-Caveat Lector-
Should 'education' in the formal sense be separated
from Government control, 'public' funding and the like?
... perhaps for the same reasons that it has been
suggested that Religion and Government should remain
apart?
~~for educational purposes only~~
The Lies Your Professor Told You
An Accuracy in Academia Address
by Daniel J. Flynn
Variations of this talk have been delivered more than
a dozen times in 1998, including at the University of
Massachusetts, Georgia Tech, Wabash College, George
Washington University, St. John’s College, and the
University of New Hampshire.
My talk is about how little truth seems to matter in
higher education today. At one time, as the mottoes of
Harvard and Yale attest, truth was the ultimate goal
of our colleges and universities. Today that ideal has
been subverted by something that modern academics prize
more highly -- I’m referring to the concept known as
"diversity." For the modern academic, "diversity" is
something to be preserved at all costs, even when it
comes at the expense of truth.
When faculty and administrators talk about "diversity,"
the term is used as a euphemism for left-wing conformity
-- an inversion of the word’s true meaning. As Thomas
Sowell has observed, when folks on campus talk about
creating a "diverse faculty," they mean they want to
hire a faculty that includes black leftists, Asian
leftists, Hispanic leftists, female leftists, gay leftists,
and so on and so forth. The diversity envisioned by many
of those who run America’s top colleges and universities
is a diversity where everybody looks like the United
Nations but thinks like a San Francisco coffeehouse.
That is to say it is not diversity at all.
Specifically, I want to focus my remarks on the conflict
between truth and "diversity" in the once political, and
now strangely academic, areas of environmentalism,
feminism, gay rights, and multiculturalism. It is
because professors overwhelmingly support these political
ideologies that they have adopted the stance of accepting
what Plato referred to as "needful falsehoods" over the
not-so-convenient truth in these fields.
More than 70 colleges and universities currently offer
programs in lesbian and gay studies. The most popular
textbook in the subject admits that the field was designed
to "advance the interests of lesbians, bisexuals, and gay
men" and that it "straddles scholarship and politics." You
don’t have to be Nostradamus to predict what would happen
if it were not gay activists but say NRA members, pro-lifers,
or some other group on the Right that was offering courses
that straddle "scholarship and politics." They’d by laughed
out of their jobs.
Courses in the discipline, as one might guess, reflect this
political mindset: Yale’s "Sexual Diversity and Social
Change," the University of Minnesota’s "Gay Men and
Homophobia in American Culture," and Oberlin’s "Queer Acts"
in which the course description reads: "Drag will be
encouraged, but not required."
Those who champion such fields often throw around buzzwords
like "tolerance" to justify the politicization of scholarship.
So we should probably ask ourselves what it is that we are
being asked to tolerate?
The very first essay in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader,
the Bible of this emerging field, demonstrates just what
it is that faculty activists want us to "tolerate."
Anthropologist Gayle Rubin writes, "Like communists and
homosexuals in the 1950s, boy lovers are so stigmatized
that it is difficult to find defenders for their civil
liberties, let alone erotic orientation." She complains
of a "savage and undeserved witch-hunt" organized by the
Post Office, the FBI, and local police departments "to wipe
out the community of men who love underage youth." The
feminist anthropologist goes on to state that opposition
to "sadomasichism," "transsexuality," and
"cross-generational encounters" have "more in common
with ideologies of racism than with true ethics."
Perhaps the most tireless champion of sex between children
and adults is the New York University Press. In NYU Press’
Lavender Culture, Gerald Hannon blasts what he sees as two
"archaic concepts": #1. "the innocence of children" and
#2. "the potential harmfulness of sex." Hannon argues that
gays must "proselytize" in order to "abolish repressive,
ageist legislation." By this he means: "reaching young
people with the message" that "they should get out of
their families as soon as they can" and that "it’s all
right to be having sex." And this is a reoccurring theme
in many of the gay and lesbian studies books that NYU
publishes.
Because Gay and Lesbian Studies is admittedly political,
it puts forward claims that have everything to do with
an agenda and very little to do with true scholarship.
I want to back this claim up, briefly, with a few examples
from history, literature, and science.
University of Massachusetts-Boston Professor Charley
Shively claims that Abraham Lincoln had numerous gay
affairs. "For his taste in men," Shively writes,
"Lincoln was clearly an ass rather than a crotch
man." What’s Shively’s evidence? Well, Lincoln, it
seems, shared a bed with his law clerk Joshua Speed
for a time -- a practice that was common and not
thought much about in the 19th Century. Shivley
claims that George Washington was gay as well.
