AP Photo/Fionn Kidney

The erstwhile Dr. Leopold Stotch passes along news of the exploits of a fellow Irish prankster:

When Dublin university student Shane Fitzgerald posted a poetic but phony quote on Wikipedia, he said he was testing how our globalized, increasingly Internet-dependent media was upholding accuracy and accountability in an age of instant news.

His report card: Wikipedia passed. Journalism flunked.

The sociology major’s made-up quote — which he added to the Wikipedia page of Maurice Jarre hours after the French composer’s death March 28 — flew straight on to dozens of U.S. blogs and newspaper Web sites in Britain, Australia and India.  They used the fabricated material, Fitzgerald said, even though administrators at the free online encyclopedia quickly caught the quote’s lack of attribution and removed it, but not quickly enough to keep some journalists from cutting and pasting it first.

A full month went by and nobody noticed the editorial fraud. So Fitzgerald told several media outlets in an e-mail and the corrections began.

“I was really shocked at the results from the experiment,” Fitzgerald, 22, said Monday in an interview a week after one newspaper at fault, The Guardian of Britain, became the first to admit its obituarist lifted material straight from Wikipedia. “I am 100 percent convinced that if I hadn’t come forward, that quote would have gone down in history as something Maurice Jarre said, instead of something I made up,” he said. “It would have become another example where, once anything is printed enough times in the media without challenge, it becomes fact.”

So far, The Guardian is the only publication to make a public mea culpa, while others have eliminated or amended their online obituaries without any reference to the original version — or in a few cases, still are citing Fitzgerald’s florid prose weeks after he pointed out its true origin. “One could say my life itself has been one long soundtrack,” Fitzgerald’s fake Jarre quote read. “Music was my life, music brought me to life, and music is how I will be remembered long after I leave this life. When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head that only I can hear.”

Fitzgerald said one of his University College Dublin classes was exploring how quickly information was transmitted around the globe. His private concern was that, under pressure to produce news instantly, media outlets were increasingly relying on Internet sources — none more ubiquitous than the publicly edited Wikipedia.

This was something of a perfect storm:  The sudden death of a notable but relatively obscure figure combined with a superbly crafted quote.

Wikipedia spokesman Jay Walsh says, “We always tell people: If you see that quote on Wikipedia, find it somewhere else too.”  That’s generally been my practice.   Trouble is, once a quote is out there, it quickly loses its Wikipedia moorings.   My guess is that many of those who used the quote found it at The Guardian or elsewhere.   Yes, journalists use Wikipedia without attribution.   Even more lift quotes and story ideas from other journalists, with or without attribution.

I’ve been quoted or asked for interviews many times based on blog posts that were mostly excerpts of media stories or others’ blog posts.  Given the formatting of this site — which has long used very well marked blockquotes and which highlights the name of the source being quoted — that would seem rather obvious.  But those searching for information stumble on the site via Google search, where we tend to rank well, and see an authoritative byline and go with it.

Similarly, the Atlantic Council put out a report on Afghanistan in January 2008 which began, “Make no mistake: NATO is not winning in Afghanistan.”  A subsequent edition of the report two months later changed that to, “Make no mistake: The international community is not winning in Afghanistan.”  It has thus been more than a year since the original quote appeared on the Council website or was available in a fresh print copy.  I still see the original version with some frequency.   It’s the quote that’s being quoted, not the report.

Indeed, were this report on the fake quote written differently, I’d expect that people would have used this report of the fake quote — and reports on the reports on the fake quote like this one — as a source of the quote. I’m not sure if AP’s Shawn Pogatchnik, whose report I quote above, intentionally broke up the fake quote with the phrase “Fitzgerald’s fake Jarre quote read” to forestall that happening or whether it’s a happy accident.   I have had enough blog comments and emails resulting from blog posts to know that quite a few people will mistake, say, a commentary about Jesse Jackson as a posting by Jesse Jackson.  People doing Internet searches will glom onto a single sentence and ignore everything else on the page.

Henry Farrell, Eric Lawrence, and John Sides have collaborated on a paper, still in late draft stages, entitled “Self-Segregation or Deliberation? Blog Readership, Participation, and Polarization in American Politics.” A PDF of the working copy is available here.

Henry reports that,

[B]log readers seem to exhibit strong homophily. That is to say, they overwhelmingly choose blogs that are written by people who are roughly in accordance with their political views. Left wingers read left wing blogs, right wingers read right wing blogs, and very few people read both left wing and right wing blogs. Those few people who read both left wing and right wing blogs are considerably more likely to be left wing themselves; interpret this as you like. Furthermore, blog readers are politically very polarized. They tend to clump around either the ‘strong liberal’ or the ‘strong conservative’ pole; there aren’t many blog readers in the center. This contrasts with consumers of various TV news channels, as the figure [thumbnailed at right] illustrates. All of this suggests that blog readership is unlikely to be associated with the kinds of deliberative exchange between different points of view that some political theorists would like to see.

Sides adds,

Only 6% of political blog readers named both left and right blogs. Thus, most blog readers are “carnivores” rather than “omnivores”: they like partisan red meat, as it were. This is the self-segregation that the paper discusses.

I’m clearly an outlier, a right-of-center blogger who not only reads from both sides of the aisle but reads predominantly the other side. I suspect this stems from my tendency to read blogs written by academics and journalists, which skews the choices of quality blogs available to me.  Further, I’ve got numerous commenters from the left, right, and center.

That aside, the results don’t much surprise me.  After all, we’re a polarized polity right now, so it stands to reason that we’d see the same in the blogosphere.  Given that the mass media outlets to which blogs are compared in the chart above are ostensibly “neutral” whereas the blogs are openly biased, it’s remarkable how polarized the audiences of the former are.

Further, as I’ve discussed perhaps ad nasuem in posts over the past five plus years, most blogs are frankly unreadable by those not sympathetic to the point of view of the author.  This holds true even when one excludes the 90-plus percent of political blogs that are unreadable, period.   Few people have an appetite for being rudely insulted on a regular basis, having their intelligence, decency and patriotism questioned.

Spanish-only speakers have an easier time getting by in Miami than English-only speakers, AP reports.

In many areas of Miami, Spanish has become the predominant language, replacing English in everyday life. Anyone from Latin America could feel at home on the streets, without having to pronounce a single word in English. In stores, shopkeepers wait on their clients in Spanish. Universities offer programs for Spanish speakers. And in supermarkets, banks, restaurants — even at the post office and government offices — information is given and assistance is offered in Spanish. In Miami, doctors and nurses speak Spanish with their patients and a large portion of advertising is in Spanish. Daily newspapers and radio and television stations cater to the Hispanic public.

