On the bedside table:
Who Are The Brain Police?
As with red-baiting during the 1950s, the leaders of these current attacks are exploiting the fear and anxiety the American public feels about enemies abroad in order to advance their own political agenda. Now with access to the Internet and a whipped media, the likes of Lynne Cheney, Ann Coulter, David Horowitz, Pats Buchanan & Robertson and their supporters have been able to expand their attacks into a virtually limitless campaign of harassment and intimidation of intellectuals, especially those at our nation's universities.
For example, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), founded by Senator Joseph Lieberman and Lynne Cheney, published a report in November 2001--"Defending Civilization: How Our universities Are Failing America and What Can Be Done About It." The report claimed college and university faculty were "the weak link in America's response to the attack" of 9/11. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, ACTA's report documented incidents that reflected "a shocking divide between academe and the public at large." In addition, it stated that "we learn from history that when a nation's intellectuals are unwilling to defend its civilization, they give comfort to its adversaries." It names more than 40 academics out of line with American public opinion on the war on terrorism (see www.goacta.org/Reports/defciv. pdf).
Interestingly, it seems that regardless of their national settings and their stated versions of "patriotism", the right-wingers of the world seem to speak with an incredibly similar voice, especially when it comes to cultural education. Let's take a sampling of five of these protectors of the collective morality:
1) Lynne Cheney:
The underlying sentiment of the ACTA report is the often heard assertion that when universities stopped requiring students to take American History and Western Civilization courses, these institutions succumbed to morally bankrupt curricula emphasizing moral relativism and multiculturalism. "Expressions of pervasive moral relativism are a staple of academic life in this country and an apparent symptom of an educational system that has increasingly suggested that Western civilization is the primary source of the world's ills-even though it gave us the ideals of democracy, human rights, individual liberty, and mutual tolerance," the report says. These are themes that Lynne Cheney (and Buchanan, Robertson, Coulter and Horowitz) has been promoting for years. Ironically these cherished western ideals seem to be less important in our post 9/11 country run by Lynne's hubby, for example, democracy (2000 election decided by Supreme Court and electoral college but by less than a majority of voters), human rights (Abu Ghraib, terrorist interrogation laws etc..), individual liberty (Patriot Act and NSA spy program) and mutual tolerance (Muslim profiling and anti-immigration laws).
Cheney's mission is transparent, and serious: to muzzle professors and create an atmosphere where the right intimidates all into sheep-like acquiescence. Near the end of the report, ACTA gives a call to action: Colleges and universities must adopt "strong core curricula" based on Western civilization, American history, "America's founding documents" and the continuing struggle to defend our (ACTA's) principles. "If institutions fail to do so," the report advises, "alumni should protest, donors should fund new programs, and trustees should demand action." Despite ACTA's claims that its objective is to expand dialogue on campus, the report implicitly criticized anyone who dared speak out against the Bush/Cheney "War on Terror."
2) Mahmoud Ahmadinejad:
TEHRAN, Sept. 5 - President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad called Tuesday for a purge of liberal and secular professors from Iranian universities, the IRNA news agency reported.
"Today, students have the right to criticize their president for the continued presence of liberal and secular professors in the country's universities...Our educational system has been affected by 150 years of secular thought and has raised thousands of people who hold Ph.D.'s," he said. "Changing this system is not easy and we have to do it together," he told a group of young conservatives on National Youth Day, according to the news agency.
3) Ann Coulter:
In a speech in September 2005 at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C., Coulter encouraged "a new McCarthyism" on college campuses. Displaying the usual hypocrisy of those who make these specious arguments, Coulter devoted a significant portion of her speech to attacking Colorado University's Ward Churchill (who certainly can be accused of exercising a lack of judgment and timing) for "treason" while in the same speech lamenting the suppression of conservative thought on campuses. Angry Americans continue to call for Churchill's firing, choosing to challenge the authenticity of his Native American heritage rather than address the real issues of his constitutional rights.
When liberals say unpleasant things, they should be silenced, Coulter suggests. But when conservatives say unpleasant things, they should be lauded for their courage and for embracing free speech.
The solution to ideological imbalance on campus, in Coulter's view, is oppressing the liberals. "I say let's do it. Let's oppress them," she told the crowd, which was more than happy to oblige. "Define, attack, destroy. They ought to be destroyed."
