Diversity Dishonesty on College Campuses — April 2002

The Luntz Research Companies, a respected polling company, conducted a survey this spring of the opinions of the liberal arts and social science faculty at Ivy League colleges and universities. The results explain the ideological indoctrination rampant on campuses today and prove that the colleges’ sanctimonious accolades to diversity are dishonest.

• Only 3% identified themselves as Republican, while 57% admitted they are Democrats.
• 64% identified themselves as liberal, 23% as moderate, and only 6% as conservative.
• Here is how they voted in the 2000 election: 61% for Al Gore, 5% for Ralph Nader, 6% for George W. Bush, and 28% either did not vote or refused to answer.
• Here is how they answered the question “who do you think has been the best President in the past 40 years?”: 26% Bill Clinton, 17% John F. Kennedy, 15% Lyndon Johnson, 13% Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan came in a poor fifth at 4%.
• 79% said George W. Bush’s political views are “too conservative.”
• 71% disagree that “news coverage of political and social issues reflects a liberal bias in the news media.”
• 74% said that we “should not spend the money that would be required for research and possible development of a missile defense system.”
• 61% believe “the federal government should do more to solve our country’s problems” rather than individuals, communities or private enterprise.
• 80% disagree that “if the federal budget has a surplus in any a given year, this money should be returned to taxpayers in the form of a tax cut.”
• 40% agree that “the federal government owes American blacks some form of reparations for the harms caused by slavery and discrimination.”

This survey was commissioned by David Horowitz and released by the Center for the Study of Popular Culture. Horowitz calls the biased faculty “institutional leftism.” He says it is unfair for institutions that receive hundreds of millions of dollars and subsidies from the taxpayers to be so partisan in their hiring practices. “How can students get a good education if they’re only being told one-half of the story?”

It’s a well-kept secret how much money the elite colleges are getting outright from the federal government — in addition to billions of dollars in all sorts of student financial aid. Here is a sampling of the latest available annual figures: Johns Hopkins $793 million, Stanford $391 million, Harvard $349 million, Washington University (St. Louis) $347 million, MIT $301 million, Yale $300 million, Emory $248 million, Cornell $247 million, Duke $218 million, and Northwestern $204 million.

It’s no wonder that, after 9/11 when Congress tried to legislate a time-out on the granting of student visas to aliens from countries that sponsor terrorism because of obvious fraud, negligence, bribery and treachery, the colleges sent an army of high-priced lobbyists to Capitol Hill to kill the bill. The colleges want the alien students enrolled in the graduate programs in order to bolster their demand for these federal handouts for “research.”

The INS didn’t learn any lessons from its embarrassing approval of student visas for the two dead terrorists who flew the planes into the World Trade towers on September 11. The INS fouled up again when it granted “shore leave visa waivers” in Norfolk to four Pakistani crewmen who immediately disappeared and can’t be found.

INS Commissioner James Ziglar now says, “The days of looking the other way are over.” (3-22-02) But why weren’t they over by sundown on 9/11?

