Protagoras6

Any thoughts on why neocons would hate Ayn Rand and Objectivism so much (more so, possibly, than even the Christians)?

I don't know the answers, Robert, to your questions relative to the Schramm and Foster. With regard to John Lewis, one can only assume that he naively assumed that his teaching and publication record were so superior that they couldn't possibly deny him tenure. The evidence clearly suggests that he had good reason to think so. The whole thing seems to have gone down something like this. Lewis assumes that he's a slam dunk for tenure and promotion and doesn't object to Foster putting Schramm on the commitee. Schramm then votes against tenure with the rest of the committee supporting tenure. Foster then, despite years of strong letters, rummages through all of Lewis's published writings and digs up a few passages that suggest that Lewis thinks that Aristotelian morality is superior to Christian morality, and recommends that he not be given tenure. Meanwhile, Schramm is working the upper administration and the Board of Trustees.

Here are some more facts that are being discussed on different discussion boards and blogs and which are emerging from people at Ashland. Lewis is also apparently making publicly available all the letters of evaluation concerning his tenure application. 1. A university-wide faculty committee that heard Lewis's appeal ruled unanimously in favor once all the facts were made known. Here's what they found. 2. During Lewis's first year at Ashland six years ago, Peter Schramm, the most senior member of the political science dept. and director of the neocon Ashbrook Center, was formally reprimanded by a dept. personnel committee for violating Lewis's academic freedom. It turns out the dept. chair, David Foster, put Schramm on Lewis's dept. tenure committee. The committee, by majority vote, supported Lewis. Schramm did not. Better yet, it turns out that Schramm is also the only Ashland University faculty member on the university Board of Trustees. Mmmm! 3. Dept. chair, David Foster, is said to have written annual evaluations of Lewis that were highly favorable about his teaching and scholarship every single year until the year Lewis applied for tenure. Foster's tenure letter is said to be a "hit job" against Lewis despite years of very favorable letters. Foster, it turns out, is an adjunct fellow at the Ashbrook Center. It sounds to me that the whole thing was set up by the neocons from the beginning of the process. Apparently there are Muslims teaching at Ashland and many secular liberals who have publicly stated that they are not religious. My guess is that Schramm started the ball rolling in the dept., Foster wrote the first official letter against Lewis, and then Schramm finished the job as a member of the Board of Trustees. The atheist Strausseans used and manipulated the more pious people at Ashland. The big question for me is not why the religious people at Ashland wanted Lewis out, but, rather, why the non-religious Strausseans wanted Lewis out.

The FIRE documents are incredibly revealing. First, it's now absolutely clear that Lewis was required by his Ashland University contract (via the Anthem Foundation grant) to research and write on Ayn Rand. Had Lewis failed to do so, he would have been in violation of his contract. In other words, he was contractually obliged to do exactly what he did. Futhermore, Ashland's public commitment AAUP standards of academic freedom are now a sham given the Lewis case. I don't understand why he didn't sue them. It seems to me that he has a solid case. There have been suggestions all over the blogosphere that a (non-religious) neoconservative cabal were behind Lewis's denial of tenure. This much is publicly known: A quick look at the Ashland political science/history dept. suggests that the dept. is dominated by third-rate Strausseans and that they all have connections to the Ashbrook Center at AU. I know some people who know some people at Ashland, so I hope to know some more very soon.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education has just posted the facts of the John Lewis/Ashland case and their involvement in his defense. It now seems clear that Ashland U. violated its own standards of academic freedom, and it clearly violated their contractual agreement with Lewis. The article and all of the relevant documents can be found at: http://www.thefire.org/index.php/article/8226.html