From the Catalogue

As an ongoing service to our readers who have not encountered them yet, we provide profiles of college professors whom students may want to avoid. Today’s winners’ circle is drawn from the Buckeye and Golden States.

First, the Ohio contingent: We first encountered Ohio State University professor Mark Grimsley [pictured] when he blogged about one of our articles on his web site. He linked to the article that we ran on professors who make Ward Churchill look like an American flag waver. Full disclosure: Grimsley did not like the article, or us.

Although it is entitled warhistorian.org, the name of Grimsley’s blog may be somewhat misleading. “Sure, I could tell you that one of my specialties is the ethics of war, and that my current research deals with such trendy, left-leaning subjects as counterhegemonic resistance or the influence of war upon race formation in the United States,” Dr. Grimsley writes. “It sounds very cool, very fellow traveler.”

Dr. Grimsley has balanced out his résumé by interning at the RAND Corporation, lecturing at the Army War College and participating in a conference sponsored by the Marine Corps University. He also wrote “respectful,” “even, in the case of [Robert E.] Lee and [Stonewall] Jackson, admiring” biographies of Confederate generals who served in the War between the States.

“Of course, I wrote them years ago, before I presumably drank the kool-aid and became a tenured radical.”

Over at Bowling Green State University (BGSU), British-bred Phil Dickinson teaches a course in The Literature of Terrorism. This course is part of BGSU’s Perspectives program which all students at the university must rack up credits in.

“Phil’s voice is like peanut butter,” wrote one admiring reviewer on ratemyprofessor.com. In the course description, the instructor insists on using the word “terrorism” in double quotation marks.

The required reading list for the course ranges from the far left to the farther left. In fairness to Dickinson, a couple of the writers his students read have proven themselves to be more literate than historically accurate. Two of the three authors studied—Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky—have at least one thing in common, weird theories masquerading as fact.

Here’s Howard Zinn on the war on terror: “It seemed that the United States was reacting to the horrors perpetrated by the terrorists against innocent people in New York by killing other innocent people in Afghanistan.” That’s an interesting way to describe the Taliban.

Then there was Noam Chomsky’s take on Afghanistan: “Everyone was in favor of the overthrow of the Taliban, except the U. S. government.”

* * *

Moving west, we meet the University of Southern California (USC)’s Marty Kaplan. “The right has become the media establishment and so is a target for parody and ridicule,” Kaplan, director of USC’s Norman Lear Center, says. “It’s very juicy and a lot of fun to make fun of those people.”

“Instead of those earnest shades of gray, people on the left enjoying putting people on the right on whoopee cushions.” I’ll bet Kaplan, associate dean of USC’s Annenberg School for Communication, never thought of putting his old boss on a whoopee cushion. Kaplan formerly worked as a speech writer for former Vice President Walter Mondale.

Closing out the quartet is Branislav L. Slantchev, professor of Political Science at the University of California at San Diego. Dr. Slantchev rewrites the history of the [Senator Joseph R.] for his students. “He did not succeed in having a single individual convicted of communism,” Dr. Slantchev says of the late Senator Joseph R. McCarthy (R-Wisc.). “He did ruin many.”

Somebody should tell the political scientist that Senate committee chairmen can hold hearings and get information but convictions are up to the U. S. Justice Department and the courts. And, the communist ties of McCarthy’s “victims” are a running theme in their FBI files.