Violent Leftists Control Universities

[Martin Eisenstadt]

Puerile and antiquated? Self-indulgent and anti-intellectual?? Committed to suppressing the truth?? Sounds like the TOS at DI and DD.

Left State University
Mike Adams

William Irvine is a professor of philosophy at Wright State University. He is one of the most courageous and honest professors in the country. Recently, he wrote a column concerning Wright State's decision to invite the Reverend Jeremiah Wright to speak on his campus. Although he disagrees with many of Reverend Wright's views, he publicly welcomed him to the campus because he believes that a university should be a marketplace of ideas. That view alone makes Irvine exceptional among today's professoriate.

Irvine calls out his university for being "curiously one-sided in the speakers it brings to campus."? He notes that liberal speakers are routinely invited and that ultra-liberal speakers including Wright and Angela Davis are occasionally invited. No one seems to think it strange that avowed communists and those with significant criminal backgrounds are paid to speak on campus at considerable expense to the taxpayer. But politically conservative speakers are scarce and in the case of John McCain and Sarah Palin pay for the privilege of using campus facilities.

William Irvine is the rare professor willing to confront his colleagues' hypocrisy and to publicly quote their silly defenses of rigid ideological conformity. When he confronted another professor with the idea that the university should invite conservative speakers his colleague responded by asking "You mean someone like Glenn Beck?" This kind of reaction shows how off-center our universities have become. What educated person could consider Glen Beck to be more extreme than Angela Davis?

Another professor reacted to Irvine's reasonable suggestion by saying that it wouldn't be a good idea to bring any Holocaust deniers to campus. The statement is an odd one indeed. It suggests that most conservatives refuse to accept the Holocaust as fact. I think liberal supporters of abortion are today's true Holocaust deniers.

Professor Irvine has discovered something I have also discovered about the liberal professoriate; namely, that they see no reason for debate. In their eyes, the debate is over on all the major issues of the day. Of course, in their eyes they won all the major debates. Now, the reward for winning these debates is that we can proceed into the implementation phase. Of course, professors rarely use the word "implantation."? They just mindlessly repeat the word "diversity" like catatonics in padded cells.

Professor Irvine has also discovered that suggestions of bringing people like Thomas Sowell to campus are met with one pretty serious problem: Most liberal professors have never heard of Thomas Sowell.

Many years ago I suggested that Sowell should be required reading for college students. The reaction was amazing. According to one of my left-leaning colleagues - one who actually knows who Thomas Sowell is - the students don't need to read Sowell because they were raised in conservative homes where those ideas were regularly espoused.

Notice the intellectual sleight of hand my "liberal" colleague employed. His argument is against intellectual diversity. The $64,000 question: Why oppose intellectual diversity? The answer: Since parents do it for eighteen years it is only fair that professors be allowed to do it for four years.

Professor Irvine has accurately identified a big problem in saying that it is now possible for students to get a college "education"? without ever encountering a conservative professor. But the problem is even bigger than that. Most professors now believe it is desirable for students to get a college "education"? without ever encountering a conservative professor. Their idea of "liberal education"? is nothing more than a poorly disguised war on conservatism. This anti-conservative mindset is so entrenched that one of my "liberal"? colleagues wants to remove the entire Cameron School of Business from UNC-Wilmington (where I teach). He explicitly stated that a school of business has "no business at a liberal university."? Between his puerile and antiquated lectures on Marxism he denies the existence of any liberal bias. This is the personification of self-indulgence and anti-intellectualism.

Professor William Irvine says that we do not have a fair hearing of conservative views on campus but instead "liberal professors galore, who will be happy to tell you what they imagine the conservative viewpoint on various issues must be and why these viewpoints are wrongheaded."? This statement is bull's-eye accurate. And his follow-up statement is brilliant: "This is a pale substitute for a genuine political debate, but it is, on many campuses, what students have to settle for."?

Good for him. This debate should remain focused on the shortchanged students. College is not becoming less expensive. But it is becoming less relevant.

The public challenge issued by Professor Irvine is one that every professor, conservative or liberal, should issue to his university. That challenge comes in two parts: 1) Hire at least a few conservative professors. (I'm open to this idea. What better way to remedy the historical oppression of conservatives!). 2) If you cannot stomach hiring conservative professors then at least hire some conservative speakers.

Of course, today's "liberal" professor will agree to neither of those suggestions. He uses affirmative action to promote his self-esteem not to promote "a diversity of perspectives." And he uses the word "diversity" only to hide his deep-seated intellectual insecurity.

