Indoctrination U: Brooklyn College Requires Students Read Anti-American Book
The publisher is notorious for being devoted evidently to publishing books opposed to Israel’s existence, including those of the discredited and particularly vile Norman Finkelstein. It is a firm that describes itself as one that “embraces progressive change in politics, culture and the way we do business.” So you can immediately get their agenda from their own website.
OR Books describes its thesis in the following paragraph:
“In these pages, a range of activists, journalists, and analysts piece together the events that occurred that May night, unpicking their meanings for Israel’s illegal, three-year-long blockade of Gaza and the decades-long Israel/Palestine conflict more generally. Mixing together first-hand testimony, documentary record, and illustration, with hard-headed analysis and historical overview, Midnight on the Mavi Marmara reveals why the attack on Gaza Freedom Flotilla may just turn out to be Israel’s Selma, Alabama: the beginning of the end for an apartheid Palestine.“
Essays are by all the usual suspects, including Philip Weiss, Max Blumenthal, Noam Chomsky, Juan Cole, Alice Walker, Stephen Walt and a score of Arab writers. What unites them all is a hatred for Israel and a commitment to its enemies.
No one is asking that Professor Bayoumi’s book be censored. Unlike KC Johnson, whose leftist colleagues wanted him out because of his views, no one is demanding that the professor be disciplined in any way, not to speak of being fired. In the United States, we believe in freedom of speech, which includes the right to publish one’s views and to present them for airing in the marketplace of ideas.
But that freedom does not include forcing the book in a compulsory fashion upon incoming students, without any other point of view being presented to them for comparison. It is a matter of balance and perspective. If they chose, for example, to present it alongside many of Alan Dershowitz’s books defending Israel and answering its critics, that would be another matter. But the Baymoui book is the only one they are being told that they must read. The choice, one faculty member said, “may be more about ‘indoctrination’ than education.”
Chalk it up for a future chapter of David Horowitz’s Indoctrination “U.”
Update:
I have an op ed in today’s New York Post on this same issue, in which perhaps I make my point a bit more clearly. You can read it here.
Using guilt to prepare us for dhimmitude perhaps?
The university system is a cesspool of indoctrination-both in the US and in Israel.The only arenas worth anything are those which concentrate on engineering and the hard sciences, the humanities are beyond the pale.
There is NO marketplace of ideas, NO balance of opinions.
Period.
Nothing we didn’t already know. Do they teach Logic in college anymore? Figured they’d have to stop by now. I failed Logic 101 in college but can still point out glaring fallacies in nearly all Leftist arguments. Heck, I don’t even need facts on my side most of the time. Their arguments fail because of their own structural deficiencies. Not minor deficiencies. Just look at the latest.
Opposed to Obamacare, GZM, Obama in general. Racist, Uncle Tom. Ad hominem.
Global Warming Consensus. Argument from Authority.
Base assertion fallacy in practically everything.
The list goes on. Arguments for ObamaCare,Bank ‘Reform’..basically any 1,000+ page bill and/or anytime ‘Reform’ is used. Homunculus fallacy. The bureaucrats we don’t know in various agencies we haven’t read about will all fix it, somehow and reform is good because it’s reform. Works for Homeland Security too. Conservatives weren’t exactly ecstatic about that agency.
Hate the capitalist system? Nirvana fallacy. It’s not right because it’s not perfect therefor we must destroy it.
In fairness Conservatives occasionally do the same thing. However it isn’t systematic among politicos and conservative(and libertarian) voters don’t like being sold a bill of goods from either party.
Remember I did fail logic, so I’m sure others will correct me.
My base argument on-topic is: If students were taught basic Logic, no ‘opposing viewpoint’ would be necessary for this Anti-American tripe. A reading of this book would only point out it’s obvious fallacies and rejection of anything resembling facts. And on the facts bit:
Don’t colleges teach basic research or how to look up(and vet and verify) references anymore?
The teacher I remember most was in Algebra. She started 1st class with ‘I’m not teaching you math, I’m teaching you how to think’. Not ‘how to think’ as in tow the party line, but HOW to think. This is how you use your brain to figure things out. Guess they don’t teach that anymore either.
