Mary Grabar - Bill Ayers: Bringing Down America - Destroying Education

In 1969, hippies and the Vietnam War were abstractions to me, glimpses from photos in an occasional Life Magazine. I had not heard about the Weathermen.

I was twelve years old. In the following year my main source of normalcy and inspiration—my school day--would be turned upside down. I would go to a high school where riots and the threats of riots were commonplace.

Anti-American forces were at work to bring down America.

While I was worrying about junior high school, Larry Grathwohl, who had just come back to Cincinnati from Vietnam, was infiltrating the domestic terrorist group Weatherman, the only one to have done so. Larry saved potentially hundreds of lives when he alerted the FBI to a bomb placed near a Detroit police station and a restaurant.

Bill Ayers, Education Secretary of Weatherman, told him that in the revolution, lives would have to be sacrificed.

This week I have been traveling with Larry and Tina Trent, who have helped republish Larry’s memoir Bringing Down America, about his days with the domestic terrorists. Tina tells the story as we speak to various groups in Florida this week about how she happened to read Larry’s book in high school in the late 1970s. It was the one truthful one amidst a growing collection already devoted to hagiographies of the 1960s radicals in the library.

My interest in Bill Ayers began a few years ago when I learned about his career as a “Distinguished Professor of Education.” In reality he was working to destroy everything that was good about our education system. Ayers, after escaping punishment in 1980, used his position at the University of Illinois at Chicago, to spread his revolutionary ideas throughout the educational system--in the classes he taught, the books and articles he wrote, the conferences he attended, the dissertation committees he sat on, and the political connections he fostered with Barack Obama and Arne Duncan on the Annenberg Challenge.

One of the things that has encouraged me as we’ve talked to these groups is the awareness of Obama and Duncan’s education plan called Common Core. This is a complete federal power grab with an agenda in line with the educational aims of Bill Ayers. The last refuge of conservatives for education, homeschooling and private schools, will effectively be eliminated under Common Core.

I have no evidence directly connecting Bill Ayers to the writing of Common Core, but I do have evidence that Bill Ayers is still very influential in educational circles crafting the project. As I noted in my report for Accuracy in Media, in 2009, Bill Ayers was a keynote speaker at a Washington, D.C., education conference, alongside Arne Duncan, his Under Secretary, and a representative from Achieve, a well-connected D.C.-based non-profit credited with being the architect of Common Core. Linda Darling-Hammond, a longtime close associate of Bill Ayers, and Obama’s education transition team leader, is in charge of developing one of the two national tests that will be administered under Common Core.

More recently, Duncan, Darling-Hammond, and Ayers participated in the annual meeting of AERA, the American Educational Research Association, held in San Francisco from April 27 to May 1, 2013. This professional association boasts of over 25,000 members consisting of faculty, researchers, and graduate students who work at universities and colleges, federal and state agencies, school systems, test companies, and non-profit agencies. Ayers used to be vice president for curriculum in the organization.

Ayers was listed in the program as participating in eight activities this year, including a panel discussion called “The Role of Education in the Quest for Freedom,” “Dystopia and Education,” “Social Imagination and Political Activism in Education,” and “Making Comics as Educational Research and Theory” (his book To Teach: The Journey of a Teacher was adapted into a “graphic,” or comic, book in 2010; it is used widely in colleges of education).

Ayers also coauthored and presented a paper with the Marxist professor of education, Peter McLaren, titled “In Memoriam: Hugo Chavez.” Ayers had traveled at least four times to speak in Venezuela to promote his idea of education as “the motor-force of revolution.”

Arne Duncan

The Department of Education bragged about Arne Duncan’s speech at the AERA conference, which appeared to be devoted entirely to sessions advocating social justice and not academics. They did not mention Ayers.

In his address, Duncan talked about the “sea-change” in “assessments” under Common Core. Darling-Hammond’s tests, he said approvingly, would address “deeper learning.” “Diagnostic or formative assessments” will measure “student growth,” and determine whether students are “college-and-career ready.” Much in line with Ayers’s pedagogical strategy, Duncan hailed the forthcoming Assessment 3.0 that “will shift from seat-based learning to competency-based learning.” The “next frontier in assessment research,” said Duncan, is in “non-cognitive skills.”

Why would a school want to measure “non-cognitive skills” and what does this mean? Aren’t students supposed to be tested on their “cognitive skills,” their knowledge in subjects like history and science, and their skills in subject like math and writing?

