Academic freedom under attack - Part II

In response to an earlier post on the subject, Dr. W. from California State University - Northridge, in Los Angeles, sent an article printed in CSUN's Daily Sundial. (Full article is online here.)

According to Dave Blumenkrantz, journalism professor, on Sept. 22, a student not enrolled in his visual communication class sat in to observe the classroom proceedings. Blumenkrantz said that after class ended, the student, Matthew Gerred, co-chair of the CSUN College Republicans at the time, told him he was unfairly presenting liberal political views during class.

According to Blumenkrantz, Gerred cited the use of a photograph of Richard Nixon that contained the satirical caption, “I am not a crook,” and the use of a paragraph of an article containing Vice President Dick Cheney’s name to demonstrate how to align type on a page.

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Blumenkrantz said that when Gerred presented his concerns, he attempted to engage Gerred in a discussion and resolve the issue. When Gerred persisted, the two immediately took the matter to the chair of the Journalism Department, Blumenkrantz said.

The three discussed various issues, including the monitoring of a classroom by a student not enrolled in the class, and a professor’s right to free speech, Blumenkrantz said.

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Gerred, a finance and real estate major, said he attended Blumenkrantz’s class because he had heard the instructor was making inappropriate, negative comments toward President George W. Bush, and wanted to witness it for himself. He said he has dealt with teachers in his own classes who have openly voiced their political views in class, including a particular geography course. He would ask the geography instructor not to make political comments in his presence, Gerred said.

Bush's little brownshirts will be monitoring classrooms it seems. Professors take note.

Dr. W's letter prompted me to hunt down a few internet articles on academic freedom in this time of unbridled nationalism. Here are a few bits:

From Working for Change...

10.08.04 - At Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, "WANTED" posters with a headshot of Professor Abel Alves appeared on campus a few weeks back; a student who took Associate professor David Gibbs' "What is Politics?" class at the University of Arizona claimed that Gibbs "is an anti-American communist who hates America and is trying to brainwash young people into thinking America sucks"; a political-science professor at Metropolitan State College of Denver in Colorado says she has been the target of death threats and hate e-mail in the wake of the recent debate in the state over an Academic Bill of Rights; a University of Georgia professor is being investigated after allegations he bullied a conservative student. Revenge of the Nerds? Twenty-first century Gipper brigades? No, and No. It's the Horowistas -- a small, hearty and growing band of followers of right wing provocateur David Horowitz and his Students for Academic Freedom.

Horowitz, the head of the Los Angeles-based Center for the Study of Popular Culture, and the conservative women at the Washington, DC-based Independent Women's Forum are focusing their homeland security spying on a much more specific target, liberal academics. Together Horowitz and the IWF have been cranking out advertisements and placing them in a number of student newspapers across the country encouraging conservative students to scan their campuses for so-called anti-American academics.

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On September 27, David Gibbs told Amy Goodman, the host of Democracy Now! that his largely freshmen class "focuses on propaganda and deception," and he "emphasize[s] incidents of the government lying and things like that." When he taught the class last spring, "the Independent Women's Forum... put into the local student newspaper, an advertisement that basically argued that there's a kind of left wing domination of the universities and students should fight that with the strong implication they should monitor their professors and report them, at least that's how I read it."

When Gibbs received student evaluations, "a student who said I'm anti-American communist who hates America and is trying to brainwash young people into thinking that America sucks," said that "I should be investigated by the FBI, and the FBI has been contacted."

Later on, "another student on a web log during the summer said he took my class and also said that he didn't like my politics and suggests that students shouldn't take my class but should drop by and try to disrupt it. There have been a number of instances like that which I hadn't had before."

From The Orange County Weekly....

Last year, David Horowitz led a political assault on American universities when the 1960s radical-turned-Republican strategist claimed campuses are little more than "an ideological subsidiary of the Democratic Party and the far side of the political left." According to Horowitz, universities are controlled by "hard leftists" whose mission is not education but "the suppression of conservative ideas." These conspirators are "anti-American" college administrators and professors who, he says, "subvert society" by systematically shielding students from conservative lecturers. If Horowitz is right, we’ve stumbled on a fantastic mystery: Why did the conspirators allow Horowitz to speak, for instance, at 23 U.S. colleges in the spring of 2002? At more than 200 campuses in the past decade?

I think the push is to shut down any liberal voice. Suppress conservative ideas? I hardly think that universities, which are increasingly becoming business schools, are suppressing conservative ideas. It amazes me to hear conservatives screaming about the liberal press and liberal universities. If they are such threats, then why is our country's politics moving toward fascism? Why are our social programs being gutted? Why have Republican neoconservatives taken over every branch of government?

I have many complaints about our education system in this country, but the major one is that it is intended to turn out ignorant citizens. It's a wonder there are any professors left who actually try to edify their students still holding jobs. If you have time, read this article from Luciana Bohne, in which she laments...

You might think that reading about a podunk university's English teacher's attempt to connect the dots between the poverty of American education and the gullibility of the American public may be a little trivial, considering we're about to embark on the first, openly-confessed imperial adventure of senescent capitalism in the US, but bear with me. The question my experiences in the classroom raise is why have these young people been educated to such abysmal depths of ignorance.

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I don't think serious education is possible in America. Anything you touch in the annals of knowledge is a foe of this system of commerce and profit, run amok. The only education that can be permitted is if it acculturates to the status quo, as happens in the expensive schools, or if it produces people to police and enforce the status quo, as in the state school where I teach. Significantly, at my school, which is a third-tier university, servicing working-class, first-generation college graduates who enter lower-etchelon jobs in the civil service, education, or middle management, the favored academic concentrations are communications, criminal justice, and social work--basically how to mystify, cage, and control the masses.

This education is a vast waste of the resources and potential of the young. It is boring beyond belief and useless--except to the powers and interests that depend on it.

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But the detritus and debris that American education has become is both planned and instrumental. It's why our media succeeds in telling lies. It's why our secretary of state can quote from a graduate-student paper, claiming confidently that the stolen data came from the highest intelligence sources. It's why Picasso's "Guernica" can be covered up during his preposterous "report" to the UN without anyone guessing the political significance of this gesture and the fascist sensibility that it protects.

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One of the infamous and telling reforms the Pinochet regime implemented was educational reform. The basic goal was to end the university's role as a source of social criticism and political opposition.

And just to give you the opposite side of the picture (only one - oh, how unbalanced and unfair!), here's something from Students for Academic Freedom:

You have to admire the ability of the left to project its own phobias, rages, distortions, smears and mendacities on other people.

Round and round and round we go. I was just saying the same thing during the recent presidential campaign about the current administration's constant tack of projecting its own phobias, rages, distortions, etc., onto the opposition party. If you read some of the leads on that SAF page, you might become confused. Don't worry. It's not you. The typical complaint is that colleges are trying to turn young people into liberals, and they want to put a stop to it. Non-liberals are typically also intolerant. They invariably seem to want to shut up anyone who disagrees with them and to prefer nationalism to edification.

Right-wingers so often excoriate universities and academics. So here's my suggestion: don't go. Or, if you really want an education devoid of any opposition to the nationalist status quo, there are plenty of Christian colleges in the country. Choose one of them.

But no, I'm sure that won't do. Those liberal professors must be silenced.

Dr. W., we hope you do not permit your voice to be one of them. Thanks for the link.