Many departments and programs at this institution – Anthropology, Women’s Studies, African and African American Studies, Literature, Philosophy, English, the Multicultural Center, the Major Speakers program, the Institute of U.S. Critical Studies, and the John Hope Franklin Center – were not happy about the prospect of my appearance and rejected the requests of the students who arranged this evening to co-sponsor my event. In fact, only one academic department, Political Science, thought it might be a good idea to have an intellectual dialogue at Duke by extending a rare invitation to a conservative like myself to appear at an institution of higher learning.
These departments and programs that objected to David Horowitz's appearance have become so politicized that they have become of negative value to the university. Duke's crown jewel is medical sciences, along with the physical sciences and engineering, and some top rate professional schools. However, these other, politicized departments have become like a spreading concer, and not just at Duke, but at nearly all of our top universities.
Duke has its own version of this kind of academic corruption and fraud. I am referring to the Marxism & Society program, which is described in the catalog as a course in the theories of Marxism. Marxism is complex subject for study. After all, Marxist theories have been directly responsible for the murder of 120 million people since 1917. In China alone, an estimated fifty million people starved to death because China’s progressives tried to apply the crackpot economic theories of Karl Marx.
But the Marxism & Society program at Duke is not a program located in the Economics or Sociology or History Department at Duke, where it would be guided by experts knowledgeable in such fields. It is under the jurisdiction of the Literature Department. In other words it is a program run by individuals who lack professional expertise in the fields of economics, sociology, political science, and history, the fields relevant to evaluating a theory of social and historical developments like Marxism. The director of the Marxism & Society program at Duke is a Professor of Literature, named Jane Gaines. In fact, Professor Gaines is not even a professor of literature in any meaningful sense. She is a film critic or a student of film -- literature having been dumbed down in the progressive academy to include popular – and non-literary – arts like film. Professor Gaines’ entire academic output consists of writings on the movies.
How can someone whose expertise -- we’ll give her that -- is cinema be academically qualified to direct a program which is devoted to a theory that purports to explain the most complex developments of human societies? How can it evaluate a theory whose practical consequences include the creation of the most murderous and oppressive regimes in human history? There are no real answers to those questions. And, of course, this is not an academic program seeking to conduct a dispassionate examination of the nature and consequences of Marxism in the first place. The course was founded by Duke Professor Michael Hardt, a Professor of Comparative Literature who has attempted to resurrect Marxism as a theory for explaining contemporary history in a book called Empire.
What a disgrace.