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.
John Hughes - Honorary Chairman
C Co., 3rd Marine Reg., 3rd Marine Div.
Recipient - Purple Heart
Two tours of duty - Vietnam
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
VICTORY IN IRAQ EXPOSES BANKRUPTCY OF CAMPUS LEFT - STUDENTS AND VETERANS URGE FIRING OF LEFTIST PROFESSORS TO END DECADES OF ACADEMIC TYRANNY
A Manifesto of Student Liberation from Leftist Tyranny
April 2003
Section 1 - The Charges
SECTION 2 - Students and Veterans Denounce the Academic Left
SECTION 3 - Final Commentary
Section 1: THE CHARGES
1) THE ACADEMIC LEFT HATES AMERICA
-excerpt from an article by Thomas Segel, retired Marine journalist
“...they grew and mutated until today all of education is infected with educators who champion the left. This was very observable in the anti-war movement of the Vietnam era, the environmental movement of the 80s and 90s, and the globalization demonstrations of recent years. Now familiar faces and new converts are found deep within the ‘Hate America’ anti-war protests. America’s students are being exposed to the political agendas of leftist faculty members and the student organizations these same teachers created...the result can be seen in the streets, where the majority of protesters are from the ranks of high schools and college campuses.” Here is what some of these leftists are saying:
George Borts, Brown Univ., said, “If people have some patriotic fervor they are all going to have to work for the CIA, slitting throats in dark alleys.” Richard Berthold, Univ. of New Mexico, said, “Anyone who can blow up the Pentagon would get my vote.” David Barash of Univ. of Washington said, ‘”Many people consider the United States to be a terrorist state.” Hugh Gusterson of MIT, said, “The best way to begin war on terrorism might be to look in the mirror.” Rosalyn Kahn of Pasadena City College ordered students to write anti-war letters to Bush and penalized those who refused. Nicholas DeGenova of Columbia Univ. made a widely publicized remark about wishing “a million Mogadishus” on our armed forces and urged soldiers to murder their officers. (Students spoke out big time on this one. William Pratt, a Columbia student said, “There is a thin line between freedom of speech and stupidity of speech. And DeGenova jumped right over it.”)
He is right. What most of the antiwar professors have been saying are really stupid things, not thought out, not factual, purely emotional, much more bizarre and hysterical than anything the Left said in the 60’s.
As David Revelman says, “When a leftwinger begins any statement with an air of moral superority, what follows usually turns out to be another sickening example of left-wing callousness, moral equivalence, and nauseating hypocrisy.” It seems to matter not what the topic is, in the minds of leftist faculty members if it involves the United States, it must be evil.
The left is a gang of moral posturing hypocrites and phonies. Discussions with them are impossible. Their classes tend to pure anti-American propaganda, and for that reason the time has come for them to go. No more attempt to reason. The mission now is to get them fired. The world crisis is much too dangerous for this to continue.
There is nothing more lamentable than the spectacle of hordes of American college students, because of their leftist professors, unable to draw moral distinctions between their own nation and a land of total oppression such as Iraq and wholly unaware of the catastrophic result that appeasement and wishful thinking have historically brought to their practitioners.
2) THE ACADEMIC LEFT IS LYING TO OUR SCHOOLCHILDREN
-excerpt from an article by Edgar Anderson, journalist
“The left’s stranglehold on education in the United States is not limited to our colleges and universities. Anti-American and multicultural propagandists are constantly at work attacking the minds of even our youngest children.
Bridges to Literature, and American Literature (two new textbooks), present the worst that can possibly be dredged up about the United States. The apparent goal is to teach students to be ashamed of their country, especially its military. Children are encouraged not to see themselves as Americans possessing a common humanity but rather to view the world through the prism of race and ethnicity and to regard white people as the oppressor. It is long past time that the American people wake up and put a stop to the brainwashing of our children.”
As an additional example, the National Association for the Education of Young Children is pushing a controversial preschool teacher’s guide called That’s Not Fair: A Teacher’s Guide to Activism for Young Children, the purpose of which is to “use the children’s sense of fairness to change the world.” One lesson portrays the Navy’s famed Blue Angels as heartless killers. The teachers then ask the children to write the Blue Angels, pleading with them to stop their bombing and killing. Wrote one child, “If you blow up our city, we won’t be happy about it, and our whole city will be destroyed.” Michelle Malkin, nationally syndicated columnist, says, “It’s not just an anti-military agenda; it’s an anti-family and pro-homosexuality agenda. This whole guidebook is a nightmare. What the group is doing is planting a lot of Marxist-pacifist type preschool teachers who are indoctrinating these kids every day.”
In the 60’s, it was the universities, behind the backs of those serving, that had the most to say about the Vietnam War, most of it lies. But those vets are back and many are in our universities, and now its their turn to ask what the universities are doing. The evidence is clear, that in various forms they are sacrificing the children of America to their left/liberal ideology just as they sacrificed the children of South Vietnam to the same ideology in the 60’s. Vietnam veterans in academia should be the logical leaders in the new fight against the left. Let the reforms begin.
3) THE ACADEMIC LEFT PROMOTES RACISM
-from “The Chronicle of Higher Education”
“Programs set up to help minority students, such as ethnic campus housing and support systems, have led to segregation at many colleges and are a form of racism,” argues a new report by the New York Civil Rights Coalition.
