On Wednesday, National Public Radio Education Correspondent Larry Abramson phoned Education Action Group to ask about our activities related to Issue 2 in Ohio, the referendum on the collective bargaining reform that was defeated at the polls Tuesday. Specifically, he inquired about our “canvassing and mobilization” efforts.

As a 501(c)(3) non-profit, EAG is prohibited from engaging in such activity. I told him as such. I did acknowledge that last year EAG published an analysis of collective bargaining agreements in southwest Ohio, prior to knowing anything about Senate Bill 5.

Additionally, we recently issued an analysis of how the mere threat of SB 5 had a positive impact on finances in several Ohio school districts.

We never recommended that Ohio voters support or oppose SB 5 or the ensuing ballot referendum on the bill.

Abramson, whose tone was clearly adversarial and one-sided, then asked me if EAG posts a donor list on its website – which oddly is the same question our union antagonists frequently ask. He was told EAG does not make that information public. Abramson then made a reference to having “ways of finding out” and ended the conversation.

So much for impartial journalism. This so-called reporter was clearly on the attack. If I didn’t know better, I would have thought the Huffington Post or Media Matters was on the line. (more…)

And so we begin to hear some feedback from the liberal side, including direct comments from one prominent member of the “Cry Wolf” project.  On the Inside Higher Ed website Friday, founder and editor Scott Jaschik addresses Big Journalism’s Academia-Gate series in his post, “Who Is Crying Wolf?”

Some prominent liberal academics are soliciting short essays from faculty members and graduate students to document a pattern in American history of major social advances being opposed by conservatives who “cry wolf” about the impact of proposed reforms. The campaign — known as the “Cry Wolf Project” — hasn’t been officially announced. But conservative bloggers obtained some of the solicitations of essays and published them this week, along with considerable criticism.

A series of posts on Andrew Breitbart’s Big Journalism Web site have called the program “Academia-Gate” and suggested that the effort is inappropriately political. The creators of Cry Wolf, meanwhile, say that what they are doing is awfully similar to the ways that right-leaning scholars have used academic work to advance their causes over the years.

Jaschik acquaints readers with the members of the “Cry Wolf” project coordinators and the details of the request for proposals.  He then goes on to cite from a couple of BigJournalism’s posts in the series:

One post on Big Journalism noted that those involved in the project are sympathetic to organized labor, and that many influential academics are serving on the advisory board. “This is what our higher education system has become – a publicly funded amplifier of progressive ideology,” says the post by Patrick Courrielche. “If this Cry Wolf program were just limited to a few faculty members at a limited number of universities, it would be of little concern. But the project reaches into some of the most prestigious public and private schools of higher learning in the U.S., including MIT, Yale, Harvard, USC, Columbia, Rutgers, UC Santa Barbara, University of Pennsylvania, and President Obama’s alma mater — Occidental College.”

Liberty Chick, the blogger who started calling Cry Wolf “Academia-Gate,” described her concerns this way: “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…)

After a week-long series of Big Journalism articles delving into the funding, agenda and dubious academic credentials behind the now-infamous “Cry Wolf Project,” the program’s co-chair, Prof. Peter Dreier has finally emerged from his bunker at Occidental College to respond to the controversy.

After first quoting heavily from the Soros-funded talking points supplied by our pals, the Senior Fellows over at Media Matters, Scott Jaschik at InsideHigherEd.com, quotes Dreier as follows:

Dreier, one of the organizers of Cry Wolf, said in an interview Thursday that the furor over the project was unfair. “This is legitimate work,” he said, and the essays will be scrutinized for accuracy. The end result will simply be better organized resources that might be consulted by the public, op-ed writers or others. He also said that he didn’t view this effort as either replacing traditional scholarship or doing anything that conservative groups don’t already do. He added that the pattern of “the world is going to end” reactions to “progressive efforts” is a legitimate issue for scholars to raise and explore.

Why are the conservatives so critical? Said Dreier: “That’s what they are paid to do.”

Let’s savor the delicious irony of Dreier’s last statement. (more…)

Patrick Courrielche’s kickoff article exposing major university faculty and graduate students’ Cry Wolf Project is alarming. Each installment in the series has only made it more so.

CWP’s solicitation for policy briefs designed to construct politically driven narratives is a confession of academic malpractice. As Kurt Schlichter has pointed out, its participants’ intentions are unethical, insubordinate, and potentially illegal.

The CWP email shows its players to be intolerant of varying viewpoints in the pursuit of their ideological ends. The fact that they are offering colleagues and grad students money to predetermine outcomes proves their intent: to tell partisan political stories:

What are they afraid of? (more…)

ACORN’s radical allies are now attempting to rewrite history to cast the organized crime syndicate as victim instead of as the prolific victimizer that it has been ever since it was created in 1970. ACORN online campaign director Nathan Henderson-James served notice in February that a propaganda effort was about to begin.

“[T]here will be a fight over the narrative of ACORN’s demise,” he wrote to members of Townhouse, a discussion forum run by Matt Stoller, senior policy adviser to Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.). The other side wants “a narrative about the corruption of popular organizations and how they are simply vehicles for the personal enrichment and power fantasies of their top staff members while pushing public policies that destroy middle America.”

Such a narrative must be fought, Henderson-James argued, because it “gives people pushing a pro-corporate agenda a way to tar progressives and even non-progressive Democrats running for office with the ACORN brush.”

The effort was already underway when Henderson-James reached out to the leftist community. After ACORN’s national board expelled ACORN founder Wade Rathke for engineering an eight-year cover-up of a million dollar embezzlement, Rathke wrote a combination political memoir/manifesto called Citizen Wealth. More recently, Seeds of Change, an institutional hagiography of ACORN by true believer John Atlas was published.

