The Intrafraternity Council at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities campus has decided after a mere six weeks to lift the drinking ban with the assumption that their high rates of sexual assault are due to letting in too many “non-greeks,” and that if they can maintain a 1 to 1 ratio between Greeks and non-greeks, it will once again be safe to continue their binge-drinking, grinding-in-a-dirty-basement tributes to stereotypical college night life.
With increasing pressure from bored and thirsty fraternity houses, the focus appears to have fallen on preserving the reputation of the Greek community. While the IFC’s cooperation with the Office of Student Affairs to create the peer-monitoring group “Arkeo” to ensure that new policies are followed may provide some level of accountability in these parties, it falls short of actually solving the problem. The issue of sexual assault on our campus runs far deeper than just the recent and terrifying cases which survivors were brave enough to report. Until members of campus communities are willing to recognize the true causes of sexual assault and to accept what that means in terms of core prevention, fraternities will continue to be unsafe for guests and Greeks alike.
Even if we can assume that these Arkeo monitors will be willing to crack down on and report their peers in a manner that will actually protect victims or potential victims of sexual assault, the “solution” that has been proposed by the IFC is based on a series of common myths about sexual assault, and for reasons I will now discuss, will be more likely to silence current and future victims of sexual assault than to prevent the actual incidents of sexual assault and rape on campus.
The University’s campus newspaper, the Minnesota Daily, reported that IFC President Martin Chorzempa “said this was put in place to ensure things remain under control and that the people who have been part of these new solutions will be able to participate, instead of non-greeks, who may view this as a free-for-all.”
Rather than taking responsibility for their part in these sexual assaults, too many members of the Greek community have taken the easy route in assuming that, because the sexual assaults that happened earlier this semester were committed by young men who were not members of the fraternity, sexual assault in general has been something perpetrated by non-greeks sneaking into otherwise-safe greek parties. It sounds ridiculous when worded bluntly doesn’t it?
Yes, the men who committed these rapes earlier in the semester were non-greeks, but, according to the Department of Justice, these stranger-rapes constitute only 10% of rape crimes. Though the first thing that comes to mind for us when we think of rape tends to be this idea of a man in a dark alley, or a man who shows up in a bathroom in this case, in reality, 90% of rapes are committed by acquaintances. This means that a large majority of the rapes which will occur in these communities are actually between acquaintances, often using alcohol as a tool in committing the crime. The act alone of imiting the number of strangers who can attend a party won’t protect sorority women and guests from the incidence of sexual assault.
In addition, it was found that 50% of all sexual assaults were committed by men who were drinking at the time, according to the study “Alcohol and Sexual Assault,” by Abbey et.al. Depending on the samples taken and measures used, estimates for the percentage of perpetrators who raped under the influence of alcohol ranged between about 34 and 75%. According to a study done by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University, alcohol is implicated in more incidents of sexual violence than any other drug. So, even though statistically speaking, the presence of strangers is far less risky than the presence of alcohol, the fraternities’ “solution” conveniently chose to ignore the detrimental effects of the latter.
But I don’t mean to give alcohol too much credit here. After all, a beer doesn’t commit sexual assault-the guy drinking it does. (I say guy because, while 14% of sexual assault victims are male, regardless of victim gender, an overwhelming 96% of offenders are male.) Rather than asking how fraternities can satisfy the community enough to be able to keep drinking and partying, or how fraternities can keep out people who could potentially fall within that narrow category of rapists, we should be focusing on what it is about the mindsets and cultural norms that characterize college life which allow for 1 in 5 women to become the victim of rape or attempted rape while in college, according to the National Institute of Justice.
Too often, men are using alcohol at these parties to make women “less resistant.” They utilize alcohol and intoxication as a tool and even sometimes as an excuse for committing these assaults, because among our generation, there’s this widespread and completely false belief that “not taking no for answer” or pressuring someone to have sex aren’t actually considered sexual assault in certain cases, simply because “they were drunk.” People conveniently ignore the fact that consent, by legal and university standards, must be freely given, and is not considered legitimate if extracted through the use of coercion, threats or intoxication.
With all of the issues in our society that combine to create this unsafe atmosphere-the media’s sexual objectification of women, sexual violence in our music, regular derogatory comment towards women, men’s perceptions when drinking at a party that they are going to “get sex” tonight, and our knee-jerk response of blaming the victims of sexual assault for bringing these crimes onto themselves by how they dress or act or where they went-fraternities are only focusing on one tiny little piece, while ignoring some of the far larger contributing factors.
We don’t need to keep non-greeks out of fraternity houses and, if you ask me, we are certainly not ready to have frat row getting drunk again. What we need to see is change in the way campus communities view sex and intimacy. We need to implement educational and awareness programs that will draw attention to these influences in society and to the initial signs of sexual violence. Rather than trying to prevent sexual assault on the level of rapists who are willing to sneak into bathrooms and commit violent crimes against strangers, let’s address this issue even earlier. Prevention could start at that first comment, when a guy says something stupid to his friends like, “just buy her a few drinks. That’ll loosen her up.” Or perhaps addressing core causes like the messages in our culture that pressure young boys to fit into the super-masculine, violent stereotype that perverts the idea of healthy intimacy into a one-sided conquest for sex.
Luckily, there are initiatives on campus that are working to make this happen, including a potential interventions being designed by students volunteering on campus as violence prevention educators and as members of the Men Against Gender Violence group. The fraternities will be back to drinking and partying as usual soon, but the shocking amount of sexual assaults that we have been seeing have provided a rather loud wake-up call to many on campus. Hopefully as these new campaigns and initiatives are designed and implemented, we will be able to see some changes not just in the list of attendees at parties, but in the perspectives of these young men and in the treatment of women on campus.
For now, though, the changes the IFC has decided on have the potential to do more harm than good. With Greeks so desperate to prove that they aren’t the ones to blame for the assaults that we’ve seen, and some even complaining about people who, in making a “big deal” out of these incidents ruined it for the rest of them, the atmosphere at these parties will be all the more dangerous for young women. My greatest worry is that the pressure won’t be on men to treat women with more respect and hold themselves accountable, but on women to refrain from “complaining,” or reporting anything that will make the greek community look bad. As if there weren’t already huge barriers for victims of sexual assault to overcome in their process of healing, including the difficulty in reporting or talking about something that happened when others in the group know the person who assaulted you and may or may not believe you and may or may not turn the blame on you, now these women will have to deal with the possibility of their peers getting upset with them for reporting a crime because of how it will make the greek community look.
