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Cat Defender

Exposing the Lies and Crimes of Bird Advocates, Wildlife Biologists, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, PETA, the Humane Society of the United States, Exterminators, Vivisectors, the Scientific Community, Fur Traffickers, Cloners, Breeders, Designer Pet Purveyors, Hoarders, Motorists, the United States Military, and Other Ailurophobes

Monday, July 18, 2011

Evil Professors Have Transformed College Campuses into Hotbeds of Hatred Where Cats Routinely Are Vilified, Horribly Abused, and Systematically Killed



"There's no (other) data set like this for cats. Without these sensors, it would require a field team of ten to twelve people to collect that data."
-- Jeff Horn of the University of Illinois


Bird advocate Nico Dauphiné of the National Zoo in Washington, who back in May was arrested for attempting to poison a colony of homeless cats, is far from being the only academic who feels that she has a god-given right not only to take the law into her own hands and kill cats with impunity but also to shanghai countless others into becoming research guinea pigs. (See Cat Defender post of July 12, 2011 entitled "The Arrest of Nico Dauphiné for Attempting to Poison a Colony of Homeless Cats Unmasks the National Zoo as a Hideout for Ailurophobes and Criminals.")

In fact, it has become standard practice on college campuses all across the world for ornithologists, wildlife biologists, zoologists, and their like-minded colleagues from other disciplines to steal, kidnap, hideously abuse, and kill untold thousands of cats each year. Although their patently criminal behavior violates every anti-cruelty statute on the books, neither humane groups nor the police will lift so much as finger in order to bring these supremely evil professors and their subalterns to the altar of justice.

To top it all off, just about all of their heinous crimes are paid for by welfare dollars cadged from the public. That in itself makes the politicians who approve their funding and the public which foots the bill complicit in their crimes.

Even worse, all of their bogus, fabricated research is then used in order to justify large-scale eradications and draconian legislation which tramples upon the rights of cats. Although it is not known how many ornithologists and wildlife biologists are actively engaged in abusing and killing cats, anecdotal evidence, their anti-cat rants, and the few of them that have run egregiously afoul of the law and been arrested, tends to suggest that the number is in the thousands.

When they re not actually physically harming cats, they cool their heels by demonizing the species and indoctrinating their students to do likewise. In their grand scheme of things, not only will their brainwashed students carry on their machinations long after they are rotting in their graves but, hopefully, they will take up arms and thus commit the types of atrocities that they are far too cowardly to carry out themselves.

Having honed their manipulative skills to a sharpened razor's edge through centuries of practice, the members of the professorial class are old hands when it comes to exploiting and using the young, impressionable, and naïve for their own ends. They are in fact so accomplished in their métier that they stack up rather well when pitted against such other age-old villains as capitalists, militarists, and salvation hustlers.

Recently, for example, Jeff Horn, Nohra Mateus-Pinella, Richard Warner, and Edward Heske of the University of Illinois announced the results of a two-year study wherein they repeatedly trapped and radio-collared forty-two homeless and domesticated cats in and around Champaign and Urbana. In addition to the radio collars, twenty-three of the cats also were forced to wear activity tracking devices that were equipped with tilt and vibration sensors that allegedly were able to determine whenever any of them killed another animal.

"There's no (other) data set like this for cats," Horn caroled triumphantly May 26th on the university's web site. (See "Researchers Track Secret Lives of Feral and Free-Roaming House Cats" and "Home Range, Habitat Use, and Activity Patterns of Free-Roaming Domestic Cats" in The Wildlife Society's Journal of Wildlife Management, volume 75, issue 5, July 2011, pages 1177-1185.) "Without these sensors, it would require a field team of ten to twelve people to collect that data." (See photo of him above.)

As per usual, Horn and his fellow criminals have not disclosed either where they obtained the cats or what was done with them at the conclusion of the study. The cats, quite obviously, were repeatedly trapped by the professors and fitting them with tracking devices also required that they were sedated each time. While they had them at their mercy, the professors no doubt took blood samples, weighed and measured them, and tested them for the presence of diseases.

