9/11 In The Schools

September 11, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Terrorism, U.S. History, education | 1 Comment 

A lot of us remember the appearances on TV, in the agonizing weeks and months after September 11, 2001, of the expectant mothers – widows of firemen, stockbrokers, waiters, policemen – who would, before long, give birth to sons and daughters who would never know their fathers.  And then, through late 2001 and 2002, the babies were born and some went before the cameras – looking like babies always do, happy or puzzled or bored. All ready to grow up and, one day, find out from their relatives – or from their history textbooks – why their fathers weren’t there when they got off the bus in the afternoon.

The youngest of these children are now seven and in school – some, maybe, in the second grade, since kids seem to start their education a lot earlier than when I was their age in 1964. Several 9/11 survivors have been thinking about what they would be taught, and recently have been working with leading educators to develop a role for studying the tragedy in the secondary curriculum. Yesterday Eli Saslow in the Washington Post and Zach Miners in US News And World Report wrote very informative articles describing how this curriculum is going over in the six high schools in which it’s being given a trial run.

One feature of the lessons on 9/11 is that students are offered the chance to get extra credit by interviewing older relatives, neighbors, or those actually caught in the events of that day, about their memories. In Vincennes, Indiana, eighteen-year-old JaLeah Hedrick decided to talk to a member of the Greatest Generation:

Ed Hedrick, 83, was the only person his granddaughter knew whose recollections of Sept. 11 might have the gravitas worthy of extra credit.

She rode a mile across town and sat across from her grandfather on his front porch. She pulled a blue notebook and a pink pen from her backpack and then looked at a class handout that provided a list of possible interview questions. “I have to ask you some of these for homework,” she told her grandfather, her eyes still fixed on the sheet. “Where were you when you first heard about the attack?”

“I was sitting in that red chair over there in the living room,” he said.

She nodded and then read the next question. “Did you continue to listen to the radio or watch TV?”

“Yes,” her grandfather said. “I barely moved all week. I couldn’t stop watching.”

“How did it affect you?” she asked.

“Severe anger, for days,” he said.

“What action did you want the government to take?” she asked.

“Well, I guess I wanted them to load up three or four of those H-bombs and send them over there. That’s how I felt at the time.”

“How has it affected your daily life since?”

“Not much. I don’t think about it. They teach you not to think about ugly things when you fight in a war.”

Debunking the Myth of the Nixon “Southern Strategy”

September 3, 2009 by Bob Bostock | Filed Under American Politics, Civil rights, History, Nixon Administration, Republican Party, Richard Nixon, education | 4 Comments 

I agree with nationally syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker more often than not. Her column today, Can the GOP Speak to Blacks?, makes some excellent points about why the Republican Party has failed to attract support from African-American voters over the past 45 years.

Unfortunately, in analyzing the GOP’s alienation from black voters, Parker repeats the old canard that the African-American exodus from the GOP began in 1968 in response to what she describes as, “Richard Nixon’s ‘Southern strategy,’ which tried to harness votes by cultivating white resentment toward blacks.” At quick glance at a little history refutes this persistent and pernicious myth.

For its first 70 years , the Republican Party – the Party of Lincoln – was the home of the vast majority of African-American voters. FDR was the first Democratic president to win the support of a majority of black voters. Nevertheless, Republican presidential candidates in every election through 1960 could expect to receive the support of roughly one-third of black voters. Indeed, in 1960, about one in every three African-Americans voters voted for Richard Nixon.

It wasn’t until 1964 that African-American support for the GOP fell off the cliff. Barry Goldwater’s vote against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (which, ironically, was supported by larger proportions of Republicans than Democrats in both houses of Congress) drove black voter supporter for the GOP standard-bearer down below ten percent. In the years since, it has rarely climbed much above that mark and has never come close to the level RN received in 1960.

