Creative Math

When I did my first survey of the Full Members of the "Scholars" for 9/11 "Truth" back in May, I merely counted the fields that they were in, I did not count of their level of qualification. I have been meaning to ever since, but haven't got around to it. It is not so much that it makes a difference to me, I don't believe you necessarily need a PhD to research all these subjects, but they are the ones bragging about their qualifications.

So I was reading Kevin Barrett's website mujca.com the other day, and they are making claims about their qualifications again:

The O’Reilly Harbor Toss is Barrett’s response to a thinly-veiled threat from Mr. Bill. During his program on 11 July, O'Reilly expressed dismay that Barrett, one of 80 university-affiliated Ph.D. members of Scholars for 9/11 Truth, was being allowed to teach: “At the University of Wisconsin there are no standards. . . . I'm stunned. This guy would have been gone at Boston University, my alma mater, in a heartbeat. The Chancellor there, John Silber, would of--would have--this guy'd be in the Charles River floating down, you know, toward the harbor."

I found this interesting, because only a couple of weeks ago him and Bill Woodward were complaining that there were only 2 or 3 professors who were willing to speak out about 9/11. So now there are really "80 university-affiliated Ph.D. members"? So I put the list of Full Members (they have now finally broken into triple digits with 100) into Excel and laboriously looked up their qualifications.

First let me define how I did this. The count I was looking for was PhD level, full time professors at 4 year institutions. I omitted non US and Canadian institutions for a variety of reasons, first of all, because I am not familiar with their systems and it is hard for me to evaluate. Several of those at foreign schools are listed as "ESL instructors". I don't know if that really qualfies as an academic posting, my sister taught English in Japan for a couple of years, but I would hardly count her as a scholar. I also categorized those who have an academic affiliation, but not a full-time, PhD level one, this includes adjunct (part-time) professors, lecturers, and non-PhD level faculty. Other categories include non four year institutions (community college), those who are retired or no longer employed for whatever reason, and those that have no identifiable academic affiliation whatsoever.

So my grand total for PhD level full-time affiliated professors comes to 29 (and this even includes all of the English and psychology professors), out of the 100 members. The other totals are:

Retired\unemployed: 19
Non full-time/Non-PhD level: 7
No academic affiliation found: 32
Non four year institutions: 5
Foreign institutions: 8