In addition to the harmful side effects brought on by both the repeated trappings and the barbiturates, there simply is not any way that being burdened with both radio collars and activity tracking devices could have been beneficial to the cats' health. In particular, being forced to lug around the professors' spyware no doubt impeded their movements, ability to hunt, and diminished the foot speed and climbing agility that they require in order to escape predators.

For instance, on February 3, 2010, Holly Crawford of Sweet Valley, Pennsylvania, was convicted of piercing the ears, necks, and tails of kittens. Jewelry then was inserted in their ears while submission rings were threaded through their necks and docked tails.

At trial, veterinarian Melinda Merck testified that those piercings had damaged the kittens' delicate hearing, balance, and jumping ability. Extrapolating from Merck's expert testimony, it is hard not to believe that far worse damage was done to the cats so hideously abused by Horn and his subalterns.

Since implanted microchips have been shown to cause cancer in both cats and dogs along with the fact that it is strongly suspected that the use of mobile phones and laptop computers causes similar health problems in humans, the radiation emitted from Horn's tracking devices very well could have done irreparable damage to the cats. (See Cat Defender posts of November 6, 2010 and September 21, 2007 entitled, respectively, "Bulkin Contracts Cancer from an Implanted Microchip and Now It Is Time for Digital Angel and Merck to Answer for Their Crimes in a Court of Law" and "FDA Is Suppressing Research That Shows Implanted Microchips Cause Cancer in Mice, Rats, and Dogs" as well as London's Independent, June 1, 2011, "Mobile Phone Users Warned over Cancer Link.")

That is even more so the case because the systematic abuse meted out to the cats dragged on for at least two years and they were living outdoors and on their own for most of that period. Yet Horn and his fellow cat-haters and abusers are walking around as free as birds and are continuing to abuse cats whereas Crawford at least was forced out of business, sentenced to six-months of house arrest, and placed on probation for twenty-one months. (See Cat Defender post of April 24, 2010 entitled "Holly Crawford Hits the Jackpot by Drawing a Judge Who Simply Adores Kitten Mutilators and Dope Addicts.")

Furthermore, there is something not only morally reprehensible but also sadistic about the way in which Horn and his colleagues delighted in the cats' interminable suffering. "That particular male cat was not getting food from humans, to my knowledge, but somehow it survived out there amidst coyotes and foxes," he marveled to the University of Illinois' web site in the article cited supra. "It crossed every street in the area where it was trapped. (It navigated) stop lights, parking lots. We found it denning under a softball field during a game."

Needless to say, any halfway decent human being would have attempted to alleviate the cat's suffering by providing him with food, water, shelter, security, and veterinary assistance. The bottom line on diabolical monsters like Horn, Mateus-Pinella, Warner, and Heske is that they do not have an ounce of either compassion or common decency in their miserable old bones; that alone makes them capable of almost any evil.

H. G. Wells was well acquainted with no-good rotters like Horn and his crew. "To this day I have never been troubled about the ethics of the matter," Dr. Moreau confessed to Edward Prendick in The Island of Doctor Moreau. "The study of nature makes a man at least as remorseless as nature."

At the University of Reading in Berkshire, environmental biologist Rebecca Dulieu and her fellow cat-haters are in the midst of a four-year study that is almost identical to the one just completed by the University of Illinois. The one major difference is that Dulieu somehow has managed to inveigle up to two-hundred-fifty cat owners into donating the services of their companions.

Like the cats in the Illinois' study, those in Reading, Nottingham, and Brighton will be saddled with both radio collars and what Dulieu calls acceleration data loggers. "For the first time, pet cats will be fitted with data loggers attached to a harness which will log their every movement and allow us to identify actions which have distinctive signatures such as eating, drinking and hunting," she boasted to the BBC on February 16, 2009. (See "Cats Tagged in Bird Killing Study.")

