THE PSYCHOLOGIST : Leftist bias: "Yes"; Christian bias: "No"

Leftist bias: "Yes"; Christian bias: "No"

The University of California and an association of fundamentalist Christian schools are heading for a showdown over their competing views of academic freedom. The conflict erupted over a decision by UC admissions officers a couple of years ago to reject future proposals for high school curricula based on certain Christian textbooks published by Bob Jones University Press of South Carolina and A Beka Books of Florida. Approval was not withdrawn from courses that already received an OK.

The Christian schools sued UC, asserting a right to teach the viewpoints they choose. A federal judge in Los Angeles has refused to throw out the suit, ruling in August that the schools should have a chance to prove that religious discrimination was behind UC's decision. A two- or three-week trial is expected in 2007.

Among the books are a physics text that treats the Bible as infallible truth and a biology text that calls evolution "a retreat from science." American history, government and literature texts also are at issue.

The 4,000-member Association of Christian Schools International has been joined in the suit by current and former high school students in Riverside County and their alma mater, Calvary Chapel Christian School of Murrieta, which says its mission is to teach students "to understand, analyze and interpret every subject from a biblical perspective." "At the same time," the mission statement continues, "we will be familiarizing our students with the so-called 'facts' of the subjects."

In its response to the suit, UC has said it's not stopping the Christian schools from teaching or studying anything, but that the schools "have no right to freedom from academic evaluation." UC lawyer Christopher Patti said in an interview that the challenged texts fail to meet the university's academic standards. They're too narrow in outlook, he said, with "huge gaps ... about the experience of ... any nonwhite movements in the United States," or they rely too much on faith and supernatural explanations instead of objective evidence and reasoning.

Despite long-established legal precedents recognizing a university's right to control its admission standards as an aspect of academic freedom, U.S. District Judge S. James Otero said in his opinion in August that "if in fact" UC has been discriminating against religious viewpoints, "such action would run afoul of the limits of (its) freedom to determine its admissions policies."

Among many issues to be sorted out at the trial is whether UC's admissions criteria, which permit students to qualify via routes other than approved course work, such as standardized testing, leave Christian school students at a disadvantage. "We're clearly not trying to keep these kids out," Patti said. He said graduates of the school in Murrieta have had a particularly high admission rate in recent years. He also said UC's approval rate for courses taught at Christian schools is identical to the rate for schools overall.

But Robert Tyler, who represents the Christian schools, said the UC has been turning down Christian school courses at the same time it has accepted secular school courses based on viewpoints such as feminism or Buddhism or "the influence of nearly every imaginable group on history" except Christians. The Christian schools assert they want to use the disapproved texts only as supplementary materials, to deepen the education their students get from standard texts. For example, Tyler said, to explain the concept of separation of church and state, a standard U.S. government text might discuss the Supreme Court's 1952 pro-church decision in Zorach v. Clauson.

A Christian text might go back to the origin of the phrase in Thomas Jefferson's 1802 letter to the Danbury (Conn.) Baptist Association, which was concerned that a larger denomination might establish a national church. The class then might consider how a national church would work, "to give students a better understanding and, frankly, a more diverse understanding," Tyler said.

Patti countered that far from being merely supplementary, the Christian texts contradict the standard curriculum with a single point of view that fails to promote critical thinking. While "the university has no opposition to questioning current scientific points of view," he said, certain ways of questioning aren't legitimately academic because they aren't subject to scientific testing. The Bob Jones physics text, for example, teaches that "the only sure truths are found in God's Word, which is settled forever in heaven. ... The Bible, written by an omniscient God, can never be proved wrong."

The higher education establishment seems to be firmly in UC's corner. Barmak Nassirian, spokesman for the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers, said universities must defer to academics to define the essence of their disciplines, not only in biology, chemistry and physics but also in the humanities and social sciences. "You simply can't bring a bundle of your particular views" to the university and demand that it "manufacture a degree," he said. "We wouldn't do this in engineering" if someone refused to concede, for example, the theory of gravity.

Christian high schools in the Sacramento area and elsewhere refused to comment on the issues. But one prominent school official who's familiar with the case said UC shouldn't be examining Christian high school curricula at all. The university should admit students solely on the basis of their ability to succeed, said Assemblywoman Sharon Runner, R-Lancaster, a co-founder and board member of Desert Christian Schools. In their suit, the Christian schools say their students score better on standardized tests than students overall. They say that should be enough to satisfy UC admissions officers, who should not be "parsing through the viewpoints and content of Christian school instruction and texts to ferret out disapproved religious views."

