VIETNAM VETERANS FOR ACADEMIC REFORM
The University of Kansas Student Auxiliary
V.V.A.R.: Leading the student revolt on campus against speech codes, political correctness, multiculturalism, gender feminism, dormitory re-education, lying about Vietnam, and other instruments of academic oppression.
Leonard Magruder - Founder/President
Former professor of psychology - Suffolk College, N.Y.
Member: National Association of Scholars
CONTACT: Magruder44@aol.com - Phone: 785-312-9303
(Vietnam vet contact: General Carl Schneider (ret.) Korea, Vietnam
dukesch@aol.com, 480-595-7668)
TURNING THEIR BACKS - AGAIN
January 15, 2005
by Leonard Magruder
The show-piece of the counter-inaugural protest on the 20th will be a simultaneous turning of their backs along the parade route by the largely leftist students and no doubt many faculty from major East Coast universities. This is not the first time they turned their backs on America. They’re good at it.
They turned their backs on freedom for the South Vietnamese. They turned their backs on the soldiers of that war when they returned. And now on our soldiers fighting in Iraq. They went on to turn their backs on the great thinkers of Western Civilization, on the history of their own nation. On millions of babies only minutes from birth, on the word “God,” even when it appears in words like Godzilla, so silly are they. They turned their backs on moral relations between men and women, on morality itself, values and truth.
This turning of the back has nothing to do with the inauguration of President Bush. The rest of the people in the crowd are just going to boo and yell “bye bye.” They know what it really means. I’ll use a phrase I first used at my protest at the University of Colorado against the student anti-war protestors in June, 1972. It always seemed to get them.
“America correctly senses the true underlying message. We do not believe in truth or morals, we will not sacrifice for democracy, we do not care if millions are slaughtered or enslaved. We want only to be left in peace, to pursue our sloth, our sex games, and our drugs.”
And they are going to recycle those tired old hags from the 60’s: “imperialism” and “oppression.” In fact, everything they’ve got is a recycling. I don’t have to write anything more to finish this newsletter. Just quote from a Press Release I handed out in a one-man protest against the anti-war movement in San Francisco in 1968. That was the worst year of the 60’s, the Tet Offensive, the assassination of King and Robert Kennedy, the riots in Watts. I was there, all over the place, complaining. But being an academic, my primary concern at the time was the role of the university in all this. Just as it is of major concern in our own time.
The other side was inventive, often dramatic. But we did dramatic things, too. It was war, and we were all doing outrageous things.
Press Release - San Francisco, CA, February 10, 1968
“Mr. Leonard Magruder, a former professor of psychology, revealed today that he was working as a night-clerk in a San Francisco hotel as a result of publicly returning his M.A. degree to Southern Methodist University to call the attention of the American people to the ‘moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the universities and the false understanding of man in the social sciences in particular that was proving itself incapable of dealing with the social problems of our times, such as crime, violence, mental illness and the alienation of youth. University intellectuals are out of touch with reality, are betraying students into lives of meaninglessness, and have abandoned their country to myths in an hour of crisis (Vietnam).’
In San Francisco today, Mr. Magruder said the President’s panel on violence was too little and too late, that an approach to the problem could only begin with a massive acknowledgement of bankruptcy and guilt on the part of the universities, especially the social sciences, and an immediate exposure of their basic assumptions to re-examination in debate. He said the nation’s violence was directly related to the dominance in our universities of philosophies of man whose basic assumptions were closer to those of totalitarianism than to the ideals and heritage of the free West.
He said the universities had failed to deal honestly with the significance of Communism, had sown the seeds of a ‘Hate America’ student mentality, had laid the grounds for a totalitarian style student revolt which they now couldn’t control, had launched totally irresponsible attacks on the President and the Government and had taught students to do so as well, and were now determined to elect an appeasement President who could lead us straight into nuclear crisis.
He said that real change would only come when students and the American people demanded an end to the use of the university as an instrument of indoctrination in a bankrupt liberalism.
He said the ‘morality’ that student and youth were attributing to themselves with the blessings of liberal faculty was a pseudo-morality, that the natural idealism of youth, distorted by academic cynicism and nihilism was producing a fascist caricature of morality; violent, self-righteous, riddled with contradictions, and totally unamenable to reason or discussion.
Mr. Magruder said that the consequences for this country and the world of the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the universities, with the consequent violence it has released and with its program to save America by destroying it, were so great, and the American people being kept in such deliberate confusion by the refusal of the universities to help clarify the real issues, that he proposes that some large foundation provide prime television time and a select panel of thinkers to provide a national “teach-in” on the theological and philosophical foundations of current events. He said such a program should provide for the appearance of key spokesmen for the Hippie, student, Black Power, radical theology, and other movements in open discussion of their philosophies and aims to provide a sound basis for judgment on the part of the American people. He said that as a last resort parents may want to register a protest against the betrayal by intellectuals of American ideals of free speech and academic freedom by not sending their children to ringleader universities in an economic boycott.”
The protest in San Francisco did not make the news. But the University of Colorado protest in Boulder did.
From The Boulder Daily Camera, June 22, 1972:
“Mr. Magruder called for a national movement to reform the American university. The issues, he said were, ‘The failure of the social sciences with regard to contemporary social ills, the ignorance of students on Communism and basic philosophical and theological alternatives, the indoctrination of students and their manipulation by liberal faculty to influence national policy, the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the student anti-war movement, and the regressive movement on campus back to witchcraft, astrology and drugs as sources of truth and self-fulfillment.’”
The above is but part of the history of activism in the 60’s and 70’s that eventually lead to the launching of Vietnam Veterans for Academic Reform at Suffolk College, New York, in 1981.
Intellectual suppression has long been a problem at our larger universities. As Leon Botstein, President of Bard College, recently said, “Our universities today are centers of forbidden questions.”
The proposal in San Francisco to have national debate on television is something that should be pursued. We don’t need more pundits talking to other pundits. The nation needs to see conservative intellectuals directly confronting people like Chomsky, Zinn, Moore, and others on the left. I did something like this for over a year not long ago in a weekly half-hour television program on Public Access called, “The University Under Fire.” It consisted of interviews with professors at the University of Kansas on a wide range of critical issues. Here are some of them:
§ How Leftist Academics are Rewriting American History
§ The University: An Island of Repression in a Sea of Freedom
§ Hey! Hey! Ho! Ho! Multiculturalism Has Got to Go !
§ Vietnam Veterans Expose the Campus War Protests of the 60’s.
§ An Explanation for “Killer Kids” No One Will Talk About
§ Science and the Return of the God Hypothesis
§ The Bizarre World of Gender Feminists
§ Baby Talk from Social Scientists as Kids Continue to Kill
§ Problems Between Science and Religion
§ Issues That Can’t be Discussed in the University Newspaper
§ Open Letter to Parents on the Disaster in Education
§ Rational Autonomy and the Darkening of Intellect
§ On Separation of Church and State
§ Molecular Biologists on the Crisis in Evolution Theory
This needs to be taken to the next, national level, because the university is failing miserably to keep the students and the public informed on the dangerous problems of the day. Just as the university failed to be honest with students about the Communism at the heart of the Vietnam conflict, so today they are not telling students the truth about terrorism, the role in it played by Islam, and the threat of nuclear attack. With an estimated 12 liberals on faculties to every conservative, it is not likely students will ever get the truth about anything, except perhaps in the sciences. The university has truly become as David Horowitz says, “nothing but a huge patronage machine for the Left.” Turning its back on America.
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Founder/President, V.V.A.R.
Phone: 785-312-9303
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