General Petraeus has received a lot of the sort of service awards which senior officers accumulate simply as a result of having occupied important posts, but he has also been awarded the Bronze Star (with “V” device signifying it was awarded for valor), presumably in connection with his leading the 101st Airborne in the 2003 drive on Baghdad.

Members of the United States Marine Corps are wont to comment negatively on the abundance of badges and awards displayed by US Army personnel. References to alleged prizes for spelling and deportment are not unusual. But when the kind of badinage normally occurring in the context of interservice rivalries starts coming out of the mouths of liberal sissies who probably flunked their physicals for the local cub scout pack, it is time to be outraged.

First, Matthew DeBord, best-known as a wine writer, in the LA Times, has the temerity to offer General Petraeus fashion advice on how to wear the uniform when delivering testimony to Congress:

Gen. David H. Petraeus may be as impressive a military professional as the United States has developed in recent years, but he could use some strategic advice on how to manage his sartorial PR. Witness his congressional testimony on the state of the war in Iraq. There he sits in elaborate Army regalia, four stars glistening on each shoulder, nine rows of colorful ribbons on his left breast, and various other medallions, brooches and patches scattered across the rest of the available real estate on his uniform. He even wears his name tag, a lone and incongruous hunk of cheap plastic in a region of pristine gilt, just in case the politicians aren’t sure who he is.

That’s a lot of martial bling, especially for an officer who hadn’t seen combat until five years ago. Unfortunately, brazen preening and “ribbon creep” among the Army’s modern-day upper crust have trumped the time-honored military virtues of humility, duty and personal reserve.

This civilian wine expert is obviously unacquainted (probably because the US military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy was too upsetting) with the fact that the correct uniform and the display of medals and decorations for various occasions are prescribed. Soldiers do not, in fact, while dressing in the morning, get to reflect, “I’m a bit out-of-sorts today, and don’t feel like getting all dressed up. I think I’ll just wear my fatigues.”

Superannuated television personality Dick Cavett (famous back when the Beatles were the coming thing) emerges from the assisted-living home to bring his 1960s perspective to the matter.

I can’t look at Petraeus — his uniform ornamented like a Christmas tree with honors, medals and ribbons — without thinking of the great Mort Sahl at the peak of his brilliance. He talked about meeting General Westmoreland in the Vietnam days. Mort, in a virtuoso display of his uncanny detailed knowledge — and memory — of such things, recited the lengthy list (”Distinguished Service Medal, Croix de Guerre with Chevron, Bronze Star, Pacific Campaign” and on and on), naming each of the half-acre of decorations, medals, ornaments, campaign ribbons and other fripperies festooning the general’s sternum in gaudy display. Finishing the detailed list, Mort observed, “Very impressive!” Adding, “If you’re twelve.”

There are regrettably some people in this country, so self-obsessed and so utterly removed from reality, that they are able to believe that their own third-rate careers in the entertainment industry place them in a position to sneer at men who have devoted their careers to defending their country, and who have on occasion placed their lives in hazard to preserve this country’s freedom and institutions. If military service and its symbols fail to impress the likes of Mort Sahl and Dick Cavett, that is a reflection on them and not upon the soldiers they have the unmitigated indecency to mock.

Yes, makin’ mock o’ uniforms that guard you while you sleep
Is cheaper than them uniforms, an’ they’re starvation cheap.

–Kipling

Professor Richard Crandall posted a photo of Ronald Reagan and various conservative political cartoons on his office door at Lake Superior State University. He was reprimanded and ordered to remove the materials last year, as he had created “a hostile environment.” Meanwhile, other faculty members posting non-conservative expressions of political opinion were left alone. Is anyone surprised?

Inside Higher Ed

Michelle Malkin updates the Absolut advertising controversy, reporting that, having angered many Americans with an ill-conceived ad campaign picturing the entire American Southwest, including California, Texas, New Mexico, Utah, Colorado, Arizona (and beyond the Southwest: Oregon, along with most of Wyoming, and much of Idaho) incorporated into Mexico, in the face of mounting criticism, Absolut withdrew the offending ad and apologized, and then the Swedish company, now part of France’s Pernod Ricard, announced its launch of new Gay-oriented advertising.