But this situation, so pleasing to Latin American immigrants, makes some English speakers feel marginalized. In the 1950s, it’s estimated that more than 80 percent of Miami-Dade County residents were non-Hispanic whites. But in 2006, the Census Bureau estimates that number was only 18.5 percent, and in 2015 it is forecast to be 14 percent. Hispanics now make up about 60 percent.

“The Anglo population is leaving,” said Juan Clark, a sociology professor at Miami Dade College. “One of the reactions is to emigrate toward the north. They resent the fact that (an American) has to learn Spanish in order to have advantages to work. If one doesn’t speak Spanish, it’s a disadvantage.”

According to the Census, 58.5 percent of the county’s 2.4 million residents speak Spanish — and half of those say they don’t speak English well. English-only speakers make up 27.2 percent of the county’s residents.

That Miami has a huge Spanish-speaking population is hardly news, of course. They’ve been electing Hispanic mayors almost exclusively since 1973 and all their first-time mayors since 1985 have been Cuban-born.*

It’s arguable, at least, that people who live in Miami should be expected to be able to speak some Spanish. The problem, though, is that Miami isn’t an island. It’s a major city in an overwhelmingly English-speaking country. It’s not reasonable that Americans who live elsewhere should feel as if they’re in a foreign country when traveling domestically on business. More importantly, it threatens to isolate Miami from the rest of the country, making them less able to participate in the political system and cut off from the broader national culture.

Generally, immigrants have a strong incentive to learn English and their children do so almost universally. But that’s much less likely to happen when they can get by in their native tongue. We should expect, therefore, that this trend will continue.

__________
*Stephen P. Clark, who served from 1993-1996, had previously been city mayor from 1967-1970 and mayor of Miami-Dade County from 1970-1972 and 1974-1993.

The Hotline On Call Quote Of The Day:

“I want people to know when they look at me, to be clear that they see what an investment in public education can look like.” — Michelle Obama

Now, I’m in favor of investment in public education. I went to seven different public schools growing up, including three on American military bases, and have three degrees from public institutions. I’ve even taught at four public colleges and universities.

But Michelle Obama? She’s a different story:

Michelle graduated from Whitney Young High School in 1981 and went on to major in sociology and minor in African American studies at Princeton University, where she graduated cum laude with an Artium Baccalaureus in 1985. As part of her requirements for graduation, she wrote a thesis entitled, “Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community.” She obtained her Juris Doctor degree from Harvard Law School in 1988.

Whitney Young High School “is a highly selective-enrollment Chicago public school that opened its doors to students on September 3, 1975 as the city’s first public magnet high school.” It’s as close to a private school as it gets on the taxpayer’s dime. Princeton and Harvard, of course, are not only private institutions but part of the Ivy League.

So, looking at Michelle Obama might give one a very good idea what going to the most selective institutions in the country can look like. An investment in public education? Not so much.

UPDATE: A couple of commenters note that exclusive public magnet schools are still public schools. True that.

The problem, though, is that it undercuts her argument. You don’t have to “invest” in a public school if it can cherry pick the best students in the city and send the bad ones elsewhere. Any school would provide a good education under those conditions. Indeed, one of the chief arguments against vouchers for private schools is that it leaves behind the hardest-to-teach children for the public schools and isolates those kids, disproportionately from minority groups and the underclass, even further.

Additionally, it appears the Obama’s send their own kids to private school. For the convenience, of course.

UPDATE II: Another commenter observes that Obama went to public grade school. That’s true. The CST feature “The woman behind Obama” reports,

Both Michelle and Craig, now head basketball coach at Brown University, learned to read at home by the age of 4. Both skipped second grade (both their parents also skipped a grade).

By sixth grade, Michelle joined a gifted class at what is now Bouchet Elementary, at 73rd and Jeffery. The gifted program exposed Michelle to three years of French before she graduated as class salutatorian, and, for two years, to special biology classes at Kennedy King College. There, the gifted class studied photosynthesis, worked in a laboratory and identified the muscles of dissected rat specimens, recalled childhood friend Chiaka Davis Patterson. “This is not what normal seventh-graders were getting,” Patterson said.

No joke. So, if you’re really bright, your parents teach you to read at home before you start school, you go to special college classes in grade school, and then to school with the best students in all of Chicago, then there’s nothing like a public school education. Then again, for most kids, that’s nothing like a public school education.

Dennis Prager, who apparently hasn’t been on a college campus in a few decades, compiles a handy dandy list of questions to ask in selecting a college for your kids.

1. Can one obtain a Bachelor of Arts degree at your college without having read a single Shakespeare play, one Federalist Paper or one book of the Bible?

If so, why attend such a college?

I’ve attended and/or taught at a total of seven institutions of higher learning. All, except for the United States Military Academy, were state schools in the Southeast. None of them required Bible reading. Nor, come to think of it, was it absolutely certain that you’d be required to read Shakespeare or a Federalist Paper.

Why on earth would reading a book of the Bible be required as part of a university education? An understanding of the role of religion in history, sure. Learning about the centuries-long struggle to define the proper roles of church and state, absolutely. Knowing how the 10 Commandments fit into the evolution of our legal system would certainly come into play. But college isn’t Sunday School.

I read plenty of Shakespeare in both college and high school and have seen several of his plays performed since. But most universities that I was associated with allow B.A. students to chose between two semesters of either American or British Literature. Those choosing the former, obviously, could escape forced exposure to the Bard.

I’ve got three degrees in political science and have read and taught both the Federalist and the Anti-Federalist Papers. I honestly don’t remember, though, whether, say, Federalist 10 was part of the core curriculum when I was an undergrad. Nor, really, is it immediately obvious why it should be.

In many of the schools I was associated with, a political science class was not absolutely mandated; it was merely one of several social sciences/humanities offerings from which students had to pick several courses. An American National Government survey course was a requirement for certain students at Troy State when I taught there and both Steven Taylor and I required some selections from the Federalist Papers. I’m not entirely sure we would have been remiss, though, had we just taught the principles and eschewed the primary source reading. We didn’t, for example, require reading Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws even though we taught about checks and balances.

The rest of Prager’s list is equally misguided. He asks such questions as, “In the political science, English, sociology, anthropology and history departments — or any other liberal arts department — what is the ratio of Democrats to Republicans among the professors?” Or, “What are the names of the speakers invited and paid with college funds to speak last year at the college?” Or, most hilariously, “Can my child live in a same-sex dorm and are the bathrooms co-ed?”

The list’s core flaw is that it begins with the common — and yet obviously absurd — premise that decent, hardworking folks send their kids off to college only to have their values assaulted by hippie, dope smoking, Communist professors who hate America.

Not only is that not the case but it wouldn’t matter if it were.

Yes, the professoriate is, on average, less religious and more likely to vote Democrat than the median American. But there’s plenty of diversity on campus. At most institutions, there are plenty of professors who vote Republican, go to church, and enjoy the company of the opposite sex. With rare exception, professors simply teach their subject matter without any interest in converting students to their worldview.