Shivley’s "scholarship" would be laughable, however,
the LA Unified School District -- based on his work
-- instructs teachers to inform homosexual youth that
Lincoln was "gay" to boost student self esteem.
By reading "gay" issues into the literary canon, claimed
Richard Zeikowitz at this year’s Modern Language
Association meeting, "male\male friendships are not
only strengthened but eroticized." Huckleberry Finn
and Tom Sawyer, because they are friends, are now
read as having an even stronger friendship.
"Homosocial" relationships -- where two men compete
for the same woman -- argued the City University of
New York professor, are actually manifestations of
homosexual feelings between male characters. Thus,
Jay Gatsby and Tom Buchanan, by virtue of their
competition for Daisy Buchanan, are read as gay
by many English literature instructors.
The third example I want to employ is that of Alfred Kinsey.
Fifty years ago, Indiana University Professor Alfred Kinsey
launched what was perhaps the first salvo in the Sexual
Revolution. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, the work
of Kinsey, Wardell Pomeroy, and Clyde Martin, hit post-war
America like a sucker punch. Claiming that 85% of American
males engaged in pre-marital sex, 70% had paid for sex with
prostitutes, and between 10% and 37% were homosexual, the
Kinsey Report revolutionized American law, culture, education,
and a host of other areas. Critics of the report, the media
informed America, were to Kinsey what the church was to
Galileo. Kinsey was, after all, a "scientist."
At mid-century, Kinsey’s fame rivaled the likes of Harry
Truman and Douglas MacArthur. Today, he is perhaps best
known for putting forward the idea 10% of the population is
gay -- this "10%" figure has become something of a mantra for
gay activists and is often repeated as fact in news reports
and in sociology text books. I’m sure you’ve encountered it
before.
The Kinsey that has been passed on by college texts and
popular histories is that of the disinterested scientist,
whose research is unimpeachable. In David Halberstam’s The
Fifties, Kinsey is "prudish," "old fashioned," and "the
very embodiment of Middle American square." Rutgers
University Professor William O’Neil praises Kinsey in
American High as a "hero of science"; those who pressured
the Rockefeller Foundation to cut his funding won "a
victory for small mindedness." William Manchester’s Kinsey
in The Glory and the Dream is "an objective investigator,"
"a stickler for explicit detail," and a "disciple of truth."
"As a scientist," Manchester informs readers, "he had
naturally played no favorites."
Kinsey, as we know now, was a very different kind of
"scientist." A homosexual, a wife-swapper, a sado-masochist,
and, perhaps, a pedophile, Kinsey was much more involved in
his work than the keepers of the tablets would have us
believe. For Kinsey, biographer James Jones writes, "the
personal was always the political."
Taken alone, Kinsey’s bizarre personal life only provides
a motive for why he attempted to uproot the sexual mores
of mid-century America. A close examination of his sample
group demonstrates just how he did this.
Although the total number of men used for the Male volume
is in dispute (estimates range from 4,100 to 6,300), we
know that 1,400 members of the sample group were prison
inmates. For Kinsey and his fellow researchers, basing
their survey on the inhabitants of an environment that
is a notorious breeding ground for perversion was still
not enough to skew the data to their satisfaction. By
developing key contacts in the urban gay subcultures of
Chicago, New York, St. Louis and other big cities, Kinsey
was able to interview hundreds of homosexuals -- managing
to tilt his data and procure sexual liaisons for himself
all at once.
This same kind of statistical trickery is pervasive
throughout Sexual Behavior in the Human Female.
Prostitutes, for instance, were reclassified as "married
women" to portray American wives as more promiscuous than
they really were.
Attempting to prove that humans are sexual from birth,
Kinsey collected data on at least 324 (and perhaps as
many as 2,000) children. Infants, as young as five months
old, said Kinsey, achieve "orgasm" after being stimulated
from those he called "partners." Symptoms of sexual climax
for young children, claimed Kinsey, often included "sobbing,"
"violent cries," "loss of color," and an "abundance of
tears."
Kinsey and his apostles have made contradictory claims
concerning the number of child-molesters employed to
produce this data. It is quite possible that Kinsey -- who
privately condoned child-adult sexual encounters and served
as a longtime counselor for such groups as the Boy Scouts
and the YMCA -- was a prime "observer" and source of
information.
>From Thomas Jefferson to J. Edgar Hoover, the sex lives
of prominent Americans have been obsessed over by modern
academics. Yet Kinsey, the very man who would merit such
an investigation most, has been largely ignored. Academics,
feeling an ideological kinship with Kinsey, have balked at
attempting to uncover information that might undermine the
work of a figure they hold in such high esteem.
