American higher education is a house divided

From George Will via H/T at Instapundit:

Higher education is increasingly a house divided. In the sciences and even the humanities, actual scholars maintain the high standards of their noble calling. But in the humanities, especially, and elsewhere, faux scholars representing specious disciplines exploit academia as a jobs program for otherwise unemployable propagandists hostile to freedom of expression.

Ouch!

A false rape case with a twist

From Instapundit:

Bizarre Lesbian Assault Case Revived in Georgia.

A woman arrested based on fabricated claims that she sexually assaulted a female classmate may have a case against college police officers, the Georgia Supreme Court ruled.

The arrest stems from a report that Haley Maxwell made to the Department of Public Safety at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Ga., in April 2009. Maxwell claimed that her classmate Amanda Hartley had beaten and sexually assaulted her in Maxwell’s dorm room two weeks earlier.

Maxwell also claimed that she had gone to Hartley’s apartment in Knoxville, Tenn., just the night before and that Hartley beat her again.

Hartley said campus police had her arrested in Tennessee on charges of battery, sexual battery and aggravated sexual battery.

She was extradited to Georgia where she allegedly faced more than three weeks of incarceration.

In her lawsuit against Agnes Scott College, three of its campus police officers and the head of the public-safety department, Hartley said a reasonable investigation by the District Attorney’s Office showed that Maxwell fabricated the whole ordeal.

Evidence allegedly showed that Hartley was not in Georgia at the time of the assault, and the charges against her were dismissed in December 2009.

The defendants claimed immunity under the Georgia Tort Claims Act, but the trial court refused to dismiss the case.

Good. False accusations should have consequences.

YEs, and the false accuser should face the same amount on time in jail as the false accused, if they were convicted.

Maybe George Will's theory that "they make victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges" no that far of a stretch.

George Will Meets The Clerisy Media

From The American Spectator:

The Clerisy Media strikes again. This time the target is longtime conservative columnist George Will, who was dispatched by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch over a column on rape. But before that? The Los Angeles Times refused to publish letters to the editor from what the paper called “climate change deniers.” The Arizona Daily Sun has done the same.

A while back it was National Public Radio firing Juan Williams for comments made on Fox News about Muslims.
............................

What are we really seeing here in this witch-hunt against George Will? Yes, the typical liberal double standard to be sure. But there’s more. Weeks before the St. Louis Post-Dispatch episode, Joel Kotkin, a presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University and a contributing editor to City Journal, wrote a prescient piece at the Daily Beast titled “Watch What You Say, The New Liberal Power Elite Won’t Tolerate Dissent":

In ways not seen since at least the McCarthy era, Americans are finding themselves increasingly constrained by a rising class — what I call the progressive Clerisy — that accepts no dissent from its basic tenets. Like the First Estate in pre-revolutionary France, the Clerisy increasingly exercises its power to constrain dissenting views, whether on politics, social attitudes or science.

An alliance of upper level bureaucrats and cultural elites, the Clerisy, for all their concerns about inequality, have thrived, unlike most Americans, in recent years. They also enjoy strong relations with the power structure in Washington, Silicon Valley, Hollywood and Wall Street.

As the modern clerisy has seen its own power grow, even while the middle class shrinks, it has used its influence to enforce a prescribed set of acceptable ideas. On everything from gender and sexual preference to climate change, those who dissent from the official pieties risk punishment.” ...

Today’s Clerisy attempts to distill today’s distinctly secular “truths” — on issues ranging from the nature of justice, race and gender to the environment — and decide what is acceptable and that which is not. Those who dissent from the accepted point of view can expect their work to be simply ignored, or in some cases vilified.

This is exactly what happened to George Will. He dared to dissent from the clerisy media’s party line, and he was fired. This is what was going on with the Los Angeles Times, the Arizona Daily Sun, and their respective decisions to ban so-called climate deniers from their pages.

It used to be called "McCarthyism", something abhorrent to Liberals, when they were accused of being communist. Now the shoe is on the other foot, since the Liberals dominate the Establishment, i.e. The Media, University Professors, and Government. And They like it.

Rage Against the Outrage Machine

From Conor Friedersdorf of Atlantic Magazine via Instapundit:

To sum up, the flaws in Will's column are real enough, or so it seems to me. But they're well within the normal range of wrongheaded things that newspaper columnists inevitably write if they do the job twice a week for years. What distinguishes Will's column is the fact that he addresses a sensitive, fraught topic. His critics' unstated belief is that because he dared to do so with inadequate sensitivity, they're justified in twisting his words in the most provocative way possible, all the while striking an exaggerated pose of righteous outrage. (Could it be that a curmudgeonly septuagenarian is both offensive to the sensibilities of his ideological opposites and has something valuable to contribute?) The perverse effect will be a broadened subset of cautious pundits who are less likely to write about rape or sexual assault at all (especially at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch!). Totally ignoring rape won't ever get a person fired. Writing about it might, especially if one's words aren't reliably conveyed. Public discourse is undermined by people whose focus is drawing red cards on their opponents.

But let’s be clear. People aren’t “misunderstanding” what Will wrote. They deliberately misrepresented what Will said, and they did it to chill debate. That’s who they are, that’s what they do.

All dissenting opinion will be eliminated, from the members of the party that demand "diversity" and "tolerance."

George Will Dispatched By Dispatch For Sexual Assault Column

From The Daily Caller:

Popular conservative columnist George Will has been dumped by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch following the backlash over a column he wrote two weeks ago regarding sexual assault on college campuses.

The move was announced by the paper’s editorial editor Tony Messenger late Wednesday. He said the move had been under consideration for months beforehand, but that the recent column “made the decision easier.”

“The column was offensive and inaccurate; we apologize for publishing it,” Messenger wrote.

Will drew ire on the left when his column cast doubt on the “supposed campus epidemic of rape,” and said that victimhood was a “coveted status” that encouraged people to make spurious allegations. Will also argued that campus activists have expanded their definition of “sexual assault” to overly broad levels that include actions like unwanted touching, and that campus tribunals are an inappropriate venue for assessing allegations of assault.

So when one questions the "facts" of the feminists, especially when the math doesn't work, you get banned?

George Will -- Obama worse than Nixon

Bam ! ! ! ! - George Will lets Dear Leader have it by actually comparing Dear Leader to the bane of all liberal Tricky Dick Nixon.

In a 1977 interview with Richard Nixon, David Frost asked: “Would you say that there are certain situations . . . where the president can decide that it’s in the best interests of the nation . . . and do something illegal?”

Nixon: “Well, when the president does it, that means it is not illegal.”

Frost: “By definition.”

Nixon: “Exactly, exactly.”

Nixon’s claim, although constitutionally grotesque, was less so than the claim implicit in Obama’s actions regarding the ACA. Nixon’s claim was confined to matters of national security or (he said to Frost) “a threat to internal peace and order of significant magnitude.” Obama’s audacity is more spacious; it encompasses a right to disregard any portion of any law pertaining to any subject at any time when the political “environment” is difficult.

Wow!