Welcome to the Brave New World of social and emotional learning. As I noted, Darling-Hammond has served on the board of CASEL (Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning), based at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where Ayers taught. Welcome to the Bill Ayers way of teaching, through emotionally invasive sessions, indoctrination, chaos, and confusion. (I describe this in my new book Bill Ayers: Teaching Revolution.)

It may be called “Assessment 3.0,” but it sounds an awful lot like the “criticism/self-criticism” sessions of the Weathermen Larry Grathwohl has been describing to me and to our audiences.

Weatherman recruited in high schools. Now they’ve essentially entered the Department of Education.

It’s no longer abstract when you can’t hide or remove your children.

For more information on our tour, go to www.bringingdownamerica.com. The site includes an archive of newspaper articles and documents about the Weathermen, compiled by Tina Trent. In it you will see the shameful history of the media endorsing the Weathermen and helping them lie about their violent pasts. If you’d like to have us come speak to your group, contact us. We’ll be in Georgia next month.

Mary Grabar

Mary Grabar is a writer and college English teacher, whose parents escaped from Slovenia in 1959 and spent a year in a refugee camp in Austria. They immigrated to Rochester, New York, when she was two.

Her views have been formed by experiences as an immigrant during the racial violence in Rochester in the 1960s and then at her alma mater, Benjamin Franklin Junior-Senior High School.

She tried to be a liberal, but then quickly realized that it was an exclusive club. Her conversion to conservatism was cinched when she returned to school in the master's program in English in the 1990's.

In spite of the hostility of most of the faculty and the torture of having to wade through postmodern nonsense, she earned her Ph.D. from the University of Georgia in 2002.

Mary Grabar is a frequent Columnist at Town Hall.com and writes articles for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution Newspaper.

Visit Mary's Website and her other Website: The Literate Citizen

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Mary Grabar - More Radicals for Common Core: The Pro-Amnesty Contingent

My antennae go up whenever any education initiative is associated with radicals, like Bill Ayers. We still don’t know why Bill Ayers was at an education conference with Arne Duncan and a representative from Achieve, the well-connected, Washington-based non-profit organizing this effort to nationalize education.

But once I began investigating the curricula and test questions I learned that sure enough, the rigorous “standards” turned out to be nothing more than efforts to impose a curriculum that will make global citizens out of all American students. Or the kind of curriculum Bill Ayers would like.

Now I learn via Tina Trent that an organization called NALEO (National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials), a pro-amnesty group, co-hosted an event in Los Angeles last month on Common Core.

The NALEO Newsletter announced “NALEO Educational Fund last month co-hosted a national kickoff on the common core state standards, in partnership with the Campaign for High School Equity (CHSE) in Los Angeles.”

They quoted the official line from the Department of Education: “The Common Core State Standards Initiative is a state-led, voluntary effort to establish a single set of educational standards for English-language, arts and mathematics that states can share and adopt. They are designed to ensure that students graduating from high school are prepared for college, employment and success in the global economy.”

Right.

The official propaganda continues: “State leaders, through their membership in the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) and the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices (NGA) Center, have developed a common core of state standards with the assistance of content specialists and education experts.” Common Core, of course, was passed without legislative approval and usually without legislative knowledge, as happened here in Georgia. That’s why Senator William Ligon introduced a bill to withdraw the state from Common Core standards.

So who are these “content specialists and education experts”? It turns out that they are usually radicals, like Bill Ayers’s “pal” Linda Darling-Hammond who is in charge of developing one of the two sets of the nationally administered tests.

The meeting sponsored by NALEO had the usual suspects, and not any traditional Core Knowledge Curriculum representatives in the tradition of E.D. Hirsch, who advocates learning about the literary classics and history: “The program in Los Angeles included local NALEO members and representatives from the NAACP, the National Indian Education Association (NIEA), the South East Asian Resource Asian Center (SEARAC), the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), the National Urban League, the Alliance for Excellent Education, the Leadership Conference on Civil & Human Rights and the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC).”

Trent, who opposed Georgia’s Hate Crimes bill more than a decade ago, says that these are many of the same radical groups who were pushing for hate crimes legislation. And as with the hate crimes law, non-profits are being empowered by the government to promote Common Core. “In the hate crimes model, non-elected non-profits were given vast powers to advise police and develop procedures for identifying and prosecuting so-called ‘hate,’” says Trent. “What we ended up with was the politicization of justice itself, and a handover of government powers to activist groups with an identity politics agenda.” She warns that Common Core is empowering the same activist groups through the federal educational bureaucracy--hardly a process in accord with our republican, representative form of government.

Common Core, it turns out, is just one more way, as she puts it, that we are “handing over government operations to politically driven non-profits.”