So sure, there will be an even ratio, but that will also mean that the greek community will not be able to pass the blame to non-greeks if a sexual assault is committed. And because the factors leading up to sexual assault weren’t prevented, this “solution,” won’t actually be preventing sexual assaults from occurring; it will simply prevent victims from reporting them. Some students may be excited to hear that the ban had been removed, but this isn’t good news. I just hope that the interventions that students, including myself, are planning, will be successful and reach these students before someone else gets hurt. For now, I guess we can only hope that women attacked at these parties will have the courage to at least seek help for themselves by calling 24-hour campus help-lines or taking advantage of the resources and advocates there to support them in their healing process. And hopefully some of these survivors of sexual violence, coercion and violations will also have the courage to report these crimes, in spite all of these new pressures on them to stay silent, just so that others can selfishly protect their rights to partake in their heavy (and often underage) drinking.
Cross posted on Ladies Logic and True North.
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Tuesday, November 2, 2010
Tom Emmer Endorsement
Today, just in time for elections, my Letter to the Editor, titled "Tom Emmer for a Free Market" appeared in the Minnesota Daily:
Tom Emmer for a Free Market
Eventually, we have to stop dumping money we don’t have into temporary relief. We have to stop perpetuating debt and this recession in favor of fleeting gratification for lobbying groups and small portions of the population. We need to spare people from burdening taxes because, despite what representatives may claim, it’s the people who keep the system running.
But somewhere, tyranny adopted a softer face and started making grand and glorious promises. And we forgot that we were never meant to serve the government. We forgot that the government exists to serve us.
This is because the entrepreneurs who fuel the economy, hire workers and keep our free market running, are the people. And instead of giving them a break through tax cuts and giving them a sense of security by removing the extreme and constantly fluctuating federal measures and mandates from the market, our politicians are willing to risk causing disincentives to invest and hire.
But of course, since many of them have no real experience in business and consider themselves to be of a high moral order, politicians justify burdening us further with excessive spending, creating a deteriorating economy.
We can pay tax-and-spend Democrats until we have nothing left to give and no way of earning more, and until every house on our block is in foreclosure and every business unable to hire or even stay afloat, but they will still be saying the same thing: ‘If we only had a little more of your money, we could fix this.’
They can’t fix this. But we can. That’s why we need to elect representatives who will let us find work and earn money, who will stop pulling us deeper into recession. Aren’t you sick of voting for and paying for people who say we can’t take care of ourselves, that the reason we disagree with them is because we just don’t understand, and that they know better what to do with our money than we do? Well, I am.
We need to take our country back now, while we still have the ability to do so. If we wait another term for these same old policies of ‘tax more, spend more,’ we will be deeper in debt and further from a solution. This is why we should vote for candidates like Tom Emmer, who has been paying taxes and working in the business world. Emmer, like us, is a citizen who has earned a living here and who — unlike the DFL gubernatorial candidate Mark Dayton — actually keeps money here. But most importantly, he will actually represent us rather than rule over us.
Tom Emmer for a Free Market
Eventually, we have to stop dumping money we don’t have into temporary relief. We have to stop perpetuating debt and this recession in favor of fleeting gratification for lobbying groups and small portions of the population. We need to spare people from burdening taxes because, despite what representatives may claim, it’s the people who keep the system running.
But somewhere, tyranny adopted a softer face and started making grand and glorious promises. And we forgot that we were never meant to serve the government. We forgot that the government exists to serve us.
This is because the entrepreneurs who fuel the economy, hire workers and keep our free market running, are the people. And instead of giving them a break through tax cuts and giving them a sense of security by removing the extreme and constantly fluctuating federal measures and mandates from the market, our politicians are willing to risk causing disincentives to invest and hire.
But of course, since many of them have no real experience in business and consider themselves to be of a high moral order, politicians justify burdening us further with excessive spending, creating a deteriorating economy.
We can pay tax-and-spend Democrats until we have nothing left to give and no way of earning more, and until every house on our block is in foreclosure and every business unable to hire or even stay afloat, but they will still be saying the same thing: ‘If we only had a little more of your money, we could fix this.’
They can’t fix this. But we can. That’s why we need to elect representatives who will let us find work and earn money, who will stop pulling us deeper into recession. Aren’t you sick of voting for and paying for people who say we can’t take care of ourselves, that the reason we disagree with them is because we just don’t understand, and that they know better what to do with our money than we do? Well, I am.
We need to take our country back now, while we still have the ability to do so. If we wait another term for these same old policies of ‘tax more, spend more,’ we will be deeper in debt and further from a solution. This is why we should vote for candidates like Tom Emmer, who has been paying taxes and working in the business world. Emmer, like us, is a citizen who has earned a living here and who — unlike the DFL gubernatorial candidate Mark Dayton — actually keeps money here. But most importantly, he will actually represent us rather than rule over us.
Saturday, October 30, 2010
Vote for a Solution
Eventually we have to stop dumping money we don’t have into temporary relief. We have to stop perpetuating our debt and this recession in favor of fleeting gratification for certain lobbying groups and certain small portions of the population. We need to spare the people from burdening taxes because, despite what our representatives may claim, it’s the people who have made this state and country great and it’s the people who keep the system running. When we formed this nation, freeing ourselves from crippling taxes that failed to serve those who were actually paying them, we understood that we deserved something better. But somewhere along the lines, tyranny adopted a softer face and started making grand and glorious promises. And we forgot that we were never meant to serve the government. We forgot that the government exists solely to serve us.
