Roots of Academic Bias

Accuracy in Academia ^ | August 20, 2010 | Malcolm A. Kline

[AccuracyAcademia]

With everybody but college professors acknowledging the left-wing bias in academia, the next question becomes, when did it start? Well, it goes back at least a half a century.

“While teaching at Ohio State University in the 1960s, I had a bumper sticker that read, Bury Goldwater and was shunned by colleagues until one took a close look at it and said, ‘Ah, it says Bury Goldwater, we thought it said Barry Goldwater,’” author Alston Chase remembered. “Would you like to go to a party?,” the colleague asked Chase.

Despite the image of the 1960s as one in which left-wing student radicals battled buttoned-down administrators, the reality was that the decade saw the left fighting putative liberals who ran the colleges and universities. “The college presidents are coming along nicely!” read one internal memo from Lyndon Johnson’s White House sent in the heat of the 1964 presidential campaign.

Indeed they were. “There are no real critics, no new ideas, no fundamental differences of opinion,” Rutgers provost Richard Schlater claimed in the Partisan Review. Goldwater’s defeat showed that “we are all part of the American establishment,” according to Schlater.

The last two quotes were unearthed by Rick Perlstein, himself a man of the Left, in his book, Before The Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus. Perlstein also digs out some quotes from celebrated scholars such as Richard Hofstadter of Columbia who asked, “When in our history has anyone with ideas so bizarre, so archaic, so self-confounding, so remote from the basic American consensus, ever got so far?”

Hofstadter, who died in 1970, was the author of The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It, still, next to Howard Zinn’s, about the most widely used text in American schools.

Speaking of seminal texts, when Milton Friedman published Capitalism and Freedom in 1962, “some Keynesians successfully lobbied to have it purged from their universities’ libraries,” Perlstein reveals.

[Roccus]

The fact that teachers in the 60’s and early 70’s were exempted from the draft has a lot to do with academia's position today. Many that joined that profession then as a means of escaping their military obligation to their country rose through the ranks in the ensuing decades and spread their poisonous ideology

[fullchroma]

...exempted from the draft...

Never thought of that, it makes a lot of sense. The ripple goes far and wide, doesn't it?

[InterceptPoint]

A half a century? Hardly.

The roots of the academic takeover of our Universities can be traced back to the 1920's when the Soviet Union made the decision to spread that beautiful egalitarian system of theirs to the United States and the rest of the civilized world so they wouldn't be the only ones starving. They targeted the media, Hollywood, the arts, our political parties, our government and our schools. It was an extremely successful program that is still being executed long after the demise of the Soviet Union. Crushing Marxism is not an easy job and there seems to be very few willing to enter the battle, Freepers excepted of course.

[Roccus]

I also believe that the marriage exemption (which later required a child) was a key component in America’s high divorce rates after the draft ended.

[AEMILIUS PAULUS]

The left was strong in the 1950’s. Generally, socialism(liberalism) started, in the United States, in the late 19th early 20th centuries with the large immigration from Central and Eastern Europe. Socialism's growth received a boost under Wilson and an enormous increase under FDR.

[Russ]

Wasn’t it around 1952 that Bill Buckley exposed the left-wing bias in academia in “God and Man at Yale”?

[texmexis best]

“The fact that teachers in the 60’s and early 70’s were exempted from the draft has a lot to do with academia’s position today”

That is a fact, Jack. Without the draft, it would have been a very different scenario. I had intended to teach in college, but felt that the left wing takeover of our academic institutions would have made it very difficult to make a living. It turns out that I was correct in all particulars.

[Roccus]

I didn’t say it was the ONLY reason, but it certainly contributed to what we have today.

[Little Ray]

Goes back further than that, to Woodrow Wilson, president of Princeton, and, later, of the US. IIRC, he brought a lot of “academics” in with his administration.

[Blind Eye Jones]

Ward Churchill was related to Ward Cleaver of Leave To Beaver fame and to get around having an unusual identity crisis he went into academia just to be "unusual." Whilst there, Ward bought into subverting America... if for no other reason than you get to wear funky clothes and pretend you're an Indian. The universities thought highly of themselves for not ousting or rousting the communists, but little did they know those drab men would recruit Ward and outfit him with unusually funky clothes. People vote based on clothes, so the communist academics thought, and being drab dressers they knew they would never get votes. Ward and subversive hipsters like himself would always get the youth vote. So America basically changed due to the fashionable sense of drab academics and an assortment of snappy dressers vowing to do away with all the injustices that inflict mankind.

[Roccus]

Without the draft, it would have been a very different scenario.

Don't get me wrong, IMO it's not the draft that was the problem. It was the way the bureaucrats implemented it that was problem.

[ForGod'sSake]

With everybody but college professors acknowledging the left-wing bias in academia...

A minor quibble with the author: The left generally, including Dims and the Ministry of Information, including most publishing, are fellow travelers and you will not likely hear a peep out of them re the marxist indoctrinators in academia.

[ansel12]

Becoming a national union is what really changed school teachers and schools and the curriculum the most, it suddenly put a hostile, left wing, oppositional, national union in charge of American education.

“Before the 1960s, only a small portion of public school teachers were unionized. But that began to change when, in 1959, Wisconsin became the first state to pass a collective bargaining law for public employees. Over the next 20 years, most other states adopted similar laws. The passage of these laws had a significant impact on NEA, which began to serve members as a labor union, in addition to serving members as a professional association. Passage of these new labor laws, along with NEA’s new role as a labor union, helped NEA membership grow from 766,000 in 1961 to roughly 3.2 million today.

In the 1960s, the NEA’s demographics were changing. This was due the merger with ATA and the decision to become a true labor union, among other factors. In 1967, the NEA elected its first Hispanic president Braulio Alonso. In 1968, NEA elected its first Black president, Elizabeth Duncan Koontz.”

[Roccus]

Yup. It all ties in.

[Theodore R.]

The professors are on the left because they jealously think liberals will raise their pay and conservatives might cut it. Neither happens.

[nathanbedford]

I remember vividly a Barry Goldwater rally at South Mountain Arena in New Jersey in 1964. We had tickets to get in but many did not. After the rally I went home to watch the 11 o'clock news out of New York City so that the establishment media there could tell me what I witnessed. I was astonished to see on my television screen precisely the opposite of what I had witnessed with my own eyes.

Those people without tickets clamoring to enter the hall to support Barry Goldwater were transformed by the magic of television into protesters against him. Barry Coldwater was transmogrified into a divisive candidate. Have we heard that since?

Some time later Pres. Lyndon Johnson campaigned in Newark New Jersey at an open air rally which I attended. He said, "my good friend, MayorAddunzio" when he should have said, "my stooge in the Newark, Mayor Addonizio." But I knew the gaffe did not matter. The game was over, the fix was in, Lyndon Johnson was the beneficiary of an elitist consensus.

One last observation: I have posted countless times on these threads that Tip O'Neill's maxim, all politics in America is local, is off the mark. The truth is, all politics in America, ultimately, is racial. Do not let anyone confuse you if you are young. Barry Goldwater did not lose because people thought he was a crazed anti-Communist who would blow up the world, Barry Goldwater lost because he was on the wrong side of history concerning race. The media simply would not tolerate any viewpoint other than mindless support of Lyndon Johnson's civil rights initiatives. Goldwater was painted as a crazed bombthrower because he was wrong on race-or least the media saw it that way.

In 2008 we had a replay.