Moreover, most of us survive college with our values intact. Most conservative intellectuals, business leaders, and even preachers managed to spend four years with liberal college professors and still learn learn something. If anything, they come away with a better understanding of their own position after being exposed to other ways of thinking. Hell, that’s what college is supposed to be about.

Frankly, if you want your kids to be steeped in the Bible, I wouldn’t advise waiting until sending them off to college. It’s a little late at that point.

Instead of Prager’s questions, parents would be better served to ask things like:

• What is the ratio of required courses taught by full-time professors rather than graduate students or adjuncts?

• How strongly is the Writing Across the Curriculum program integrated into the institution’s philosophy?

• Are courses in statistics and logical analysis required or at least available?

Mostly, though, a college education is what the students make of it. Parents need to make sure their kids are intellectually, emotionally, and socially ready for higher education and should guide them to choosing schools that will fit their personalities. Not everyone will thrive on a large campus, for example.

Via Leonard Pierce, who fisks some other portions from the left flank.

Images: AllPosters and College Candy via Google

Several days after the story of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Columbia University visit inflamed the blogosphere, professional outrage monger David Horowitz has weighed in. Robert Stacy McCain has the story on the front page of today’s Washington Times.

Columbia University’s invitation to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak at the Ivy League school’s New York City campus tomorrow is a “disgrace,” says conservative author David Horowitz, a Columbia alumnus. “Why are they inviting the Persian Hitler to Columbia?” Mr. Horowitz said in a telephone interview with The Washington Times. “It’s a disgrace. … What Columbia is doing is giving moral support to genocide, and as an alumni, I am deeply ashamed.”

[...]

University President Lee Bollinger has said the Ahmadinejad invitation is in keeping with “Columbia’s long-standing tradition of serving as a major forum for robust debate.”

Naming a list of current and former Bush administration officials, Mr. Horowitz said, “Just ask yourself … do you think any of those people would be invited to Columbia by the president of the university under the pretext of a ‘robust debate?’ ”

Mr. Horowitz, the author of more than 20 books, said he’s never been invited to lecture at Columbia, “certainly not by Lee Bollinger.” Currently promoting the paperback edition of his book “The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America,” Mr. Horowitz said: “There are nine professors from Columbia in my book — that should tell you something. No other university has more than about three.”

Columbia’s invitation to Mr. Ahmadinejad is an example of the current climate at America’s universities, he said. “It shows that these people do not appreciate that we’re in a war,” said Mr. Horowitz, who has promoted legislation and organized a campus group, Students for Academic Freedom, to “end political abuse” at universities. “The curriculum today teaches students to be sympathetic to our enemies.”

The very idea that academics, qua academics, can be “dangerous” is baffling; it does, however, put Horowitz’ views on Ahmadinejad into proper perspective. A February 2006 excerpt at his FrontPage site gives a good taste of his argument. Here’s a sampling:

Not all of the professors depicted in this volume hold views as extreme as Ward Churchill’s, but a disturbing number do. All of them appear to believe that an institution of higher learning is an extension of the political arena, and that scholarly standards can be sacrificed for political ends; others are frank apologists for terrorist agendas, and still others are classroom bigots. The dangers such individuals pose to the academic enterprise extend far beyond their own classrooms. The damage a faculty minority can inflict on an entire academic institution, even in the absence of a scandalous figure like Ward Churchill, was recently demonstrated at Harvard, when President Lawrence Summers was censured – the first such censure in the history of the modern research university in America — because Summers had had the temerity to suggest in a faculty setting an idea that was politically incorrect.

One of the professors profiled in this text, Columbia University’s Todd Gitlin, explained the achievements of faculty radicals in an essay that appeared in 2004. After the Sixties, Gitlin wrote, “all that was left to the Left was to unearth righteous traditions and cultivate them in universities. The much-mocked ‘political correctness’ of the next academic generations was a consolation prize. We lost – we squandered the politics – but won the textbooks.”

Because activists ensconced in programmatic fields like Black Studies and Women’s Studies also teach in traditional departments like History and English ,and influence them as well, the statements by Rorty and Gitlin may actually understate the ways in which a radical left has colonized a significant part of the university system and transformed it to serve its political ends. In September 2005, the American Political Science Association’s annual meeting, for example, featured a panel devoted to the question, “Is It Time To Call It Fascism?” meaning the Bush Administration. Given the vibrant reality of American democracy in the year 2005, this was obviously a political rather than a scholarly agenda.

Only at the margins and taken to an extreme is this sort of thing “dangerous.”

Churchill was, until fired for reasons unrelated to his rantings, an underqualified crank teaching in a bogus “discipline” whose very existence is coalesced around a political agenda. Black Studies and Women’s Studies are, with rare exceptions, ideology masquerading as scholarship. The topics they study are often quite important; my strong preference, however, would be for it to be done within the context of more rigid methodologies within departments of history, sociology, political science, or what have you.

Still, these people aren’t dangerous. Most of us reading and writing blogs are products of the university system and were exposed to these ideas along the way. Most of us rejected them as silly even as 18- and 19-year-olds.

Presumably, the answer to “Is It Time To Call It Fascism?” is No. Is a discussion of presidential power and the limitations on civil liberties in the name of national security a worthwhile endeavor for political scientists? Absolutely.

Todd Gitlin couldn’t be much further from me ideologically. Still, when I taught a Politics of Communications class a dozen years ago, I selected one of his books to use as one of the course texts. He’s a leading scholar in the field and he argues his anti-Establishment perspective very well. I don’t think many of the students came away converted to his way of thinking. They were, however, forced to grapple with some ideas that were otherwise foreign to them and to thus re-examine their own. That’s the essence of a university education.

Unlike Churchill, Gitlin, and the other 108 scholars mentioned in the book, Ahmadinejad is a very dangerous man. He expresses some genuinely evil ideas and has the wherewithal to carry some of them out. The idea of him possessing nuclear weapons is frightening.

But . . . the Persian Hitler?

He is, according to prominent human rights groups, a bad guy.

According to Amnesty International, dissidents who oppose the government non-violently face harassment, torture and execution and the election of Ahmadinejad signaled the defeat of “pro-reform” supporters. According to Human Rights Watch, “[r]espect for basic human rights in Iran, especially freedom of expression and assembly, deteriorated in 2006. The government routinely tortures and mistreats detained dissidents, including through prolonged solitary confinement.”

Human Rights Watch described the source of human rights violations in contemporary Iran as coming from on the one hand the Judiciary, accountable to Ali Khamenei, and on the other to members directly appointed by Ahmadinejad. Again according to Human Rights Watch, “[s]ince President Ahmadinejad came to power, treatment of detainees has worsened in Evin prison as well as in detention centers operated clandestinely by the Judiciary, the Ministry of Information, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.”

