University Bigots and Vietnam Part 1

Leonard Magruder
06/03/2005

"Hey, I like it ! Spitooey on you , hippy scum."
Vietnam Marine vet on hearing election results

The following is a selection from an important article by Larry Schwekert, a professor at the Univ. of Dayton that appeared on FrontPageMagazine .com on May 24, 2005. It accurately describes the attack by the left on conservatives, ( usually meaning people with religious views,) going on in today's academia. It began in the late 60's. Today it is worse, total. Back then I told them to shove it, described below, but today we are going to have to change it, beginning with my announcement that our new research division will introduce Intelligent Design into the field of psychology. (see "Intelligent Design to Psychology," at v-v-a-r.org) The whole controversy in Kansas over evolution involves a hidden philosophical assumption, metaphysical naturalism. The same problem needs to be examined in psychology. Academic reform is our thing .The historical moment has come to really push for it.

by Larry Schwekert:
" For the conservative student entering a graduate history program there is no simple advice. Your way will be tenuous, precarious, and often downright dangerous... The fact is that American leftism has ensconced itself into a near-impregnable position in universities through its dominance of liberal arts faculties, and, especially, the graduate programs. By controlling who gets hired, and who studies what, radical/liberal faculty have, over the last 40 years, redefined what constitutes legitimate history. 
Part of conservatism is that one orders one’s life in certain priorities: God, family, work. But the radicals act as if God doesn't exist, redefine family, and elevate work as their deity. Conservative graduate students learn... they have to either find a conservative dissertation director and risk being shunned on the job market, or play ball with the radicals and hope to appease them with small doses of "race, class, gender" in the dissertation."

His recommendations? 

"Resist the temptation to "include" the concepts of "race/class/gender" just to "get through." Be faithful to your principles. Fight for them. You’ll make some enemies, but you’ll also gain some respect. Trying to "sin just a little" will only make you appear weak, uncommitted to your principles, and indecisive. Stick with it, be confident. If you enter graduate work with a strategy, and realize that your ideology makes you a target, you will be better prepared to find the creases in the system and secure a place in what has become a depressingly politicized academy"
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In getting my graduate degree at Southern Methodist University in the 60's I did all he suggests, and was told I had been the best student in ten years. Nevertheless, when it came time to rehire me as an Instructor, they turned me down, tellng me directly to my face that it was because of my "religious convictions, the concept of God having no place in Psychology"." At Southern Methodist University yet ! 
Following is a composite of two articles that tell the story, one in "The Dallas Morning News," of August 19, 1969, and an earlier one in "The Dallas Times-Herald".

Degree Returned by Ex-Instructor in SMU Protest.- "Dallas Morning News" - April 19, 1969

"Magruder, a former instructor in psychology at SMU where he received his Master degree, has returned that degree to SMU in a dual protest. First, "to protest being told he would not be rehired because three of his colleagues objected to his Methodist convictions. And second, to protest the state of U.S. universities as being "morally and intellectually " bankrupt."(Vietnam)
Magruder, now a psychology and philosophy Instructor at the Univ. of North Dakota, said, 'What happened to me was totalitarian. It reflects the spirit of the liberal intellectuals who are tyrannizing our universities and who are in process of betraying the very foundations of Western civilization. Student unrest over Vietnam, with its fascist overtones, is a direct product of the universities themselves.'
Magruder hopes to appear before the Senate committee investigating campus unrest in America, headed by Sen. John McClellan, D-Ark."

Later that year I did meet in a Senate building in Washington, D.C. with the McClellan Committee on Student Unrest, giving them documents and testimony warning that the polarization occuring in society over Vietnam was "largely due to the closer kinship of philosophical assumptions amongst university professors to atheistic dialectical materialism, and therefore totalitarianism, than to the traditional, largely Judeo-Christian values of the Free West, " and warned that "our universities had become intruments of indoctrination in a bankrupt liberalism that was leading the nation towards tragedy." That tragedy, of course, was the fall of South Vietnam.

Anyone on the homefront with any sense at all at that time knew there was a momentous betrayal of our troops in South Vietnam going on. The soldiers only knew about it when they returned. And then it was too late. In later years, when everyone knew about it, they rejected John Kerry as president, looking on him as a leader of the war protests along with people like Jane Fonda. The only reason we share this history with you today is because another betrayal has started on our campuses, this time over the war on terrorism. Professor Larry Schwekert has accurately described for us the oppressive conditions on campus, and has proposed what we should do. Fight. !

