The Left's Campus Tyrants

Submitted by Paul broughton (United States), Jan 7, 2003 at 17:04

Mr. Pipes claims that it was in the 1960s that the hard left seized ideological control in American universities. Not so. I arrived on a college campus in 1960 an found that ly the left's hijacking of professorships was well established. In 1960 the was out and had been for years that if you wanted a A or B grade you had better never disagree with the overwhelmingly left leaning faculty.

If an audacious student doubted or questioned a professor's view or interpretation, your grades were at risk. A student had best stifle their dissent if gpa was a concern. Essay tests and written papers to earn an acceptable grade had to hew to the leftist line. Classes in the social sciences, arts and letters, and humanities were little more than indoctrination sessions condemning the republicans and American cold war policies. The USSR was touted as a model for the future and American imperialism was
condemened as endangering the world. Casro's Cuba was a cause celebre. A professorate disconnected from reality has long been a national bane.

One of Pipes's contributions to present day public dscourse is that he and a few others are at last attempting to bring the lack of a spirit of intellectual inquiry and questioning on college and university campuses to the attention of the American electorate.
The now forgotten late sixties tirade Student as N----- by Farber was an attack on the arrogance of academia's the professorate's tyranny. The left was in charge of American academia well before its Berkeley coup d' etat in 1964. In four years of undergraduate studies I had not one conservative professor. The sole conservative voice at ye alma mater was a small group of students belonging to Young Americans for Freedom.

YAF was the continuous subject of verbal abuse and revulsion in professors's classroom lectures. The lack of free speech and thought on college and university campuses is unfortunately old hat. The only difference between 1960 and the present is that the label political correctness for allowed speech, acceptable thoughts, and permissible opinions had not been coined nor had the professorate acquired their anti-intellectual bownshirts: the feminazis, on campus ethnic studies departments, and the liberal media to ruthlessly stifle dissent and enforce campus correct thought and ideological purity.

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