Tag Archives: Campus

News

Flordia A&M university shuts down Christian campus group

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From the Examiner.

Full text:

In January, Florida A&M University officials had placed the student group “Commissioned 2 Love” on “inactive status”.  Their reasoning was; because the club’s adviser [who was assigned by the university] was not present at all of the group’s gatherings. The Florida A&M Student Handbook states that student organization advisers, who are assigned by the university and not chosen by the clubs themselves, must “attend and remain present for the duration of all organizational meetings, official functions, and sponsored activities.”

Based on this, the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) sent officials of Florida A&M University a letter yesterday urging them to reinstate a Christian student group they de-recognized in January and banned from engaging in activities on campus.  This rule, says ADF’s Jeremy Tedesco , would allow the university to “appoint an atheist to oversee a Christian group, a meat-eater to advise a vegetarian group, or a Republican to provide direction to College Democrats”.  He said that the policy is not only unconstitutional, but absurd.

According to the ADF letter, this requirement is unconstitutional because it gives university employees complete and unbridled discretion over whether a student group’s meeting or speech will occur.

The ADF letter also points out that the university’s policies violate the Constitution because they “compel student organizations to associate with government employees who they may not want to associate with, and who in fact may be adverse to the group’s mission and expression.

Even worse, the students are not given the authority to select their own advisers, but rather the Associate Vice President for Student Life appoints advisers for student organizations…. FAMU’s policies are particularly egregious violations of the right to association, since they require the government employee with whom student organizations must associate to…‘[p]rovide counseling, leadership and direction regarding…the mission of the club or organization.’”

According to a related Competitive Enterprise Institute post, Obama has made it a priority to increase the amounts of money extracted from Christian taxpayers that are paid to secular universities that treat Christians like dirt.

Excerpt: (with links removed)

Education expert Neal McCluskey earlier lamented the failure of House Republicans to propose meaningful cuts in education spending, “despite the fact that the ivory tower is soaking in putrid, taxpayer-funded waste. Quite simply, the federal government pours hundreds of billions of dollars into our ivy-ensconced institutions every year, but what that has largely produced is atrociously low graduation rates; at-best dubious amounts of learning for those who do graduate; ever-fancier facilities; and rampant tuition inflation that renders a higher education no more affordable to students but keeps colleges fat and happy.” Shortly thereafter, in an effort to trim the deficit, House Republicans came out with some additional cuts, proposing the elimination of some wasteful education programs.

If the GOP is reluctant to make cuts, Obama is much, much worse: he earlier sought to double education spending, and Obama’s recent State of the Union called for more increases in education spending (and other wasteful boondoggles at taxpayer expense), even though many students learn little in college. As we noted earlier, half “the nation’s undergraduates show almost no gains in learning in their first two years of college,” according to a study cited in USA Today. “36% showed little change” even after four years. Although education spending has exploded, students “spent 50% less time studying compared with students a few decades ago.” “32% never took a course in a typical semester where they read more than 40 pages per week.” States spend hundreds of millions of dollars operating colleges that are worthless diploma mills, yet manage to graduate almost no one — like Chicago State, “which has just a 12.8 percent six-year graduation rate.”

Wake up! Not only do Christians need to do a lot more studying of these issues, so that we can ground our social views with public evidence and research, but we also need to do a lot better job of developing an understanding of fiscal conservatism that reflects our individual goals and priorities. The left is not on your side – stop giving them other people’s money.

News

Do universities discriminate against conservatives?

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From the radically-leftist New York Times. (H/T The Blog Prof)

Excerpt:

Discrimination is always high on the agenda at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology’s conference, where psychologists discuss their research on racial prejudice, homophobia, sexism, stereotype threat and unconscious bias against minorities. But the most talked-about speech at this year’s meeting, which ended Jan. 30, involved a new “outgroup.”