I live close to Berkley. I was thinking of of marching around campus with a sign saying: “Americans will not live by the Marxism you learn here.”
but I have better things to do like pursuing happiness.
Your post made *me* happy, Ruebacca!
If you’re near Berkeley, you no doubt know the popular phrase “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.”
If they don’t want to “feel like a problem,” they can become part of the solution. Not that that’s going to happen …
To paraphrase George Will’s comments of several decades ago: there is nothing wrong with most institutions of post-secondary education that couldn’t be solved by having the state department of public roads come in and pave it over. I spent more than three decades in academia and this nonsense increasingly became par for the course. One of my colleagues was such a caricature of a “human rights” activist that the students did a parody of him, saying, “I belong to Amnesty International and you’d damn well join too, if you want a good grade in this course. I’m about human rights and tolerance, you will be too.” The parody spoke for itself.
“…there is nothing wrong with most institutions of post-secondary education that couldn’t be solved by having the state department of public roads come in and pave it over.”
I want it to be crystal clear that Abraham Miller might be speaking in a tongue in cheek manner—but I am not. These institutions have been effectively destroyed. They must be abandoned. New ones must take their place.
50-100k in debt for a BA in BS. Online schools will put and end to this.
LOL! I think anyone who has worked (or studied) in academia for any length of time has ran across at least one of those!
It is very sad, but true — most colleges do not teach basic logic (of course, logic isn’t introduced to K-12 either, so when you do try to teach logic anymore, you may not get far — last time I taught at the collegiate level was 3 years ago, in the 15 years I taught I saw a steady decline in the ability to think critically, and to do research…heck, just in any desire to learn to think on one’s own). Equally sad but true, that the humanities have been destroyed by professors such as these, but anyone who thinks that the other departments cannot be gutted in much the same way are being foolish. It’s already happening to a certain extent.
We have our own little cesspool of knowledge in Washington State – The Evergreen College. The maroon Rachel Corrie got her education there.
I suppose that’s where she learned to play with bulldozers.
I just take it for granted that a soft science credential from any college should be looked at with a huge grain of salt. They are normally phonier than a three dollar bill. This is why graduates are having a hard time finding a good job after acquiring a bachelors degree. There is also little reason to save these schools. We will likely have to start entirely new institutions. It is virtually impossible to get rid of the crazies now in control. The law is unfortunately on their side. Never forget how difficult in was for the University of Colorado to finally rid itself of Ward Churchill.
Perhaps Mr. Thomson can find another focal subject for his monomania besides the fraudulence of “soft-science” degrees? We get it. We got after the first ten or twenty such postings on a host of center-right websites. Not everybody is cut out to study civil engineering or organic chemistry, and in my experience the academic liberal arts retain a least a fair part of their moral and intellectual legitimacy. And the appalling job market for newly minted B.A. graduates is hardly the result of a surfeit of gender studies degrees.
“It is clear that the book is a highly exaggerated view of how American citizens treat Muslims and Arabs. (The book carries a blurb by none other than Rashid Khalidi.)”
Have you read the book, Ron? Seems like you’re judging it from blurbs (which include, incidentally, a blurb from the Wall Street Journal). It also seems like your criticisms are mostly directed at another book, edited by the same man. As for the blurbs, if these young Moslems have faced harassments, firings, etc., why shouldn’t they write about them? You think anti-Islamic feelings in the US are exaggerated? Don’t you read the publication you blog for?
Yeah, telling the truth about Islam is pretty Islamophobic.
The worse thing is actually quoting from the Qur’an, now that’s really Islamophobic.
Like, we all know it’s just a coincidence that 99% of the terrorism in the world is committed by Muslims in the name of Islam. Honour killings, stonings, hanging gays, those are just harmless folk customs, just like murdering apostates. I mean, really, why make a big deal out of another culture’s values, after all, all cultures are equal, except Western culture, which is evil imperialism & not worth preserving anyway. We need to show tolerence to people who want to kill us, I’m sure dialogue will change their minds.
