working at NAS he was the sole librarian at the John McEnroe Library at New York Studio School.”

He wrote “The Irreproducibility Crisis of Modern Science,”launched with great fanfare (and a laudatory afterword by Will Happer), well-dissected by Michael Schulson in “A Remedy for Broken Science, Or an Attempt to Undercut It? ”

“DAVID RANDALL and Christopher Welser are unlikely authorities on the reproducibility crisis in science. Randall, a historian and librarian, is the director of research at the National Association of Scholars, a small higher education advocacy group. Welser teaches Latin at a Christian college in Minnesota. Neither has published anything on replication or reproducibility.”

Schulson's article is well worth reading for more on NAS, including Kerry Emanuel's comments after a run-in with Wood:

“He left the organization soon afterward.

“It sort of revealed them not to be what they claimed to be — people who stood for scientific truth and scientific integrity. It was just another organization that used that as a front,” Emanuel said. “They’re basically a political organization posing as an organization dedicated to free inquiry,” he added.”

15. S. Stanley Young is a statistician and CEO of his own consulting business CGState. He has a web pageat Heartland, he where wrote an article with many people profiled at DeSmog: Tim Huelskamp, Joseph Bast, Jay Lehr, S. Stanley Young, H.Sterling Burnett, Frederick D. Palmer, Bette Grande, Steven Milloy, “PRESS RELEASE: HEARTLAND INSTITUTE APPLAUDS END OF ‘SECRET SCIENCE’ AT EPA”.

He is also “Director of the Shifting Sands Project”at NAS.

16. James Enstrom (Sourcewatch, Wikipedia) is now a retired professor of epidemiology, with a long  history of downplaying secondhand smoke and damage from PM2.5 particulate matter, in addition to denying the science of climate change. He received funding from Philip Morris, has a webpage at Heartland, has spoken at several Heartland climate conferences (ICCC-10, 12), and is a Trustee of ACSH. He signed the APS2009 and HAPPER2016 letters.

17. Louis Anthony Cox is a well-published statistician/risk expert, but with a long history of corporate “product defense.” Unlike some of the others, he displays technical competence, but employed in the service of doubt.

David Michaels in Triumph of Doubt(2020) (review) discusses Cox with whom he often had direct interactions, p.133-134 (silica), 224-225, and 270. For example, on p. 224-225 he writes:

“The Trump Administration's choice to chair the Clean air Scientific Advisory committee was Louis Anttony (Tony) Cox, a long-time industry consultant who clings to uncommon opinions, like lowering ozone and the belief that PM2.5 exposures would not improve public health. Cox was well-known at the Labor Department for his testiomony on behalf of the National Mining Association, predictably claiming that the government's risk assesment on respirable coal dust was flawed.”

Jie Jenny Zou and Chris Young wrote, “Wave of climate lawsuits threatens the future of Big Oil” in 2017:

“But the all-expenses-paid event hosted by George Mason University’s Law & Economics Center in Arlington, Virginia, served another purpose: It was the first of several seminars designed to promote 'skepticism' of scientific evidence among likely candidates for the 140-plus federal judgeships President Trump will fill over the next four years.

The lone science instructor was Louis Anthony Cox Jr., a risk analyst with deep industry ties whose recent appointment as chair of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee drew condemnation in public-health circles. Since 1988, Cox has consulted for the American Petroleum Institute, a lobby group that spent millions to dispute the cancer-causing properties of benzene, an ingredient in gasoline, and is now working to discredit the science on smog-causing ozone. He’s also testified on behalf of the chemical industry and done research for tobacco giant Philip Morris.

For a $4,000 honorarium, Cox delivered two closed-door lectures at George Mason: “a primer on the scientific method,” followed by a session aimed at “understanding what science can and cannot do.” Included in his presentation were slides urging judges to be wary of EPA science on fine particles — a pollutant he has been researching for API. “

See also “EPA swaps top science advisers with industry allies” (2017), for more information on Cox.

Harvard School of Public Health published: “EPA may limit review of evidence on air pollution and health risks”:

“The paper, published on March 21, 2019, noted that the EPA’s Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC) has recently recommended that the EPA limit the types of epidemiological studies used to assess the health risks of air pollution … CASAC is currently headed by Louis Anthony Cox Jr., a Denver-based risk assessment consultant who has worked for the oil, chemical, and healthcare industries. Cox said in December that his panel wasn’t convinced by the EPA’s 1,800-page assessment of small particle air pollution, which cited more than 2,800 research papers on the subject and was authored by more than 50 of the world’s leading experts on air pollution — and reviewed by dozens more, according to a March 21, 2019 Los Angeles Times article. That assessment concluded that even low levels of exposure to particulate matter can lead to illness and death. Cox accused the authors of that assessment of being subjective in their conclusions and using bad science, according to the Times.” [emphasis added]

An Industry Documents Library search finds 57 documents, including interactions with Shell Oil and expert-witnessing for Philip Morris.

18. Mark Regnerus's work and criticisms of his methods are not ones I've studied, although it is not clear what expertise he really brings to improving science. Dorothy Bishop wrote:

“Mark Regnerus, Professor, Sociology Department, University of Texas at Austin has a Wikipedia page which notes the controversy around his research on the adverse impact of a child having a parent who has been involved in a same-sex relationship. The research is funded by the Witherspoon Institute, a conservative think tank. Regnerus also contributed to an amicus brief in opposition to same-sex marriage. A sympathetic account of the controversy was published by the NatAsSchols .”

Update 02/08/20: HI attendee count 7 typo, fixed to 6 and missing link to David Randall as HI Policy Advisor added.

* People were unfamiliar with The King's College and asked for more. I looked for its Form 990s at candid.org and citizenaudit.org, found 2016 the latest available.  Most 501(c)(3) nonprofits filed  2017 reports by late 2018 as required. Perhaps this has been filed, but not yet processed at those websites. Warning: in various reports, it is sometimes “KIngs” and sometimes “KIng's” so care needed with searches. However I did find, among many other grants:

Table D A few selected Grants to The KIng's College| All grants in $1,000s | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 |

UPDATE 02/09/20: Add link to Desmog profile for Rachelle Peterson, link to Noah Huber's commentary, and to annotated copy of NAS brochure provided at Fixing Science Symposium.

TXT

The “Fixing Science” symposium, which is hosted by the National Association of Scholars and kicks off today in Oakland, California, includes credible speakers who want to improve some areas of science hurt by the use of poor statistical methods or making irreproducible claims.

Unfortunately, they are outnumbered by people who have often cast doubt on mainstream climate, environmental, and health sciences. For starters, who thinks that long-time fossil fuel–funded Patrick Michaels, a senior fellow with the climate science–denying Competitive Enterprise Institute, will “fix science”?  UPDATE 02/10/20: NAS Brochure at Symposium.

I was first tipped off to the swarm of climate science deniers at this meeting by Lenny Teytelman on Twitter, who said he found seven climate deniers (an undercount), and by Oxford professor Dorothy Bishop in her January 12 blog post, “Should I stay or should I go?…” about this meeting and whether scientists should engage with those with dissenting views in a situation like this.

Both provided useful insight and information, which I've consolidated with other research here.

Professor Bishop summarized well:

“But, I reiterate, the main point is not whether NatAsSchlols is left- or right-wing. It's the weird structuring of the meeting, which juxtaposes a set of experts in the 'reproducibility crisis' with a set of individuals who promote scientific views that are far from mainstream … You know your arguments would not survive scrutiny by experts familiar with evidence in the area, so you don't invite those (and to be fair, it's unlikely that they'd come anyway, as there are diminishing returns in engaging with those whose minds are fixed). But what you can do is to cast doubt on all scientific evidence by inviting along those who are questioning the solidity and credibility of current scientific practices. That's what is happening here.” [emphasis added]

Many speakers at this meeting have been affiliated with groups known for anti-science efforts, either ideologically or financially, funded mostly by dark money. When their funding sources are accessible, they include the usual companies (fossil fuels, tobacco, and chemical) and private conservative foundations, which lines up with 2013 research by sociologist Robert Brulle, summarized in my post “Study Details Dark Money Flowing to Climate Science Denial.”

A few other speakers have often worked in “product defense,” an area covered well by David Michaels in Triumph of Doubt (2020) (review). I'm compiling here a list of the speakers and organizations who are more often denying science than trying to fix it. People should be very wary of those listed in red, and I've included links to more information for those who want to do their own research.

The Fixing Science symposium sponsors are the National Association of Scholars (NAS, which should not be confused with the reputable U.S. National Academy of Sciences, which also goes by NAS) and The Independent Institute (TII). The former is led by Peter Wood and the latter by David Theroux, both vocal (but non-technical) climate science deniers.

Anti-science Groups

I've scoured IRS Form 990 data (line 8) for the four organizations affiliated with the most symposium speakers, a search that yielded total grants received each year from 2003-2017, shown in Table A. But such 501(c)(3) “public charities” need not report the sources of those grants. Using the candid.org website, I've compiled the information in the spreadsheet, “Grants To Think Tanks, whose two sheets each contain a Table 1 that lists all 1,528 grants, and a Table 2 that summarizes them.

The first sheet sorts by Recipient-Donor-Year, the second by Donor-Recipient-Year. Donor Advised Funds (DAFs) like Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund do report grants they make, but their legal structure makes it impossible to know the original sources of the funding. Perhaps that was not dark enough for some donors. The huge Fidelity Charitable DAF started making grants to the same four organizations in 2015. It is impossible to know who got the idea first, but by 2016, Charles Koch was routing millions of dollars through that DAF.

In Table A, the Miss % is the fraction of total grant money given directly by corporations or others, so not reported on 990PF forms, and therefore, invisible to the public. Adding DAF% and Miss % yields Dark %, which shows the extent of dark money. The Heartland Institute's DAF% is high, as it receives roughly a third of its money (32%) via Donors Trust/Capital Fund.

In the tables below, CD indicates promotion of Climate Denial and TD shows persistent Tobacco Defense, with lower case implying a lesser degree. Appearing in red shows clear, well-documented anti-science behavior, generally to create doubt about science that conflicts with business interests.

DeSmog readers are likely familiar with many of the better known groups, or can click on the profiles, so this section will focus on lesser known groups...much more charts, see bak

==

mostly old ppl

http://www.horowitzfreedomcenter.tv/2018/06/22/david-horowitz-at-uc-santa-cruz/

==

National Scholars' Group Turns 25, Showing Its Age.

Authors:

SCHMIDT, PETER

Source:

Chronicle of Higher Education. 3/8/2013, Vol. 59 Issue 26, pA3-A4. 2p.

Document Type:

Article

Subject Terms:

*AFFIRMATIVE action programs in education -- Lawsuits & claims

*COLLEGE curriculum

*WESTERN civilization -- Study & teaching

*MEMBERSHIP in associations, institutions, etc.

*EDUCATION advocacy

UNITED States

Company/Entity:

NATIONAL Association of Scholars (U.S.)

People:

BALCH, Stephen H.

Abstract:

The article discusses the financial standing and effectiveness of the U.S. higher education advocacy group called the National Association of Scholars (NAS). The author looks at the group's legal action in cases involving affirmative action plans for admissions at public colleges, its advocacy for colleges to adopt Western civilizations curricula, and the challenges NAS has in maintaining membership and influence. Topics include comments by Stephen H. Balch, a former NAS president, as well as NAS's challenges in obtaining funding from foundations and philanthropic organizations. Also discussed is its alignment with conservative and traditionalist approaches to higher education.

==

A QUARTER CENTURY Spent fighting change it regards as harmful to higher education, the National Association of Scholars has learned just what a mighty foe change can be.

The group, whose 25th-anniversary conference was set to be held in New York this past weekend, has struggled to keep up with technology and has been hurt by economic downturns. Its membership has dwindled to about 3,000, down by one-third from its height in the late 1990s. It has given up on trying to maintain the health of its state affiliates, several of which have shut down or are dying on the vine. It has found philanthropic support harder to come by as tight times have prompted major donors to give less money, with more strings attached, and a federal program that provided much of its revenue in recent years has stopped awarding grants.

Other national higher-education groups are similarly challenged--forced by a tight economy, an aging professoriate, and the ascendance of online communication to rethink how they take in money, enlist members, and promote their agendas. But most other such groups exist to represent specific constituencies, like admissions officers or language professors, and can alter their messages to keep up with the times.

The NAS cannot change its message because its message is its reason for being.

That message is that colleges should be meritocracies focused on teaching, research, reasoned discourse, and the scientific method, and should resist tailoring their policies and instruction to conform with anyone's political views. It is a message rooted in romanticized recollections of how America's colleges operated in the middle of the 20th century, before the advent of affirmative action, ethnic-studies departments, and other products of the 1960s that the association regards as anathema.

Barring a major resurgence of traditionalist thinking on college campuses, the appeal of that message might not be enough to carry the group another 25 years.

LOOKING AHEAD

The NAS's leaders believe they have taken big steps to reinvigorate their organization, including moving its headquarters from Princeton, N.J., to Manhattan, where they will have easier access to media outlets and major donors.

They see their group as still being more than capable of making a big splash in the news media, as it did last summer with a report arguing that colleges' American-history programs overly emphasize race, class, gender, and ethnicity at the expense of important subjects like military and religious history.

The NAS expects to make headlines again this spring when it releases the results of a two-year study of Bowdoin College. The group says the study will illustrate how selective liberal-arts colleges have abandoned instruction in the traditional liberal arts by eliminating course requirements in that area.

Some of the campaigns the scholars' association helped get under way, and some of the organizations it helped establish, have had a major effect on higher education and continue to do so. The association's California affiliate, for example, mounted the first campaign for a state referendum barring public colleges from using affirmative-action preferences, which passed in 1996. Five other states have since approved similar referenda, and the NAS has remained a significant player in legal challenges to race-conscious admissions policies, offering up both legal briefs opposing the policies and critiques of the research supporting them.

In the two decades since the scholars' group undertook a campaign to encourage colleges to establish academic programs on Western civilization, America's founding, and the study of free institutions, more than 60 such programs have emerged, estimates Stephen H. Balch, who served as president of the NAS from its founding, in 1987, until 2009 and remained chairman of its Board of Directors until last year.

The NAS also played a central role in establishing four national groups that have a significant voice in academe: the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, a conservative group that encourages college trustees to assert more influence over their institutions' affairs; the Association for the Study of Free Institutions, a free-market-oriented group; the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers, founded as a traditionalist alternative to the Modern Language Association; and the Historical Society, founded to counter what its members regard as the politicization of that field.

A fifth group that the NAS helped establish, the American Academy for Liberal Education, continues to gives its stamp of approval to institutions and programs that meet its standards, but it gave up seeking the Education Department's recognition as an accreditor after running afoul of federal regulations.

PICKING BATTLES

Despite its recent gains, some critics of the NAS dismiss it as a thing of the past.

"If I had to be blunt, I would say the NAS is composed of old men playing a broken record," says Cary Nelson, who often verbally sparred with that group's leaders in his capacity as president of the American Association of University Professors, a post he held from 2006 until last year.

The group appeared to be earning grudging respect from its foes as a voice of dissent in the mid-1990s. But Stanley N. Katz, an expert on higher-education policy at Princeton University and the director of Princeton's Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies, argues that "they haven't been real players in years."

The NAS denies that it lacks influence, although it acknowledges having to make tough choices about where to focus its resources.

For example, the association's central office devotes little attention to its Argus Project, established in 2008 as a way to enlist faculty members and ordinary citizens in reporting incidents of political indoctrination on campuses. Peter W. Wood, a former provost of King's College, in New York, who rose from executive director to president of the NAS in 2009, says the group lacks the money and manpower to investigate most complaints it receives.

A few of the association's 46 state affiliates, such as those in California and New York, remain vibrant and vocal due mainly to strong leadership. But the national association has decided not to try to prop up state affiliates that are struggling. Mr. Wood blames the decline of the affiliates largely on the aging of his organization's membership, and says the Internet has alleviated much of the need for his groups members in each state to meet face to face.

Only a few state affiliates have closed their doors, but many are barely hanging on. The Iowa affiliate, for example, has had to scrap recent efforts to hold state meetings because it has been unable to gather an eight-person quorum. The president of the association's Colorado affiliate, Charles L. King, a 91-year-old retired professor of Spanish at the University of Colorado at Boulder, says he has been trying to get someone to take over his leadership post for years.

The NAS also has come to regret a longstanding contractual agreement with Springer, a publisher, that has left most of the group's flagship journal, Academic Questions, behind a paywall, limiting its reach.

Aside from a 2009 decision to open itself up to nonacademics, the association has done little recently to build its membership. Mr. Wood, a frequent contributor to The Chronicle, says he would rather devote his energies to speaking out against developments in higher education that he opposes. Those include the sustainability movement, which he sees as demanding conformity to radical environmentalism, and a White House-backed effort to promote civics education that he criticizes for defining such education in liberal terms. Raising his group's profile by weighing in on such matters, he says, is a far more cost-effective means of attracting members than direct recruitment.

Once able to count on foundations to underwrite whatever activities it chose to engage in, the association now derives its funds mainly from grants for specific research projects its benefactors want carried out. It had found a new source of revenue in the U.S. Department of Education's Teaching American History program, established in 2001 largely in response to a survey by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. That survey found that most seniors at highly selective colleges could not answer basic questions about the nation's past. The NAS became a provider of short-term training for teachers of history, but the federal program is no longer awarding grants.

Mr. Balch says the NAS planned ahead for the loss of such funds, and Mr. Wood says he "won't miss" the association's involvement in the program because "it didn't do a whole lot to enhance other things we were doing." But the NAS's most-recent filing with the Internal Revenue Service, for 2011, shows that federal grants for its training of history teachers accounted for about $2-million of its $2.4-million in revenue that year. That's a large sum to do without, and the association's expenses exceeded its revenues in recent years. The NAS has responded to the loss of the grants by establishing its own in-house fund-raising operation and by temporarily trimming the salaries of its top executives.

As was the case in past years, most of the association's major donors in 2011 were philanthropies with reputations for backing conservative causes, like the Adolph Coors Foundation and the Sarah Scaife Foundation. Its reliance on conservative support has fed arguments that the NAS represents conservative ideology more than any sort of vision of higher education as untainted by politics. Mr. Wood, like Mr. Balch before him, argues that his group should not be labeled conservative because it has liberal members and does not take conservative positions on issues outside academe.