Survival Advice for College Students

1. Pick your courses carefully. Since you are paying an enormous hourly rate for classes, don’t waste your education dollar on trivial, non-academic courses, or rap sessions on highly specialized subjects of no value to anyone other than the professor who is writing an article for a journal no one reads. Don’t waste your education dollar on trashy courses that are just entertainment or propaganda, such as courses in horror or porn movies, rock music, witchcraft, or gay or erotic writings,
2. Don’t think that the title of the course is a guarantee of what the course really covers. Get a syllabus to find out if the course has been politicized by the liberals and the feminists. The title may indicate a traditional course of study, but the famous DWEMS (Dead White European Males), who wrote the great books of Western civilization, may have been censored out and replaced with Oppression Studies, i.e., selections from third-rate writers who paint themselves as victims and attack Western civilization as sexist, racist, and oppressive.
3. Take courses where you learn things that are true (not things that are false and must be unlearned later), such as engineering, math, accounting, statistics, and the classics.
4. Avoid taking advice from college counselors. They are working for the financial interests of the college, not the students. Counselors frequently channel students into a schedule that requires five or six years to get a bachelor’s degree — federal grants and loans make this profitable for the college. Your degree isn’t worth a penny more even if it costs you 25% or 50% more in money and time.
5. Make sure you don’t get trapped in a course taught by an instructor who doesn’t speak intelligible English. Many important and necessary college courses — especially in math and science — are taught by immigrants who can barely speak English.
6. If you take Economics, seek out the professors who teach the successful free-market economics according to Adam Smith or Milton Friedman. Try to avoid professors who teach the failed economics of socialism.
7. Beware of professors of English who teach Deconstructionism. That means there is no such thing as intrinsic merit in a work of literature and that what matters is what you think, not what the author wrote.
8. Avoid women’s studies. They are usually just propaganda courses for sexual politics and radical feminist, and often lesbian, ideology and behavior.
9. Seek out courses that teach the true history and achievements of Western civilization and the United States rather than multiculturalism, the code word for downgrading America as the worst of all cultures. Avoid instructors who impose their anti-Christian bias by demanding that students replace B.C. (Before Christ) and A.D. (Anno Domini) with B.C.E. (Before the Common Era) and C.E. (Common Era).
10. Don’t believe everything you read in the college catalogue. Many college catalogues are dishonest advertising because up to half of the courses listed may not really be offered, or may be offered only once in ten years.
11. Take courses taught by qualified professors rather than by Teaching Assistants (T.A.s), underpaid graduate students who know very little more than you do.
12. Beware of crime on campus. Most colleges conceal the actual amount of crime that takes place on college campuses. If your roommate is on drugs, has sex in your room, or engages in obnoxious behavior that interferes with your studying, demand a change.
13. Prepare yourself morally and psychologically for the culture shock of freshman orientation. You might be asked to role-play what it’s like to be gay, or told that if you object to coed bathrooms you need psychological counseling.
14. Don’t think you can get into a first-rate college because you are smart. Michele Hernandez, Dean of Admissions at Dartmouth, says you have a better chance of being admitted if you are from a ghetto, a barrio or an Indian reservation, or if you are someone they can feel sorry for, even if your academic qualifications are lower.
15. Avoid the colleges that have speech codes. Speech codes are Political Correctness run amuck and an offense against the First Amendment.
16. Don’t pile up debt on credit cards. You will probably have plenty of tuition debt to pay off after you graduate and you don’t need any more debt. Many colleges are secretly paid by the credit card companies for the privilege of pressuring college students to get credit cards even though they have no job.
17. Don’t think you are getting a good education just because you get high grades. Grade inflation is an insidious system designed to make you and your parents feel good about exorbitant tuition rates.
18. Seek out companions who share your values and beliefs and join a conservative student support group such as Eagle Forum Collegians. Engage in conservative, pro-family activism on your college campus. Stand up against the professors and students who attack America. Run for student government positions and demand a fair share of student activity fees for conservative, pro-family student groups. Write for the student newspaper, where you can expose such abuses as inviting only leftists to lecture, and giving financial aid to large numbers of aliens even though so many American citizens need help. (The Wall Street Journal reported (2-1-02) that about 40% of 240,000 foreign graduate students now receive financial aid and the colleges plan to increase this substantially.) Boston University, for example, has 5,240 foreign students, researchers or professors.

To be forewarned is to be forearmed.

Mandatory Student Fees Finance Leftist Causes 
A principal source of funding for the radical leftwing movement in the United States is the student activity fees collected from all college students. It’s a mandatory tax in addition to tuition; i.e., a student cannot receive his grades or diploma unless student fees are paid in full.

At many if not most colleges and universities, the student activity money becomes a pot of gold that goes into the hands of student leftists, who then direct much or all of the funds into liberal, leftwing, feminist, gay, socialist, or radical student groups or activities. These funds are used to bring leftwing speakers to campus, to lobby for leftwing causes, and to engage in leftwing demonstrations and activities. The amount of money is very large; at state universities, the student fee can add up to a million dollars a year or more.

