In short, here we have a professor of humanities who views a crude and violent “gangsta-rapper,” a convicted rapist, as an apex of culture, and who views the flying of airplanes filled with women and children hostages into buildings filled with ordinary office workers as morally justified.

See also: Professors Baraka, Berry, hooks, Karenga, Thomas

Research: Thomas Ryan

Professor Rick Eckstein

Villanova University

— Associate professor of sociology, Villanova University

— Instructor in Villanova’s Center for Peace and Justice Education

— Leninist who teaches that terrorism is a product of capitalist imperialism

Rick Eckstein is an associate professor of sociology at Villanova University, and is an instructor in the University’s Center for Peace and Justice Education, an interdisciplinary program that offers students both a minor and a concentration in issues of, “world peace and social justice.”

Professor Eckstein’s trained expertise is in the sociology of American sports and stadium-building in American cities. He is the co-author of Public Dollars, Private Stadiums: The Battle Over Building Sports Stadiums. This is about as far from international relations as one can get. Nevertheless, this has not stopped him from venting his personal political passions on his students in a course titled, “War, Imperialism and Terrorism.” In the syllabus for this class, Professor Eckstein makes clear his belief that terrorism is not a product of radical Islamic organizations and ideas, but of the oppressions inflicted by American capitalism. His syllabus explains: “In this class we will explore war, imperialism, and terrorism as reflections of national and international social inequality. As the U.S. wages its seemingly endless ‘war against terrorism,’ and its episodic wars on other nation-states, it is increasingly important that we look beyond slogans and good/evil dichotomies to understand why so many people are dying (and will continue dying) in the name of peace and freedom. I think of this course as an antidote to our cultural emphasis of reducing complex social phenomena (such as war, imperialism, and terrorism) to moral dichotomies and/or personalities. There is a lot more to these social phenomena [than] ‘good vs. evil’ and crazy people. However, you should be warned that these more complex explanations often indict us as co-conspirators in the institutionalized violence so prevalent in our world.”²⁹⁷ [emphasis in original]

As should be obvious, this is a completely one-sided approach to the subject. As one might expect from an amateur unfamiliar with the vast quantity of scholarly research conducted over the last century in the fields of History and Political Science regarding the complexities of imperial expansion and its causes, Professor Eckstein’s principal text is a political pamphlet that is both outdated and primitive: V.I. Lenin’s Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism. Other readings include, Gore Vidal’s rhetorical broadside, Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta; and Noam Chomsky’s polemic, Media Control , nothing remotely resembling a scholarly text. In his course summary, Professor Eckstein implores students to “start reading Lenin right away.”²⁹⁸ The readings, he warns, are “not optional and there are no Cliff Notes to steer you through Lenin’s classic on imperialism.”

So that students will not mistake his course for an academic exploration of ideas, Professor Eckstein provides guidelines for the topics he expects students to pursue: “I want YOU to suggest certain topics for our collective consideration. For example, I know at least two of you took trips last year that raised a lot of questions about the United States’ imperialistic actions with other countries. Therefore, I am going to leave the course outline vague at this time except for the first topic. During the next several weeks, we will explore the nature of capitalism and how the internal logic of this political economic system makes war, imperialism, and terrorism seem perfectly normal; kind of like economics and politics by other means!”²⁹⁹

Professor Eckstein sees Villanova as a political institution that can strengthen the opposition to American imperialism: “Institutionally,” he writes,³⁰⁰ “[Villanova] can make it more comfortable for people to question official policy. They can lend . . . institutional support to certain student groups, by having a speaker series and bringing in prominent people, who are, if not necessarily against the war, asking questions about the war.”³⁰¹

Incredible as it may seem, given so intellectually one-sided a syllabus as described above, Professor Eckstein has been appointed to the Arts & Sciences advisory board for the Villanova Institute for Teaching and Learning. In 2000, Eckstein was awarded Villanova’s Lindback Award for Teaching Excellence. This pattern of academic amateurs teaching courses for which they have no qualification is of course not confined to Villanova.

See also: Professors Armitage, Aptheker, Barash, Coy, Ensalaco, Fellman, Haffar, Schwartz, Wolfe

Research: Thomas Ryan

Professor Paul Ehrlich

Stanford University

— Professor of population studies and biology at Stanford University

— Author of the 1968 book The Population Bomb

— “We’ve already had too much economic growth in the United States. Economic growth in rich countries like ours is the disease, not the cure.”

Paul Ehrlich is currently a professor both of population studies and biological sciences at Stanford University. He is best known as an environmentalist who gained notoriety in the 1960s and 1970s, most notably with his 1968 book The Population Bomb, co-authored with his wife Anne Ehrlich, by predicting an impending ecological apocalypse. Among Professor Ehrlich’s predictions which turned out to be false were the following:

— “The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines . . . hundreds of millions of people (including Americans) are going to starve to death.” (1968)

— “Smog disasters” in 1973 might kill 200,000 people in New York and Los Angeles. (1969)

— “I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.” (1969)

— “Before 1985, mankind will enter a genuine age of scarcity... in which the accessible supplies of many key minerals will be facing depletion.” (1976)

— Falling temperatures will cause the ice caps to sink into the ocean, producing “a global tidal wave that could wipe out a substantial portion of mankind, and the sea level could rise 60 to 100 feet.” (1970)

— After switching from predicting an impending Ice Age to its logical opposite, Global Warming, Ehrlich said, “The population of the U.S. will shrink from 250 million to about 22.5 million before 1999 because of famine and global warming.”

In The Population Bomb, Paul Ehrlich decreed, “We must have population control at home, hopefully through a system of incentives and penalties, but by compulsion if voluntary methods fail.” He suggested adding “temporary sterilants” to the water supply but thought “society would probably dissolve” before the government could do that. Ehrlich called China’s policy of forced abortion “vigorous and effective,” a “grand experiment in the management of population.” Ehrlich’s predictions snared a generation of gullible reporters and Green activists in the 1970s, who gave his totalitarian prescriptions serious consideration.

Ehrlich also authored the books Human Natures: Genes, Cultures, and the Human Prospect; Betrayal of Science and Reason: How Anti-Environment Rhetoric Threatens Our Future; and The End of Affluence.

Over the years, Paul Ehrlich has made the following preposterous statements, none of which has affected his tenured position and lifetime job at one of America’s most prestigious universities:

— “Actually, the problem in the world is that there is much too many rich people.” (Associated Press, April 6, 1990)

— “Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.” (Quoted by R. Emmett Tyrrell in The American Spectator, September 6, 1992)

— “We’ve already had too much economic growth in the United States. Economic growth in rich countries like ours is the disease, not the cure.” (Quoted by Dixy Lee Ray in her book Trashing the Planet, 1990)

Paul Ehrlich’s career is a testament to the fact that in the current university, outside the hard sciences, there is no bottom line for bad ideas and no consequence for wrong ones.

Professor Ehrlich is also a relentless critic of American foreign and domestic policies. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, he theorized that a central cause of the attacks against the United States was the unequal distribution of wealth worldwide; that American affluence was resented and viewed as unjust by much of the human race; and that it was incumbent upon the United States—which had just seen 3,000 of its citizens murdered by Muslim fanatics—to convince foreign onlookers that in declaring war against the terrorists’ patrons, it was not seeking “to wage war on Islam.” Ehrlich advocated that the U.S. respond not with a military strike against the Taliban, but rather with charity and financial aid for the people of Afghanistan; the Taliban, in his view, should have been permitted to remain in power.³⁰²

In a November 2002 article titled “Getting at the Roots of Terrorism,” Professor Ehrlich attacked the Bush administration for “its utter failure to take any steps to reduce the factors that inspire terrorists to attack us,” and its “apparent plans to take control of Iraq’s vast petroleum reserves.” “Oil,” he claimed, “also explains the presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia, which enrages some Muslims, especially Osama bin Laden.”³⁰³ American troops were placed in Saudi Arabia in 1990 at the request of the Saudis after Saddam Hussein’s invasion and attempted annexation of Kuwait. ³⁰⁴

Research: Ben Johnson³⁰⁵ and John Perazzo

Professor Marc Ellis

Baylor University

— Professor of Jewish studies at Baylor University

— Director of the Center for American and Jewish Studies at Baylor

— Anti-Israel activist and propagandist

Marc H. Ellis is director of the Center for American and Jewish Studies at Baylor University, a Baptist University in Waco, Texas. Like Norman Finkelstein, Ellis is honored and cited as a Jewish anti-Jewish and anti-Israel authority by Holocaust Deniers,³⁰⁶ including on the website³⁰⁷ of recently deported Canadian Nazi Ernst Zundel. Unlike Finkelstein, however, Ellis has never endorsed Holocaust denial. But Ellis has hosted Finkelstein on numerous occasions,³⁰⁸ such as at the 2nd Dallas Palestinian Film Festival; in addition, the two sit together on the boards of a number of anti-Israel propaganda organizations, such as the Deir Yassin Remembered Organization,³⁰⁹ which also includes among its members PLO spokeswoman Hanan Ashrawi and convicted Israeli spy, Mordecai Vanunu.

Ellis has publicly endorsed Finkelstein’s book, The Holocaust Industry, and also Finkelstein’s scurrilous ad hominem attacks on Nobel Prize winning writer and concentration camp survivor Elie Wiesel. Ellis is proud of his collaboration with Finkelstein and also endorses Finkelstein’s activities against Israel.

Ellis holds a PhD from Marquette University, a Jesuit institution in Milwaukee, also no one’s idea of a serious research center on Jewish thought. His first position after graduation was at the Maryknoll School of Theology in New York, a Jesuit institution that is not accredited as a research university but is a center of “liberation theology,” which is Marxized Christianity and was also the center of the solidarity movement for Central American Communists in the1980s. Ellis moved to Baylor University in 1998 as a full professor, where he directs “Jewish Studies,” all by himself, the sole faculty member in the program. The Center web site lists endorsements by a “Christian feminist theologian,” but not by a single Jewish scholar.

Professor Ellis has published a series of books, all largely promoting liberation theology mixed with his thoughts about the Holocaust and Israel’s endless record of “inhumane crimes.” Most of his books have been published with Fortress Press, a non-academic church publisher associated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church. Ellis seems to have succeeded in getting virtually no Jewish audiences, publishers or journals anywhere in the world to take his scholarship seriously with one exception. Ellis sits on the editorial board of Tikkun magazine, a leftist, prodrug, sixties-fixated magazine, which promotes Marxism and New Age liberation theology dressed up in Jewish garb and is antagonistic to Israel’s policies. Professor Ellis is a regular on the lecture circuit, especially before Christian audiences before whom he attacks Israel. He is naturally a speaker in demand for Palestine “solidarity” events.

Professor Ellis repeatedly insists that Jews have abandoned “prophetic ethics.” But there is little in his books to indicate that he has the slightest idea of which ethics the Prophets of the Bible really promoted, nor that he has even read the prophets. Ellis’s idea of promoting the ethics of the Hebrew Prophets is to write attacks on Israel for the same al-Ahram Egyptian daily that regularly prints blood libels about Jews and cites the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as an authoritative source. ³¹⁰

In Professor Ellis’s opinion, Israel’s existence is not justified by Jewish suffering during the Holocaust. The only massacres of any Holocaust-relevance are those Israel perpetrates. Jenin and Deir Yassin (neither of which was in fact a massacre) are the moral equivalents of the Holocaust of the Jews, Professor Ellis insists over and over. But in Jenin, fewer than twenty civilians died in the midst of a military operation by Israel against terrorists hiding in the town. Deir Yassin was the scene of a battle in which some civilians got killed in the fighting but no massacre took place.³¹¹ One cannot imagine a more obscene distortion than to compare these Arabs killed in military operations with the Jewish victims of the Nazi Holocaust, especially when the person doing the comparison has never had a word to say against Arab aggression and Arab anti-Jewish terrorist atrocities, nor against Arab calls for genocide.

Professor Ellis is openly contemptuous of any talk about Jews being in need of any national empowerment. Such things constitute “Constantinian Judaism,” to use Ellis’s favorite terminology, a malapropism picked up—one suspects—after spending too much time misrepresenting Judaism at Christian theological institutions. National empowerment for the Jews is nothing more than conscripting religion to serve the agenda of the militarist state—Professor Ellis uses it to describe Jews who support either Israel or the United States. Jews can only fulfill their proper ethical role in history, which—Professor Ellis is persuaded—is to promote socialism and leftist fads, if they are stateless and suffering. While crying his eyes out over the “inhumane” treatment of Arabs by Israel, Professor Ellis never finds time in all his discussions of the theological implications of the Holocaust to consider the mass murder of Jewish children by the Palestinian terrorists.

Professor Ellis is a passionate endorser of the “One-State Solution,” in which Israel will simply be eliminated as a Jewish state and will be enfolded within a larger Palestinian-dominated state that stretches from the Jordan to the sea. This, insists Ellis, is the ultimate realization of the Jewish mission and the only permissible lesson that Jews may learn from the Holocaust.

See also: Professors, Christiansen, Finkelstein, LeVine, Mazrui

Research: Steven Plaut³¹²

Professor Mark Ensalaco

University of Dayton

— Professor of political science at the University of Dayton

— Teaches a course on Western Imperialism for which he has no academic qualifications

— Has called for an investigation of Iraq’s gassing of Kurds during the Iran-Iraq War, because “the United States gave the Iraqis the principal agents on which to build chemical weapons”

Mark Ensalaco is an associate professor of political science at the University of Dayton, a faculty he joined in 1989. He also directs the university’s International Studies and Human Rights Studies programs. Ensalaco earned an M.T.S. in Theological Studies at Harvard Divinity School in 1984, and a PhD in Political Science from the State University of New York in 1991.

Much of Professor Ensalaco’s teaching before 9/11 centered on Latin America. But following the attacks, he focused his efforts heavily on a seminar course titled “Human Rights and Terror,” and a class called “Political Violence.” Of the latter, Ensalaco said, “I see that our students are angry and hurt about what happened in New York and Washington [on 9/11 ], and as important as it is for us to promote learning here at the University, I think it’s also important to promote tolerance.”³¹³ By tolerance, Professor Ensalaco meant tolerance for those who appear to be America’s enemies. Professor Ensalaco regards the United States as responsible for the 9/11 attacks on itself. “I’d like our students to understand the historical context of the attitudes that caused the attacks. If the students understand the complexities involved, perhaps they’ll avoid the conception that all people of Islam or all Arabs are terrorists.”³¹⁴

Professor Ensalaco says he “would like to see a truth commission investigate the United States’ support for Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war.” He has also called for an investigation of Iraq’s gassing of the Kurds during that war, in which American policy was directed towards preventing the Islamic revolutionary regime of Iran from dominating the Gulf, because, as he asserts, “the United States gave the Iraqis the principal agents on which to build chemical weapons.”³¹⁵ In other words, if Iraq builds chemical weapons and commits war crimes, in Professor Ensalaco’s view, the United States is culpable.

In the “Human Rights and Terror” course, Professor Ensalaco assigns students Through Our Enemies’ Eyes: Osama Bin Laden, Radical Islam & the Future of America. This tract was penned by an anonymous author who is described as a “senior U.S. civil servant with nearly two decades of experience in the U.S. intelligence community’s work on Afghanistan and South Asia.” The book’s author explains that Osama bin Laden’s overriding personality traits are not unlike those of many revered American heroes: “I . . . will use several analogies from . . . Anglo-American history that are meant to show that bin Laden’s character, religious certainty, moral absolutism, military ferocity, integrity, and all-or-nothing goals are not much different from those of individuals whom we in the United States have long identified and honored as religious, political, or military heroes, men such as John Brown, John Bunyan, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, and Thomas Paine.”

Professor Ensalaco, who lacks professional training in the areas he has chosen to teach, is now listed on the University of Dayton website as a university “terrorism expert.”

See also: Professors Barash, Becker, Berlowitz, Fellman, Wolfe

Research: Thomas Ryan³¹⁶

Professor John Esposito

Georgetown University

— Professor of Islamic studies at Georgetown University

— Defended suspected (then indicted) terrorist Professor Sami al-Arian as a “consummate professional”

— “September 11 has made everyone aware of the fact that not addressing the kinds of issues involved here, of tolerance and pluralism, have catastrophic repercussions.”

The Wall Street Journal once described John Esposito as “America’s foremost authority and interpreter of Islam.” The former president of the Middle East Studies Association, he currently teaches at Georgetown University, where his dual titles are professor of religion and international affairs, and professor of Islamic studies. He also heads Georgetown’s Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding.

Esposito received his PhD in Islamic studies from Temple University in 1974. He went on to become a professor at the College of the Holy Cross, a small Jesuit school in Massachusetts, where he spent the first twenty years of his professional academic career. From there, he moved to Georgetown. He has written more than two-dozen books focusing on Islam’s relation to politics and human rights. He was named editor-in-chief of the Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World, and has served as a Muslim affairs consultant to the Department of State, as well as to corporations and universities worldwide.

Averting his scholarly eyes from the study of Islamist violence on grounds that it “reinforces stereotypes,” Professor Esposito contends that the Muslim world is steadily advancing toward democratic reform, toward an “Islamic democracy that might create an effective system of popular participation unlike the Westminster model or American system,” the latter of which he disparages as “ethnocentric.” Forecasting a trend of ever-increasing freedom and democracy in Muslim lands, Professor Esposito wrote in 1994 (a year after the first attack on the World Trade Center): “democratization in the Muslim World proceeds by experimentation and necessarily involves both success and failure. The transformation of Western feudal monarchies to democratic nation states took time ... Today we are witnessing a historic transformation of the Muslim world.”³¹⁷ In the decade prior to 9/11, Professor Esposito predicted that fundamentalist Islamic groups and governments in Arab nations would reject violence and thus would present no threat to the United States. “The [very] term ‘fundamentalism,’ he warned, “is laden with Christian perceptions and Western stereotypes. More useful terms are Islamic revivalism and Islamic activism, which are less value-laden and have roots within a tradition of political reform and social action.”³¹⁸

Impugning those who equate Islamist movements “with radicalism and terrorism,” Professor Esposito claims that such thinking merely “becomes a convenient pretext for crushing political opposition.”³¹⁹ Islamist movements, he explains, “are not necessarily anti-Western, anti-American, or anti-democratic.” ³²⁰ Moreover, he minimizes the fact that those nations that have adopted Islamic law (such as Afghanistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan) are, for the most part, totalitarian states that export terrorism and egregiously violate the human rights of their inhabitants. “Contrary to what some have advised,” he writes, “the United States should not in principle object to implementation of Islamic law or involvement of Islamic activists in government.”³²¹

Professor Esposito subscribes to the Edward Said school of thought, which holds that Middle Eastern attitudes toward Israel can never be understood from an “American colonialist perspective.” In other words, they should be viewed from the point of view of Israel’s alleged role as a base of American imperialism. Ignoring Hamas’s program of creating an Islamic radical state to replace Israel—a genocidal agenda—Professor Esposito has characterized the Palestinian terror group as a community-focused organization that, in addition to its violence, does a considerable amount of societal good via such productive activities as “honey [production], cheese-making, and home-based clothing manufacture.” Professor Esposito described Yasser Arafat’s calls for jihad as social initiatives not unlike the launching of a “literacy campaign” or a fight against AIDS.³²² He has defended Professor Sami al-Arian, then a suspected terrorist (now indicted) as a “consummate professional.” At the time of this remark, al-Arian was running Palestinian Islamic Jihad from the campus of the University of South Florida, and his activities had been exposed in the press.