Pro-amnesty non-profit groups have been trying to indoctrinate school children about immigration for a long time now. They fought an Arizona law that prohibited teaching hatred towards certain ethnic groups (primarily white Americans), which a Mexican-American (“Raza studies”) studies curriculum did. Education professors have also been using their classrooms to lobby for amnesty. Common Core, the initiative of Obama’s Department of Education, may be the latest way they are trying to deny the sovereignty of the United States in students’ minds.

This information about NALEO and other groups is one more piece of evidence for opposing Common Core. Do we need any more?

For more information about Common Core, see my website, www.dissidentprof.com, where I have a section on Common Core and links to organizations that are fighting this unconstitutional takeover of education.

Mary Grabar

Mary Grabar is a writer and college English teacher, whose parents escaped from Slovenia in 1959 and spent a year in a refugee camp in Austria. They immigrated to Rochester, New York, when she was two.

Her views have been formed by experiences as an immigrant during the racial violence in Rochester in the 1960s and then at her alma mater, Benjamin Franklin Junior-Senior High School.

She tried to be a liberal, but then quickly realized that it was an exclusive club. Her conversion to conservatism was cinched when she returned to school in the master's program in English in the 1990's.

In spite of the hostility of most of the faculty and the torture of having to wade through postmodern nonsense, she earned her Ph.D. from the University of Georgia in 2002.

Mary Grabar is a frequent Columnist at Town Hall.com and writes articles for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution Newspaper.

Visit Mary's Website and her other Website: The Literate Citizen

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Mary Grabar - Skeeter President: Mock on, Americans

"There is still a segment of the American population that will not comply with the kind of order that is demanded by petty dictators who are incapable of commanding respect in other ways.

Obama, the quintessential metrosexual, has been as careful as Vladimir Putin to project an image of command, from the jaunty run on the steps of Air Force One, to the overly crisp military salute, to the affected steely gaze, to the decisive end to sentences (skewered on Saturday Night Live). He began his campaign with Roman columns, after all."
Mary Grabar

”This official White House photograph is being made available only for publication by news organizations and/or for personal use printing by the subject(s) of the photograph. The photograph may not be manipulated in any way and may not be used in commercial or political materials, advertisements, emails, products, promotions that in any way suggests approval or endorsement of the President, the First Family, or the White House.”

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Mary Grabar - Sam Tanenhaus’s Fevered Historical Imagination About the Racist GOP

Where to begin with the screed in The New Republic, “Original Sin: Why the GOP is and will continue to be the party of white people,” mislabeled “an historical investigation”?

In his claim that racism is the original and irredeemable sin of Republicans, Tanenhaus sets up the contrast to “the civil rights pageantry of the [Obama second] inauguration—Abraham Lincoln’s Bible and Martin Luther King’s, Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s swearing in of Joe Biden, Beyoncé’s slinky glamor [sic], the verses read by the gay Cuban poet Richard Blanco.”

In his enthusiasm, Tanenhaus missed the irony of using the word “pageantry,” which the dictionary defines as “mere show” or “an ostentatious display,” even as he indicts the GOP for its “history of long-standing indifference, at times outright hostility, to the nation’s diverse constituencies—blacks, women, Latinos, Asians, gays.”

Perhaps it was the lilting lines of Blanco’s inaugural poem, “All of us as vital as the one light we move through / the same light on blackboards with lessons for the day: equations to solve. . . .” that to Tanenaus conveyed “an assertion of Democratic solidarity.”

Like many other white liberals, he lectures the blacks, women, Latinos, Asians, and gays who vote Republican by presumably giving them a history lesson on John C. Calhoun, vice president under Andrew Jackson.

To Calhoun’s ideas of nullification (code for the right to own slaves) Tanenhaus links today’s “resisters—most glaringly Tea Partiers.” Today’s “most recent immigrants,” according to Tanenhaus, sense the “’hidden hand’ of Calhoun’s style of dissent, the extended lineage of rearguard politics, with its aggrieved call, heard so often today, ‘to take back America.’” This is all part of the lingering infatuation with the ‘lost cause.” Even “a new cast of GOP leaders—Ted Cruz, Nikki Haley, Bobby Jindal, Marco Rubio” have become “tethered to movement ideology.” Cruz, especially because he urged a “partial government shutdown” at the recent National Review Institute conference, cannot understand how his participation harkens back to the segregationist policies of Calhoun, George Wallace, and Barry Goldwater, who resisted the inevitable ushering in of the “egalitarian” one-party system of big government and majority rule.