It was identified by Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia who studies the intuitive foundations of morality and ideology. He polled his audience at the San Antonio Convention Center, starting by asking how many considered themselves politically liberal. A sea of hands appeared, and Dr. Haidt estimated that liberals made up 80 percent of the 1,000 psychologists in the ballroom. When he asked for centrists and libertarians, he spotted fewer than three dozen hands. And then, when he asked for conservatives, he counted a grand total of three.

“This is a statistically impossible lack of diversity,” Dr. Haidt concluded, noting polls showing that 40 percent of Americans are conservative and 20 percent are liberal. In his speech and in an interview, Dr. Haidt argued that social psychologists are a “tribal-moral community” united by “sacred values” that hinder research and damage their credibility — and blind them to the hostile climate they’ve created for non-liberals.

“Anywhere in the world that social psychologists see women or minorities underrepresented by a factor of two or three, our minds jump to discrimination as the explanation,” said Dr. Haidt, who called himself a longtime liberal turned centrist. “But when we find out that conservatives are underrepresented among us by a factor of more than 100, suddenly everyone finds it quite easy to generate alternate explanations.”

[…]The politics of the professoriate has been studied by the economists Christopher Cardiff and Daniel Klein and the sociologists Neil Gross and Solon Simmons. They’ve independently found that Democrats typically outnumber Republicans at elite universities by at least six to one among the general faculty, and by higher ratios in the humanities and social sciences. In a 2007 study of both elite and non-elite universities, Dr. Gross and Dr. Simmons reported that nearly 80 percent of psychology professors are Democrats, outnumbering Republicans by nearly 12 to 1.

And yet all we ever hear from the academic left is how open-minded they all are – how they love to celebrate diversity. What diversity? They’re more bigoted and segregated than the Ku Klux Klan. At least the Klan isn’t taxpayer-funded by the very people who are being discriminated against!

News

University of Kentucky pays $125,000 to settle anti-Christian discrimination suit

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From the radically leftist Washington Post. (H/T Evolution News)

Excerpt:

An astronomy professor who sued the University of Kentucky after claiming he lost out on a top job because of his Christian beliefs reached a settlement Tuesday with the school.

The university agreed to pay $125,000 to Martin Gaskell in exchange for dropping a federal religious discrimination suit he filed in Lexington in 2009. A trial was set for next month.

Gaskell claimed he was passed over to be director of UK’s MacAdam Student Observatory because of his religion and statements that were perceived to be critical of evolution.

Court records showed Gaskell was a front-runner for the job, but some professors called him “something close to a creationist” and “potentially evangelical” in interoffice e-mails to other university scientists.

“We never thought from the start that everybody at UK was some sort of anti-religious bigot,” said Frank Manion, Gaskell’s attorney. “However, what I do think this case disclosed is a kind of endemic, almost knee-jerk reaction in academia towards people, especially scientists, of a strong religious faith.”

A statement from University of Kentucky counsel Barbara Jones Tuesday said the school’s “hiring processes were and are fundamentally sound and were followed in this case.” The university does not admit any wrongdoing.

[…]After applying for the job in 2007, Gaskell said he learned from a friend at UK that professors had discussed his purported religious views. E-mails turned over as evidence in the case showed that university scientists wondered if Gaskell’s faith would interfere with the job, which included public outreach and education.

One astrophysics professor at UK told department chair Michael Cavagnero in an e-mail that hiring Gaskell would be a “huge public relations mistake.”

[…]Manion said documents and e-mail communications turned over by UK in the case showed strong evidence of religious bias, including a professor who surmised that Gaskell was “potentially evangelical.”

“The fact that somebody could say that without realizing the implications, speaks volumes,” Manion said. “Because all you have to do is substitute any other label – potentially Jewish, potentially Muslim. Nobody would say that.”

I think we should definitely de-fund these universities, put the money into the hands of taxpayers, and let the taxpayers decide where to send their children to college – or WHETHER to send their children to college.