Think Differently: The Police Will Contact You

Think Differently: The Police Will Contact You

You doubtless heard of the incident where a student was supposed to give a oral presentation on an important topic--and the professor stopped him part way through because he was arguing for "one man, one woman" marriage laws, called him a "fascist bastard" and otherwise behaved inappropriately. Here's an example of academic support for freedom of thought that makes that pale in comparison. From Central Connecticut State University's student newspaper, The Recorder, February 24, 2009:

For CCSU student John Wahlberg, a class presentation on campus violence turned into a confrontation with the campus police due to a complaint by the professor.

On October 3, 2008, Wahlberg and two other classmates prepared to give an oral presentation for a Communication 140 class that was required to discuss a “relevant issue in the media”. Wahlberg and his group chose to discuss school violence due to recent events such as the Virginia Tech shootings that occurred in 2007.

Shortly after his professor, Paula Anderson, filed a complaint with the CCSU Police against her student. During the presentation Wahlberg made the point that if students were permitted to conceal carry guns on campus, the violence could have been stopped earlier in many of these cases. He also touched on the controversial idea of free gun zones on college campuses.

That night at work, Wahlberg received a message stating that the campus police “requested his presence”. Upon entering the police station, the officers began to list off firearms that were registered under his name, and questioned him about where he kept them.

They told Wahlberg that they had received a complaint from his professor that his presentation was making students feel “scared and uncomfortable”.

...

Professor Anderson refused to comment directly on the situation and deferred further comment.

“It is also my responsibility as a teacher to protect the well being of our students, and the campus community at all times,” she wrote in a statement submitted to The Recorder. “As such, when deemed necessary because of any perceived risks, I seek guidance and consultation from the Chair of my Department, the Dean and any relevant University officials.”

...

“If you can’t talk about the Second Amendment, what happened to the First Amendment?” asked Sara Adler, president of the Riflery and Marksmanship club on campus. “After all, a university campus is a place for the free and open exchange of ideas.”

Nope. Not now that the left is in charge. Imagine if, in 1970, a student had given a presentation in a class in support of homosexual marriage. Would even the most conservative professor have called the police, so that they could interrogate the student about his sexual preferences? What calls itself liberalism today is really fascism.

There are days that I think that defunding most of the squishy subjects (English, History, Psychology, Art, Ethnic Studies) in state colleges wouldn't be any great loss.

UPDATE: It is conceivable that this student said something that was genuinely scary, or that indicated that he was engaged in a violation of law (perhaps carrying concealed on campus)--but it seems pretty odd that the professor wouldn't defend her call to the police department by mentioning this.

The Modern Language Association

The Modern Language Association

The MLA is the academic association for English professors, and I confess that I have less than warm feelings about them. If Ambrose Bierce were updating his Devil's Dictionary for modern conditions, he would list MLA as a synonym for Political Correctness. So I was not surprised to see this discussion in the January 2, 2009 Inside Higher Education of a recent panel at an MLA convention. I'm quoting rather carefully from the article, because some the language is a bit too...modern...for my blog. (Do you remember when the use of vulgar language was the sign of a poorly educated person?)

SAN FRANCISCO — Here’s a shocker: The one-night stand may be being replaced by long-term monogamous relationships when it comes to sex at academic conferences. That was among the revelations Tuesday at a panel of the Modern Language Association devoted to conference sex. Well, actually it was devoted to theorizing and analyzing conference sex, although it was probably the only session at the MLA this year in which a panelist appeared in a bathrobe.

The annual meeting of the MLA has long been known (and frequently satirized) for the sexual puns and imagery of paper titles — even if many of the papers themselves are in fact more staid than their names would suggest. As the MLA meeting concluded on Tuesday, however, one session sought to put sex at academic conferences center stage. Drawing on literature, theory and experience, panelists considered not only the role of sex at conferences, but talked about identity, love and (perhaps more timely to many MLA attendees) the dismal academic job market.

Many presenters at the MLA use categorization to make their points, and this session was no exception. Jennifer Drouin, an assistant professor of English and women’s studies at Allegheny College, argued that there are eight forms of conference sex (although she noted that some may count additional forms for each of the eight when the partners cross disciplinary, institutional or tenure-track/non-tenure track, or superstar/average academic boundaries).

