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
V.V.A.R. COMMENTARY : NEED FOR UNIVERSITY REFORM HAS ROOTS IN 60’S. PIONEER ORGANIZATION NOTES GROWING NUMBER OF STUDENT GROUPS DEMANDING CHANGE
By Leonard Magruder
August 29, 2003
Leonard Magruder, president of Vietnam Veterans for Academic Reform, today sent a letter of congratulations to Sara Russo, president of the latest student organization calling for academic reform, Students for Academic Freedom.
“Students for Academic Freedom is a clearing house and communications center whose goal is to end the political abuse of the university and to restore integrity to the academic mission as a disinterested pursuit of knowledge.” www.studentsforacademicfreedom.org.
There are now a dozen or more organizations dedicated to university reform. Said Mr. Magruder, “As founder of the first organization of this kind, I find it very gratifying to find that so many others now recognize the same problems we did in 1982, and are also speaking out. However, it is important to remember that all these totalitarian trends on campus today have their roots far earlier in the rise of the Left in the campus war protests of the early 60’s.”
A second organization, Accuracy in Academia, began two years later. Reed Irvine, the founder, invited Mr. Magruder to become President of the organization in 1985 but because of prior committments he could not accept. Mr. Michael Capel, however, Editor of the AIA’s magazine Campus Report, later served on the Board of Advisors of V.V.A.R.
The next major organization to appear around this time was the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, founded by the former 60’s radical David Horowitz, with probably the nation’s most brilliant and most read group of writers. Mr. Magruder met Mr. Horowitz when both spoke at the Vietnam Symposium in 1986 following former Senator Eugene McCarthy on the platform. Mr. Horowitz also served for a while on the V.V.A.R. Board of Advisors. He recently launched a Campaign to Take Back Our Campuses.
Mr. Horowitz, having been there at the time, often writes about the connection between the new totalitarianism on campus and the 60’s. Recently he wrote:
“Beginning in the mid-1960s, the left made a concerted effort to take over our colleges and universities. The turmoil surrounding the Vietnam War made our schools ripe for leftist pickings, and they did - they methodically took over our campuses. Now, four decades later, they have a stranglehold on hiring, teaching and administrating most of our schools in all 50 states. As they’ve taken control, they’ve trampled free speech, virtually banished all conservative professors, and turned our schools into little more than hugh megaphones for anti-American rhetoric from coast to coast. “
Also relatively new is the The Foundation of Individual Rights in Education, a highly effective legal action group fighting for the civil rights of both students and professors. Also recently launched is the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, co-founded by Lynne Cheney, wife of the vice-president.
Another important organization made up of professors calling for reform is the National Association of Scholars. In a letter to Mr. Magruder inviting him to join the organization, Executive Director Bradford Wilson said, “The last 20 years have witnessed the steady erosion of academic standards. Academic freedom and open discourse are under assault from ideological and bureaucratic bullies. Since 1987 NAS has been working to bring about reform, first virtually alone but now at the center of a vigorous and expanding movement for higher education reform that we helped create. (V.V.A.R. started in 1982).
More recently, reform organizations have either been started by, or involve, students themselves. For example, Campus Watch, which presents criticism of academics written by students., with founder Daniel Pipes complaining that Middle East studies are largely tainted by “disinformation, incitement, and ignorance.” Noindoctrination.org is another new website that presents reports by students about the indoctrination going on at their schools. Professor Watch will present profiles of professors reported to be using their classrooms for propaganda purposes rather than education.
And there are other new groups. It is very clear that a revolution has started, but one of the first things that will have to happen is to demonstrate once and for all how left-liberals lied about Vietnam in the 60’s as that will ruin the credibility of what they are saying today. That is why in September [2003], to celebrate its 22nd year, Vietnam Veterans for Academic Reform will present a five-night series of new, far more objective and truthful films on the Vietnam War to help students understand the connection.
Why should the prevailing interpretation of the Vietnam War on American campuses be that which best serves the interests of those who would not serve? Isn’t it time to end this farce? As Michael Lind wrote in his new Vietnam: the Necessary War, probably our best analysis of that war, “...this synthesis of progressive and leftist myths became the conventional wisdom about the Vietnam War for several decades following the conflict. Today it is at once possible and necessasry for a new generation of both centrist liberals and conservatives to disentangle fact from fiction about the Vietnam War.” In other words, we don’t have to put up with this any longer; we shouldn’t have put up with it this long. (The event in September will also be to protest the predominant use on campuses for decades, including the Univ. of Kansas, of Stanley Karnow’s Vietnam: A History, a text so absurdly inaccurate and biased that a PBS series based on it caused massive protests by Vietnamese and American veterans in such places as Los Angeles, Houston, Washington, London and Paris.)