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Background

The essence of conservatism is caution. The essence of Leftism is anger

This blog is written solely by John Ray, who has a Ph.D. degree in psychology and 200+ papers published in the academic journals of the social sciences. It does occasionally comment on issues in psychology but is mainly aimed at giving a conservative psychologist's view on a broad range of topics. There are very few conservative psychologists.

The blog originated in Australia and many (but not most) posts discuss Australian matters. Australians have an unusually good awareness of events outside their own country. Australian newspapers feature news from Britain and the USA not as an afterthought but as a major part of their coverage. So Australians do tend to have a truly Western heart, which is the reason behind the old name for this blog. So events in Australia, Britain and the USA all feature frequently here, plus occasional coverage of other places, particularly Israel.

A primer in American politics for non-Americans:

SCOTUS is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the land

The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Global warming

Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Two examples of Leftist racism below (much more here and here):

Beatrice Webb, a founder of the London School of Economics and the Fabian Society, and married to a Labour MP, mused in 1922 on whether when English children were "dying from lack of milk", one should extend "the charitable impulse" to Russian and Chinese children who, if saved this year, might anyway die next. Besides, she continued, there was "the larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants" and "obviously" one wouldn't "spend one's available income" on "a Central African negro".

Hugh Dalton, offered the Colonial Office during Attlee's 1945-51 Labour government, turned it down because "I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run and who, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful."

Defensible and indefensible usages of the term "racism"

The book, The authoritarian personality, authored by T.W. Adorno et al. in 1950, has been massively popular among psychologists. It claims that a set of ideas that were popular in the "Progressive"-dominated America of the prewar era were "authoritarian". Leftist regimes always are authoritarian so that claim was not a big problem. What was quite amazing however is that Adorno et al. identified such ideas as "conservative". They were in fact simply popular ideas of the day but ones that had been most heavily promoted by the Left right up until the then-recent WWII. See here for details of prewar "Progressive" thinking.

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a war criminal. Both British and American codebreakers had cracked the Japanese naval code so FDR knew what was coming at Pearl Harbor. But for his own political reasons he warned no-one there. So responsibility for the civilian and military deaths at Pearl Harbor lies with FDR as well as with the Japanese. The huge firepower available at Pearl Harbor, both aboard ship and on land, could have largely neutered the attack. Can you imagine 8 battleships and various lesser craft firing all their AA batteries as the Japanese came in? The Japanese naval airforce would have been annihilated and the war would have been over before it began.

FDR prolonged the Depression. He certainly didn't cure it.

WWII did NOT end the Great Depression. It just concealed it. It in fact made living standards worse

Joe McCarthy was eventually proved right after the fall of the Soviet Union. To accuse anyone of McCarthyism is to accuse them of accuracy!

The KKK was intimately associated with the Democratic party. They ATTACKED Republicans!

People who mention differences in black vs. white IQ are these days almost universally howled down and subjected to the most extreme abuse. I am a psychometrician, however, so I feel obliged to defend the scientific truth of the matter:

The average African adult has about the same IQ as an average white 11-year-old and African Americans (who are partly white in ancestry) average out at a mental age of 14. The American Psychological Association is generally Left-leaning but it is the world's most prestigious body of academic psychologists. And even they have had to concede that sort of gap (one SD) in black vs. white average IQ. 11-year olds can do a lot of things but they also have their limits and there are times when such limits need to be allowed for.

America's uncivil war was caused by trade protectionism. The slavery issue was just camouflage, as Abraham Lincoln himself admitted. See also here

Did William Zantzinger kill poor Hattie Carroll?

Did Bismarck predict where WWI would start or was it just a "free" translation by Churchill?

Leftist psychologists have an amusingly simplistic conception of military organizations and military men. They seem to base it on occasions they have seen troops marching together on parade rather than any real knowledge of military men and the military life. They think that military men are "rigid" -- automatons who are unable to adjust to new challenges or think for themselves. What is incomprehensible to them is that being kadaver gehorsam (to use the extreme Prussian term for following orders) actually requires great flexibility -- enough flexibility to put your own ideas and wishes aside and do something very difficult. Ask any soldier if all commands are easy to obey.

A good article on Leftist hate

The real history of social Darwinism

Some personal memoirs

Memoir highlights

THE PSYCHOLOGIST

Leftist bias: "Yes"; Christian bias: "No"

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