The categories:

1. “Conference quickies” for gay male scholars to meet gay men at local bars.
2. “Down low” sex by closeted academics taking advantage of being away from home and in a big city.
3. “Bi-curious” experimentation by “nerdy academics trying to be more hip” (at least at the MLA, where queer studies is hip). This “increases one’s subversiveness” without much risk, she said.
4. The “conference sex get out of jail free” card that attendees (figuratively) trade with academic partners, permitting each to be free at their respective meetings. This freedom tends to take place at large conferences like the MLA, which are “more conducive” to anonymous encounters, Drouin said.
5. “Ongoing flirtations over a series of conferences, possibly over several years” that turn into conference sex. Drouin said this is more common in sub-field conferences, where academics are more certain of seeing one another from year to year if their meetings are “must attend” conferences.
6. “Conference sex as social networking,” where academics are introduced to other academics at receptions and one thing leads to another.
7. “Career building sex,” which generally crosses lines of academic rank. While Drouin said that this form of sex “may be ethically questionable,” she quipped that this type of sex “can lead to increased publication possibilities” or simply a higher profile as the less famous partner tags along to receptions.
8. And last but not least — and this was the surprise of the list: “monogamous sex among academic couples.” Drouin noted that the academic job market is so tight these days that many academics can’t live in the same cities with their partners. While many colleges try to help dual career couples, this isn’t always possible, and is particularly difficult for gay and lesbian couples, since not every college will even take their couple status seriously enough to try to find jobs for partners. So these long distance academic couples, gay and straight, tenured and adjuncts, must take the best academic positions they can, and unite at academic conferences.

...

At a conference, he said, “a collegial discussion of methodology becomes foreplay,” and the finger that may be moved in the air to illuminate a point during a panel presentation (he demonstrated while talking) can later become the finger touching another’s skin for the first time in the hotel room, “where we lose our cap and gown.”

For gay men like himself, Wendland said, conference sex is particularly important as an affirmation of elements of gay sexuality that some seem to want to disappear. As many gay leaders embrace gay marriage and “heteronormative values,” he said, it is important to preserve other options and other values.

“Conference sex encounters become more than mere dalliance and physical release,” he said. It is a stand against the “divorcing physicality from being human, much less queer,” he said.

Some of the comments by readers of the article about this panel at a supposedly academic conference are rather entertaining:

Is this what students, their parents and taxpayers are subsidizing instead of classroom instruction?

The short answer: yes. And a lot of stuff not even this valuable in many classrooms.

And this marvelously clever observation (someone must have done well on the analogies section of the SAT):

To me, this panel’s work seems like the scholarly equivalent of Britney Spears’ publicity strategy; if you can’t sing well, wear skimpy clothing.

Nothing Ever Means What It Says

Nothing Ever Means What It Says

The August 29, 2008 Inside Higher Education reports on what at first seems like a rather odd idea: that political science as an academic discipline, should no longer have a subfield focused on American political science:

The precise number of subfields within political science is itself the subject of debate. Most people would include American politics, comparative politics, political theory and international relations. Some would add methodologies or area studies or various other topics, but American politics always makes the list. Should it? What would new organizations for the field look like? While the discussion of this issue Thursday at a panel of the political science association’s annual meeting didn’t find a consensus, there was agreement that the current structure has real flaws.
Scholars who called for the abolition of American politics as a subfield were not arguing that scholars shouldn’t study American politics, which may have been reassuring to audience members, most of whom identified by a show of hands as Americanists. But they said that using the United States as an organizational structure, in isolation from the rest of the world, is producing flawed ideas.

What does "flawed ideas" mean? Now we're getting to the meat of the matter:

Mary Hawkesworth, a political scientist at Rutgers University, said that when the United States is studied in isolation, “certain things get masked.” The “notion of American exceptionalism,” she said, produces “a social amnesia.” For example, she said that that the violence and corruption of the American revolutionaries receives little emphasis, so when students are exposed to the violence of other revolutions, they see no connection to the American revolution and have little tolerance for those other revolutions. Similarly, she said that slavery is taught only as “an aberration in the United States rather than as part of a racist feudalism” imported from Europe.
American politics scholars, she said, largely embrace a view of their work as “non-ideological and moderate,” limiting the critique they may offer of American society. And the current organization of political science, she said, isn’t producing the kinds of understanding that the public needs. Where was political science in predicting the reunification of Germany or the rebound of Russia? she asked. A more global perspective might make the discipline more aware and useful, she said.

