Call for University Reform
Has Roots in Vietnam War, Pioneer Organization Notes Growing Number of
Student Groups Challenging Professors.
Leonard Magruder
05/16/2005
Leonard
Magruder, President of Vietnam
Veterans for Academic Reform, today sent a letter of
congratulations to Sara Russo, president of the latest student
organization calling for academic reform, Students for Academic Freedom. The following is from “About Us”
at their website:
“Students
for Academic Freedom is a clearing house and communications center whose
goal is to end the political abuse of the university and to restore
integrity to the academic mission as a disinterested pursuit of
knowledge.”
They
now have fifty students at major universities building chapters.
There
are now a dozen or more major new organization dedicated to university
reform. Said Mr. Magruder, “As founder of the first organization of this
kind, I find it very gratifying to find that so many others now recognize
the same problems that we did in 1982, and are also speaking out. However,
it is important to remember that all these totalitarian trends on campus
today have their roots far earlier in the rise of the Left in the campus
war protests of the early 60’s.”
The
second such organization, Accuracy
in Academia, began about 1984. Reed Irvine, the founder, invited
Mr. Magruder to become President of the organization in 1985 but because
of prior committments he could not accept. Mr. Michael Capel, however,
Editor of th AIA’s magazine Campus Report, later served on the Board of Advisors of V.V.A.R.
Another
major organization to appear around this time was the Center
for the Study of Popular Culture, founded by the former 60’s radical
David Horowitz, with probably the nation’s most brilliant and most read
group of writers. Mr. Magruder met Mr. Horowitz when both spoke at the
Vietnam Symposium in 1986, following former Senator Eugene McCarthy on the
platform. Mr. Horowitz also served for a while on the V.V.A.R. Board of
Advisors.
Mr.
Horowitz, having been there at the time, often writes about the connection
between the new totalitarianism on campus and the 60’s. Recently he
wrote:
... you
quickly realize that something is terribly wrong at our institutions of
higher learning. Beginning in the mid-1960s, the left made a concerted
effort to take over our colleges and universities. The turmoil surrounding
the Vietnam War made our schools ripe for leftist pickings, and they
did—they methodically took over our campuses. Now, four decades later,
they have a stranglehold on hiring, teaching and administrating most of
our schools in all 50 states. As they’ve taken control, they’ve
trampled free speech, virtually banished all conservative professors, and
turned our schools into little more than huge megaphones for anti-American
rhetoric from coast to coast.
And
then he goes on to tell about his new National Campaign to Take Back our
Campuses.
[Note:
the full article is archived at this link: http://www.frontpagemag.com/Content/read.asp?ID=10]
More
recently this type of organization is being started by the students
themselves, rather than older activists such as Magruder or Horowitz, and
the writing is being done by students. For example, Campus
Watch, which presents criticism of academics written by young people. Noindoctrination
is another new website that presents reports by students about the
indoctrination going on at their school. Professor Watch will present
profiles of professors reported to be using their classrooms for
propaganda purposes rather than education.
And
there are other new groups. It is very clear that a revolution has started
on campus, but one of the first things that will have to happen is to
demonstrate once and for all how the Left lied about Vietnam in the
60’s.That is why in September [2003], V.V.A.R. will present a five-night
series of new, far more objective and truthful films on the Vietnam War to
help students see the connection.
That
many could see the connection between the campus war protests of the
60’s and a growing corruption in academia as early as 20 years ago
should be very clear from the following presentation of selections from
the Manifesto of our organization, delivered by appointment to the White
House by Professor Magruder in Jan. of 1982. Although copies were
distributed throughout the National Press Building, the Washington press
never mentioned the students’ protest.
MANIFESTO
President Ronald Reagan The White House Washington, D.C.
Dear Mr.
President,
Over the
past year 300 of my students in 10 sections of Psychology and Sociology
were assigned the task of studying the Vietnam War to answer two questions
that had been asked of President Carter by Vietnam Veterans of America:
Why had they been sent to war, and what lessons had the nation learned
from the experience ?
