SOAKING THE RUBES WITH CRUZ?Glenn Beck's Blaze posted
this today:
A new online course featuring several notable conservative figures aims to teach students about the history of the conservative movement, a Washington D.C. area based non-profit said this week.
The 14-segment course, sponsored by the Leadership Institute and Free Think University, features "some of the conservative movement’s most influential voices," including Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), talk-show host Mark Levin and the Wall Street Journal's Stephen Moore.
"Leadership Institute believes in equipping the next generation of leaders in America with a clear view of the values and ideals of the American Conservative Tradition," Morton Blackwell, president of the Leadership Institute, said. "We're happy to help bring this world-class college course experience to thousands of students." ...
(Morton Blackwell, you may recall, is
the guy behind the Kerry-mocking purple heart Band-Aids at the 2004 Republican convention.)
So Free Think University is an (alleged) institution of higher learning? How does it work exactly? Well, here's one explanation:
Or, if you want more detail,
The Chronicle of Higher Education says
this, quoting Free Think's co-founder:
Jim Van Eerden has come up with a resource that he says will give conservative parents a chance to counteract any liberal indoctrination of their children before it happens. His plan would let parents deposit tuition money into a "scholarship" that would go to a child's college only after the student had passed one or more short online courses offering a "more balanced" take on various issues.
Mr. Van Eerden, who serves as an "entrepreneur in residence" at Grove City College, a Christian college in Pennsylvania, has opened a nonprofit Web site, FreeThinkU, that offers almost 30 free "courses" -- each designed to last only a few hours, culminating in a multiple-choice quiz—on topics such as global warming, the Second Amendment, and American exceptionalism....
The idea, said Mr. Van Eerden, is that rather than paying their children's tuition outright, parents and grandparents will sponsor scholarships through FreeThinkU. In order to unlock the scholarship funds, their college-going progeny will have to take a series of FreeThinkU courses....
That type of arrangement, called an "UP! Scholarship," will become available to concerned parents and grandparents this spring for a $76 membership fee.
Members can set up other scholarships as well, such as funds aimed at students at particular universities. FreeThinkU believes it can harness money that alumni might have donated to their alma maters, and instead get them to sponsor scholarships that would send current students through FreeThinkU courses, rewarding the students with money for tuition....
Now, let me say something to anyone who thinks that, yes, Ted Cruz and the other new right-wing extremists are bad, and their voters are nuts, but you've got the exact same thing taking place on the liberal side of the spectrum. Well, no, you don't. There is no liberal senator whose speeches are repurposed by a phony-baloney "university" that seems like nothing more than a clever means of extracting cash and e-mail addresses from credulous conservatives.
Yeah, Elizabeth Warren taught students, but
she was a tenured professor. Her lectures had real educational value. No one on the left is going to pay money to subsidize an ersatz school with "courses" that consists of warmed-over political speeches from Warren or other Democratic pols. We don't operate that way. We don't think political speeches by pols and pundits we like contain all the collected wisdom of the ages. The only major political party whose adherents engage in that sort of cult thinking is the GOP.
