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“Abuses of the University”: Professor Berube described University as “the final resting place of the New Left,” said those who failed to regard “feminist or queer theory as a legitimate area of scholarship”—were only perpetuating “ignorance and injustice
WhenThe 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.
The unsubstantiated claims that the author misrepresented his subjects and that his text is factually inaccurate were also categorically dismissed by one of the academics profiled. Dana Cloud, a professor of communication studies at the University of Texas, led a protest against the book’s author when he spoke at her campus, and has been candid about her own use of the classroom for political agendas.
But she was firm in her conclusion that The Professors was an accurate account of what its subjects proposed: “There are the organizations and professors who have devoted themselves to refuting Horowitz’s ‘facts’ about their publications and activism,” wrote Professor Cloud; “I believe this also is a wrong approach because his ‘facts’ about faculty syllabi and political affiliations are not in question.”
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Professor Michael Berube - Professor of English, Penn State University
— Self-described “progressive educator” — Believes in teaching literature so as to bring about “economic transformations.”
A leftist and self-proclaimed “progressive educator,” Professor Berube is candid about the political character of many university English departments. In a 2003 commentary in the Chronicle of Higher Education, he acknowledged that “it’s widely understood that English departments are well stocked with liberals, and I’ve often wished we leftists had less of a presence in literature departments and more of a presence in state legislatures.”
Professor Berube supported the war in Afghanistan and came under heavy critical fire from more radical leftists for doing so. In September 2002, Professor Berube wrote that the U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan was “laudable” for having overthrown the Taliban, one of “the worst regimes on the planet.” He questioned the morality of “the anti-imperialists who opposed the war in Afghanistan in stark and unyielding terms,” and who argued, “to their shame, that the U.S. military response was even more morally odious than the hijackers’ deliberate slaughter of civilians.” With the onset of the Iraq War, Professor Berube resumed an orthodox anti-war position.
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As Professor Berube himself acknowledges, his literature classes often have little to do with literature. For instance, a class that he has taught for years, “Postmodernism and American Fiction,” is merely a forum for the professor to dilate on the “anti-foundationalist philosophy” of radical philosopher Richard Rorty, a philosophy which among other things leads to moral relativism. Professor Berube regards Rorty’s views as the only views a “sane” person could hold.
By the same token religious people were to be regarded simply as irrational. “In the class,” Professor Berube wrote in May 2000, “we talk about what it means to be an ‘anti-foundationalist’—that is, one of those sane, secular people who believe that it’s best to operate as if our moral and epistemological principles derive not from divine will or uniform moral law, but from ordinary social practices.”
That Professor Berube’s class promoted his anti-religious prejudices under the guise of “postmodernist theory” and did so at the expense of the literature he had been hired to teach, did not trouble him. On the contrary, “The problem is with the fiction: It just isn’t postmodern enough.” In this context, Professor Berube chastised “accomplished novelists” for failing to “write the kind of stuff that fits into college seminars on postmodernism.”
According to Professor Berube, “The important question for cultural critics, is also an old question—how to correlate developments in culture and the arts with large-scale economic transformations.” In the old Marxist days, for which Professor Berube is obviously nostalgic, this was called the “base-superstructure” question—to what degree a society’s economic base allegedly determined its cultural productions. The idea that Marx’s discredited “science” of human development is “post-modern” rather than pre-modern is one of the quainter notions of academic leftists, which Professor Berube obviously shares.
Professor Berube is more than prepared to defend his idea that a university literature curriculum should be subordinated to his left-wing politics. In a 2002 article for the Association of Departments of English Bulletin, Professor Berube took exception to one professor’s claim that university English departments had become “laughingstocks” because of their overt political agendas. Conceding that English departments had been steadily losing students over the years, Professor Berube was impatient with the notion that the blame for this lack of interest rested with the left wing character of the departments themselves, and their jettisoning of the traditional literary canon in favor of modish political subspecialties under the guise of “literary theory.” By Professor Berube’s lights, the only corrective to the “laughingstock” reputation attached to university English departments should be the introduction of more theory. “If we want to think seriously about graduate programs as institutions of professional training, we should be concentrating on the current status of literary theory,” he explained. “I mean, more or less, the history of Twentieth-Century theories of literature and of textuality, beginning with the work of Viktor Shklovsky and his fellow Russian formalists . . . and running through Marxism, psychoanalysis, New Criticism, structuralism, poststructuralism-deconstruction, feminism, reader-response, new historicism, postcolonialism, and queer theory. . .”
