Our Universities Threaten our Religion, Our Culture, and Our National Security

ScreamingEagle

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Jul 5, 2004
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(Exhibit A: Brown)
By Luke Sheahan

Last month, Brown University suspended its largest evangelical organization, with over a hundred students the student group was one of the largest on campus. Rev. Janet Cooper Nelson, Director of Brown’s Office of Chaplains and Religious Life, justified the suspension as the result of the organization’s sponsoring church, Trinity Presbyterian Church, withdrawing its support for the organization. Within minutes of receiving the e-mail that Trinity had withdrawn its support David Sherwood, Trinity Senior Pastor, wrote to Brown’s Office of Chaplains and Religious Life to assert that Trinity had not withdrawn its support for the evangelical organization and was actually very happy that the student group was affiliated with his church.

What’s going on here? It must just be an egregious miscommunication or perhaps a case of mistaken identity, maybe Rev. Nelson had mixed up this evangelical organization with some other whose respective sponsoring church had actually withdrawn its support. Either way it could be easily remedied with a quick e-mailed apology from Brown.

Rev. Allan Callahan, Brown’s Associate Protestant Chaplain, then claimed that the evangelical organization was not actually a recognized student group, in fact, they hadn’t been recognized since the previous year. Apparently the previous group leader had been tardy in the submission of a required form for the Office of Religious Life. If this was the real reason, then why fabricate the charge that Trinity had withdrawn its sponsorship?

Curiously, no one in the organization was aware that they were suspended. Apparently, no one in the Office of Religious Life bothered to tell them. The group retained the right to reserve rooms for regular meetings throughout the school year, a right not granted to derecognized organizations. Maybe Rev. Callahan was referring to some sort of “double secret probation” of the type Dean Wormer placed on the Delta fraternity in Animal House. That would explain why the evangelical group was unaware of their suspension. At any rate, the evangelical organization has turned in all the requisite paperwork for this year; there’s no reason the sins of a previous group leader should be visited upon this year’s leadership.

Instead of pursuing the accusation of previous suspension and attempting to demonstrate that the organization had indeed been suspended the previous year, Rev. Callahan accused the evangelical organization of having “become possessed of a leadership culture of contempt and dishonesty.” Furthermore, Callahan claimed, the organization’s “repeated and willful failure to be respectful and transparent in its dealings with” his office had made the organization “the topic of more meetings, e-mails, letters, and phone calls” than all the other organizations affiliated with the Office of Religious Life combined.

Taken aback, the evangelical group immediately responded with a letter signed by all the members of the organization’s leadership. They first declared that they had no knowledge that their group was possessed of a “culture of contempt and dishonesty” and then they humbly asked for correction if they had indeed been in error, they only requested that the Office of Religious Life actually provide proof that such a culture existed. No one from Rev. Callahan’s office responded to the organization’s request.

In desperation, the organization contacted the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) who wrote to Brown, requesting that they either explain the suspension or revoke it. Russell Carey, Interim Vice President of Campus Life and Student Services, responded to FIRE stating that he believed the Office of Religious Life’s treatment of the evangelical organization was appropriate.

So one of the nation’s elite universities suspended a Christian group first on a demonstrably false claim, then on an old infraction with no bearing on the present status of the group, and when all else failed issued a vague and unsubstantiated accusation of creating a “culture of contempt and dishonest.” All this from Brown, founded as a Baptist school seeking a religious alternative to Harvard and Yale; one would think that religious liberty would be the pride of the campus. Brown delights in allowing its students to choose their own curriculum, but apparently not their own religious affiliation.

At a deeper level Brown displays two disturbing modern pathologies: contempt for the religious beliefs and traditions that form the foundations of our culture and an actual “culture of contempt and dishonesty.” The traditions and practices of every culture are formed around the core beliefs of a given society; in ours, this was the Christian faith. The antipathy toward conservative religious beliefs displayed by the Brown Office of Religious Life is only a microcosm of a general distaste for traditional Christian beliefs at American universities.