Goldwater, of course, carried much of the Deep South in 1964 (Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina), all five of which the Democrats had carried in 1960. But, with the exception of his home state of Arizona, that’s all he won. New York Senator Jacob Javits, writing in early 1966 about the electoral debacle of 1964, blamed it squarely on “the Goldwater-Miller ill-fated ‘Southern Strategy.’”

Over the years, however, RN’s critics have blamed him for creating a “Southern Strategy” designed to win white votes by exploiting racial tensions.   If that had been his aim, the results of the 1968 election suggest he failed at it miserably. In 1968, RN lost four of the five Southern states that Goldwater had carried. George Wallace carried the rest of the Goldwater Southern bloc – Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi. And of those four states, RN ran third, behind both Wallace and the Democrat’s nominee, Hubert Humphrey, in three of them.

Once in the White House, President Nixon’s actions can hardly be called those of a president seeking to inflame racial tensions. Nothing illustrates that better than the historic progress his administration achieved in finally ending the practice of segregating the races in “separate but equal” schools in the South. When RN took office in 1969, 68 percent of black Southern students attended segregated schools. Within five years, that number had been cut to 9 percent. As Tom Wicker wrote in his biography, One of Us, “The Nixon administration did more in 1970 to desegregate Southern school systems than had been done in the sixteen previous years, or probably since.”

Of course, beginning in 1972, the Democrat’s once Solid South turned reliably red at the presidential level, except when a Son of the South was running for president (Carter in 1976 and Clinton in 1992). The lock the Democrats had on Southern Senate and House seats also began to erode during the Nixon years.

The reasons for this change are many. Chief among them is RN’s success in occupying the middle ground in American politics and thus attracting the support of Silent Majority, not just in the South, but also in every part of America. Attributing the Republican Party’s success in breaking the Democrat’s hold on the South to a cynical, Nixon-devised  “Southern Strategy” based on creating and then exploiting racial division is not only simplistic, it’s also contradicted by the record.

The President At Notre Dame

May 16, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, California politics, Congress, Culture, Democratic Party, Domestic issues, Election 2008, Lifestyle, Media, Obama administration, Political Philosophy, Presidents, Public Opinion, Religion, Republican Party, Supreme Court, Vice President Biden, economy, education | 1 Comment 

Tomorrow President Obama will receive an honorary degree at the University of Notre Dame, the nation’s quintessential Catholic institution of higher learning, and will deliver an address to the assembled graduates. The invitation extended by the school’s president has stirred considerable controversy (and plenty of vocal protests) because of the President’s espousal of the pro-choice viewpoint on abortion throughout his career. (It has been noted here and there that other pro-choice politicians like New York’s onetime Governor Mario Cuomo and the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan appeared at previous Notre Dame commencements without much incident. But it may have helped that they were lifelong Catholics, unlike Obama.)

The Chief Executive’s appearance tomorrow is an opportunity for him to extend a conciliatory hand to the large number of Americans who, whether or not they voted for him in November, are not supporters of some of the radical programs being espoused by a considerable number of Democratic-affiliated groups, such as an expansion of legal abortion, decriminalization of marijuana and other drugs, and gay marriage.

It seems to become more evident by the month that when voters sought “change” in voting for Obama and Vice President Biden last month, a substantial percentage of them were mainly concerned with the economy, health care, and perhaps increased opportunity of education, and were not that keen on the other aspects of “change” as defined in the agendas of MoveOn.org or other groups. This would especially apply to voters in the states surrounding the Deep South, large portions of the Catholic electorate, and churchgoing African-American voters nationwide.

In California, the voters in the latter group helped Obama carry the state, but at the same time provided the margin that passed Proposition 8 which reversed the California Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage. And it turns out that on abortion, the percentage of voters supporting Roe vs. Wade and the pro-choice line, after peaking during the Clinton years, has steadily been declining, to the point that this week, a Gallup poll revealed that a bare majority of those whose opinion was sampled – 51% – described themselves as “pro-life.”

