Michigan Homosexual Lobby Backs Jail, Lawsuits For Refusal to Recognize Homosexual "Marriage"

Gary Glenn

President of AFA-Michigan

Homosexual activist says business owners should be jailed, newspapers sued and "slapped publicly"

LOS ANGELES -- Michigan's largest homosexual activist group says once marriage is legally redefined to include homosexual couples, business owners and even news media outlets who refuse to recognize such marriages should be jailed or sued and "publicly slapped," a Jewish and openly bisexual columnist for the Los Angeles Daily News reported Monday.

Statements attributed in the column to homosexual lobbyist Sean Kosofsky, director of policy for the Detroit-based Triangle Foundation, were denounced Wednesday by American Family Association of Michigan President Gary Glenn, co-author of the Marriage Protection Amendment approved by voters in 2004 to constitutionally reaffirm the legal definition of marriage in Michigan as only between one man and one woman.

"The Triangle Foundation openly admits homosexual activists' intentions, once they gain sufficient political power, to impose their radical social agenda on America by brute force, trampling cherished American values such as religious freedom, freedom of speech, academic freedom, and even freedom of the press if it stands in their way," Glenn said.

Glenn pointed to comments by Kosofsky reported Monday by David Benkof, author of Gay Essentials: Facts for Your Queer Brain and founder of the Q Syndicate, a "gay"-press syndicate that provides columns and other material to a hundred homosexual newspapers.

Benkof, who strays from "gay" political orthodoxy by opposing the redefinition of marriage, wrote in a column published Monday by the Los Angeles Daily News that he had interviewed homosexual activists nationally about the legal implications of a California Supreme Court ruling last week declaring a constitutional "right" to so-called homosexual "marriage."

Benkof wrote: "What happens if a traditionally religious business owner wants to extend his 'marriage discount' only to couples married in his eyes? Sean Kosofsky of Michigan's largest gay-rights group, the Triangle Foundation, says, 'If you are a public accommodation and you are open to anyone on Main Street, that means you must be open to everyone on Main Street. If they don't do it, that's contempt and they will go to jail.' " http://www.dailynews.com/editorial/ci_9312682

Benkof continued: "Michael Taylor-Judd, the president of the Legal Marriage Alliance of Washington state, said if a newspaper writes that a given same-sex marriage wasn't really a marriage, 'it is certainly in the realm of possibility for someone to bring a (libel) suit, and quite possibly to be successful.' Kosofsky agreed: 'I would be sympathetic to some damages. They need to be slapped publicly.' "

(See link to Benkof column below)

Glenn said the Triangle Foundation routinely justifies its hostility toward individuals and organizations who disagree with homosexual activists' political agenda, as well as Triangle's admitted plans to suppress their opponents' free speech rights, by demonizing those who support traditional one-man, one-woman marriage as promoters of "hate" and violence.

* The Triangle Foundation's web site currently features a news release charging that support for Michigan's Marriage Protection Amendment by Glenn and Catholic Cardinal Adam Maida of the Archdiocese of Detroit was a motivating factor in the alleged beating death of a homosexual senior citizen last year in Detroit. "It is appalling hypocrisy," the statement reads, "for (Glenn and Maida) to pretend that their venomous words and organizing have no connection to the plague of hate violence against gay people, including the murder of Mr. Anthos." http://www.tri.org/violence/pdfs/taskforce.pdf

Triangle's claims were proven false when police reported they found no evidence of assault and

the Wayne County medical examiner's office concluded the man had died from natural causes after a fall resulting from arthritic paralysis. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,262308,00.html

* Kosofsky has for years publicly accused Glenn's organization of supporting murder, though only one news media outlet has ever published the allegation. "We personally believe that the AFA may support the murder of gay, lesbian and bisexual people," Kosofsky said, as reported in 2001 by State News, the student newspaper at Michigan State University.

http://www.statenews.com/index.php/article/2001/11/gay-rights_group_fights

And Kosofsky in a published column in 2005 called Cardinal Maida "recklessly wicked," accused him of "arrogance, bigotry and hypocrisy," and said the Catholic church's position in support of one-man, one-woman marriage "should be tossed in the trash."