Many of the faculty on major campuses in the 60's, primarily in the social sciences and the humanites, gave students totally false reasons for being opposed to the war in Vietnam. Theirs was largely a philosophical agenda - the students had a more pragmatic agenda, simply staying out of the war.

(For a detailed expose of the Big Lie of the campus war protestors, see our article, "We Don't Want Your Views on War - You Lied About Vietnam," and also "Kerry Too Naive -part 1, " at v-v-a-r.org These show how the campus protests rested on the lie that we were fighting only "Agrarian peasants in the South yearning for freedom in a civil war," and documents this by showing the actual material distributed at major protests against the war.)

But the real locus of authority on campus for students as to what was happening in Southeast Asia came from the witness of the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars. In what is one of the best histories of the war, "America in Vietnam", author Guenter Lewy writes that this group asserted, " The largely peasant forces of South Vietnam received meaningful support from North Vietnam only when the American assault intensified beyond which they could resist by their own means." "This", said Lewy," represents a reversal of the real sequence of events. American support for the South Vietnamese armed forces was stepped up because the VC, beefed up by infiltration from the North, were winning and threatened to take over South Vietnam."
Later he wrote, "Noam Chomsky said that among rational people it was not in dispute that the United States Command is responsible for major crimes in the layman's sense of this term." The fact is, declared the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars, " U.S. war crimes are an accepted and regularly used method of waging war in Indochina."
In 1967 the Russell War Crimes Tribunal charged that American flyers systematically and intentionally bombed North Vietnamese medical facilities. The Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars reported, "Maps with hospitals marked as targets on them have been found in the possession of U.S. pilots shot down over North Vietnam." 

The parallel academic group today to the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars, to which students turn to as an authoritative source of understanding of events in the Middle East is MESA, the Middle East Studies Association. 

Here are a few observations about that organization that have appeared recently on the Internet:

'The Middle East Studies Left"- by Jonathan Calt Harris 
“The field is pervaded by hostility to American aims, interests, and power in the Middle East, and peopled by tenured radicals who think of the United States as the incarnation of racist imperialism.” Last year’s MESA conference, held in Washington, DC, was noteworthy for the refusal of participants to discuss issues of terrorism and militant Islam. Out of five hundred papers presented, just one solitary study dealt with Al-Qaeda. Not one paper dealt with militant Islam. Suicide bombings were labeled “resistance.” On the current MESA conference ...of nearly three hundred papers, panels, and presentations over a four-day conference, the words “terror”, “terrorist,” “terrorism,” “attack,” and “suicide bombing” do not appear once. The nine papers on women in the Middle East somehow manage to avoid the topics of “honor” killings or female circumcision. 

Terror's Academic Sympathizers
by Leslie Caebon
"Americans are paying taxes to support professors in Middle East Studies programs who openly sympathize with al-Qaeda’s "position" and oppose American values, American interests, and America’s war on terror in the Middle East.
Blinded by ideology and wishful thinking, scholars of the Middle East have consistently miscalculated the political climate of the region they claim to be experts about. Avoiding the politically incorrect topic of Islamic terrorism, Middle East scholars insist that the United States could bring peace and democracy to the region only by supporting Islamic fundamentalists. Blasting the war on so-called terrorism, Georgetown’s Michael Hudson declared, "We have not shown that our actions differentiate us from those who attacked us." 

by Stephen Schwartz
" One of the more ridiculous incidents in the 21st century history of the “treason of the intellectuals” - occurred on July 16 when Stanford professor Joel Beinin, the current president of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) delivered himself of a panicked e-mail warning that MESA members’ programs are under “public attack.” 
Of course, there is an urgency about the situation in MESA that was absent in earlier cases. With all their depredations against democracy, the West, and America, neither the Russian Communists, nor the Serbian ultras, nor the Sandinistas, nor the domestic leftists of the past, committed an act like the September 11th attacks. In failing to discern, and educate the American leadership and public about the real threat of Islamic extremism, the Middle East Studies mafia - to call it as it is - has disarmed the country in the face of great danger... perhaps the most outrageous academic, media, and political coverup of modern times: the willful campaign to suppress worldwide awareness of violent extremism ."

