None Dare Call It…

Every now and then, professors let down their guard and reveal how left-wing they really are. In a lecture on 1030s propaganda that he delivered at the Modern Language Association (MLA) 2013 meeting in Boston, UC Davis English professor Matthew Stratton noted that FDR’s head of the National Recovery Administration, Hugh Johnson, “was fond of handing out Italian fascist pamphlets to his colleagues.”

“He didn’t last long,” Stratton averred. “One should certainly not compare the New Deal with Italian fascism unless one is trying to get on a conservative talk show and I’m not going to do that.”

Stratton needn’t worry: Few are likely to mistake him for one of Rush Limbaugh’s ditto-heads. Stratton warns of “places that are increasingly undemocratic, like the United States.”

For his part, Harilaos Stecopolis of the University of Iowa finds Hillary Clinton’s State Department in the Obama Administration too right-wing for his liking. He critiqued State’s multicultural website: “The State Department takes a normative view of multiculturalism,” Stecopoulos alleged in the same panel that Stratton spoke on.

For one thing, Stecopoulos noted, the site includes “no women writers.” Rather, the site features:

• Edgar Allan Poe;
• Mark Twain;
• Stephen Crane;
• Jack London; and
• O’Henry.

Well, that’s one way to work them into the MLA program.

Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.
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