Tired of the orthodox statist ideology that permeates higher education today?  You aren't alone.  Here's a list of links to other organizations with similar points of view:

Alexander Hamilton Institute (AHI) The Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization (AHI) promotes rigorous scholarship and vigorous debate in the study of freedom, democracy, and capitalism.

American Academy for Liberal Education (AALE) The American Academy for Liberal Education (AALE) accredits institutions that meet the academy's stringent standards. Its imprimatur provides clear means for identifying curricula with a well-articulated focus on mathematics, science, literature, and other elements at the core of a liberal education.

American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA)
The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) encourages members of the larger academic community to step forward in defense of the life and liberty of the mind. Founded by Lynne Cheney, ACTA promotes the discussion of issues crucial to our universities and assists alumni in supporting, and trustees in overseeing, balanced and unpoliticized programs that exemplify the highest academic standards.

Association for Art History (AAH)
The Association for Art History (AAH) seeks, through openness and diversity of inquiry, to create a forum for art historians, while insisting on the centrality of the art object itself. It reaffirms the significance of art history as a rigorous humanist discipline that embraces scholarly and critical standards of the highest order.

Association for Core Texts and Courses (ACTC)
The Association for Core Texts and Courses (ACTC) promotes the common study of texts of cultural significance to the West and beyond, and helps initiate core text programs. This association challenges both aimless curricular choice and the current dominance of vocational, professional, and specialized curricula.

Association for the Study of Free Institutions (ASFI) The Association for the Study of Free Institutions (ASFI) is an interdisciplinary scholarly society dedicated to the revitalization of freedom as a prime topic of academic attention that is too often neglected in today's academy. The association's members are scholars from a wide range of schools and subjects, whose interests and backgrounds include the study of freedom, its pre-conditions, and its institutions.

Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, Inc. (AAPS)
A Voice for Private Physicians Since 1943.

Association of Literary Scholars and Critics (ALSC)
The Association of Literary Scholars and Critics (ALSC) welcomes those with a serious interest in literature -- classicists and moderns, independent and academic literary critics, as well as creative writers and editors -- who seek to transcend today's superficial ideologies that dictate who are the correct authors and what they can write.

Center for Equal Opportunity (CEO)
The Center for Equal Opportunity (CEO), the only think tank devoted exclusively to the promotion of colorblind equal opportunity and racial harmony, is uniquely positioned to counter the divisive impact of race conscious policies in multicultural education, immigration and assimilation, and racial preferences.

Center for Excellence in Higher Education (CEHE)
CEHE's purpose is to educate the public about the state of higher education in America and help donors promote excellence in higher education through philanthropy.

Center for Individual Rights (CIR)
The Center for Individual Rights (CIR) is a nonprofit, tax-exempt public interest law firm that advances a broad, civil-libertarian concept of individual rights, representing deserving clients (often pro bono) with particular emphasis on civil rights, the free exercise of religion, and sexual harassment law.

Center of the American Experience
The Center of the American Experience, through its aptly named web site, www.IntellectualTakeout.com, provides students with an appealing alternative to the political orthodoxy that has prevailed in academe. As part of this effort, it offers solid subject matter and truly diverse ideas to those who might be called upon to support their choice of a more traditional conception of what a college education entails.

Core Knowledge Foundation
The Core Knowledge Foundation promotes a reform movement that fosters literacy and academic excellence in elementary and middle school. It offers a shared core curriculum that helps children cultivate and build upon knowledge, grade by grade.

Florida Higher Education Accountability Project (FHEAP)
FHEAP focuses on the root causes of the rampant Quality Control problems in higher education in the South and Florida, including the need for accreditation reform, and other institutionally-based structural problems faced in the South.  

Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE)
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) will defend and sustain individual rights at America's increasingly repressive and partisan universities, bringing public scrutiny to bear on threats to free speech, religious freedom, right of conscience, legal equality, due process, and academic freedom on those campuses.

Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History
The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History promotes the study and love of American history. Increasingly national in scope, the Institute creates history-centered schools; organizes seminars and enrichment programs for educators; produces publications and traveling exhibitions; and sponsors lectures by eminent historians. It also publishes a quarterly journal, available at www.historynow.org, which offers educational resources for teachers and students.