The report examines promotional material from minority programs at 50 public and private colleges and universities across the country, and details the range of services offered to minority students. While many colleges tout such programs, the report’s stongly worded conclusion calls them “segregationist” and “apartheid policies.”
“Segregated housing, courses, and programs disseminate poisonous strereotypes and falsehoods about race and ethnicity,” the report states. “They limit interactions between minority and non-minority students, and reward seperatist thinking. Although they claim to have minorities’ interests at heart, these colleges and universities in fact are taking the civil-rights movement giant steps backward.”
It was multiculturalism, a leftist idea, that created this situation.
4) THE ACADEMIC LEFT EFFORT TO DISARM THE COUNTRY
-excerpts from articles by Stephen Schwartz and Daniel Pipes
“The almost universal interpretation by American scholars of “jihad” as “inner struggle over faults” is false. “Jihad “ is an instrument for both the universalization of Islamic religion and the establishment of an imperial world state, that is, warfare against unbelievers to extend Muslim domains. Muhammad himself engaged in 78 battles, of which just one (the Battle of the Ditch) was defensive.
Islamists seeking to advance their agenda in the West cannot frankly divulge this fact. So as to not arouse fears or isolate themselves, they cloak their true outlook in moderate language. Thus, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the most prominent Islamist group in the U.S., insists that jihad “does not mean holy war.” This is pure disinformation, but perfectly in tune with the explaining away of jihad promoted by American academic specialists and Islamist organizations.
It is an intellectual scandal that, since Sept. 11, scholars at American universities have repeatedly, and all but unaminously, issued public statements that whitewash the primary meaning of jihad in Islamic law and history. Among today’s academic specialists who have undertaken to sanitize this key Islamic concept, many are no doubt acting out of the impulses of political correctness and the multiculturalist urge to protect a non-Western civilization from criticism by making it appear just like our own.
But Americans struggling to make sense of the war declared on them in the name of jihad have every reason to be deeply confused as to who their enemy is and what his goals are.
In failing to discern and educate the American leadership and public about the real threat of Islamic extremism, MESA, the Middle East studies mafia—to call it as it is—has disarmed the country in the face of great danger. This is the most outrageous academic, media, and political cover-up of modern times, the willfull campaign to suppress worldwide awareness of the violent extremism harbored by the Wahhabi death cult, the offical Islamic sect in Saudi Arabia.”
In the center of all the other betrayals of America by the left, this one is the worst.
5) THE ACADEMIC LEFT IS ANTI-SEMITIC
- an excerpt from an article by Daniel Pipes
“For three decades, left-wing extremists have dominated American academics, spouting odd but seemingly harmless theories about “deconstructionism,” “postmodernism,” and “race, gender, and class” while venting against the United States, its government and its allies. Only these ideas are not so harmless. They have dangerous consequences, especially visible with regard to the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Hamid Dabashi of Columbia Univ. compared Israel’s military maneuvers in Jenin with the Nazi Holocaust.
Joseph Massad, also of Columbia, told students Israel is “a Jewish supremacy and racist state that should be threatened.”
Robert Ostergard of Suny-Binghamton converted his political science class into an anti-Zionist platform where a guest speaker presented a lecture one student called a “45-minute diatribe against Islael,” equating Zionism with fascism, Israel with apartheid South Africa, and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon with Hitler.
Julio Pino of Kent State published an ode to a Palestinian suicide bomber, lauding her courage and calling on Allah to “elevate your place in paradise.”
Douglas Card of the Sociology Dept.,Univ. of Oregon, called Israel “a terrorist state” and Israelis “baby-killers.”
Snehal Shinavi of Berkeley announced a course on The Politics and Poetics of Palestinian Resistance, with the now infamous “warning” to conservatives “to seek other sections.”
Not surprisingly, some students interpret all this as implicit permission to harass Jewish and pro-Israel students. The result has been a wave of verbal and physical attacks. At San Francisco State Univ. anti-Israel students physically threatened students marching for Israel.
Professors teaching Middle-East courses are the most responsible for this degeneration on campus, but others are responsible also. The time has come to take back the universities as institutions of civilized discourse. The place to start is by condemning and curbing the leftist activism that too often passes for Middle East scholarship.”
6) THE ACADEMIC LEFT STOOD BY AT SAN FRANCISCO STATE
- excerpts from an article by Laurie Zolothe
“After nearly 7 years as director of Jewish Studies, and after nearly two decades of life here as a student, faculty member and wife of the Hillel rabbi, after years of patient work and difficult civic discourse, I am saddened to see SFSU return to its notoriety as a place that teaches anti-Semitism, hatred for America, and hatred, above all else, for the Jewish State of Israel. I cannot fully express what it feels like to have to walk across campus daily, past maps of the Middle East that do not include Israel, past posters of cans of soup with labels on them of drops of blood and dead babies, labeled “canned Palestinian children meat slaughtered according to Jewish rites under American license,” past poster after poster calling out “Zionism=racism, and “Jews=Nazi.” This is not civic discourse, this is not free speech, this is the Weimar Republic with brown shirts it cannot control.