Using "science" as a means to promote one’s political
objectives is certainly not a phenomenon that is confined
to homosexual academics. Environmentalists, too, shout
"science" when they are attempting to fulfill an agenda.
It seems the more obvious the agenda, the louder the
shouts of "science" become.
Stanford University Professor Paul Ehlrich’s
The Population Bomb, twenty-nine years after
it was first published, is still one of the
most frequently assigned texts at the college
level. "The battle to feed humanity is over,"
he apocalypticly asserted. "In the 1970s the
world will undergo famines -- hundreds of
millions of people are going to starve to
death." Like Malthus 180 years earlier,
Ehlrich was wrong. Yet, the Stanford
professor’s belief that an increase in human
beings inevitably leads to an ecological
disaster is taught as fact at so many
colleges and universities.
Like the "population bomb" that never happened,
"global warming" is a theory that has trouble
playing itself out in practice. Over the past
two decades, weather satellites show that the
average global temperature has actually cooled.
The global warming point is especially
interesting when you discover that many of the
same so-called "scientists" who argue that the
earth is heating up argued the very opposite
thing 25 years ago. In 1971, Dr. Stephen
Schneider warned that there will be "a cooling
of the earth" and of the potential of what he
classified as a coming "ice age." Today,
Schneider is a professor at Stanford and
the author of the frequently assigned,
Global Warming.
According to academic environmentalists, our
forests are being depleted. Yet, through
reforestation and advances in fire-fighting
technology, America has more trees than at any
point this century. As John Tierney points out
in a recent New York Times Magazine article,
"Yes, a lot of trees have been cut down to
make today’s newspaper. But even more trees
will probably be planted in their place.
America’s supply of timber has been increasing
for decades, and the nation’s forests have
three times the amount of wood today than in
1920."
I want to take a few minutes to examine feminism
-- specifically it’s academic arm, women’s studies.
Thirty years ago there were no women’s studies programs
in America. Today, there are more than 600 degree-granting
programs in the subject. The American Council on Education
states that of the more than 3000 institutions of higher
learning in America, 2000 offer women’s studies in one
form or another. Every Ivy League college, with the
exception of Princeton, now offers more courses in
women’s studies than in economics.
Why is this?
The proliferation of feminist inspired courses does
not stem from student interest. When I examined
Harvard in 1996, for instance, I found that there
were 540 economics majors and yet there were only 52
economics classes listed in the school’s program of
study. Compare this to women’s studies, where a mere
13 students majored in the field, yet had over 60
courses to choose from. The Cornell Review found
that the average women’s studies course at that
institution had four students enrolled. The story
is much the same at other universities. Economics
majors have less courses to chose from despite
outnumbering students majoring in women’s studies
by 28 to 1 at Yale and 23 to 1 at Penn. Clearly
it is supply and not demand that is fueling the
onslaught of the politically correct curricula.
Students know that just about the only jobs one can
secure as a result of majoring in a field like women’s
studies is either to become a professional activist
or to stay in education and teach the same women’s
studies classes that one enrolled in as an undergraduate.
The few students who do enroll in fields like women’s
studies often do so only because they are coerced -- it
fulfills a "diversity" or "third world requirement," or
they are drawn to the field through the allure of
attaining an easy "A."
What, exactly, is it that students typically learn about
in women’s studies?
In Williams College’s "Practicing Feminism: A Study of
Political Activism," students perform "fieldwork at
community agencies" so that they "might raise awareness
of feminist issues in the community." The University of
Massachusetts-Amherst’s "Women of Color and Activism,"
"Moves beyond representations of women of color as
storytellers" and seeks "to establish groundwork for
future activism between women of color and other women."
And this comes directly from the course catalogs.
Perhaps more alarming than the political grunt-work
students are asked to do are the pseudo-scientific
theories that are expounded throughout women’s studies.
Women’s Ways of Knowing is the title of a book
and of numerous college courses. It is also a
growing philosophy which states that logic and
reasoning are men’s ways of knowing, and feeling
and intuition are women’s ways of knowing. Now if
a man were to say this a few decades ago, he would
be rightfully condemned as a sexist. Today it is
self-proclaimed feminists who are preaching this
nonsense.