Heritage Foundation
The Heritage Foundation is a research and educational institute that seeks to improve the quality of American education at all levels, as part of its general mission to formulate and promote public policies based on the principles of free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national defense.

Historical Society
The Historical Society invites people of every ideological and political tendency to revitalize the teaching and broad dissemination of historical knowledge. It is a place to lay down plausible premises, reason logically, appeal to evidence, and prepare for exchanges with those who hold different views on the context of historical study. It is not the place to formulate or impose political lines and programs.

Institute for Humane Studies (IHS)
The Institute for Humane Studies (IHS) encourages the free exchange of ideas in pursuit of a better understanding of the foundations of a peaceful, prosperous, and harmonious society. IHS runs a series of programs around the theme of liberty for undergraduate and graduate students, such as seminars, scholarships, essay competitions, and internships.

Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI)
The Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) works to nurture in future leaders the American ideal of ordered liberty that finds expression in our founding principles as limited government, individual liberty, personal responsibility, free enterprise, and Judeo-Christian moral standards.

Minding the Campus
Minding the Campus will provide the best that is said and written about the requisites of genuine liberal education, in order to bridge the divide between the Academy - where intemperate orthodoxies trump open intellectual exchange - and society outside, which is not fully aware of how truth has been compromised within the ivied walls.

Mountain States Legal Foundation (MSLF)
The Mountain States Legal Foundation (MSLF) is a nonprofit, public interest legal center dedicated to individual liberty, the right to own and use property, limited and ethical government, and the free enterprise system. MSLF's only activity is representing those unable to hire legal counsel to defend constitutional liberties and the rule of law.

National Association of Scholars (NAS)
NAS is an independent membership association of academics working to foster intellectual freedom and to sustain the tradition of reasoned scholarship and civil debate in America’s colleges and universities. The NAS today is higher education’s most vigilant watchdog, standing for intellectual integrity in the curriculum, in the classroom, and across the campus—and responds when colleges and universities fall short of the mark. It upholds the principle of individual merit and opposes racial, gender, and other group preferences. And regards the Western intellectual heritage as the indispensable foundation of American higher education

National Great Books Curriculum
The National Great Books Curriculum is an academic community dedicated to furthering the study of Great Books in higher education.

Pope Center for Higher Education Policy
The Pope Center for Higher Education Policy brings innovative thinking and critical analysis to such crucial questions about higher education as: "Are the benefits of the steep rise in spending worth the costs?" "Do students, parents, and taxpayers get their money's worth?" and "Has higher education damaged itself by attempting to be all inclusive?"

Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship (SAFS)
The Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship (SAFS) seeks to maintain standards of individual merit in decisions about students and faculty and opposes such measures as speech codes that may infringe on the rights and responsibilities of the academic community in Canada.

Thomas B. Fordham Foundation
The Thomas B. Fordham Foundation promotes reform in elementary/secondary education to effect the following goals: dramatically higher academic standards; an education system designed for and responsive to its consumers; verifiable outcomes and accountability; equality of opportunity; a solid core curriculum; educational diversity, competition, and choice; knowledgeable, capable, and professional teachers; and the dissemination of sound research and candid public information about school performance.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/dilorenzo/dilorenzo158.html

Quote:Tales From an Academic Looney Bin
by Thomas J. DiLorenzo

Three or four years ago my friend Professor Paul Gottfried asked me if the cultural Marxists (CMs) had taken over Loyola College yet and ruined the scholarly atmosphere there, as they have at so many other institutions of higher education. My answer at that time was no, although there have been sightings. One or two CMs had apparently received a government grant that they were using to pay a few faculty to listen to them explain how to "infuse" their left-wing ideology into all of their classes, but no one seemed to take them very seriously. My economics department colleagues assured me that the proper approach was just to ignore these lunatics.

Shortly after that conversation with Professor Gottfried the CMs took over and began acting, well, like lunatics. I learned from the local media that the former academic vice president had rejected an applicant for a top job because the applicant "wasn’t black enough." The job was academic vice president for diversity and the interviewee was an African-American man with very impressive credentials. According to news reports, this man was told that he was well qualified, but that the College preferred an African-American with somewhat darker skin.

