"David Horowitz has single-handedly exposed the intellectual corruption that exists within the classrooms of American colleges. Like all forms of corruption, indoctrination flourishes when kept in the dark. Here, Horowitz turns on the bright lights to expose what has become profoundly wrong with our colleges and universities. We are all in his debt." Ward Connerly, former regent, University of California David Horowitz and coauthor Jacob Laksin take us inside twelve major universities where radical agendas have been institutionalized and scholarly standards abandoned. The schools they examine are not the easily avoided bottom of the barrel. Rather, they are an all-too-representative sampling of American higher education today. Horowitz and Laksin have conducted the first comprehensive, in-depth, multiyear investigation of what is being taught in colleges and universities across the countrypublic to private, from large state schools to elite Ivy League institutions. They have systematically scrutinized course catalogs, reading lists, professors' biographies, scholarly records, and the first-person testimonies of students, administrators, and faculty. Citing more than 150 specific courses, they reveal how academic standards have been violated and demonstrate beyond dispute that systematic indoctrination in radical politics is now an integral part of the liberal arts curriculum of America's colleges. The extreme ideological cant that today's students are being fed includes: Promoting Marxist approaches as keys to understanding human societieswith no mention of the bloody legacy of these doctrines and total collapse in the real world of the societies they created Instilling the idea that racism, brutally enforced by a "white male patriarchy" to oppress people of color and other marginalized groups, has been the organizing principle of American society throughout its history and into the present Requiring students to believe that gender is not a biological characteristic but a socially created aspect of human behavior designed by men to oppress women Persuading students that America and Israel are "imperialistic" and "racist" states and that the latter has no more right to exist than the South African regime in the days of apartheid In page after shocking page, Horowitz and Laksin demonstrate that America's colleges and universities are platforms for a virulent orthodoxy that threatens academic ideals and academic freedom. In place of scholarship and the dispassionate pursuit of truth that have long been the hallmarks of higher learning, the new militancy embraces activist zealotry and ideological fervor. In disturbingly large segments of today's universities, students are no longer taught how to think but are told what to think.
Best "insider" to the leftist fallacies of the world!
Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 15 years ago
I have read numerous books by Horowitz, and he is THE best at opening up the idiotic, moronic, and dangerous philosophies of the leftists in our American society. As a former liberal leftist, he exposes not only the ridiculous ideas, but he gives you lots of "inside info" on how and why these "progressives" are leading us down the path of destruction. I attended colleges and universities back in the 60's and 70's, and they were full of leftist, liberal, and even "Commie" profs, but the "takeover" of our "higher education" institutions in modern society is even a more serous problem. Back in the "good old days" one could state your more conservative opinion and not be marginalized,ridiculed or shouted down. But, in today's world these types of reactions are almost universal!
Be sure you are clear about what Horowitz is saying. Read the book!
Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 15 years ago
I wish people could actually hear the message that Horowitz is trying to convey in this book rather than jumping to a wrong conclusion. People seem to think that Horowitz is saying that only conservative and/or pro-American ideas should be taught at our colleges and universities. This is exactly the opposite of what he is advocating. His point is that classrooms should not used as tools for political advocacy, activism, and indoctrination. They were built for the purpose of education and that is about presenting evidence, approaches to thinking about that evidence, tools for clear thinking, and allowing individuals their freedom of conscience. Subverting that purpose by dragging students into political advocacy and indoctrination is wrong no matter which side is doing it. However, the modern university is so clearly dominated by the left-wing that the examples Horowitz provides are from the lefty side of things. When you look at any programs that have the word "studies" in their title, you can be very confident that you have arrived in a very left-wing environment. That they would say they are mainstream or middle-of-the-road just confirms how far left their basic views are. So, as you read this book, and you should, remember that Horowitz is NOT advocating the termination of the academic study of women, minority, or any other studies program. What he wants stopped is the use of these programs for miseducation and as a platform and cudgel for the political activism of the teacher. Horowitz takes you on a tour of the sad state of affairs at 12 major universities: Duke (remember the Lacrosse team?), University of Colorado (Ward Churchill, anyone?), Columbia, Penn State, University of Texas (at Austin), University of Arizona, Arizona State University, Temple University, Miami University (in Ohio), University of Missouri, University of Southern California, and University