By Mike Adams
1/16/2012
I’m often asked how Marxism took root in the American university system. I’ve never been fully satisfied with my standard answer to the question. Given my background in psychology, I sometimes seek psychological explanations to the exclusion of broader historical explanations. But I do believe there is something different about the mind of the man to whom Marxism appeals.
The Marxist is less willing to compete with others. He is content living in a world where everyone is similarly situated. He relinquishes the prospect of success for the assurance that he cannot fail. The same mentality is often found among those who seek refuge in the academy. There is little chance that the academic will find fame or fortune. But a few years of hard work will be rewarded with promotion and tenure and all of the security that comes with it.
Marxism was once the dominant philosophy in higher education – at least within the social sciences and humanities. But one would be hard pressed to make the case that Marxism remains the dominant philosophy on college campuses today. That title now belongs to postmodernism - although the two philosophies cannot be divorced from one another. Marxism is an economic and political philosophy. Postmodernism is a broader worldview. But postmodernism could not have achieved its rapid ascent without Marxism.
The Marxist emphasis on class struggle has fueled the postmodern assault on objective truth. It has led to the idea that truth is simply a byproduct of power struggles between warring factions. That idea has dangerous moral ramifications.
Postmodernism poses a threat to college students and to the very existence higher learning itself. For many students, postmodern education lights a well-paved path that leads directly to moral relativism. The two are not the same thing. But postmodernism eventually compels moral relativism. If there is no objective truth then moral positions cannot be objectively true. When morals become private or subjective, they tend to be built around personal conduct – simply to accommodate personal conduct. That is why many college students find themselves trapped in a downward moral spiral in the wake of abandoning the idea of objective truth. I am speaking from personal experience as well as years of observation.
Sixteen years ago, I had an experience for which I am most grateful. I was in a prison in South America interviewing prisoners and prison guards. I witnessed firsthand a very brutal clubbing of a young prisoner. I heard prison guards admit that they shot prisoners in the back on their way out of the prison. This was just after they tricked them into believing they were free to go. The same prison officials told stories of suspects shocked into giving false confessions. This was after police officers wired the suspects’ testicles to car batteries as they sat locked in police vans undergoing coercive questioning.
I needed to witness that beating and hear those stories in order to be shocked out of my own childish belief system. The day I walked out of that prison, I left behind my faith in moral and cultural relativism. I realized that forced confessions, brutal beatings, and staged escape executions were all objectively wrong. The time and place of such atrocities is irrelevant. They are examples of purely objective evil. But there is good news accompanying this realization. As C.S. Lewis often said, the shadow proves the sunshine. Therefore, the heart is sometimes awakened to a greater appreciation of the truth after witnessing its collision with falsity.
When I returned to my position in the secular university, I realized we were doing something more than simply promoting a worldview that made it easy for students to spiral downward morally. We were also clinging to a philosophy that was threatening the very existence of higher education as we know it. That philosophy was being encoded into campus rules that threatened permanent entrenchment of the very ideas which gave them birth.
I’ve written of many conflicts involving such policies – the most notable cases involving campus speech codes. But I often wonder how many times the reader has taken the time to examine the common themes that run through the many cases. It is worth taking a moment to reflect back upon some of the worst.
In 2006, two young conservative women contacted me for help. They had protested The Vagina Monologues because the play encouraged use of the c-word as a way of describing women. After posting a sign saying “We are not (c-words)” feminists invoked the university speech code. They claimed that they, as feminists, could use the c-word as a term of endearment. They then claimed that their detractors could not use the same word if they did so in a derisive way. In other words, the constitutionality of the c-word hinged upon the thought behind the word at the time of its utterance. This was more than simple thought control. It was state-enforced though control undertaken for the ostensible purpose of protecting fragile feminists from being offended.
These speech code supporters are the same people who advocate abortion. They are also the same people who hurled abusive racial epithets at those two plaintiffs I brought to the Alliance Defense Fund. But we won this case in both the court of law and the court of public opinion. Those will be familiar themes when we dissect the next case in part two of this series.
