Cornell University under siege in 1969

State Of Mankind - How Much Do You Know?

Excerpts from "How the Specter of Communism Is Ruling Our World"

Using New Academic Fields for Ideological Infiltration

In a healthy society, women’s studies or research of different races reflects the prosperity of the academic community, but following the 1960s counterculture movement, some radicals made use of these new academic disciplines to spread their left-leaning ideas to universities and research institutes. For example, some scholars believe that the establishment of departments dedicated to African-American studies is not so much because of inherent demand for such an academic division, but rather the result of political blackmail.

In 1968, a student strike forced San Francisco State College to shut down. Under pressure from the Black Student Union, the college established the Africana Studies Department, the first of its kind in the United States. The department was envisioned primarily as a means of encouraging black students, and with it arose a unique African-American science. The achievements of black scientists were brought to the forefront, and class materials were transformed to make them include greater mention of African-Americans. Mathematics, literature, history, philosophy, and other subjects underwent similar modifications.

In October 1968, twenty members of the Black Student Union caused another campus shut down at the University of California–Santa Barbara when they occupied the school’s computer center. A year later, the school established the Department of Black Studies and the Black Research Center.

In April 1969, more than one hundred black students at Cornell University occupied the school’s administrative building while waving shotguns and ammo packs to demand the establishment of a black research department staffed solely by blacks. When a teacher came forward to stop them, a student leader threatened that Cornell University “had three hours to live.” Cornell University eventually conceded to the black students and established the third black research department in the United States.

Shelby Steele, who later became a senior researcher at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, was once a proponent for the establishment of black research departments at universities. He said that university leaders had such a strong sense of “white guilt” that they would agree to any request from the representatives of black student unions. At the same time, women’s studies, Latin American studies, gay studies, and so forth were introduced to American universities and are now ubiquitous.

The basic premise of women’s studies is that sex differences result not from biological differences but instead are social constructs. Due to the alleged long-term suppression of women by men and patriarchy, the mission of women’s studies is to trigger female social consciousness, bringing overall social change and revolution, according to this perspective.

A feminist professor at the University of California–Santa Cruz grew up in a famous communist family. She proudly displayed her credentials as a communist and a lesbian activist. Since the 1980s, she had been teaching feminism and regarded her sexual orientation as a kind of lifestyle to arouse political consciousness. Her inspiration for becoming a professor was because a fellow communist had told her it was her mission to do so. In a public statement, she said that “teaching became a form of political activism for me.” She founded the Department of Feminist Studies at the University of California–Santa Cruz. In one of her syllabi, she wrote that female homosexuality is “the highest form of feminism.”

The University of Missouri has designed its courses to prime students to see the issues of feminism, literature, gender, and peace from the position of the Left. For example, a course called Outlaw Gender sees the sexes as “artificial categories produced by a particular culture,” rather than being naturally produced. Only one viewpoint was instilled in students—the narrative of gender-based oppression and discrimination against multiple-gender identities.

As discussed in Chapter Five, the anti-war movement in the Western world following World War II was heavily influenced by communist infiltrators. In recent decades, a new subject, Peace Studies, has emerged in American universities. Scholars David Horowitz and Jacob Laksin studied over 250 organizations that had some connection to the new academic field. They concluded that these organizations were political, not academic, in nature, and their aim was to recruit students to the anti-war Left.

Citing the popular textbook Peace and Conflict Studies, Horowitz and Laksin laid out the ideological motivations of the field. The textbook used Marxist arguments to explain the problems of poverty and starvation. The author condemned landowners and agricultural merchants, claiming that their greed led to the starvation of hundreds of millions of people. Though the point is ostensibly against violence, there is one form of violence that the author does not oppose, and in fact praises—violence committed in the course of proletarian revolution.

A passage from Peace and Conflict Studies says the following: “While Cuba is far from an earthly paradise, and certain individual rights and civil liberties are not yet widely practiced, the case of Cuba indicates that violent revolutions can sometimes result in generally improved living conditions for many people.” The book makes no mention of Fidel Castro’s dictatorship or the catastrophic results of the Cuban Revolution.

Since it was written after 9/11, Peace and Conflict Studies also touched on problems of terrorism. Surprisingly, its authors seemed to have so much sympathy for the terrorists that the term “terrorist” was put in quotation marks. They defended their stance by saying: “Placing ‘terrorist’ in quotation marks may be jarring for some readers, who consider the designation self-evident. We do so, however, not to minimize the horror of such acts but to emphasize the value of qualifying righteous indignation by the recognition that often one person’s ‘terrorist’ is another’s ‘freedom fighter.’”

Academia should be objective and avoid harboring political agendas. These new academic fields have adopted an ideological stand: Professors of women’s studies must embrace feminism, while professors involved in studies of blacks must believe that the political, economic, and cultural hardships of African-Americans result from discrimination by whites. Their existence is not to explore the truth, but to promote an ideological narrative.

These new subjects are byproducts of the American cultural revolution. Having been established in universities, they have expanded by demanding more budgets and recruiting more students, who further strengthen these subjects. These new fields are already deeply ingrained in academia.

These new academic fields were created by people of ill intent acting under the influence of communist ideology. Their aim is to foment and expand conflict among different groups and to incite hatred in preparation for violent revolution. They have little relation to the people (African-Americans, women, or others) they claim to stand for.

From Chapter Twelve: Sabotaging Education