http://www.pridesource.com/article.shtml?article=13021

Glenn also noted that when Kosofsky said news media outlets should be sued and "slapped publicly" if they report material to which homosexual activists object, one example may have been fresh on his mind. Last month, Kosofsky attacked WNEM-TV Channel 5, Saginaw, for its coverage of a pro-homosexual student protest in public schools. "WNEM has run one of the worst stories I have seen in recent years on Lesbian-Gay-Bisexual-Transgender issues by using insensitive and inflammatory terms," Kosofsky wrote on his blog, Blog O' Queer.

http://www.blogoqueer.org/2008/04/horrible-coverage-of-day-of-silence-in.html

Violations of religious freedom, free speech rights, academic freedom, and freedom of the press have become routine in countries and states that have already adopted so-called homosexual "marriage" or "hate crime" laws based on homosexual behavior, Glenn said.

* Swedish Pastor Ake Green in 2004 was sentenced to 30 days in jail for preaching a sermon in which he defined homosexual behavior as sinful and harmful to society. http://www.akegreen.org/

* Baptist Press reported in 2005: "A Catholic bishop in Canada is under investigation by a government agency for condemning 'gay marriage'... The bishop, Fred Henry of Calgary, is being investigated by the Alberta Human Rights Commission for comments he made about homosexuality in both a letter to parishioners and a Calgary Sun newspaper column. Two homosexuals filed the complaints." http://www.bpnews.net/bpnews.asp?id=20716

* The Irish Times reported in 2003: "Clergy and bishops who distribute the Vatican's latest publication describing homosexual activity as 'evil' could face prosecution under incitement to hatred legislation. ...Those convicted under the Act can face jail terms of up to six months."

http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/frontpage/2003/0802/1059775167952.html

* The London Daily Telegraph reported in 2006: "New Government proposals on equality could require clergy to bless homosexual 'weddings' or face prosecution, the Church of England said yesterday. It said the proposed regulations could undermine official teaching and require Christians to act against their religious convictions." http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1520849/Church-

* Catholic Charities in Boston was forced by a state "sexual orientation" law to either process the adoption of children to homosexual couples, a direct violation of Vatican policy, or abandon their century-old adoption referral services altogether. They chose the latter. http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2006/03/11/catholic_charities_stuns_state_ends_adoptions

* The Saskatoon Star-Phoenix newspaper was ordered by the Saskatchewan Human Rights Tribunal to pay three homosexual men $1,500 each after the newspaper agreed to run an ad that featured Bible verses critical of homosexual behavior. "As the Star-Phoenix lawyer said in his closing statement (before the Tribunal), 'A Human Rights ruling against the Star-Phoenix and Mr. Owens could limit freedom of speech in the media, in churches and in classrooms.'" http://www.realwomenca.com/newsletter/1999_Sept_Oct/article_7.html

* A British couple were questioned by police on possible "hate crime" charges after they wrote a letter-to-the-editor of their local newspaper criticizing city officials for distributing brochures at city hall promoting homosexual behavior. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/lancashire/4555406.stm

* The London Daily Telegraph reported last month: "A Christian couple who have taken in 28 children have been forced to give up being foster parents after they refused to promote homosexuality. Vincent Matherick, 65, and his 61-year-old wife Pauline were told by social services that they had to comply with legislation requiring them to treat homosexuality as equal to heterosexuality." http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1567160/Christian-foster-parents-condemn-

* A British Anglican bishop in February was fined for refusing to hire an openly homosexual man as a church youth minister. http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2008/feb/08021104.html

* The London Daily Telegraph reported in 2003: "A bishop who angered homosexuals by suggesting they seek a psychiatric cure is to be investigated by police to see if his outspoken views amount to a criminal offence, it emerged yesterday."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1446318/Bishop

