The Professors

Joseph Massad is assistant professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures at Columbia University. Among a faculty distinguished more for its militancy and political activism than its scholarship, Professor Massad is in a radical class of his own. A self-described “Palestinian-Jordanian,” Professor Massad routinely condemns Israel as a “racist state,” and calls for its destruction. In April 2002, he delivered a characteristically venomous public lecture describing Israel as “a Jewish supremacist and racist state.”⁶¹⁵ Taking this charge to its logical conclusion, Professor Massad explained that “every racist state should be destroyed.”⁶¹⁶ A month earlier, Professor Massad had said “the Jews are not a nation” and the “Jewish state is a racist state that does not have the right to exist.”⁶¹⁷

“It is only by making the costs of Jewish supremacy too high that Israeli Jews will give it up,” Professor Massad said on another occasion.⁶¹⁸ Jewish supremacists, he believes, are those Jews “not confined to [Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon and the Israeli Jewish right wing which is anyway a majority in Jewish Israel, but also to liberal and leftist Jews.” In short, all Jews are “Jewish supremacists.”⁶¹⁹

In common with Palestinian terrorists, Professor Massad does not distinguish between civilian and military targets. He stresses that the “resistance of Palestinians,” must extend to Israeli “civil institutions” (that is, ordinary people walking on the street, women, children), and hails as “anti-colonial resisters” those Palestinian terrorists who undertake to murder Jews inside the so-called Green Line demarcating Israel’s pre-1967 border.⁶²⁰

If Professor Massad’s hostility toward Israel is formidable, his knowledge of the Jewish state is significantly wanting. Speaking no Hebrew, Professor Massad has a demonstrably feeble grasp of Israeli history and his books contain numerous errors prompted by his animus towards the Israeli state. In his 2001 book, Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan, for example, Professor Massad makes reference to a November 1966 Israeli raid and “massacre” that took place in Samu, Jordan. Yet not even the Jordanians, who suffered the casualties to which Professor Massad is referring, depicted Israel’s action as a “massacre.” Samir Mutawi, who authored the semiofficial account of Jordan’s involvement in the 1967 war, wrote that “eighteen Jordanians” were killed in the raid. In fact, Professor Massad, himself provides an identical casualty figure later in his own text—fifteen soldiers and three civilians killed—thereby contradicting his prior claim that a “massacre” had occurred. Professor Massad also writes that in the March 1968 battle of Karamah, the Israeli army “could not escape unscathed (as it had during the 1967 war and on many other occasions). For the first time in its history, it received heavy damages in personnel and material.” But while Israel lost twenty-eight soldiers at Karamah, it had lost some eight hundred in June 1967. Moreover, in the 1948 war against its Arab attackers, Israel lost a combined six thousand of its soldiers and civilians.⁶²¹

An observer uninitiated in the rituals of the modern university might suppose that Professor Massad’s savage enmity towards Israel, his expressed rejection of its right to exist as a nation, his support for violence against Israeli civilians, and his many egregious errors in scholarship—to say nothing of his biased view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—would be sufficient to disqualify him from teaching about the Jewish State. Not at Columbia. After all, Professor Massad teaches in a program in which one of the senior members, Professor Hamid Dabashi, has publicly written that the physical bodies of Israeli Jews are in their very structure evil. ⁶²²

Besides vilifying Israel in public, Professor Massad acts out his aggressions in an introductory course on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The course description for “Palestinian and Israeli Politics and Society” itself notes: “The purpose of this course is not to provide ‘balanced’ coverage of the views of both sides but rather to provide a thorough yet critical overview of the Zionist-Palestinian conflict.”⁶²³

To appreciate what is meant by “critical,” it is worthwhile to reflect on Professor Massad’s use of the word “Zionist.” In Professor Massad’s view, Zionism—that is, the political and religious movement advocating the right of the Jewish people to an independent state—is inherently “anti-Semitic.” On its face, the claim is absurd: Zionism has never defined itself with reference to biological or racial traits, accenting only affiliation to the Jewish faith; moreover, Israel boasts a considerable diversity of races and grants more rights to its Arab citizens than does any Arab state.

Writing in the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram in January of 2003, in the course of attacking “Israel’s racist nature,” Professor Massad alleged an “ideological and practical collusion between Zionism and anti-Semitism since the inception of the movement.” ⁶²⁴ Professor Massad concretized this “collusion” with the following example: “Zionism’s anti-Semitic project of destroying Jewish cultures and languages in the diaspora in the interest of an invented Hebrew that none of them spoke, and in the interest of evicting them from Europe and transporting them to an Asian land to which they had never been, is never examined by these intellectuals.”⁶²⁵

By urging the migration of the Jewish people “to an Asian land to which they had never been,”⁶²⁶ (an obvious falsehood) Zionism intended to safeguard the Jewish people from the perennial depredations visited on them in Europe. Far from “destroying Jewish cultures and languages,”⁶²⁷ Zionism aspired to save them. But this account, though more faithful to the historical record, had the disadvantage of voiding Professor Massad’s claim that “Zionism has always been predicated on anti-Semitism and on an alliance between Zionists and anti-Semitic imperialists.” ⁶²⁸ It also conflicted with Massad’s view of the “European Jew as a coloniser [sic] who has used racist colonial violence for the last century against the Palestinian people.”⁶²⁹

But it did not preclude Professor Massad from condemning Israel in the most extreme terms. In one representative passage of the Al-Ahram article, Professor Massad, citing no evidence, derided “the racist curricula of Israeli Jewish schools, the racist Israeli Jewish media representations of Palestinians, the racist declarations of Israeli Jewish leaders on the right and on the left, and the Jewish supremacist rights and privileges guiding Zionism and Israeli state laws and policies.”⁶³⁰

In a December 2002 article for Al-Ahram, Professor Massad provided perhaps his most bizarre definition of Zionism to date: “All those in the Arab world who deny the Jewish holocaust are in my opinion Zionists,” he explained.⁶³¹ Lest one think that he harbored any genuine sympathy for the victims of the Holocaust—a word he specifically refused to capitalize—Professor Massad immediately likened the murder of six million Jews to “Zionist attempts to play down the number of Palestinian refugees.”⁶³² He then asserted that modern-day Arabs and Muslims were suffering from an equally horrific holocaust, one perpetrated by, inter alia, Jews: “Today we live in a world where anti-Arab and anti-Muslim hatred, derived from anti-Semitism, is everywhere in evidence. It is not Jews who are being murdered by the thousands by Arab anti-Semitism, but rather Arabs and Muslims who are being murdered by the tens of thousands by Euro-American Christian anti-Semitism and by Israeli Jewish anti-Semitism.”⁶³³

Equally striking is Professor Massad’s repeated equation of Israel and its leaders with Nazis. There are “stark” similarities, he claims, between the plight of Jews in Nazi concentration camps and Israeli prisons’ treatment of Palestinian terrorists (or “the children and young men of the stones and Molotov cocktails,” as Massad—echoing a phrase coined by the Unified National Leadership of the Uprising—euphemistically dubs them⁶³⁴). In Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, meanwhile, Professor Massad sees the incarnation of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.⁶³⁵

But Professor Massad is not a stickler for the Israel-as-Nazi-Germany typology. It is enough to confront him with his statements to this effect—as a group of Columbia students did in their critical documentary, “Columbia Unbecoming”—for Massad to issue outraged denials. Writing in the stoutly anti-Israel website the Electronic Intifada in November of 2004, Professor Massad stated, “The lie...that I would equate Israel with Nazi Germany is abhorrent. I have never made such a reprehensible equation.”⁶³⁶

As Professor Massad’s reaction to the above-mentioned charges suggests, he does not take criticism well. Or at all, for that matter, when his alleged abuse of students in his classes led to a university-mandated investigation in the spring of 2005. Upon being confronted with two incidents in which he was alleged to have screamed at pro-Israeli students, his response was to declare that he did not remember the incidents. The investigatory committee concluded, however, that these incidents did indeed occur. And, of course, it would be unlikely for a faculty member to forget screaming at a student who disagreed with him (unless, of course, he did it all the time). Massad’s colleague Professor George Saliba, when confronted with similar allegations, had a similar failure of memory, and the investigatory committee concluded that these incidents had also occurred. It is instructive that nevertheless no action at all was taken against Massad for dissembling to the university committee. ⁶³⁷ Instead, Massad was allowed to dismiss his critics as being “pro-Israel.” He then claimed it was his Jewish critics who were anti-Jewish. They had targeted him, he said, for being pro-Jewish. Explained Professor Massad: “What galls them most is that I’m a pro-Jewish Palestinian critic of Zionism.”⁶³⁸

Arbitrary censorship of hate speech, according to Professor Matsuda, was therefore preferable to the potentially devastating effects it might otherwise have on its ostensibly defenseless targets. Racist speech, Professor Matsuda wrote, “is best treated as a sui generis category, presenting an idea so historically untenable, so dangerous, and so tied to perpetuation of violence and degradation of the very classes of human beings who are least equipped to respond that it is properly treated as outside the realm of protected discourse.”⁶⁴⁰ Not all hate speech was actionable, however: “Expressions of hatred, revulsion, and anger directed against members of historically dominant groups by subordinated-group members are not criminalized by the definition of racist hate messages used here.”⁶⁴¹ Hence, hate speech leveled by black Americans against whites may be “troubling,” Professor Matsuda explained, but, in view of the latter’s “historically dominant” role, permissible.

Many of the speech code laws advocated by Professor Matsuda were later struck down as unconstitutional. But they remain preserved at schools like Professor Matsuda’s own Georgetown, which is a private institution beyond the reach of constitutional protections. At Georgetown, a broad ban is in effect on any “offensive act which is intentional or persistent” and “which is directed at specific individuals or groups of individuals, in such a way as to make an individual or group feel intimidated or unwelcome because of their actual or perceived color, disability, ethnicity, gender, national origin, race, religion, and/or sexual orientation.”⁶⁴²

Speech codes are not the only mark that Professor Matsuda has left on the Georgetown campus. In fulfillment of the scholarly half of her “activist scholar” dual identity, Professor Matsuda also teaches three courses at Georgetown—all of them distinguished by their unmistakable preference for activist recruitment over legal instruction.

This preference is perhaps most transparent in a course called “Organizing for Social Change: Anti-Subordination Theory and Practice,” co-taught by Professor Matsuda and adjunct law professor Marilyn Sneiderman, who is the director of field organization for the AFL-CIO and a winner of the “Harrington-Thomas-Debs Award” from the Democratic Socialists of America. ⁶⁴³ “This class is designed for the lawyer as change agent,” explains the course description in the Georgetown catalogue. The course is concerned less with educating a new generation of lawyers than with honing “the strategies of professional organizers.” ⁶⁴⁴ Having absorbed “readings from Critical Race Theory, feminist legal theory, anti-colonial theory, peace studies, and other social justice traditions,” each student “is expected to complete a social change organizing project as part of the course requirements.”⁶⁴⁵ There are no alternatives to activism, for as the course description cautions: “Students who take this class should have in mind a social justice project that includes some form of public outreach, education, or institution building.”⁶⁴⁶

A similarly activist methodology prevails in Professor Matsuda’s course on “Peacemaking.” In her course description Professor Matsuda explains that it “evolved from conversations with students who are interested in taking peacemaking seriously” in the aftermath of 9/11. “Peacemaking,” however, is a highly misleading title for a course that aspires to train a new generation of lawyer-activists in the fundamentals of opposing American military intervention: “How have lawyers participated in peace movements, from draft resistance to Constitutional challenges?” asks the course description.⁶⁴⁷ But although wars usually have two contending sides, any “peacemaking work” Professor Matsuda’s course considers worth undertaking is directed solely at one side, the United States.