Professor Esposito serves on the board of advisors for the Institute for Islamic Political Thought, a London-based foundation run by Azzam Tamimi, a Palestinian academic who has openly proclaimed his support for Hamas and the Taliban, and who has praised the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. Tamimi considers Esposito his “ustadh,” or teacher.³²³

Professor Esposito traces the root causes of the 9/11 attacks not to fanatical Islamic extremism, but directly to the doorstep of the United States and what he regards as its exploitation of Muslim nations. “September 11,” says Professor Esposito, “has made everyone aware of the fact that not addressing the kinds of issues involved here, of tolerance and pluralism, have catastrophic repercussions.”³²⁴ He advises Americans “to look at the proximate grievances, not to justify what terrorists do, but to be able to address, when one can, those conditions which foster the growth of radicalism and extremism in societies overseas. There are real grievances; it is not as though we are dealing with a bunch of crazies. As we all know now, a lot of the so-called terrorists involved in 9/11 were people who came from good families, were educated, etc. One needs to ask why there was this attraction for these people. And why, for a while, did someone like Osama bin Laden acquire something of a cult following? He did because some of the things he appealed to were real issues that exist in the Muslim world and real sources of anti-Americanism as well.”³²⁵

See also: Professors al-Arian, Beinin, Cole, Cooke, Haddad, LeVine, Matsuda, Mazrui, Massad

Research: John Perazzo

Professor Larry Estrada

Western Washington University

— Associate professor of comparative cultures and ethnic studies, Western Washington University

— President of the National Ethnic Studies Association

— Founding member of the separatist radical organization MEChA, which seeks to establish an independent Hispanic state, “Atzlan,” in the American Southwest

Lawrence “Larry” Estrada is associate professor of ethnic studies and both the creator and director of the American Cultural Studies program at Fairhaven College. An interdisciplinary liberal arts college within Western Washington University, Fairhaven has adopted a number of heterodox approaches to education, including rejecting letter grades in favor of “narrative evaluations.”³²⁶

Described as a unique “interdisciplinary program,” American Cultural Studies features a curriculum designed around identity politics, with course titles like “The Native American Experience” and the “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Experience.” ³²⁷ Such courses are in keeping with the program’s aim to encourage “students and faculty to address issues such as race, ethnicity, social and cultural theory, social economic class, gender and sexual orientation.” A website for the program informs the inquisitive that it “[e]mpowers [students] to examine and question such deep concepts as privilege, silence and voice.”³²⁸

Professor Estrada is a former chair of the Washington State Commission for Hispanic Affairs. He teaches a course called “The Hispano/a-American Experience, which focuses on “the development of the Hispano/a-American community,” placing a special emphasis on “continuing immigration and economic stratification.”³²⁹

Listed among Professor Estrada’s academic interests is the “U.S./Mexican Border.” During the summer Professor Estrada teaches a course in Mexico, called “Contemporary Cultures of Mexico.” After traveling to Oaxaca students are offered “training” that is “inclusive of seminars” on several subjects, evidently chosen for their compatibility with Professor Estrada’s political views, especially with respect to the environment. Thus students can learn about “Mexican sustainable agriculture,” and research “environmental justice issues in Mexico.”³³⁰

Since 2002, Professor Estrada has served as president of the National Association for Ethnic Studies, a self-described forum of “scholars and activists” that promotes an educational curriculum geared toward “ethnic studies” to supplant a traditional curriculum of higher education. In October 2003, Professor Estrada gave a talk to Hispanic students at Yale under the auspices of MEChA—the Chicano Student Movement of Atzlan—a militant Chicano separatist group he helped found.³³¹ On its official website, MEChA describes itself as “part of the intercontinental Indigenous Struggle of the Americas.”³³² Its stated goal is the “liberation of Atzlan, meaning self-determination of people in this occupied state and the physical liberation of our land.”³³³ In his Yale presentation, Professor Estrada urged his student listeners to campaign for the expansion of ethnic, and specifically Chicano, studies on campus and warned that unless students pressed for, and universities implemented, affirmative action policies, “We’re going to see a disproportionate amount of Latino students unable to continue on to a higher education.”³³⁴

Appearing at an April 2004 National Association of Ethnic Studies conference, Estrada claimed, “We are in a state of denial about how segregated our education system is. Segregation is rampant in public schools, although it has been legally outlawed. It’s residential segregation but it’s still segregation.”³³⁵ According to Professor Estrada, a “hundred thousand lower income students cannot begin or continue their education because of tuition increases and reduction of state support.”³³⁶

Professor Estrada, a radical ethnic separatist who believes that “Aztlan” should secede from the United States, has naturally used his position as the National Association of Ethnic Studies head to defend Colorado professor Ward Churchill. Asked in a February 2005 interview to comment on widespread condemnation of Churchill—whose notorious essay likened the victims of September 11 to Nazis and blamed American foreign policy for the terrorist Islamist attacks—Professor Estrada lashed out at Churchill’s critics. “Churchill,” he explained, “is really getting a bad rap for what he was trying to do, which was to explain why events like 9/11 transpired.”³³⁷ Professor Estrada had no patience for claims that Churchill’s statements were extreme or that his academic record was questionable. Churchill’s critics, Professor Estrada claimed, are motivated merely by McCarthyism. “The far right media are trying to create a domestic scare,” Estrada claimed. “If we can’t find terrorists, we’ll create terrorists in our midst.”³³⁸

Besides his role as the director of the American Studies program, Professor Estrada has served as Western Washington University’s vice provost for diversity, and its director of affirmative action and equal opportunity.

Among his accomplishments is the creation of the Ethnic Student Center, a student-run “cultural/ethnic” organization that assists students in “being active in social justice,” and provides them with a forum to advance “social change.”³³⁹ Past events organized by the center include a “MEChA social,”³⁴⁰ presentations on “Colonialism in Native North America,”³⁴¹ and “Environmental Justice.” Members of the Ethnic Student Center also regularly accompany Professor Estrada on his visits to other colleges, where they support his claims that university curricula are insufficiently multicultural and urge administrators to make “diversity” a top priority on campus.³⁴²

See also: Professors Gutierrez, Navarro, Perez

Research: Jacob Laksin

Professor Matthew Evangelista

Cornell University

— Professor of government, Cornell University

— Director of the Peace Studies Program

— Took part in anti-war teach-in and signed letter urging Cornell faculty to speak out against Iraq war in class

Matthew Evangelista is professor of government and the director of the Peace Studies Program at Cornell University. Professor Evangelista’s academic writings have dealt with the peace movement during the Cold War and the conflict itself. In a compendium of academic writings called Ending the Cold War, Evangelista claims that “Soviet reformers” like Gorbachev pursued arms control negotiations “despite” such Reagan administration policies as the Strategic Defense Initiative, rather than because of them, as is the consensus among many historians.³⁴³ In his view, the Soviet dictator Michael Gorbachev is to be credited with bringing an end to the Cold War.

The same theme is prominent in Professor Evangelista’s book, Innovation and the Arms Race: How the United States and the Soviet Union Develop New Military Technologies, which disparages American efforts to develop a missile defense system, and alleges that the commercial pressures of arms suppliers in the “military-industrial complex” propelled the Cold War arms race more than any Soviet threat. Professor Evangelista has predicated an entire course around his idiosyncratic account of the Cold War’s end.³⁴⁴

Other courses taught by Professor Evangelista draw on such standbys of the ideological academy, namely identity politics. Typical is Evangelista’s course, “Gender, Nationalism, and War,” which takes as its subject the “relevance of gender to nationalism, conflict, and war,” and explores the “political formation of gender identity.”³⁴⁵

Upon assuming the directorship of the Peace Studies Program at Cornell in July 2002, Professor Evangelista vowed to turn his “attention to how the war against terrorism relates to questions of just war theory and international law.”³⁴⁶ Instead, Professor Evangelista directed his energies simply toward opposing the war on terror.

In November 2002, as both political parties authorized the use of force to remove Saddam Hussein as a threat to the peace, Professor Evangelista published an article blaming the United States for Saddam’s criminal regime: “If Saddam Hussein is a monster. . . then the United States is in many respects his Dr. Frankenstein.”³⁴⁷ In the same article, Professor Evangelista explained that “the United States intends to continue its military domination of the world,”³⁴⁸ and warned “that other major powers should be concerned about U.S. pretensions to act independently of any international legal constraints.”³⁴⁹

The following month, Professor Evangelista took part in a teach-in to protest America’s policy in Iraq, sponsored by Cornell’s “Anti-War Coalition.” Professor Evangelista’s contribution to the teach-in was a lecture titled “Living in a State of Perpetual War.”³⁵⁰ Dismissive of any rationale for military action against Iraq, Professor Evangelista likewise had little sympathy for the war against terror. Instead he suggested that the terrorists were avenging the grievances of the oppressed: “We should separate those who sympathize with some of the same concerns of terrorists from those who are actually willing to carry it out,” Professor Evangelista insisted. ³⁵¹

In February 2003, Professor Evangelista played a key role in organizing a series of anti-war events called “Week against War.” To mark the event, Professor Evangelista lent his signature to an anti-war declaration by Cornell faculty members. Called “An Appeal to Cornell Faculty, Staff and Graduate Students in a Time of War,” it urged “Cornell faculty and instructional staff to make class time available during the week of February 10-14 to discuss issues relating to the war in Iraq.” Whether the academic disciplines of the faculty members had any connection to war and foreign policy was irrelevant, according to the signatories. All that was important was that the professors impress upon their students the “ramifications of the current crisis.”³⁵² As if to justify this flagrant appeal to the stern inculcation of one-sided political advocacy in the classroom, the signatories explained that “we are not only academic professionals but citizens with a conscience and a voice.”³⁵³ Whether the classroom was the equivalent of a public square was a question the appeal did not address.

That same month, during a discussion of Iraq with Cornell faculty members, Professor Evangelista declared that the planned American bombing attacks would make American forces look like “war criminals.”³⁵⁴ He further claimed that the United States planned “to launch one war after another; first Iran, then North Korea, then Pakistan and Colombia,”³⁵⁵ and that American foreign policy was premised on “a future of wars without end.” Like other overwrought predictions about American intentions, this prediction of Professor Evangelista has not come to pass nor is it likely to—not that it hurts his standing on the Cornell campus. Professor Evangelista also dismissed the idea that American foreign policy supported political reform in the Middle East: “I don’t see a sustained U.S. commitment to democracy in Afghanistan, and I’m concerned the U.S. will not follow-through in Iraq, even if there is a lot of good will.”³⁵⁶ Professor Evangelista’s concern did not last long. A year and a half later in September of 2004, Evangelista’s name appeared on a political advertisement in the New York Times, demanding an end to the “occupation” of Iraq, even as the United States was securing the formation of an independent and democratic Iraqi regime. The ad called on the U.S. to abandon its “misguided efforts to choose Iraqi leaders, impose governmental structures and enforce American-drafted laws.”³⁵⁷

As well as being director of the Peace Studies Program, Matthew Evangelista is a full professor in the Department of Government at Cornell, which is one of the most important in the nation. A product himself of that department (he received his PhD there) and still relatively young, Evangalista’s opinion will naturally carry great weight within his faculty, both regarding the hiring and the promotion of future scholars, for decades to come. Given the intensity of his politics and the overtly one-sided character of his teaching, it is not difficult to predict what sort of scholars he will be voting to hire and which kind he will be voting to promote.

See also: Professors Berlowitz, Fellman, Targ, Wolfe

Research: Jacob Laksin

Professor Richard Falk

Princeton University

— Milbank Professor of International Law Emeritus, Princeton University

— Visiting Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara

— Regards America as a “proto-fascist” state

Richard Falk is professor emeritus of International Law and Policy at Princeton University. Following his recent retirement from Princeton, he now serves as a Visiting Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and is chair of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. Central to the theme of his life’s work, which includes the writing of more than twenty books, is Falk’s consistent opposition to American foreign policies, including the War on Terror. Falk claims that the root cause of these terrorist attacks is that “the mass of humanity. . . finds itself under the heels of U.S. economic, military, cultural, and diplomatic power.”³⁵⁸ Twenty-five years earlier, Falk was an enthusiastic supporter of the Islamic radical, the Ayatollah Khomeni whom he hailed as a “liberator” of Iran. In 1979, Khomeni instituted one of the bloodiest and most repressive regimes in Iran’s history and launched the current radical Islamic jihad against the West.

Falk described the Ayatollah’s inner circle as “uniformly composed of moderate, progressive individuals,” and argued that “Iran may yet provide us with a desperately needed model of humane government for a Third World county.”³⁵⁹

In a 2003 article titled “Will the Empire be Fascist?” Professor Falk cites “unaccountable military power,” “uncritical and chauvinistic patriotism,” and “an authoritarian approach to law enforcement” as indicators of what he refers to as America’s “slide toward Fascism.” He alleges that terror warnings and threat assessments are tools used by the government to frighten and thereby control the American people, observing that the “periodic alarmist warnings of mega-terrorist imminent attacks” have not yet been followed by any actual attacks.³⁶⁰ In an interview conducted in 2003, Professor Falk stated, “Given an Attorney General like John Ashcroft, the domestic face of the American global design is revealed as a kind of proto-fascist mentality that is prepared to use extreme methods to reach its goals. Without being paranoid, this is the sort of mentality that is capable of fabricating a Reichstag fire as a pretext, so as to achieve more and more control by the state over supposed islands of resistance.”³⁶¹

Attacking the Bush administration for what he calls its “fascist conception of control,” Falk writes, “America has proved to be resilient in the past, as when anti-Democratic forces were unleashed by the rabid witch-hunting anti-Communism of McCarthyism during the 1950s, but this resilience is now being tested as never before, because the proponents of this extremist American global strategy currently occupy the heights of political influence in and around the White House and Pentagon.”³⁶²

Professor Falk’s proposed antidote to what he calls the rise of American fascism is the creation of a “Global Peoples’ Assembly,” a governing body whose members would “represent the worldwide voice of the people in action and decision making.” In practice, such an organization would be authorized to direct U.S. foreign and domestic policies, as well as the policies of other nations. In an article titled Globalization Needs a Dose of Democracy, which he co-wrote, Falk said, “We believe that the most promising innovation would be a worldwide grassroots campaign to establish the first Global Peoples’ Assembly.”³⁶³

Professor Falk has been particularly outspoken against the War in Iraq. In an article he co-wrote prior to the 2003 U.S. invasion, Falk stated, “Nothing in Iraq’s current behavior would justify a preemptive attack against Iraq.... There are available alternatives to war that are consistent with international law and are strongly preferred by America’s most trusted allies. These include the resumption of weapons inspections under United Nations auspices combined with multilateral diplomacy and a continued reliance on non-nuclear deterrence.”³⁶⁴

Falk worked closely with the anti-sanctions organization Voices in the Wilderness, helping the group to formulate legal arguments against the UN-authorized, U.S.-enforced sanctions against Iraq. Members of the group met with senior Iraqi officials, and Saddam Hussein himself publicly thanked Voices for serving as a channel of information from the Iraqi regime to the American people. Throughout its anti-sanctions crusade, Voices turned a blind eye to the human rights atrocities Saddam himself was perpetrating against his own people.

Falk is also the chair of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. This group’s recommended strategy for combating terrorism is to increase U.S. aid to those fundamentalist countries that act as a breeding ground for terrorists. Foundation president David Krieger states that a “new approach to security [which] must be built on the power of diplomacy and aid rather than on military power. It must be built on policies that reverse inequities in the world and seek to provide basic human rights and human dignity for all. These policies must adhere to international law, and end the double standards that have helped to produce extreme misery in much of the Arab world.”³⁶⁵

See also Professors Aptheker, Cole, Davis, Matsuda, Navasky, Targ

Research: John Perazzo

Sasan Fayazmanesh

California State University, Fresno

— Professor of economics, California State University, Fresno

— Anti-American, anti-Israel. He refers to the two countries as “Usrael”

— Apologist for terrorist groups Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah

Born in Iran, Sasan Fayazmanesh is an economics professor at California State University, Fresno. He received his Bachelors and Masters degrees in applied mathematics from California State University, Los Angeles, and UCLA, respectively. He then went on to earn a PhD in economics at the University of California’s Riverside campus.

Fayazmanesh’s writings have appeared in such publications as the Journal of the History of Economic Thought, Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology, the Encyclopedia of Political Economy, and the Review of Radical Political Economics. He is currently writing a book entitled Money and Exchange, scheduled to be published in 2005.

Fayazmanesh detests the United States and Israel. He derides the U.S. government’s classification of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah as terrorist groups, asserting that the designation is unjustly based solely on the fact that those groups “are hostile to the Israeli occupation and answer violence with violence.”³⁶⁶

Fayazmanesh condemns what he calls “the holy alliance” between the United States and Israel, whose names he mockingly combines as “USrael” to show that the two nations’ foreign policies are interwoven, inseparable, and mutually supportive. He states, “USrael has been using the accusation of Iran developing WMD for a long time to overthrow the Iranian government.... The Israelis, of course, have been repeating the same charge. . . . The USraeli accusation is . . . quite hypocritical. Both countries have nuclear weapons. Both are engaged in research and development in the area of nuclear weapons technology. Both are ready to use nuclear weapons if necessary.” Fayazmanesh gives no indication that he sees any unusual danger in a scenario where an Islamic theocracy, whose government has sworn death to infidels and death to America might gain access to the most potent weapons on earth.³⁶⁷

Fayazmanesh is offended by President Bush’s reference to an “axis of evil,” composed of Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. Says the professor, “David Frum, a former speech writer for President Bush . . . took credit for coining the phrase ‘axis of evil’ and including it in President Bush’s 2002 State of the Union message. Frum . . . currently writes for the neo-fascistic National Review Online, which supports everything Israel does.... The expression ‘axis of evil’ was part of the neoconservative agenda of making the world safe for Israel.”³⁶⁸

In Fayazmanesh’s view, American policy toward Iran’s Islamic theocracy since 1979 has been “duplicitous, irrational, and incoherent, since it was pulled in opposite directions by Israel and the US corporations.”³⁶⁹

Several of Fayazmanesh’s courses reveal a sharply political bent. For instance, an introductory course he teaches, “Economics 101: History of Economic Thought,” features no fewer than five works on Marx, including one by Fayazmanesh himself, “Marx’s Methodology of Political Economy,” which he wrote for the Encyclopedia of Political Economy. Fayazmanesh’s views on the Middle East, meanwhile, are on display in another course he teaches called “Economics 183: Political Economy of the Middle East.” The course has only two required textbooks, one of which is A History of the Modern Middle East, written by William Cleveland, a professor of history at Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, Vancouver, in British Columbia and an anti-Israel activist who has long decried Israel’s “occupation.” The book offers a politically charged chronicle of the Middle East that apportions the blame for the region’s political and economic tribulations to U.S. foreign policy and Israel.

Research: John Perazzo

Professor Joe Feagin

Texas A&M University

— Professor of sociology at Texas A&M University

— Former president of the American Sociological Association

— “Every part of the life cycle, and most aspects of one’s life, are shaped by the racism that is integral to the foundation of the United States.”

Joe Feagin is the Ella McFadden Professor of Liberal Arts in Texas A&M University’s Department of Sociology. He is also the former (1999–2000) president of the American Sociological Association.

The distinguishing feature of Professor Feagin’s worldview, as expressed in his writings, is his passionately held belief that the United States is a racist nation. According to Professor Feagin, America’s “systemic racism” is defined by “a diverse assortment of racist practices; the unjustly gained economic and political power of whites; the continuing resource inequalities; and the white-racist ideologies, attitudes, and institutions created to preserve white advantages and power.” “One can accurately describe the United States,” he says, “as a ‘total racist society’ in which every major aspect of life is shaped to some degree by the core racist realities.”³⁷⁰ “In the United States,” Feagin elaborates, “racism is structured into the rhythms of everyday life. It is lived, concrete, advantageous for whites, and painful for those who are not white.... Every part of the life cycle, and most aspects of one’s life, are shaped by the racism that is integral to the foundation of the United States.”³⁷¹

Though his primary focus is on race, Professor Feagin also focuses on America’s alleged hostility to women. “[M]ost men,” he states, “will not aggressively promote women’s rights because of their personal and economic interest in maintaining discriminatory practices. Thus, women must take the initiative in fighting sex discrimination.”³⁷²

America’s inherent impulse to oppress African Americans has abated only scarcely, if at all, since the days of Jim Crow segregation policies. “[T]he central problem is that, from the beginning, European American institutions were racially hierarchical, white supremacist, and undemocratic. For the most part, they remain so today.”³⁷³ All that has changed since the days of segregation, he contends, is that whites have become more adept at concealing their racism: “We’ve learned to say the polite, nonracist thing, but that doesn’t meant there has been a sharp decline in white racist attitudes. We’ve just learned to camouflage [racism], to hide it.”³⁷⁴ Explains Feagin, “Most of white America is in denial about racism, but we know just backstage it exists in extreme forms.”³⁷⁵ As Feagin told the Texas A&M student newspaper in October 2004, “There are two types of white Americans: racists and recovering racists.”³⁷⁶

To compensate blacks for their many afflictions at the hands of America’s longstanding racist traditions, Feagin advocates the payment of monetary reparations to African Americans. In the September/October 1994 issue of Poverty & Race magazine, he wrote: “Reparations for African Americans is an idea whose time has come.... Richard America’s $3-trillion estimate of the reparations cost seems reasonable, given the huge amount of labor stolen from African Americans over 375 years. The logical payer is the U.S. government.”³⁷⁷ Since the U.S. government was created only 207 years earlier, the implication is that the United States must pay reparations for English slavery as well.

Anticipating white resistance to this idea, Feagin adds: “[T]he magnitude of the oppression of African Americans by white Americans has yet to be understood by whites. Most whites need to be educated to the past and present costs of racism for African Americans, as well as the costs to themselves and for society generally.... Transforming white opinions and attitudes is no easy matter, but short of revolution no changes will come until whites give up their ancient prejudices and stereotypes. ” ³⁷⁸ In Feagin’s view, whites who cannot see the logic and the justice of reparations are suffering from a psychological malady he calls “slavery denial.”³⁷⁹ Note the contradiction between these statements about the white attitude towards blacks and the very different statements made by Feagin above, where whites are portrayed as viciously and consciously racist. Now, apparently, they are merely in denial, merely ignorant of the magnitude of oppression suffered by their fellow human beings. Which is it? It cannot be both. We see here the clarity of analysis that has brought Feagin an endowed Chair in Liberal Arts and the presidency of the American Sociological Association.

Professor Feagin is a Marxist: “The Marxist tradition provides a powerful theory of oppression centered on such key concepts as class struggle, worker exploitation, and alienation. Marxism identifies the basic social forces undergirding class oppression, shows how human beings are alienated in class relations, and points toward activist remedies for oppression.”³⁸⁰ Ultimately, therefore, Professor Feagin blames capitalism for American racism. “The Marxist tradition has accented the way in which capitalist employers take part of the value of workers’ labor for their own purposes—thus not paying workers for the full value of their work. That theft of labor is a major source of capitalists’ profit. Similarly, white employers have the power, because of institutionalized discrimination, to take additional value from black workers and other workers of color. White employers can thus superexploit workers of color. This continuing exploitation of black workers not only helps to maintain income and wealth inequality across the color line but also is critical to the reproduction of the entire system of racism over long periods of time.”³⁸¹

Professor Feagin condemns the “blatant, obscene ignorance” underlying white Americans’ “deep nativism and racist tradition [that] we need to get over.” Claiming that most white Americans object to hearing foreign-born immigrants speak their native languages, he says, “You know in Europe, you’re considered cultivated and educated if you speak two languages. Here it’s just [considered] wrong.”³⁸²

In October 2004, Professor Feagin told an audience of sociology students and professors that “the white-racist mind is the basic problem on campus and in society.”³⁸³ Expanding on this theme, he has said: “One of the ways racism plays out in colleges and universities is in a severe bias in curriculums that only examine issues in white society... a study needs to be done on mediocre white men because the term ‘unqualified’ never seems to apply to white men.”³⁸⁴ Possibly Professor Feagin is unaware of the multi-culturalist curriculum which virtually all American universities have adopted.

See also: Professors Baraka, Dyson, Schwartz

Research: John Perazzo

Professor Gordon Fellman

Brandeis University

— Professor of sociology, Brandeis University

— Chairman of Brandeis University’s Peace, Conflict, and Coexistence Studies Program

— “If [the War on Terror] is about terrorism and terrorism is the killing of innocent civilians, then the United States is also a terrorist.”

Gordon “Gordie” Fellman, a former sixties radical at Brandeis, is the professor of sociology and chair of the Peace, Conflict, and Coexistence Studies Program known familiarly as “PAX” at Brandeis University.