* Eleven Christians in Philadelphia -- including two grandmothers in their 70's, one white and one African-American -- were arrested and charged with "ethnic intimidation" under Pennsylvania's "hate crimes" law when they tried to read Bible verses out loud during a homosexual street festival. They faced a cumulative 47 years in prison had they been convicted. http://www.cultureandfamily.org/articledisplay.asp?id=6542&department=CFI&categoryid=nation

* A New Mexico Christian photographer was fined $6,600 for refusing on religious grounds to photograph a homosexual marriage-like "commitment" ceremony.

http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewCulture.asp?Page=/Culture/archive/200804/CUL20080416a.html

* Catholic bishops in Belgium and Spain were sued in 2004 by homosexual activist groups for making public statements in opposition to homosexual behavior and homosexual "marriage."

http://www.ewtn.com/vnews/getstory.asp?number=43235

* Boston public school teachers were threatened with termination if they failed to portray so-called homosexual "marriage" in a positive light. http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?pageId=27201

The full text of Benkof's column in the Los Angeles Daily News is here.

Georgia Governor Signs School-Choice Bill

From Family News in Focus

About 10,000 students could benefit from landmark legislation.

Thanks to a $50 million school-choice bill signed into law last week by Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue, students stuck in failing public schools will be able to transfer to private schools.

The Scholarship Tax Credit program allows corporations and individuals to grant private-school scholarships in exchange for a tax credit.

Jamie Self, vice president of public policy at the Georgia Family Policy Council, said about 10,000 children could receive assistance.

“We’re looking forward to helping organizations start scholarship funds so students can get the education that their parents feel is best for them," she said.

The law puts Georgia among the leaders in school-choice legislation, with two programs in play. The state’s Special Needs Scholarship has been helping kids for the past year.

“Across the country, we are seeing more and more states adopting programs," said Andrew Campanella, spokesman for the Alliance for School Choice. “School choice provides a competitive marketplace. It gives parents options that they desperately need, and it revitalizes communities.”

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Most states have policies and programs that increase education options for families.

Pro-Lifers: Let's Picket NEA Teacher Convention in Washington, DC & NEA HQs in State Capitals July 2

From Christian Newswire

"Pro-Life activists, teachers, school employees, students, parents, and clergy are invited to come pray and peacefully picket the National Education Association's convention at the Washington Convention Center, July 2nd between 10:00AM and 2:00PM," announces Pro-Life Educators and Students (PLEAS) Coordinator, Bob Pawson. "Especially pro-lifers from DC, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, and Pennsylvania. Activate your groups. Bring your families, friends and pro-life signs and banners. Hundreds of citizens publicly admonishing NEA's leaders would create excellent media reportage and inspire the Pro-Life Movement nationwide. Let's go!"

Hillary Clinton and/or Barack Obama will surely address NEA's 9,000 Delegates, as they did last year; especially the eventual Democratic nominee. NEA-PAC may vote for and announce NEA's endorsement during the convention. Late-term abortionist George Tiller spoke at NEA headquarters for the Feminist Majority Foundation's Leadership Conference in March 2008

METRO Yellow and Green Lines provide convenient transportation to 'Mt. Vernon Sq/7th Street & Convention Center' station.

Pro-life groups and activists across America are urged to organize lunch-hour pickets at NEA State Affiliate HQs in all fifty states July 2nd. Most prolife groups have school employees in their ranks, including NEA members, to alert and activate

"Please unite in a high-profile rebuke of the leadership of America's largest, socio-politically meddlesome union for misrepresenting so many teachers on abortion. Seize this opportunity to focus nationwide attention and condemnation upon the pro-abortion activism of arrogant educrats disingenuously pretending to protect children and teachers' jobs."

"A pro-abortion position isn't just morally outrageous; it's stupid; economic suicide. Twenty-five abortions equal one lost classroom, lost teaching careers, and catastrophic losses to America's future," said Pawson, an NEA-NJEA teacher in Trenton.

"We teachers love children. Most are pro-life. It's unacceptable for union representatives to condone or promote killing babies, future students, in their mothers' wombs. We resent having our dues used to subvert our moral, social, and political values while creating artificial divisions among the rank-and-file. NEA must repeal Family Planning Resolution I-15 and similar policies to respect the diversity of 3.2 million members."