Tolerance of public protest varies under Ahmadinejad. Human Rights Watch writes that “[t]he Ahmadinejad government, in a pronounced shift from the policy under former president Mohammed Khatami, has shown no tolerance for peaceful protests and gatherings.”

In January 2006 security forces attacked striking bus drivers in Tehran and detained hundreds. The government refused to recognize the drivers’ independent union or engage in collective bargaining with them. In February government forces attacked a peaceful gathering of Sufi devotees in front of their religious building in Qum to prevent its destruction by the authorities, using tear gas and water cannons to disperse them. In March police and plainclothes agents charged a peaceful assembly of women’s rights activists in Tehran and beat hundreds of women and men who had gathered to commemorate International Women’s Day. In June as women’s rights defenders assembled again in Tehran, security forces beat them with batons, sprayed them with pepper gas, marked the demonstrators with sprayed dye, and took 70 people into custody.

Horrible stuff, surely placing him in the running for Most Despicable Dictator.

On the other hand, Hitler is several rungs up the ladder from him in the standings for Most Despicable Dictator of All Time. Ahmadinejad has not, for example, rounded up and systematically murdered millions of people or launched a world war. Were I Jewish, I’d prefer my foreign leaders calling me names and denying that the Holocaust took place to, say, actually conducting a Holocaust.

Further, as I noted last week, Bollinger has not invited Ahmadinejad to a forum presenting him as a hero. He’s insisted that half the time be alloted to questions and answers, including some rather pointed questions of his own about Ahmadinejad’s policies and outrageous statements.

Do I think Bollinger would love to have Karl Rove or Alberto Gonzales or John Ashcroft or Dick Cheney in for such a forum? Absolutely. He’d do it tomorrow, I’d bet. My guess, however, is that none of them would actually submit themselves to the process.

Rusty Shackleford has discovered that Hassan Ali El-Najjara, a Palestine-born sociology professor at Dalton State College in Georgia, is pushing crackpot theories about American foreign policy and Zionist plots on a website and a self-published book. He finds it “really surprising” that “the people of Georgia aren’t demanding the immediate firing of Dr. Hassan A. El-Najjar.”

I’m really not sure on what basis he’d be fired. He is an associate professor, which almost certainly means he has tenure. By definition, it’s hard to get rid of tenured professors, let alone for expressing crackpot ideas. Further, he’s at a junior college teaching “three introductory courses to Cultural Anthropology, Sociology, and Marriage and Family.” Unless he’s bringing his anti-Semitic rantings into those courses, there’s not much grounds for dismissal.

According to the article by Stacy McCain linked in Rusty’s post, El-Najjara has “an agreement with Dalton College not to talk to the news media.” This was in 2003. Presumably, the college is well aware of the situation and have distanced themselves from his extra-curricular activities.

Nor, according to the same article, does the nutty professor seem to be having much sway, at least locally.

“Ordinary people here are very pro-war,” said Peter Augustine Lawler, a political-science professor at Berry College near Rome, Ga., about 40 miles from Dalton. The state has a strong military tradition, Mr. Lawler explained. “A disproportionate number of the men in battle are from Georgia. It’s a very military state, comparatively speaking.”

And the anti-Israel rhetoric of the Al-Jazeerah site clashes with the Bible Belt beliefs of most northern Georgians, Mr. Lawler said. “There’s really no constituency for that here,” he said, adding that many evangelical Christians believe the state of Israel is prophetically important. “People are very pro-Israel. Even the rednecks are pro-Israel, because of evangelical teachings.”

The existence of the Al-Jazeerah site came as a surprise to an official of the Dalton-Whitfield County Chamber of Commerce. “That’s really very strange,” said the official, who did not want to be named. “I have never heard of either of these professors.”

Mr. Lawler said he was also “stunned” that the site was based in Dalton, but added, “Professors are a different breed, even in Dalton, I guess.”

Yup.

Wellesley College sociology prof Thomas Cushman muses on what Professor Socrates’ teaching evaluations would look like. Some samples:

Socrates is a real drag, I don’t know how in hell he ever got tenure. He makes students feel bad by criticizing them all the time. He pretends like he’s teaching them, but he’s really ramming his ideas down student’s throtes. He’s always taking over the conversation and hardly lets anyone get a word in.

He’s sooo arrogant. One time in class this guy comes in with some real good perspectives and Socrates just kept shooting him down. Anything the guy said Socrates just thought he was better than him.

He always keeps talking about these figures in a cave, like they really have anything to do with the real world. Give me a break! I spend serious money for my education and I need something I can use in the real world, not some b.s. about shadows and imaginary trolls who live in caves.

He also talks a lot about things we haven’t read for class and expects us to read all the readings on the syllabus even if we don’t discuss them in class and that really bugs me. Students’ only have so much time and I didn’t pay him to torture me with all that extra crap.

[...]

I was warned about this man by my adviser in women’s studies. I don’t see that anything other than white male patriarchy can explain his omnipresence in the agora and it certainly is evident that he contributes nothing to a multicultural learning environment. In fact, his whole search for the Truth is evidence of his denial of the virtual infinitude of epistemic realities (that term wasn’t from queer theory, but from French lit, but it was amazing to see how applicable it was to queer theory).

via Dan Drezner

The New York Times is on the case of yet another group who’ve been oppressed by The Man and aren’t going to take it any more: the obese are the latest group to stake a claim on a research program within the academy:

Even as science, medicine and government have defined obesity as a threat to the nation’s health and treasury, fat studies is emerging as a new interdisciplinary area of study on campuses across the country and is gaining interest in Australia and Britain. Nestled within the humanities and social sciences fields, fat studies explores the social and political consequences of being fat.

For most scholars of fat, though, it is not an objective pursuit. Proponents of fat studies see it as the sister subject — and it is most often women promoting the study, many of whom are lesbian activists — to women’s studies, queer studies, disability studies and ethnic studies. In many of its permutations, then, it is the study of a people its supporters believe are victims of prejudice, stereotypes and oppression by mainstream society.

“It’s about a dominant culture’s ideals of what a real person should be,” said Stefanie Snider, 29, a graduate student at the University of Southern California, whose dissertation will be on the intersection of queer and fat identities in the United States in the 20th century. “And whether that has to do with skin color or heritage or sexual orientation or ability, it ends up being similar in a lot of ways.”

Fat studies is still a fringe area of scholarship, but it is gaining traction. Three years ago, the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association, which promotes scholarly research of popular culture, added a fat studies component to regional and national conferences.

Professors in sociology, exercise physiology, history, English and law are shoehorning discussions of fat into their teachings and research.

Alas, some want to stand athwart history shouting Stop!

