My talk today is pertinent in two different ways. First, this is meant as somewhat of a synopsis of some of the things we have run into over the past couple of years here at Campus Report. I will especially focus on two aspects: perversion running amuck on the campuses, and the censorship of conservative ideas. This talk is also meant as an overall report on the state of academe. Though we can say that the hard sciences—for example: mathematics, engineering, and the many scientific–ologies—though they remain taught at a high and praiseworthy level—a level attractive to the best students from around the world—we can’t say the same for the social sciences and for the free discussion of ideas. What we find is that the social sciences have become political pawns, ripe for pushing Leftist ideologies and lifestyles, while destroying the traditional role of the liberal arts and the university: the quest for truth.

In fact, the questioning of Leftist movements is so anathema on campus today that dissenters can expect to go through sensitivity training (ala the reeducation camps in the former Soviet Union), have their reputations smeared, and even have death threats hurled at them. If you are a professor and you take a conservative stance on an issue, you may be dismissed from your job.

I’d like to begin my talk today, then, by reading a portion of a recent article written by columnist Wendy McElroy, which I found very interesting and pertinent. It kind of summarizes what I’ll be talking about here today. She writes:
 

Geology professor David Deming of the University of Oklahoma was tired of "the very vile rhetoric" hurled at "people who support Second Amendment rights." As a result, sexual harassment complaints against him have been filed with the University and Deming may be dismissed.

His confrontation with political correctness began on Feb. 18, when the school newspaper, The Oklahoma Daily, reprinted a column by anti-gun zealot Joni Kletter. Kletter stated that current gun laws allow "criminals, youth, and the mentally disabled to quickly and easily kill as many random people as they want."

In a letter to the editor, Deming replied, "I just want to point out that Kletter's 'easy access' to a vagina enables her to 'quickly and easily' have sex with 'as many random people' as she wants." Referring to Kletter's "unregistered vagina" which could spread disease, Deming expressed the hope that she was "as responsible with her equipment as most gun owners are with theirs."

So we can laugh about this, and it is certainly funny in one sense, but the aftermath from it we certainly cannot laugh about. The aftermath saw widespread protests and condemnation of Deming as a hater of women and whose letter would increase the likelihood of rape. One professor filed a legal complaint with the university’s Office of Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action for violating the school’s sexual harassment policies. In other words, Deming’s beliefs were creating a “hostile environment” for radical feminists and lesbians on campus.

Ironically, it is these same folks that condemn Deming and other dissenters of the Left who have been very vocal in supporting the recent V-Day 2000 Initiative. V-Day, which substitutes recognition of the peaceful loving union of man and woman, heralded as Valentine’s Day, for recognition of Violence Against Women and the Vagina, has grown into a full-blown international feminist movement. With V-Day 2000 nearing completion, the off-Broadway play created by Eve Ensler—provocatively titled The Vagina Monologues—has now been performed on over 200 campuses in North America over the past 12 months. I wrote about this quite extensively in the March Issue of Campus Report.

So, although this play is supposed to raise awareness about sexual violence, it really amounts to pornographic, lesbian propaganda. Plain and simple. You can even see it in the ads promoting the play on the campuses. One such ad appeared at Dartmouth. The Women’s Resource Center posted flyers on campus that were very explicit in showing the part in question of a woman in the play.

You have to ask your self, what does this pornography have to do with achieving V-Day’s stated goal of raising awareness of violence against women? In researching this story I found that the answer, really, is simple. Not only is about its stated goal, it is also about raising awareness of the feminist agenda, and, specifically, lesbianism. I say ‘raising awareness,’ but it is really promotion of, propaganda for. They say as much themselves. One Monologues actor at Bradley University said about the play, “It went beyond feminism as a political stance and was more about feminism in everyday life.”

The Vagina Monologues go way beyond the normal bounds of decency and rational discourse. I’m not going to give you too many details here—you can read about it in my article, but it purports to be about violence against women, but I found that the play contains less than 15 pages of actual facts regarding sexual violence. However, it does contain an abundance through the other 100-plus pages an abundance of allusions to lesbian sex; it contains juvenile jokes about menstruating girls when they first hit puberty; it discusses in a very favorable light sado-masochism; and it has a very explicit scene depicting the statutory rape of a thirteen year old girl.

This play, performed widely on taxpayer-funded properties, discusses vaginal “workshops,” women who “wore outrageous outfits” when they “dominated women… [with] whips, handcuffs, rope, dildos,” and it also depicts lesbian exploitation of minor girls.