This strongly indicates that a considerable number of voters – perhaps poised on becoming the majority – would not be looking forward to Al Franken taking his seat in the Senate and locking in a (theoretically) filibuster-proof majority that would then fulfill all the left’s fondest dreams in the social arena.

The events of the last few weeks involving Miss California USA, Carrie Prejean, might prove a harbinger of things to come. A few weeks ago, during the Miss USA pageant, Ms. Prejean, educated at Christian schools, was asked by the online gossip columnist Perez Hilton, one of the pageant’s judges, what her opinion was of gay marriage. The contestant replied that her own view was that marriage could only exist between a man and woman – which is still officially the view of Congress, as expressed in the Defense of Marriage Act, passed by a majority of both parties and signed by President Clinton a decade ago.

Hilton (followed by an avalanche of bloggers and left-leaning pundits) subjected Ms. Prejean to ridicule. But instant polls soon made it clear that most Americans supported her right to express her opinion, and even Gavin Newsom, the San Francisco mayor who spearheaded the legalization of same-sex unions in his city, acknowledged her right to free speech.

Ms. Prejean was then ridiculed as a hypocrite, after some rather mild and fairly tasteful photos of her in an unclad state appeared online. But Donald Trump, owner of the Miss USA pageant, rejected pressure to strip her of her crown, and so in recent days the beauty queen has managed to largely prevail in the court of public opinion.

The way this particular controversy has played out has not been conveniently timed for the supporters of same-sex marriage. As I noted last week in my post “Gay Marriage At The Crossroads,”  the District of Columbia city council just voted to recognize such unions as performed in other states. Under the Home Rule Bill, Congress has a right to challenge this decision – and GOP lawmakers have made it clear that they will pursue this option, which means that in a matter of months each member of Congress will have to vote yes or no on this question.

The issues of abortion, gay marriage, and narcotics delegalization will also be prominent when the President selects a nominee to replace Justice David Souter on the Supreme Court. It seems less and less likely that any thoroughly liberal, MoveOn-approved choice would automatically sail through the Senate.

So I think that the best approach for the President tomorrow is not to mouth a series of platitudes predicated on the idea that his listeners (or the American public in general) will automatically accept all of his positions, but to acknowledge that there are differences of opinion and to express a willingness to work within the Constitution to achieve a consensus that will bridge these differences. If he does that, and follows through, he may considerably improve the chances of his party maintaining control of Congress in 2010. If he pursues a partisan path, however, the GOP – perhaps as early as the Virginia election this year – could be on the comeback trail.

All The Archdioceses’ Men

April 21, 2009 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Nixon Administration figures, education | Leave a Comment 

Two former Nixon aides are on the front lines in the battle to save America’s Catholic schools.

Harvard: Turning Back On Its History

April 8, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Military, education | Leave a Comment 

Two Marine cadets and Harvard seniors, who commute to MIT for ROTC, write in the WSJ that since their alama a mater was the first university to launch the program, they are now turning their back on a proud history that produced John Kennedy and Teddy Roosevelt:

Sadly, the number of Harvard students who choose military service has dwindled. Harvard, where ROTC was founded in 1916 and which once boasted over 1,000 participants, is now home to only 29 cadets and midshipmen, spread over four years and four branches of service. Recruitment opportunities are deliberately limited, and the student handbook cautions students against joining ROTC, remarking that the program is “inconsistent with Harvard’s values.” And cadets begin every semester seeking to avoid the professors known to exhibit hostility toward students who wear their uniform to class.

Rather than embracing the mutually beneficial relationship Harvard might share with the military, the faculty prefers to stand in the way of progress, abdicating its responsibility to contribute to one of our nation’s most important institutions. The same Harvard that once produced 10 recipients of the Congressional Medal of Honor, and warrior-scholars such as Teddy Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy, now turns its back on its proud, patriotic history.