This is because the innovators, laborers, and entrepreneurs who fuel the economy, hire workers and keep our free market running, are the people. And instead of giving them a break through tax cuts and giving them a sense of security by removing the extreme and constantly fluctuating federal measures and mandates from the market, our politicians are willing to risk causing disincentives to invest and hire. But of course, since many of them have no real experience in business and consider themselves to be of a higher moral order than we the ignorant and senseless citizens, politicians justify burdening us further with their excessive spending, creating an unstable and deteriorating economy that no one in their right mind would invest in.
I’m sick of having our money go towards worsening our problems simply because a group of self-praising politicians continue to promise us that one day these failed methods will start to work. We have to wake up and take back our economy and businesses. We have to take back our schools so that the system is once again efficient and accountable. And we have to take back our rights to decide for ourselves what to do with our incomes, our profits, and our investments.
We can pay these tax-and-spend Democrats until we have nothing left to give and no way of earning more, and until every house on our block is in foreclosure and every business unable to hire or even stay afloat, but they will still be saying the same thing: “If we only had a little more of your money, we could fix this.”
They can’t fix this. But we can. That’s why we need to elect representatives who will let us find work and earn money, and who will stop pulling us deeper into this recession. Aren’t you sick of voting for and paying for people who say that we can’t take care of ourselves, that the reason we disagree with them is because we just don’t understand, and that they know better what to do with our money than we do? Well I am. I’m sick of other people voting for representatives who take my money with the arrogant idea that they know better how to spend my earnings and they know better how we should live our lives and raise our families.
We need to take our country back now, while we still have the ability to. If we wait another term for these same old policies of “tax more, spend more” to finally kick in, we will just be that much deeper in debt and that much further from the solution. They’ve given us a huge mess to clean up and the longer we wait, the harder that process will be. We deserve the same liberties and opportunities that this country offered the generations before us. This is why we should vote for candidates like Tom Emmer and Sanu Patel-Zellinger, who have been paying these taxes and working in the business world. They, like us, are citizens who have earned a living here and who (unlike the DFL gubernatorial candidate Mark Dayton) actually keep their money here. But most importantly, they will actually represent us, rather than rule over us.
Vote for a solution now so we aren’t stuck paying for even more of these consequences later.
This is because the innovators, laborers, and entrepreneurs who fuel the economy, hire workers and keep our free market running, are the people. And instead of giving them a break through tax cuts and giving them a sense of security by removing the extreme and constantly fluctuating federal measures and mandates from the market, our politicians are willing to risk causing disincentives to invest and hire. But of course, since many of them have no real experience in business and consider themselves to be of a higher moral order than we the ignorant and senseless citizens, politicians justify burdening us further with their excessive spending, creating an unstable and deteriorating economy that no one in their right mind would invest in.
I’m sick of having our money go towards worsening our problems simply because a group of self-praising politicians continue to promise us that one day these failed methods will start to work. We have to wake up and take back our economy and businesses. We have to take back our schools so that the system is once again efficient and accountable. And we have to take back our rights to decide for ourselves what to do with our incomes, our profits, and our investments.
We can pay these tax-and-spend Democrats until we have nothing left to give and no way of earning more, and until every house on our block is in foreclosure and every business unable to hire or even stay afloat, but they will still be saying the same thing: “If we only had a little more of your money, we could fix this.”
They can’t fix this. But we can. That’s why we need to elect representatives who will let us find work and earn money, and who will stop pulling us deeper into this recession. Aren’t you sick of voting for and paying for people who say that we can’t take care of ourselves, that the reason we disagree with them is because we just don’t understand, and that they know better what to do with our money than we do? Well I am. I’m sick of other people voting for representatives who take my money with the arrogant idea that they know better how to spend my earnings and they know better how we should live our lives and raise our families.
We need to take our country back now, while we still have the ability to. If we wait another term for these same old policies of “tax more, spend more” to finally kick in, we will just be that much deeper in debt and that much further from the solution. They’ve given us a huge mess to clean up and the longer we wait, the harder that process will be. We deserve the same liberties and opportunities that this country offered the generations before us. This is why we should vote for candidates like Tom Emmer and Sanu Patel-Zellinger, who have been paying these taxes and working in the business world. They, like us, are citizens who have earned a living here and who (unlike the DFL gubernatorial candidate Mark Dayton) actually keep their money here. But most importantly, they will actually represent us, rather than rule over us.
Vote for a solution now so we aren’t stuck paying for even more of these consequences later.
Friday, October 29, 2010
UMD Bias Exemplifies the Larger Issue of Ideological Discrimation on Campuses
I posted the following on Ladies Logic this morning:
Let Freedom Ring writer Gary Gross noticed something strange posted on Twitter last night: The University of Minnesota-Duluth College Republicans tweeted, “UMD administration won’t let us put up signs for Tom Emmer, but yet the dems can put this up?” followed by a link to this photo of a Vote-for-Dayton sign endorsed by the College Democrats.
According to a recent press release, the College Republicans group had asked if they could post signs encouraging students to vote for Emmer, but were told by the University that “any type of poster or flyer that supported a candidate and encouraged students to vote for that candidate cannot be posted on campus.” The College Democrats, however, posted pro-Dayton flyers across campus. The University’s excuse for the College Democrats was apparently that these signs were giving directions to an upcoming Dayton rally, and would be taken down afterwards. Yet, after the rally, these signs were replaced with “a wave of posters telling students to vote for Mark Dayton for governor.”
Naturally, in light of this, the University denied having ever prohibited the College Republicans from doing the same and changed the rules to allow these postings on campus. Upon hearing that UMD had changed the rules to grant this privilege to the College Democrats, the College Republicans quickly came out with their own wave of “Vote for Chip” signs to support Congressional candidate Chip Cravaak who is running against 18th-term incumbent Jim Oberstar.
Though they can now post, it doesn’t change the fact that the College Democrats were able to keep their signs up “for the rally” and then post a whole series of signs encouraging students to vote for their candidate before the College Republicans were allowed to do so, giving one group an obvious campaigning advantage and demonstrating a clear bias in its dealings with student groups. The problem here is far greater than a single instance of double standards at a University. What the UMD CRs are going through is only one of many incidents of discrimination that public universities commit against conservative, libertarian and Republican students every single day, not only across campuses, but in classroom discussions and grading, in hiring faculty for academic departments and in setting the standards of academia.
