This page features brief excerpts of stories published by the mainstream
media and, less frequently, blogs, alternative media, and even obviously
biased sources. The excerpts are taken directly from the websites cited in
each source note. Quotation marks are not used.
Jonathan Kay, in the Weekly Standard (3-14-05):
[Jonathan Kay is managing editor of Canada's National Post and a media fellow at the Hoover Institution.]MOST PEOPLE who earn Ph.D.s aspire to tenure-track professorships, think-tank jobs, or careers in government. When Stanford University awarded Victor Davis Hanson his classics degree 26 years ago, he chose to become a farmer.
Nat Hentoff, in the Village Voice (3-11-05):On February 15, The New York Sun, in a front-page story, reported:"A Columbia University professor who has called Israel a 'racist' state with an 'apartheid system,' and who has supported attacks by Palestinian Arabs on Israelis, is scheduled to lecture a group of New York City public school teachers on how to teach Mideast politics to schoolchil
From the Scrapbook of the Weekly Standard (3-14-05):
Veteran comic actor Douglas Brinkley, best known for his pitch-perfect television cameos as a shamelessly sycophantic, celebrity-smitten history professor--Scrapbook readers will doubtless remember Brinkley's hilarious performance as "the candidate's biographer" on last season's since-cancelled John Kerry Show--may finally be get
William Mullen, in the Chicago Tribune (3-16-05):
Just days after announcing a $22 million project to re-engineer the Chicago Historical Society for its 150th anniversary, museum President Lonnie Bunch said Tuesday that he is leaving to head the Smithsonian Institution's yet-to-be-built African-American history museum in Washington.Highly regarded in museum circles for his vision and fundraising talent, Bunch takes on a monumental challenge in creating what is expected to be
News: The Harvard Crimson, citing interviews with members of the Emory committee that investigated Michael Bellesiles's flawed book on guns, says that the members were not paid $10,000. In his book on the history scandals, Jon Wiener said that two anonymous historians claimed that Emory offered to pay members $10,000. Really, asks the Crimson? “I have no idea if the others were paid,” Princeton's Stanley Katz wrote the Crimson. “Jon [Wiener] never asked me. I would have told him that I was not
Bill Broadway, in the Wa Po (3-12-05):From an interview with Huston Smith, a religious icon and a strongly opinionated individual:
Q: Professor Smith, you've said that Westerners have been "ravished" by science, taken in by technologies and inventions that make life easier but offer little insight into spiritual reality. What do you mean by that?
A: Scien
Jeet Heer, in the Toronto Star (3-12-05):
While most of U.S. President George W. Bush's domestic critics are on the left of the political spectrum, there are also traditional conservatives who object to his policies, as historian John Lukacs reminded a Toronto audience this week.Speaking as part of the Grano Lecture
Robin Wilson, in the Chronicle of Higher Education (3-14-05):Mine Ener would have liked the Oriental rug and the two copper end tables. They have the kind of international flair the late professor admired. That's why her Villanova University colleagues, still saddened by her death in 2003, chose them when they furnished a student lounge in her honor. They placed them in a corner of the lounge, along wi
Eric Alterman, in the Nation (3-28-05):That the Boston Globe is a great newspaper can be in no doubt, as its brave (though flawed) reporting on sexual abuse in the Catholic Church has recently demonstrated. But the paper's opinion columnists have proven a constant source of embarrassment in recent years, producing not merely the fantasist Patricia Smith but also two plagiarists, Mike Barn
Thomas Ryan, commenting on alleged "Ward Churchill Clones" at Ohio State University, at frontpagemag.org (3-8-05):Another professor of OSU’s Peace Studies program is Mark Grimsley, who teaches History in Columbus, and who has been the recipient of the university’s Alumni Award for Distinguished Teaching. Grimsley has taught the Peace Studies elective course “History of
Steven Plaut, at frontpagemag.org (3-7-05):The University of California at Berkeley has developed a new academic specialty, providing a home for anti-Israel Israelis. The anthropology department at the University of California, headed by leftist Lawrence Cohen, a leading scholar in “queer studies,” recently hired an Israeli anthropologist who had been forced to
Martin Kramer, in his newsletter and blog (2-28-05):The spotlight in the Columbia crisis has shifted to Professor Rashid Khalidi, director of Columbia's Middle East Institute and the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies. He's not a part of the reeking mess over at the Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures (MEALAC) department, where extremist professors stand accused of browbeating their stu
From the website of Brandeis University (March 3, 2005):
The campus may look different, but the fond memories and comfortable feelings associated with Brandeis never change for Deborah Lipstadt, who returned to her alma mater on March 2 to participate in a leadership conference and speak about her new book."I always love coming back," said Lipstadt, who earned a master's d
Sean Wilentz, in the Chronicle of Higher Ed (3-3-05):
[Sean Wilentz is professor of history and director of the program in American studies at Princeton University.]For 30 years I have tried to write history. It is extremely hard work, but gratifying over the long haul. Landing a Grammy Award nomination for a brief historical piece was never in the cards, but a fluke, the result of strange twists of good fortu
Lynne Duke, in the Washington Post (2-27-05):What a dream. So bizarre. How strange to see himself shrunken, like a pocket-size
person. But there he was, Kenneth Maxwell, renowned scholar, rendered a tiny
creature trembling at the windswept ramparts of his dream. Gargantuan figures
loomed above, gazing down on this mere morsel. Maxwell awoke. The dream trailed him out of bed. "I've seen this somewhere before," he thought, vexed for a while
Cathy Young, in the Boston Globe (2-21-05): CONSERVATIVES often complain, with good cause, about America-hating left-wing radicals in academia. Yet in recent weeks, a college professor who co-founded an organization that refers to the United States as an "alien occupier" in its manifesto and whose 2001 essay blaming the "barbarism" of American policies for Sept. 11 was picked up by Pravda, the Russian communist newspaper has received gushing praise on the
Jacob Gershman, in the NY Sun (2-22-05):The Palestinian intifada against Israel may have been a blessing in disguise for Jews, according to a Columbia University assistant professor, Joseph Massad.
Mr. Massad, who teaches in the university's Middle East studies department, argues in a recently published essay that Palestinian Arab "resistance" against Israelis is not anti-Semitic but an expression of goo
Ralph Luker at HNN blog, Cliopatria:
I am aghast at news that comes from a fellow historian in the west. At Blog and Mablog, the Aryan supremacist minister in Idaho, Douglas Wilson, says that he is publishing a revised version of his book, Southern Slavery As It Was, under a new title, Black and Tan. Used in some private academies i
Hafidah Samat, in New Straits Times ( Malaysia) (2-12-05): AUTHOR Gavin Menzies is out to prove a point. A former submarine commander in Britain's Royal Navy, Menzies has declared that the Chinese - in the 1400s travelling on a fleet of ships led by the famed Admiral Zheng He - reached America 70 years before the great European explorer Columbus.
The Chinese, a
Samuel G. Freedman, in the NYT (2-16-05):... While Columbia has attracted international attention in the last several months
for allegations by Jewish and Israeli students that they were intimidated by
several Middle East studies professors, N.Y.U. with rather less limelight hired
Professor [Ronald] Zweig to hold a newly endowed chair in Israel studies....
