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January 17, 2005
Conservative Attacks on Liberal Professors
John Lovas
http://faculty.deanza.fhda.edu/jocalo/
Currently on Progressive Teachers you can find a long and powerful account by Professor Oneida J. Meranto of how three "conservative" students turned her into a national figure of disapprobrium from the right in Making of a Poster Child. Her detailed account makes clear that the efforts of a small group of radical right-wingers will use any pretext they can find to gain controlling influence over the one part of American public life they do not currently dominate.
In quite a different context, I chose to address this issue in BLOG ONE, the first posting to this blog nearly two years ago. There I challenge a colleague's claim that "liberal" professors are indoctrinating students.
And the current flap over the Department of Education paying Armstrong Williams to express "independent" opinions about education policy is well documented in Laurie Spivak's The Conservative Marketing Machine. Who is indoctrinating who?
Back in February, 2003, I had another encounter, one I've never blogged, which illustrates how the right-wing currently operates in an effort to establish, simultaneously, a sense of victimhood and a claim of superiority.
In browsing the Web, I came across a guest column in National Review Online titled College Students Can't Write? by Stanley K. Ridgeley. I found Ridgeley's claim so preposterous and so lacking in evidence, that I immediately e-mailed him, telling him that if he had submitted the piece to the course I was teaching at the time, that his column would earn an F, based on wild overgeneralizing and an almost complete lack of evidence and documentation for the claims. Within the hour, he shot an e-mail back, essentially telling me that I was simply wrong, that he knew whereof he spoke about the quality of college writing, because he had been Executive Director of Collegiate Network for eight years, and campus editors had sent him proof that college teachers didn't teach writing.
Well, this all piqued my curiosity, so I poked around the Collegiate Network and discovered that it's part of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. The latter entity has a staff of 10 or so. CN has a staff of 6. What CN does is recruit and provide support for conservative newspapers on major university campuses, at least 75 of them. They hold annual conferences where these student editors are trained to search out evidence of "liberal bias" on their campuses. Often, the conservative newspaper is staffed by only 3 or 4 students, but they typically claim to be the "independent" voice on campus. CN provides a network so that stories on one campus can be fed to editors on another. I don't know who provides the funding for all this activity, but it's got to be more than chump change, given the extent of the network.
I know the Stanford Review as an example of this effort began in 1987. Ridgeley founded the Duke Review in 1989. In homage to the National Review, many of the conservative papers call themselves "Review." While I think it's fine that people who have a viewpoint create a newspaper and promote their views, I've never found them very forthcoming about how they operate or who funds them. Professor Meranto's account shows the kind of nastiness they can create and the damage some of them are willing to do. As far as I can tell, they only operate on big university campuses. I'm not aware of any efforts by Collegiate Network to establish papers on community college campuses.
Currently, Ridgeley is President of the Russian-American Institute, but I can find no Web presence for such an organization, and Ridgeley himself doesn't come up on a Google search, except for this rather bizarre case for American military superiority based on our playing American football, a piece I have renamed Football Uber Alles.".
I expect all aspects of American education will be targeted by right-wing radicals over the next few years. It behooves all academics, regardless of their political persuasion, to keep an eye out for these efforts to discredit professors who challenge whatever the current received wisdom is.
Posted by sparks at January 17, 2005 2:34 PM
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Posted by: Steve Parks at January 17, 2005 2:50 PM