A FURRY BRAIN

An obscure professor at a minor university spends class time telling students that America is the world's biggest oppressor and greatest terrorist state. He urges them to "work for communism." The same professor, presenting himself as an expert on communism, scours internet academic forums in defense of Josef Stalin, calls the fall of the Soviet Union a moral outrage, implies that Israel is a fascist state and encourages his students to utilize an anti U.S., anti-capitalist and pro-communist website he publishes as a study resource.

Grover C. Furr is this little-known professor, and if you think that American college students should be educated and not indoctrinated then you should know what he's been up to.

For more than twenty years, Furr has been an English professor at Montclair State University in Montclair, New Jersey where he drenches his classes in Marxism and advocates the destruction of America's existing government and social structures.

Professor Furr employs a simple ploy in ramming Marxism, glowing accounts of communism and anti-U.S. propaganda down his student's throats-- he packs his courses' required reading lists with books and papers reflecting Marxist viewpoints. The majority of these books are written by authors who are or were themselves Marxists, or Communists. Most of the remaining books on his course reading lists relate to violent revolution, or glowing accounts of lower classes overthrowing ruling classes.

A "General Humanities" course Furr teaches provides a good example of his method of cloaking political indoctrination as legitimate teaching. On his Montclair-provided website, Furr describes his General Humanities course as being "an introduction to Western European culture and society from the Ancient World through the Middle Ages." But it is actually a vehicle which he uses to spread his fringe leftist ideas and beliefs. A sampling of the course's reading list provides overwhelming evidence to support this contention. Required reading for students taking Professor Furr's General Humanities course includes the following authors:

James Axtell, whose "The White Indians of Colonial America" (required course reading) implies that Native American culture was better than European culture in colonial America; Ronald Takaki, a prominent multicultural advocate whose works take a hard anti-Anglo slant; Alan D. Winspear, whose "Who was Socrates?" is a Marxist analysis of the great thinker; Moses I. Finley, a Marxist and member of communist Karl Polanyi's leftist think-tank at Rutgers University; Rodney Hilton, a British Marxist, G.E.M. de Ste Croix, whose "The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World" is often praised for its contributions to Marxist theory and I.F. Stone, a fellow traveler if not Soviet agent and life-long hater of Israel, a communist apologist who once commended the Soviet Union for "steadily expanding democracy in every sphere."

After completing Furr's skewed course on Western European culture, students are assured of viewing the West with disdain while gaining no true understanding of greater Western culture.

More here






AN OLD-TIME PROFESSOR LOOKS AT THE ACADEANICS

Some excerpts from an article by Fred Siegel

Back in the fall of 2003, when Dr. Dean was still riding high in the Presidential primary, I'd listened in on a conversation among undergraduate Deaniacs outside my office at Cooper Union in the East Village. "This just doesn't feel like America any more," one of them said to a friend, who replied, "Fuck Bush," and pointed to a button on his jacket bearing the same slogan.

It's an old professor's habit, but I had to engage them. "What does that mean?" I asked the fellow with the button. "Bush is bullshit," he replied, "the most evil man in the world." When I said that wasn't an argument and pressed him, he acknowledged that "Saddam isn't a good guy," but "who are we"-he pointed both to me and his like-minded friend-to "judge Saddam Hussein?"

"Why not?" I asked. He replied with an answer right out of the postmodern playbook. Americans can't judge another culture, he insisted, because there is no common morality. But if that's the case, I asked, why then was George Bush "undoubtedly the most evil man in the world?" He seemed puzzled by the idea that his version of an emotional truth might seem incoherent to others.

Recently, the professoriat has been embarrassed by a series of dustups exposing the irrationalist underside of academic life. After Hamilton College invited a former Brinks holdup terrorist to take a faculty position, it compounded its problems by asking "Indian" poseur Ward Churchill of the University of Colorado to speak, only to back off when he was found to have delivered a rant about how the people killed in the World Trade Center were "little Eichmanns." Columbia's alumni, if not its administration, has been discomfited by the ravings of Joseph Massad, a professor so extreme in his support of Palestinian terrorism as to have labeled Yasir Arafat a collaborator with Israel. Harvard president Larry Summers has been forced to don the sackcloth and ashes after he commented reasonably that the differences between men and women might-and his stress, the transcript shows, was on might-be one part of the reason why there are fewer females in the sciences....

But then again, academia has been getting it wrong over and over again. Criminologists, as a group, were convinced that crime couldn't be cut; sociologists were sure that welfare reform couldn't work because it didn't go to the root causes of poverty; and Sovietologists were certain that the USSR of the 1980's had matured into a successful, even pluralistic society. As for radical Islam, the consensus view of the Middle Eastern Studies Association was that the danger to America came from a "terror industry" which conjured imagined threats in order to justify American aggression.

But even as academia's batting average has declined, its claim to superior knowledge has expanded. The old ideal of disinterested scholarship, or at least the importance of attempting to be objective, has been displaced. In 2003, the University of California's Academic Assembly did away with the distinction between "interested" and "disinterested" scholarship by a 45-3 vote. As Berkeley law professor Robert Post explained, "The old statement of principles was so outlandishly disconnected to what university teaching is now that it made no sense to think about it that way."

The reality, as Professor Post recognized, is that many professors now literally profess. Far from teaching the mechanics of knowledge, they are in fact preachers of sorts, spreading a gospel akin to that of Howard Dean. And if they are part of grievance-studies departments, like Ward Churchill or Joseph Massad, there never was any expectation of objectivity: They were knowingly hired as activists and are now puzzled as to why this has become a problem for some of their students and the larger public. After all, what they preach is built into the very orientation students are given when they arrive on campus. New students at many schools are quite literally given a new faith in which the world is divided into victims and victimizers, with little room for common ideals of citizenship or rationality, and no basis for debates that approximate the give-and-take of politics.

