I’m from Bulgaria and still learning more about English language usage. Impressed by one of the presidential hopefuls I told my cousin, “This boy, Obama, is the best orator of them all.” She looked at me with fear and explained that it was dangerous to call a black man “boy,” since slave owners had used that term for their male slaves in the nineteenth century. It did not matter that I was not a slave-owner or that Obama had never been a slave.

Maybe you have to be an outsider to be surprised at such sensitivity, but I should point out that the world knows about slavery and segregation in America. It will benefit America to learn the history of the world. Other nations have had much worse for many more centuries and they do not brood on the past as much. In just a few years after gaining freedom from Turkey in 1878, the Bulgarians got over centuries of their children being taken from their families to be forcefully converted to Islam. These “enichari” were trained as soldiers of the sultan to be sent back to their native villages to continue murdering the fathers, raping the mothers, and taking even more Bulgarian children as government taxation.

We have to remember the evils of the past so we do not relive its horrors. And we are to mourn the victims. But unless people forgive, really forgive, and move on, they will keep bickering over their segregated past long after the Tutsi and Bhutto have found harmony in Rwanda. And Martin Luther King’s dream will never come true. Call me a wishful thinker but I have seen many Christians of racial and ethnic minorities who are now free to love their neighbors regardless of melanin content. God has more power than history. He can heal any pain, ancestral or personal.

I want to see the end of the American racial divisions but I don’t want to have to consult the current politically correct dictionary. I do not intend to feel uncomfortable because of the color of my skin or the shape of my skull. I will make every effort to judge people solely on character, just as Martin Luther King preached.

In this post yesterday, I made reference to the Port Huron Statement, authored in 1962:

This was an organization that began by agitating for “participatory democracy,” became the largest organization of the left and ended up, a bare seven years later, calling for war against “Amerikkka” and creating the Weather Underground - the first terrorist political cult.

Well, after writing that post (the Times article I mentioned has the funniest accidental lead in Times history), I perused the Port Huron Statement.  It’s long and boring and full of dull revolutionary language, but the very end is more interesting.    (more…)

So, that English (the nation, not the language) teacher in the Sudan was pardoned and released from prison, even after lots of Sudanese Muslims called for her execution because she named a class Teddy Bear after Muhammad.  This rather irreverent piece from National Review ties in this Sudanese situation with the Christmas situation closer to home.  Sudanese Muslims took offense at something, just like people over here take offense to phrases like “Merry Christmas” or “Your coffee will be $10.”  So why don’t we call for executions?  Mark Steyn writes, “The ability to give and take offense is what separates free societies from Sudan.”

What does the modern university have to do with the church, and vice versa?  Quite a lot.  After all, the university is a Christian institution and invention, starting in the courts of Charlemagne, on to the first universities of Europe, on to the campuses we see on ESPN’s College Gameday every Saturday morning during football season.  The church, as well as the university, would do well to pay more attention to the other one, and one new book has that in mind. 

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You can’t say bomb on a plane, and you can’t make fun of minorities on television.  Well, one of those taboos is being broken just about every night.     

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Michael Knox Beran at National Review writes about the glut of multicultural claims on Abraham Lincoln, and we’re still more than a year away from his 200th birthday.  Beran writes about a series of various symposia scheduled for the run up to the bicentennial celebration, including “Lincoln in the Eyes of Native Hawaiians” (”Life in a tropical paradise is harder than it looks, and Lincoln would no doubt have agreed that native Hawaiians deserve preferential treatment from the federal government”), “The Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual Lincoln” (”The town hall meeting will consider whether Lincoln’s gay lovers should have ‘outed’ the President after Gettysburg, by which time the South was pretty much licked anyway”), “Lincoln as a Muslim” (”A panel discussion will consider the death-wish Lincoln displayed at Fort Stevens in the light of the experiences of freedom-fighters in Palestine who have opted to use suicide bombs in their struggle against the Zionist Oppressor”), and, of course, “The Multicultural Gettysburg Address” (”Numerous scholars have noted regrettable defects in the Gettysburg Address, and have expressed reservations about its use as an educational text in schools”).

Richard Weaver, progenitor of modern conservatism and author of Ideas Have Consequences, wrote this:

It is possible in some abstract sense that all men are equal. But according to the Bible, Aristotle, and most considerate observers, men are not equal in natural capacity, aptitude for learning, moral education, and so on.

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John R. Lott Jr. says, “With hunting season starting in various parts of the country, it may be time to acknowledge what vegetarians, as well as hunted animals, owe to hunters.”  His argument: Hunted animals, if not lying around being dead, would otherwise be eating all the vegetables of the world.  Anyone with a crotchety old grandfather who hunted deer from the edge of his garden (to keep them out of his corn and into his belly), knows what I’m talking about.  If you need a refresher about the utilitarian benefits of hunting, you might enjoy his article.  If, like me, you are familiar with these benefits, you might instead enjoy opening your deep freeze to feast on the fleshy bounty of creation.

This is the title of a column at National Review.  To explain it, Mark Moyar writes: “It’s not the score of a Hawkeye football game. It’s the number of Democrats versus the number of Republicans in the University of Iowa history department, and it has Iowans in an uproar.”  Now, nobody’s debating the fact of liberal majorities in most humanities and liberal arts colleges and schools and departments around the nation.  That should be no surprise.  But what people should debate is why.  Why do liberals end up filling so many academic departments?  The easy answer from the left, and one I’ve heard and read many times over, is that conservatives are stupid and don’t get PhDs.  Many conservatives are stupid.  And so are many liberals.  So let’s keep wondering. 

Is it a self-fulfilling prophecy, where so many professors are liberal, and so the students they cultivate and mentor tend to become liberal, and the students who receive that kind of mentoring are most likely to model their mentors and go into the professorate?

Is it because the content of so many graduate-level seminars and courses skew to a liberal interpretation, and thus don’t appeal to conservatives, who’d rather spend their time elsewhere?

Is it because people become professors to change and understand the world, and conservative students choose to change and understand the world in a different venue?

As a conservative with a PhD (in playwriting, no less, where I was surrounded by good people who treated my ideas like the plague, but who nonetheless invited me to their parties), I think the answer is pretty complex.  I wanted a PhD because I wanted to change the world from the classroom, because my world had been changed in the classroom (at a Christian college).  In my formative, undergraduate years, I was emboldened and educated by intelligent, winsome, compassionate Christian men and women.  I knew what I believed (mostly) and knew why I believed it (mostly) and had quite a lot of intellectual confidence when later I entered secular universities.

I’d like to see a study.  I’d bet that most conservative PhDs who teach in higher ed attended a conservative undergraduate institution.

WMB has often posted on Indoctrinate U, the documentary by Evan Maloney about free speech and political correctness on campuses around the country.  It’s an amateur attempt to do something like a Michael Moore documentary from a conservative angle.  The kid has promise, but he’s not quite there yet, it seems.  But maybe he is, given the fact that Stanley Fish is writing Times columns about him.

Fish gives a fair, albeit predictable, treatment of Maloney’s film, calling most of the charges red herrings.  But he does write this:

Still, when all the red herrings and non-issues have been checked off, there remain some serious questions. Why, Maloney asks, should “schools pay people to operate offices and programs that are blatantly political in nature?” (He has in mind offices and programs like Women’s Studies, Gay and Lesbian Studies, African American Studies, Chicano Studies.)

Read Fish’s answering of this charge here.  Learn more about the documentary here.