Critical Mass

From the Chronicle of Higher Education's news blog:

About a dozen students at Purdue University are staging a hunger strike to pressure the Indiana university to stop allowing apparel companies to use what the strikers call “sweatshop” labor to manufacture garments bearing the Purdue logo and colors. According to The Indianapolis Star, one student has not eaten since November 20 and another has not eaten solid food since November 17. Purdue is already a member of the Worker Rights Consortium and the Fair Labor Association, two groups that claim to monitor working conditions at factories where university-licensed apparel is made. The protesters want Purdue to adopt higher standards for its licensees.

Wikipedia has a lengthy entry on the subject of hunger strikes.  When I was in Northern Ireland in the summer of 2005, an Irish political activist spoke to my international relations group about the strike led by Bobby Sands, who died before any changes could be made.  Somehow I doubt American college students have the same level of commitment.

The ability to converse with those with whom you do not agree is an important skill to learn; this is especially true in the realm of education, where one is often presented with new and challenging ideas, forcing one to more clearly define one's own belief system.  Students at Liberty University seem to understand that, for as the Chronicle of Higher Education's news blog notes, many students from Liberty recently attended a speech Richard Dawkins at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Virginia, where they heard Mr. Dawkins read from his book The God Delusion and engaged him in what the Chronicle calls "a lively back-and-forth, with most of the audience cheering on Mr. Dawkins as he respond[ed] to questions about the origin of morality, the beginning of the universe, and so on."  Whatever your opinions about Liberty University or Richard Dawkins, it is encouraging to see such discussion in an educational setting, though I'm sure it was quite heated at times.

Not all students are so open to discussion, however.  The US News and World Report's Paper Trail reported today that "Students at the University of St. Thomas law school are signing a petition to protest the school's choice of a constitutional law professor for next semester," as the proposed professor, Robert Delahunty, helped write a memo concerning the military's treatment of detained terrorist suspects.  The Minnesota Daily News has some of the content of the memo:

The memo stated, "because of the novel nature of this conflict, moreover, we do not believe that al Qaeda would be included in the non-international forms of armed conflict to which some provisions of the Geneva Conventions might apply."

Delahunty and his co-author went on to address specific concerns from the president's administration.

"Only by causing great suffering or serious bodily injury to POWs, killing or torturing them, depriving them of access to a fair trial, or forcing them to serve in the Armed Forces, could the United States actually commit a grave breach," the memo stated.

Students are protesting Delahunty's ideology and alleged ethical misconduct, not his teaching ability or knowledge.  As University first-year law student Jon Taylor said, "It doesn't have anything to do with academics; we hear he's a fine teacher [. . . .] It has more to do with ideology."  In essence, students are protesting a Bush official who rightly acknowledged that terrorists do not fall under the same purview as uniformed members of a national army, yet who still denounced the injury, torture, denial of fair trial, impressment or killing of said terrorists by the United States.  The Daily News reports "Taylor said students and staff were uninformed about the decision, and those active in human rights immediately recognized the name because 'amongst human rights violators, he's a pretty prominent leader,'" yet officials at the school support Delahunty's hiring.  Says the Daily News:

Others at the University support and are even excited about the decision, like law professor Michael Paulsen.

"Robert Delahunty is one of the nation's leading constitutional and international law scholars," Paulsen said. "He's an outstanding teacher."

Some of the controversy comes from a misunderstanding of the facts, Paulsen said. Most likely, many students are not familiar with Delahunty's memo.

Paulsen also said the protests are coming from a few extreme individuals in the Law School.

"That's a gross violation of academic ethics and academic freedom," he said.

Paulsen attributes the uproar to one professor in particular he said has an ideological problem with those who disagree with his legal point of view. Paulsen declined to name the professor.

"It sometimes happens that even professors are not respecters of academic freedom and get their facts wrong, too," he said.

When so many who are responsible for adding to the conversation flee from any opposition, it is easy to see why students would likewise run from discussion with any disagreeing persons.  From the Daily News' story, it seems like Delahunty is not only in the clear concerning his memo but also that he could be a valuable addition to the University's faculty.