As a College Republican at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, this news didn’t surprise me at all. As a matter of fact, if I brought it up to my fellow CRs here, no one would be surprised by yet another anecdote about public universities limiting conservative and libertarian discourse and implementing their left bias in the classrooms and across campus. This bias has been forcibly instituted on students through an entire system in academia that works to keep Conservative and Libertarian ideas out of the classroom and out of academic discourse. A few years ago, Annie Karni, writing for the New York Sun, wrote:
"Conservative professors must publish more than their liberal peers to be competitive for the same university jobs and promotions, according to new reports. At a conference sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute today in Washington, D.C., researchers from across the country will present 18 papers that they say document the growing liberal bias in academia.
"Universities are tilting to the left, and it starts at the student level and goes all the way through to the hiring level and even to the promotion level," the vice president and director of the National Research Initiative at AEI, Henry Olsen, said. "This is a real problem, not anecdote masquerading as fact."
But is academia really controlled by the left because a majority of students lean to the left and that preference trickles upwards, or is it because, from an early age, students are forced to contend with the unyielding biases of their teachers and professors who present their opinions as fact? Those who would have us believe that the bias is initiated by students and works its way up to the hiring level where Conservative professors are systematically kept out of faculty positions are the same people who are implementing this institutionalized ideological discrimination in the first place. Karni also reported:
"Using national surveys that measured political party registration and ideological self-designation of faculty at 183 randomly selected four-year colleges and universities, researchers concluded that ideology had about a third as much impact as merit in determining the career success of socially conservative university professors.
"The trend is worrisome to many conservative scholars. "It hurts academia," a professor of Political Science at Villanova University, Robert Maranto, said. "It limits the questions we academics ask and the phenomenon we study, limiting the ideas which undergraduates are exposed to during their college education."
And the departments where we find the most disparities are those in which professors have the greatest opportunity to implement their political and social agendas and ideals. These are the humanities. Karni reported on this as well:
"In departments such as sociology and anthropology, "progressive" and "liberal" professors outnumber "conservative" and "libertarian" faculty members by a margin of at least 20 to 1, according to a new study by a husband and wife research team from George Mason University and the Swedish Institute for Social Research. The findings are based on dozens of national surveys about faculty voter behavior, policy views, and voter registration."
This was also found in a study Paul Kengor conducted in an issue of Policy Review examining the political affiliations of 190 social science and humanities professors at top Universities like Stanford and Cornell. He found that of those 190, 184 were self-proclaimed and/or registered Democrats and only 6 were Republicans. And this bias in professors then seeps down towards students. Kani added that:
"Some professors said a liberal bias is damaging the intellectual vitality of campus life, and they discourage conservative students from pursuing doctorate degrees in the humanities.
"If my students show conservative bias, I steer them away from the academy," a professor of English at the University of Virginia, Paul Cantor, said. "They have no future — they will not get jobs. If they want to teach traditional works in a traditional matter, they have no future in an English department today."
"Mr. Cantor, who is spending a semester at Harvard University teaching a course on Shakespeare and politics, said English departments were more intellectually diverse 50 years ago than they are today. Professors today may have broadened their syllabi, but most of them interpret those texts through the uniform lenses of race, class, and gender, he said."
Conservative students aren’t choosing to stay away from academia and conservative faculty members aren’t failing to qualify for positions. Instead, these faculty members are being held to higher standards by an increasingly discriminatory institution in order to suppress conservative and libertarian ideology and speech. And students are being discouraged from pursuing careers in the academy by self-serving leftists who hide behind the excuse that they are protecting these students from not having a job due to a system of discrimination that these same professors and their employers are creating and perpetuating.
In addition, students whose beliefs aren’t in line with the institution’s agenda are being further dissuaded through the process of obtaining an education, which often requires an adherence to the biases of their professors. Jason Dore of the Free Republic reported:
"Students detail how, time after time, professors introduce topics not included on the course description, squelch opposing opinions in discussion, misrepresent facts and encourage students to adopt the professor's point of view. A senior at UCSD detailed how he wrote a paper espousing a pro-life view that was picked apart. He rewrote it with a pro-choice stance and received an A.
"Cases of obvious bias are troubling enough, but when a teacher's opinion is taught as fact, students become indoctrinated without ever realizing they were taught lies. This often is the case in history classes when teachers present an unhistorical account of people or events.
"With the lack of accountability in the classroom and balance in teachers' views, how are students to trust the education they receive? Are they merely becoming indoctrinated members of the liberal left?"
Just this month, Richard. E. Redding of the LA Times wrote an article called, “It’s Diverse if You’re Liberal,” reporting on how “Conservative and Libertarian professors are becoming increasingly rare at colleges and universities, and this lack of diversity hampers the developments of innovative solutions to the nation’s problems.” He wrote:
"Last month, 18 million college students returned to school — to those hotbeds of debate about the crucial issues of the day, right? But not so fast. A major new study on the campus climate for viewpoint diversity — surveying 24,000 U.S. students and published by the American Assn. of University Professors — found otherwise.
"Only a third of college students felt that their professors made learning about different views a priority. In fact, most did not think it entirely safe to hold unpopular opinions on campus. Since more seniors felt this way than freshmen, it appears that the college experience makes students less comfortable about exploring and voicing diverse opinions.
"This lack of intellectual diversity at our nation's colleges and universities should be a concern to all of us. It means that our future leaders in industry, government and science are receiving a one-sided education (at an average cost of $75,000 to $155,000 for a degree) that leaves them ill-equipped, as the report explains, to work "across differences to tackle challenges and create solutions." "It also limits the phenomena studied, questions asked and solutions proposed by professors who, as the main producers of research and development in this country, fuel our innovative edge."
The left’s utilization of education as an ideological apparatus to mold the minds of students to fit their political agendas is not only unethical, but because they are paid with the money of taxpayers who believe that they are funding an open and free-thinking education system, it’s a direct violation of our American principles.
