Thursday, March 10, 2005
Posted in the comments to this post at CampusJ by a student who believes he is defending the University:
This from a student accusing others of having a political agenda. If that doesn't tell you all you need to know about what those who are fighting the campus orthodoxy (everywhere) are up against I don't know what will.
I have seen the students who appear in Columbia Unbecoming speak twice now. In each case and from every student they have tried to make it clear that they believe Columbia to be an excellent school in spite of the controversy. Further, and perhaps most importantly, they have emphasized that the answer to Columbia's ills is NOT more professors with an opposite slant in the hopes that the truth may be somewhere in the middle, but simply good, respectful scholarship and instruction and let the truth fall where it may. I think that's an admirable attitude.
The air at Columbia and at campuses across the nation is stale. Time to raise the shades, throw upen the windows and let the light shine in!
Better “Read†Than _Red_: Sinking the Party Line
A Conservative Exposé on a Library School’s Front for “Liberal†Radicalism
By Hetero Norm
As a boy I was taught to visit and patronize the local library. I found it a place of endless variety of books, old and new, clean tables and helpful, but often, perhaps “clinicalâ€, library help.
As a frequent patron of libraries as an adult, having decided to work in the sphere of Information Technology, I found that my college degree might somehow be advanced by graduate work. I believed the canard that getting graduate level degrees will automatically increase your earning power right after graduation day.
In November of 2004, after several months of investigating graduate schools I decided to attend the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. This must be the ticket, I thought. I have the brainpower and ability after three years of very successful bachelor’s work, and several years of genuine corporate work experience.
Being a lifelong conservative, and wanting to vote for Ronald Reagan as a youngster but being well shy of voting age, I had heard the various - shall we call them, rumors - about Library Schools in general - and librarians in particular.
They are places for the Commies. People there aren’t exactly...er...“straightâ€. A what? A Male Librarian? greeted by assorted laughings up sleeves. Being a red-blooded American man, the kind that the entrenched university liberals love to bugaboo from their ivory towers, I decided I would not take no for an answer. I knew the numbers of actual liberals, while small, held a great deal of weight since their thinly-veiled communist takeover - or some would say holdover - from the McCarthy hearings of the 1950s. Chomskeyites all.
Arriving in Illinois farm country, the candy-colored Saabs and Beemers with Kerry stickers soon gave way to American autos, trucks and rvs plastered with Bush stickers. The campus, being in the middle of Champaign County appeared to be predictably “dividedâ€. Hippy babies and rejects from farm country were the “Kerry crowdâ€. Most of the rest of the students - those that weren’t foreign students, from South and East Asia, that is - were Centrist, Don’t-Care, or Bush Republicans, and didn’t have time for games or sit-ins.
Being a Straight White Male, I soon found myself a minority at the school - and a loathed one at that. Rainbow-colored ribbons and “stereotypical leftists†- bespectacled, thin and unhealthy looking, edgy, verbal, and irritated - peppered the rows of incoming students, and the professors had the unmistakable air of Leftism - that and creme-brulés, subcompacts with Kerry stickers, diversity posters, and their noses firmly in the air - about Me.
“I†soon found myself in the midst of a quietly hostile crowd. My mere presence was scoffed at or ignored. I felt my summa cum laude and corporate stripes were somehow treading on “their†ground. (Ironically, the rumor held the rather roomy school had in a previous incarnation been a famous fraternity in the 80s and 90s for growing pot on the roof.)
The good news was that the number of my people, my tribe - the White Man - were silently and decidedly increasing. The Leftists began to get nervous. Spillover from the IT Revolution? Spies! Healthy? White? Straight? Returning sultry glances at “our†women?
Cry Subversion! Agents of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, no doubt!
The weeks wore on. Perhaps I was fooling myself. After all, this is 2005. Communism died its rightful death fifteen years ago. Were there still Communists alive today?
How wrong I was. The taunts and insults began again. A few had the temerity to wear red buttons and trumpet the dead doctrine of Marxism-Leninism in class and in the hallways (if not outside the school on campus grounds). My professors saw they were slipping. The party line was not cutting it by the Children of Reagan, in the Administration of Bush. They had to find scapegoats, and quickly. Unsurprisingly - accompanied by disillusioned liberals, White Men decided to drop the classes, as did their conservative, working-class women.
