Part-Time Pundit

Academic Freedom or Academic Honesty?

The seemingly perennial debates surrounding Catholic universities in actualizing their claimed Catholic identity seems to revolve around the concept of “academic freedom.” To be frank, higher education in general succeeds and is a benefit to society when all questions can be asked and people are free to inquire and research.

The problem is that academic freedom, as it is currently preached, is not truly practiced. Most universities, in general, hold to a secular humanist ideal where the mere mention of religion is restricted. Entire departments and fields on inquiry are restricted to one particular position. Try to get tenure in cellular biology and dissent from the embryo-destroying stell cell research dogma. Try to defend the traditional family and get hired into a sociology department. Good luck.

For decades, left-wing professors and administrators have silenced debate on their closely held doctrines. As a result, they simply don’t have any way to defend them because they don’t have to. Question affirmative action on campus and they cudgel you with racism charges. Speak out against gay marriage and you’re an intolerant homophobe. In some places, donating to a Republican campaign is a career-ending decision.

There would be nothing wrong with liberal professors or liberal institutions on campus… if they were actually open to debate. With panel discussions being mostly political rallies, something has got to give. In the context of Catholic universities, there are plenty of critics of the Catholic Church in higher education. Most places simply don’t allow any defense of the Catholic Church.

The higher education system works largely because of they great diversity of universities in the system. There are plenty of colleges to choose from if you want to be thoroughly immersed in the secular humanist ideal. Why is the system under such great danger if a Catholic institution wants to be actually Catholic?

If a university is honest about its perspective and disposition with new students and new faculty, there is nothing wrong is being true to its claimed identity. Professors who wish to thoroughly investigate why the Catholic teaching on abortion is wrong will find a home at a near infinite number of religious studies departments across the country. Yet, when a Catholic college wants its faculty to be actually Catholic (or at a minimum take Church teaching seriously) then they are waging a war against academic freedom. Whatever happened to academic honesty? If you don’t really believe it, don’t teach in an environment that claims to.

These fights have started and grown in intensity because the university system has largely banned conservative lines of questioning. Far from trying to take over the university systems to indoctrinate, it’s time to really have the free exchange of ideas. If this can’t take place in the context of a campus, at least allow universities to exist that allow for those lines of questions.

No ideology grows and thrives when it seeks to eliminate any and all criticisms of it.

October 27th, 2006 Posted by John Bambenek | Education, Politics | one comment

College Democrats’ “Victory Rally”

They were on campus yesterday and brought out Dr. “Kill a Baby” Gill and Senator Dick Durbin. I was there with fellow columnist Andrew Mason. I thought about blogging it but realized I just didn’t care enough. So read Andrew’s account.

For the record, I do think students shouldn’t generally vote in Champaign County elections, certainly when their permanent residence is still back home. Yeah, they can “legally” vote in Champaign even if they live in a dorm, but as an actual resident of this county, I’d prefer people voting who actually have a stake in the outcome. Get an absentee ballot and vote at home. Naomi represents Chicago interests enough.

HT IlliniPundit.

October 26th, 2006 Posted by John Bambenek | Chambana, Elections, Politics, University of Illinois | no comments

Wictory Wednesday Presents Sen. Jim Talent

This week Wictory Wednesday presents Jim Talent for re-election to the United States Senate.

Control of the Senate will come down to three races, Missouri, Tennesse, and Virginia. Jim Talent is fighting the hard fight in Missiouri and he’s a solid conservative. It’s one thing to lose a seat because the sitting Republican has no conservative credentials, defending a solid conservative however is a must.

Immigration is a hot issue with conservatives wondering why no one in the government seems to recognize a problem with an open border. Sure, many people come here to work and do contribute to the economy and their communities, however with an insecure border, even terrorists and criminals can walk in with complete ease. The current system also all but ensures that illegal immigrants are exiled to the fringe of society and left to be abused by human traffikers and malicious employers. The border needs to be shut so we can control who comes in and let in only those who are here for a better life.

Energy independence is another hot issue, and Jim Talent believes there are only a few ways to get that done. Either we need to research alternative fuels (which Talent supports) or drill for oil in land we control like ANWR (which Talent also supports). This race is also overshadowed by the ballot proposition on stem cell research and cloning, which was so disgustingly politicized by Michael J. Fox.

Please consider donating or assisting Jim Talent’s campaign.