In the words of my personality psychology professor, who was teaching that a personality type characterized by discrimination and prejudice is associated with the right wing (despite the fact that it has only been tested for the far right and never the far left), those in academia tend to lean to the left themselves, so they wouldn’t be interested in looking for prejudice on the left. Despite admitting this, though, that same professor still included this assumed stereotype of prejudice against the right wing in the academic models we would be tested on in class. It didn’t matter that the research was done to find prejudice only in the right wing; he was still going to teach this idea about right-wingers as fact.
Too few studies have been conducted to expose this discrimination in the classroom and alienation of conservative students which contributes to blocking us from careers in the academy, largely due to the fact that leftists don’t find this to be a particularly “interesting” topic since it would prove the incidence of their use of our money to force their beliefs and propaganda onto students whose grades are subject to the successful reproduction of those opinions. This lack of checks on the leftists who have seized control of academia safely secures their ability to do as they please in the classroom, without any real consequences for overtly discriminating against conservative students. It also ensures that the only real proof of their doings lies in the experiences and anecdotes of college students, which are easily disregarded and ignored as simply being anecdotes.
With the discrimination that Republican, libertarian and conservative students have to face every day on campus as they try to simply get their grades and get out so that they can move into careers that will hopefully not punish them for their beliefs, does it really surprise anyone that there’s overt discrimination on campus as well?
The incident we saw at UMD was concerning, yes, but not just because it gives one party candidate an advantage over the other. The reason we should be concerned is that our public universities as a whole are suppressing free speech and targeting anyone who is not a leftist. Our country is seeing this pattern of blatant prejudice against a certain political ideology in our daily lives and experiences, but because it is being instrumented by ideological apparatuses like education and the media, students are feeling virtually powerless to expose it and even worse, virtually powerless to stop it now that it has been allowed to get this far.
What left-wing faculty create is a cycle. Left-wing bias keeps the right out of faculty positions, preventing the right from getting promotions. This in turn means that University policy, standards and fees allocations are controlled primarily and almost exclusively by members of the political left. It also means that classroom lectures, textbooks, discourse and grading are controlled by the left, which often leads to the indoctrination of students into those same views and the marginalization and alienation of those students who resist by daring to form differing opinions. Over the years, students with left-wing ideas are supported, encouraged and reinforced, while students with right-wing ideas are targeted for reform through the hostility of their peers, the expectations of their professors, and their vulnerability to subjective grading which has many students writing what the professor wants to hear, which also works psychologically to indoctrinate these students. Faculty discourage right-wing students from going into academia where they won’t find jobs due to this discrimination, which feeds into the cycle.
It’s time society stops excusing left-wing discrimination against conservative, libertarian and Republican citizens of society who pay just as much for their right to an education and deserve the same respect as both students and faculty as their left-wing counterparts.
Let Freedom Ring writer Gary Gross noticed something strange posted on Twitter last night: The University of Minnesota-Duluth College Republicans tweeted, “UMD administration won’t let us put up signs for Tom Emmer, but yet the dems can put this up?” followed by a link to this photo of a Vote-for-Dayton sign endorsed by the College Democrats.
According to a recent press release, the College Republicans group had asked if they could post signs encouraging students to vote for Emmer, but were told by the University that “any type of poster or flyer that supported a candidate and encouraged students to vote for that candidate cannot be posted on campus.” The College Democrats, however, posted pro-Dayton flyers across campus. The University’s excuse for the College Democrats was apparently that these signs were giving directions to an upcoming Dayton rally, and would be taken down afterwards. Yet, after the rally, these signs were replaced with “a wave of posters telling students to vote for Mark Dayton for governor.”
Naturally, in light of this, the University denied having ever prohibited the College Republicans from doing the same and changed the rules to allow these postings on campus. Upon hearing that UMD had changed the rules to grant this privilege to the College Democrats, the College Republicans quickly came out with their own wave of “Vote for Chip” signs to support Congressional candidate Chip Cravaak who is running against 18th-term incumbent Jim Oberstar.
Though they can now post, it doesn’t change the fact that the College Democrats were able to keep their signs up “for the rally” and then post a whole series of signs encouraging students to vote for their candidate before the College Republicans were allowed to do so, giving one group an obvious campaigning advantage and demonstrating a clear bias in its dealings with student groups. The problem here is far greater than a single instance of double standards at a University. What the UMD CRs are going through is only one of many incidents of discrimination that public universities commit against conservative, libertarian and Republican students every single day, not only across campuses, but in classroom discussions and grading, in hiring faculty for academic departments and in setting the standards of academia.
As a College Republican at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, this news didn’t surprise me at all. As a matter of fact, if I brought it up to my fellow CRs here, no one would be surprised by yet another anecdote about public universities limiting conservative and libertarian discourse and implementing their left bias in the classrooms and across campus. This bias has been forcibly instituted on students through an entire system in academia that works to keep Conservative and Libertarian ideas out of the classroom and out of academic discourse. A few years ago, Annie Karni, writing for the New York Sun, wrote:
"Conservative professors must publish more than their liberal peers to be competitive for the same university jobs and promotions, according to new reports. At a conference sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute today in Washington, D.C., researchers from across the country will present 18 papers that they say document the growing liberal bias in academia.
"Universities are tilting to the left, and it starts at the student level and goes all the way through to the hiring level and even to the promotion level," the vice president and director of the National Research Initiative at AEI, Henry Olsen, said. "This is a real problem, not anecdote masquerading as fact."
But is academia really controlled by the left because a majority of students lean to the left and that preference trickles upwards, or is it because, from an early age, students are forced to contend with the unyielding biases of their teachers and professors who present their opinions as fact? Those who would have us believe that the bias is initiated by students and works its way up to the hiring level where Conservative professors are systematically kept out of faculty positions are the same people who are implementing this institutionalized ideological discrimination in the first place. Karni also reported:
"Using national surveys that measured political party registration and ideological self-designation of faculty at 183 randomly selected four-year colleges and universities, researchers concluded that ideology had about a third as much impact as merit in determining the career success of socially conservative university professors.
"The trend is worrisome to many conservative scholars. "It hurts academia," a professor of Political Science at Villanova University, Robert Maranto, said. "It limits the questions we academics ask and the phenomenon we study, limiting the ideas which undergraduates are exposed to during their college education."