Postmodern Political Correctness and Christianity II
By Mike Adams
1/17/2012
In January 2009, a pro-life group at Spokane Falls Community College (SFCC) decided to publicize and protest the disproportionate abortion rate among black Americans. They argued that the racist roots of Planned Parenthood were reflected in the organization’s activities in our nation’s inner cities. But before they could hold their event, they had to have their posters approved by the college administration. They were denied approval ostensibly because they presented only one side of the issue. In other words, the administration tried to force them to argue the side of the debate with which they disagreed.
The administration claimed that “biased” speech could lead to hate speech, which, in turn, could lead to genocide. Think about that for a second: if the pro-life group protested Planned Parenthood’s genocide, then genocide could result unless they also argued in favor of abortion.
Common sense alone should have reigned in the SFCC administration. But it required the intervention of the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) and the Washington Attorney General. In the end, the student pro-life group prevailed.
Later that semester, a student at Los Angeles Community College (LACC) was given a chance to speak on a topic of his own choosing. He chose to speak about the role God has played in his life. During the speech, he mentioned a Bible verse affirming the traditional definition of marriage. His professor was incensed. He abruptly ended the class and refused to grade the student’s speech.
After the ADF intervened, there was a successful federal injunction against the speech code that was used to punish the LACC student for uttering “offensive” speech. The matter should have ended there but it did not. The school appealed to the 9th Circuit, which ruled that the student did not have standing to challenge the speech code. It was a bizarre ruling, given that the student was, in fact, punished with public humiliation and withholding of credit for work he did in a class he paid to take. Then again, this was in the 9th Circuit.
Last year at Vanderbilt University, a homosexual student knowingly joined a student group espousing beliefs which he actively opposed. After he was predictably removed from the group, he complained to the university administration. This resulted in an investigation of several hundred student groups. In the wake of the investigation, Vanderbilt administrators began threatening to derecognize student groups that required members to adhere to specific beliefs. This bizarre belief-ban went even further. Vanderbilt began to threaten de-recognition of Christian groups that required leaders to lead Bible studies. It was so intrusive that it resulted in a letter of condemnation from 23 members of the United States Congress to the administration.
All of these cases show how identity politics, rooted in postmodernism, is destroying the marketplace of ideas at our nation’s colleges and universities. The lack of principle is seen in cases like Georgia Tech (see part one of this series) where feminists pretended to be offended by words they often use themselves. Their assault on “offensiveness” was shown to be contrived when their allies invoked racially offensive language to attack the opponents of the Georgia Tech speech code. Defenders of the speech code even superimposed swastikas on pictures of one of the Jewish plaintiffs.
The postmodern roots of identity politics show through in the cases I mentioned. In none of them was there any attempt to assert that the offending beliefs were untrue. They were simply determined (usually by white liberals) to be offensive to various disenfranchised groups said to lack the power to establish their own beliefs as “true.” At Georgia Tech it was women (feminist women). At SFCC it was blacks. At LACC and Vanderbilt it was homosexuals. In each case, postmodernism fueled a vicious assault on free speech in the name of group-based identity politics. In each case, there was a significant chilling effect on the free exchange of ideas, which no institution of higher learning can long withstand.
Public universities can be sued in federal court whenever they try to enforce overly broad speech codes. They may also be sued when their zeal to control student groups encroaches upon freedom of association. Private schools, on the other hand, are not bound by the First Amendment. But they are bound by moral considerations. If they tell students they promote a diversity of opinion, they should behave as if the First Amendment does, in fact, apply at their university. They should not use false promises of diversity to lure students into paying tens of thousands of dollars tuition per year.
But what are the requirements of a Christian university? I believe they are twofold: First, the Christian university must remain Christian. That means certain core beliefs are taken off the table as un-debatable. Belief in the deity of Christ and His resurrection are among those beliefs.
Second, the Christian university must remain a university. And that requires the maintenance of robust debate on the vast majority of the controversial issues of the day. It also means that student groups must be given wide latitude in writing their own constitutions, selecting their own leaders, and sponsoring their own events.
In John 14:6, Christ claimed that there is but one path to heaven. No greater affirmation of objective truth is needed. Christianity is and will always be a religion predicated upon individual, not group, salvation. In Galatians 3:28, Paul affirms what Christ was saying: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Christianity has no room for postmodernists. They should be left to enjoy their speech code-enforced dominance within the shallow halls of the secular university.
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