May 13, 2018
MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey
Public Education as a Weapon to Subvert and Transform: Frankenstein’s
Monster Reborn in the Classroom
Friends,
On
May 16, 2018, as many as 10,000 North Carolina teachers will “take sick leave”
from dozens and dozens of schools across the Tar Heel State to come to Raleigh
to demonstrate for higher salaries and other benefits. It is the same day that
the General Assembly, which has major oversight of those salaries, will
re-convene for its “short session.”
I
don’t know anyone who would begrudge a good and dedicated teacher a salary
increase or better benefits. Indeed, the teaching profession traditionally has
been considered akin to the ministry and priesthood or law-enforcement as an
honorable and valued calling—something essential to the very progress of any
society, without which a culture cannot succeed and cannot pass on its
collected wisdom, its insights, its learning, and its understanding of its
heritage. Educators—teachers—have been rightly seen as pivotal in this critical
process: from the assemblies in the ancient Greek stoa and the rabbinic schools in the temples of Israel, to the
great monastic traditions of Ireland and of the monk Alcuin under Charlemagne,
to the first great universities in Bologna and Paris, their role has enjoyed a
special, elevated status.
They
were an extension, as it were, of the family, occupying a role conceded to them
by the family which, by both natural law and Divine Positive Law, had the
primary role of educating its offspring. Educators were, in fact, employees of
the family. And just as the more wealthy and noble families were able to hire
private tutors and instructors for their households, the children of less
affluent families in community often took advantage of the rich plethora of
religiously-oriented educational opportunities which appeared in the early
Middle Ages. A major goal of the church was to provide to its students a full
education, steeped in classical knowledge, in logic and mathematics, philosophy
and an ability in languages, an appreciation of inherited knowledge, and an
understanding of nature surrounding them…while not leaving more practical
learning completely aside (thus in most religious schools, students also
experienced manual work, as well).
Obviously,
not all children were able to access or receive such education; it was
certainly understood that apprenticeships in the trades and journeyman
experience were in many ways just as critical, if not more so, to the
well-functioning society and social order.
Indeed, just as today, joining military service or pursuing clerical
orders were seen as excellent means of acquiring an education and an important
vocation (“vocation” comes from the Latin word, “vocare,” meaning “to call”).
During
the 19th century a debate raged across the United States about the
role of what was termed “free public education,” that is,
education—schools—created by the county or city and run by the local government (with direction and support by the
state), and, of course, supported by citizens (usually via taxation). In
particular in Virginia a fierce debate over public education erupted in 1876 between the great
Southern author and social critic Robert Lewis Dabney and Virginia’s first
Superintendent of Public Instruction, William H. Ruffner. The issues and
repercussions raised in those exchanges are still with us, if in modified
forms. [http://www.unz.com/article/robert-lewis-dabney-and-his-attack-on-progressivism/]
Dabney’s
central question remains: how is it possible to educate a child if the moral
and ethical values of religion are not taught but proscribed, for did not
“public education” directly imply such avoidance? Given
the developing status of relations between church and state and changing constitutional
interpretations, the state could not endorse one religious belief over another.
Thus, Dabney observed, state-sponsored education tended to become secularized.
But if education were not Christian, then it would inevitably become
anti-Christian. Could education really be education if it educated “the mind
without purifying the heart?” In Dabney’s view: “There can be no true education
without moral culture, and no true moral culture without Christianity.” The Achilles’s
Heel of state-supported public education, in addition to its assertion of state
rights over parental rights in a child’s education, was its inevitable and systemic
use by “demagogues, who are in power for a time, in the interests of their
faction.”
Dabney and the partisans of privately-supported and family-controlled
education lost that debate, practically speaking. And with the advent of social
and political Progressivism in the early years of the 20th century,
public education was seen as a key, in many cases, the key to the future, to better jobs, to success in life, to
prosperity, in fact, to real happiness.
Nevertheless, even with the totem of “free public education”
firmly fixed in the public mind as absolutely essential and its centrality in
any political election program or campaign—not to mention the billions of
dollars to be spent by both by local and state authorities and the Federal
government—nearly every study, almost every report card on education, both
K-through Grade 12 and college, indicates an inverse proportion of results to
expenditures. It seems the more money we spend on what is called “education,”
the worse our schools and colleges become, at least in those basic skills that
the educational process is supposed to implant.