“In one field after another, passion and venting have come to define the nature of what academics do,” said Stephen H. Balch, president of the National Association of Scholars, a group of university professors and academics who have a more traditional view of higher education. “Ethnic studies, women’s studies, queer studies — they’re all about vindicating the grievances of some particular group. That’s not what the academy should be about.

“Obviously in the classroom you can look at issues of right and wrong and justice and injustice,” he added, “But if the purpose is to vindicate fatness, to make fatness seem better in the eyes of society, then that purpose begs a fundamental intellectual question.”

Or as Big Arm Woman, a blogger, wrote: “I don’t care if people are fat or thin. I do, however, care that universities are spending money on scholarship about the ‘politics of fatness’ when half of the freshman class can’t read or write at the college level.”

There’s further discussion at Althouse.

Auburn has investigated itself and found that it did nothing wrong.

Auburn athletics officials were cleared of wrongdoing by a university probe of claims that athletes improperly boosted their grades with an easy independent study course.

Interim university president Ed Richardson said at a news conference Thursday that an internal investigation determined athletes were not steered to the courses of sociology professor Thomas Petee, who was accused by a colleague of helping football players stay eligible by offering classes that required little work or no work. Petee and another professor, who also gave “directed-reading” courses, have resigned their administrative posts. Both are professors have tenure at Auburn and will continue to be members of the faculty, Richardson said.

Richardson said the probe, launched after sociology professor James Gundlach made the allegations reported in The New York Times last month about Petee’s courses, found it was purely an academic matter. He said 82 percent taking the courses were non-athletes, 18 percent played a sport of some kind and 7.5 percent were football players.

I have respect for Richardson, who was a superb Secretary of Education for the state for many years, but find these findings hard to swallow. The NYT story on this was quite damning and the fact that non-athletes also took the courses hardly matters. Rather clearly, Auburn football players found out about Petee’s “independent study” courses and began flocking to them.

Previously: Auburn Football Players Got Top Grades for Bogus Classes

OTB Sports

Today’s NYT has a long feature on one particular Sociology professor who almost singlehandedly ensured Auburn’s football team had the best grades of any squad in the nation.

A graphic popped up on James Gundlach’s television during an Auburn football game in the fall of 2004, and he could not believe his eyes. One of the university’s prominent football players was being honored as a scholar athlete for his work as a sociology major. Professor Gundlach, the director of the Auburn sociology department, had never had the player in class. He asked two other full-time sociology professors about the player, and they could not recall having taught him, either. So Professor Gundlach looked at the player’s academic files, which led him to the discovery that many Auburn athletes were receiving high grades from the same professor for sociology and criminology courses that required no attendance and little work.

[Isn't that true of all sociology and criminology courses? -ed.]

Much more below the fold.

Eighteen members of the 2004 Auburn football team, which went undefeated and finished No. 2 in the nation, took a combined 97 hours of the courses during their careers. The offerings, known as directed-reading courses, resemble independent study and include core subjects like statistics, theory and methods, which normally require class instruction.

The professor for those players and many other athletes was Thomas Petee, the sociology department’s highest-ranking member. The star running back Carnell (Cadillac) Williams, now playing in the National Football League, said the only two classes he took during the spring semester of his senior year were one-on-one courses with Professor Petee. At one point, Professor Petee was carrying the workload of more than three and a half professors, an academic schedule that his colleagues said no one could legitimately handle. “It was a lot of work,” Professor Petee said. “And I basically wore myself out.”

[...]

Professor Petee’s directed-reading classes, which nonathletes took as well, helped athletes in several sports improve their grade-point averages and preserve their athletic eligibility. A number of athletes took more than one class with Professor Petee over their careers: one athlete took seven such courses, three athletes took six, five took five and eight took four, according to records compiled by Professor Gundlach. He also found that more than a quarter of the students in Professor Petee’s directed-reading courses were athletes. (Professor Gundlach could not provide specific names because of student privacy laws.)

The Auburn football team’s performance in the N.C.A.A.’s new rankings of student athletes’ academic progress surprised many educators on and off campus. The team had the highest ranking of any Division I-A public university among college football’s six major conferences. Over all among Division I-A football programs, Auburn trailed only Stanford, Navy and Boston College, and finished just ahead of Duke.

[...]

In the spring of 2005, Professor Gundlach confronted Professor Petee, to whom he reported, about the proliferation of directed-reading courses. That spring, the university’s administration told Professor Petee he was carrying too many of the classes. Far fewer have been offered since.

[...]

The 18 football players received an average G.P.A. of 3.31 in the classes, according to statistics compiled by Professor Gundlach. In all of their other credit hours at Auburn, their average was 2.14.

“He’s the kind of teacher that, you know, he wants to help you out, not just pile a lot of stuff on you,” said Carlos Rogers, a former sociology major and defensive back who left the university early and now plays in the N.F.L. for the Washington Redskins.

Mr. Williams said one of the two directed-reading courses he took with Professor Petee during the spring of 2005 was a statistics class. Asked if that course, considered the most difficult in the sociology major, was available to regular students as a directed reading, Professor Petee said, “No, not usually.”

Mr. Williams described the class this way: “You’re just studying different kinds of math. It’s one of those things where you write a report about the different theories and things like that.” He said that Virgil Starks, the director of Student Athlete Support Services at Auburn, set up the courses. Mr. Starks said scheduling was not his responsibility, but that of the dean’s office. Mr. Williams said he appreciated the convenience of the two courses, because he was traveling around the country auditioning for N.F.L. teams at the time. “I didn’t do nothing illegal or anything like that,” he said when told that Professor Petee was under investigation. “My work was good. It was definitely real work.” Mr. Williams said Professor Petee asked him to autograph a football once when they met in his office. “To be honest with you, if they think that’s a problem, they need to investigate all the teachers at Auburn,” Mr. Williams said.

Mr. Williams, who now plays for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, had already completed his football eligibility at Auburn. He was a B student, according to Professor Petee. But Professor Petee also acknowledged that by taking those two classes, Mr. Williams helped boost Auburn’s standing in the academic rankings. He left Auburn six credits short of graduating.

The academic journey of the former Auburn defensive end Doug Langenfeld illustrates how Professor Petee and the athletic department helped athletes remain eligible. When Mr. Langenfeld arrived at Auburn in 2003 from a junior college in California, he wanted to major in nursing. To do so would have required him to take a heavy load of 21 credits his first semester. Instead, he said, Mr. Starks suggested he major in sociology. Mr. Langenfeld asked for advice from Mr. Williams, who claimed that the major was “easy if you studied.”

In the fall of 2004, Mr. Langenfeld found himself in an academic bind. More than two months into the fall semester, he realized he had been attending the wrong class because of a scheduling error. Mr. Langenfeld approached Professor Gundlach about adding a class, but Professor Gundlach said he could not help him because it was too late in the semester.

