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
Indeed. The left got firm hold on the coming generations with their early takeover of the media and academia. They seemed to have understand they needed to control the flow of information, first. Now they have infiltrated the nominal Christian church and the military, formerly two remaining staunch bastions of the right.
This would bother me more if I didn’t believe in Biblical prophecy.
And the cat has to be bribed with treats.
LOL
Women has to sneak up on a glass of water.
It’s the same way they find the most absurd examples of “white privilige”, like the recent moron in Salon, who complained about a ruined train trip because a white man had the gall to impose his “privilege” by politely expecting her to move her bag from a seat, since her fat ass was already taking up two.
Yep. Not even Laz would hit it.
Taking fugly to a whole new level. Guilty.
She looks like some of the Norwegian socialist scum on Lillehammer.
There... that's better.
Yep.. the "Nutcracker of Lillehammer."
Thanks. I needed that!
sounds more like a description of emotionalistic libtards filled with fear and hate like Susan J. Douglas
My wife and I laughed heartily at the fat assed salon “journalist”.
The word “journalist” is the single most mis-used word on planet earth today... in any language.
Those duckspeak propaganda slime-worms are “journalists” like Mengele was a “doctor”.
They always look to me like they came straight out lithographs of the Salem witchhunters baying for blood. Just pull back the hair, and change the clothes, and put their natural expressions back on them-screaming at or about something.
That's a pretty fair working description of an academic Marxist, actually. One wonders if she was looking into a mirror when she wrote it.
Mengele comparison—well done.
Here’s a flash... the rest of us LOOK DOWN on liberal elite Gruber nose-in the-air assh*les...
All she’s really describing (within moderation, of course), is a natural human need for stability. But leftists never stop trying to engineer human nature, while mocking Christians for allowing that God can do what they think man can do.
Actually, I don’t think Mengele is a good comparison because Mengele was an evil genius. These people are engage in duckspeak every waking moment of their lives. The opposite of genius. They are puppets on a string, with the strings doing directly into their brains.
I can’t think of an apt comparison. They are a new phenomenon on the planet. People who have voluntarily dumbed down their own brains to a level never before seen in history.
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