Now, if you aren't in the social science academic community, you may be wondering what "American exceptionalism" means. For a great many years, many historians and political scientists believed that there was something quite unusual about America. We were the first of the Western Hemisphere colonies to throw off connection to the Old World. We were, for a number of years, into the mid-20th century, a model to which revolutionaries around the world looked. We strongly influenced at least their rhetoric (such as the French Declaration of Human Rights, and Ho Chi Minh's 1945 declaration of independence from France), and often their governmental structures, such as the Constitutions of Mexico adopted in 1824 and 1857.

The belief in American exceptionalism, while the origins may have been at least partly driven by patriotism, had at least some factual basis. There have been more than a few non-Americans who have recognized that there was something quite remarkable about what happened here. But because it smelled of patriotism, and even worse, of a Providential view of history, simply wasn't acceptable to intellectuals from the 1960s onward.

There's another term that you will occasionally see: "American particularism." This is a watered-down version: the belief that while there isn't anything exceptional about the American experience, there might well be aspects to American history that are somewhat different, even if not necessarily better.

The left is in a rather difficult situation on this idea. On the one hand, they are big on the idea that the U.S. is an exceptionally evil place. As I mentioned earlier this month, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution which claimed that American slavery "resembled no other form of involuntary servitude known in history." This is simply false. Indeed, it was quite similar to slavery throughout the Western Hemisphere, and had some strong similarities to Arab enslavement of European Christians and black Africans.

There were areas of slavery that are "particular" to America relative to the rest of the Western Hemisphere. Some of these differences were bad: compared to the West Indies, American slaves were generally a minority of the population, and their African cultures were pretty effectively stamped out. But to the discomfort of the left, American particularism also includes that some of these differences were good: the U.S. imported a tiny fraction of all the slaves brought to the Western Hemisphere--but working conditions were so much better here that the U.S. ended up today with one of the largest percentages of blacks.

As one example, American slaves were very, very seldom worked to death, unlike the West Indies, where this was common in the sugar cane business. (There were American slaves intentionally worked to death in the Louisiana sugar cane business, where the need to bring in the harvest took precedence over the economic value of a slave's life.) Another example is that in the West Indies in the 18th century, newborn slaves were often thrown into ditches to die; it was cheaper to buy a newly imported adult slave than to invest food in raising a newborn to adulthood.

So what else is driving this concern about "flawed ideas"?

Anne Norton of the University of Pennsylvania agreed that the American politics formulation should go.

...

She also criticized scholars of American politics for their failure to jump on key issues. In an era in which executive power has been abused to encourage torture and to deny civil liberties, too many professors in the field seem more likely to study some Congressional subcommittee, she said, using “extraordinarily small-scale, literature driven methodological studies.”

Oh, now we're getting to the real story. Political science is too focused on being an academic discipline, not enough on being a partisan force.

College Has Changed Since I Was A Freshman

Back in 1974, at USC. Dorms were still sex-segregated, and while the opposite sex could visit, they had to be out by 2:00 AM. Yes, it was perhaps a bit hypocritical to pretend that this was preventing the students from having sex, but I'm not sure that this upcoming program at William & Mary is better. From the January 28, 2008 Daily Press:

WILLIAMSBURG - College of William and Mary President Gene Nichol gave students the go-ahead this morning to hold the controversial Sex Workers' Art Show on campus next month.

In a statement, Nichol said he tried to work with students to hold the event at a venue off the Williamsburg campus.

Students were unable to find an off-campus venue, however, and Nichol said the First Amendment and "defining traditions of openness that sustain universities" required he permit the show be held at the college.

"My views and the views of others in the community about the worth or offensiveness of the program can provide no basis for censoring it," he said.

A Unitarian Universalist church in James City County had considered hosting the show, according to co-pastor Rev. Jennifer Ryu. County law, however, prohibited the church from hosting events that might feature public nudity, she said.

...

The Sex Workers' Art Show features performances and monologues by strippers, prostitutes and other sex workers, with its goal being to "dispel the myth that (the performers) are anything short of artists, innovators, and geniuses."

