Many recent diaries have documented the shocking right-wing bias in the wire stories carried by the Associated Press. I'm too disgusted right now to link back to these- I'll do so later this evening.
Picture, if you will, the most vile freeper spin on the resignation of Larry Summers as Harvard President. Then take two more steps to the right. You'll be standing next to Justin Pope, who actually has the title of "AP Education Writer."
Pope's missive on Summers' resignation is so vile it is beneath contempt. I do not encourage you to read it if you want to stay in a good mood. The article loads up every right-wing talking point, uncritically elevates dredged-up right-wing trash to the level of thinkers, and dismisses the truth of Summers tenure at Harvard and his resignation. All under the banner of "AP Education Writer" and not "Op-Ed."
Excerpts are below.
In his first five years as Harvard President, Summers supported ROTC on campus, suggested men may excel over women in the scientific elite partly because of genetics, and confronted a prominent professor, Cornel West, over the academic value of his rap CD.
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Conservatives, with few fellow-travelers running top universities, adopted Summers as one of their own. Now many of them say Summers' downfall underscores how those schools have lost touch with the country.
"Larry Summers is a liberal, (but) he was trying to do the right thing," said David Horowitz, an outspoken critic of liberal faculty bias on campuses. "These universities have been taken over. It's 10 percent who got rid of him. They're hardline Stalinists. They're not liberals."
Some moderates and even liberals hear at least some truth in what Horowitz says.
"It's unfortunate that it's seen as an issue of liberal vs. conservative, because real liberals are horrified by the academic hard left," said Harvey Silverglate, a Boston civil rights lawyer and author of the book, "The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America's Campuses."
"Academic freedom can't survive the control by that cult," he said.
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But many supporters saw politics in Summers' departure.
Law professor Alan Dershowitz has argued Summers was done in by a core group of faculty angered over his support for the military, Israel, and for his comments on women in science -- the last of which he apologized for repeatedly.
"I'm clearly in the left 20 percent of the country, nationally. I'm a Ted Kennedy liberal," Dershowitz said. "In the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, I'm in the 10 percent side of the conservatives.
"That doesn't show I'm out of sync with the country," he said. "It shows how out of sync Harvard is."
Right-of-center pundits couldn't agree more, at a time when some conservative students say they feel under attack in the classroom for their beliefs. The Wall Street Journal's editorial page wrote: "Only on an American university campus" would Summers "be portrayed as a radical neocon."
Blogger Glenn Reynolds of instapundit.com predicted Summers' fall would help conservatives pass bills monitoring academic freedom -- including one currently under consideration in South Dakota's legislature.
More traditionally moderate to left-leaning media have also criticized Harvard's faculty. A Washington Post editorial said "professors, of all people should not require mollycoddling." Peter Beinart in The New Republic Online wrote Harvard's faculty "has just made an ass of itself."
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Now, some people who may have donated money or sent their children to Harvard may think twice, said George Leef, executive director of the John W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, a North Carolina think tank devoted to what Leef calls "educational traditionalism."
"What Summers was trying to do was restore some of the academic integrity that he could see and many other people could see has been eroding at Harvard," he said. "And for doing so, for saying some things that the faculty regarded as intolerable, he had to march to the scaffold."