Terry. you make more sense than any of the posts I have read so far. and so true my friend,
Well, I was talking about anti-Islamic feeling in the U.S., but I’ll accept William’s “so true my friend” as a demonstration of my point.
You think anti-Islamic feelings in the US are exaggerated?
YES YES YES and YES
Did you read the post you’re criticizing? Where does the author say that the book should not have been written? His point is that has been assigned without anything to balance it.
Huh? Nowhere do I claim that RR says the book should not have been written.
I grew up in Flatbush, went to PS 152 and Midwood HS and then went across the street to Brooklyn College and graduated from there back in the early 80′s. Despite its being a hotbed of radical politics during the 60′s, the professoriate (at least in my time there) were not completely leftist and you could get a decent education without the indoctrination. I remember in 1978 when the Puerto Rican Student Union, led by a radical “professor” took over one of the buildings and had to be forcibly ejected by the police. They expected to be cheered as heroes by the student body but to their shock and dismay they got just the opposite. Oh how the times have changed. Sad.
Sort of reminds me of the late Joe Columbo (boss of the Columbo crime family) when he started the Italo-American Anti-Defamation League. He had his goons go around to all the stores in the neighborhood and you the merchants were “encouraged” to pay $10.00 to join.
(“Mafia? What Mafia? There is no Mafia, and if you say that there is I’ll have your legs broken.”)
The rot at Brooklyn College goes back farther than Ron Radosh recognizes. Back in the mid-1970′s a political science professor was fired from Brooklyn College for allegedly having had some kind of association with the CIA. It was partly in support of that firing that Puerto Ricans seized the building J J Sefton refers to.
My undergrad institution did not have any such suggested reading for incoming freshmen, so I am unfamiliar with the rules for these things. But I would have to seriously question whether the students are actually *forced* to read such texts. What would the school do to verify that they had? Are they going to give the students some sort of test or exam on the material? And what would be the penalty if a student failed the test, or failed to read the text?
If I were an incoming freshman, I would treat the “assigned” reading as merely a suggestion, not a requirement. If I didn’t like the proposed text but still wanted to participate in discussion, I might choose to read what I think is a counterpoint text, in order to bring a diversity of viewpoints to the table. Of course, I am speaking from a more mature viewpoint. A naive freshman might well take the “requirement” more seriously, so the wording of the request is still very much an issue.
The situation is a bit complicated to explain, and it differs from institution to institution. I will try to explain what happened through my own experiences:
When I first started my own career, we (the instructors) were given a list of the texts from which we could base our syllabus, plus a general guideline as to what was the expected skill set students should master by the end of the semester. The instructors were free to request other assigned readings and to bring in outside reading materials; they were also fairly free to set their lesson plans themselves — just as long as the skill set was met. Then, about 3 years later, instructors could not request additional texts (bugetary concerns), but still were allowed the other freedoms. Then in another few years, instructors were asked to only use the listed texts and those only, plus there were more guidelines than just “meet the skill set”. There became rules on how the skill sets should be learned. The last two years I worked at the collegiate level, the college I worked for set out a “master syllabus”, and that was the one the instructors were supposed to follow — it was explained as a way to ensure “equality of outcome through equality of teaching material and course instruction”. In short, everyone was…pressured…to teach the same thing in the same way, little to no deviations allowed.
There would be no way a student could duck an assigned reading (just as there is next to no chance that an instructor can duck it either) — not and make a passing grade (or keep one’s job).
This is the low state to which academia has fallen. It is no longer institutes of higher learning so much as diploma factories.
“This is the low state to which academia has fallen.”
At least in the unnamed institution you cite.
The institution in question was a fairly average, non-radical college — if it could happen there, it could happen anywhere.
In fact, it pretty much does…have you looked into how colleges and universities are setting up the teaching parameters for the 100 and 200 level courses recently? Have you perused any of the books on pedagogy lately, or on the process of heuristics? These are routinely distributed to instructors as tools to help them ply their trade, not just education class textbooks. It runs workshops and symposiums, essentially trade fair manuals — the latest, greatest way to teach in a nutshell.
There has been a change that has taken place even over the last 20 years, even over the last 10. It’s worth looking into.