Neil Gross, a professor of sociology at the University of British Columbia, discusses the history of the NAS in his book Why Are Professors Liberal and Why Do Conservatives Care?, scheduled for release this week. He says the NAS has managed to attract the support of some liberals and moderates, even as it "has really carved out a reputation as a critic of the liberal professoriate," because faculty members across the political spectrum are concerned about the politicization of academe.

Looking back on the association's first quarter century, Mr. Balch acknowledges, "we have not converted the academy." His group's chief accomplishment, he says, may have been helping to keep in place a group of scholars who adhere to the traditionalist view that college professors should be treated as individuals and be free to go against political currents. "We have kept that ideal alive."

Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, in Manhattan, where the group moved its headquarters in an effort to reinvigorate itself and be closer to media outlets and major donors.

By PETER SCHMIDT

Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, in Manhattan, where the group moved its headquarters in an effort to reinvigorate itself and be closer to media outlets and major donors.... hunt:

Arts and Culture Conference to Be Held in March

Jan 14, 2014 by NAS | The Center for American Culture and Ideas at the University of Arizona will hold its first conference March 2014 in Tucson, Arizona.

U Arizona Center for American Culture and Ideas to Hold First Arts and Culture Conference

Sep 18, 2013 by NAS | The Center for American Culture and Ideas at the University of Arizona will offer its first conference, on “The Future of (High) Culture in America,” in March 2014.

Ruminations at the end of the semester

May 04, 2012 by Daniel Asia | I have recently returned from a trip abroad.  In receiving my peanuts, pretzels and drink during the flight, I also received two napkins.

Dollars for Diversity and Equity at U of Az

Feb 02, 2012 by Glenn Ricketts | Those agitating for social justice get a financial boost at the University of Arizona

Center for the Study of American Ideals and Culture

May 13, 2010 by Daniel Asia | A project I have been imaging for a long time is now actually a reality. The Center for the Study of American Ideals and Culture has received its first funding, from the new Apgar Foundation. With this first seed money, we can…

Ward Connerly at the University of Arizona

Nov 19, 2009 by Daniel Asia | Ward Connerly spoke at the University of Arizona just a few weeks ago. He was masterly. At five minutes before his talk was to begin there were only five people in the audience. At the start there were between seventy-five and…

U Arizona Celebrates Chicano Walk-Out Day with a Teach-In

Sep 16, 2009 by Ashley Thorne | La Raza studies, teaching students that white America is the enemy, lives on in American public education.

Wal-Mart’s Eco-Index

Jul 21, 2009 by Ashley Thorne | The retail giant teams up with the University of Arkansas and Arizona State University to find ways to measure products' social and environmental impact.

Hey Guys!

Mar 27, 2009 by Ashley Thorne | The University of Arizona surveys: do professors and others on campus use "GLBT-inclusive language"?

“Gender Identity” Restrooms at U Arizona

Feb 24, 2009 by Catherine Pavlich | It doesn't matter if you are a man or a woman; campus restrooms at UA are categorized by self-image and behavior.

Stop the Hate and Celebrate: The University of Arizona Purges

Nov 11, 2008 by Ashley Thorne, Peter Wood | After a controversial comic was published in the student newspaper, the campus will "regroup."

Weighing the Evidence: New Studies on Racial Preferences at Three Universities

Oct 16, 2008 by Glenn Ricketts | NAS affiliates helped the Center for Equal Opportunity document discrimination in law school admissions.

... Dennis Outwater is the new president of the Massachusetts Association of Scholars. Here he tells about his professional career and his vision for the affiliate. He may be contacted at profout@hotmail.com or 978-546-7324.

I graduated from the University of Chicago in 1972, doing a Ph.D. dissertation on "The Problem of Evil" within the context of an Independent Study degree. I began teaching Philosophy at Suffolk University in 1969, and retired from same in 2008. I also opened an entrepreneurship in 1982, called "Perchance Company," focused on land development and advanced architectural home building, ending the company in 2006. I am currently finishing up my first scholarly book, entitled "Grand Canyon Panology: The Psyche of Water and Stone," and have started a second book on the environmental movement, entitled "The Condor's Meat." I am also writing a screenplay based on these two books.

I joined NAS about four years ago under the solicitation of Stephen Balch.  I was asked to take over the Presidency of the Massachusetts Association of Scholars this year, and we have had our first meeting on February 13th.  Since the Boston area has the largest concentration of students of any city its size, and rivals New York City in this regard, I believe that our Association should overcome its quiescence of the last few years and begin to contribute strongly to the overall NAS effort.  We discussed, along with Peter Wood, the need to continue NAS efforts to be non-partisan politically and avoid the Leftist stereotype of NAS as a "right-wing reactionary organization."  My conviction is that NAS's future depends on a new generation of scholarship, despite the politicization of the universities and most colleges.

In this regard we have discussed, so far, two ways of addressing non-partisanship:

(1) Projecting a strong interest in independent scholarship, for, after all, our foremost concern is scholarship and not the nature and destiny of the American  academy.  If the latter is inimical to scholarship, our scholarly efforts must go on, regardless.  We also recognize that within academia there are occasional spaces wherein which independent scholarship can and does take place, and we hope for more of this as well.

(2) Studying the issue of student voting, within the context of widespread election fraudcoming from both parties in the past, although generally concentrated in American cities.  I have suggested that our members look at Stealing Elections by John Fund, in this regard, and I feel that it is important that efforts are made for students to not be able to vote in Massachusetts if they are registered in out-of-state home towns or cities.  Obviously free and fair elections are a non-partisan issue; no political party should be able to effect elections by either encouraging or discouraging voter participation in illegal ways.  This becomes, in my view, a scholarly issue, for if the political parties cannot strongly recognize the necessity of the rule of law—and the need for non-partisan laws, in the first place—democracy will not work.  It is our presupposition that democracy is the best political polity within which scholarship can function and flourish.

I have also brought up a third issue for future study and discussion: environmental ethics.  This issue also transcends, or ought to do so, that of politics and the academy generally, and is a long-term issue of the deepest scholarly importance. Contemporary universities and colleges most often teach that "nature" is socially constructed, and engage in an assault on the notion of a fixed or fundamental human nature. It seems to me at bottom all scholarship must take its stand in defense of the role of nature, understood "metaphorically or mythically" as well as scientifically, so that the full range of human reason can be applied to human concerns.

2011

==

2017

April 26, 2017

"Red Star Over Campus: How China's Confucius Institutes Court Western Colleges and Universities"

Peter Wood, Rebecca Sears, Rachelle Peterson, Mike Gonzalez, and Doris Liu

Alliance Defending Freedom

Washington D.C.

See Details >

Register to Attend >

February 22, 2017

"Making citizens: A 'Sputnik moment' for civic education?"

David Randall, Juan Rangel, Robert Pondiscio, Charles Sahm, and Rebecca Burgess

American Enterprise Institute

Washington D.C.

See Details >

January 21, 2017

"Securing Liberty: Rebuilding American Education in an Era of Illiberal Learning"

Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs

Oklahoma City, OK

See Details >

January 12, 2017

"Wasted Colleges: The New Civics in Colorado"

Senator Kevin Lundberg, David Randall, and Peter Wood

Independence Institute

Denver, CO

See Details >

January 10, 2017

"Losing the Republic: The Progressive Hijack of Civics Education"

John Fonte, Stanley Kurtz, David Randall, Peter Wood, and Jack Warren

Anderson House

Washington D.C.

2016

October 5, 2016

"Academic Freedom in the Age of Political Correctness"

Jay Schalin, Peter Wood, and KC Johnson, with moderator Mark Bauerlein

First Things Editorial Offices

New York, NY

See Details >

September 30, 2016

Peter Wood

The New Criterion

Winchester, England

September 30, 2016

"The Purposes of Academic Freedom"

Ashley Thorne

The Philadelphia Society

Philadelphia, PA

June 14, 2016

Peter Wood

Ronald Reagan Presidential Library

Simi Valley, California

May 21, 2016

Commencement Address

Peter Wood

Veritas Preparatory Academy

Phoenix, AZ

April 12, 2016

"Debate: Opposing Views on Affirmative Action"

Peter Wood and Randall Kennedy

The University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Amherst, MA

See Details >

April 7, 2016

"Safe Spaces or Free Speech?"

Peter Wood and Charles Kesler

The Claremont Institute

Claremont, CA

See Details >

April 6, 2016

"Drilling Through the Core"

Peter Wood

The Heartland Institute

Chicago, IL

See Details >

March 1, 2016

"The Crisis in Civic Education"

Ashley Thorne

Conservative Political Action Conference

Oxon Hill, MD

February 26, 2016

"Who Rules the Universities?"

Charles Kesler and Peter Wood

Heritage Foundation

Washington D.C.

See Details >

February 9, 2016

"Beach Books Report Launch: What Do Colleges and Universities Want Students to Read Outside of the Classroom?"

Peter Wood, Ashley Thorne, and David Randall, with keynote speaker Mark Bauerlein

First Things Editorial Office

New York, NY

See Details >

==

ripple/echo:

YEARS

2015 | 2014 |  2013 | 2012 | 2011 | 2010 | 2009 | 2008 | 2007

2015

READ THE ANTI-SPEECH AGITATORS' PLAYBOOK

November 18, 2015 | The Federalist

Read More >

THE ‘ILLIBERAL’ RELIGIOUS CAMPAIGNERS BEHIND FOSSIL-FUEL DIVESTMENT

November 18, 2015 | Acton Institute Power Blog

Read More >

HOW GREEN MEGADONORS BUILT A BOGUS CAMPUS ANTI-CARBON DRIVE

November 18, 2015 | New York Post

Read More >

AUTHOR ON COMMON CORE: ‘A COMPREHENSIVE DUMBING DOWN OF AMERICAN EDUCATION AT EVERY LEVEL’

November 17, 2015 | CNS News

Read More >

BOOK VIRGINS

October 26, 2015 | The Marietta Daily Journal

Read More >

SCHOLARS: CAMPUS ‘SUSTAINABILITY’ INDOCTRINATES COLLEGE STUDENTS

August 23, 2015 | The Daily Caller

Read More >

SUSTAINABILITY MOVEMENT FOSTERS HOTBEDS OF LIBERAL INDOCTRINATION (PART 3)

August 23, 2015 | The Heartland Institute

Read More >

TESTING THE LIMITS

August 21, 2015 | World Magazine

Read More >

A TOUGH ASSIGNMENT FOR COLLEGES: WHAT SHOULD N.J. FRESHMEN READ?

August 20, 2015 | NJ.com

Read More >

WHO SHAPES AMERICAN HISTORY?

August 6, 2015 | National Public Radio

Read More >

DR. PETER WOOD ON THE LARS LARSON SHOW

August 4, 2015 | The Lars Larson Show

Read More >

COLLEGE BOARD TO REWRITE US HISTORY EXAM AFTER CRITICS BLAST ANTI-AMERICA LANGUAGE

August 4, 2015 | Fox News

Read More >

CONSERVATIVES CONVINCED COLLEGE BOARD TO REWRITE AMERICAN HISTORY

July 30, 2015 | Washington Post

Read More >

AFTER FACING BACKLASH, AP U.S. HISTORY COURSE REVISED TO EMPHASIZE AMERICAN IDEALS

July 30, 2015 | Huffington Post

Read More >

HISTORIANS BLAST ADVANCED PLACEMENT U.S. HISTORY FRAMEWORK

June 11, 2015 | Washington Post

Read More >

IS AP U.S. HISTORY BIASED?

June 11, 2015 | Huffington Post

Read More >

BYE, BYE, AMERICAN HISTORY

June 10, 2015 | Wall Street Journal

Read More >

'PERVASIVE ANTI-PATRIOTISM': 55 SCHOLARS REJECT NEW AP HISTORY LESSONS

June 8, 2015 | Fox News

Read More >

A FEW COURAGEOUS ACADEMICS FIGHT THE REWRITING OF AP AMERICAN HISTORY

June 3, 2015 | National Review

Read More >

AMERICA’S HISTORY

June 3, 2015 | National Review Online

Read More >

EMINENT SCHOLARS BLAST NATIONWIDE U.S. HISTORY PROGRAM

June 3, 2015 | The Federalist

Read More >

NOTABLE & QUOTABLE: A WARNING ON AP HISTORY STANDARDS

June 2, 2015 | Wall Street Journal

Read More >

55 SCHOLARS PROTEST AP U.S. HISTORY CHANGES

June 2, 2015 | National Review Online

Read More >

CIVICS TEST IS A GOOD IDEA

May 31, 2015 | Journal Sentinel

Read More >

STEM IS FINE, BUT U.S. NEEDS AN INFORMED CITIZENRY

May 20, 2015 | Wall Street Journal

Read More >

THE COURT SHOULD FINISH WHAT IT STARTED IN THE FISHER CASE

May 14, 2015 | National Review

Read More >

PROSE BY ANY OTHER NAME

May 7, 2015 | Slate

Read More >

POWERFUL ANTI-FOSSIL ENERGY LOBBIES TARGET STUDENTS

May 4, 2015 | Newsmax

Read More >

GEORGE WILL TRASHES THE DOMINANT BUSINESS THEME OF OUR TIME

April 21, 2015 | Bloomburg

Read More >

HIGHER EDUCATION WEEK IN REVIEW: CATCH-UP EDITION

April 20, 2015 | Forbes

Read More >

YEARNING FOR NORMAL, &C.

April 20, 2015 | National Review

Read More >

THINK GLOBAL WARMING IS BAD? WAIT UNTIL YOU MEET SUSTAINABILITY

April 18, 2015 | Breitbart News

Read More >

WILL: COLLEGES' SUSTAINABILITY DRIVE JUST...UNSUSTAINABLE

April 17, 2015 | Boston Herald

Read More >

DIVESTMENT AND SUSTAINABILITY MOVEMENTS - ANTI-HIGHER EDUCATION?

April 17, 2015 | Townhall.com

Read More >

WILL: SUSTAINABILITY GONE WILD

April 16, 2015 | Longview News-Journal

Read More >

COLLEGES BECOMING CHURCHES OF SUSTAINABILITY

April 16, 2015 | The Register-Guard

Read More >

GEORGE WILL: SUSTAINABILITY GONE WILD

April 15, 215 | The State Journal-Register

Read More >

'SUSTAINABILITY' GONE MAD ON COLLEGE CAMPUSES

April 14, 2015 | The Washington Post

Read More >

DEMOCRAT DIVINITY SCHOOLS

April 13, 2015 | National Review Online

Read More >

SUSTAINABILITY: A GROWING IDEOLOGY ON COLLEGE CAMPUSES

April 07, 2015 | WNPV

Read More >

GREEN BILLIONAIRE ACTIVIST TOM STEYER ESCALATES HIS WAR ON SCIENCE, TRUTH AND WESTERN INDUSTRIAL CIVILISATION

April 07, 2015 | Breitbart News

Read More >

COLLEGES' OBSESSION WITH 'SUSTAINABILITY' IS UNSUSTAINABLE

April 06, 2015 | Investor's Business Daily

Read More >

NOTABLE & QUOTABLE: 'SUSTAINABILITY' IS THE LATEST INCOHERENT COLLEGE CRAZE

April 03, 2015 | Wall Street Journal

Read More >

GREENS GONE WILD ON COLLEGE CAMPUSES

March 20, 2015 | New York Post

Read More >

OPINION JOURNAL: CAMPUS CLIMATE CRUSADE

March 26, 2015 | Wall Street Journal

Watch the video >

SUSTAINABILITY IS THE NEW CAMPUS ORTHODOXY, REPORT ARGUES

March 25, 2015 | Chronicle of Higher Education

Read More >

IS "SUSTAINABILITY" SUSTAINABLE?

March 25, 2015 by Steven Hayward | Powerline

Read More >

THE GREENING OF THE IVORY TOWERS

March 25, 2015 by James Woudhuysen | spiked

Read More >

SUSTAINABILITY: SMASHING THE ECO-ORTHODOXY

March 25, 2015 | spiked podcast

Read More >

CCSU, OTHER UNIVERSITIES SHOULD EDUCATE, NOT INDOCTRINATE, STUDENTS

February 27, 2015 | New Haven Register

Read More >

IT'S TIME TO MOVE PAST RACE-BASED AFFIRMATIVE ACTION

February 22, 2015 | The Pitt News

Read More >

OKLAHOMA GOP LAWMAKERS CRITICAL OF AP COURSE FOR MONTHS

February 20, 2015 | Southwest Times Record

Read More >

ANOTHER WILD, WACKY (WORRISOME) WEEK IN HIGHER EDUCATION

February 20, 2015 | National Review Online

Read More >

RULE NO. 84: DIANE RAVITCH'S OTHER LETTER TO LAMAR ALEXANDER

February 02, 2015 | Huffington Post

Read More >

'FINDING COMMON CAUSE'

January 22, 2015 | Inside Higher Ed

Read More >

COLLEGES TODAY MAKE ACTIVISTS NOT SCHOLARS

January 07, 2015 | Aleteia

Read More >

==

charting aca freedom:

We hope it will be helpful not only to scholars interested in how the debate has shifted in the 100+ years following the AAUP’s foundational 1915 Statement of Principles, but to legislators, jurists, all participants in the current debates, and members of the general public. Even those of us who follow these debates closely can struggle at times to recall the many different reasons that have been put forward for protecting academic freedom—or for limiting those protections. Our chart, of course, does not take the place of careful reading of the original statements. It is merely a handy way to keep in mind some key distinctions. We intend it as a public service.

Its value lies in part in the highlighting of elements that are missing from some well-known and influential statements. For example, the AAUP’s 1915 Statement of Principles grounded academic freedom in the pursuit of truth, but the AAUP’s even more influential 1940 statement omitted the pursuit of truth, as did seven of the other nine statements analyzed in the chart.

Only four of the ten statements call for sanctions against those who willfully violate the principles of academic freedom. Eight of the ten statements make no mention of tenure for faculty members—a surprising absence in view of how often tenure comes into the public discussion of academic freedom.

We leave to the reader the discovery of other salient patterns and subtle differences.

We release “Charting Academic Freedom: 102 Years of Debate” knowing that it is not complete. We have in hand three other documents that could be added: The John William Pope Center’s 2016 “Academic Freedom in the age of Political Correctness;” the University of Chicago’s 2017 “Report of the Committee on University Discipline for Disruptive Conduct;” and the American Legislative Exchange Council’s “Forming Open and Robust University Minds Act.” Doubtless there are still others we have not found. Our intention is to release a “2.0 version” of the chart that includes such additional items as seem broadly comparable. We also trust that readers will point out to us any errors that have crept into this first version of the chart so that we may correct them.

