There is a tradition at Caltech that a Spanish-American War cannon, the property of Fleming House (one of its student residental houses), is fired to mark a number of important events.

Twenty years ago, students from Caltech’s in-state rival Harvey Mudd stole the Fleming House cannon, gaining national news coverage, and undying glory, for their feat. The cannon was returned to Caltech after about two months.

It was anticipated that the current generation of Harvey Mudd students would try to repeat the theft of the Caltech Cannon on the 20th Anniversary of the original heist, but more enterprising rivals of Caltech from MIT struck first.

The cannon is in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the web-site of a bogus moving company, “Howe & Ser” triumphantly displays the cannon now sporting an MIT class ring.

Robert Irwin discusses the reasons for the decline of Arabic and Islamic studies at British universities. At a time featuring a conspicuous need for this specific cultural and linguistic expertise, a suitable candidate to occupy the Sir Thomas Adams Professorship in Arabic, established at Cambridge in 1632, is not in evidence. Irwin attributes the decline in Arabic studies partly to the politically correct disrepute of the field brought about by the influence of Columbia University’s late professor Edward Said:

As far as large sections of the British intelligentsia are concerned, orientalism is thought of as an historical evil, something to be ashamed of and linked, however vaguely, to such wickednesses as crusading, racism, the slave trade, colonialism and Zionism. Orientalism, by the Palestinian literary critic Edward Said, published in 1978, pioneered this paranoid approach to an essentially benign academic discipline. In his immensely influential book, Said presented a somewhat confusing survey of the way Europeans and Americans have written and thought about the orient and, more precisely, about the Arab world. Said argued that orientalism was a sinister discourse that constrained the ways westerners could think and write about the orient. He suggested that there was a malign tradition of disparaging and stereotyping orientals in various ways that went back to Homer, a tradition that was continued by such grand writers as Aeschylus, Dante, Flaubert and Camus. However, Said argued, in recent centuries academics in Islamic and middle eastern studies had been instrumental in framing a mindset that facilitated and justified imperial dominance over the Arab lands. According to Said (who died in 2003), the west possesses a monopoly over how the orient may be represented.

But the contemporary School of Resentment was only partially responsible, Irwin maintains.

Broader intellectual trends have had a role—a flight from difficulty, a suspicion of old-fashioned, fact-bound scholarship and a taste for deconstructive readings of classic works.

There has been an increasing volume of criticism in recent years of the strange double-standard of contemporary American universities in which diversity consisting of the presence on campus of representatives of recognized victim groups is esteemed as of essential educational value, but diversity of faculty political opinion is conspicuous by its absence, and not valued at all.

Adam Liptak, in yesterday’s Times, has a great deal of fun noting the astonishing unanimity of law professors from prestigious schools on the right of American universities receiving money from the federal government to exclude military recruiters. Last Monday’s Supreme Court decision in Rumsfeld v. Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights produced a highly embarassing rebuke.

Hundreds of law professors at the nation’s finest law schools, representing the all-but-unanimous views of the legal academy, filed a series of briefs last year on one side of a Supreme Court case. On Web sites and in lecture halls, the professors spoke out about the case, which they called a crucial test for gay rights and free speech.

Marshalling their collective intellectual firepower and moral outrage, the professors, from Harvard, Yale and elsewhere, made it sound obvious: Universities should be allowed, they said, to take government money but oppose the military’s policies on homosexuality by restricting military recruiting on campus.

On Monday, the best minds in the legal business struck out. The vote was 8-to-0 against them — a shutout, a rout, a humiliation. It is one thing for liberal academics to fail to persuade conservative justices like Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. But the law professors did not produce so much as a sympathetic word from liberal justices like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David H. Souter and John Paul Stevens. (The newest justice, Samuel A. Alito Jr., did not participate.)And if the result was not embarrassing enough, there was also the tone of the court’s unanimous decision, written by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. In patient cadences, the kind you use in addressing a slightly dull child, the chief justice explained that law students would not assume that their schools supported the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy if they saw military recruiters on campus.

So traumatic was the unanimous SCOTUS decision that, already, a variety of theories accounting for the discrepancy of opinion have been articulated:

There is the reactionary Supreme Court hypothesis. William N. Eskridge Jr., a Yale law professor who helped shape the losing side’s arguments, said the defeat demonstrates the “ridiculously obvious” point that the Supreme Court is “a justificatory instrument” for military policy.

Then there is the clueless law professor theory.