I'm sure that there are some "artists, innovators, and geniuses" among "strippers, prostitutes, and other sex workers"--just like I am sure that there are some "artists, innovators, and geniuses" picking up garbage for the sanitation company (you know, the garbage man in the Dilbert comic strip)--but somehow, I am just a bit skeptical.

I suspect that if most Americans realized the extent that universities waste resources on trash like this (and there are a lot of examples out there), you would see a lot less enthusiasm for spending public money on these institutions. There is clearly a need for a lot more supervision of the children--and I am not talking about the students!

A New Method For Deciding Tenure?

There are a lot of arguments against tenure for professors; I won't go into them here. But this article in the December 19, 2007 Inside Higher Education concerns me, because having failed to win tenure, a gay law professor is now suing on the grounds that members of the tenure committee weren't honest about their reasons:

Hammer’s suit is based on contract law, not discrimination law; there are no federal or Michigan laws barring discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation on which he could sue. His suit is based on the idea that he was assured when accepting the job at Michigan (and turning down other offers) of the university’s commitment to equity for gay employees, as outlined in the faculty handbook and various university policies. Hammer’s legal specialties are health policy and Southeast Asia, especially Cambodia. So while he was out to colleagues, his teaching and scholarship did not focus on gay issues.

...

An argument made by Hammer is also attracting attention. He examined the records and backgrounds of some of the faculty members who voted against him. In several cases (enough to affect the outcome of the vote), he argues that the professors’ comments or writings or affiliations raise questions about their fairness — especially because in the discovery process he maintains that they were not forthright about their beliefs. For example, one professor is a member of a church that will not admit gay people unless they promise to “reform their ways,” according to court documents. Yet the professor, according to depositions and statements provided by Hammer’s lawyer, denied knowing his church’s views on gay people, even though they are identifiable from links on the church’s Web site, and the professor teaches Sunday school there. In another case, a professor’s opposition to same-sex marriage is cited. Another faculty member wrote of gay people as a “pariah group.”

In discovery, Hammer’s lawyers asked these and other professors questions about hot-button social issues (not only on gay rights, but abortion in some cases) to document what Hammer considers to be a pattern of people with conservative social values misrepresenting their own views. (In all of these cases, the professors have said that they voted against Hammer because they didn’t think his scholarship rose to the necessary level of excellence and not because Hammer is gay, and the university backs these professors.)

“We were trying to triangulate the extent to which these beliefs or biases affect these decisions,” Hammer said. “You’ve got a pattern of people obscuring and denying their beliefs on these issues, and that creates an incredibly negative inference.” He added that the question for these professors is: “How can we trust you when we say the vote is all about scholarship?”

Asked if his suit would unfairly assume anyone with conservative social values would be biased against him, Hammer said that was not the case. He said that what makes the professors’ stances questionable is denying that they hold views that they hold. “This isn’t about trying to have an ideological test about who should vote,” he said. “It’s about honesty. It’s about lying about these deeply held beliefs as the discrimination claim is being litigated.”

Hammer acknowledged that his approach to the case is a new method for fighting bias. But he noted that faculty members these days are not going to say publicly in a tenure vote that they are voting for or against someone based on sexual orientation (or gender or race, for that matter). “The theory of the case is that you are dealing with this very strong combination of religion and family values. You’ve got to get inside somebody’s mind and present it in a way that can be objectively verified. You are looking for something that is so often invisible and shrouded in secrecy.”

There are at least two major problems with this:

1. People are often members of organizations with whom they do not completely agree.

2. Some of those who voted against Hammer's tenure might well disapprove of homosexuality, and yet made their decision based on the quality of Hammer's scholarly work.

In practice, if Hammer gets his way, universities will find themselves pressured to remove anyone from tenure committee decisions who is a member of a church that disapproves of homosexuality--which in practice means that the tiny number of Christians, Orthodox Jews, and Muslims that are on faculty will be further marginalized.

Can you imagine the uproar if a conservative denied tenure (which I would presume is extremely common) demanded that members of the tenure committee be carefully examined about their political beliefs, with the assumption that their decision was based on lies?