Mr. Langenfeld then went to his academic counselor in the athletic department, Brett Wohlers, with a plea: “I got dropped from a class and need a class to stay eligible for the bowl game,” Mr. Langenfeld recalled in a recent telephone interview. “I need a class, and I’ll take any class right now. I don’t not want to play in my last bowl game.”

He said Mr. Wohlers told him about a “one-assignment class” that other players had taken and enjoyed. So in the “ninth or 10th week,” Mr. Langenfeld said, he picked up a directed-reading course with Professor Petee. Semesters typically run 15 weeks. Mr. Langenfeld said he had to read one book, but he could not recall the title. He said he was required to hand in a 10-page paper on the book. Between picking up the class and handing in the paper, he said, he met several times with Professor Petee in his office.
“I got a B in the class,” said Mr. Langenfeld, who started in the Sugar Bowl against Virginia Tech. “That was a good choice for me.”

[...]

Professors around the university said they saw Mr. Langenfeld’s late-semester rescue as inappropriate. When told of Mr. Langenfeld’s situation, David Cicci, the chairman-elect of Auburn’s faculty senate, said: “From my point of view, that’s not much work for three credit hours. It’s an awful lot of credits for reading one book.”

[...]

At a heated faculty meeting in the spring of 2005, Professor Gundlach challenged Professor Petee. The number of directed readings that Professor Petee offered had jumped to 152 in the spring of 2005, from 120 in the fall of 2004. Professor Gundlach described them as fake courses and said they were undermining the department’s integrity. Professor Petee offered 15 different courses as directed readings both semesters, along with teaching regular courses. His full-time-equivalent number on his teaching schedule for the fall of 2004 was 3.5, or the workload of three and a half professors. In the spring, it rose to 3.67. He was not compensated for the extra work.

[...]

Also after the confrontation in the faculty meeting, Professor Petee’s grades for the football players dropped sharply. Professor Gundlach found that before the meeting, the players received 81.1 percent A’s and 16.8 percent B’s in directed-reading courses with Professor Petee. After the meeting, those numbers fell to 40.9 percent A’s and 51.7 percent B’s.

Professor Petee defended his record on directed readings, saying he provided so many because of an influx of students, a shortage of faculty and the convenience of using the Web to communicate with and teach students. Professor Petee said that the classes were structured, even though he did not meet with the students regularly, if at all. The department office assistant at the time, Rebecca Gregory, said Professor Petee managed the work with students primarily through e-mail messages. “I would give you a readings course that amounts to substantively reading the stuff,” Professor Petee said. “You’re going to be going through the process of doing the work in the course. You’re going to have to take exams. You’re going to have to write a paper.”

Professor Petee’s mentor, the former sociology department director Gregory Kowalski, said he considered Professor Petee like “a brother.” Still, he said, he could not find any comparable situation at Auburn in which one teacher taught so many directed-reading courses. “I don’t think it was anything malicious or that he had anything to gain,” Mr. Kowalski said. “He’s always been a very accommodating faculty member.”

But the numbers baffled educators around the university. “I have never heard of anything of this magnitude in any discipline at any university,” Mr. Cicci said.

Auburn University has had its share of embarrassing incidents involving athletes. In 1991, tapes of the football coach at the time, Pat Dye, talking about arranging a loan for a player were aired on “60 Minutes.” In the late 1990’s, a star tailback from two decades earlier, James Brooks, told a judge in a child-support case that he was illiterate and had used his athletic prowess to skate through high school and college. Brooks did not graduate.

In November 2003, the university president and the athletic director flew on the private plane of a booster and trustee, Bobby Lowder, to the outskirts of Louisville, Ky. They held a meeting with Bobby Petrino, the University of Louisville coach, to gauge his interest in replacing Tommy Tuberville as the head coach at Auburn. No permission was sought from Louisville, and both coaches were still under contract. Through a spokesman, Mr. Tuberville declined to be interviewed for this article. The news of the visit emerged, and William Walker, Auburn’s president, resigned under pressure two months later. Mr. Tuberville remained as coach and led the Tigers to a 13-0 record the next season.

Auburn admitted two football players in the fall of 2004, Lorenzo Ferguson and Ulysses Alexander, who attended University High School in Miami. That school, an investigation by The Times found, gave fast and easy grades to talented athletes. Ferguson said that during his senior year at University High his grade-point average went to 2.6 from 2.0 in one month. Auburn defended their admission by saying that both players met N.C.A.A. standards.

Once players arrive at Auburn, they tend to find themselves clustered in the same classes. “When you’ve got more than five or six athletes in one class, you’re guaranteed to have fun,” said Robert Johnson, a tight end who left Auburn in 2003 and now plays for the Washington Redskins. “Class is guaranteed to not be as hard as the rest of your classes, especially if you’re winning.”

Auburn was coming off its 13-0 season in the spring of 2005 when Mr. Heilman met with Professor Petee in the aftermath of Professor Gundlach’s initial accusations. Mr. Heilman refused to offer any details of their conversation. Professor Petee said: “I got chastised by the provost’s office for it. He said you’re teaching too many independent study courses to try to accommodate the students. In essence, you know, you really need to stop that practice. And I did.”

After the confrontation, Professor Petee’s directed readings dipped to 25 last fall from 152. His full-time-equivalent number dropped to 1.0 from 3.67. Mr. Heilman left Professor Petee in charge of the sociology department, something that stunned many around the university. That left the department divided, and it was what led Professor Gundlach to decide to retire after next year. “Things have reached a point where we’re getting ready to produce more James Brooks incidents,” Professor Gundlach said. “It’s embarrassing.”

My guess is that Petee is one of those annoyinng professors who thinks his role is to make students happy rather than educate them. I once worked for a department chair that did almost the same thing for international students, for whom he had a special fondness, ensuring that students who were failing classes left and right (owing to a winning combination of laziness and lack of brainpower) from the other profs in the department got enough A’s and B’s to graduate by virtue of independent study. There wasn’t a blessed thing we could do about it.

The bottom line is that, except in incredibly egregious cases, professors in non-core-curriculum classes have virtual carte blanche at most institutions to teach and grade as they see fit. It’s not surprising that the athletic department would target a few notoriously easy professors for their “student-athletes.”

UPDATE: My former colleague, Steven Taylor, found the story earlier this morning. His post concludes, “One sometimes wonders why schools don’t just design majors in football and be done with it.” I’m sure they would if NCAA regs permitted it.

OTB Sports

North Carolina may be the home of a college “applying the philosophy of Ayn Rand,” if organizers, including two Duke faculty members, get their way:

Founders College has submitted an application projecting a fall 2007 start and an enrollment of 500, said Michelle Howard-Vital, associate vice president of academic affairs for UNC General Administration.

Eric Daniels of Durham filed the request, Howard-Vital said. She identified Daniels as a faculty member at Duke University. The Duke faculty directory lists him as a visiting professor in the sociology department.

