When The Professors was first published in February 2006, it was greeted by cries of outrage from the academic Left. The author was denounced as a reincarnation of Joseph McCarthy and his book as a “blacklist,” although no evidence existed to support either claim and both were the opposite of the truth.

Far from being a “blacklist,” the text explicitly—and in so many words—defended the right of professors to teach views that were unpopular without fear of political reprisal. The author also publicly defended the First Amendment rights of Ward Churchill, the most notable case of a professor under attack for his political views.

To identify 101 radical professors for this volume, it was not necessary to scour university faculties. This sample is but the tip of an academic iceberg, and it would have been no problem to provide a thousand such profiles or even ten times the number. The faculty members of the entire Ethnic Studies Department, which Churchill chaired, share views similar to Churchill’s and have declared their solidarity with him. Yet only the new chair of Churchill’s department, Emma Perez, has been selected for inclusion in these profiles.

None of the nine professors participating on the Political Science Association panel—or many others like it—are included. Out of the more than 250 “Peace Studies” programs whose agendas are overtly political rather than scholarly, this collection includes only half a dozen professors. The same is true for other ideological fields like women’s studies, African American studies, gay and lesbian studies, post-colonial studies, queer studies, whiteness studies, and cultural studies.

Professor Marvin Berlowitz, University of Cincinnati

— Director, the Urban Center for Peace Education and Research, University of Cincinnati
— Marxist, anti-war activist

Marvin Berlowitz is a professor of educational foundations at the University of Cincinnati and the director of the Urban Center for Peace Education and Research. A committed Marxist, Professor Berlowitz teaches “resistance” as in, “Privatization must be resisted,” although only a Marxist could make the connection between resisting privatization and peace. The center is in effect a collective of left-wing professors who are intent on indoctrinating students in Marxist ideology and hostile to other views.

The course offerings of the Peace Education Certificate program, available to both graduate and undergraduate students, are a testament to Professor Berlowitz’s educational philosophy: all avoid academic rigor in favor of de rigueur left-wing dogmas. Courses in Berlowitz’s program cover the range from Marxist dialectics to radical environmentalism, feminist theory, identity-politics, multiculturalism, and “Educational Sociology,” which is described in the catalog this way: “Courses in Educational Sociology concentrate on Marxist, feminist and other classic and social transformation theories in education as well as on research on social issues related to schooling and educational inequities.”

The only possible connection to peace research in this smorgasbord would be if one made the assumption that capitalism and private property, along with the American culture that is founded on them, were the root causes of war. This is precisely the assumption that Berlowitz makes. In Berlowitz’s seamless totalitarian web everything is interconnected and—where the market system is involved—negative: “The capitalist concentration in the pop culture industry,” he says, “has given rise to a genre which systematically desensitizes our youth to violence in much the same manner that the U.S. military has utilized to increase the kill ratio of our troops in firefights.

Perhaps such ‘culture’ is equally useful to desensitize our civilian population to the human costs of neo-liberal [capitalist] ideology. We must also keep in mind that the U.S. pop culture industry saturates the world market with its toxins to an even greater extent than Mc Death sows metabolic destruction by extending its arches to every hemisphere. In the sociopathic language of our leaders, I suppose that Columbine & Santee would be viewed as ‘acceptable collateral damage.’”

A faculty biography describes Berlowitz’s interests in these terms: “His most recent publications have been in the area of educational reform including a broad-based critique as well as specific works on the expansion of JROTC [officer’s training] and also magnet schools as examples of neo-liberal ideology in educational reform.”

Neo-liberal is a neo-Marxist term for “capitalist.” Professor Berlowitz’s objects of disdain range from the McDonald’s hamburger chain to the two-party system and the world market:

— “We’re limited to a choice between the party of the rich and a party of the wealthy. We have the only major industrial capitalist country in the world that does not have a labor party.”

— “Structural changes because of globalization have led to increasing economic disparities between the wealthy and the poor. As a result, the highest concentration of poverty is found among urban school children and racially oppressed groups.”
Professor Berlowitz’s educational reform zeal is inspired in part by his contempt for the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC). He claims that the program is part of a pernicious Pentagon plan to convert underachieving schools into boot camps. “The Defense Department seeks ‘at risk’ schools to transform into military academies for the purpose of future recruitment,” he explains.

One of Berlowitz’s educational reform missions is to expunge “Eurocentricity” from the curriculum. Working in partnership with Professors Nathan Long of the University of Cincinnati and Eric R. Jackson of Northern Kentucky University, Professor Berlowitz has authored a 17-page paper arguing for peace education courses to take up the concept of “Eurocentricity.” The paper states that “the dominance of Eurocentricity in peace education leads to the exclusion and distortion of African American perspectives and this restricted focus undermines the status and viability of peace education as a component of educational reform.”

As the authors see it, current programs are characterized by (1) a failure to represent accurately the African American emphasis on positive peace, the role of trade unions, anti-imperialism, solidarity with socialist nations, and internationalism in general; (2) the vanguard role of African Americans in the struggle against nuclear proliferation and conscription; (3) a tendency to minimize the role of African Americans in the development of non-violent philosophy as merely being eclectic; and (4) a tendency to under-represent the leadership role of African Americans in anti-war movements and white peace organizations.

With an eye toward overcoming potential academic opposition to their proposed focus on “Eurocentricity,” the authors point to the success of left-wing feminists in making the university receptive to their radical agendas. “Peace educators can learn from the successes of feminists in overcoming the contradictions of sexism and patriarchy in the field,” they note. Thus the professors conclude that the surest way of adding yet another dose of left-wing politics into the curriculum is to portray peace as a fight for racial equality. The paper even includes a racial slogan to this effect: “Peace cannot be achieved in a white skin while the black is branded.”

Professor Berlowitz’s radical evangelizing is not confined to the Peace and Education program or to the university. As the director of the university’s in-house research institution—the Center for Peace Research, Implementation, Development and Education (UC PRIDE)—Professor Berlowitz has designed several “educational” initiatives aimed at transporting his politics into high school classrooms.

In 2001 under the direction of Professor Berlowitz and several students and former students in the University of Cincinnati’s Peace Education department, UC PRIDE unveiled an online course offering credit at the university and targeting elementary school teachers in Ohio. At the core of the course, which has been offered since the fall of 2001, was Professor Berlowitz’s distinctly radical approach to education.
As Professor Berlowitz himself explained the course in March 2001, “This is an alternative to school metal detectors and the software that is aimed at profiling students at risk for violence.”

Professor Berlowitz’s alternative, in keeping with his Marxism-inspired contempt for the white middle class, was to alert teachers to the role of suburban whites, presumed to be biased against minority students, in allegedly driving these students to violence. “The bias awareness component of the course is especially significant to those who are working with youth who have grown up in historically homogeneous white suburbs, which are now experiencing conflicts associated with an influx of ethnically and racially diverse populations,”

Professor Berlowitz explained. The course offered teachers no solution for alleviating violence among troubled students in urban schools. Instead, it urged them to be “more culturally sensitive to the needs of urban schoolchildren.”

Such efforts are complemented by the peace education department’s attempts to instill anti-war views in the University of Cincinnati student body. For instance, a running “Peace News” feature on the department’s website reads like a one-stop directory for anti-war protests in the Cincinnati area. The department also makes regular financial contributions to on-campus antiwar groups.

Research: Jacob Laksin

References:

The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America - David Horowitz