A word or two on our principles of selection thus far. Debates about academic freedom in the United States have continued for over one years. OCLC’s WorldCat lists nearly 100,000 volumes written on the topic. Some of these have attained the status of classics. Frequently these books include extensive and valuable commentary on some of the statements we have analyzed, but we have focused on the statements themselves, not on the scholarly literature surrounding them. Our criteria for including a statement on the chart are:

The statement was originally presented as speaking with institutional authority. Thus we exclude statements that represent primarily an individual author’s views.

The statement stands as an attempt to present a comprehensive view of the topic. Thus we exclude supplementary statements from the AAUP, such as its 1992 statement, “On Freedom of Expression and Campus Speech Codes.”

The statement is intended to supply or has generally understood to be an articulation of principles that apply to all of higher education. Thus we exclude the statements of individual colleges on academic freedom, except in those cases such as the Kalven Report, the Woodward Report, and the Stone Report, where the university’s statement has been embraced as a model by many institutions.

Even within these boundaries, it seems likely that we have overlooked some important statements, and it might be best to add a fourth criterion:

The statement has had some lasting historical significance. It is, of course, too soon to tell which of the statements issued in the last several years will pass that test. For recent declarations on academic freedom, we err on the side of inclusion.

Statements on academic freedom are proliferating at a rate far above that of the last century. From 1915 to 2014, we found five. In the last two and a half years, there have been five more we included on the chart and at least three others we have not yet added. This sudden increase in statements on academic freedom clearly is a reflex of new worries and concerns. We hope that our chart will be of some value to those who are wrestling with these issues.

==

Pittsburgh, Not Paris: Explaining the Climate Hysteria

Jun 27, 2017 by Peter Wood | Peter Wood analyzes the vehemence of the global warming movement in conjunction with the weakness of its claims.

Academia is in the New Dark Age

Jan 19, 2017 by Leo Goldstein | Leo Goldstein replies to comments by Bruce Gilley and Edward R. Dougherty.

https://www.nas.org/articles/academia_on_the_verge_of_a_new_dark_age

Editor’s Introduction: It has been widely reported that President-elect Trump is considering cuts to NASA’s Earth division, which is a major source of “climate change” research.  Broadly speaking, climate change research has become a cause favored by the political left and dis-favored by the political right.

The following article by Leo Goldstein is a strongly-stated criticism of global warming theory that focuses on the political left’s support for the theory. We publish it in the spirit of opening the door to discussion of an important topic, and we welcome contrasting views. One such contrasting view is presented by Bruce Gilley in "The Lack of Prudence of Fossil Fuel Supporters."

To be clear, the National Association of Scholars does not take a position on catastrophic man-made global warming. We are, rather, champions of scientific integrity, including skeptical examination of hypotheses and careful consideration of alternative hypotheses. To this end we uphold the importance of allowing dissenters in the scientific community reasonable space to make their arguments and to advance evidence that supports their critiques.

The closing off of debate in several areas of legitimate scientific inquiry concerns us.  The most conspicuous example is the claim that climate science has reached a “consensus” of CO2-forced climate change and that those scientists who continue to dissent from the “consensus” do so in bad-faith.  The attacks on so-called “climate deniers,” however, are far from the only instance in which contemporary academe has circled the wagons around a favored view and prevented the more robust debates that would, in the long run, lead to more solidly grounded science.

Science is only a collection of methods, and scientists themselves are human, with all the vulnerabilities of humans.  Among those vulnerabilities are susceptibility to groupthink, psychological overinvestment in one’s opinions, confirmation bias, and unconscious self-interest.  These are inevitably factors that influence all scientists to varying degrees, and the pursuit of science requires a constant effort to neutralize that influence.  The most effective check on human fallibility is open debate in which each contributor must be ready to meet well-informed objections to his ideas.

Some areas of science, however, have found themselves in a whirlpool of circular reasoning to the effect that any and all doubts about a favored theory are to be seen as ill-informed, ignorant, or deceptive.  The whirlpool provides a rationalization for refusing to give any real consideration to dissenting views which, merely because they express dissent, are treated as illegitimate.

There is such a thing as frivolous dissent that does not deserve much if any response from the scientific community.  It is late in the day to contest the value of the Planck constant.  But a great deal of non-frivolous dissent is often brushed into the same bin that serves as the resting place for crank formulations.

The gate of contemporary academic science is also guarded by those who insist that any would-be challenger has to meet a very high threshold of evidence to warrant a hearing.  The principle is analogous to a boxing championship:  to challenge a champion, the challenger must work his way up the ranks.  This is a reasonable safeguard—provided the challenger is allowed to have those preliminary fights.  A system that forecloses the possibility of a serious challenge has a deep flaw.

ACADEMIA ON THE VERGE OF A NEW DARK AGE

by Leo Goldstein

One of the strongest and most longstanding political/social prejudices has been that Liberals represent Science and Reason, while Conservatives oppose them.  This opinion was probably imported from Europe, where it had some ground in the Enlightenment period.  But it has never been the case in America. The fact that overwhelming majority of post-WWII scientists held liberal beliefs is not evidence, because scientists comprised only a tiny minority of Liberal or Conservative supporters.

Over the last thirty years, in fact, Liberalism has been taken over by the hard Left, abandoned science and reason, and become a hotbed of obscurantism and oppression.  The myth that Democrats were the party of science but Republicans were anti-science played a significant role in this downfall.  One notable phenomenon is the rise of the so-called “postmodern science,” a product of cultural studies.

AL GORE’S WAR ON SCIENCE

Al Gore played a unique role in corrupting and degrading the American scientific enterprise.  He belonged to the group of “Atari Democrats” who made an early alliance with the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, but Gore had neither aptitude not training in science.  He was no friend of science.  Gore compared science to the Faustian bargain:

“[W]e have chosen to escape the Malthusian dilemma by making a set of dangerous bargains with the future worthy of the theatrical legend that haunted the birth of the scientific revolution: Doctor Faustus. Some of these bargains have already been exposed …” (Al Gore, Earth in the Balance, 1992, pp. 127-128)

In 1993-2000, Vice President Gore removed many distinguished, independent-minded scientists from the leadership of the American scientific community, replacing them with his political allies—especially from the environmentalist movement.  For example, he fired Will Happer from the position of the Director of Science in the DOE, after Professor Happer suggested measuring the UV radiation impact of the alleged ozone layer depletion.  This and other symptomatic cases are described in Michael Gough’s excellent book Politicizing Science: The Alchemy of Policymaking (2003). Gore’s staff further demanded that distinguished oceanographer Roger Revelle’s name be removed from an article against global warming alarmism that Revelle had co-authored.  Gore’s unsuccessful attempts to intimidate Professor Fred Singer and to manipulate Ted Koppel, then an ABC anchor, were well-publicized as well.

But the media and academics believed that science had no enemies on the left, so these misdeeds were largely ignored.  The publication of Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science (1994) by Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt, the Sokal affair (in which physicist Alan Sokal submitted an article of deliberate gibberish phrased in politically correct cant to Social Text, and got it published), and similar expressions of academic dissent were too little and too late. Other processes leading to the corruption of National Academy of Sciences and scientific societies are outside the scope of this article.

“POSTMODERN SCIENCE” AND CLIMATE CHANGE

...

Debating Scientific Epistemology

Dec 19, 2016 by Edward R. Dougherty | Professor Dougherty discusses the dangers of modeling complex systems in response to Professors Gilley and Goldstein.

The Lack of Prudence of Fossil Fuel Supporters

Dec 13, 2016 by Bruce Gilley | Bruce Gilley replies to Leo Goldstein arguing that humility and discretion are needed in the climate change debate.

Academia on the Verge of a New Dark Age

Dec 13, 2016 by Leo Goldstein | Guest author Leo Goldstein offers a criticism of "climate alarmism" and "postmodern science."

Sustainability: Higher Education’s New Fundamentalism Released by Polaris Books

Dec 09, 2016 NAS | PRESS RELEASE: Sustainability: Higher Education’s New Fundamentalism, co-written by Rachelle Peterson and NAS president Peter Wood, is now available at Amazon.com and bookstores nationwide.

?

The Environmentalists Versus Trump

Nov 17, 2016 by Rachelle Peterson | Rachelle Peterson discusses Trump's possible environmental policies and what where the college environmentalist movement goes next.

https://www.nas.org/articles/the_environmentalists_versus_trump

Canada’s Crusade Against Fossil Fuels

Jul 20, 2016 by Rachelle Peterson | Frontier Centre for Public Policy releases a report illuminating the failed agenda of fossil fuel divestment.

Exposing Climate Alarmism in 90 Minutes

May 10, 2016 by Rachelle Peterson | Rachelle Peterson writes for the National Review about an important new documentary, Climate Hustle.

Ask a Scholar: What are the Effects of Carbon Dioxide on the Earth’s Atmosphere?

Mar 23, 2016 by Glenn Ricketts | Climatologist David Legates explains why the influence of atmospheric gasses does not necessarily reflect their proportion in the atmosphere.

Concerns about National Academy of Sciences and Scientific Dissent

Dec 15, 2015 by Peter Wood | Peter Wood writes to members of the National Academy of Sciences with three concerns about how the scientific establishment has responded to serious dissent.

This Changes Everything?

Oct 09, 2015 by Rachelle Peterson | Naomi Klein's new movie admits conservative critics of the environmental left were right.

AP Denies the “Denier” Label

Sep 24, 2015 by Rachelle Peterson | The Associated Press asks news writers to quit calling scientists "climate change deniers."

The Pressure of Group Thought

Aug 31, 2015 by Peter Wood | NAS president Peter Wood questions the legitimacy of always seeking academic consensus.

Bill McKibben Responds to NAS Questions on Divestment

Jul 13, 2015 by Rachelle Peterson | Prominent sustainability activist Bill McKibben offers some answers to questions posed by NAS.

==

==

RP

Censorship: Another Cheap Chinese Import We Don’t Need

Aug 30, 2017 by Rachelle Peterson | Efforts to censor Cambridge University Press show how far the Chinese government will go to stifle intellectual freedom.

Dead: Fossil Fuel Divestment

Aug 14, 2017 by Rachelle Peterson | Rachelle Peterson describes the steps that led to the closing of the Divestment Student Network (DSN).

Will the Other Claremont Colleges Defend Free Speech?

Aug 10, 2017 by Rachelle Peterson | Other Claremont schools are still investigating the student protests at Claremont McKenna college that obstructed speaker Heather Mac Donald.

One-and-a-Half Cheers for Claremont McKenna

Jul 31, 2017 by Rachelle Peterson | Rachelle Peterson applauds the school's decision to discipline several students who obstructed free speech and calls for increased vigilance from all college administrators to protect free speech.

Outsourced to China

Jul 12, 2017 by Rachelle Peterson | Rachelle Peterson warns of the dangers inherent in allowing a foreign government to exert influence on classrooms and university administrators.

NAS Sends Letter to SUNY Trustees

Jun 27, 2017 by Peter Wood, Rachelle Peterson | Peter Wood and Rachelle Peterson ask the SUNY Board of Trustees to investigate the Confucius Institutes in their system.

American Universities Are Welcoming China’s Trojan Horse

May 15, 2017 by Rachelle Peterson | Rachelle Peterson writes on China's use of soft power to influence students at American universities.

Disinvited, Re-invited, Still Slighted

Apr 05, 2017 by Rachelle Peterson | Virginia Tech staged a public putdown of Jason Riley's BB&T Distinguished Lecture.

Middlebury Admissions Tells Alumni How to Talk About the Protest Over Charles Murray

Mar 09, 2017 by Rachelle Peterson | A new document tries to guide conversations about Charles Murray's visit to campus.

?

Securing Liberty

Jan 26, 2017 by Rachelle Peterson | NAS members and friends gathered in Oklahoma City for NAS’s 30th anniversary conference.

?

The Environmentalists Versus Trump

Nov 17, 2016 by Rachelle Peterson | Rachelle Peterson discusses Trump's possible environmental policies and what where the college environmentalist movement goes next.

?

Election Reflections

Nov 07, 2016 by Ashley Thorne, David Randall, Peter Wood, Rachelle Peterson | On this election eve, a few of the staff at the National Association of Scholars have written reflections on citizenship in America.

Federalist Universities

Oct 17, 2016 by Rachelle Peterson | To what extent is the university a microcosm of the political party system?

On Reading Old Books

Sep 21, 2016 by Rachelle Peterson | Are the classics outdated? Four reasons support the reading of old—even flawed—books.

Free Speech v. Free Speech

Aug 04, 2016 by Rachelle Peterson | Many of the opponents of free speech believe they are its champions.

==

ggl suggests climate change:

Climate Change - National Association of Scholars

https://www.nas.org/topics/climate_change

The Lack of Prudence of Fossil Fuel Supporters. Dec 13, 2016 by Bruce Gilley |. Bruce Gilley replies to Leo Goldstein arguing that humility and discretion are needed in the climate change debate.

Estimated 40 Percent of Scientists Doubt Manmade Global Warming ...

https://www.nas.org/.../Estimated_40_Percent_of_Scientists_Doubt_Manmade_Global...

PRINCETON, NJ (January 3, 2011)—S. Fred Singer said in an interview with the National Association of Scholars (NAS) that “the number of skeptical qualified ... In 2009 NIPCC published Climate ChangeReconsidered,an 880-page report on scientific research that contradicts the models of man-made global warming.

National Association of Scholars - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Association_of_Scholars

The National Association of Scholars (NAS) is an American non-profit politically conservative advocacy group, with a particular interest in education. It promotes free speech on college campuses for dissident political trends, a return to mid-20th-century curricular and scholarship norms, and an increase in conservative ...

?

History and organization · ?Positions and activities · ?Academic Questions

National Association of Scholars - SourceWatch

https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/National_Association_of_Scholars

Aug 13, 2011 - Learn more from the Center for Media and Democracy's research on climate change. TheNational Association of Scholars (NAS) is a non-profit organization in the United States that opposes multiculturalism and affirmative action and seeks to counter what it considers a "liberal bias" in academia. In 2010 ...

?

Mission · ?Funding · ?Personnel · ?Actions

TIL: There is an organization called National Association of ...

https://www.reddit.com/r/skeptic/.../til_there_is_an_organization_called_national/

Dec 17, 2015 - There's a group in Canada called Friends of Science that is actually just a pro-oil group claiming that the sun is the main driver behind climate change. If you want to pissed them off go on their Facebook page and call them deniers. Using that word will actually get you banned from their page. They prefer to ...

NAS President Peter Wood: wrong, dishonest or hopelessly ...

https://www.desmogblog.com/nas-president-peter-wood-wrong-dishonest-or-hopeless...

Aug 2, 2011 - Well, the question must be rhetorical, unless the President of the National Association of Scholars chooses to answer it himself. ... Wood has long had a tendency to question climate science or to laud whacky climate change deniers such as Christopher Monckton or Fred Singer, but his most recent outburst ...

National Association of Scholars calls out threats to the 'Integrity of ...

https://wattsupwiththat.com/.../national-association-of-scholars-calls-out-threats-to-the-...

Dec 16, 2015 - For several years I've been trying to get some traction for the National Association of Scholars on the threats to the integrity of contemporary science arising from entrenched political interests. We've .... Science promotes the so-called consensus model of climate change and excludes any contrary views.

Climate change used to be a bipartisan issue — until the fossil fuel ...

www.businessinsider.com/climate-change-used-to-be-a-bipartisan-issue-until-the-fossi...

Nov 25, 2016 - The source for Walker's consensus figure seems to be the National Association of Scholars, a conservative group that lists “multiculturalism”, “diversity” and “sustainability” in academia as sources of concerns. A press release on the group's website includes the following excerpt: S. Fred Singer said in an ...

National Association of Scholars - Fossil Free

https://gofossilfree.org/national-association-of-oil/

Aug 10, 2015 - NYT fails to mention that the “National Association of Scholars” is actually an industry funded right wing think tank ... of institutions to act, the financial and political impact of divestment, etc. all help spur the campaign forward, hone our strategies, and generate a key ingredient for all socialchange: heat.

Canadian rhapsody for “Climate Hustle” - cfact

www.cfact.org › All Posts

Sep 23, 2016 - Published in the Wall street Journal on 05/26/2014 Joseph Bast and Roy Spencer Title of said article The Myth of Climate change 97% WSJ. Then we have another Article Published In theNational Association of Scholars. title : Estimated 40 Percent of Scientist Doubt Man made Global warming. This list ...

==

off bs

https://www.nas.org/topics/climate_change

p8 1 of 8, 12/17

==

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/04/26/report-confucius-institutes-finds-no-smoking-guns-enough-concerns-recommend-closure

More than 100 American colleges and universities house Confucius Institutes, centers of Chinese language and cultural teaching funded and staffed in part with instructors screened by a Chinese government-affiliated entity known as Hanban. The Confucius Institutes may seem to many to be benign outposts offering cultural events programming and noncredit courses in introductory Chinese, calligraphy or Tai Chi, but for nearly as long as the Confucius Institutes have been around -- more than 10 years now -- they’ve been controversial.

Advocates for the institutes say they’ve brought welcome new resources for Chinese language study and study abroad at a time when financial support for the humanities has been shrinking, while critics question whether American universities sacrifice some degree of academic freedom and autonomy in hosting the Chinese government-backed institutes, which in some cases are involved in delivering for-credit classes. Many Confucius Institutes are also involved in teaching or teacher training for local K-12 schools.

One U.S.-based Confucius Institute, at the University of Chicago, closed in 2014 after more than 100 faculty signed a petition that cited, among other things, concerns that Hanban's role in the hiring and training of teachers “subjects the university’s academic program to the political constraints on free speech and belief that are specific to the People’s Republic of China.” Ontario's McMaster University closed its Confucius Institute a year earlier after a former instructor filed a complaint alleging that the university was “giving legitimization to discrimination” because her contract with Hanban prohibited her participation in the spiritual practice Falun Gong. Over the years, Confucius Institutes have been dogged by allegations that they self-censor when it comes to sensitive subjects in China such as Taiwan, Tiananmen Square, Tibet and Falun Gong; the institute's supporters frequently reply that these topics are largely outside the confines of the Confucius Institutes' narrow cultural and language education mandates. In 2014, organizers of a Chinese studies conference in Europe accused Hanban, a sponsor of the conference, of outright censorship of conference materials related to Taiwan.

