I'm up and posting super-early today as I was in bed at 9:30 last night, and that was after a long nap or two during the day. Feeling much better.
I came across a site called Campus Reform, which is one of those right-wing whiner sites about colleges—apparently colleges are supposed to be "fair and balanced", as opposed to, you know, each unique and offering a different mess of views and such depending on what bit of the potential student body they want to capture. What do they call that again...the mahr-kut or something like that? CR also has a button that allows on to report "leftist abuse" and more interestingly is going through the "top 100" colleges in the country to see how commieriffic they are. Scraping the bottom of the list is my alma mater.
SUNY Stony Brook.
Incidentally, the place changed its name to Stony Brook University a few years ago, after decades of not being called "SUNY Stony Brook", or worse, "SUNY at Stony Brook" by anyone other than the local media. But who cares about such minor details as the name of the school.
CampusReform then goes on to fume that there are 13 leftist political clubs and only seven right-wing clubs. Among the "left" clubs: "Students for Peace and Humanity" to name two things that conservatives are presumably...against? Also, the website for this student group hasn't been updated since 2003, making me wonder how active it is seven years later, just in time to terrify people for the contentious mid-term Congressional elections.
A bigger red flag (RED FLAG!! OH NOES!!) is the listing of The Statesman, the campus paper, as a left group. The Statesman is an utterly average newspaper for the campus, and its editorial page is controlled by whomever puts in the time and effort. When I was a student at the school, the editorial page was dominated by members of the College Republicans, for example, most of whom were transfer students from BU and such who had to come back home after their folks were laid off by Grumman and thus had to slum it with the proles. (Friggin' "peace dividend"! Well, we'll have no more of THAT!) Even then, I wouldn't count the club itself as a right-wing organization or a leftist one; the paper had a traditional op-ed page and space for unaffiliated commentaries, as would any daily paper.
Further, the "conservative" clubs are also suspect: why is the Rifle Club—which is about target shooting—necessarily right-wing? Sure, one of the club's Facebook page admins and the current President of the groups comes from old New England stock. Ooold stock—the Arkham Bard-Cthulhus specifically, but none of the admins have even managed to "like" anything more right-wing than The Lord of the Rings on their publicly accessible Facebook pages. One guy is reading and "liked" a book called Animal Liberation. During my own time at the 'Brook, the right wing was eager to make sure the campus police were armed, but the only people I knew who had guns were members or fellow travelers of the Red Balloon Collective, and their weapons were often unpapered and only, you, kinda legal to own, if you catch my drift.
CR then goes on to fume that 56 faculty and employees gave money during the 2008 Presidential race, and all but three to Democrats. A shocking 94% of contributing Stony Brook staff donated to Democrats -- putting the campus far to the left of even a blue state like New York. (emphasis theirs) Btw, that's 56 faculty and staffers out of...1389 faculty members and thousands of employees. Even leaving aside the dubious claim that giving to the Democrats would put anyone "far to the left" of anything—those who donated to Senator Clinton may have done so because of her stance on the death penalty (for), gay marriage (against), or Israel (whatever AIPAC wants) or, because as New York's Senator, she might be able to bring money in for the campus itself—the shocking statistic isn't all that shocking. Even if Democrats are the "left", as far as faculty and staff donations to the Presidential race went, it wasn't the Dems but the NAYS who won in 2008.
Not too much else is left to say, sadly. CR tries to make some hay out of undocumented immigrants earning degrees from Stony Brook (thus suggesting that CR isn't in favor of the free market, but prefers Affirmative Action for inferiors who just happened to be born on the right side of a dotted line) and that FIRE located some bad rhetoric in the school's anti-harassment policies. That last bit is entirely hypothetical; a search of FIRE's website shows no zero cases or controversies worthy of that group's intervention or even notice at Stony Brook. Of course, FIRE dislikes almost all such anti-harassment codes. This is what earned the group's red light:
No student shall participate in creating an environment that is sexually intimidating, abusive, hostile or offensive to others. This includes, but is not limited to, unwelcome sexual reference or gestures, sexual exploitation, sexual comments, teasing; sexual slurs, derogatory statements, or other verbal abuse; graphic or sexually suggestive comments about an individual's attire or body; inquiries or discussions about sexual activities; sexually suggestive letters or other written materials; sexual touching, brushing up against another in a sexual manner, graphic or sexually suggestive gestures, cornering, pinching, grabbing, kissing, or fondling.