Bar owner Matthew Rogers of Pt. Richmond, Calif., sent this note to the company: “I run a bar in Pt. Richmond. … After seeing your ad campaign where you show a western map of the United States in which California is part of Mexico again, I’ve decided to do the following: 1) Never carry Absolut. Ever; 2) Lower the price of Ketel One vodka to $2 a shot indefinitely to build loyalty; 3) Print a copy of your ad and put it above the Ketel One drink special; 4) Tell all my friends and family what Absolut thinks of the United States of America and our right to enforce border laws. I am on the frontline of illegal immigration and its effects. Where are you? Oh, yes, Sweden. Good riddance.”

Absolut’s initial response to complaints was to hang up on consumers who phoned and to delete their e-mail without bothering to read it. But the controversy spread like a California wildfire stoked by Internet Santa Ana winds. In the first of two statements, Absolut Vice President of Corporate Communications Paula Eriksson attempted to douse the flames by touting the company’s embrace-diversity ethos. “As a global company,” she pedantically intoned, “we recognize that people in different parts of the world may lend different perspectives or interpret our ads in a different way than was intended in that market. Obviously, this ad was run in Mexico, and not the U.S. — that ad might have been very different.”

That arrogant, p.c. sanctimony had the effect of pouring gas on the flames. So over the weekend, Eriksson issued a new statement announcing withdrawal of the ad. It was comically titled “We apologize” — and disingenuously argued that “In no way was the ad meant to offend or disparage, or advocate an altering of borders, lend support to any anti-American sentiment, or to reflect immigration issues. …This is a genuine and sincere apology.” …

Fresh off its Aztlan debacle, the company announced its newest campaign this week featuring an ad titled “Ruler,” described as “a humorous look at gay men and their fascination with perfect, eight-inch ‘member’ measurements.”

Absolut Press Release:

The brand’s two new, daring print ad executions include: “Ruler,” a humorous look at gay men and their fascination with perfect, eight-inch “member” measurements, while “Stadium” engages on the issue of gay marriage when one half of a gay couple “pops” the question during a sports outing. Created by SPI Marketing/Moon City in New York, these new lifestyle-driven ads build on a heritage of advertisements that prominently featured gay artists since 1984.

“As a long-time supporter of the gay and lesbian community, we acknowledge that you can’t simply speak to gay men and lesbians as consumers, but instead need to make real connections to their lives which we believe we are achieving with our new creative executions,” said Jeffrey Moran, ABSOLUT® spokesperson. “As a company, we respect gay men and lesbians not simply in advertising messages, but behind the scenes as well. We’re not gay-washing here.”

The preferred brand of vodka for gay and lesbian consumers, ABSOLUT® was one of the first major brands to place an ad in a gay magazine 27 years ago and is a long-time supporter of events and causes important to the gay and lesbian community.

Original story.

——————————-

Dominique Poirier also notified us of Absolut’s apology.

Ed Kaitz, at American Thinker, has some observations on the contradictions inherent in the rhetoric of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.

Recent polls are showing that by a good 60% margin, Barack Obama is seen as a candidate who can “unify” the nation. This may be the most brilliant example of what George Orwell called “doublethink” in the recent history of the Democratic Party. Think about it: for over thirty, maybe forty years the American public has been variously sermonized and threatened by crusaders in Obama’s same party into embracing not unity, but “diversity.” Call it what you will – brilliant or duplicitous – it is still a masterful political achievement.

For decades students in our schools have been told to “celebrate difference” and to see America as a “salad bowl” rather than the “melting pot” of old. Those who resisted the collective swoon for “diversity” and who descried the resulting balkanization of our educational institutions were forced into “diversity training seminars” and reeducated under the watchful eyes of “diversity officers.” For as Mao Tse Tung famously said, those who oppose progressive change “must go through a stage of compulsion before they can enter the stage of voluntary, conscious change.” But if these polls are correct, and Obama is indeed the great unifier, what will happen then to all of the “diversity officers” and “diversity training” seminars on our college campuses and in our corporations? Will the entire “diversity” superstructure in our society finally be dismantled? Will Democrats, for maybe the first time since JFK or MLK start talking about what unites us rather than what divides us? Will citizens be thought of as “Americans” first and not categorized and rewarded based on skin color? Is Obama, the great unifier, going to finally liberate us from this divisive ideology? Don’t hold your breath.

