Posted on 12/15/2003 12:30:07 AM PST by nickcarraway
D A L L A S, Dec. 13— University of Texas journalism professor Robert Jensen is an unapologetic liberal who openly expresses his strong views, both in and out of the classroom.
"My political views are left," Jensen said. "Some people would call me a radical." In the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, student Austin Kinghorn felt Jensen crossed the line.
"We walked in, and he had the overhead projector turned on, and on there was a sentence, 'What is terrorism?' " Kinghorn said. "And Jensen took the next hour and 15 minutes of class to basically make his point, two days after 9/11, that the American government is a far worse perpetrator of terrorism than the 9/11 hijackers."
Kinghorn, chairman of the Young Conservatives of Texas, was deeply offended.
"I felt like Professor Jensen was manipulating a national tragedy," Kinghorn said, "to make a point that he wants to make about his far-leftist agenda that seems to blame every problem in the world on American policy."
The Young Conservatives decided to make Jensen No. 1 on a newly created "watch list," which was posted on their Web site and also published in a local newspaper. It includes 10 professors at the University of Texas, the nation's largest public college, whom the conservatives accuse of trying to indoctrinate students and using the classrooms to promote their personal agendas.
"It's a list of professors that need to be scrutinized, watched," said Brendan Steinhauser, a member of the Young Conservatives of Texas. "They need to be held accountable for their actions in the classroom. And they haven't been yet."
Conservative Trend
The number of conservative and Republican groups organizing on college campuses has nearly tripled in the last four years. And some officials in Washington also have acted.
"I think you're going to have more and more conservative students standing up and creating a new counterculture that doesn't believe that all morals are relative, that believes in absolute values, that believes in conservative government," Kinghorn said. "And they're going to get louder and louder as they feel more and more oppressed."
Though colleges have a reputation as bastions of liberalism, college students are more likely to call themselves political independents than any other affiliation, according to the ABCNEWS polling unit. For those in college, ages 18 to 22, 27 percent call themselves Democrats, 34 percent Republicans and 35 percent independents. College students are more likely to say they are liberal than other Americans, but the biggest percentage, 41 percent, call themselves moderate.
The general public is roughly evenly divided among Democrats, Republicans and independents.
In Washington, Rep. Jack Kingston, R-Ga., recently introduced an academic "bill of rights" to protect students from "one-sided liberal propaganda." The House of Representatives passed a bill to monitor whether federally funded centers for international research reflect and respond to the needs of national security.
And a group founded by Lynne Cheney, the wife of the vice president, that blasted academics right after 9/11 for being "the weak link in America's response to the attack" urged a Senate committee to raise public awareness of what it called the problem of liberal bias on campus and to encourage universities to conduct "intellectual diversity reviews."
"It's a trend which, if it got completely out of hand, could lead us to another McCarthy kind of situation," said Edmund Gordon, a UT associate professor who is on the Young Conservatives of Texas list. "I certainly hope it doesn't go that far."
‘Labeled a Radical’
Gordon is accused of overemphasizing white oppression of African-Americans.
"I was actually not labeled a liberal," Gordon said. "I was labeled a radical."
He said his classroom has undergone a dramatic change.
"I never had people who were avowedly Young Conservatives in my class, as students, who announced that they were that from the very beginning," Gordon said. "I feel like they were put there to watch me. And this watch list or my position on this watch list is a result of that. So, do I feel like I'm under surveillance? I am under surveillance."
Jensen gives the conservative students plenty to watch, hanging posters of Cuban revolutionary leaders in his office and writing controversial editorials in the Texas papers. One such editorial, published in the Houston Chronicle just after Sept. 11, 2001, was headlined, "U.S. Just as Guilty of Committing Own Violent Acts."
"It led the president of the university to issue a public statement denouncing me, in which he called me foolish," Jensen said.
The reprimand did not bother Jensen or affect his behavior. He's a tenured professor and his job at the public university is protected.
He loves to stir things up in the classroom, and some students are complimentary.
"I think what Jensen really wants us to do is to learn to think critically about our role in society and society as a whole," one student said.