The thesis of Professor Fellman’s 1998 book, Rambo and the Dalai Lama: The Compulsion to Win and Its Threat to Human Survival, maintains that all human conflicts are fundamentally rooted in the desire “to overcome the other,” or what Fellman calls the “adversary tendency”: “The ultimate expression of the adversary tendency is murder, and that collectively is war,” according to Fellman.³⁸⁵ Opposing this tendency, Fellman advocates a “mutuality paradigm” of universal brotherhood that would end war and conflict once and for all.

Professor Fellman believes that responsibility for Islamic hatred of America lies with America itself: “The only rational way to address [terrorism] is to acknowledge the humiliations inflicted by centuries of colonialism and imperialism . . . which appear to underlie the complaints against the West. Some people who identify with Islam appear to be determined either to restore the former glory of Islam somehow through force, or at least to have the humiliations and degradations inflicted upon Islamic cultures by the West avenged.”³⁸⁶ Professor Fellman apparently forgets that the European powers did not control the Middle East “for hundreds of years” but only for a brief interregnum after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire from 1920 to 1950. Previously it was large and powerful Muslim states, which pursued vast imperial expansion for hundreds of years (including against Europe) before the Europeans ever got into the imperial business. Behind the facade of “peace studies” analysis, Professor Fellman seems only concerned to blame the West. Professor Fellman even justifies suicide-bombings as “ways of inflicting revenge on an enemy that seems unable or unwilling to respond to rational pleas for discussion and justice.”³⁸⁷ Professor Fellman evidently regards the fifty-year war the Arab states have conducted against Israel and their refusal to recognize its existence as a state, as a “rational plea for discussion.” In fact the only Arab states—Jordan and Egypt—who have made such a plea have been able to conclude successful peace treaties with Israel.

Professor Fellman is a leader of the protests at Brandeis against Operation Iraqi Freedom. “This war has been planned since before Bush became president,” claims Fellman. “It sets a horribly dangerous example of preemptive war. It is consistent with Bush’s violation of all international treaties.... For Bush to claim that Saddam is evil for ignoring the United Nations—if he were more self-conscious, he would be talking about himself.”³⁸⁸ Similarly, in a 1998 essay, Fellman likened Hussein to special prosecutor Kenneth Starr. “Saddam Hussein of course causes vastly greater damage than does Kenneth Starr,” Fellman conceded, “but the impulse appears to be the same: destruction of the other as the highest item on one’s agenda.”³⁸⁹ Nor can there ever be any justification for war, Fellman has argued: “I consider war the way of the weak. Making war is for the imagination challenged, it only reasserts masculinity.”³⁹⁰ Apparently Professor Fellman views masculinity as an undesirable trait.

Professor Fellman has turned his crusade against the War on Terror into a campus-wide phenomenon, creating the Faculty Coalition Against the War and attending rallies as an “anti-war” leader. When conservative students at Brandeis organized a support the war protest on campus, Fellman confronted them and called them “freaks.” Fellman is notorious for grading his students subjectively, and for making “personal evolution” in class, i.e., the assimilation of his perspective on the world, count for one-third of the grade.

See also: Professors Berlowitz, Coy, Eckstein, Haffar, Shortell, Schwartz, Targ

Research: Thomas Ryan³⁹¹

Professor Norman Finkelstein

DePaul University

— Assistant professor of political science at DePaul University

— Asserts that the Holocaust has been exaggerated and exploited by Jews to justify Israeli human rights violations and crimes against humanity

— “The U.S. qualifies as the main terrorist government in the world today . . .”

Norman Finkelstein was recruited by DePaul University as an assistant professor of political science. At the time, Finkelstein had recently been fired from two New York-area adjunct teaching jobs (New York University and Hunter College) because of his pseudo-scholarship and rantings against Jews and Israel. The fact that Professor Finkelstein was hired after his anti-Semitic statements had made him notorious reflects on the university itself. An entire department voted to hire him, and the DePaul administration approved the appointment. This is the same university that fired an adjunct professor, Thomas Klocek, without a hearing because he asserted in an argument with a group of eight Palestinian students, whom he neither knew nor had ever personally taught, that Israel should not be destroyed. (That September 2004 incident occurred during a student activities fair. Klocek, who is Catholic, told the eight students who were disseminating literature for two anti-Israel groups—Students for Justice in Palestine, and United Muslims Moving Ahead—that their literature was biased against Israel; that Palestinians were Arabs who resided in the West Bank and Gaza but had no national historical identity as a people; that it was irresponsible and inaccurate to suggest that Israel was treating Palestinians in a manner similar to how Nazi Germany once treated Jews; and that while most Muslims are not terrorists, most terrorists nowadays are Muslims. ³⁹² For making these assertions, Klocek lost his job.)

Professor Finkelstein is a disciple of discredited historian and Holocaust denier David Irving, who he claims is an authoritative scholar. Professor Finkelstein refers to the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis as the “Six Million” in quotation marks,³⁹³ and says that nearly every self-identified Holocaust survivor is a fraud, a thief and a liar. Professor Finkelstein’s own parents are Holocaust survivors and Professor Finkelstein has long tried to capitalize on this as a way to legitimize his anti-Semitism. In an interview with the German paper Die Welt he has said: “Not only does the “Six Million” figure become more untenable but the numbers of the Holocaust industry are rapidly approaching those of Holocaust deniers. . . . Indeed, the field of Holocaust studies is replete with nonsense if not sheer fraud.”³⁹⁴

In his book The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering, Professor Finkelstein wrote, “‘If everyone who claims to be a survivor actually is one,’ my mother used to exclaim, ‘who did Hitler kill?’”³⁹⁵ He added that most survivors are fraudulent and that too much money is spent commemorating the Nazi genocide. “My parents often wondered why I would grow so indignant at the falsification and exploitation of the Nazi genocide. The most obvious answer is that it has been used to justify criminal policies of the Israeli state and U.S. support for these policies.” The New York Times has compared Professor Finkelstein’s book to the old czarist forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

In a December 2001 interview with CounterPunch magazine, Professor Finkelstein said, “[Jewish organizations that seek compensation for Holocaust survivors] bring to mind an insight of my late mother, that it is no accident that Jews invented the word ‘chutzpah.’ They steal, and I do use the word with intent, 95% of the monies earmarked for victims of Nazi persecution, and then throw you a few crumbs while telling you to be grateful. . . . They have disgraced the memory of the Jewish people’s suffering on the one hand by turning it into an extortion racket.” Also: “If you understand terrorism to mean the targeting of civilian populations in order to achieve political goals, then plainly the U.S. qualifies as the main terrorist government in the world today. . .”³⁹⁶

When asked whether he thought that “the West was in some way responsible for the tragedy of September 11,” Professor Finkelstein replied: “Let’s put it this way. The so-called West, and really we’re talking about the United States, and to a lesser extent its pathetic puppy dog in England, have a real problem on their hands. Regrettably, it’s payback time for the Americans and they have a problem because all the other enemies since the end of World War Two that they pretended to contend with . . . were basically fabricated enemies.... Why should Americans go on with their lives as normal, worrying about calories and hair loss, while other people are worrying about where they are going to get their next piece of bread? Why should we go on merrily with our lives while so much of the world is suffering, and suffering incidentally not with us merely as bystanders, but with us as the indirect and direct perpetrators.”³⁹⁷

See also: Professors Anderson, Armitage, Bagby, Baraka, Dabashi, Haddad, LeVine, McCloud

Research: Steven Plaut³⁹⁸

Professor Eric Foner

Columbia University

— DeWitt Clinton Professor of history at Columbia University

— Former president of the American Historical Association

— “I’m not sure which is more frightening: the horror that engulfed New York City or the apocalyptic rhetoric emanating daily from the [Bush] White House.”

Columbia University history professor Eric Foner is by today’s politicized academic standards one of the foremost professionals in his field. He is a former president of both professional historical associations and regarded as the leading expert on the Reconstruction period, the tumultuous era that followed the Civil War.

Professor Foner was raised in a notable Communist family—his uncle, Philip Foner, was the Party’s official labor historian. Eric Foner was an anti-American sixties radical and as a historian is an apologist for American Communism. On October 4, 2001, following the attack on the World Trade Center, Professor Foner contributed to a London Review of Books symposium of reactions to the atrocity. In his contribution, Professor Foner focused not on the atrocity itself but on what he perceived to be the threat of an American response: “I’m not sure which is more frightening: the horror that engulfed New York City or the apocalyptic rhetoric emanating daily from the White House.”³⁹⁹

In March 2003, as American forces entered Iraq to overthrow the Saddam dictatorship, Professor Foner participated in an anti-war “teach in” at Columbia University, where he invoked Communist Party icon Paul Robeson as a model of patriotism. “I refuse to cede the definition of American patriotism to George W. Bush,” Professor Foner declared. “I have a different definition of patriotism, which comes from Paul Robeson: ‘The patriot is the person who is never satisfied with his country.’”⁴⁰⁰ Robeson, a recipient of the Stalin Peace Prize, had made headlines in the early Cold War by proclaiming that “American Negroes” would not fight to defend America in a war against the Soviet Union. Professor Foner had been preceded on the podium by fellow Columbia professor Nicholas De Genova, who told the 3,000 students and faculty in attendance, “The only true heroes are those who find ways that help defeat the U.S. military. I personally would like to see a million Mogadishus.”⁴⁰¹ This was a reference to the 1993 killing and public mutilation of eighteen American soldiers killed by Muslim rebels in Mogadishu, Somalia.

In Professor Foner’s view hostility towards America was warranted by America’s historical record. “A study of our history in its international context might help to explain why there is widespread fear outside our borders that the war on terrorism is motivated in part by the desire to impose a Pax Americana in a grossly unequal world.” In a September 2004 article for the History News Network, Foner wrote that the hostility to the United States was “based primarily on American policies—toward Israel, the Palestinians, oil supplies, the region’s corrupt and authoritarian regimes, and, most recently, Iraq.”⁴⁰²

In a lengthy review of Professor Foner’s academic work, the liberal intellectual historian John Diggins wrote, “[Eric] Foner . . . is both an unabashed apologist for the Soviet system and an unforgiving historian of America.”⁴⁰³ Foner’s history of the United States, The Story of American Freedom, was caustically dismissed by historian Theodore Draper, who called it a work more accurately described as “the story of unfreedom.” Writing in the New York Review of Books, Draper characterized Foner as “a partisan of radical sects and opinions” and described his narrative as “a tale of hopeful efforts that failed and of dissident voices that cried out in the wilderness.” A distinctive feature of Foner’s history was his attempt “to rehabilitate American Communism.” Draper summed up: “From [Foner’s] account it would be hard to understand why so many millions of immigrants should have come to the United States for more freedom.”

Professor Foner has written a new introductory text to American history, Give Us Liberty, which was adopted by 300 collegiate institutions in its first year. ⁴⁰⁴

See also: Professors Dabashi, De Genova, Gitlin, Marable, Massad, Zinn

Research: David Horowitz⁴⁰⁵

Professor John Bellamy Foster

University of Oregon, Eugene

— Associate professor of sociology

— Editor of the Marxist magazine Monthly Review

— Considers the collapse of the Soviet empire a setback for human progress

John Bellamy Foster has taught at the University of Oregon, Eugene campus since 1985. Among the courses Foster teachers are “Social Movements,” “Marxist Sociological Theory,” and “Classical Marxist Theory.” Foster is a member of the American Sociological Association as well as the Union for Radical Political Economics. He has been a speaker and panelist for several years at the annual Socialist Scholars Conference in New York City and was an invited speaker at the Marxism 2002 Conference in London.

Since 1996, Foster has been an editor of the international academic journal of ecosocial research Organization & Environment. He has also been an editorial board member of the British Routledge journal Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, which describes itself as “an international red-green journal of theory and politics.”

In 1992, Professor Foster became an editor of Monthly Review, founded by Paul Sweezy and Leo Huberman. The magazine was close to the Communist Party but independent. Its political line shifted from fellow-traveling Stalinism to Maoism after 1957. Foster was co-editor of Monthly Review from 2001 until 2004 with Robert W. McChesney, a professor and co-founder of the “media reform” organization Free Press. Since McChesney’s departure as co-editor in 2004, Foster has been Monthly Review’s sole editor.

In an academic world of publish-or-perish, many Foster books and articles have been published—most of them, conveniently, by Monthly Review and Monthly Review Press, both under his control. These include Foster’s books The Theory of Monopoly Capitalism (1986, MRP) and Ecology Against Capitalism (2002, MRP). Foster is also the editor of Hungry for Profit: The Agribusiness Threat to Farmers, Food, and the Environment (2000, MRP) and Pox Americana: Exposing the American Empire (2005). This anthology includes essays by radical Noam Chomsky, former Weather Underground domestic terrorist group leader Bernardine Dohrn, and others.

In an interview with one of his Monthly Review writers, Professor Foster said, “The dominant thrust nowadays is toward what might be called the privatization of nature.” Foster advocates “the socialization of nature.... the more that nature is placed under the protection of people in general through democratic processes that determine the rules of sustainability, the better things are going to be.”⁴⁰⁶ Government, in other words, should “own” nature.

Accordingly, Professor Foster regrets the collapse of Communism. “The fall of the Soviet bloc made matters worse,” wrote Professor Foster in the March 2005 Monthly Review, “in the sense that there were now seemingly no obstacles to the univer-salization of capitalism, and thus no reason for the system to present itself any longer in sheep’s clothing. Beginning in the 1990s the world witnessed an even more dramatic shift toward naked capitalism, heartless both in its treatment of workers and its domination of those countries at the bottom of the global hierarchy. Both class struggle from above and imperialism were intensified in the wake of capitalism’s triumph in the Cold War.”⁴⁰⁷ Never mind that with the collapse of the Soviet empire, the world discovered that government-created environmental catastrophes on a scale far worse than anything in the capitalist West were commonplace in the “People’s Democracies.” The scale of ecological degradation inflicted by Soviet Communism has been known since at least the mid-1990s. ⁴⁰⁸ Professor Foster evidently has not noticed.

In the same issue of Monthly Review, Professor Foster revealed himself to be an adherent of the most extreme global warming scenario. “It is now rational, as Jared Diamond explains in his new book Collapse,” he wrote, “to consider the possibility of the ecological collapse of global capitalist society, in ways analogous to earlier ecological collapses of civilizations.”⁴⁰⁹ Global warming is happening, Foster suggests, because of the end of the Cold War and collapse of Soviet socialism, which unleashed rapacious capitalism. “[T]he problem is capitalism,” Professor Foster writes; “the only solution, as difficult as this may be to contemplate at the present time [March 2005], is socialism.” ⁴¹⁰

Thomas Jefferson once observed that “to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.”⁴¹¹ It is likely that working Americans in Oregon would probably share Jefferson’s disgust if they were aware of the Marxist religion of hatred for economic liberty and for America that their tax dollars subsidize at their state university.

Research: Lowell Ponte

Professor H. Bruce Franklin

Rutgers University

— John Cotton Dana Professor of English and American Studies, Rutgers University

— Co-founder of the Bay Area Revolutionary Union, a Maoist vanguard

— Editor of The Essential Stalin. (“Stalin is the opposite of what we in the capitalist world have been programmed to believe.”)

In 1969, as an associate professor of English at Stanford University, H. Bruce Franklin co-founded the Bay Area Revolutionary organization as a Maoist vanguard. His partners in creating the organization were Bob Avakian (who would later become the cult leader of the Revolutionary Communist Party) and Stephen Charles Hamilton, formerly a member of the Progressive Labor Party, also a Maoist group. Based in the San Francisco Bay area and drawing many of its members from Stanford, Professor Franklin’s group embraced the ideals of armed struggle in the hopes of establishing a “dictatorship of the proletariat” in the United States.

In 1971, a factional dispute caused Professor Franklin, formerly a military intelligence officer, to leave the organization taking about half of its 500-odd members with him. The dispute centered on the issue of “armed struggle.” Avakian’s faction maintained that violent revolution should not begin for another fifteen years or so, while the impatient Professor Franklin and his followers wanted to begin acts of terror immediately. Avakian eventually renamed the organization the Revolutionary Communist Party, which is a campus presence today.

Meanwhile, Professor Franklin established a new organization, Venceremos (Spanish for “We will win” and a slogan of Fidel Castro). Calling for the victory of Maoism everywhere, Venceremos demanded that its members maintain a passionate commitment to armed struggle. Venceremos supported the victory of the North Vietnamese, and voiced its commitment to violence to support the Communist side in the war. Each Venceremos member was required to own four specific types of guns. A San Francisco Examiner reporter who interviewed Professor Franklin at the time summarized the Venceremos agenda as Professor Franklin described it to him: Encourage young men “not to fight the draft. Go to Vietnam and shoot your commanding officer. Become an airplane mechanic and learn to sabotage planes. . . . [A]ll police and members of their families must be killed and law enforcement demoralized. All jails and prisons must be opened and inmates liberated.”⁴¹² An outgrowth of Venceremos was the notorious Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) terrorist group that kidnapped Patricia Hearst in 1974. Venceremos provided most of the SLA’s members and support.

In 1972, Professor Franklin was fired from his tenured professorship for having delivered three on-campus speeches that led to violence and rioting on campus. Only after listening to 110 witnesses testify during a six-week period did a seven-member Advisory Board vote 5–2 in favor of his dismissal. That decision was endorsed by Stanford president Richard Lyman and was upheld by the Board of Trustees by a margin of 20–2. Professor Franklin later sued the university in an attempt to regain his job, but lost in court.

In that same year, Professor Franklin edited The Essential Stalin. Identifying himself as a Communist, Franklin wrote, “I used to think of Joseph Stalin as a tyrant and butcher who jailed and killed millions.... But, to about a billion people today, Stalin is the opposite of what we in the capitalist world have been programmed to believe.... If we are to understand Stalin at all, and evaluate him from the point of view of either of the two major opposing classes, we must see him, like all historical figures, as a being created by his times and containing the contradictions of those times.... In 1952, the Soviet Union was the second greatest industrial, scientific, and military power in the world.... From a Communist point of view, Stalin was certainly one of the greatest of revolutionary leaders. . . . ”⁴¹³

Today Professor Franklin holds an endowed chair in the English Department at Rutgers University, implying that there was no more qualified candidate than a man who was an admirer of Stalin and had already lost a tenured position because he had incited students to acts of violence. In 2000, Professor Franklin published a book titled Vietnam and Other American Fantasies, which, according to one enthusiastic reviewer, “is the product of [his] long history of critical analysis of the United States’ imperial arrogance.” The text is widely used in college courses. According to Professor Franklin, “Countless Americans came to see the people of Vietnam fighting against U.S. forces as anything but an enemy to be feared and hated. Tens of millions sympathized with their suffering, many came to identify with their 2,000-year struggle for independence, and some even found them an inspiration for their own lives.” Franklin was one of the signatories to the Historians Against the War [in Iraq] 2003 denunciation of America’s effort to liberate Iraq.

See also: Professors Aptheker, Baraka, Davis, Furr, Targ

Research: John Perazzo

Professor Grover Furr

Montclair State University

— Associate professor of English at Montclair State University

— Believes it was “morally wrong” for the United States to bring about the collapse of the Soviet Union

— “What [American universities] need, and would much benefit from, is more Marxists, radicals, leftists—all terms conventionally applied to those who fight against exploitation, racism, sexism, and capitalism.”

Since 1970, Grover Furr has been a professor of English at Montclair State University in Montclair, New Jersey. While his academic expertise is in medieval English literature, he presents himself as an expert on Communism, which he embraces. “Was there something morally wrong in trying to bring down the Soviet Union?” asks Furr. “I think the only honest answer possible is: Yes, it was wrong.”⁴¹⁴

In a speech delivered at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Essex County in New Jersey, Furr said, “I think the reason Stalin is vilified is because, in his day at the helm of the Soviet Union, the exploiters all over the world had something to worry about! That’s why I feel some kinship with Stalin and the Communist movement of his day.” And not only his day: “What the majority of humanity needs today is an International like [the Communist International] to co-ordinate the fight against exploitation—just as the IMF and the World Bank, Exxon and Reebok, the U.S. and French and the other governments, coordinate the fight FOR exploitation.” A copy of the entire speech appears on his academic website, which is a site his students must use as a study resource.⁴¹⁵

Although not a historian, Furr frequents the “Historians of American Communism” net, ⁴¹⁶ a scholarly forum. There he engages in arguments with actual experts, for instance denying that Stalin’s government was responsible for the Katyn Massacre of 15,000 Polish Army officers during World War II (even though the Soviet government under Gorbachev admitted Soviet guilt and actually apologized to Poland), or denying Stalin’s well-documented campaign to liquidate the Jews: “The mass murder of Jews, but not only of Jews, by the Nazis is very well documented. In the case of the Cold War horror stories demonizing Stalin, the shoe is on the other foot—all the evidence points in the opposite direction.”⁴¹⁷ On another occasion, he wrote: “Of the hoary horror tales virtually taken for granted as true concerning Stalin, I have researched many at this point in my life, and have yet to find a single one that is true, or anywhere near it.”⁴¹⁸ Scholars participating in the forum generally find Furr’s positions alternately amusing and irritating, but generally absurd.

At Montclair State University, Professor Furr teaches a “General Humanities” course described on his website as “an introduction to Western European culture and society from the Ancient World through the Middle Ages.” Required reading for the course includes Ronald Takaki, a prominent multiculturalist whose view of America’s oppression of minorities is only a shade more moderate than Ward Churchill’s; Rodney Hilton, a British Communist; and G.E.M. de Ste Croix, whose The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World is a Marxist tract. Another of Furr’s courses, titled “The Great Books and Ideas,”⁴¹⁹ offers more radical fare. Readings for the course include works by Karl Marx, a Marxist analysis of Shakespeare by Richard Wilson, a book by Communist Party member Ted Allen, another by Marxist feminist Silvia Federici, and one by radical activist Marcus Rediker, who has worked to win a new trial for convicted cop killer and leftist icon Mumia Abu-Jamal. So much for “great ideas.”