Our universities are no longer committed to revealing the truth. They are committed to suppressing the truth. And among those truths is that tolerance is not the academy's most enduring intellectual achievement. It is its most transparent moral weakness.

[WilliamW]

Here's a surprise. ? Social psychologists are all a bunch of leftists.? Who would have guessed??

Ditching or distorting science if it threatens a sacred value?? Isn't that part of the toelickers' TOS too?

Social Scientist Sees Bias Within
By JOHN TIERNEY
Published: February 7, 2011

SAN ANTONIO -- Some of the world's pre-eminent experts on bias discovered an unexpected form of it at their annual meeting.

How do your moral intuitions shape your political ideology?

You can get a personalized answer by filling out a short questionnaire at Your Morals, a research project of Jonathan Haidt, the subject of this Findings column, and six other social psychologists.

Discrimination is always high on the agenda at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology's conference, where psychologists discuss their research on racial prejudice, homophobia, sexism, stereotype threat and unconscious bias against minorities. But the most talked-about speech at this year's meeting, which ended Jan. 30, involved a new "outgroup."

It was identified by Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia who studies the intuitive foundations of morality and ideology. He polled his audience at the San Antonio Convention Center, starting by asking how many considered themselves politically liberal. A sea of hands appeared, and Dr. Haidt estimated that liberals made up 80 percent of the 1,000 psychologists in the ballroom. When he asked for centrists and libertarians, he spotted fewer than three dozen hands. And then, when he asked for conservatives, he counted a grand total of three.

"This is a statistically impossible lack of diversity," Dr. Haidt concluded, noting polls showing that 40 percent of Americans are conservative and 20 percent are liberal. In his speech and in an interview, Dr. Haidt argued that social psychologists are a "tribal-moral community" united by "sacred values" that hinder research and damage their credibility -- and blind them to the hostile climate they've created for non-liberals.

"Anywhere in the world that social psychologists see women or minorities underrepresented by a factor of two or three, our minds jump to discrimination as the explanation," said Dr. Haidt, who called himself a longtime liberal turned centrist. "But when we find out that conservatives are underrepresented among us by a factor of more than 100, suddenly everyone finds it quite easy to generate alternate explanations."

Dr. Haidt (pronounced height) told the audience that he had been corresponding with a couple of non-liberal graduate students in social psychology whose experiences reminded him of closeted gay students in the 1980s. He quoted -- anonymously -- from their e-mails describing how they hid their feelings when colleagues made political small talk and jokes predicated on the assumption that everyone was a liberal.

"I consider myself very middle-of-the-road politically: a social liberal but fiscal conservative. Nonetheless, I avoid the topic of politics around work," one student wrote. "Given what I've read of the literature, I am certain any research I conducted in political psychology would provide contrary findings and, therefore, go unpublished. Although I think I could make a substantial contribution to the knowledge base, and would be excited to do so, I will not."

The politics of the professoriate has been studied by the economists Christopher Cardiff and Daniel Klein and the sociologists Neil Gross and Solon Simmons. They've independently found that Democrats typically outnumber Republicans at elite universities by at least six to one among the general faculty, and by higher ratios in the humanities and social sciences. In a 2007 study of both elite and non-elite universities, Dr. Gross and Dr. Simmons reported that nearly 80 percent of psychology professors are Democrats, outnumbering Republicans by nearly 12 to 1.

The fields of psychology, sociology and anthropology have long attracted liberals, but they became more exclusive after the 1960s, according to Dr. Haidt. "The fight for civil rights and against racism became the sacred cause unifying the left throughout American society, and within the academy," he said, arguing that this shared morality both "binds and blinds."

"If a group circles around sacred values, they will evolve into a tribal-moral community," he said. "They'll embrace science whenever it supports their sacred values, but they'll ditch it or distort it as soon as it threatens a sacred value." It's easy for social scientists to observe this process in other communities, like the fundamentalist Christians who embrace "intelligent design"? while rejecting Darwinism. But academics can be selective, too, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan found in 1965 when he warned about the rise of unmarried parenthood and welfare dependency among blacks -- violating the taboo against criticizing victims of racism.

"Moynihan was shunned by many of his colleagues at Harvard as racist," Dr. Haidt said. "Open-minded inquiry into the problems of the black family was shut down for decades, precisely the decades in which it was most urgently needed. Only in the last few years have liberal sociologists begun to acknowledge that Moynihan was right all along."