In a 1998 essay called “The Abuses of the University,” Professor Berube described the university as “the final resting place of the New Left,” and the “progressives’ only bulwark against the New Right.” Critics of this definition—in particular those who failed to regard “feminist or queer theory as a legitimate area of scholarship”—were only perpetuating “ignorance and injustice,” he wrote. The idea that a university might be an institution dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge rather than the imposition of left wing fashions would seem to professors like Michael Berube an idea from a galaxy far away.
Research: Jacob Laksin
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Professor Laurie Brand ~ Professor of international relations, University of Southern California
— Former president of the Middle East Studies AssociationProfessor Brand blames the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on Israel alone. “There is no peace without justice, and there is no justice under [Israeli] occupation,” she has written, ignoring the fact that Israel’s military presence in Gaza and the West Bank stems from three invasions by Arab states through those same corridors. In 2002, as Israel moved to defend itself from a series of suicide bombings and terrorist attacks during the Second Intifada, Brand joined a group of anti-Israel academics in signing a notorious letter imputing to Israel, without evidence, the intention to drive the Palestinians from the disputed territories: “Americans cannot remain silent while crimes as abhorrent as ethnic cleansing are being openly advocated. We urge our government to communicate clearly to the government of Israel that the expulsion of people according to race, religion or nationality would constitute crimes against humanity and will not be tolerated.” This was an anticipation of fact that failed to materialize (Israel announced its unilateral withdrawal from Gaza instead), which revealed the ideological nature of the authors’ positions.
Professor Brand’s attitude towards her own country is hardly more balanced. In the run-up to the war in Iraq, Professor Brand, then temporarily working in Lebanon, took to the streets to protest the planned effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power. She even drafted a letter of protest to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, which she promptly dispatched to the U.S. embassy in Beirut. Signed by 70 Americans, the letter claimed to speak on behalf of “Americans living in Lebanon,” listing a number of anti-war arguments ranging from the tendentious (“‘regime change’ imposed from outside is itself completely undemocratic”), to the ludicrous in charging that in excess of one million Iraqis could die because of damage to Iraq’s water supply resulting from the war. It concluded: “We refuse to stand by watching passively as the US pursues aggressive and racist policies toward the people around us. We reject your claim to be taking these actions on our behalf. Not in our name.”
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At a conference at the German embassy in Beirut in July 2003, Professor Brand rejected the notion that the United States intended to foster democratic government in Iraq. To the extent that the American administration was concerned with democracy, she said, it was to destroy it in the United States. The administration, she said, was guilty of “systematic disregard for democratic institutions and values.” Professor Brand’s fury at the Bush administration had not appreciably mellowed in October 2004 when she joined a “nonpartisan group of foreign affairs specialists” in signing an open letter claiming that “the war in Iraq is the most misguided one since the Vietnam period.” The letter argued that, “[e]ven on moral grounds, the case for war was dubious” and the “results of this policy have been overwhelmingly negative for U.S. interests.”
The following month Professor Brand delivered an address to the Middle East Studies Association, the professional association of academic scholars of the Middle East. It was called “Scholarship in the Shadow of Empire.” In it she insisted that the Bush administration’s policies in Iraq were “dismal failures,” a claim she sought to substantiate by invoking the authority of Paul Krugman, the left wing columnist for the New York Times. Although she was conspicuously silent about Islamist terrorism generally and dictators like Saddam Hussein specifically, Brand could scarcely contain her rage at what she held to be the real source of strife in the Middle East: the United States. “Given the current situation in the region, especially, but far from exclusively, in Iraq and Palestine/Israel, and the US’s role in these conflicts, I cannot remember when I have been more continuously outraged,” she said.
Her outrage? “What greater abdication of responsibility, as both citizen and scholar, than to remain silent in the face of Guantánamo, Abu Ghrayb, and Fallujah?” Evidently, Brand has outrage only for the alleged terrorist “victims” of American actions. As for the actual innocents in Fallujah whom the terrorist Zarqawi condemned to death and beheaded, Professor Brand maintains a discreet silence.
Research: Jacob Laksin
REFERENCES:
The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America - David Horowitz
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