The latest take on this contentious topic, a 183-page report on Confucius Institutes from the National Association of Scholars, by the author’s account finds “few smoking guns, and no evidence of outright policies banning certain topics from discussion” -- but reasons for concern nonetheless. The report, which examines hiring policies, course offerings and textbooks, funding structures, academic freedom protections, and what the author describes as “formal and informal speech codes” at 12 Confucius Institutes in New Jersey and New York, concludes that “to a large extent, universities have made improper concessions that jeopardize academic freedom and institutional autonomy. Sometimes these concessions are official and in writing; more often they operate as implicit policies.”

The report from NAS recommends that universities close their Confucius Institutes. “Confucius Institutes permit an agency of a foreign government to have access to university courses, and on principle that is a university function,” Rachelle Peterson, the author of the report, said in an interview. “Institutions should have full control over who they hire, over what they teach, and Confucius Institutes basically act like class-in-a-box kits that come ready-made for universities to use.”

Short of closing the institutes -- NAS’s primary recommendation -- the report makes a series of recommendations for changes that faculty and administrators should push for. Those recommendations include: increased transparency and public disclosure of contractual and funding agreements, and the renegotiation of contracts “to remove constraints against ‘tarnishing the reputation’ of the Hanban” and “to clarify that legal disputes should be settled only in the jurisdiction of the host institution (in our cases, American courts).”

Other recommendations in the report call on universities to “cease outsourcing for-credit courses to the Hanban,” to “formally ask the Hanban if its hiring process complies with American nondiscrimination policies,” and to “require that all Confucius Institutes offer at least one public lecture or class each year on topics that are important to Chinese history but are currently neglected, such as the Tiananmen Square protests or the Dalai Lama’s views on Tibet.”

NAS, which promotes liberal arts-style education and intellectual freedom, is perceived in higher education as something of a contrarian scholarly organization with a politically conservative bent, though the organization maintains it has no partisan affiliation (its website quotes the organization’s president, Peter Wood, saying, “Both the left and the right produce their share of intellectual obtuseness. The NAS is not a partner with either”). Much of the prior criticism of the institutes has come from scholars associated with the left.

While NAS may be an organization that prides itself on “challenging campus orthodoxies,” on Confucius Institutes its recommendations are to a large extent in step with that of the American Association of University Professors. In 2014, the AAUP came out with a statement “recommending that universities cease their involvement in Confucius Institutes unless the agreement between the university and Hanban is renegotiated so that (1) the university has unilateral control, consistent with principles articulated in the AAUP’s Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities, over all academic matters, including recruitment of teachers, determination of curriculum and choice of texts; (2) the university affords Confucius Institute teachers the same academic freedom rights, as defined in the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, that it affords all other faculty in the university; and (3) the university-Hanban agreement is made available to all members of the university community.”

One theme of the NAS report is the lack of transparency on the part of the universities in the sample. Although NAS’s researcher obtained contracts through Freedom of Information Act requests for eight public universities in her sample -- as well as an unsigned draft contract shared by one private university -- Peterson found what she called “significant resistance” on the part of many university officials to answer questions about their Confucius Institutes. She reported that only two of the 12 Confucius Institute directors in her sample consented to interviews.

The most secretive institution, Peterson reported, was Alfred University, a private institution located about 80 miles south of Rochester, N.Y. She writes that Alfred's provost personally ejected her partway through a Confucius Institute class she'd received advance permission from the instructor to observe.

Reached by phone, the instructor of the class, Lanfang “Haley” Gao, referred questions to the university. Alfred's provost, Rick Stephens, said he asked Peterson to leave the class and escorted her to her car after receiving worried messages from students about a strange person in the class. He disputed that Peterson received permission to visit the class -- he said she was told that her proposed dates were not suitable -- and said in her outreach to Confucius Institute staff she initially misrepresented herself as an interested Chinese student rather than a journalist or researcher.

Peterson, in turn, disputed this. She said Gao gave her permission over the phone to observe her class and that she identified herself clearly. "I asked Professor Gao two questions: 1) if classes were open to members of the public to visit and 2) if I could visit her class as a researcher from the National Association of Scholars doing some research on Confucius Institutes. She answered yes to both questions. I did not represent myself as a prospective student of Chinese. Professor Gao did not say anything about the dates not being a good time to sit in on her class," Peterson said. "I arrived at the class early, having located it with the help of another person for whom I did not get a name (this person spoke limited English, and told me as much). When Professor Gao arrived I introduced myself as Rachelle Peterson from the National Association of Scholars, and mentioned again that we had spoken by phone about the possibility of my visiting her class. She did not object to my presence at the beginning of class or ask me to leave, or in any other way indicate that I misunderstood our phone call regarding my proposed visit."

"There's too much being read into this," Stephens, the provost, said, "but I will tell you that when you are approached in secret and you discover that, you are not inclined to be transparent in every which way" -- especially, he said, speaking of NAS, when that person "comes from an organization that also has a clear agenda."

"We don’t have anything to hide," Stephens said, "but they certainly didn’t approach Alfred University in a professional way."

The NAS report includes detailed looks at the governance, leadership and funding agreements for the institutes, which are managed by the host American universities in conjunction with Chinese partner universities. The financial terms vary somewhat, but various contracts obtained by Peterson -- and shared with Inside Higher Ed -- show that Hanban typically commits to provide around $150,000 in start-up funding for the institutes, followed by annual sustaining operating grants (generally, Peterson found, in the $100,000 range), plus 3,000 volumes of textbooks and teaching materials. Hanban also commits to pay for the salaries and airfares of the Chinese language teachers it sends. The American host university is expected to match Hanban's support, a requirement that Peterson reports is typically met through in-kind contributions such as office and classroom space and faculty/staff time.

The NAS report includes an extended discussion of the content and quality of Hanban-supplied textbooks. It also raises concerns about Hanban’s role in prescreening Chinese language teachers -- Peterson writes that universities select instructors from a pool of candidates proposed by the Chinese partner university or Hanban -- and the relationship of those instructors to the American host university at which they teach.

“Almost no teachers within Confucius Institutes are hired as employees of the host university with standard protections for academic freedom,” Peterson writes. “Most are hired by, paid by and report to the Hanban, which reserves the right to remove teachers who violate Chinese law -- including speech codes. There is some evidence that the Hanban may provide teachers with stock answers to questions it wishes to avoid. When we asked Chinese teachers and directors what they would say to a student who asked about Tiananmen Square, several replied that they would talk about the square’s historic architecture.”

The report continues, “We also found that some professors within the university felt pressured to self-censor. Those affiliated with the Confucius Institute sensed the need to maintain a friendly relationship with the Hanban. Those outside the Confucius Institute felt pressure from the university -- most immediately from their department -- to protect the Confucius Institute’s reputation.”

"Throughout this report there are, I think, unsupported insinuations and allegations without concrete evidence," said Stephen C. Dunnett, the vice provost for international education at the State University of New York at Buffalo and the chair of the advisory board for the Confucius Institute there. Dunnett, a key source cited in the NAS report, said the case study about Buffalo was largely accurate. But he was troubled by the preface, authored by NAS President Peter Wood, in which Wood cites off-the-record stories in granting himself "license to go beyond what we can fully verify" (Wood contrasts this to the remainder of the report, authored by Peterson, where, Wood writes, NAS limits itself "to what we know for sure." Inside Higher Ed is not repeating the unverified statements from the preface.)

More broadly, Dunnett said, "I have not witnessed nor have we experienced any of these practices that they sometimes hint at and sometimes come right out and accuse us of."

"The teachers that come here are young, they’re well-meaning, they’re teaching basic Chinese. They're pretty free to do what they like. We pick the textbooks. Hanban doesn’t force anything on us, and they never have. They’ve never interfered. We select the teachers, but of course they’re selected from a list that they present, just like, for example, Fulbright scholars are selected from a list. They're vetted here, and the list is sent to home countries and they pick. There’s nothing sinister in that, and they make it sound that way, and I think it’s kind of regrettable." (Buffalo may be somewhat of a model in how it treats the visiting instructors: the NAS report singles out Buffalo as having negotiated "more authority in hiring CI staff and teachers than any other Confucius Institute among our case studies.")

Dunnett added that he thinks it's unfortunate that the Chinese government doesn't get more credit for the resources it's providing. "In Western New York, this is a depressed area, and our schools are struggling to cover the things that they need to cover. They just don’t have the money that they need to hire Chinese language teachers, and also there are no local teachers certified to teach Chinese. So along come the Chinese and they offer us these teachers. That was one of the reasons we did this. We thought this could be community service for Buffalo. We could help the local schools," he said.

?Qing Gao, the director of the Confucius Institute U.S. Center, which is listed on Hanban's website as an overseas representative, likened Confucius Institute funding to any external grant funding universities receive. "To me, the best way to explain the Confucius Institute, it’s simply a grant program," said Gao, who's also an assistant professor of arts management at George Mason University and director of the Confucius Institute there. "We apply for a grant from China, from the headquarters, and that grant also provides us a partnership with a Chinese university."

?Qing Gao said that while the Confucius Institute U.S. Center receives funding from Hanban, it is an independent nonprofit and he cannot speak for the headquarters organization. He said, however, that the long-standing concerns about intellectual and academic freedom at Confucius Institutes are in his view unfounded.

"In terms of the intellectual freedom or academic freedom, I think that’s something that we have to always pay attention to, to make sure that these programs do not interfere with academic freedom," ?Qing Gao said. "When we receive individuals from China, the very first day we will have orientation. The very first message we deliver is to make sure everybody understands the value of academic freedom and freedom of speech. What we’ve found here is there's no such evidence whatsoever from the very first Confucius Institute opening in the United States until today that any individual case can prove that Confucius Institutes interfered with academic freedom. This has no factual basis."

Elizabeth Redden

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off bs

https://www.nas.org/resources/recommended_books

not heart of d:

JOSEPH CONRAD – UNDER WESTERN EYES  (1911)

This novel, set in St. Petersburg and Geneva, is Conrad’s answer to Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. We chose it because the narrator observes a non-Western mindset through “Western eyes”—a skill Western students should learn; it depicts both the allure and the repugnance of terrorism (to which Conrad in his introduction to the book referred as “senseless desperation provoked by senseless tyranny”); and it shows the truth as being worth defending despite the cost.

...

RALPH ELLISON – INVISIBLE MAN (1952)

his novel presents the memory of an unnamed African-American character who is currently living as a hermit in the basement of a New York City apartment building. In his youth in a small southern town he was school valedictorian and went on to college but was expelled. As he struggles to make a life for himself, he encounters a succession of people—most of whom see him not as the individual that he is but only in relation to their particular take on race—promoting various responses to white oppression: accommodation, Communism, black nationalism, and cynicism. We picked it because it is a powerful evocation of the deadening quality of ideological responses to racism, and because it depicts the struggle for individuality in circumstances that strongly reinforce the claims of group identity. These are very much living questions on most college campuses.

...

WILLIAM LEAST HEAT-MOON – BLUE HIGHWAYS (1982)

...

SINCLAIR LEWIS –BABBITT (1922)

Babbitt is a partner in an upper Midwest real estate firm in this satiric novel. His life is devoted to social climbing until in a moment of crisis he realizes the vapidity of his materialism. At that point he plunges headlong into flouting social conventions, but eventually becomes disillusioned with the emptiness of rebellion as well. We picked this book because it is the classic indictment of American middle-class complacency, and students deserve the chance to think this through. Is American life the sum of culturally-dead self-seeking Babbitts who conform even in their non-conformity? How true is this picture?

...

not 1984 but GEORGE ORWELL – HOMAGE TO CATALONIA (1938)

Orwell, a journalist, reflects on his experiences during the Spanish Civil War from December 1936 to June 1937, where he had the misfortune to enlist in a non-Stalinist Marxist militia that Soviet-controlled Communists had secretly determined to liquidate. Betrayed by people he mistook as allies, Orwell began a painful reconsideration of his views. He remained a socialist but had grown wise to the lawless nature of totalitarian regimes, and he came to loathe Stalinism. We picked this book because it represents a genuine act of personal courage, it vividly depicts the human reality of the great contest of political ideals that defined the twentieth century, and it exemplifies lucid political writing.

...

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https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/266816/national-association-scholars-beach-books-report-jack-kerwick

no link

THE NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF SCHOLARS’ “BEACH BOOKS REPORT”

College “Common Reading Programs” are as “progressive” as you think.

May 26, 2017  Jack Kerwick  18

Depending on the institution of one’s choice, those who are planning to enter college for the first time in the fall may be expected to read an assigned book over the summer. That is, many schools have a “common reading program,” a program designed to insure that incoming students read the same book before embarking upon their college career.

As the National Association of Scholars has amply demonstrated in its recent “Beach Books Report (BBR),” the ideological indoctrination of college students can’t begin quickly enough.

The BBR is a study of 348 institutions of higher learning.  This includes 171 public four-year schools, 81 private sectarian schools, 70 private nonsectarian institutions, and 26 community colleges.  Fifty-eight of these schools were identified by U.S. News & World Report as among the top 100 universities in the country, while 25 are among the top 100 liberal arts colleges. The colleges and universities covered by the BBR report are located in 46 states and Washington D.C.

What the study found is that colleges “rarely assign” classic texts, making “the common reading genre…parochial, contemporary, and progressive.”  In fact, 75% (271) of the common reading books were published between 2010 and 2016 while 94% (327) were published between 2000 and 2016.

The books were all published during the lifetime of the students.

As for the most popular subjects and themes, anyone who knows anything at all about contemporary academia won’t be surprised by the BBR’s findings.

For the academic year 2016-2017, the study’s authors ascribed to the common readings 576 subject labels that are divided into 30 subject categories. “The most popular subject categories,” it states, “were Civil Rights/Racism/Slavery (74 readings), Crime and Punishment (67 readings), Media/Silence/Technology (34 readings), Immigration (32 readings), and Family Dysfunction/Separation (31 readings).”

The BBC also broke the readings down into 251 theme labels and 18 theme categories.  That most of these “register the common reading committees’ persisting interest in ‘diversity,’ defined by non-white ethnicity at home and abroad,” is hardly unexpected to readers of this column.  Some other findings, though, while anything but shocking, are nevertheless telling.

“Many common readings discuss books of which a film or television version exists, an increasing number are graphic novels [what used to be called “comic books”] or memoirs, many have a protagonist under 18 or simply young-adult novels, and a significant number have an association with National Public Radio (NPR).”

Comic books; young-adult novels; books based on popular films and TV shows and associated with NPR—this is much of the stuff of common reading programs.

The BBR summarizes its findings: “The themes register most strongly the common reading genre’s continuing obsession with race, as well as the infantilization of its students, its middlebrow taste, and its progressive politics.”

Indeed. This past academic year, “the most popular themes were African-American (103), Latin American (25), Protagonist Under 18 (25), African (15), and Islamic World (13).”

For the last three consecutive years, “Racism/Civil Rights/Slavery and Crime and Punishment were the two most popular subject categories,” and “African-American themes were…the most popular theme [.]”  These subjects and themes became even more popular this past year than they had been in the two preceding years.

The “top books” for common reading illustrate this trend.  The most routinely assigned text is Bryan Stevenson’s, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption.  This is a work of nonfiction. The theme is “African-American” and the subject categories are “Civil Rights/Racism/Slavery” and “Crime and Punishment.”

Then there is Ta-Nehisi Coates’ memoir, Between the World and Me. The theme is “African-American,” and the subject categories are “Civil Rights/Racism/Slavery” and “Crime and Punishment.”

Wes Moore’s memoir, The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates, is another hit.  Its theme is “African-American” and its subject categories are “Crime and Punishment” and “Poverty.”

Malala Yousafzai’s memoir, as written by Christina Lamb, is quite popular. I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban has an “Islamic World theme.”  Its subject categories are “Education” and “Feminism/Sex Discrimination/Women.”

Of the six remaining most popular books in the common reading genre, the themes are: “African-American,” “Muslim-American,” “Asian American,” “Latin American,” and “Protagonist Under 18.” One book, a fictional novel, doesn’t have a specifically designated theme.

The BBR laments that the “ideologically-constrained common reading genre has become so homogenous that common reading selections have become predictable.” These reading programs are designed to advance a “progressive message” or “dogma through discussion guides, question prompts, and cooperation with ‘social justice’ programs.” They are also meant to “promote activism,” thus neglecting “the virtues of the disengaged life of the mind.”

This preference for inculcating activism over the love of knowledge for its own sake, ideology over education, has resulted in an intellectual flaccidity that has become an all too salient feature on college campuses.  “Common reading programs make new students’ first experience in college ‘co-curricular,’ and so tell students that the heart of college is not the regular academic coursework but the ‘co-curriculum.’” Their mission statements “usually direct committees to fulfill non-academic goals, such as building community or inclusivity” (emphases original).

For parents who plan upon remortgaging their homes so as to subsidize their children’s four-year (or more) excursion to the university, the National Association of Scholars’ “Beach Books Report” is must reading.

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https://gofossilfree.org/national-association-of-oil/

Update: After posting this piece yesterday, the National Association of Scholars got in touch with us to push back on some of the assertions I made below, especially on the structure of NAS and its funding.

The (admittedly short) research I’d done on NAS pulled up a description from SourceWatch that said “according to its 2009 IRS Form 990 (Part VI Section A), the Association doesn’t have members (line 6), members don’t elect the officers (line 7a), and the decisions of the governing body are not subject to members’ approval (line 7b).”  NAS clarified that they have “several thousand faculty members, administrators, students, and citizens, who hold meetings with state affiliate chapters, receive copies of our quarterly journal, and in other ways interact as an association.” Fair enough , that counts an association in my book.

NAS also pushed back on the assertion that they’re “industry” funded. According to NAS, the Scaife Foundation is a donor, but that “funding had nothing to do with and was in no way conditional on our work on sustainability or divestment.” I’ll take them at their word on that one, although it remains a valid point that the other recipients of Scaife funding  (Hoover, AEI, Heritage, etc.) are indeed a who’s who of climate misinformation.