That many could see the connection between the campus war protests of the 60’s and a growing corruption in academia as early as 22 years ago is very clear from the following selections from the Manifesto of Vietnam Veterans for Academic Reform, placed on record with the White House, along with a student petition, after having been presented there by Professor Magruder by appointment in January of 1982, with copies distributed throughout the National Press Building.
V.V.A.R. MANIFESTO of 1982 President Ronald Reagan The White House Washington, D.C.
Dear Mr. President,
Over the past year, 300 of my students in 10 sections of Psychology and Sociology were assigned a project to study the Vietnam War to answer two questions that had been asked of President Carter by Vietnam Veterans of America: Why had they been sent to war, and what lessons had the nation learned from the experience?
In every section the students concluded that the answer as to why we were there was now even more clear than when President Kennedy first explained the matter. We were there because of our relationship to the South Vietnamese through SEATO. They had asked for our help in defending their freedom against Communist aggression originating from North Vietnam and supported by Russia and China. He warned that should South Vietnam fall, it would have a domino effect and threaten the balance of power in Southeast Asia in favor of Communist totalitarianism.
Kennedy, and every president who followewd him, the students agreed, had told the nation the truth. The campus “peace” movement, which said that the war was “immoral,” that the motive was “imperialism,” that the domino theory was “absurd,” that the war was only a “civil war,” that Ho Chi Mihn was only a “nationalist,” and that America was engaged in “aggression” and “genocide,” was wrong.
(note: At the end of this exercise, Professor Magruder, after giving the students their grades to insure objectivity, asked them to vote on whether the war was justified. 85% said that it was justified, a legitimate struggle for freedom for others.We challenge all universites to repeat this experiment, using the more objective, up-to-date materials now available on the war.)
Puzzled as to why the students of this generation could see the truth so clearly, whereas those of the 60’s could not, the students concluded that faculties, to serve their own ideological purposes, had misinformed their students, who in turn used the misinformation to serve their own purposes. Some of the students admitted that had they been in college at the time and were subject to the draft, they would have viewed this issue differently.
The role of the campus “peace” movement is seen in President Johnson’s telling General Westmoreland shortly after the Tet Offensive that to pursue the war more aggressively was politically unfeasible, that he had “no choice but to calm the protestors lest they precipitate an abject American pull-out.” (Lewy, 1978) The role of the media is seen in the conclusion of Peter Braestrup, the noted journalist who researched in detail the reporting of the war by the news media: “Rarely has contemporary crisis journalism turned out, in retrospect, to have veered so widely from reality.”(“Big Story,” 2 vols.)
The “peace” movement, my students concluded, was never really concerned for peace. Although it cloaked itself in an aura of great moral purpose, it in fact gave aid and comfort to the enemy, marched under the flag of the Viet Cong, allowed Hanoi to dictate its agenda, and turned its back on the American soldier. By ascribing the basest possible motives to the government and the American people, it in fact played out the role of a Hanoi lobby in enemy territory.
Said Guenter Lewy, in America in Vietnam, the most comprehensive and best balanced study to date of the war, “... it was obvious that many of these men and the organizations and committees they spawned were not so much for peace and against the war as they were partisans of Hanoi, whose victory they sought to hasten through achieving an American withdrawal from Vietnam.”
It was this support for Hanoi and the desire to humiliate America that caused my students to decide that the anti-war movement was not an authentic domestic peace force.
Particularly disturbing to my students was the fact that the university had spawned, in the very heart of academia, two totalitarian movements, the New Left and the S.D.S., behind which tens of thousands of students rallied to defeat the sacrifices for freedom of their own countrymen. Based largely on Marxism, these two groups advocated authoritarian repression of opposing opinion, political violence, and ultimately class murder and dictatorship, all with the encouragement of liberals in the university. This tendency to encourage totalitarianism, the students concurred, still lies latent within the profound contradictions of contemporary liberal thought. Unless immediate university reform begins, the university and the media, they fear, could prove instrumental in the destruction of America, by again polarizing, and then paralyzing, the nation in a time of crisis.
