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It should come as no surprise that American universities are dominated by leftwing professors and administrators. But the extent to which many teachers seek to indoctrinate their students and draw them into radical activism, as revealed in One-Party Classroom, will astonish even the most jaded reader. David Horowitz and Jacob Laksin have painstakingly researched the course offerings and teaching methods at 12 major universities. Not only do their findings indicate a vast leftwing conspiracy, they also demonstrate a total unwillingness of the faculty and administration to address the lack of academic freedom in the classroom. Horowitz and Laksin grant that teachers have a right to their biases, but they insist that professors have a duty to teach their students how to think rather than what to think, which, of course, is not what is happening. One course at the University of California-Santa Cruz, for example, uses "feminist theory" to examine "species, human-animal co-shapings, and the problems of categories for humans and animals." The thesis of the course is that no real distinction exists. Besides the basic stupidity of the idea, how does feminism, which deals with a very different subject, validate this opinion? Courses devoted to race present a similarly skewed vision of the world. The authors correctly note that if a German university's American studies department examined history from an exclusively Aryan perspective (teaching that Aryans were a global community bound by blood and that Germany was the center of world history), everyone would be outraged. But certain African-American studies departments do exactly the same thing. Perhaps the funniest passage in the book concerns Horowitz's attempts to convince the administration at Penn State University that a number of the school's courses violate academic standards. The university's own policy requires that when professors present controversial material, they stay within their field of study and set forth several different opinions, allowing the students to think for themselves. Horowitz recounts what happened after he sent his critique of certain courses to several members of the administration. He received one reply suggesting that certain topics necessitate a certain point of view. Horowitz's second, longer letter detailing the ideological rigidity of the courses was snubbed. Evidently many universities do not see the one-sided nature of their courses as a problem. The writers frequently compare the ideology dominating universities to that of a religious institution. While this comparison is at times unfair to religion, no one can doubt after reading One-Party Classroom that liberal orthodoxy holds sway. (Random House, Inc., 2009, 288 pp., $26.95) |
Course after course dedicates itself to the theses that Marxism never failed, that differences between men and women have no basis in reality but are imposed by society, and that America's distinguishing characteristic is its oppression of minorities. Nor do educators advance these opinions as theories to be proved. They presuppose them and use their classroom time to inculcate even more radical ideas in their students.