The NAS didn’t push back on its record of going after sustainability in higher education (their president did in fact publish a book referring to it as higher education’s “new fundamentalism”). That history doesn’t disqualify them from commenting on divestment, but it does give you a useful sense of their ideological bent . An honest thanks to NAS for the clarifications. At this point, we can agree to disagree–and keep making a forceful case for our side.

Today the New York Times is hosting another “Room for Debate” on the efficacy of the fossil fuel divestment movement. Here at Go Fossil Free, we love seeing a healthy discussion about divestment. Debates about the carbon bubble, the moral responsibility of institutions to act, the financial and political impact of divestment, etc. all help spur the campaign forward, hone our strategies, and generate a key ingredient for all social change: heat.

But good debate needs to be honest and transparent. Today the Times stumbled by not making it clear that one of the contributors to its debate, the National Association of Scholars, is in fact neither an association, nor a group of scholars: it’s an industry funded right wing think tank.

According to SourceWatch, the NAS is a “non-profit organization in the United States that opposes multiculturalism and affirmative action and seeks to counter what it considers a ‘liberal bias’ in academia.” The group’s primary funder is the Sarah Scaife Foundation, an offshoot of the Mellon industrial, oil, aluminum and banking fortune. Other groups supported by Scaife foundation funding in include the Heritage Foundation, The Hoover Institute, and the American Enterprise Institute, all prominent right-wing think tanks who’ve been at the forefront of spreading misinformation about the climate crisis and opposing action to address it.

The NAS has its own nasty track record of intolerance and anti-environmental advocacy. The “association” has been a long time opponent of multiculturalism and affirmative action. Back in 2012, for example, a writer associated with the group argued in the Wall Street Journal that “activist” professors at the University of California were “indoctrinating” students and having a “corrupting” effect on the university.

More recently, the NAS has lobbied against the “broad imposition of the ‘sustainability’ agenda on university activity and campus life,” (they’ve also opposed the “neglect of character education” at colleges, but who really knows what’s that’s all about). The President of NAS, Peter W. Wood, wrote a book called Sustainability: Higher Education’s New Fundamentalism, which admittedly I haven’t read, but judging from the title I’m assuming he’s not a fan of the concept. In a blog for the Huffington Post last April, Wood wrote that universities that warned their students about climate crisis were “dangerously intemperate” and were likely under the influence of “enviro-radicals” like 350.org founder Bill McKibben.

Little  surprise then that the association is on the attack against the divestment movement. As the movement has grown in size, the fossil fuel industry has increasingly gone on the offensive, trying everything from launching animations criticizing the effort (look up, “Breaking up with fossil fuels is hard to do,” it’s worth a good laugh) to trying to make divestment illegal in Australia.

Methinks the industry protests too much. When fossil fuel front groups are so quick to point out how divestment isn’t working, you can be pretty sure it’s having an impact. As we continue to debate the importance of the growing divestment campaign, let’s make sure to be clear about where each party is coming from.

12 | SUSTAINABILITY

NAS

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

“Sustainability” is a key idea on college campuses in the United States and the rest of the Western world.  To the unsuspecting, sustainability is just a new name for environmentalism. But the word really marks out a new and larger ideological territory in which curtailing economic, political, and intellectual liberty is the price that must be paid now to ensure the welfare of future generations.

This report is the first in-depth critical study of the sustainability movement in higher education. The movement, of course, extends well beyond the college campus. It affects party politics, government bureaucracy, the energy industry, Hollywood, schools, and consumers. But the college campus is where the movement gets its voice of authority, and where it molds the views and commands the attention of young people.

While we take no position in the climate change debate, we focus in this study on how the sustainability movement has distorted higher education. We examine the harm it has done to college curricula and the limits it has imposed on the freedom of students to inquire and to make their own decisions. Our report also offers an anatomy of the campus sustainability movement in the United States. We explain how it came to prominence and how it is organized.

We also examine the financial costs to colleges and universities in their efforts to achieve some of the

movement’s goals. Often the movement presents its program as saving these institutions money. But

we have found that American colleges and universities currently spend more than $3.4 billion per year

pursuing their dreams of “sustainability” at a time when college tuitions are soaring and 7.5 percent of

recent college graduates are unemployed and another 46 percent underemployed.1 In addition to the

direct costs of the movement, we examine the growing demands by sustainability advocates that colleges

and universities divest their holdings in carbon-based energy companies without regard to forgone income

or growth in their endowments. What makes “sustainability” so important that institutions facing financial

distress are willing to prioritize spending on it? In this report, we examine that question.

Because the idea of “anthropogenic global warming”—or “climate change”—is so closely interwoven with the sustainability movement, we devote a chapter early in the report to laying out the arguments on both

1 The basis of the $3.4 billion estimate is given in Chapter 5 of this report. For the unemployment rate see:

Heidi Shierholz, Alyssa Davis, and Will Kimball, “The Class of 2014: The Weak Economy Is Idling Too Many Young Graduates,”

Economic Policy Institute, EPI Briefing Paper #377, May 1, 2014. The Shierholz study uses the term “underemployed” to mean

“working part-time” and calculates that 16.8 percent of recent college graduates fit that description. The more common definition

of “underemployed” is “working in jobs that generally don’t require one to have a college degree.” By that definition, 46 percent

of recent college graduates are underemployed. See also Catherine Dunn, “Are College Grads Destined For Jobs As Baristas And

Clerks? Federal Reserve Economists Explain,” International Business Times, September 4, 2014. http://www.ibtimes.com/arecollege-grads-destined-jobs-baristas-clerks-federal-reserve-economists-explain-1679120

sides of this debate. The appeal of the sustainability movement depends to a great extent on the belief that the world is experiencing catastrophic warming as a result of human activities that are increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Is this belief warranted? We are neutral on this proposition, but we stand by the principle that all important

ideas ought to be open to reasoned debate and careful examination of the evidence. This puts us and

others at odds with many in the sustainability movement whose declared position is that the time for

debate is over and that those who persist in raising basic questions are “climate deniers.” The “debate-is-over”

position is itself at odds with intellectual freedom and is why the campus sustainability movement

should be examined skeptically.

We support good stewardship of natural resources, but we see in the sustainability movement a hardening

of irrational demands to suspend free inquiry in favor of unproven theories of imminent catastrophe.

And we see, under the aegis of sustainability, a movement that often takes its bearings from its hostility

towards material prosperity, consumerism, free markets, and even democratic self-government.

We offer ten recommendations under three categories:

Respect Intellectual Freedom

1. Create neutral ground. Colleges and universities should be neutral in important and unresolved

scientific debates, such as the debate over dangerous anthropogenic global warming. Claims made on

the authority of “science” must be made on the basis of transparent evidence and openness to good

arguments regardless of their source.

2. Cut the apocalyptic rhetoric. Presenting students with a steady diet of doomsday scenarios undermines

liberal education.

3. Maintain civility. Some student sustainability protests have aimed at preventing opponents from

speaking.

4. Stop “nudging.” Leave students the space to make their own decisions about sustainability, and free

faculty members from the implied pressure to embed sustainability into the curricula of unrelated courses.

Uphold Institutional Integrity

5. Withdraw from the ACUPCC. Colleges that have signed the American College and University Presidents’

Climate Commitment should withdraw in favor of open-minded debate on the subject.

6. Open the books and pull back the sustainability hires. Make the pursuit of sustainability by colleges

financially transparent. The growth of administrative and staff positions in sustainability drives up costs

HIGHER EDUCATION’S NEW FUNDAMENTALISM| 13

NAS

and wrongly institutionalizes advocacy at the expense of education.

7. Uphold environmental stewardship. Campuses need to recover the distinction between real

environmental stewardship and a movement that uses the term as a springboard for a much broader

agenda.

8. Credential wisely. Curtail the aggrandizement of sustainability as a subject. Sustainability is not a

discipline or even a subject area. It is an ideology.

Be Even-Handed

9. Equalize treatment for advocates. Treat sustainability groups on campus under the same rubric as

other advocacy groups. They should not enjoy privileged immunity from ordinary rules and special access

to institutional resources.

10. Examine motives. College and university boards of trustees should examine demands for divestment

from fossil fuels skeptically and with full awareness of the ideological context in which these demands

are made.

The sustainability movement has become a major force in American life that has largely escaped serious

critical scrutiny. The goal of this report is to change that by examining for the first time the movement’s

ideological, economic, and practical effects on institutions of higher education.

==

CONFIDENTIAL

December 5, 2017

CROWN COLLEGE, Provost

COWELL COLLEGE, Provost

MERRILL COLLEGE, Provost

OAKES COLLEGE, Provost

PORTER COLLEGE, Provost

RACHEL CARSON COLLEGE, Provost

STEVENSON COLLEGE, Provost

Re:  Request for Information under the California Public Records Act

Dear Colleagues:

As you may be aware and to document our process, I write to inform you that the University received the following request for information under the California Public Records Act (CPRA) from David Randall of National Association of Scholars. You need only produce records from your department; I will contact other units for any records they hold. If your unit possesses no responsive records, kindly confirm via reply email.

"[...] the common/summer reading programs at various of the UCSC Colleges, [...] what books were assigned each year."

Clarified 11/17/2017:

"Cowell; Crown; Kresge; Merrill; Oakes; Porter; Rachel Carson; Stevenson. 2007 - present."

Please ensure that the appropriate documents are located. During the search for records1, keep in mind the CPRA does not require us to create data or generate new documents in order to respond to a request. However, if the required information is contained within a database please contact my office for guidance.

...

April Exner Nycum

Information Practices Analyst

Office of Campus Counsel

University of California, Santa Cruz

1156 High Street

Santa Cruz, CA 95064

Phone: (831) 459-3788

Fax: (831) 459-2760

Email: aprile@ucsc.edu

Web: www.ucsc.edu

http://infopractices.ucsc.edu

I am delighted to announce the appointment of Lorena Peñaloza as chief campus counsel.

Lorena's impressive background includes experience in public higher education, as well as city and federal government.

Lorena joins us from the California State University system's Office of General Counsel, where she has worked since 2008, most recently as University Counsel for Sonoma State University and Humboldt State University. She previously served on the office's litigation team, where she handled a variety of systemwide and campus-based matters in state and federal courts. She also served as a resource attorney on matters including residency, police, and student discipline.

Prior to joining CSU, Lorena was an assistant city attorney for the City of Santa Ana. She began her legal career with the Social Security Administration’s Office of the General Counsel in Maryland. She worked in various federal departments, including the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, and served two years in the administration's Office of General Law, litigating employment law matters before the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Federal Labor Relations Authority, and the Merit Systems Protection Board.

Lorena earned her B.A. in sociology and political economies of industrial societies from the University of California, Berkeley, and her J.D. from the University of California, Hastings College of the Law.

Lorena succeeds Michael Troncoso, who joined the UC Office of the President last April. I want to thank Associate Campus Counsel Liv Hassett for the excellent support she provided as interim chief campus counsel during the recruitment.

Email Lorena Peñaloza

Phone: (831) 459-3126

Fax: (831) 459-1910

==

David Randall - National Association of Scholars

https://www.nas.org/authors/david_randall/

Video: Education and the Federal Government. Oct 17, 2017 by David Randall |. NAS Director of Communications David Randall presents steps the Federal government should take to guarantee individual liberty on college campuses.

NAS Welcomes David Randall as Director of Communications ...

https://www.nas.org/.../nas_welcomes_david_randall_as_director_of_communications

Oct 13, 2015 - NAS Welcomes David Randall as Director of Communications. National Association of Scholars.

National Association of Scholars

https://www.nas.org/

Churchill In, Columbus Still Out: A Half-Loaf from the College Board. Dec 05, 2017 by David Randall |. The College Board makes a superficial response to NAS' critique of their AP European history standards.

David Randall | Professional Profile - LinkedIn

https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-randall-226341115

New York, New York - ?Director of Communications - ?National Association of Scholars

View David Randall's profile on LinkedIn, the world's largest professional community. David has 3 jobs listed on their profile. See the complete profile on LinkedIn and discover David's connections and jobs at similar companies. ... David Randall. Director of Communications at National Association of Scholars. Location ...

David Randall | Minding The Campus

www.mindingthecampus.org/author/david-randall/

Jun 15, 2016 - 9) Americans should restore choice and accountability to secondary education in America by developing competitive alternatives to the College Board's AP testing program. David Randall is director of communications at the National Association of Scholars. He writes on early modern European history and ...

David Randall | C-SPAN.org

https://www.c-span.org/person/?davidrandall

... of 'The Universal Journalist', a textbook on journalism. Wikipedia*. On the C-SPAN Networks: David Randall has one video in the C-SPAN Video Library; the first appearance was a 2016 Speech. Appearances by Title:c. October 1, 2015 - c. Present Director, Communications, National Association of Scholars Videos: 1 ...

Citizen Crazed: Civic Derangement and the NAS Attack on Academic ...

https://academeblog.org/.../citizen-crazed-civic-derangement-and-the-nas-attack-on-ac...

Jan 10, 2017 - The National Association of Scholars (NAS) has issued a new report, “Making Citizens: How American Universities Teach Civics” (pdf) that is absolutely breathtaking ... The 302-page NAS Report (525 pages with appendices), written by director of communications David Randall, is mostly dull and repetitive.

David Randall - PJ Media

https://pjmedia.com/columnist/david-randall/

Nov 21, 2016 - David Randall, Director of Communications at the National Association of Scholars, is the author of Making Citizens: How American Universities Teach Civics (January 2017). WRITTEN BYDavid Randall. Paying Students to Protest Trump. Parenting ...

David Randall, Author at The James G. Martin Center for Academic ...

https://www.jamesgmartin.center/author/davidrandall/

Author Profile. David Randall. David Randall is Director of Communications at the National Association of Scholars. He has taken part in both sides of the accreditation process—working to prepare his own institution (New York Studio School) for an accreditation examination, and serving on an accreditation committee to ...

David Randall, Author at The Federalist

https://thefederalist.com/author/davidrandall/

davidrandall. David Randall is director of communications at the National Association of Scholars. His academic writing includes work on early modern British history. Why Gov. Cuomo's 'Free College' Plan Will Fail Miserably. Gov. Andrew Cuomo's Excelsior Scholarship will likely cost the moon, and could have catastrophic ...

defends ball but does not chide Singer ~ Oreskes

bs uc licter

4.1 The Political Orientation of the Faculty

American university faculties have, at least since the mid-twentieth century, leaned to the political left, and if recent surveys of faculty only found that this continues to be the case, there would be no need for concern. However, a great deal of recent empirical work has shown that what is now happening goes well beyond that traditional pattern in a number of ways. Some of the relevant studies have been of college and university faculty nationwide, but others have been devoted specifically to the University of California. We cite both, since the findings of the nationwide studies are virtually identical to those that are specific to UC; the two sets of studies thus confirm each other. There are six major findings of these studies that show something far more disturbing than the traditional preponderance of liberals among university faculty: 1. The extent of the tilt to the left has been growing and has now reached a magnitude not remotely matched in the past. In some areas it is so extreme that it amounts to virtual exclusion of any but left-of-center faculty members. 2. The kind of leftism has also become considerably more extreme. 3. The more that politics is relevant to a field of study (the most obvious cases being those of political science and sociology) the greater the preponderance of left-of-center faculty members and the more complete the exclusion of any but left-of-center faculty members. The point is worth emphasis: exactly where programmatic concerns would most suggest a need for a wider range of voices, that range is most likely to be absent. This pattern is strongly suggestive of a conscious intent in the hiring process. 4. Younger faculty members are more solidly left-oriented than older faculty members, which means that the extent of the tilt continues to grow as retirements replaced by new appointments increase the imbalance.

A CRISIS OF COMPETENCE | 19 NAS 5.

College faculty members have become far more likely to admit that activism is a goal of their teaching. 6. The public is alarmed about the professoriate’s radical leftism to a degree that has not been true in the past.14 If we were to take these findings individually, each one would suggest that an important change in the place of politics on campus has occurred during the last forty years. But taken together, they indicate a huge transformation in faculty attitudes, tolerance of politicization, and the entire intellectual quality of academic life. We now take a closer look at the studies that reach these conclusions. A Sharp Shift to the Left Still Increasing A study done in 1999 by the political scientist Stanley Rothman found a decisive shift from historical patterns.15 According to Rothman and his co-authors Robert Lichter and Neil Nevitte: “The results indicate that a sharp shift to the left has taken place among college faculty in recent years.” In 1969, the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education’s survey had found that 45 percent of faculty had political views that were left or liberal, while 27 percent were middle of the road, and 28 percent either moderately or strongly conservative. By contrast, Rothman now found margins that were much more extreme. Whether the question was posed in terms of liberals versus conservatives or Democrats versus Republicans, the margins favored the former by nearly 5:1 in each case, and in some departments the results were overwhelming. For example, in English departments the margin was 88:3, and in Politics 81:2. A more recent study by Neil Gross and Solon Simmons (2007)16 showed that the situation had continued to deteriorate in the years since Rothman’s 1999 study, as the lop-sidedness became even more extreme. Rothman’s 5:1 had now become 8:1. This result was all the more convincing since Gross and Simmons clearly wanted the reverse to be true and even claimed that what they had found was greater moderation; but they hadn’t. Gross and Simmons asked a large sample of faculty (from 927 different institutions) to self-identify as very liberal, liberal, slightly liberal, middle of the road, slightly conservative, conservative, or very conservative. The results in percentages were 9.4, 34.7, and 18.1 for liberals, and 1.2, 8, and 10.5 for conservatives, going from “very” to “slightly” in each case. Eighteen percent self-identified as middle of the road. Gross and Simmons then collapsed these seven categories into three (liberal, moderate

...

Democrat/Republican: UCB Sociology* 17:0 UCB Political Science* 28:2 UCB English* 29:1 UCB History* 31:1 UCB Psychology* 26:1 UCLA History 53:3 UCLA English 29:2 UCSD Politics 27:0 UCSD History 26:1 UCSB English 21:0 UCSB History 28:1

These are astonishing, and astonishingly consistent margins; yet they are consistent with national data, for even Gross and Simmons found that in the 2004 presidential election the overall margin favoring John Kerry over George Bush was 19:1 among professors of history, as it also was among professors of political science and of sociology. These figures confirm yet again both that the shift to the left of recent years has been striking, and that in those departments where it matters most to be able to draw on a spectrum of political and social views (that is, where such concerns are central to a department’s work) https://thefederalist.com/author/davidrandall/+David+Randall+of+National+Association+of+Scholars Is anthropogenic global warming (AGW) a valid scientific theory?  Is it well supported by the empirical data or is it mostly an artifact of computer modeling?  I don’t have answers to these questions.  I stand, rather, on the side of those who favor rigorous scientific inquiry, transparency, and openness.  I am not a climate scientist, but neither do I cede the whole matter of answering such questions to the designated experts.  Good science doesn’t limit itself to the views of narrow-cast specialists.  Valid observations, corrective criticism, competing hypotheses, and rigorous testing can and often do arise from other sources.