Were he not so obsessed with proving “a politics of frustration and rage . . . most evident within the GOP’s dwindling base—its insurgents and anti-government crusaders, its ‘middle-aged white guys,’” Tanenhaus might have had time to do some historical checking, like reading one short speech by Senator Barry Goldwater. It would have helped to recall the 1964 smear campaign by segregationist Democrats who understood which way the political winds blew. They had shifted toward integration, often in sacrifice of the Constitution. Lyndon Johnson, former segregationist, is reported to have promised “to have these n*****s voting Democratic for the next two hundred years.”

Barry Goldwater understood this and noted it in his speech explaining why he voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act, an action Tanenhaus misrepresents. (The speech is reproduced in The Story of the Draft Goldwater Movement and other books about the 1964 presidential campaign.)

Goldwater, contrary to Tanenhaus’s casting, begins his speech:

“There have been few, if any, occasions when the searching of my conscience and the re-examination of my views of our constitutional system have played a greater part in the determination of my vote than they have on this occasion.

“I am unalterably opposed to discrimination or segregation on the basis of race, color or creed, or on any other basis; not only my words, but more importantly my actions through the years have repeatedly demonstrated the sincerity of my feeling in this regard.”

Goldwater mentioned his twelve years as a member of the Senate Labor and Public Welfare Committee when he “repeatedly offered amendments to bills pertaining to labor that would end discrimination in unions” (a Democratic-stronghold with entrenched segregationists repeatedly criticized by Goldwater supporter, journalist George Schuyler).

Goldwater reminded Congress that “repeatedly those amendments have been turned down by the very members of both parties who now so vociferously support the present approach.” Those presuming to do “historical investigations” should read histories that reveal Goldwater’s lifelong support for civil rights.

For example, Lee Edwards’s well-known biography:

As a member of the Phoenix City Council [elected in 1949], Goldwater had voted to desegregate the restaurant at Sky Harbor Airport. As chief of state for the Arizona Air National Guard, he had pushed for desegregation of the guard. As a businessman, he had opened his doors to everyone. As senator, he had desegregated the Senate cafeteria in 1953, insisting that his black legislative assistant, Katherine Maxwell, be served along with every other Senate employee. As an individual citizen, he had donated generously to the Arizona NAACP, including a $200 check in 1952 to its legal defense fund to speed integration of the public schools.

Goldwater was a member of the Phoenix and Tucson chapters of the NAACP, until that organization, infiltrated by radicals, started attacking him politically. He was also a strong supporter of the Phoenix Urban League and in 1991 received their Humanitarian Award “’for fifty years of loyal service.’”

But Goldwater—unlike progressives—did not brag.

In his speech he only reminded Congress of his support for the 1957 and 1960 civil rights bills, opposed by many of the same Democrats clamoring for the 1964 bill.

Goldwater stated, “My public utterances during the debates on those measures and since reveal clearly the areas in which I feel that federal responsibility lies and federal legislation on this subject can be both effective and appropriate.”

Goldwater felt the 1964 bill was “effective and appropriate” except for Titles II and VII regarding public accommodations and employment. “I find no constitutional basis for the exercise of federal regulatory authority in either of these areas,” he went on. “The attempted usurpation of such power,” he said, was a “grave threat to the very essence of our basic system of government” and to the “freedoms of the very persons whose feelings and whose liberties are the major subject of this legislation.”

Goldwater would not compromise his oath to uphold the Constitution, an act that was supported wholeheartedly by the great journalist and black civil rights advocate George Schuyler. His amendments were not accepted, so with a reluctant heart and knowing that his vote would be “misconstrued” Goldwater voted against the act.

His vote was not only “misconstrued,” but used in a smear campaign against him, started by fellow Republicans like William Scranton. At the 1964 Republican Convention in San Francisco, 40,000 civil rights demonstrators picked up the ball and denounced Goldwater as Hitler. CBS reporter Daniel Schorr then spread a false report that Goldwater was to meet with Nazi holdovers on an upcoming trip to Germany. Schorr would go on to pontificate regularly at taxpayer-funded NPR—until his death in 2010—the same station that gave Tanenhaus a platform to expand on his lies.

Goldwater’s vote against the 1964 bill was misrepresented by his opponents, and by historians and textbook writers ever since.

The civil rights movement had been hijacked by the New Leftists (“communists with a small ‘c’”). The majority of blacks and old-line civil rights leaders rejected these (white) radicals’ demands for redistribution of property and loose sexual mores (“smashing monogamy”) under the cover of civil rights.

