Parents, don't worry...

Parents, don't worry about your kids when the go to college. Rest assured that your children will be getting the best education your money or their student loans & scholarships can buy. The best part is, after four (OK, maybe five or six) years, the hard work, discipline, and dedication will all be rewarded with a degree, backed up by the knowledge that everything they've learned in their classes is the most recent, up-to-date, factual information that the professors could find. To quote the great comedian and storyteller Bill Cosby, "Right!"

Like the rest of the educational system in America, even our colleges and universities are directed by their share of internal politics. Often, these politics are not originating in the offices of university presidents and deans. Instead, at times, the system appears to be essentially run by the professors, while the administrators sit idly by, cowering in the corner. Is that how you think your hard-earned tuition dollars are being spent?

One of the problems in the system involves instructors who teach classes not to educate and inform, but to indoctrinate and push their own personal or political agendas. One example of this is demonstrated by professors who twist and, in cases, revise history in an attempt to convey their own agendas. Facts take a back seat to that end. Their ultimately irrelevant to some. Is this how you want your children to spend their time and your money (or theirs)?

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying all college professors are full of crap. In fact, I believe the majority of them to be staying on topic and within the historical facts. Like everyone else on this planet, these instructors have their own beliefs on politics, religion, economics, etc. Also, like most of us, they can easily do our jobs without letting those personal beliefs interfere with their jobs. But what happens when an instructor dismisses accepted historical facts in an effort to promote an ideology all their own?

A link in "Nealz Nuze", on the website of nationally syndicated talk show host Neal Boortz, led me to this article by George Leef on the website for the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy. I found it very interesting. As a short-term college student at the University of Tennessee over fifteen years ago, I had heard this sort of thing went on in some classes, although I was fortunate enough not to be subjected to such indoctrination disguised as education. Read the article and see what happened when a professor at Wellesley College tries to take a fellow professor to task for relating factually unsound information to students in his classes.

Thank you to Mr. Leef for giving me permission to repost this well written and eye-opening article.



Clarion Call
How Truth Lost Out to Political Correctness at Wellesley

A professor describes her bitter experience defending historical fact over mythical Afrocentrism claims.

By George Leef
June 11, 2008

Are professors in American colleges and universities interested in the truth? That sounds like a strange question, but in an extremely revealing new book, Mary Lefkowitz shows that there are some who won’t let the truth get in the way of their efforts at indoctrinating students. Worse yet, administrators often cave in to these academic bullies rather than standing up for faculty members with the nerve to question them.

Lefkowitz is an emeritus professor at Wellesley College, where she taught courses on classical culture for many years. Ancient Greece is her specialty. It is hard to imagine that such a quiet scholar would become the center of a vehement controversy that would rock the campus and descend (on one side) to the level of vicious personal attacks. History Lesson (Yale University Press, 202 pages) is the story of her bitter experience after challenging the accuracy of material a professor in Wellesley’s Africana Studies Department used in his classes.

In her introduction Lefkowitz writes, “Telling the truth, instead of being our first responsibility, has suddenly become less important than achieving social goals. These goals were to be reached not by means of the usual scholarly tools of reflection and reasoned persuasion. They were to be imposed by assertion and fiat.”

One of those “social goals” that now dominate in American education is that of making various minority groups (those designated as victims of our oppressive culture) feel good about themselves. Toward that end, some professors have taken to the creation of myths. The particular myth that plays the central role in this drama is that of the “Stolen Legacy.”

Here is the way that myth goes. The culture and philosophy of the ancient Greeks was not truly their creation, but was “stolen” from Egypt. Since Egypt is in Africa and all the people in Africa are “black” this means that white Europeans were victimizing blacks more than 2400 years ago. In one particularly ludicrous aspect of this myth, it is asserted that Aristotle journeyed to the Library at Alexandria and stole books that he later claimed as his own works.

When Professor Lefkowitz learned that this and other intellectually indefensible ideas were being taught by a professor (Tony Martin) in the Africana Studies Department, she publicly challenged their historical accuracy. Among other problems with the “stolen legacy” idea is that Aristotle died years before the Library at Alexandria was built. But when she pointed this fact out to Professor Martin, he took umbrage. Who was she, a white Jew, to question his interpretation of black history?! At that point, it began to occur to her that Martin, a tenured faculty member, was one of those people who won’t let the truth get in the way of achieving their objectives.

