Bettina Aptheker: Target of an attack by David Horowitz
Nestled in a redwood glade on cliffs above the Pacific Ocean, the University of California at Santa Cruz is one of the most picturesque campuses in America. Its 15,000 students attend classes in 62 majors at 10 colleges, in an environment that would seem an ideal locale for the contemplative life. In the hard sciences, it can be said that Santa Cruz handsomely fulfills its academic expectations. Its physics program is ranked among the best in the country, while its Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, which houses the Lick Observatory, is a world class scientific institution. But inside the classrooms of its liberal arts division something besides the life of the mind is being nourished. In these environs, UC Santa Cruz is beyond any doubt the most radical university in the United States, its curricula anything but academic.
... An entire Santa Cruz curriculum devoted to similar revolutionary agendas is also one of the oldest and most influential Women’s Studies programs in the country. Its creators have renamed it the Department of Feminist Studies to reflect their real agenda which is to provide a training center for political radicals. The chief architect of these academic programs is Bettina Aptheker, a former Party comrade of Professor Davis and a well-known Berkeley radical in her own right. Like Huey Newton, Aptheker received her PhD from the Santa Cruz History of Consciousness program, which allowed her to submit as a “scholarly” thesis, a collection of political articles previously rejected by the Communist Party’s publishing house because of her deviation on the “woman question” (Aptheker is a lesbian activist).
In a recently published autobiography, she described her initial reluctance to take on an academic career,[2] and explained how she overcame her hesitation when Marge Frantz, a lecturer in American Studies at Santa Cruz and, like Aptheker, a Bay Area Communist, advised her: “It’s your revolutionary duty!”[3] Aptheker was duly made the instructor for the “Introduction to Women’s Studies” course in the fledgling program: “I redesigned the curriculum and re-titled it, ‘Introduction to Feminism,’ making it more overtly political, and taught the class in the context of the women’s movement.”
According to Aptheker, most of her students “were activists themselves”[4] and nothing remotely academic entered her lesson plan: “Teaching became a form of political activism for me, replacing the years of dogged meetings and intrepid organizing with the immediacy of a liberatory practice,…”[5] This abusive approach to education was made possible by the abdication of university authorities and the shirking of their legal obligations to students and the public....
Read entire article at David Horowitz and Jacob Laksin at FrontpageMag.com
... An entire Santa Cruz curriculum devoted to similar revolutionary agendas is also one of the oldest and most influential Women’s Studies programs in the country. Its creators have renamed it the Department of Feminist Studies to reflect their real agenda which is to provide a training center for political radicals. The chief architect of these academic programs is Bettina Aptheker, a former Party comrade of Professor Davis and a well-known Berkeley radical in her own right. Like Huey Newton, Aptheker received her PhD from the Santa Cruz History of Consciousness program, which allowed her to submit as a “scholarly” thesis, a collection of political articles previously rejected by the Communist Party’s publishing house because of her deviation on the “woman question” (Aptheker is a lesbian activist).
In a recently published autobiography, she described her initial reluctance to take on an academic career,[2] and explained how she overcame her hesitation when Marge Frantz, a lecturer in American Studies at Santa Cruz and, like Aptheker, a Bay Area Communist, advised her: “It’s your revolutionary duty!”[3] Aptheker was duly made the instructor for the “Introduction to Women’s Studies” course in the fledgling program: “I redesigned the curriculum and re-titled it, ‘Introduction to Feminism,’ making it more overtly political, and taught the class in the context of the women’s movement.”
According to Aptheker, most of her students “were activists themselves”[4] and nothing remotely academic entered her lesson plan: “Teaching became a form of political activism for me, replacing the years of dogged meetings and intrepid organizing with the immediacy of a liberatory practice,…”[5] This abusive approach to education was made possible by the abdication of university authorities and the shirking of their legal obligations to students and the public....