This has been a production of the Wictory Wednesday blogburst. If you would like to join Wictory Wednesday, please see this post or contact John Bambenek at jcb (dot) blog [at] gmail {dot} com. The following sites are members of the Wictory Wednesday team:

October 25th, 2006 Posted by John Bambenek | Elections, Politics, Wictory Wednesday | one comment

The New Jersey Supreme Court just Gave a Boost to the Republicans

The New Jersey ruling opening the door to gay marriage in the state is a last minute boon to Republicans. While Democrats will say that Republicans are using the politics of division (as they supposedly did in 2004) to get votes in November, the reality is, it was never Republicans putting gay marriage on the agenda, it was the Democrats. And here again, they shoot themselves in the foot.

Nothing gets the evangelical groups up in arms like gay marriage. I’m against it, but I am not all that fired up on the issue. However, that group who was tuning out just got a wake up call. A Democratic House and a Democratic Senate means no defense against judicial activists (I doubt any federalists or strict constructionists will make it past a Democratic Senate) and certainly no laws stopping this behavior will be pondered on a House agenda driven by San Francisco liberal Nancy Pelosi.

The result is, the before the stakes could be rationalized as low by some voters and that idea got put to death. Now the stakes are high to the evangelical vote (and others who don’t want to see gay marriage rammed down the throat of the American public without so much as a simple consultation) and there is a tangible issue that they don’t want to lose that’s now on the line.

The Foley story is old news and few people but the party faithful read all the hit piece books that come out in October. People see this ruling and their paying attention. It just gave the Republican faithful another big reason to come out and vote in 2 weeks.

October 25th, 2006 Posted by John Bambenek | Elections, Law / Legal Issues, Politics | 7 comments

Big.Small.All. Liveblog

12:05pm - Final comments

The biggest items that got support aren’t big surprises, they were adequate funding for public schools and comprehensive health care available for all. The documents given at the assembly weren’t identical to the actual vision available on Big.Small.All.’s website. The reason this is important is because the objective that talks about fully funding public schools is mapped to the action item that reads “Calculate property tax less to school districts in the county due to the University of Illinois and other institutional property holdings and negotiate and annual compensation plan.” This is patently absurd as I’ve said before. I’m quite certain that once you calculate those property tax losses and then compare them to all the revenue the University brings in, you’ll find the benefits are at least one order of magnitude (probably 2) larger than what their property tax bill would be. What this action item says is that they want to charge property tax to the University without calling it property tax. If Herman goes for this, he’s monumentally stupid.

This skips past the fact that I doubt the problems in the schools have anything to do with funding. Mahomet schools are great, for instance. Champaign Unit 4 Schools (and for that matter, the Urbana schools which fly under the radar) have problems that have little to do with not having enough money. If the county wants to have a superior education system, it’s time for school choice and vouchers.

As far as comprehensive health care (including dental, eye, mental, so on) is concerned, it’s a nice pipe dream but it is impossible to enact on the county level. Heck, Europe is moving away from the single-payer model because it doesn’t work for them. We have free/low-cost health clinics in town, and any visit by a poor person to an ER doesn’t need to be paid for by that poor person, so I’m not quite so sure how they justify a health care crisis in Champaign. If Champaign wants to be a premier business-friendly environment, there is no way they can take on the tax burden required to even begin to fund the kind of health care system they are contemplating.

However, when I went to this assembly, I went with a decidedly cynical attitude and I left thinking it wasn’t bad. Sure there were things I disagreed with, but the discussion was intelligent and reasoned. I don’t quite have the pessimistic view that I came in with. I don’t think much in the way of bias was over-represented, certainly because the health care and education concerns are widely held. The objectives were worded in a such a way to imply a certain “right answer”, but that’s to be expected. Conservatives in general need to get the word out more on their objections over those concerns, and more importantly, get out there with an alternative and solution.

11:39am - Meeting adjourned, will have comments later that I’ll post here when I get somewhere else.

11:28am - Ballot results (I’ll backfill what the objective numbers mean)

High Priorities (top 11):

#4 - 41 votes (intergovernmental cooperation)
#5 - 42 votes (remove duplicative government services)
#6 - 40 votes (national reputation for favorable business environment)
#15 - 46 votes (technology infrastructure will make us leader in nation)
#20 - 39 votes (new development will be more compact and either inside current areas or contiguious to them)
#27 - 39 votes (protect groundwater)
#33 - 49 votes (per capita land rate conversion will be reduced by promoting infill development)
#42 - 58 votes (affordable housing for all)
#53 - 46 votes (county will be center fo arts and entertainment)
#59 - 124 votes (schools will be fully funded with less dependence on property taxes)
#65 - 65 votes (everyone will have comprehensive access to health care)

