I'm frustrated!

Very frustrating--working on blog. Can't get it to paragraph properly. Don't give up--I'll keep working on this.

Is the United States in decline?

The Wall Street Journal online (can you tell it’s my favorite source of information?) had an article that was refreshing. We hear of America’s decline all the time. But this article showed the nonsense of that outlook. Much has been made of certain recent events that have led to this negative view of the United States. Countries like China, India, Turkey and Brazil seem to be more powerful and important when it comes to economic matters. Then there is the financial crisis that appears to have sapped the strength of the U. S. and Europe. Add to this the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which many claim have sapped American strength and destroyed America's ability to act in the Middle East. The Journal article refutes this. The United States isn't in decline, but the author says it is in the midst of a major rebalancing. The alliances and coalitions America built in the Cold War no longer seem adequate for the tasks ahead. As a result, under both the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, American foreign policy has been moving toward the creation of new, sometimes difficult partnerships as it retools for the tasks ahead. First, the piece states we need to give some history From the 1970s to the start of this decade, the world was headed by three players-- Western Europe, Japan and the U.S. Currency policy, the promotion of free trade, integrating the developing world into the global financial system, assisting the transition of Warsaw Pact economies into the Western World all were results of these three partners in power. This system worked particularly well for America. Europe and Japan shared a basic commitment to the type of world order that Americans wanted, and so a more cooperative approach to key policy questions enlisted the support of rich and powerful allies for efforts that tallied pretty closely with key long-term American goals. The Journal claims it is this three-way system that is in decline, not America itself. I need to spend more time on this, so I’ll save more blogs for this important issue.

Sorry . . .

I have been highly disciplined these past three or four years, creating a new post twice a week. This week has been a real problem--my mom has had lots of physical needs that have kept me from adding new material here. It's been difficult focusing on my teaching job as well as my mom's needs. I have lots I want to cover in future blogs, so don't give up on me just yet.

One last look at universities and their failed purpose of education

This will be the last of the three blogs dealing with college indoctrination--at least for now. I'm sure the problem will continue until parents wake up and spend their money more wisely by choosing schools that place a priority on education rather than indoctrination.

There are so many reasons why it's bad to teach just one political position as correct. here's one. Excluding from the curriculum those ideas that depart from the progressive agenda implicitly teaches students that conservative ideas are contemptible and unworthy of discussion. Don't these lefties see that this one-sided approach to education harms them too since it keeps them from open-mindedness and the ability to see other viewpoints?

Imagine a world where these brainwashing techniques were gone in colleges. There would be long-term political benefits. Liberal education equips students with intellectual skills valued by the marketplace. It prepares citizens to discharge civic responsibilities in an informed and deliberate manner. It fosters a common culture by revealing that much serious disagreement between progressives and conservatives revolves around differing interpretations of how to fulfill America's promise of individual freedom and equality. All this would be a huge benefit to our society.

The sad thing is that the administration is part of this problem. A recent report states, "UC administrators, far from performing their role as the university's quality control mechanism, now routinely function as the enablers, protectors, and even apologists for the politicized university and its degraded scholarly and educational standards." This is so frustrating.

But it's more than frustrating--it's illegal. In California, it's a violation of the law. Article IX, Section 9, of the California state constitution provides that "The university shall be entirely independent of all political or sectarian influence and kept free therefrom." Wow, what a concept--a free and independent university.

The politicization of higher education by activist professors and compliant university administrators deprives students of the opportunity to acquire knowledge and refine their minds. It also erodes the nation's civic cohesion and its ability to preserve the institutions that undergird democracy in America. Let's hope change will come to the People's Republic of California.

More on college indoctrination

Before Easter I had started a blog on the indoctrination occurring on college campuses. I wanted to continue this idea in a second blog today.