And the departments where we find the most disparities are those in which professors have the greatest opportunity to implement their political and social agendas and ideals. These are the humanities. Karni reported on this as well:
"In departments such as sociology and anthropology, "progressive" and "liberal" professors outnumber "conservative" and "libertarian" faculty members by a margin of at least 20 to 1, according to a new study by a husband and wife research team from George Mason University and the Swedish Institute for Social Research. The findings are based on dozens of national surveys about faculty voter behavior, policy views, and voter registration."
This was also found in a study Paul Kengor conducted in an issue of Policy Review examining the political affiliations of 190 social science and humanities professors at top Universities like Stanford and Cornell. He found that of those 190, 184 were self-proclaimed and/or registered Democrats and only 6 were Republicans. And this bias in professors then seeps down towards students. Kani added that:
"Some professors said a liberal bias is damaging the intellectual vitality of campus life, and they discourage conservative students from pursuing doctorate degrees in the humanities.
"If my students show conservative bias, I steer them away from the academy," a professor of English at the University of Virginia, Paul Cantor, said. "They have no future — they will not get jobs. If they want to teach traditional works in a traditional matter, they have no future in an English department today."
"Mr. Cantor, who is spending a semester at Harvard University teaching a course on Shakespeare and politics, said English departments were more intellectually diverse 50 years ago than they are today. Professors today may have broadened their syllabi, but most of them interpret those texts through the uniform lenses of race, class, and gender, he said."
Conservative students aren’t choosing to stay away from academia and conservative faculty members aren’t failing to qualify for positions. Instead, these faculty members are being held to higher standards by an increasingly discriminatory institution in order to suppress conservative and libertarian ideology and speech. And students are being discouraged from pursuing careers in the academy by self-serving leftists who hide behind the excuse that they are protecting these students from not having a job due to a system of discrimination that these same professors and their employers are creating and perpetuating.
In addition, students whose beliefs aren’t in line with the institution’s agenda are being further dissuaded through the process of obtaining an education, which often requires an adherence to the biases of their professors. Jason Dore of the Free Republic reported:
"Students detail how, time after time, professors introduce topics not included on the course description, squelch opposing opinions in discussion, misrepresent facts and encourage students to adopt the professor's point of view. A senior at UCSD detailed how he wrote a paper espousing a pro-life view that was picked apart. He rewrote it with a pro-choice stance and received an A.
"Cases of obvious bias are troubling enough, but when a teacher's opinion is taught as fact, students become indoctrinated without ever realizing they were taught lies. This often is the case in history classes when teachers present an unhistorical account of people or events.
"With the lack of accountability in the classroom and balance in teachers' views, how are students to trust the education they receive? Are they merely becoming indoctrinated members of the liberal left?"
Just this month, Richard. E. Redding of the LA Times wrote an article called, “It’s Diverse if You’re Liberal,” reporting on how “Conservative and Libertarian professors are becoming increasingly rare at colleges and universities, and this lack of diversity hampers the developments of innovative solutions to the nation’s problems.” He wrote:
"Last month, 18 million college students returned to school — to those hotbeds of debate about the crucial issues of the day, right? But not so fast. A major new study on the campus climate for viewpoint diversity — surveying 24,000 U.S. students and published by the American Assn. of University Professors — found otherwise.
"Only a third of college students felt that their professors made learning about different views a priority. In fact, most did not think it entirely safe to hold unpopular opinions on campus. Since more seniors felt this way than freshmen, it appears that the college experience makes students less comfortable about exploring and voicing diverse opinions.
"This lack of intellectual diversity at our nation's colleges and universities should be a concern to all of us. It means that our future leaders in industry, government and science are receiving a one-sided education (at an average cost of $75,000 to $155,000 for a degree) that leaves them ill-equipped, as the report explains, to work "across differences to tackle challenges and create solutions." "It also limits the phenomena studied, questions asked and solutions proposed by professors who, as the main producers of research and development in this country, fuel our innovative edge."
The left’s utilization of education as an ideological apparatus to mold the minds of students to fit their political agendas is not only unethical, but because they are paid with the money of taxpayers who believe that they are funding an open and free-thinking education system, it’s a direct violation of our American principles.
In the words of my personality psychology professor, who was teaching that a personality type characterized by discrimination and prejudice is associated with the right wing (despite the fact that it has only been tested for the far right and never the far left), those in academia tend to lean to the left themselves, so they wouldn’t be interested in looking for prejudice on the left. Despite admitting this, though, that same professor still included this assumed stereotype of prejudice against the right wing in the academic models we would be tested on in class. It didn’t matter that the research was done to find prejudice only in the right wing; he was still going to teach this idea about right-wingers as fact.
Too few studies have been conducted to expose this discrimination in the classroom and alienation of conservative students which contributes to blocking us from careers in the academy, largely due to the fact that leftists don’t find this to be a particularly “interesting” topic since it would prove the incidence of their use of our money to force their beliefs and propaganda onto students whose grades are subject to the successful reproduction of those opinions. This lack of checks on the leftists who have seized control of academia safely secures their ability to do as they please in the classroom, without any real consequences for overtly discriminating against conservative students. It also ensures that the only real proof of their doings lies in the experiences and anecdotes of college students, which are easily disregarded and ignored as simply being anecdotes.
With the discrimination that Republican, libertarian and conservative students have to face every day on campus as they try to simply get their grades and get out so that they can move into careers that will hopefully not punish them for their beliefs, does it really surprise anyone that there’s overt discrimination on campus as well?
The incident we saw at UMD was concerning, yes, but not just because it gives one party candidate an advantage over the other. The reason we should be concerned is that our public universities as a whole are suppressing free speech and targeting anyone who is not a leftist. Our country is seeing this pattern of blatant prejudice against a certain political ideology in our daily lives and experiences, but because it is being instrumented by ideological apparatuses like education and the media, students are feeling virtually powerless to expose it and even worse, virtually powerless to stop it now that it has been allowed to get this far.