Man, what are America's college campuses coming to when you can't even run a whorehouse on campus, or corner someone and honk their tits whether they like or not?
I came across a site called Campus Reform, which is one of those right-wing whiner sites about colleges—apparently colleges are supposed to be "fair and balanced", as opposed to, you know, each unique and offering a different mess of views and such depending on what bit of the potential student body they want to capture. What do they call that again...the mahr-kut or something like that? CR also has a button that allows on to report "leftist abuse" and more interestingly is going through the "top 100" colleges in the country to see how commieriffic they are. Scraping the bottom of the list is my alma mater.
SUNY Stony Brook.
Incidentally, the place changed its name to Stony Brook University a few years ago, after decades of not being called "SUNY Stony Brook", or worse, "SUNY at Stony Brook" by anyone other than the local media. But who cares about such minor details as the name of the school.
CampusReform then goes on to fume that there are 13 leftist political clubs and only seven right-wing clubs. Among the "left" clubs: "Students for Peace and Humanity" to name two things that conservatives are presumably...against? Also, the website for this student group hasn't been updated since 2003, making me wonder how active it is seven years later, just in time to terrify people for the contentious mid-term Congressional elections.
A bigger red flag (RED FLAG!! OH NOES!!) is the listing of The Statesman, the campus paper, as a left group. The Statesman is an utterly average newspaper for the campus, and its editorial page is controlled by whomever puts in the time and effort. When I was a student at the school, the editorial page was dominated by members of the College Republicans, for example, most of whom were transfer students from BU and such who had to come back home after their folks were laid off by Grumman and thus had to slum it with the proles. (Friggin' "peace dividend"! Well, we'll have no more of THAT!) Even then, I wouldn't count the club itself as a right-wing organization or a leftist one; the paper had a traditional op-ed page and space for unaffiliated commentaries, as would any daily paper.
Further, the "conservative" clubs are also suspect: why is the Rifle Club—which is about target shooting—necessarily right-wing? Sure, one of the club's Facebook page admins and the current President of the groups comes from old New England stock. Ooold stock—the Arkham Bard-Cthulhus specifically, but none of the admins have even managed to "like" anything more right-wing than The Lord of the Rings on their publicly accessible Facebook pages. One guy is reading and "liked" a book called Animal Liberation. During my own time at the 'Brook, the right wing was eager to make sure the campus police were armed, but the only people I knew who had guns were members or fellow travelers of the Red Balloon Collective, and their weapons were often unpapered and only, you, kinda legal to own, if you catch my drift.
CR then goes on to fume that 56 faculty and employees gave money during the 2008 Presidential race, and all but three to Democrats. A shocking 94% of contributing Stony Brook staff donated to Democrats -- putting the campus far to the left of even a blue state like New York. (emphasis theirs) Btw, that's 56 faculty and staffers out of...1389 faculty members and thousands of employees. Even leaving aside the dubious claim that giving to the Democrats would put anyone "far to the left" of anything—those who donated to Senator Clinton may have done so because of her stance on the death penalty (for), gay marriage (against), or Israel (whatever AIPAC wants) or, because as New York's Senator, she might be able to bring money in for the campus itself—the shocking statistic isn't all that shocking. Even if Democrats are the "left", as far as faculty and staff donations to the Presidential race went, it wasn't the Dems but the NAYS who won in 2008.
Not too much else is left to say, sadly. CR tries to make some hay out of undocumented immigrants earning degrees from Stony Brook (thus suggesting that CR isn't in favor of the free market, but prefers Affirmative Action for inferiors who just happened to be born on the right side of a dotted line) and that FIRE located some bad rhetoric in the school's anti-harassment policies. That last bit is entirely hypothetical; a search of FIRE's website shows no zero cases or controversies worthy of that group's intervention or even notice at Stony Brook. Of course, FIRE dislikes almost all such anti-harassment codes. This is what earned the group's red light:
No student shall participate in creating an environment that is sexually intimidating, abusive, hostile or offensive to others. This includes, but is not limited to, unwelcome sexual reference or gestures, sexual exploitation, sexual comments, teasing; sexual slurs, derogatory statements, or other verbal abuse; graphic or sexually suggestive comments about an individual's attire or body; inquiries or discussions about sexual activities; sexually suggestive letters or other written materials; sexual touching, brushing up against another in a sexual manner, graphic or sexually suggestive gestures, cornering, pinching, grabbing, kissing, or fondling.
Man, what are America's college campuses coming to when you can't even run a whorehouse on campus, or corner someone and honk their tits whether they like or not?