Have our universities also become moral cesspools like the

[Veggie Meathead]

Bush administration? Look at two perfectly good examples. Johns Hopkins University, the home of Wolfowitz continues to blithely ignore his complicity in the Abu Ghraib scandals and his lies in promoting the War on Iraq.Instead of revoking his Professorship, it continues a cowardly silence toward his many crimes.Also look at Stanford University which appointed Condi Rice the Provost of that august institution and now having known about her lies seems to maintain its silence.

I can go on about many other schools including Harvard, Princeton and others.They have long forfeited any authority to teach our children anything to do with moral values when they do not see fit to raise their voices against illegal wars or tortures of innocent civilians.

[LittleApple81]

1. Look, if you use that argument, the repugs use the same argument to

try to eliminate "liberalism" from Academia. Academia is better left alone for the time being.

[Veggie Meathead]

2. I would agree with you in normal times.But people like Wolfowitz and Rice

make my skin crawl with some of their proposals.One of their proposals in the PNAC document includes gene warfare against arabs/muslims by creating viruses that affect specific genotypes.Maybe I need to tone down my capacity for outrage until after we win the elections but this kind of thing just bugs the hell out of me.Sorry.

[LittleApple81]

3. I agree completely with you. It is just an insult to humanity. But right

now it would create more problems than it would solve.

[sleepystudent]

4. Huh?

Condi Rice was provost at Stanford *before* she joined the Bush Administration. I was a student there at the end of her term as provost, she was respected for her intelligence,but not popular because of her politics. And since when has any school made a major stink about foreign policy that had any effect? Not in twenty years since apartheid and divestment protests. And making a stink about that is the responsibility of the students and faculty ( i.e. individuals ) not the institution. And also, since when have schools had the authority to teach about moral values-if the kids don't have them by the time they enter college, then the parents are to blame. Why single out these schools?

Don't get mad because every group in the world may not see things the way you do and doesn't do exactly what you want them to do. If so get used to lifetime of disappointment and anger. This just sounds like an excuse to bash some elite colleges.

[Veggie Meathead]

5. The President of Harvard, Larry Summers, rightly castigated

Cornel West for appearing with Louis Farrakhan in a political campaign.Does this not sound like an institution taking a moral position to you? Why is he now silent in the face of the even more repulsive disclosures emanating from Abu Ghraib?

I am sure that many of our universities are feeding at the trough of government grants (NIH, NASA,DoD etc) and so keep their mouths shut
even when faced with such outrages as the ones I have described here.

In some ways you may be right to say that we need to look to individual students and faculty to carry the torch of moral responsibility.It was Mario Savio after all who faced down UC Berkeley
to own up to its part in the Vietnam War.

[sleepystudent]

6. honestly...

that Summers/West row is your opinion. Summers crossed the line IMO-as a tenured professor and an individual, West had every right to associate with Farrakhan if he wanted to and if that offended individuals within the university, then those people should take it up with West personally. The University as a whole should stay out of it. Summers just should have said "*I* am offended" not "Harvard doesn't like that"

Which shows my point. The University is not some ultra moral hive mind-it's full of people with differing points of view on many things and has to take all of those opinions into account and remain neutral unless a critical mass of people making up the school raise their voice. If they don't raise their voice, the university has no obligation to do so either.

[Danger Duck]

7. Isn't university the time

to forget your moral values? Good god, but there is nothing remotely moral about dorm life.