The American Council of Trustees and Alumni For Academic Freedom and Excellence has just released a new report entitled, “How Many Ward Churchills?” The report examines how much colleges and universities promote professors and classes that share the same kind of mentality as Ward Churchill.
Churchill is infamously known for his horrendous comparison of the victims of the 9/11 attacks to “little Eichmanns.” The results of the survey done by ACTA are staggering. The report found that “the kinds of politically extreme opinions for which Ward Churchill became justly infamous are not only quite common in academe, but enthusiastically embraced and rewarded by it.” The report stated, “throughout American higher education, professors are using their classrooms to push political agendas in the name of teaching students to think critically.”
ACTA examined U.S. News & World Report’s Top 25 Private colleges and universities, the Big 10 and Big 12 conference schools, to see how many Ward Churchills there really are. The report scoured all the electronic documents on different areas in the liberal arts departments at these schools.
“Our review of college and university courses revealed a remarkable level of homogeneity. As individual disciplines increasingly orient themselves around a core set of political values, the differences between disciplines are beginning to disappear. Courses in such seemingly distinct fields as literature, sociology, and women’s studies, for example, have become mirror images of one another—a fact that colleges and universities openly acknowledge in their practice of cross-listing courses in multiple departments,” the report observed.
The report came across an array of courses that seem to be more opinion than fact:
• “Stanford University offers a course that not only challenges students’ assumptions, but explains to them why such a challenge is psychologically and socially necessary. “The Psychology of Dominant Group Identity and the Experience of Privilege” examines “how members of dominant groups experience their group identity,” with special emphasis on “how the experience of the self as a dominant group member (e.g. male or White) motivates choices and behaviors that may perpetuate social inequality, even in the absence of negative stereotypes or prejudice against less powerful groups.’”
• “A Vassar College course on “Domestic Violence” describes ‘the prevalence and dynamics of domestic violence in the United States and its effects on battered women,’ examining ‘the role of the Battered Women’s Movement in both the development of societal awareness about domestic violence and in the initiation of legal sanctions against it,’ and exploring how ‘our culture covertly and overtly condones the abuse of women by their intimate partners.’ At least as far as the course description is concerned, women never batter men.”
• “A freshman seminar in sociology at Northwestern University describes the manner in which American ethnic groups congregate and self-segregate in neighborhoods as ‘American apartheid.’”
These are just some of the numerous courses and seminars that fill up lecture halls across the nation and no one in charge really seems to care. Professors are not being required to take responsibility for their duty to educate rather than opine.
“Some professors take a positively programmatic approach to re-educating students’ sensibilities. Penn State University sociology professor Sam Richards declares that he is ‘open about bringing my ideology into [the] classroom because I see that all educational systems are ideological to the core.’”
Matthew Murphy is an intern at Accuracy in Academia.