So here was a man who had probably been discriminated against in employment during his lifetime who had reached the peak of his professional career, and was interviewing for what was probably his dream job. And he is told he wasn’t getting the job, once again, because of his skin color. And you probably thought "lunatic" was too strong a word.

The new academic vice president introduced himself to the business school faculty in August 2007 by looking around the room of about 60 faculty members and declaring that there were too many Jews in the room. He said his top priority over the succeeding five years was to do something about that. Sensitivity training, anyone? My initial thought was: How is this different from the academic bureaucrat who may have entered a similar room sixty years ago and declared, "there are too many black guys in here, and I intend to change that"?

His exact words were a combination of white liberal guilt and political correctness. "There are too many people in this room who look like me," he said, after which he expressed his everlasting love and devotion to all that matters in academe these days: "diversity" (the mating call of the contemporary academic bureaucrat). Two faculty members asked if all this extreme devotion to "diversity" included diversity of ideas, but the question went unanswered. (To end the suspense, the answer is unequivocally "no.")

The CMs have taken over the hiring process, instructing academic departments to merely provide them with unranked lists of acceptable candidates for interviews. They will then choose which candidates are invited for campus interviews after a proper, politically-correct vetting process. We have been told to ignore whether or not a candidate’s research interests are similar to others in the department. Scientific synergy, like everything else, plays second fiddle to achieving the correct conglomeration of skin colors on campus.

Perhaps the dumbest "advice" that has come from the CMs is that when interviewing say, an Italian-American job candidate, we are not to take him or her to dinner at an Italian restaurant. That would possibly be "bigoted," we are told. In other words, don’t use Baltimore’s famous "Little Italy" section of town, with all of its great restaurants, as a selling point to an Italian who we are trying to persuade to move to Baltimore. Only an academic bureaucrat with a Ph.D. could say something so foolish.

There’s always plenty of nonsense to chuckle at in academe. For years, I have been entertained by the spectacle of a Catholic College making such wide use in the classroom of The Communist Manifesto and other works of Karl Marx, who was of course an atheist and one of religion’s biggest enemies. I myself use The Communist Manifesto in my "Capitalism and its Critics" course, but I treat it as an historical document. One of my students once told me that that was the fourth time he had been assigned to read it, and that the other three professors treated the Manifesto not as an historical document but as a roadmap for the future! Social justice at last!

There’s nothing wrong with this, of course, for those of us who believe in academic freedom. Loyola College is quite open-minded about certain controversial views. An outspoken atheist was invited to speak on campus last year, and the Jesuits even held a conference on atheism. They have also given prestigious commencement day awards to famous pro-abortion politicians, including Rudy Giuliani and Senator Barbara Mikulski.

Loyola College is so open-minded about some things that it even associates itself (inadvertently, I assume) at times with publications that advertise and even advocate sexual debauchery. A colleague of mine in another department recently published a book on the history of tattoos which was given the "book of the year" award by the Baltimore City Paper, one of those left-wing "alternative" papers that are found in most larger cities. The College made a very big deal of this, issuing press releases and celebrating the award on the College Web page. This was another one of those chuckle-at-the-lunacy moments for me, for I am familiar with the Baltimore City Paper. The classifieds of this paper are filled with ads for "escort services," "Oriental massage," and local strip joints including "Larry Flynt’s Hustler Club," which is located on the notorious "block" in downtown Baltimore.

Atheists, communists, and abortion activists are all welcomed at Loyola College, but there is one category that is not: defenders of capitalism – the system that allows the parents of Loyola College students to accumulate enough wealth to pay those hefty tuition bills every year, and which provides the means of success for the College’s non-stop fund-raising drives. Defenders of capitalism may exist on campus, but it is clear that such views are not welcomed or appreciated. I learned this recently after John Allison, the CEO and Chairman of the Board of BB&T, contacted me and offered me a $350,000 grant for a program on "The Moral Foundations of Capitalism." The BB&T Foundation funds such programs at numerous universities, including at least one other Jesuit school that I know of, Wheeling Jesuit College.