Daniels, contacted Monday by The Herald-Sun, declined to answer questions “because of the nature of the project.”

“I just have no comment at this time, thank you,” he said.

Stories about a possible college have been circulating in Oxford for weeks. …

As proposed, Founders College would offer an associate of arts degree and a bachelor of arts in liberal arts.

Oxford, N.C. certainly has the right name for a college town, but is the world really clamoring for Objectivist higher education? While there may be a ready source of disgruntled faculty from another start-up college just to the north, I’m just not sure where the students are going to come from.

þ: Division of Labour.

William Stuntz argues that Harvard’s pushing Larry Summers out the door signals the decline of higher education. Noting that seemingly lofty institutions quickly fall from their own arrogance and inefficiency, Stuntz contends,

Harvard is the General Motors of American universities: rich, bureaucratic, and confident–a deadly combination. Fifty years from now, Larry Summers’s resignation will be known as the moment when Harvard embraced GM’s fate. From now on, the decline will likely be steep. And not only at Harvard: Among research universities as in the car market of generations past, other American institutions will follow the market leaders, straight to the bottom. The only question is who gets to play the role of Toyota in this metaphor

He anticipates the obvious response:

To a casual observer of the university world today, that picture likely seems too pessimistic. American universities are the best in the world, probably by a large margin. The best scholars and researchers in the world are drawn to America’s shores to work in America’s libraries and labs. Students, parents, and alumni seem willing to pay whatever they are asked; the gravy train shows no sign of slowing down, much less stopping.

Regardless, he believes a fast decline is afoot because costs are exploding without a commensurate increase in productivity.

There is little reason to believe that undergrads and graduate students are better educated today than a generation ago. More likely the opposite. Teaching loads of senior professors have declined; probably teaching quality has declined with it. The culture of research universities has grown ever more contemptuous of students, especially undergraduates, who are seen as an interruption of one’s real work rather than the reason for the enterprise. Which means that, year by year, students and their parents pay more for less. That isn’t a sustainable business plan.

This observation is sadly true for the big research institutions. Professors at those schools are rewarded for producing good publications and securing grant money, not teaching. And to the extent “teaching” is measured at all, it is in the form of student evaluations which reward professors who are easy and entertaining more than those who push students.

If undergraduate education is too often an afterthought, graduate education is too often a con game. A sizeable percentage of PhDs will never get tenure-track teaching jobs, which are the only jobs for which their education trains them. Since no jobs await them, they hang around longer getting their degrees, all the while teaching classes and doing research for their academic sponsors. It’s a great deal–for the sponsors. For the grad students, it’s akin to buying a daily lottery ticket as a retirement plan. The grad students keep coming, but eventually that well will dry up; the quality of the talent pool will decline. No system that depends on systematic irrationality can long survive, much less succeed.

The fact that there are too many PhDs chasing too many tenure track jobs is hardly a secret. That the supply of PhD seekers has not dried up accordingly is an indication that those people are economically irrational, a sign that they find value in having a PhD beyond the landing of a tenure track job, or perhaps both. Many of us find rewarding lives outside the academy and manage to put our training to use elsewhere.

The problems go beyond education to the production of knowledge itself. Universities compartmentalize knowledge, chopping it up into ever more and smaller pieces. I teach and write about American criminal justice. Scholarship on crime and criminal justice is divided among a half-dozen different schools and departments: law, political science, economics, sociology, anthropology, and public health. Scholars in each of those areas know next to nothing about scholarship in all the others. (I’m no better than anyone else on this score.) No wonder our work is ignored by policymakers; each of us can elaborately describe his own piece of the elephant but none sees the beast whole. One could tell the same story with respect to dozens of other fields of study.

Hyperspecialization may indeed be a problem, since scholars may be producing work read only by a handful of their own peers. On the other hand, such specialization exists because the supply of knowledge continues to grow geometrically and is outside the ability of a single individual to be an expert across the breadth of the subject matter.

There are, however, scholars whose work aggregates the findings across disciplines. Their expertise may be a mile wide and an inch deep, but they can glean enough insights to pass on useful information to those seeking to formulate public policy. Indeed, many of the people who do that are PhDs who do not have tenure track academic jobs but instead work for think tanks, public policy groups, congressional staffs, the Congressional Research Service, or other policy oriented concerns.

The fact that policymakers read secondary and tertiary work rather than the specialized materials produced by scholars at the big schools is not necessarily an indication that that work is unimportant, any more than the fact that work in “pure science” is often translated into technology by different people. There is simply a symbiotic nature to the flow of information.

Overspecialization breeds self-indulgent scholasticism. Too many scholars write for an audience of dozens (if that–a good friend of mine says he writes for six people), and far too few write for thousands, fewer still for millions. In a bygone era, the best intellectuals wrote for educated people generally, not for a handful of specialists. American universities are chock full of brilliant minds that keep their brilliance locked up in a closet, talking only to people in their small corner of the intellectual world.

Many academics are also public intellectuals. But public intellectuals, by necessity, tend to spend most of their time talking about things well beyond their genuine expertise. There’s a trade-off there.

Regardless, I suspect that the number of academic public intellectuals is at an all time high, thanks to the blogosphere. The number of prominent bloggers who are also professors or holders of advanced degrees is staggering. Indeed, as impressive as the credentials of Glenn Reynolds, Eugene Volokh, Dan Drezner, Juan Cole, and many others are, they simply would not have had anywhere near the audience a decade ago as they do now. And that is infinitely more true of people like Cori Dauber, Steven Taylor, and myself who are either at less prominent institutions or outside the academy altogether.

Are there many problems with American higher education? Sure. But there’s a lot of good, too.

As much fun as it is to make fun of Harvard and Yale, they remain an amazing collection of talent. They’re not great places to be, though, for those who need a lot of personal attention from senior professors as freshmen. But there are plenty of liberal arts schools and solid regional universities who provide that. Indeed, the menu of choices is ridiculously abundant.

Enforcing the Congressional ban on gays in the military cost $364 million from 1994 to 2003, substantially more than originally calculated.

The financial costs to the U.S. military for discharging and replacing gay service members under the nation’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy are nearly twice what the government estimated last year, with taxpayers covering at least $364 million in associated funds over the policy’s first decade, according to a University of California report scheduled for release today.

Members of a UC-Santa Barbara group examining the cost of the policy found that a Government Accountability Office study last year underestimated the costs of firing approximately 9,500 service members between 1994 and 2003 for homosexuality. The GAO, which acknowledged difficulties in coming up with its number, estimated a cost of at least $190.5 million for the same time period. The new estimate is 91 percent higher.