What left-wing faculty create is a cycle. Left-wing bias keeps the right out of faculty positions, preventing the right from getting promotions. This in turn means that University policy, standards and fees allocations are controlled primarily and almost exclusively by members of the political left. It also means that classroom lectures, textbooks, discourse and grading are controlled by the left, which often leads to the indoctrination of students into those same views and the marginalization and alienation of those students who resist by daring to form differing opinions. Over the years, students with left-wing ideas are supported, encouraged and reinforced, while students with right-wing ideas are targeted for reform through the hostility of their peers, the expectations of their professors, and their vulnerability to subjective grading which has many students writing what the professor wants to hear, which also works psychologically to indoctrinate these students. Faculty discourage right-wing students from going into academia where they won’t find jobs due to this discrimination, which feeds into the cycle.
It’s time society stops excusing left-wing discrimination against conservative, libertarian and Republican citizens of society who pay just as much for their right to an education and deserve the same respect as both students and faculty as their left-wing counterparts.
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
Announcement
I was just given a great opportunity to write for Ladies Logic, so that's where you'll find most of my posts for a while. I'll do what I can to link between both and continue to post more personal and opinion pieces here, along with updates on campus politics, which Cindy's readers will be less interested in. My more researched and state-wide entries will largely by on LL, though. My alias there is "EspressoPress," which is thought sounded cool, so feel free to stop by the site and read through mine and Cindy's recent posts. :)
My post on the Emmer rally last night is there as well:
Check it out at http://www.ladieslogic.com/component/content/article/1-governor/524-mitt-romney-rallies-for-emmer.html
My post on the Emmer rally last night is there as well:
Check it out at http://www.ladieslogic.com/component/content/article/1-governor/524-mitt-romney-rallies-for-emmer.html
Monday, October 18, 2010
It's that time again!
With elections just around the corner and the politically-active community in a buzz, the College Republicans at the University of Minnesota will again be hosting Conservative Awareness Week!
But, until that happens, there are still plenty of events to keep us on our toes. Tonight, for example, Mitt Romney will be endorsing Tom Emmer in a rally at the Ramada MOA, by the Mpls Int'l Airport. The doors open to the public at 7 and it's free!
I hope to get there myself so that I can post the highlights of the event both here and on Ladies Logic, but unfortunately that will be dependent on my ability to get to Bloomington fast enough after class to secure a parking spot. I'm not entirely sure how full the lot will get, but the nice woman who picked up the phone at Ramada said that anyone who gets there early enough should be able to snag one.
Another upcoming event is the President's visit to the University of Minnesota this Saturday. Traffic will be horrific so for anyone coming to that (be it for the rally or the protest or the home football game), arrive early. The College Republicans have signs made up, so if you are as disappointed with our current executive as we are, feel free to join us in voicing that.
And remember, Conservative Awareness Week kicks off on Monday the 29th! I'll be sure to post updates on that as well!
But, until that happens, there are still plenty of events to keep us on our toes. Tonight, for example, Mitt Romney will be endorsing Tom Emmer in a rally at the Ramada MOA, by the Mpls Int'l Airport. The doors open to the public at 7 and it's free!
I hope to get there myself so that I can post the highlights of the event both here and on Ladies Logic, but unfortunately that will be dependent on my ability to get to Bloomington fast enough after class to secure a parking spot. I'm not entirely sure how full the lot will get, but the nice woman who picked up the phone at Ramada said that anyone who gets there early enough should be able to snag one.
Another upcoming event is the President's visit to the University of Minnesota this Saturday. Traffic will be horrific so for anyone coming to that (be it for the rally or the protest or the home football game), arrive early. The College Republicans have signs made up, so if you are as disappointed with our current executive as we are, feel free to join us in voicing that.
And remember, Conservative Awareness Week kicks off on Monday the 29th! I'll be sure to post updates on that as well!
Friday, October 1, 2010
The Truth About the "Small Business Jobs" Act
To try to break up the flood of far-left, anti-Emmer and anti-Republican posts and columns dominating the Opinions page each and every day, despite the more diverse and moderate views of the paper's audience on campus, I recently sent in a letter to the Minnesota Daily. As it becomes less and less recent, I'm guessing my letter won't actually be posted in the paper. At least I can still post it here.
Passing the “Small Business Jobs” Act
And the Controversial Dispute behind It
With elections just around the corner, Democrats were looking for a way to salvage their approval ratings. Enter the “Small Business Jobs” Act, a 42 billion-dollar addition to Stimulus package legislation. The President announced, “Now the Republicans have said this is their number one concern. I’m going to call their bluff.”
With the way Democrats designed the bill, the federal government would control and subsidize a $30 billion lending fund, regulate which businesses and products were eligible, and allocate funds for the expenses it deemed appropriate. On top of that, there would be another $12 billion in tax breaks. 38 Republican senators, wary of further government expansion and spending, voted against the bill. Yet, it wasn’t because they were all hypocrites as a previous letter to the Daily on this subject assumed. In reality, the Republicans proposed dozens of amendments to help Small Businesses through regulatory tax relief, including a safety measure to relieve small businesses from upcoming tax hikes and a bipartisan proposal to remove the government cap on the amount of loans businesses can obtain from credit unions. Senate Majority leader Harry Reid refused to let these be put to a vote, claiming they were not “germane” to the bill.
John Berlau and Andrew Kwiatkowski of the Competitive Enterprise Institute commented on this in the American Spectator saying, “[I]ndeed, actually providing relief to entrepreneurs from the government's burdens may not be ‘germane’ to a bill that purports to help small business by setting up a $30 billion big-government ‘small business lending fund’ -- what National Review writer Stephen Spruiell has called ‘Son of TARP’ -- in which the U.S. Treasury buys up stakes in banks and directs them to lend to small business with an emphasis on ‘linguistically and culturally appropriate outreach.’”
The phrase “linguistically and culturally appropriate” is concerning as well. After the President’s attack on GM, can any of us really believe he won’t let politics influence lending decisions? Republicans attempted an amendment to make loans available without government control, but of course, Reid was quick to block it, confirming their concerns that this was more about government control.
Spruiell also wrote that "this is the kind of politicized bank lending that the government has encouraged for decades through laws such as the Community Reinvestment Act and through mandates requiring Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to promote homeownership [that] actively drove the deterioration of lending standards that led to the bust."