Yesterday the hatred coalesced into a hate mob. They screamed that they would kill us, and other terrible things. They surrounded praying Jewish students and the elderly women who had survived the Shoah (Holocaust), only to watch as a threatening crowd shoved the Hillel students against the wall of the plaza, screaming at the Jews, “Get out or we will kill you,” and “Hitler did not finish the job.” Not one administrator came to stand with us. We had to have a police guard.”
7) THE ACADEMIC LEFT STIFLES DISCUSSION EVERYWHERE
- by Leonard Magruder
“The histories that have come out in recent years on the Vietnam War make it abundantly clear that the arguments of 60’s academics and students, still being made on campus today, are false. and the time has come to acknowledge this. The perpetuation of these falsehoods to justify the leftist philosophy that has tyrannized higher education now for four decades has not only resulted in a whole rash of oppressive trends on campus, such as speech codes, political correctness, multiculturalism and gender feminism, but has further intellectual implications. It is stifling the discussion of what could be new support of a natural theology that should be emerging from the new discoveries in physics such as the Big Bang, the Anthropic Principle, the Autoscopic phenomenon, and Intelligent Design. This has the potential for a whole new, more optimistic and empowering cultural revolution but is being suppressed by bigoted academics in the social sciences and the humanities primarily.”
8) THE ACADEMIC LEFT SEES THAT ONLY LEFTISTS ARE HIRED
- excerpts from an article by David Horowitz
“At the beginning of April, after the United States and Great Britain had liberated Iraq, and the streets of Bagdad were filled with Iraqis celebrating their freedom, the academic senate at UCLA voted to “condemn America’s invasion of Iraq” by a vote of 180-7. In a nation where 76% of the population supported the war, 95% of the faculty senate at a state-funded academic institution were passionate enough in their opposition to “condemn” it. The absurd under-representation of conservative viewpoints on university faculties obviously does not happen by random process. It is the result of systematic repression. In state universities the political bias against conservatives in the hiring process amounts to an illegal political patronage system operation, which provides hugh advantages to the Democratic Party and to the political left. Democratic and leftwing activists are subsidized and provided platforms at institutions with billion dollar budgets. Leftist journalism schools provide a steady stream of cadre to the nation’s media institutions. Campus funds available for political activities are inequitably distributed to student groups with leftwing agendas. The ratio normally being in the neighborhood of 50-1. These fees underwrite an army of radical speakers and agitators who operate nationally, while skewing the politics of the campus strongly to the left.
“Grades are often employed to make the bias stick. My visit to the University of Missouri in Columbia is a case in point. Before I even arrived, the students informed me that a leftist professor named Miriam Golomb was offering her students credits to come and protest my speech.”
9) THE ACADEMIC LEFT PAYS STUDENTS TO PROTEST
- excerpts from an article by New Criterion.com
At Citrus College in California, Professor Rosalyn Kahn is apparently one of those teachers who find it difficult to separate politics from teaching. This winter in her class on communications she offered her students an extra-credit assignment, to write to President Bush to protest the war with Iraq. She was not endeavoring to sharpen her students’ mastery of rhetoric; she was exploiting her students in order to further a private political agenda. Protesting students contacted the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) and their quick intervention sparked a strong response from the college, including a letter of apology to President Bush and the requirement that Kahn apologize to her students. Like most leftists, she failed to grasp the most elementary requirements of academic freedom. We need to see a lot more of this kind of action. We now have remarkable organizations like FIRE, loaded with lawyers willing and able to defend the rights of students against leftist professors and almost overwhelmed with cases of academic injustice all over the country. To see the current cases go to www.thefire.org.
Kors and Silvergate, leaders at FIRE, said of today’s campus in their recent bestseller, The Shadow University: the Betrayal of Liberty on America’s Campuses, “Universities have become the enemy of a free society, and it is time for the citizens of that society to recognize this scandal of enormous proportions and to hold these institutions to account.”
11) THE ACADEMIC LEFT BREEDS TERRORISTS OF THEIR OWN
- author unknown
Al-Qaeda operatives aren’t the only threats we face on the domestic front. Homegrown environmental radicals who get their ideas from the university have declared their own fatwa on the United States.
In a manifesto published across left-wing internet sites, infamous eco-thug Craig Rosebraugh called on his antiwar troops to take “direct action” against military establishments, urban centers, corporations., government buildings, and media outlets. Rosebraugh is urging radicals to ditch “pointless “protests and wage outright acts of terror “using any means necessary,” as follows:
“Large-scale urban rioting. With massive unrest and even state of emergencies declared in major cities the govermmnent will be forced to send troops...thereby taking resources away from the war.
“Attack the media centers of the country, shut down the national networks, using strategies which knock the networks off the air.
“Take the battle to the individuals responsible for the war and destruction of life, the very heads of government and U.S. coorporations. Hit them in their personal lives, visit their homes. Make them feel personally responsible for committing massive atrocities.
“Create an atmosphere lacking of support to assist U.S. troops home and abroad in losing their morale and will to fight. If you support the troops you support this war and the U.S. government which is the primary terrorist regime in the international arena.
“Actively target military establishment in the United States..use any means to slow down the functioning of the murdering body.”