To recruit picketers, PLEAS is contacting pro-life organizations across America, including over fifty headquartered in the greater DC area.

Groups and individuals committed to picketing NEA should e-mail:

BobPawson@bringyourbible.com.

Bring traditional pro-life signs & messages like:

PRO-LIFE NEA MEMBER; PRO-LIFE TEACHER; PRO-LIFE STUDENT; REPEAL NEA RES I-15; MAKE NEA ABORTION-NEUTRAL; PRO-LIFE PARENT; FORMER FETUS/CURRENT STUDENT; ABORTION=FEWER STUDENTS; ABORTION=UNEMPLOYED TEACHERS; 25 ABORTIONS=1 LOST CLASS

Kids Deserve Choice of Better Schools

(Originally published in the Newark Star-Ledger, 7/4/99)

As a sixth-grade public school student in 1963, I was asked to deliver a speech about brotherhood that my class had written to commemorate National Brotherhood Week. The riots that accompanied James Meredith's enrollment at the University of Mississippi had occurred a year earlier, and photographs of the dogs and fire hoses being turned on demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama, were fresh in the minds of Americans everywhere.

The closing words of that speech, suggested by our teacher, have remained with me ever since. They were the words of another Long Island student, an African-American girl, who said in a forensics competition, "Take my hand, for it is clean; take my heart, for it is pure; but do not refuse me justice because of the color of my skin, for if you do, I will refer you to God who made me."

The battle for universal civil rights, for freedom and opportunity for every American, has been the animating struggle of American history. It is a struggle that continues to this day. Meredith's struggle concerned the right of African-Americans to attend the college of their choice. Today, a growing number of parents, policy makers and citizens are beginning to demand recognition for a new civil right -- the right of poor Americans to send their children to the schools of their choice.

The opposition of modern-day teachers unions to school choice has placed them in direct conflict with poor inner-city parents, and with our American ideals of liberty and justice. The ultimate threat to government schools comes not from caring parents seeking the best schools for their children but from self-interested teachers unions, which secure generous salaries and benefits from monopoly school systems where, in inner-city neighborhoods, only one of every four students who enters the ninth grade graduates from high school.

In the years since delivering the Brotherhood Week speech, I have been privileged to work in Congress for the late Senator Hubert Humphrey, D-Minn., and in the White House for former President Bush. However, it was only in the past five years, while working in the inner-city for Jersey City Mayor Bret Schundler, that I fully grasped how far many American school systems have strayed from their ideals.

In 1995, Pepsi-Cola Co. approached the mayor's office with a proposal that would have resulted in a contribution from the company to a college scholarship program for every case of Pepsi products sold in Jersey City. We thanked the company for the offer, but explained that the great majority of kids in Jersey City had no hope of going to college. More than half of those who enter public high schools drop out, and fewer than half of those who remain pass a basic test required for graduation.

Would Pepsi consider, we asked, contributing to a new, privately funded scholarship program being established to help low-income parents who want to send their children to private elementary and secondary schools? This plan involved no public funds, would ease the burdens on the city's overcrowded schools, and would let poor people exercise the same choices enjoyed by more affluent parents, including the majority of Jersey City public schoolteachers who send their children to private schools. Pepsi agreed, and the scholarship program was announced to an approving media and a grateful city.

But within a day, we saw how ruthless those in control of the education monopoly are prepared to be in order to thwart choice and competition. Pepsi machines in public schools were vandalized throughout the city, and an official of the public schools (whose children had attended private schools) called Pepsi officials into her office to state that school choice is "elitist" and to protest Pepsi's involvement in the scholarship program. The president of the Jersey City teachers union, who sent his son to an elite private school, threatened a New Jersey Education Association boycott of Pepsi products across the state if the company did not withdraw its scholarship offer. Pepsi complied.