In addition to cruelly and inhumanely allowing their cats to be turned into guinea pigs, study participants have consented to respond to door-to-door surveys and to keep logs of the number and types of dead animals that their companions bring home. They also have agreed to store the dead bodies in plastic bags which they in turn will hand over to Dulieu.

Data collected from the study, "What the Cat Brought In," will in turn be used in order to justify feline eradication efforts in England and elsewhere. For example, Dulieu's comrades-in-arms at the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds already have conducted extermination campaigns against, inter alia, Lundy rats and ruddy ducks. (See Daily Mail, January 22, 2011, "My Cats Aren't a Danger to Wildlife...but the Power-Crazed RSPB Is.")

"We will be able to work out precisely how many animals a cat is killing every year, and from that estimate a national figure," Dulieu boldly predicted to the Guardian on February 15, 2009. (See "Special Tags to Measure How Often Cats Kill.") "It will be a pretty formidable number."

Her last declaration is an admission that she and her colleagues already have arrived at their conclusions and that the tagging study is being undertaken solely in order to fabricate data desperately needed in order to give their research the semblance of credibility. Much more importantly, both Dulieu's and Horn's extraordinary claims about the reliability of their data loggers are grossly exaggerated to say the least.

First of all, just because a cat occasionally gets its claws on a mouse or a bird and plays with it for a while does not necessarily mean that it will end up killing it. Most of the time these animals escape although they do sometimes sustain injuries. That is due principally to cats' notoriously poor eyesight. They can see practically nothing in front of them and instead are forced to rely almost entirely upon sound and smell when hunting.

Secondly, cats also chase worms, ants, and other insects crawling on the ground. They play with flies, bees, leaves, and other debris blowing in the wind, their mates, and any number of other objects. They also do somersaults in the snow, wallow in leaves, engage in mating rituals, experience cat fits, and chase strings. They additionally act in self-defense when they are attacked by blue jays, hawks, gulls, owls, dogs, and other predators.

Consequently, considerably more than tilt and vibration sensors are required in order to determine what a cat is doing. That, of course, is of no concern to Horn and Dulieu. After all, honesty, integrity, and a commitment to the truth never have been the strong suits of inveterate cat-haters; any manufactured lie, no matter how absurd, is good enough for them.

As for cat owners such as Robert Davey and his daughter, Sarah, who have volunteered the services of their aging cat, Guinness, to Dulieu, they surely must be either closet ailurophobes or the world's biggest dupes. "Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens," Friedrich Schiller wrote in his 1811 tragedy, Die Jungfrau von Orléans. (See photo above of Davey holding a cat named Hattie, Dulieu with Guinness, and Sarah with Tigger.)

Although the University of Illinois is not saying what it did with the cats that it shanghaied into its cruel web of intrigue, very few cats so abused ever make it out alive. That most definitely was the fate of most of the cats studied on Santa Catalina Island by Darcee A. Guttilla and Paul Stapp of California State University at Fullerton. (See photo of Stapp on the left above.)

"We trapped one-hundred-forty-two cats between May 2002 and October 2004," the authors admitted in the Journal of Mammalogy, volume 91, issue number 2, April 2010, pages 482-489. (See "Effects of Sterilization on Movements of Feral Cats at a Wildland-Urban Interface.") "Forty-one of one-hundred-thirty-four cats tested positive for Feline Leukemia (FeLv) and-or the Feline Immunodeficiency Virus (FIV) and were euthanized."

Since cats suffering from both FeLv and FIV can live perfectly normal lives for many years, Guttilla and Stapp are guilty of mass murder and therefore belong in jail.

Of the remaining one-hundred-one cats, thirty-five were sterilized and their ears tattooed and sixty-six were left intact. Fourteen of the sterilized cats and thirteen of those left intact were radio-collared by the authors and their rambles spied upon until either the batteries in their collars failed or they died. It is unclear whether the cats simply died on their own or were killed off by Guttilla and Stapp.