Similarly, Larry Summers, then president of Harvard, was ostracized in 2005 for wondering publicly whether the preponderance of male professors in some top math and science departments might be due partly to the larger variance in I.Q. scores among men (meaning there are more men at the very high and very low ends). "This was not a permissible hypothesis," Dr. Haidt said. "It blamed the victims rather than the powerful. The outrage ultimately led to his resignation. We psychologists should have been outraged by the outrage. We should have defended his right to think freely."

Instead, the taboo against discussing sex differences was reinforced, so universities and the National Science Foundation went on spending tens of millions of dollars on research and programs based on the assumption that female scientists faced discrimination and various forms of unconscious bias. But that assumption has been repeatedly contradicted, most recently in a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by two Cornell psychologists, Stephen J. Ceci and Wendy M. Williams. After reviewing two decades of research, they report that a woman in academic science typically fares as well as, if not better than, a comparable man when it comes to being interviewed, hired, promoted, financed and published.

"Thus," they conclude, "the ongoing focus on sex discrimination in reviewing, interviewing and hiring represents costly, misplaced effort. Society is engaged in the present in solving problems of the past." Instead of presuming discrimination in science or expecting the sexes to show equal interest in every discipline, the Cornell researchers say, universities should make it easier for women in any field to combine scholarship with family responsibilities.

Can social scientists open up to outsiders' ideas? Dr. Haidt was optimistic enough to title his speech "The Bright Future of Post-Partisan Social Psychology," urging his colleagues to focus on shared science rather than shared moral values. To overcome taboos, he advised them to subscribe to National Review and to read Thomas Sowell's "A Conflict of Visions."

For a tribal-moral community, the social psychologists in Dr. Haidt's audience seemed refreshingly receptive to his argument. Some said he overstated how liberal the field is, but many agreed it should welcome more ideological diversity. A few even endorsed his call for a new affirmative-action goal: a membership that's 10 percent conservative by 2020. The society's executive committee didn't endorse Dr. Haidt's numerical goal, but it did vote to put a statement on the group's home page welcoming psychologists with "diverse perspectives." It also made a change on the "Diversity Initiatives"? page -- a two-letter correction of what it called a grammatical glitch, although others might see it as more of a Freudian slip.

In the old version, the society announced that special funds to pay for travel to the annual meeting were available to students belonging to "underrepresented groups (i.e., ethnic or racial minorities, first-generation college students, individuals with a physical disability, and/or lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgendered students)."

As Dr. Haidt noted in his speech, the "i.e." implied that this was the exclusive, sacred list of "underrepresented groups." The society took his suggestion to substitute "e.g."? -- a change that leaves it open to other groups, too. Maybe, someday, even to conservatives.

[ham]

Another professor reacted to Irvine’s reasonable suggestion by saying that it wouldn’t be a good idea to bring any Holocaust deniers to campus. The statement is an odd one indeed. It suggests that most conservatives refuse to accept the Holocaust as fact. I think liberal supporters of abortion are today’s true Holocaust deniers.

Instead of shivering in fear, I would ask the leninist bastard why did they do nothing for Jews while they were alive. Come on...Nobody knew? You mean the opposite to that eleventeen catchy documentary bragging about how the good guys had cracked the German secret code (google Enigma etc) since 1942 and could be wary of classified orders even before the German addressees? How do you reconcile the fact nobody knew with THAT?
Oh yea, Germans were good at keeping secrets...that's why the files related thereto amount to this day to cubic miles of document...ever been to a concentration camp? Hardly a good cover-up job...they say upto 70.000 people died there each day or whatever...the good guys had spies who knew all about the German atomic program but nothing about THAT...really...
Oh yea, Eisenhower claimed he knew nothing...sure, what do YOU expect HIM to say?

Remember in the USSR they didn't realize Stalin was a dictator until Krechev's revision of the personality cult.

PFFT!

[Virtual Bison]

There seems to be little political control in Distance Learning programs. I guess that is why the elitists hate it so much.

[ham]

There seems to be little political control in Distance Learning programs. I guess that is why the elitists hate it so much.

I disagree here.
Of course, DE offers greater variety and is not AS polluted by Chicano, genocide, African, women, queer etc studies as mainstream academia, but you get the same wild bunch of leninists, progressives and other clowns there, too...the fact is that you are NOT obliged to put up with their nonsense for hours, nor with the nonsense from their diseased supporters cashing welfare paychecks AND hailing the proletarian uprising...living room revolutionaries who stuff themselves with foi gras and oysters while watering down their champagne thinking of those racists who still maintain the USSR made more victims than the NSDAP...hell, can't they read that new all-star-academia book edited in Russia who demonstrates it's all a hoax?