Presuming that this study is more accurate than the GAO report, it still does not amount to much money in the context of a defense budget that will be $426 Billion in the current fiscal year–excluding additional costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Further, it’s paltry even in context of less controversial policies. As noted several paragraphs into the WaPo story:

According to Pentagon figures provided to the GAO last year, there were 9,501 people separated from the military for homosexuality from 1994 to 2003, compared with 26,446 separated for pregnancy, and 36,513 separated for failing to meet weight standards.

So, we separate more than 2-1/2 times more soldiers for pregnancy and nearly 4 times more for failing to meet arbitrary weight standards as for homosexuality. And most of those soldiers are in non-combat jobs where being pregnant or overweight is a non-issue. (Females are excluded from virtually all combat arms positions and the administrative “tail” of the military is roughly nine times size of the combat “tooth.”)

Furthermore, one can not consider cost in isolation:

Charles Moskos, a sociology professor at Northwestern University and an architect of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” said in an interview yesterday that he believes allowing openly gay people into the military — especially combat arms positions — could cause the services to lose many more recruits who would be uncomfortable living in close quarters with them. He said the loss in financial costs does not outweigh the costs of forcing people to live in intimate circumstances with openly gay people. He also said he believes many of the discharges are the result of people claiming to be gay to get an honorable discharge from service early.

Moskos is the preeminent military sociologist of his generation and hardly a right winger. He’s likely quite right in his assessment here. Like it or not, a substantial number of the type of men who sign up for infantry duty would not want to serve with homosexuals.

None of this is to say that the ban on gays is the right public policy. It may well be that, as with black soldiers half a century ago, the military should absorb a short-term blow to its readiness in order to get a long term increase in the qualified pool of applicants. And that’s aside from the fact that removing the ban may simply be the right thing to do.

But let’s not pretend that $34 million a year is a lot of money in the scheme of a half trillion dollar budget and that there is nothing gained from that expenditure.

Egyptian blogs Freedom for Egyptians and Arab Sandmonkey both report that the Danish Mohammad cartoons that have sparked so much outrage “were actually printed in the Egyptian newspaper Al Fagr back in October 2005,” during the holy month of Ramadan.

Many more photos here.

Amir Taheri notes that, despite what we have been told since the cartoon controversy erupted, that “Islam prohibits neither images of Muhammad nor jokes about religion.”

The “rage machine” was set in motion when the Muslim Brotherhood–a political, not a religious, organization–called on sympathizers in the Middle East and Europe to take the field. A fatwa was issued by Yussuf al-Qaradawi, a Brotherhood sheikh with his own program on al-Jazeera. Not to be left behind, the Brotherhood’s rivals, Hizb al-Tahrir al-Islami (Islamic Liberation Party) and the Movement of the Exiles (Ghuraba), joined the fray. Believing that there might be something in it for themselves, the Syrian Baathist leaders abandoned their party’s 60-year-old secular pretensions and organized attacks on the Danish and Norwegian embassies in Damascus and Beirut.

[...]

There is no Quranic injunction against images, whether of Muhammad or anyone else. When it spread into the Levant, Islam came into contact with a version of Christianity that was militantly iconoclastic. As a result some Muslim theologians, at a time when Islam still had an organic theology, issued “fatwas” against any depiction of the Godhead. That position was further buttressed by the fact that Islam acknowledges the Jewish Ten Commandments–which include a ban on depicting God–as part of its heritage. The issue has never been decided one way or another, and the claim that a ban on images is “an absolute principle of Islam” is purely political. Islam has only one absolute principle: the Oneness of God. Trying to invent other absolutes is, from the point of view of Islamic theology, nothing but sherk, i.e., the bestowal on the Many of the attributes of the One.

The claim that the ban on depicting Muhammad and other prophets is an absolute principle of Islam is also refuted by history. Many portraits of Muhammad have been drawn by Muslim artists, often commissioned by Muslim rulers.

Richard Fernandez says that the multiculturalists have been “Sold some phony interpretation of Islam the way you would take a rube to the Olive Garden for Italian food, Taco Bell for Mexican, or serve up chop-suey and General Tso chicken as authentic Chinese cuisine.”

Don Sensing is more pointed:

The more the onion of this manufactured scandal is peeled, the more it’s apparent that the cartoons merely presented Islamists and oppressive Arab governments with an opportunity to try to embarrass the West and let the oppressed peoples (of Syria, for example) blow off some steam by redirecting their anger out away from their own regimes. Some fellow travelers in other places, such as Afghanistan, grabbed on to the caboose.

Sensing points to a very long Walid Phares essay detailing the timeline by which the reaction to the cartoons flared up.

Would a generalized inflaming of the masses on the “cartoon matter” be better before or after the Palestinian elections, by Hamas standards? Before or after the Iraqi elections, by Salafi angle? Before or after the Egyptian elections, by Muslim Brotherhood plans? Before or after the withdrawal from the Lebanese Government, by Hezbollah calculations? Before or after the Iranian decision to rush to the nuclear race, by Ahmedinijad’s planning? And on the top coincidence list was the fact that Denmark was to head the UN Security Council, just as its members were to take Tehran to the UN.

[...]

It is reality that Muslims worldwide certainly found the drawings inherently offensive but it is also another reality that the “intermediaries” between the masses and the “crisis” were thoroughly preparing their campaign. Many voices, including in Europe today, are asserting that the Jyllands Posten and its sisters in the cartoon field wanted to make a point back in the summer: that is to affirm that freedom of speech is not selective. They went too far in view of Muslim religious sociology. But many other voices are discovering by the day, that the “party” the journalists were confronting was not the Muslim public, but political activists -the Islamists- who claim representing about fifth of humanity: Islam. The issue is about a clash between liberal secularists in the West and Islamists worldwide. It is about their world views on law, ethics, and international relations. The Islamists want to draw the limits of world freedoms and the Western liberals reject that limitation.

Quite so. The irony is that both the Islamists and the most virulent anti-Muslims have done a good job at presenting the most extreme face of Islam as its true face.

________

See the twelve cartoons that sparked the protests in full size at my Danish Muslim Cartoons page.

Related stories below the fold.

Previously:

Danish Cartoons & Abu Ghraib Photos (Leopold Stotch)
Hypocrites? (Steve Verdon)
Danish Muslim Cartoons: What Would Mohammad Do?
Iranian Paper Launches Holocaust Cartoon Competition
Danish Muslim Cartoon Protests Kill Six
Dutch Muslim Cartoon: Anne Frank and Hitler in Bed
Danish Muslim Cartoon Controversy in Context
Danish Embassy in Syria Torched over Muslim Cartoons
Danish Muslim Cartoons ‘Offensive,’ Says U.S. Government
Muslim Day of Anger to Respond to Cartoons
French Editor Fired Over Muhammad Drawings
French and German Papers Republish Danish Cartoons
Danish Newspaper Apologizes for Muslim Cartoons