Although Professor Furr has no training or credentials either as a historian of the United States or as a historian of southeast Asia, he is allowed by the Montclair State University central administration to teach a course on the Vietnam War. As one might expect from an amateur guided by political agendas, Professor Furr uses the course to vent his political passions on his helpless students. “The Western imperialists, the U.S. among them, are the biggest mass murderers in history.... The U.S. is even more guilty [of genocide] than Pol Pot.... It was a good thing that the U.S. ‘lost’ in Vietnam.... If the U.S. and their South Vietnamese stooges had won, South Vietnam would have been yet another place for American companies to move to. Hundreds of thousands more American workers would have lost their jobs.... Under no circumstances, therefore, should we ever support the U.S. government or believe what it says.”⁴²⁰ [emphasis in original]

A number of Professor Furr’s views are taken directly from Challenge, the Progressive Labor Party’s (Maoist) newspaper. Opinion pieces written by Professor Furr, on the other hand, are published in the school newspaper, The Montclarion, and also posted on his Montclair University website, where he celebrates the violence that took place in Los Angeles after the 1992 Rodney King verdict as a “rebellion,” accuses the U.S. of being behind the 1981 assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II,⁴²¹ and echoes the views of Ward Churchill and Noam Chomsky that on September 11, 2001 the U.S. got what it deserved.

Professor Furr is involved in the Modern Languages Association, whose recommendations are often implemented in secondary schools. Professor Furr heads the association’s radical caucus, ⁴²² which wields significant influence in the organization.

A sampling of the views of forty of Professor Furr’s students is available on RateMyProfessors.com.⁴²³ Among the comments: “I can’t believe this man is teaching!” “He sends you radical left wing propaganda almost every day through email.” “Pretend to be a communist and he’ll think you’re the greatest thing ever.” “He uses the classroom as a platform to teach his radical political views.” “Hates the USA.”

In Professor Furr’s view, universities are not radical enough. “What [American universities] need, and would much benefit from, is more Marxists, radicals, leftists—all terms conventionally applied to those who fight against exploitation, racism, sexism, and capitalism. We can never have too many of these, just as we can never have too few ‘conservatives.’”⁴²⁴

See also: Professors Aptheker, Davis, Foster, Franklin, Targ

Research: Rocco DiPippo⁴²⁵

Professor Melissa Gilbert

Temple University

— Associate professor of geography and urban studies, Temple University

— Favors a teaching approach that puts political “social action at the center of academic projects”

— Enlists students to conduct research substantiating her opposition to welfare reform as part of their coursework

Melissa Gilbert is an associate professor of geography and urban studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies at Temple University. Professor Gilbert’s academic interests include such political sub-specialties as “feminist geography” as well as “feminist and critical race theory.” Also listed among Professor Gilbert’s areas of expertise are political advocacy initiatives disguised as scholarship. These include Professor Gilbert’s zeal for “labor and community organizing,” and her affinity for “economic empowerment.”⁴²⁶

Professor Gilbert’s scholarly research is framed by her enthusiasm for political “social action.” In fact, she regards the roles of political activist and professional educator as one and the same. Her academic website notes that “because she is interested in social change, and the role of academics and research in this process, she has utilized social action research as part of a broader feminist methodology.”⁴²⁷ In other words, her research is self-consciously ideological and is driven by her fervent desire to impose her political agendas on the world.

Toward this end, Professor Gilbert is an exponent of what she calls “service learning.” In practice, this amounts to a sustained effort to inculcate political activism in her students by providing them with “opportunities to participate in community organizations,” and exposing them to “contexts for supporting community and grassroots efforts at social transformation.”⁴²⁸ In a 2004 academic paper expounding the merits of this approach, Professor Gilbert explained that it “positions social action at the center of academic projects.”⁴²⁹

Chief among these projects is Professor Gilbert’s ongoing campaign to oppose welfare reform. In 1998, for example, Professor Gilbert attempted to establish a “service learning program” in the Department of Geography and Urban Studies at Temple “to document human rights violations related to welfare reform.”⁴³⁰ It is a measure of her success that the “research” that current Temple students are assigned to conduct is aimed primarily at confirming Professor Gilbert’s assertion that work requirements “reduce the ability of [welfare] recipients to pursue educational goals” and, against all logic, that seeking employment makes it difficult for “poor women [to] attain economic self-sufficiency.”⁴³¹

Professor Gilbert concedes that programs that fuse academics and left-wing activism pose some “ethical problems.”⁴³² Nevertheless, she advocates “moving beyond course by course learning approaches.” The reason, according to Professor Gilbert, is that “these [activist] types of programs . . . help mitigate the unequal power relations between the university and the community.” So important is this goal to Professor Gilbert that she asserts that politically motivated research should be a “cornerstone of [university students’] educational development.”⁴³³

Evidence suggests it is already the cornerstone of Professor Gilbert’s courses. Transparently geared toward political activism, Professor Gilbert’s courses are informed by her belief that American society and its institutions are fundamentally racist and discriminatory, especially toward women. In one recent academic article, Professor Gilbert asserted that “most women are in sex-segregated occupations with the attendant low wages and lack of opportunity for advancement”⁴³⁴ (a proposition that would be hard to square with any data).

Professor Gilbert’s course “Urban Society: ‘Race,’ Class and Gender in the City,” begins in tendentious fashion, with a section called “The Social Construction of ‘Race’: Racism and White Privilege.”⁴³⁵ The title reflects the fashionable view among radical social theorists that race is not a neutral biological fact but is the creation of white supremacists who use it to oppress minorities. The next section of Professor Gilbert’s course propounds a feminist version of this radical social-constructivist theory, and is called the “Social Construction of Gender.” Assigned readings in both these sections and throughout Professor Gilbert’s syllabus are exclusively by radical advocates of these theories. A third section of the course is organized around the proposition that the “internal structure” of American cities is “institutional racism.” Again, no texts critical of this conclusion are provided for students. The final section of Professor Gilbert’s syllabus introduces students to a variety of radical organizations and movements working to transform society in accordance with Gilbert’s own radical politics.⁴³⁶

A similarly activist spirit pervades Professor Gilbert’s course “Urban Policy Analysis.” The course starts from the dubious premise that unjust urban policies in the United States are responsible for the fact that “resources and power are unequally distributed by ‘race,’ class, gender, and geography.”⁴³⁷ Any scholarly discussion of public policy issues presenting a different intellectual viewpoint—liberal, libertarian, or conservative—is conspicuously absent from the course’s agenda. Instead, students are expected to concentrate on a narrow political goal: designing policies that will realize Professor Gilbert’s vision of a radically transformed and egalitarian society. As the syllabus for the course notes, “We will also explore what kinds of policies and/or political action might result in a more equitable distribution of power and wealth.”⁴³⁸

Professor Gilbert’s other course on urban policy, “Modern Urban Analysis,” follows this pattern. The course is billed as an instruction in those “dominant accounts of scientific inquiry” that supposedly “explain urban processes.” The course is billed as an instruction in “Marxism, feminism, critical race theory, and postmodernism.”⁴³⁹ A fifth perspective, “positivism,” is included in addition to these four to represent views that accept the unjust status quo.

Yet another course taught by Professor Gilbert, “Poverty and Employment in the Changing Urban Economy,” seeks to blame poverty on “globalization” (i.e., the spread of free market institutions) and privatization. Comprised entirely of readings opposed to welfare reform and advocates of the welfare state, the course promises to introduce students to “the ways in which poor people have been organizing against the attacks on their economic and human rights.”⁴⁴⁰ Yet another introduction to radical movements.

Professor Gilbert, now in her forties, is a tenured associate professor in her department. This means that she will be playing a significant role in both the hiring and promotion of younger scholars at Temple for decades to come. Given the ideological fervor of her views, and her deep hostility to any perspective besides her own, it is hard to imagine that her votes will encourage intellectual diversity or disinterested academic inquiry in her field.

See also: Professors Austin, Bell, Berlowitz, Schwartz, Wolfe

Research: Jacob Laksin

Professor Todd Gitlin

Columbia University

— Professor of journalism and sociology at the Columbia School of Journalism

— Anti-war activist, author of a book on the sixties

— “The most powerful public emotion in our lives was rejecting patriotism.”

A former president of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the largest campus organization of the New Left in the early 1960s, Todd Gitlin is today a professor of journalism and sociology at the Columbia School of Journalism, where he immerses students in the obscurantist texts of leftist icons like Jurgen Habermas so that they can understand the oppressive nature of capitalist media. He is also an occasional contributor to The Nation and the New York Times.

Professor Gitlin is the author of The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage a standard apologia for the sixties, critical enough to earn it credibility, but firmly committed to the view that this was a progressive rather than a “destructive generation”⁴⁴¹ (the title of a critical book on the sixties by former radicals Peter Collier and David Horowitz). As a chronicler of the events of that decade, Professor Gitlin can hardly bring himself to acknowledge the actual crimes committed by sixties radicals like the Black Panther Party activists who were responsible for a series of robberies, arsons, and murders, preferring to view their thuggery as provoked by a repressive society.

Professor Gitlin has been a strong supporter of the Iraq antiwar movement. He has stated that the very “essence” of American policy in the war on terror is “monumental arrogance.” Not only is arrogance “the hallmark of [President] Bush’s foreign policy,” Professor Gitlin writes, but “it is his foreign policy.” Professor Gitlin participated in the infamous March 2003 Columbia University “teach-in,” at which his colleague Professor Nicholas De Genova expressed his wish that American soldiers might be slaughtered en masse in “a million Mogadishus.”

In an article titled “Varieties of Patriotism,” Professor Gitlin recently reflected upon the decades he has spent harboring the belief that his country is ultimately unworthy of his respect and even allegiance. He traced the roots of that sentiment back to the fires of the Vietnam War. “For a large bloc of Americans my age and younger,” he writes, “too young to remember World War II—the generation for whom ‘the war’ meant Vietnam and possibly always would, to the end of our days—the case against patriotism was not an abstraction. There was a powerful experience underlying it: as powerful an eruption of our feelings as the experience of patriotism is supposed to be for patriots. Indeed, it could be said that in the course of our political history we experienced a very odd turn about: The most powerful public emotion in our lives was rejecting patriotism.”⁴⁴² Coming of age in the era of the Vietnam War, then, was the perceived cause of what Professor Gitlin described, on another occasion, as his persistent sense of “estrangement,” “shame,” and “anger at being attached to a nation.” But of course the alienation of the Left from America long predates the Vietnam War and has outlasted it. That is because the alienation is the inevitable consequence of the analysis and agendas of the Left, which reject capitalism and individualism, the very foundations of the nation itself.

After 9/11 Professor Gitlin wrote an article critical of leftists who opposed the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan and even unfurled an American flag and hung it from his apartment window for a few weeks. But he soon re-furled it because “leaving the flag up was too easily misunderstood as a triumphalist cliché. It didn’t express my patriotic sentiment, which was turning toward political opposition . . .”⁴⁴³ This opposition quickly turned into contemptuous condemnation of his country’s efforts to liberate Iraq. “By the time George W. Bush declared war without end against an ‘axis of evil’ that no other nation on earth was willing to recognize as such—indeed, against whomever the president might determine we were at war against,... and declared further the unproblematic virtue of pre-emptive attacks, and made it clear that the United States regarded itself as a one-nation tribunal of ‘regime change,’ I felt again the old estrangement, the old shame and anger at being attached to a nation—my nation—ruled by runaway bullies, indifferent to principle, their lives manifesting supreme loyalty to private (though government slathered) interests, quick to lecture dissenters about the merits of patriotism. ”⁴⁴⁴

See also: Professors De Genova, Foner, Marable, Navasky, Scheer

Research: David Horowitz⁴⁴⁵

Professor Lewis Gordon

Temple University

— Laura H. Carnell Professor of Philosophy, Temple University

— Director of the Institute for the Study of Race and Social Thought,Temple University

— Structured Temple’s philosophy department around “genuinely radical” thinking

Lewis R. Gordon is a professor of philosophy at Temple University, Philadelphia. According to a faculty biography, his work concentrates on “Africana thought and the study of race and racism,” and particularly such sub-specialties as “postcolonial thought, theories of race and racism, philosophies of liberation, philosophy in film and literature, philosophy of education.”⁴⁴⁶

Professor Gordon is a member of the Radical Philosophy Association and was for many years the executive editor of its journal the Radical Philosophy Review, which bills itself as a “forum for activist scholars.” In keeping with its radical agenda, the association features an “Anti-Intervention Project” whose mandate explains “What is called globalization is, in fact, global capitalism, under the cultural, political and economic hegemony of the United States.” The Radical Philosophy Association proposes to play a “unique role in analyzing the various forms of intervention brought about by this new form of capitalism. As philosophers we can deconstruct the various ideological legiti-mations of these interventions.”⁴⁴⁷

Professor Gordon has written several articles for Political Affairs, a journal that describes itself as the “theoretical organ of the American Communist Party.” Gordon’s most recent book, Existentia Africana, was dedicated to his mentor Professor William R. Jones, author of a treatise called Is God a White Racist? A Preamble to Black Theology. In the preface to Existentia Africana, Gordon describes Jones’s work as a text in which “black liberation thinkers [are challenged] to take seriously the possibility that the signs and symbols of the Western religions upon which they depended may harbor the seeds of their destruction.”

According to Professor Gordon white America does not see blacks as individuals, but as a threatening “existential reality” waiting to overtake the country. “African philosophy” is Professor Gordon’s remedy. It will counter the “hostility” to blacks in American public life, Gordon argued, because it is “premised on identity and liberation.” Toward this end, practitioners of African philosophy have to do more than teach; they also have to “encourage the spirit of possibility” among their students, to “develop a sober conception of ‘utopia.’”

In a 1998 essay based on his book Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism, Professor Gordon argued for an “African-American philosophy,” a field of inquiry altogether different from “the traditional motivations of Western philosophy.”⁴⁴⁸ What made this racially defined discipline necessary, according to Professor Gordon, were the “humanistic anxieties” stemming from “modern slavery and racism,” which in Gordon’s view were “historically specific” to black Americans. Nor had these injustices been exorcised from modern American society, according to Professor Gordon. Especially outrageous was the unwillingness of Americans to regard African Americans in racial terms, in their “blackness.” As Professor Gordon explains, “The problem is that without their blackness, they would disappear; without addressing their blackness, the ethical question of how black people should be treated—as all people should be treated, with respect, with dignity—would be evaded.”

For Professor Gordon politics is an essential component of a philosophical education: “How seriously do we need to engage such a marriage of inquiry and politics? Consider the fact that right-wing and fascist forces are busily deploying instrumental reason in the service of their projects of a misanthropic future. Progressive education demands the construction of viable alternatives.” ⁴⁴⁹ The key, Professor Gordon explains, is for professors to view their students not merely as seekers of knowledge. They should also be seen as potential agents to be deployed in the service of their “progressive” political aims. “Our students should be the optimism of possibilities,” Professor Gordon writes.

An activist approach to teaching requires students ready to be activists. Before coming to Temple, Professor Gordon was a professor at Brown University and head of its Africana studies program where he specialized in “black philosophy.” In the spring of 2001, the student paper at Brown printed a paid advertisement opposing reparations for slavery 137 years after the fact. When radical students protesting the ad stole and destroyed an entire issue of the Brown Daily Herald, Professor Gordon became their faculty spokesman and chief defender. “If something is free, you can take as many copies as you like,” referring to the destruction. “This is not a free speech issue.”⁴⁵⁰

When Professor Gordon left Brown to take up his new position at Temple in the fall of 2004, he cited as one of his motivations his view that the students in urban Philadelphia would be even more political than the traditional students of Ivy League Brown, or as he put it, were more “willing to take intellectual risks.”⁴⁵¹ Professor Gordon’s appointment at Temple coincided with that of a new and like-minded department chair, Professor Paul Taylor, a “critical race theorist.”⁴⁵² Together they set about the task of reorganizing the philosophy department to ensure that it was “based on genuinely radical, genuinely critical thinking.” ⁴⁵³

In his first year at Temple, Professor Gordon founded a special institution, supported by Temple, to combine his twin avocations, activism and racial politics, called the Institute for the Study of Race and Social Thought. His colleague Professor Taylor is a close collaborator in shaping the programs of the Institute, which has held several conferences devoted to radical race themes. In September 2005, for example, the Institute hosted a conference on “Black Civil Society in American Political Life.” Among the panels were “Politics of Race, Gender and Class,” and “African Americans and American Democracy,” which was led by Professor Gordon and Al Sharpton adviser and Princeton professor Cornel West.⁴⁵⁴

In his departmental course on “Existentialism” Professor Gordon urges students to meditate upon the theme of “liberation.” Absurdly for a course about existentialism—which was exclusively the creation of European thinkers from Kierkegaard to Sartre—but wholly in keeping with Professor Gordon’s Afro-centrist prejudices, his course is not limited to what he calls the “Western perspective” but includes “contributions from Africana and Eastern thought,” including the work of such obscurities as “Nishtani” and “Jones.”⁴⁵⁵

Professor Gordon’s emphasis on the “liberation” of his students, especially racial minorities, is predicated on his view that minorities generally and blacks particularly are cruelly oppressed in American society. “Generally speaking, Blacks are expected to be attacked and never respond,” Professor Gordon explains. “To respond often leads to attacks of either being ‘too sensitive’ or ‘contentious.’ There seems only to be room for docility.”⁴⁵⁶ His solution, besides pursuing the study of revolutionary philosophy, is to support racial preferences. In this, he cites himself as an example: “I am a very proud affirmative action recipient.”⁴⁵⁷

Professor Gordon’s mission at Temple, apparently successful so far, is to replace a traditional department devoted to academic philosophy with a department of philosophy blatantly devoted to political activism. It is the overt, indeed self-confident nature of this agenda that is both striking and troubling for the future of academic studies at Temple.

See Also: Professors Anton, Austin, Bell, hooks, Jaggar, Jeffries, Thomas

Research: Jacob Laksin

Professor Jose Angel Gutierrez

University of Texas, Arlington

— Professor of political science

— Director of the Mexican-American Studies Center at the University of Texas, Arlington

— “We have got to eliminate the gringo, and what I mean by that is if the worst comes to the worst, we have got to kill him.”

A licensed attorney and a former county judge for Zavala County, Texas, Chicano activist Jose Angel Gutierrez is a professor of political science and director of the Mexican-American Studies Center at the University of Texas, Arlington. Gutierrez has also served as president of the school board for the Crystal City Independent School District, and as the Urban Renewal Commissioner for Crystal City, Texas. He received a BA from Texas A&M University in 1966; a master’s degree from St. Mary’s University in San Antonio, Texas; a PhD from the University of Texas, Austin; and a law degree from the University of Houston’s Bates College of Law.

Early in his activism, in the 1960s Gutierrez worked to reform public education, demanding equal treatment for Chicano students. By 1967, however, his call for equality had been transformed into a doctrine of Chicano supremacy, and he helped establish the Mexican American Youth Organization (MAYO). For a decade, MAYO was the most important political organization of Mexican American youth in Texas. While professing a dedication to social justice⁴⁵⁸ for its constituents, MAYO stressed Chicano cultural nationalism and sought to achieve its goals via direct political confrontation. Rejecting diplomacy in favor of a more aggressive style, the group made its official logo an Aztec warrior inside a circle.

According to the April 3, 1969, Congressional Record, Texas Democratic congressman Henry B. Gonzalez said the following about MAYO: “MAYO styles itself the embodiment of good and the Anglo-American as the incarnation of evil. That is not merely ridiculous, it is drawing fire from the deepest wellsprings of hate. The San Antonio leader of MAYO, Jose Angel Gutierrez, may think himself something of a hero, but he is, in fact, only a benighted soul if he believes that in the espousal of hatred he will find love. He is simply deluded if he believes that the wearing of fatigues . . . makes his followers revolutionaries.... One cannot fan the flames of bigotry one moment and expect them to disappear the next.”⁴⁵⁹ Although MAYO closed its doors in the 1970s, Gutierrez’s radical calls for a Chicano uprising continued.

“We have got to eliminate the gringo,” Professor Gutierrez said, “and what I mean by that is if the worst comes to the worst, we have got to kill him.”⁴⁶⁰ Animated by this belief, Gutierrez established the militant La Raza Unida (“the Unified Race”), an association of groups formed in the late 1960s and early 1970s with chapters throughout the Southwest, especially in California, Colorado, and Texas. La Raza Unida was founded on the premise that Mexican territory was stolen by white Americans, and that large regions of the American Southwest do not rightfully belong to the United States. With calls for the seizure of U.S. land as one of the organization’s chief objectives, La Raza Unida held its first convention in 1972 and continues working toward this goal today. In 2004, La Raza Unida produced an ad to publicize an August 24 rally to be held in a venue it identified as “East Los Angeles, Califaztlán.” The significance of this merging of the words “California” and “Aztlán” cannot be overstated. Radical Hispanic groups such as La Raza Unida and MEChA commonly refer to a mythical place called Aztlán.⁴⁶¹ This is supposedly the cradle of Aztec civilization which was unjustly seized by the United States following the Mexican-American War, and which ought now be returned to its alleged rightful owners: the people and government of Mexico. La Raza Unida articulates its own—and Gutierrez’s—immigration philosophy as follows: “We see no human being as ‘illegal.’ Those who have arrived to the U.S. with heritage indigenous to the Americas, and specifically those crossing the southern border, are migrants on their own continent.”⁴⁶²

Speaking in California in 1995, Professor Gutierrez said: “The border remains a military zone. We remain a hunted people. Now you think you have a destiny to fulfill in the land that historically has been ours for forty thousand years. And we’re a new Mestizo nation. And they want us to discuss civil rights. Civil rights. What law made by white men to oppress all of us of color, female and male. This is our homeland. We cannot—we will not—and we must not be made illegal in our own homeland. We are not immigrants that came from another country to another country. We are migrants, free to travel the length and breadth of the Americas because we belong here. We are millions. We just have to survive. We have an aging white America. They are not making babies. They are dying. It’s a matter of time. The explosion is in our population.”⁴⁶³

In April 2004, Gutierrez spoke in Kansas City at the “Latino Civil Rights Summit,” where he stated, “We are the future of America. Unlike any prior generation, we now have the critical mass. We’re going to Latinize this country.”⁴⁶⁴ Gutierrez is the author of a number of books about Chicano activism, including The Making of a Chicano Militant and Making of a Civil Rights Leader: Jose Angel Gutierrez. He is also the author of A Chicano Manual on How to Handle Gringos.