It surprises me, however, that proponents of AGW, or what might be called the climate orthodoxy section of AGW theory, often respond to criticism and dissent with a kind of fury.  Far from welcoming discussion, they seek to suppress it. In doing so they jeopardize both their own authority and the prestige of the scientific community.

A month ago I posted on Innovations a brief item, “Bottling Up Global Warming Skepticism,” about the machinations of one of Professor Michael Mann’s ardent defenders, Dr. John Mashey, who has taken a no-holds-barred approach to silencing Mann’s critics. Mann himself has deployed nuisance lawsuits in a similar fashion. He has sued Tim Ball—a Canadian global-warming skeptic, an environmentalist, and former professor of geography—for libel for writing that Mann “should be in the State Pen, not Penn State,” for his role in Climategate. Mann also threatened a lawsuit [on watts up, no doc for claim] against Minnesotans for Global Warming for a satiric YouTube video titled “Hide the Decline.” (YouTube suppressed the original video. There is now a “Hide the Decline II.”)

The tactic of suing critics of AGW theory to silence them isn’t Mann’s alone, and it isn’t the only extracurricular means the global warmists use in attempts to shut up dissenters. The BBC recently announced that in an effort to be more attuned to the scientific “consensus,” it would no longer strive to provide balanced coverage of climate issues. Its decision followed a report by the BBCTrust, “Review of impartiality and accuracy of the BBC’s coverage of science.”

In 2007, Weather Channel meteorologist Dr. Heidi Cullen seemed to call for the firing of meteorologists who expressed doubt about AGW. She later clarified toThe New York Times that “I didn’t exactly say that. I was talking about the American Meteorological Society’s seal of approval. I was saying the A.M.S. should test applicants on climate change as part of their certification process. They test on other aspects of weather science.” In 2009, Environmental Protection Agency economist Alan Carlin was subjected to a gag order by an EPA administrator after submitting a report that was critical of the role of CO2 in recent global warming.

The techniques vary. The results, however, are similar: What cannot be established by transparent science can be imposed by coercion and intimidation.

John Mashey, who was the subject of my initial criticism, exercised his right to post replies on Innovations and elsewhere to my initial article.  He is welcome to express his opinions, but the pretense that he is defending science or academic due process wears thin. His replies posted to The Chronicle and elsewhere come in the company of some very irate people. Many of them seem to think that only those who accept the premises of their own sectarian version of climate modeling have a right to speak in this debate. Anyone else is fair game for—what shall I call it?  It goes well beyond scolding.

For example, one of Mashey and Mann’s supporters has made it her business to contact by telephone and e-mail NAS trustees, members, employees, and others with leading questions about my views on climate change and sustainability.  Her questions have insinuated that two former employees of NAS who died in 1995 were murdered, perhaps at the behest of Richard Mellon Scaife! (As it happened both died of heart attacks; and both had suffered previous heart attacks.)  This woman has similarly attacked other people and organizations that express views on climate change that she disagrees with.

Her targets have sometimes spoken up, but as far as I can tell she is accepted by AGW proponents as a welcome contributor to the effort.

Let me go back to what started all this.  On June 30, I wrote:

Science reports that retired computer scientist Dr. John Mashey is attempting to patch the tattered reputation of “hide the decline” Michael Mann, the climate scientist whose famous “hockey stick” chart shows exponentially increasing global temperatures in the near term. Mashey has been, as he puts it, “trying to take the offense” against global warming skeptics by flyspecking their publications. “You hope they make a mistake,” he says, and when they do, he pounces with demands that journals retract whole articles. Some journals indeed have. As Science puts it, “His critics say Mashey is more interested in destroying his foes than in debating the issues.” Professor Mann is extolling his efforts at “exploring the underbelly of climate denial.”

The issue of Science I referred to is Vol. 332, No, 6035, 10 June 2011, pp. 1250-1251.

The only mentions of Michael Mann in my article are in the two sentences quoted above.  This provoked not only the long string of mostly hostile comments (over 60) on the original article but also threads of vehement commentary on other sites.  Since I had said next to nothing about Mann himself, his scientific contributions, or the controversies surrounding him, it was up to those posting comments to focus their anger by inventing through creative inference things that I did not say.

Thus, for example, several respondents introduced the idea that I had somehow endorsed the behavior of a George Mason University economist and statistician, Edward Wegman, who was forced to retract a 2008 paper critical of Mann that he had published in the journal Computational Statistics & Data Analysis after Mashey published a 250-page online analysis of it identifying “portions of other authors’ writings” in Wegman’s article “without sufficient attribution.”  Wegman defends himself as “innocently unaware” that a George Mason student had cut and pasted the paragraphs that he included in the report.  George Mason University is investigating whether Wegman is guilty of plagiarism.

I, of course, said nothing about Wegman.  I don’t know his work.

Rhetorical excess seems endemic to these defenders of Mannian climate orthodoxy.  Scott A. Mandia declares in all caps, “DR. MANN’S WORK HAS BEEN VERIFIED BY MANY OTHER SCIENTISTS,” and that to doubt the hockey stick graph is “to also believe in magic.”  Naumer and Mandia are among several correspondents who posted repeated declarations, in a crescendo of agitation.  Mostly they seemed to want to drag me into a discussion of the scientific details.  That wasn’t my topic and I declined, which brought out still more Mann enthusiasts.  Ted Kirkpatrick observes “Dr. Mann’s reputation is extremely good, as his fellow climate scientists regard both him and his work highly.”

Mann’s reputation is “good?”  Well, indeed, after Climategate, Mann’s work was subject to a series of extraordinary committee reviews—three that I know of.  In each case, the committee found no particular fault with his work.  I pass no judgment on those committees and I don’t presume to know Mann’s work well enough to venture an independent assessment of the quality of his science.  But to rest the case, as Kirkpatrick does, on what “his fellow climate scientists” think is a doubtful proposition.  I know of several climate scientists (e.g., Will Happer, Richard Lindzen, Fred Singer, Stan Trimble) who certainly don’t join in that endorsement, and some in the academy and among the general public judge Mann’s scientific contributions as suspect and his behavior as deplorable.

The hardball approach of his defenders is in large part a reflex of this loss of prestige and authority.  The proponents of AGW, however, have chosen a very foolish tactic.  Bullying skeptics and sneering at those who raise questions is no way to regain public trust.

The sharp practices of the warmists also damage the tenor of academic, scientific, and public debate.  Frivolous lawsuits, intimidation, mobbing are not the flying buttresses of modern science.  They are the rot that undermines the intellectual authority of science.  Can you trust anything said by someone who engages in such tactics?

This warning can be turned against some of the global warming skeptics as well.  There is, for example, a blogger who writes as “The Hockey Schtick” who refers to Mann’s 1998 article in Nature (which introduced the hockey stick graph) as “the most thoroughly  discredited paper of the modern age.”  Rhetorical excess for rhetorical excess.   Some of Mann’s defenders, however, much as they preen themselves as defenders of scientific rigor, are skating in the same rink.

The science will, in due course, be sorted out.   Shoddy hypotheses will be discarded.  Data massaged to accommodate models will prove discrepant with better observations.  It could be that anthropogenic global warming will win out as a valid theory; it could be otherwise.  I’m not taking sides on the science.  But when it comes to efforts to silence debate and intimidate critics, I very much take the side of those who want to see science rid of such mischief.

This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged AGW, Alan Carlin,Edward Wegman, Heidi Cullen, John Mashey, Michael Mann, Tim Ball. Bookmark the permalink.

http://chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/guest-post-bottling-nonsense-mis-using-a-civil-platform

==

deltoid:

At The Chronicle of Higher Education‘s blog Peter Wood excuses Wegman’s plagiarism, calling it a flyspeck:

Mashey has been, as he puts it, “trying to take the offense” against global warming skeptics by flyspecking their publications. “You hope they make a mistake,” he says, and when they do, he pounces with demands that journals retract whole articles. Some journals indeed have.

Compare with Wood’s comments on Wade Churchill’s dismissal for plagiarism:

Yesterday Denver District Court Judge Larry J. Naves turned down Ward Churchill’s motion to be reinstated in his professorial position. The former University of Colorado Ethnic Studies professor walks away from his celebrated trial with his jury award of one dollar, the prospect of enduring popularity on the academic left, but not much more–for now. … Here is why I think Judge Naves decided the case correctly. …

The jury in the Churchill trial came in with a verdict that almost perfectly captured the diffidence American feel about the matter. It recognized that Churchill’s firing was in some wise connected to his provocative speech, but it didn’t deny the plain evidence of Churchill’s plagiarism, academic misconduct, and falsified credentials. The one-dollar award was the minimum that Judge Naves told the jury it could award in the event that it found in favor of Churchill.

For Peter Wood, whether plagiarism is grounds for dismissal or a flyspeck seems to depend on whether they are on his side or not.

Wood also libels Michael Mann, accusing him of “academic dishonsesty”. His proof: “a few minutes of googling”. Who is this man who writes with such a reckless disregard for the truth?

John Mashey provides some background:

1) Peter Wood runs NAS*, which was originally funded by folks like Richard Mellon Scaife and others listed on pp.93-95 of CCC. For some reason, there is a long gap in their 990-form funding records.

2) If you rummage in the NAS* website, you may get as sense of its viewpoints. Look for Mann, climategate or sustainability and you will be rewarded.

It happens that (well-respected) climate scientist, NAS* member Kerry Emmanuel, has different views, although apparently Wood was not convinced.

3) Wood got his PhD in anthropology in 1987, his history includes a stint at Boston University, apparently spending most of his time as Assoc. Provost for Pres. John Silber.

Here is a 2001 BU Faculty page, which points at his page, which says:

“Peter Wood graduated from the University of Rochester, earning his doctorate with field research on American religious movements. He is an Associate Professor of Anthropology while also serving as Associate Provost of the University. His interests are in religion, art and aesthetics, Catholicism, and the culture of the United States. While administrative duties limit his teaching in the Department, he is responsible for the graduate pro-seminar in theory.”

Now, of course, he may have studied substantial physics, math, statistics, climate science sometime, but this is not instantly apparent. He certainly is certain.

From simple descriptions, it is easy to miss strong, bu non-obvious background. Better to ask.

4) From there, he became Provost of this ~500(?) person college in NYC.

5) After a few years, he started at NAS*, rising to become President, see 2009 990 Form. Interesting information may be found therein.

Other interesting information will emerge, I’m certain.

6) A useful bio is here, and on last page of recent testimony for Congress.

Testimony to the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology Subcommittee on Research and Science Education June 2, 2011 Peter W. Wood President, National Association of Scholars Table of Contents 1 Introduction 2 2 Bottling, CHE 06/30/11 3 3 Bottling Annotated 4 4 Bottling Comments Annotated 8 5 Conclusion Bottling Nonsense 10 A.1 CHE Innovations – Wood Articles 11 A.2 NAS Blog - Peter Wood and Others, One Expert 13 A.3 Wood at American Freedom Alliance‘s Big Footprint 18 A.4 Follow The Money –Scaife and L&H Bradley 19 A.5 Follow The Money: NAS 23 A.6 Key People 29 A.7 TAH –Teaching American History 31 1

Introduction Dr Peter Wood recently published ?Bottling Up Global Warming Skepticism? (Bottling) in a blog at Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE).

Anthropologist Wood is President of The National Association of Scholars, (NAS), which describes itself thus:1 ?NAS is an independent membership association of academics working to foster intellectual freedom and to sustain the tradition of reasoned scholarship and civil debate in America‘s colleges and universities. The NAS today is higher education‘s most vigilant watchdog. We stand for intellectual integrity in the curriculum, in the classroom, and across the campus. …?

Bottling appeared the day after the AAAS Board strongly decried attacks on climate scientists, continuing its long support for reality of anthropogenic global warming (AGW). 2 Bottling mentioned a 3-week-old Science profile (about me) and was later republished at NAS, leaving unanswered many questions raised at CHE. The chronology was:

....

Anthropologist Peter Wood is President of The National Association of Scholars and he recently published ?Bottling Up Global Warming Skepticism? (Bottling) in a Chronicle of Higher Education blog.

Bottling mentioned a 3-week-old Science profile (about me) and was later republished at NAS. This seemed a very strange post to appear under the credible umbrella of CHE. It not only lacked substance and relevance to CHE concerns, but seemed written only to damage reputations of myself and Michael Mann, using well-known false association tactics from politics. Wood devoted 60% of the article to scam artist P. T. Barnum, but then dismissed that as ?vacant thoughts,? and shifted to the Science profile.

He quote-mined short phrases, losing context. He termed my reporting of serious plagiarism as ?flyspecking.? He tried to conflate me, Mann and climate science with Barnum and Bruno Latour. Mann has been attacked incessantly for years. I mostly get attacked in certain blogs and ignore them, but I was surprised to find an article at CHE that many might consider libel.

Wood had strong opinions, often erred on simple facts and displayed little obvious expertise. I had never even heard of Wood or NAS. So how did this attack arise? What was NAS about? Since I study the machinery of climate science and the ways in which people get science wrong, I was stirred to investigate, as I have before. Mirabile dictu, a fascinating story appeared, analyzed here in detail.

Since 2009, Wood has run articles at NAS attacking climate science and Mann. He has supported Ken Cuccinelli‘s attack on Mann. He called Steve Milloy ?an informed observer.? Kerry Emmanuel, a NAS member and fine climate scientist objected eloquently, but was ignored. .? Fred Singer was feted. Wood recently spoke twice at a fringe antiscience conference dominated by the Viscount Christopher Monckton (keynote, 4 panels).

Wood wrote favorably of Monckton at CHE, ignoring the swastikas in the keynote. The pattern was pervasive. So why? As usual, it pays to follow the money. NAS has been core –funded by Richard Mellon Scaife and the L&H Bradley Foundation, the key backers of the two key thinktanks that organized attacks on climate science, the hockey stick, and Mann.

NAS membership dues declined 40% from 2002 to 2009. NAS lobbied and managed to get the majority of its revenues from Federal grants for Teaching American History, i.e.. training high school teachers. It is unclear how that fit NAS‘ own mission statement, and the funding paths are somewhat murky, but no new grants are being made. It was good money while it lasted.

Perhaps Wood is trying reinvigorate the organization with new ideas. In any case, some of Wood‘s comments might be considered even more libelous than the original article, and he has upped the ante with ?Climate Thuggery? a few days ago, to be covered later. The main story is followed by the usual large appendices, including detailed financials. Hopefully, more NAS members will join the discussions and offer their own viewpoint

...

{C4}?hide the decline? this is at best serious error on Wood‘s part, at worst something worse. Does Wood have the slightest knowledge of this, or is this a slogan he picked up from blogs? Kerry Emmanuel explained this and other issues on the NAS blog a year ago.10 Wood ignored him. In any case, Mann did not write this, Phil Jones wrote about a study by Keith Briffa. 11 In context, no one was hiding anything, as the topic has been widely published, as in Nature, and removing known bad data is quite appropriate. So why is Mann tarred w

...

Conclusion Bottling Nonsense

CHE of course has every right to offer its highly-respected imprimatur to anyone they choose, but Wood seems a strange choice. He repeatedly refuses to engage in serious or even civil dialog, preferring to insult readers. I had mentioned CHE on several blogs, imploring people to be polite, but some said they found it difficult, for reasons that may be clear.

Although Wood is obviously the strongest voice of NAS, he wants to claim that NAS has no position on climate change. When NAS lauds Fred Singer or Wood applauds Viscount Christopher Monckton44 , anyone familiar with this topic might think differently. See examples in A.1 – A.3. It is common for people to claim to have no position, then show repeatedly that they reject mainstream science, often found in Wegman Report. 45

Scientists gain great respect if able to competently challenge mainstream views and change them, but incompetent complaints are worthless. Do NAS members vote on positions, or does Wood just say what he wants?46 Wood posts as President of NAS, a useful platform. Finally, Wood seems to want to claim that “opinion pieces” allow people to say anything about anyone without ever having to provide citations or evidence. Recall the NAS description: ?NAS is an independent membership association of academics working to foster intellectual freedom and to sustain the tradition of reasoned scholarship and civil debate in America‘s colleges and universities. The NAS today is higher education‘s most vigilant watchdog. We stand for intellectual integrity in the curriculum, in the classroom, and across the campus. …? Perhaps these rules apply only on-campus, but bottling nonsense is silly wherever it is done.

==

indoc u

Snitch Studies at Cal Poly: We Snare Because We Care

May 05, 2009 |  Peter Wood

Cal Poly is back. It is reclaiming its place on the frontier of political correctness with a new program aimed at encouraging students to turn in their teachers and fellow students for deviating from officially approved thought patterns.

California Polytechnic State University, in San Luis Obispo, may be best known these days for its starring role in Indoctrinate U, Evan Coyne Maloney’s riveting documentary about the suppression of free speech on America’s campuses.

In an extended sequence in the film, Maloney seeks an explanation from campus authorities as to why a student, Steven Hinkle, got in serious trouble in November 2002 for posting flyers that announced a talk by C. Mason Weaver, author of It’s OK to Leave the Plantation, who is a black conservative. Hinkle was charged by campus police for posting “offensive racial material” in the Multicultural Center, and he was sent up to Director of Judicial Affairs. Hinkle ended up with a seven-hour hearing, during which he was denied access to legal counsel.   The judicial board found him guilty and demanded he write a public letter of apology. Hinkle instead went to FIRE and the Center for Individual Rights. Eventually Cal Poly, watching its case collapse in court, agreed to settle with Hinkle and paid his $40,000 legal bill.

The movie includes Maloney’s attempt to see the president of Cal Poly, which results in an amusing display of bureaucratic power by a pompous little man who intensely dislikes the idea that his actions are being filmed. Catch it if you can.

