Has brainwashing by the far-left gone too far?

Mamdouh AlMuhaini

Well-known historian Niall Ferguson complains from the dominance of leftist ideas on American universities, especially on the faculties of history, political sciences and sociology.

In a recent interview he lamentingly said he was so naïve because he thought talents, perseverance and efficiency are the standards of progress in academic work and in all other fields but he was wrong as he recently figured out that ideology is the most important factor.

Those with a leftist ideology support one another and eliminate people with different ideas until their voice and influence disappear. Whenever a conservative academic leaves a faculty, he’s replaced with a historian with a leftist tendency. By doing so, the influence of the leftist ideology increases.

The leftist vision thus decisively dominates students’ minds even in the most prestigious universities. Ferguson, who published interesting writings including an important biography about the most famous secretary of state Henry Kissinger, said that while substituting for a lecturer at the University of Berkeley once, he noted the religious reasons behind the September 11, 2001 attacks but he felt students were uncomfortable about this truth as they preferred other ideas that were planted in their heads, such as the idea that the attacks were a reaction to American “imperialism.”

Based on a personal experience, I’ve seen how leftist ideas overwhelm students’ little minds that are dazzled and incapable of resisting. In the American university where I studied, I took plenty of history lessons and found that the American lecturer strongly opposed her country’s policies and did not mention any of the latter’s advantages.

We took many lessons about the Vietnam War and the tragedies that happened, and we watched the documentary which features US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in tears for he regretted some of his decisions. This perspective may be right but it also forgets the bigger picture which is that the US has formed the face of the modern world which we live in with power sometimes and with diplomacy at other times.

It destroyed Nazism, Communism, Fascism and Al-Qaeda and supported Muslims in Bosnia and Kuwait. All these threats would have changed the face of the world today if they hadn’t been confronted and eliminated by American force. However, it’s difficult to bring up a free discussion in faculties that plant ideas in students who turn them into accepted facts. I remember I objected to this sharp and subjective vision but teachers pityingly looked at me implying I am deceived and brainwashed.

You would not expect the tails of this ideology to reach practical technological specialties like media production but I was wrong. Among the courses I wanted to study was the history of American media but the excitement to learn something new and get to know this huge media quickly disappeared.

Volatile ideas

The lectures were sessions to plant the leftist doctrine in one’s mind and heart. Lessons turned into trials and sessions that aim to dig ideas and find racist insinuations hidden in the folds of articles and in documentaries, movies and series. Some of them were right but they were also based on exaggerated analysis that’s driven by paranoia and that’s obsessed with the evil conspiratorial approach rather than with facts.

Another strange thing I heard was from a far-left lecturer during a lesson that aims to understand protest movements and follow their right approach. A course about social justice turned into an introduction to revolting! I then understood the secret of why there are plenty of frivolous and reckless figures who despise the idea of the state and development in favor of lustrous, empty slogans.

Those with a leftist ideology support one another and eliminate people with different ideas until their voice and influence disappear.

Ideas are volatile and these institutions need human demons to bring them up and increase their influence over the public imagination. American President Nixon was suitable for this purpose. He was completely demonized although he is to thank for the largest transformation our world is witnessing today, as he’s the one who opened the door to China to enter than international order and his visit to the Soviet Union was the actual beginning to disciplining the latter and declawing it. However, in an exclusionary atmosphere, it’s difficult to speak out and voice this opinion!

The situation was different at the faculty of economy. For the first time ever we heard about prominent economists like Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell. The reason is because the faculty is famous for its faith in the principle of the free market and in its belief that the government should stop interfering in economy and was also against a minimum wage. All these ideas oppose the traditional leftist ideology. The faculty however was recently under heavy criticism due to its ideological approach, and the donor funds were also questioned. The aim is to subjugate it to one ideology, as per the fanatics’ way. The Wall Street Journal wrote an editorial defending it.

