Students For Academic Freedom

Academic Bias Watch · 18 February 2004

by AndrewSullivan.com--02/15/04

I had to take a class at the College of NJ called ... hmmm... ah ... SET (Science, Ethics, and Technology). A truly liberal-ating experience it was. During the Semester, a speaker was to give a lecture on the modern state. After the usual accolades, he began his lecture with his first point, "The final and greatest evolution of government is communism." He later moved on to say that Gulf War I was pushed by the military to test newly developed weapons. Well I paid too much money and spent too much time in the military at Ft. Bragg to take his rhetoric any longer. I asked him openly "If communism is sooo great why did its bastion implode?" On the Gulf War point, I told him it was baseless and I didn't think he knew what he was talking about. Anyway the rest of the semester I was attacked almost at every turn by brainwashed classmates. It didn't matter. I got an A-. To the conservative students: do your homework; read ahead so they can't trap you in an argument that they prepared throughout the 60's and 70's for."

That's good advice. But then you never know when it's going to come flying at you:

This past fall term at the University of Oregon, I was taking a Brazillian Jiu-Jitsu class. The teacher decided that on Columbus Day, he would give the class a huge lecture on how evil it was for our government to celebrate a man who not only is to blame for the extinction of countless Native American cultures, but is indirectly a cause of Hitler's Holocaust. This went on for an entire class, and at one point he even made a comparision of Bush to Hitler using what Bush was doing in the Middle East as his justification for that. This led to a diatribe on the evils of capitalism and the Oil Industry. Before that class session, I always thought that Brazillian Jiu-Jitsu was just about grapple-style fighting, little did I realize that if I were to be a true Brazillian Jiu-Jitsu artist I would have to battle the evils of genocide and capitalism as well.

"The only time I was ever really intimidated in class for my political beliefs, though, was in a Spanish class. The professor told us that there are no more dictators in Latin America. When I asked about Castro, I was informed that you cannot take the word of the defectors; they are the worms who want to live off the labor of others rather than having solidarity with the workers. What about the persecution of homosexuals? Well, we persecute homosexuals in the US too. When he asked what I wanted to do with my degree, I told him I was considering joining the Air Force. The next class began with him telling how disappointed he was in one of his students who had gone into the Army a few years earlier, supporting rather than criticizing the foreign policy of our horrible government. I have never been so eager for a term to end. I know he was the exception, but that doesn't excuse it."

Ouch. This one struck a nerve as well:

" I'm a doctoral student in English Literature at a large southeastern University, and I also work as a research assistant for a professor who works in a rather trendy area in Theory. In a welcome change, my professor asked me last week to read a biography about apartheid South Africa and help her discuss the book with one of her undergraduate students. The notion arose in our discussion that once peoples previously separated by fear and stereotypes actually met individually, they were often able to put aside these fears. As an example, my professor put forward the abstract idea of meeting Republicans and trying to understand them as people. Misreading the consternation on my face, she quickly noted that she didn't personally know any Republicans and, anyway, there could be NO justifiable excuse for being a Republican. Now, this professor is a lovely and amiable person, but she felt more than comfortable making this comparison in front of two students whose political leanings she assumed were her own. Considering our discussion of apartheid, I said nothing but savored the delicious irony all day."

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