11) THE ACADEMIC LEFT: A FORMER LEFTIST ANALYZES
- from an article by David Horowitz
Horowitz, a former leader of the anti-war movement of the 60’s recently wrote,”Beginning in the mid-60’s, the left made a concerted effort to take over our colleges and universities. Four decades later, thay have a stranglehold on hiring, teaching, and administering most of our schools in all 50 states. As they took control, they trampled free speech, banished conservative professors, and turned our schools into little more than huge megaphones for anti-American rhetoric. And once again, the left is attempting to divide the home front in the face of the enemy. Even as we are at war, they are stabbing our young men and women in the back.”
With the recent more objective books and films about the Vietnam War, the veterans of that war, many of them now professors, can now show definitively how faculty and students lied in the 60’s leading, as Horowitz says, to the present situation. This is the single most vulnerable subject and locus of leftist lies on campus. With this exposed the entire edifice of indoctrination must come tumbling down. They lied then; they are lying now. All credibility in the eyes of students will be gone.
But this must be done quickly, because once against the leftists on campus are fatally misinterpreting the current world crisis to students, and this could again lead to failure.
As we wrote in the V.V.A.R. Manifesto, placed on record with the White House twenty years ago:
“The major lesson of Vietnam, the students concluded, was that American foreign policy must henceforth take into consideration that the liberal university and media, largely apologists for the left and therefore hostile to the values of the majority, have created within our society a large and dangerous bloc lacking in the intellectual and moral foundations necessary to defend freedom.”
12) THE ACADEMIC LEFT TEACHES STUDENTS TO ACT LIKE THUGS
-excerpts from an article by Daniel Flynn
“The Left hates America. This obvious fact has been affirmed to me through attending scores of left-wing demonstrations, visiting the most virulently left-wing campuses, and reading the Left’s journals and web sites.
In the course of interviewing attendees of a leftist rally in front of the U.S. Supreme Court in early 2000, I was physically attacked—twice. After covering the first two days of the Black Panther’s 35 Anniversary reunion this April, I was ejected from the conference on the third day and informed that I was henceforth banned for life.While speaking at Swathmore, a disturbed young womam held up her middle finger through the entirety of the lecture. Radical activists shouted down my lecture on the Mumia Abu-Jamal case at Berkeley in an orchestrated campaign of screaming. As I spoke, one activist attempted to rip the microphone’s plug out of its socket. I was also ‘mooned.’ The Left concluded the evening by holding a public book-burning using my writings as the kindling.
The Left’s reflexive anti-Americanism doesn’t withstand even mild scrutiny. This is why so many on the anti-American left are quick to resort to violence, censorship and other tactics to stifle debate.”
13) THE ACADEMIC LEFT IS EASY TO RIDICULE
-Marianne Jennings, an Arizone State Univ. professor, describes a visit to the university by David Horowitz
“You could see and smell the political leanings. Women with no mascara—trouble. Men with bandanas on their heads—trouble with a capital ‘T.’ Women with Toni Morrision novels and the new Cliff notes for them—grand poohbahs of trouble. Greenies—easily detected by odor. Conservatives—easy to spot; they read books.
The spoiled liberal brats were in full tantrum mode. When the College Republicans’ president, the son of Syrian immigrants, began the meeting with the pledge of allegiance, mockery reigned. Many remained seated, smirking at the flag and country that gave them their Pell grants and free condoms at the health center.
I have long known that college campuses do not promote the exchange of ideas. My colleagues fuel the fires of oppression with fiction and suppress fact. The pent-up frustration of students’ resulting inability to reason was palpable in that room ...arrogant brats who couldn’t see the magnitude of their ignorance let alone the role that the free exchange of ideas play in resolution of issues.”
14) THE ACADEMIC LEFT TRYING TO BLAME IT ON AMERICA
-author unknown
“We are hearing more and more from what Jeanne Kirkpatrick has aptly called the ‘Blame America First’ crowd. This crowd views the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks as the desperate and understandable, if not actually justified, acts of ‘frustrated’ people who, because their previous ‘cries for help and understanding’ purportedly fell on deaf ears, were left with no option but to communicate their supposedly legitimate grievances in the most dramatic fashion possible.
This condescending and paternalistic perspective infantilizes terroists and demands absolutely nothing of them—neither decency, nor respect for innocent life, nor self-control, nor even the barest shred of humanity. Rather, they are seen only as frustrated, desperate, childlike creatures reacting petulantly to the woefully indadequate ‘parenting’ skill of the United States. The loss of 3000 innocent lives, the enlightened critics dutifully tell us, was of course ‘tragic,’ but must be viewed in the context of American transgressions. A Univ. of North Carolina professor summed things up, calling for the U.S. to issue a formal apology to ‘the tortured and the impoverished and all the millions of other victims of American intervention.’
If our standard is anything short of perfection, it is difficult not to notice that America’s track record is quite demonstrably the most awe-inspiring model of benevolence in the recorded history of mankind.”
15) THE ACADEMIC LEFT: REMEMBER THE 60’S BETRAYAL
-an excerpt from an article by James Webb, a company commander in Vietnam and former Secretary of the Navy
“The North’s blatant discarding of the promises of peace and elections contained in the 1973 Paris Accords, followed by the rumbling of North Vietnamese tanks through the streets of Saigon, was treated by many as a cause for actual rejoicing.
Denial is rampant in 1997, but the truth is this end result was the very goal of the antiwar movement’s continuing efforts in the years after American withdrawal.
