Category archive: Academia

Dissecting Progressive Arrogance, Part VII: ‘Climate Change’ Follies

By Chuck Roger • July 15th, 2011 12:00 am

The Clear Thinking blog is on hiatus and will return with new posts on July 18, 2011. Meanwhile, please enjoy this re-post of the “Dissecting progressive arrogance” series. More “Dissecting Progressive Arrogance” I, II, III, IV, V, VI By Chuck Rogér Progressive Arrogance 101 Main Learning: The ability to role model ideological zealotry an utter [...]

Programming Scientists to Perform Social Engineering

By Chuck Roger • June 14th, 2011 12:00 am

Originally at National Association of Scholars By Chuck Rogér An Arizona State University professor wants to train physical scientists to be social engineers. Political science professor David Guston contends that “stakeholders” in academia and industry should work with consumers and the feds to manage the “societal implications” of “environmental health and safety issues” surrounding certain technological [...]

Education that Corrupts

By Chuck Roger • May 9th, 2011 12:00 am

Originally in American Thinker, May 8, 2011 By Chuck Rogér It is the job of educators to “change the thoughts, feelings, and actions of students.”[1]  So proclaimed psychologist Benjamin Bloom, originator of Outcome-Based Education.  The U.S. Department of Education was created in 1979, setting the stage for Bloom’s decree only two years later.  In the [...]

Dissecting Progressive Arrogance, Part VII: ‘Climate Change’ Follies

By Chuck Roger • April 22nd, 2011 12:00 am

By Chuck Rogér More “Dissecting Progressive Arrogance” I, II, III, IV, V, VI  Progressive Arrogance 101 Main Learning: The ability to role model ideological zealotry an utter disregard for fact and logic the gullibility to swallow other zealots’ twists of fact and logic ignorance of the scientific method self-righteous preachiness and a superior attitude in [...]

Knocking the Constitution: an exercise in enlightened, academic arrogance

By Chuck Roger • February 2nd, 2011 12:30 am

Calling the U.S. Constitution “The Commandments” may seem like something that an overly enthusiastic, strict interpretationist might do. And that’s exactly what Harvard history professor Jill Lepore implies in an article in The New Yorker, titled “The Commandments.” Lepore makes much of the allegedly shoddy treatment dealt the actual document in the decades after ratification. [...]

Big government, academia, and corporations will team up to create America’s energy future? Guess again

By Chuck Roger • November 5th, 2010 2:10 am

Some people never learn. Even conservatives fall for bunk on occasion. The American Enterprise Institute’s Steven Hayward wants to “bring corporate, university, and government scientists together to tackle big energy problems…” Hayward essentially follows the fallacy put forth by Obama during his presidential campaign. In the Obama-Biden plan, “Investing in America’s Future,” Obama proposed to [...]

Obama’s business-hostile policies: from the minds of academics who get everything wrong

By Chuck Roger • September 17th, 2010 2:56 am

Every year, Wall Street strategist Byron Wien of The Blackstone Group conducts a meeting with wealthy people to discuss the global economy and investing. This year the group–50 individuals, including more than 10 billionaires–had an extremely pessimistic outlook and a decidedly negative view toward the Obama administration. Wien reports that the focus group… …saw the [...]

Academic environmentalist arrogance: If we green it, they will buy it

By Chuck Roger • September 16th, 2010 2:58 am

When someone is described as having a “career as an environmental activist,” you know you are dealing with a lefty ideologue. But for our edification, we turn to the source in which the claim appears. ASU Magazine, the official publication of Arizona State University, recently ran a story titled, “Fields of green: sustainability’s intersection with [...]

Another global warming alarmist calls for civilization to move backwards

By Chuck Roger • September 10th, 2010 3:01 am

As noted in my 9-7-10 post, Financial Times has become a hangout for advocates of global warming alarmism. In today’s post we discuss the latest installment in FT-hosted  lunacy. University of Oxford professor of energy Dieter Helm makes [free registration required] two absurd statements to open his recent FT article. See if you can detect [...]

Ivy League economic nonsense

By Chuck Roger • August 24th, 2010 3:14 am

The arrogant liberal intellect has a knack for putting on a show. Columbia University economist Joseph Stiglitz is a showman. I have dissected Stiglitz’s illogic once before, in an early 2009 column titled “Clowns behaving badly.” Presently, we treat the matter of Stiglitz’s recent proclamation in Financial Times that: The blame game continues over who [...]

Academia’s rejection of true diversity

By Chuck Roger • July 20th, 2010 8:49 pm

“Diversity.” In the world of academia, social engineering-minded progressives take the noun in one direction: race. On MindingTheCampus.com, Princeton University’s Russell Nieli captures the attitude of ivory tower elitists. Asians, unlike blacks and Hispanics, receive no boost in admissions. Indeed, the opposite is often the case, as the quota-like mentality that leads college administrators to [...]

American health care, British style

By Chuck Roger • June 22nd, 2010 8:57 pm

Tomorrow’s post will bring to you an article of mine that originally appeared on American Thinker. The piece sums up how Harvard Professor Donald Berwick, if confirmed as Obama’s appointee to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, will change the face of American health care decidedly for the worse. For now, here’s a preview [...]

College level leftwing indoctrination

By Chuck Roger • March 8th, 2010 10:05 pm

David Horowitz recently audited a political science class at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Horwitz documents the left-ness of university faculty. In his analysis, he provides a definition of indoctrination. Indoctrination is presenting opinion to students as though it were scientific fact or as though no rational, decent, and moral person could have any other [...]

The progressive worldview: looking at diamonds and seeing coal dust

By Chuck Roger • September 30th, 2009 12:30 am

Sometimes you have to wade through a bit of bog before finding solid ground. That boggy feeling struck as I began to read Columbia Professor Edmund Phelps’s recent article, “Economic Justice and the Spirit of Innovation,” in which the professor claims that “the prevailing view on the left” tolerates “inequalities of income” as long as [...]

Clowns behaving badly

By Chuck Roger • January 28th, 2009 4:30 am

Behold whiz kids plotting the salvation of the masses. Prescribing how the government should ease the recession, Columbia University economist Joseph Stiglitz writes, “What is clear is that tax cuts will not help much.” There is no brighter red flag for approaching silliness than a preachy “intellectual” calling something “clear.” Stiglitz claims that tax cuts “would be [...]