Too Stupid for School

Remember when your teachers would assign you something to read that you thought was stupid or useless, and you'd moan about it? Of course you do. Then you read it, or at least enough of it to fake your way through class, and moved on.

No more! Today, you sue!

Apparently some students in North Carolina were horrified, horrified I tell you, because they had to read the Qur'an for school. Can you imagine that - the idea that educated people should perhaps have read a religious text that is part of a major world religion? Next thing you know, the precious minds of North Carolina's best and brightest might be expected to learn something about how people in other countries live! They might even have to learn French!

(Note that I also think that everyone in the US should read the Bible, or at least learn about it if they can't wade through the beats. It's worth reading because it's an incredibly influential text that is a major part of the culture we live in, whether or not we believe in its God who kills his offspring to save us.)

The student pictured in the photo in that article complained, "A lot of students feel like they are being discriminated against!"

This young man is just too fucking stupid to take up space at a university. I know, that is not very charitable of me, but I am having trouble giving the slightest benefit of the doubt to someone complaining that he is being exposed to new ideas at a university.

Okay, he probably only went for fraternities and keg parties, but did he wonder why they were making him get all those books?

This is actually part of a broader movement. I see it this way: Republican-leaning people by and large go off and make a lot of money, not something likely to happen as a university professor. Then, they complain that faculty at universities tend to be liberal.

There's a group called Students for Academic Freedom beating this drum. Interestingly, while many of their materials talk in lofty terms about pursuit of knowledge without regard to a scholar's political beliefs, and David Horowitz (who seems to be the driving force behind this) even goes on at some length in an editorial to explain that they are not trying to get anyone to achieve "balance" by offering viewpoints no matter what, but simply trying to ensure that a student's political beliefs are not used against them. Of course, at the top of the site, above his piece, is the subtitle: "You can't get a good education if they're only telling you half the story."

Clicking through some of the links, it seems that about the only incident of major anti-conservative bias they could come up with was one course at a school in Indiana. The course sounded rather ridiculous, but they seem to be getting a lot of mileage out of it.

So this seems like the same conservative "we are an oppressed minority (who runs the country)" bullshit whining. It's horrible! Mean liberal professors tell them they are wrong! They make them read those dirty non-Christian books! Make them stop.

Particularly creepy is this article from Colorado, where an "academic bill of rights" has been put into practice (modeled on the SAF ideas). The creepy parts: GOP lawmakers urging crackdowns on professors who say the wrong things, and death threats against professors. (Why do conservatives always want to kill people they disagree with?)

Yes, pity the poor oppressed conservatives in America today, barely holding their own against the sea of liberalism.