How sobering it must have been ... to observe the spectacle of hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese fleeing the “pure flame of the revolution” on rickety boats that gave them a 50 percent chance of death at sea, or to see television pictures of thousands of Cambodian skulls lying in open fields, part of the millions killed by Communist “liberators.” How hollow the memories of drug-drenched and sex-enshrined antiwar rallies must be; how false the music that beatified their supposedly noble dissent.
There is perhaps no greater testimony to the celebratory atmosphere that surrounded the Communist victory in Vietnam than the 1975 Academy Awards, which took place on April 8, just three weeks before the South’s final surrender. The award for Best Feature Documentary went to the film “Hearts and Minds,” a vicious piece of propaganda that assailed American cultural values as well as our effort to assist South Vietnam’s struggle for democracy. As one of the producers, Bert Schneider, stepped to the mike he commented that, “It is ironic that we are here at a time just before Vietnam is about to be liberated.” Then came one of the most stunning moments in Hollywood history. As a struggling country many Americans had paid blood and tears to try to preserve was disappearing beneath a tank onslaught, Schneider pulled out a telegram from our enemy, the Vietnamese Communist delegation in Paris, and read aloud its congratulations to his film. Without hesitating, Hollywood’s most powerful people rewarded Schneider’s reading of the telegram with a standing ovation.
How could they stand and applaud the victory of a Communist enemy who had taken 58,000 American lives and crushed a struggling, pro-democratic ally? Not a peep was heard then, or since, from Hollywood regarding the people who disappeared behind Vietnam’s bamboo curtain. At a time when a quiet but relentless battle is taking place over how history will remember our country’s involvement in Vietnam, those who ridiculed government policy, avoided military service, and actively supported an enemy who turned out to be vicious and corrupt do not want to be remembered as having been so naive and so wrong.”
The time has come to end this “quiet but relentless battle,” by bringing all this out, before students, and shatter forever the lies the Left told about Vietnam in the 60’s, and show students how they are trying this again, over the war on terrorism. In the infamous “Not in Our Name” ad that so many celebrities signed they used the same old dog-eared slogans they used in the 60’s.
Section 2: STUDENTS AND VETERANS NOW PUBLICLY DENOUNCING THE LEFT
Vietnam Veterans for Academic Reform was the pioneer organization calling for academic reform, Mr. Magruder placing its Manifesto on record with the White House twenty years ago. It was followed later by organizations such as Accuracy in Academia (Reed Irvine once asked Mr. Magruder to be President of the organization), Center for the Study of Popular Culture (David Horowitz was a charter member of our Board of Advisors), Campus Watch, Noindoctrination.org, National Association of Scholars, ProfessorWatch.com, and others. And now, as we shall see, huge new forces are joining the battle as students and veterans begin to openly and bitterly complain about the leftist tyranny on campus. Following are some recent examples. The end in now in sight.
1) THE ACADEMIC LEFT BEING CHALLENGED BY STUDENTS
- by Cathy Young
Cathy Young of “Reason” recently wrote, “According to a recent article in The New York Times, students on various campuses across the country have publicly chided professors who have canceled classes to protest the war or asked college administrators to enjoin faculty from discussing the war in class unless its related to course material. At Amherst College, an antiwar rally drew more professors than students; another time students angrily confronted professors who marched into a dining hall with placards protesting the war. Said Professor Martha Saxton of Amherst, “We used to like to offend people. We loved being bad in the sense that we were making a statement. Why is there no joy now?” Her statement speaks volumes about the mentality of many antiwar professors. It’s not so much that they are concerned about the loss of Iraqi lives; it’s that they want to thumb their noses at American society. One could say that such an attitude—essentially the politics of a temper tantrum—is a bit childish for a college professor.”
Post Sept. 11, many academics talked about using the tragedy as an opportunity for classroom discussion of “U.S. imperialism and terror.” Oh please. Not that toothless old hag still haunting the faculty lounge.
2) THE ACADEMIC LEFT AND “THE DRASTIC AND GROWING DIVIDE BETWEEN ACADEMIA AND THE PUBLIC”
- by two freshmen at Yale, Eliana Johnson and James Kirchick in an article “Postwar Delusion at Yale”
“It’s not the Bush administration that is controlling United States policy towards Iraq,” according to Gutas, Prof. of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, in a recent panel discussion,”It’s a cabal of neoconservative, fiercely pro-Israel ideologues.” Bill Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, said Gutas, were the initiators of the war in Iraq, Jews having hijacked the Bush administration.
Prof. Glenda Gilmore, in the smug self-righteous fashion that characterizes a large component of the anti-war movement (what Thomas Sowell calls the “anointed ones”), said, “Bush’s National Security Strategy makes the United States an imperial power in the most sinister sense of the term.” Her comments were devoted almost entirely to decrying the supposed international conspiracy launched by right-wingers.
Few positive comments about our military victory were heard from the faculty panel. Indeed, the conspiracy theories espoused by Gulas and Gilmore are a symptom of the hateful bitterness that characterizes the campus left in the face of American success, and, as the panel demonstrated, vicious prevarication (lying) has become a substitute for honest argument.
In a second article on the success of the first article, Eliana Johnson wrote, “The response to my 4/11 article was overwhelmingly positive. In that article we summarized the teach-in at which several Yale professors expressed hate-filled, irrational and illiberal opposition to the liberation of Iraq. I received over one hundred e-mails, many from American veterans, including one from a Special Forces officer.”