The BB&T Foundation generously offered to pay for the purchase of enough copies of the famous novel Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand for all of the students in the Sellinger School of Business and Management where I teach. I was told by the former dean that that would not be acceptable, however, because people might believe that Atlas Shrugged was "the official view of Loyola College." There’s that academic lunacy again. I responded by pointing out that, every year, a "common text" is chosen and given to every incoming freshman, and then the text is discussed during freshman orientation and throughout the year. And no one, I argued, has ever assumed that what was in those books was "the official view" of the College.

After about a month I received a different excuse for not allowing me to give away free copies of Atlas Shrugged to Loyola undergraduates: Ayn Rand was an atheist, and the powers that be apparently feared that the public would think that Loyola College was promoting atheism. This of course was just as nonsensical as the first excuse I was given. No one with an I.Q. above ten (Oops! Am I allowed to say "I.Q."?!) would believe that Loyola College was promoting atheism by allowing its students to read Atlas Shrugged any more than they would believe this upon learning that a well-known atheist was invited to speak on campus last year. And who knows what the religious (or anti-religious) views of all the hundreds of textbook authors are?

I did get the grant, after several months of haggling with the bureaucracy. At that point BB&T was very anxious to publicize the grant locally, and well they should be. I naïvely assumed that Loyola College would also be anxious to publicize it, since it is probably the largest single grant ever received by any business-school faculty member, and it comes from one of top-ten financial institutions in America (in terms of assets). (The genesis of the grant is that John Allison liked my book, How Capitalism Saved America, so much that he suggested to all of his senior managers that they read it. He then contacted me personally about the grant.)

As I said, I stupidly thought that all of this could be good publicity for the school of business at Loyola College. After paying a visit to the College PR department to get the ball rolling on a press release I was told by the new dean that Father Brian Linnane, the president of the College, had forbidden them from publicizing the grant. This is when I realized that the CMs had not only infiltrated Loyola College but had taken total control. They not only attempt to make it difficult for faculty to express opposing viewpoints, but have proven that they are willing to take extreme measures of orchestrating vicious smear and slander attacks on dissenters from their "orthodoxy," as they did when my good friend Professor Walter Block recently lectured on campus at my invitation.

Today’s college students are not being taught the value of academic freedom and the freedom of inquiry at Loyola College and at most other colleges and universities. They are being taught a set of politically-correct, left-wing platitudes that are given a semi-religious aura. They are also apparently being taught that it is appropriate to conduct themselves like little fascist barbarians whenever a speaker appears on campus who questions any of these platitudes. Can campus book-burnings be far behind?

November 19, 2008

It's not unusual for U.S. News to have schools like Northcentral, American InterContinental, and similar colleges in the "unranked" category. I don't understand it exactly, but I've accepted it. (I'm guessing it's simply the non-traditional approach they take.)

What I had never seen, until yesterday, was a traditional college in the unranked category. This college has been discussed here and the other boards for launching some cheap online programs. Who is it?

Western New Mexico University
http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreview...items/2664

What about the rest of New Mexico state schools?

New Mexico Highlands- 4th Tier
Eastern New Mexico- 4th Tier
University of New Mexico- 3rd Tier
New Mexico State- 4th Tier
Northern New Mexico College- Not even listed (Formerly a technical/community college but they have had NCA approval since 2004 to confer bachelor degrees)

There is an exception: New Mexico Institute of Mining & Technology did get a Tier 1 ranking and is ranked 16th in the west:

http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreview...+2654+2657

Graduated? Started some MBA, passed a few courses, and now you want to transfer? Great.. Northwest Nazarene University may take your credits, but you'll still have pay tuition for what they gave you credit for. You will now pay for the same course twice.

"Students accepted into graduate programs in business may transfer up to 9 semester credits of previously completed work from another regionally accredited institution. The maximum amount of transferable course work is three courses (9 semester hours). All transfer credits must have received at least a "C" letter grade and be approved by the appropriate Program Director. Single-credit courses may not be transferred. Credits must have been earned within seven years preceding the date of admission. No tuition will be waived for transferred credits."

Their bold words not mine.

http://www.nnu.edu/academics/online-prog...-policies/

What can happen when one chooses to be a self-serving busybody.

http://www.degreediscussion.com/forums/v...f=5&t=6270

Ex-Hendrix drummer John "Mitch" Mitchell died under "mysterious" circumstances in the Benson Hotel in Portland, Oregon.