@jane: Thank you for the clarification. It was my impression from descriptions of reading programs at other schools that incoming freshmen were sent a letter in the preceding spring asking them to read a certain text over the summer before they first arrive on campus (or perhaps they would be sent a complimentary copy of the text). I did not realize that this article was referring to a text assigned to all freshman English 101 classes.
I’m in a math department, where all sections of any given 100-level course (so-called “service courses”) will use the same department-determined text and syllabus. It makes sense for standard math material at this level, and I suppose it would be true for the hard sciences as well. It doesn’t make so much sense to me in an English course, unless they standardized on classical texts.
Universities, especially in major cities, are just as dangerous to America, if not moreso, than the terrorists themselves. Hitler knew how to use academia to brainwash. This is scarcely different.
Not too long ago, I wrote a long-overdue letter to my college academic advisor. I wanted to thank him, for among other things, teaching me and every other student who crossed his path how to think, evaluate, question, connect and examine. He set the bar high, insisted on excellence and graded accordingly. He is, I fear, a retiring/dying breed.
Like the government, the only viable solution may be to scrap the current model and start over. The institutions and educators I see today bear little or no resemblance to those I learned so much from, a few decades ago.
Time for the students to have a good old-fashioned bookburning.
Rarely does the right-wing ethos express itself so clearly.
There was going to be this new book.
How does it feel to be a problem: Being a Christian aid worker in Afghanastan. Unfortunately the potential authors were murdered before the manuscript could be started.
There was a young Jewish-American student at Brooklyn college who called in on the Tamar Yonah Show of Israel National Radio for an interview. The core of the interwiew was a history book they had to read. One chapter dealt with the Middle East which was riddled with myths and distortions. He countered it by writing a paper on it how this is all blatant lies. The teacher wasn’t very supportive of it all.
Needless to say, I got on my computer and found out the e-mail and gave the school a piece of my mind. Seems like it does not make a dent into the schools thinking after all. But hey, what can we expect today from our halls of higher learning anyway but indoctrination of filth. Sounds too harsch, well it shouldn’t because it’s true.
11 Ballionensis:
I seem to recall that the protest was a reaction to the Bakke affirmative action case which was then before the SCOTUS. Then again, they used to protest about everything. When they ran for student government offices, the campaign slogan was “no more hotdog eating contests, wet t-shirt contests or Gong Shows!” Also, the cries of “Kneller, you liar! We’ll set your a$$ on fire!” were ever-present.
Oh, the humanity.
Fools! Self-loathing fools and cowards!
This slow, cruel submission is painful & humiliating.Why not just turn the country over to the invaders & be done with it?
The USA is becoming weaker and weaker due to compromised individuals strategically placed in key positions, as if this is a championship game. But it’s no game. It’s the attack on American, from inside. Recently, our own Department of Justice is suing Arizona over trying to protect their state from the pervasive influx of hostile illegal immigrants who are pouring into American and damaging our environment, overwhelming our school systems, draining our medical resources and breeding new generations of gang members who hate America and are used by south american cartels to bring drugs into USA for the sole purpose of destroying American lives and minds. Evil has one face and it’s the face of confusion. Wherever there is confusion, you will find evil and that is what is happening now. God is our only hope. And it’s the God of Israel that will help us. As for global warming, don’t waste your time on this money making for the elites hoax, the only time global warming is coming my friends is when the Lord burns up this world and melts the eyeballs out of the non believer’s eyesockets. (see bible revelation book) Not my idea of a good time.
This is all perfectly understandable when you become aware of the driving force behind it. The opening few words in that 1st line of the U.S. Constitution, “We the people” has never pleased the Left. “We the people” are just too ignorant to be the predominant force in their form of Utopia, always an improvement over the last disaster, a form that was developed and continues to be nurtured and adjusted by the tenured in academia and taught surreptitiously and with impunity to the young, impressionable and typically rebellious students easily enthralled by attractive, glib professors with that exalted badge of intellectual superiority, the PhD. They need to change it to “We the intellectual few with vastly superior powers of reasoning need to protect, defend & control the working class” and continue with their revised Constitution which they alone will ratify and shape to suit their purpose of the moment; a living document.
