BACKGROUND: Kennesaw State University recently invited Angela Davis to speak on Martin Luther King Day. As many readers know, Davis is the unrepentant ’60s Marxist revolutionary and black racist who was at one time on the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted” list. In her prime she was a leader in the Communist Party and an ally of the Black Panther Party—neither of which she has ever repudiated. She’s also a retired professor with the “History of Consciousness Department” at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a former director of the university’s Feminist Studies Department.
In response to her visit, in which the university paid her $20,000, Jefrey Breshears wrote a guest column for Marietta Daily Journal entitled “KSU, Angela Davis, and the Academic/Industrial Complex” that ran in the Sunday, Jan. 25th edition of the newspaper.
The reason that secularists and cultural Marxists dominate higher education, the media, popular culture, and much of the legal profession today is because too many Christians (and conservatives in general) have been so uninformed, apathetic, and disengaged for decades. As a result, the left dominates by default. Imperious, arrogant and intolerant, they have turned academia into a closed shop in which secular and leftwing ideas go virtually unchallenged while alternative views are either ignored or else ridiculed and suppressed.
It may be too late to reverse the course of this nation, but Christians have a spiritual and a moral responsibility nonetheless to do all we can to be a source of light and truth. Like the early church, we should think and act as a radical counterculture within a society that is increasingly hostile toward Christian beliefs and values. To do otherwise is not only irresponsible but faithless and cowardly.
Reprinted from the Marietta Daily Journal, Sunday, Jan. 25, 2015.
I found it interestingly congruous that Ann Coulter’s recent column, “The Cost of College,” appeared in the MDJ just a few days before Angela Davis spoke at Kennesaw State University. As Coulter commented, “The explosion in college tuition bears no relation to anything happening in the economy” as the cost of a college education has increased by more than 1,000 percent since 1978 — far in excess of the rise in health care, consumer goods, home prices or any other economic indicator.
During my academic career as a history professor, I watched with amazement this dramatic explosion in the cost of higher education. Most of this increase has virtually no correlation to improving the quality of education as much of it funds administrative expansion and the creation of new “student services” offices for select segments of the student population including women, African-Americans, and of course the LGBT lobby.
As the Yale computer science professor Daniel Gelernter has said, colleges and universities are “threatening to become an elaborate, extremely expensive practical joke” for those who naively assume that a baccalaureate degree is a ticket to success in life.
But the true cost of higher education cannot be measured in dollars alone. Far more troubling than the economic factor is the social, political and moral climate on most campuses. Ideologically, most of these colleges and universities function literally (not hyperbolically) as cultural Marxist indoctrination centers, undermining the very values that led to the founding of these institutions generations ago.
As the Princeton University philosopher Richard Rorty commented several years ago, professors have one primary purpose: to assure that students who enter college with traditional conservative and religious values “leave college with views more like our own.” He warned parents they must accept the fact “we are going to go right on trying to discredit you in the eyes of your children,” ridiculing their values to the point that “your views seem silly rather than discussable.”
As the radio talk show host Dennis Prager often observes, the modern university is the most godless place in American society. The Brown University biologist Kenneth Miller concurs, noting “a presumption of atheism or agnosticism is universal in academic life.”
In a sense, one has to admire the perverse ingenuity of an industry that has succeeded in persuading parents to finance, at exorbitant cost, the destruction of their own values and beliefs.
I am not surprised KSU invited the racist, anti-American radical Angela Davis to speak on MLK Day, and that university officials had the temerity to pay her $20,000 out of the Student Activities budget. When I taught at KSU in the early 1990s, the university was as Politically Correct as any college or university in the nation — except that back then our community might not have tolerated such a blatantly foolish and provocative insult to mainstream American values.
I recall at the time, the “chair” of my department, an ardent feminist, was far less concerned with academic integrity and standards than with the fact that the KSU Owls baseball team played at a facility that students had dubbed “Hooters’ Field.” Filled with indignation, she launched a campaign to change this horrifyingly sexist name. I doubt, however, that she would have been troubled by the prospects of bringing to campus an unrepentant Marxist propagandist.
It’s not that university faculties and administrators have no values. The problem is that too often they are the values of smug leftwing elites.
So what would be an appropriate response to this latest KSU fiasco? Simple. Don’t donate a single dollar to this or any other institution in the Academic Industrial Complex until they commit to honoring ideological diversity in the spirit of true “liberal” education. As it is, parents and students should understand most of these institutions function essentially as secular leftwing indoctrination centers.
Jefrey Breshears, Ph.D., of Marietta is a historian and former university professor. In 2003 Dr. Breshears founded The Areopagus, a Christian education organization that sponsors seminars and forums in Christian history, apologetics, and contemporary cultural issues. Dr. Breshears can be contacted at “JBreshears (at) TheAreopagus.org”.
