campus correctness

The New Radicals: How Liberal Campuses Harass Conservatives

By Paul Strand
Washington Sr. Correspondent

CBN.com – BERKELEY, California - America has long been a country where both conservatives and liberals have their place in politics. But that is not true in America’s universities, where classrooms are dominated by Left-leaning professors. So when Ward Churchill said that some Americans killed on 9-11 deserved it, his words did not seem all that shocking on many campuses.

Churchhill is not the only radical Left professor who spews anti-American statements on campus these days. In fact, Dan Flynn says nearly every public university in the U.S. is dominated by the Left and an overwhelming number of liberals on the faculties. Flynn keeps an eye on such professors through the Conservative Leadership Institute and wrote about them in his book, "Intellectual Morons."

A new study Flynn is just releasing shows how lopsidedly they donated cash to Sen. John Kerry (D-MA). He remarked, "At Harvard, for instance, for every 32 dollars that went to John Kerry, one went to George W. Bush. At MIT just down the road, it was 43 to one. At Princeton, it was about 300 dollars for Kerry for every one dollar to Bush."

Almost half of the students recently surveyed for the American Council of Trustees and Alumni at the nation's top 50 universities say their professors, most of them Left-leaning, comment often on politics in their classrooms, even if the course they are teaching has nothing to do with politics.

Bucknell University's Allison Kasic told us about a chemistry class held the day after the election.

Kasic said, "Basically, half the class of an hour-and-a-half class was just spent complaining about the election and saying how dumb the country is. And how does that help you learn anything about chemistry?"

Ryan Clumpner has friends in a mechanical engineering class at the University of California, Davis. Clumpner said, "Before the election, the professor goes on a half-hour rant about President Bush."

In the same survey, nearly a third of students said they feel they have to agree with their professors' political or social views in order to get a good grade.

ACTA (Association of College Trustees and Alumni) President Anne Neal said, "We were really quite shocked that there was such a great degree of evidence of political pressure in the classroom."

Now we come to the liberal campuses of California, like Berkeley here, where we thought we would find quite a few examples of this.

Amaury Gallais, Vanessa Wiseman and Andrea Irvin all hold offices in Berkeley’s Club of the College Republicans, and all have seen the intimidation and prejudice against all things conservative at their famously radical university.

Irvin said, "If the professor has a Leftist opinion in class, students feel very fearful of making a comment to counter that."

Gallais added, "...afraid of expressing their own minds, because the guy that's going to be grading your paper, giving you your final grade, believes that your opinions are insane, they're outrageous."

Irvin commented, "I personally got a comment on a paper that I wrote that was like 'your argument is too conservative.'"

These young conservatives often man a Republican table in the middle of campus.

Wiseman stated, "On Monday, a man came by yelling 'Shame, shame, you warmongers!'"

At Foothill College, south of San Francisco, one conservative Kuwaiti student on a visa was ordered to get a mental checkup because of his pro-American views.

Student Ahmad al-Qloushi said, "I wrote an essay upholding the U.S. Constitution and the Founding Fathers as pioneers of freedom and democracy."

Ahmad said that his professor told him, "...I needed psychological help. That I was emotional, that I was irrational."

Ahmad continued, "He also threatened me by saying that he'll go to the dean of international admissions to make sure that I go to the psychologist's office."

The story broke in the media, and rather than apologize, Ahmad said that the professor "...filed a grievance against me on the basis of harassment."

Denis Hiller attended the same college as Ahmad. He had a friend who dared write a paper defending capitalism.

Hiller, former head of Foothill College Republicans, said, "The professor gave him an F. On the paper, he wrote a long essay of his own saying explaining why socialism is better. My friend handed in a paper using basically the teacher's talking points, toeing the party line, and got an A."

Clumpner said, "It sounds horrible to say, but you really do have to worry about being mocked by your teacher in front of a class, which is pretty outrageous to think about."

Hiller remarked, "Most students are here to get an education, and would rather participate in the brainwashing and pass the class than fight back."