"I think that if a teacher is completely neutral, which I personally don't think is possible, it would make a class boring," said another.
Censorship?
Jensen fears he could be pressured into toning down his message.
"Nobody with power is telling me I can't say something," Jensen said. "It's only going to become censorship if university administrators, who have the power to hire and fire and the power to punish faculty, start requiring a kind of ideological conformity for advancement in the profession. If that happens, then higher education is dead."
The very idea of making lists of members of opposing groups has a long and checkered history in America. Hollywood once had its black list, an unwritten understanding of those who would be denied work because of their suspected affiliation or sympathy with communism. President Nixon had an infamous enemies list, and his political opponents had their own scoreboard of so-called war criminals in his Cabinet. The National Rifle Association recently put out its own listing of adversaries. Some of them said they were proud to be on it.
So, perhaps there's no wonder the latest incarnation of political watch lists has caused such a stir on college campuses. Whether these lists are promoting tactics of intimidation or simply exercising free speech is a matter of debate.
The Young Conservatives say their watch list is about promoting intellectual diversity. But others say it feels more like censorship and the start of a campus culture war.
The Young Conservatives bristle at any suggestion their watch list is a form of censorship. But they intend to put a select group of professors on notice that the classroom is not the place for a one-sided bully pulpit.
"I've had liberal professors who are great professors," Kinghorn said. "I'm not afraid of opinions. None of us are. What we're afraid of is students who don't get both sides of the stories and don't have enough information to make informed decisions, which is supposedly what a college degree is all about."
Me too ...
On the other hand, I had an Ethics teacher who came in and gave us on our first night his history of having worked for just about every liberal candidate we found. He then expressed to us the position that he had and stated that he felt that one of his jobs was to show us the right way to "good thought" because only the left was ethical. I had a field day with him. One day, he lost it when the study was on the ethics of employee/employer relationship and I asked him if it was ethical for an employer to engage in a sexual tryst with an employee. He said it was absolutely not. Then I looked him square and asked him in front of the class how he could tell us, based on the fact that he was an ethics teacher, that Bill Clinton was one of the greatest presidents, considering he had done just that. He sputtered and stammered and then told me that I better be careful, because he held my grade in his hand. I looked at him and said "You are the one who needs to be careful. You don't have tenure." Needless to say, I got an A in his class. He knew to give me anything less, I would have eaten him alive.
Pot calling the kettle black.
Every time these Communists are called out on their indoctrination of our young people, they start screaming like a stuck pig about censorship.
Oh yeah? Well how about all the "speech codes" and "campus discipline" dished out at anyone who dares to publicly disagree with their Trotskyist dogma? If that isn't censorship, then I don't know what is.
In my opinion, the best method of counter-leftism involves and open field and a bunch of 12-foot long sharpened wooden stakes. But that's me, and I could be wrong.
I have to say that as a combat veteran I thought I was doing it in part in order to protect the speech rights of even such losers as Katz and Corrie, and that other kid in your link (forget his name) who was with the Earth First terrorists. But free speech cuts both ways, as these goons forget.
I celebrate the deaths of the two kids -- hey, join with evil, and evil befalls you. The universe has some harsh laws. Like gravity, as young George of the Jungle found out ("watch out for that tree!"). And "an object in motion tends to remain in motion" --particularly when it's a bulldozer. If Rachel Corrie's parents had helped her with her physics homework instead of filling her full of antisemitic hate, she might still be sucking oxygen instead of feeding worms. Well, good riddance to bad rubbish.
And I also thought I was protecting the right of individuals and groups to speak out, even in the days before the election. Little did I know that, to our supreme court, random schmoes have the right to send you endless kiddie-porn spam but no one who is not a card-carrying member of the press has the right to speak on politics... haysus marimba.
Funny also, that when these professors say the most outrageous crap, it's "freedom," like that Marxist guy Katz who couldn't even articulate, when asked, what Marxism was or what it stood for, and when other people merely report what the losers are saying, it's "censorship." Dude, if what you said makes people hate you, I am not a censor for telling them you said it.
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F
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