In every
section the students concluded that the answer as to why we were there was
now even more clear than when President Kennedy first explained the
matter. We were there because of our relationship to the South Vietnamese
through SEATO, they had asked for our help in defending their freedom
against Communist aggression originating from North Vietnam and supported
by Russia and China. He warned that should South Vietnam fall, it would
have a domino effect and threaten the balance of power in Southeast Asia
in favor of Communist totalitarianism.
Kennedy,
and every president who followewd him, the students agreed, had told the
nation the truth. The campus “peace” movement, which said that the war
was “immoral,” that the motive was “imperialism,” that the domino
theory was “absurd,” that the war was only a “civil war,” that Ho
Chi Mihn was only a “nationalist,” and that America was engaged in
“aggression,” and “genocide,” was wrong.
[note:
At the end of this exercise, Professor Magruder, after giving the students
their grades to insure objectivity, asked them to vote on whether the war
was justified. 85% said that it was justified, a legitimate struggle for
freedom for others. We challenge all universites to repeat this
experiment, using the more objective, up-to-date materials now available
on the war.]
Puzzled
as to why the students of this generation could see the truth so clearly,
whereas those of the 60’s could not, the students concluded that
faculties, to serve their own ideological purposes, had misinformed their
students, who in turn used the misinformation to serve their own purposes.
Some of the students admitted that had they been in college at the time
and were subject to the draft, they would have viewed this issue
differently.
The najor
lesson of Vietnam, the students concluded, was that American foreign
policy would henceforth have to take into consideration that left-liberals
in our universities and media, hostile towards traditional American
values, have created within our society a large and dangerous bloc lacking
in the intellectual and moral foundations necessary to defend freedom. The
lesson of Vietnam is epitomized in the title of a recent book by
Congressman John Leboutieller, “Harvard Hates America.”
The role
of the campus “peace” movement is seen in President Johnson’s
telling General Westmoreland shortly after the Tet Offensive that to
pursue the war more aggressively was politically unfeasible, that he had
“no choice but to calm the protestors lest they precipitate an abject
American pull-out.” (Lewy, 1978) The role of the media is seen in the
conclusion of Peter Braestrup, the noted journalist who researched in
detail the reporting of the war by the news media. “Rarely has
contemporary crisis journalism turned out, in retrospect, to have veered
so widely from reality.” As Senator Margaret Chase Smith said at the
time, the press “had become more sympathetic to the enemy than to our
own national interest.” (Congressional
Record, June 16, 19721)
The
“peace” movement, my students concluded, was never really concerned
for peace. Although it cloaked itself in an aura of great moral purpose,
it in fact gave aid and comfort to the enemy, marched under the flag of
the Viet Cong, allowed Hanoi to dictate its agenda, and turned its back on
the American soldier. Rejecting the democratic principle of majority rule,
it set out to intimidate the nation through violence. So dangerous did it
become that it paralyzed national will and drove a President from office.
By ascribing the basest possible motives to the government and the
American people it in fact played out the role of a Hanoi lobby in enemy
territory.
Said
Guenter Lewy, in “America in Vietnam,” the most comprehensive and best
balanced study to date of the war “... it was obvious that many of these
men and the organizations and committees they spawned were not so much for
peace and against the war as they were partisans of Hanoi, whose victory
they sought to hasten through achieving an American withdrawal from
Vietnam.”
It was
this support for Hanoi and the desire to humiliate America that caused my
students to decide that the anti-war movement was not an authentic
domestic peace force. They agreed with General Westmoreland who said, “I
can make no accommodation for those who burned draft cards and their
country’s flag, besieged the Pentagon, paraded the enemy’s flag in the
streets, encouraged others to break the law, fled their responsibility,
and in general went beyond the bounds of reasonable debate and fair
discussion. None should escape the reality that his or her actions helped
to prolong the war.”
Particularly
disturbing to my students was the fact that the university had spawned, in
the very heart of academia, two totalitarian movements, the New Left and
the S.D.S., behind which tens of thousands of students rallied to defeat
the sacrifices for freedom of their own countrymen. Based largely on
Marxism, these two groups advocated authoritarian repression of opposing
opinion, political violence, and ultimately class murder and dictatorship,
all with the encouragement of liberals in the university. This tendency to
encourage totalitarianism, the students concurred, still lies latent
within the profound contradictions of contemporary liberal thought. Unless
immediate university reform begins, the university and the media, they
fear, could prove instrumental in the destruction of America, by again
polarizing, and then paralyzing the nation in a time of crisis.