[Yancy Derringer]

Chuck is talking about primary schools, but his remarks on suppressing alternative education for purposes of control and indoctrination could just as easily be applied to higher education. An educational monopoly run by union goons is what Stalinists want at all levels.

Chuck Norris
Stalin-Style U.S. Public Education

I love teachers. I really do. And I'm sure that most are overworked and underpaid. Certainly, no one is getting rich from teaching kids. I applaud the hardworking teachers across this land.

But, as has happened in Wisconsin, when teachers unions muscle legislators like the Mafia and Democrats abandon their voting posts because they don't like projected outcomes, haven't we abandoned the very foundational principles of our republic? Where were the "be civil" mainstream media police last Friday morning, when union demonstrators screamed at legislators on the floor of the Wisconsin Assembly while they voted?

More proof of union dominance and monopoly came out Feb. 22, when Wisconsin's Government Accountability Board released a report that disclosed the top 10 lobbying groups in the state. Look who is at the top of the list:

1) Wisconsin Education Association Council, 7,239 hours, $1,511,272

2) Wisconsin Insurance Alliance, 1,427 hours, $777,430

3) Forest County Potawatomi Community, 1,492 hours, $756,512

4) Altria Client Services Inc., 1,321 hours, $755,733

5) Wisconsin Hospital Association, 5,126 hours, $605,033

6) Wisconsin Petroleum Marketers and Convenience Store Association, 1,379 hours, $560,544

7) Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, 4,967 hours, $508,023

8) RAI Services Co., 186 hours, $466,253

9) Wisconsin Independent Businesses Inc., 7,939 hours, $458,414

10) Wisconsin Energy Corp., 1,547 hours, $387,222

The Wisconsin Education Association Council leads the pack of lobbyists, spending two times as much and five times the amount of time as its closest lobbying competitor in order to buy, bribe and bamboozle legislators to do as it wants.

What also chaps my hide is that a gigantic chunk of the WEAC's gangster money and time is used to lobby against alternative choices in schools (including charter schools) and against tuition tax credit programs, which aid parents in sending their children to private schools.

The fact is that teachers union-sponsored protests spreading the land are not primarily about the teachers or the students. They are about the unions and feds maintaining their Mafia-style rule over education and our kids and preventing people from choosing educational alternatives.

Or are we naive enough to believe that Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, is stopping by the White House repeatedly for just tea and crumpets even though he admitted this past week: "I'm at the White House a couple times a week. ... I have conversations every day with someone in the White House or in the administration"?

It brings me back to that bully educational manifesto of President Barack Obama's secretary of education, Arne Duncan, who explained in an NPR interview, "I'm a big believer in choice and competition, but I think we can do that within the public-school framework."

There's something that the U.S. government and unions don't want you to know. And it came out a short time ago in a Heritage Foundation report on education. It conveys the general public's increasing dissatisfaction with public education and tells of the rising number of people opting for private education.

The report explains that during the 2007 and 2008 legislative sessions, 44 states introduced school-choice legislation. Forty-four states! And in 2008, choices for private school were enacted into law or expanded in Arizona, Utah, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana and Pennsylvania. And as of 2009, 14 states and Washington, D.C., offered voucher or education tax credit programs.

Despite the growing public preference for private education, however, Congress last year canceled the District of Columbia's Opportunity Scholarship Program, created in 2004 to offer students from low-income families in the nation's capital an opportunity to join the school voucher community. The law provided $14 million in scholarships to help pay tuition at private schools of their choosing. But no longer.

And why did Congress nix the program, especially when studies had shown that students receiving vouchers since the program's inception were academically 18.9 months ahead of their peers? (All of Thurgood Marshall Academy's charter graduates are accepted to colleges.) Why would Congress phase out a program that cost $7,500 per student annually, compared with the $15,000 it costs in Washington's public schools to educate a child?

There's only one reason Congress canceled the program. It's the same reason at the heart of the teachers unions' battle in Wisconsin. It comes down to this: control and educational indoctrination.

I wrote in the paperback expansion of my New York Times best-seller "Black Belt Patriotism: How To Reawaken America": "The reason that government ... (is) cracking down on private instruction has more to do with suppressing alternative education than assuring educational standards. The rationale is quite simple, though rarely if ever stated: control future generations and you control the future. So rather than letting parents be the primary educators of their children -- either directly or by educating their children in the private schools of their choice -- (government wants) to deny parental rights, establish an educational monopoly run by the state, and limit private education options. It is so simple any socialist can understand it. As Joseph Stalin once stated, 'Education is a weapon whose effects depend on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.'"