But just as the faculty were out of touch in their scathing rejection of former president Larry Sumners, ROTC is also generally supported by the student body:

But there are reasons to be hopeful that the 40-year exile of ROTC may be drawing to a close. Today, the faculty is out of touch with a student body that is generally supportive of ROTC. The support that both Barack Obama and John McCain expressed during the 2008 presidential campaign for the return of ROTC to elite college campuses showed Harvard’s stance to be far from mainstream.

We are also fortunate that Harvard’s new president, Drew Faust, has privately praised and met with cadets and midshipmen, and publicly stated her hope that the day ROTC returns to campus is not far off. Though she remains bound by Harvard’s discrimination policy, she spoke at last year’s commissioning ceremony and expressed her desire to see our numbers grow.

This is encouraging, but it falls short of the appropriate policy: support for the military and those who serve in it, regardless of federal policies. ROTC should be fully and unequivocally welcomed back to Harvard. Accomplishing this would take leadership and courage from President Faust. Perhaps she will be inspired to show this leadership as she joins Gen. David Petraeus in recognizing the ROTC graduates at our commissioning ceremony in June.

An Unkind Cut

March 12, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, Congress, Obama administration, education | Leave a Comment 

The Washington Post recently remarked on the House leadership’s decision to cut a small program and, thus, to commit a serious wrong.  And when the Washington Post cries foul where unions are involved, you know that something truly rotten is afoot:

Last week, the Democrat-controlled House passed a spending bill that spells the end, after the 2009-10 school year, of the federally funded program that enables poor students to attend private schools with scholarships of up to $7,500. A statement signed by Mr. Obey as Appropriations Committee chairman that accompanied the $410 billion spending package directs D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee to “promptly take steps to minimize potential disruption and ensure smooth transition” for students forced back into the public schools.

We would like Mr. Obey and his colleagues to talk about possible “disruption” with Deborah Parker, mother of two children who attend Sidwell Friends School because of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program. “The mere thought of returning to public school frightens me,” Ms. Parker told us as she related the opportunities — such as a trip to China for her son — made possible by the program. Tell her, as critics claim, that vouchers don’t work, and she’ll list her children’s improved test scores, feeling of safety and improved motivation.

But the debate unfolding on Capitol Hill isn’t about facts. It’s about politics and the stranglehold the teachers unions have on the Democratic Party. Why else has so much time and effort gone into trying to kill off what, in the grand scheme of government spending, is a tiny program? Why wouldn’t Congress want to get the results of a carefully calibrated scientific study before pulling the plug on a program that has proved to be enormously popular? Could the real fear be that school vouchers might actually be shown to be effective in leveling the academic playing field?

Over The Moon

February 5, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, History, Obama administration, education | Leave a Comment 

Political advance —of which presidential advance is a subset— is an art as well as a science.  It’s not just important to move POTUS from point A to point B in the most efficient and secure way possible.  What he does when he reaches point B is, well, the whole point of the exercise.

When the President and First Lady paid a “surprise” visit to the Capital City Public Charter School in Northwest Washington yesterday, the visit and the venue were weighted with significance.  As was the book they decided to read to the kids.

When President Bush famously was trapped reading to kids at the Emma Booker Elementary School in Sarasota on 9/11, his text was The Pet Goat.  

The Pet Goat is about a a young girl’s beloved pet whose voracious appetite starts the girl’s parents talking up the benefits of a puppy or a kitty.  The girl and her goat are vindicated when the latter butts a car jacker around until the police can apprehend him.

From an educational point of view The Pet Goat was a home run because of the phased reading skills it was imparting.  From an advance point of view it was a missed opportunity because it was only available as a textbook: Reading Mastery II: Storybook 1 by Siegfried Engelmann and Elaine C. Bruner.   

The book the Obamas read —The Moon Over Star, written by Dianna Hutts Aston and illustrated by Jerry Pinckney— is easily available for schools or parents who will want to get it for their kids.  