In short, we are paying
much more for far less. As Professor Walter Williams writes [https://patriotpost.us/opinion/55531-educational-fraud-continues] less than four out of ten graduating high school seniors can
pass a simple English reading test (and only 17% of black students make
the grade!!). Just 25% of high school seniors are proficient in math. Nevertheless,
our high school graduation rate is 80 %.
Yet by even primary
school and certainly by middle school, most public school students have begun
to receive ample injections of ideological toxins that will only increase as
they advance in the system. By graduation time they may not be able to write a
clear English sentence (much less speak one) or know who Thomas Jefferson was
or how to do simple mathematics, but you can bet your last tax dollar they’ve
heard about how evil the NRA is, that “gender fluidity” is normal, and that
white folks have been oppressing “people of color” since the beginning of time
itself.
Just in recent days we have heard via the media (Fox News) that
at the University of Michigan (and on another 200 campuses), zealous “social
justice warrior” students are instructed by the university administration to
report (anonymously of course) if they overhear another student making “racist,”
“sexist,” or “homophobic” remarks, even if those conversations are private. And
correction will be meted out! Thus, those poorly educated but richly
indoctrinated high schoolers, now undergoing the full panoply of Leftist envenomization
at the collegiate level, are being turned into newly-minted domestic
informants--spies--on their fellows. How does this differ from the worst aspects of
Stalin’s Russia? And this is what we get for $20,000 to $40,000 or so a year
paid to our colleges to educate our children?
I have discussed various aspects of this situation in several MY
CORNER columns earlier this year (i.e., February 16, 22, and 25, 2018) and this
past December (i.e., December 11 and 18, 2017). I cited a number of really
egregious examples of just how our educational system has degenerated, becoming
a virtual petri dish for inculcating the most extreme Leftist and cultural
Marxist theories on a variety of subjects, including race and racism, sex and
gender, white supremacy, and a host of other topics—all the while the
traditional basic rudiments of learning, logic, communication, and
understanding of our history and culture are left largely by the wayside as
tossed out garbage.
And I offered some general proposals about how those of us truly
concerned with education, and in particular, the education of our own children,
should act, what we might do. On December 18 last year, while praising recent
actions of the Board of Governors of the University of North Carolina system on
free speech and academic freedom [http://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/education/article188880434.html], I also
suggested that the issues and problems were much deeper and more endemic, and
thus would take much longer to fully correct.
But that those problems had to—must—be addressed if we are to salvage
our educational system, not just colleges but our public schools as well, from
the clutches of those ideologues—those “demagogues, who are in power for a
time, in the interests of their faction,” as Dabney presciently called them 142
years ago.
Today, then, I pass on three articles. The first is the essay
from the pen of Professor Walter Williams that I quoted previously, offering
details and statistics about the present state of our public education system
that should be front-and-center in the mind and legislative action of every
politician—but are outrageously ignored, or, worse, dismissed (after all, the
goal for much of modern education is indoctrination).
The two following essays, one about the reception that Dr. Paul
Gottfried received on a recent speaking visit to Hamilton College in New York
State, and a second by Dr. Gottfried on the treatment of a distinguished
scholar at Florida Atlantic University, are just two examples of this madness
gone berserk. And each time we say to ourselves: “It can’t get any worse,” and
then, inevitably it does.
My friend Dr. Clyde Wilson, himself a long time nationally-recognized
history professor at the University of South Carolina, suggests that not only
we shutter our public colleges and start over again, but that we should napalm
them. While I don’t go quite that far, what is needed is radical and resolute
action. Indeed, even as so-called “conservatives” babble on unceasingly about
reform, words, it seems, are always easier to find than action. Events, however, have advanced too far to
temporize.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Educational Fraud Continues
By Dr. Walter Williams
APRIL 25, 2018
Earlier
this month, the 2017 National Assessment of Educational Progress, a.k.a. The
Nation’s Report Card, was released. It’s not a pretty story. Only
37 percent of 12th-graders tested proficient or better in reading, and only 25
percent did so in math. Among black students, only 17 percent
tested proficient or better in reading, and just 7 percent reached at least a
proficient level in math.
The
atrocious NAEP performance is only a fraction of the bad news. Nationally,
our high school graduation rate is over 80 percent. That means high school
diplomas, which attest that these students can read and compute at a 12th-grade
level, are conferred when 63 percent are not proficient in reading and 75
percent are not proficient in math. For
blacks, the news is worse. Roughly 75 percent of black students received high
school diplomas attesting that they could read and compute at the 12th-grade
level. However, 83 percent could not read at that level, and 93 percent could
not do math at that level. It’s grossly dishonest for the education
establishment and politicians to boast about unprecedented graduation rates
when the high school diplomas, for the most part, do not represent academic
achievement. At best, they certify attendance.