It’s not just outsiders who think there is a change in attitudes of teachers and their roles in colleges. Many faculty groups themselves declare indoctrination as their chief goal. A recent study by UCLA's prestigious Higher Education Research Institute found that more faculty now believe that they should teach their students to be agents of social change than believe that it is important to teach them the classics of Western civilization. Think about that for a minute—ignore our foundations in order to create sweeping changes in the social fabric of our culture. Scary.

Some university programs also unashamedly proclaim their political presuppositions and objectives openly. Here’s just one example: the mission statements of the Women's Studies program at UCLA prejudges the issues by declaring that it proceeds from "the perspectives of those whose participation has been traditionally distorted, omitted, neglected, or denied." Here’s another example: the Critical Race Studies program at the UCLA School of law announces that its aim is to "transform racial justice advocacy."

Even the well-known American Association of University Professors has changed dramatically in its understanding of its mission. In 1915, the AAUP affirmed that in teaching controversial subjects a professor should "set forth justly without suppression or innuendo the divergent opinions of other investigators; he should cause his students to become familiar with the best published expressions of the great historic types of doctrine upon the questions at issue." But this changed recently. In 2007 and 2011, the AAUP came up with a new focus. It now says that restricting professors to the use of relevant materials and obliging them to provide a reasonably comprehensive treatment of the subject represent unworkable requirements because relevance and comprehensiveness can themselves be controversial. As an example of how far this group has come, last year the leadership of AAUP officially endorsed the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Again, this is a big issue deserving of more space than just this blog. So in a few days I’ll run a third blog that covers more of this concern.

Happy Easter

I'm making this short. Tomorrow is Easter. We Christians celebrate it yearly, of course. But we should think of it more often. We don't live as others do . . . the grave is not the end.

Because of that single fact, I can deal better with the physical problems I see my mom going through. She's 90 years old, and the body is failing. I still feel bad right now, but it's more for what she's enduring. I know that in the long run, there is more to life than living 90 years.

I have read a lot on the existence of the soul. I firmly believe we are more than our bodies for a lot of reasons. Maybe I can cover that in a future blog. But for now, I'm convinced we are more than physical entities. If so, then part of us goes on after physical death.

That's where the good news of Jesus comes in. I don't have to stand before a holy God and account for my moral failings. Jesus took my place and paid for my violations of God's moral laws by his death. His resurrection, something I have also spent a lot of time researching, proved that God accepted his sacrifice.

Because of Jesus, I know that my mom will some day pass from this shadowy life to true life eternal. I'm so grateful that I, my wife, sons, and daughters-in-law will also stand before the God of the universe and be declared not guilty. Thank you, Jesus, for the greatest gift of all.

The university classroom--a hotbed of leftist ideologies

From what former students have told me, there’s a plague sweeping college campuses. No, it’s not a new Ebola outbreak. It’s indoctrination. A new report on the UC system documents the plague of politicized classrooms.

The Wall Street Journal explains all about it in a recent issue. "A Crisis of Competence: The Corrupting Effect of Political Activism in the University of California," is a new report by the California Association of Scholars, a division of the National Association of Scholars (NAS). The report is addressed to the Regents of the University of California, which has ultimate responsibility for governing the UC system, but the problems it diagnoses prevail throughout the country.

The analysis begins with a disappointing fact: Numerous studies of both the UC system and of higher education nationwide demonstrate that students who graduate from college are increasingly ignorant of history and literature. They are unfamiliar with the principles of American constitutional government. And they lack the skills necessary to comprehend serious books and effectively marshal evidence and argument in written work.

This decline in the quality of education coincides with a profound transformation of the college curriculum. None of the nine general campuses in the UC system requires students to study the history and institutions of the United States. None requires students to study Western civilization, and on seven of the nine UC campuses, including Berkeley, a survey course in Western civilization is not even offered. In several English departments one can graduate without taking a course in Shakespeare. In many political science departments majors need not take a course in American politics. I see this out at Palomar, where students can fulfill their U. S. history and American ideals requirement without any political science class.