Objectionable Items (top 5):
#17 - 63 votes (no more than 10,000 acres of farmland will be converted)
#18 - 36 votes (number of farms will be at least as large as it is today)
#20 (yes again) - 27 votes (compact development, contiguous development, infill development)
#47 - 21 votes (new interstate highway access points as needed)
#48 - 20 votes (Willard Airport will be premier central Illinois air terminal)

11:23am - It seems the earlier planning meetings were much more contentious than this one. My small group is agriculture and development, so my views my be skewed as to what the other groups have going on. In a bit they’ll summarize the ballot results, we’ll see how it falls.

11:15am - Small group and participants in general seem to be more reasonable than those that lobbied their suggestions. For instance, no one seemed to support the 10,000 farmland conversion cap.

9:31am - Ballot time… be back in a few…

9:30am - Speaking to criticism, plan is not “anti-business”… says the vision is a market study of what customer’s want. “Don’t get hung up in the words”. What if the study is based on a non-representative sampling? They said they had a problem getting small business involvement.

9:22am - They’re reading all the action items, it’s quite boring. I don’t think they know what “sustainable” means… usually when regressives use it they mean reverse development. They want to minimize sprawl which tends to have the effecs of:

1) minimizing home ownership (the absolute key to financial independence, or at the very least, financial security).
2) causing a huge increase in property values which further make it difficult if not impossible for those with more modest incomes to get housing and certainly own their own homes.
3) diminishing the right of private property. Places that enact policies like that also tend to engage in massive regulation of what you do in your own home, or what you do with your own home.

9:12am - Final vision will be presented in early 2007.

9:07am - They will be lobbying to implement their action items (a phrase that ought to be stricken from our collective memory) once this meeting is complete. My bad, 2 more workshops after this.

9:05am - “APC” consulting giving a presentation on how this beast came to be. Barb Wysocki is stiing at my small group table, that’ll be fun.

9:03am - Is it possible to use any *more* buzzwords… I haven’t heard this much since I left consulting.

9:01am - Herman is done. Format is “assembly” presentation and voting and then small group discussion facilitated by some trained facilitator. Insist that this is a non-profit, non-governmental, even though as I understand government started it. The project members (not the community) is supposedly representative of all segments of society.

8:56am - Orchand Downs is being torn down… didn’t know that. They want to make it an “intergenerational retirement community.” Heh… he plugged the YouTube guys as a story of success who are back in town.

8:50am - Chancellor Herman is giving keynote. As expected, he’s talking up the University. What do you know, Herman is a conservative, talking about standing on the shoulders of giants and the legacy of the past… A quick count is about 350-400 attendees… I’ll work on a better count later. University added a goal of community economic development, faculty resistance, but an odd but probably good goal for a University.

8:46am - Up and running… they’re showing a movie plugging their suggestions. A crying girl at the side of the road gets a teen to stop on his bike and as he result he gets kicked in the nuts and his bike gets stolen. It was cute, even it a plug for the MTD. One of the complaints is that there is no where in town for teens to go to hang out… I’m not sure I buy this.

October 25th, 2006 Posted by John Bambenek | Chambana, Politics | one comment

Big.Small.All.: Rule by Few

Tomorrow (Oct. 25) there is a “community meeting” on the University of Illinois campus to discuss what “we” want the future to be for Champaign County. They have already developed a preliminary plan to indicate what concrete directions they will take. (I hope to liveblog this; we’ll see how that works out.)

First, this plan was developed with input from 681 people at their community dialogue meetings. As the county population is over 180,000, this is about 1/3rd of one percent of the total population represented at these meetings. The people in attendance are chosen by no one, accountable to no one, who speak for no one, yet the views of this minority group have determined the direction of Big.Small.All. More than one person has commented on the decided left-wing tilt of the group.

Some of the goals make it all but clear that this is a politically regressive group deciding they speak for the community and insisting they are representative so they should get their way. For instance, in their heading of “Supportive and Spirited County” there is no mention of religious institutions, the very lifeblood of almost every true supportive and spirited community. Most of the county is religious. Most of the religious institutions are in the county doing good work. To Big.Small.All they have no role to play.

The Big.Small.All plan has been touted as an economic development plan. However, the Champaign Chamber of Commerce has dropped out because of the anti-business policies and massive land regulation programs that Big.Small.All is contemplating.

