My new course will be titled “US History: The Awesomeness of Awesome Americans.”

“A Crisis of Competence,” which bills itself as “A Report Prepared for the Regents of the University of California by the California Association of Scholars, A Division of the National Association of Scholars,” (hereafter CAS, for short) has garnered a great deal of attention. It was, apparently, the basis for Rick Santorum’s laughably false claims that California’s universities do not teach US history – though to be fair to the report, Santorum evidently misunderstood what was in it. It was the subject of an April 1 news story (no, not an April Fool’s) in the Los Angeles Times. And it was the basis for a May 20 op-ed in the LA Times. To be fair to the LA Times, its own editorial, on April 7, was skeptical of the report, describing it as “a mélange of anecdotes.”

This is correct: the paper’s methodology is highly suspect, depending as it does on self-selected students’ complaints that the UC tilts leftward. One could with the same level of credibility cite the complaints of the self-selected students sitting in tents as evidence that the UC tilts rightward.

But the paper does worse than depend on anecdotes. At least in the case of history, it relies on tendentious readings of course titles and descriptions to dismiss a serious scholarly discipline.

http://chronicle.com/blognetwork/edgeofthewest/2012/05/25/my-new-course-will-be-titled-us-history-the-awesomeness-of-awesome-americans/

Please read the whole post

From Paul Krugman about this article and right-wing political correctness today in general.

"And then there’s the teaching of history. Eric Rauchway has a great post about attacks on the history curriculum, in which even talking about “immigration and ethnicity” or “environmental history” becomes part of a left-wing conspiracy. As he says, he’ll name his new course “US History: The Awesomeness of Awesome Americans.” That, after all, seems to be the only safe kind of thing to say."

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/26/the-new-political-correctness/