I’m sure you’ve heard it said on campus that one out
of every four women is raped. Every time I’ve been
on a college campus for more than a few hours, I’ve
come across this statistic somewhere. It’s a
constant reminder in women’s studies textbooks,
dormitory halls, campus literature, and at "take
back the night" rallies. Implicit in this statistic
is not just that millions of American women are
victims, but that millions of American men are
rapists. University of Michigan Professor Catherine
MacKinnon, along these same lines, claims that all
heterosexual sex is rape. The "one in four" statistic
is based on a Ms. magazine survey of college-age
women. Amazingly enough, a full 73% of the women
that Ms. categorized as being the victims of rape
actually told Ms. that they believed that they
were not raped. Feminists constantly remind us that
every time a woman says she is raped we should
believe her. Judging from the Ms. survey, when
women say they have not been raped we should
disbelieve them. This is a little confusing
considering that feminists are the ones saying we
should always believe women. Yet in their own
surveys, feminists do not trust women.
In a heavily publicized case at Georgetown this past
school year, two female undergraduates were denounced
by classmates and college officials for exposing the
untruthfulness of such feminist myths in a publication
they produced. The pressure was so great that the girl’s
roommates even denounced them. Said one student, "if
one women is not raped by publishing false statistics
than that justifies it."
The final category I want to talk about is multiculturalism.
At its core, multiculturalism is Marxist. Economic Marxism
takes money earned by the wealthy and gives it to the poor.
Cultural Marxism -- or multiculturalism -- seeks to debase
the achievements of the majority group while exaggerating
the accomplishments of so-called "victim groups."
Multiculturalism is not about trumpeting other cultures. It
is about debasing our own. If so-called multiculturalists
were serious about studying other cultures we might expect
to see campus takeovers of buildings in the name of more
foreign language courses, protests calling for expanded
student exchange programs, or petitions circulated to
bring back Will and Ariel Durant’s 11-volume Story of
Civilization. Needless to say we don’t. Instead we get
mobs shouting, "Hey, hey, ho, ho. Western culture’s got
to go."
A common practice of multiculturalists is to highlight the
sins and failings (both real and imagined) of Western
Civilization. When this fails to make the achievements of
all groups appear relatively equal they often invent a new
"history" to enhance the esteem of minority groups.
In They Came Before Columbus, Rutgers University Professor
Ivan Van Sertima argues that Africans, not Columbus,
discovered the Americas. Despite no credible evidence to
support these claims, the Rutgers professor’s work is
widely cited in Afrocentric circles as proof of the
African discovery of the New World.
In Exemplar of Liberty, professors Donald Grinde and Bruce
Johansen claim the political philosophy of Native Americans
was a key influence on the Founding Fathers. "Someday,"
state the authors, "when the dominant society becomes more
concerned about reciprocity and less concerned about
superiority and domination, we may all be able to join
hands and celebrate the diverse roots of American democratic
tradition without the blinders of indifference and cultural
arrogance."
Afrocentrism holds that ancient Greek thinkers such
as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, stole their ideas
from "black" Egyptians and the Library at Alexandria.
This theory has been touted as fact by leading
Afrocentrist Molefi Assante of Temple University
among many others. Well, it must have ruined Mr.
Assante’s day when he found out that the Library at
Alexandria was built after Socrates, Plato, and
Aristotle were dead and gone. Facts rarely get in
the way of a good story, however, and this myth is
still taught as the truth at many institutions of
higher learning.
However ridiculous these three examples may seem, we should
remember that they’re taught as fact in hundreds of college
courses throughout America. The notion that Indians were
instrumental in our Founding somehow made it into the
Clinton Administration’s National History Standards. The
idea that Greeks stole their knowledge from black Egyptians
is taught within the book African-American Baseline Essays
which is part of the public school curricula in Portland,
Oregon and Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Still, you may say: "Flynn, I know they’re teaching this
stuff, but I doubt any sensible person is stupid enough
to believe it." This criticism may be valid, so let me
offer up one example of how multiculturalists have cooked-up
a series of events and have had tremendous success in passing
this invented history off as fact.
The example I will use centers around Japanese internemnt
during World War II -- a story that I’m sure most of you
have heard about in any class you’ve taken on American
history in the 20th Century.
In the widely assigned American history text The Enduring
Vision, it is explained that during World War II, "The worst
abuses of civil liberties ... was the internment of 112,000
Japanese Americans" in what the authors label "concentration
camps." This injustice, states the book that is read by
"hundreds of thousands" of students, occurred despite the
fact that "military intelligence had [not] uncovered any
evidence of disloyal behavior by Japanese Americans."
There is a slight problem with this official version. And
the problem is it’s not true.
It is claimed that more than 100,000 Americans were interned
during World War II. The true figure is 31,265. More shocking
than this is that of all those who were interned, half were
European-Americans.