With the real estate market seeing its highest foreclosure rate last month since the downturn, we are still feeling the ill effects of the last time the government micromanaged bank lending decisions. But, as we’ve seen with overwhelming public opposition to the Health Care bill and bloated $814 billion Stimulus, Mr. Obama won’t let trifles like the will of his constituents sway his stance on legislation.
Yet, the failure of similar measures isn’t the only reason many small businesses are voicing their disapproval. Pallavi Gogoi with the Associated Press reported that, “Bank executives say their customers don't want loans, even at low interest rates, because the sluggish economy has chilled expansion plans. Some say the federal money isn't worth it because they fear it will come with too much regulatory oversight.”
The President doesn’t appear to understand that what businesses need right now is not a pile of cash wrapped in bureaucratic tape. As Gogoi reminded us, people remain distrusting after the Troubled Asset Relief Fund (TARP), which “formed at the height of the financial meltdown to pump money into banks. Banks that accepted TARP money had to later cut dividends to shareholders and limit compensation to top executives. They were also penalized for early repayment.” He also added that, “Ninety-one percent of small business owners surveyed in August by the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) said all their credit needs were met. Only 4 percent cited a lack of financing as their top business problem. Plans for capital spending were at a 35-year low.”
Understanding that this bill was the right intention but the wrong approach, and realizing their attempts at compromising with amendments were being ignored, Republicans went for their last option, a filibuster. The President seized that opportunity to tell the press, “Understand, a majority of senators support the plan but Republican leaders in the Senate won’t even allow it to come up for a vote,” ironically casting the Republicans as the unreasonable ones.
Because of the Democrat majority’s blatant disregard for minority views and the President’s unprofessional and unyielding partisan stance, our representatives were once again unable to produce a bill that will bode well for the taxpayers funding it. With power clearly getting to their heads, Democrat leaders didn’t stop to realize that they weren’t just silencing and bashing members of the Congressional minority, but the citizens represented by that minority. As such, it’s going to take a lot more than this last political ploy to win the public back by November.
Passing the “Small Business Jobs” Act
And the Controversial Dispute behind It
With elections just around the corner, Democrats were looking for a way to salvage their approval ratings. Enter the “Small Business Jobs” Act, a 42 billion-dollar addition to Stimulus package legislation. The President announced, “Now the Republicans have said this is their number one concern. I’m going to call their bluff.”
With the way Democrats designed the bill, the federal government would control and subsidize a $30 billion lending fund, regulate which businesses and products were eligible, and allocate funds for the expenses it deemed appropriate. On top of that, there would be another $12 billion in tax breaks. 38 Republican senators, wary of further government expansion and spending, voted against the bill. Yet, it wasn’t because they were all hypocrites as a previous letter to the Daily on this subject assumed. In reality, the Republicans proposed dozens of amendments to help Small Businesses through regulatory tax relief, including a safety measure to relieve small businesses from upcoming tax hikes and a bipartisan proposal to remove the government cap on the amount of loans businesses can obtain from credit unions. Senate Majority leader Harry Reid refused to let these be put to a vote, claiming they were not “germane” to the bill.
John Berlau and Andrew Kwiatkowski of the Competitive Enterprise Institute commented on this in the American Spectator saying, “[I]ndeed, actually providing relief to entrepreneurs from the government's burdens may not be ‘germane’ to a bill that purports to help small business by setting up a $30 billion big-government ‘small business lending fund’ -- what National Review writer Stephen Spruiell has called ‘Son of TARP’ -- in which the U.S. Treasury buys up stakes in banks and directs them to lend to small business with an emphasis on ‘linguistically and culturally appropriate outreach.’”
The phrase “linguistically and culturally appropriate” is concerning as well. After the President’s attack on GM, can any of us really believe he won’t let politics influence lending decisions? Republicans attempted an amendment to make loans available without government control, but of course, Reid was quick to block it, confirming their concerns that this was more about government control.
Spruiell also wrote that "this is the kind of politicized bank lending that the government has encouraged for decades through laws such as the Community Reinvestment Act and through mandates requiring Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to promote homeownership [that] actively drove the deterioration of lending standards that led to the bust."
With the real estate market seeing its highest foreclosure rate last month since the downturn, we are still feeling the ill effects of the last time the government micromanaged bank lending decisions. But, as we’ve seen with overwhelming public opposition to the Health Care bill and bloated $814 billion Stimulus, Mr. Obama won’t let trifles like the will of his constituents sway his stance on legislation.
Yet, the failure of similar measures isn’t the only reason many small businesses are voicing their disapproval. Pallavi Gogoi with the Associated Press reported that, “Bank executives say their customers don't want loans, even at low interest rates, because the sluggish economy has chilled expansion plans. Some say the federal money isn't worth it because they fear it will come with too much regulatory oversight.”
The President doesn’t appear to understand that what businesses need right now is not a pile of cash wrapped in bureaucratic tape. As Gogoi reminded us, people remain distrusting after the Troubled Asset Relief Fund (TARP), which “formed at the height of the financial meltdown to pump money into banks. Banks that accepted TARP money had to later cut dividends to shareholders and limit compensation to top executives. They were also penalized for early repayment.” He also added that, “Ninety-one percent of small business owners surveyed in August by the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) said all their credit needs were met. Only 4 percent cited a lack of financing as their top business problem. Plans for capital spending were at a 35-year low.”
Understanding that this bill was the right intention but the wrong approach, and realizing their attempts at compromising with amendments were being ignored, Republicans went for their last option, a filibuster. The President seized that opportunity to tell the press, “Understand, a majority of senators support the plan but Republican leaders in the Senate won’t even allow it to come up for a vote,” ironically casting the Republicans as the unreasonable ones.
Because of the Democrat majority’s blatant disregard for minority views and the President’s unprofessional and unyielding partisan stance, our representatives were once again unable to produce a bill that will bode well for the taxpayers funding it. With power clearly getting to their heads, Democrat leaders didn’t stop to realize that they weren’t just silencing and bashing members of the Congressional minority, but the citizens represented by that minority. As such, it’s going to take a lot more than this last political ploy to win the public back by November.
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