Plagiarism

Plagiarism isn't the worst sin in the academic world, fraud is. Plagiarism is stealing something valuable; fraud is selling cyanide labeled as aspirin. Still, as this October 8, 2007 Inside Higher Education article points out, students are now calling professors on plagiarism, instead of the other way around. From the October 4, 2007 Yale Daily News:

Several passages in Yale Law School professor Ian Ayres’ ’81 LAW ‘86 newest book are unattributed verbatim reproductions or nearly identical paraphrases of passages from various newspaper and magazine articles published in the last twenty years, an investigation by the News has shown.

Ayres’ ninth book, entitled “Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-By-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart,” was published in August by Bantam Dell Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc. The News found nine passages in the book similar to or the same as sentences from articles printed in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, the San Diego Union-Tribune and Fast Company magazine.

Ayres, the William K. Townsend professor at the Law School and a professor at the Yale School of Management, said he plans to make changes to future printings of the book. Three research assistants currently enrolled in the Law School worked with Ayres on the book, according to the acknowledgments printed in the back.

Although Ayres uses endnotes to cite his sources, sentences from many of those sources were printed without quotation marks or other in-text attributions. Of the passages identified by the News, only one is a verbatim reproduction of text published previously by another author. Other passages substitute words or clauses into sentences written by others or omit words or clauses.

That Ayres is one of the academic community's gun banners just makes it sweeter.

Addicted To Deception: What Passes For History These Days

I ran into a most peculiar book the other day--a comic book presentation of American foreign policy, titled, Addicted to War: Why The U.S. Can't Kick Militarism. What worries me is that a piece of inaccurate and deceptive trash like this has been adopted by the San Francisco Board of Education. As I've mentioned in the past:

I have some sympathy for the point of view that says that U.S. intervention in the internal affairs of other countries have often been counterproductive to democracy, capitalism, and human rights. Libertarian critics of U.S. foreign policy claim that our intervention in Central American countries in the early twentieth century was driven by commercial interests. Major General Smedley Butler's War is a Racket makes this claim concerning Nicaragua and Haiti--both places where Butler played a major role in the operations. (There's nothing quite as gauche as Butler walking into the Haitian Congress in 1915 and telling them to go home; he was now in charge.)

However: when I have dug through newspapers of the period, for example, the 1909 intervention at Bluefields, Nicaragua, I often find that the evidence as to intent is complex. Yes, there were often commercial interests that had a clear reason to encourage those interventions. The U.S., for example, ran Nicaragua's customs service for a couple of decades until the tariffs paid off the debts that Nicaragua owed to certain U.S. banking interests.

But there were often legitimate reasons for U.S. intervention as well, such as protection of U.S. citizens in the midst of chaotic civil wars. Sometimes, we stepped in because the locals were behaving in a manner that was offensive to any proper notion of civil rights--for example, when the President of Haiti was literally ripped limb from limb in the streets of Port-au-Prince. And sad to say, in many of these countries, it wasn't that we were intervening on the side of bad guys at the expense of the good guys. Nicaragua, El Salvador, Haiti, and Cuba are all examples of places where the differing factions were arguing over who got to exploit and brutalize the peasants.

Cold War realpolitik took a bad situation in many parts of the world, and made it worst. Lyndon Johnson's famous remark, "He may be a sonofabitch, but he's our sonofabitch" captures this rather well. We often chose one thug over another thug because the other thug had allied himself with Moscow. Aggravating this was that local thugs played Moscow vs. Washington for their benefit as well--and usually to the detriment of the peasants who just wanted to be left alone.

There are serious criticisms of our pragmatic foreign policy out there, not only by academics, but by politicians:

We seek democracy in that region for the same reasons we spent decades working for democracy in Europe -- because freedom is the only reliable path to peace. If the Middle East continues to simmer in anger and resentment and hopelessness, caught in a cycle of repression and radicalism, it will produce terrorism of even greater audacity and destructive power. But if the peoples of that region gain the right of self-government, and find hopes to replace their hatreds, then the security of all free nations will be strengthened. We will not repeat the mistakes of other generations, appeasing or excusing tyranny, and sacrificing freedom in the vain pursuit of stability. We have learned our lesson; no one's liberty is expendable. In the long run, our security and true stability depend on the freedom of others. And so, with confidence and resolve, we will stand for freedom across the broader Middle East.

