Watchers Council – What American Universities Will Tolerate These Days…

cat-fighting-tooth-brush-watchers-council

Each week, in a contest for the week’s best post, every member of the Watchers Council nominates one of their own posts and a second from outside the Council for consideration by other council members. Last week’s top posts all focused one way or another on pedagogy and education, per the results overview posted on the Watcher of Weasels page:

I know it’s not high school, but there’s lots of crap going on in higher education, whether it’s excusing genocidal convictions as part of essential debate or believing that only certain folks have the necessary understanding to lead, our colleges are less devoted to education than in indoctrination.

The top non-Council post was from Iowahawk and dealt with academic elitism. It dealt with the topic, which has reemerged during the Kagan nomination, in a somewhat less than reverent way. But address academic elitism, it did.

The reference to excusing genocidal convictions was to Joshuapundit’s top Council post, which provided some context about the UCSD Muslim student who kind of sort of announced that she’d like to see Jews get slaughtered. That’s apparently just another identity-soaked position these days on US college campuses, albeit one delivered with a little bit of blustering faux defiance. “I don’t care what anyone else says, to me…” has been a self-indulgent trope for post-adolescents since time immemorial. It’s just that today’s Muslim college students complete the sentence with bigoted calls for mass murder. Which is weird because, as the Council runner up post from Rhymes with Right explained, campuses are almost eager to take on much less virulent “victimizing” speech when it comes from non-Muslim quarters.

It’s a very good thing we have Walt and Mearsheimer around, lest universities become hotbeds of strictly enforced Zionist sentiment. In any case, Joshuapundit:

I received an e-mail from one of Ms. Albahri’s professors, Anita Casavantes Bradford in which she defended Ms. Albahri, claiming that her student had been manipulated into the exchange by Horowitz, was allegedly friendly with some Jews on campus and definitely did not support a second Holocaust… I politely pointed out to Professor Bradford that the above video clearly shows that David Horowitz merely asked her directly to unequivocally condemn genocidal organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah… I mentioned that the best way for Ms. Albahri to clarify her views would be to issue a statement… Today, I got an email from Professor Bradford directing me to this blogpost by Jumanah Imad Albahri which was supposed to clarify things. Unfortunately it does, and it reveals an astonishing ignorance as well as a moral relativism that is simply indefensible. And no,she still refuses to condemn Hamas and Hezbollah.

For completion’s sake, here’s a link to the non-Council runner up post from Doug Ross, which covered the depressing morass that is Illinois. Or as I like to call it, “the Democratic bastion spiraling out of control that isn’t California.” All of last week’s Council and non-Council nominees are listed just below this video of a cat beating up an electric toothbrush, the better to fortify you before you dig in: