Cascading Colleges, Upended Universities

We often hear that the recorded instances of academic bias and inaccurate lectures and texts are nothing but a bunch of anecdotes. The problem is that anyone who looks into the controversy rapidly accumulates several hundred anecdotes on about as many schools.

Author Jim Nelson Black undertook an investigation of the politically correct, but factually less so, biases on campus today and published his research in the book Freefall of the American University (WND Books). The title gives a pretty good idea of the author’s findings, which he thoroughly supports with ample documentation.

“And while 70 percent of students indicated that professors often express political opinions during class, they said that ideological diversity doesn’t exist,” Black notes, citing a poll of students compiled by the Independent Women’s Forum.

African-American conservative Lenny Edwards describes how this “expression” works in the classroom. Bear in mind, this happened before the September 11 attacks on the United States:

“Professor Rula Abisaab is originally from Syria and she teaches in the history department at the University of Akron. The first time I took a class from her was in 1998, supposedly a class on medieval Islam—at least that’s what the catalog said.

“But almost immediately the class steered away from what was presented in the syllabus and became a long-winded attack on America and the West. It went on like that for weeks—an all-out attack on Western culture and civilization. I eventually got so sick of it I asked her, ‘Excuse me, but what does this have to do with the course we signed up for? This is all your personal opinion, when it’s supposed to be a history course where we focus on facts.”

Professor Abisaab responded to Lenny’s exercise of his academic freedom by giving the student, who maintained a 3.9 GPA, a D+. At a forum just two weeks after the 9-11 attacks, Professor Abisaab took her turn at the podium to blame the suicide bombings on the United States. Interestingly, just last August, Professor Abisaab left the University of Akron to take a post at McGill University in Canada. Unfortunately, most of the profs that Black writes about are still teaching in this country.

“Where the real bias comes in is that the same professors who are teaching the classes are leading the rallies outside of class,” Mark Buschenfeldt, a recent graduate of Colby College, told Black. Elsewhere in the book, Black informs us that in the wake of the 9-11 attacks, more than 140 campuses in 36 states served as the backdrop for antiwar demonstrations and protests.

As we can see from the evening news, the demonstrations did not end in 2001 and show no signs of abating. Equally unabating are the anti-war efforts of academics. Thus we still have Historians Against the War, Poets Against The War, _____________Against the War.

Black interviews many dissident professors, such as Donald Kagan, Robert George and Harvey Mansfield as well as current students and recent graduates whom he met with on trips to campuses throughout the United States—from Harvard to UCLA. The author of Freefall, in turn, is a veteran educator and researcher and the founder of Sentinel Research Associates in Washington, D. C.