America is rife
with morally dubious awards
By John Leo
March 13, 2006
Yahoo!News
Rachel Corrie, a young
American woman accidentally flattened by an Israeli bulldozer during a
protest in Gaza three years ago, is a hero to Palestinians and the
anti-American left. When she died, a photo of her burning an American
flag sealed her high status on the left. Her honors included many
vigils, memorials, buildings named for her, at least two plays, an
annual pancake breakfast, and the Rachel Corrie Award for courage in
the teaching of writing. Why helping people learn to write should
require courage is not explained.
I have been planning for some time
to write about America's peculiar awards, prizes and memorials, and the
flourishing of Rachel Corrie awards is a good excuse to list some of
them.
Stanford University gives the Allan
Cox medal each year for faculty excellence in guiding student research.
Cox was a professor of geophysics and dean of the school of earth
sciences at Stanford. He committed suicide in 1987 while under
investigation for sexually molesting the son of a former student. The
molesting allegedly went on for five years, starting when the boy was
14.
One of the most elegant prep
schools, Phillips Exeter Academy, gives an annual Edmund E. Perry Award
for "diversity and cultural awareness." Perry was an outstanding black
student at Phillips Exeter who was shot to death in Harlem while trying
to mug a plainclothes cop.
Convicted cop-killer Mumia
Abu-Jamal has been honored as a commencement speaker (via audiotape) at
Antioch College, Evergreen State University, Occidental College and the
University of California-Santa Cruz.
Warren Kimbo confessed to shooting
a fellow Black Panther in the back of the head. After his release from
prison, he was accepted at Harvard, then served as a dean at Eastern
Connecticut State University.
Susan Rosenberg, an advocate of
"collective violence" against the U.S. government, was caught with
nearly 700 pounds of explosives in 1984, and went to prison to begin
serving a 58-year term. She was pardoned by Bill Clinton, then hired as
a writing instructor by Hamilton College in upstate New York, the
institution that gave us Ward Churchill. Her course was in "Resistance
Memoirs: Writing, Identity and Change."
Bard College notoriously maintains
a chair in social studies named for Alger Hiss, the communist spy,
traitor and perjurer. This is perhaps the stupidest honor given
anywhere in America. The University of Washington's Harry Bridges
Center for Labor Studies is named for the late and powerful labor
leader, who was a communist, a perjurer and an apologist for Stalin.
Last year the Borough of Manhattan
Community College in New York announced a new scholarship named for Ho
Chi Minh and another honoring Joanne Chesimard, the former Black
Panther and convicted murderer of a New Jersey police officer. Both
scholarships were quickly renamed after protests.
Stanford Law School paid Lynne
Stewart, the lawyer who had been indicted for aiding Islamic
terrorists, to speak and mentor students at a conference. After loud
complaints, the school withdrew the word "mentor" from her conference
title, but let her conduct mentoring and deliver her lecture anyway.
Since then, she has been convicted on all five counts of conspiring to
aid terrorists and lying to the government.
Jeffrey Eden, a 17-year-old Rhode
Island student, created a high-school art project comparing President
Bush to Adolf Hitler, complete with three swastikas, little toy
figurines and several slogans. One slogan was "Hitler's own
justification was his own hatred." The Bush-equals-Hitler artwork was
just what some people wanted to see. It got an A from his teacher and a
silver key at the Rhode Island scholastic art awards.
Villanova University installed a
memorial plaque honoring a professor who killed her Down syndrome baby
and herself in 2003. After protests, including some from parents of
Down children, the plaque was removed. A spokesman said, "At no time
did the university nor anyone associated with the university intend to
devalue the sanctity of life."
And we have the awards that many
Austrians and other Europeans wanted to bestow on Tookie Williams, the
unusually vicious multiple murderer who was executed in California late
last year. He was nominated for a Nobel Peace prize by opponents of the
death penalty, and when Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger denied Williams
clemency, a drive began to remove Arnold's name from an Austrian sports
stadium and dedicate the building to Tookie instead. Awards are the new
frontier of moral confusion.
Copyright © 2006 Yahoo! Inc.
All rights reserved.
Questions or Comments
Privacy Policy -Terms of Service -
Copyright/IP Policy - Ad Feedback