Redstate

By Repair Man Jack Posted in Archived — Comments (1) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

The College of William and Mary and Columbia University come as close as any institution in America can get to immortality. Each institution can trace its roots further back than the current form of government we live under. William and Mary first began holding classes on 8 February, 1693. Only Harvard started assigning the term papers earlier, on this side of the Atlantic. Columbia, lagging somewhat behind, opened for business in July of 1754.

Each institution holds an exemplary ranking among the top fifty universities in the most scientifically and culturally advanced society on the planet. US News and World Reports magazine ranked William and Mary 6th in academic performance among public universities. Columbia also enjoys an international reputation for outstanding teaching and research.

Both of these educational facilities should serve as shining examples for everything that is right about modern America. Regrettably, each has endured recent disgrace because of the short-sighted and profoundly self-serving behavior of their faculty members. This behavior suggests that America may be the America of its most vituperative haters and critics; an America rotting at the core of the very institutions that once were the wellspring of our national greatness.

The Board of Visitors at The College of William and Mary recently cashiered the College President Dr. Gene Nichol. Technically, Dr. Nichol resigned. He did so, however, well aware that the board would not renew his contract this coming June.

Dr. Nichol prevailed over a contentious term at the college, and wrote an email announcing his resignation, in which he described his firing as politically motivated. His firing was politically motivated, and it occurred, in my humble opinion, for very good reasons.

Dr. Nichol mentions specific issues that provided impetus for his dismissal. He describes each topic below.

”First, as is widely known, I altered the way a Christian cross was displayed in a public facility, on a public university campus, in a chapel used regularly for secular College events -- both voluntary and mandatory -- in order to help Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, and other religious minorities feel more meaningfully included as members of our broad community.”

He removed the aforementioned cross from the alter of The Wren Chapel. This set off a major controversy amongst the college community. An alumnus cancelled a $12mil donation to the college over President Nichol’s action.

Dr. Nichol’s apologia continues.

Second, I have refused, now on two occasions, to ban from the campus a program funded by our student-fee-based, and student-governed, speaker series. To stop the production because I found it offensive, or unappealing, would have violated both the First Amendment and the traditions of openness and inquiry that sustain great universities.

The aforementioned campus speakers were a touring group of professional sex workers. The group recently performed at Duke University. Their act featured vulgarity, rudeness and a general lack of anything resembling a redeeming value. Some highlights of the performance follow below.

The performers did not just take their clothes off – and the actual nudity part of the show was rather tame. But mere nudity could hardly compare with a show that began with the Art Show’s founder and announcer, Annie Oakley, imploring the audience to stand up and shout “I take it up the butt!” Some other highlights, or lowlights if you prefer, included:

A transvestite, naked except for some strategically placed tape, with the words “F___ Bush” painted on his chest, kneeled on all fours and lit a sparkler protruding out of his rectum with “America the Beautiful” playing.

A bare-breasted stripper sang a lewd song about Saint Bridget of Ireland, with lyrics mocking the act of ascension as she climbed to the top of a stripper’s pole.

A stripper, in the guise of a U.S. flag-draped Lady Justice, emptied coins out of her scales, pulled dollar bills out of her clothes as she removed them, and yanked a string of dollar bills out of her posterior as the sound system played Dolly Parton’s version of “God Bless the U.S.A.” She ended her act by saluting and holding up her middle finger to the crowd. The announcer referred to it as her “Infamous Patriot Act.” Her most private area was kept covered by a small American flag.

A porn actress read a series of prose-poems. In one, entitled “Spit,” she described how another actress spit into her eye and then licked it out. Another, called “Staph,” was about an infection on her genitals.

A dominatrix donned a large, “strap-on” male sex organ, and pretended to masturbate while the crowd was urged to shout “faster, faster,” in Chinese.

What Gene Nichol conveniently forgot to mention is that the organizations funding this performance would be doing so at least partially with alumni contributions and student fees. No surprise that Nichol lost the $12mil in embarrassing fashion.