Professor Matsuda’s views on war and peace are clarified in a 2003 letter to the Boston Review. With respect to anti-American terrorism, Professor Matsuda writes, “Our job is to ask how we [the United States] participated in its creation, and how we feed it still by choosing militarism and global inequality over peace and global justice.”⁶⁴⁸ Any discussion of the war on terror, Professor Matsuda declares, must be above all a discussion of American “militarism.” “Militarism—choosing arms and battlegrounds and dead bodies before we ask how a coming war will position us yet again as the target of someone else’s unchecked fury—is the big story of how we came to this place of danger in which, we are told, the Bill of Rights is a luxury.”⁶⁴⁹

Even Professor Matsuda’s one course with a discernible connection to law—an “Asian Americans and Legal Ideology Seminar”—places “particular emphasis” on “political theory.”⁶⁵⁰ Presented as an exploration of the “Asian American experience,” the course is focused on the “relationship between law and social change, and the limits of liberal legal ideology.”⁶⁵¹ Students enrolled in the seminar also examine how Asian Americans have fared within the American legal system—a subject on which Professor Matsuda has been conspicuously outspoken. In an address to the Asian Law Caucus in 1990, Professor Matsuda described twentieth-century America as a “land where racism found a home,” and where anti-Asian hatred is fueled by the “real villains—the corporations and politicians who put profits before human needs.”⁶⁵²

In 1986 Professor Mazrui hosted a PBS series called The Africans: A Triple Heritage, and authored an accompanying book of the same title. One insistent point of The Africans was the horror, and the continuing cost to the continent, of the history of European slave-trading. Professor Mazrui failed to mention, in this context, that he himself is descended from the leading slave-trading family of Mombasa (their conduct was suppressed by the British). Professor Mazrui’s family sold slaves into the Muslim lands, including Saudi Arabia—another geographical goal of “the terrible heritage of slavery” that Mazrui failed to mention. In the book version, Professor Mazrui also supported the expansion of Islam south through the Sudan as a natural development not to be resisted by the Christian South. That is, he explicitly supported the genocidal conduct of the Sudanese Islamic government. ⁶⁵⁴

In April 2002, Professor Mazrui co-authored an article titled “Is Israel a Threat to American Democracy?” The article depicts Osama bin Laden’s anti-Americanism as a response to “massive economic aid from the United States to Israel” and the “provision of sophisticated American weapons to Israel.”⁶⁵⁵ This is historically untrue, however. Bin Laden’s fatwa of 1998 was not greatly concerned with “Palestine,” which ranked low on his list of grievances. Bin Laden was concerned with the presence of American forces “polluting the land of the Two Mosques” (i.e., Saudi Arabia) and the impact of sanctions on Iraq.

In Professor Mazrui’s view, however, Arab terrorism is a reasoned reaction to unjust American and Israeli policies: “Israeli militarism, occupation of Arab lands and repression of Palestinians are the main causes of not only anti-Israeli terrorism but also anti-American terrorism.... Israeli repression and militarism provokes suicide bombers” and gives “rise to movements like Hamas and al Qaeda. . . . If Israeli atrocities and repression cause terrorism in the United States, and terrorism in turn threatens civil liberties in America, a chain of causation is established. The behavior of the state of Israel threatens not merely democracy within the Jewish state. Israel threatens democracy in America as well.”⁶⁵⁶

Professor Mazrui and his co-authors accuse Israel of promoting a doctrine of Jewish racial superiority and, mirroring the atrocities of Nazi Germany, instituting policies of apartheid and genocide: “Israeli neo-Nazism reversed the scale of genetic values favored by German Nazis. Both forms of extremism exaggerated the impact of the Jewish factor. The Nazis thought the Jewish impact was negative. The Israeli extremists erred the other way.”⁶⁵⁷ “As for the trend towards militarization, Israel has indeed become the most efficient war machine since Nazi Germany.” ⁶⁵⁸ “Perhaps Israel ought never to have been created. Millions of Jews were opposed to its creation in the first place. Those Jews have now been vindicated.”⁶⁵⁹

Before Professor Meranto became an academic, she was a potter and art gallery director in Colorado. She received her BA from Metropolitan State College in 1985, her MA from the University of Colorado (UC) in 1987, and, at age forty, earned her PhD in political science from UC in 1991. Professor Meranto, who is a Navajo, designed a minor in Native American Studies at Metro State. She has served as faculty advisor to Students for Social and Economic Justice and currently advises the Metropolitan American Indian Students for Empowerment (originally called “Native American Students for Un-American Values”).

Professor Meranto was married to the late political science professor and anti-capitalist activist Philip J. Meranto, whose books include: School Politics in the Metropolis (1970); The Persistence of Institutional Racism in Higher Education (1981); and Guarding the Ivory Tower: Repression and Rebellion in Higher Education (1985), which, after his death, Oneida Meranto completed.

Guarding the Ivory Tower helped form the intellectual foundation of Professor Meranto’s leftist politics, which she herself describes as “very raw.”⁶⁶¹ The book embodies the Merantos’ belief that “progressive” professors are entitled to use the classroom to foment social rebellion against capitalist, Anglo-Saxon America. The book tells the story of radical faculty who were “purged” during the 1970s “due to their political beliefs and activities” (as radical Michael Parenti observed in a review of the book). Philip Meranto himself was forced to resign from both the University of Illinois and then the University of Washington as a result of his radical activism, which involved collision with the law and subsequent arrests. After his resignation from the latter, he was unable to secure another regular academic appointment.

Professor Meranto views the United States as a nation in which racism and “sexism” are rampant. Over a decade ago, she went on record in The Metropolitan saying that she was fed up with the “white mind-set” of America. On February 24, 2004, she gave a speech at a protest, on Metro State’s campus, against the sexual assault and rape allegations that had recently been made against a number of players on the University of Colorado football team. In her speech, Professor Meranto claimed that the only reason the allegations became a scandal was because the victims were white:

“Take a look at how we’ve rewarded white women or women in general that claim sexual harassment. They receive sympathy as they well should; they’re accommodated; they’re sometimes given their own talk shows; they receive a TV series; they write books; in essence they become famous. And if they join the reactionary right as Paula Jones did, they even get a makeover . . . Let me give you a few assumptions about race and rape. These two [race and rape] should always be intertwined as long as the parties are mixed race. Now number one, nonwhite women can’t be raped. See, we’ve been socialized at a very young age, even at the age of five, that we can’t be raped since rape is about power and since nonwhite women don’t have power our voices are automatically suppressed. Two, nonwhite men, whether black, brown or red, desire white women. There is a history to sex, power and race in America and I suggest you understand it. Obviously some white men in great power have a nonwhite partner, but overall we as a society still have in our minds an overall sexual connotation of nonwhites. Let me give you an example. Nonwhites are closer to nature. Those that are closer to nature are more animalistic. Thus, animals are less capable of curbing their basic animalistic tendencies. The favorite movie of a white professor here on campus is Black Robe. Why? He said it was because the Christians taught the natives how to have sex in a more loving way.”⁶⁶²

In an article written in 2001 titled “From Buckskin to Calico and Back Again,” Professor Meranto claims that America has been and always will be racist and sexist because of “Capitalism, Christianization and Civilization.” According to Professor Meranto, American history is all about “sex, power and race;” the only contributions the “Euro-American” Founders brought to the New World were “cultural genocide,” “racial hierarchy,” and “gender politics.”

To judge from her own website, Professor Meranto has almost no published scholarly work to her credit—perhaps one peer-reviewed article in 2001. She also has three or four polemics in obscure left-wing venues. It is an open question as to how someone with these poor credentials ever became an associate professor with tenure, when the normal requirement for that status, which confers a lifetime appointment, is at least a scholarly book and perhaps several peer-reviewed articles. The only book Meranto ever published was in 1986, and that was her husband’s book, which she completed after his death, long before she earned a PhD. A perusal of the Department of Political Science website for Metro State College reveals the vast difference between Meranto’s negligible scholarly accomplishments and those of the other members of her department.

Professor Navarro believes that Mexicans “were victims of an imperialism by which Mexico lost half of its territory.”⁶⁶⁴ He predicts that by the year 2050, the Latin population in the United States will reach 100 million, and that in states like California, New Mexico, and Texas, Mexicans will comprise the majority of the population. Says Navarro, “The Latin vote has the potential of ‘tipping the balance’ of U.S. elections, especially the presidential elections. . . . Imagine the possibility that Mexico recovers the lost territories, or that a new Republic of Aztlán is established; imagine that what happens is similar to the separatist movements in the province of Quebec and Puerto Rico.”⁶⁶⁵ Professor Navarro advocates the reclamation of the southwestern United States by Mexico, the overthrow of the U.S. government, and the “liberation” of the ancestral Mexican homeland of “Aztlán.”

One way that Professor Navarro hopes to “[tip] the balance of U.S. elections,” and “recover the lost territories of Mexico” is by supporting policies that weaken America’s ability to secure its borders against illegal immigration. Professor Navarro fervently opposed California’s Proposition 187, which sought to bar state and local agencies from providing social services and public education to illegal aliens. In January 1995, speaking at the Latino Summit Response to Proposition 187 conference at UC Riverside, Professor Navarro declared:

We’re in a state of war. This Proposition 187 is a declaration of war against the Latino/Chicano community of this country! They know the demographics, they know that history and time is on our side, as one people, as one nation within a nation as the community that we are, the Chicano/Latino community of this nation. What that means is a transfer of power. It means control. It means who’s going to [have] influence. And it is the young people that are going to be in a position to really make the promise of what the Chicano movement was all about in terms of self-determination, in terms of empowerment, even in terms of the idea of an Aztlan!⁶⁶⁶

In March 2001, Professor Navarro led a national delegation of Chicanos and Mexicans at the Zapatista March into Mexico City. “Our purpose of joining the march along with the Ejercito Zapatista de Liberacion Nacional (EZLN),” he said, “is to demonstrate our solidarity with the indigenous people of Mexico. It is important for us on this side of the border to continue our friendship and unity with our brethren in Mexico.”⁶⁶⁷ The EZLN is a Marxist guerrilla group that seeks to unite the “workers, farmers, students, teachers, and employees... [and] the workers of the city and the countryside,” in an effort to create a socialist revolution.

In April 2005, Professor Navarro led a group of some forty activists to Arizona to oppose the Minuteman Project, a volunteer group, which has tried to bring attention to the problem of illegal immigration by aiding the U.S. Border Patrol in monitoring the porous U.S./Mexico border. Despite the Minutemen’s adherence to principles of non-violence, Professor Navarro has mendaciously depicted the group as a violent domestic terrorist outfit. But Navarro himself has not explicitly ruled out violence as a means himself. “We have a number of strategic scenarios that we can implement very quickly depending upon the circumstances,” he says. “Believe me, they will be very assertive, very aggressive.”⁶⁶⁸ “We will adjust to the situation,” he adds, “and obviously some of us have experience in the military... so there will be maybe some elements of surprises in terms of activities, and that is a warning to the militias.”⁶⁶⁹

In October 2002, Professor Navarro spoke out against the impending war with Iraq, and organized a demonstration in front of Representative Joe Baca’s district office in San Bernardino, California, exhorting the Democratic representative to vote against military action. In Professor Navarro’s view, the Bush administration “seeks war at the expense of peace”⁶⁷⁰ for the purpose of gaining control over Iraq’s oil reserves.

Professor Navarro is active in a number of groups that share his views. He is head of the National Alliance for Human Rights (NAHR), an organization of immigrant rights activists who promote open borders and demand increased rights for illegal aliens. In 2002, Navarro was also sworn in as a new member of the State Central Committee for the Party of Democratic Revolution, a socialist party in Mexico. ⁶⁷¹

Professor Navasky’s views of the journalism world are discernibly colored by his left-wing politics, specifically his aversion to the trend of corporate ownership of media outlets. With an obvious reference to conservative media mogul Rupert Murdoch, Professor Navasky has inveighed against this trend as the “Murdochization” of the media, as he put it during one journalism workshop.

Professor Navasky is also director of the George Delacorte Center for Magazine Journalism at Columbia University. Several times per month, the center hosts lectures by prominent journalists, and attendance is required for students with a concentration in magazine journalism. In past years, the center has played host to a diverse slate of lecturers. Under Professor Navasky’s guidance, the slate of invitees has narrowed dramatically to the political Left. In February of 2005, for instance, three of the four lectures were by prominent leftists: The American Prospect’s Michael Tomasky; The New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg; and Navasky himself.

In the Nation world he inhabits, Professor Navasky is best known for his after-the-fact defenses of Alger Hiss and the Rosenberg spies, and for his skepticism about the veracity of the Venona decrypts—the communications between Soviet intelligence controllers and their American agents, many of whom were members of the American Communist Party. Professor Navasky has written long articles on each of these subjects. Professor Navasky, whose own background has deep roots in the Communist and fellow-traveling Left, equates anti-Communists with the followers of the late Senator Joseph McCarthy. According to Professor Navasky the real agenda of anti-Communists is not to oppose Communism—which in his mind was never a threat—but “to discredit the left-liberal project today.”

