Fundamentals of Brainwashing

When psychologist Denis Nissim-Sabat takes his political positions into the classroom, he threatens to turn the science of the mind into the control of the thought.

Dr. Nissim-Sabat teaches at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia and has taken sabbaticals to work with a Democratic senator and do research for the American Psychological Association (APA).

The Senator who Nissim-Sabat worked for, the late Paul Simon, ran unsuccessfully for the presidency and retired to academia—a future few Republican officeholders can look forward to. The APA itself is an organization not above the political fray: Republican senators took the group to task in the late 1990s for publishing an article vaguely sympathetic to pedophiles in its journal.

As a member of the faculty senate at Mary Washington, Dr. Nissim-Sabat also went on record opposing the U. S. intervention in Iraq. “Nissim-Sabat said the war would result in more cutbacks for faculty and less student scholarships and loans,” The Bullet, Mary Washington’s school newspaper reported in April of 2003. Ironically, federal spending on education at all levels—elementary, high school and higher— was soaring to historic highs at the time.

Dr. Sabat runs a part-time clinical practice in Fredericksburg and teaches at least three courses at Mary Washington—Abnormal, General, and Historical Psychology. But does Dr. Nissim-Sabat build a wall of separation between his politicking and his professorial duties?

Not according to his students, most of whom prefer to remain anonymous. “As for his liberal views: Welcome to college,” reads one of his favorable reviews on ratemyprofessor.com. “The professors are mostly liberal.”

“Deal with it,” the reviewer advises. “I hate all the political stuff,” one reviewer who apparently didn’t want to deal with it wrote. “I don’t really care to find out his views on anything but psychology.”

Students in Dr. Nissim-Sabat’s classes usually don’t have to go on a treasure hunt to find out what the professor’s views are. “What did ya’ll think about the IMF/World Bank protests?,” Dr. Nissim-Sabat asked his class a few years ago.

“I think the protests are a great idea,” one student answered. “The IMF (International Monetary Fund) is a corrupt capitalist organization meant to keep third-world countries where they are.”

“For example, Nigeria’s power plant was built on a tectonic plate and rendered useless. We should forgive the debts to all third-world nations.”

“Very well,” Dr. Nissim-Sabat said. “Does anyone else have anything to contribute?”

A second student begged to differ from the first, we learned. “I disagree with the lady because IMF could quite potentially be the only way Nigeria ever receives foreign aid,” the dissenting student said.

“When a country defaults on its debt, their credibility in the world market is reduced to zero. Who would ever lend them money again?”

The professor’s response? Dr. Nissim-Sabat called the student defending the IMF “the son of a rich oil miner.” The psychologist also said the people such as the student who the professor categorized as the scion of a rare breed of energy entrepreneur “have been fed with a silver spoon and do not know the troubles and problems of the real world.”

Ironically, a defense of the IMF and the World Bank hardly ranks as a conservative position. Both multilateral government organizations, in turn, specialize in the government-to-government aid that most conservatives eye with suspicion.

The university that hosts Dr. Nissim-Sabat, on the other hand, has more traditional roots. Located in a city where the Confederate Army enjoyed one of its most notable Civil War victories, the school is named after the mother of George Washington.