Jay Ambrose’s editorial (“Colleges need more conservatives,” December 12, 2014) begins, incensed at a “pledge of allegiance” to a right-wing Christian state used by a Colorado college professor in his “American Civilization” class to get students talking about – well – American civilization.
See? he says: Colleges are filled with Democrats, liberals, Marxists, and moral relativists rejecting “Western values” – and we need more diversity to “offset such influences.”
Odd. I didn’t think Conservative liked Affirmative Action or meddling with the “free market” of ideas.
Ambrose is unhappy that most professors are Democrats. That may well be. But they’re also PhD’s for the most part – independent thinkers who don’t hate science or get most of their information from scripture and lobbyists.
It’s probably the “independent thinker” part that has Ambrose so riled.
His essay is filled with bizarre claims, figures, and logic. He objects to a Marxist professor on the grounds that millions were supposedly killed “in Marx’s name” – forget that Marx, who predicted socialism replacing advanced capitalism in modern Europe, had been dead for about 40 years when revolutionaries in feudal societies in Asia seized on some of his ideas.
But Ambrose, a bible-thumping Tea Partying Kentuckian, characterizes the new far-right Conservatism as “a sense of the world that appreciates the best of the past.”
Maybe that was true in Eisenhower’s day. But since when are fracking, filling the environment with CO2, giving corporations human rights and taking them away from people, endless welfare programs for defense contractors, preservation of advantage for the white male super-rich, attacks on immigrants, misogyny, and classism – “the best of the past?”
Assuming liberal universities do adopt “Affirmative Action for the Koch Brothers” plans and invite more conservative visiting professors, where’s the reciprocity in Christian madrassas like Bob Jones University or Liberty University?
More insidious than propagandizing college students, the New Conservatives want to reach even younger minds. Many high schools run ROTC programs and, as part of No Child Left Behind laws, are obliged to host military recruiters. These are schools that still can’t manage to completely steer clear of religion, are constantly reacting to conservative attacks on books, sex education, evolution, and on teachers who try to challenge their students to think.
What Ambrose really wants is right-wing political orthodoxy to be dispensed to the young through preferred hiring of people like him. When education starts bending to creationism, climate change denial, and militarism, we might as well all take the “pledge” that irked Ambrose so much.
This was published in the Standard Times on December 17, 2014
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/article/20141217/opinion/141219568
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