Addicted to War, however, does not qualify as a serious criticism--it is such a distorted and inaccurate portrayal of U.S. foreign policy history that even though many of the individual facts contained within it are true (or at least appear to be true), it is in total, a lie.

The entire book is visible starting here. For example, page 1 blames the problems of local schools not having enough toilet paper on military spending--ignoring that nearly all school funding is from state and local governments--not the federal government. But as part of the author's deception, page 1 claims that "A huge part of the money that the IRS takes out of our paychecks goes to support the military," and shows a pie chart that claims that 51% of all discretionary spending in 2004 is for the military.

But that's a very misleading statement, because discretionary spending is less than half the budget. I couldn't find the 2004 budget data, but the 2008 budget data is here. On page 4 of that document you can see a breakdown of 2007 federal spending, with 20.1% of the federal spending going to defense spending, 18.5% going to non-defense discretionary, 20.4% going to Medicare/Medicaid, and 20.9% to Social Security. Defense spending is actually less than we spend on Medicare/Medicaid. (A minor quibble--but payroll taxes aren't the only source of federal revenue. This spreadsheet shows the breakdown of revenue sources, and all payroll taxes combined for 2004 are about 82% of the federal receipts.)

On page 2, Addicted to War claims that cutbacks in social programs "have caused far more devastation than any foreign army ever has." That's a strong claim--but where are these cutbacks in social programs? Over what period of time? Could we get some specifics?

I ask because this table shows spending by budget function from 1940 to 2011. Here's the inflation adjuster data; from 1940 to 2007, inflation has caused a 14.56 times decrease in the value of the dollar. Therefore, the 1940 Human Resources budget category spending of $4,139,000,000 would be equivalent to $60,273,368,000 in 2007. But the 2007 Human Resources budget estimate is 1,787,609,000,000--or 29x larger. Our population has more than doubled since 1940, but even adjusting the Human Resources budget for both inflation and population change, we are spending more than 12x as much per person on social spending today as we did in 1940.

Page 4 is a statement of how the Indians were slaughtered and driven off their lands--but the problem is that it is a statement that is only partly correct, and often quite incorrect. There's some pretty shameful history in this area, but many of the lands east of the Mississippi were acquired by purchase. Sometimes the persons selling the lands weren't authorized by the rest of the tribe to make the sale; sometimes, the people doing the buying were breaking federal law by doing so (which required Congressional approval of such purchases); sometimes, alcohol was used to "lubricate" the process. Many of the lands that Indian tribes legitimately sold were because the presence of so many settlers had driven much of the game away, and the tribe decided that they were better off moving west. To make a single bald statement such as this one about Indian removal is so often false that it qualifies as deceptive.

Page 5's version of the Spanish-American War is so sloppy as to be inaccurate. It is precisely "progressive" Democratic sorts like William Randolph Hearst who pushed the U.S. to invade and liberate Cuba--and Republicans like President McKinley resisted those calls as long as they could. The claim that Spain was already on the verge of defeat by independence movements in Cuba and the Philippines is nonsense.

For example, Addicted to War devotes most of pages 10 and 11 to World War II--and asserts that our involvement in World War II was because of our desire to expand our economic empire. There is no mention that Japan attacked the U.S., and that Germany declared war on the U.S. before we declared war on them. Addicted to War neglects to mention that liberating Europe from German military forces was one of the goals--and of course, there's no mention of that little unpleasantness that Allied forces broke up at Auschwitz, Dachau, and hundreds of lesser known concentration camps across Europe. (After all, that's something that only military intervention could have stopped.)

Page 12 reduces the entire Cold War to a struggle for world domination. There's no mention of one fundamental difference between the Soviet Union and the United States: one of them censored opposing political ideas; prohibited its citizens from leaving the country; murdered millions of its own people, sometimes because they were political dissenters, but often because it was a police state built around paranoia; and in general, did not tolerate dissent such as Addicted to War.

To give you some idea of how utterly delusional Addicted to War is, go look at the first page of chapter 7, where he explains that the reason that Americans support our foreign policy is because news organizations are cheerleaders for it.

Addicted to War has a list of notes, but looking through the notes makes you realize that this guy started out with a conclusion, and then looked for sources that would agree with him. Hence, the grossly distorted history. He relies very heavily on Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, and a number of books by Noam Chomsky, and several books published by International Publishers, the Communist Party USA's publishing arm.