“It is perhaps no surprise that the only negative response we received came from a Yale professor. His response sheds light on the degeneration of the anti-war movement in the face of events that had dramatically refuted each and every on of the cardinal arguments of the movement and on the drastic and growing divide between academia and the American public. To the extent that these professors’ remarks are representative of those made by the leading opponents of the war in Iraq, it is safe to say that we can declare not only a military victory in Baghdad, but also an intellectual victory on the homefront.”
3) THE ACADEMIC LEFT IN UNHOLY ALLIANCE AT ARIZONA STATE
- by Oubai Mohammad Shahbander, a student at Arizona State
“As on many campuses, the Muslim Student Association at Arizona State is in unholy alliance with the leftists. I was taken aback at the pure seething viciousness in which the MSA reacted to a counter protest I helped organize. Members of the Muslim Student Association threw a collective tizzy after finding that I, a Muslim Arab, would dare stand up to their totalitarian leadership and declare my love for liberty and country. The MSA’s actions embody the hate filled and racist overtone of the so-called “peace” movement protestors on the Arizona State campus and are yet another example of the hypocrisy of the anti-war crowd when it comes to tolerance.
“The militant nature of MSA is not isolated to my campus alone...the MSA is steadily garnering a growing influence among the nationwide anti-American movement. This is truly cause for alarm. MSA members are fueled by a religious extremism parallel to that of their spiritual counterpart, Saudi Wahabbism. The hateful nature of the MSA can only continue to contribute to the festering divide that threatens to alienate all American Arabs and Muslims from their fellow countrymen.”
4) THE ACADEMIC LEFT HATES THE MILITARY
- a Harvard student sees through multiculturalist hypocrisy at Harvard
“Despite the current war, Harvard continues to ban ROTC from its campus. Alone among student groups, ROTC is not permitted to use university facilities or advertise on campus. At the same time, radical Islamic student groups operate freely, have held on-campus fund raisers for terrorist front groups, and had one of their leaders selected as a commencement speaker.
“Students participating in the programs are subject to a variety of indignities.They must travel to MIT to participate in ROTC classes and activities. Unlike students at schools like MIT with full ROTC programs, Harvard students receive no academic credits for ROTC classes. Unlike all other Harvard student groups, they cannot distribute flyers or participate in student club fairs. Students in the program feel like second-class citizens. In November 2000, the Harvard Islamic Society and Society of Arab students sponsored a well-publicized fund-raising dinner on campus to support the Holy Land Foundation. President Bush recently froze the assets of the Holy Land Foundation because of its direct financial support for the terrorist group Hamas and the families of sucicide bombers. Elevating radical Islamist students at commencement shows the school’s real priorities: the promotion of multiculturalism at the expense of Western and American values.”
5) THE ACADEMIC LEFT INVADES THE HIGH SCHOOL
-excerpt from a Santa Monica High School student
Steve Miller, a junior at Santa Monica High School, CA, said recently in Frontpage Magazine, “There is a war going on in America—a war of ideology. It’s being waged in public schools like mine. Those running the school and teaching the students have such deeply held left-wing beliefs that they cannot help but spread their agenda to the young people. This is evidenced in nearly every facet of the school and has resulted in the indoctrination of thousands of students, some unaffected, but many more misinformed, misguided, and misdirected. Subsequent to 9/11, the school newspaper condemned the notion of a military response and a Muslim leader was brought to the school to explain the glory and splendor of Islam. My history teacher handed out a lengthy article lambasting the United States as absolutely wicked and also condemned the notion of a military response.”
6) THE ACADEMIC LEFT MEETS MASSIVE VETERAN PROTEST
The recent flap between an Air Force cadet and a professor of history at St. Xavier University, drawing thousands of letters of protest from veterans, is another example of what we like to see—veterans speaking out when academics make public statements intended to further ideological agendas hostile to the interests of the American people. A polite request for information from an Air Force cadet was responded to by Professor Peter N. Kirstein in a typical leftist “Exorcist” reaction, with head spinning and rhetorical green vomit spewing:
THE VC !!! Every cliche in the leftist handbook, plus tears for the Viet Cong.
The President of the university apologized to the Air Force Academy and suspended the professor from teaching and his record will be reviewed next semester before teaching again.We want to see a lot more of this.
7) THE ACADEMIC LEFT: A STUDENT AND VIETNAM VET REPORTS FROM THE FRONT
-Gary Stanley is a student at the Univ. of South Florida. he served in the Marines for 30 years, retiring as a Master Gunnery Sergeant. He served in Vietnam with the 3rd Marines and the 9th Marines, 68-69, and was awarded two Purple Hearts, a Bronze star, and a Silver Star. A senior, he will graduate in Dec. with a degree in Social Science and a minor in History and plans to teach.What he says is very typical of our left- dominated campuses and pretty well supports a lot of the above.
Special to V.V.A.R.
The school newspaper has a “letter to the editor” section for students to express themselves about different topics. There are a group of students who regularly write letters expressing their dislike for the government of President Bush, the war in Iraq, and the conservative side of things. They constantly badmouth America and express their dislike for what America stands for and some of the policies of the government. Some have expressed the idea that America caused 9/11 and that our arrogance was the major cause. They express the idea that America is a country that is evil at its heart.
