Perverting College Coursework to Conform to Ideology
The latest onslaught against reason in the university propaganda war on Israel.
October 13, 2016
Richard L. Cravatts
18
AddThis Sharing Buttons
Share to Facebook70Share to TwitterShare to More108Share to Print
In April of 2012, the California Association of Scholars, a division of the National Association of Scholars, prepared a report for the University of California Regents entitled “A Crisis of Competence: The Corrupting Effect of Political Activism in the University of California.” In that report, the association outlined in a thoughtful way how the politicization of teaching by the professoriate degraded academic integrity, conflicted with the core principles of academia, and was antithetical to the promotion of scholarship and the pursuit of meaningful learning.
In fact, the report suggested, “Political activism is the antithesis of academic teaching and research. Its habits of thought and behavior are un-academic, even antiacademic.” Why is that? Because, the report said, “political activism values politically desirable results more than the process by which conclusions are reached. In education, those priorities must be reversed.”
Imposing a one-sided, pre-determined line of thought in coursework has the exact opposite effect that most universities strive to achieve; namely, preventing the truth from emerging as a result of considering competing views and coming to conclusions about the truth by analyzing many views on a topic. “The fixed quality of a political belief system will stifle intellectual curiosity and freedom of thought when it dominates a classroom,” the report noted. “In any worthwhile college education, a student’s mind must have the freedom to think afresh and to follow wherever facts or arguments lead. But this freedom of movement is constrained when the end process of thought has already been fixed in advance by a political agenda.”
http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/264455/perverting-college-coursework-conform-ideology-richard-l-cravatts
