Posted on 12/23/2014 7:57:14 AM PST by Academiadotorg
A feminist professor of communications at the University of Michigan has become a laughingstock for a poorly-sourced column in a socialist newspaper about the academic basis for hating Republicans. In the article, Susan J. Douglas began with the statement, I hate Republicans and declares that marrying a Republican is unimaginable to me
A specialist on Gender and the Media, she is reportedly married with a daughter.
Ive got something that beats that. Curtis J. MacDougall, the author of a journalism textbook that I used in college, was a Marxist with a 319-page FBI file, who wrote favorably about Fidel Castro and feared Joe McCarthy. MacDougall was an activist in the communist-dominated Progressive Party.
As a young journalism student, I studied from MacDougalls textbook, Interpretative Reporting, which encouraged a form of advocacy journalism, and learned that Walter Duranty of The New York Times was one of the great figures in the media. I later discovered that Duranty was a stooge of Stalin and one of the greatest liars in the history of journalism. In fact, he helped Stalin cover up the deaths of 7- to 10-million Ukrainians in a forced famine.
A modern-day MacDougall, Professor Douglas tries to sound like an intellectual and apparently wants to be taken seriously. She insists in the article that a series of studies has found that political conservatives tend toward certain psychological characteristics, such as Dogmatism, rigidity and intolerance of ambiguity; a need to avoid uncertainty; support for authoritarianism; a heightened sense of threat from others; and a personal need for structure.
She cites unnamed researchers as proving that the two core dimensions of conservative thought are resistance to change and support for inequality.
Douglas, who graduated from Elmira College in New York and received a masters degree and a doctorate from Brown University, is not only a professor but the head of the University of Michigan communications studies department.
Since MacDougalls textbook, Interpretative Reporting, was instrumental in training a generation of journalists, perhaps he influenced Douglas.
Now, she is trying to influence her students. But her self-declared hate for Republicans has backfired. She has exposed the real purpose of her educational pursuits.
The Detroit News reports that Andrea Fischer Newman, a member of the UM Board of Regents, said she found Douglass column extremely troubling and offensive, and that it condoned hatred toward an entire segment of individuals in our society based solely on their political views
Grant Strobl, head of Young Americans for Freedom at the school, called the Douglas piece ugly and full of hatred.
While the article has to be taken seriously, its dependence on clearly dubious studies and research make it practically ridiculous.
Douglas ought to be laughed out of academia.
In an earlier piece for In These Times, she also gave us a precious insight into her own ideology. She hailed Stuart Hall, the founding editor of New Left Review, as a towering Marxist public intellectual who had influenced multiple generations of professors and their students Its apparent she is one of them.
Indeed, she appears to thank Hall for helping establish communication studies as one of the most popular majors in the United States She wrote, We owe him a monumental debt.
She notes that Hall was a follower of Antonio Gramsci, but doesnt point out that Gramsci was an Italian communist whose writings were introduced to the United States in the mid-1950s by Carl Marzani, a publisher and Soviet KGB agent whose publishing house was subsidized by the KGB. (Interestingly, Curtis A. MacDougalls history of the Progressive Party, Gideons Army, was published by Marzani as well.)
Gramsci popularized the idea of destroying Western society through infiltration rather than armed revolution. It helps explain why Weather Underground terrorists such as Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn became college professors after giving up on a communist armed revolution inside the United States.
Robert Chandler, in his book Shadow World, noted that Gramscis Marxist theory of cultural revolution stressed that dominance over the existing order in the West, including religion, was rooted in education, the media, law, and a mass culture of beliefs, values, and traditions. In order to overturn the existing order and Marxize the inner man, Gramsci taught that one must create a subversive program of counter-hegemony against its supporting culture, in order to negate the established modes of thought and ways of doing things.
That appears to be Susan Douglass mission in academia and journalism.
Douglas Curriculum Vitae identifies her participation in a Rethinking Marxism conference in 1992, delivering a talk on Pop Culture, Kitsch and Social Change in the 1960s: Hegemony, Subjectivity and the Rise of Feminism.
The editors of the journal, Rethinking Marxism, also sponsor Marxism and the World Stage conferences, described as celebrations of the Marxian tradition.
Douglass academic credentials include numerous articles for such publications as The Nation, The Progressive, and In These Times.
Her hate for Republicans is making news, but dont think students in her classes havent been aware of the agenda shes been pushing. Some of the comments from students who have taken her classes include:
She openly states that she hates certain members of the student body based on their political opinions. Avoid this closed minded intolerant person....
Boring and disorganized. Talks to students like they are children. I think she rates herself to get good scores.
Condones hatred and intolerance towards differing viewpoints.
Socialist feminist nut.
This controversy will serve a purpose if it renews a focus on the corruption in journalism education and why left-wing and even pro-Marxist bias in the media is getting worse.
Her book on decoding enlightened sexism was the subject of a talk she gave that was video recorded. An elitist who knows better than everyone else, she claims to be an expert on uncovering subtle forms of sexism in the media.
Her courses include:
Media, Culture, and Society
Media Theory and Criticismintroductory and advanced levels
Qualitative Methods in Media Studies
Gender and the Media
History of Broadcasting
Origins of Mass Culture: 1870-1930
Images of Women in Popular Culture: 1945-present
Analysis of Television News
Motherhood and the Mass Media
The Social History of Radio in America
History of Communications Technologies
Introduction to Mass Communications
In a University of Michigan profile of Douglas, she was asked, What inspires you?, and she replied, My students inspire me. I love teaching undergraduates: their energy, their optimism, their openness to new ideas.
But this love seems to have undergone a transformation into a closed mind of hate toward opposing views. She has made explicit what we know and understand to be their usually hidden biases.
Thank you Ms. Douglas for telling us openly what we always suspected to be the case. Thank you for alerting us to the Marxist revolutionaries in positions of power in journalism and academia.
Now, please tell us why you deserve to be in a position of trust and authority over students who desire a good education and want to make something of their lives.
Cliff Kincaid is the Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism, and can be contacted at cliff.kincaid@aim.org
What small minds progressives have.
Conservatives are losing the cultural and political battle, because we’ve already lost the financial battle. We live in a financial system that allows maximum power of government, its cronies, and political lackeys.
Douglas sounds like she might not be right in the head. The perfect commie ‘RAT “educator”.
I see good news in all this!
The conservative side is “resurging”, thanks to what is going on as of now. DO NOT BELIEVE otherwise.
Angry blowback is coming.
Having located her picture, the only polite thing I could say is that I don't see how any Republican would want to....
Please see post number 6. Thank-you!
Just as having relations with a (ugh... gag...) feminazi leftist woman would be unimaginable to me (gag.. urp..).
Wow. What an important specialty. She must be very highly educated to have that as a specialty. And extremely intelligent. You can't be just any old leftist dummy and be a Specialist on Gender and the Media.
Just imagine how DEEP that is!
The evil tends to leak out with age in leftist women, does it not?
Its amazing how many “professors” there are who make a good living spouting drivel and emotional nonsense of little or no value. Being an ideological specialist and purveyor of BS evidently pays well and makes for a long career in academia. Conservatives need not apply however.
How can one be a ‘specialist’ on Gender?
If she hates republicans what must she think of Conservatives?
Certainly....they are the primary drivers for Womens’ Studies in colleges and universities (or as I like to call them “Bitter” Womens’ Studies. :0))
She’s the idiot who moderated the “Non partisan” seminar about the GOP war on women a couple years ago.
My guess is the only male companionship she experiences is in coming home at night at cuddling her neutered male cat.
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