Evan Coyne Maloney details more misadventures of the acadhimmic establishment at Brain-Terminal.com via FrontPage:
Two words. At Bucknell University, that's all it takes to get dragged into the President's Office for a half-hour discussion of word choice. And these aren't offensive words, at least not out here in the real world. But Bucknell apparently has a different definition of what is and is not acceptable.On August 29th, the Bucknell University Conservatives Club sent out a campus-wide e-mail announcing an upcoming speaker: Major John Krenson, who had been in Afghanistan "hunting terrorists." Those two words--"hunting terrorists"--resulted in three students being called to Bucknell's Office of the President by Kathy Owens, the Executive Assistant to the President.
According to the students, when they arrived at the President's Office for the meeting, Ms. Owens held up a print-out of the offending e-mail and said "we have a problem here," telling the students that the words "hunting terrorists" were offensive. For the next half-hour, the three students were given a lecture on inappropriate phrasing.
(When contacted, Ms. Owens did acknowledge that the meeting took place, but refused to answer any questions about what transpired. She did not deny the account of the students.)
Last year, while collecting footage for my upcoming film Indoctrinate U, I noticed that the campus was plastered with flyers that screamed "vagina" in large block letters. Although some people might find these flyers offensive, it is protected speech at Bucknell--as it should be--but apparently the phrase "hunting terrorists" is not.
(Perhaps someone should remind Bucknell's administrators that the American soldiers who are "hunting terrorists" are fighting the very sort of misogynistic thugs who would gladly stone a woman to death for talking about her vagina in public.)
Read it all.
This is the 21st century (no offense to certain islamofascists reading this). Get email working for you:
kowens@bucknell.edu
Email and tell her just how utterly mad this contention is. Ask for an apology from her to the students for this madness.
Prophet Geoff
But, they were hunting terrorists, bagged a bunch of em too.
Why does it seem like the idiots are in charge of everything?
Time to use the only language that universities or colleges understand: the language of denial. The language that the Beating Heart of any thoroughly modern university, the Development Office, will understand, and communicate to the President's Assistant, and to the President himself, herself, themselves. The salary, the rent-free house, the car, the difficult life hobnobbing at parties with would-be donors, ah the university president's life is so very difficult, isn't it? And then when you choose to stop, you are either given a job as head of some foundation, or you are given (if you did not possess before) a tenured job at the same university, with a salary a good deal higher, stil, than that of your new colleagues (who don't know exactly what you are making, but would like to find out).
That's right -- get to the trustees. Get to the alumni. No one in his right mind should be contributing a cent to any American university today. They are suffering not because of endowments that are too small, but because they are too large. From Harvard, with its Jeffery-Sachsian delusions of grandeur, its Solving of the World's Problems, to smaller and poorer schools, tenured radicals are joined by tenured idiots, not everywhere, not always, but in sufficient quantities, and so well-ensconced, as to ensure that the problems will continue unto the nth generation. Intelligent faculty members hover together, trade horror stories, write books on the collapse of the university, and wait to get out -- their mother never told them it would be like this.
Stop those donations. Promise they will not start again until something is done - a new attitude. How about ensuring that a certain percentage of the new faculty hires are, let's say, veterans -- even, perhaps, veterans of Iraq? Yes, that would be a good thing for trustees, and the government, to begin to require. A way of changing the stifling ideological climate, by way of a little neutral "support-our-troops" act.
Talk about it. Think about it. Run it up the flagpole in federal-funds dispensing Congress. See if anyone salutes.