The racial oppressors of Meredith's day were able to hold back racial justice for a time, but they ultimately were moved out of the schoolhouse door, allowing Americans of all races to enter. Those who oppress the poor today think they can do so forever, but they are on the wrong side of history.

School choice can be delayed, but it can not be denied. The most powerful human instinct -- the love of parents for their children -- will overcome today's heartless union bosses, who would leave children in schools where they have a better chance of dropping out than of receiving a diploma. Polls now show strong majorities in New Jersey and across the United States in favor of school choice. Political and religious leaders and the courts are increasingly giving the idea a thumbs-up.

Americans are starting to recognize school choice as an important chapter in the civil-rights movement. But what will history say of those who denied justice, stood in the doorway, blocked private initiatives, thwarted the potential and ruined the lives of so many millions of students? Perhaps, like the Long Island girl, we can only refer them to the God who made us all.

Daniel J. Cassidy serves on the South Carolina Advisory Board to the United States Commission on Civil Rights.

What Was A Liberal Education?

From The New Criterion
By Roger Kimball

The real difficulty in modern education lies in the fact that, despite all the fashionable talk about a new conservatism, even that minimum of conservation and the conserving attitude without which education is simply not possible is in our time extraordinarily hard to achieve.
—Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis in Education”

To be deceived about the truth of things and so to be in ignorance and error and to harbor untruth in the soul is a thing no one would consent to.
—Socrates, in The Republic

“Everybody has won, and all must have prizes.”
—The Dodo, in Alice in Wonderland

When I ponder the recent itinerary of education in this country—not just college education, but the whole shebang—I often think of that old advertisement for a brand of cigarettes designed to appeal especially to women: “You’ve come a long way, baby!” How right they were. But a distance traveled is not necessarily progress logged. It was not so long ago that Cardinal Newman’s enumeration of the goals of a liberal arts education in The Idea of a University could have been taken as a motto by the American academic establishment. Newman spoke of “a cultivated intellect, a delicate taste, a candid, equitable, dispassionate mind, a noble and courteous bearing in the conduct of life” as being the chief “objects of a University” education. Quite normal in the 1850s. But today? Or consider the observation made by the philosopher John Searle in the 1990s that “the idea that the curriculum should be converted to any partisan purposes is a perversion of the ideal of the university. The objective of converting the curriculum into an instrument of social transformation (leftist, rightist, centrist, or whatever) is the very opposite of higher education.” Until the day before yesterday, Searle’s warning was regarded as common sense. Now it is uncommon, and highly provocative, wisdom.

I am not suggesting that in the past our educational institutions always lived up to the ideal that Newman enunciated, or that they always avoided the perversion against which Professor Searle warned. But they aspired to. Indeed, until at least the early 1960s there was robust agreement about the intellectual and moral goals of a liberal arts education even if those goals seemed difficult to achieve. There was, for example, a shared commitment to the ideal of disinterested scholarship devoted to the preservation and transmission of knowledge—which meant the preservation and transmission of a civilization—pursued in a community free from ideological intimidation. If we inevitably fell short of the ideal, the ideal nevertheless continued to command respect and to exert a guiding influence.

The essays that follow provide a series of pathologist’s reports on contemporary liberal arts education in an age when traditional ideas about the civilizing nature and goals of education no longer enjoy widespread allegiance. It would be difficult to overstate the resulting intellectual and moral carnage. Everything about Newman’s description—from its lucid diction and lofty tone to its praise of the dispassionate cultivation of the intellect—is an object of derision in the academy today. Likewise, Professor Searle’s insistence that the curriculum not be reduced to a tool for partisan propaganda, “leftist, rightist, centrist, or whatever,” is now widely derided as hopelessly naïve or insidiously reactionary.

The truth is that despite widespread concern about the fate of higher education, and despite many and various efforts to call attention to and remedy the situation, the situation is in many ways far graver today than it was in the 1970s and 1980s when exotic phenomena such as Afrocentrism, “Postcolonial Studies,” Queer Theory, Critical Legal Studies, and the attack on science by so-called humanists were just beginning to gather steam. And despite the rise of alternative voices here and there, those dominating the discussion at most institutions are committed to discrediting the traditional humanistic ideals of liberal education by injecting politics into the heart of the educational enterprise.