Students are taught to believe that the faith of our Fathers is not just questionable or even challengeable, but odious. So we have Christian groups threatened with derecognition at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Princeton University, Gonzaga University, and many more. Columnist Mike Adams has talked at length about anti-Christian bias at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington where he teaches Criminology; professors calling Christianity a “violent religion” and this in the face of our nation’s struggle with a religion that actually is violent. Job candidates are turned down because they are too much of a “family man” or because they “seem too religious.” Prominent religious liberty attorney David French recounts a time sitting on an admissions committee at Cornell Law School when an evangelical student was nearly rejected for admission solely because of his evangelical beliefs; he was only accepted when French, an honors graduate of Harvard Law and successful corporate litigator, spoke up in his defense.

So universities hate Christians and use crooked tactics to keep them off our nation’s campuses, what does this mean for our national security? It means that our nation’s children are raised with either disdain or embarrassment for the beliefs that form the basis of our culture and social institutions. It means that our nation’s children are taught that dishonesty is a viable means of combating ideas with which one disagrees. It means students at Columbia see no problem rioting to suppress the expression of an idea they find distasteful with barely a blink from Columbia’s administration. It means we produce leaders who think it better to hide Mark Foley’s transgressions than to govern with honesty and integrity.

We can’t expect those so raised to defend American culture when they are taught it is inherently corrupt and we can’t expect to produce leaders that will champion the American cause with passion and integrity.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/challenges.php?id=424837
 
Now this is just messed up. If anyone hears updates of this id like to know about it.
 
We don't need no education, we don't need no thought control...

Michigan State University Engaged in Thought Reform
December 14, 2006

FIRE Press Release

EAST LANSING, Mich., December 14, 2006—It may be almost 2007, but it feels more like “1984” at Michigan State University. The university’s Student Accountability in Community Seminar (SAC) forces students whose speech or behavior is deemed unacceptable to undergo ideological reeducation at their own expense. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) is challenging Michigan State to dismantle this unconstitutional program, which presents a profound threat to both freedom of speech and freedom of conscience.

“Michigan State’s SAC program is simply one of the most invasive attempts at reeducation that FIRE has ever seen, yet it has been allowed to exist at the university for years,” FIRE President Greg Lukianoff said. “As bad as it is to tell citizens in a free society what they can’t say, it is even worse to tell them what they must say. Michigan State’s program is an immoral and unconstitutional program of compelled speech, blatant thought reform, and pseudo-psychology.”

According to the program’s materials, SAC is an “early intervention” for students who use such “power-and-control tactics” as “male/white privilege” and “obfuscation,” which the university cryptically defines as “any action of obscuring, concealing, or changing people’s perceptions that result in your advantage and/or another’s disadvantage.” Students can be required to attend SAC if they demonstrate what a judicial administrator arbitrarily deems aggressive behavior, past examples of which have included slamming a door during an argument or playing a practical joke. Students can also be required to attend SAC for engaging in various types of constitutionally protected speech, including “insulting instructors” or “making sexist, homophobic, or racist remarks at a meeting.” When participation in SAC is required, “non-compliance typically results in a hold being placed on the student’s account,” an action that leaves the student unable to register for classes and thus effectively expelled from the university. Students are required to pay the cost of the SAC sessions.

Once in the program, students are instructed to answer a series of written questionnaires. In their answers, students must specifically describe how they are taking “full responsibility” for their offensive behavior and must do so using language that the director of the session deems acceptable. Most students will be asked to fill out this questionnaire multiple times, slowly inching closer to what administrators deem to be “correct” responses.

There's more....http://thefire.org/index.php/article/7587.html?PHPSESSID=792cc40f1b7977dd22c82c6656aa5573

Mike Adams's been issuing PC warnings for years now, it's now a level 4.

Archive: http://www.townhall.com/columnists/MikeSAdams

"Reeducation", thought control, motive over action. Sounds Orwellian to me!
 

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