The Soviet archives have now been opened, however, and the Venona intercepts have been released. As a result, it is now known, except for holdouts like Professor Navasky, that McCarthy underestimated the extent of Soviet infiltration in the American government and that virtually all individuals called before congressional committees were involved in a conspiratorial network controlled by the Kremlin. The head of the Communist Party, Earl Browder, himself ran an espionage operation for the Soviets. Alger Hiss and Julius Rosenberg were guilty as charged.⁶⁷⁴

Like many who grew up reading pro-Soviet articles in The Nation, Professor Navasky is reluctant to acknowledge that the martyrs of the Left were actually guilty. To do so would mean admitting their right-wing opponents were actually right. If the Left were to concede error, the confession might lead to questions about whether they should be taken seriously today (and in this sense, Professor Navasky’s aversion to anti-Communists is a sound one from his point of view). Professor Navasky and other longtime apologists for Communism have never acknowledged their role in enabling a movement that in the last century killed one hundred million innocent people.

Professor Navasky’s political prejudices are evident in his pronouncements on journalism bias. Describing the animating values of anti-Communist magazines like National Review, Professor Navasky has used the terms “jingoistic” and “super-nationalistic” (Navasky has written about his unease with concepts like patriotism).⁶⁷⁵ By contrast, The Nation in his view draws on “human rights values and humanist values.”⁶⁷⁶

From the platform that his academic employment provides, Professor Navasky has labored to disseminate The Nation’s far-left agendas throughout the American education system. By Navasky’s own calculation, The Nation has special representatives on 160 college campuses, where they distribute copies of the magazine to students and urge them to purchase subscriptions. Under Professor Navasky’s stewardship, The Nation has run an ongoing campaign to expand its influence on college campuses, sponsoring speakers and debates and even launching a radio program, called “Radio Nation,” which airs on forty college radio stations. Professor Navasky has also revealed that the magazine intends to put its agendas into a special “text,” supplemented by computer programs, and geared toward colleges and high schools. Professor Navasky has described this politically motivated form of outreach as an “auxiliary teaching tool.”

Those critics who question whether rap music, with its crude, violent, and misogynistic lyrics and its reliance on inner-city vernacular (“Ebonics”), is an effective medium for teaching literacy are dismissed by Parmar as craven apologists for bourgeois hegemony. “Rap music causes moral panic in many because of its ‘threat’ to existing values and ideologies held by the dominant middle class,” asserts Parmar.⁶⁷⁸ According to Parmar the sexual lyrics and violent subject matter of rap make perfectly appropriate learning aids for young children:

From my experience in the classrooms—and that of my students who are practitioners in the field—we’ve learned that kids—even as young as third grade—are very sophisticated about the homophobic, violent and sexual messages from some mainstream rap artists. If you give students an opportunity to deconstruct the lyrics and then compare them with those of more social and political consciousness raising artists, such as [rap groups] The Roots or Dead Prez . . . youth are capable of distinguishing between reality and false perceptions and stereotypes perpetuated in commercialized rap.⁶⁷⁹

Rap, Parmar teaches, is more than a means of teaching literacy. It is also a vehicle for social engineering. In addition to teaching children grammar and sentence structure, Parmar maintains, the “critical examination and deconstruction of rap lyrics becomes a method to get students to critically examine such issues as race, class, culture, and identity.” Parmar calls this mode of instruction an “an empowering, liberating pedagogy.” She notes with approval that one of her former students used rap to “explore economic social and political issues” in a middle school.⁶⁸⁰

Parmar’s controversial course at Brooklyn College, “Language Literacy in Secondary Education,” typifies the professor’s preference for politicized pedagogy. Required of all students who intend to become secondary-school teachers, the course is designed to teach students to draft lesson plans that teach literacy. Parmar’s syllabus informs students that the principal focus of these lesson plans must be “social justice.”⁶⁸¹

Another theme animating Parmar’s course is her aversion to proper English usage. To insist on grammatical English, Parmar believes, is to exhibit an intolerable form of cultural chauvinism—a point reinforced by the preface to the requirements for her course, which adduces the following quotation from the South African writer Jamul Ndebele: “The need to maintain control over English by its native speakers has given birth to a policy of manipulative open-mindedness in which it is held that English belongs to all who use it provided that it is used correctly. This is the art of giving away the bride while insisting that she still belongs to you.”⁶⁸² Students are expected to share Parmar’s antipathy toward grammatical rule-based English, since she does not countenance dissent: In December 2004, for instance, several disaffected Brooklyn College students wrote letters to the dean of the School of Education taking issue with Parmar’s hostility toward students who dared voice their support for correct English usage.⁶⁸³

Nor was this the only confrontation between Parmar and her students. Evan Goldwyn, a Brooklyn College student who took Parmar’s course, caused a campus furor when he wrote a lengthy critique of the course for the New York Sun, detailing his objections to Parmar’s teaching methods. Topping Goldwyn’s list of grievances were Parmar’s pronounced bias against English and her bigotry towards white students. “She repeatedly referred to English as a language of oppressors and in particular denounced white people as the oppressors,” Goldwyn wrote. “When offended students raised their hands to challenge Professor Parmar’s assertion, they were ignored. Those students that disagreed with her were altogether denied the opportunity to speak.”⁶⁸⁴

Students also charged that Parmar’s insistence on bringing politics into the classroom went beyond issues relating to English literacy. A week before the 2004 presidential election, Parmar screened Michael Moore’s anti-Bush documentary, Fahrenheit 9/11 in class.⁶⁸⁵ Students were required to attend the screening, even if they had already seen the film. “Most troubling of all,” Goldwyn wrote, “she has insinuated that people who disagree with her views on issues such as Ebonics or Fahrenheit 9/11 should not become teachers.”⁶⁸⁶

Professor Perez has made it her mission to draw attention to what she regards as the paucity of information that history books have traditionally provided about Chicana women. (The terms “Chicana” and “Chicano” were appropriated by Mexican American activists in the Brown Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s in the American Southwest.)⁶⁸⁸ To address her concern, Perez authored the 1999 book The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History—a text she describes as “an archaeology of discursive fields of knowledge that write Chicanas into histories.”⁶⁸⁹ Depicting history as a male-dominated discipline whose works are written largely from a male perspective (and focus heavily—and unfairly—on the deeds of men), Professor Perez writes, “I am more concerned with taking the ‘his’ out of the ‘story,’ the story that often becomes the universalist narrative in which women’s experience is negated.”⁶⁹⁰

According to Professor Perez, those women whose names do appear in history books are, for the most part, caricatured and misrepresented. “Voices of women from the past, voices of Chicanas, Mexicanas, and Indias, [sic] are utterances which are still minimalized, spurned, even scorned. And time ... has not granted Chicanas, Mexicanas and Indias much of a voice at all. We are spoken about, spoken for, and ultimately encoded as whining, hysterical, irrational, or passive women who cannot know what is good for us, and who cannot know how to express or authorize our own narratives.”⁶⁹¹

Professor Perez writes of the anger she feels whenever “a white man was trying to persuade me to forget a history of brutality and move on.”⁶⁹² White mistreatment of Chicanos is, in Professor Perez’s view, by no means a thing of the past, but rather “a history that still brutalizes.”⁶⁹³ She lauds the author Antonia Castaneda for pointing out “how incoming Euro-americans sexualized Mexican women in their diaries and travel logs”—which both Perez and Castaneda cite as evidence of “the intimate bond between sexual violence and colonization.”⁶⁹⁴

Regarding American culture as hostile to Mexicans, Professor Perez is less than enthusiastic about the efforts of “Chicanos/as” to assimilate into white society, though she empathizes with the emotions and the pragmatic concerns that she believes compel them to do so. “Few have probed how assimilation may be a tactic, an interstitial move for survival,” writes Professor Perez. “Why must we call upon assimilation at all? ... To say yes to speaking English, to say yes to an American education, to say yes to participation in organizations like the YWCA—these were interstitial moves for survival. The contradictions women faced forced them to accept existing structures and to create their subjecthood within those structures.”⁶⁹⁵

Professor Perez identifies what she considers her personal and scholarly mission as follows: “[T]o invert all power... to love myself and other Chicanas and women of color, to revere the Chicana . . . is the revolution I speak of now.... I prefer to think of myself as one who places women, especially Third [W]orld and lesbians, in the forefront of my priorities.”⁶⁹⁶

In February 2005, Professor Perez was among the most passionate defenders of Professor Ward Churchill when he faced public criticism for having described the victims of 9/11 as “little Eichmanns.” “We as faculty in ethnic studies stand in full and unconditional support of Ward Churchill and his First Amendment rights,” she said, explaining that Churchill’s comments had been “misconstrued in virulent terms.”⁶⁹⁷

Writing in the conspiracy-minded webzine Counterpunch in February 2005, Professor Perez argued that the criticism of Churchill’s statements was rooted in a neo-conservative effort to establish ideological control over the University of Colorado: “We’ve done some preliminary research and analysis,” wrote Professor Perez, “and it’s become clear exactly what’s at stake and what we’re up against. CU-Boulder has been made the national frontline of the neocon battle for dominance in academe. CU-Boulder has likely been made their ‘test case,’ their break-the-mould moment in a national strategy. Their local resources and troops (think tanks, legislative, rank-and-file followers) are already fully mobilized and their national resources are mobilizing in our direction. This is much, much bigger than an individual attack on Ward [Churchill]. What we’re looking at is a carefully developed, pre-existing national strategy that has been searching for exactly the right breakthrough ‘test case.’ It has found extremely favorable conditions in Ward’s situation and in the post-911 climate. As they’ve been doing already in other areas, they want to dismantle the structural footholds (academic freedom/tenure, ethnic studies) that social movements gained for people of color and liberal and progressive intellectuals inside academe during the 60s & 70s.”⁶⁹⁸ Perez further hinted that criticism of Churchill was motivated by racism, asserting that “There are faculty who have problems with his being American Indian.”⁶⁹⁹

This statement is an example of the quality of “scholarship” that has propelled Professor Perez to the chairmanship of a Department of History and now a Department of Ethnic Studies—since Ward Churchill is not an American Indian, and this has been public knowledge for some time; his false claims in this respect (which earned him his original appointment in ethnic studies) are part of the scandal.

As chair of ethnic studies, and even after she steps down, the fact is that Professor Perez will be having a large influence for the next two decades on the type of scholar this department hires, and on that person’s fate at the University of Colorado. One can imagine the results in terms of, say, the creation of variety of ideological viewpoints in this department at a major university.

The essay⁷⁰¹ draws heavily on the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, as well as anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss and the psychoanalysts Sigmund Freud and post-modernist Jacques Lacan. Professor Rubin’s aim in this essay is to expose and condemn what she calls the “set of arrangements” that relegate women to a subordinate position in their relations with men. She believes that gender is a social and historical construct (i.e., man-created) that is neither natural nor essential, and that one of the chief goals of feminism is to liberate both sexes from the patriarchy-created “strait-jacket of gender.”⁷⁰²

Professor Rubin is an enthusiastic advocate of “queer theory,” which rejects the view that sexuality is a universal human impulse. It says that sexual desire does not exist apart from history and culture; that nothing is “natural,” including heterosexuality. Professor Rubin further asserts that there are no natural differences between men and women. Her views on this topic are discussed by professors Micaela di Leonardo and Roger Lancaster in their article “Gender, Sexuality, Political Economy”: “Gayle Rubin’s 1975 ‘The Traffic in Women,’ for example, a tour de force of Marxism, structuralism, and Freudo-Lacanian theory, draws on analogies with political economy to hypothesize a universal ‘sex-gender system.’ Rubin associates the universal presence of gender asymmetry with a system of compulsory heterosexuality. The one implies and mandates the other: the taboo on same-sex behavior both bars women from phallic power and mandates heterosexual alliance—the traffic in women. At the same time, the system of gender inequality requires an enforced and coercive production of dichotomous gender differences—an equilibrium that can only be enforced by a strict taboo on homologous couplings. Although overstated in their universalist scope, such arguments were mainstays of lesbian feminism, and signaled early on the possibilities of collaboration between feminism and gay/lesbian studies.”⁷⁰³

Impressed by Marx’s explanation of class oppression (despite its refutation by historical events), Professor Rubin sees capitalism as a powerful agent of the oppression of women, though by no means the only one. She defines capitalism as “a set of social relations in which production takes the form of turning money, things, and people into capital. And capital is a quantity of goods or money which, when exchanged for labor, reproduces and augments itself by extracting unpaid labor, or surplus value, from labor into itself.”⁷⁰⁴ She views women’s housework as a critical component of the amount of unpaid labor that capitalists can squeeze out of the working class. An outspoken advocate of gay relationships, Professor Rubin further writes, “Suppression of the homosexual component of human sexuality, and by corollary... oppression of homosexuals, is . . . a product of the same system whose rules and relations oppress women.”⁷⁰⁵

Professor Rubin has made her mark both as an academic and as an activist. On the one hand, her academic works like “The Traffic in Women,” “The Leather Menace,” and “Thinking Sex” have been published in scholarly books and academic journals. Such writings are mandatory reading in universities throughout the United States, including University of California, Santa Barbara, Harvard, Columbia, and MIT. She will soon publish, through the University of California Press, a collection of essays entitled Deviations: Essays in Sex, Gender, and Politics.