Further, it makes a point and conveys a message. Here’s how Publishers Weekly describes it:

The 1969 moon landing is the locus for this inspired collaboration. Aston (An Egg Is Quiet) subtly inserts facts about the Apollo 11 mission into a broader, poetic story about the excitement it generates in an eight-year-old’s community. Mae, the narrator, begins the day in church with her grandfather, where everyone prays for the astronauts. Later, as she and her cousins build a play spaceship, she thinks more about her grandfather, a hardworking farmer who considers the space program a waste of money. By the end of the evening, the whole family has seen Neil Armstrong on the moon, and Mae’s quietly confided dream of going to the moon someday has reminded Gramps of the wonder in his own childhood (afterward, “A sigh in Gramps’s voice/ Made my heart squeeze”). In some of his finest watercolors to date, Pinkney (The All-I’ll-Ever-Want Christmas Doll) supplies both his characteristically affectionate, realistic portrayals of African-American families and lyrical views of the moon, giving visual form to what Aston evokes: awe. Ages 6-8.
   

Connoisseurs of advance —and readers of tea leaves— will also glean from this that President Obama is planning to do some serious celebrating come July when the fortieth anniversary of the first moon walk will provide a win/win opportunity to raise national morale while associating himself with JFK.

A Nixon/Obama Plan For Schools?

December 27, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Obama administration, Richard Nixon, education | Leave a Comment 

Matt Miller thinks 44+37=a workable blueprint for education reform:

Nixon’s commissioner of education said publicly that the federal government should pay 25 percent to 30 percent of the cost of public education. His domestic policy staff considered a new national tax, with the proceeds distributed to states that drastically reduced state and local property taxes while closing the financing gaps among their school districts.

In the end, of course, Nixon found he had bigger problems to deal with. But he left a blueprint for Mr. Obama to follow. The federal government contributed just $45 billion of the $488 billion spent on primary and secondary schools in 2004 and 2005 (the most recent data available). That’s just nine cents of the nation’s education dollar.

Going to 25 percent to 30 percent of the overall tab by using a Nixonian revenue-sharing plan would lift the federal contribution by $80 billion to $100 billion a year, and replace an equivalent amount of state and local taxes. A little more federal money might be needed to sweeten the pot, round up the votes and give a boost to the poorest schools.

Refresher Course

December 19, 2008 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under News media, Nixon Administration, Richard Nixon, U.S. History, Vietnam, education | Leave a Comment 

In last week’s  New Yorker, deputy “Talk of the Town” editor Lauren Collins set up a story about Ivy Leaguers in the Obama administration —”Team of Brainiacs“— by stirring up some trouble over one of the recently released Nixon tapes.  Ms. Collins refers to the 18 May 1972 recording of “Richard Nixon (Whittier ’34, Duke Law ’37) excoriating Henry Kissinger (Harvard B.A. ’50, M.A. ’52, Ph.D. ’54)”:

NIXON: The Ivy League Presidents? Why, I won’t let those sons-of-bitches ever in this White House again. Never, never. None of them. They’re finished. The Ivy League schools are finished. . . . Henry, I would not have had them in. Don’t do that again. . . . They came out against us when it was tough. . . . Don’t ever go to an Ivy League school again, ever. Never, never, never.

David Skorton, the president of Cornell, was apprised of Nixon’s comments over the phone. “My mouth is open,” Skorton said, after the line went quiet. “Gosh, what a negative thing to say. Ivy League schools, like all good universities, teach people to think and to reason, and why would anyone be against that?”

The taped exchange was widely reported as the latest example of Nixon’s paranoia and anti-intellectualism, and President Skorton’s was the expected and widespread reaction to its revelation.  But no one seemed to have the time,  interest, or intellectual rigor —not to mention the plain old curiosity— to do a little research to discover the actual context of RN’s remarks in terms of what was happening at the time.

In fact, a helluva lot was happening.  The steam RN was letting off that May had a significant backstory.

The late spring and early summer of 1972 were the cruelest and most critical months of the Nixon administration up to that time, when RN saw his policies being tested and his resolution being challenged at home and abroad in ways they had not been before.

