http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/06/orwell_goes_to_college.html
As yet another edition of the text titled Writing and Reading across the Curriculum edited by Laurence Behrens and Leonard J. Rosen is rolled out, I am faced with a serious dilemma concerning academic integrity. In chapter 11 entitled “Have You Heard This? The Latest on Rumor” I read one after another essay with a pro-Obama tilt. What irony for a book that purports to be about critical thinking acquisition!
In their introduction to the chapter, the editors write “[c]onsider political rumors, which often arise out of fear about what a president or political party might do unless stopped. During the health care debate of 2009, so many rumors were competing for public attention (among them, the government’s ‘death panels’) that the White House eventually created a Web site to attempt to set the record straight” (341).
Apparently Behrens and Rosen conveniently forget pro-Obama sycophant Paul Krugman who recently admitted that, indeed,
We’re going to need more revenue, we’re going to need, and probably in the end, surely in the end it will require some sort of middle class taxes as well. So again, we won’t be able to pay …without some increase in taxes, not a huge one, but some increase on taxes on the middle class, maybe a value-added tax. We’re going to have to make decisions about health care, not pay for health care that has no demonstrated medical benefits. So you know the snarky version I use, which is, I shouldn’t even say because it will get me in trouble, is death panels and sales taxes is how we do this.
Will other instructors who teach from this text offer up this information to their students who are already low-information individuals? Will they update students about Sarah Palin’s comments concerning the recent government intervention in the case of a 10-year old with cystic fibrosis? Will they expose the outright hypocrisy of Sebelius?
Then in the same introduction, Behrens and Rosen assert that “President Obama felt compelled to release his long form birth certificate to put to rest the stubbornly persistent rumor that he was not born in the United States” (341). Then there are “the falsehoods about Barack Obama’s citizenship [which] are the most prominent recent manifestations of rumor in American presidential politics” (341).
Again, how do these academics refute the in-depth American Thinker investigations that have repeatedly exposed the forged documents? Certainly I will be telling my students about the Obama literary agency that touted Obama’s birth in Kenya. But since the mainstream media ignored this information, most of my colleagues remained uninformed and cannot present these details.
In fact, Nick Chase and others have painstakingly pointed out that the Obama “birth certificate” is “a fake.” Will other instructors present the “Obama Built This Forgery” piece to contemplate? Consequently, neither Behrens nor Rosen saw fit to include this information and instead made an outright assertion, and disregarded countering evidence. This is hardly notable in a text which is supposed to assist a student with “deducing consequences from what he knows, and … seeking relevant sources of information to inform himself.”
The relevant source in this chapter is none other than Cass R. Sunstein. Will the students have a chance to consider the myriad of Sunstein’s ideas? Labeled as a “rumor expert” Mr. Sunstein seems most comfortable assaulting freedom of speech since he wrote,