Parents deserve educational choices. Choice is what this country was founded upon.

Want to better U.S. public education? Feed the competition!

[ham]

There's only one reason Congress canceled the program. It's the same reason at the heart of the teachers unions' battle in Wisconsin. It comes down to this: control and educational indoctrination.

Hell, it can't be THAT bad if it's the FIRST thing "the good guys" get into when occupying...ops...liberating a country...from Iraq to Nazi Germany...

[Armando Ramos]

Public Education: Progressive Indoctrination Camps
Chuck Norris

Why should liberals want to change the public educational system when it is turning out the product they have been striving for years to produce?

Check out these real news headlines from the past several weeks and months about the state of public education across the country:

--"U.S. teachers tell U.N. sex is a 'spectrum' -- advocate mandatory classes to free students from 'religion'"

--"Principal orders (Ten Commandments) yanked from school lockers"

--"Teens ask for more sex ed, greater condom availability"

--"University defines Christians as 'oppressors'"

--"Why Catholic Schools Score Better Than Public Schools"

--"Teachers take charge to save ailing public schools"

--"Texas Schools' Mandatory Arabic Classes Create Firestorm"

--"District taking money, but censoring Christians?"

--"No opting out of pro-gay school propaganda"

--"District pays up for slamming student's rosary"

--"Judge cites homeschoolers for violating U.N. mandate -- Police interrogate parents, confiscate their curriculum"

--"Some say schools giving Muslims special treatment"

On Dec. 27, 1820, Thomas Jefferson wrote about his vision for the University of Virginia (chartered in 1819): "This institution will be based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind. For here we are not afraid to follow the truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it."

But what should happen 200 years later when our public schools and universities avoid the testing of truths? Or suppress alternative opinions because they are unpopular or politically incorrect? Or no longer tolerate opinions now considered errors or obsolete by the elite? What happens when socio-political agendas or scientific paradigms dominate academic views to the exclusion of a minority's even being mentioned?

What happens when the political and public educational pendulum swings from concern for the tyranny of sectarianism in Jefferson's day to secularism in ours? What happens when U.S. public schools become progressive indoctrination camps?

Dr. Jim Nelson Black, founder and senior analyst of Sentinel Research Associates, wrote "Freefall of the American University," which is an excellent book. In it, he documents the clear biases pervading our public academic settings. Among that lopsidedness is the intentional training of students to disdain America, freely experiment sexually, forcefully defend issues such as abortion and homosexuality, and become cultural advocates for political correctness, relativism, globalization, green agendas and tolerance for all.

One of the primary ways these educative platforms are spread is by recruiting and retaining faculty members who reflect and teach them. For example, citing the polling firm Luntz Research, Black notes that 57 percent of faculty members in our most esteemed universities are Democrats (only 3 percent are Republican), and 64 percent identify themselves as liberal (only 6 percent conservative). Moreover, 71 percent of them disagree that "news coverage of political and social issues reflects a liberal bias in the news media." They also were asked, "Who has been the best president in the past 40 years?" The No. 1 answer was Bill Clinton. (Only 4 percent said Ronald Reagan.)

This is why it is no surprise that the two largest teachers unions, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, are the largest campaign contributors in the nation (giving more than the Teamsters, the National Rifle Association or any other organization) and that 90 percent of their contributions fund Democratic candidates. So do you think such funding is going to balance traditional and conservative values with liberal ones in public schools?

The impact of progressivism is being experienced by students across this land, hundreds of thousands of whom already have cried out with complaints of academic inequity. A sampling of the hundreds of student grievances from across the academic spectrum can be found on Students For Academic Freedom's website.

It is also no surprise that an average of 6,000 students every year are leaving the approximately 94,000 public schools in America. If the powers-to-be over our public schools, such as government and unions, continue to oppose conservative curricula and impose overarching liberal educational revisions and laws, public schools will continue to experience an exodus.

I fully realize there are some great conservative people on the staffs of many public schools and universities, but I know that virtually all of them would concur that a liberal bias in our academic curricula and system is overwhelmingly dominant and ubiquitous.

Is this present restrictive and one-sided educational environment that which Thomas Jefferson and other Founders intended for the future generations of America? Absolutely not! Rather than encourage freethinking, the U.S. academic system has turned Jefferson's plans for open education into our culture's system of indoctrination.