It is their right to express these things and I support that right. I have for the two years I have been on this campus, regularly expresssed my opinions about what I thought of some of of these writers of anti-American propaganda and the other ideas they express. I have been called such things as ignorant, narrow minded, unintelligent, brain-washed, belligerent, moron, white-trash, idiot, trailer trash, and redneck.
The newspaper here at USF is quite liberal and conservative views on subjects are very rarely printed. They have virtually stopped posting any of my articles. In some of the liberals’ own words, I am a throw back to brain-washed America who has no idea of the new world of globalism. I am stuck on nationalism and cannot understand that America is dead and a new and improved world order will swallow it up.
The average student at this University is really ignorant about world politics. They exist on a lack of real information and a view of the world through colored glasses. They live in a fantatasy world with little interruptions on their cell phones. They believe what they read in the likes of the school paper and what they hear from the many liberal, anti-government, anti-conservative professors who teach on this campus, many of whom grew up in the 60’s or were young anti-war protestors during Vietnam.
Since the protestors could not stop the war, they are beginning to get the idea that they can now attack the men and women who served as the protestors did during Vietnam. They first need to silence the likes of me and a few other others on campus.
Section 3: FINAL COMMENTARY
MANIFESTO OF STUDENT LIBERATION FROM ACADEMIC TYRANNY—WHAT YOU CAN DO
Between its articles, published and read nationwide, its TV series, the programs it has to offer to student groups, its documentary “How the Campus Lied About Vietnam” (currently being shown at about 80 universities), Vietnam Veterans for Academic Reform, already the pioneer in higher education reform, is right in the center of this new national movement to return intellectual integrity to our universities by challenging the Left.
To read some of our recent articles exposing the corruption in academia go to: www.v-v-a-r.org.
The history of V.V.A.R is found in the 10-part series, Vietnam and the Media, listed at the bottom of the Index.
We at V.V.A.R. were probably the first to call upon veterans to speak out on the current “Hate America” leftist tyranny on our campuses and now it is happening, and professors are being relieved of duty and even fired. Mr. Joel Kernodle, President of the 1st Marine Association of Indiana has authorized me to say that it was one of our articles that led to some 100 members or so of his group going to Washington on Jan. 18 to protest against the anti-war protestors, the only such group present that day. In some of our earlier articles, comments from Vietnam veterans questioning professors were compiled and passed on to the university in an attempt to bring “Hate America” professors out of hiding and into dialogue, but generally the response was, “Take me off your list.” But therein is the challenge to us, to get these professors to explain to the American people why they hate America and teach their students to do so.
Additional challenges we have publicly issued to the campus can be seen in the titles of some of the weekly half-hour televison programs we produced all last year titled, The University Under Fire, as follows:
The series will return again next fall with an aggressive new format which will present the university with the questions below for which the American people, and now students, are demanding answers. Academics, mostly those in the social sciences and the humanities, can no longer continue to pontificate on world affairs from their ivory towers, unopposed, when they clearly lied about Vietnam in the 60’s, lied again about Iraq, and all America can see their failure at all levels of education with American high school students ranking 19th in international scholastic competition, and college students graduating by the grace of massive grade inflation alone. Not to mention their contribution to rising anti-Semitism and racism on campus and support of the new Viet Cong (terrorists). Why should this great nation have to put up with this?
Questions:
2) Why are textbooks on the Vietnam War still spreading the lies of the S.D.S. and the New Left, when dozens of histories have since definitively exposed that the campus protests rested on falsehoods?
3) Why do psychology departments continue to feed programs in “affective education” to the schools when massive research has shown that they are psychonoxious ( make students sick, as in “killer kids”)
4) How is it possible to teach world religions without ever raising the “truth question”?
5) How can the enormous agitation over postmodernism and deconstructionism, both nothing but nihilism, be justified, especially when the icons of both, Heidegger and Paul de Man, were Nazi apologists?
6) Why are academics complaining when a brave professor at Harvard finally decides to do something about the disgrace of massive national grade inflation?
7) Why do psychologists run from metaphysically tinged developments such as existential psychology and transpersonal psychology, when what they teach is riddled with covert (and unexamined) philosophical assumptions?
8) Why does academia continue to discuss sexuality as if it had no moral dimension and fail to speak out against the sexual anarchy and exploitation going on in university dormitories?
9) Why do university newspapers increasingly print nothing but smut, exhibiting such total contempt for traditional values?
10) Why continue with multiculturalism, an idea that has obviously failed, leading as the noted liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. warned, “to the fragmentation, re-segregation,and tribalization of American life.” A major contributor to rising racism and anti-Semitism on campus.
11) Why are homosexuality and abortion glorified on campus with no serious debate on possible moral dimensions or need for restraint?
12) How is it possible to have a learning atmosphere when two-thirds of all students never attend classes?
13) Why are academics not speaking out when gender feminists write American history textbooks filled with bias bordering on lies?
14) Why are the violent disagreements between scientists in evolution theory, and the increasingly impressive arguments for Intelligent Design, being hidden from students?
15) Why are oppressive policies, as found in political correctness and speech codes, (stemming from Marxists like Marcuse), still being allowed to stifle free speech on campus?
16) Why are students allowing leftist professors to dictate to them in dormitory re-education how they must think on matters such as class, race, and gender?