of California, Santa Cruz. No, Horowitz is not saying that these are the only universities allowing and protecting these intellectual abuses, but he does provide interesting examples from each of them. He also presents samples of courses taught that illustrate the kinds of abuses he is writing against. The kinds of abuses vary from place to place, but when you see people teaching courses for which they have no academic credentials, when they only allow students already sympathetic to their political views in the class or to pass it, when you require the students to participate in outside advocacy in sympathy with the teacher's politics, when you present material from only one side of the issue, when you openly and clearly violate the written academic standards of the university, when you base the course on a controversial idea as if it were an accepted verity, and when you tell the students what to think rather than provide them the tools to help them to think and weigh the evidence dispassionately and according to their own conscience, well, you have tax payer su
Why Our Higher Education System Is Failing America
Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 15 years ago
This is a depressing book. Receiving bad news is never a pleasant experience, but sometimes reality bites a person in the rear end just to get their attention. That's the case with the current state of the United States College System. Like so many other Baby Boomer-aged employers I'm constantly amazed with the poor quality of today's typical Liberal Arts College Graduates. Too many of them can't read, but even more serious, few of them seem to show any ability to think. They aren't educated so much as indoctrinated. They believe too many "facts" that defy common sense. Many of today's graduates seem to smugly believe that their indoctrination is correct and it's their lying eyes or ears that are in error. This book discusses how the American College system has been taken over by 1960's radicals. It doesn't say so in so many words, but the Vietnam War sent many war protestors into higher education in order to stay out of the military. Many of them are still there but they are now tenured faculty members. The authors examine several colleges and university curriculums to illustrate how the classes have become politically correct and radical to the point that millions of students are being trained to revolt against all the existing American Institutions. The typical liberal arts degree has been diluted and corrupted to the point that the degree is almost worthless. Millions of Americans are mortgaging their homes and futures in order to send their children into the arms of radical revolutionary college professors with agendas that don't have teaching critical thinking anywhere on them. The authors point out how "Critical Thinking" is currently a code word for Marxism at most colleges and universities. That is the kind of critical thinking too many institutions of higher learning are teaching. A harmless sounding college course called "'Asian Americans in Film and Video' is in fact an attack on American society, which is presented as racist in its treatment of Asian-American. American racism is the common theme of virtually all the texts and films featured in the course." In that same class, "Students are also required to read `The Joy F**k Club: Prolegomenon to an Asian American Porno Practice." One University of CA course for "Feminist Methods of Teaching" is taught by Professor Bettina Aptheker. "Aptheker has described her teaching philosophy as a`revolutionary praxis,' a Marxist term of art for political organizing." Parents looking to send their high school graduates to a good college might want to carefully read this book and avoid some of the institutions of higher learning that have been turned into factories for radicals and community and street mob organizers or as Lenin and Stalin called such people, "Useful Idiots." A good trade school might be a much better use of tuition money? At least the students are taught a useful trade instead of how to attack and destroy the American economic, political and judicial systems. While rea
Brilliant, insightful and backed up by research
Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 15 years ago
Horowitz presents a well-documented, irrefutable case that the academy has been taken over by the radical far-left. This should be a must read for politicians, policy-makers, administrators, faculty (the sane ones), students and their parents. Unfortunately, the Left is a religion, and those who subscribe to it's tenets (you know, the "open-minded") are impervious to persuasion, argument and debate. They know only that they and their beliefs are superior to all others, that if they and theirs had political power, they would be able to transform the world into a far better place than it is now, and that therefore anyone who opposes, or even questions them -- like Horowitz -- is an inhuman monster who must be smeared, defamed and destroyed. So when you read the one-star reviews of this book by the small-minded and intolerant, take them with a grain (better yet, a gallon) or salt.
A Nice Perspective.
Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 15 years ago
A quick read that will give anyone a good idea into what some professors and administrators are doing in America's universities. A senior education major myself, I found this book to explain a lot of the agenda's I have witnessed in the political and european classes that I have taken. A great read if you do not mind being shocked at how "undemocratic" some universities can be.
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