And now comes the “Cry Wolf” Project, a push to encourage academics to help spread more lies about the corrupt group. (more…)

Over at the website Minding the Campus, Prof. KC Johnson takes a look at the academic astroturf project called “Cry Wolf” that Big Journalism has been breaking all week.  The reviews are not good for Prof. Peter Dreier, E.P Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics and Urban & Environmental Policy Program director at Occidental College:

A newly announced project called “Crying Wolf,” organized out of the Center on Policy Initiatives, seems blithely unconcerned with any requirements associated with academic freedom… project coordinators Peter Dreier (a distinguished professor of politics at Occidental College), Nelson Lichtenstein (a historian of 20th century U.S. history at UC Santa Barbara who directs the university’s Center for the Study of Work, Labor and Democracy), and Donald Cohen, CPI executive director, are recruiting professors and graduate students (in “history, sociology, economics, political science, planning, public health, and public policy”) to perform “paid academic research” that can “serve in the battle with conservative ideas.”

The initiative is open about its biases: it intends to “construct a counter narrative” against what it describes as conservative opinions about taxation and regulation policy.

(more…)

The co-chair of the ‘Cry Wolf” project, Professor Peter Dreier, E.P Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics and Urban & Environmental Policy Program director at Occidental College, is a sort of email buddy of mine. If by “email buddy” I mean someone who once sent me a snide one-line missive with a link to an alternative weekly paper political cartoon depicting me in a negative light.

I’ll show you that email shortly but first background on why Professor Dreier is in my life:

In late September of 2009 two weeks into the beginning of the explosive James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles ACORN video scandal, an academic study critical of media coverage of ACORN came out from Peter Dreier and Christopher Martin, professor of journalism, University of Northern Iowa, Department of Communication Studies. The study, “Manipulating the Public Agenda: Why ACORN Was in the News, or,What the News Got Wrong,” was billed as “[a]n independent study by two prominent academics” that purported to have “found repetition of unverified allegations and distortions was the rule in national reporting of a purported ‘voter fraud’ scandal involving the community organizing group ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) during the 2008 presidential campaign.”

Peter Dreier, E.P Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics and Urban & Environmental Policy Program director at Occidental College

When I first saw the study’s press release, I naively reached out to Professor Martin to offer him and Dreier a place at our new website Big Government to act as ongoing ombudsmen of our ACORN story. We were cognizant that a left-leaning media would likely come to ACORN’s defense, so why not provide a platform for two professors claiming the media had wronged ACORN in its previous coverage of the organization to show that we were doing everything in our power to play the story fair? Recall, we proactively offered unedited transcripts and audio of O’Keefe and Giles work to show that the edited videos did not take things out of context.

After conferring with his colleague, Professor Martin declined my offer: (more…)

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…)

Critical Mass, a blog devoted to what’s wrong with American academe, has weighed in on the emerging scandal we here at Big Journalism are calling “Academia-Gate” — the “Cry Wolf” request for proposals devoted to pre-empting and discrediting conservative political positions in the sheep’s clothing of disinterested academic “scholarship,” spearheaded by leftist professor Peter Dreier at Occidental College in Los Angeles.

It’s not a pretty sight:

On the one hand, there are no surprises–there has been a decades-long academic tradition, at this point, of discounting the notion that disinterested research is even possible, and of selling the idea that the proper response to this is to shape one’s scholarship self-consciously, as a means of ensuring that it assists and justifies the kinds of social justice one would like to see in the world. On the other hand, this activist line of thought has historically had only one line of defense–and that is that it is conducted with impeccable scholarly integrity, is entirely above-board vis a vis research ethics, and is unimpeachable from within the standards of professional conduct. In other words, the ethical standards that accompany interested scholarship are, in theory, terrifically strict. That’s how such scholarship can continue to call itself scholarship, and escape being dismissed as propaganda. It’s a shaky edifice, but it’s an edifice all the same, and it has succeeded. Arguably, though, the Cry Wolf project undermines that entire edifice, as it explicitly supports the arguments of those who would say that large swathes of academia are little more than publicly funded mechanisms for disseminating and producing an ideologically-driven world view.

Ya think? (more…)

The “Cry Wolf” leader Professor Peter Dreier has a clear right to solicit all the biased, agenda-driven, fraudulent “research” he desires under the First Amendment of the Constitution he and his pals have so little regard for.  But his antics may not pass muster under another set of guidelines that he – and his institution – operate under.

Occidental College, Professor Dreier’s employer, expressly promises the students, whose parents fork over a cool $55,655 a year for the privilege of attending, that they will not be subject to any political litmus test as they participate in the school’s academics between bong hits and sessions of binge drinking:

Students are entitled to an atmosphere conducive to learning and to even-handed treatment in all aspects of the teacher-student relationship. Faculty members may not refuse to enroll or teach students because of their beliefs or the possible uses to which they may put the knowledge to be gained in a course. The student should not be forced by the authority inherent in the instructional role to make particular personal choices as to political action or his or her own part in society. Evaluation of students and the award of credit must be based on academic performance professionally judged and not on matters irrelevant to that performance, whether personality, sex, race, religion, degree of political activism, or personal beliefs.  (Occidental College Faculty Handbook, p. 2)

Of course, here a professor – in his capacity as an Occidental professor while using his Occidental email account – is expressly soliciting research work to support his personal political beliefs.  Sure, he’s not technically granting or denying credit based on his students’ political views.  He’s just exercising some of the informal “authority inherent in the instructional role.”  And it’s abundantly clear – even if he doesn’t say it outright – that a student who disagrees with Professor Dreier’s politics best keep on walking. (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.

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