George Leef documents for Forbes readers the frightening ideas of one taxpayer-funded university professor in California.
If you’re someone who thinks that the politicization of education is a bad trend, you’ll be aghast at a recent book arguing that higher education in America needs to have even more of a leftist slant: Why Higher Education Should Have a Leftist Bias by Donald Lazere, a professor emeritus in the English Department at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.
What he wants to accomplish with the book is to show America how horribly it is distorted by corporate/conservative culture and politics. But what Professor Lazere actually accomplishes is to show how poorly many avowedly left-wing academics understand those who don’t subscribe to their belief system.
Lazere says he wrote the book because he wants to make common cause with conservative educators in “elevating the level of civic education to that of reasoned debate.” He writes that most Americans, including college students, aren’t able to think through the constant barrage of false and misleading “right-wing” indoctrination that saturates the country. That creates a “conservative” slant that keeps most Americans from grasping the truths of leftist criticism and seeing how much better off we would be if truly progressive politicians and thinkers could have their way.
In the author’s own words, “Critical pedagogy and left media have a legitimate responsibility to provide minimal balance against the far more powerful forms of conservative bias in American society.”
From Lazere’s perspective, the dark and greedy forces of corporate America and its right-wing attack machine have prevented President Obama from moving full-throttle to transform the U.S. into the wonderful country we could enjoy. He maintains that the country is so dominated by “conservative” thinking that college professors must try to even things up.
It’s impossible to take that seriously.