Fraudulent
high school diplomas aren’t the worst part of the fraud. Some of the greatest
fraud occurs at the higher education levels — colleges and universities.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 70 percent of white high school
graduates in 2016 enrolled in college, and 58 percent of black high school
graduates enrolled in college. Here are my questions to you: If only 37 percent
of white high school graduates test as college-ready, how come colleges are
admitting 70 percent of them? And if roughly 17 percent of black high school
graduates test as college-ready, how come colleges are admitting 58 percent of
them?
It’s
inconceivable that college administrators are unaware that they are admitting
students who are ill-prepared and cannot perform at the college level. Colleges
cope with ill-prepared students in several ways. They provide remedial courses.
One study suggests that more than two-thirds of community college students take
at least one remedial course, as do 40 percent of four-year college students.
College professors dumb down their courses so that ill-prepared students can
get passing grades. Colleges also set up majors with little analytical demands
so as to accommodate students with analytical deficits. Such majors often
include the term “studies,” such as ethnic studies, cultural studies, gender
studies and American studies. The major for the most ill-prepared students,
sadly enough, is education. When students’ SAT scores are ranked by intended major, education majors place 26th on a
list of 38.
The bottom
line is that colleges are admitting youngsters who have not mastered what used
to be considered a ninth-grade level of proficiency in reading, writing and
arithmetic. Very often, when they graduate from college, they still can’t
master even a 12th-grade level of academic proficiency. The problem is worse in
college sports. During a recent University of North Carolina scandal, a
learning specialist hired to help athletes found that during the period from
2004 to 2012, 60 percent of the 183 members of the football and basketball
teams read between fourth- and eighth-grade levels. About 10 percent read below
a third-grade level. Keep in mind that all of these athletes both graduated
from high school and were admitted to college.
How
necessary is college anyway? One estimate is that 1 in 3 college graduates have
a job historically performed by those with a high school diploma. According to
Richard Vedder, distinguished emeritus professor of economics at Ohio
University and the director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity,
in 2012 there were 115,000 janitors, 16,000 parking lot attendants, 83,000
bartenders and about 35,000 taxi drivers with a bachelor’s degree.
I’m not
sure about what can be done about education. But the first step toward any
solution is for the American people to be aware of academic fraud at every
level of education.
HOW HAMILTON COLLEGE DEFINES 'ACADEMIC RIGOR'
The insanity that passes for "scholarship" at a radical liberal arts college. May 2, 2018
by Professor Mary Grabar
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What do college presidents mean by
“academic rigor”? Good “judgment” in the classroom? Making the campus
“inclusive”? Recent developments on the campus of Hamilton College after the
visit of Paul
Gottfried, Horace Raffensberger Professor of
Humanities Emeritus, Elizabethtown College, provide clues.
Gottfried was invited to speak to
two classes by Robert Paquette, Executive Director of the nearby Alexander
Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization. As I described at
the AHI’s
website, Gottfried on October 25, 2017,
discussed conservatism in the United States in “Modern Conservative Politics”
in the Government Department, and then gave a lecture based on his recent
book, Fascism: The Career of a Concept, in
a history course, “Nazi Germany.” Although he was greeted by students holding
signs accusing him of racism, Gottfried gave two informed performances and
responded to questions, including hostile ones, with intelligence and
courtesy.
Nevertheless, his visit inspired
campus-wide denunciations in a letter from the Government Department,
editorials in the student newspaper, and a letter from the college
president.
Two days after the visit, students,
faculty, and administrators received the following proclamation:
We the undersigned full-time
members of the Government Department would like to speak out regarding Paul
Gottfried’s visit to one of our courses. We are still learning about what
transpired on Wednesday. . . . However, we have already heard multiple
complaints from students about racist remarks allegedly made by
Gottfried. We unequivocally condemn any and all such racist remarks. . .
.
Similarly, the student newspaper
vaguely claimed that Gottfried was “espousing
hateful opinions” and therefore should not have
been allowed on campus. It took until December 4 for President David Wippman to
reply, which enraged student Katherine Barnes who wrote “Too
little, too late, too tolerant: President Wippman fails to
condemn Gottfried.”