So, let’s see if there’s a reason for the decline in the quality of education and the lack of traditional classes. The Journal reports that national studies by Stanley Rothman in 1999, and by Neil Gross and Solon Simmons in 2007, have shown that universities' leftward tilt has become severe. And a 2005 study by Daniel Klein and Andrew Western in Academic Questions (a NAS publication) shows this is certainly true in California. For example, Democrats outnumbered Republicans four to one on University of California, Berkeley, professional school faculties; in the social sciences the ratio was approximately 21 to one.

The same 2005 study revealed that the Berkeley sociology department faculty was home to 17 Democrats and no Republicans. The political science department included 28 Democrats and two Republicans. The English department had 29 Democrats and one Republican; and the history department had 31 Democrats and one Republican.

There’s much more to this issue, but I’ll stop here and cover the rest in a following blog. For now just keep in mind that there has been a huge decline in abilities and a loss of traditional courses that has coincided with a leftward tilt in the classroom.

Job killers--thanks to our government

I just read a great piece by John Stossel, one of Jared's favorite authors. his complaint is that politicians say they "create jobs." In fact, only the private sector generates the information needed to create real, productive jobs.

What's so sad is the reaction from politicians who are not that stupid. They understand basic economics (am I being too optimistic here?). You'd think that even they would be smart enough to sweep away the labyrinth of government regulations that hinders job creation. Successful job creators like Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban and Staples founder Tom Stemberg tell Stossel there are so many new rules and taxes today that it would be difficult, if not impossible, for them to create the thousands of jobs they once made. Think about that--the land of opportunity is a distant dream now for many.

Stossel notes that the feds now have 160,000 pages of rules. Do these rules make life safer? No, he says. A few new rules are useful, but most are not. Their sheer volume makes us less safe and less free.

Stossel brings up something I hadn't thought of when it comes to more regulations. The thick rulebooks, according to him, help cheaters by giving them an indecipherable screen to hide behind. They also mislead consumers by giving them the illusion of protection. "I don't need to worry because regulation protects me." It's why some sophisticated people gave all their savings to Bernie Madoff.

A false sense of security is worse than none at all.

Stossel points to all the waste with these regulations. Americans will spend $46 billion a year to obey just the new regulations the Obama administration imposed. Think of the money diverted to lawyers, accountants and "compliance officers" -- money that might have created jobs and financed products that could make our lives better.

Advocates of regulations don't acknowledge the law of unintended consequences, Stossel points out. For example, the Department of Energy demands energy-efficient appliances. But the extra cost deters some consumers from buying new appliances, so they stick with the old, wasteful ones.

Stossel shows that one other drawback to all these regulations is huge. Endless rules kill the freedom that made America the land of opportunity. We preach entrepreneurship, and try to teach children the value, satisfaction and excitement of starting their own businesses. Then we let entrepreneurial opportunity be crushed under the weight of the regulatory state. The byzantine rules send this message to Americans: Don't try. Don't build anything. Don't innovate. Don't create anything new.

Let's not overlook the fact that big businesses often have no problem with this. They frequently benefit from complex regulation because it increases the chance that potential competition won't even get off the ground. Big business's hand has been behind the regulatory state at least back to the Progressive Era.

Stossel ends by giving two examples of small businesses crushed by big government. Shelly Goodman paid millions to buy a 13,000-square-foot mansion on 10 acres in Arizona in order to create a wedding reception center and bed-and-breakfast. Local bureaucrats forced her to spend thousands of dollars on studies to show that her business would not create burdensome traffic or noise. She did. The studies said it wouldn't. Yet the big house sits empty because her local government refuses to let her operate a business, even on her own property.

In Virginia, Greg Garrett started farming oysters. His neighborhood is zoned for livestock. He could raise buffalo, but local bureaucrats decreed that he could not sell oysters. Why not? My staff talked to the zoning official, and we still have no clue. That's the case with a lot of American law. It's arbitrary power. Regulations are so numerous and complex that no one really understands them. This diminishes our ability to flourish.

Big government makes us all small.