College campuses are home to elitists who are out of touch with and have contempt for American values. Let’s look at some of their statements after the recent terrorist attacks. A list of those statements have been compiled by Young America’s Foundation (www.yaf.org), Virginia Institute (www.virginiainstitute.org) and Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (www.thefire.org).
Hours after the terrorist attacks, University of New Mexico History Professor Richard Berthold told his students in his Western Civilization and Greek history classes, “Anyone who can blow up the Pentagon has my vote.” A University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, teach-in featured William Blum, author of “Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower.” Blum equated the United States with the terrorists, saying, “There are few if any nations in the world that have harbored more terrorists than the United States.”
Nick Woomer, a student columnist at the University of Michigan, thinking that the United States deserved to be attacked said that “the action taken by the terrorists on Tuesday are not completely unwarranted. We try to forget about the way this country behaves internationally – that we too often behave as terrorists.”
California is home to most of America’s leftists and the blame-America-first crowd, and they made their thoughts clear. Sixty-six Berkeley professors were joined by 100 other academics in placing a New York Times ad calling the U.S. war on terrorism “unacceptable.” A Sacramento elementary school teacher burned an American flag in front of his sixth-grade class. A California Chico State College professor said that President Bush wants to “kill innocent people,” “colonize” the Arab world and capture “oil for the Bush family.”
University of Texas professor Robert Jensen said that the terrorist attack “was no more despicable than the massive acts of terrorism … that the U.S. government has committed during my lifetime.” Adam Goldstein, University of Wisconsin-Madison’s former campus relations committee chairman, said in a letter to the editor of the Badger Herald that “before you preach at us about the evil terrorists, why don’t you try getting your facts straight and face up to the reality that our leaders are war criminals just as much as people like Hitler, Stalin and other monsters of the 20th century.”
What were some campus responses to staff or student pro-American sentiment? At Florida Gulf Coast University, Library Services Dean Kathleen Hoeth ordered employees to remove stickers saying, “Proud to be an American,” from their workplaces. At the University of Massachusetts, students against the military response to terrorism were granted rally permits. Students in support of our military response had their rally permit revoked. At Lehigh University, Vice Provost John Smeaton ordered removal of the American flag from the campus bus. After adverse publicity, the flag was replaced and Smeaton apologized.
These actions and remarks shouldn’t surprise us, for they represent the prevailing attitude on far too many, perhaps most, American campuses. These professors and administrators, formerly the hippies and flower children of the 1960s and ’70s, are people to whom we entrust our impressionable 17- and 18-year-olds. As parents, we cough up to $30,000 and sometimes more in tuition money to have our youngsters taught that America is not only a racist, sexist and homophobic nation, but a terrorist nation as well, and an international monster creating world poverty and destroying the planet. Among their preachments is that Western civilization is no better than other civilizations. I’d like one of these professors to stand up and make the case for the moral equivalency between the Taliban and American treatment of women.
Americans as donors and taxpayers have been far too generous with the higher education establishment. It’s about time we stop paying for campus anti-Americanism and academic dishonesty. Nothing opens the closed minds of college administrators more than the sounds of pocketbooks snapping shut.