Radical Agendas on College Campuses — April 2006

The gender police have already ruined college sports for many men, forcing the senseless elimination of 171 wrestling teams to reduce the overall proportion of men to women on college athletic teams. Fresh from that attack on masculinity, the new targets are math and science departments.

Universities know all too well how this game is played and have every reason to fear the worst. Just one feminist lawsuit can have a devastating effect on most universities, both financially and in adverse publicity.

An internal Title IX regulation invented by Carter and Clinton administration feminists established the “proportionality” of men and women enrolled in a college as the bean-counting goal for the proportion of men and women on sports teams. If the percentage of men on sports teams is too high, then the college can expect to be sued for gender discrimination, even though men are far more interested in sports than women. If the college loses the lawsuit, it must pay the feminist lawyers’ attorney’s fees. This encourages lawsuits and has resulted in million-dollar paydays at the expense of schools that rely on donations to stay afloat.

The Bush Administration is now getting ready to apply this same mindless mentality to math and science departments, which are predominately male because men are more interested in those fields than women and score significantly higher on math and science aptitude tests. The National Science Foundation (NSF) has an ADVANCE program that is already spending $75 million over five years to lure more women into science and engineering.

Math and science departments have traditionally been based on merit and have produced code-breakers and technology essential to winning wars and preserving our freedoms. Why should we accept anything less than the best in our classrooms or on our athletic fields?

The NSF confirms that it is starting “a joint effort” with the Education Department “to do Title IX compliance reviews,” which spells the end of picking the best and the brightest. Apparently that effort was initiated when liberal Democrat Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) demanded that the Government Accountability Office (GAO) review gender issues. This was probably welcomed by Education Secretary Margaret Spellings whom the National Journal (3-25-06) describes as “a prominent supporter of the Title IX law.”

There isn’t a shred of evidence that women are discriminated against in math and science; there are no separate tracks for men’s math and women’s math. There simply is a higher proportion of men than women who voluntarily choose math and engineering just as more men choose competitive sports.

The feminists want a quota-imposed unisex society regardless of the facts of life, voluntary choice, human nature, common sense, or documented merit. They use the power of government to achieve their goal.

One of the agitators for compliance reviews, Debra Rolison of the Naval Research Laboratory, reveals that compliance reviews are focusing on the way women students are “experiencing a different climate” in engineering and computer science departments. Boo hoo. Bring on MIT feminist Nancy Hopkins to stage another tantrum and demand preferential funding for women to let them feel cozy in technical subjects.

The feminists expect that their whining and outbursts about alleged discrimination will intimidate men into giving them preferential treatment. The feminists want to rig the system so they will not have to compete with men, but will compete only with other women for a quota of scholarship slots, resources and professorships.

Meanwhile, the Bush Administration ignores the gender disparity that is having a very harmful consequence: the precipitous decline in male schoolteachers. The number of male public school teachers has fallen to only 20%, and at the elementary school level fewer than 10% of teachers are men, giving boys the distinct impression that school is not for them.

This nationwide trend is getting worse. Public school unions are dominated by feminists who have weighted teacher compensation in a way that is more attractive to women than men, i.e., toward generous retirement packages rather than better salaries based on merit, especially for teaching the more difficult subjects.

We do not hear anything about spending taxpayer funds to force universities to attract more men into the soft Liberal Arts subjects that now have a big majority of women students. How about giving tax-paid scholarships to men to lure them into majoring in Women’s Studies?

What You Won’t Learn in College 
Colleges and universities are supposed to be places of debate and intellectual discourse, but most campuses these days are not. Instead, too many college classes are about gender theory, post-modernism, the oppression of peoples, and the evils of capitalism.

The problem is not only what students are taught and the way leftwing professors cram leftwing propaganda down the students’ throats. It is what they are not taught that is most disturbing. Too often college students will not ever hear of the classical philosophers, the virtues of the market economy, or the role Christianity played in the history of Western civilization in liberating blacks and giving women rights unheard of in the rest of the world.

Most college students will not hear about the role Ronald Reagan, the most important president in the 20th century, played in ending the Cold War. Most students will hear a lot about McCarthyism but nothing about the Venona tapes that proved there was large-scale Communist espionage penetration into the highest levels of the U.S. government.

Students in Literature classes will read the latest novels about alienation, oppression, suicide and sex, but they won’t encounter the novels of James Fenimore Cooper, Joseph Conrad, or Dostoevsky. In most Economics courses, students will not encounter Friedrich von Hayek’s famous, landmark book The Road to Serfdom or find out about the success of a free-market economy. If students encounter religion in their classes, the subject is often treated as cultural superstition opposed to scientific reason.

This censorship of the great works written in the English language and of the accomplishments of Western civilization means that our young people don’t learn about our great American heritage and why it is that people want to come here from all over the world. That’s why it’s up to parents to give conservative books and magazines to their children, and take them to hear conservative speakers, so they will learn the things they won’t learn in college.

Young America’s Foundation made a survey of courses taught at prestigious colleges, both private and public, and came up with an incredible list of truly bizarre subjects. Here are the titles of the courses that Young America’s Foundation listed as its “Dirty Dozen” courses.

At Harvard, students can take a course in “Marxist Concepts of Racism.” Karl Marx didn’t say much about racism, but that course is an excuse for a left-wing professor to talk about racism. At John Hopkins, students can take a course in “Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll in Ancient Egypt.” That course offers a slide show of Egyptian women drunk and vomiting. Princeton University students can study “The Cultural Production of Early Modern Women,” covering prostitution and cross-dressing in 16th and 17th century England, France, Italy and Spain.

Marxism, homosexuality and racial theory are recurrent themes in college classes. Here is another shocking course title: “The Unbearable Whiteness of Barbie: Race and Popular Culture in the United States” in which students are taught that so-called “scientific racism” was used to market the Barbie doll. Students at the University of California at Los Angeles can take “The Psychology of the Lesbian Experience,” a course that includes study of the so-called “impact of heterosexism/stigma.” Swarthmore College offers a course in “Lesbian Novels Since World War II.”

Other courses that made the “Dirty Dozen” list include Amherst College’s “Taking Marx Seriously: Should Marx Be Given Yet Another Chance?”, Brown University’s “Black Lavender: A Study of Black Gay and Lesbian Plays,” and the University of Michigan’s course called “Ancient Greek to Modern Gay Sexuality.”

One reason college tuition is so high is that colleges are paying high-priced professors to teach this radical nonsense.

State Universities Cheat Americans 
The University of Illinois is maintained and financed by the taxpayers of Illinois to the tune of $700 million a year, and university officials are constantly pleading for increases. This year, the University of Illinois received 23,300 applications for the 7,100 freshman slots available. Fewer than one out of three freshmen are accepted; the University chooses the lucky ones to attend this outstanding university.

The University of Illinois seems to favor admitting foreign students rather than Americans. Students from India, Pakistan, China, Korea and dozens of other countries make up 12% of the student body. The university trustees are currently planning to increase foreign students to 25% of the student body, and at the same time reduce the freshman class by 1,000 students.

This means that many hundreds of qualified Illinois students will be denied admission to the tax-supported university in their own state in favor of admitting foreigners from all over the world. The university chancellor brags about his policy, saying that it is “our responsibility to all of our students regardless of where they are from.” Sorry, Mr. Chancellor, you’ve got your priorities all backwards. Your first responsibility is to the taxpayers of Illinois. There is nothing wrong with admitting some foreign students, but it is just plain wrong to admit such a high percentage of foreigners over qualified Illinois students.

One bad effect of this policy is that the university hires the foreigners to teach math and science courses. One of the most frequent complaints I hear on college campuses is that so many math and science instructors don’t speak intelligible English. This is a terrible cheat on the students and on the Illinois taxpayers. State universities have the obligation to provide math and science instructors whose native language is English. The way to assure this is admit more Americans rather than foreigners to get their college degrees in math and science.

It is a major national security problem that the United States is not graduating anywhere near enough students in engineering, math and science. Why is anybody surprised that Americans don’t want to take courses taught by instructors who can’t speak English? Universities have the obligation to provide instructors who can speak good English.

Books College Students Should Read 
Danger from Radical Professors. David Horowitz’s book The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America exposes the radicalism that professors are imposing on college students today. The 3 million kids now attending college are targets for brainwashing by some 30,000 extreme leftwing academics.

When asked what’s the typical ideological profile of 101 professors in his book, Horowitz replied: “A professor who believes the terrorists are freedom fighters and America is the Great Satan. They all believe in some version of Marxism, though they call it feminism, post-structuralism, post-modernism. They believe private property is evil. War is caused by corporations and American generals. America is an oppressive, racist, homophobic, imperialist society and the reason we are being attacked is because of what we do to other people. Jews are monsters who have turned Palestinians into suicide bombers because Palestinians have no other choice. That’s the fundamental creed of the tenured radical.”

Horowitz profiles some of these radical professors in his book. They represent every imaginable form of Marxism, radical Islamism, and sexual deviancy. At the University of Oregon, Professor John Bellamy Foster edits a Marxist magazine and he considers the collapse of the Soviet empire to be a setback for human progress. At the University of Texas in Arlington, Professor Jose Gutierrez says: “We have to eliminate the gringo, and what I mean by that is, if the worst comes to worst, we have got to kill them.” Columbia University Professor Victor Navasky still thinks that the traitor Alger Hiss and the Rosenberg spies who betrayed our atomic secrets to the Russians were innocent.

97 other professors are described in Horowitz’s book about campus extremism. He says this book should scare the wits out of any parent whose child is enrolled in a U.S. college or university. He says that more than 90% of the professors profiled in this book have attained tenure rank, and that’s an indication that their academic work is approved by their peers. The status of tenure also means that these leftwing professors can decide who will be hired and given tenure in the future.

Time to Ridicule Leftwing Intellectuals. Intellectual Morons: How Smart People Fall for Stupid Ideas by Daniel J. Flynn ridicules the irrationality of many major so-called intellectuals. It is mainly leftwing intellectuals who are the author’s targets, yet he is equally critical of the atheist/objectivist Ayn Rand. Flynn’s thesis is not that leftwing ideologues are necessarily morons, but that their passionate ideology clouds their reason even if they are otherwise intelligent academics.

Daniel Flynn describes the lunacy of these leftwingers, beginning with one of their heroes, the Communist Herbert Marcuse, who preached the nonsense that “freedom is totalitarianism, education is indoctrination, violence is nonviolence and fiction is truth.”

Intellectual Morons provides devastating analysis of two icons of the environmental movement, Paul Ehrlich and Princeton University professor Peter Singer who believes parents should be allowed to kill their children within 28 days of birth. Singer is an animal rights zealot who believes animals are entitled to more respect than babies.

Intellectual Morons shows how truly fraudulent as well as wrong many liberals actually are. This book was not written to persuade, but it surely does amuse, thanks to the sheer silliness of what many liberals say and write. Someone has to show outrage against the wrong-headed policies the liberals have inflicted on America.

How Celebrities Hijacked American Culture. What do these people have in common: Walter Duranty, Herbert Matthews, Margaret Mead, Alfred Kinsey, Rachel Carson, Charles Darwin, Alex Haley, Rigoberta Menchu, and Michael Bellesiles? They are all celebrities who had a tremendous influence on American culture and on what is taught in U.S. universities, but they were frauds. Some pretended to be scientists, some academic researchers, some investigative journalists, but their books were filled with lies, often masquerading as scientific discoveries.

Walter Duranty was the New York Times reporter who reported falsely to cover up Stalin’s massive murders in Russia. Herbert Matthews, another New York Times reporter, helped Castro to power in Cuba by denying he was a Communist. Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring has been exposed as full of falsehoods. Influential books by anthropologist Margaret Mead and others have been proven to be fabrications but continue to be taught in university anthropology departments.

Alfred Kinsey’s data presented in his famous book about male sexuality was based on data collected from the gay underworld of Chicago and college students, and then skewed to promote his notion that homosexuality is more common than it actually is. Kinsey’s research included the sexual abuse of hundreds of children. Yet in spite of various exposés, the liberal elite continue to paint Kinsey’s work as scientific, and Hollywood recently made a favorable movie about him.

These cases of academic dishonesty are described in fascinating detail by Jack Cashill in his book called Hoodwinked: How Intellectual Hucksters Have Hijacked American Culture. The stories share a common theme — the willingness of the liberal intellectuals and academics to condone mass deception in order to promote their agenda. This book is a fascinating exposé of how these favorites of the liberal establishment used their falsehoods to propagate the liberal line and influence our culture.

Students Need a Politically INcorrect Guide to History. The typical American student leaves high school and even college with a head full of misconceptions about American history. They are taught downright falsehoods, such as that the success of entrepreneurs like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller was founded on exploitation of the poor; that Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal pulled America out of the Great Depression of the 1930s; and that Senator Joseph McCarthy’s claims that Communist sympathizers had infiltrated the State Department were largely unfounded.

The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History by Professor Thomas E. Woods is a good antidote to the biased and erroneous accounts often found in high school and college textbooks. One of the best chapters is entitled “Yes, Communist sympathizers really existed.” The liberals usually denied the existence of Communists in the U.S. government, but Professor Woods provides plenty of modern evidence to prove that our government was crawling with Communist agents and spies during the 1940s and 1950s. New evidence, such as the release of the famous Venona files, proves that Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, who were executed in 1953 for atomic espionage, were really guilty; that Alger Hiss, a darling of the establishment, was guilty; and that dozens of lesser known persons were traitors, or, at the very least, were ideological subjects of the Soviet Union.

This book is feisty and opinionated, and even conservatives won’t agree with all of its conclusions. However, it makes an excellent counterweight to the liberal bias prevalent in today’s colleges.

Politically INcorrect Guide to Science. Tom Bethell’s book called The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science revels in pointing out the flawed thinking and hidden political agendas in the way science is currently taught. Consider stem cell research. Bethell reveals the inconvenient facts that embryonic stem cell research has not produced any miracle cures, and that cloned animals die quickly, often with strange tumors and other ailments. In July 2005, Scientific American reported that embryonic stem cells used directly in therapy cause cancer. The smart private money knows that embryonic stem cell research is greatly exaggerated, and that’s why there’s a current stampede to get government funding.

Bethell turns up the heat on the intellectual dishonesty about global warming. He quotes the former Canadian Minister of the Environment as saying: “No matter if the science is all phony . . . Climate change provides the greatest chance to bring about justice and equality in the world.”

Has anything been as unfairly maligned as nuclear power? The nuclear power industry was stopped cold for 25 years because of the Three Mile Island accident even though no one was hurt! The French produce 80% of their power safely with nuclear reactors, and 83 U.S. Navy ships with nuclear reactors regularly visit ports all over the world.

Tom Bethell has lots of fun with the hysteria about dioxin. Bethell presents evidence that small doses of many substances thought to be deadly such as arsenic, radiation, mercury, and even dioxin, actually can have beneficial effects. And, of course, he covers Rachel Carson’s dishonest book that scared us out of using DDT. DDT was banned in 1972, and now malaria kills more than a million people a year in Africa alone.

Human Accomplishment: 800 B.C. to 1950. This book by the scholar Charles Murray is a tremendous tribute to Western civilization. Murray refutes the popular political correctness so widespread in universities today, which de-emphasizes the so-called dead white European males (known as DWEMs). They were the very ones who contributed so massively to the arts and sciences.

Human Accomplishment uses persuasive statistical techniques to give us a list of the most significant historical figures in the arts and sciences, including a top-20 ranking in each field. More interesting than the rankings, however, are the discussions of the conditions that gave rise to their remarkable genius. Charles Murray concludes that the “giants” overwhelmingly emerged between 1400 and 1900 from four countries in Europe, aided by such factors as prosperous cities with good schools and universities and some political freedom. He analyzes the resilience of accomplishment amid adverse conditions such as warfare and plague; the dearth of female significant figures; the flowering of Jewish achievement after anti-Semitic restrictions were lifted; and the more recent rise of U.S. accomplishment.

But why did Western Europe predominate and not Asia, Russia or the Arab world, all of which made valuable contributions? Murray’s answer turns out to be Christianity. The ancient Greeks invented Western individualism, but it took the Christian doctrine of the equality of all people in the eyes of God, plus Thomas Aquinas’s exaltation of reason as pleasing to God, plus the Reformation’s assertion of the individual’s direct relationship with God and Scripture, to foster the sense of purpose and autonomy that best enable genius to flourish. Brilliant people in the East had to contend with cultures showing far more deference to clan, tradition and authority, and aversion to debate and innovation, than prevailed in the West.