Mitch Mitchell meets mysterious death

What role, if any, did Oregon's mysterious pervert Alan "Anal" Contreras play in Mitchell's demise?

This from the deviant's gay bird blog:

Quote:Other interesting birds around today were Sabine's Gulls at the Burns sewage ponds behind the fairgrounds and at Benson Pond on the refuge.

Quote:Testimony of witnesses in the case revealed that managers in the Online Enrollment Department at the University of Phoenix discriminated against non-Mormon employees, and favored Mormon employees, in several ways, including: (1) providing the Mormon employees better leads on potential students; (2) disciplining non-Mormon employees for conduct for which Mormon employees were not disciplined; (3) promoting lesser-qualified or unqualified Mormon enrollment counselors to management positions while repeatedly denying such promotions to non-Mormon enrollment counselors; and (4) denying tuition waivers to non-Mormon employees for failing to meet registration goals, while granting the waivers to Mormon employees.

Is the stalker gene hereditary?  Maybe so, if the antics of the Gollin Breeding Experiment are any indication.  

While participating in an assassination game at leftist cesspool Oberlin College, the admitted lesbian offspring of George Gollin (George D. Gollin, George Dana Gollin) was "killed":

Quote:Obituaries
Obituaries listed in order of death, starting with the most recent.
...
Cordelia Loots-Gollin
Died: Thursday, November 08, 2007

Quote:Don’t be stupid. Don’t be an asshole. We are the judge of what constitutes stupid and asshole behavior. Do not damage anyone else’s property.

He has been gone for quite a while and, suprisingly, never even offered his opinion on the U.S. Presidential Election.

I wonder if his absence is due to a loss of interest in DL, time-consuming outside business interests (maybe this venture won't end up bankrupt) or .. perhaps he is working on another degree?

They've tried fake cowboys, dancing bears, third-rate actors, now they want to try a 'green' or 'red' mulatto...
I wish them good luck.
It was predictable enough, but of the sad kind of predictability after all of Obama's 'mistakes', 'parting with (wrong) friends' and befuddled TV declaration of Muslim faith.
I think, however, that old Bush was the only one in recent times to go for a third term in a row for the same party...it was just predictable it'd end like this.
For those who think it is a brand new trick, it's not.
In Italy around 1994-96 there was already such sleight of hand.
MISS ITALIA is the biggest nationwide beauty pageant, first run under Fascism to celebrate 'Italian beauty' (whatever that is, it's supposedly in the 'white' color zone ).

Now there had been severe, ongoing political crisis since 1992 in Italy, that had led to the collapse of a regime having lasted since 1945. A new copy of the same regime would soon be reinstated, but that's another matter.

A new political party (Lega Nord) at that time pushed what servile journalists referred to as 'racist and secessionist' agenda.
Now as an insult to that party, its agenda and its (at the time) raising consensus, a mulatto woman was 'politically propelled' to win the beauty contest, with servile journalists dancing and celebrating throughout the tiresome weeks in which the contest had become a political battle field.
I still remember plenty of first page, AAA+ newspaper or prime time TV tirades by intellectuals and other regime hirelings celebrating the upcoming defeat and ridicule of 'racist secessionists' and -such was usually the punchline- what better way to celebrate than the election of a 'black' top beauty queen?
Much like Obama, Denny Mendez was not 'black' but a dominican mulatto misnamed 'black' for political reasons, given that she was 'italian' only because her mother had married an Italian citizen who wasn't her biological father.
Political crisis had thus found a sublimation in that farce.

Now some may object that a beauty contest, however important, in some minor country has nothing in common with the election of a president of a major country...think again.
It's just the 'billion dollars' Hollywood copy of some minor foreign production...not the first time it happens, not the last.
Michael Jackson was sentenced to pay hefty compensation for having stolen a song from Italian songwriter Albano Carrisi...now how many people outside Italy know him?
'Big' with Tom Hanks was the carbon copy of an earlier Italian low-profile movie ('da grande'), and so forth.
I am sure the Denny Mendez lesson didn't escape American AAA+ analysts...[/quote]