Professor Rubin has also written for non-academic publications such as the Cuir Underground, which published from 1994 to 1998 and is described as “a San Francisco-based magazine for the pansexual kink communities.”⁷⁰⁷ In her article “Old Guard, New Guard,” Rubin writes: “In the 1950s there were those who eroticized and engaged in very formal interactions based on strict codes of courtesy in the military model, and others who preferred the look of dirty bikers and a more orgiastic kind of buddy sexuality. Of course, there were spit and polish bikers too, and others who looked like greasy bikers but preferred formal SM sex . . . In the mid-1960s, classic leather styles began to give way to a kind of ‘hippie leather.’ People grew their hair, took psychedelic drugs, became less invested in 1950s formality and created new subgroups organized around different sexual styles, for example fistfucking. At one point, dope smoking leather guys and fistfuckers were in effect a kind of ‘New Guard’ . . .”⁷⁰⁸

Professor Rubin was the founder of Samois,⁷⁰⁹ the first ever women-on-women sadomasochism group, and its successor organization, the Outcasts. The latter takes pride in “proud and principled perversions.”⁷¹⁰ In 1988 Professor Rubin received a Woman of the Year Award from the National Leather Association, ⁷¹¹ a sadomasochistic, fetish, BDSM (Bondage & Discipline/ Domination & Submission/Sadism & Masochism) organization.

Among Professor Rubin’s more controversial positions has been her support for the practice of adults engaging in sex with minor children. Her endorsement of pedophilia was evident as early as 1978, when she wrote in “Leaping Lesbian”:

The recent career of boy-love in the public mind should serve as an alert that the self-interests of the feminist and gay movements are linked to simple justice for stigmatized sexual minorities. . . . We must not reject all sexual contact between adults and young people as inherently oppressive. ⁷¹²

In 1984, Professor Rubin refined and repeated her stance in “Thinking Sex.” One commentator wrote of that article: “Rubin pursues her apology of pornography, prostitution, sadomasochism, and all dissident sexual minorities; she concentrates especially on the defense of pedophilia by refusing to see in it a form of sexual exploitation. For her, any law aiming at governing sexuality constitutes “a sexual apartheid,” intended to strengthen the structures of power.”⁷¹³

Professor Rubin’s views on pedophilia remained relatively restrained until the 2003 publication of The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, to which Rubin contributed a chapter openly endorsing pedophilia. In that chapter, she defended her claim that the government’s pursuit of child molesters was “a savage and undeserved witch hunt”—reflective of a prejudice that has “more in common with ideologies of racism than with true ethics.”⁷¹⁴ Professor Rubin wrote, “Boy lovers are so stigmatized that it is difficult to find defenders for their civil liberties, let alone erotic orientation. Consequently, the police have feasted on them. Local police, the FBI and watchdog postal inspectors have joined to build a huge apparatus whose sole aim is to wipe out the community of men who love underaged youth.”⁷¹⁵ To Rubin, even pedophiles who prey on helpless children are the victims of captalism and the terrorist American State.

On the other hand, Professor Saitta does not extend his calls for “provocative speech” on campus to individuals whose views differ from his. Early in 2005, fellow University of Denver professor Richard Lamm (a liberal Democrat and former Colorado governor) tried unsuccessfully to place an article in the university newspaper, The Source. Titled “Two Wands,” the piece described a fanciful scenario where racism could be wiped out with the wave of a magic wand, and where minority neighborhoods could acquire, with the aid of a second wand, the intellectual and educational tools they would need in order to improve their lives without public assistance. Said Professor Lamm, “we must recognize that all the civil rights laws in the world are not going to solve the problem of minority failure. Ultimately Blacks and Hispanics are going to have to see that the solution is largely in their own hands.”⁷¹⁷

Scientific papers and journal articles Professor Saitta has written include: “Communal Class Processes and Pre-Columbian Social Dynamics”; “Politics and Surplus Flow in Communal Societies”; “Dialoguing with the Ghost of Marx: Mode of Production in Archaeological Theory”; “Marxist Theory and Tribal Political Economy”; “Marxist Models of Chacoan Prehistory”; and “Marxism, Prehistory, and Primitive Communism.” He is also the author of a forthcoming book titled Marxism and Archaeology. Professor Saitta is a member of the editorial board of the journal Rethinking Marxism, which “aims to stimulate interest in and debate over the explanatory power and social consequences of Marxian economic, cultural, and social analysis.” ⁷¹⁹

Mao’s “screw up” led to the murder of more than a million human beings and the enslavement of many hundreds of millions more. Like others on the far Left, Schell blames Mao or Stalin for evils committed under Communist regimes—but never Communism or Marxism, whose totalitarian outlook makes megalomaniacal dictatorship and the mass violation of human rights inevitable. No such sympathy is in evidence when Schell describes the democratic capitalist alternative: “There isn’t much I’d recommend anybody imitate in China now,” Schell told Whole Earth Review in 1988, “because China is becoming an imitation of us. . . . Now among the young there’s enormous amounts of crime and disaffection and skepticism and cynicism, along with disillusionment, and its analogue, a greed for money. People always reach for money when everything else fails.” ⁷²¹

When the People’s Republic of China was dogmatically Communist, Schell wrote of it as a beacon of hope and idealism. But the more China has inched towards capitalism, the more negative and even nasty towards it Schell’s rhetoric has become. In 2004, for example, he described China as practicing “Leninist capitalism.” In a September/October 1997 interview with the American socialist magazine Mother Jones (on whose masthead Schell is listed as a “contributing writer”), he described China’s pro-free market reform ruler Deng Xiaoping as “the counterrevolutionary par excellence in history.”⁷²² He described the nation’s minority of Communist Party leaders as “using their positions both in the party and in the government to make money.”⁷²³

About China, Schell has written In The People’s Republic: An American’s First-Hand View of Living and Working in China (1976, Random House); Watch Out for the Foreign Guests: China Encounters the West (1981, Pantheon); To Get Rich Is Glorious: China in the 1980’s (1984, Pantheon); Discos and Democracy: China in the Throes of Reform (1988, Pantheon); Mandate of Heaven: A New Generation of Entrepreneurs, Dissidents, Technocrats, and Bohemians Grasp for Power in China (1994, Simon & Schuster); The China Reader: The Reform Years co-edited with David Shambaugh, (1999, Vintage); and Empire: Impressions of China (5 Continents Press, 2004).

Schell is an environmental activist who lives in Bolinas, California, and wrote about its counterculture activists’ efforts to thwart private property development in The Town That Fought to Save Itself (1976, Pantheon). He is a pig farmer with his own small meat business and has written about that as well in Modern Meat: Antibiotics, Hormones and the Pharmaceutical Farm (1983, Random House).

After twenty-five years as a “progressive” journalist, Schell was selected as the new dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley, a post he has held for the last ten years. Dean Schell’s selection was not without controversy. The head of the search committee, Berkeley Marxist Troy Duster, refused to even interview the one qualified conservative journalist who applied for the job. A lawsuit filed by the Individual Rights Foundation contended that Schell’s appointment constituted political patronage, illegal under California labor laws. It also argued that a political litmus test for the deanship illegally denied public employment and First Amendment rights to a conservative applicant because of his political ideas. The lawsuit was dropped after the conservative applicant abandoned the fight.

In 2000, Dean Schell published Virtual Tibet: Searching for Shangri-La from The Himalayas to Hollywood (Holt/Metropolitan Books). It discussed the construction, and deconstruction, of what this ancient nation now under brutal Communist Chinese occupation has meant in the Western world view. To his credit, Dean Schell has urged the People’s Republic of China to grant autonomy to Tibet and to re-admit its traditional leader, the Dali Lama.

Nevertheless, Dean Schell has made the UC Berkeley Journalism School a hothouse culture of left-wing exotics. Among his faculty appointments are Barbara Ehrenreich, an editor at Mother Jones and other Left publications and an officer of Democratic Socialists of America, the largest American wing of the Socialist International; anti-Iraq war activist of The New Yorker: veteran Berkeley radical and book editor Steve Wasserman; and Tom Engelhardt, author of the Left blog TomDispatch at The Nation Institute. Perhaps the closest Dean Schell has come to including a non party-liner teaching fellow in recent years is left-wing maverick Christopher Hitchens.

In an ostensible show of solidarity with the working class, the Harvard-educated Schwartz (PhD 1971) is also listed as an affiliate faculty member with the Center for Study of Working Class Life, a Stony Brook facility that promotes “multiple forms of scholarship, teaching, and activism related to working-class life and cultures.”⁷²⁵ The center is headed by the Marxist economist Michael Zweig. In addition, Professor Schwartz regularly lends his signature to causes espoused by labor union activists. In September of 2001, for instance, Professor Schwartz’s name appeared on a statement authored by New York City labor activists that opposed the U.S.-led intervention in Afghanistan on the grounds that the “United States and its allies have already inflicted widespread suffering on innocent people in such places as Iraq, Sudan, Israel and the Occupied Territories, the former Yugoslavia and Latin America.”⁷²⁶

Over the years, Professor Schwartz has been well compensated for this output. In 1986, he was awarded a $125,000 grant by the National Science Foundation. The grant allowed him to bring his Marxist insights to bear on the study of the “causes of industrial decline.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of the sociology courses offered at Stony Brook bear the imprint of Professor Schwartz’s Marxist obsession with class conflict and ruling class oppression. A course called “Stratification” purports to investigate the “causes and consequences of the unequal distribution of wealth, power, prestige, and other social values in different societies.” ⁷²⁷ Special seminars in the Stony Brook sociology department regularly take as their subject issues like “Advanced Topics in Marxist Theory,” as though the decline and fall of all Marxist societies of such economic basket cases as North Korea and Cuba never happened.

Professor Schwartz’s Marxism has guided him to the other side in the war on terror, towards which his interests are anything but academic. In November of 2004, just as U.S. troops were laying siege to the terrorist stronghold of Fallujah, Professor Schwartz was leading a crowd of anti-war protesters rooting for an American defeat. “We as Americans have to hope America will lose,” Professor Schwartz declared. “If we win, we have to expect more wars, more destruction. Iran is next, Syria is next, and this is only the beginning.”⁷²⁸ The remarks, which echoed similar comments by professors Nicholas De Genova, Robert Jensen, John Pilger, Ward Churchill, and others, were hardly spontaneous. Writing in the Asia Times in late September 2004, Professor Schwartz entreated the “international community” to side with terrorists in Iraq in opposing the then incipient U.S. offensive in Fallujah. Cautioning that “even the most ferocious Iraqi resistance may not be sufficient to deter the coming November offensive,” Professor Schwartz wrote, “the Iraqis need and deserve the support of the international community; the best (and least destructive) deterrent against this impending onslaught would be the threat of uncontrollable worldwide protest, should the U. S. attempt to level either Fallujah or Sadr City.”⁷²⁹

In defense of this forthrightly anti-American position, Professor Schwartz sought to portray the terrorists beheading Iraqi, American, and other foreign infidels in Fallujah as gallant “revolutionaries” fighting a rearguard action against “brutal” American tactics. Professor Schwartz repeated terrorist propaganda, dismissing the “cover story” that U.S. military forces were targeting legitimate terrorist targets, a charge he purportedly substantiated by noting that “hospitals report daily that the vast majority of the casualties are civilians.”⁷³⁰ Professor Schwartz declined to note that the majority of those casualties were caused not by U.S. forces but by the terrorist “insurgents” whose cause he urged the world to embrace.