A trend was developing. The most liberal of the class, the ones that began like chickens to follow the party line, nod their heads and wear rainbows on their backpacks, were the ones that got ahead. The nod from teachers. Graduate assistantships (paying for all tuition plus a stipend or hourly pay for hours worked that semester), meetings with the Directors. Committee meetings for the Student Chapter of the famously “liberal†American Library Association (ALA). And so on. Muslim diversity meetings and workshops in “changing areas of the former Soviet Unionâ€. And the ever-present rainbow flags.
I wondered again why there is not a “Heterosexual flag†- and when someone in our billions will design one for our billions to wear it proudly.
I stood up for my rights. When insulted, I tore at them with cruel, calculated words. The kind that stuck in your craw and stayed there. President Bush does not back down. America does not back down -- and neither do I.
By two weeks before Spring Break, the reality of the Library School became clear as day -- and red as dawn. The most “liberal†suddenly became “educated.†Discussion sessions became decidedly polemical, communalist, and the reading sources decidedly anti big-business and unpatriotic. Since this is a three semester program, the programming of new students by the “liberal†Baby Boomer professors was this - as it is I suspect across the Western World included the following tasty tidbits:
• Empower women. No children encouraged and expected. “Nontraditional students†like married women (imagine that!) scapegoated. Hold power over men - especially White Men (even if they are White Women that have White Men as Fathers and Husbands). An impossible and hateful view of the world, where crypto-homosexual or “feminist†elements in the campuses played the fool - yet somehow Gay Rights and Feminist Radicals continually and quietly expanded their intimidation over Heterosexual Female Students in the program, and by extension, the other schools in campus were under covert attack.
• Promote Gay Rights. The infamous sexual hazing or intimidation of women in colleges and especially graduate schools continues - in not-so-quiet and increasingly aggressive “social circlesâ€.
• Support the farthest left wings of the Democratic Party. But weren’t Communists against freedom of speech and individual rights? Why support totalitarianism? Especially librarians? Odd.
• Support “minority causes†for the massive numbers of racial and religious minority groups in the West, and their immigration therein to the Western countries for no apparent - or genuine -economic reason, even as the countries these “minorities†(80% of the world’s population) come from terrorize, intimidate and murder Whites who wish to move there in great numbers.
• Demonize Republicans, Small Towns, George Bush, National Security, White Americans, and Patriotism general. Another page from the Marxist-Leftist-Radical Muslim playbook. It seemed while buckled down from the numbers and intensity of the 1960s and 1970s, the Liberals had found an infusion of support (cash?) from outside sources.
• Rioting and hateful behavior in an already “diverse†community. A mock St. Patrick’s Day “celebration†in March 2005 where a number of students with partial or whole Irish ancestry wore green and white and cut class. Their violence prompted police response, blue-collar “townie†Illinoisan irritation, and in a peculiar replay of “Gangs of New York†a response of cohorts of crimson-garbed Anglos and Protestants, and became a tool for Radicals to speak out in class, to the detriment of learning in a lawless and violent atmosphere. Quo vadis?
• Support of crypto-Communist, pagan, drug-using and other doctrine. The atmosphere of hatefulness was entirely contrary to the ideal of the politically-neutral small-town (or city) librarian.
• Complete opposition to the movement of intellectual property to the corporations and entrepreneurs. That one’s a no-brainer, even for a money-hating liberal -- try this axiom: No patrons, no library.
When I put all this together, I realized that the 15,000+ dollar sting in tuition was not worth a red cent for the inferred support of a not-so-covert section of the covert political warchest for the Radical Left.
Something had to be done. Shouting from the rooftops is a good start.
Spies? Vast Right Wing Conspiracy? Let’s put it this way. Would you send your kids to libraries run by these people? The school is _still_ in the red from years of budget mismanagement.
How could the University of Illinois justify continual financial support for this school?
Support your local “Marion the Librarian�
For the time being, better to slum at your local bookstore, and do the world a favor. Shred your library card.
No patrons, no library.