Consider the phenomena of “multiculturalism” and political correctness. (I use scare quotes because what generally travels under the name of “multiculturalism” is really a form of monocultural animus directed against the dominant culture.) The multiculturalists claim to be fostering a progressive cultural cosmopolitanism distinguished by superior sensitivity to the downtrodden and dispossessed. In fact, they encourage an orgy of self-flagellating liberal guilt as impotent as it is insatiable. Hence the sensitivity of the multiculturalist is an index not of moral refinement but of moral vacuousness. Multiculturalism is a paralyzing intoxicant; its thrill centers around the emotion of superior virtue; its hangover subsists on a diet of ignorance and blighted good intentions. As the essay by Alan Charles Kors shows, the crucial thing to understand about multiculturalism is that, notwithstanding its emancipationist rhetoric, “multiculturalism” is not about recognizing genuine cultural diversity or encouraging pluralism. It is about undermining the priority of Western liberal values in our educational system and in society at large. In essence, as the political scientist Samuel Huntington has pointed out, multicultur- alism is “anti-European civilization… . It is basically an anti-Western ideology.” The most ironic aspect of this whole spectacle is that what appears to its adherents as bravely anti-Western is in fact part of the West’s long tradition of self-scrutiny. Indeed, criticism of the West has been a prominent ingredient in the West’s self-understanding at least since Socrates invited his fellow Athenians to debate with him about the nature of the good life. No civilization in history has been as consistently self-critical as the West.

Anti-Americanism occupies such a prominent place on the agenda of the culture wars precisely because the traditional values of American identity—articulated by the Founders and grounded in a commitment to individual liberty and public virtue—are deeply at odds with the radical, de-civilizing tenets of the “multiculturalist” enterprise of political correctness. A profound ignorance of the milestones of American (or any other) culture is one predictable result. The statistics have become proverbial. Huntington quotes one poll from the 1990s showing that while 90 percent of Ivy League students could identify Rosa Parks, only 25 percent could identify the author of the words “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” (Yes, it’s the Gettysburg Address.) In a 1999 survey, 40 percent of seniors at fifty-five top colleges could not say within half a century when the Civil War was fought. Another study found that more high school students knew who Harriet Tubman was than knew that Washington commanded the American army in the Revolution or that Abraham Lincoln wrote the Emancipation Proclamation.

Political correctness also fosters an atmosphere of intimidation and encourages slavish moral and intellectual conformity, attacking the very basis for the free exchange of ideas. Even worse, it encourages a kind of intellectual sentimentality that makes it difficult to acknowledge certain unpalatable realities—the reality, for example, that not all cultures, or indeed all individuals, are equal in terms of potential or accomplishment. It insinuates that “lie in the soul” Socrates warned about in The Republic. The consequence, as Charles Murray sets out in his essay below, is a species of educational “romanticism” that may be motivated by good intentions but has disastrous results.

It almost goes without saying that the tenured or soon-to-be-tenured radicals now controlling nearly all of the most prestigious humanities departments in this country reply that their critics have overstated the case. Really, they say, there is nothing amiss, nothing has happened that need concern parents, trustees, alumni, government, or private funding sources. On the issue of enforcing politically correct behavior on campus, for example, they will assure you that the whole thing has been overblown by “conservative” journalists who do not sufficiently admire Edward Said and cannot appreciate that the free exchange of ideas must sometimes be curtailed for the higher virtue of protecting the feelings of designated victim groups. And the curriculum, they will say, has not been politicized, it has merely been democratized: opened up to reflect the differing needs and standards of groups and ideas hitherto insufficiently represented in the academy.