This too was not a novel argument for Professor Schwartz. In August of 2004, writing in TomDispatch.com, a site run under the auspices of The Nation Institute, Professor Schwartz inveighed against the U.S. offensive in Najaf, condemning the “agony” of the American campaign against the Shiite guerrillas of radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, and bemoaning “the death and destruction it is wreaking on an ancient and holy city.”⁷³¹ The overheated rhetoric was a logical leap from Professor Schwartz’s claim, in June of 2004, that the “Bush administration plans to remake Iraq as an agent of American policy in the Middle East.”⁷³²

Professor Schwartz now has his own taxpayer-funded personal pulpit at Stony Brook: he serves as the faculty director of a Stony Brook institution called the Undergraduate College of Global Studies. Informing students that its function is “preparing you to be a citizen of the world,” the College of Global Studies has its own unique conception of proper citizenship. A November 2004 conference sponsored by the College of Global Studies was called “Could You Be Drafted? Forum on the Draft.” The conference featured a gallery of left-wing speakers. Among them was Michael Foley, a professor of history at the City University of New York and the author of Confronting the War Machine: Draft Resistance During the Vietnam War; Brother Clarke Berge, an activist and Protestant chaplain at Stony Brook; and Anita Cole, a member of the Center on Conscience and War, a non-profit group that champions the “rights of conscientious objectors.”

In typically tendentious fashion, Professor Schwartz began the forum by asserting that the introduction of a military draft was not only possible but, indeed, imminent. So desperate was the beleaguered American military for additional manpower, according to Schwartz, that the U.S. government intended to enact a draft—which Schwartz called a “ticking time bomb”—in the spring of 2005. “This ticking time bomb will go off next spring,” Professor Schwartz declared.⁷³³ However, spring came and with it the first free elections in Iraq in half a century—elections that U.S. victories made possible, and without a draft.

Professor Sedgwick explains her academic campaign on behalf of queer theory as a necessary response to what is, to her mind, a reactionary American culture that harbors a murderous antipathy toward homosexuals. “Seemingly, this society wants its children to know nothing; wants its queer children to conform or (and this is not a figure of speech) die; and wants not to know that it is getting what it wants.” So Sedgwick claimed in her 1993 book Tendencies. ⁷³⁵

Courses taught by Professor Sedgwick seek to confine literary achievements—and even entire literary eras—in a rigidly ideological harness. In the spring of 2002, Sedgwick presided over a seminar titled “Victorian Textures.” After readings in Victorian fiction, prose, and poetry, students were expected to gain some insight into the “material world of the Victorians.”⁷³⁶ But they were to gain these insights in Professor Sedgwick’s own ideological terms: “class,” “imperial relations,” “spirituality,” and “gender and sexuality.”⁷³⁷

Professor Sedgwick’s interest in portraying Victorian-era writings as vessels of radical theory has been a recurring theme throughout her career. In 1989 Sedgwick, then the Newman Ivey White Professor of English at Duke, taught a graduate course called “Gender, Sexuality, and Power in Victorian Fiction.” Topping the list of issues discussed in the course were “female and male homosocial, homosexual, homophobic, and cross-gender relations.”⁷³⁸ Sedgwick’s efforts to write queer theory into the Victorian era are also encapsulated in her 1985 work, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosexual Desire. Among the claims advanced in this book is Professor Sedgwick’s belief that the aristocratic men of nineteenth century England were drawn to a “homosexual role and culture.”⁷³⁹

An analogous methodology operates in the course Professor Sedgwick teaches yearly on Marcel Proust. The course focuses on Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past). But students anticipating an introduction to the grand themes of childhood memory and unrequited love that infuse Proust’s classic novel are destined for disappointment. As a course description illustrates, the issues of primary interest to Sedgwick are of an altogether different variety. These include the “complicated relation to the emerging discourses of Euro-American homosexuality,” “the vicissitudes of gender,” “the relations between Jewish diasporic being and queer diasporic being within modernism,” and “phallic and non-phallic sexualities.” Professor Sedgwick expresses the hope that the course will become a discussion forum for her distinctly radical “preoccupations.” ⁷⁴⁰

Proust is by no means the only author to be drummed out of the closet by Professor Sedgwick’s politically motivated theories. A self-described “sexual pervert,”⁷⁴¹ Professor Sedgwick interprets Henry James’s diary entries as “an invocation to fisting-as- écriture”⁷⁴² and has ransacked James’s writings for evidence of the suppressed homosexual desires in which she claims they abound. Other writers afforded the Sedgwick treatment include Jane Austen, the subject of a 1989 lecture before the Modern Language Association titled, “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl.”⁷⁴³

Professor Sedgwick also teaches classes in “Non-Oedipal Psychologies: Psychoanalytic Approach to Queer Theory,” and “Queer Performativity.” A course description for “Queer Performativity” observes that the “theatrical and deconstructive meanings of ‘performative’ seem to span the polarities of, at either extreme, the extroversion of the actor vs. the introversion of the signifier; the supposedly total efficiency of liturgy, advertising, and propaganda vs. the self-referential signifier’s dislinkage of cause from effect.”⁷⁴⁴ Infinitely less opaque than these theoretical references is the course’s declared interest in “identity-based political activism.”⁷⁴⁵

Professor Sedgwick’s influence over young academics has been considerable. Inspired by her certitudes as to the broadly homophobic and progress-averse nature of American society, a central theme of her 1990 Epistemology of the Closet, disciples of the “queen of queer theory” have wreaked observable havoc on the field of literary studies. Hostile to the enduring literary themes of their subjects, the dilemmas of life and death and the complexities of human conflict, they instead engage in “queering” the texts, i.e., reducing them to palimpsests in which they read the evidence of sexual repression and homophobia that reaffirms their political choices.

Most notably, Professor Shortell had proclaimed himself a passionate hater of organized religion and its practitioners. Characterizing religion as a portal to inevitably dangerous and contemptible extremism, he wrote: “. . . [R]eligion without fanaticism is a logical impossibility. Anyone whose mind is trapped inside such a mental prison will be susceptible to extreme forms of hatred and violence. Faith is, by its very nature, obsessive-compulsive. All religions foment their own kind of holy war. (Those whose devotion is moderate are only cowardly fanatics.) In a world in which individuals and events are controlled by magical forces (symbolized by spirits, angels, ghosts, gods, etc.) fear will be the equilibrium state. There is no way to understand how such a world functions; one will be in awe of those who, through their mystifications, appear to have a special understanding of supernatural mechanics. Faith is, therefore, a child-like rationality.”⁷⁴⁷

Sneering at those who believe in divinity and attempt to live according to the tenets of their faith, Professor Shortell characterized religious people as intellectually immature and consequently “incapable of moral action, just as children are.” Professor Shortell continues: “On a personal level, religiosity is merely annoying—like bad taste. This immaturity represents a significant social problem, however, because religious adherents fail to recognize their limitations. So, in the name of their faith, these moral retards are running around pointing fingers and doing real harm to others. One only has to read the newspaper to see the results of their handiwork. They discriminate, exclude and belittle. They make a virtue of closed-mindedness and virulent ignorance. They are an ugly, violent lot.”⁷⁴⁸

Christians are inherently violent in Professor Shortell’s view. “American Christians,” he has written, “like to think that religious violence is a problem only for other faiths. In the heart of every Christian, though, is a tiny voice preaching self-righteousness, paranoia and hatred. Christians claim that theirs is a faith based on love, but they’ll just as soon kill you.”⁷⁴⁹ On the other hand, Professor Shortell gives no indication that he considers contemporary Islamic fundamentalism, which underpins the most hateful and murderous terrorist movements of our time, to be of any special concern.

Along with religion, Professor Shortell despises America’s economic system: “Weakness,” he writes, “is demanded of us by religion and consumer capitalism.”⁷⁵⁰ The categories of Professor Shortell’s hatreds goes on. He describes President Bush as America’s “war-criminal-in-chief”⁷⁵¹—and compares the Bush administration to Hitler’s. “Someone really ought to do a comparative study of this administration and the propaganda techniques of Nazi Germany,” Professor Shortell writes. “Karl Rove [the Republican political strategist] owes a lot to Joseph Goebbels [Hitler’s minister of propaganda].”⁷⁵²

Professor Shortell loathes the United States, which he regards as an aggressive, oppressive nation that is quite content to sacrifice countless numbers of innocent lives as it lustfully pursues its quest for empire and dominion. “Just as any fascist state,” he writes, “the megalomania of the ruling elite is paid for in working class blood.”⁷⁵³

Professor Targ’s views on the questions of war and peace are standard Communist doctrine. Addressing himself to “the power of the people”⁷⁵⁶ in an April 2003 email, Professor Targ called for concerted opposition to “U.S. imperialism,”⁷⁵⁷ making it clear that he viewed the United States specifically, and capitalism more broadly, as the greatest threats to international security: “We need to clarify the connections between U.S. capitalism, global conquest, and visions of empire... we need to discover where multinational corporations and international financiers stand, whether the oil and/or military industries are driving the doctrine of preemption, and which, if any, sectors of the ruling class regard unilateralism, globalism, and militarism as a threat to global trade, production, investment and speculation.”⁷⁵⁸ Professor Targ also condemned the U.S.-led war against Iraq, on the grounds that it represented the “U.S. drive toward global hegemony.” To the extent that Professor Targ evinced any concern for the suffering of Iraqis, he placed the blame squarely on American intervention in the early 1990s to oppose Iraq’s aggression against Kuwait. In one February 2003 interview with a local Indiana newspaper, Professor Targ dismissed the “war option” as “grotesque and inhumane,” adding, “The Iraqis never recovered from the first Gulf War.”⁷⁵⁹ That same month, Professor Targ condemned any attempt to liberate Iraq by proclaiming, “If there’s one Iraqi who’s killed as a result of this [war], it’s criminal.” ⁷⁶⁰

Professor Targ has no hesitation about using his classroom as a megaphone for the one-sided promulgation of his political ideas. The Peace Studies program at Purdue is designed to indoctrinate undergraduates in Professor Targ’s political views. In his preferred approach to Peace Studies, Professor Targ employs two strategies: first, as noted earlier, he says, “we need to clarify the connections between U.S. capitalism, global conquest, and visions of empire.” Second, “we need to discern whether the imperial superpower is homogeneous or riddled with factional disagreements that can be used for our purposes.”⁷⁶¹ To this end, the Peace Studies program features such courses as “Persuasion in Social Movements,” “America in Vietnam,” and “Classical and Contemporary Marxism.” The last is a course in applied Marxist doctrines, which includes two propaganda films that reflect the range of the course. One “illustrates the trajectory from Marx’s Manifesto to anti-globalization movements,” while the second lionizes the terrorists in Chiapas, Mexico, showing how their activities “intertwine” so-called “post-colonial” theories of liberation with “liberation theology,” which is a religious coating for Marxist agendas. ⁷⁶²

“Persuasion in Social Movements” meanwhile is a practical training course for radical activists. As described in the course catalogue, it “focuses on six essential functions persuasion serves for social movements.”⁷⁶³ Among these are: “transforming perceptions of reality; altering self-perceptions of protesters; [and] legitimizing the social movement.”⁷⁶⁴ Professor Targ himself instructs the required lecture course for Peace Studies, called “Introduction to the Study of Peace,” in which he draws on the views he has developed in tracts like International Relations in a World of Imperialism and Class Struggle and Cuba and the United States: A New World Order? Professor Targ is also the co-editor of Marxism Today: Essays on Capitalism, Socialism, and Strategies for Social Change.

