College Student Alert: Beware of One-Party Classrooms

Phyllis Schlafly
Tuesday, April 07, 2009

How can we explain continued public support for Barack Obama's extremist spending plans, even though it is painfully obvious that his much-touted "remaking America" means mortgaging the financial future of young people with trillions of dollars in debt? Are the American people really willing to let the government be our nanny, manage our economy, federalize our schools, and decide which businesses can keep their doors open, what health care will be permitted, who will get new jobs and how extravagant will be the foreign handouts as Obama "rejoins the world community"?

One answer to these questions may be what has been taught over the last 30 years in U.S. colleges and universities, where the radicals of the 1960s have become tenured professors. David Horowitz has made it his life mission for the last two decades to expose the hypocrisy of professors pushing propaganda instead of education.

The latest of his several books on the academic left is called "One-Party Classroom: How Radical Professors at America's Top Colleges Indoctrinate Students and Undermine Our Democracy" (co-authored with Jacob Laksin; Crown Forum). "One-party" does not refer just to the fractious Harry Reid Democratic Party -- full-blown Marxist socialism is the "one party" that is indoctrinating students in the classroom.

Horowitz documented 150 college courses at 12 elite universities, from Columbia in New York to the University of California at Santa Cruz, which he calls "the worst school in America" and whose highest-ranking professors are the communist lesbians Angela Davis and Bettina Aptheker. Other institutions along the way include Duke, Penn State, the University of Colorado and the University of Southern California.

Horowitz quotes directly from the syllabus of each course he critiques, lists assigned readings, and reports on the credentials and background of the instructor paid to teach the course. The most offensive departments are women's studies, black studies and peace studies.

These so-called academic departments teach students to hate America, to believe that women, blacks and all minorities are the victims of oppression and racism, and that America is a land of injustice that needs drastic change in our social structure. The universities teach William Ayers-style "social justice," which is the template for a socialist political agenda.

Women's studies departments teach that gender is not a fact of nature or biologically determined, but is a socially or environmentally determined classification that ascribes qualities of masculinity and femininity to people, a peculiar view accepted by feminists as though it were a principle of Newtonian physics. Women's studies instructors consider it a given that women have been subordinated and discriminated against by an unjust male patriarchy and need government action by legislatures and courts to give women their just due.

At Columbia University, students who hope to be teachers are expected to adopt a radical view of American society and to attack the legitimacy of the social order. The courses dish out a running attack on capitalism and the free-market system.

Even at the University of Miami in Ohio, the women's studies department makes clear that its courses are organized around radical feminist theory. To get a degree in women's studies, the first requirement for the senior thesis is that it "must incorporate feminist perspectives."

If any course syllabus promises to include "critical thinking," that means criticizing men and the patriarchy.

The University of Texas uses required texts that take as their starting point the patriarchal structure of society. Twenty-five points of a student's final grade are determined by a gender journal in which students question norms about sexuality.

Typical readings assigned at the University of Arizona reveal the bias of the courses: "Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism," "Sexual Democracy: Women, Oppression and Revolution" and "The Radical Future of Liberal Feminism."

A course at the University of Missouri asserts that U.S. institutions exert social control over women's bodies to promote gendered inequalities, especially the media, the legal system and the medical profession. Missouri courses attack femininity as "a tool of self-oppression," and courses are frankly described as "a training course for radical feminists in radical feminism."

Women's studies courses don't assign readings by any of the great women writers: Jane Austen, George Eliot, Emily Dickinson or the Bronte sisters. Also blacklisted are those who criticize feminism, such as Christina Hoff Sommers, Carolyn Graglia, Daphne Patai and Camille Paglia.

The cultural Marxists have been teaching college students long enough to deceive two generations. The abuses of the liberal arts curriculum were set forth 20 years ago by Allan Bloom in "The Closing of the American Mind" and nearly 50 years ago by E. Merrill Root in "Collectivism on the Campus."

When are young people and their parents going to stop paying exorbitant tuition for the privilege of being brainwashed by the left?