The aim of such objections is not to enlighten or persuade but to intimidate and pre-empt criticism. The truth is that what we are facing today is nothing less than the destruction of the fundamental premises that underlie our conception both of liberal education and of a liberal democratic polity. Respect for rationality and the rights of the individual; a commitment to the ideals of disinterested criticism and color-blind justice; advancement according to merit, not according to sex, race, or ethnic origin: these quintessentially Western ideas are bedrocks of our political as well as our educational system. And they are precisely the ideas that are now under attack by bien pensants academics intoxicated by the coercive possibilities generated by their self-infatuating embrace of political correctness.

One of the most depressing features of the long-running epic saga called “educational reform” is how intractable the problems seem. A couple of years ago, I wrote an essay in these pages called “Retaking the University.” One thoughtful internet commentator responded with an alternative that I must have had somewhere in the back of my mind but had never articulated explicitly. This forthright chap began by recalling an article on military affairs that poked fun at yesterday’s conventional wisdom that high-tech gear would render tanks and old-fashioned armor obsolete. Whatever else the war in Iraq showed, he observed, such tried and true military hardware was anything but obsolete. The moral is: some armor is good, more armor is better. “It makes sense,” this fellow concluded, “to have some tanks handy.”

He then segued into my piece on the university, outlining some of the criticisms and recommendations I’d made. By and large, he agreed with the criticisms, but he found my recommendations much too tame. “Try as I might,” he wrote, “I just can’t see meaningful change of the academic monstrosity our universities have become issuing from faculties, parents, alumni, and trustees.” What was his alternative? In a word, “Tanks!” He called his plan Operation Academic Freedom. It has that virtue of forthright simplicity:

We round up every tank we can find that isn’t actually being used in Iraq or Afghanistan. Next, we conduct a nationwide Internet poll to determine which institutions need to be retaken first… .

The actual battle plan is pretty simple. We drive our tanks up to the front doors of the universities and start shooting. Timing is important. We’ll have to wait till 11 A.M. or so, or else there won’t be anyone in class. Ammunition is important. We’ll need lots and lots of it. The firing plan is to keep blasting until there’s nothing left but smoldering ruins. Then we go on to the next on the list. If the first target is Harvard, for example, we would move on from there to, say, Yale. So fuel will be important too. There’s going to be some long distance driving involved between engagements.

Well, perhaps we can call that Plan B, a handy expedient if other proposals don’t pan out. And there have, let’s face it, been plenty of other proposals. The task of reforming higher education has become a vibrant cottage industry, with think tanks, conferences, special programs, institutes, and initiatives cropping up like mushrooms after a rain. I think, for example, of the Manhattan Institute’s Center for the American University, The American Council of Trustees and Alumni, or Robert George’s Madison Center at Princeton University, which has become a model for many seeking institutional reform.

Naturally, many of these initiatives tend to run into stiff resistance. In his melancholy essay below, Robert Paquette tells the sorry tale of attempting to start an Alexander Hamilton Center, dedicated to “excellence in scholarship through the study of freedom, democracy, and capitalism,” at Hamilton College in upstate New York. An obstreperous and politicized faculty intimidated a pusillanimous administration and the center had to be started off campus without college affiliation.

I applaud all of these initiatives. But I wonder what lasting effect they will have on the intellectual and moral life of the university. They are important in any event because, even if they remain relegated to the sidelines of academic life, they demonstrate that real alternatives to reflexive academic left-wingery are possible. I suspect, however, that they will remain minority enterprises, a handful of gadflies buzzing about the left-lunging behemoth that is contemporary academia. Why? There are several reasons.

One reason is that the left-wing monoculture is simply too deeply entrenched for these initiatives, laudable and necessary though they are, to make much difference. For the last few years, I have heard several commentators from sundry ideological points of view predict that the reign of political correctness and programmatic leftism on campus had peaked and was now about to recede. I wish I could share that optimism. I see no evidence of it. Sure, students are quiescent. But indifference is not instauration, and besides faculties nearly everywhere form a self-perpetuating closed shop.

Something similar can be said about the fashion of “theory”—all that anemic sex-in-the-head politicized gibberish dressed up in reader-proof “philosophical” prose. It is true that names like Derrida or Foucault no longer produce the frisson of excitement they once did. That is not because their “ideas” are widely disputed but rather because they are by now completely absorbed into the tissues of academic life. (The same thing happened with Freud a couple decades ago.)

