Academic PC Under FIRE Again

Many bloggers, including ourselves, and even a few reporters in the MSM, surprisingly, have written about the increasingly draconian—and blatantly unconstitutional—PC speech codes and organized coercion that increasingly lie at the heart of today's Stalinist university community. Take this absolutely outrageous, yet oddly honest, snippet of pure race hatred that formed the core of Delaware's now-banished course, forcing mandatory class struggle indoctrination down freshman throats:

"A RACIST: A racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. 'The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture, or sexuality. By this definition, people of color cannot be racists.' " [emphasis added]

Hard to believe, no? National Journal writer Stuart Taylor, Jr. explains further that:

The quoted language appears in an August 2007 "diversity facilitation training" program for resident assistants. The RAs were, in turn, assigned to use far-left propaganda such as this in what university documents called the mandatory "treatment" of freshmen and the rest of the 7,000 students in university residence halls....This and dozens of other cases suggest to me that the cancerous spread of ideologically eccentric, intellectually shoddy, phony-diversity-obsessed fanaticism among university faculties and administrators is far, far worse and more inexorable than most alumni, parents, and trustees suspect.

Delaware's forced indoctrination was exposed and ultimately terminated due to the efforts of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). But the price of freedom is eternal vigilence. Look for Delaware's sneaky Marxists (on the taxpayer payroll of course) to find a way to slip this stuff back into the mandatory curriculum while no one is looking. They have other skills, too, according to the author:

They are also ruthless in blocking appointment of professors whose views they don't like; are eager to censor such views; and in many cases are determined to push their own political views on students, who have few reality checks in their course material and are often too innocent of the world to understand when they are being fed fatuous tripe.

Wonker knows all about this. He was a "privileged" first-wave casualty, in the late 1970s, of the kind of class-struggle reverse racism that's become institutionalized in America's universities today, where wholesale fraud has replaced the traditional liberal arts education that once included learning about American culture, history, and law. No more.

Small wonder our cultural traditions are disappearing. This is precisely the stuff that Wonker, a newly-minted English Ph.D., wanted to teach three decades ago. But the doors were already locked. Pre-Bakke, reverse racism and gender hatred, combined with the declining enrollments after Vietnam, put a permanent end to that career choice, as it did for literally thousands of other highly qualified would-be professors. Their "privileged" positions, however, were wasted as academia created self-perpetuating ghettos for "ethnic," "feminist," and "transgendered" studies, bogus academic fields of no use in the real world. Save for providing hate-mongers with highly-paid employment for life while helping drive up the cost of education by forcing the subsidization of useless and phony fields of study that waste parental and taxpayer funds while wasting the time of students who deserve something better. And more "authentic," perhaps?

Meanwhile, it would be fascinating to read a book some day on whatever happened to the Lost Generation of the 1970s and 1980s, that sad (and continuing) diaspora of genuinely dedicated college teachers who might have made a difference. But it would never get published.

As far as the media and the professoriat are concerned, this academic diaspora simply never happened. But it did, and its consequences have been catastrophic for our country, although quite beneficial to the Stalinists who continue to shield themselves from accountability. Taylor describes the results:

The PC sickness goes far beyond intolerance of dissent. It also has a pervasive effect on course offerings. History departments, for example, offer fewer and fewer traditional courses such as political and diplomatic history, to make room for courses portraying history as a tale of unrelieved oppression of minorities, women, the poor, gays, and everyone else by privileged white males.

Academia's "diversity" obsession is founded on hostility to diversity of opinion. To most academics, "diversity" is a code word for systematic preference of minorities and women over white males in all walks of life. The preferred groups include many faculty members who are manifestly unqualified for their positions and whose websites read like a "Saturday Night Live" parody of wacky professors.

Read the rest of this excellent article here. If you do, and if you're not already a confirmed Stalinist, you'll surely agree with the author's conclusion:

In academia today, a professor who falsely smears his university's students as racists is a hot commodity. And hate means never having to say you're sorry.

Something that also holds true for Democrats, BTW.