Rodent Regatta

University indoctrination and conservative stupidity
By Craig J. Cantoni

(For Internet publication)

While conservatives smugly and mistakenly believe that they are winning the ideological war because they control talk-radio, the presidency and Congress, their kids are being indoctrinated in leftist thinking in a new and more insidious way on college campus, where 90 percent of professors vote Democratic, according to surveys.

Everyone has his own definition of stupidity. My definition is this: Stupidity is paying tens of thousands of dollars to have your kid receive an illiberal education instead of a classical liberal education and to see your offspring enter adulthood thinking like Ted Kennedy and Hillary Clinton.

The new method of indoctrination was described in the September 21, 2003, edition of The Arizona Republic. Of course, the Republic portrayed the method as a positive change and not as indoctrination, probably because journalists have the same left-leaning worldview as professors. True to form, the Republic did not include any opposing views.

Like all effective indoctrination, the new method seems innocuous on the surface. It entails offering ”integrated learning” programs that tie together what is learned in separate courses in separate academic disciplines. For example, an integrated learning program might teach the interrelationships between economics, history and literature.

Arizona State University has three such programs. One is Multicultural America.

No, I’m not making this up. And, no, the university is not offering it as a parody of the politically-correct, anti-intellectual, multicultural claptrap that has been taught on universities.

These people cannot help themselves. It’s some form of mental illness.

The other two programs are War, Culture and Memory; and Human Disease and Society.

In the War, Culture and Memory program, according to the Republic, ”students are studying how nations at war often dehumanize the enemy through propaganda, art and literature.”

Wow, how profound!

The Republic went on to say that the program shows how Americans characterized the Japanese in W.W.II as ”apelike, inhuman, brutal creatures.” It also shows how the Japanese did the same thing. In other words, the program implies that there was a moral equivalency between America and Japan.

No doubt, the program does not include the following facts from the disciplines of history, political science and economics:

History: The program does not include the facts about the brutality of the Bataan Death March; the torture of American prisoners by the Japanese, including ghastly medical experiments in which organs were removed until the prisoners died; and the Rape of Nanking, where the Japanese raped women, cut fetuses from the wombs of living women, and threw babies in the air and then speared them with bayonets on the way down.

Political Science: The program does not include the common ideological thread between the autocratic regimes of Imperial Japan, the Soviet Union and the Third Reich—namely, that each had a culture and tradition of putting the state before the individual, similar to how modern-day American liberals (really illiberals) want to put the state before the individual.

Economics: The program does not include the fact that that individual freedom cannot exist without economic freedom, which is anathema to professors, who favor collectivism and disdain capitalism, free markets and the profit motive.

How do I know that the program does not include the foregoing facts? Because I have guest-lectured to senior business classes at Arizona State University. Even business students have a bias against capitalism and are ignorant of the moral, philosophical and historical foundations of capitalism and our constitutional republic.

It is axiomatic that if leftist claptrap is being taught in individual course in individual disciplines by leftist professors, then a program that shows the interrelationships between the individual courses and disciplines will also be leftist claptrap if it is taught by leftist professors.

Of course, you will never see a program on college campus that shows the interrelationships between leftist claptrap and leftist claptrap. Conservative parents are too smug and stupid to demand such a course.

• * * * *

Mr. Cantoni is an author, columnist and founder of Honest Americans Against Legal Theft (HAALT). He can be reached at ccan2@aol.com.