Legalectric

In the Letters of today’s STrib, I see someone’s noticed the Center of the American Experiment’s one way rhetoric:

In class there’s recourse

Whether or not one believes there is a liberal bias in higher education, at least in a classroom it is clear who is speaking and the opportunity for disagreement over facts is available to students. The Center of the American Experiment’s new “watchdog” website takes St. Olaf College to task for its supposed liberal bias by publishing an unsigned blog criticizing the college’s sustainability theme (Star Tribune, Sept. 14). The website provides no mechanism for responding to its charges, some of which are demonstrably ideological and not supported by facts.

If conservative students feel they need protection from liberal thinking, perhaps what they really need is more practice articulating their views face to face in their own classrooms, instead of hiding in this kind of anonymous forum for unattributed complaints.

Randolph Jennings,

Northfield, Minn.

And there’s class in recourse and discourse, and no recourse is declasse! We had an example of this on a more personal level in Northfield, where someone felt free to criticize, using statements unsupported by facts, and did it in a “hit & run” way with no way to respond. I’d linked directly to the comments in a blog post. Then, suddenly, the link I’d used linked to the Republican national site! She’d pulled her post and linked it over — couldn’t take the accountability. That had a few people snorting — maybe the CAE could adopt the same method and forward any complaints to __________, or set up a feedback loop! (Update: Try this, more current, link. What a hoot — it’s flagged so traffic from this site gets the feedback loop!)

Hmmmmmmmmm… try this and see if it happens to you: When I go to www.intellectualtakeout.com I get “The connection was refused when attempting to contact www.intellectualtakeout.com” so I tried it from a number of other links, including from CAE, and nada… Takeout’s been taken out, at least for now!