Flynn said, "There's a college in Florida that has banned a student group from showing 'The Passion of the Christ' because ostensibly it's R-rated. Now the interesting thing about that is very recently before that, there was an X-rated play about Jesus Christ that was staged on the campus, but they had no problem with that."

Like most of the students we talked to, Israeli-born Eldad Yaron says he loves his college, but, "Education has become kind of a propaganda tool for the party of Michael Moore."

He says a young woman at Brooklyn College wrote him about an education class where just before Election Day, "The professor stopped the class, stopped the lecture, and just a week before the election made everybody sit and watch 'Fahrenheit 9-11', which has absolutely nothing to do with education, nothing to do with the material of the class."

Just how far Left do the professors go?

Tatiana Menaker was actually trained in the Soviet Union to be a Marxist-Leninist philosophy professor. But she rejected that teaching, and later came to America. Now she says she finds the exact same philosophy being spewed on American campuses, like at her present school, San Francisco State.

Menaker said, "They're getting the same Soviet-originated style propaganda teaching them to hate America. And we are paying our tax dollars. We are paying for turning our kids into America-haters."

Naya Lekht and Isaac Traynis also grew up in the USSR. They find the intimidation of conservative students at University of California Santa Cruz, and the constant anti-Americanism, frighteningly Stalinistic.

Traynis frequently sees flyers on campus that "...accuse the U.S. of being a fascist state, that somehow Bush is equivalent with Saddam Hussein or Hitler, and that we require regime change just like in Iraq."

Lekht says of her fellow students, "It's hard for them to speak out in class. I've met many people who came up to me afterwards and said 'you know, I have the same views, but I'm so scared.'"

Traynis and Lekht say whole runs of a conservative campus newspaper have been stolen.

Traynis said, "Any flyer that promoted anything pro-American, pro-Israel, anything that challenged the dogma of this campus, it would be taken down."

Lekht commented, "In the 2000 election, I wanted to register, and they asked what my party affiliation was. I said, 'Republican.' They said, 'We don't register Republicans here.'"

Former Leftist-radical-turned-conservative firebrand David Horowitz is dedicated to trying to get states and their universities to end all these political shenanigans on-campus and return to offering an objective education.

Horowitz said, "A law professor opened his class by saying, 'You all know what the R in Republican stands for? It stands for Racist.' A student objected, and the professor slapped the student down, saying 'We have too many Nazis like you on the campus.'"

To be fair, as the case of Michael Wiesner shows, sometimes the occasional conservative professor will bully liberal students as well.

Wiesner says he was vocally liberal and pro-choice in an ethics class with a fervently conservative, pro-life instructor. He said, "Because this professor did not like me as a student, he took it out on me with my grades, giving me a D in the class."

Wiesner fought back, going eventually to the dean, at which point the professor said, "You're right. I made a big mistake. Here's the grade you really deserve, and he gave me an F instead."

But by overwhelming numbers, it is the conservative students who face prejudice and intimidation.

Stanford's Bob Sensenbrenner heads up his chapter of College Republicans.

Sensenbrenner remarked, "I'm always embattled here. We have the administrators approving class, the Stanford Democrats using classrooms to call voters for John Kerry, but if I'm trying to hold a meeting, I get hassled by Meeting Services and get told that I have to leave till they can go back and check their records."

Flynn said, "When it is almost unanimous for one candidate, it suggests there's something really, really wrong with higher education."

Yaron stated, "I know of a professor that assigned a paper for students to describe how President Bush is a war criminal."

Neal said, "If this had been a case of sexual harassment, I dare say that it would have prompted a great deal of attention. It should equally draw attention now, because clearly it's almost a political harassment in the classroom where they're not being allowed to hear both sides of the issue."

Diversity is all the rage on campus these days -- racial, sexual, cultural diversity -- but maybe in the area where it matters the most, diversity of thought, well, there seems to be less and less tolerance for that.

Translate Page