Fighting for Marxist Indoctrination on Campus
October 16, 2012 By Steven Plaut
There is a species of radical Leftist that believes that it is the main purpose of taxpayer-funded universities to engage in indoctrination of students into radical left-wing ideology. Such people believe that the only legitimate form of scholarly research and teaching is to force upon students the ideas and agendas of the radical Left, because only these represent correct thinking.
For such people, the highest form of academic inquiry is to engage in one-sided advocacy. They believe that faculty members at universities should be hired mainly, if not exclusively, on the basis of their devotion to radical leftist ideology. They believe that classrooms should be arenas in which students are immersed into leftist NewThink. They believe that student grades should reflect the extent to which the student toes the ideological line of the radical Left. They believe academic conferences and research forums should be restricted to those who advocate the Left’s political agenda, while non-leftist dissident thought should be suppressed and barred. Most importantly of all, they believe that those who dare to criticize the radical tenured Left should be silenced and demonized.
The totalitarian Left believes that taxpayers are morally obligated to fund the teaching of extremist ideology in the classroom, including by people advocating the demise of those same taxpayers and of their country. It is the job of citizens to sit back passively and pay for the far Left to operate propaganda centers, while the radicals collect their cushy salaries as payment for advocating their anti-Israel agenda. It is the job of universities to criticize (actually to demonize) the state of Israel, the tenured Left insists, just as long as no one is permitted to criticize those critics of Israel.
Nowhere is this ideological extremism so clearly on display as in the Department of Politics at Ben Gurion University (BGU), a pseudo-academic propaganda and indoctrination center disguised as an academic department. It is not the only such department in Israel nor at BGU, but it may well be the worst.
---
Fighting for Marxist Indoctrination on Campus