These are not scholarly books but political propaganda, the last one an example of crude racism. (One can only imagine how the University of Texas at Arlington would have reacted to a faculty member who had dared to publish a book with a reverse title, say, An Anglo-Saxon Manual on How to Handle Chicanos. Yet Professor Gutierrez has received tenure status from his department and his university, and is therefore authorized to pass on scholarship, hiring, and promotion of other faculty.

Professor Gutierrez once said, “Our devil has pale skin and blue eyes.”⁴⁶⁵ Notwithstanding such statements, and notwithstanding his intimate involvement with such radical organizations as MAYO and La Raza Unida, Gutierrez has received a number of awards and honors. In 2000 he was named one of the “100 Outstanding Latino Texans of the 20th Century” by Latino Monthly. In 1996 he was named “Distinguished Texas Hispanic” by Texas Hispanic Magazine. In 1995 he received the Distinguished Faculty Award from the Texas Association of Chicanos in Higher Education. And in 1994 he received the “Chicano Hero Award” from the largest Hispanic organization in the United States, the National Council of La Raza.

See also: Professor Navarro

Research: Thomas Ryan, John Perazzo

Professor Yvonne Haddad

Georgetown University

— Professor of the history of Islam and Christian-Muslim relations

— Criticized the U.S. government for closing down several Islamic charities funding terrorist organizations

When White House officials briefly used the word “crusade”⁴⁶⁶ to express American resolve in the war on terror, Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad, professor of the history of Islam and Christian-Muslim relations at the Center for Christian-Muslim Understanding at Georgetown University, scolded them. “It’s what the terrorists use to recruit people—saying that Christians are on a crusade against Islam. It’s as bad to their ears as it is when we hear ‘jihad.’”⁴⁶⁷ Of course the last crusade—a response to the Muslim invasion of the Holy Land—occurred more than seven hundred years ago.

When the media later observed that American Muslim football teams use such names as “Mujahideen,” “Intifada” and “Soldiers of Allah,” Professor Haddad was quick to defend the team titles, saying, “Who cares? Why are people so sensitive? Intifada is something that Muslims and Palestinians all approve of. It means ‘just get off my back.’ Is the only way we accept [Muslims] is if we devalue their faith?”⁴⁶⁸

In fact, although Professor Haddad has made a name for herself advocating “sensitivity” in the dialogue between Orient and Occident, hers is a one-way street, where it is only the West that possesses a deficit of cross-civilizational understanding, contrition, and deference. Haddad’s double standards are embodied in the very mission statement of Georgetown’s Center for Christian-Muslim Understanding, which she helps to run, proclaiming, “Regrettably, it continues to be imperative to counter the misunderstanding and ignorance of Islam. The Center works to erase the stereotypes and fear that lead to predictions of Islam as the next global threat or a clash of civilizations between the Muslim world and the West.”⁴⁶⁹ In Haddad’s view, as between Occident and Orient, it is exclusively the West that is in need of remedial education.

Since the World Trade Center attacks of 2001, Professor Haddad has used the language of multiculturalism and Muslim sensitivity to attack a raft of policy decisions the administration has embarked on. For example, when the U.S. intervened in Afghanistan in the fall of 2001, Haddad explained, “many Muslims were offended by the U.S. destruction of the Taliban in Afghanistan because the Taliban stood for Islam.”⁴⁷⁰ Haddad added that liberating Afghani women was counterproductive to U.S. interests, as “Muslim women have formed their opinion of American women from watching T.V. reruns of shows like Dynasty and as a result assume American women to be ‘whores’.”⁴⁷¹

Professor Haddad’s quest for greater sensitivity towards Muslims has prompted her to castigate virtually every domestic response to the terrorist threat. In a speech in the spring of 2004, Haddad condemned the Patriot Act, saying (falsely) “It basically lifted all legal protection of liberty for Muslims and Arabs in the United States.”⁴⁷² When the FBI closed down several Islamic charities after discovering they were funding terrorist organizations, Professor Haddad protested, “In effect, the American government is perceived by Muslims to have assumed a veto power over zakat (tithe), one of the basic tenets of the Islamic faith.”⁴⁷³ Her conclusion: “The security measures adopted by the Bush Administration are perceived both overseas and among many in the Muslim community in North America not as anti-terrorism but as anti-Muslim.”⁴⁷⁴

True to multiculturist form, Professor Haddad would have the West respond to its present security challenges not with statecraft or force, but with apologies. In a forum discussing Pope John Paul II’s visit to the Holy Land in 2000, Professor Haddad fixated on what she called an “apology deficit” in the West. “It is a fact that there are some Arab Christians and Muslims who are still waiting for the Jewish people to apologize for what they have done to the Palestinians.”⁴⁷⁵ In addition, she remonstrated with the pope for apologizing to Jews for the Holocaust but not apologizing to the Palestinians for what Israel is allegedly doing to them.

See also: Professors Algar, J. Cole, McCloud, Mazrui

Research: Jonathan Dowd-Gailey⁴⁷⁶

Professor Warren Haffar

Arcadia University

— Assistant professor of political science at Arcadia University, director of the International Peace and Conflict Resolution Program

— Believes Osama bin Laden should be a negotiating partner

— Likens American Revolutionaries to Islamist jihadists

Warren Haffar is an assistant professor of political science at Pennsylvania Arcadia University. He received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in “Conflict Resolution and Peace Science.” An environmental activist, he also serves as the director of the school’s International Peace and Conflict Resolution Program. The scarcely concealed aim of the program is to indoctrinate students in a left-wing understanding of international conflicts grounded in the unswervingly anti-military certitudes of the faculty. An emblem of this mission is Haffar’s reaction to the terrorist attacks of September 11. The core of Haffar’s argument was that Osama bin Laden was a man with genuine grievances whom the United States could do business with.

In October of 2001, Haffar warned a still-grieving American public against the folly of demonizing the al-Qaeda terrorist. Better to accept bin Laden as a permanent feature on the international landscape, Haffar advised. “Oftentimes,” he explained, “these people stick around and we have to look at them, deal with them in a different capacity.” Rather than hunting down the terrorist responsible for the atrocities of 9/11, Haffar urged the United States to accommodate him, to “reconstruct his identity in a way that is positive.”⁴⁷⁷ That is, the brutal deaths of 3,000 innocent Americans had somehow wrongly led the United States to the “cultural construction” of Osama bin Laden as a savage enemy who ruthlessly killed civilians.

As the director of Arcadia’s International Peace and Conflict Resolution Program, Haffar has made his perspective the underlying theme of the program’s curriculum. The program was developed with the assistance of the radical anti-war group Physicians for Social Responsibility. Its staff is made up of faculty with an aversion to any existing American foreign policy direction and to any course other than one guided by the assumption that all international conflicts, irrespective of their nature or of the parties involved—even terrorists whose agenda is the killing of infidels—have non-violent solutions. “War,” Haffar insisted during the lead-up to the Iraq conflict, “is the least desirable outcome. If we go to war, that means we’ve failed.” How this attitude differs from that of appeasement, considering Saddam’s many violations of international law, including the U.N. ultimatum (Resolution 1441) of November 8, 2002, Haffar does not address.

In an observation that would be unintelligible to most Americans but is nonetheless common to many peace studies programs, Professor Haffar claims there is no significant difference between the American founders and the Islamic terrorists. “Look at the strategies and tactics that were used at the time of the Revolution, and that were responsible for our winning,” Haffar says. “Rebels were jumping out of the woods and using guerrilla tactics.” Professor Haffar deplores the negative images in which al-Qaeda terrorists have been cast: “We look upon terrorists as savages,” he laments, attributing the negative images to a biased media.⁴⁷⁸

While Professor Haffar has relentlessly negative views of America’s international actions, he is more than willing to exculpate organizations like the United Nations and its leader Kofi Annan of any malfeasance. In the midst of the scandal in which top UN officials colluded with Saddam Hussein to steal $21 billion of the “Oil for Food” program earmarked for Iraqi children, Professor Haffar explained to the press: “Kofi Annan has not been shy about confronting the U.S. That is his role and that is why some people are going after him.”⁴⁷⁹

In attacking America’s war in Iraq, Professor Haffar claimed to be concerned about children. “If bombs are flying and troops are marching in, it’s a terrible experience for kids,” Haffar told an interviewer. “They might lose their parents. They might lose their house. They might lose their school. They might lose their friends. War is such a horrible option.” Yet when urging Washington to appease Saddam Hussein (“To manage interethnic conflict, you can have a dictator like Saddam Hussein that holds all the power”), Professor Haffar simplify ignored Saddam’s war against Iraq’s children, his deportation and detainment of thousands of children during the Iran-Iraq war; his unleashing of chemical weapons on thousands more in the Kurdish regions of his country; his approval of government-run sex trafficking in children; his prison for four- to twelve-year-olds; his torturing of children in the presence of their parents to extract information from them; and his theft of the money earmarked for Iraqi children in the “Oil for Food” program. ⁴⁸⁰

Professor Haffar is a regular speaker on the academic lecture circuit, where he bills himself as an expert on “conflict resolution” and “terrorism and anti-terrorism.” Professor Haffar’s view is that all anti-terrorism efforts that involve force are wrong and a “failure.”

See also: Professors Alam, Berlowitz, Coy, Eckstein, Fellman, Targ

Research: Jacob Laksin

Tom Hayden

Occidental College

— Adjunct lecturer in politics at Occidental College

— Lectures that the United States seeks to establish an “empire” in the Middle East

— Calls for an anti-war “strategy” to defeat the United States in Iraq

Tom Hayden is a former New Left activist and a current adjunct lecturer in politics at the Urban and Environmental Policy Institute at Occidental College, Los Angeles. Hayden has no scholarly publications, nor does he have any training beyond a BA that would qualify him for such a post—and especially for teaching (as he does) a course on international politics (see below); his writings are merely the venting of left-wing opinions, which also describes his classes at Occidental.

A onetime leader of the 1960s-era radical group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Hayden has made his experiences as an activist the organizing theme of his course “Politics and Protest.” The activist agenda underlying “Politics and Protest” is transparent in the course description and syllabus. Adopting the vocabulary and specific agendas of the political Left, it explains that the course “will focus on such protest issues as human rights, fair trade, racial and gender justice, the environment, immigration, war and militarism, and poverty.”⁴⁸¹ A typical lecture is titled “The Student Anti-Sweatshop Movement.” One text is assigned for the lecture: Featherstone, “Latin Sweatshops Pressed by U.S. Campus Power.” No text is provided which takes a critical look at the agendas of the activists or at the underlying economic assumptions of their movement.

Other required texts follow this pattern and are drawn overwhelmingly from left-wing authors, mainly Hayden himself (e.g, “It’s Empire Vs. Democracy”). The readings hail the Marxist guerrillas in Chiapas, and incite opposition to “globalization” and “American Empire.” The course even includes a special section on SDS, for which students are required to read a single article from The Nation magazine: “The Port Huron Statement at 40.” Co-authored by Hayden with Dick Flacks in 2002, it is an exercise in nostalgia in which the two authors of the SDS manifesto celebrate their own handiwork.⁴⁸² Students are provided with no critical views of SDS, its ideology, its tactics, or its spiral downwards into terrorism—although there are several academic studies available.

Another course taught by Hayden, “The Politics of Globalization,” displays the same preference for political advocacy over scholarship. A longtime activist in the radical wing of the environmental movement and as a legislator, Hayden views the course as a training ground for future activists. Although the course claims to address the “debates about free trade and fair trade,” what it in fact does is settle these debates in favor of Hayden’s hostility towards free market capitalism. Toward this end, the course focuses on such fashionable environmentalist causes as “sustainable communities.” The course praises the “grassroots movements linking Americans and others around the world to address issues of economic justice, and issues of corporate social responsibility.”⁴⁸³ The movements praised are anarchist, Marxist, and other forms of radicalism.

Hayden has also leveraged his reputation as a student radical into regular speaking engagements on university campuses. Appearing at the University of Wisconsin in 2002, he delivered a lecture entitled “Saving Democracy from the Globalization and from the War on Terror.” Hayden took the occasion to air a conspiracy theory, claiming that the United States had no interest in putting an end to terrorism. Rather, he asserted, the U.S. government was only using the pretext of the war on terrorism to establish an empire in the Middle East, with plans to invade Syria and Iran in the offing.⁴⁸⁴ In this connection, Hayden has claimed that the threat of terrorism is merely a propaganda invention of “conservatives inside and outside the Bush administration [who] are seeking to take advantage of America’s understandable fears to push a right-wing agenda that would not otherwise be palatable.”⁴⁸⁵ Far from being focused on combating terrorism, according to Hayden, these conservatives simply seek to “justify the continuation of a growing military budget and an authoritarian emphasis on national security.”⁴⁸⁶

By 2004, Hayden was openly calling for the anti-war movement to sabotage the U.S.-led military campaign. “The strategy,” he explained, “must be to deny the U.S. occupation funding, political standing, sufficient troops, and alliances necessary to their strategy for dominance.”⁴⁸⁷ Beyond denying any further funding to American troops, Hayden insisted that “the movement will need to start opening another underground railroad to havens in Canada for those who refuse to serve.” Hayden also called for opposition to America’s “puppet regime” in Iraq and stressed the need to defeat the U.S. strategy of “Iraqization”—that is, devolving power to democratically elected Iraqi leaders. ⁴⁸⁸ The tactic bore striking similarities to Hayden’s successful campaign during the Vietnam War to pressure Congress into suspending all aid to the anti-Communist regimes in Vietnam and Cambodia. In his autobiography, Reunion, Hayden momentarily regretted the consequences of that campaign, which led to the victory of Pol Pot and the Cambodian genocide (approximately two million people were killed), but evidently this remorse was short-lived.

See also: Professors, Cloud, Ensalaco, hooks, LeVine, Schwartz

Research: Jacob Laksin

Professor Caroline Higgins

Earlham College

— Professor of peace and global studies and history, Earlham College

— Director of the Global Studies Program, Earlham College

— Her courses are premised around community activism; students are informed that they will “be working for peace and justice.”

Caroline Higgins is a professor of peace and global studies and history, and director of the Global Studies Program at Earlham College, a Quaker school in Richmond, Indiana. In a review posted online for Earlham’s “Peace and Global Studies Library,” Professor Higgins lauded Empire, a polemical analysis of globalization by the neo-Marxist writer Michael Hardt and the convicted terrorist Antonio Negri, “for its vision of putting an end to capitalist exploitation and ushering in a communist society based on cooperation and community.”⁴⁸⁹

Professor Higgins is entitled to her private political views. The professional issue is that her political views are everywhere stringently enforced in her classroom. For example, her course “Methods of Peacemaking” amounts to a for-credit blueprint for left-wing activism. A syllabus for the course notes that it is principally concerned with “social movements and initiatives which suggest new strategies for change.”⁴⁹⁰ But students are not only expected to study such movements and their strategies—they are actually expected by their professor to implement those strategies in the Richmond community. In the words of the syllabus, there is “inevitably an intersection of practice and theory.” Students are informed that “we shall be working for peace and justice.”⁴⁹¹

The students are to begin by mapping “the thematic universe of Richmond, Indiana,” in order to identify “challenges and growth points in the community.”⁴⁹² Professor Higgins does not hesitate to provide an example of the types of “growth points” that students are encouraged to consider. Students are expected to “visit a factory” and meet with “labor union leaders.”⁴⁹³ The underlying idea of the course is for students to “refine” their own theories about “which initiatives for peace and social change are effective,” in order that they may “contribute through cultural action to building peace in Richmond.”⁴⁹⁴ Assignments for the course duly reinforce that mission. For instance, students are required to write a paper meditating on “the challenges and rewards of ethnographic activity for the social activist.”⁴⁹⁵

An analogous methodology marks “Theory and Practice Revisited,” a senior seminar for peace studies students and one which is intended to be the “capstone” course of their experience at Earlham. Taught after taking the seminar, students are expected to achieve “clarity” about their “personal positions with regard to peace and social transformation.” Similarly, one purpose of the course is “to work together to produce analysis of a problem, development, challenge, or approach to social change, which is enlightening for peace theorists and activists.”⁴⁹⁶ That there should be no doubt about the kind of social change that Professor Higgins finds desirable, readings for the course are comprised, without exception, of works by Marxists and other radicals, including Gore Vidal, Angela Davis, and even the Mexican Marxist guerilla leader Subcomandante Marcos. No alternative social analysis, no conflict or debate with these views, is even attempted—or wanted.

Professor Higgins’s course in the “Philosophy of Social Science” is an exercise in anti-Western polemics: “Only in the twentieth century have various African, Asian, and Latin American philosophers challenged European hegemony in the field,” her syllabus informs students. They are joined by “women, people of color, and other diverse groups who have also rejected what they consider to be an [sic] European, male-centered approach to philosophy.”⁴⁹⁷ Professor Higgins makes no attempt to justify the evident absence of diverse views or scholarly skepticism in her required readings: “Against the approach of this course it can be objected that students get essentially one point of view, a point of view critical of mainstream thinking. This is a valid objection,” Professor Higgins notes in her syllabus.⁴⁹⁸ Rather than remedying this unprofessional curriculum, Professor Higgins suggests that students look elsewhere for a less doctrinal discussion of philosophical issues: “My response is that rather than changing this course, I should urge all of you to take more courses and read more books,” she writes.⁴⁹⁹ Explaining her position, Professor Higgins invokes her radical belief that the function of a professor is essentially adversarial to the mainstream culture, and that she must challenge the “common assumptions of our culture.” ⁵⁰⁰ In other words, if students do not want to be fed one-sided radical propaganda instead of scholarship, then her only advice is to try someone else’s course.

The main theme of Professor Higgins’s course “Feminism, Ecology and Peace” is her transparent aversion to Western culture. Teeming with feminist, environmentalist, and Marxist tropes, the course examines “three kinds of oppression—sexism, exploitation of the earth, and class and colonial violence.”⁵⁰¹ In keeping with its promise, outlined in the syllabus, to offer “[a]lternatives to oppressive economic social structures,”⁵⁰² the course’s required readings consist entirely of tracts from radical feminist and environmentalist ideologues.

Despite being a full professor of peace and global studies and history, and the head of an entire academic program, Professor Higgins’s “scholarship” is essentially non-existent. It is limited to the editing of a book of impressionistic essays praising peace studies. Her only solo-authored book is a novel, Sweet Country. Written twenty years ago under her married name, Caroline Richards, it tells the story of a leftist underground movement in the wake of the 1973 coup in Chile.

See also: Professors Berlowitz, Eckstein, Fellman, Targ, Wolfe

Research: Jacob Laksin

Professor James Holstun

State University of New York, Buffalo

— Professor of English

— Faculty adviser to the Graduate Group of Marxist Studies

— Refers to Israel’s 1948 creation as “The Catastrophe”

James Holstun is a professor of English at the State University of New York (SUNY), Buffalo. Though his professional training is in English literature, his departmental website informs students : “My work is generally Marxist, and I think Marxist theory and political practice are more relevant now than ever, given the global dominance of the capitalist mode of production and American imperialism.”⁵⁰³

Holstun received his BA in English Literature from Georgetown University in 1977; he pursued his graduate studies at the University of California, Irvine, where he earned both a master’s degree (1979) and a PhD (1983) in English Literature. Holstun began his teaching career at UCLA, where he was a lecturer in the English Department from 1983 to 1985. The following year he was hired as an assistant professor of English at the University of Vermont and in 1991 became associate professor of English at SUNY Buffalo. Since 2000, he has been a full professor of English at Buffalo.

Professor Holstun has authored two books: A Rational Millennium: Puritan Utopias of Seventeenth-Century England and America (1987); and Ehu’s Dagger: Class Struggle in the English Revolution (2000). He also edited Pamphlet Wars: Prose in the English Revolution (1992).

Professor Holstun’s extreme views on Israel have propelled him into the midst of a rising campus controversy. At issue is Professor Holstun’s insistence on spreading anti-Israeli bias through both the academic and advisory positions he currently holds at Buffalo.

Beginning in 2002, Professor Holstun has taught at least one course each year on Palestinian literature, though he holds no formal academic qualifications to teach in the relevant fields, neither in Middle Eastern history nor in Arabic. His degrees are all in the field of English literature. But in a pattern that is all too common in the contemporary academy, this has not prevented Holstun from using the cover of a “literature” class to vent his political prejudices, encountering no problems with either the English Department or the Buffalo central administration for doing so. The texts for the course are Palestinian writings since the foundation of the State of Israel in 1948. According to Professor Holstun, the ensuing years have proven an unrelieved disaster for the proletarian Palestinians, who have been “occupied and exiled” by the powerful capitalist Jews.

Professor Holstun is forthright about the polemical content of his course. “We will focus on Palestinian culture and society since Al-Nakbah (‘The Catastrophe,’ which is how Professor Holstun and the Palestinian rulers at war with Israel refer to Israel’s creation in 1948), during which Zionists drove 700,000 Palestinians from their homes.”⁵⁰⁴ There is no historical basis for Professor Holstun’s statement. Nonetheless his syllabus continues. “We’ll be looking not just at Palestine’s struggles with Zionism, but . . . Joan Peters’s influential attempt to erase Palestinians, and Norman Finkelstein’s response.” The advocacy nature of this course, wholly inappropriate to an academic curriculum, is underscored by the invidious reference to Joan Peters’s scholarly work and to a notorious Holocaust denier like Professor Norman Finkelstein as the antidote. In April of 2004, the Graduate Group of Marxist Studies, at Professor Holstun’s instigation, invited Professor Finkelstein to Buffalo to deliver a lecture. A New York Times review of Finkelstein’s 2003 book The Holocaust Industry described the book as “an ideological fanatic’s view.”⁵⁰⁵ In an email that was reprinted on Professor Finkelstein’s personal website, Professor Holstun enthused that Finkelstein’s Buffalo lecture was a “particularly welcome event . . . Finkelstein was superb.”

