• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

The Collegiate Network Announces Its 9th Annual Campus Outrage Awards

Posted on: Monday, 3 April 2006, 09:01 CDT

WILMINGTON, Del., April 3 /PRNewswire/ -- Outrageous politicization and double standards continue to abound in higher education, and the Collegiate Network (CN) has once again chronicled the worst of those abuses in its 9th Annual Campus Outrage Awards. These awards highlight the worst excesses of "politically correct" students, faculty, and administrators in higher education. Popularly known as the "Pollys," these awards for the worst campus outrages are given each year to universities to remind the public that political correctness, curricular decay, and violations of academic freedom and free speech remain an unfortunate reality throughout much of higher education. The 2006 "Polly" winners are:

1st - Yale University enrolled a former Taliban official with a 4th grade education into a non-degree program. "I'm the luckiest person in the world," gushed Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, the former Deputy Foreign Secretary of the Taliban. Yale pursued Hashemi's admission in the name of that sacred cow, diversity, which now appears to extend not only to people of various sexes, creeds, races, ethnicities, sexual preferences and practices, but also to enemy combatants who make war upon the United States. (This from the same university that bars ROTC from its main campus.) Yale's drive for ever-increasing diversity has certainly hit a new low, and, as reported by John Fund in today's Wall Street Journal, its official silence with regard to this outrage speaks volumes, causing immense pain and suffering for the families of victims of 9/11. 2nd - DePaul University has essentially declared war on free speech on campus. First, the university suspended -- without a hearing -- a veteran adjunct professor for daring to debate students handing out pro- Palestinian literature on campus. Next, the administration branded as "propaganda" a College Republican protest of a Ward Churchill speech on campus. Finally, college officials shut down an affirmative action bake- sale sponsored by the campus conservative club and charged the club member who organized the event with harassment. Apparently, free speech is allowed at DePaul only as long as it accords with the political views of the university administration. 3rd - (TIE) Administrators at both Stanford University and at the College of the Holy Cross are trying to silence the independent voices of their conservative alternative newspapers. Both The Stanford Review and Holy Cross' The Fenwick Review felt pressure from leftist administrators after criticizing politically-correct campus groups. The Stanford Review ran an investigative article revealing the racist character of a campus Latino group, which led to the group's being de-funded by the student government. The Fenwick Review's unpardonable sin was its satire of the campus homosexual group's "Gay? Fine by me" campaign. Officials at both schools have resurrected long-dormant rules about distributing materials on campus in an effort to suppress the dissemination of the papers. 4th - Officials of the University of California System, representing 10 campuses with 200,000 students in the state, don't like diversity -- at least, of the intellectual variety. The Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools (BOARS Committee) of the UC Faculty Senate is refusing to award credit to high school students in Christian schools who take courses using textbooks published by A Beka Book and other conservative Christian presses. The California State University system, which is twice as large as UC, also follows UC admission guidelines. In effect, this small group of elites seeks to discriminate in the admissions process of nearly all California schools, proscribing a certain type of education it deems dangerous to the state. 5th - (TIE) Some college administrators wish we jingoistic Americans would simply let bygones be bygones and would stop talking about the terrorist attacks of 9/11. The University of Iowa chose not to honor appropriately the 3,000 Americans killed that tragic day and instead held a "Peacefest" on September 11, 2005. This celebration was sponsored by several radical groups, including the International Socialist Organization, War Resisters League of Iowa City, University of Iowa Antiwar Committee, the University of Iowa College Greens, and the Women for Peace Iowa. Meanwhile, Canisius College deems nothing more dangerous to campus safety than the creation of a simple memorial commemorating Americans killed on 9/11. Annually, on the anniversary of the attacks, Young America's Foundation's students commemorate the victims by participating in the Foundation's 9/11: Never Forget Project. When the College Republicans of Canisius College asked the college administration whether the group could place 3,000 small American flags on the quad as part of this effort, a college official nixed the idea, claiming that it would damage the college's expensive sprinkler system -- apparently, these pointy-headed educationists never heard of the benefits of aerating soil.

CONTACT: Caitlin Anderson, +1-800-526-7022 x168, media@isi.org, for Collegiate Network.

Collegiate Network

CONTACT: Caitlin Anderson, +1-800-526-7022 x168, media@isi.org, forCollegiate Network

Web site: http://www.collegiatenetwork.org/

Source: PRNewswire

More News in this Category