Now, there's nothing wrong with using sources such as these to get a broad range of viewpoints--but reading his list of sources makes you realize that the author did not even try to get more than one perspective--hence, it is not just the layout that is a comic book, but also the ideas contained therein.

One of the great weaknesses of Marxist reductionism (of which Addicted to War is a prime example), is that the real world is more complex than simple formulae. What is especially troubling is not that this is amateur history written by someone who hasn't a clue about the expectations of intellectual integrity, like certain other books of similar accuracy, but the author turns out to be a professor:

Joel Andreas began following his parents to demonstrations against the Vietnam War while in elementary school in Detroit. He has been a political activist ever since, working to promote racial equality and worker's rights inside the United States and to stop U.S. military intervention abroad.

After working as an automobile assembler, a printer, and a civil engineering drafter, he completed his doctoral degree in sociology at the University of California in Los Angeles, studying the aftermath of the 1949 Chinese Revolution. He now teaches at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

I am also aware that there are some universities that are using this dishonest piece of trash; it says quite a lot about the low standards of the academic community, doesn't it?

Lott v. Levitt Suit

Here's the letter where Levitt basically admits that previous letters attacking Lott's integrity wasn't just wrong--but that Levitt made statements that he knew were false.

It's about as self-damning of a letter as an academic can write--I mean, without admitting to have shot JFK.

The 1997 Lott Survey That Various Critics Claim Didn't Happen

More about the Lott v. Levitt suit.

Lott says that the data was lost in a hard disk crash. Here's a very long list of emails from people who remember Lott telling him about the hard disk crash, or who lost data from research projects that they were doing with Lott at the time. If Lott fabricated the 1997 survey, and the hard disk crash was a later excuse to cover that up, it would require that he destroy a hard disk in 1997 so that others would remember it later.

The evidence that he did the 1997 survey is pretty persuasive. If Lott didn't do the 1997 survey--and the hard disk crash was the equivalent of Michael Bellesiles's flood that destroyed all his notes but that doesn't match the memories of others about when it happened and how severe it was--then not only is Lott lying, but so are quite a number of professors, many of whom do not share Lott's views about gun control.

The evidence that he didn't do it? None--just suspicions and doubts by Lott's political opponents who have constructed everything from the Mary Rosh sock puppetry.

Which is more likely? That Lott did a survey which he was able to replicate five years later with similar results, and he had a hard disk crash that caused the loss of the data? Or that Dr. Lott and a whole bunch of other professors, as well as at least one (and maybe two) survey respondents are all lying?

Lott v. Levitt Suit

Some of you may be aware that John Lott filed suit against Steven D. Levitt for defamation of character in the book Freakonomics. Professor James Lindgren at Volokh Conspiracy has a detailed explanation of the suit (and Lindgren isn't exactly on Lott's side). While Lindgren clearly believed that Lott has a pretty strong truth claim against Levitt, he didn't think it was necessarily going to be something that would win in court.

Now I see that there has been a settlement of at least part of the suit--and Lott seems to be the winner:

In documents filed on Friday in federal court, the two parties outlined a settlement that requires Mr. Levitt, who is a professor of economics at the University of Chicago and a co-author of the best-selling book Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explains the Hidden Side of Everything, to send a letter of clarification to John B. McCall, a retired economist in Texas.

Mr. Lott's lawsuit alleges that Mr. Levitt defamed him in a 2005 e-mail message to Mr. McCall. In that message, Mr. Levitt criticized Mr. Lott's work on a special 2001 issue of The Journal of Law & Economics that stemmed from a conference on gun issues held in 1999.

By some measures, Mr. Lott appears to have won little from his 15 months of litigation. No money will change hands, and the settlement does not require a formal apology from Mr. Levitt.

But on certain points of reputation and pride, Mr. Lott might take some satisfaction. Mr. Levitt's letter of clarification, which was included in Friday's filing, offers a doozy of a concession. In his 2005 message, Mr. Levitt told Mr. McCall that "it was not a peer-refereed edition of the Journal." But in his letter of clarification, Mr. Levitt writes: "I acknowledge that the articles that were published in the conference issue were reviewed by referees engaged by the editors of the JLE. In fact, I was one of the peer referees."