Cal Poly got itself into this trouble by means of an extended and rather relentless campaign of political correctness. It encouraged the idea that students were frail creatures who might suffer untold damage if exposed to ideas or images they deemed “offensive.” And a great many Cal Poly students in Steven Hinkle’s era drank in the concept that they were all potential victims of the “hate speech” that malignant people were just waiting to unleash.

So did Cal Poly learn its lesson when it settled with Hinkle?   Not hardly.  According to the student newspaper, The Daily Mustang, Cal Poly is launching a new “outlet for students to report grievances,” called CARE-Net. “It is essentially a forum for students to report discriminatory incidents.”

The “CARE” in CARE-Net stands for “Community Advocating REspect.” The University initiative already has its own website, a page for the new identity-group-grievance-snitch system. The student newspaper account quotes special assistant to the vice provost and CARE-Net organizer Patricia Ponce expressing Cal Poly’s interest “in hearing about students’ experiences at Cal Poly,” which she reminds us, “is committed to be an inclusive community.” The webpage goes further. It declares that “Cal Poly is an ardent supporter of free speech.” That ardor, however, will not stand in the way of Cal Poly’s attempt to ensure that all members of the community "live and work free from bias, harassment, abuse, mockery, and discrimination.”

CARE-Net encourages students to report, “any speech, act, or harassing incident or action taken by a person or group that is perceived to be malicious or discriminatory toward another person or group based on bias or prejudice relating to such characteristics as race, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, ancestry, ethnicity, religion, age or mental or physical disability.”

According to the website, the Cal Poly community seems to face a grave risk from unnamed but extremely ill-intentioned forces: “Incidents that are motivated by bias, prejudice, intolerance, and hatred pose a unique danger to society and undermine the fundamental fabric of our campus community.” The website links to other valuable tools, such as the Cal Poly personnel office’s great grid of grievances.

CARE-Net will start with a staff of twelve “campus advocates” to vet the reports from the University’s 18,000 or so students. Students will also be able to report online through a system called EthicsPoint, which describes itself as “a leading provider of ethics hotline and case management solutions, [and] a strategic partner with the Association of College and University Auditors (ACUA).” EthicsPoint situates itself as a compliance tool for institutions seeking to keep up with Sarbannes-Oxley regulations, but it also provides “Whistleblower Hotline Solutions” to over 2000 organizations! We might think of EthicsPoint as Big Brother’s little nephew.

What more could or should we say about Cal Poly’s new venture? It is, of course, rooted in an alleged bias incident. Last October, some students during Halloween hung a Confederate flag, a noose, and an offensive sign outside the campus residence in which they were living, “Crops House.”   This occasioned much soul-searching and many meetings. Cal Poly administrators apologized (apparently for their inability to overrule the First Amendment) and students protested the apology as insufficient. Cal Poly president, Warren Baker, said the incident was “unacceptable” and that in thirty years as president, nothing had saddened him as much. The upshot was that the flag-displaying, noose-hanging students (they denied putting up the sign) were moved out of Crops House and the University announced its decision to tear down the building.

It isn’t entirely clear what the louts in Crop House thought they were doing, but in any case, the “bias incident” got reported easily enough without the help of EthicsPoint or the dozen new CARE-netters. Cal Poly’s new policy thus doesn’t exactly track the event that the administration cites as evidence for the need—unless we accept the logic that the Cal Poly is rife with ethnic hatred and bias that has just gone unreported for lack of a safe means to turn in the culprits.

Cal Poly is, of course, not the first college or university down this path. Last fall, we reported in Williams Chokes Up, on a similar system called Williams Speaks Up at Williams College in Massachusetts.   Williams Speaks Up was, at the time, a bias reporting system with a frustrating dearth of bias reports. Perhaps it is time to check in with Williams again. At the end of the academic year has the bias-reporting business picked up? Or are we in a bias recession?

I suppose a larger question is whether systems such as the one Williams created last year and Cal Poly has just instituted make campuses more wholesome? I am skeptical. As I wrote last week in American Character, the Remix: How College is Shaping Us Now, the ethos of American higher education has shifted towards encouraging psychological dependency. A portion of this involves identity politics and the careful nurturance of grievances, and an even larger portion involves fostering a whiney irritability in students—an irritability that is directed towards everything. Life is unfair; people insult me; I’m going to tell.

This world of resentful passivity is fed by the university that increasingly tells students that a major part of their education is coming to recognize the grievances they didn’t know they had. To help them come to that awareness, more and more university resources are devoted to the therapeutic side of the university. Cal Poly calls its new system, naturally, CARE-Net. Cal Poly cares enough to help you snare in its net the imaginary tormentors that make your life imperfect.

Cal Poly’s motto, incidentally, is “learn by doing.”   Doing, apparently, includes dropping a dime to little nephew at EthicsPoint when your professor says something that crosses your threshold of racial sensitivity or calling the inclusivity police at CARE-Net if someone like Steven Hinkle mentions a lecture on a topic you don’t approve.

In his thirty years at Cal Poly, President Baker may have built some educational programs that deserve broad respect. Be that as it may, he also helped to make Cal Poly a place of intellectual repression and cringing acceptance of ideological fashion.   He has favored a style of education that ill prepares students for morally responsible adulthood by training them to think that complaining to a bureaucracy or calling the police will cure their dissatisfactions.

People who complain about the reign of political correctness on campus often think mainly of the hardship inflicted on those who disagree or who attempt to dissent, such as Steve Hinkle. But that’s only the most visible cost to political correctness. It also a system of rewards to those who comply with its edicts. And those rewards are far more insidious than the punishments meted out to dissenters. They are tickets to a lifetime of unappeasable grievance.

UPDATE 5/12/09 - After this article was published and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education sent a letter to Cal Poly, CARE-Net removed all the information [?] from its website, leaving only a promise that "new text will be available soon" and that interested parties can send the program an email for more information. Stay tuned for further developments.

==

http://mustangnews.net/hundredsprotestcollegeclaimsactsprotected/

Hundreds protest, college claims acts protected

by jon

When news came out about a noose, a confederate flag and allegations of a sign that read racial and gay slurs, hundreds of Cal Poly students and faculty joined together wearing black shirts in response to the on-campus crop science house members who allegedly committed the offenses at recent weekend parties.

The crop house is a subsidized house for crop science students to live while they work for the campus crop unit.

Brad Pupura, a student leader of the protest at University Union Hour on Thursday, addressed the crowd before a band played, informing everyone about the incident and the reasoning behind the protest.

“This is on-school property and it is hate speech,” said Pupura, a graphic communication senior. “They are just getting a slap on the wrist and issuing an apology. It’s absurd and I’m dumbfounded.”

He said that Cal Poly should foster an environment of acceptance.

“Cal Poly should have been proactive and not reactive. This is completely uncalled for. It’s 2008.”

Peter Wade, city and regional planning and chapter president for the Society of Black Engineers and Scientists, said that those protesting want a town hall meeting with Cal Poly President Warren Baker and faculty to share and brainstorm solutions.

During the hour of protest, a petition accumulated about 150 signatures for the expulsion of the students living in the crop science house and those involved with the disputed materials.

“We think that what they did was a threat and we do not consider it free speech,” Wade said.

Camille O’Bryant, associate professor and department chair of kinesiology, held a sign that read “End Racism Now.”

“I wasn’t there, but I absolutely condemn the idea that anyone feels it is OK to write derogatory terms and post them in public,” Bryant said. “People are unaware of the multiplicity to the symbols without awareness to them. That’s a problem for me.”

For now, Cal Poly is standing by the decision that this is a free speech issue.

Provost Robert Koob first learned about the incident with the noose and flag on Tuesday evening after a reporter for The New Times called John Peterson, Cal Poly department head of horticulture and crop science, for comments on the incident.

Koob said that an unknown female student visiting the crop science house felt uncomfortable about what she saw and described and gave information to the New Times, a San Luis Obispo weekly paper.

“(The incident) appears to be true and we don’t approve of it,” Koob said. “My first reaction was: What are we going to do to punish them?”

But the Cal Poly administration will not be taking any legal action against those students involved since the First Amendment supports their right to voice their opinions.

“We learned that it’s a protective element of free speech so we aren’t able to take any punitive actions,” Koob said. “So what we are doing is to work with those students to first, understand their motivation and second, to help them understand how hurtful that is to a large number of people.”

Koob said that the students have also broken the trust of the university by using the house that they are allowed to reside in for such an event.

Peterson, who visited the crop science house after he learned about the event, talked to the students about what exactly happened.

“The students admitted that it was not good, stupid and wrong,” Peterson said, adding that the hanging skeleton, he was told, was a Halloween decoration. “They said it was a foolish rebellion and ruthless behavior.”

Peterson said that the students living at the house were unsupervised at the time, but that is going to change.

“We absolutely need to be on an enhanced level of oversight,” he added, emphasizing that the students’ actions do not reflect the values of the department.

“We have a high level of respect and regard for diversity in its fullest scope.”

Rachel Glas contributed

==

President, National Association of Scholars Dr. Peter Wood can be reached at pwood@nas.org.

Chasing Eels

Jun 10, 2016 by Peter Wood | The new book The Closing of the Liberal Mind helps us get a better grasp on the slippery modern academic Left.

Students Are Not Customers

Jun 10, 2016 by Peter Wood | Peter Wood argues that higher education entails a hierarchical relationship between students who seeks knowledge and others who teach knowledge, as opposed to a consumer relationship.

Time and Beauty: Commencement Address at Veritas Academy

Jun 02, 2016 by Peter Wood | Last week, NAS president Peter Wood spoke to students of Veritas Preparatory Academy as they move into America's universities.

NAS Welcomes Spencer Kashmanian as Development Associate

Jun 02, 2016 by Peter Wood | Join us in welcoming Spencer Kashmanian to the NAS team! If you appreciate Edmund Burke, Spencer may interest you with his studies of the Burkean.

The Feds Make a Mess of Sex and Gender

May 18, 2016 by Peter Wood | NAS president Peter Wood explains how the Office of Civil Rights is creating more problems for universities.

Springfield College’s Reply to NAS Letter

May 09, 2016 by Peter Wood | NAS presents a new case of bias against a faculty member over his course "Men in Literature."

NAS President Peter Wood’s Letter to Springfield College President Mary-Beth…

May 09, 2016 by Peter Wood | NAS presents a new case of bias against a faculty member over his course "Men in Literature."

Springfield College Purges Men in Literature

May 09, 2016 by Peter Wood | NAS presents a new case of bias against a faculty member over his course "Men in Literature."

Virginia Tech Relents and Re-Invites Jason Riley to Speak on Campus

May 09, 2016 by Peter Wood, Rachelle Peterson | Virginia Tech felt the pressure and re-invited Jason Riley to the podium.

An Open Letter to Virginia Tech’s Dean Sumichrast

May 04, 2016 by Peter Wood | NAS president Peter Wood calls on Virginia Tech to acknowledge and uphold its invitation to Jason Riley.

You Are Cordially Disinvited

May 03, 2016 by Peter Wood, Rachelle Peterson | Jason Riley is the most recent conservative speaker to recieve a disinvitation.

How Anthropology Was Corrupted and Killed

May 03, 2016 by Peter Wood | NAS President Peter Wood writes on how the American Anthropology Association's bandwagon vote to boycott Israeli academic institutions is a step toward toward the death of another academic discipline.

War, What Is It Good For? Sometimes, Absolutely Everything

Apr 20, 2016 by Peter Wood | Wars have significantly contributed to our identity as a nation.

Mizzou Wipes Out Respect and Excellence

Apr 18, 2016 by Peter Wood | Enrollments at the University of Missouri are plummeting.

Safe Spaces or Free Speech? Intellectual Freedom and the Modern Campus

Apr 15, 2016 by Peter Wood | NAS President Peter Wood discusses the tension between safe spaces and free speech, clarifying the importance of intellectual freedom.

==

==

New Mashey Report Disrobes Climate Disinformer

What would cause a senior anthropologist such as Peter Wood to stagger outside his field of expertise and launch a bitchy, personal and error-ridden attack on a climate scientist and his defender? Wrong-headedness? Ideological blindess? Great wads of Richard Mellon Scaife’s cash? What?

Well, the question must be rhetorical, unless the President of the National Association of Scholars chooses to answer it himself. According to his fields of study, Wood is an “expert” in art, aesthetics, Catholocism and culture. He neither claims nor can demonstrate the tiniest academic mastery of atmospheric physics or any other aspect of climatology.

Yet he has used his launching pad as president of the NAS (suspiciously rendered with the same acronym as the National Academy of Sciences) and a podium at the Chronicle of Higher Education to try to dismiss both Michael Mann and John Mashey as huckster fellow travellers of P.T. Barnum.

As the attached report demonstrates, that was a mistake. Because Wood doesn’t fare at all well when someone turns the investigatory camera on him. Wood has long had a tendency to question climate science or to laud whacky climate change deniers such as Christopher Monckton or Fred Singer, but his most recent outburst followed an excellent short feature of John Mashey by the journal Science. As Wood says, “Science reports that retired computer scientist Dr. John Mashey is attempting to patch the tattered reputation of ‘hide the decline’ Michael Mann, the climate scientist whose famous ‘hockey stick’ chart shows exponentially increasing global temperatures in the near term.”

Beyond correctly identifying Mashey as a computer scientist, Wood appears to be wrong on all fronts. Far from being “tattered,” Mike Mann’s reputation has been hardened in the fires of hell. Despite a pitched attack on his character and scientific output going back nearly a decade, every inquiry appears to exonerate his personal behavior and reaffirm the quality of his science. I suspect Mann’s work has been cited more in the last six months than Wood’s has in his entire career.

Neither was it Mann who penned the famous (and famously misquoted) “hide the decline” line from the stolen East Anglia emails. And the important part of Mann’s hockey-stick chart was not the exponential increase in global temperature: you can see that in any rendering of the actual instrumental record. The defining work in Mann’s graph (and in every other climate reconstruction that has been done since) is the demonstration that, before humans started pouring carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, we had enjoyed at least a thousand years of remarkable climate stability (constituting the shaft of the hockey stick that came before the exponential blade).

So Wood either doesn’t understand any of this or doesn’t want us to. And Mashey, a ferociously energetic researcher, has created a 34-page report pondering Wood’s own frailties and setting forth some possible explanations of why the (less credible) NAS president could be so far off the rails.

There is, of course, ideology. Although the NAS declines to identify itself as a bastion of “conservative” thought, it seems to spend a surprising amount of time digging its nose into issues that are more of interest to its well-healed conservative funders than those that are centrally reflected in the organization’s own mission statement. (I dare you to find much “reasoned scholarship” or “civil debate” in Wood’s original salvo or in any of the back-and-forth commentary that followed.)

Mashey also points to the coincidence that the big donors to the (less credible) NAS are also suspiciously generous to organizations such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the George C. Marshall Institute - two of the most prominent climate science denying think tanks in the country. Now, it could be purest chance that all these organizations share a passion for spreading climate confusion.  Just as it could be possible that the devastating weather events that have marred America so far this year are entirely unrelated to climate change ….

You also have to admit the possibility that Dr. Wood just isn’t that smart - that he is doing all this work in purest good faith, but that he has the terrible misfortune to have consistently and repeatedly got all the details wrong.

Certainly, it was a case of misfortune that he attacked Mashey, or else the encyclopedic evidence of Wood’s connections and previous protestations would not have been gathered in this handy reference.

Alas, when you look at the clownish Monckton, the discredited Singer or Steve Milloy and, now, the unfortunate Peter Wood, you have to wonder that the oily barons can’t afford more impressive champions for their increasingly incredible cause.

SourceWatch

Peter W. Wood is President of the National Association of Scholars. He has a PhD in Anthropology and is listed as the author of two books published by Encounter Books.[Bradley]

In the role of National Association of Scholars President he has espoused climate contrarianism, but it is unclear that he has any background in the climate science field.

1 Background and experience

2 Climate science and policy

2.1 Expertise is unclear

2.2 Writings are dismissive

3 Articles and resources

3.1 References

3.2 Related SourceWatch articles

3.3 External resources

3.4 External articles

Background and experience

"He is a graduate of Haverford College, Rutgers University, and the University of Rochester, from which he received a Ph.D. in anthropology in 1987. He previously served as provost of The King’s College in New York City, and as associate provost and the president [ John Silber ]’s chief of staff at Boston University, where he was also a tenured member of the anthropology department."[1]

Climate science and policy

Expertise is unclear

It is unclear whether Dr. Wood has any academic background or experience that would qualify him to hold informed views about the field of climate science.[2]

Writings are dismissive

In June 2011, in the Chronicle of Higher Education weblog, posts appearing under Wood's byline included a 3-part attack on sustainability[3],[4],[5] and a post[6] casting doubt on human-caused climate change and dismissing the work by John Mashey and others to expose and counter the climate denial PR effort.[7]

Articles and resources

References

? Peter Wood. Carolina Journal. Retrieved on 2011-07-12.

? Dr. Wood has declined to provide this information so far, saying he will take the request "under advisement." - Ahaynes, 2011-07-14; no further information, two weeks later

? Peter Wood (2011-06-16). Tyranny or Theft? Part 1 - Innovations. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved on 2011-07-10. “Tyranny or Theft? Part 1”

? Peter Wood (2011-06-16). Tyranny or Theft? Part 2. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved on 2011-07-10. “Tyranny or Theft? Part 3”

? Peter Wood (2011-06-16). Tyranny or Theft? Part 3. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved on 2011-07-10.

? Peter W. Wood (2011-06-30). Bottling Up Global Warming Skepticism. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved on 2011-07-10. “"At 15, P.T. Barnum showed what he was made of...Of course, man-made global warming is just one exhibit in the contemporary higher-education circus."”

? Tim Lambert. Peter Wood's double standard on plagiarism. Deltoid. Retrieved on 2011-07-10.

Related SourceWatch articles

National Association of Scholars

External resources

Bottling Nonsense – Peter Wood and the National Association of Scholars, 34pp report by John Mashey, 2011-08-01

External articles

Categories: Climate change | Stubs

Stephen H. Balch is the chairman and was the founding president of the National Association of Scholars.

He was previously involved in founding the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics, and the Association for the Study of Free Institutions.

He holds a Ph.D. in political science from the University of California.[1]

Contents

[hide]

1 Articles and resources

1.1 References

1.2 Related SourceWatch articles

1.3 External resources

1.4 External articles

Articles and resources

References

? NAS - The National Association of Scholars :: People. ?. Retrieved on 2011-07-13.