George Orwell claimed that there was something more calculated at work when politicians begin to claim for example that “Slavery is Freedom” or that “Hate is Love,” or in Mao Tse Tung’s words, that “Compulsion is Voluntary.” The new and improved Democratic Party version seems to be that “Diversity is Unity.” Orwell called this “doublethink” and he claimed that it was a condition endemic to the totalitarian mind. It meant the ability “to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory” and “to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies.” For example, a liberal socialist political platform usually involves “liberating” us from our attachments to property, families and nation in the name of “freedom.” When the State chooses for us, however, the result is slavery. Doublethink in Mr. Obama’s case (“Diversity is Unity!”) gives him the luxury of defending not only the divisive and intolerant Reverend Wright and his party’s divisive policies over the years, but it also allows him to be seen as the savior who will finally make America whole.

Since it is difficult to recall a time when national unity was high on the list of Democratic Party priorities, the coming months should be a rather curious time for many. …

When.. divisive affirmative action programs were challenged in courts across the country “diversity” was invented as a way of continuing the assault on what many considered “white privilege” or “white oppression.” In the final analysis however, diversity or multiculturalism were never more than a charade to cover the underlying Marxist theory of conflict. Minority students brought in on affirmative action were rarely encouraged to study other languages and cultures because the liberal gatekeepers understood something rather disturbing about this endeavor: a thorough and sensitive investigation of other cultures and religions reveals a rather conservative, not liberal, orientation in their respective beliefs and habits. …

The bottom line is that when the Left in this country embraced Marxism they committed themselves to conflict and division, not cooperation. Obama, unlike Hillary however is smart enough to understand that fostering division is a poor strategy for winning elections. In the words of Eric Hoffer:

Those who would transform a nation or the world cannot do so by breeding or captaining discontent. . . They must know how to kindle and fan an extravagant hope.

Obama’s relationship with Reverend Wright complicates this strategy, as does his receptivity to and defense of the anger in much of the black electorate. But if Obama’s message is “unity” then it means absolutely nothing unless he addresses several decades of divide and conquer liberal ideology. In other words, unless he does this, Obama’s message will amount to nothing other than the latest form of Orwellian doublethink: “Diversity is Unity!”

Maureen Dowd gives a pretty good summary of the liberal perspective on public affairs on the editorial page of today’s New York Times.

Politics, you see, is really a branch of the entertainment industry. What matters is fashion and perception. George W. Bush’s foreign policy has been opposed by the international community of fashion, and by provoking its wrath, Bush has damaged the image of the United States. The decision on whom to elect president in 2008 needs to be made on image grounds.

It’s all about the magic, really.

And whether we can take a flier on this skinny guy with the strange name and braided ancestry to help us get it back.

Bernard Kouchner, the foreign minister of France and a strong supporter of the United States, recently observed that President Bush has done such a number on our image in the world that no one will be able to restore the luster.

“I think the magic is over,” he said.

Pas si vite, mon vieux. In terms of style, the Obamas could give Carla Bruni-Sarkozy a run for her euros. …

Obama, like the preternaturally gifted young heroes in mythical tales, is still learning to channel his force. He can ensorcell when he has to, and he has viral appeal. Who else could alchemize a nuanced 40-minute speech on race into must-see YouTube viewing for 20-year-olds?

But at several crucial points in the last year, he held back when he should have poured on, leaving his nemesis around to damage him further.

Obama has social engineering plans as ambitious, in their own way, as the Bush administration’s failed social engineering plans to change the psyche of America and the Middle East.

“I think the president needs to use the bully pulpit to change our culture,” he said Thursday, talking energy at a $1,000-a-plate fund-raiser in Manhattan. “We are a wasteful culture. It’s always been that way because of our history. We do everything big.”

He wants to make government “cool” again. He wants to banish the red-blue culture of conflict on TV and in Washington. And he wants to make the country healthier, thinner and smarter. “I want our students learning art and music and science and poetry,” he says, in a crowd-pleasing line.

From image flows practical effect, in Dowd’s fantasy. All you have to do is elect this season’s smooth-talking democrat, and abracadabra! all over America, healthier and thinner children are learning “art and music and science and poetry.” The bitter divisions of race and class, city and country, left and right vanish overnight. Republican deer-hunters need only listen to the latest Obama speech on YouTube, and they are instantly converted into tree-hugging socialist supporters of Sarah Brady. The entire country, from sea to shining sea, is magically transformed into one super-sized version of Berkeley, California.

For a liberal, it must be pretty to think so.

George Will discusses the liberal approach to charity: “Let’s have the government make George do it.”