In addition to his duties as a professor, Targ serves as the coordinator and administrator of Purdue’s “Committee on Peace Studies.” In keeping with the activist nature of the Peace Studies program, the committee organizes public propaganda sessions whose recent focus has been devoted to condemning the Bush administration, the war in Iraq, and the greater War on Terror, and brings radical speakers to campus. Among the speakers that have been invited to Purdue are the anti-American British journalist Robert Fisk. In November of 2002, Fisk delivered a lecture at Purdue entitled “September 11: Ask Who Did It, But For Heaven’s Sake Don’t Ask Why.” A report in the campus newspaper recorded that Professor Targ “turned Fisk’s visit into homework for 140 students in his classes on U.S. foreign policy and introduction to peace studies.”⁷⁶⁵ In January 2003, the Purdue Peace Studies Committee screened a film assailing the looming war to liberate Iraq. Professor Targ is a longtime enthusiast of left-wing propaganda films. He wrote a review of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, in which he cheered its portrayal of the “brutal and bloodthirsty consciousness of young American fighting men and women at the outset of the [Iraq] war,” warning that the “film is the one that can help people understand that defeating George Bush is a necessary but not sufficient condition to create a just society.”⁷⁶⁶

The Peace Studies program at Purdue also includes a trip to the terror-sponsoring state of Cuba. In a course titled “Experiencing Cuba,” co-taught by Professor Targ, students are given the opportunity to tour Fidel Castro’s Communist police state. For eighteen days in May 2004, Professor Targ chaperoned students to Cuba, where they were “educated” at a Cuban university and visited factories and farms to learn about socialist means of production. An agreement was signed with the Castro dictatorship for a student and faculty exchange between Havana University and Purdue. Of this, observed Professor Targ, “We have a real chance to change all levels of education.”⁷⁶⁷

A secondary purpose of the trip was to protest the embargo the United States has placed on Cuba in the hopes of ending the Castro dictatorship’s extensive violations of human rights. Naturally, Professor Targ had nothing to say about Castro’s political prisons, but called the U.S. policy “draconian.” As a member of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, Professor Targ, a longtime Castro supporter, continues to hail the Cuban Revolution as “a radical and deeply egalitarian socialist experiment which has raised the bar to new heights on questions of race, gender and class equality and international solidarity.”⁷⁶⁸ Targ is also the co-founder of the local Lafayette Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador, an organization created by Cuban intelligence to lend support to the Communist guerrilla movement in El Salvador during the 1980s.

Professor Thomas saw much to admire in Lil’ Kim’s foul-mouthed repertoire: “It’s the art with the most profound sexual politics I’ve ever seen anywhere,” he said.⁷⁶⁹ “It’s about her lyricism and the lyrical persona . . . new notions of sexual consciousness, sexual politics in her rhymes, how she deals with societies based on male domination in her rhymes and societies based on rigid gender categories and constructs.”⁷⁷⁰ Interviewed by ABC Radio, Professor Thomas stressed that “[h]er lyrical artistry is nothing short of revolutionary.”⁷⁷¹

Writing on the website allhiphop.com, Professor Thomas boasted that his course “overturns male domination, lyrically, and rigid, homophobic gender identity on record—way more effectively than any elite Women’s or Gay & Lesbian Studies program in academia,”⁷⁷² and rhapsodized that Lil’ Kim’s “whole system of rhymes radically redistributes power, pleasure and privilege, always doing the unthinkable, embracing sexuality on her kind of terms.”⁷⁷³

According to Professor Thomas, the course addressed another pressing dilemma: “How do we communicate the political absurdity of this brilliant Black female artist facing hard time [Lil Kim had been convicted of perjury] in the age of George ‘Weapon of Mass Destruction’ Bush, and all these corporate lies?”⁷⁷⁴ The entire class, observed Professor Thomas, “developed out of my ongoing research on race and sex in the context of empire.”⁷⁷⁵

Professor Thomas began the course by instructing his students to transcribe the lyrics of “Get Money,” a song that Lil’ Kim had recorded with her group Junior M*A*F*I*A. Among other colorful incantations, it featured the following lines:

Niggas . . . betta grab a seatgrab on ya dick as this bitch gets deepDeeper than a pussy of a bitch 6 feetstiff dicks feel sweet in this little petite ⁷⁷⁶

Professor Thomas described his classroom technique to a reporter this way: “After [the students] had basically been compelled to show respect to the song . . . then we did the video analysis,” adding, “They got to see the way that that meaning was translated on video. They were blown away and we’ve been riding ever since. ”⁷⁷⁷ To supplement the “analysis” of “Get Money,” Professor Thomas had his students conduct comparative analyses with other rap music. The Syracuse Post-Standard reported a classroom exchange between Professor Thomas and his students:

“Ya’ll know that [rapper] Jay-Z joint? I got 99 problems?” [Thomas] asks his students. “How the chorus go?”

“If you having girl problems, I feel bad for you son,” Thomas says along with the class. “I got 99 problems but a bitch ain’t one.”

“The chorus draws an equivalence between a girl and a bitch. Is the girl a positive or negative?” he asks. “Negative,” they say in unison.

“(Jay-Z) says his problems are bigger than a bitch.”

Then he plays a Lil’ Kim joint. One where she uses Jay-Z’s line about 99 problems except her meaning is different.

“It’s a whole difference articulation of the same words,” Thomas says.

“Jay-Z says they’re beneath him. She says bitches are not her number one enemy. Men are. See how it’s been flipped?”

Scribbling notes, several students nod.⁷⁷⁸

In November 2004, Professor Thomas turned his classroom into an unofficial rap venue when he invited Lil’ Kim to speak before faculty and students. Though initially startled by the invitation—“I was shocked,” the rapper confessed to one newspaper reporter—she enthusiastically accepted. And so, for ninety minutes, Lil Kim’ proceeded to share her wisdom with the gathered students and faculty, before answering students’ questions on topics such as “race, gender and sexuality.” “At the same time you’re learning from me, I’m learning from you,” she gushed. ⁷⁷⁹

Critics, largely outside the university, rebuked Professor Thomas for profaning a serious college curriculum. But he had no patience for their concerns. The intellectual appeal of Lil’ Kim, he sniffed, was “beautifully clear to anyone who is not committed to illiteracy in the language and literature of Hip-Hop.” ⁷⁸⁰ Professor Thomas’s enthusiasm for Lil’ Kim was unchastened by her conviction for perjury in a case involving a gunfight outside a radio station. In a sulfurous polemic, Professor Thomas condemned the court, whose action he termed evidence of the persecution of “Black women who do not conform to white racist codes of sexual repression.”⁷⁸¹ Said Professor Thomas: “This case was not about ‘perjury’ at all, no more than the U.S. in Iraq is about ‘liberation.’ It’s about whether or not we cooperate with state power, however illegitimate, and this includes its power to persecute us—as usual. It is about the power of the government to criminalize and imprison us along lines of race, class and Hip-Hop affiliation, over here, when they don’t send us to commit their own violence over there. And if ‘lies’ were actually ‘immoral,’ according to the U.S. state, its prison-industrial complex might not be large enough to house those who rule us.”⁷⁸²

Such sentiments were signature Greg Thomas, whose radicalism had long preceded “Hip Hop Eshu: Queen Bitch 101.” Professor Thomas is a longtime devotee of the radical black activist Elaine Brown, a former head of the Black Panther Party, who views America as a racist, fascist state. Brown’s autobiography, A Taste of Power, describes a criminal career and a criminal mind,⁷⁸³ but to Professor Thomas hers is a tale of “Bourgeois Cancer vs. Revolutionary Love.”⁷⁸⁴

In December 2002, Professor Thomas played an instrumental role in bringing Brown to the Syracuse campus to deliver a well-paid speech. Brown more than lived up to her end of the bargain by using her speech to call for the immediate overthrow of the American government: “On behalf of black people and all oppressed people, I am calling for unfettered action—I would like a regime change in America by any means necessary,” Brown declared.⁷⁸⁵ Brown followed up this call with a hagiographic account of the Black Panther Party, which she hailed for its “ideological commitment to black people.” Professor Thomas, who regularly assigns Brown’s book as mandatory reading, was particularly delighted by her presence at Syracuse. “When you go to see Elaine Brown, you leave knowing what she’s about, and you leave wanting to learn more,” Professor Thomas enthused to the campus newspaper, The Daily Orange. “She’s exciting, entertaining, knowledgeable—everything you could want.”⁷⁸⁶

Professor Thomas is the founder and editor of Proud Flesh. In an editorial in its premiere issue, after praising the calumnies of convicted Black Panther felon George Jackson against “Urban Fascist Amerika,” Professor Thomas explained the journal’s agenda: “we seek revolutionary words and strive to make them flesh.”⁷⁸⁷ In the fall 2003 issue of The New Centennial Review Professor Thomas observed: “The entire history of our African presence in ‘American’ captivity is one that lays bare a raw sexual terror that defines the cult of ‘white supremacy’ here and elsewhere.” Professor Thomas contended that the history of blacks in the United States could be explained as an uninterrupted procession of “direct and indirect colonization.”

In a second article, Professor Thomas railed against the concept of “post-coloniality.” Post-colonialism is a popular theme of left-wing academics, but according to Professor Thomas there is no post-colonial reality in a country in which black people are colonized. The article, not distinguished by its coherence, offered a final insight into Professor Thomas’s bitter and conspiratorial mind:

Saying “Post-coloniality” is like saying President Bush your words cry “freedom” while your life is full of bombs, surveillance, police brutality, corporate looting, fire and brimstone, Black Death, comprador complicity, democratic fascism, unfreedom. When a CIA father invents a “dictator” chief, installs him against a people’s will, then bombs these same people again and again; and when his unelected son continues, after said chief becomes disposable, after another chief “terrorist” and former employee cannot be found, all in the name of Liberty, in the name of white men’s burdens; then it’s time we remember that Liberty was a slave ship. That it is a slave ship.⁷⁸⁸

One book that Professor Toton requires her students to read is Dorothy Day’s Loaves and Fishes. Day was a Marxist Catholic who in the 1930s helped found the Catholic Worker’s Movement, which was both socialist and pacifist. Today, the Catholic Worker’s Movement still advances its agendas by promoting individuals like Noam Chomsky and organizations like the International Action Center founded by Ramsey Clark. ⁷⁹¹

Professor Toton is an advisor to Villanova’s chapter of Bread for the World, a politicized “citizens” movement seeking “justice for the world’s hungry people by lobbying our nation’s decision makers.” In the 2000 election year, Bread for the World graded every congressional representative, giving each a numerical score between 0 and 100, depending on the percentage of times he or she voted in a manner that was politically correct. Members of the radical Progressive Caucus consistently garnered scores of 100, the organization’s highest rating, while Republicans commonly had scores of zero. Opposed to the war in Iraq, Bread for the World said, “The U.S. economy is mired in a significant slump.... But Congress and the president are preoccupied with war and security. They aren’t paying attention to what’s happening to poor people.”⁷⁹³ In 2004, Toton was one of thirty activists honored at Bread for the World’s 30th Anniversary celebration.

Professor Toton is also Villanova University’s contact for the Justice Union of Students, Staff and Teachers. This is part of the Peace and Justice Consortium of Colleges and Universities in the Philadelphia Area, which is dedicated to sharing information “on events and resources with member schools for the purpose of involving faculty, staff and above all students in a process of educating, mentoring and modeling for social change.”⁷⁹⁴

Like other institutions of higher learning, the University of Hawaii instructs its teachers not to “let disparaging comments go unnoticed. Explain why a comment is insensitive or offensive. Let your students know that racist, sexist and other discriminatory remarks are unacceptable in class.”⁷⁹⁶ Apparently these precepts don’t apply to professors of Hawaiian studies.

Professor Trask believes that the Hawaiian people have been subjugated by the “racist, colonialist United States of colonial America.”⁷⁹⁷ In addition to being redundant, Professor Trask’s assertion is inaccurate. Professor Trask insists that “disease-laden racists . . . took our government and imprisoned our queen,” and continue forcibly to occupy Hawaii thorough military occupation and institutionalized racism.⁷⁹⁸ This is an interesting claim when both of Hawaii’s U.S. senators are of Asian descent, there are two democratically elected congressmen, and its citizens have full rights under the U.S. Constitution.