One example is six-year old girl in this play who is asked what her vagina would say and wear if it could. Adolescent girls describe the thrill of inserting tampons for the very first time. The play even contains an explicit scene describing the statutory rape of a 13-year old girl by a 24-year old lesbian. If there is any doubt about whether this is just promotional material for the lesbian agenda and an attack on heterosexuality, that’s put to rest when the 13-year old girl after being raped remarks, that now she’ll, “never have to rely on a man.”

I have yet to hear a satisfactory defense for how throwing the word “vagina” around and chanting derogatory slang words like “cunt” dozens of times, or watching women actors bent over walking around on stage sniffing the air while they are asked to describe what a vagina smells like—I have yet to hear why this is considered worthy of academia’s time and money.

As for the academic freedom defense that is always thrown out, there is world of difference between academic freedom and academic anarchy. Academic freedom cannot and should not mean that anything goes, but it does have everything to do with academic responsibility and the proper use of public funds. As Dan [Flynn] mentioned in his speech this morning, even the universities that are purportedly private—outside of a few like Bob Jones, Grove City, and Hillsdale—they receive an abundance of federal money. With limited resources and declining educational standards, why should this money be going into something which has nothing to do with the university’s original mission, which, as I stated earlier, is the quest for truth.

So what we are seeing is the pornographication and the queerification of the academy. I say queer for as we found out at the highly politicized to the left Modern Language Association conference, they themselves use the word ‘queer.’ It is more than just gays and lesbians, it’s bisexuals, transsexuals, cross-sexuals—I think there are something like 15 different ‘genders’ that are recognized by the UN now. Anyway, we see that the academic core curriculum has gone hard core. Already classes abound throughout higher education that deal with “Queer Theory” and that even show explicit porn films in class for credit. One example is Berkeley’s graduate course called “Pornographies On/scene,” taught by Linda Williams. Among the films students’ watch in that class are Deep Throat, The Opening of Misty Beethoven, Suburban Dykes, and John Wayne Bobbitt: Uncut.

Linda Williams also previously taught pornography to undergraduates at UC-Irvine. Unfortunately for her maybe, but fortunately for us, she found that the undergraduates weren’t accepting of her subject matter. Why? Well, she tells us: “They used to have trouble with gay-oriented films: when it came to anal penetration,” she said, “they just couldn’t watch.”

Well, I ask why anyone is watching this stuff on America’s campuses in the first place?

But don’t you dare try to question the Leftist orthodoxy on campus or present an opposing view to what they are trying to promote. Conservatives are constantly shouted down, have their newspapers destroyed, and are heckled right off campus.

Just before I headed down here for this conference, I received word that the administration at Brandeis University was actively erecting ridiculous barriers to stop an already pre-approved address by Charlton Heston on March 28. By the way, this is the same administration that looked the other way over a year ago when student senators trashed hundreds of copies of the student run conservative publication, Freedom Magazine, in the campus dumpsters. These same two student senators who did this then attempted to trash Freedom Magazine permanently—because they didn’t like what it was saying—by de-funding and de-chartering it. The administration remained largely silent on the issue, though it did basically condemn the paper for holding views that created the “oppressive environment” that caused the perpetrators to trash the paper in response. 

Anyway, I was talking about the Heston event. Among the hurdles the administration is forcing the event’s organizers to leap over in order to keep the Heston event from being canceled are as follows:

* They must provide a bomb sniffing dog;
* Ten police officers must be present;
* Two full body metal detectors like you find for airport security must be installed at the entrance doors;
* They must have two hand-held metal detector wands present; and,
* A paramedic team must be there on standby with four units of Mr. Heston’s blood type available.

If this isn’t an effort to silence him and to keep him form coming, I don’t know what is. Believe me, this is way out of the ordinary. The “very controversial” Charlton Heston has appeared on all kinds of campuses. At most he has his personal bodyguards that usually to provide security, or he will have one or two police officers, maybe. That’s it. Of course, Brandeis’ administration declares this as standard operating procedure, even though they have never mandated these measures before, even for Leftist speakers like Gloria Steinem and Alan Dershowitz, who are at least as controversial as Charlton Heston is in their own right.

Ironically, Brandeis is named after the late Justice Louis Brandeis, who, you may know, was an ardent champion of the free expression of ideas. The judge must be rolling over in his grave considering the things that are happening on the campus named in his honor.

