Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!
Hi, y'all, I'll be taking a little holiday break from blogging this week. However, I've got a few tidbits to leave with you before I go to make merry and celebrate the holidays.
The NCAA is demanding that UNC-Pembroke stop using its "racially-offensive" lndian athletic logo and "Braves" nickname. The NCAA demand would be politial correctness run amuck in any case, but in this case it's particulary obnoxious - UNC-Pembroke was founded for the Lumbee Indians, and was for a time the only four-year institution in the U.S. for Native Americans:
...many Lumbees are chancellors, board members or university staff as well as students and emphasized the Lumbees continued involvement with the school since its inception. In fact, the school has an American Indian Studies department and a Native American museum preserves Indian heritage for coming generations, including exhibits on Indian arts and crafts; Indian language, music, literature and heroes; as well as video biographies of courageous Native American veterans from WWII.
Needless to say, the university is going to battle the NCAA over the right to preserve their heritage.
Best line from this update on the shameful denial of tenure of CUNY history professor Robert David Johnson - "It’s odd that they would choose to go after a historian and assume that he would not have retained all of his documents," Johnson recently remarked in conversation with the author, "that was a bad mistake." CUNY is suffering public-relations disaster from the Johnson case, as well they should.
Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs has previously commented on this NY Daily News article about school textbooks that are filled with errors and politically-correct propaganda, but I do have to add one thing. In the article, William Bennetta, head of watchdog group The Textbook League, comments on the fact that some religious groups in Texas have pressured textbook authors to revise scientific timelines. The purpose of the revisions, of course, is to make the timelines more compatible with creationism. Now, Mr. Bennetta has a point when he requests that such religious claims not be taught in a science textbook. But he should leave off calling the Texans "rednecks", as he does in the article. Mr. Bennetta is from California, and not a few ugly epithets could be applied to citizens of that fair state. What's more, anyone who's from the South knows that the categories of religious fundamentalists and rednecks are not one and the same, and in some areas do not overlap at all. So the use of this regional insult is likely to cause more liberal Southerners to dismiss Mr. Bennetta as a sanctimonious secular Left Coast know-it-all, even though he has a point. Just my two cents here.
Via Joanne Jacobs: Carver Academy, built by NBA star David Robinson, is posting stellar test scores after just one year of operation. In every subject, the students beat the national average - and 99 percent of the students are on full or partial scholarship, while 95 percent are black or Hispanic. Think lowered expectations and educational coddling for poor minority kids could produce this? Think again - these students follow "a well-rounded curriculum that incorporates religion, fine arts, languages and technology with core academic subjects...Starting in pre-kindergarten, students receive weekly instruction in Spanish, German and Japanese. Algorithms and negative numbers are taught as early as first grade." Schools such as this one can help reverse the downward trend of American public education, the trend that has led us to our current, ridiculous situation where college seniors now score no better than high-school graduates of fifty years ago on questions assessing general cultural knowledge.
Of course, what do colleges have to do with educational standards nowadays? Go here to find out if you could be admitted to the University of Michigan. These kinds of calculators highlight the problematic nature of affirmative action, both for the recipients of it (who may not be academically prepared for college), and those who are disadvantaged by it.
Another senator who needs to go: Opinion Journal reports on Sen. Patty Murray, a Democrat from Washington State who recently preached the anti-war gospel to a group of high school students. Did she ask them to "consider alternatives to war" because she has a strong religious or philisophical opposition to it? No, it's because Osama bin Laden is the good guy here - he's "been out in these countries for decades, building schools, building roads, building infrastructure, building day care facilities, building health care facilities, and the people are extremely grateful. We haven't done that." Opinion Journal rightly notes: "Murray must have a screw loose if she thinks al Qaeda has been building 'day care facilities.' What, to cater to all the fundamentalist Muslim families in which the husband and all four wives have to work?"
And on that note, I'm outta here. You guys should all take some time off and be subversive - you know, sing a Christmas carol or two. If anybody complains, tell them that celebrating Christmas is the new trendy and multicultural thing to do. And then go spike the eggnog with Jack Daniels.