All one-hundred-forty-two cats used in this study were illegally trapped, anesthetized with ketamine and acepromazine, weighed, and tested for FeLv and FIV. Exactly how many times the cats were trapped and sedated has not been disclosed by the authors. The only thing that they are admitting is that the "feral cats were difficult to recapture; nearly fifty per cent of cats known to be alive in 2002 and 2003 evaded traps." (page 485.)

One thing is perfectly clear, however. That between being electronically monitored, trapped, and hounded at night with spotlights, the cats on Santa Catalina scarcely were granted a moment's peace during their brief existences.

In a lengthy study that stretched over a decade, Roland W. Kays of the New York State Museum and Amielle A. DeWan of Cornell University studied at least one-hundred-five cats living near the Albany Pine Bush Preserve (APBP). Twelve of the cats were radio-collared and monitored between May and August of 1991 and between June and August of 2001 one-hundred-eight scent posts were erected and monitored by motion sensitive camera traps. (See photos of them above on the right.)

The researchers also used binoculars in order to spy on the cats for an additional one-hundred-eighty-one hours during the daytime. At night, they covered headlamps with red filters in order to facilitate additional snooping.

As is the case with the ongoing study at Reading University, six-hundred surveys were hand-delivered to area residents and eight households were inveigled into collecting and freezing prey brought home by the cats. Once again it bears repeating that gegen Dummheit gibt es keine Pillen.

Eleven of the radio-collared cats came from eight families and, presumably, were returned to them at the conclusion of Kays and DeWan's probing. The fate of a tagged homeless cat named Tiger never has been revealed. (See Kays and DeWan, "Ecological Impact of Inside-Outside Cats Around a Suburban Nature Preserve" in volume 7 of Animal Conservation, pages 273-283 (2004) and the Press-Republican of Plattsburgh, June 13, 2010, "The House Cat -- a Major Wildlife Predator?")

Last August, the Municipal Council in Provo, Utah, approved a cruel and inhumane plan that allows wildlife biologist Thomas Smith and his students at Brigham Young University (BYU) to trap and radio collar up to two-hundred cats living on campus. (See photo of him on the right below grinning like Old Nick himself.)

Smith, who during 2009-2010 served as president-elect of the ultra-ailurophobic Wildlife Society, originally wanted to hand over the cats to Animal Control for liquidation at the conclusion of his manipulations. Public opposition, however, forced him and the Municipal Council to accept TNR instead.

In addition to collecting data on feline predation, Smith intends to use the cats in order to teach his students how to trap and tag animals. (See The Salt Lake Tribune, August 18, 2010, "Provo Okays BYU Plan to Trap, Neuter, Release Cats" and the Daily Herald of Provo, August 18, 2010, "Provo Okays Change to Allow BYU Students to Study Cats.")

Although Smith's about-face to spare the cats' lives is a step in the right direction, his naked exploitation and abuse of them as guinea pigs is in violation of the anti-cruelty statutes. First of all, no limits are placed on either the duration of the collaring or on how many times they can be repeatedly trapped.


Repeated trappings always are accompanied by life-threatening sedations, stress, and needless invasive procedures, such as the taking of blood and other fluids. The radio collars also are burdensome, toxic, and interfere with their mobility. They may even injure the delicate muscles in the cats' necks.

Samples of the cats' fur also will be shaved off in an effort to ascertain their diets. Since multiple factors contribute to the types of chemicals that are present in a cat's fur, the accuracy of such testing is highly suspect. (See The Salt Lake Tribune, August 9, 2010, "BYU Students Could Track Feral Cats on Campus.")

Even more outrageously, this plan has the support of both No More Homeless Pets in Utah of Sandy and Best Friends Animal Society of Kanab. Just as it was on San Nicolas and in the Florida Keys, the cats at BYU have been sold down the river by precisely those groups and individuals who are pretending to be their friends. (See Cat Defender posts of April 28, 2009 and June 23, 2011 entitled, respectively, "Quislings at the Humane Society Sell Out San Nicolas's Cats to the Assassins at the Diabolical United States Fish and Wildlife Service" and "Wallowing in Welfare Dollars, Lies, and Prejudice, the Bloodthirsty United States Fish and Wildlife Service Is Again Killing Cats in the Florida Keys.")

