Part Six: Grand Jury Presentment on "Problems in Higher Education"

Portions of the Presentment of the Grand Jury for the Eleventh Judicial District of Iowa follow, with words added for clarification in brackets.  Supplemental ideas are italicized.

 

Summary

 

The concrete evidence of failures is well illustrated by the article entitled "New Left's Boasts: We Are Organizing Sedition."  According to the article, the New York Times asked an Iowa State University student where he picked up his radical ideas.  The student referred to a teacher by name and concluded, "He was a history teacher here [Iowa State University] two years ago.  I took a course in Ideas of Western Civilization from him.  That got me started."  There is no doubt that some teachers are guilty of using their status to effectively subvert or undermine the morals and allegiance of some students.

 

Friedrich A. Hayek said, regarding sectarian missionaries, "The whole intellectual climate [is a] complete perversion of language…  Collectivism means the end of truth…  The most effective way of making people accept the validity of the values they are to serve is to persuade them that they are really the same as those which they, or at least the best among them, have always held, but which were not properly understood or recognized before."*

 

The atheistic humanist approach to education is illustrated by events at ISU.  Using scurrilous charges, tenured academic mafia undermined academic freedom and forced the discontinuation of a very popular university course dealing with creation science.  The course violated the secular dogma upon which the God-rejecting theory of evolution, anti-Americanism, and anti-morality are constructed.  The course, taught by a highly ranked professor administrator at Iowa State University, was discontinued, and the professors who bullied that decision into effect did not receive so much as a reprimand.

 

According to an article in the Ames Tribune, May 12, 2007, "Guillermo Gonzalez… [was] denied tenure this semester by Iowa State University."  In this event that became known to the public, Iowa State University denied tenure to gifted astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez, who made the mistake of writing a book that included academic support for intelligent design.  At the same time, the university promoted to full professor with tenure rights in the soft sciences an outspoken leftist, Hector Avalos. As a religious studies professor, he served as the adviser to the ISU Atheist Society.

 

Our investigation indicates that the main reason for the youthful rebellion and attitude of carelessness in student morals is their loss of confidence in the wisdom embedded in their heritage.  Failure to clearly implant these truths detaches future generations from past experience, the very basis of education.

 

In the field of morality, all basic truths have been apprehended.  All the changing conditions we hear so much about do not affect the validity or applicability of the central directives of human conduct.  These truths are demonstrated both by their benefits and by the consequences of disregarding them--those who do fall easily into lawlessness, and harmful addictions, et cetera.  There is no greater contribution a teaching institution can make to human progress and purpose than to endow students at all levels with this knowledge.

 

Those who place their present faith and future hope in law enforcement to conduct humanity to brighter times ignore a fundamental psychological truth.  Legal and material attempts to correct human conduct resulting form improper training must all end in failure.  It is impossible to superimpose an effective code of ethics through compulsion.  Police force provides nothing more corrective than temporary control of faulty behavior that is traceable to education's failure to implant established knowledge of morality and the precepts of individual responsibility.

 

Gonzalez

Dr. Guillermo Gonzalez

 

 

*Friedrich A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, Britain, Rutledge, 1944, 174).

 

Image from http://www.public.iastate.edu/~astro/fickwww/calendar2005/mather.html

 

Biography of Dr. Guillermo Gonzalez at http://www.discovery.org/a/4058

 

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