Myth of the Liberal Campus

College campuses are packed with dangerous radicals like Ward Churchill, Noam Chomsky, Michael Parenti, and Howard Zinn, right? It's a popular myth, but is it true? The fear of anti-American radicals brainwashing our nation's youth isn't new. You can find it in posts like this, from--surpirse, surprise--a " a pro-victory Associate Professor of Political Science." That is, you'll often hear this myth the most from right-wing professors on college campuses.

The charge is not a new one. It serves as a powerful tool to keep new professors in line. The firing of someone like Ward Churchill let's faculty know that they will not be protected if they go against the grain.

Michael Parenti addresses this in a must-read essay: Myth of the Liberal Campus:

The repression continued throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Angela Davis, a communist, was let go at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Marlene Dixon, a Marxist feminist sociolo gist, was fired from the University of Chicago and then from McGill University for her political activism. Bruce Franklin, a tenured associate professor at Stanford, author of 11 books and 100 articles and an outstanding teacher, was fired for "inciting" students to demonstrate. Franklin later received an offer from the University of Colorado that was quashed by its board of regents, who based their decision on a packet of information supplied by the FBI. The packet included false rumors, bogus letters, and unfavorable news articles.

During the 1970s, eight of nine anti-war professors who tried to democratize the philosophy department at the University of Vermont were denied contract renewals in swift succession. Within a three year period in the early 1970s at Dartmouth College, all but one of a dozen progressive faculty members (who used to lunch together) were dismissed. In 1987, four professors at the New England School of Law were fired, despite solid endorsements by their colleagues. All four were involved in the Critical Legal Studies movement, a left oriented group that viewed the law as largely an instrument of the corporate rich and powerful.

One could add hundreds of cases in volving political scientists, economists, historians, sociologists, and psycholo gists. Whole departments and even schools and colleges have been eradi cased for taking the road less traveled. At Berkeley, the entire school of criminology was abolished because many of its faculty had developed a class analysis of crime and criminal law enforcement. Those among them who taught a more orthodox, mainstream criminology were given appointments in other depart meets. Only the radicals were let go.

I should also point out that Michael Parenti was also fired from the University of Vermont for his opposition to the war in Vietnam. The idea that college campuses are filled with radicals pushing some agenda is blatantly false.

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