A different kind of cliff

While reading a story in the Guardian about Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, the embattled president of Argentina, I came across this paragraph:

“It’s a peculiar brand of populism because it isn’t leaving the country in debt,” said Nicolás Dujovne, an economist. “They’ve financed their social spending with inflation, not debt. Argentina will be in a much better situation than Spain or Portugal, countries with much larger debt problems.”

So let's see....we haven't run up a ton of debt, we've just left the country with inflation that is running about 40% per year in real terms (not the false official rate).  That's supposed to be a much better situation?

How about a recognition that either kind of phony finance eventually leaves the country for the worse?  Nope...you see, it was for "social spending" - that makes it all worthwhile because it's for the PEEEPLE.  Social spending good, no matter how it happens.

No wonder respect for academics keeps plummeting.  But fawning journalists keep quoting them to prop up the image of leftist leaders.

Chickens at Harvard

I was inwardly chuckling when I read this from a story on Powerline:

Many conservatives are chuckling over this New York Times story about the impact Obamacare is having on Harvard’s health care plan: “Health Care Fixes Backed by Harvard’s Experts Now Roil Its Faculty.” Heh. It was easier to promote Obamacare when they thought it was only going to apply to others:

For years, Harvard’s experts on health economics and policy have advised presidents and Congress on how to provide health benefits to the nation at a reasonable cost. But those remedies will now be applied to the Harvard faculty, and the professors are in an uproar.

Members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the heart of the 378-year-old university, voted overwhelmingly in November to oppose changes that would require them and thousands of other Harvard employees to pay more for health care. The university says the increases are in part a result of the Obama administration’s Affordable Care Act, which many Harvard professors championed.

I remember something in my youth about sauce for the goose.

So now Harvard’s professors, pretty much all of whom voted for Obama and supported Obamacare, are learning the hard way, from experience, what they apparently were not able to learn by analysis. Lots of conservatives enjoy this, because they don’t like Harvard. I am not in that category. I got my law degree from Harvard, and, while Harvard is no Dartmouth, I liked the law school about as much as anyone likes any law school. But the current controversy illustrates an all too common phenomenon. Liberals are great at telling other people what to do, but it rarely occurs to them that someday, they might have to live under the rules that they advocate for the rest of us. 

The chickens have come home to roost. But not to worry. Remember...they are our betters and know how we should live.  Or so they keep telling us.

Toe the line, or else

News out of California and that bastion of truth, UCLA.  A respected academic is being forced out for speaking the truth about environmental issues.  His "crime":

Dr. James E. Enstrom’s peer-reviewed research challenged California’s status quo by contending that exposure to fine particulate matter, like diesel particles, does not kill. The majority of his colleagues believe the particles cause lung cancer and death, a popular belief that Enstrom said ignores evidence to the contrary.

Pulling back the curtain:

Enstrom charged in 2008 that his colleagues exaggerated the adverse effects of particulate matter in order to justify expensive diesel fuel regulations to the California Air Resources Board (CARB). Enstrom testified in the same year to the state Senate that the lead contributor to the CARB report, Hien T. Tran, paid $1,000 for his Ph.D. from a fake university, and members of a CARB panel had exceeded their mandated three-year term limits by decades.

Shortly after Enstrom revealed the misconduct, UCLA began sending him notices of termination and has refused to compensate him for more than a year’s worth of work.

You see, only true believers are allowed.  Otherwise you are banished to the hinterlands.

“The facts of this case are astounding,” said David French, senior counsel of the American Center for Law and Justice and one of Enstrom’s lawyers. “UCLA terminated a professor after 35 years of service simply because he exposed the truth about an activist scientific agenda that was not only based in fraud, but violated California law.”

Interestingly, there's support for Enstrom within the university, just not at the top:

The UCLA’s Academic Freedom Committee, made up of professors and students, unanimously expressed concern in 2011 that the School of Public Health’s decision to lay off Enstrom “may represent a violation of academic freedom.”

Read the whole story at the Daily Caller.  H/T to Moonbattery.

The Diversity Racket

More of Victor Davis Hanson at NRO:

It is really amazing that Elizabeth Warren, in Orwellian fashion, continues to say, “I’m proud of my Native American heritage” after being caught in a blatant deception, in which even her theoretical claim of being a Native American on the dubious basis of a great-great-great grandparent was not substantiated. I guess some of us are on a different planet, because both Warren and Harvard University seem to have been unethical at best and unlawful at worst — if she or anyone from the Law School (no less!) signed forms or affidavits attesting to Warren’s Native American status in accordance with federal affirmative action/diversity guidelines. Fabricating an entire identity seems to me right up there with plagiarism, and yet neither Harvard nor Warren is the least bit troubled by the fact that at the heart of this scandal is an outright lie, both spoken and written. How many Harvard Law Schools or Elizabeth Warrens are there out there in academia, that have been untruthful in assessing their diversity profiles, and is that the reason for the complete silence on this matter from various professional academic and scholarly associations?

