James Ottavio Castagnera: Is Your Kid Getting Brainwashed at College?
Pennsylvania lawmakers are worried that our kids in college are being brainwashed.
Late last month a committee of the Pennsylvania state legislature convened in Philadelphia to investigate whether the Commonwealth’s colleges discriminate against politically conservative students. The committee took two days of testimony at Temple University. Established last July, this committee will conduct two more hearings in other parts of the state, before reporting back to the House of Representatives next November.
Representative Gibson C. Armstrong, a Republican out of Lancaster County, introduced the resolution creating the committee. During the first day of the hearings, Armstrong told Temple President David Adamany he had received more than a dozen complaints from Owl students about political indoctrination in the classroom. While defending his faculty’s academic freedom, Adamany reportedly replied, “Classrooms cannot be viewed as pulpits.”
During the two days of hearings, only two students stepped forward to voice complaints. One contended that fellow conservatives feared retribution if they piped up. A Democrat on the committee retorted that “we may be over-blowing this problem.” Another added that such hearings may be “a path we don’t want to go down.”
Maybe so… but the path is certainly not a lonely one these days. On the University of Colorado’s Boulder campus last year, controversial ethnic-studies Professor Ward Churchill became the meat in a politico-media feeding frenzy after publishing a book called “On the Justice of Roosting Chickens.” The title was drawn from a comment made by Malcolm X when he heard in November 1963 that Kennedy had been killed. “Chickens coming home to roost,” the Black Muslim leader reportedly responded. Professor Churchill’s book questioned the innocence of the victims of the 9/11 World Trade Center terrorist attack, labeling them “technocrats” and “little Eichmanns.” When the national press chomped down on this, Churchill was driven from his directorship of the university’s ethnic studies program; if conservatives in the Colorado legislature --- not to mention Fox Network’s Bill O’Reilly --- had their way he would have lost his professorship, too.
At UCLA last month a new group of conservative alumni offered students a bounty of $100 per class to provide the year-old Bruin Alumni Association with information on instructors who are “abusive, one-sided or off-topic” in their political advocacy. The BAA’s prez is Andrew Jones, a 24-year-old former chairman of UCLA’s Bruin Republicans student organization. “Having been a student myself up until 2003, and then watching what other students like myself have gone through, I’m very concerned about the level of professional teaching at UCLA,” he told the L.A. Times.
The conservative National Review, founded by William F. Buckley, who once wrote a novel about Senator Joe McCarthy, apparently shares that concern. Last October it ran an article chronicling the mistreatment of conservative professors on several college campuses. For his part, Professor Churchill considered himself a victim of latter-day McCarthyism… a word handed down to us from the right-wing senator’s anti-communist witch-hunts of the 1950s.
In the middle of this mess are millions of college students --- your kids and mine --- who mostly just want to get a good education that’ll lead to a decent job. When I was an undergraduate in the sixties, a national survey consistently found that the main thing we wanted from our college educations was the wisdom to lead meaningful lives. For a decade and a half or more, this same national survey has reported that the most popular answer, year after year, is: to be VERY financially successful. This answer implies a much more conservative crop of kids on average than 30 or 40 years ago.
Aye, as Hamlet might moan, there’s the rub. Profs from my generation are teaching these budding business men and women, who just want their teachers to cut to the chase.
No, Representative Armstrong, I don’t think the students at Temple were afraid to speak up to your committee. And, no, Bruin Alumni President Jones, I don’t think UCLA students are intimidated by their left-leaning faculty either.
Frankly, my dears --- much as you may hate to hear this --- I think they really just don’t give a damn about what either side is saying.