The American soldier, with few exceptions, fought bravely and honorably. He did what the nation asked of him and in no sense was the war lost on the battlefield. Even though American resolve fell short in the end, few nations in history have ever engaged in such sacrifices for others, and no gain, or attempted gain for human freedom can be discounted. Those who fought for freedom for South Vietnam not only deserve to be honored, they deserve that the nation start facing the truth.
The aspects of the war that most need clarifying, in TV documentries, film, movies, books, debates, courses, etc., are: the idealistic motives for our involvement, the subversive nature of the “peace” movement, the true intentions of Communist North Vietnam to conquer all Indochina, the barbaric tactics of the Viet Cong, the use of the media to influence public opinion, the manipulation of American journalists and intellectuals by Hanoi propaganda, the true bravery and victorious record of our fighting men, the genuine thrust for freedom of South Vietham, and the truth about liberals in Congress in their final abandonment of South Vietnam.
But to tell the truth about Vietnam, the students realized, would necessarily involve challenging the reigning philosophies on campus. Out of this could come, however, not only freedom for the Vietnam veteran from a false image, but a profound intellectual and moral revolution on campus. They decided they wanted to do something to start this reform.
There is unquestionably a growing resentment against the suppression of their right to be exposed to the full spectrum of intellectual debate. Minor secular philosophies have become institutionalized on campus as ultimate truth. These positions are protected by the simple expedience of refusing debate and running major challengers, such as theism, off campus. The insights of centuries of Western experience and thought have simply disappeared, from curriculum, bookstores, and textbooks.
The time has unquestionably come for the American people to demand the liberation of their educational systems from the defensive, hypocritical, and potentially treasonous confines into which they have been betrayed.”
End of 1982 Manifesto
So it was that the students came to realize that something terrible had happened to our universities in the 60’s, something that not only helped to destroy our efforts for freedom in South Vietnam, but would compound itself in the years ahead in terrible conflict with everything American, leading to further totalitarian movements as we see now in multiculturalism, political correctness, speech codes, gender feminism, postmodernism, etc. And so the students organized the first rally on any campus to honor the returned veterans of the Vietnam War, and launched the first student organization calling for university reform, Vietnam Veterans for Academic Reform, with campus auxiliaries.
The subsequent history of V.V.A.R. over the next 22 years is found in a 21-page (single-spaced, plus appendix) monograph, The War on the Home Front, available for $5 by contacting Leonard Magruder. A collection of selections from various speeches, lectures, writings, projects, radio and TV interviews by Prof. Magruder and his group, it includes a parallel account of the three-decades long deterioration in higher education that followed the leftist takeover of American universites in the 60’s, along with various efforts at reform and various past projects of V.V.A.R..
These projects include the first rally on any American campus to honor the returned veterans from Vietnam, organized by Prof. Magruder and his students, his speech to Vietnam veterans on the occasion of his resignation at Suffolk College, N.Y., to protest the manner in which the vets were treated on campuses when they returned, the first Symposium on Vietnam involving the particiption of Vietnam combat veterans at Suffolk College, N.Y., the delivery of the V.V.A.R. Manifesto to the White House, the protest at the American Psychological Association Convention in Washington, and the first exposé of the lies in the notorious CBS film, The Uncounted Enemy. (“You have done an exhaustive bit of research and I congratulate you.” --Gen. William Westmoreland, personal letter) .
Then came Mr. Magruder’s call to serve as National Coordinator for the Vietnam Symposium at Stony Brook Univ., N.Y., his successful campaign to get PBS to air the boycotted documentary, Television’s Vietnam:The Impact of Media, and his appeal to Congress to investigate the role of the media during the Vietnam War, in particular, its flawed reporting of the Tet Offensive. (“Professor Magruder’s project is an extremely important one and I support his efforts 100%” --Gen. Westmoreland in National Vietnam Veteran’s Review of Apr.- Jun, 1986)
Later V.V.A.R. launched is first student auxiliary on the campus of the University of Kansas, and up to this time has held four protests on the campus involving various controversial issues, in additon to a number of lectures and programs for students calling for reform. With a computer the organization began a whole stream of articles going out nation-wide on reform issues, many of which can be found reproduced on major veteran, news, and educational websites. Last year the group gave out 80 copies of its new documentary, How the Campus Lied About Vietnam, based on interviews with Vietnam vets, to universities, vet organizations, and high schools that requested the film.
For recent articles and our Manifesto declaring war on leftist academics, go to: www.v-v-a-r.org.
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Founder/President, V.V.A.R.
Phone: 785-312-9303
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