{"id":21519,"date":"2018-02-21T03:02:20","date_gmt":"2018-02-21T10:02:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lastbestnews.com\/site\/?p=21519"},"modified":"2018-02-21T03:02:20","modified_gmt":"2018-02-21T10:02:20","slug":"free-to-lecture-sure-distinguished-hah","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/2018\/02\/free-to-lecture-sure-distinguished-hah\/","title":{"rendered":"Free to lecture? Sure. Distinguished? Hah."},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

This has nothing whatsoever to do with the column it accompanies, but you should see my new granddaughter, Beatrix Wynne, who was born just a few hours before this column. I hope her birth was less painful.<\/p><\/div>\n

Just as I overdosed for years on conservative talk radio (I\u2019m better now, thanks), I spent way too much time last weekend reading the columns of Mike Adams.<\/p>\n

Adams is the conservative college professor whose Jeff Cole Distinguished Lecture<\/a> last week at the University of Montana turned out both protesters and defenders. The most surprising defender was U.S. Sen. Steve Daines, who, we now learn, is all for free speech when it doesn\u2019t involve answering questions posed by Montana reporters.<\/p>\n

\"DC\"<\/a>

David Crisp<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cFaith and conscience can\u2019t be swept aside when people walk through university gates,\u201d Daines said in a video message<\/a>. As usual, he missed the point. Adams\u2019 faith and conscience were not under attack. His manners were.<\/p>\n

My reading of Adams\u2019 work suggests a fairly conventional conservative thinker. It also suggests nothing particularly distinguished.<\/p>\n

I confess that my reading skipped his sometimes controversial Twitter feed. Apparently, excessive use of Twitter results in bad hair and an inflated sense of self.<\/p>\n

Adams is perhaps best known for a seven-year legal battle against the University of North Carolina-Wilmington. He alleged that he was denied promotion to full professor there because of speeches and columns he wrote for Townhall.com. The university won a summary judgment in district court, but Adams won a jury trial after an appeals court<\/a> sent the case back to district court. The two parties then settled<\/a>, and Adams got his promotion plus back pay. Neither party admitted liability.<\/p>\n

Even the appeals court did not find that Adams was discriminated against because of his religious beliefs. The case turned on a much narrower question: whether Adams\u2019 speeches and columns were the protected speech of a citizen speaking on matters of public concern or whether they became part of his university work when he submitted them in support of his application for promotion.<\/p>\n

His columns are not exactly scholarly work. The record suggests, at least to me, that what continues to get Adams in trouble is not his beliefs but his arrogant and dismissive way of expressing them.<\/p>\n

\"CapreAir_Variable\"<\/a><\/div><\/div>For example, in a column called \u201cThe Whiteness Protection Program,\u201d<\/a> Adams suggests that white males in the classroom can expect to be \u201cattacked viciously by Marxists\u201d and \u201ctenured bigots\u201d and \u201cStarbuck Stalinists.\u201d He suggests white males enroll in an online degree program using their \u201ctemporary black lesbian identity,\u201d leaving the traditional classroom as \u201ca safe space for the sharing of grievances by minorities, feminists, and alphabetically marginalized Americans.\u201d<\/p>\n

Let me just say this: I have been an American white male for half of the 20th century and nearly a quarter of the 21st. It\u2019s great. As far as comfort and privilege go, the simple act of birth probably put me in the top 1 percent of all humans who have ever lived. I wouldn\u2019t trade it for anything.<\/p>\n

But that may not be good enough for Adams. When he was criticized in a letter to the editor by a \u201cMarxist sociologist\u201d<\/a> at his university, Adams responded by reprinting negative comments by the sociologist\u2019s students on the Rate My Professors<\/a> website.<\/p>\n

In a column<\/a> about leftist professors at his university, Adams wrote, \u201cMy Marxist colleagues are not true revolutionaries. They are cowards in a civil war of their own creation. And they are poisoning the academic climate with their toxic and highly contagious intellectual cowardice.\u201d<\/p>\n

In yet another column<\/a>, he says his leftist colleagues are \u201ctrying to fundamentally transform America into a Marxist utopia.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a recent column<\/a>, Adams warned future students that professors will try to destroy their faith, that they will say science has disproved the existence of God, that they will attack the unborn and that they will insist there is no objective basis for truth or morality.<\/p>\n

Now, I am no expert on the academic thicket. But I have two degrees, and I have attended five colleges and taught at six. Not once have I ever heard a professor try to do any of those things.<\/p>\n

Yet Adams makes it sound inevitable. He even committed the grievous offense of attacking a student<\/a> by name in one of his columns.<\/p>\n

I have never insulted a student in print, and no faculty member or administrator has ever asked me about my political convictions or religious beliefs. No political standards for instruction have ever been imposed or even suggested. Nobody checks my work to see if I conform to any politically correct standard.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t doubt that abuses occur. I have heard too many troubling anecdotes to think otherwise. But I have been around long enough that I ought to have encountered at least some shades of leftist indoctrination. Yet I haven\u2019t.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s true that liberal professors predominate on college campuses. All my experience and all of the academic studies I\u2019ve seen agree on that.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also true that more educated people tend to be more liberal. For example, in the 10 best educated states<\/a>, based on the percentage of adults who hold at least a bachelor\u2019s degree, only two voted for a Republican presidential candidate in any of the last three presidential elections before 2016. That\u2019s two states carried by Republicans in 30 tries.<\/p>\n

In the 10 least educated states, only three Democrats won the presidential vote in those same three elections.<\/p>\n

But it doesn\u2019t necessarily mean that liberal professors create liberal college graduates. Studies<\/a> suggest<\/a> that professors do not indoctrinate their students and actually have little influence on their beliefs. Some professors have found, as I have, that on at least some cultural issues, students are already way more liberal than their teachers.<\/p>\n

Evidence also suggests that academic life isn\u2019t as hostile to conservatives as public opinion seems to have it. A self-identified conservative Republican found in a survey<\/a> that only 7 percent of Republican faculty considered discrimination against those with \u201cright-wing\u201d views a serious problem on their campuses. Ninety-three percent said that if given a chance to do their careers over, they would still want to be college professors.<\/p>\n

So Adams may be an outlier. Typically, he took shots<\/a> at the University of Montana after controversy arose over his speech there. He said that UM \u201chas never been a selective university with a stellar reputation,\u201d and he accused Larry Abramson, dean of UM\u2019s School of Journalism, of \u201csmug academic hypocrisy.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s true that Abramson didn\u2019t present his case against Adams very well. You may also be sympathetic to many of the views Adams expressed in the columns I cited. No doubt he has taken some helpful stands on behalf of the First Amendment, and he apparently is a popular instructor.<\/p>\n

But while his high-handed, antagonistic style brings many words to mind, \u201cdistinguished\u201d is not one of them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Just as I overdosed for years on conservative talk radio (I\u2019m better now, thanks), I spent way too much time last weekend reading the columns of Mike Adams.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":21521,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3864],"tags":[6777,2524,6760,528,63],"class_list":["post-21519","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinion","tag-jeff-cole-distinguished-lecture","tag-larry-abramson","tag-mike-adams","tag-steve-daines","tag-university-of-montana","prominence-category-featured"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21519","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21519"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21519\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21524,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21519\/revisions\/21524"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21521"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21519"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21519"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21519"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}