Some Heavy Stuff
Dr. History was looking at NoIndoctrination.com last week. The site allows students to register complaints about professors or programs that"advance one-sided social or political ideologies, denigrate alternative views, or create an intimidating atmosphere for expressing diverse opinions." What surprised the good Doctor was that nearly 30% of the complaints were about historians. Why would history professors get such a disproportionate percentage of complaints?
Hiram Hover cites a new study by the National Association of Scholars,"Words to Live By: How Diversity Trumps Freedom on Academic Websites." It purports to show the"yawning gap that has opened between the cultural allegiances of American higher education and the country at large." You should read what Hiram found. My question is: Why does Halliburton hate America?
From my"green with envy" file: Liberty & Power's David Beito spent the other night hobnobbing with Morgan Freeman and Ruby Dee at a juke joint. Miss Ruby is 83 now. I hope David didn't keep her up past her bedtime.
Er, congratulations, I think, to our colleague, Hugo Schwyzer, who currently ranks #2 among the"Top 50 Hottest Professors" at RateMyProfessors.com! We'll try not to hold this against him, but it will be hard to forget. Other historians on the list lag far behind: Canadians Arne Kislenko at Ryerson University and Michael Dennis at Acadia University, at #34 and #35, and Matt Johnson at Northwest Missouri State, at #38. Students seem to think that mathematicians and psychologists are"hotter" than historians. Color me skeptical.
Finally, here's to Graham Mason,"the drunkest man in the Coach and Horses." As a journalist, he was once"found asleep under his desk, drunk. It was something of a low point." I've had faculty colleagues who were notorious drunks and faculty colleagues who were notoriously asleep. They weren't always the same person. Thanks to Jack Shafer and my virtual son, Andrew Ackerman, for one of the best obits I've ever read.