Another well-known ruthless abuser of cats is Stanley Temple of the University of Wisconsin at Madison who forced his own cat, Flynn, to wear a radio collar for eight years. (See University of Wisconsin press release of January 27, 2011, "Stan Temple: A Life of Saving Threatened Species.")

Tel Aviv University for years harbored an even bigger criminal in its bosom in the form of zoology professor Heinrich Mendelssohn who poisoned countless cats from his neighborhood in an effort to protect the green lizards that he employed in order to keep the bugs off of his plants. (See Haaretz, December 24, 2010, "Israeli Cat Lovers' Lament.")

The doyen of professors who kill cats is, arguably, Les Underhill who since 1972 has been using his position as an ornithologist at the University of Cape Town in order annihilate thousands of cats. (See Cat Defender posts of March 23, 2006, April 27, 2006, and March 23, 2007 entitled, respectively, "South Africans, Supported by Ailurophobic PETA, Are Slaughtering More Cats on Robben Island," "Cat-Hating Monster Les Underhill and Moneygrubbing Robben Island Museum Resume Slaughtering Cats in South Africa," and "Bird Lovers in South Africa Break Out the Champagne to Celebrate the Merciless Gunning Down of the Last of Robben Island's Cats.")

Even when wildlife biologists and ornithologists are not actually imprisoning, abusing, and killing cats, they are libeling them in print. The scurrilous anti-cat screed entitled "Feral Cats and Their Management" which was published last November by Stephen M. Vantassel, Scott E. Hygnstrom, and Aaron M. Hildreth, professional exterminators employed by the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, is a classic example of just how hate-filled, criminal minds do their sums. (See photos of them on the right below.)

Contrary to all existing anti-cruelty statutes, the professors recommended that cats assumed to be homeless be either shot in the head, crushed to death in body-gripping traps, or killed with carbon dioxide. Predictably, the American Bird Conservancy was beside itself with glee at the exterminators' conclusions. (See Audubon Magazine, December 3, 2020, "Feral Cat Predation on Birds Costs Billions of Dollars a Year.")

Travis Longcore of UCLA is another thoroughly unscrupulous cat-hating popinjay who devotes all of his time and energy to churning out one-sided, dishonest rants that denounce cats and malign TNR. (See Longcore et alii, "Critical Assessment of Claims Regarding Management of Feral Cats by Trap-Neuter-Return" in Conservation Biology, volume 23, number 4, pages 887-894 (2009) and the Daily Bruin, June 7, 2010, "Cat Management Program Hopes to Curb Feral Feline Population Living on Campus.")

All of Longcore's toil finally paid off in spades in December of 2009 when he and the Urban Wildlands Group succeeded in convincing a local judge to ban the city of Los Angeles from financing TNR programs. (See Los Angeles Times, January 17, 2010, "A Catfight over Neutering Program.")

Back in the days when integrity, objectivity, and a commitment to the truth still mattered, no-account bums and intellectual frauds like Longcore would have been laughed off of campus. As things now stand, he is left to strut around Westwood with his malignant gourd swelled up to twice the size of one of Goodyear's blimps.

In addition to their professors' outright crimes against cats, many college administrators have taken it upon themselves, no doubt at the urging of wildlife biologists and ornithologists, to have all homeless cats living on campus trapped and killed. (See Cat Defender posts of September 11, 2006, February 12, 2007, and July 31, 2008 entitled, respectively, "Selfish and Brutal Eggheads at Central Michigan University Target Colony of Feral Cats for Defamation and Eradication," "God-Fearing Baptists at Eastern University Kill Off Their Feral Cats on the Sly while Students Are Away on Christmas Break," and "Cal State Long Beach Is Using the Presence of Coyotes as a Pretext in Order to Get Rid of Its Feral Cats.")