At a January 1993 protest rally commemorating the one-hundredth anniversary of Hawaii’s monarchy, Trask explained: “Hawaii is presently a colony of the United States, not because we Hawaiians chose that status, but because the American government overthrew our Hawaiian government in 1883 [the actual date is 1893], and forcibly annexed our islands in 1898. With the overthrow, things Hawaiian were outlawed and things haole [derogatory word for ‘white’] American were imposed.” In the same speech she expressed her view that white people are irredeemable racists who share the “common characteristic” of “not understand[ing] racism at all.” Invoking the standard radical re-definition of racism, she said: “Racism is a system of power in which one racially identified group dominates and exploits another racially identified group for the advantage of the dominating group. . . . That’s what the so-called ‘founding fathers’ of the United States intended, and that’s how American society operates today.... The hatred and fear people of color have of white people is based on that ugly history.” Finally, she declared: “I am NOT an American. I will DIE before I am an American.”⁷⁹⁹

Professor Trask is part of a movement of Hawaiian ethnic nationalists and racial separatists who seek a system of Hawaiian racial supremacy that would resemble the policy of South African apartheid. The ethnic nationalists and racial separatists Professor Trask represents “agree that Hawaiians are indigenous people of Hawaii and are therefore entitled to political and economic supremacy” over all non-indigenous Hawaiians.⁸⁰⁰

Professor Trask’s view of the 9/11 attacks accords with Ward Churchill’s. He received a warm welcome from Trask and her faculty colleagues when he visited their campus at the height of his controversy. Apropos the 9/11 attacks, Professor Trask said, “Chickens have come home to roost.... What it means is that those who have suffered under the imperialism and militarism of the United States have come back to haunt in the twenty-first century that same government. . . . Why should we support the United States, whose hands are soaked with blood?. . . We need to think very, very clearly about who the enemy is. The enemy is the United States of America and everyone who supports it.”⁸⁰¹

Professor Vocino’s scholarly work is most notable for its absence. Aside from a short book on ethics for public administrators (1996), Professor Vocino has practically no original work to his name. Most of his publications are simply descriptive bibliographies of journals and newspapers already available in libraries—i.e., they are lists. His work in film studies consists of a 1998 conference paper on the film Titanic. With his glaring paucity of both graduate training and independent scholarly achievement, Professor Vocino does not even qualify for the position of an assistant professor, let alone associate professor with tenure rank, let alone a full professor.

That has not prevented Professor Vocino from posturing as an expert in all the many fields he teaches, which run the astounding gamut from “Film Theory” and “Film History,” to “Political Ideologies,” to “Political Philosophy: Plato to Machiavelli,” to “The American Presidency,” to “Contemporary Italian Politics.” Vocino teaches all these courses—although he is essentially a librarian with an MA. But what he lacks in scholarly and professional expertise, Vocino—a militant gay activist who describes himself as “firmly on the deep Left politically”⁸⁰⁵—compensates for with his aggressive personal biases. His course “Film Theory,” for instance, is billed as “an introduction to the basics of film theory and film criticism.”⁸⁰⁶ Instead, the course indulges Professor Vocino’s preferences for “Queer Theory,” as well as “Gay and Lesbian Criticism.” The course also includes a section called “Marxism and Film,” for which students are required to watch the cinematic adaptation of the Motorcycle Diaries of Che Guevara.

Professor Vocino elaborated on his criteria for excellence in film in a June 2004 posting on URI’s academic list serve. In it, he gushed over left-wing provocateur Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. Applauding the distinction bestowed on the film at the Cannes Film Festival, Professor Vocino wrote: “Now we all know that i [sic] am not the brightest apple on the tree, something i [sic] know myself, but if only through osmosis, i [sic] did pick up enough substance in many courses and seminars during that time in Amsterdam to firmly assert that Moore deserved to win the coveted Cannes best film award for this production.”⁸⁰⁷

A student named Nathaniel Nelson who took Professor Vocino’s political science class, “Political Philosophy: Plato to Machiavelli,” was struck by the professor’s aggressive disregard for professional standards of conduct. According to the student, Professor Vocino entered the classroom on the first day announcing, “My name is Michael Vocino and I like dick.”⁸⁰⁸ Professor Vocino next asked the student, “Are you queer?” On another occasion, Professor Vocino, cognizant that the student was a Christian, demanded to know why Christians “hate fags.”⁸⁰⁹ Besides sexually harassing his male students—he informed one that he thought him “hot”—Professor Vocino urged them to try “making out” with other males and describe their experiences for the class.⁸¹⁰ Vocino has also been known to use the university email system to send to female URI faculty his gleeful announcements of his acquisition of new pornographic material for the university library.⁸¹¹ According to Nelson, Professor Vocino devoted an entire class period of his political philosophy course to a discussion of masturbation; another class session centered on whether President Bush’s decision to deploy troops in Iraq made him a “serial killer.”⁸¹² All this in a course listed as the history of ancient and medieval political philosophy.

That a person totally lacking the proper professional credentials or scholarly achievements should be a full professor at the University of Rhode Island is scandal enough; that his astoundingly harassing behavior in class, both ideologically and sexually, has gone unchecked by the university administration can only deepen one’s concern for students at this institution.

Professor Warner does not view gay marriage or adoption rights as ideals for which homosexuals should fight. On the contrary, the professor has been an outspoken critic of such crusades, finding them to be demeaning attempts to “normalize” the gay experience. As such, he reasons, they can only serve to destroy the queer lifestyle, which for Professor Warner necessarily includes promiscuous, unprotected, and public sex acts—in bathhouses and elsewhere.

In 1997, during a resurgence of HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases, particularly among gay men, Professor Warner and a number of likeminded activists founded “Sex Panic,” an organization that aimed to counter measures taken by law enforcement and policy makers to shut down bathhouses and other institutions that catered to promiscuous, anonymous homosexual sex. At the National Sex Panic Conference—held in San Diego, November 13–15, 1997, activists gathered to “discuss the emerging culture war within the gay community.”⁸¹⁵ A Sex Panic press release on the conference read: Sex Panic organizers are concerned about the “increased attack against marginalized sexualities including the harassment and closure of sex clubs, bathhouses and public sex spaces; racist selective enforcement and policing of lesbian/gay bars; anti-sex AIDS activism and education campaigns; increased policing of and attacks on sex workers; and the burgeoning demonizing of sex and party cultures appearing in current gay men’s writings.”⁸¹⁶

Professor Dessima Williams teaches sociology and Caribbean studies at Brandeis University, near Boston, Massachusetts, and is on the faculty of Peace, Conflict and Coexistence Studies.⁸¹⁸ Professor Williams has no scholarly publications and her only text credit is co-editing a book of speeches and articles by the deposed Marxist dictators of Grenada, which was published twenty years ago (In Nobody’s Backyard: The Grenada Revoluton In Its Own Words⁸¹⁹). The Caribbean-born Williams completed her primary and secondary education in Grenada before traveling to the U.S., where she received her BA in International Relations from the University of Minnesota, and her PhD in International Relations from American University in 1995. With interests in international relations, global apartheid, feminism in developing countries, and the peace movement, Williams was hired as a professor of political science at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, before taking a faculty position as a visiting associate professor in the Sociology Department at Brandeis in 1992. In the same year she was appointed “assistant professor of sociology” at Brandeis, where she has remained ever since. It is highly unusual for an assistant professor to remain so for thirteen years. Normally, universities like Brandeis have a six-year trial period before awarding or denying tenure. The fact that Williams has produced no scholarship in this lengthy period suggests that her retention is a political rather than an academic decision.

Prior to launching her university career, Professor Williams was an ambassador for the dictatorship of Grenada, which was established as the result of a coup d’etat carried out by the Marxist-Leninst New Jewel Movement led by Maruice Bishop. From 1979 to 1983, she was the Grenadan ambassador to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, and the Organization of American States. In 1982 the Reagan administration rejected her credentials to be the dictatorship’s new ambassador to the United States as a gesture of its displeasure towards a regime that had suspended civil liberties and allied itself with Fidel Castro and the Communist bloc. Bishop had set Grenada on a collision course with the United States by allowing the Cubans to build a military airport that would accommodate Soviet nuclear bombers.

Professor Williams’s career took a dramatic turn when Defense Minister Bernard Coard—himself a former Brandeis student and a New Jewel Movement Marxist—seized power for himself and murdered half of his fellow cabinet members, including Bishop and the pregnant minister of education, and put the entire population under house arrest. This precipitated an invasion by the United States Marines, which led to Grenada’s return to a democratic regime. Sensing that her opportunities in liberated Grenada were limited by her role in the dictatorship, Professor Williams emigrated to the United States to begin her academic career. In 1984, carrying lapel buttons that said “The Spirit of Maurice Bishop Lives,” she was arrested by INS agents, but subsequently released.

Professor Williams’s courses at Brandeis reflect her continuing radicalism and pursuit of “social change activism.” Professor Williams’s “Global Apartheid, Global Social Movements”⁸²⁰ is a for-credit introduction to Professor Williams’s assorted radical interests. The course’s stated mission is explicitly political—”expanding social justice.” Course assignments and activities are specifically aimed at “developing an informed critique of injustices in the global system and a disposition toward social justice via social movement as intellectual and social action.” Obviously this is not a course to conduct a scholarly examination of globalization. Among the assignments are what Professor Williams calls “re-empowerment” exercises. By way of example, Professor Williams urges students to adopt the proper social justice attitude by imagining that they are an “over-worked, under-paid, undocumented worker with very little English in a ritzy hotel on Martha’s Vineyard.” Still another assignment requires students to discuss approvingly “the social movement of feminism or environmentalism,” while criticizing “the western over-consumer.” Course readings include books like Eyes of the Heart, a Marxist tract written by the deposed Haitian ruler Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The texts reflect Professor Williams’s ingrained Marxist prejudices.

Professor Williams is particularly critical of what she calls the “assumed dominance and assumed superiority of the analysis and experiences of the West.”⁸²¹ This anti-Western mindset has guided Professor Williams’s activist career in several organizations and agencies. One of these is Oxfam America, which she served as a board member and vice president. Oxfam⁸²² is a confederation of twelve organizations ostensibly dedicated “to find[ing] lasting solutions to poverty, suffering, and injustice.” Oxfam’s approach to these issues is notably one-sided. Oxfam routinely condemns Israeli policies, for example, while remaining silent about Palestinian-perpetrated human rights abuses, including suicide bombings and the use of children to carry out acts of terror. Oxfam America was a signatory to a November 1, 2001, document⁸²³ characterizing the 9/11 attacks as a legal matter to be addressed by criminal-justice procedures rather than military means. Ascribing the hijackers’ motives to alleged social injustices against which they were protesting, this document explained that “security and justice are mutually reinforcing goals that ultimately depend upon the promotion of all human rights for all people,” and called on the United States “to promote fundamental rights around the world.”

Professor Williams opposes America’s war on terror for several reasons, but “one of the simplest . . . is that war hurts people.” In 2001, Professor Williams received the Debs-Thomas-Bernstein Award, which is given by the Boston Democratic Socialists of America. At the presentation ceremony, “Williams delivered a moving and inspirational speech recount[ing] how a young graduate student in the U.S. came to find herself appointed UN Ambassador from Grenada’s new revolutionary government,” and lamenting “the bitterness and sorrow of seeing their promising movement collapse, leading to military coup and ultimately a U.S. invasion.”⁸²⁴ That such a person with no scholarly publications is teaching as “courses” what are essentially radical anti-Western rants at a prestigious academic institution reveals a great deal about the nature of American higher education today. One can only wonder what Justice Louis Brandeis—who was a promoter of the ideas and ideals of western civilization—would think if he knew that a former ambassador for a Communist dictatorship who continues to defend its principles and views was teaching at a university named after him.

A fierce critic of Israel, Professor Wolfe raised funds through the center to sponsor what he called a “student research project in the Israeli occupied territory.”⁸²⁷ One of the anti-Israel speakers he invited to address his students in 2005 was Philip C. Wilcox Jr., president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace. Wilcox is a former American diplomat who blames Israel for Palestinian terrorism.⁸²⁸

The center’s website explains that “It is the mission of the Center for Peace and Conflict Studies to promote nonviolent alternatives to conflict resolution.”⁸²⁹ This is a political vocation, not an academic pursuit. “The Center will continue to study, teach, and be an advocate for nonviolent philosophies and strategies that have been proven successful in various parts of the world.”⁸³⁰ Citing some groups it hopes to emulate, the website lists, among others, “nuclear disarmament” groups, and “the United Farm Workers movement,” and “organized labor.” The required textbook for Professor Wolfe’s course is a widely used peace studies text, Barash and Webel’s Peace and Conflict Studies , which instructs students that “revolutionary violence” is sometimes necessary and therefore justified.⁸³¹ Wolfe’s fervent advocacy of Gandhian non-violence evidently goes only so far.