The
American soldier, with few exceptions, fought bravely and honorably. He
did what the nation asked of him and in no sense was the war lost on the
bttlefield. Even though American resolve fell short in the end, few
nations in history have ever engaged in such sacrifices for others, and no
gain, or attempted gain for human freedom can be discounted. Those who
fought for freedom for South Vietnam not only deserve to be honored, they
deserve that the nation start facing the truth.
The
aspects of the war that most need clarifying, in TV documentries, film,
movies, books, debates, courses, etc., are: the idealistic motives for our
involvement, the subversive nature of the “peace” movement, the true
intentions of Communist North Vietnam to conquer all Indochina, the
barbaric tactics of the Viet Cong, the use of the media to influence
public opinion, the manipulation of American journalists and intellectuals
by Hanoi propaganda, the true bravery and victorious record of our
fighting men, the genuine thrust for freedom of South Vietham, and the
truth about liberals in Congress in their final abandoment of South
Vietnam.
But to
tell the truth about Vietnam, the students realized, would necessarily
involve challenging the reigning philosophies on campus. Out of this could
come, however, not only freedom for the Vietnam veteran from a false
image, but a profound intellectual and moral revolution on campus. They
decided they wanted to do something to start this reform.
Mr.
President, the problem and the cure are both touched upon in this petition
my students have asked me to bring to you. It begins, “We, the
undersigned, students in Professor Magruder’s classes in psychology,
wish to protest the news blackout by the liberal press, particularly
“Newsday,” of our rally to honor the Vietnam veteran on Thursday,
April 10, 1981. We also wish to protest the tyranny of naturalistic and
deterministic views on the nature of man in contemporary education,
particularly in the social sciences. We would like to see a reformation of
the American university through renewed dialogue between psychology,
theology, and philosophy.”
There is
unquestionably a growing resentment against the suppression of their right
to be exposed to the full spectrum of intellectual debate. Minor secular
philophies have become institutionalized on campus as ultimate truth.
These positions are protected by the simple expedience of refusing debate
and running major challengers, such as theism, off campus. The insights of
centuries of Western experience and thought have simply disappeared, from
curricuum, bookstores, and textbooks. The impact of this on students who
raise such basic existential questions as “Why do I exist,” “What
should I do,” and “Is there a God,” is to make them feel that it is
wrong to raise such questions, that there is even something strange about
themselves.
Amongst
the symptoms of the suppression of open dialogue are: a deterioration in
the intellectual quality of textbooks, a profusion of covert philosophical
assumptions in the social sciences masking as scientific fact, a steady
nation-wide deterioration in academic standards, the inability of the
social sciences to understand or cope with rising social pathology, the
capitulation of philosophy to scientism, and a breakdown in moral
standards by faculty and students alike in the name of “life style.”
That
those most priviledged in terms of education are not ony those most likely
to abandon America in times of crisis, but also those most likely to be in
the forefront of moral decline, is a contradiction this nation can no
longer afford.
The time
has unquestionably come for the American people to demand the liberation
of their educational systems from the defensive, hypocritical, and
potentially treasonous confines into which they have been betrayed.
End of
Manifesto
So it was
that my students came to realize that something terrible had happend to
our universities in the 60’s, something that not only helped to destroy
our efforts for freedom in South Vietnam, but would compound itself in the
years ahead in terrible conflict with everything American, leading to
further totalitarian movements as we see now in multiculturalism,
political correctness, speech codes, gender feminism, postmodernism, etc.
And so began the first student organization to call for university reform,
Vietnam
Veterans for Academic Reform.
***
For
additional articles from V.V.A.R., please go to the Magruder
Articles Index.
This
article may be reproduced in any form. Copy this article, distribute, add us as a link.
Leonard Magruder
Founder/President, V.V.A.R.
Phone: 785-312-9303
Magruder44@aol.com
"Support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign or domestic"
