First Person Campus Report

On the last broadcast of Accuracy in Academia’s Campus Report I was joined by authors Mason Weaver and Jim Nelson Black. Both gentlemen were also speakers at AIA’s Conservative University summer conference on Capitol Hill.

The author of It’s Okay to Leave the Plantation, Weaver makes about 50 appearances on college campuses annually. Few of these talks take place without incident. “I always begin my speeches by saying I’m an Uncle Tom sellout,” the black conservative said on our interview on www.rightalk.com.

This stratagem usually leaves his detractors virtually speechless. “They have no facts, no evidence,” Weaver observes. “When you take away their ability to name call, they have nothing left.”

A graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, Weaver frequently returns to his alma mater as a speaker. He left as a liberal graduate but returns as a conservative lecturer. “I’m a recovering liberal in a 12-step program,” Weaver told students at Conservative University. “It’s called ‘Making money every week.’”

In the 1970s, Weaver worked for the federal government overseeing the then-embryonic Section 8a program designed to steer government contracts to minority businesses. The goal of the program was to give these businesses a boost that would allow them to graduate the program once their enterprises took off. Few did.

The experience confirmed his worst suspicions about government subsidies. He likens such largesse to the benefits that plantation owners claimed they lavished on slaves. “Slavery,” he reminded me, “was about control.”

On October 20th, Weaver will face off against representatives of the group By Any Means Necessary at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Although Weaver gives a standing offer to liberal professors to debate him, rarely do they take him up on it.

Jim Nelson Black’s book, Freefall of the American University, gives exhaustive details on campus bias. A veteran researcher and educator, Black traveled across the United States to colleges and universities large and small while accumulating material for this book. He talked to professors and students at both Ivy League institutions of higher learning and their state counterparts.

Most colleges and universities are geared towards indoctrination rather than education, Black found. We both found that students now find themselves regurgitating information that they know to be inaccurate in order to pass tests.

“My daughter had a class in college in which she wrote down the inaccurate answer she had to memorize and followed it with the correct answer,” Black remembered. “At least her professor was an honest liberal.”

“He gave her a good grade.”

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.