This appeal to tribalism was nearly summed in a popular T-shirt of the mid-1990's. It read in large print: "If you're not black, you wouldn't understand."

The effect of victims-studies departments, in which intellectual standards are ignored-the personalization of the political by way of feminism, and the epistemological nihilism of postmodernism-has cut much of academia off from its lifeblood of free and open debate. Like the Deaniacs, who wrote off the success of the Iraqi elections, they never need to refine their arguments in light of new evidence, since criticism can be written off as "Republican," or "racist," or "sexist," or "Islamophobic," or just plain "bullshit."

It has gotten so bad that philosophers at a prestigious university have asked to be detached from the humanities department because the English and history departments are so mired in subjectivity that faculty members in the same department can barely speak with each other, let alone across disciplines.

Postmodernism is the Indian rope trick of academia; it's an intellectual illusion that collapses before even slightly skeptical scrutiny. The postmodern game consists of an insistence that objective judgments are impossible, since all knowledge is riddled with prejudice, power considerations, ethnocentric assumptions and so on. The trick is that these prejudices infect only those who differ from the (almost always left-wing) positions of the professors. Its triumph on campus after campus-where the tenure system ensures that only like-minded scholars are accepted and deters those with different ideas from even considering the academy as a career choice-means that the postmodern academy speaks largely to itself and its offspring. In the absence of truth, there's little reason to try and persuade people. Instead, performance replaces plausibility and persuasion as the coin of academic success, giving rise to percussive performers like Ward Churchill and Joseph Massad.

If the Democratic Party comes to be dominated by angry ill-informed activists who believe that George Bush is more evil than Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden, it will have a bleak future. It's time for Democrats, if only out of their own self-interest, to start paying attention to the tragic decline of our college and universities. If they don't, the party's future will be in the hands of the acadeaniacs.




CATHOLIC SCHOOLS NEED PAYING CUSTOMERS

The news had spread quickly: The south Sacramento Catholic parish will close St. Peter's School to merge it this fall with All Hallows School in Tahoe Park. All Hallows will have a new name. The decision was formally announced in a letter to parents sent Tuesday. Parish and school officials did not return phone calls or declined to comment to The Bee. "It really could be a very exciting time. And perhaps a lot of new energy will surround that," said Lynette Magnino, Catholic Diocese of Sacramento spokeswoman. "We're just very pleased that they've come to a point where they've addressed their needs."

Separately, St. Lawrence Parish has announced it will consolidate the classes at its North Highlands school in the fall. Eight grades will be combined into four classes with four teachers, said the Rev. Joe Ternullo. St. Lawrence, St. Peter's and All Hollows face declining enrollment, making them more financially dependent on subsidies and loans from the parish and diocese. With the potential cost to the diocese of settling clergy sexual abuse lawsuits, parish officials wrote All Hallows and St. Peter's parents that the diocese can no longer provide subsidies for schools and may cut back on scholarships.

Outside St. Peter's brick school building Tuesday, on a residential street near Stockton Boulevard and Fruitridge Road, students scanned the grass for four-leaf clovers. Parents in the parking lot were reacting to the impending changes with dismay. Many said they wouldn't send their children to All Hallows, based in an area they consider unsafe. They worried about higher tuition costs at other schools and said their children shouldn't have to suffer for the abuse lawsuits.

Some parents at All Hallows and St. Peter's said they felt their schools - less than three miles apart - were targeted for restructuring because they are in low-income neighborhoods. "They were the poorest of schools. They're not as economically advantageous," Hagemann said. "They're just treating us as second class," said Steve Ramirez, picking up his fifth-grade son from All Hallows. "The majority of the people that go here are Mexican American, and look who goes to the other schools, like El Dorado Hills."

Holy Trinity Parish opened a $4 million school in El Dorado Hills in 2003 - the same year Immaculate Conception School in Oak Park was closed.

School closures in inner-city neighborhoods and openings in more wealthy suburbs are part of a national trend over the last five years, said Michael Guerra, president of the National Catholic Educational Association. It is a "crisis" that pits changing demographics and finances against the mission of the church to serve the poor, Guerra said.

In Sacramento, an endowment provides scholarships to urban schools like All Hallows and St. Peter's but it provides money for fewer than 10 students to attend each school every year. "It is absolutely still a value of the church to serve those that are in need, and there will be new ways of doing that," Magnino said. "But it just may not look the way it used to."

The market for schools is clearly in the suburbs, said Dean Hoge, professor of sociology at Catholic University of America. "The future of Catholic schools is generally a big issue of social justice versus playing to the market," he said. "The question is, we as a Catholic Church, is that really our business? Why should we be in the private school business? Why shouldn't we have an option for the poor?"

Source




Princes steal from paupers: "Thousands of dollars in federal funds intended to assist poor District of Columbia schoolchildren appear to have been spent instead by school administrators on retreats and unapproved travel. DC auditors are looking into the public school system's use of these federal funds. 'You had at least principals and some other managers participating,' Deborah K. Nichols of the Office of the District of Columbia Auditor says. 'No cost was spared.' Nichols disclosed the inquiry at an oversight hearing by the DC Council's Committee on Education, Libraries and Recreation. DC public schools received more than $10 million in 2004 for after-school programs, according to city documents. Under the proposed fiscal 2006 budget, the programs would receive more than $13 million, which includes federal money and private donations."

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

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