17) Why is the university passing on to lower schools any number of programs based on cultural Marxism that don’t work, such as “approximate” spelling and math, massive grade inflation to insure “self-esteem,” “look-say” over the proven superiority of phonics, dropping of the multiplication table, feminist brainwashing about the “patriarchy,” literature chosen on the basis of gender, class, and race, and the attack on excellence, standards, and honors?
18) Why do administrators stand by as leftist academic thugs beat up guest speakers who present dissenting opinions?
19) Why do administrators stand by and do nothing about the “host of absurd, bizarre, and outrageous escapades” listed recently, for example, by College Network? These include multicultural hooliganism, lewd course material, assaults by hooded leftists on conservative students, and newspapers on campus facing censorship, death threats, and robbery.
20) Why is the average ratio of left/liberals to conservative professors on campus about 35 to 1, with hiring practices clearly designed to perpetuate their bias?
21) Why are world-class Middle East scholars such as Daniel Pipes able to write article after article documenting how MESA is deceiving the American people about the true threat of jihad and the Islamists?
22) Why are libraries going unused, and the books they contain going unread?
Daniel Pipes, world-class expert on the Middle East, is asking the most important questions: “Why do American academics so often despise their own country while finding excuses for repressive and dangerous regimes? Why have university specialists proven so inept at understanding the great contemporary issues of war and peace, starting with Vietnam, then the Cold War, the Kuwait war and now the War on Terror? What is the long-term effect of an extremist, intolerant and anti-American environment on university students?” (For raising such questons, Mr. Pipes is having lecture invitations at universities canceled all over the country.)
The time has come, he says, “for adult supervision of the faculty and administrators at many American campuses. Especially as we are at war, the goal must be for universities to resume their civic responsibilities. This can be achieved if outsiders (alumni, state legislators, non-university specialists, parents of students and others) take steps to create a politically balanced atmosphere, critique failed scholarship, establish standards for media statements.”
For years, Vietnam Veterans for Academic Reform continued to hope faculty themselves would see the growing tyranny on campus and address it. We now see, as does Pipes, that this will never happen. The campus cannot be reformed from within. The answer is to reach the “outsiders”—trustees, legislators, the public. Pressure must come from the outside and hopefully some of the leftist demagogues in the social sciences and the humanities will be fired.
The situation today, with regard to the war in Iraq and the war on terrorism is exactly the same as when we wrote the following in the Manifesto of Vietnam Veterans for Academic Reform, placed on record with the White House twenty years ago.
“Faculties are engaged in a vast hypocrisy, pretending to a moral critique of society after decades of debunking morality, values, and religion. The vehemence of both faculty and students (over Vietnam), and their need to avoid dialogue at all costs, flows from the need to mask that hypocrisy, hoping the public will confuse the vehemence for certainty and go along. But adult America, all of whom are for genuine peace in this world, did not fall for it.
“It conspicuously did not join the marches because it correctly sensed the true underlying message, which is, 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, out sex games, and our drugs.
“We are under no further obligation to listen to these deluded, with the whole future of our nation now at stake.”
We would like to see Vietnam vets marching on the campus with posters that say:
Said Mr. Magruder recently, “I urge all veteran groups to call their local university and protest the lies about the Vietnam War that are still being perpetuated on today’s campuses, as well as the lies they are telling about the current crisis. Especially complain to trustees, alumni, and legislators; try to get people fired. Demand that they look into hiring practices, and insure that the leftists are allowing a balanced faculty. Copy and send out this Manifesto so people will understand the issues. See that classes on the Vietnam War are using the new more objective textbooks, and the latest films. Two films in particular are recommended. Our own documentary, How the Campus Lied About Vietnam, and The Long Way Home Project [and also, Silent Victory.] Call talk shows and raise the issues, write letters to the editor. Use your imagination to find ways to be heard. We need to create a highly vocal public ground swell as opponents to what is going on in educaton.
Anyone can declare themselves an auxiliary or associate member of Vietnam Veterans for Academic Reform. In fact you and your neighbors can even form an auxiliary chapter, like we have here at K.U. You can then speak as a member of a growing national organization with a long history of calling for academic reform. Only our leadership, the members of our Board of Advisors, are required to be Vietnam veterans. We also call upon veteran organizations to be ready to march in protest wherever blatant oppression of student rights appear on any nearby campus, and to publicly support any effort by a student to speak out. All Americans, in fact, should start speaking out loudly about what is going on these days on campus and in secondary education. The day of the academic bigotry of the last four decades is over. It began with the betrayal of Saigon. It ended with the fall of Baghdad.
In Mao’s Cultural Revolution, intellectuals were for the first time invited to surface and speak their minds, upon which Mao promptly cut off their heads. There is a parallel, although not physically, in what happened to our intellectuals over the war in Iraq. It brought out for the whole nation to hear, and be appalled, the stupidity, the treason, the baby talk, of our intellectuals, mostly in the social sciences and the humanities, in which, in effect, they cut off their own heads. Now is the time to press the issue.
Here are the names of some of the more prominant leftists at various campuses. Using search engines you may be able to find their e-mails and send them letters complaining about the leftist tyranny on campus. Send them this Manifesto. Usually these leaders are surrounded by a larger circle of leftists.