Professor Holstun’s course on Palestinian literature includes such non-literary texts as A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples by Ilan Pappe, a virulently anti-Zionist professor at Haifa University, who recently backed an academic boycott of Israeli universities by English academic leftists. Professor Holstun has said he welcomes the author’s conspiratorial narrative, which calls the “expulsion of Palestinians in 1948 an act of ‘ethnic cleansing,’ proceeding under the aegis of the Zionist ‘Plan D,’ which systematically drove 700,000 Palestinian Arabs from their villages.”⁵⁰⁶ The claim is pure invention.

In his class Professor Holstun also screens films such as Jenin, Jenin, a discredited piece of PLO propaganda, which describes as a “massacre” an attempt by Israeli military forces to root out terrorists in this Palestinian town after a series of suicide bombings of Israeli civilians. The Israeli effort was actually conducted in house-to-house attacks that minimized civilian casualties among the Palestinians while maximizing the risks to the Israelis themselves. Fifty-six people died, thirty-four of whom were armed terrorists. ⁵⁰⁷ The Israelis themselves lost twenty-three troops.⁵⁰⁸

In a February 2005 commentary on Buffalo’s National Public Radio, located on the SUNY-Buffalo campus, Professor Holstun accused Israel of perpetrating a “land grab” against the Palestinian people, although Israelis occupy no lands that are Palestinian that were not taken as the result of Arab aggressions and as a military precaution against future aggressions; moreover, Israel has returned lands seized under these circumstances when Arab states, like Egypt, have been willing to sign a formal peace with Israel. Professor Holstun also refers to the Israeli security fence as an “apartheid wall,” built to keep the Palestinian people caged in and treated as “criminals” and “livestock,” ignoring (and/or denying) that the Palestinians on the other side of the fence are there because Israel was invaded by Arabs three times across those lands and has been the target of terrorist attacks from them for more than fifty years. Professor Holstun: “Our media have seen to it that Americans know more about Palestinian suicide attacks than about Israeli attacks by sniper, tank, helicopter gunship, and F-16.”⁵⁰⁹ The correct phrases would be Palestinian suicide attacks against civilians and Israeli retaliations against the terrorist attackers. But then, Professor Holstun is not an academic expert in Middle East politics, only a promoter of Palestinian propaganda.

See also: Professors Algar, Dabashi, Finkelstein, Haddad, Harrar, Massad

Research: Karen Welsh ⁵¹⁰

Professor bell hooks

City University of New York

— Distinguished professor of English at City College in New York

— “It is difficult not to hear in standard English always the sound of slaughter and conquest.”

— “My commitment to engaged pedagogy is an expression of political activism.”

Gloria Watkins, better known by her nom de guerre, “bell hooks,” (the lowercase affectation is hers) is one of the most highly regarded academics by her peers in America and a distinguished professor of English at City College in New York. Her written work, however, is virtually never about literature as such, but rather about the “patriarchy” and race and class “hierarchies” that in her view dominate every aspect of the social order and its culture. Typical of her numerous titles are Killing Rage: Ending Racism; Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representation; Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom; Art On My Mind: Visual Politics; We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity; Reel to Real: Race, Sex and Class at the Movies. Her book Killing Rage begins with this sentence: “I am writing this essay sitting beside an anonymous white male that I long to murder.”⁵¹¹

Professor hooks sees herself as an “insurgent Black intellectual voice” committed to “renewed liberation struggle.” As a tenured member of the academic elite who has taught at Yale and the Sorbonne, is a highly prized and amply rewarded campus lecturer, and makes an income in the six-figure range, Professor hooks concedes some internal conflict. In a 1996 essay, “The Rebel’s Dilemma,” Professor hooks laments: “the academy has always been so similar to the dysfunctional patriarchal family hierarchy that hemmed me in as a child that I feel that I can never be truly healthy, well and whole in the deepest sense, without leaving it.” Her conclusion however is not to leave but to use her position to confront the “structures of domination.” As she puts it, “The work then is always part of our struggle for liberation.”⁵¹²

Of hooks’s more famous sentence, “I am writing this essay sitting beside an anonymous white male that I long to murder,” the inspiration for this malice was nothing more heinous than the occupation of an airline seat. A stewardess had given a white stranger the first-class seat previously assigned to hooks’s traveling companion and moved her to coach, because her upgrade had not been entered into a computer correctly and therefore was not registered.⁵¹³ Hooks attributes this innocent contretemps to “white racism.”

Professor hooks’s views on education are expressed in her 1994 book, Teaching to Transgress, which like her other writings is a broadside against the “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.” ⁵¹⁴ According to Professor hooks, an educator has a “right as a subject in resistance to define reality.” Teaching, according to Professor hooks, “is a performative act . . . that offers the space for change, invention, spontaneous shifts, that can serve as a catalyst drawing out the unique elements in each classroom.”⁵¹⁵ Professor hooks exhorts educators “to teach in a manner that empowers students” by converting their classrooms into incubators of “progressive” politics. “My commitment to engaged pedagogy is an expression of political activism.”⁵¹⁶ Of English, the language of her nominal subject, Professor hooks writes: “It is difficult not to hear in standard English always the sound of slaughter and conquest.”⁵¹⁷

In the same text, Professor hooks provides an example of the success of her “engaged pedagogy” on one of her students at City University: “I have not forgotten the day a student came to class and told me: ‘We take your class. We learn to look at the world from a critical standpoint, one that considers race, sex, and class. And we can’t enjoy life anymore.’”⁵¹⁸ Should her teaching strategy run into obstacles, Professor hooks recommends a tract about the feminist movement: “When such conflicts arise, it is always useful to send students to read Yours in Struggle.” In other words, Professor hooks is not engaged in the practice of teaching students how to think, i.e., how to think critically when confronted with complex and differentiated material; but rather is teaching them what to think—and she is perfectly explicit about the fact that her classroom “pedagogy” is simply an extension of her political activism.

Professor hooks’s widespread popularity in the academic world has brought her invitations to give commencement speeches at collegiate graduation ceremonies. In 2002, she was the commencement speaker at Southwestern University in Texas, where she had been invited to teach as a visiting scholar-in-residence of feminist studies: “The radical, dissident voices among you have learned here at Southwestern how to form communities of resistance that have helped you find your way in the midst of life-threatening conservatism, loneliness, and the powerful forces of everyday fascism which use the politics of exclusion and ostracism to maintain the status quo,” Professor hooks told the graduating class.⁵¹⁹ “Every imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal nation on the planet teaches its citizens to care more for tomorrow than today.... And the moment we do this, we are seduced by the lure of death.... To live fixated on the future is to engage in psychological denial. It is a form of psychic violence that prepares us to accept the violence needed to ensure the maintenance of imperialist, future-oriented society.”⁵²⁰

Referring to terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, she said, “Our nation’s call for violence in the aftermath of 9/11 was an expression of widespread hopelessness, the cynicism that has been at the heart of our nation’s ongoing fascination with death.” This “moment of collective clarity,” she explained, however, “was soon obscured by the imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal hunger to show the planet our nation’s force, to show that this nation would commit absolute acts of violence that will wipe out whole nations and worlds.” Her speech passed no judgment on the terrorists who carried out the attack, but decried instead “our government’s declaration of its commitment to violence, to death.”⁵²¹

In sum, this is a distinguished professor with a six-figure salary, loaded with academic honors, who is given license to conduct a one-sided Marxist-feminist indoctrination of hapless students, but still believes—as she explains as an invited commencement speaker—that she is living under the tyranny of a fascist dictatorship: namely, the United States.

See also: Professors Baraka, Dyson, Jeffries, Karenga, Marable, Schwartz, Thomas

Research: Jacob Laksin

Professor Alison Jaggar

University of Colorado, Boulder

— Professor of philosophy and women’s studies

— Describes herself as a “socialist feminist”

— Author of the paper “One Is Not Born a Man”

Alison Jaggar is professor of philosophy and a former chair of the Women’s Studies Department at the University of Colorado, Boulder (UCB). She is the former president of the American Philosophical Association. Integrating Marxist and feminist theory, Jaggar describes herself as a “socialist feminist” and “activist,” who seeks to combat “the male-dominant structure of everyday life.” According to Professor Jaggar “the standpoint of women is discovered through a collective process of political and scientific struggle.”

Professor Jaggar received her BA in philosophy from the University of London (Bedford College), her master’s in philosophy from the University of Edinburgh, and her PhD in philosophy from the State University of New York, Buffalo. As early as 1983, UCB began offering students a major in women’s studies, but the degree was granted under the umbrella of American studies. In 1995, Jaggar headed a successful campaign to extricate women’s studies from the American studies program, calling the American studies designation “increasingly inappropriate.”⁵²²

In Jaggar’s view, women are analogous to the proletariat in Marx’s class schema. “The political economy of socialist feminism,” writes Jaggar, “establishes that, in contemporary society, women suffer a special form of exploitation and oppression.... The distinctive social experience of women generates insights that are incompatible with men’s interpretations of reality and these insights provide clues to how reality might be interpreted from the standpoint of women. The validity of these insights, however, must be tested in political struggle and developed into a systematic representation of reality that is not distorted in ways that promote the interests of men above those of women.”⁵²³

Professor Jaggar’s socialist feminism is rooted in a dissatisfaction with gender-blind Marxist class analysis. In Professor Jaggar’s perspective, virtually all undesirable social conditions can be traced to the doorstep of capitalism, including the oppression of women. According to Jaggar, “residual capitalism” in socialist countries is the cause of women’s oppression. ⁵²⁴ Professor Jaggar is a totalitarian thinker: “[W]hereas the standpoint of the ruling class reflects the interests [of] only one section of the population,” she writes, “the standpoint of the oppressed represent[s] the interests of the totality in that historical period.”⁵²⁵ In other words, the viewpoint of the revolutionary agent is unitary and coincides with historical truth.

In Professor Jaggar’s view, women and men are not gender selected by nature but are social constructs. At a 1995 “Conference on Feminism, Epistemology, and Ethics,” Professor Jaggar delivered a paper titled “One Is Not Born a Man.” Since to her, men and women are not so by nature, their gender roles can be changed. To overcome women’s oppression, Professor Jaggar believes the act of childbearing must no longer be limited to one sex. She writes: “The one solid basis of agreement among socialist feminists is that to overcome women’s alienation, the sexual division of labor must be eliminated in every area of life. . . . [W]e must remember that the ultimate transformation of human nature at which socialist feminists aim goes beyond the liberal conception of psychological androgyny to a possible transformation of ‘physical’ human capacities, some of which, until now, have been seen as biologically limited to one sex. This transformation might even include the capacities for insemination, for lactation and gestation so that, for instance, one woman could inseminate another, so that men and non-parturitive [non-childbearing] women could lactate and so that fertilized ova could be transplanted into women’s or even into men’s bodies.”⁵²⁶

Professor Jaggar has taught at the University of Illinois; the University of California, Los Angeles; and Rutgers University, where she was chair of the Women’s Studies Department. That a person with these bizarre beliefs was elected president of the American Philosophical Association speaks for itself about the political radicalization and intellectual decline of a major national scholarly organization.

See also: Professors Anton, Sedgwick

Research: Thomas Ryan

Professor Frederic Jameson

Duke University

— Professor of comparative literature at Duke University and leading academic figure

— Co-chair, “Marxism and Society” academic studies major at Duke

— Believes “Americans created bin Laden during the Cold War,” and claims 9/11 attacks are “a textbook example of dialectical reversal”

Of the innumerable Marxist literary critics currently plying their craft at American universities, few enjoy the following of Frederic Jameson, an admirer of Mao, an unreconstructed Marxist, and a longtime professor of comparative literature at Duke. Professor Jameson is also co-chair of Duke’s “Marxism and Society” studies program. He is a person of national and international intellectual influence.

Professor Jameson’s work is a mainstay of university literature departments. Among his more influential texts is his 1971 effort, Marxism and Form, credited by some observers with resurrecting the then-moribund study of Marxist literary theory. Jameson’s writings on criticism are embraced with equal ardor by practitioners of post-modern Marxism. Professor Jameson’s seminal work in this regard is his 1981 tome, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Art. In this work, Professor Jameson took the forthrightly “extreme position” that the task of a literary critic is to impose a narrow political framework on a given text. With this end in mind, Professor Jameson argued that “the political perspective [is] the absolute horizon of all reading and interpretation,” and urged students to approach literary texts not as works of intrinsic merit but rather as “socially symbolic acts.”⁵²⁷

Professor Jameson’s conception of literary works as essentially activist—indeed revolutionary—endeavors has given rise to several courses at Duke. A writing course called “Novel Visions,” offered at Duke in 2001, was expressly founded on Professor Jameson’s claims. Students taking the course were urged to understand “writing as a social and political practice,” a message reinforced in the course description: “This class will think seriously about how novels, in different historical moments, provide views on the social world or ‘visions’ for meaningful change.”⁵²⁸ In other words, a person with no formal training in history, under the smokescreen of a “literature” course, is teaching a primitive Marxist history of the western world.

Another class, “Globalization and Literature,” draws on a comprehensive array of Marxist theories, including Professor Jameson’s 1991 work, Postmodernism or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, in which he bewailed the “baleful” spread of global capitalism and called for a “political form of postmodernism” to counteract it by stimulating the “capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralised by our spatial as well as our social confusion.”⁵²⁹

As such examples attest, Duke’s comparative literature program is in many ways the brainchild of Professor Jameson’s radical theories. A largely traditional program prior to Professor Jameson’s arrival in 1985, the Duke program is today a nursery of “critical theory” and Marxist cultural criticism. Professor Jameson’s influence at Duke extends to the university’s publisher, Duke Press, on whose faculty board Jameson served for five years. Beyond publishing two books through the press, Jameson played a prominent role in influencing the kinds of writing and research selected for publication.

Now getting on in years, the seventy-one-year-old Jameson is still active in campus causes. Most prominent among these is his involvement in Duke Divest, a movement that compares Israel to apartheid South Africa, and pressures universities to withdraw their investments in companies that do business there. Jameson is one of forty faculty members in the group. A petition drafted by the group and signed by Professor Jameson states that it is “appalled by the human rights abuses against Palestinians at the hands of the Israeli government,” and denounces the “continual military occupation and colonization of Palestinian territory by Israeli armed forces and settlers.”⁵³⁰ The petition acknowledges that attacks on Israeli civilians are “unacceptable and abhorrent,” but does not call for their suspension. ⁵³¹

Several weeks after 9/11, the London Review of Books convened a scholarly symposium on the terrorist attacks, titled “Reflections on the Present Crisis.” Professor Jameson joined twenty-nine other radical scholars in attendance. After asserting matter-of-factly that “the Americans created bin Laden during the Cold War,” Professor Jameson concluded that the attacks were “therefore a textbook example of dialectical reversal.”⁵³²

Professor Jameson evinced no sympathy for the victims of the attacks, but condemned instead “the nauseating media reception,” the “cheap pathos” that “seemed unconsciously dictated” by the “White House.”⁵³³ According to Jameson, the real cause of the terrorist attacks was the “absence of any Left alternative means that popular revolt and resistance in the Third World” could pursue. ⁵³⁴ In Professor Jameson’s view, this indicated that the Islamist rage over injustice has “nowhere to go but into religious and ‘fundamentalist’ forms.”⁵³⁵ In the spring of 2002, Professor Jameson published an article in the Duke academic journal, The South Atlantic Quarterly, contending that the “history of the [American] superstate is as bloody as anyone else’s national history,” and despairing that a “minority president [Bush] has been legitimized,” and bemoaning the “sinister extension of the surveillance state. . . in the name of a universal revival of patriotism . . .”⁵³⁶

Professor Jameson is so revered by the academic community at Duke that he has been the subject of special ceremonies paying tribute to his legacy. In April 2003, Professor Jameson stepped down as chair of Duke’s Literature Program, a title he had held for eighteen years. In tribute, Duke hosted a four-day conference honoring his work: “The Future of Utopia: Is Innovation Still Possible in Politics, Culture, and Theory? An Inter-disciplinary Conference in Honor of Frederic Jameson.”⁵³⁷ The conference was attended by scores of radical academics who turned up to lavish praise on the guest of honor.

See also: Professors Berube, Holstun, hooks

Research: Jacob Laksin

Professor Leonard Jeffries

City University of New York

— Professor of black studies at City University of New York

— Believes that blacks (“sun people”) are morally and culturally superior to whites (“ice people”)

— “Jews are a race of skunks and animals that stole Africa from the Black Man.”

Leonard Jeffries is a longtime faculty member at the City University of New York and a onetime chair of its Black Studies Department. He is also one of the leading proponents of Afrocentrism—a school of dubious intellectual merit that judges Western civilization to be racist in essence and demands a corrective curriculum glorifying African peoples and culture. But Jeffries subscribes to more than just cultural chauvinism. He is also a black supremacist, claiming whites to be genetically inferior to blacks, and an inveterate anti-Semite, apportioning to “rich Jews” the blame for everything from the allegedly anti-black content of Hollywood movies to the transatlantic slave trade.

In 1988, Professor Jeffries was appointed by then-New York State education commissioner Thomas Sobol to help draft a report recommending an expanded focus on “multiculturalism” in the state’s K-12 curricula. Jeffries’s influence was everywhere in evidence in the final report. Reading more like a polemic than a scholarly assessment, the report claimed that “African Americans, Asian Americans, Puerto Ricans/Latinos, and Native Americans have all been the victims of an intellectual and educational oppression that has characterized the culture and institutions of the United States and the European American world for centuries.” ⁵³⁸ The title of the report was: “A Curriculum of Inclusion.”

Professor Jeffries’s black supremacist views first came to public notice at this time, when a white student, writing in the campus newspaper, catalogued the host of anti-white theories that Professor Jeffries routinely advanced in one of his classes, Black Studies 101. Professor Jeffries had been teaching at the City University since 1972, when he was tapped to head the black studies department and was almost instantly granted tenure, thanks in no small part to an administration determined to appease a surging militancy among black leftists on campus. Jeffries had little or no standard peer-reviewed scholarship to his name at the time he was granted tenure—or, for that matter, since. And this was not the first time that his bigotry had been aired in public.

Nor would it would be the last. In April of 1990, the New York Times reported that another Jeffries class, nominally about African heritage, would have been truer to its content had it been offered under the title “Anti-Jewish Conspiracies 101.” Unhistorically and irresponsibly overstating the participation of Jews in the transatlantic slave trade, Professor Jeffries taught that “rich Jews who financed the development of Europe also financed the slave trade.”⁵³⁹ In a similar vein, Jeffries carried on against the notion that the murder of six million Jews during World War II deserved to be recognized as a uniquely horrific act of genocide. Professor Jeffries also used his class to instruct students in his theory that humanity was divided into “sun people” (i.e., blacks) whose higher melanin content made them morally and culturally superior to the “ice people” (whites).⁵⁴⁰

The two reports confirmed what some students at the City University already knew: that Jeffries was using his classes as pulpits to preach bigotry against Jews and whites. At this point, Jeffries decided to aggressively go public with his hate-filled views. In July of 1991, Jeffries delivered a speech that made him nationally notorious. Speaking at the taxpayer-funded Empire State Black Arts and Cultural Festival in Albany, New York, he asserted that there was a “systematic” and “unrelenting” “attack coming from the Jewish community” against blacks: “Russian Jewry,” Jeffries claimed, “had a particular control over the movies, and their financial partners, the Mafia, put together a system of destruction for Black people.”⁵⁴¹ Singling out his Jewish disputants in academia, Professor Jeffries claimed that they were “slick and devilish and dirty and dastardly.”⁵⁴² Especially vile was Professor Jeffries’s attack on then-assistant U.S. secretary of education Diane Ravitch, whom Jeffries denounced as the “ultimate, supreme, sophisticated, debonair racist” and a “Texas Jew.”⁵⁴³

Professor Jeffries claimed that he had once headed a Jewish fraternity in college. Boasting that he had been known as the “King of the Jews,” Jeffries claimed that the fraternity’s members had relied on a “system of support” to cheat their way to academic success. Stated Jeffries: “The whole average of the fraternity was a dean’s list average, even dumb Jews made it, because there was a system of support.”⁵⁴⁴ But according to the president of Greek life at the college that Jeffries attended (Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania), the school has never had a Jewish fraternity.⁵⁴⁵

In the same speech Professor Jeffries insisted that America’s first president must henceforth be known as “George Washington the slave master bastard Founding Father.” Professor Jeffries then offered his distinctive account of American history. In his historical narrative, “America was founded by rich white men with property and power,” whose bigoted ideals were codified in the Constitution, a “document of affirmative action for rich white folks with property and power.”⁵⁴⁶

The response was immediate: Michele Wallace, a professor in the English department, led off the attacks, calling Jeffries a “maniac.” Under public fire, the university was compelled to take action. In March of 1992, the board of trustees voted to remove Jeffries as head of the Black Studies Department. Contemptuous of his City University critics—in his Albany speech Jeffries had spoken with derision of “my Jews at City College” ⁵⁴⁷—Jeffries refused to accept the trustees’ decision, challenging it in the federal district court in Manhattan on free speech grounds. The legal battle would rage until April 1995, when an appeals court, reversing an earlier ruling, upheld Jeffries’s dismissal as department head.

His legal defeat notwithstanding, it was not at all clear that Jeffries came out the loser in his fight with the college. Though he was not reinstated as the head of the Black Studies Department, Jeffries remains at the college as a tenured professor. Moreover, he continues to travel to colleges and universities, delivering speeches in which his hatred of Jews and whites reveals itself as fiercely as ever.

See also: Professors Baraka, Dyson, hooks

Research: Jacob Laksin

Professor Robert Jensen

University of Texas, Austin

— Associate professor of journalism

— “The United States has lost the war in Iraq and that’s a good thing.”

— “Scratch the surface of U.S. rhetoric about its quest to bring freedom and democracy to the world, and one finds the suffering of the people who must live with the reality of U.S. foreign policy.”

