A fixed fight: The Influence of Labor Unions in Academe. Part One is here.

In the academic world, employees are very often public employees. This means that they are also very often union employees. At all levels. This includes everyone from janitors, to dormitory housekeepers, cafeteria workers, clerical staff, and computer techs, to even the graduate assistants and professors. While the salary gap between a cafeteria worker and a senior professor may be huge, the solidarity of the unions is a powerful magnet that creates an unbreakable bond amongst them.

Unions are fond of bashing capitalism with seething rhetoric, decrying the economic system as irredeemably corrupted by greed and racism and classism. But the ideology they themselves embrace is itself driven by the same ugly characteristics they profess to detest. Except in their case, power is the motivating force, the passion that drives them.

The burning desire for the power to control your life is the tie that binds the union service worker to the academic intellectual. It is this common fabric that connects the union janitor more closely to the ideological academic intellectual than to his working-class counterparts beyond campus.

What’s far more dangerous is that the ideological academic, in his capacity as a professor, actually possesses the power to control. The power to influence students’ minds, to mold the students’ way of thinking to embrace their own power-hungry desires and believe in it as “social justice” – this is a frightening weapon. Via union solidarity, this weapon is shared with the mobilizers, the janitors and cafeteria workers who agitate the students with various demands against the university after ideologically minded professors have indoctrinated them to hear every grievance as a call for “social justice.”

(more…)

Yesterday’s story on the “Cry Wolf” project has exposed a dangerous pretense that has been prevalent, yet well disguised, for some time in our institutions of higher learning. It’s an important post.  A small committee of professors and academic professionals, normally held in high regard, have blatantly betrayed the trust of the public and quite possibly smeared the reputations of all colleges and universities nationwide.  By soliciting “paid activists” to create research papers that are intentionally designed to silence opposing viewpoints, they have undermined the political system and manipulated the governmental policy making process.  And in the meantime, they’ve also implicated all of academia in the manufacturing of their propaganda.

It is an abuse of their power, and an abuse of the institutions they represent.  It is appalling and repellent.  Perhaps even against their employers’ rules or the industry’s ethical code. Consider it an ominous warning — this will have a dire impact on our political and economic system in the future, if we remain apathetic in the face of such a rhetorical and intellectual assault.

In fact, both the rhetoric and the intentions demonstrated in Peter Dreier’s email are a classic example of much of what is wrong with today’s educational institutions: hypocrisy, bias, recklessness, and a blatant disregard for differing beliefs and viewpoints.

As Americans, we place an enormous amount of pride in the quality of our nation’s system of higher education.  In our country, colleges and universities have long been the bastions of research, the sources to which we turn for information that is expertly developed; for data that is honestly mined, analyzed, reviewed and responsibly published by noted researchers so that individuals, business people and policy makers can make well-informed decisions.

(more…)

In part one, we revealed there are only two kinds of government when you strip away all the smoke and mirrors. Big Government (BG) or Limited Government (LG). Or as we will see in this chapter, “top down” or “bottom up.” The choice you make determines if you support freedom or slavery. Today we’re going to talk about why in more detail.

To start, I need to say that this chapter explores the role of religion as a tool of statecraft. It’s going to discuss how rulers use religion to get what they want. It is not a comment on the merits of any religion, just on how it’s been used.

The earliest form of government is the tribe. The tribe had a chief of some kind who made all the big decisions. The tribe went out and gathered resources and the chief got the pick of the spoils. This system was expanded as civilization grew into villages, towns and cities. There was one person at the top, a ruler. Below them was his support group, a court. And they were the major beneficiaries of whatever wealth the society created. Everyone below them got diminishing returns. This system is still in use today in varying forms. It’s called a top down system. BG systems are all top down no matter how they try to spin it.

In order to motivate the people to agree to this arrangement, the rulers used soldiers to impose their will. But even an army isn’t enough to keep people in line. These rulers needed them to perform well, to be focused on producing goods to benefit the state. So they used the earliest form of ideology: religion. (more…)

The most infuriating thing about our mainstream media is the utter ignorance of their so-called “journalists.”  When little miss anchorwoman, Katie Couric, interviewed the president last Sunday on his sudden, desperate invitation to Republicans for ideas on healthcare reform, he told her this:

I want to look at the Republican ideas that are out there. And I want to be very specific. ‘How do you guys want to lower costs? How do you guys intend to reform the insurance markets so people with preexisting conditions, for example, can get health care?’

Ms. Couric was so ignorant of the past year-long healthcare debacle that she offered no challenge whatsoever to this latest whopper by President Obama.  If she had known the issues — which is the job for which she is supposedly paid $14 million a year, or $300,000 per week — then she would have immediately challenged the president with the fact that very specific ideas from Republicans have been on the table – in writing – since early last summer.

Over and over again, the president and his “people” go unchallenged on every whopper they tell. Either our MSM is a bunch of ignorant boobs, or they are, once again, indulging their penchant for left-wing ideology.  Whatever the case, their coverage of the president on his healthcare-reform shenanigans has been nothing short of disgraceful.

Doing the job, our MSM refuses to do – for whatever reason — here is the other half of the story on healthcare reform efforts: (more…)

James O’Keefe still gets my vote for investigative journalist of the year.  Teaming with Hannah Giles to expose illegal and immoral tactics deep in the ACORN shakedown operation was brilliant.  Now, O’Keefe has one-upped himself with his exposure of an MSM drowning in its own leftist ideology.

American journalists once cheered for those among their own who were brave enough to risk jail in the quest of exposing corruption and malfeasance.  Yet when O’Keefe and his band of whippersnapper journalists went undercover, disguised as telephone repairmen in the hopes of exposing Senator Landrieu’s denying her own constituents phone access to her, the MSM fell all over themselves denouncing the young men.

Rush to judgment?  No.  It was a stampede.

From MSNBC, CBS, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Talking Points Memo and others came shrill, utterly false headlines about “attempted bugging” and the “new Watergate,” which are now being corrected or retracted with but a faint whisper.  MSM “journalists” in high-and-mighty places haven’t had this much egg on their faces since their coffee-klatch therapy sessions over the misunderstood, “non-jihadist” Ft. Hood terror attack.

Bravo Mr. O’Keefe, honey! (more…)