FACES AND PLACES: Academics losing touch (01/06/02)

FACES AND PLACES

by Myron B. Kuropas

Academics losing touch

Look around. It seems that everyone in America is supporting our war on terrorism. The nation has come together. The stars and stripes are waving in the wind, and people can be heard singing "God Bless America." Our new heroes are firefighters, police officers and military personnel. Even some public schools have gotten the message.

Just before Christmas every year, Lesia's pre-retirement elementary school produced an annual "winter show" featuring Santa Claus, Rudolph and Frosty. There were Hannukah songs and Kwanzaa candles but traditional Christmas carols were, well, verboten.

This year was different. There were no Christmas carols as yet, but we were treated to the next best thing: a patriotic pageant the likes of which I haven't experienced since I was in elementary school during the second world war. The program began with the posting of the colors by a color guard comprised of uniformed firefighters and police officers, all parents of the children performing. This was followed by the "Pledge of Allegiance." Can you imagine? The entire program was a patriotic panorama with every kid triumphantly belting out "Yankee Doodle Dandy," "You're a Grand Old Flag," "Nifty Fifty States," "Coming to America," "This Land is Your Land" and, of course, "America the Beautiful." The audience applauded wildly, savoring every minute.

While it seems that everyone is supporting President W. Bush, not everyone is. Who's on the sidelines? Sad to say, it's our intellectual nobility, the tenured, radical campus gentry that has captured many of our colleges and universities. They belong to the "Blame America First" oligarchy, which prides itself on being Marxist, neo-Marxist, socialist, post-modernist, and deconstructionist. They are vessels of confused, ideological irrelevance, out of touch with the real world.

Here's a small sample of their reasoning: "The best way to begin a war on terrorism is to look in the mirror" (anthropology professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology); "Anyone who can blow up the Pentagon gets my vote" (history professor, University of New Mexico); if I were president, I would "apologize to the widows and orphans, the tortured and the impoverished and all the millions of other victims of American imperialism" (University of North Carolina lecturer); the attack on the U.S. "was no more despicable than the massive acts of terrorism ... that the U.S. government has committed during my lifetime" (professor, University of Texas); "[We] should be aware that, whatever its proximate cause, its ultimate cause is the fascism of U.S. foreign policy over the past many decades" (English professor, Rutgers University); "I'm not sure which is more frightening: the horror that engulfed New York City or the apocalyptic rhetoric emanating daily from the White House" (history professor, Columbia University).

For more campus capers check out "Defending Civilization: How Our Universities Are Failing America and What Can Be Done About It," published by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni.

Accustomed to addressing a captive student audience and free of having to defend their beliefs with solid data, some of the above professors were shocked that their remarks were openly criticized by some of their students. They forgot that freedom of speech does not freedom from criticism.

Ukrainian Americans who attended universities during the Cold War know how obdurate some professors were regarding Ukraine's freedom aspirations. For many of them, Ukraine was a myth. Parroting Russian historians, they argued that Ukraine had always been part of Russia. Those who disagreed were labeled "nationalists" at best, "fascists" at worse. Apologists for the Soviet Union, these same Sovietologists were shocked when Ukraine declared its independence, causing the disappearance of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. For decades they blamed the United States for the Cold War, and even today they can't accept the fact that they were hoodwinked, that the Soviets were bent on conquering the world and that it was the United States that stopped the Soviet imperialism dead in its tracks. Anxious to remain "objective," our university "experts" became Moscow's puppets.

There were exceptions, of course. Profs. Clarence Manning, Robert Conquest, Richard Pipes, Robert S. Sullivant, John Armstrong, John Reshetar, Yaroslav Bilinsky and Taras Hunczak come immediately to mind as being among those whose serious scholarly publications had an impact. For most of the Cold War, however, these gentlemen were viewed as voices in the wilderness by mainstream Sovietologists.

If Soviet experts got it all wrong, what about the Middle East experts currently teaching on American campuses? They got it wrong, too. In a review of Martin Kramer's "Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America," Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum, writes: Most Middle East scholars "dismissed militant Islamic terror as unworthy of their attention." One "expert" with connections to Oxford, Cambridge and Harvard "declared himself skeptical of the U.S. government's warnings about terrorism and criticized what he called the 'terrorist industry' (a disdainful term for specialists on this topic) for exaggerating 'the terrorist threat to American citizens.'" Six months before the September 11 suicide hijackings, he accused terrorist specialists of "perpetuating an 'irrational fear of terrorism by focusing too much on farfetched horrible scenarios.'" Although there are hundreds of professors of Middle East studies on American campuses, not one of them ever "'got around to producing a single serious analysis of Osama bin Laden..." America's academics, concludes Prof. Kramer, "failed to predict or explain the major evolutions of Middle Eastern politics and society over the past two decades." Like their Soviet studies predecessors, Middle East specialists received millions of foundation and government dollars for their research.

"America still doesn't understand what has happened to its campuses," writes John Leo, U.S. News and World Report columnist. "A strong culture has arisen around dangerous ideas. Among them ... all knowledge and morality are constructions built by the powerful. Add to this the knee-jerk antagonism to the 'hegemony' of the West and reflexive feeling of sympathy for anti-Western resentments, even those expressed in great violence. This is a toxic mix, and it is now crucial for those on and off campus to start saying so."

For Ukrainian Americans soured by campus "Russian experts" during the Cold War, the "toxic mix" is old news.

Myron Kuropas' e-mail address is: mbkuropas@compuserve.com.

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