Disillusionment is a terrible thing:

He has meetings in the White House with businessmen and he reads to them from the TelePrompter?

Makes you kind of wonder how he got into Punahou, Occidental, Columbia and Harvard Law, doesn’t it? Either the man is not the genius-level IQ the media has so devoutly wished him to be, or else…

Or else this: (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.”

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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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Many conservatives and libertarians think of labor unions as merely the grassroots muscle behind the progressive movement. Showing up as a swarm of purple shirts, with the forearms of a lumberjack and a penchant for terrorizing teenagers, labor unions have always been considered the rough and rugged group that intimidate their opponents through the “persuasion of power.”

Drier-Email –

But if you haven’t thought of the labor movement as a cerebral bunch, think again. Meet Peter Dreier, Donald Cohen, Nelson Lichtenstein, and their syndicate of progressive university professors – the “intellectual infrastructure” of the progressive labor movement.

It is no secret that progressives have created a self-cloning machine by hijacking our educational system. Their indoctrination efforts are well documented. But we rarely think of research institutions as propaganda factories. A Request for Proposal (RFP) — see document above — recently obtained by Big Journalism gives us a rare look at how progressives and labor unions attempt to manipulate the national media narrative.

And their process? you may ask. Use the credibility and resources of the American higher education system to create researchprop – biased collegial research papers that serve as propaganda to support political policies.

Entitled Cry Wolf, the RFP proclaims a desire to look “for faculty and graduate students… interested in writing short (2,000 word) policy briefs” that “construct a counter narrative that demonstrates the falsity or exaggeration” of conservative claims. Writers of briefs selected by the project coordinators will receive 100,000 pennies for their thoughts. (more…)