But Wippman’s letter would be
considered laughable if it weren’t so slanderous. “I write to address issues of
serious concern to every member of the Hamilton community,” it began as it
addressed “the aftermath” of Gottfried’s visit and repeated the Government
Department’s hearsay of “’racist remarks.’” Wippman, too, wrote that “racism,
sexism, anti-Semitism, and all other forms of bigotry are anathema to our core
values.”
“Second,” he intoned, “we are a
community that insists upon academic rigor. . . . [W]e should not invite
speakers to address subjects on which they have little or no relevant expertise
or who espouse views that have no grounding in reason or fact.”
Wippman then declared his
commitment to the “free and open exchange of ideas,” noting the “dozens, if not
hundreds,” of invited speakers every year, but added, “Special considerations
apply when a speaker is invited to a class, in which attendance is expected. .
. . It is essential that all members of our community exercise good judgment. .
. .”
“Academic rigor”? “Good judgment”?
History Professor Paquette rightly contends, “no one on Hamilton’s campus approaches” Gottfried’s level of scholarship. He wrote multiple
scholarly books on the topics of his
lectures.
In contrast, we have two members of
the faculty recently touted on Hamilton’s website.
Ashley Bohrer, Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy, at Hamilton since at
least 2016, has a department web page describing her scholarship as “making
philosophy transcend disciplinary and institutional boundaries,” with research
focusing “on the intersections of capitalism, colonialism, racism, and
hetero/sexism in both the early modern period and in the contemporary world.”
The page advertises her as “a committed activist who has organized with a
variety of feminist, anti-racist, and anti-capitalist grassroots collectives.”
Yes, she served on the “education committee” of Occupy
Chicago and was an “activist
with SlutWalk Chicago (photo). At Hamilton, she has taught “Philosophy and Incarceration”
(with which she appears to have had firsthand
experience) and “Marxism, Feminism,
Antiracism.”
Bohrer has been bestowed with at
least three grants from the college: the “Emerson Foundation Scholars Summer
Grant for Collaborative Research,” “Building Inclusive Classrooms Seminar
Grant,” and a “Social Innovation and Transformational Leadership Course
Development Grant.” Bohrer, though a visiting professor, has been a
member of the Hamilton College Humanities Council and of the Arthur Levitt
Center Council for Public Affairs. In 2016/2017 she served as an “organizing
faculty member” on “problematizing whiteness.”
Her “scholarship”--spouting Marxist
drivel—was displayed at the 2016 Marxist
Feminist Conference in Vienna. She claims a
forthcoming book bearing the title, “Marxism and Intersectionality: Race,
Class, Gender, and Sexuality under Contemporary Capitalism,” information
derived from a notice about her presentation on “gender policing” to Red Bloom,
a “Communist Collective” in April.
Canary
Mission, which “documents individuals and
organizations that promote hatred of the USA, Israel and Jews on North American
college campuses,” describes Bohrer’s numerous anti-Israel activities, including
a “leading role in a campaign to occupy an illegal outpost in Israel, in hopes
of building a Palestinian settlement.” She vocally supported Steven Salaita,
whose tweet in 2014 wishing that more Jews would be kidnapped by Palestinian
terrorists prompted the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign to withdraw
their job offer to him. She has authored several articles that “demonize”
Israel and is a founding member of the Syracuse chapter of Jewish Voices for
Peace, a group, which, contrary to its name, engages in disrupting pro-Israel
speakers and events, and promotes BDS activities.
Over in the Anthropology
Department, recent tenure-track hire Mariam
Durrani is praised for incorporating
“feminist and decolonial methodologies” in her research on “Muslim youth and
communities, cultural mobilities, higher education in Pakistan and the United
States, race, gender, and migration studies”—as well as her use of multimedia
and for being “a committed social-justice advocate.” In April 2017, Durrani
participated in the “Resistance and Complicity to Empire Through Political
Movements” panel at the “Beyond Bans, Beyond Walls: Women, Gender & Islam
Symposium” at Harvard Divinity School, along with a Ph.D. candidate, Cambridge
City Councilor Nadeem Mazen, the first elected Muslim politician in Massachusetts,
and Haley Rogers, Massachusetts Director of Development and Community
Relations, CAIR. The video shows her employing “Marxism” and “praxis,” and denouncing
capitalism and the “military-industrial complex.”
After class, Hamilton students have had many offerings in terms of
speakers and workshops, for which they often receive class credit or extra
credit for attending.
On January 18, students were
offered the Art Department Visiting Artists Series lunchtime workshop, “Wise Up
for Otherwise: Queer Scholarship Into Song,” in which Dr.