The Peace Studies and Conflict Resolution Minor offered at Ball State explores the “challenges of promoting peace and justice,” and urges students to practice “mediation and other more equitable, cooperative, and nonviolent methods that can be used to transform unjust, violent, or oppressive situations.”⁸³² Toward this end, Professor Wolfe’s course, “Introduction to Peace Studies and Conflict Resolution,” is also an introduction to “peace movements.”

Brett Mock, a Ball State student who took Professor Wolfe’s introductory class in the spring of 2004, charged in a published article that the class was organized around “indoctrination rather than education,” and noted that Professor Wolfe recruited students to activist groups.⁸³³ Mock disclosed that Professor Wolfe had urged his students to join Peace Workers, a Ball State student activist group formed in January 2003 in opposition to the Iraq war. Professor Wolfe acts as faculty advisor to the organization, which regularly stages anti-war protests on campus, and receives its funds from the Center for Peace and Conflict Studies. Under Professor Wolfe’s direction, the center has even devised awards for students who join Peace Workers opposed to U.S. military efforts. In April of 2003, for instance, the center presented a special “Social Activist Award” to Peace Workers for organizing a march and a sit-in expressing opposition to the Iraq war.

According to Brett Mock, Professor Wolfe showed “no tolerance whatsoever for any disagreement and said that he would never support the use of force as an instrument of peace,”⁸³⁴ an ideological disposition reflected in the required readings for the course. Mock also claimed that Professor Wolfe regularly gave lower grades to students who did not share his ideological disposition. On the other hand, students who echoed Professor Wolfe’s own positions that the U.S.-led war in Iraq was a “fiasco” that was “leading us down the wrong path,” and traveled to Washington, D.C., to take part in anti-war demonstrations, were rewarded with extra credit.⁸³⁵ So that there should be no doubt about the political opinions students were expected to hold, Professor Wolfe required his class to attend a screening of the anti-war film Uncovered: The Whole Truth about the War in Iraq.

In a letter to the national director of the organization Students for Academic Freedom, Ball State provost Beverley Pitts defended Professor Wolfe’s classroom performance and academic credentials, citing his doctorate in education and his Toda Institute board membership.⁸³⁶ With the administration behind him, Professor Wolfe dismissed the criticism of Mock and other students as the work of “propaganda artists.” He claims that in finding fault with his politically motivated teaching methods, his detractors are “confusing liberal politics with liberal education.” ⁸³⁷

The pattern of academically untrained and unqualified faculty members allowed to vent personal prejudices and passions in the classroom (in this case at taxpayers’ expense), while supported by a pliant or enthusiastic administration has been encountered multiple times throughout these profiles. It is an example of the degradation of professional standards, and in the case of a professor of the saxophone presuming to teach courses on international politics and the economic social causes of war and peace, hits an academic rock bottom.

Professor Zinn announces the overtly political agenda of A People’s History of the United States in an explanatory coda to the 1995 edition. Zinn explains to the reader that he has no interest in striving for objectivity, and that his history is “a biased account.” Professor Zinn explains: “I am not troubled by that. I wanted my writing of history and my teaching of history to be a part of social struggle. I wanted to be a part of history and not just a recorder and teacher of history. So that kind of attitude towards history, history itself as a political act, has always informed my writing and my teaching.” ⁸⁴⁰

Zinn begins his narrative not with the settling of North America, or the creation of the United States as one might expect, but with a long chapter on Columbus’s “genocide” against the native inhabitants, an event—which even if it had happened as Zinn describes it—was an act committed by agents of the Spanish empire more than a century before the English settled North America and nearly three centuries before the creation of the United States, which is also geographically well-removed from the scene of the crime. It is Zinn’s unintended way of announcing the tendentiousness of his entire project, which is really not a “history” of the American people, but an indictment of white people and the capitalist system.

The perspective that informs the nearly seven hundred pages of A People’s History is a pedestrian Marxism encapsulated in the idea that nation states are merely a fiction, and only economic classes are “real” social actors: “Class interest has always been obscured behind an all-encompassing veil called ‘the national interest.’ My own war experience [in World War II], and the history of all those military interventions in which the United States was engaged, made me skeptical when I heard people in high political office invoke ‘the national interest’ or ‘national security’ to justify their policies. It was with such justifications that Truman initiated a ‘police action’ in Korea that killed several million people, that Johnson and Nixon carried out a war in Indochina in which perhaps three million died, that Reagan invaded Grenada, Bush attacked Panama and then Iraq, and Clinton bombed Iraq again and again.”⁸⁴¹

A Stalinist in his youth, Professor Zinn retains into his seventies the same ideological blinders he wore as a young man. America’s defense of South Korea against a Communist invasion from the North was not initiated by the United States as the Communist propaganda machine maintained at the time and Professor Zinn still believes. It was a response to the Communist aggression, which was initiated by Stalin himself according to most recent historical accounts.⁸⁴² The war and subsequent American support for the South Koreans resulted in their liberation from both poverty and dictatorship. South Korea was, in 1950, one of the poorest Third World countries, with a per capita income of $250, on a level with Cuba and South Vietnam. Fifty years of American protection, trade, and investment has made South Korea a First World industrial nation with a reasonably stable democracy. By contrast, North Korea, which was the industrial heart of the Korean peninsula and which the American armies failed to liberate—thanks to Professor Zinn’s political allies at the time—is an impoverished totalitarian state that has starved more than a million of its inhabitants in the last decade, while its Communist dictator hoards scarce funds to build an arsenal of nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles. The rest of Professor Zinn’s examples are equally tendentious.

In a twist of reality characteristic of this entire text, Professor Zinn describes the founding of the American Republic—the world’s most successful democratic experiment—as an exercise in tyrannical control of the many by the few for greed and profit. “The American Revolution . . . was a work of genius, and the Founding Fathers deserve the awed tribute they have received over the centuries. They created the most effective system of national control devised in modern times, and showed future generations of leaders the advantages of combining paternalism with command.”⁸⁴³ In Professor Zinn’s reckoning, the Declaration of Independence was not so much a revolutionary statement of rights as a cynical means of manipulating popular groups into overthrowing the King to benefit the rich. The rights it appeared to guarantee were “limited to life, liberty and happiness for white males”—and actually for wealthy white males—because they excluded black slaves and “ignored the existing inequalities in property”⁸⁴⁴ (in other words, they were not socialist rights). This is an ahistorical, not to say absurd view of the Declaration and of the history of the Republic to which it gave birth.

Of course, traducing the historical data is no problem for Professor Zinn. “Objectivity is impossible,” the professor writes, “and it is also undesirable. That is, if it were possible it would be undesirable, because if you have any kind of a social aim, if you think history should serve society in some way; should serve the progress of the human race; should serve justice in some way, then it requires that you make your selection on the basis of what you think will advance causes of humanity.”⁸⁴⁵ Of course if you think socialism and Communism are systems that advance the cause of humanity and that America is a reactionary, terrorist state, as Professor Zinn does, then you get the kind of history on display in his book.

Through Professor Zinn’s rose-colored glasses, Maoist China, site of history’s bloodiest state-sponsored killings, is transformed into “the closest thing, in the long history of that ancient country, to a people’s government, independent of outside control.” ⁸⁴⁶ Castro’s Cuba, Professor Zinn’s readers learn, “had no bloody record of suppression.”⁸⁴⁷ The Marxist dictators of Nicaragua were “welcomed” by the people, while the opposition Contras, whose candidate triumphed when free elections were held as a result of U.S. pressure, were a “terrorist group” that “seemed to have no popular support inside Nicaragua.”⁸⁴⁸ In fact, the Contras were the largest peasant army in Latin America’s modern history.

In A People’s History of the United States, greed is the explanation for every major historical event. According to Professor Zinn, the separation from Great Britain, the Civil War, and World Wars I and II—to name some central examples—were all driven by base motives involving rich Americans seeking to enrich themselves even more at the expense of others: “Around 1776, certain important people in the English colonies made a discovery that would prove enormously useful for the next two hundred years. They found that by creating a nation, a symbol, a legal unity called the United States, they could take over land, profits, and political power from the favorites of the British Empire. In the process, they could hold back a number of potential rebellions and create a consensus of popular support for the rule of a new, privileged leadership.”⁸⁴⁹

In Professor Zinn’s account the answer is the same whatever the question. Thus Professor Zinn describes antebellum America as a uniquely cruel slaveholding society whose goal was subjugating man for profit. On the other hand, the war of the Union against the slaveholding system is portrayed in exactly the same terms: “It is money and profit, not the movement against slavery that was uppermost in the priorities of the men who ran the country.”⁸⁵⁰ The same explanation is given for America’s entry into World War I (forget the sinking of the Lusitania or Germany’s Zimmerman memorandum which promised Mexico the American Southwest for joining a war against the United States): “American capitalism needed international rivalry—and periodic war—to create an artificial community of interest between rich and poor.”⁸⁵¹

The explanation for World War II is also the same. Was America attacked? No, it was America and not Japan that was to blame for Pearl Harbor. The fight against fascism was a manipulated illusion to conceal America’s real goals, which were empire and money. “Quietly, behind the headlines in battles and bombings, American diplomats and businessmen worked hard to make sure that when the war ended, American economic power would be second to none in the world. United States business would penetrate areas that up to this time had been dominated by England. The Open Door Policy of equal access would be extended from Asia to Europe, meaning that the United States intended to push England aside and move in.”⁸⁵² Yet, despite defeating Japan and helping to vanquish Germany, afterwards America rebuilt the economies of both countries. Both are now among the chief economic rivals of the United States, hardly its colonies.

Not surprisingly, Professor Zinn’s text abounds in factual inaccuracies. George Washington, for example, was not “the richest American” at the time of the revolution, nor did unemployment grow during the Reagan years. Even more impressive than his inaccuracies, on the other hand, are the events that are left out of his seven hundred–page text in order to concoct his Marxist fantasy. These include Washington’s Farewell Address, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, and Reagan’s defiant speech at the Brandenburg Gate, “Tear down this wall!” Nowhere does a reader learn that Americans were first in flight, first to fly across the Atlantic, and first to walk on the moon. Alexander Graham Bell, Jonas Salk, and the Wright Brothers are absent. Instead, the reader is treated to the exploits of Speckled Snake, the anti-war folksinger Joan Baez, and the anti-war activist Berrigan brothers (Philip and Daniel.) While Zinn sees fit to mention that immigrants often went into professions like ditch-digging and prostitution, the fact that they also created Hollywood and the Federal Bank, among other prodigious achievements, or that America has an ongoing problem of too many people wanting to take advantage of its opportunities are missing. Valley Forge is mentioned but in a single fleeting reference, while the Normandy invasion, Gettysburg, and other historical turning points are omitted. In their place, the reader is given several pages on the My Lai massacre episode in the Vietnam War, and colorful descriptions of U.S. bombs falling on hotels, air-raid shelters, and markets during the Gulf War to stop Saddam’s aggression in Kuwait. (Professor Zinn opposed the war.)

The historical progress Professor Zinn seeks to serve is evidently served by sympathizing with America’s enemies and relentlessly denigrating the achievements of the American people. In a pamphlet-like tract published after 9/11 called Terrorism and War, Professor Zinn portrays America as the terrorist state, and—just as he did the Japanese during World War II—the terrorists as the people valiantly standing up to America’s empire. Professor Zinn’s book is part of what is now a dominant trend in the teaching of American history and the writing of American history texts: to see the American narrative through a Marx-tinted lens that puts its achievements in a negative light and its enemies in a sympathetic one.

Professor Mari Matsuda

Professor Ali al-Mazrui

Professor Oneida Meranto

Professor Armando Navarro

Professor Victor Navasky

Professor Priya Parmar

Professor Emma Perez

Professor Gayle Rubin

Professor Dean Saitta

Dean Orville Schell

Professor Michael Schwartz

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Professor Timothy Shortell

Professor Harry Targ

Professor Greg Thomas

Professor Suzanne Toton

Professor Haunani-Kay Trask

Professor Michael Vocino

Professor Michael Warner

Professor Dessima Williams

Professor George Wolfe

Professor Howard Zinn