A couple of weeks ago I posted on the differences between CNN's and Reuters' reporting on the decision by Orange Coast College's student trustees to drop the recital of the Pledge of Allegiance from their meetings.  At that time I said that based on Reuters' story, it seemed the reason for the ban might be "to spark up a new debate on the propriety of saying the Pledge in schools, and possibly to get it eliminated."  Critical Mass readers Stars N. Stripes, Old Glory, and Art MacArthur have since pointed me to news follow-ups on the story that I had not seen, including Costa Mesa's local paper the Daily Pilot, which reported a week ago that "the [student trustees] board opted to reinstate the pledge as an 'opportunity' for any attendees who wish to recite it and promised to hold a forum or take an opinion poll in the near future to determine students' feelings on the matter," and that Jason Ball, mentioned in my post, had said "the trustees' decision had been based only partially on an objection to the words 'under God,' and more on the relevance of the pledge to other business at the meetings."  Our readers also focused on this comment by one trustee:

Trustee Coyotl Tezcatlipoca, who voted along with Ball against the final decision, said he had a personal contention with the American flag but believed that others should be allowed to salute it during the public comment session.

"That represents genocide to me, and I'm not going to pledge allegiance," he said, in a statement that drew a number of angry retorts from the audience. "But I respect anyone who wants to stand up and do it." [emphasis added]

The Daily Pilot ran stories in the days following the incident noting that student Vice President Christine Zoldos "said Monday [November 13] that she will order the Pledge of Allegiance to be recited at all upcoming meetings," and questioning local religious leaders about their opinions on the ban and the Pledge.  Daily Pilot readers fell on all sides of the issue in their responses, many of which are linked from here.

Apparently there was a lot more to the story than I originally thought.  Thanks to our readers, we can see how the situation plays out.

Diversity in education seems to be the big news story these last couple of days as articles tackle the issue from all sides of the political spectrum.  For example, Cathy Young of the Boston Globe had a column today recognizing what she call the marginalization of conservative ideas, though she has a slightly different spin on America's left-leaning academia than I have heard before:

Numerous studies confirm that most college faculty lean left, especially in the more prestigious institutions. At a time when political discourse in American society in general has shifted noticeably to the right, some people wonder why an academy that tilts left is a problem: The universities, they argue, are islands in a sea of conservatism. But no academic institution can thrive on uniformity; liberalism itself can turn illiberal when isolated from different ideas. What's more, the marginalization of right-of-center ideas in the academy may have a lot to do modern conservatism's transformation into a caricature of itself.

I was unaware we were living in a "sea of conservatism;" granted, I have heard on numerous occasions that American citizens tend to lean more right than left, but one certainly could not tell from our most public figures.  What's more, Ms. Young argues, the preponderance of hostile right-wing activists is a reaction to this liberal educational bias:

When stifled on campuses, right-of-center ideas don't just go away. These days, they are expressed -- in pungent manner -- on talk radio, and in overtly political journalism and publishing. Such outlets have increased in prominence, and universities have lost influence over American politics. When intellectual life is seen as a bastion of the left, conservatism devolves from intellectual giants like the late Milton Friedman to intellectual thugs like Ann Coulter -- with dangerous consequences for the political climate.

Then there's Richard Paddock's story in the LA Times about Ward Connerly, the self-proclaimed "anti-establishment libertarian fighting for racial equality" (whom the Times refers to as a "conservative activist" - Bill Redpath might have a problem with this) whose anti-racial preference measure in Michigan passed in the last election.  Apparently Connerly has declared the "end is at hand for affirmative action as we know it."

Australia's The Age reports that in Britain, student unions at three universities have voted to ban Christian societies on the grounds that "they discriminate against non-believers, particularly gay people."  Religious organizations are protesting the decisions.

And finally, Bill Schackner writes in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that Penn State's Dr. Michael Berube "seems too genial to be one of America's 101 most-dangerous academics," as David Horowitz has described him, but Dr. Berube's new book doesn't hold back:

In his book, Dr. Berube doesn't dispute that liberals far outnumber conservatives in academia -- by almost three to one -- or that a few fringe professors on the left damage themselves by espousing extreme views. But he says liberal professors are increasingly under siege from a well-organized and politically connected movement that distorts figures, fabricates classroom injustices against conservative students and encourages the dissemination of their stories to sympathetic politicians and the news media.

He asks why conservative elites who decry "leftist" universities nevertheless send their own children to the Ivy League, Berkeley and Duke.

"Even culturally conservative pundits -- the kind who spend a good deal of ink decrying the state of American campuses -- know better than to ship their offspring off to Bob Jones University," he said.

Because heaven knows there are no universities that fall anywhere in the range between Berkeley and Bob Jones.