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
Part 10a (and final) in the 10-part series, Vietnam and the Media, from the archives of Vietnam Veterans for Academic Reform - Leonard Magruder, President
Part 10a - Subject: How the advocacy journalism of the 60’s is throttling today’s campus
“The American university is a culture of forbidden questions.”–Leon Botstein, President of Bard College
Our experience with the Univ. of Kansas paper reinforces the truth of what David Horowitz recently said, “… campus newspapers across the nation demonstrate that campuses are being terrorized by leftist totalitarianism.” Or, as the noted columnist Michael Barone said recently on USNews.com, “Berkeley and hundreds of other colleges and universities today are some of the few places in America where free exchanges of ideas CANNOT take place because some ideas—most of them ideas shared by the great majority of the American people—are systematically suppressed. Colleges and universities are the least free places in America.”
University gender feminists are doing the same by rewriting American history books for schoolchildren. Says Dr. Paul Vitz, professor of psychology at New York University in his study of textbooks studied by 90% of America’s school children, “It is abundantly clear that public school textbooks commonly exclude the history, heritage, beliefs, and values of tens of millions of Americans.” Kors and Silverglate say the same in their new book, The Shadow University, “Universities have become the enemies of a free society. The result has been an emerging tyranny over all aspects of a student’s life.” (Including what a student can read in his school newspaper.) In the atmosphere of bread and circus that the university has become, instead of serious dialogue what students are getting is often just pornography, for example, the series in the Daily Kansan by Megan Bainum, whose recent articles were titled, “Genitals are Treasured Jewels,” and “Desire, not Penis, Shrinks with Usage.” It is not, however, the fault of the students. They have no knowledge of how they have been betrayed, hopelessly miseducated and brainwashed since grade school by feminist “transformism” and “hate America” multiculturalism.
University newspapers today will not publish any serious criticism of any of the issues that follow. If they publish any opposing ideas, it is almost always from some unsophisticated religious fundamentalist and they only publish it to make fun of them. But nothing written by anyone informed by modern theology, or idealistic philosophy, or philosophical theology, the sources of the most powerful criticsm, will be published. Nor will you find any book in the university bookstore of this type of criticism. The American university, which is now basically bread and circus until students leave by the grace of massively inflated grades, in the social sciences and the humanities primarily, is a closed system totally impervious to criticism or dialogue. People who try that are considered not just mistaken, but evil, and therefore any kind of treatment, such as the way academic thugs beat up dissenting speakers, is justified.
Listen to what Ben Shapiro, a second-year political science student wrote in an alternative newspaper at UCLA. “Universities have a serious problem. The type of liberalism so heavily favored by the intellectual elite has crossed the line. Professors throughout the educational world are supporting murders and terrorists. It’s fine as long as the murder is anti-capitalist, anti-establishment, or anti-conservative. This frightening ideology has not only blurred the line between liberalism and radicalism—it has destroyed it.
(Remember Magruder’s High Noon Shootout at Wescoe -K.U. last semester!! Within a few e-mails, feminist graduate students in philosophy were reduced to dribbling, foulmouthed idiots, and a Chairman pandering to them unsuccessfully tried to exclude Mr. Magruder, a student, from the building for challenging the feminists, an incident that also included slander, terroristic threats, appeals to the Dean, and discussions with the police. A classic example of how the universities today react to criticism.)
You cannot question the lies being told by gender feminists about “patriarchal oppression” even when the questioning is documented with massive research. You cannot mention how they are lying to America’s schoolchildren by rewriting their history books. Robert Bork said it all, “The most destructive and fanatical movement to come down to us from the 60’s.” The modern equivalent of the radicals of that era and spouting the same nonsense. And you absolutely cannot question homosexuality or abortion. These are the biggest sacred cows of all.
You cannot bring up the clear failure of, generally, Enlightment philosophies in the social sciences that have turned dormitories into booze and sex circuses, causing abortion rates twice as high as the national average and AIDs rates four times as high at Stanford. You cannot mention the massive research showing that programs devoid of any mention of values or morality, designed by university professors for the high schools, are resulting in increases in social pathology, including “killer kids,” or the data showing the failure of psychotherapy or the fact that recent research shows that major assessment tools, such as the Rorschach and the MMPI, don’t work.
You cannot mention that multiculturalism has brought about the very opposite of higher learning, through speech restrictions, an intolerance known as “political correctness,” a hysterically anti-Western curriculum, and significantly increased rates of racism on campus. A minority student today can spend all four years without ever eating, living, speaking, or graduating with someone from a different race. And in “dormitory re-education,” students are mandated to accept “proper” beliefs as to how they should think about sex, gender, and sexual preference, supposedly based on a new “scientific morality”(Maslow), which in fact, does not exist.