Peter H. Schuck, a Yale law professor who thought the law schools’ legal position was misguided, said that many professors were so indignant about the military’s treatment of gay men and women and so scornful of the military itself that their judgment became clouded.

“There is often a feeling that if something is morally wrong it must be legally wrong and that clever arguments can bring those two things into alignment,” Professor Schuck said.

The elite law schools have for decades been overwhelmingly liberal, Professor Schuck said, and that may have blinded professors to problems with their arguments. Only one law school brief, organized by members of the faculty of George Mason University School of Law, supported the military.

“If you put together a Vietnam legacy, a gay rights ideology, the idea that courts can solve all problems and the legal academy’s echo chamber, you get this result, ” said Joseph Zengerle, an adjunct professor at George Mason who helped write the brief.

We’ll vote for the latter. Uniformity of opinion allowed to thrive too long insulated from challenge inevitably breeds subjectivity and self indulgence.

Ezio Capizzano

The British Telegraph reports:

A 70-year-old Italian law professor has discovered a new career writing erotic memoirs after losing his university job following accusations that he offered students high marks for sex.

Ezio Capizzano, a former law teacher at Camerino University in central Italy, gives detailed accounts of his amorous “tutorials” in the book, The Last Baron In A Campus of Tulips, published this week.

When it emerged in 2002 that he had video-taped his “one-to-one” tutorials he became a household name in Italy and a role model for ageing Casanovas. Far from condemning him, the media lauded Prof Capizzano.

The respected Corriere della Sera newspaper described him as “Italy’s answer to Sean Connery”.

In 2004 he was acquitted of any wrongdoing after the court accepted his claim that the students had all given their full consent.

And Anza.it predicts Video sex romp account set for best-seller list :

Camerino, January 10 – A university lecturer sacked for secretly filming sex sessions with students has told all in his first book .

Law professor Ezio Capizzano, dubbed ‘the porno prof’ by the Italian media, gives lavish details of his amorous encounters in the book, which he has called The Last Baron In A Campus of Tulips .

In Italian, ‘barone’ means a tenured professor with a lot of clout .

The book, which looks set for the best-seller lists, also contains excerpts of letters from students as well as Capizzano’s musings on philosophy and religion .

The lecturer in agrarian and commercial law lost his job in this small Marche town after his sex videos found their way onto newsstands, sparking a nationwide scandal. Despite the apparent evidence against him, Capizzano was cleared in June 2004 of obtaining sexual favours in exchange for boosting grades .

“I’d do it all again,” he said after the judgement came down .

Scott Johnson of Power Line links an Investors Business Daily editorial which notes:

Representatives of autocratic theocracies that finance terror, oppress women and consider homosexuality a capital crime are welcomed at Harvard and other campuses. But not the U.S. Marines.

The 39 colleges of Oxford University are destined to lose their 800 year-old right to select their own students in a plan drafted by a so-called “working party” of sophisters, calculators, and economists appointed by the Labour Party’s collectivizing commissars in a new social engineering outrage aimed at further levelling. The Telegraph musters at least a modestly pejorative headline of protest.

The Times

But even this is insufficient. The Guardian exposes other surviving relicts of elitism:

Oxford University is being accused of snobbery after leaked details of admissions criteria for a post-graduate course revealed that tutors were instructed to give preference to candidates from “prestigious” universities over those from “second-rank” and “weak” ones…

Michael Driscoll, the vice-chancellor of Middlesex University and the chair of the Campaign for Mainstream Universities, representing the new universities, said the guidance was appalling.

“On what basis can they be saying that a degree from one institution is worth more than a degree from another?”

Hat tip to Cacciaguida.

The New York Times reports that at the University of the South (recently renamed as “Sewanee: The University of the South”), as at numerous other Southern colleges and universities these days, traditions and symbols pertaining to history and Southern regionalism, especially those associated with the Lost Confederate Cause, are being bowdlerized out of existence.

Submission to contemporary prejudice and political correctness is seen by many college executives as necessary for achieving so-called “diverse” enrollments, i.e. student bodies featuring significant percentages of members of designated victims’ groups, and national reputation.

The flags from Southern states disappeared from the chapel. The ceremonial baton dedicated to a Confederate general who helped found the Ku Klux Klan vanished. The very name of the University of the South was tweaked, becoming Sewanee: The University of the South, with decided emphasis on Sewanee…

Across the country, colleges are trying to reposition themselves to attract more high-quality students and raise their national profiles. But perhaps nowhere is this more challenging than in the South, where university officials often find themselves struggling to temper Confederate imagery without alienating alumni and donors determined to uphold their heritage.