DeWan's old stamping ground, heartless and ruthless Cornell University, even went so far as to fire an employee who had the audacity to show an ounce of compassion for the upstate New York school's homeless cats. (See Cat Defender post of June 14, 2006 entitled "Kindhearted Dairyman, Sacked for Feeding Feral Cats, Files $20 Million Lawsuit Against Cornell University.")

Back in July of 2007 when alumnus Larry Johnson died and left an estate valued at $6.5 million to his alma mater, Juniata College in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, administrators quickly gobbled up the windfall but fobbed off his cat, Princess, on a neighbor. (See Cat Defender post of June 9, 2008 entitled "Pennsylvania College Greedily Snatches Up Alumnus's Multimillion-Dollar Bequest but Turns Away His Cat, Princess.")

Irresponsible and just plain wicked students also must be held accountable for their crimes. In addition to being largely responsible for the vast majority of cats that wind up abandoned on college campuses, some students commit unspeakable atrocities against the species. (See Cat Defender posts of September 22, 2005 and August 25, 2008 entitled, respectively, "College Students in South Africa Cook a Cat to Death in a Microwave Oven" and "Danish Journalism Students Procure the Corpse of a Murdered Cat and Then Skin, Cook, and Eat It in Order to Promote Their Careers.")

The studies cited above constitute only a handful of the hundreds of cat defaming efforts that are undertaken by professors each year. The same holds true for the atrocities committed by administrators and students.

They do demonstrate conclusively however that neither wildlife biologists, ornithologists, nor their kindred spirits in related disciplines have the slightest interest whatsoever in saving and protecting wild animals from their number one enemy which is man. Instead, all of their sweat and the bushels of shekels that they are able to coax from the public are devoted to defaming and killing cats.

It is a staggering indictment of these so-called great minds that the sum total of everything that they have learned as the result of a lifetime of scholarship boils down to an irrational hatred of cats. After all, even like-minded serial killers and mental retards are fully capable of arriving at that same pathological conclusion without either attending a single class or so much as cracking open a book.

While they certainly are entitled to wallow in their prejudices, hatreds, and delusions, once they cross the line that separates thought from action and commence abusing and killing cats they should be promptly arrested and jailed. It therefore is incumbent upon all of those who care about cats to take the necessary steps that will ensure that the anti-cruelty statutes are rigorously enforced against these criminal professors.

In particular, they should be stopped from using cats as guinea pigs. That means first of all that they should be precluded by law from illegally trapping homeless cats, adopting cats from shelters under false pretenses, and procuring them from breeders.

In addition to repeatedly illegally trapping cats, they should be barred from fitting them with tracking devices, sedating them, and conducting invasive medical procedures. Above all, they must be stopped from both killing cats once they have finished with them and dissecting their stomachs.

They also should be precluded from trapping and tagging both wild and farm animals as well. (See Cat Defender posts of April 17, 2006, May 4, 2006, February 29, 2008, and May 21, 2009 entitled, respectively, "Hal the Central Park Coyote Is Suffocated to Death by Wildlife Biologists Attempting to Tag Him," "Scientific Community's Use of High-Tech Surveillance Is Aimed at Subjugating, Not Saving, the Animals," "The Repeated Hounding Down and Tagging of Walruses Exposes Electronic Surveillance as Not Only Cruel but a Fraud," and "Macho B, America's Last Jaguar, Is Illegally Trapped, Radio-Collard, and Killed Off by Wildlife Biologists in Arizona.")

Humane groups for far too long have turned a blind eye to these flagrant violations of the anti-cruelty laws and that cannot be tolerated any longer. Specifically, individuals who care about cats should refrain from financially supporting any organization that continues to steadfastly refuse to protect them from the hideous crimes committed against them by wildlife biologists and bird advocates.