A few years ago, The American Enterprise magazine created a small stir when it published “The Shame of America’s One-Party Campuses,” providing some statistical evidence to bolster what everyone already knew: that American colleges and universities were overwhelmingly left-wing. You know the story: out of 30 English professors at college X, 29 are left-leaning Democrats and one is an Independent while in the economics department of college Y, 33 profs are left-leaning Democrats and 1 is, or at least occasionally talks to, a Republican. Well, that’s all old hat now. A few months ago, the Yale Daily News ran a story revealing that faculty and staff at Yale this election cycle have contributed 45 times more to Democratic candidates than to Republications. “Most people in my department,” said the one doctor known to have contributed to Guiliani’s presidential campaign, “are slightly to the left of Joseph Stalin.”

The key issue, I hasten to add, is not partisan politics but rather the subordinating of intellectual life generally to non-intellectual, i.e., political imperatives. “The greatest danger,” the philosopher Leszek Kolakowski wrote in “What are Universities For?,”

is the invasion of an intellectual fashion which wants to abolish cognitive criteria of knowledge and truth itself… . The humanities and social sciences have always succumbed to various fashions, and this seems inevitable. But this is probably the first time that we are dealing with a fashion, or rather fashions, according to which there are no generally valid intellectual criteria.

Indeed, it is this failure—the colonization of intellectual life by politics—that stands behind and fuels the degradation of liberal education. The issue is not so much—or not only—the presence of bad politics as the absence of non-politics in the intellectual life of the university.

I used to think that appealing over the heads of the faculty to trustees, parents, alumni, and other concerned groups could make a difference. I have become increasingly less sanguine about that strategy. For one thing, it is extremely difficult to generate a sense of emergency such that those groups will actually take action, let alone maintain the sense of emergency such that an outburst of indignation will develop into a call for action.

What’s more, those groups are increasingly impotent. Time was when a prospective hiccup in the annual fund would send shivers down the spine of an anxious college president. These days, many colleges and universities are so rich that they can afford to cock a snook at parents and alumni. Forget about Harvard and its $30 billion, or Princeton, or Yale, or Stanford, or the other super-rich schools. Even many small colleges are sitting on huge fortunes.

Consider tiny Hamilton College again. When Hamilton tried to hire Susan Rosenberg, the former Weather Underground member whose 58-year sentence was commuted by Bill Clinton on his last day in office, I reported the fact in The Wall Street Journal. The story appeared on the day that Hamilton kicked off a capital campaign in New York. My article was highly critical, and it generated a lot of comment. Donations to Hamilton, I am told, simply dried up. But so what? The college sits on an endowment of some $700 million. That is more than half a billion dollars. So what if the Annual Fund is down a few million this year? Big deal. They can afford to hunker down and wait out the outcry.

Some observers believe that the university can not really be reformed until the current generation—the Sixties generation—retires. That’s another couple of decades, minimum. And don’t forget about the self-replicating engine that is tenure in which like begets like. Deep and lasting change in the university depends on deep and lasting change in the culture at large. Effecting that change is a tall order. Criticism, satire, and ridicule all have an important role to play, but the point is that such criticism, to be successful, depends upon possessing an alternative vision of the good.

Do we possess that alternative vision? I believe we do. We all know, well enough, what a good liberal education looks like, just as we all know, well enough, what makes for a healthy society. It really isn’t that complicated. It doesn’t take a lot of money or sophistication. What it does require is patience, candidness, and courage, moral virtues that are in short supply wherever political correctness reigns triumphant. In large part, those who want to retake the university must devote themselves to a waiting game, capitalizing in the meanwhile on whatever opportunities present themselves. That is Plan A. Of course, it may fail; there are no guarantees. But in that case we can always avail ourselves of the more dramatic Plan B outlined above.

Roger Kimball is co-Editor and Publisher of The New Criterion and President and Publisher of Encounter Books.