University Tour: Update from Santa Cruz · 08 April 2009
I'm in Tucson on the second day of my Indoctrination Tour of as many of the 12 universities in the book Jacob Laksin and I have written, One-Party Classroom,which documents the political corruption of American universities by the academic left. Indoctrination takes place when a sectarian agenda is instilled in classrooms filled with impressionable students, and taught as though it were scientific doctrine. '
In One-Party Classroom, we have described 150 courses that are designed to drill students in leftwing ideology and persuade them that America is a racist, sexist, homophobic, imperialist country and that our enemies have a case when they say they have no choice but conduct a holy war against us.
On Monday I arrived in the Chicago area in a snowstorm (letters to Mr. Gore and the NYTimes please -- it's April after all) to speak at DuPage community college whose trustees are attempting to adopt the Academic Bill of Rights. The ABOR would require faculty to inform students when controversial doctrines and opinions are being paraded in front them and to provide them with access to critical texts. The American Association of University Professors regards such measures as a threat to their faculty preorogatives which include (in their view) the right to indoctrinate undergraduates.
I spoke at noon at DuPage and then took a car to Knox, which is the alma mater of John Podesta and whose last three commencement speakers have been Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton and Podesta. And oh yes, the repugnant Bill Ayers spoke there as well. Today I'm in Tucson to speak at the University of Arizona, then on to Arizona State and the University of Texas.
This morning I have received several emails noting that the University of California Santa Cruz -- the Worst School in America according to our book -- is terminating its Community Studies Department -- Communist Activities Department would be a more accurate title. It is officially doing so for economic reasons as described in this article in the San Jose Mercury News,
For years I have been forced to play a game with the education media (InsideHigherEd.com in particular) and with disingenous spokesmen for the AAUP, including Michael Berube and Cary Nelson, who pretend that there is no such problem as political recruitment and indoctrination going on in American liberal arts colleges. Here is the Mercury News account of what a Santa Cruz sophomore said to the in the course of making a thinly veiled threat to the UC administrators: "Sophomore Elena Rossman, 20, said students would not let go of the department without a fight. 'This major trains community activists and organizers,' Rossman said. "So they're kind-of messing with the wrong people."
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