Coulter urged students to report and attack professors for being "traitors" while in the same speech decrying other limits to free speech on campuses. She ardently supports "academic freedom," but only as long as those freedoms fall within her definition of American values.
4) David Horowitz:
Thanks largely to the efforts of David Horowitz, bills like (PA) HR 177 "Academic Bill of Rights," which promotes the investigation of individual teachers and reading lists, have been introduced as part of an intimidation campaign in about twenty states so far. In promoting the "Academic Bill of Rights" nationwide Horowitz's organization Students for Academic Freedom seeks to pressure schools that receive state funding to implement affirmative action-like programs to hire conservative professors. In Florida, for instance, State Rep. Dennis Baxley insisted, upon introducing a similar bill and shepherding it through an 8-2 party-line committee vote, that the legislation would help to combat "leftist totalitarianism" on the part of "dictator professors," by allowing students to sue professors whenever they felt their beliefs were not being "respected."
Students for Academic Freedom is a vehicle to promote this thought police agenda. Horowitz claims that American colleges and universities are "indoctrination centers for the political left" and that many higher education professors "hate America." SAF suggests that students investigate the professors at their schools for "bias" by searching voter registration records, create a spreadsheet of the data and send it to SAF. SAF distributes and promotes the booklet "Unpatriotic University" which Horowitz describes as "a wealth of information about the bias in hiring, the anti-American rhetoric, and the shutting out of conservative points of view both in classrooms and on speakers' platforms." (Horowitz's Center for the Study of Popular Culture publishes the booklet.
5) Augusto Pinochet:
History appears to prove that the idea of a relatively autonomous university is completely antithetical to rightwing ideologues. Sometimes, as in Chile in 1973, the higher ends of the authoritarians require terror -- as when Pinochet cleansed the universities of liberal-radical faculty and ideas and installed military officers in charge.
After the coup against Allende that brought Pinochet to power in Chile all universities had military officers appointed as rectors and were declared ‘under reorganization'. The existing governing bodies were dissolved. Many faculties were closed (e.g. at the University of Chile in Santiago, the faculties of sociology, philosophy, journalism and psychology). http://www.labournet.org.uk/pinochet/twentyqu.html
The New York Times (August l7, 1975, p. 29B) reported an official announcement by Admiral Arturo Troncoso, Minister of Education of Chile that (i) 44 professors, employees and students of the University of Chile had been arrested for "Marxist activities"and turned over to military intelligence agents for interrogation, (ii) a few of these 44 were likely to be released shortly as lacking serious involvement in such activities, but (iii) all, including any released, would be dismissed from the University, if employed there, and expelled, if students. (January 1976 Council Minutes-American Mathematical Society. http://www.ams.org/secretary/council-minutes/council-minutes0176.html )
Afterword:
Of course, a more objective reading of the educational landscape makes clear that it is mainly the Liberal Arts and Social Sciences which seem to attract many like-minded left leaning scholars. I work at a major research university, Ohio State, and one would be hard-pressed to accuse those who make up the faculties in the scientific disciplines of being radically liberal. A huge portion of the sciences are today comprised of foreign, mainly Asian, knowledge workers who don't seem to be a revolutionary threat to the so called American dream. So are these right-wing crusaders accusing the universities of some huge conspiracy in hiring practices, especially in the Liberal Arts and Social Sciences, which somehow excludes huge numbers of conservative applicants in favor of liberal ones? I find it hard to believe that questions of voting preference are part of the interview process. Or, more plausibly, is there something else in their political and social beliefs that tend to make some people want to work in the educational rather than the commercial arena? Could it be that, by their emphasis on understanding and promoting the "human condition," these avenues of study lead to more progressive ideas in practice? Progressive thought that seems to be the enemy of conservatives.
In 1984, The Party's slogan was, "Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past."
Be Seeing you....
New York Times, September 6, 2006 : Iranian Leader Wants Purge Of Liberals From Universities
http://www.michaelberube.com/index.php/weblog/48_hours/
http://www.pfaw.org/pfaw/general/default.aspx?oid=16227
The Ithacan | Ithaca College | Ithaca, NY 14850. Volume 72, Issue 20 February 24, 2005 Coulter's hypocrisy threatens free thought By Kate Sheppard
Z Magazine. Februar, 2002. Bill Berkowitz. "Academic Bashing" www.zmag.org/Zmag/articles/february02berkowitz.htm
1984. George Orwell