Robert Jensen is an associate professor of journalism at the University of Texas, Austin. He has opposed American military reprisal for 9/11, the war in Iraq, minimal precautions to protect U.S. borders, and capitalism. Calling America a warlike nation, Jensen has denounced “U.S. aggression against innocent people in the rest of the world . . . Given the bloody record of the United States in the past sixty years, and the seemingly limitless capacity of U.S. officials to kill without conscience, I must confess I am not optimistic that such aggression will stop anytime soon, in large part because those corporate structures that drive the killing are still around.... I am hopeful about the possibilities but not optimistic that in my lifetime I will see the demise of capitalism, corporations and wage slavery.” ⁵⁴⁸

In a 2004 article in the Web publication Alternet, Jensen dismissed U.S. efforts to bring democracy to Iraq. He endorsed Ward Churchill’s attack on the victims of 9/11 as “little Eichmanns” and has rejoiced in the setbacks the United States has experienced in Iraq, referring to the war as a “Defeat for an Empire.”⁵⁴⁹ He has urged that “God condemn America, so the world might live,”⁵⁵⁰ though there is little evidence that he is a believer in anything but Marxism. He condemns Israel’s efforts at self-defense, referring to its “brutal occupation of Palestine.” He has criticized Michael Moore’s film Fahrenheit 9/11 as being “too conservative.” On racial matters, he is narcissistically flagellant on the subject of “white privilege,” a posture that he can use to mount attacks on merit-based hirings and school admissions, and even the economic system itself. He recites Ward Churchill’s erroneous claim that the United States intentionally infected Native Americans with diseases such as smallpox (as has long since been demonstrated, Lord Amherst, an English general, considered doing this in 1763; that it was done by American forces in the 1830s has passed into leftist dogma, without foundation). Jensen is a member of the radical No War Collective and the Third Coast Activist Resource Center.

In an introduction to a recently published collection of his speeches, Jensen, expressing his contempt for America, writes: “Citizens of the United States are citizens of the empire—not an empire in exactly the same fashion as the Roman or British versions, but an empire all the same, reaching for global domination through the use of military and economic power. The consequences of this imperial project have been grim for many people around the world—those who have been the targets of U.S. military power; those who have lived under repressive regimes backed by the United States; and those who toil in economies that are increasingly subordinated to the United States and multinational corporations. Scratch the surface of U.S. rhetoric about its quest to bring freedom and democracy to the world, and one finds the suffering of the people who must live with the reality of U.S. foreign policy.”⁵⁵¹

Jensen’s academic performance at Texas has come under fire by his colleagues as well as those outside the university. He has been accused on the Professor Watch List of using his Critical Issues in Journalism class as a forum for indoctrinating students into socialism and a denunciation of “white privilege.”⁵⁵² A conservative student organization audited Jensen’s Journalism 101 course in the spring of 2004 and posted this evaluation: “In a survey course about journalism, one might expect to learn about the industry, some basics about reporting and layout, the history of journalism, the values of a free press and what careers make the news machine function. Instead, Jensen introduces the unsuspecting student to a crash course in socialism, white privilege, the ‘truth’ about the Persian Gulf War and the role of America as the world’s prominent sponsor of terrorism. Jensen half-heartedly attempts to tie his rants to ‘critical issues’ in journalism, insisting his lessons are valid under the guise of teaching potential journalists to ‘think’ about the world around them.”⁵⁵³

As an associate professor who has been awarded tenure, Jensen will vote on the fates of younger faculty in the Department of Journalism at Austin, perhaps for the next thirty years. This is the major state-funded school of journalism in Texas.

See also: Professors Cloud, Gitlin, McChesney, Navasky, Scheer, Schell

Research: Joseph Wilson

Professor Ron (Maulana) Karenga

California State University, Long Beach

— Professor and chair of the Department of Black Studies

— Convicted in 1971 of falsely imprisoning and torturing two female members of his radical organization

— Creator of the African American holiday Kwanzaa

Ron Karenga is chair of the Department of Black Studies at California State University, Long Beach. Professor Karenga claims to hold two PhDs. The first is in political science, with a focus on the theory and practice of nationalism, obtained from the United States International University—an institution that no longer exists. The second is in social ethics, with a focus on the classical African ethics of ancient Egypt, obtained from the University of Southern California.

An activist and Marxist, Professor Karenga is best known for creating the African American holiday Kwanzaa. In the mid-1960s, he bestowed upon himself the title “Maulana,” Swahili for “master teacher,” and is now widely referred to as Maulana Karenga. Professor Karenga began his foray into black nationalism in the early 1960s, founding the militant black power organization United Slaves (US), which became notorious after a shootout between US and the rival Black Panthers in the UCLA cafeteria over a student election resulted in the deaths of two of the Panthers.

In 1971, Professor Karenga and US members Louis Smith and Luz Maria Tamayo were convicted of felonious assault and false imprisonment for assaulting and torturing two female US members, Gail Davis and Deborah Jones. According to a contemporary newspaper account of the trial, “The victims said they were living at Karenga’s home when Karenga accused them of trying to kill him by placing crystals in his food and water and in various areas of his house. When they denied it, allegedly they were beaten with an electrical cord and a hot soldering iron was put in Miss Davis’s mouth and against her face. Police were told that one of Miss Jones’s toes was placed in a small vise, which then was tightened by the men and one woman. The following day Karenga told the women that ‘Vietnamese torture is nothing compared to what I know.’ Miss Tamayo put detergent in their mouths; Smith turned a water hose full force on their faces, and Karenga, holding a gun, threatened to shoot both of them. The victims Deborah Jones and Gail Davis were whipped with an electrical cord and beaten with a karate baton after being ordered to remove their clothing.”⁵⁵⁴

Karenga was convicted of two counts of felonious assault and one count of false imprisonment. He was sentenced on September 17, 1971, to serve one to ten years in prison, and was released after four years in 1975. This history did not prevent him from securing faculty appointments, first at San Diego State and then at Cal State Long Beach following his release. Apparently a nationwide search for applicants for these positions was unable to turn up a better candidate (or alternatively, Professor Karenga’s political bona fides trumped all other considerations). The US organization was temporarily disbanded during Karenga’s incarceration but was reestablished by him in 1975.

In 1977, Professor Karenga devised a cultural philosophy called Kawaida, a Swahili term for tradition and reason, from which the holiday Kwanzaa arose. Professor Karenga billed Kwanzaa as an alternative to Christianity, Judaism, and Islamic holiday traditions. He asked his followers to follow the seven “principles” of Kwanzaa, known as the “Nguzu Saba,” or the “Seven Principles of Blackness,” which are observed during the seven days of Kwanzaa. The core principles are collectivist, including: “Umoja (Unity)—To strive for and maintain unity in the family, community, nation and race; Ujima (Collective Work and Responsibility)—To build and maintain our community together and make our brother’s and sister’s problems our problems and to solve them together. Ujamaa (Cooperative Economics) —To build and maintain our own stores, shops and other businesses and to profit from them together. Nia (Purpose) —To make our collective vocation the building and development of our community in order to restore our people to their traditional greatness. Imani (Faith)—To believe with all our heart in our people, our parents, our teachers, our leaders and the righteousness and victory of our struggle.”

In a 2002 article, Ann Coulter observed that the seven principles of Kwanzaa are also the same seven principles of the 1970s domestic terrorist group the Symbionese Liberation Army. Each snake head of the SLA’s emblem stood for one of the SLA’s revolutionary principles: Umoja, Kujichagulia, Ujima, Ujamaa, Nia, Kuumba, and Imani—the same seven “principles” of Kwanzaa.⁵⁵⁵

In 1998, Professor Karenga and United Slaves issued a statement in support of the Third Annual Celebration of Cuba’s Internationalism. The statement read: “The Organization US joins all freedom-loving peoples around the world in standing in solidarity with the Cuban people in their heroic and historic struggle to defend their right of self-determination and to break out of the unjust and immoral economic boycott by the U.S. government.”⁵⁵⁶

In explaining the 9/11 attacks, Professor Karenga observes: “they did it to: (1) avenge years of state terrorism, mass murder, selective assassination, collective punishment, and other forms of oppression by the U.S. and its allies; (2) to demonstrate vulnerability of the U.S. at its crucial centers of power, i.e., financial—Manhattan, military—the Pentagon, and political—Washington, D.C.; (3) to cause the rulers of the country to fear, to be uncertain and to reverse the role of hunter and hunted; (4) to insist on being heard and considered in human, political and military terms; (5) to demonstrate a capacity to strike regardless of the superior strength and technology of the U.S.; and (6) to dramatize and underline in a highly visible way the asymmetry of suffering between the U.S. and the oppressed in the world.”⁵⁵⁷

In an April 2003 event at his school, Professor Karenga joined faculty and students in a “Walk Out for Peace” anti-war rally organized by Students Against the War. Professor Karenga invoked his African American philosophy of Kawaida, stating, “Our ethical tradition requires several conditions for a just war, which this self-declared war against the Iraqi people doesn’t meet. This is not a war of self defense, it is a war of self aggrandizement.” ⁵⁵⁸ On another occasion Professor Karenga wrote, “The proposed war against Iraq is not an isolated initiative. Rather, it is part of a post-9/11 imperial offensive which carries with it racist and colonial conversations and commitments of ‘crusades’ to protect ‘the civilized world’ against ‘dark and evil nations’ in ‘dark corners of the world.’”⁵⁵⁹

In 1989, Professor Karenga became head of the Department of Black Studies at Cal State Long Beach. The department, which seeks to “critically examine and understand the African experience from an Afrocentric perspective,”⁵⁶⁰ features such courses as “Politics of Black Power” and “Racism in the American Military.” As chair of the Black Studies Department, Professor Karenga is in a position to appoint the departmental search committee and influence all hires. He is also the author of Introduction to Black Studies, regarded as the most widely used introductory text in black studies. ⁵⁶¹

Research: Thomas Ryan

Professor Peter Kirstein

Saint Xavier University

— Professor of history, Saint Xavier University

— Created a national controversy by attacking an Air Force Academy cadet as a “baby killer”

— Member of Historians Against the War

Peter Kirstein is a professor of history at Saint Xavier University in Chicago, Illinois. His academic website⁵⁶² features his “teaching philosophy,” which includes these edicts: “Teaching is a moral act. It is NOT a dispassionate, neutral pursuit of ‘truth.’ It is advocacy and interpretation.” “Teach peace, freedom, diversity, and challenge American exceptionalism on every front.” “Move beyond the academic concentration camp of one’s ‘discipline.’” The website also informs students that “the CIA is a terrorist organization,” and recommends that “the agency should be abolished and its $30+ billion budget used to buttress Social Security and feed the starving poor in America!!” [emphasis in original]

The accent on advocacy is on prominent display in Kirstein’s courses at Saint Xavier. For instance, his introductory course “United States History to 1877” centers on the “European invasion of America,” while his follow-up course, “United States History Since 1877,” engages with the “[t]hemes of war, racism, civil rights, and economic issues,” through the prism of a “non-elite, multicultural social history” and unaccountably ends its survey with the Vietnam War. Vietnam is also the subject of another Kirstein course, “Vietnam and America.” Of particular concern to the course is the war’s “impact on domestic protest and peace movements.” Another Kirstein course, “Socialism and Capitalism,” invites students to ponder the “socialist alternatives” to “unregulated” free-market capitalism.⁵⁶³ On Kirstein’s personal website, the course listing is embedded with a link to a special page, created by Kirstein, paying tribute to Karl Marx.⁵⁶⁴

In November 2002, Professor Kirstein created a national controversy after receiving the following email in late October from an Air Force Academy cadet:

Dear Sir or Ma’am,

 

The Air Force Academy is going to be having our annual Academy Assembly. This is a forum for mainly but not only Political Science majors, discussing very important issues dealing with politics.

Right now we are in the planning stage for advertising and we would appreciate your help in the follow [sic] areas. Do you know of or have methods or ways for interschool advertising and or communications? What would be the best way for us to advertise at your school whether it is sending you the fliers and you making copies or by perhaps putting an advertisement in your local publication? We would appreciate your input and the cost of what you recommend. Thank you for your time and consideration.

 

Very Respectfully,
Cadet Robert Kurpiel

On October 31, 2002, Kirstein sent this email to Cadet Kurpiel:

You are a disgrace to this country and I am furious you would even think I would support you and your aggressive baby killing tactics of collateral damage. Help you recruit. Who, top guns to reign [sic] death and destruction upon nonwhite peoples throughout the world? Are you serious sir? Resign your commission and serve your country with honour.

No war, no air force cowards who bomb countries without AAA [anti-aircraft artillery], without possibility of retaliation. You are worse than the snipers. You are imperialists who are turning the whole damn world against us. September 11 can be blamed in part for what you and your cohorts have done to Palestinians, the VC, the Serbs, a retreating army at Basra.

 

You are unworthy of my support.
Peter N. Kirstein

When Kirstein’s letter became public, it set off a national controversy, becoming the subject of radio and TV talk shows and Internet chatter. The History News Network reported the flap in a November 17, 2002, article titled, “The Historian Who Denounced the Military for ‘Baby-Killing’ Tactics.”⁵⁶⁵ (There are of course no such tactics.) In the debate that followed, Kirstein provided further insight into his beliefs: “One of the great achievements of Communism, rarely recognized in the West,” he wrote, “is its relatively successful containment of American power from the early 1950s through the demise of the Soviet state in 1991.”⁵⁶⁶ America’s rejection of the World Court, he sneered, was because of its “concern that its senior-national leadership might be tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity.”⁵⁶⁷

While conceding he may have committed an indiscretion in his email to the cadet, Kirstein escalated his attack on his country and its military: “Vietnam was a disgrace, a war crime and an event far worse than the crimes of President Saddam Hussein.” ⁵⁶⁸ Kirstein’s use of the honorific “president” to describe Saddam is instructive. Saddam did get 100 percent of the votes in the election he staged, but he was the only candidate. Moreover, the penalties for voting against him were a dip in one of his acid baths, or a stint in the plastic shredders he used for his opposition, or silent burial in one of the mass graves into which 300,000 “no” votes had already disappeared.

Despite his apology for his indiscretion, Kirstein was obviously unrepentant: “I welcome the controversy that I have caused and I am in this for the duration. I will not be silenced or intimidated by talk shows, Wall Street Journal editorials, Internet campaigns to destroy me and take away my livelihood, or pressure from militants who play the New McCarthyism game of patriotism and blind allegiance to an immoral foreign policy.”⁵⁶⁹ In a 2003 talk sponsored by the Center for Educational Practice, Kirstein urged his fellow educators to follow his example and condemn the American military. Likening his email to the struggles of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Gandhi, Kirstein said: “I crossed the line, through an e-mail, when I also protested against a military institution that trains its students to kill other human beings with high-tech, invulnerable flying machines. I ask you to consider peacefully crossing the line. If enough people cross the line, I guarantee you, they will have to remove the line.” In the same speech, Kirstein said, “The militarization of American society and its incessant military crusades pose a greater threat to our freedoms than the putative enemies that we slaughter on the battlefield or even worse in their homes or hospitals in distant lands.”⁵⁷⁰

Professor Kirstein’s academic website ⁵⁷¹ commemorates “Vietnam Liberated 30 Years Ago: April 30, 1975,” ignoring the reality that Vietnam is still a Communist police state. It also features a shrine to Karl Marx, with Kirstein proudly posing at Marx’s gravesite and a link to an ironically named speech by Fidel Castro, one of Marx’s last surviving dictator disciples, “History Will Absolve Me.”

Of the U.S.-led intervention in Iraq, Kirstein has claimed that “American motives were not self-defense but dreams of hegemony: namely the control of oil, a permanent military force that could virtually eliminate any geostrategic competition in the Gulf and an encirclement and ultimate invasion of Iran.”⁵⁷² Kirstein hastened to add that even if Saddam Hussein was in possession of illicit weapons of mass destruction, this would not justify his ouster since both the United States and Israel had nuclear weapons arsenals. From Kirstein’s perspective, the distinction between dictatorship and democracy was seemingly one without difference.

To mark the one-year anniversary of the U.S. army’s entry into Baghdad, Saudi Arabia’s Arab News published comments by several American radicals, including Professor Kirstein: “Images remain. The image of the American flag being draped over a statue of Saddam Hussein as the invaders conquered Baghdad. The Oil Ministry alone being guarded as vandals stole precious artifacts from Baghdad museums and other facilities. Innocent Muslims being whisked away in chains to Guantanamo Bay. The president of the United States referring to non-white, non-Western nations as an axis of evil . . .”⁵⁷³ Professor Kirstein regards the United States as “the leading terrorist and criminal nation in the world today.”⁵⁷⁴

Among his colleagues at St. Xavier, Professor Kirstein is by no means regarded as a fringe radical. In 1997, he won St. Xavier University’s Teaching Excellence Award. ⁵⁷⁵

See also: Professors Chomsky, Lembcke, Zinn

Research: Michael Bauer

Professor Vinay Lal

University of California, Los Angeles

— Associate professor of history

— Regards the war on terror as fraudulent

— Views America as a threat to mankind

Vinay Lal has been on the faculty of UCLA since 1993. He teaches courses in Indian history, comparative colonial histories, subaltern history, and Indian historiography. In addition, he teaches graduate-level seminars on the contemporary politics of knowledge, “postcolonial theory,” and the politics of culture. In 1992–93, just prior to his arrival at UCLA, he was a William R. Kenan Fellow, Society of Fellows in the Humanities, and lecturer in history at Columbia University.

Among the courses Professor Lal teaches is one titled “Fiat Lux Seminar: Honors Collegium 98,” which is subtitled “ReReading Democracy in America: Politics Before and After 9/11.” According to the UCLA catalog, there are “two requirements” for students to complete the course—a paper on one of the two class texts, and an in-class presentation. Here is how the requirement is described:

A presentation might focus on what the election to California’s governorship of a movie star who has been charged by a dozen women with sexual molestation, drives perhaps the most environmentally unfriendly vehicle in the world, and appeared not to have a single idea about governance says about American ‘democracy.’ Other presentations can focus on corporate ownership of the media, the rise of Fox News, the MTA and grocery chain strikes in Los Angeles, the trade union movements, the presence of African-Americans and Latinos in the US army, the film ‘Bowling in [sic] Columbine’, the assault on civil liberties, the indefinite detention of hundreds of Muslims without any accountability to notions of justice, or thousands of such phenomena.⁵⁷⁶

The course description shows that Professor Lal’s seminar is a course in political propaganda, not academic inquiry. Unsurprisingly, the text assigned for the Fiat Lux Seminar is Vietnam and Other American Fantasies by H. Bruce Franklin, a radical who in the past has edited (and provided a favorable introduction for) a collection of writings by Joseph Stalin. Professor Lal explains the importance of Franklin’s text in this way: “Though many commentators have unthinkingly rehearsed the cliché that after 9/11 all is changed, our other principal text comes from one of the most respected scholars of American history [Franklin is in fact a professor of English literature], whose relatively recent inquiry into the meaning of the Vietnam War in American life suggests that nothing has changed, insofar as the U.S. remains on course in exercising its ruthless dominance over the rest of the world.”⁵⁷⁷

Professor Lal sees many similarities between George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden, characterizing both as rogues who egotistically invoke divine blessings for their unworthy causes. “Bush and bin Laden have much more in common,” he wrote. “If anything, bin Laden’s parochialism is slightly less offensive: whereas Bush concludes his addresses to the nation with ‘God bless America,’ as though God should care about nation-states or has earmarked America as especially deserving of His approbation, bin Laden is content to observe, ‘God is great, may pride be with Islam.’ The fundamentalism of fanatical conviction knows no boundaries; rogues do understand each other.”⁵⁷⁸

Professor Lal regards the horrors of 9/11 as a type of karmic justice visited upon the United States for its past transgressions. He sneers at “America’s discovery that it is no longer inviolable, and that it may be susceptible to the very suffering that it has so cavalierly visited upon others.”⁵⁷⁹

Professor Lal’s view of the United States is of a nation obsessed with violence and conquest, always in search of new pretexts for making war—in large part, the professor claims, because war is a lucrative enterprise for corporate America. “War is the reigning metaphor of American experience, it dominates the idioms of speech and conduct: in the last decade alone, the airwaves have been full of the ‘war on cancer,’ the ‘war on crime,’ the ‘war on drugs.’ The largest hoaxes are bathed in the language of war: thus all types of crime have declined, but with two million Americans in jail, the country has the largest prison population in the world. If Palestinians could be locked away, doubtless Israel would be entitled to declare success in its war on the aspirations of a people.... No modern power has so consistently been at war with such a wide range of political regimes; no other culture has so elaborate a mythology of guns, so profound an affection for the right to own guns . . . Politicians and the much-feted ‘American public,’ whose ‘compassion’ and ‘values’ are tirelessly trotted out at every turn, recognize that war is good for America. That, alone, raises the most terrifying prospects for the future of humankind.”⁵⁸⁰

As an associate professor, Vinay Lal will be voting on who is hired and promoted in the UCLA history department for the next twenty-five years.

See also: Professors Eckstein, Holstun, Reich

Research: John Perazzo

Professor Jerry Lembcke

Holy Cross College

— Associate professor of sociology, Holy Cross College

— Socialist and anti-war activist

— Believes post-traumatic stress disorder was invented to discredit the anti-war movement

Jerry Lembcke is an associate professor of sociology at Holy Cross College in Massachusetts, where he is regarded as a “nationally recognized expert on the Vietnam War and Vietnam veterans.”⁵⁸¹

For the socialist Lembcke, the Vietnam War is a consuming interest, but hardly a scholarly one. Professor Lembcke’s mission is to persuade students to accept his inflexible view that the Vietnam War, along with all the wars of the United States, are “neo-imperialist” manifestations of America’s capitalist foundations and are to be opposed.