Kay Turner described “how she writes lyrics from queer texts, and why transforming
those texts into song is both an entertaining and necessary mode of queer world
making.”
On April 10, Porsha O. (sic) led a
writing workshop titled “Glory: On Radical Self-Love.” The student newspaper
described her as the Lead-Teaching Artist & Program Manager at Mass Leap in
Boston, and a “renowned
poet.” A video from the 2014 Individual World Poetry Slam Finals shows the
self-described “Black, poet, dyke-goddess, hip-hop feminist, womanist” shouting
that she is so “pissed off” about racism, injustice, and slavery that she is
ready to “Break my foot open over everybody’s ass,” and repeating, “I’m pissed
the F!*k off.” We doubt that students under her tutelage learned how to write
sonnets.
Two days after this workshop, on
April 12, students were tantalized with an email from the Hamilton College
Womxn’s (sic) Center, asking, “Do you love amazing music about queer lovin’?”
and announcing the evening visit by Be Steadwell* (sic). The mailing included a
link to her music
video containing witchcraft,
marijuana-smoking, and lesbianism.
The following evening, students
had two events. From 5 p.m. to 6:15 p.m. in the Chapel
they could hear far-left media commentator and professor of African-American
Studies Marc Lamont Hill’s “message to inspire hope, courage, and constructive
social change.” At 7:00 p.m. they could then learn how to
implement such ideas in a workshop titled “Activism 101,” hosted by
“Mexican-American spoken word artist David A. Romero.”
A few days later, on April 18, the
Sociology Department presented a talk on “LGBTQ+ Polyamory and the Queering of
Intimacy” by Dr. Emily Pain, whose “findings speak to current struggles over
LGBTQ sexual citizenship. . . .” In the vital research field of “polyamory,”
Hamilton students learned, the “voices of queer people of color, of low-income
backgrounds, and of trans* [sic] identities have been virtually silenced.”
On April 25, professor Durrani gave
a late afternoon presentation titled “What Is Islamophobia?” at the
Days-Massolo Center, a place of “intercultural dialogue,” which features
speakers like Angela
Davis. Later, students could go upstairs
to the Womxn’s (sic) Center to make “zines,” about “healing, surviving, and
trauma” and then discuss agitating for vending machines for birth control and
abortifacients, like Plan B.
One would think Hamilton College
would value AHI’s generosity in providing speakers on campus and at leadership
dinners at our site, as well as reading clusters on classic works of Western civilization. Instead,
they have pressured
students, especially African-Americans, to
stay away from the AHI, and ignored threats against AHI-affiliated students, including in 2016 on the
leader of the campus Republican Club, now defunct.
But in totalitarian regimes
alternate views cannot be tolerated.
ABOUT MARY GRABAR
Mary Grabar, Ph.D., a resident fellow at
the Alexander Hamilton
Institute for the Study of Western Civilization,
taught college English for 20 years. She founded the Dissident Prof Education Project, Inc., a
501(c)(3) education reform initiative. The motto, “Resisting the
Re-Education of America,” arose in part from her perspective as a very young
immigrant from the former Communist Yugoslavia (Slovenia specifically). Her
writing can be found at www.marygrabar.com.
May 5, 2018
The Pleasures of Bullying
Feigned outrage
against Marshall DeRosa, a professor of political science at Florida Atlantic
in Boca Raton, has now taken predictable forms. Nietzsche observed
that a successful war can be used to justify any cause. At Florida
Atlantic, even going after an implausible victim can provide sadistic
satisfaction to bullying students and faculty.
Professor DeRosa's
picture has been plastered on the walls of college buildings by supposedly
concerned students with demeaning messages that he's a "white
supremacist" and that his presence on campus is an outrage "demanding
action." In my opinion, it's ridiculous to describe those
engaged in these defamatory actions, as some commentators do, as
"snowflakes." They are dangerous thought police, who in
this case have targeted a thoroughly decent teacher.
Marshall is
someone I have known for decades and who has suffered unbearable personal
tragedy. Last fall, he lost a brilliant son of twenty-seven, who
practiced law in Boca, when a car struck him from behind while he was loading
his parked vehicle.
Leading to these
attacks was, among other factors, Marshall's acceptance of a Koch grant to
teach prison inmates in a nearby correctional institute. We know
that academic recipients of Koch funds have been targeted by the left elsewhere
– for example, at the Eudaimonia Institute at Wake
Forest University. Those who are "outed" as beneficiaries
of Republican foundations can now expect to see all hell break loose on their
heads, once academic agitators and their groupies organize against them.