More disturbing yet, she discovered that the dean of the college would not intervene. Quoth the dean, “He has his view of ancient history and you have yours.” Throughout the confrontation between Martin and Lefkowitz, the Wellesley administrators were cowering, spineless creatures—much like the Duke administration during the infamous lacrosse case in 2006.

Looking further into the curriculum in Martin’s department, Lefkowitz discovered that students were assigned a book entitled The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, an anonymous book published by the Nation of Islam. While masquerading as a work of scholarship, complete with 1,275 footnotes, it is a screed that seeks to promote the idea that Jews were mainly responsible for slavery. The book is hate literature with a thin veneer of sophistication. Using it in a college course is deeply troubling. The Wellesley administration, however, ducked behind the curtain of professors’ “academic freedom” when it was brought to their attention.

Lefkowitz’s purely academic criticisms of the materials being used to teach Wellesley students elicited an outrageous counter-attack by Martin, a book entitled The Jewish Onslaught: Dispatches from the Wellesley Battlefront. In it, Martin depicted himself as a hero standing strong for “black progress” against the evil oppressor class (the Jews) and craven blacks who didn’t go along with his racial harangues (such as Wellesley economics professor Marcellus Andrews and Harvard historian Henry Louis Gates, Jr.).

Martin wasn’t done yet. Next he filed a lawsuit against Lefkowitz claiming that an article she had written slandered him. The article was about an incident in 1991 where Martin had verbally abused a female student. His suit alleged that the article contained erroneous material that had damaged him professionally. Naturally, Wellesley’s administration refused to defend Lefkowitz. She was able to find expert legal help, however, through the Anti-Defamation League. The case dragged on until 1999, when it was finally dismissed.

One of the hot topics in higher education these days is whether there is a significant problem of professors turning their classes into indoctrination camps. We often hear from defenders of the status quo that instances of this are mostly made up or exaggerated, and that in any event, American students are “critical thinkers” who are too bright accept any propaganda that might happen to make its way to their ears. History Lesson refutes both parts of that defense. Martin clearly meant to indoctrinate his students with historical falsehoods, and from the letters and comments of his students about the controversy, it’s evident that many of them had swallowed his line completely. To them, Lefkowitz was an enemy just as to Mao’s Red Brigades any intellectual was an enemy. If you’ve heard that American college students are impervious to propaganda because they can see right through it, this book demonstrates otherwise.

In a fascinating aside, Lefkowitz explains that she tracked down the origin of the “Stolen Legacy” myth. It comes from a novel published in France in 1731. The American writer George G. M. James based his ostensibly factual 1954 book Stolen Legacy on this work of fiction.

Sadly, it isn’t just in the area of Africana Studies that we encounter the double standards and anti-intellectualism on display throughout the book. Professors who question global warming, the benefits of “diversity,” and other articles of faith on the left risk intimidation or reprisals for saying what they believe to be true. American colleges and universities are far from being havens for objective, dispassionate inquiry. .

History Lesson is an extremely important, gutsy book. I’m afraid, however, that the people who most need to read and reflect on it—college administrators—will avert their eyes.



Once again, thank you to Mr. Leef for giving me permission to repost this well written and eye-opening article.

Remember, this may not be the rule in modern higher education, but this DOES happen. The best defense against such so-called "educators" is to start early by teaching your children how to think for themselves. Teach them that if they hear something they don't understand or that doesn't make sense, check it out. Question what they are told. Educate your kids to realize that just because a person is in a position of authority doesn't mean they are never wrong. Our children are not born with the inherent ability to simply know who's educating them and who's just trying to further their own ends. It falls to the parents to help them learn that. Don't raise another generation of automatons. As a society, we've done that. Let's try something new (and actually something tried and true, as well) -- let's raise a generation of kids who know how to think for themselves, who have useful problem solving skills, who know how to stand on their own two feet, instead of simply following wherever they are unsuspectingly led.