Residents of Austin, home of Texas’s government and flagship university, have very refined social consciences, if they do say so themselves, and they do say so, speaking via bumper stickers. Don R. Willett, a justice of the state Supreme Court, has commuted behind bumpers proclaiming “Better a Bleeding Heart Than None at All,” “Practice Random Acts of Kindness and Senseless Beauty,” “The Moral High Ground Is Built on Compassion,” “Arms Are For Hugging,” “Will Work (When the Jobs Come Back From India),” “Jesus Is a Liberal,” “God Wants Spiritual Fruits, Not Religious Nuts,” “The Road to Hell Is Paved With Republicans,” “Republicans Are People Too — Mean, Selfish, Greedy People” and so on. But Willett thinks Austin subverts a stereotype: “The belief that liberals care more about the poor may scratch a partisan or ideological itch, but the facts are hostile witnesses.”

Sixteen months ago, Arthur C. Brooks, a professor at Syracuse University, published “Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism.” The surprise is that liberals are markedly less charitable than conservatives.

If many conservatives are liberals who have been mugged by reality, Brooks, a registered independent, is, as a reviewer of his book said, a social scientist who has been mugged by data. They include these findings:

Although liberal families’ incomes average 6 percent higher than those of conservative families, conservative-headed households give, on average, 30 percent more to charity than the average liberal-headed household ($1,600 per year vs. $1,227).

Conservatives also donate more time and give more blood.

Residents of the states that voted for John Kerry in 2004 gave smaller percentages of their incomes to charity than did residents of states that voted for George Bush.

Bush carried 24 of the 25 states where charitable giving was above average.

In the 10 reddest states, in which Bush got more than 60 percent majorities, the average percentage of personal income donated to charity was 3.5. Residents of the bluest states, which gave Bush less than 40 percent, donated just 1.9 percent.

People who reject the idea that “government has a responsibility to reduce income inequality” give an average of four times more than people who accept that proposition.

Brooks demonstrates a correlation between charitable behavior and “the values that lie beneath” liberal and conservative labels. Two influences on charitable behavior are religion and attitudes about the proper role of government. …

Reviewing Brooks’s book in the Texas Review of Law & Politics, Justice Willett notes that Austin — it voted 56 percent for Kerry while he was getting just 38 percent statewide — is ranked by the Chronicle of Philanthropy as 48th out of America’s 50 largest cities in per capita charitable giving. Brooks’s data about disparities between liberals’ and conservatives’ charitable giving fit these facts: Democrats represent a majority of the wealthiest congressional districts, and half of America’s richest households live in states where both senators are Democrats.

While conservatives tend to regard giving as a personal rather than governmental responsibility, some liberals consider private charity a retrograde phenomenon — a poor palliative for an inadequate welfare state and a distraction from achieving adequacy by force, by increasing taxes. Ralph Nader, running for president in 2000, said: “A society that has more justice is a society that needs less charity.” Brooks, however, warns: “If support for a policy that does not exist . . . substitutes for private charity, the needy are left worse off than before. It is one of the bitterest ironies of liberal politics today that political opinions are apparently taking the place of help for others.”

In 2000, brows were furrowed in perplexity because Vice President Al Gore’s charitable contributions, as a percentage of his income, were below the national average: He gave 0.2 percent of his family income, one-seventh of the average for donating households. But Gore “gave at the office.” By using public office to give other people’s money to government programs, he was being charitable, as liberals increasingly, and conveniently, understand that word.

Professorfate, at Daily Kos, proposes a lesson for Americans.

As a nation the United States no longer has the remotest idea about what it really feels like to be part of a war zone. Americans have lost the empathy that is necessary to make an informed, meaningful, compassionate decision about whether or not war should be waged. While candidates fight over who has the required experience to properly oversee our republic’s international interests, none realize that none of them have ever felt what it is like to have war waged in their neighborhood and occupied by intruders. While they may claim to know when to wage wars and to know the horrors of war, they only know them intellectually. They can’t claim that they have emotionally felt them. No one who was born and raised in the United States can claim that and none can really feel it. We have allowed a Congress and an administration to encourage hate and to hi-jack our compassion. In fact, as a nation we have lost our compassion.

Unfortunately, America is at a point that to be able to really feel again, to regain that compassion, it needs to be invaded and occupied in the same way that we have invaded and occupied Iraq.

I think myself that Professorfate ought to advance that kind of thesis somewhere in the real America. There are a lot of people around who have a moral lesson to share with him.

H/T to SavannahWinslow via Charles Johnson.