Historians don’t dare question the loyalty of Japanese
Americans. To do so would be to undermine their thesis that
internment was unnecessary. Yet it is an undisputed fact
that more than 5,600 Japanese Americans renounced their
citizenship following Pearl Harbor and an additional
20,000 joined the Japanese war effort. Nor do historians
bring up the internment of Europeans. This inconvenient
fact de-legitimizes the idea that internment was racist.
If America is truly a racist country, why then, is it that
we only hear about Japanese internment in the history books?
Why was it that the federal government paid $20,000 in
restitution in 1988 to Japanese-Americans who were interned
or forced to relocate and European-Americans who endured
the same thing got nothing?
It is true that tens-of-thousands of Japanese-Americans were
forced to relocate from the West Coast. This is why,
presumably, historians have cooked-up the figure of
112,000 for the total number of Japanese interned.
It is also true that thousands of Italian- and German-Americans
were forced to relocate. The family of New York Yankee Joe
DiMaggio, for instance, was forced by the government to
relocate from San Francisco. Like the Japanese, the
Europeans were free to move to any of the 44 states
outside of California, Arizona, Oregon, and Washington.
Unlike the Japanese, however, Germans and Italians were
not given the luxury of having the option of relocating to
government funded centers that offered free food, clothing,
housing, medical care, and education. Europeans who were
forced to move had to fend for themselves.
These government centers, that historians have derisively
labeled "concentration camps," had the lowest infant
mortality rate and the highest life expectancy rate
during the war. Living in the centers was optional --
35,000 Japanese chose to live on their own elsewhere --
and when the war ended the Japanese American Citizens
League protested to keep them open.
I’m willing to go out on a limb and say that none of the
inhabitants of Kolyma or Auschwitz protested to keep those
real concentration camps open. Only in America I guess.
The story of Japanese internment, like so much of what is
taught in our educational institutions, is a lie. For the
purpose of promoting political ideologies -- feminism, gay
rights, environmentalism, and multiculturalism – academics
have disregarded their original mission: the search for
truth.
The generation that told us to "question authority" three
decades ago now is the authority on America’s campuses.
Questioning authority, however, is the last thing they
want students to do today. John Stuart Mill’s community
eccentric who bucks the norms of society for society’s sake
is public enemy number one at many leading colleges and
universities.
Students who question the prevailing campus orthodoxy are
often shouted down in class by their peers and graded down
on tests by their professors. For academics, the punishment
for this "mind-crime" is much worse. The chances of a
professor who doesn’t subscribe to "identity politics"
gaining tenure at a top college or university are very
slim. Allow me to illustrate this with some numbers.
Recent surveys of the political affiliations of college
professors demonstrate the degree to which a monolith of
opinion is present among faculty members. At Dartmouth,
Democrat professors outnumber Republicans by a ratio of
25 to one. Cornell professors also shun enrollment as
Republicans by 25 to one. At the University of North
Carolina-Chapel Hill, Democrats yield a greater than ten
to one advantage. A 1994 study showed that among Stanford
professors in the humanities who were members of the two
major parties, nine out of ten were registered Democrat.
A similar study conducted by the Rocky Mountain News,
revealed a 31 to one Democrat\Republican ratio at the
University of Colorado-Boulder.
In the history departments of the five schools combined,
for instance, there were 137 Democrats and only three
Republicans. In English, the combined total was 159 to
6.
When it comes to intellectual diversity, our leading
colleges and universities are bankrupt. The very
institutions where we would want the marketplace of ideas
to be the freest are the places where it faces the greatest
hostility. Speech codes, sensitivity training, newspaper
thefts, and the banning of controversial speakers are
aspects of university life that have lead to a climate
of suppression at hundreds of schools.
I do want to close on a note of optimism. Although true
diversity -- intellectual diversity -- is virtually
non-existent on campus, things can, and I think will,
change. In the communist world, leaders often referred
to their nations as "democracies" even though they plainly
weren’t. They also utilized democratic rhetoric to support
their plainly totalitarian ends. It shouldn’t have surprised
us that after years of hearing about democracy, people in
these nations rose up and said, "Hey, this democracy thing
sounds pretty good, how ‘bout a little for me?"
On campus, the situation is much the same. For years,
university commissars have preached diversity while
presenting students with a sham diversity based on
superficial characteristics. We should be encouraged, and
not a bit surprised, when students start saying, "Hey,
this diversity thing sounds pretty good. How ‘bout a
little for me?"
Thank you.
(Daniel J. Flynn is executive director of Accuracy
in Academia and editor of Campus Report)
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