Due to the dominance of this sharp and narrow-minded ideology, several thinkers, journalists and writers were targeted and faced restrictions as they were literally deprived of the chance to hold open lectures. You would not expect something like this to happen in the US but in recent months, students at famous universities committed acts of violence and arson after they announced hosting figures with ideologies that are different than the common ideology. One of the angry students who contributed to silencing an author said: “We stopped the event from happening. This is great. Mission accomplished.”

The resistance

This ideology raged after President Trump arrived to the White House and it became some sort of resistance as they themselves say. Some wonder about the reason behind this terror and anger in the American media which transformed into a partisan media in crisis but they are not aware that most of these journalists and anchors are the product of this ideological environment which formed them and firmly established their principles and that they live among angry masses that share the same ideas and increase their rush.

This is why they celebrated President Obama and turned him into the prophet of the new era. As we celebrated the first black president, they saw in him the first president who will achieve their worldly and missionary prophecy on earth.

According to the recently published book by Ben Rhodes, Obama’s close adviser, Obama was shocked when Trump was elected after him as he viewed this as treason to his legacy and he talked as if he is a savior whom his people did not understand and he said with a sigh: “Sometimes I wonder whether I was 10 or 20 years too early,” i.e. the people are not yet ready for his teachings.

Of course these ideas extend to reach our world. We can thus understand why we find it difficult to convince these figures in universities and in the media that Iran, for example, is the most destructive element in the region and that it allies with Al-Qaeda and that the Muslim Brotherhood is a terrorist group on the ideological and practical levels hence it’s not possible to get rid of terrorism while keeping it and that the terrorists’ doctrine is due to an extremist religious doctrine and not because of the illusion of a western invasion. These figures have lived in a shell since an early stage and haven’t yet come out of it.

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New Topic on Campus: Civil Discourse 101

Colleges across the U.S. are teaching students, parents and alumni how to talk politics without going on the attack in an effort to counter growing polarization and nastiness in political discourse.

The new Project on Civil Discourse at American University’s School of Public Affairs will coordinate student-led discussions through classes, dormitories and clubs. Students will reflect on their debate styles and talk through hypotheticals like whether to engage or kick out party guests who say hateful things.

Wake Forest University is using an intimate approach: Dinner parties for 10 to 16 people at a time. After pilot sessions with parents and alums in 45 cities over the past year, it is aiming to get 1,000 undergraduates and another 2,000 parents and alums to the dinner table this school year.

The goal is to have participants reveal things about themselves, find connections with others and feel more confident working together, says Brett Eaton, who leads communications at Wake Forest.

Carleton College in Minnesota plans to expand a two-year-old offering that has had roughly a dozen freshmen from different backgrounds live together and study how to engage on topics such as race and income inequality. In the fall of 2019, a version of the program will be an option to fulfill its first-year “argument and inquiry” course requirement.

“It forced us to have discussions,” says Zachary McCrary, a 19-year-old who took the class last year. Mr. McCrary, who said he was a liberal from a conservative Republican household in Colorado, encourages all first-year students to participate so they encounter a range of opinions.

With schools criticized either for coddling oversensitive young adults or for allowing extremists to spew hate, universities including Butler, Tufts and Duquesne are working to improve civil discourse. They are starting speaker series and courses and even designing skits on how to respond if a roommate hangs an offensive poster.

“The real world is full of incivility,” says Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor of the history of education at the University of Pennsylvania. “To me that’s all the more reason why our educational institutions have to try to teach a different way of being.”

In a 2017 survey of more than 3,000 college students from Gallup Inc. and the Knight Foundation, 61% said the climate on their campus stifled certain speech that might be viewed as offensive, up from 54% the prior year. They reported feeling that social-media dialogue was less civil than a year earlier, and that people blocked out views they disagreed with. Pew found in 2016 that 52% of Republicans said Democrats were more closed-minded than other Americans, while 70% of Democrats said the same about Republicans.

Administrators say students and faculty need to be exposed to more ideological diversity to revive policy-based debates and reverse a broader societal breakdown of civil discourse. Violent protests against controversial conservative speakers at Middlebury College and the University of California, Berkeley prompted concerns from the right that liberal students were unable to constructively engage opposing views.