As someone on the
right who never received such a grant, I too was verbally abused as a speaker
at an elite academic institution. Not taking money from a Republican
foundation is no guarantee that the P.C. police won't go after you if you're a
teacher or university speaker. But accepting Koch money may cause
the P.C. crowd, led by gender studies students and activists at Florida
Atlantic, to swing into action. And since no one is likely to push
back, why not kick around and degrade one's target?
The charge of
being a "white supremacist" that's been leveled against
DeRosa is supposedly justified on several grounds, all equally
specious. One, although he's given his time and energy sacrificially
to teaching prisoners and preparing them for life after prison, he's done this
with money from a Republican source. Never mind that there's zero
evidence that the Koch Foundation has ever advocated for a single racist
position or that it's even particularly conservative on social
questions. According to Politico, the Koch
brothers have had at best an "uneasy relation" with the Trump
administration, if that's our new criterion for white racism. But
that's not how the thought police (not snowflakes) at Florida Atlantic and Wake
Forest think. The Koch brothers generally support the GOP and
therefore must be racist, as the left now defines that
term.
Two,
DeRosa must be a racist because decades ago he published The Confederate Constitution
of 1861: An Inquiry into American Constitutionalism with
University of Missouri Press. Since then, he has had the audacity to
note in scholarly commentaries that blacks sold other blacks into slavery and
that "although slavery is a reprehensible institution," Southerners
were justified in claiming that it was protected as property under American
law. Just about everything DeRosa seems to have said on the subject of slavery that his
detractors are now pulling out of context was said by historians of slavery,
including Marxist ones, until the day before yesterday. In 2014,
President Barack Obama awarded a National Humanities Medal to Yale
historian David Brion Davis, whose scholarship maintains the very
points on slavery for which DeRosa is being pilloried.
Concerned students
also crashed a faculty meeting, presumably without repercussions, to denounce
DeRosa for once having been a member of the League of the South, a Southern
regional organization that took on white racist overtones years after being
founded. It's a matter of record that DeRosa quit the League in
protest over this change. Even the decidedly leftist website Media Matters admits this
fact. One has to wonder (or does one?) why, given this well-known repudiation,
students had to break into a faculty meeting to humiliate a senior professor.
Ironically, the
target of these attacks at Florida Atlantic is someone who has been an
outspoken advocate of prison reform in his state. DeRosa has given
speeches and published articles calling for the release of prisoners for
nonviolent offenses. He has also conspicuously protested long
prison sentences. An essay that DeRosa published in
the Journal of the James Madison Institute includes this line that might
have been drawn from the collected speeches of a very liberal
Democrat. DeRosa praises "every bit of progress this
country has made toward expanding access to that dream [of freedom] to millions
of people who were previously denied it."
A large percentage
of the prisoners whom DeRosa has argued for happen to be black, and it is
ridiculous to claim that his use of a Koch grant has gone toward advancing
white supremacist ideology. Two years ago, I was a co-presenter with
DeRosa at a conference sponsored by the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn,
Alabama. Contrary to what I expected to hear, which was a
comparative study of the Federal and Confederate constitutions,
DeRosa launched into an impassioned speech about the black victims of what
he thought were overly long prison terms in his state. When
DeRosa and I had dinner together, he continued in this vein and then
interrupted himself to assure me, "No, I am not a bleeding-heart
liberal." At that point, I jokingly retorted: "You
certainly give that impression."
DeRosa's field of
study or his characterization of himself as a libertarian of the right has
absolutely no bearing on his fate as a target of the academic left. It
is also hard to believe that his standard observations about slavery in the
Western Hemisphere or his onetime membership in a then-anodyne League of the
South have produced genuine, belated cries of outrage. The charge
against him, like denunciations of "running dogs of capitalism" made
against victims of the murderous Maoist regime in China, are transparently
false. The bullying that occurred at Florida Atlantic was a way of
flexing leftist muscle and pushing faculty who might be inclined to offer a
dissenting opinion into anxious silence.
As Marshall DeRosa
in his lecture at Auburn described hapless youth incarcerated in Florida jails,
a fellow listener turned to me and remarked with a broad smile: "No good
deed goes unpunished." What was intended as humor has turned
out to be prophetic.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/05/the_pleasures_of_bullying.html#ixzz5EdUyMgqn
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