Indoctrination

David Horowitz writes about the two Universities of Texas:

Graduate students in an Introduction to Women’s and Gender Studies course, for example, are provided with a reading list that includes scores of texts written from a radical viewpoint. Only one text blatantly criticizes the radical feminist perspective. This is a book written by two founders of women’s studies who subsequently left the field, because they felt it had become totally devoted to a political ideology to the point that its practitioners regularly denied scientific findings that conflicted with their political agendas.

This is the way the course syllabus for the introductory class refers to the book: “Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge, professing feminism, passim (note that this represents anti-women’s studies – prepare to refute it).” This is the instruction of a political ideologue, not an academic scholar.

This is one example, but a glance at other curricular offerings in this and related programs reveals similarly unprofessional agendas. Many of the professors who teach these courses are neither trained historians nor sociologists nor economists, yet the subject matter they teach will often be, such as courses on the history of radical movements, globalization, race or all three.

Communications and Social Change, taught by a professor of communications studies, is such a course. It has no academic rationale except to recruit students to the causes favored by its Marxist instructor: “After the historical survey of social movements, the second part of the course asks you to become involved as an observer and/or as a participant in a local social movement.”

The course requires only two texts, naturally by two Marxists (Howard Zinn and UT’s own Robert Jensen), both situated on the far left of the political spectrum. There’s no harm in reading Zinn or Jensen, but a properly academic course would include their critics on the right and left.

There are enough such courses at the University of Texas that students can enroll in a degree-granting curriculum which has no academic component, but is a comprehensive training program in the theory and practice of radical politics.

How many parents are unwittingly contributing to their offspring’s maleducation, and enabling the continuation of such nonsense, by paying the outrageous tuitions at institutions like this?