Professor Lembcke’s views are made explicit in his 1998 book, The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam. The book is required reading in several sociology classes at Holy Cross and advances two arguments that are equally tendentious. The first is that the stories of Vietnam veterans returning from the war only to be spit upon by angry anti-war activists are nothing more than a “myth” invented, Professor Lembcke argues, by the Nixon administration. The documentation of spitting incidents is an interesting scholarly challenge, but Professor Lembcke claims that the only documented instances of spitting actually involved belligerent Vietnam veterans unloading on those of their disillusioned comrades who joined forces with the anti-war movement. Professor Lembcke’s claims are undermined by the testimony of countless veterans who have reported the disrespectful treatment they received from anti-war activists, which reflects the general attitude of a movement that burned flags and draft cards, poured blood on draft files, conducted “Days of Rage” in major cities, was responsible for more than a thousand bombing incidents, and relentlessly accused the president and the troops he commanded of being “baby killers.” Nevertheless, Professor Lembcke’s book was well received by mainstream media outlets upon its release, and many credulous journalists persist in recycling its claims. ⁵⁸²

The second and even more preposterous thesis advanced by Professor Lembcke in The Spitting Image is that post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was a political invention. Specifically, Professor Lembcke argues that PTSD was created with the aim of discrediting returning veterans who protested the Vietnam War. “PSTD functioned to help erase the memory of the war as an act of U.S. aggression that we lost because the Vietnamese beat us, by rewriting it as a war we lost because we defeated ourselves, i.e. our military was stabbed in the back, our soldiers spat on, etc.”⁵⁸³ According to Professor Lembcke, “the image of the dysfunctional PTSD-stricken victim-veterans” replaced the “historical reality” that the Vietnam War “empowered a generation of GIs who revolted against the war and joined the movement to stop it.”⁵⁸⁴

In fact, the number of veterans who protested the war was miniscule compared to the number who served. Professor Lembcke was himself one of those few. A former chaplain’s assistant in the war, Lembcke returned home to join the radical group Vietnam Veterans Against the War. As Professor Lembcke himself conceded in a 1999 article for Holy Cross Magazine, he hopes with his book to burnish the “image of anti-war warriors,” which, he claims, is at odds with the “militarism that dominates our culture.” In the same article, Professor Lembcke darkly warned that “reclaiming our memory of the Vietnam era entails a struggle against very powerful institutional forces that toy with our imaginings of the war for reasons of monetary, political, or professional gain.” For Professor Lembcke, “Vietnam symbolizes popular resistance to political authority and the dominant images of what it means to be a good American.”⁵⁸⁵

It is these themes, informed more by Professor Lembcke’s political inclinations than scholarly research into Vietnam-era history, that dominate his lectures at Holy Cross. For instance, in 1998 Professor Lembcke gave a sociology lecture called “Men, Women, and Medicine,” making the case for the “social construction of post-traumatic stress disorder”—i.e., its invention to serve political ends. On another occasion, delivering a guest lecture for a sociology course called “Abnormal Psychology,” Lembcke warned students to beware of the supposedly sinister political motivations behind “the mental labeling of Vietnam vets.”

During the 2004 presidential election, Professor Lembcke deployed his revisionist theories in the service of the John Kerry campaign. The attacks on Kerry, Professor Lembcke explained in an October 2004 op-ed, were “premised on a widespread discontent about Vietnam. On the surface, Kerry is targeted because he came home from the war and joined the anti-war movement, but the gendered lexicon of the barbs themselves points to an unarticulated angst in the American subconscious that is about something more serious than Kerry’s fidelity or even the defeat in Vietnam.”⁵⁸⁶ What this something was, according to Professor Lembcke, was the “American character and its struggle to confront the neo-imperialist impulses common to the U.S. invasions of both Vietnam and Iraq.”⁵⁸⁷

See also: Professors Berlowitz, Eckstein, Fellman, Shortell

Research: Jacob Laksin

Professor Mark LeVine

University of California, Irvine

— Associate professor of history

— Blames the U.S. and Israel for provoking Islamic terrorism

— Rock musician and Marxist

Mark LeVine is a radical activist and guitar-playing associate professor of history at the University of California, Irvine. His academic website explains: “My scholarship, activism and music are all tied to my commitment to struggles for social justice in the United States and around the world.” He is an advisory board member to Occupation Watch, an organization set up by radicals to incite American soldiers in Iraq to request “conscientious objector” status and leave their posts. Professor LeVine is an academic known for his steady stream of anti-American and anti-Israel diatribes that depict Washington and Jerusalem as aggressors in a war against Islam.

Professor LeVine has performed musically with Mick Jagger, Johnny Copeland, Chuck D, Albert Collins, and Ben E. King. He considers himself, with his long blond hair and rock persona, a “disgruntled ex-hippie” who renounced his Jewish faith in his late teens after—as he puts it—witnessing his father’s death as well as “a lot of suffering and injustice.” A left-wing anti-war activist who frequently guest-stars at “peace” rallies, Professor LeVine views globalization, capitalism, and any form of nationalism—or at least especially American and Israeli nationalism—as forces of evil that promote war and misery.

Professor LeVine’s hipster persona is on ample display at his website.⁵⁸⁸ Casting himself as a latter-day Renaissance man, he describes how he “interviewed senior international political figures, reported from Beirut’s green line, taught the Qur’an to Muslim Brothers, performed from Woodstock to Paris to Damascus Gate, lived next door to Hamas mosques, stood against bulldozers, dodged terrorist bombs, and uncovered damning files in dusty archives. [He knows] the history, politics, religions—and most important, the peoples—of the region as a friend, but with a highly critical eye.” LeVine also claims a “long history of blending art, scholarship, and activism” and being “uniquely positioned to offer such analysis in a manner that will be especially appreciated by members of generations of X and Y.”

Beneath this trendy exterior, LeVine, who has degrees from Hunter College and New York University, is an utterly unoriginal incarnation of very old and discredited intellectual ideas. His worldview encompasses a quasi-communist utopia, a classless future, where all racial, nationalist, and cultural identities are dissolved. In other words, the discredited vision of Marx that led to the deaths of one hundred million people while bankrupting whole continents in the last century.

To bring this socialist millennia to fruition, he claims, it is necessary to “dig beyond the easy symbolism of ‘freedom,’ ‘democracy,’ ‘Zionism equals racism,’ and other mantras and challenge a matrix of discourses—modernity, colonialism, capitalism and nationalism; what I call the ‘modernity matrix’—that are each based on the creation of zero-sum oppositions between (individual or collective) Selves and Others, us and them, and which together have supported a five-hundred-year-old world system that supports slavery in the Sudan and Mauritania and IMF bailouts, organized terrorism and ‘le peuple du Seattle’ alike.”⁵⁸⁹ For someone claiming to be a historian to suggest that modernity consists simply of “oppositions” is as preposterous as lumping together slavery, terrorism, and the International Monetary Fund (not to mention le peuple of Seattle or anywhere else). In LeVine’s view, there is only one cause of global evil—capitalism. This is thought worthy of a rock musician.

When the UN Development Program and the Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development released the Arab Human Development Report 2002, a devastating account of the failures of the Arab world written by Arab intellectuals, Professor LeVine criticized the Western media for their enthusiastic acceptance of its chief premise, which was to hold Arab states accountable for their plight, instead of blaming the United States and Israel. For LeVine, the report was an inherently flawed document because it failed to address the external “issues of money and power” that prevent Arabs from instituting substantive reform. It is the capitalist West, according to LeVine, that is responsible for the Arab world’s inability to create economic prosperity.⁵⁹⁰

When an Israel Defense Forces bulldozer inadvertently killed pro-Palestinian activist Rachel Corrie as she tried to prevent it from destroying a tunnel used for weapons smuggling, Professor LeVine praised her “spirit and courage” and extolled the International Solidarity Movement, a pro-terrorist organization which had recruited Corrie to her fatal occupation. “As America’s war on Iraq grows bloodier, we would do well to reflect on the meaning of Rachel’s life and death, and the powerful message of the International Solidarity Movement,” LeVine wrote at the time. “She and the other human shields, like their colleagues in Iraq, are true soldiers of peace.”⁵⁹¹ The remark about “colleagues in Iraq” is a reference to American “anti-war” volunteers who went to Iraq before hostilities in 2003 began, in order to protect the Saddam dictatorship from being overthrown. They soon left.

Professor LeVine’s view of the war on terror boils down to a single point: if Islamic terrorists harbor murderous rage against America and Israel, then America and Israel are responsible for that fury. The causes of terrorism are capitalism and American and Israeli imperialism, and have nothing to do with social and religious issues within Islam: “without both an acceptance of responsibility for past policy and the transformation of future policy toward the Islamic regions of our planet, there will be no solution to terrorism, only continued violence and war.”⁵⁹²

“[W]ar and occupation,” Professor LeVine writes, in a series of Marxist clichés unanchored in any observable reality, “are wonderful opportunities for corporations to make billions of dollars in profits, unchecked by the laws and regulations that hamper their profitability in peace time. . . Because of this, in the postmodern global era, global corporations and the government elites with whom they work have great incentive to sponsor global chaos and the violence it generates.”⁵⁹³ Exaggerated reports of widespread civilian casualties in Iraq prompt the professor to hysterical responses, calling the United States “a criminal nation that must be stopped.”⁵⁹⁴

See also: Professors Algar, Dabashi, Haddad, Massad

Research: Tzvi Kahn⁵⁹⁵

Professor Robert McChesney

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

— Research professor of communications

— Founder of left-wing “media reform” organization Free Press

— A current director of the Marxist Monthly Review Foundation

In 1999 Robert McChesney was hired as a research associate professor at the Institute of Communications Research, Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He was also appointed a senior research scientist at the school’s National Center for Supercomputer Applications. In 2000, McChesney was promoted to research professor. From 1988 until 1998 he taught journalism and mass communication at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he became friends with local radical journalist John Nichols, now Washington correspondent for The Nation magazine. McChesney has co-authored three books with Nichols: It’s the Media, Stupid!; Our Media, Not Theirs: The Democratic Struggle Against Corporate Media; and Tragedy & Farce: How Media Warps Elections and Democracy.

Professor McChesney is the founder of the left-wing “media reform” organization Free Press, and a board member of the left-wing Institute for Public Accuracy. He is a former editor and current board member of the Marxist magazine Monthly Review, which has a fifty-year history of supporting Communist movements and regimes.

Professor McChesney blames the media for having “helped anoint a president” in 2000.⁵⁹⁶ He refers to President Bush as “the moronic child of privilege.”⁵⁹⁷ Professor McChesney writes, “[C]onsider the manner in which the press reported President Bush’s ‘victory’ in the 2000 election. It is now clear that the majority of the people in Florida who went to vote for president in November 2000 intended to vote for Al Gore. . . . But Al Gore isn’t president. Why is that? Or to put it another way, why didn’t the press coverage assure that the true winner would assume office?... The primary reason is due to sourcing: throughout November and early December of 2000, the news media were being told by all Republicans that the Republicans had won the election and Al Gore was trying to steal it. The Democrats, on the other hand, were far less antagonistic and showed much less enthusiasm to fight for what they had won. Hence the news coverage, reflecting what their sources were telling them, tended to reflect the idea that the Republicans had won and the Democrats were grasping for straws.... Once the Supreme Court made its final decision, the media were elated to announce that our national nightmare was over.”⁵⁹⁸

Elaborating further on this theme, Professor McChesney writes, “No one should be surprised by the polls showing that close to 90 percent of Americans are satisfied with the performance of their selected president, or that close to 80 percent of the citizenry applaud his Administration’s seat-of-the-pants management of an undeclared war. After all, most Americans get their information from media that have pledged to give the American people only the president’s side of the story.”⁵⁹⁹ This “analysis” by an alleged expert in research was made in the spring of 2003, just after a short, almost casualty-free, successful war. When consolidating victory proved more difficult and a domestic opposition developed, the president’s poll numbers fell dramatically. How would Professor McChesney’s analysis, which presumes a pliant corporate media eager to do the government’s bidding and possessing a determining influence on citizen opinion, explain this dramatic shift?

In Professor McChesney’s view, the American media are largely shills for conservatives and the Bush administration, and willing abettors of his unjust wars. In a 2003 article titled “The Media Crisis of Our Times,” McChesney writes: “What is most striking in the U.S. news coverage following the September 11 attacks of 2001 is how... the very debate over whether to go to war, or how best to respond, did not even exist. Tough questions were ignored. Why should we believe that a militarized approach will be effective? Moving beyond the 9/11 attacks, why should the United States be entitled to determine—as judge, jury, and executioner—who is a terrorist or a terrorist sympathizer in this global war? What about international law? Most conspicuous was the complete absence of comment on one of the most striking features of the war campaign, something that any credible journalist would be quick to observe: ... There are very powerful interests in the United States who greatly benefit politically and economically by the establishment of an unchecked war on terrorism. This consortium of interests can be called . . . the military-industrial complex. It blossomed during the Cold War when the fear of Soviet imperialism—real or alleged—justified its creation and expansion. A nation with a historically small military now had a permanent war economy, and powerful special interests benefited by its existence.”⁶⁰⁰

See also: Professors Foster, Gitlin, Navasky, Scheer

Research: Lowell Ponte

Professor Aminah Beverly McCloud

DePaul University

— Professor of Islamic studies

— Director of the Islamic World Studies Program at DePaul

— Follower of Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan

Aminah Beverly McCloud is the director of the Islamic World Studies Program at DePaul University, America’s largest Catholic college. Launched in September 2004, the program offers both a major and minor in the subject of Islamic religion and culture. An admirer of the Nation of Islam and a disciple of its anti-Semitic, anti-white leader Louis Farrakhan, Professor McCloud helped DePaul develop the program in response to what she considers Americans’ widespread ignorance about the Islamic world.

Professor McCloud teaches the courses “Islam in the United States” and “Islam in Global Contexts.” One of the texts she requires students to read in both classes is Seyyed Hossein Nasr’s The Heart of Islam: Enduring Values for Humanity. This text turns a blind eye toward the darker sides of fundamentalist Islam and likens Muslim terrorists to the American founders who fought for independence from Britain. Nasr writes, “When some people attack Islam for inciting struggle in the name of justice, they forget the Boston Tea Party and the American Revolution.” ⁶⁰¹

Another required text is the novel Nisanit by Fadia Faqir. A Publishers Weekly review of this book states, “Mired in political rhetoric, this alarming first novel by a Jordanian native tracks a Palestinian terrorist, his girlfriend, and his Israeli interrogator. The subject matter—a terrorist’s thought processes, his lethal acts (including the murder of nine Israeli settlers), capture, torture and attendant plunge into madness—is potentially gripping, but Faqir repeatedly proffers graceless, simplistic agitprop instead of careful plotting or characterizations.”⁶⁰² In the book, Israelis are portrayed as sadists, and the protagonist of the story, a terrorist named Shadeed, ponders the prospect of peace, observing, “It would never spread over their country until these aggressors [the Israelis] stopped polluting their air.”⁶⁰³

As a Black Muslim, Professor McCloud has often found herself at odds with Middle Eastern Muslim immigrants. “In their pursuit of the American dream and whiteness,” she says, “the new arrivals have largely ignored African-American Muslims, and have assumed that they can impose their own understanding of Islam on African-Americans.”⁶⁰⁴ In an interview with the house organ of Farrakhan’s movement on the seventieth anniversary of the organization created by Elijah Muhammad, Professor McCloud said “The Nation of Islam must define what Islam is within the American Culture.”⁶⁰⁵

Professor McCloud has denounced the Patriot Act and protested the State Department’s decision to bar Tariq Ramadan from entering the United States to join the faculty of Notre Dame University. Ramadan—the grandson of Hasan al-Banna, who founded the terrorist Muslim Brotherhood—was denied a visa because of his connections to al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups.

Professor McCloud’s in-class treatment of students has been the subject of complaints on the website RateMyProfes-sors. com, where students post their evaluations of their teachers. Commented one student, “It’s amazing that someone like this is allowed to teach. If you’re ready to be her toady, agree with everything she says and fall all over yourself by extolling her self-proclaimed ‘genius,’ then I guess you would love her. Anyone with half an independent brain will resent her enormously.” ⁶⁰⁶

In addition to her teaching career, Professor McCloud has been a consultant to the Ford Foundation’s “Civil Rights and Muslims in America” project; and a consultant and affiliate to Harvard University’s Pluralism Project. These prestigious appointments indicate that Professor McCloud is not viewed as a fringe in American academic life.

See also: Professors Bagby, Finkelstein, Mazrui

Research: Thomas Ryan⁶⁰⁷

Professor Manning Marable

Columbia University

— Professor of history and political science, Columbia University

— Director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies, Columbia University

— Marxist, member of the Communist Party faction, “The Committees on Correspondence”

Manning Marable is professor of history and political science and director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies at Columbia University. A lifelong Marxist and member of the Communist Party faction called “The Committees on Correspondence,” of which professors Angela Davis, Bettina Aptheker, and Harry Targ are also members, Professor Marable advocates black “resistance” as the only antidote to the “inherent racism” of American society. Needless to say, Professor Marable makes no attempt to distinguish between political activism and education.

In an April 2004 lecture called “Living Black History,” Professor Marable denounced the “master narrative” of American history espoused by “white Americans,” which conceives America as a pluralistic society. He regarded such a view as indefensible. America, according to Professor Marable, was “organized around structural racism” and “the ongoing racial stigmatization and systematic exploitation of a significant segment of the population.” The only possible solution, according to Professor Marable, was “the subversion of the master narrative itself, which must involve to a great extent the deconstruction of the legitimacy of white racial identity, and the uncovering and examination of massive crimes against humanity that have been routinely sanctioned and carried out by corporate and state power.”⁶⁰⁸

This is the mission of Columbia’s Center for Contemporary Black History,⁶⁰⁹ which Professor Marable established in 2002. The center, according to Professor Marable, seeks the “advancements of political projects that actively challenge structural racism and the consequences and effects of discrimination.” No pretense to academic or scholarly inquiry here. In 2003, working in concert with the NAACP and the Mississippi Legislative Black Caucus, the Center created a project called “Freedom Summer 2004.” Its purpose was to mobilize 250 “college-aged” students in Mississippi to register new voters in support of “social justice,”⁶¹⁰ and in particular the repeal of “repressive voter laws,” which allegedly diminished the Democratic vote. The “repressive” laws in question were those barring convicted felons from casting a vote. In Professor Marable’s ominous telling, the project was a vital front in the battle for “black liberation.” He has sounded similar themes in the pages of Souls, a quarterly journal of “African American Studies” produced by his Columbia CBH Center. Serving as a platform for Marable’s political causes—reparations for American slavery 140 years after the fact being prime among them—the journal lists the anti-Semitic poet Amiri Baraka among its contributing editors.

Professor Marable’s center is supported financially by George Soros’s Open Society Institute, no doubt in part because it fits Soros’s agenda of unseating Republicans. Under Marable’s direction, the center has also launched the Africana Criminal Justice Project. The undisguised mission of the project, “distinguished by its forthright commitment to the pursuit of social justice,”⁶¹¹ is to radicalize black studies departments in universities across the country. As Marable has put it, “To enrich the black intellectual tradition, we must push the boundaries of what has become ‘Black Studies’ well beyond Black Studies.” Toward this end, the program promulgates a “black theory of justice,” maintaining that the American criminal justice system is irredeemably racist, because American society is “defined by rigid racial hierarchies.” ⁶¹² The “academic” sources for these tendentious conclusions are the works of “black scholars, artists, and public intellectuals,” including convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal.

A revealing scholarly inquiry of the Center for Contemporary Black History is the “Malcolm X Project,” which proposes to “critically explore” the assassination of the Nation of Islam leader, of whom Professor Marable is an outspoken devotee. In practice, the project attempts to advance the conspiracy theory, to which Professor Marable has long subscribed, that police and government officials colluded in Malcolm’s assassination. This conspiracy theory is so extreme that it was even rejected by Malcolm X’s film biographer, Spike Lee, as well as by reputable scholars in the field. Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan had pronounced a death sentence on Malcolm for betraying the Nation and its leader and two members of the Nation were convicted of the crime.

But according to Professor Marable, the project seeks to answer the “lingering question of what those in law enforcement and government actually knew and did in this crime [the assassination],” and proposes a “reconstructed history” to “bridge the distance between the divided racial past and the present.” This “reconstructed history,” Professor Marable explains, “could be incorporated into the curricula of public schools,” and function as “educational resources for a proposed memorial honoring Malcolm X” at Columbia University. “The goal is not just to educate and inform, but to transform the objective material and cultural conditions that perpetuate the status of marginalized groups,” and ultimately to “reconstruct America’s memory about itself.”⁶¹³ The result, Professor Marable hopes, will be the emergence of “new social movements,” and “spontaneous insurrections.” The Columbia Center for Contemporary Black History’s website features a photograph of rapist, drug dealer, and convicted felon Huey Newton brandishing a clenched fist, taken during the Black Panther leader’s incarceration for killing a police officer.

Clearly the purpose of this project is not to find out, objectively, whether there was some sort of passive police conspiracy (“let it happen”) or even an active one (“urge them on”) behind Malcolm X’s death. Instead, the conspiracy is assumed, despite all the evidence tested in a court of law pointing to the Nation of Islam. But since the obvious culprit is politically unacceptable to Professor Marable, the facts of the courtroom conviction of two Nation of Islam members for murdering Malcolm are ignored, the obvious masterminds Elijah Mohammad and Farrakhan are ignored—even though Farrakhan himself has apologized in public to Malcolm X’s family for fostering a climate of hate against Malcolm that led to his death—and what remains is a paranoid “research project,” where the answer is already assumed, on the basis of no evidence. And this from a professor of history.

Professor Marable is convinced, of course, that there are enemies of his project, chief among whom he identifies as the white middle class, which he also believes to be the source of the inequities of American society that inflame his radical passions: “Part of the historic difficulty in uprooting racial and gender inequality in the United States is that whites generally—and especially white middle and upper-class males—must be taught to how the omnipresent structures of white privilege perpetuate inequality for millions of Americans.”⁶¹⁴ The remedy lies in indoctrinating students “of privileged backgrounds,” in Professor Marable’s view, of “the meaning and reality of hunger and poverty,” to “create and nourish” in them “a commitment to a society committed to social justice... and foster impatience with all forms of human inequality, whether based on gender, sexual orientation, or race... and empower those without power.”

See also: Professors Aptheker, Baraka, Davis, Targ

Research: Jacob Laksin

Professor Joseph Massad

Columbia University

— Assistant professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history at Columbia University

— Calls for the destruction of “the Jewish State” and denies that the Jews are a nation