Enjoying tight control over this tremendous pot of money, the leftwing students (with the patronage of leftwing professors) are able to finance the radical movement in the United States and pay honoraria of thousands of dollars to leftwing speakers. Only rarely is a token conservative invited. Student activity fees often finance the college newspaper, which usually manifests a strong bias for liberalism and political correctness.

One of Eagle Forum’s major projects has been to sponsor campus groups called Eagle Forum Collegians, and our Collegians keep trying to cut off this flow of money to leftist causes or at least to try to get equal treatment for conservatives.

Our first big effort was at the University of California at Berkeley. In 1979, a handful of students including Roger Schlafly (then studying for his Ph.D. in math) went into the Small Claims Court to challenge the policy of taxing all students and channeling the money into leftwing causes.

After a 30-minute hearing, the handful of students won, based on Thomas Jefferson’s dictum: “To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves, is sinful and tyrannical.”

The powerful University of California, determined to maintain the flow of the $3-million-a-year student-fee money to leftwing causes, then hired high-priced San Francisco lawyers and moved the case into the regular state courts where the litigation dragged on for 14 years.

Finally, on February 3, 1993 the California State Supreme Court in Smith v. Regents of the University of California condemned the policy in which students are “forced to support causes they strongly oppose.” The Court listed 14 “frankly political or ideological” groups to which the student government organization had given funds from mandatory student fees, including the National Organization for Women, Campus Abortion Rights Action League, Gay and Lesbian League, Spartacus Youth League, Radical Education and Action Project, UC Sierra Club, Greenpeace Berkeley, and UC Feminist Alliance. Student fees were even spent to send a delegation of Berkeley feminists to Chicago to march with Phil Donahue in a demonstration for the Equal Rights Amendment.

The California decision said students could demand a refund of the portion of mandatory student fees used for off-campus lobbying or given to ideological groups. When the Smith case was remanded, however, a lower court ruled in 1997 that student governments are free to spend student fees directly for leftwing activism.

The bottom line is that mandatory student fees are still collected and spent for leftist causes, and the burden is on individual students to get reimbursement for a small portion. In a related case in 1999, a federal judge ruled that lobbying with student fees cannot be banned.

The next breakthrough came at the University of Wisconsin in Madison where Bill Clinton’s friend, Donna Shalala, had been president. A group of students filed suit to challenge the forcing of all students to pay fees that were given exclusively to leftwing causes. In 1998 the federal Court of Appeals ruled that the University of Wisconsin cannot constitutionally force students to pay into funds that give money to organizations or causes they oppose.

The Court’s decision cited 18 student organizations that had been funded by University of Wisconsin student fees, including WISPIRG (which lobbied Congress and distributed environmentalist voter guides), the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual Campus Center (which distributed sexually explicit materials), the Campus Women’s Center (which lobbied for abortion rights and against any regulations), the UW Greens (which distributed campaign materials for the Green Party), the Madison AIDS Support Network, the International Socialist Society (which advocated the overthrow of the government and disrupted a church meeting), the Ten Percent Society (which lobbied for same-sex marriages), the Progressive Student Network (which lobbied against the GOP Contract with America), the United States Student Association (which lobbies for a mix of leftwing causes), the Militant Student Union, and Students of National Organization for Women.

The University appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which unfortunately ruled in favor of the University in Board of Regents v. Southworth, 529 U.S. 217 (2000). The Supreme Court was persuaded by arguments in favor of academic freedom and giving broad discretion to the University.

Buried in the Supreme Court’s opinion, however, was a powerful caveat: the system imposing and spending the student fees must be “viewpoint neutral.” The case was remanded to the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. The Circuit Court judges were then besieged by amicus briefs from the groups that had long been on the student-fee gravy train, including Wisconsin Student PIRG (which received $45,000 in one year) and the Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Campus Center.