Thus the College Board of Visitors brought down the hammer on Gene Nichol’s pretentions of making The College of William and Mary so open-minded that the collective brain tissue would all fall out. By putting his own ideological crusades above the overall wellbeing of the institution, Dr. Nichol shamed and embarrassed one of the oldest and most prestigious educational centers in The United States.

Dr. Madonna G. Constantine continues to put Columbia University through a similar wringer. She has been accused of pilfering the work of her graduate students and then passing it off as her own. Apparently, three separate students have provided the university with twelve separate incidents of suspected plagiarism.

This began to happen five years ago, and the investigation commenced in 2006. A university spokesman describes the situation from Columbia University’s standpoint.

"The investigators found a real pattern - two dozen instances of similar language from three people who came forward separately," Teachers College spokeswoman Marcia Horowitz said. "Dr. Constantine's explanation was not credible."

Perhaps Dr. Constantine's defense was not credible, because it came reeking of methane from the fever-swamps of a paranoid mind. Dr. Constantine accuses one of the intellectually and politically liberal universities in America of exhuming Senator McCarthy below.

In a written statement, Constantine said she had been subjected to "a conspiracy and witch-hunt by certain current and former members of the Teachers College community."

Dr. Constantine achieved national prominence when a noose was found attached to the door of her office. Dr. Constantine, an African American, was seen as a victim of symbolic intimidation. This engendered an FBI Hate Crimes Task Force Investigation and an outpouring of sympathy for Dr. Constantine.

The Noose Incident remains unexplained. In part, this is because Columbia University refused to turn over surveillance tapes of the building where it happened to the campus police. Columbia University railed against the incident, condemned the purveyors and then refused to give police investigators evidence to help solve the case.

Dr. Constantine continues to defame Columbia University for investigating her academic integrity. She accuses her employers of racial bias in the statement below.

“I am left to wonder whether a white faculty member would have been treated in such a publicly disrespectful and disparaging manner,” she wrote. “As one of only two tenured Black women full professors at Teachers College, it pains me to conclude that I have been specifically and systematically targeted.”

It doesn’t pain Dr. Constantine to conclude this; it protects her. When Michael A. Bellesiles essentially invented a historical work about firearms in early America, he was dishonored, publically humiliated and drummed out of the upper echelons of his profession. Harvard University Overseer, Doris Kearns Goodwin, had her name become synonymous with academic duplicity and honor code violations.

As long as Columbia University holds on to the tape of the infamous noosing incident, and as long as it refuses to disclose what actions were taken concerning Dr. Constatine’s plagiarism, rational minds can only wonder why she isn’t in the same boat with Kearns Goodwin and Bellesiles.

Incidents like what happened at William and Mary and Columbia have become increasingly commonplace, and in fairness, not just in the academic world. Prominent Americans increasingly care less about their communities and the institutions that they lead. Just ask any investor in the Enron employee retirement plan whether Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling gave any thought to the welfare of the people they cajoled into buying worthless stock.

Perhaps Peggy Noonan described this phenomenon best in her superb editorial “a separate piece.” Peggy Noonan describes just the sort of betrayal of our history and our obligations that people like Dr. Nichol and Dr. Constantine seek to undertake.

”I suspect that history, including great historical novelists of the future, will look back and see that many of our elites simply decided to enjoy their lives while they waited for the next chapter of trouble. And that they consciously, or unconsciously, took grim comfort in this thought: I got mine. Which is what the separate peace comes down to, ‘I got mine, you get yours.’ “

This, while stark and unforgiveable, is what I’ve come to expect from our politicians. Professions that terminate careers early for honesty and willingness to buck popular trends, tend to get exactly what they filter for. The academy was supposed to be different.

The full professor gets tenure for reasons similar to why Supreme Court Justices don’t stand for election. They are supposed to be great thinkers that stand outside the yelling hubbub of the disordered popular mobs. When this doesn’t happen, even at two of the oldest and most prestigious institutions of learning in the entire United States, I, like Peggy Noonan, sometimes believe we are really going to be in for it.