Mr. Levitt's letter also concedes that he had been invited to present a paper at the 1999 conference. (He did not do so.) That admission undermines his e-mail message's statement that Mr. Lott had "put in only work that supported him."

In his letter of clarification to Mr. McCall, Mr. Levitt said, "At the time of my May 2005 e-mails to you, I knew that scholars with varying opinions had been invited to participate in the 1999 conference and had been informed that their papers would be considered for publication in what became the conference issue."

These would seem to be pretty severe admissions for Levitt. Each of these admits that Levitt made statements that were not only false, but that Levitt knew were false.

Lott's research (replicated by a number of other economists) was profoundly troublesome to the gun control movement. Consequently, they were looking for any possible way to destroy him and his work. The "Mary Rosh" sock puppetry opened up the door to raise questions about Lott's academic integrity.

Remember: the left is allowed to engage in all sorts of lies in their published work (see Ward Churchill and Michael Bellesiles) and the academy will bend over backward to give them the benefit of the doubt. Things work differently if you are on the right end of the spectrum.

UPDATE: More here.

Guillermo Gonzalez: More Impressive Than He Appears?

I mentioned recently Guillermo Gonzalez, an astronomy professor who was recently denied tenure in spite of a pretty impressive publication history--and who might have been denied tenure at least partly because of his involvement (off campus) with Intelligent Design. I also mentioned that when I searched for papers by this guy, that there seemed to be two astronomers named Guillermo Gonzalez, one at Iowa State and the other at University of Washington.

A reader with a brother who is a professional astronomer tells me that they are the same guy:

It's the same guy. Before Gonzalez came to Iowa, he was at Washington.

To have authored 68 peer-reviewed papers before tenure is stunning.
Gonzalez leads his department in citation analyses, even though
his more senior colleagues have been working for decades longer.

...

Gonzalez is a rising academic superstar, and what happened
to him is such a travesty that I can't even find words to express
my anger.

If this is correct (and it could be that University of Washington just hasn't taken down Gonzalez's old web page), the Gonzalez has an astonishing publication history. It makes it seem all the more likely that what we are seeing is what the Weekly Standard article claims: discrimination because Gonzalez doesn't toe the party line.

UPDATE: I just searched the University of Washington's faculty directory; Gonzalez isn't listed there anymore, so that webpage must be old.

Amazing! It Is Possible To Fire An Academic For Academic Fraud

Or so it appears, from this article in the May 29, 2007 Chronicle of Higher Education:

When a faculty panel at the University of Colorado at Boulder last year found Ward Churchill guilty of repeated and intentional instances of research misconduct, the committee included in its report a metaphor for the way many people view the Churchill case:

If a police officer doesn’t like the bumper sticker on a driver’s car and so stops the driver for speeding, is a ticket justified as long as the driver was really speeding?

Hank Brown, president of the University of Colorado System, gave his answer on Friday and it’s clear that to Brown, speeding is speeding. He formally recommended that Churchill, who has tenure as an ethnic studies professor at Boulder, be fired. In a detailed letter to the Board of Regents, Brown said that Churchill’s violations of academic research norms were too serious and too numerous to ignore — regardless of the circumstances that led to all the scrutiny.

Brown emphatically rejected the idea that First Amendment issues were raised because the inquiries into Churchill started after his comments about 9/11. Brown noted that more than 25 faculty members were involved in formal reviews of a series of research misconduct charges against Churchill, that none of the charges had anything to do with Churchill’s views, and that “each faculty member, without exception, determined that Professor Churchill engaged in deliberate and repeated research misconduct.”

In this context, Brown said it would be wrong to give Churchill a pass because the 9/11 remarks led people to file complaints against him. “The university cannot disregard allegations of serious research misconduct simply because the allegations were made against a professor whose comments have attracted a high degree of public attention,” Brown wrote to the regents. “The prohibition against research misconduct extends to all faculty members, irrespective of their academic disciplines or political views. Were it otherwise, the university could not maintain the integrity of the scholarly enterprise.”

Brown concluded his letter to the regents by saying that Churchill deserved to be fired because the research misconduct charges on which he was found guilty were “severe,” “deliberate” and that “Professor Churchill’s misconduct seriously impacts the university’s academic reputation and the reputations of its faculty.”