On 30 March, flush with a major infusion of Soviet arms, the North Vietnamese flooded over the internationally-recognized DMZ with an estimated 120,000 troops and pushed deep into South Vietnam.  This was clearly a calculated move on the part of the North Vietnamese who were worried —not without reason— that their Soviet suppliers were losing ardor for the cause.

After RN’s successful surprise trip to Beijing in February, the Soviets had rushed to arrange a summit of their own —now scheduled for June— and there could be no doubt that RN would be expecting some serious reduction of their support for North Vietnam.

RN saw this North Vietnamese offensive as a make or break situation for American credibility.  He was prepared to let the Soviets cancel the summit if they weren’t prepared to accept the incompatibility between their desire for better relations with the US and their determination to tweak the Chinese by supporting North Vietnam.  That’s how RN saw it; others saw it as the opportunity to make one last stand, hope for the best, but be prepared to cut losses and move on.

In RN, RN wrote:

Kissinger…perhaps to cheer me up, said that even if the worst happened and we had to pull out in the face of an enemy victory, I would still be able to claim credit for having conducted an honorable winding down of the war by the dignified and secure withdrawal of 500,000 troops.  Most people would give me credit for that, and everyone would be so glad the war was over that the domestic situation would not be impossible to handle.

I considered this prospect too bleak even to contemplate.  ”I don’t give a damn about the domestic reaction if that happens,” I said, “because if it does, sitting in this office wouldn’t be worth it.  The foreign policy of the United States will have been destroyed, and the Soviets will have established that they can accomplish what they are after by using the force of arms in third countries.”  Defeat, I said, was simply not an option.

In addition to the course of the war and the credibility of American foreign policy being at stake, it was only half a year away from the presidential election.  The situation was so extreme that, in April, RN talked to HAK about the possibility that he might not run for re-election. He recorded that conversation in his diary:

Later on in the afternoon I had a pretty candid talk with Henry about what we had to look forward to in the future.  I said that what we were really looking at was a cancellation of the summit and going hard right on Vietnam, even up to a blockade.

I said that under these circumstances, I had an obligation to look for a successor.

Over the weekend of 15 April, RN ordered “Freedom Porch Bravo” — a series of B-52 bombing raids on munitions targets around Hanoi and its port of Haiphong.  Everyone was on tenterhooks waiting to see how the Soviets would respond, and whether they would pull the plug on the upoming Summit.

It was in that context that HAK met on Monday the 17th with the eight Ivy League presidents (MIT’s prexy joined them to make it ten at the table) at the White House to explain the administration’s policies and goals.  The nine, predictably, emerged from the meeting and, exploiting the cachet of the setting, condemned the bombing and called for America’s immediate withdrawal.  At a time when he was engaged in a major military operation aimed at impressing the enemy with the seriousness of American resolve, RN can hardly have been expected to react equably to the White House being used as a venue to protest his policies.

The pressures on RN —from abroad, at home, and within his own administration— were so intense they’re exhausting (albeit exciting) just to read about.  It’s hard to imagine what they must have been like to experience.   So a little venting a few weeks later, a few days before he left for Moscow for the Summit his critics said would never take place (and in a conversation that he never imagined would ever be made public) shouldn’t be that surprising or difficult to understand.

Besides, despite the convenient lapses of memory and the generous applications of retrospective whitewash, the record of the American academy in general —and the Ivy League in particular  — during the late 1960s was far from admirable.

Roger Rosenblatt, who at the time was Master of Dunster House and on the short list for the presidency of Harvard, has written, as much in anger as in sorrow, about the shameful and self-interested capitulation on the part of a distinguished university and faculty to the barbarians within its gates.

In Coming Apart: A Memoir of the Harvard Wars of 1969 (Little, Brown and Company, 1997), he describes the “atmosphere in which every reasonable decision was overturned, every civility abandoned, every tradition made expendable, and in which no one trusted anyone else.”

