ACADEMIC ROT IN HIGHER ED
Dr. Walter Williams, a distinguished economics professor at George Mason University, noted recently that taxpayers have an imperfect understanding of the academic rot that exists at our nation’s colleges, adding that “what distinguishes one college from the other is the magnitude of that rot.”
Case in point: Dr. Williams said that in an article by Dr. Candace de Russy titled “Hate-America Sociology,” she quoted a few of the questions from a student’s exam in an introductory sociology class. The article appeared in “Minding the Campus,” a publication of the Manhattan Institute.
Dr. de Russy is a former member of the board of trustees of the State University of New York (SUNY). One of her colleagues “sent her a copy of a student’s exam from an introductory sociology class found lying in a room at an East Coast public college. The professor had given it a perfect score of 100. Here are some of the questions asked and the student’s written response:”
“Question: How does the United States ‘steal’ the resources of other (third world) countries?
“Answer: We steal through exploitation. Our multinationals are aware that indigenous people in developing nations have been coaxed off their plots and forced into slums. Because it is lucrative, our multinationals offer them extremely low wage labor that cannot be turned down.
“Question: What is the interactionist approach to gender?
“Answer: The majority of multi-gender encounters are male-dominated. (F)or example, while involved in conversation, the male is much more likely to interrupt. Most likely because the male believes the female’s expressed thoughts are inferior to his own.
“Question: Please briefly explain the matrix of domination.
“Answer: The belief that domination has more than one dimension. For example, Males are dominant over females, whites over blacks, and affluent over impoverished.”
“Out of retaliation fears, de Russy withheld the name and university of her colleague who sent the exam. Teaching students hate-America indoctrination is widespread, as I’ve documented in the past.
“A few years ago, according to UCLA’s Bruin Standard, Mary Corey, UCLA history professor, instructed her class, ‘Capitalism isn’t a lie on purpose. It’s just a lie.’ She continued, ‘(Capitalists) are swine. … They’re bastard people.
“Rod Swanson, a UCLA economics professor, told his class, ‘The United States of America, backed by facts, is the greediest and most selfish country in the world.’
“Professor Andrew Hewitt, chairman of UCLA’s Department of Germanic Languages, told his class, ‘Bush is a moron, a simpleton and an idiot.’ The professor’s opinion of the rest of us: ‘American consumerism is a very unique thing; I don’t think anyone else lusts after money in such a greedy fashion.’
“An English professor at Montclair State University in New Jersey tells his students, ‘Conservatism champions racism, exploitation and imperialist war.’
Dr. Williams noted that although “university officials are aware of this kind of academic rot,” the same does not hold true for school trustees, politicians, charitable foundations, and most of all, parents and incoming students, who expect to be educated, not indoctrinated.
In order to expose this problem, Dr. Williams suggested that students record “professorial propaganda and give it wide distribution over the Internet. I’ve taught for more than 40 years and have routinely invited students to record my lectures so they don’t have to be stenographers during class. I have no idea of where those recordings have wound up, but if you find them, you’ll hear zero proselytization or discussion of my political and other personal preferences. To do otherwise, I consider to be academic dishonesty.”
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Deborah Lambert writes the Squeaky Chalk column for Accuracy in Academia.
If you would like to comment on this article, e-mail mal.kline@academia.org.