The Court of Appeals then sent the case back to the district court with an order to consider whether a majority student vote can force a minority of students to fund projects with which they disagree. The University of Wisconsin kept fighting hard, asking the Court of Appeals to rehear the case en banc, which it refused to do.

This left the district court with the task of finally resolving the issues. The district court then held that “to require University of Wisconsin students to pay a fee to subsidize expressive speech without any protection for the rights of students who object to the funded speech is a violation of the First Amendment.” Fry v. Board of Regents, 312 F.Supp.2d 744 (W.D.Wis., 2000) This court enjoined the University from imposing such fees until it “establishes an allocation system that operates in a viewpoint neutral manner.”

The University never did establish a viewpoint-neutral allocation system. So, three months later, the district court rejected the University’s proposed alternative and granted judgment in favor of the student plaintiffs. The court held the student-fee system at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in violation of the First Amendment because “it fails to conform to the principle of viewpoint neutrality in allocating fees.” The University was enjoined from compelling students to pay those portions of student fees that fund expressive activities to which they object. Fry v. Board of Regents, 2001 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 3346 (W.D. Wis, Mar. 15, 2001).

Unfortunately, most colleges and universities haven’t gotten the message that it is a violation of the First Amendment to force students to pay for causes which they oppose. Trying to stop the unjust taxing of all students to finance leftwing causes will continue to be a priority of Eagle Forum Collegians.

My own experience in speaking on more than 500 college campuses reveals the bias in the use of student funds to bring in visiting lecturers.

At one state university in Ohio, I was invited as a token only after the student fees had paid to bring in a long succession of radical feminists: Bella Abzug, Gloria Steinem, Jane Fonda, Pat Schroeder, Katherine Brady (who spoke on incest), Shirley Chisholm, Ellen Goodman, Germaine Greer, Wilma Scott Heide, Shere Hite, Kate Millett, and Sarah Weddington.

At a state university in Virginia, I was invited as a token only after the previous speakers had been extreme feminists Susan Faludi, Molly Ivins, Patricia Schroeder, the sexologist Dr. Ruth, Faye Wattleton of Planned Parenthood, and a lesbian army colonel. Nevertheless, the feminist faculty protested the invitation to me.

I regret to say that these experiences are typical.

More than 140 college campuses in 36 states have held anti-war rallies denouncing our military actions in Afghanistan, according to a report by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. The document, called Defending Civilization: How Our Universities Are Failing America, contrasts this with the way many professors and administrators are quick to clamp down on acts of patriotism, such as flying the American flag. Listing 117 examples of anti-American sentiment on campuses, the report expressed particular concern about the anti-patriotic attitude in new post-9/11 college courses.

Don’t waste your tuition on any of these college courses that have been taught at major universities — they are just entertainment or propaganda masquerading as education: U of California-Berkeley: “Male Sexuality”; Columbia: “Sorcery and Magic”; Dartmouth: “Queer Theory, Queer Texts”; Harvard: “Feminist Biblical Interpretation”; Yale: “AIDS and Society”; Cornell: “Gay Fiction”; Princeton: “Sexuality: Bodies, Desires, and Modern Times”; U of Pennsylvania: “Feminist Critique of Christianity”; Brown: “Unnatural Acts: Introduction to Lesbian and Gay Literature”; Bucknell: “Witchcraft and Politics”; U of Iowa: “Elvis as Anthology”; Swarthmore: “Lesbian Novels Since World War II”; Stanford: “Homosexuals, Heretics, Witches, and Werewolves”; Oberlin: “Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare”; Rutgers: “Women on the Fringe: Perceptions of Women as Social and Sex-Role Deviants in American Civilization”; Vassar: “Global Feminism”; Wesleyan: “Pornography Writing of Prostitutes”; U of Massachusetts: “Rock and Roll”; U of Indiana: “Star Trek and Religion”; U of Michigan: “Crossing Erotic Boundaries”; U of North Carolina: “Magic, Ritual, and Belief”; U of Wisconsin: “Goddesses and Feminine Powers.”