There's a real story here, if we had real journalists in the MSM.

Proving the point

Jonathan Last at The Weekly Standard looks to the case of Naomi Riley  It deserves a full repost.

Late last night, in a shameful example of editorial cowardice, the Chronicle of Higher Education fired Naomi Schaefer Riley. Naomi is a good friend of mine, a sometimes contributor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, and a fine writer. And the story of what happened to her is highly instructive.

Naomi joined the Chronicle’s “Brainstorm Blog” a little over a year ago. It was a good hire—she’s written two insightful books on academia, God on the Quad and The Faculty Lounges, along with dozens of articles on the subject. Her postings were smart and entertaining. (For a couple of samples, click over to “If this is art, your middle-school daughter is Picasso” and “No sex for you.”)

Last week she wrote about the world of “Black Studies” in a post titled “The most persuasive case for getting rid of Black Studies? Read the dissertations.” You should read the whole thing, because it’s only 520 words, but here’s the gist of Naomi’s argument:

I just got around to reading The Chronicle’s recent piece on the young guns of black studies. If ever there were a case for eliminating the discipline, the sidebar explaining some of the dissertations being offered by the best and the brightest of black-studies graduate students has made it. What a collection of left-wing victimization claptrap. The best that can be said of these topics is that they’re so irrelevant no one will ever look at them.

That’s what I would say about Ruth Hayes’ dissertation, “‘So I Could Be Easeful’: Black Women’s Authoritative Knowledge on Childbirth.” It began because she “noticed that nonwhite women’s experiences were largely absent from natural-birth literature, which led me to look into historical black midwifery.” How could we overlook the nonwhite experience in “natural birth literature,” whatever the heck that is? It’s scandalous and clearly a sign that racism is alive and well in America, not to mention academia.

Naomi then went on to dissect two other incredibly silly “Black Studies” dissertations. One of these was written by TaSha B. Levy. Here’s how the Chronicle itself—not Naomi—described Levy’s work:

Ms. Levy is interested in examining the long tradition of black Republicanism, especially the rightward ideological shift it took in the 1980s after the election of Ronald Reagan. Ms. Levy’s dissertation argues that conservatives like Thomas Sowell, Clarence Thomas, John McWhorter, and others have “played one of the most-significant roles in the assault on the civil-rights legacy that benefited them.”

Chronicle readers were outraged. Not that a graduate student was earning a doctorate by claiming that Sowell, Thomas, and McWhorter are threats to civil rights. Oh, no. They were outraged because Naomi would dare poke fun at such insanity. Because, you know, that’s racist.

Eight days and 497 comments later, the Chronicle’s Liz McMillen fired Naomi. Here’s how she explained her decision:

[S]everal thousand of you spoke out in outrage and disappointment that The Chronicle had published an article that did not conform to the journalistic standards and civil tone that you expect from us.

We’ve heard you, and we have taken to heart what you said.

We now agree that Ms. Riley’s blog posting did not meet The Chronicle’s basic editorial standards for reporting and fairness in opinion articles. . . .

[M]y Editor’s Note last week inviting you to debate the posting also seemed to elevate it to the level of informed opinion, which it was not. I also realize that, as the controversy unfolded last week, our response on Twitter did not accurately convey The Chronicle’s message.

I sincerely apologize for the distress these incidents have caused our readers and appreciate that so many of you have made your sentiments known to us.

Which is simply craven nonsense. If Naomi’s post was self-evidently egregious, she would have been fired immediately. Instead, on May 3, McMillen defended the post as being part of the blog’s intellectual ferment and encouraged readers to debate it. Which makes it obvious that the reason they gave Naomi the boot wasn’t because of anything she wrote, but rather the effect her writing had on their readers, who generally reacted as though they were suffering from a case of the vapors. One of her fellow Chronicle bloggers accused Naomi of committing “hate speech” and an online petition called for Naomi’s firing. In fact, McMillen admits as much, saying that Naomi’s post “distressed” readers and made them feel “betrayed.”

Now, the Chronicle of Higher Education can fire and hire whomever it pleases—for good reasons, bad reasons, or no reason at all. That’s its business; that’s its prerogative. But the publication ought to at least have the sand to admit what it’s doing. They didn’t fire Naomi Schaefer Riley because of what she wrote. They fired her because their readers didn’t like it.

The great irony, of course, is that the whining and gnashing of teeth from the “Black Studies” crowd only reinforces Naomi’s point about the “discipline.” You’d never see chemists or physicists or mathematicians worked into a hysterical mob by a critical blog post. Because they study actual fields of knowledge—and don't simply tend the garden of their own feelings.

Last has it nailed.  The whole "Black Studies" concept, like "Women's Studies", is just a sham on the part of academia.  One more way to get fellow travelers into the faculty and then churn out new adoring members of the progressive class.

A link to the original blog posting is HERE.  A link to the Chronicle's response is HERE.