Clearly, in universities around the nation, America is being sabotaged in its efforts to fight terrorism by organization such as MESA, much as it was in the 60's by faculty in the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars. What can be done to get them on America's side? "
The dissatisfaction of Vietnam veterans over the lies that began in the early 60's but which have been perpetuated on campus ever since, came to a head in the last election when, according to our polls, 80% of them voted against Kerry. As one Vietnam vet said, “Do we really want a president who organized and led anti-war and anti-American protests and demonstrations under the flag of the enemy we were fighting?” Most vets see Kerry as having shared the same leftist agenda as people like Abbie Hoffman, Dave Dellinger, Jerry Rubin, and Jane Fonda.
But has this clear message actually registered on faculty so as to bring about the real change in the history of the Vietnam War that its veterans, and now the country, are demanding? Surrounding every major American university there is a wall of protest clamoring for this change. But how to penetrate these fortresses, where professors hunker in their cubby holes, emerging only to lie to students ? How also to directly challenge the major leftist philosophy, as in MESA, that is misrepresenting the crisis of the hour, weakening America's ability to defend itself ? 
The situation was well summed up by our best Middle East expert Daniel Pipes, when he recently said, "Why have university specialists proven so inept at understanding the great contemporary issues of war and peace , starting with Vietnam, then Granada and Kuwait, and now the War on Terrorism ? 
That is a good question, and represents great danger. We will research this question when we return to campus this fall. Why did the campus so misrepresent the war in Vietnam, and why are they so misrepresenting the current War on Terrorism ? Why do our academics remain so befuddled on everything ? Could it have something to do with academic bigotry against religion ? 

Kenneth Miller discussed this bigotry recently in his new book about evolution and religion. A world-class biologist at Brown University, he was the keynote speaker at a conference on evolution at the Univ. of Kansas not long ago:
"Western intellectual life is tolerant. On the surface this tolerance extends to religion . The problem comes when one attempts to take religion seriously. Academia just isn't prepared for that. The assumption is that religious belief is something that people grow out of as they become educated. There is, in essence, a fabric of disbelief enclosing the academic establishment."

I know from experience that this is true.

It is a matter of record and of some interest here that the opening statement of the 1981 Manifesto of Vietnam Veterans for Academic Reform submitted to the White House and signed by 400 students began as follows: "Mr. President, 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, May 10, 1981. We also wish to protest the tyranny of secular views on the nature of man and existence 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." The key word here, of course, is "theology".
In their study of the Vietnam War that led to this manifesto one of the things the students noted was how little those who protested the war seemed to understand about the fundamental difference between an atheistic philosophy like Communism, and the generally religious values of the West. And what they were saying is that for the university to understand correctly what is happening in world affairs, their needs to be a healthy dialogue going on between all three of these subjects, a dialogue that was there through the centuries until recent times when theology was run off campus.

"There is unquestionably a growing student resentment against the suppression by secularists of their right to be exposed to the full spectrum of intellectual debate. Minor secular philosophies have become institutionalized on campus as ultimate truth. These positions are then protected by the simple expedience of refusing debate and runing major challengers, such as theism, off campus. The insights of centruries of Western experience and thought have simply disappeared, from curriculum, bookstores, and textbooks. "

Most frightening, the students concluded that, "The major lesson of Vietnam is that American foreign policy should henceforth take into consideration that our liberal universities, largely apologists for secularism and therefore hostile to the values of the Judeo-Christian majority, 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 LeBoutiellier, "Harvard Hates America.""

That was then. But Harvard still hates America. Especially religious America. Can the university contribute anything to understanding the current world crisis if it has no interest in religion ? For one thing, a major world religion is at the heart of the crisis.

The last words of the 1981 V.V.A.R. Manifesto were:
"The university will now find the courage to face itself, abandon its neo-fascist juxtaposition of ignorance and arrogance, its hypocrisy of a morality based on relativism, and engage in reformation, primarily through confrontation with theology, or it must be by-passed. We are under no further obligation to indulge the deluded with the whole nation now at stake."

part 2 is on its way

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