You cannot criticize the environmentalists. The head of one such group says he has more sympathy for threatened insect species than he does for children dying of hunger in Africa. The former president of the Sierra Club says the destruction of human life is no more tragic than the destruction of trees. (These are the kind of people who will get other people sent to gas chambers to protect insects.)
You cannot criticize the absurdity of the moral equivalence preached by the postmodernists and deconstructionists, even after showing the clear parallel to Nazi thought. Nor can you criticize the analytic approach to introductory philosophy even though 100% of students protest that it is a waste of time and money, they understood nothing and learned nothing, the only thing saving the situation being massive grade inflation to cover the failure.
You cannot question what goes on in the school of education, which is responsible for creating and implementing a bizarre leftist approach to education that has placed America in 19th place in international scholastic competition and whose “value-free” approach teaches kids they are entitled to sex at any age and is moving society in an increasingly sociopathic direction.
You cannot question evolution theory, even though there is a massive and growing number of dissenters within the discipline itself (not ‘creation scientists’) who are pointing out devastating problems with the theory. One of the largest symposiums ever held on an American campus took place recently at Baylor Univ., a church-related school, with major scientists, biologists and philosophers from all over the world gathering to discuss the new field of Intelligent Design, something that cannot even be mentioned at secular universities.
Said Sacks and Thiel, two graduate students at Stanford, in ending their recent exposé on the failure of the university, The Diversity Myth:
What, in the final analysis, is the real problem with our education system? Perhaps we have a clue in these words by Kenneth Miller, a world-class biologist at Brown University, who was the keynote speaker at a conference on evolution at K.U. two years ago:
But whatever has taken the place of that belief has obviously failed. Which means that the university will have to reintroduce the debate with regard to the meaning of life, and you can’t have that without religion taking part in the debate. In other words, the current emphasis on separation of church and state has allowed philosophies to take over in education that are far worse than what we had. Now what?
Did we think it only rhetoric when Yeats asked us: “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” In the contemporary American university we approach the logical outcome of modern liberalism— fascism.
“Before long, there will be heard throughout the planet a formidable cry, rising like a howling of innumerable dogs to the stars, asking someone or something to take command.” –Ortega y Gassett
In the 60’s, it was the university that led the criticism over Vietnam, most of it lies. Now it is the veteran’s turn to question what the universities are doing. (And we do that in our new series, Vietnam Vets Take on the Campus.) 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 that ideology in the 60’s. The growing “peace” movement in the universities over the war on terrorism is also a serious threat to the nation. Those who opposed the Vietnam War cowered so long in the classroom to avoid the battlefield that they became tenured professors turning our universities into propaganda machines for philosophies clearly hostile to democracy and traditional American values. The university is the most dangerous internal enemy in the current crisis over terrorism because, through postmodernism and deconstructionism, for example, it has lost the ability to discriminate, to tell right from wrong, and can only offer a sloppy moral equivalence that cannot deal with the crisis. This is also the reason the university was so naïve about Vietnam, it couldn’t tell the difference between Democracy and Communism.
To illustrate how out of contact with reality academics once again are, a poll at Chico State Univ., California, found 89% of the student body in support of President Bush’s policy on terrorism, as are the vast majority of Americans, while 79% of the faculty were on the side of appeasement as they were in the 60’s, what David Horowitz now admits in a national ad was “treason.”
The truth is, the university is now at war with the rest of America. Following the tragedy of Sept. 11, universities are spreading the same lies the 60’s protestors did in their betrayal of Vietnam, charging that America is immoral, racist, sexist, authoritarian, and imperialistic, and that we deserved what happened. All these are lies, collectively a moral monstrosity.
The recent High Noon Shootout at Wescoe -K.U. should be understood as the firing of the opening shot in a battle to save our universities, and the nation, from our universities, the beginning of total war against all campus movements that are oppressing and lying to students.
Said Mr. Magruder, President of Vietnam Veterans for Academic Reform, “I am calling upon all American veteran groups, those who have fought for freedom, to lead the way in a struggle to free American students from brainwashing by universities. I urge all veteran groups to be ready to march in protest if blatant attacks on America, as well as attacks on student rights, appear on any nearby campus, and to e-mail any comments on the campus “peace” protestors to V.V.A.R. and we will forward them throughout our university network. Let the academics know they don’t have the field to themselves this time, can’t stab America in the back again while its soldiers are far away fighting for freedom.”
March 2002
This article may be reproduced in any form.
Founder/President, V.V.A.R.
Phone: 785-312-9303
Part 10, Vietnam and The Media
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