[ham]

--"No opting out of pro-gay school propaganda"

Hmm...
if you open the door, would some "mad racists" or something not want "out" of other propagandas, namely the desegregation item, or the manifold WWII-guilt-trip item or...?
If you tell people they are allowed to stop feeling sorry/guilty towards <insert very special group>, wouldn't they feel authorized to stop feeling sorry/guilty towards <insert very special group n.2>?
Why is it a safe bet to guess some people in the middle East are not going to love it? And if they don't, aren't they likely to push against it? What if they do?

On Dec. 27, 1820, Thomas Jefferson

Those were slave-holding white supremacy cranks...if any of them were alive today, it would found guilty under eleventeen hate laws etc.

[Armando Ramos]

Support the competition!

Why do leftist scumbags like Klempner and his Klones hate Christian schools and alternative education? That is the competition!

US Public Schools: Progressive Indoctrination Camps (Part 2)
Chuck Norris

Last week, my main point was that liberals couldn't care less about changing anything in public schools because they are producing exactly what liberals want. And that biased programming will deepen in the minds and hearts of America's young people unless we patriots stand up in every community, resist those progressive tides and demand alternatives.

There are ways to improve national academic imbalances. In Part 2 here, I give seven ways to counter that torrent of progressivism. Among the list of correctives that have been proved to work are the following:

1) Vocalize your opinions to local, state and federal representatives that government and unions need to have less of a role in running our children's education and more of a role in supporting parents' educational decisions for their children. Children belong to their parents, not to the government or unions. And parents must retain the right to personalize their children's education as they so wish.

2) Don't blindly accept a public school's or university's education plan based solely upon its name, past reputation or slick marketing. Confront the administration. Ask the hard questions of teachers and professors.

3) If you experience teachers or courses that create an intimidating atmosphere for expressing varied opinions, disparage alternative views, or advance one-sided political or social ideologies, report them to the administration or the school board. And if your concerns aren't heard, go to the district office. If the district doesn't listen, then take your complaints to other parents and the online community by posting blogs or sending mass e-mails. If our government isn't going to hold our academic institutions accountable, then its citizens must.

4) Encourage local schools and colleges to accept Students For Academic Freedom's "Academic Bill of Rights" and "The Student Bill of Rights," which are located online.

5) Consider starting a countercultural mission by teaching or assisting in a public school, college or university or even in the U.S. Department of Education. Whether or not you have a child in a public school, you still can be an active and vocal part of your school's board, PTA or equivalent. Volunteer to assist in any way that could balance the academic current.

6) And what if public schools don't improve or match the values and beliefs in our homes? Then we must remove our children from public schools and seek private alternatives, chartered schools, Christian schools or home schooling co-ops. Encourage older children to attend a private, conservative or Christian college or university, such as Liberty University or Patrick Henry College on the East Coast and Biola University, Azusa Pacific University, Pepperdine University, Westmont College or Bethany University on the West Coast. As I said last week, if you want to improve U.S. public education, support the competition.

7) Lastly, work to install a Bible curriculum into your public school district. Yes, it's legal, constitutional and being placed right now in thousands of schools across the country. A brand-new electronic version of the curriculum is available this week. The National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools' curriculum has been voted into 572 school districts (2,086 high schools) in 38 states, from Alaska and California to Pennsylvania and Florida. Ninety-three percent of school boards that have been approached to date with the curriculum have voted to implement it because the course helps students understand the Bible's influence and impact on history, literature, our legal and educational systems, art, archaeology and other parts of civilization. In this elective class, students are required to read through their textbook -- the Bible.

For a contribution of any size, you will receive a starter package with a step-by-step guide, all legal data necessary to satisfy the questions of school board members, letters from school districts that have implemented it, the table of contents of the Bible curriculum, and other NCBCPS information.

Send to: National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools, 2816-A. Battleground Ave., Box 313, Greensboro, NC 27408. Phone: 1-877-On-Bible or 336-272-3799. Fax: 336-272-7199. Website: http://www.BibleInSchools.net.

Thomas Jefferson was an enthusiastic advocate for public education and believed it was the key to preserving a republican government and society. Yet he was equally an ardent opponent against "any tyranny over the mind of man." Whether that dominance were sectarianism or secularism, conservatism or liberalism, Jefferson (and, I believe, our other Founders) would oppose and seek to correct today's disproportions in our nation's public schools.

If Jefferson supported reform in public education as a prerequisite for a lasting republican nation, would he not expect the same of us today?