It no doubt must come as a mild shock to the uninitiated that entire academic departments are allowed to get away with perpetuating a virulent hatred of cats, especially on the public's dime. Certainly none of these puffed-up, egomaniacal buffoons would last very long if they vented their spleens on certain segments of the human population. Au contraire, they immediately would be denounced as bigots and fired.

All animal research laboratories and factory farms operated by universities also need to be immediately closed. It additionally is high time that universities got out of the business of developing nuclear warheads and other weapons of mass destruction.

Perhaps the most obvious failure of American colleges lies in their inability to turn out even one halfway honest and decent politician. When Socrates scolded the Sophists for their failure to improve the moral quality of their students it was a valid criticism twenty-four-hundred years ago and remains so today. Sadly, anyone looking for either an intellectual or moral footprint in contemporary American public affairs is destined to come away empty-handed.

That no doubt is attributable to the inherent corruption that exists within the academic establishment itself. For example, if recent studies are to be believed, just about all students cheat their way to their degrees. Likewise, plagiarism and the acceptance of payoffs from various interests in return for producing favorable research appears to have become the norm with many professors.

In order to attract foreign students and new immigrants, most colleges have watered down academic standards to the point that the degrees they issue are practically worthless. Overall, the catalog of illegal conduct and patently unethical behavior that occurs on the average university campus is almost endless.

"After fifteen years in academic life, I have concluded that the vast majority of faculty members are like the vast majority of any comfortable professionals in a corporate capitalist empire: morally lazy, usually cowardly, and unwilling or unable to engage with critics...," Robert Jensen, who teaches journalism at the University of Texas, wrote in Counterpunch on October 25, 2006. (See "The Failure of Faculty in Tough Times. Academic Freedom on the Rocks.") "I find that much of the university with which I am familiar...to be populated with self-important and self-indulgent caricatures. Much of the intellectual work is trivial, irrelevant, and flabby. Most components of the contemporary United States university have been bought off, and bought off fairly cheaply."

A good illustration of Jensen's last point is the Koch (pronounced "Coke") brothers recent purchase of chairs at Florida State and George Mason universities in order to propagate the gospel of Ayn Rand's unfettered capitalism and the benefits of both pollution and global warming. (See St. Petersburg Times, May 10, 2011, "Billionaire's Role in Hiring Decisions at Florida State University Raises Questions.")

In the wastelands of southern New Jersey there is a pipsqueak of a public degree mill known as Richard Stockton College which each year keeps jacking up tuition so that it can continue to expand its financial empire by gobbling up real estate, resorts, golf courses, and theatres. It has circumvented the law that prohibits deficit spending by the states and their subdivisions by establishing a dummy corporation that in turn allows it to borrow almost unlimited amounts of cash.

Whatever the school may lack in both intellectual acumen and integrity it more than makes up for in not only its naked greed but its lawlessness as well. For although it is located in the middle of nowhere it maintains a ruthless gang of more than twenty rogue, fascist cops who routinely engage in wholesale illegal stops and searches of anyone that they catch either walking or biking in the vicinity of the school. Its uniformed thugs and hooligans are so emboldened in fact that they claim to have the authority to arbitrarily deny access to public, taxpayer-maintained highways in the neighborhood.

Ambrose Bierce anticipated Jensen's criticisms a century ago when in his Devil's Dictionary he defined a lecturer as "one with his hand in your pocket, his tongue in your ear and his faith in your patience." Rather than being a positive force in the struggle to protect all animals and Mother Earth as well as to ensure that freedom, equality, and democracy do not go the way of the woolly mammoth, the universities have degenerated into little more than greedy special interests with agendas that are inimical to the common good.

Photos: University of Illinois (Horn), University of Reading (Dulieu with Guinness and Robert and Sarah Davey), Cal State Fullerton (Stapp), New York State Museum (Kays), Linedin (DeWan), BYU (Smith), and the University of Nebraska at Lincoln (Vantassel, Hygnstrom, and Hildreth.)