Posted May 20, 2016, by Mary Grabar: Melissa Click, the bullying professor despised by most Americans, as many of you know, has been fired from her post at the University of Missouri. She is the symptom of the problem: arrogant professors who feel unbeholden to their employers, as I described in my article, "Melissa Click: One Bad Professor Fired, Thousands More to Go," at The Federalist. The ex-professor does have her allies, including Spike Lee, who made a movie about the protests last fall and the Chronicle of Higher Education. (This is despite the fact that Click claimed that she was fired because she is a white lady.) The American Association of University Professors has also come to the aid of the Lady Gaga scholar. They visited the campus in March and just released their report that concluded (surprise and drum roll) that Dr. Click did not receive due process and was fired for political reasons. At their meeting in June, they will take a vote on whether the university should be placed on its "censure list," along with such other institutions as Hillsdale College, Grove City College, and the University of Southern Maine.
This ought to help in reviving applications, which dropped off precipitously after the video of the Bully Professor went viral.
The AAUP tends to be selective in the professors it defends. In addition to Click's case, they are now objecting to naming the law school at George Mason University after recently deceased Justice Antonin Scalia. They defended communist history professor Howard Zinn, when he was summarily fired, by Spelman College President Albert Manley, the college's first black president, in 1963. The only reason Manley gave was "insubordination." Things have certainly deteriorated on our campuses since that time.
University Rules That Don't Apply for Special Groups: All this would have been avoided had administrators not violated a 1949 rule forbidding such things as camping out on school grounds. It turns out that the main protestor, Jonathan Butler, who staged a hunger strike, enjoys some privileges of his own: he is the son of a railroad executive who earns $8.4 million a year. More at Breitbart.
The Every Student Succeeds Act means Common Core forever, as I wrote at the Selous Foundation. More excellent analyses of the monstrous bill (of over 1,000 pages) at the Truth in American Education blog (The Elitist and Corporate Agenda wiith ESSA Exposed) and The Pulse 2016 at American Principles in Action, where Dissident Prof board member Jane Robbins exposes the nefariousness of Republicans who supported the power grab as well as such issues as transgenders in the little girls room. Read her columns here.
Even after several years of exposes on Common Core, proponents tout its supposed benefits as Jane Robbins writes in "The Delusional Defense of Common Core Continues."
Scores of books have been written about the educational fiasco. At the Selous Foundation, I have reviewed three, most recently The Long War and Common Core by Donna Hearne, and before that Drilling through the Core: Why Common Core Is Bad for America and Common Core Dilemma: Who Owns Our Schools?
On the Black Silent Majority: It was my pleasure to interview CUNY professor Michael Fortner, author of Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Poltiics of Punishment, for my article "The Forgotten History of 'The Black Silent Majority'" in the The Federalist. My work continues here at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization (check out our new website) on the forgotten writer representing the black silent (conservative) majority, George S. Schuyler, for Northern Illinois University Press.