Of course their intellectually superior brains tell them that a clear statement of their true intentions will likely fall flat on it’s tush. The minds of the people, those dumb rubes clinging to their guns and religion, are just a mite smarter than they should be. They, the intellectually superior, don’t have the numbers or the guts or the clarity of message for a frontal attack so more devious and diabolically ingenious methods are necessary. Accordingly they’ve decided to take the slow road to Nirvana by insinuating themselves in every form of mass media where influential footholds were achievable; broadcast and print media, the entertainment industry, politics and, the holy Grail, the halls of academia, K-whatever. Here, sweet little innocents, like blank slates, can be inculcated with the “required, politically correct, historically adjusted and artificially constructed knowledge” of world and particularly American history and sent out into the world, an army of radical robots, mentally insulated from fact based reality, determined to spread the appropriate dogma designed to eventually result in that elusive global government body eternally controlled by that intellectually superior few from on high somewhere in the venerated halls of academia. Life for the privileged, er, excuse me, deserved few will be posh and justly so since they are the only ones smart enough to enjoy its fruits.
This may be a parody of a factual commentary and a gratuitous attack on academia in general but I have no doubt that there is a concerted, ongoing effort by so called reformers in America who hate America, see and exaggerate only the warts, unlike (hopefully) most who love America and see warts and all. And it must be asked, where and how do these obviously intelligent individuals develop this irrational hatred for the country of their birth, a country that by any measure is the most successful social experiment in the undiluted, unaltered history of mankind, a country that has afforded them the opportunity to achieve whatever their abilities would allow? Why does their version of history and current events always cast America as the most evil tyrant on the planet? Where does this hatred, bordering on paranoia, come from for all things Conservative; limited government of, by and for all its people, personal responsibility, personal freedom, freedom of speech and religion, gun ownership rights, secure borders, national security, a nation of laws, fiscal responsibility, low taxation, minimal regulation, the free market and a competitive marketplace, free trade, etc.; disagreement on certain principles and methods of implementation, yes but rabid hatred?
There are no simple answers but opinions are based on knowledge and experience. Youth have no experience and so this hatred must be taught and carefully nurtured and that’s not going to happen if left to the “working class.” But in the classroom, a place most people trust to harbor their children for 7 or 8 hours a day and educate them with regard to “the American way,” a place most don’t consider indoctrination centers, unsupervised radicals can operate with impunity and America is now paying the price given the egregious media bias we’re inundated with on a daily basis, given the election of the most radical President in our history, Barack Hussien Obama and given the radical individuals he’s surrounded himself with as spiritual, economic, political, judicial and cultural advisors.
And the surprise about this event is?
When I went to city college (same university system), I had to take a Puerto Rican studies class. The first day the professor taught us how to recycle our urine since he was a supporter of allyende, che and castro. The class laughed at him and one student said Do you know this is a PR studies class not cuban THis was over thirty years ago. This attempt at radicalization isn’t new. The students should just laugh any time this BS is mentioned as “factual info”
Is yoga something of a personal journey to you? Is it more than just fitness?
Simply great ! I’ve worked in the financial sector myself (interned at Morgan Stanley so I’ve been in the position of observing a lot of investors and underwriters going through IPOs. Since then, I’ve moved from hedge funds to an entrepreneurial start-up so I’m still in a remarkably vivid position to observe human behavior. Although I wouldn’t say that I’m an master at investing in any way, I do know that while you can make a great sum from day trading, your chances of competing with other informational traders (people who really know the stocks) are slim..and don’t even mention the dealers and brokers who have their own reputation and assets at risk! My advice: if you are looking to invest for personal finance reasons, go ahead and take a brief read at an award-winning essay by Delos Chang that details the S&P 500 as a more reliable and surefire return than any sort of day trading. With the inflation, drug wars, stock bubbles, mortgage housing crises these days, you can’t just keep paying transaction costs or the capital gains tax will really make you bite the bullet (even if you’ve made a negative profit from inflation!). Opportunity cost – economics 101.