Posted on 09/08/2002 12:25:03 PM PDT by Red Jones
Hard Left Dominates Campuses: Time to Fight Back? Wes Vernon, NewsMax.com Washington Editor Thursday, Sept. 5, 2002 WASHINGTON--As young people head back to the nation’s college and university campuses, a legal scholar has raised the prospect that Middle Americans may no longer have to sit back and accept hard left indoctrination of their children. Writing for the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), Kenneth Lee, who chairs The Federalist Society’s civil rights practice group, posits the following scenario:
"Imagine opening your newspaper one morning and reading a Supreme Court opinion that puts a startling new twist on an old civil rights tactic. The Court declares that some prominent university has violated equal opportunity laws by ‘engaging in a pattern of employment discrimination….against conservative Republicans and Christian conservatives.
"Of the university’s 1,828 professors, there are only eight Republicans and five Christian conservatives. Such statistical evidence of gross political and ideological imbalance has been taken as a telltale sign of purposeful discrimination in many previous civil rights cases. In this case, as well it provides prima facie evidence that individual rights are being systematically violated on arbitrary grounds. Justice demands compensatory action to protect the rights of these groups.’”
Plaintiffs in such a case - which AEI believes may be just "waiting to happen” - would have plenty of ammunition.
In the same edition of American Enterprise magazine, the editors cite chapter and verse:
Under the heading, "Political party enrollments of professors as listed in local registration records,” the lopsided leftist campus tilt is overwhelming in such key departments as Economics, History, English, Political Science, Sociology, Psychology, and Anthropology. Examples:
Brown University - 54 on the left to 3 on the right. Cornell University - 166 to 6 Harvard University - 50 to 2 Stanford University - 151 to 17 University of California at San Diego - 99 to 6 Syracuse University - 50 to 2
At this point, one gets the drift. AEI documents similar lopsided leftist imbalance at Penn State University, University of Maryland, Denver College, Pomona College, San Diego State University, University of Colorado at Boulder, State University of New York at Binghamton, and others including (of course) University of California at Berkeley.
The University of Maryland apparently is out to indoctrinate freshmen almost before they go to their first classes.
University officials have been distributing 10,000 copies of the "Laramie Project,” described as a play based on the death of homosexual college student Matthew Shepherd. As quoted in the Washington Times, this document, distributed to all incoming freshman, is defended by the university as an effort "to encourage the exploration of ideas.”
A balanced effort to stir "the exploration of ideas” in this issue, would include a recounting of another case that took place shortly after the Matthew Shepherd killing.
As reported by NewsMax.com (‘Hate Crimes’ a One Way Street - March 6, 2001), in Arkansas, two homosexuals were charged with sodomizing and killing 13-year old Jesse Dirkheising. The boy died from suffocation after being bound, gagged with underwear in his mouth, blindfolded, and taped to the bed.
The Shepherd case was big national news. For months, the Dirkheising case did not get out to the media beyond the borders of Arkansas. It appears academia gives the same "balance” to these two cases that the media did.
There is, of course, plenty of anecdotal evidence of the "Shame of America’s One Party Campuses,” as AEI describes it. Space constraints make it impossible to do more than cite some of the many examples compiled by Accuracy in Academia (AIA):
*As the nation mourned the thousands who died on the morning of September 11, 2001, University of New Mexico Professor Richard Berthold bluntly proclaimed to his students, "Anyone who can blow up the Pentagon would get my vote.”
*Tenured professor Kenneth Hearlson of Orange Coast College was suspended without a hearing for claiming in class that Muslims who condemn terrorism in the U.S. but not in Israel were inconsistent. So much for freedom of inquiry in "the marketplace of ideas.”
*A Luntz poll of Ivy League professors revealed startling political bias. In the 2000 elections, 84% of professors surveyed voted for Al Gore, as opposed to a mere 9% for George W. Bush, a bias confirmed by the more recent AEI survey. This prompted David Horowitz, who commissioned the Luntz poll, to remark, "For all of the Ivy League’s talk of diversity, it is painfully evident from this survey that there is no real diversity when it comes to political attitudes and social attitudes of Ivy league professors.”
Which brings us back to New York attorney Kenneth Lee’s hypothetical Supreme Court case.
He acknowledges that the 1964 Civil Rights Act does not outline political affiliation as a protected status. However, interestingly, some states and localities have in fact extended civil rights protection to party membership. Washington, D.C., for example, bars discrimination on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation, OR political affiliation.
Is this a case "waiting to happen?” It depends on how many parents are outraged enough to band together and use the legal expertise of think tanks such as the Federalist Society to assist in making their case.
Chances are, however, many parents are too busy sacrificing (emptying their bank accounts, holding down two jobs, etc.) so that their offspring will get what the parents hope will be a good balanced education, as opposed to indoctrination.
Conservative students organize or try to organize on campus to tell "the other side,” but they are all too often suppressed by the dominant culture there. The late Hearst columnist Westbrook Pegler once observed that many non-leftist college kids "dare not sass back the professor lest he flunk them.”
Meanwhile, in his forthcoming book, "Why the Left Hates America,” (and the author makes a clear distinction between "liberal” and hard left) AIA’s executive director Dan Flynn says, "Large numbers of young Americans are taught to hate their country. The impressionable minds that are fed a distorted picture of America will be our next generation of teachers, journalists, clergy, and government officials. Unless the prevailing negativism is countered, the kind of history, tradition, and government that is passed on to future generations will be adversely affected.”
Independent sources of funding and organization will be required to pursue justice. The parties will never allow the government justice department to prosecute the Parties themselves.
The damage is done. The evidence is clear. The motivations are manifest. Call the Grand Jury.
Sorry, we are too far gone for that. The next bloody revolution is just around the corner.
In the minds of FReepers what is the difference? Where do people like Bill Clinton, Dick Gephardt, Noam Chomsky, and Jesse Jackson stand?
In your dreams.
Will you take the first shot?
There might blood born of riots as things get heated should the government fail to get all their checks in the mail for Social security, welfare, government contracts (that one hits the middle class hard).
But the battle must be fought FIRST in the courts. Blatantly erroneous decisions will breed more dissension (like the Pledge of Allegiance) and that in turn WILL play on the politicians, but it will require a long string of correctly targeted lawsuits and prosecutions.
It is not "revolution" we require it is Restoration.
The people can support the concept of a Restoration far better than the concept of a Revolution.
Congressman Billybob
Click for major article on turnover in the House of Representatives: "Til Death Do Us Part."
Will you take the second??
Yeah, I'll take it, but you may not like my target.
What do you mean "expose"? It's already an accepted truth by the general public.
and get rid of the left from the colleges.
The hard fact is that most Phd's who want to work at colleges are at least left-leaning moderates. Most conservative Phd's seem to end up in company/gvt labs, think tanks, or otherwise work outside the university system.
It would be exceptionally hard to find enough conservative teachers to replace 30% of the leftists on college campuses, much less replace them all.
You could, I suppose, start exclusively conservative colleges (as I believe has already been done) but they will always be fewer and further between then the liberal schools.
This is not an area that we can ever truly dominate and there are better targets to be found elsewhere.
News media anyone?
Maybe so, but how about state laws? Maybe we need some pilot cases involving state universities using taxpayers' money to hire ONLY liberal professors to the exclusion of all others.......i.e., a "pattern of discrimination", as civil rights attorneys like to say.
I wonder if some state laws are being violated. ???
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