Tony Snow is continuing his post-White House era by waving one of the Right's most beloved Persecution Banners: The War on God. This war of misperception is, however, about far more than religious tolerance. It is about undermining education - higher education in particular - by fomenting a mistrust of colleges and universities. An integral component, it would appear, to their goal of creating the Permanent Republican Majority.
Speaking at Oklahoma Christian University last week, Tony Snow managed to join together two topics of incessant obsession by the right wing, liberal bias on college campuses and the cleverly monickered War On God. Apparently, in the logic of Mr. Snow, college faculties, in particular, are at the heart of the secular progressive movement which leads the War On God. Since America is undisputably a Godly Nation, college faculties are therefore Un-American. While presenting this thesis, he charmed the audience with one-liners including the following:
"The average Iranian is more Pro-American than virtually any college faculty in this country."
Tony Snow is, however, far from the first person associated with the Bush Administration to conflate the so-called liberal bias of higher education professionals and being Un-American. Although it has been a few years, this seems like a good time to revisit one of the pillars of Republican anti-academia, the ACTA.
One of the most obvious and vitriolic examples and the Right's War on Education is the partnership of Lynne Cheney and Joe Liberman in the founding, in 1995, of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA). While the wheels of the Bush Administration's response to the suffering of Americans turned agonizingly slow after a natural disaster and incompetence is the rule when implementing policy, Lynne Cheney and ACTA were fast out of the gate in the months after 9/11 with suprising direction and execution. In November 2001, Cheney was quick to reinforce the President's assertions that terrorists were attacking us for our Freedom and way of life.
At a time of national crisis, I think it is particularly apparent that we need to encourage the study of our past. Our children and grandchildren--indeed, all of us--need to know the ideas and ideals on which our nation has been built. We need to understand how fortunate we are to live in freedom. We need to understand that living in liberty is such a precious thing that generations of men and women have been willing to sacrifice everything for it. We need to know, in a war, exactly what is at stake.
and to disparage those who offered a more, well nuanced, view:
Some educators are saying that we need more emphasis on other cultures in our classrooms. In last Monday's Washington Post, Judith Rizzo, Deputy Chancellor for Instruction in the New York City school system declared, "Those people who said we don't need multiculturalism, that it's too touchy feely, a pox on them." She went on, "I think they've learned their lesson. We have to do more to teach habits of tolerance, knowledge and awareness of other cultures."
Now, this is not exactly a sensitive expression of the multicultural argument, but I think we could all agree that in the twenty-first century, it is important that our children know about the great events and inspiring ideas of the cultures of the world...
This is an important requirement--but it was important on September 10th. To say that it is more important now implies that the events of September 11th were our fault, that it was our failure to understand Islam that led to so many deaths and so much destruction. And this is not the case...
The deputy chancellor's suggestion that "we have to do more to teach habits of tolerance" also implies that the United States is to blame for the attack of September 11th, that somehow intolerance on our part was the cause.
About the same time as Cheney was delivering the above speech, ACTA seized the opportunity to published a screed (pdf alert) against universities that included a docier of "anti-Americanisms" committed by university denizens (or, so it happens, passersby) that included such inflammatory statements as, "...we need to understand the reasons behind the terrifying hatred directed against the U.S. and find ways to act that will not foment more hatred for generations to come." The original formulation contains names for the quotations. After much protest and comparisons to the tactics of a former senator named MyCarthy, the report was re-published with titles and locations, but no names.
ACTA represents a good example of the neoconservative game-plan for the creation of their permanent Republican Majority (which, apparently, needs to be poorly educated). Adopt the language of the enemy. Adopt the goals of the enemy. Supplant the agenda of the enemy with your own. To wit, they are the original concern troll. The ACTA website is a perfect example. Framed as a non-profit organization founded to promote "academic freedom and acountability", ACTA continues to publish "studies" on various aspects of higher education that offends their sensibilities. For example, a 2005 report utilizes the tried-and-true message of stoking fear is titled, "How Many Ward Churchills??" (pdf alert). The question is quickly answered as the first chapter is titled, "Ward Churchill is everywhere". Further reading reveals the main charge: courses in humanities, social studies and english are encouraging students to challenge White Male Patriarchy! Which, in the singular logic of ACTA, represents a failing of universities to teach "diversity" of opinions. Apparently, the group wants to see courses that encourage students to challenge the need for Affirmative Action, sufferage, and the abandonment of forced sterilization of the mentally handicapped, and encourage the view that Native Americans either relocated to a terriffic new continent or willing adopted new, scaled-down lifestyles on luxurious reservations. While it is tempting to dismiss the report as the mastubatory exercise in pseud-academic "research" whose poor writting and non-existant intellectual rigoe only serves to highlight how woefully ignorant ACTA is regarding what constitutes actual Academic Pursuits that it is, it would be foolish to relegate the group and their work to the used tissue-bin where they belong. Having produced the self-gratifying "How Many Ward Churchills", ACTA is now pimping the report as "evidence" of ramapant misconduct in their persecution of additional professors:
..."UW was right to investigate whether Barrett’s extreme views polluted his classroom," ACTA president Anne D. Neal said. "Indeed, one can sincerely wonder how he was hired in the first place. ACTA is happy to recommend proactive changes so that UW never finds itself in such a situation again."
In a July 17 letter to UW’s Board of Regents and several administrators, ACTA pointed out that by instituting some simple reforms, UW can prevent problems like the Barrett controversy. As ACTA notes in the letter, "While it is chilling to use political criteria to single out individual instructors for review, reviewing course offerings and content as part of a broader, established mechanism of quality assurance is an excellent practice." UW authorities "owe it to taxpayers, families, and students to guarantee that UW not only receives the public’s tax dollars, but also deserves its trust," the letter continues.
As the letter points out, the recent occurrences at UW are not an aberration. In another report, How Many Ward Churchills?, ACTA has documented an abundance of politicized teaching on our nation’s campuses. Examples include a Vassar College course on how "our culture covertly and overtly condones the abuse of women by their intimate partners," a Penn State professor who promises to promote "un-learning" on the part of his students, and a Davidson College course that requires students to put on a 15- to 20-minute skit on a topic such as "five ways to demonize an ethnic minority" or "more ways than one to be white."
"Surely UW wishes to avoid the type of headlines it has gotten recently," Neal noted. "By adopting ACTA’s recommendations, the regents can do just that—while also protecting academic freedom and, most importantly, enhancing the education their students receive. I trust they will not delay."
Indeed. ACTA produces it's own "evidence" to bolster its claims of an insidious and determined enemy and then uses the manufactured "evidence" to back up it's own highly partisian and decidely un-American witchhunt. Now why does that sound so familiar.......