NAS616

Peter Wyatt Wood

President

pwood@nas.org

Peter Wood is an anthropologist and former provost. He was appointed president of the NAS in January 2009. Before that he served as NAS’s executive director (2007-2008), and as provost of The King’s College in New York City (2005-2007).

Dr. Wood was a tenured member of the Anthropology Department at Boston University, where he also held a variety of administrative positions, including associate provost and president’s chief of staff. He also oversaw the university’s scholarly publications and served as acting university librarian.

He received his Ph.D. in anthropology in 1987 from the University of Rochester. His dissertation, Quoting Heaven, examined the emergence of an American folk religion and pilgrimage center in rural Wisconsin. His undergraduate degree is from Haverford College (1975) and he has a master’s degree in library science from Rutgers University (1977).

Dr. Wood is the author of A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America Now (Encounter Books, 2007) and of Diversity: The Invention of a Concept (Encounter Books, 2003) which won the Caldwell Award for Leadership in Higher Education from the John Locke Foundation. These books extend his anthropological interest in examining emergent themes in modern American culture.

In addition to his scholarly work, Dr. Wood has published several hundred articles in print and online journals, such as Partisan Review and National Review Online, and the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Ashley Thorne

Executive Director

thorne@nas.org

Ashley joined the NAS staff as director of communications in 2008, became director of the Center for the Study of the Curriculum in 2012, and became executive director in 2014. She received her master's degree in linguistics from the CUNY Graduate Center in 2014, and her undergraduate degree in politics, philosophy, and economics from The King’s College in 2007. In 2010 she published a chapter, “Ducking the Coffins: How I Became an Edu-Con,” in an anthology edited by Jonah Goldberg, Proud to Be Right.

Glenn M. Ricketts

Public Affairs Director

ricketts@nas.org

Public Affairs Director Glenn Ricketts joined the NAS staff in 1989. He was the founding president of the NAS New Jersey state affiliate, and served for 20 years on the NAS board of directors. A graduate of Temple University in Philadelphia, he received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago. He is also professor of political science and U.S. history at Raritan Valley Community College in Somerville New Jersey, where he has taught since 1982.

Rachelle Peterson

Director of Research Projects

peterson@nas.org

Rachelle Peterson joined NAS in 2013 as a research associate analyzing the campus sustainability movement. She graduated from The King’s College in May 2013 with a bachelor’s degree in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics.

David Randall

Director of Communications

randall@nas.org

David Randall joined NAS in 2015 as director of communications. He earned a Ph.D. in history from Rutgers University, an M.F.A. in fiction writing from Columbia University, a master’s degree in library science from the Palmer School at Long Island University, and a B.A. from Swarthmore College. Prior to working at NAS he was the sole librarian at the John McEnroe Library at New York Studio School.

Ivan Vajdle

Controller

vajdle@nas.org

Ivan joined NAS in 2015 after graduating from Passaic County Community College with a degree in accounting. He also serves as an associate pastor at Christian Fellowship Church of God in Rockaway, NJ. A graduate of Baptist Theological Seminary (Novi Sad, Serbia), he received his M. A. in Theology from Tyndale Theological Seminary (Badhoevedorp, The Netherlands). Prior to moving to the United States, he taught in theological institutions and church ministry in his home country, Serbia. He is the father of two girls, Rebeka and Tara.

Spencer Kashmanian

Development Associate

kashmanian@nas.org

Spencer joined NAS as development associate in May 2016 after graduating from The King’s College with a Bachelor of Arts degree in politics, philosophy, and economics.

Carol Iannone

Editor-at-Large, Academic Questions

Felicia Sanzari Chernesky

Managing Editor, Academic Questions

chernesky@nas.org

Felicia Sanzari Chernesky returned to the position of managing editor of Academic Questions in October 2007. She graduated magna cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania with a BA in English, majoring in American poetry, with a minor in French literature and a concentration in Latin. She began working for the National Association of Scholars in 1987, and served as an assistant director, editor of the NAS newsletter, NAS Update, and managing editor of Academic Questions. In 1993 she left full-time employment to begin raising a family. While remaining an independent consultant to the NAS, she also freelanced as an editor and writer. A published poet, she is pursuing an MFA in Poetry with an Emphasis in Formal Verse at Western State College of Colorado. She is also active in the New Jersey chapter of the Society for Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, and is represented by The Bent Agency.

BOARD OF DIRECTORS

HERBERT LONDON

Chairman

hlondon@londoncenter.org

Herbert I. London is president of the London Center for Policy Research and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. He is the former president of the Hudson Institute. He is professor emeritus and the former John M. Olin Professor of Humanities at New York University. He was responsible for creating the Gallatin School of Individualized Study in 1972 and was its dean until 1992. This school was organized to promote the study of “great books” and classic texts. Herbert London is a graduate of Columbia University, 1960, and the recipient of a Ph.D. from New York University, 1966.

STEVE BALCH

Founder

steve.balch@ttu.edu

Stephen H. Balch is director of The Institute for the Study of Western Civilization at Texas Tech University. He previously served for twenty-five years as the founding president and then the chairman of the National Association of Scholars. He holds a Ph.D. in political science from the University of California at Berkeley and was for fourteen years a member of the faculty of the Department of Government and Public Administration of John Jay College of Criminal Justice, part of the City University of New York. In 2007 he received the National Humanities Medal from President George W. Bush. In 2009 he was the recipient of the Jeane Jordan Kirkpatrick Academic Freedom Award from the American Conservative Union Foundation and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation.

DANIEL ASIA

Professor of Music, University of Arizona, whose compositions include five symphonies, an opera, and numerous other works.

EVELYN AVERY

Associate Professor of English and former director of Jewish Studies, Towson State University.

JAY A. BERGMAN

Professor of History, Central Connecticut State University, whose research focuses on modern Russian history.

PETER BERKOWITZ

Tad and Dianne Taube Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where he chairs the National Security and Law Task Force.

WARD CONNERLY

Founder and President of the American Civil Rights Institute, former President and CEO of Connerly & Associates, Inc., a land developing consulting firm, and a former Regent of the University of California.

MIDGE DECTER

Founder, Committee for the Free World, and widely published writer.

GEORGE W. DENT, JR.

Professor of Law, Case Western Reserve University, where he is the Associate Director of the Law School's Center for Business Law and Regulation.

CANDACE DE RUSSY

Regent, Ave Maria University; member of advisory boards of FIRE, the Independent Women's Forum, the International Institute of Classical Humanities, and the Cardinal Newman Society; former trustee of SUNY and member of Board of Visitors of the U.S. Air Force Academy.

DAVID GORDON

Professor of History, City University of New York, where he focuses on the economic history of France and French investments in East Asia.

GAIL L. HERIOT

Professor of Law, University of San Diego and member of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission.

THOMAS KLINGENSTEIN

Founder and Principal of Cohen Klingenstein LLC, a New York City investment firm; Chairman of Claremont Institute; and playwright.

ROBERT C. KOONS

Professor of Philosophy, University of Texas at Austin, where he specializes in the application of logic to metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, political philosophy, and philosophy of religion.

BARRY LATZER

Professor of Criminal Justice at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY, who has published widely on criminal procedure, the death penalty, and the history of crime.

THOMAS K. LINDSAY

Former president of Shimer College, and former provost of the University of Dallas, Director of the Center for Higher Education at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, and former deputy chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. His research focuses on Aristotle’s teaching on the relation between education and democracy in the Politics.

WIGHT MARTINDALE

Former journalist and Wall Street businessman who worked at Lehman Brothers for 17 years as a Senior Vice President in the bond department and later as a managing director with Guggenheim Capital Markets. He has taught at Lehigh University, Temple University, and Villanova University.

ANNE D. NEAL

Co-Founder and President, American Council of Trustees and Alumni, which protects liberal arts education and high academic standards.

B. NELSON ONG

Associate Professor of Political Science, College of New Rochelle, focusing his research in the foundations of American constitutionalism.

NORM ROGERS

Founder and former CEO of Rabbit Semiconductor, a California manufacturer of embedded microprocessors and software for embedded programming; volunteer senior policy advisor, The Heartland Institute, Chicago. He writes about global warming from a skeptical point of view.

BARRY SMITH

Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, University at Buffalo and Director, National Center for Ontological Research.

SANDRA STOTSKY

Chair, Department of Education Reform, University of Arkansas and nationally-known expert in English language arts content standards.

RICHARD VEDDER

Distinguished Professor of Economics Emeritus, Ohio University; founder, Center for College Affordability and Productivity.

BRADLEY C.S. WATSON

Department Chair, Philip M. McKenna Professor of Politics, and Co-Director of the Center for Political and Economic Thought at St. Vincent College, Latrobe, PA.

AMY L. WAX

Robert Mundheim Professor of Law, University of Pennsylvania, and an expert in civil procedure, appellate litigation, social welfare law and policy, and the law and economics of work and family.

KEITH WHITAKER

Founding Associate, Wise Counsel Research Associates; formerly a philosophy professor, Boston College, and writing instructor, Boston University.

CURRENT BOARD OF ADVISORS

John Agresto

Edwin J. Delattre

Chester E. Finn, Jr.

Robert P. George

Gertrude Himmelfarb

Paul Hollander

Donald Kagan

Richard D. Lamm

Leslie Lenkowsky

Harvey C. Mansfield

Milton J. Rosenberg

Christina Hoff Sommers

Shelby Steele

Stephan Thernstrom

FORMER MEMBERS OF THE BOARD OF ADVISORS

Jacques Barzun

James David Barber

Walter Berns

Eugene D. Genovese

Irving Louis Horowitz

Harry V. Jaffa

Robert Jastrow

Jeane J. Kirkpatrick

Irving Kristol

Seymour Martin Lipset

Sir Hugh Lloyd-Jones

Nelson W. Polsby

Willard V. Quine

Leo Raditsa

Stanley Rothman

John R. Silber

Ernest van den Haag

James Q. Wilson

==

END 220 TXT TWO

==

hmmn/huh?

The NeoCons

These Exhibits document events taking place in conjunction with the group of people today identified as 'neoconservatives' or NeoCons.  

John Fund

 Exhibit 1 -  Website Home Page:  Copied on this site.  Original:   Johnfund.com

 Exhibit 2 - "Notes on Fund Deposition from Gary Fish to Morgan Pillsbury" October 4th,

                      NY 

Exhibit 3 - October 27, 1999 Fax to the Wall Street Journal

Exhibit 4 - Email Memo from Michael Cory to William Bartley regarding JF credit card

                    records

Exhibit 5 - Letter and Post card from Fund to Melinda - 1988

Exhibit 6 - Letter to David Steinberger re: Mark Crispin Miller 

Exhibit 7 -IM dialog between Matt Drudge and "John Fund," actually Morgan

Exhibit 8 - Morgan's rejection of coerced statement 2002

Exhibit 9 - Letter affirming abuse of Morgan by John Fund, Eric Buchanan

Exhibit 10 - Letter from Fidelity Investments January 25, 2002

Exhibit 11 - Charges of  domestic violence in Jersey City, 2001

Exhibit 12 - Email exchange with Gail Heriot January 18, 2002

Exhibit 13 - Wedding arrangements

 Exhibit 14 - Email to Morgan documenting gift of checks January 19, 2002

 Exhibit 15 - Deposition, NY 

 Exhibit 16 - Letter from Office of the DA, NY September 30, 2009

 Exhibit 17 - Letter from long time Libertarian

 Exhibit 18 -  Deposition by Manuel Klausner

 Exhibit 19 - John Fund Deposition Sidney Blumenthal Case

:{ Exhibit 20 - Legal Correspondence and Expense, Talk Magazine

 Exhibit  21 - An Open Letter to Steven M. Craig

 Exhibit 22 - Announcement wedding will not take place

 Exhibit 23 -  Police Report, 2002, New York

 Exhibit 24 - Letter to Group Professionals

Exhibit 25 -  Notarized affidavit dated January 24, 2002.

                         Link to Fund website  

Exhibit 26 -  Handwritten undated letter to the Wall Street Journal

                         Link to Fund Website 

Exhibit 27 -  Answer and Verified Counterclaim of John H. Fund dated January 23, 2003 in

                       the case of Morgan Pillsbury v. John Fund, Citicorp Group and Jane Doe, Index

                       No. 121868/02 (N.Y. Sup. Ct.)

Exhibit 28 - E-mail message from the woman in question to Professor Gail Heriot of the

                      University of San Diego School of Law. This is one among many such harassing 

                      and often vulgar communications sent by the woman in question to female 

                      friends and acquaintances of mine. Note that she was using an America-Online 

                      e-mail address that made it appear the message came from me.

More from Fund site 

UPDATE: On July 14, 2006, my accuser abandoned her meritless claim against me in the case of Morgan Pillsbury v. John Fund, Citicorp Group and "Jane Doe," Index No. 121868-02 (N.Y. Sup. Ct.: N.Y. County). She received absolutely no money from me or anyone else as a result of her voluntary dismissal with prejudice, and she was clearly entitled to none. The dismissal occurred minutes before trial was to begin when it finally became clear to her that I would not submit to her demands.

As the attached transcript reveals, at the same time, I dropped my counterclaims against her. While these counterclaims were well-founded, they had been filed only in response to my accuser's suit and had no monetary value on their own, since she is clearly judgment proof. I also promised to return miscellaneous property that she had left at my home several years ago. This property had long since been put into storage by me, and my attorney had made multiple efforts to return it to my accuser. Those efforts, however, had been met with silence.

The wheels of American justice turn slowly--painfully slowly at times. But at least in this case, they have turned surely. I would like to thank my attorney, Fred Kessler, for all his hard work. I would also like to thank Professor Gail Heriot. Despite my accuser's outrageous threats to sue Gail and her wholly uninvolved employer and colleagues, she flew across the country to be ready to testify each time the trial was scheduled to occur. I don't know what I would have done without Fred and Gail. I hope this will end an unhappy chapter in my life and look forward to the future.

}:

:{**Gail Heriot**:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:

Exhibit 1 - Gail's Face Book

Exhibit 2 - Gail Heriot's Website

Exhibit 3 - Email to John Fund

Exhibit 4 - Libelous Letter

 Exhibit 4 - Letter from Heriot to Gene Gaudette

Fund Job Program for Indigent and Morally Bankrupt Journalists

Exhibit 1 - Letter to Elle Magazine, June 11, 2004

Exhibit 2 -Lloyd Grove on misuse of photo

Exhibit 3 - :{Letter regarding Elle Article from Jennifer Bambi, August 27, 2004:(style="font-weight:normal"):}:

Exhibit 4 - Email exchange Alterman and Morgan, Mother's Day 2003

Exhibit 5 - Email response from Alterman July 4, 2003 

Exhibit 6 - Christine Reis Hall and Jule Currie

:{:{:{:{:{:{

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==

UCSC

Napolitano’s Law-Breaking Scheme at UCal

Nov 26, 2013 by Peter Wood | In her new presidency at the University of California, Janet Napolitano is embracing academic corruption in the form of a spending spree on diversity.

The University of California Regents Contradict Themselves

Jun 25, 2013 by Charles L. Geshekter , John Ellis | In a new series of correspondence about the California Association of Scholars' report A Crisis of Competence, the University of California Regents appear less than transparent.

California Association of Scholars Responds to UC Regents

Mar 05, 2013 by Charles Geshekter , John M. Ellis | The California Association of Scholars responds a second time to UC's Board of Regents.

California Scholars Confront Regents on UC Politicization

Feb 05, 2013 by Charles L. Geshekter , John Ellis | The California Association of Scholars, a division of NAS, challenges the Board of Regents to address political activism in the classroom at the University of California.

What’s Up with California Higher Ed?

Jun 14, 2012 by Ashley Thorne | Three organizations have just published reports with concerns about the state of higher education in California and recommendations for how to fix it. ALEC UCHIC?

A Crisis of Competence: Update, Comment, and Criticism

May 21, 2012 by Steve Balch | NAS chairman Steve Balch answers responses to the new report by the California Association of Scholars on politicization in the University of California.

U California President Yudof Says Political Advocacy Is a Problem

Apr 19, 2012 by Ashley Thorne | At a press conference UC president Mark Yudof declared his commitment to ideology-free education. Charles Geshekter of the Caliofornia Association of Scholars asked him to say so in a memo to the UC Board of Regents.

Politics, Education, and More Politics: NAS’s New Report on the University of California

Apr 11, 2012 by Peter Wood | Peter Wood discusses the National Association of Scholars’ new report that says higher education has been hurt by the failure of safeguards against using the classroom to advance partisan ideas and loyalties.

University of California Report in the News

Apr 02, 2012 by Ashley Thorne | Both national and local media pay attention to a new report by NAS's California affiliate on the politicization of the University of California.

A Crisis of Competence: The Corrupting Effect of Political Activism in the University…

Mar 30, 2012 John M. Ellis | A report on the consequences of politicization in higher education, focused on the University of California.

Politics Undermining Learning, Scholars Warn University of California

Mar 30, 2012 | PRESS RELEASE: The California Association of Scholars has published a report showing how radical faculty members and administrators and politicized courses have compromised the quality of education in the University of California.

California Tuition Turmoil

Nov 23, 2009 by Peter Wood | Protesters at the University of California have some demands that reflect ignorance of basic economics.

==

UC

Grade Inflation in Higher Education: Is the End in Sight?

Oct 11, 2016 by Michael J. Carter, Patricia Y. Lara | Carter and Lara examine grade inflation: how widespread is it, and will it continue?

Roses and Thorns: NAS’s Top 10 List for 2015

Dec 22, 2015 by Ashley Thorne | The National Association of Scholars remembers who stood out this year in higher education.

California Association of Scholars Conference in June

May 12, 2014 by NAS | The California Association of Scholars will co-host a conference, "Failing Grades: The Crisis in Teaching on our University Campuses."

The Highs and Lows of 2013: NAS Picks Higher Ed’s Top Ten Stories

Dec 24, 2013 by Peter Wood | NAS recaps the top ten higher education stories from 2013.

Napolitano Appointment in California: Everyone’s Unhappy

Jul 25, 2013 by Glenn Ricketts | Janet Napolitano takes the reins as UC president amid a storm of controversy.

Napolitano—A Disastrous Choice

Jul 17, 2013 by Peter Wood | The University of California Regents' choice of president proves a preference for politics over pedagogy.

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}:}:}:}:}:}: