NAS Blog

As an undergrad, I spent one year at Berkeley, 1968, a year full of death, riots, tear gas, and bayonets under Peder Sather’s gate.  I dressed in Levis, love beads from a head shop on Telegraph Avenue, and an Army field jacket pilfered from Fort Ord.  I wore OD and flashed the peace sign in “solidarity” with my contemporaries who were fighting and dying in Vietnam while I skated by with an educational deferment.

Ironically, three years later I was at Fort Ord teaching classes full of `Nam vets, some rotating back to the rice paddies and the jungle.  I learned the shorthand:  TDY, MOS, HALO jumping, “boo-coo” (beaucoup), “bookin’,” and I discovered the joy of teaching military students who were prompt, eager, did the reading, and called me “sir.”  For the next 20 years, outside our barracks classroom was Vietnam, Panama, Desert Storm; inside was Moby Dick and Dylan Thomas.  Then the Soviet Union’s collapse brought base closure, and I was transferred to main campus.

I furnish this prologue because recently I listened to a colleague expound passionately on the futility of war, and I wondered how a veteran would feel hearing that indictment of his sacrifice, however well-intentioned.  Professors with pacifistic sentiments are commonplace, of course, but one also finds naked hostility towards the military in academia, such as Dr. June Terpstra’s fever-dream, “Killers in the Classroom.”

That’s why I now include a “thank you for your service” in my syllabus and request that veterans identify themselves privately in case I need to adjust class material for them.  When studying film, I often show Apocalypse Now. Thirty years ago, a sergeant asked to be excused from the viewing because he, like Colonel Kurtz, had “gone native in Vietnam.”  Just last year, a quiet, Iraq War veteran also asked for an alternative assignment.  He ended up writing a stunning account of a chaotic, bloody firefight he was in on “IED Alley” outside Al-Qaiim.  He said it helped him to write about it and thanked me.  I could only reply, “No, Corpsman Chan, thank you.”

If you are a double major in Classical Languages and English Literature at the University of Wyoming, you are saddled with a required diversity class on “literature by and about women, not men.”  The course that Marine Lance Corporal Aaron Graham wants to transfer, my Literature By and About Men class, thus does not meet the Cowboys’ standards for diversity.  Remarkably, Wyoming describes itself as a “welcoming community.”  Welcome, Lance Corporal, to institutionalized sexism in academia where men cannot be studied, only opposed; men cannot be analyzed, only condemned; men cannot be understood, only mocked and despised.

Wyoming is no maverick.  I had a fight just getting my course approved.  The University of California bridled at accepting a course about men and uniquely male experience.  That’s understandable because anyone raised on Family Guy, The Simpsons, American Dad, beer commercials, sitcoms, gender feminism, and the glut of misandristic Hollywood films (misandristic appears not even to be a word in most dictionaries) naturally thinks that males must be roped, tied, and broken of their stupid, pathetic, and predatory ways.

Aaron, however, read serious literature by David Lloyd, Faulkner, Sam Shepard (“The Real Gabby Hayes”), Amy Clampitt, Philip Larkin, Christina Hoff Summers, Hemingway, Camille Paglia, Harry Crews, Steven Pinker, Homer, Harvey Mansfield, Isaac Clemens, Leonard Gardner, Thomas van Nortwick, Robert Hayden, James Dickey, Leonard Sax, Vergil, Harvey Swados, Tennyson, Joan Didion (“John Wayne:  A Love Song”), et al.  Aaron viewed Seven Samurai, Ghost Dog, Deliverance, Fight Club, and “I am the Lord thy God . . .” from Decalogue. Aaron studied lessons about “Boys,” “Fathers,” “Sons,” “Men and War,” “Male Codes,” “The Man of Letters,” “Love and Marriage,” and “Manly Aging, Manly Death.”

Too bad, pardner!  Those readings, those films, those topics are not worthy of study at the University of Wyoming because Wyoming has an agenda:   “. . . women, not men.”  This is not welcoming, not inclusive, and not education; it’s galloping gender discrimination.

The same day I heard of Aaron’s dilemma, I also heard of a new academic direction for men:  male studies.  As one of my gender feminist colleagues frequently asserts:  “Equity must be addressed!”  How right she is.  Cowboy up, Wyoming—time to plant this locoweed up on Boot Hill.

From Division of Labour, via Phi Beta Cons:

At UNC-Chapel Hill one can earn a minor in social and economic justice without taking an economics course. See for yourself here (scroll down)–the minor includes some economics courses as electives but does not require even a single principles course.

I always thought of utilitarianism as a somewhat capitalistic hence individualistic philosophy.  I seem to remember reading John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty in college and passages about the right of the British to sell opium to the Chinese, the right of free speech and freedom absent interference with others, which would suggest libertarianism.  But I am reading Mill’s Utilitarianism for a project on business ethics and am struck by this passage, which sounds to me like advocacy of social justice education (p. 28):

…education and opinion, which have so vast a power over human character, should so use that power as to establish in the mind of every individual an indissoluble association between his own happiness and the good of the whole; especially between his own happiness and the practice of such modes of conduct,  negative and positive, as regard for the universal happiness prescribes; so that not only he may be unable to conceive the possibility of happiness himself, consistently with conduct opposed to the general good, but also that a direct impulse to promote the general good may be in every individual one  of the habitual motives of action, and the sentiments connected therewith may fill a large and prominent place in every human being’s sentient existence.

That is social justice education in a nutshell.  One can see in Mill the close link between utilitarian capitalism and socialism; and the ease with which American capitalists in the past two years have wavered between them.

Crosspost from www.NAS.org

Two weeks ago I published an article about a Marxist journal that has seized authority in the education world. The Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies (JCEPS) is published by the UK-based Institute for Education Policy Studies (IEPS), “an independent Radical Left/Socialist/Marxist institute for developing policy analysis and development of education policy.” It takes its cues from Che Guevara and Paulo Freire.

Articles from JCEPS are required reading in some ed schools, and the editorial advisory board has representatives from universities in eighteen countries. In posting the NAS article on JCEPS, I thought that simply calling the journal what it is would be enough to discredit it. I wrote:

While it is appropriate to study the now discredited but historically important ideas of Marxism in political science, philosophy, and economics courses, education schools have no need for radical ideology. Ed schools should be preparing teachers to train the minds of the next generation, not to arm them with socialist politics. To do so cheats both future teachers and their future students out of the sound, unbiased education they deserve.

I assumed that most people would agree that Marxist politics have no place in the classroom, and that the JCEPS folks would be reluctant to own their radical left agenda. I was wrong. Since the article appeared on the NAS website, apologists for the journal have been coming out of the woodwork. We seem to have secured the attention of some of the last remaining Marxists on earth. One commenter, who seems not to be a native speaker of English, wrote:

Definitely, education should be explicitly involved in struggles for equity and justice, especially at the current situation. Therefore, it’s very meaningful to arouse teachers and students’ critical consciousness, as Professor Peter McLaren does.

School and society shouldn’t be separated. No matter it is in John Dewey’s mind “school is society”, or in other scholar’s essay “society is school”, schools have close relationship with society. George Counts once insisted that it was a great ideal that people should mainly focus on educating the children and care little about others, however, he thought that schools and teachers had to think about the injustice since the then unequal society greatly influenced teachers and students in 1930s.

As for the current situation which is much worse than in 1930s in many aspects, the “ivory tower” ideal had gone and would never come back, colleges and universities are more and more involved in the society economically and politically, students have to fight for the equality, and teachers are forced to fight for their right they deserved.

There are inequity and injustice in society, so it’s teachers’ responsibility to arouse their students consciousness to seek for the equity and justice. Those behind it are the ones who give up their responsibilities or the ones who own privilege, because they dare not to change the society or don’t want to give up their privilege. [emphasis mine]

Another person, ironically self-nicknamed “Cassiodorus” after the devout Christian who kept alive the flame of liberal learning after the fall of Rome, added:

Marxism isn’t discredited anywhere, education isn’t unbiased, and “radical” refers to the notion of examining the roots (“radical,” from the Latin radix, or root) of everyday practice, something which should be done more often in schools.  The rest of this is a rather amateurish collection of soundbites on a number of subjects, the least understood of which is critical pedagogy. [emphasis mine]

This is a delightful bit of self-delusion.  Marxism isn’t discredited anywhere?  Marxism is discredited just about everywhere, but if “Cassiodorus” needs a for instance, I can testify firsthand that Marxism is discredited in Novokuznetsk and other parts of Russia where I have stayed.  From his nom de plume, I would think Cassiodorus is implicitly acknowledging this reality.  His “Rome” would appear to be the Soviet State and the nations it held captive.  He is keeping the holy flame of Marxism alive in an age dominated by the barbarian idea of human freedom.

“Ferlaz” also chimed in:

In Argentina we are creating a new educational movement based on the critical pedagogies, especially the works of Paulo Freire, Peter McLaren.

This article only serves to confirm that we are on the correct path of struggle. This educational movement is not intended to build ideological blocs but returning to education because their political neutrality is also a way of doing politics.

This article ends endorsing own knowledge of the dominant classes, their ideologies and worldviews deny the possibility of conflict as natural and accepting the hegemonic discourse.

From Argentina, from the popular schools for youth and adults in factories recovered by their workers shouted: Che lives!, As in Peter McLaren’s page.

The grammar here is too shaky to figure out exactly what is making “ferlaz” so excited.  Che, the murderous thug of the Cuban revolution, is fortunately long dead.  He enjoys only the kind of immortality conferred by T-shirts and dorm-room posters.

It does seem to me of absorbing interest that the great folly of Marxism—having burned through the twentieth century as a fire that killed more than 90 million people, enslaved countless others, and brought more misery and oppression into the world than any other political doctrine in human history—still has its proud defenders.  And they are in schools of education.

This week in Frontpage Magazine Michelle Malkin has an article, “Hollywood and Howard Zinn’s Marxist Education Project.” Here’s an excerpt:

Zinn’s objective is not to impart knowledge, but to instigate “change” and nurture a political “counterforce” (an echo of fellow radical academic and Hugo Chavez admirer Bill Ayers’ proclamation of education as the “motor-force of revolution”). Teachers are not supposed to teach facts in the school of Zinn. “There is no such thing as pure fact,” Zinn asserts. Educators are not supposed to emphasize individual academic achievement. They are supposed to “empower” student collectivism by emphasizing “the role of working people, women, people of color and organized social movements.” School officials are not facilitators of intellectual inquiry, but leaders of “social struggle.”

Zinn and company have launched a nationwide education project in conjunction with the documentary. “A people’s history requires a people’s pedagogy to match,” Zinn preaches. The project is a collaboration between two “social justice” activist groups, Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change.

[...]

No part of the school curriculum is immune from the social justice makeover crew. Zinn’s partners at Rethinking Schools have even issued teaching guides to “Rethinking Mathematics: Teaching Social Justice by the Numbers” — which rejects the traditional white male patriarchal methods of teaching computation and statistics in favor of p.c.-ified number-crunching [see NAS's articles on this, "Social Changelings" and "Mathematical Deceptions"].

[...]

Our students will continue to come in dead last in international testing. But no worries. With Howard Zinn and Hollywood leftists in charge, empty-headed young global citizens will have heavier guilt, wider social consciences and more hatred for America than any other students in the world.

A blog on Inside Higher Ed that I pay attention to, Getting to Green, has an interesting discussion about advocacy intruding on higher education. Note that the Getting to Green blogger writes under a pseudonym and is “a sustainability administrator at a large private research university, an adjunct faculty member, and a farmer.”

Michael Legaspi at Creighton University commenting on Getting to Green:

Advocacy rears its head too often, in multicultural moralism, identity politics, and, as the CRU debacle shows, in too many kinds of environmental studies. When we are concerned only to convert students to the “right” view of things, rather than to lead them through complex engagement of the intellectual substance of important questions, we make it all too easy for them to get by in our classes by telling us what we want to hear. When they do so to our satisfaction, we may have scored a cheap political victory, but we have surely done so at the expense of our best and highest ideals.

Getting to Green responds:

Michael Legaspi is concerned that too much of American higher education consists of political advocacy. He’s right to be, and I agree with him. In fact, I’d go further. I’d say that too much teaching consists of social and economic advocacy, as well. Too much of what goes on in social sciences and professional schools treats how things are as the best they could possibly be (in this, the best of all possible worlds). Advocacy may be an acceptable form of consciousness-raising, but it’s far from the highest form of teaching.

When I work with professors at Greenback, I really don’t know how much sustainability-related advocacy they indulge in. My impression, and my sincere hope, is that it’s not much. Advocacy is appropriate in the marketplace of ideas, but potentially troubling in the classroom. My objective is to get students to engage both with the material — the facts — and in some degree of substantive analysis. If a student seriously engages with the idea that natural resources (both sources and sinks) are finite, that the systems which interact to produce the planet’s climate are many and complex, and that societies may have a responsibility to address problems of their own creation, then I’m satisfied. Not everyone has to agree with my conclusions about climate disruption, its causes, its likely costs for humanity if left unchecked, or the need to address it globally and immediately. What I comment on when I review student projects and papers is whether they demonstrate an understanding of the material, not whether that understanding matches my own.

I don’t agree with G2G’s entire post (especially the part about the mainstream media giving credence to Climategate – think Googlegate), but he’s saying the right thing here. One of the main problems with the push to “infuse” sustainability into higher education is that it brings ideological advocacy into the classroom. If we are to have sustainability education in the university, the approach G2G is talking about sounds like the right one.

In a previous post, I noted how military bloggers are writing the “first pages of history.” Likewise, student bloggers are offering a place to speak out against the abuses on their campuses: from official racial segregation (in the name of Diversity) to expulsion for being pro-life and much more.

During the 1990s, many upscale universities had students who said “Enough!” and established newspapers to advocate for academic freedom, mock the Mickey Mouse courses taught on campus, and generally play the role of watchdog. Needless to say, those newspapers were not welcomed by administrators or the PC thugs who “police” what happens on campus. Blessed by administrators who looked the other way, the thugs stole newspapers en masse and otherwise bullied these reporters in a style worthy of the Ku Klux Klan.

Flash forward ten years: the Internet offers students, alumni and faculty the opportunity to watch and report on the crazy shenanigans of those in power and those who feel empowered to act as foot soldiers in the “long march through the institutions” that has done so much damage to academic rigor and freedom.

(Disclosure: I have my own blog, FreeU, focusing primarily on Illinois issues).

Here I’d like to profile one excellent student blog: ClaremontConservative.com

Issues of interest to NAS readers include the following:

*Thought reform

*Expulsion for the “wrong” views

*Racial segregation promoted by the administration.

The military bloggers have a central directory; perhaps it is time to gather a EDUblogging directory? Meanwhile, search and you will find someone blogging about your campus, whether the pooh-bahs approve or not.

Postscript: Alumni need to get into the act. They have nothing to fear–and administrators sometimes listen to them. Using the web, I got alumni at my alma mater to pressure the administration and get rid of a mandatory “white guilt” seminar for freshmen.

During the recent election season I met  two Republicans who told me about instances of Ulster County, NY public school teachers’ using schools to ideologically brainwash children.  In one case a middle-aged man from Kingston, NY described a fifth grade teacher who repeatedly told his class to support specific left-wing political candidates.  In a second, an Olive, NY woman and advertising copy writer wrote me that  “my son was told that Snow White’s dwarfs represented the disaffected union workers, that conservative judges wanted to steal freedom from the people.”  She writes that she was “shocked, in denial, and ineffective”.

As a business professor at the City University of New York and adjunct at New York University I have frequently heard from undergraduate and MBA students who have been brainwashed.  Last year on the first day of an MBA-level management class, a young Wall Street trader raised his hand and said that the only thing that matters for business now is “whether the United States should become a socialist country.”  That was not the first instance of a first-day-of-class revolutionary declaration. On another occasion an undergrad raised his hand and asked in all seriousness about the implications for business of the coming proletarian revolution.

One reaction to the politicization of elementary schools and their use for brainwashing of children has been withdrawal and home schooling.  The woman who contacted me has proposed a different approach–a systematic training program for parents to enable them to respond to the use of schools for political purposes.

A reader from Australia commented on Tom Wood’s article “The Marriage of Affirmative Action and Transformative Education“:

This year, I was in a compulsory BA class that used transformative education. Without warning us, the teachers tried to transform us into adopting their political worldview, using all the passion they could muster. Since then I have been searching the web for critiques of transformative education, and found one of your articles, and I will read more. I have written many arguments against transformative education, but I am keen to find arguments from education professionals, lawyers, etc.

I thank you for speaking out. I am astounded that a university would force all BA students to be transformed “to create a better world”. I thought I was purchasing knowledge and skills, but instead they considered me to be mere fodder for political transformation.

University should be about teaching critical thinking, but instead I’ve had to teach my teachers critical thinking! Their main problem is unquestioned assumptions. They assume students have been brainwashed by society, that education is about the whole person, that teachers have the answers to the meaning of life, that globalisation is all bad, that the West (particularly USA) is colonising the world, that everything is basically political, etc. On the good side, they are idealistic and enthusiastic. But idealism and enthusiasm based on unquestioned assumptions leads to spreading delusion, not to improving the world. It seems to me that transformative education teachers do not trust that freely chosen unbiased knowledge can produce good results. So they force students to study the teachers’ worldviews.