Another proposal that has been missed is the attempt to extract money from the University of Illinois because the have tax exempt land. That’s right, Big.Small.All thinks that the University of Illinois should reimburse the county because they don’t pay property taxes. The proposal reads: “Calculate property tax loss to school districts in the county due to the University of Illinois and other institutional property holdings and negotiate an annual compensation plan.”

Let’s be clear on this point, Champaign County would be a spot on the map in the middle of no where without the University. The University brings in the bulk of people and businesses to Champaign-Urbana. University employees and graduate students make up no small part of the population of the county. All the money put into the economy by undergraduate students would be lost. In fact, the schools themselves benefit from the presence of the University with all the free work the Education Department does with Champaign Unit 4 schools (as well as other districts in the area) such as the Great Campus Project and all those student teachers they send out. We’ll skip past the absurdity of the concept that the problem with Champaign Unit 4 Schools is simply a matter of money.

In addition, Big.Small.All proposes universal health care for county residents, encouraging redevelopment of lands to be “more compact” (i.e. persuade home-owners to sell their homes and move into apartments I guess), wetlands preservation (think of the mosquitoes in those puddles), and regulating farm land (i.e. making sure no farmland gets redeveloped despite the complete absence of any real food shortage). Every transporation suggesting, including the ludicrous but perennial “light rail” system, is designed to eliminate personal vehicle use.

Lastly, despite the fact that the cost of living in Champaign County is surely below the median in the state, Big.Small.All wants to increase the median wage in the county. Somehow I doubt they’ll be taking the right approach to creating a living wage. Certainly taxing the largest economic body in the county (the University) won’t do much to increase wages because the state certainly won’t pick up that extra cost.

I’m going to go to the meeting tomorrow, but I suspect that it will confirm my suspicions that Big.Small.All, while a good idea, has fallen victim to grievance-based politics. Namely, only people with axes to grind tend to be the ones lobbying government, so the supporters of the status quo, even if a huge majority, tend not to be involved. I expect to find the typical far-left wing muckrakers who will pretend that Big.Small.All represents the will of the community and then insist on getting their way, despite the fact they represent even the fringe of this blue county.

October 24th, 2006 Posted by John Bambenek | Chambana, Politics | no comments

Fan Mail from my Column on Higher Education

Let’s talk about that Iraq war a second… one that WOULD NOT EXIST if it weren’t for liberals insisting we couldn’t finish the job in 1991 and the perpetuated the problem for 8 years of the Clinton Administration.

I blame liberals for you not understanding that simply because money isn’t spent in one place means that it can/should/would be spent in another.

I blame it on the liberals that you don’t understand that education is funded primarily on **the local level**, not the federal level, and when you take into account that local funding, the spending on education is over TWICE that which is given to the Department of Defense.

I blame it on liberals that you think the solution to unaccountable bureaucrats who have failed students for over 40 years and produced students with declining test scores (start approximately 35 years before Iraq War II was even on the agenda) is to simply give them more money. This is despite the fact that some of the highest funded districts (such as in DC) has the worst students and performance.

I blame it on liberals that you are too illiterate to read that comments should be sent to opinions@dailyillini.com.

I blame it on liberals that despite giving the country every reason to throw the GOP out of office, the alternative is just that bad that the GOP will retain power.

I blame it on liberals that you are too illiterate to read any other point I made in the column, but focused on one and started your childish little rant.

I blame it on liberals that we live in a society where someone who does have the right to vote and is nominally considered an adult can get away with behaving like such a child.

I blame it on liberals that you think the solution to society’s problems is that someone, somewhere owes “victims” money.

I blame it on liberals that you are unable to come up with any real intelligent counterargument to my column.

Lastly, I blame it on liberals that my morning constitutional was unsatisfactory.

—–Original Message—–
From: colgate@uiuc.edu [mailto:colgate@uiuc.edu]
Sent: Monday, October 23, 2006 2:15 PM
To: bambenek@uiuc.edu
Subject: stop blaming everything on liberals

Our higher education system has a lot of problems, and it’s because of the “liberal bias.” You do nothing but blame all of our problems on liberals. Bush has spent one trillion dollars on a war in Iraq that has caused the death of thousands and thousands of people. Instead of spending that money on war, maybe some of it could have been used on education at every level. Blame it on the liberals though. Liberals have been in control of the Whitehouse and both Houses in Congress for the past several years right. All of our countries problems are because of liberals…Wake up.

October 23rd, 2006 Posted by John Bambenek | Chambana, DailyIllini | no comments