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Isn't it interesting that the hardliners in Iran and in the US sound weirdly similar? So the nutbag in Iran and communist-turned-radical-rightwinger David Horowitz sound...well...almost identical. Get a clue! Radicals all over the world sound eerily alike. Beware.
1. Iran's hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called Tuesday for a purge of liberal and secular teachers from the country's universities, urging students to return to 1980s-style radicalism.
"Today, students should shout at the president and ask why liberal and secular university lecturers are present in the universities," the official Islamic Republic News Agency quoted Ahmadinejad as saying during a meeting with a group of students.
Ahmadinejad complained that reforms in the country's universities were difficult to accomplish and that the educational system had been affected by secularism for the last 150 years. But, he added: "Such a change has begun."
The Professors: From Publishers Weekly
Horowitz, author of Unholy Alliance and founder of FrontPageMag.com, profiles 101 professors whose politics run left of center (in many cases, very, very left of center), and though his list is impressive in size and the amount of research that went into it, the most egregious crimes perpetrated by the majority of these academics is that their politics don't mesh with Horowitz's.
Which isn't to say Horowitz hasn't turned up a few surprises: a Northwestern University law professor has a sordid history involving the Weather Underground, and a Rutgers University professor's early poems included lines like, "Rape the white girls" and "I got the extermination blues, jewboys."
However, his intention to expose the majority of these professors as "dangerous" and undeserving of their coveted positions seems petty in some cases, as when he smugly mocks the proliferation of departments dedicated to peace studies or considers "anti-war activist" as a character flaw. The only noteworthy point that emerges from Horowitz's melodramatic finger pointing is his questioning of the tenure system, which he believes "serves to protect mediocrity and encourage incompetence."
More distressing to Horowitz, it would appear, is that tenure allows professors who disagree with his personal political opinions to continue teaching.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
1. Iran's hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called Tuesday for a purge of liberal and secular teachers from the country's universities, urging students to return to 1980s-style radicalism.
"Today, students should shout at the president and ask why liberal and secular university lecturers are present in the universities," the official Islamic Republic News Agency quoted Ahmadinejad as saying during a meeting with a group of students.
Ahmadinejad complained that reforms in the country's universities were difficult to accomplish and that the educational system had been affected by secularism for the last 150 years. But, he added: "Such a change has begun."
The Professors: From Publishers Weekly
Horowitz, author of Unholy Alliance and founder of FrontPageMag.com, profiles 101 professors whose politics run left of center (in many cases, very, very left of center), and though his list is impressive in size and the amount of research that went into it, the most egregious crimes perpetrated by the majority of these academics is that their politics don't mesh with Horowitz's.
Which isn't to say Horowitz hasn't turned up a few surprises: a Northwestern University law professor has a sordid history involving the Weather Underground, and a Rutgers University professor's early poems included lines like, "Rape the white girls" and "I got the extermination blues, jewboys."
However, his intention to expose the majority of these professors as "dangerous" and undeserving of their coveted positions seems petty in some cases, as when he smugly mocks the proliferation of departments dedicated to peace studies or considers "anti-war activist" as a character flaw. The only noteworthy point that emerges from Horowitz's melodramatic finger pointing is his questioning of the tenure system, which he believes "serves to protect mediocrity and encourage incompetence."
More distressing to Horowitz, it would appear, is that tenure allows professors who disagree with his personal political opinions to continue teaching.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