Tufts University’s Institute for Democracy & Higher Education is using a $100,000 grant to study political polarization on campuses, looking at how other schools handled incendiary speakers and outside extremist groups and offering resources on turning conflict into teaching opportunities.

Free-speech advocates say schools could go too far in mandating civility, rather than just encouraging it.

“It can’t be, ‘You’re only allowed to speak if you’re going to be civil,’” says Princeton University politics professor Keith E. Whittington, whose new book, Speak Freely, was assigned reading for incoming students at the school.

At Siena College in Loudonville, N.Y., a 12-person working group on civil discourse found itself embroiled in controversy last winter. Philosophy professor Jennifer McErlean withdrew from the team, calling the leaders of conservative campus groups “evil” for organizing an event featuring Trump campaign adviser Roger Stone and Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe.

Lara Whelan, dean of the School of Liberal Arts at Siena, said the college can move past the incident by continuing “to model the ways of speaking that we want to encourage in our students and in ourselves.”

Siena recently earmarked $400,000 from a gift by the class of 1968 to expand civil-discourse programming, including moderated discussions. The first event focused on campus free speech, and future topics may include immigration, health-care policy and gun control, Dr. Whelan said.

Butler University, Duquesne University and Nebraska’s Wayne State College also have hosted speaker series on civil discourse in recent months, often drawing audiences in the hundreds.

Twenty-six private colleges, including the University of Richmond and the conservative Christian John Brown University, gathered in Atlanta in June for a Council of Independent Colleges workshop on diversity, civility and the liberal arts.

Attendees heard from experts on social movements, linguistics and psychology, and went home with plans for improving discourse on their campuses.

The council’s president, Richard Ekman, said he had been disappointed that most schools responded to the 2016 presidential election by trying to comfort students, rather than encouraging them to study underlying factors that fueled Donald Trump’s victory.

“That was a missed opportunity,” he said.

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Education ‘Equity’ Professor Wants Mathematics To Honor ‘Other-Than-Human Persons’

Sounds like a case of psychotic thought disorder

An Illinois professor who focuses on “equity” in mathematics will present her plan to redefine the field of study to oppose “objects, truths, and knowledge” at a 2019 conference.

University of Illinois education professor Dr. Rochelle Gutierrez will give her talk, titled “Mathematx: Towards a way of Being,” at the Mathematics Education and Society 10th International Conference in India during January and February 2019.

“The relationship between humans, mathematics, and the planet has been one steeped too long in domination and destruction,” Gutierrez notes in her presentation’s description. “I argue for a movement against objects, truths, and knowledge towards a way of being in the world that is guided by first principles — mathematx.”

“This shift from thinking of mathematics as a noun to mathematx as a verb holds potential for honouring our connections with each other as human and other-than-human persons, for balancing problem solving with joy, and for maintaining critical bifocality at the local and global level.”

Gutierrez focuses on the effects that class, race and language have on learning. Her University of Illinois faculty profile claims that teachers must not only possess “content knowledge,” but also “political knowledge,” according to her research

The professor received grants from the National Science Foundation and the Bureau of Educational Research to incorporate diversity into math education. She has encouraged the use of what she calls “creative insubordination” by teachers in the classroom.

“With funding from the National Science Foundation, I have worked with teachers over the past 6 years to develop their political knowledge,” she writes in a summer 2016 issue of “Teaching for Excellence and Equity in Mathematics.”

The first page of Gutierrez’s article contains extensive footnotes documenting why she says “Black students” instead of “black students,” “Latin@” instead of “Latinx” and “historically looted” instead of “low income.”

The professor outlines tactics teachers can use to employ social justice in the classroom, such as “press for explanation,” in which teachers can respond to questions like “why do we have Black History Month, anyhow?” by asking follow-up inquiries as a way of “buying time.”

She also encourages teachers to make students learn how others would arrive at incorrect test answers because it “encourages empathy for having assumed different mathematical assumptions” and advises that teachers “turn a rational issue into a moral one,” using the example “regardless of what the data suggest or what has been done in the past, is this what we want to stand for?”

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