Posted on 01/28/2003 10:42:54 PM PST by SteveH
Left Turns on Campus
Liberal agenda teaches students what to think, not how to think
BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS
by Scott Peterson
Scott Peterson is a rocket scientist at Lockheed-Martin in Sunnyvale and a part-time Math instructor at De Anza College.
The recent debacle concerning an anti-war "teach-in" in the Oakland schools provided a visible demonstration of the one-sided political discussions within our schools. The fact that only people from the anti-war side participated in the discussions, and that the Oakland school board actually saw no harm in this, goes to show that in certain areas, educators see themselves as telling students what to think, not teaching them how to think.
The dirty little secret is that such beliefs have been infecting students in our nation's colleges and universities for decades, and our local schools have not been immune to such indoctrination.
Stanford University fell victim to the zealots of diversity and multiculturalism, and the extent to which they browbeat their students is chronicled in the book, "The Diversity Myth." UC-Berkeley students were so afraid of competing ideas on reparations for slavery that they stole student newspapers, stormed the office, and demanded apologies simply because the Daily Cal ran an ad suggesting that reparations are wrong.
Cal State-Hayward had a panel discussion about Proposition 209 during its campaign, and when challenged that all speakers were from the anti-209 side, actually defended themselves by saying, "We didn't want it to be a debate." Even my own college, De Anza, has presented a speaker series so one-sided that not one speaker on political issues in the last 10 years could even be considered moderate, let alone conservative.
The dangers in presenting only one side of controversial issues to students should be obvious, but it is compounded when the only message they hear is anti-U.S., anti-male, anti-capitalist and anti-white. Our students have been exposed to speakers such as one of the organizers of the riots in Seattle at the World Trade Organization meetings, who spent an hour attacking everything capitalist or governmental. But when he was challenged to tell us what he was actually for, he could not present a single cogent idea for a competing system.
They have also been exposed to a Ph.D. in the philosophy of scients who didn't come close to answering the question, Is science multicultural? (It's not. The technology that applies science may differ widely, but the underlying science itself cannot be different. "Force equals mass times acceleration" is true whether you are Japanese, Indian, German, Mexican or even Martian.) This speaker was, however, able to use the phrase "racist white male" more than a dozen times in her presentation. Sadly, these have been the rule rather than the exception.
When faculty members take it on themselves to control the kinds of information students are exposed to, when they lie, mislead, or simply engage in propaganda to try to sway their students to a particular point of view, then the system fails its primary mission to teach our students how to think, not what to think.
When the only faculty who get hired represent a single monolithic point of view (estimates are that only 3 percent of faculty in areas such as history, political science, English or sociology are Republican); when the concept of diversity applies to every interest group imaginable, but excludes the one type of diversity critical on college campuses, that of the diversity of ideas-- then our system has gone horribly wrong.
It is time that students, parents and taxpayers demand that our colleges and universities return to the job of educating our students, not indoctrinating them to a single radical view of the world.
"Environments conducive to the rise of terrorism include international and national environments, as well as subnational ones such as universities, where many terrorists first become familiar with Marxist-Leninist ideology or other revolutionary ideas and get involved with radical groups. Russell and Miller identify universities as the major recruiting ground for terrorists..."
"The physiological approach to terrorism suggests that the role of the media in promoting the spread of terrorism cannot be ignored in any discussion of the causes of terrorism..."
"Moreover, in Guttman's analysis, the terrorist requires a liberal rather than a right-wing audience for success. Liberals make the terrorist respectable by accepting the ideology that the terrorist alleges informs his or her acts. The terrorist also requires liberal control of the media for the transmission of his or her ideology..."
I've taught there. He's right.
So this guy finds time to write between looking for his missing wife Laci?
Maybe he stays up 'til 4:30 in the morning like you.
This is not the same Scott!!!
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