But this type of treatment is not unusual for conservative speakers when they visit campus:

* When Pat Buchanan went to Syracuse last year, a group of homosexuals staged a Bible-burning in the attempt to keep him from speaking on campus. They disrupted the event with shouting, a gay “kiss-in” right in front of him while he was speaking, and they even threatened to burn down the chapel where the event was held;

* Another example: Ward Connerly, the great black conservative, who brought down racial preferences in California with his Proposition 209 and is working to do the same in other states, as well—he hardly ever gets through a speech without being heckled and sometimes even being forced to stop his remarks. People of his own race call him an “Oreo.” They call him an “Uncle Tom” and a “race traitor” because he dares to think outside of what Jesse Jackson and the rest of the NAACP and the self-appointed black leadership tells him what to think. He has a white wife that they constantly disparage. Death threats are a part of their life on a daily basis nowadays;

* Another black conservative, Star Parker, she goes to Penn State. Before she even gets there a Penn State professor calls Star an “ideological whore.” Why? Well, because “anyone who sells their body or their mind is in fact a whore,” he said. So much for the diversity of opinion and the loving tolerance of the multiculturalists. Star is giving her speech, but doesn’t even get through it before a group of radical feminists dressed in military marched to the front and disrupted the speech with some unintelligible skit, forcing her to cancel the rest of her talk. 
Meanwhile a huge mob of protesters had gathered just outside the front doors of the building, obviously in a very confrontational manner. The student group that brought her to campus feared for her safety and ushered her out the back door. Parker has been on many, many campuses, but this is the first time, she told me, that she has ever feared for her life. She said that she is not going to go on another campus in Pennsylvania without a bulletproof vest. What a shame that in a place where there is supposed to be the free discussion of ideas in an academic setting that speakers now fear for their lives. 

And, of course, there is the example of us here at Accuracy in Academia, who were nearly shut down—and in fact were kicked off the premises—at Columbia University, as Dan Flynn explained earlier.

So, the environment is less than friendly for conservative ideas on campus. Even students are on the receiving end of death threats. Just ask Berin Szoka of Duke University. He spoke up in the school paper against a proposed Hindi major—a true waste of resources on an unneeded but politically-correct major, for sure, and on behalf of Western Civilization. A big time no-no. He’s called a “racist.” He’s called a “neo-Nazi.” He’s called a hateful bigot. He even has people break into his room and leave a threat that they would beat him within one inch of his life if he didn’t watch his step. Rather than debate him on the merits of his argument they would rather slander and threaten him.

But these administrations that conduct all sorts of witchhunts and sensitivity seminars when the occasional swastika or KKK sign shows up in a bathroom stall, never seem to take these types of threats seriously. As I mentioned before, they often blame those who are threatened for causing the “oppressive” environment that forces people to lash out at them. What the president of Duke said to Berin Szoka was that their threats were just a “scary way of blowing off steam.” 

If I had more time today I could have discussed the abundance of courses with an obvious Leftist bent, such as Michigan’s course on "Affirmative Action," which seeks to, “articulate affirmative action as a right and not a benefit.” I could give plenty of other examples of papers trashed by those who disagree with the arguments made therein, like the conservative Georgetown Academy, which dared to criticize the placing of pink triangles on doors around the nation’s oldest Catholic University. 

But in closing I’ll instead limit myself to asking one question that I’d like for us to ponder the answer to, and that is: Why is it that these intellectual elites, these children of the sixties who claim superiority in all things and who haphazardly throw out the wisdom of the ages in favor of their “enlightened” theories—why is it that they feel so threatened by dissent that they seek to silence conservative voices and indoctrinate students with only their side of the story in college classrooms?

Well, in thinking about this I have one possible answer. And that is that they know that their wacky theories and fraudulent histories cannot withstand careful scrutiny. They cannot withstand comparison with the facts. Their ideologies depend upon scare tactics; they depend upon emotionalism at the expense of rationalism; they depend upon class, race, and gender warfare.

But I think it even goes beyond that, to a certain extent. I mentioned earlier the pornographication and the queerification of the academy. To a large extent, I see that the Left’s efforts aren’t explicitly Marxist and socialist anymore. Sure, they still have their classes like Amherst’s “Taking Marx Seriously,” but their ideas have been largely discredited with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the socialist economies. What they instead now focus on is change from within. The revolution must start within the individual—which I think is a strange strategy for collectivists, but I think is true just the same. They see that it is through separating morality from academia and placing everything on the basis of moral relativism and factual subjectivism, that they can rot and corrupt the American student in the name of academic freedom.

It is our job to stop them, and that is what we are here doing at Accuracy in Academia. We do this through Campus Report; we do this through conferences like this. We need your help. We need you to distribute Campus Report on your campus and get the word out—show them what’s happening on the campuses. We need you to help organize these conferences. If is only through your involvement in this crusade that we can finally right our system of higher education.

Thank you.