Miguel A. Guanipa, in the course of analyzing Obama’s vulnerabilities in the presidential campaign, debunks the conventional leftwing meme that it is American action which produces terrorism, the contemporary political equivalent of the medieval belief in the spontaneous generation of pests and vermin from decaying matter.

With the irreverent chutzpah of a snickering 8 year old tattler telling on his older sibling, Obama indulged an excitable crowd of adoring fans with the rather overused and unproven refrain that — contrary to McCain’s beliefs — Al Qaeda was not present in Iraq prior to the U.S. invasion. …

To suggest that American intervention begets more terrorism denotes a subtle endorsement of the novel diplomatic principle that a policy of retreat and noninvolvement would automatically yield better relations with the consistently volatile potentates of Middle Eastern regimes. This simple-minded sequitur continues to galvanize radical leftwing Democrats, who are already sold on the proposition that there is an inverse link between the number of terrorists in the world and the level of what is generally considered by them to be America’s modest record of charity and good will through its international relations role.

It is true that terrorism did not make the headlines as frequently when the United States remained basically uninvolved in the political affairs of countries that harbored terrorist organizations. This does not mean that the latter were heretofore virtually nonexistent and suddenly sprang up in response to the United States’ unjustified military intervention in other countries’ affairs.

This is not only a gross misunderstanding of the reasons for the existence of terrorism, it also dishonors the sacrifices of those who have the courage to be proactive about it, and what is worse, it casts them as the culprits in front of a global audience.

By effectively engaging the terrorists, America has simply forced them to expose their clandestine operations, which only the ill-informed would deny have long been in existence. Until they reached an apex of sorts on September 11, 2001, the media had decided that such operations scarcely merited their attention. Since then, simply recycling the same old tune, that it is our fault terrorism has become such a problem around the world, no longer represents a viable argument against intervention anytime the sitting president perceives a clear threat to national security.

Fighting obesity has become a cause for the trendy left in recent years, and like all leftist causes the battle of the bulge finds expression in coercive forms of petty tyranny inevitably producing the kind of story reported by WTNH:

An eighth-grade honors student at a New Haven school has been suspended for buying a bag of candy at school.

Michael Sheridan, a student at Sheridan Middle School, was suspended from school for one day, barred from attending an honors student dinner and stripped of his title as class vice president.

Officials say he was punished because he bought a bag of Skittles from another student.

A school spokeswoman says the New Haven school system banned candy sales and fundraisers in 2003 as part of the districtwide school wellness policy.

Spokeswoman Catherine Sullivan-DeCarlo says there are no candy sales allowed in schools, period.

The student who sold the candy also was suspended.

The Wall Street Journal rejoices that the liberal Seth Grahame-Smith, writing in the Huffington Post, is showing signs of recognizing the fact that we were always dead right about the Clintons, the first step in the Recovery Program converting liberals into neocons.

She has no idea how many times I defended her. How many right-leaning friends and relatives I battled with. How many times I played down her shady business deals and penchant for scandals. . . . She has no idea how frequently I dismissed her husband’s serial adultery as an unfortunate trait of an otherwise brilliant man. For sixteen years, I was a proud soldier in the legion of ‘Clinton apologists’. . . . And then she ran for president. She’s proven that she cares more about ‘Hillary’ than ‘unity.’ More about defeating Obama than defeating the Republicans. She’s become a political suicide-bomber, happy to blow herself to bits — as long as she takes everyone else with her. On Friday, one of Barack Obama’s foreign policy advisors, Samantha Power, resigned after calling Senator Clinton ‘a monster’ during an off-the-record exchange. It was an unfortunate slip, but one that echoed the sentiments of many Clinton apologists like me — who’ve watched Hillary’s descent into pettiness and fear-mongering with the heartbreak of a child who grows up to realize that his beloved mother has been a terrible person all along. Are the conservatives right about the Clintons? Will they do and say anything to get elected? I don’t know. All I know is . . . I’m through apologizing.

Vanderleun identifies the central message of the Obama campaign in a devastating post.

“Give. Us. Something. Here!” — The core Obama campaign slogan.

Can we get us something from the government? Yes we can!

Can we get us more from the government than we’ve gotten already? Yes we can!

Can we get us more of the same service that’s given the country the USPS, the Social Security System, Medicare, and a tax code so complex it needs a semi-truck just to move it around town? Yes we can!

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to the News Junkie.

Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 (passed when liberal Republican Richard Nixon was president, just wait until you see what John McCain doesn’t veto) wound up being interpreted by the Department of Education as requiring colleges and universities to provide “athletic opportunities that are substantially proportionate to the student enrollment,” i.e. a sexual quota.

Since there was inevitably less female participation in athletics, the only way the required “substantial proportionality” could be achieved was pouring money and recruiting effort into female sports while actively reducing male participation. Colleges consequently often, in deference to Title IX, deliberately eliminated lesser (non-profit center) male sports, such as wrestling, swimming, fencing, gymnastics, and volleyball.

Christina Hoff Summers explains that coercive egalitarianism’s new objective is the sciences.

The problem:

Math 55 is advertised in the Harvard catalog as “prob­ably the most difficult undergraduate math class in the country.” It is leg­endary among high school math prodigies, who hear terrifying stories about it in their computer camps and at the Math Olympiads. Some go to Harvard just to have the opportunity to enroll in it. Its formal title is “Honors Advanced Calculus and Linear Algebra,” but it is also known as “math boot camp” and “a cult.” The two-semester fresh­man course meets for three hours a week, but, as the catalog says, homework for the class takes between 24 and 60 hours a week.

Math 55 does not look like America. Each year as many as 50 students sign up, but at least half drop out within a few weeks. As one former student told The Crimson newspaper in 2006, “We had 51 students the first day, 31 students the second day, 24 for the next four days, 23 for two more weeks, and then 21 for the rest of the first semester.” Said another student, “I guess you can say it’s an episode of ‘Survivor’ with people voting themselves off.” The final class roster, according to The Crimson: “45 percent Jewish, 18 percent Asian, 100 percent male.”

Why do women avoid classes like Math 55? Why, in fact, are there so few women in the high echelons of academic math and in the physi­cal sciences?

Women now earn 57 percent of bachelors degrees and 59 percent of masters degrees. According to the Survey of Earned Doctorates, 2006 was the fifth year in a row in which the majority of research Ph.D.’s awarded to U.S. citizens went to women. Women earn more Ph.D.’s than men in the humanities, social sciences, education, and life sciences. Women now serve as presidents of Harvard, MIT, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, and other leading research universities. But elsewhere, the figures are different. Women comprise just 19 percent of tenure-track professors in math, 11 percent in physics, 10 percent in computer science, and 10 percent in electrical engineering. And the pipeline does not promise statistical parity any time soon: women are now earning 24 percent of the Ph.D.’s in the physical sciences—way up from the 4 percent of the 1960s, but still far behind the rate they are winning doctorates in other fields.

The solution:

“The change is glacial,” says Debra Rolison, a physical chemist at the Naval Research Laboratory.

Rolison, who describes herself as an “uppity woman,” has a solution. A popular anti–gender bias lecturer, she gives talks with titles like “Isn’t a Millennium of Affirmative Action for White Men Sufficient?” She wants to apply Title IX to science education. Title IX, the celebrated gender equity provision of the Education Amendments Act of 1972, has so far mainly been applied to college sports. But the measure is not limited to sports. It provides, “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex…be denied the benefits of…any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.” …

..in her enthusiasm for Title IX, Rolison is not alone.

On October 17, 2007, a subcommittee of the House Committee on Science and Technology convened to learn why women are “underrepresented” in academic professorships of science and engineering and to consider what the federal government should do about it.

As a rule, women tend to gravitate to fields such as education, English, psychology, biol­ogy, and art history, while men are much more numerous in physics, mathematics, computer science, and engineering. Why this is so is an interesting question—and the subject of a sub­stantial empirical literature. The research on gender and vocation is complex, vibrant, and full of reasonable disagreements; there is no single, simple answer.

There were, however, no disagreements at the congressional hearing. All five expert wit­nesses, and all five congressmen, Democrat and Republican, were in complete accord. They attributed the dearth of women in university science to a single cause: sexism. And there was no dispute about the solution. All agreed on the need for a revolutionary transformation of American science itself. “Ultimately,” said Kathie Olsen, deputy director of the National Science Foundation, “our goal is to transform, institution by institution, the entire culture of science and engineering in America, and to be inclusive of all—for the good of all.”

Representative Brian Baird, the Washington-state Democrat who chairs the Subcommittee on Research and Science Education, looked at the witnesses and the crowd of more than 100 highly appreciative activists from groups like the American Association of University Women and the National Women’s Law Center and asked, “What kind of hammer should we use?”

From Jim Bass via The Barrister.