The odd thing is that none of the destruction would have occurred had there not emerged a strange conspiracy between those who wanted power and those who readily ceded it to them. The fact that student radicals wanted to take over Harvard, or all of America, for that matter, did not condemn them. However naïve much of their revolution was, for the majority of them it was sincere. Even most of those who for personal reasons protested Vietnam to avoid fighting there were sincere in their objective opposition.

Yet they never could have created so much chaos at Harvard had the administration and most of the faculty not allowed them to. The administration cooperated with the people who wanted to take the place apart merely by overreacting and behaving stupidly. But the faculty’s role was subtler and more morally careless. There were certain critical moments in those two months when professors had the opportunity to instruct their students usefully merely by voting the right vote or by saying the right things — things in which they supposedly believed. Yet, for the most part, they offered no opposition to what they disagreed with, as if to tell the students: “If you want it, take it.” Liberalism rolled over on its back like a turtle awaiting the end. I do not know why, but there was an impulse running under the events of that spring to let things go to hell, and it was acted upon by young and old alike.

Maybe that’s a bit of what RN was talking about.

And as for President Skorton, who made the mistake of giving a quote to a reporter with an agenda, perhaps he might look homeward in order to understand some of RN’s frustrations.  Dr. Skorton was a twenty year old pre-med student at Northwestern University on 19 April 1969, when  armed black militant students took over Cornell’s Student Union building, demanding that the University establish a black studies program and grant them complete amnesty for their efforts.

Thomas Sowell, who was teaching there at the time, has referred to this as “The Day Cornell Died“:

No one who was at Cornell University in the spring of 1969 is ever likely to forget the guns-on-campus crisis that shocked the academic community and the nation. Bands of militant black students forcibly evicted visiting parents from Willard Straight Hall on the Cornell campus and seized control of it to back up their demands. Later, after the university’s capitulation, the students emerged carrying rifles and shotguns, their leader wearing a bandoleer of shotgun ammunition. It was a picture that appeared on the covers of national magazines and was even reprinted overseas.

What happened behind the scenes was at least as shocking. Death threats were phoned to the homes of professors who had opposed their previous actions or demands. Shots were in fact fired into the engineering building.

Maybe this was on RN’s mind when he let off some steam about the Ivy presidents (including Cornell’s newly-inaugurated Corson, whose predecessor had resigned in the wake of the capitulation to the armed protesters’ demands and refusal even to reprimand them for their actions), who were fearless when it came to criticizing his policies to the press but who folded when it came to protecting their own institutions from the predations of marauders.

(The  famous picture above  —”Campus Guns”— by Steve Starr of the AP in Albany, NY, won the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for news photography.  The takeover of the Student Union had been precipitated by a cross-burning in front of a black student residence hall.  Cornell’s house clearly needed some putting in order.  The University administration and faculty caved to the radicals’ demands, and the scars are still felt by many today.  The event is covered in considerable detail by Donald Alexander Downs in Cornell ‘69: Liberalism and the Crisis of the American University, published by the Cornell University Press in 1999.)

Can Science Ever Go Unquestioned?

December 3, 2008 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under education | Leave a Comment 

I love Charles Johnson over at Little Green Footballs, but his attacks on LA. Gov. Bobby Jindal on his signing of the Louisiana Scientific Educational Act wreaks of scientific dogmatism. Charles boldfaces the following from a Washington Post article:

his decision in June to sign into law the Louisiana Science Education Act, a bill heartily supported by creationists that permits public school teachers to educate students about both the theory of “scientific design” and criticisms of Darwinian evolutionary concepts.

But the Science Education Act states:

Proposed law requires BESE, upon request of a local school board, to allow and assist teachers, principals, and other school administrators to create and foster an environment within public elementary and secondary schools that promotes critical thinking skills, logical analysis, and open and objective discussion of scientific theories being studied including evolution, the origins of life, global warming, and human cloning.

Promoting critical thinking skills, open and objective discussion, and logical analysis, doesn’t sound all that bad to me.