Nevertheless, Tanenhaus claims that any objections to excesses are mere excuses. Shamefully, Tanenhaus writes that Goldwater “joined the Dixie contingent . . . when he opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.” He quotes Richard Rovere, Depression-era communist and writer for the New Masses, and then writer for the Nation and the New Yorker:

“for Goldwater the opportunity had been all but foreclosed by Brent Bozell—or some other hand guided by the ‘guiding hand’—in The Conscience of a Conservative. In that book, Goldwater allowed himself to be committed to a states’-rights position that Jefferson Davis could hardly have found acceptable.”

Ah, yes, the magical ‘guiding hand’ of Brent Bozell!

Tannenhaus brings readers to the present, to the ominous Calhounists of the Tea Party and the “Tea Party-inflected House of Representatives,” who “speak in the bitter tones of denial, as modernization and egalitarianism go forward.” “Nullification” is a threat and a code from those who challenge “’Obamacare.’”

“We see it as well,” continues Tanenhaus, “in Senator Rand Paul’s promise to ‘nullify anything the president does’ to impose new gun controls.”

For Tanenhaus upholding the Constitution is synonymous with racism. For him, disagreements over healthcare and gun control are not a “practical attempt to find a better answer,” but a ‘Constitutional’ demand for restoration of the nation to its hallowed prior self. It is not a coincidence that the resurgence of nullification is happening while our first African American president is in office.”

Of course, there are no “coincidences” for those like Tanenhaus. It must be the ghosts of Brent Bozell and John C. Calhoun that guide the racist hearts of those who disagree with the pure-hearted, perfectly egalitarian guardian of “blacks, women, Latinos, Asians, gays,” Sam Tanenhaus.

Mary Grabar

Mary Grabar is a writer and college English teacher, whose parents escaped from Slovenia in 1959 and spent a year in a refugee camp in Austria. They immigrated to Rochester, New York, when she was two.

Her views have been formed by experiences as an immigrant during the racial violence in Rochester in the 1960s and then at her alma mater, Benjamin Franklin Junior-Senior High School.

She tried to be a liberal, but then quickly realized that it was an exclusive club. Her conversion to conservatism was cinched when she returned to school in the master's program in English in the 1990's.

In spite of the hostility of most of the faculty and the torture of having to wade through postmodern nonsense, she earned her Ph.D. from the University of Georgia in 2002.

Mary Grabar is a frequent Columnist at Town Hall.com and writes articles for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution Newspaper.

Visit Mary's Website and her other Website: The Literate Citizen

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Mary Grabar - Common Core: Orwellian Lessons in Florida

Ask any college freshman what he knows about communism and he will likely engage in a word association game.

“The red scare, McCarthyism,” he will blurt out, displaying lessons well-learned from his textbooks and teachers.

One way to go beyond the idea of communism as evidence of paranoia, though, is to recall George Orwell’s Animal Farm. “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others” will be the phrase students recall. Students seem to get that “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” never works out in reality from this fictional work.

This novel shows how literature can sometimes demonstrate historical realities better than many textbooks.

But with the Obama administration’s unconstitutional program of nationalizing education, students will not likely be able to experience the insights and pleasures of novels, like Orwell’s. In 2009, during the economic “crisis,” states were offered part of the $4.35 billion in stimulus funds in a hurried contest called Race to the Top. After the initial application, they were told that they would have to adhere to national standards and testing called Common Core, sight unseen, and without any legislative input. Forty-eight states signed on initially; today, 45 states are committed to CC—although citizens and teachers are organizing against it.

The standards, now in place for math and English, emphasize “work and career readiness”--that is for workers who see themselves as global citizens unacquainted with their national and cultural heritage. This became apparent as I read the recent article, “Teachers Get Help with Common Core Lessons Through (sic) CPALMS,” at the NPR site. This was also because one of the CPALMS lessons for English/Language Arts was on Animal Farm.

The article explained that as Common-Core aligned assessments and textbooks are being written, the state of Florida is using a federal Race to the Top grant from the Department of Education to develop a site of resources for teachers who are scrambling to adhere to the new standards.

Pinnellas County School Superintendant Mike Grego recently told the Florida State Board of Education that there is “no resistance” to Common Core. At the same time, Florida’s new state superintendant, Tony Bennett, is steamrolling in the curriculum. Bennett, by the way, lost reelection in Indiana, many believe, because of his support for Common Core.

The lack of “resistance” may very well be due to the behind-the-scenes maneuvering by the Department of Education that bypassed state legislatures and public input, often gaining the support of Republicans with vague promises of “rigor” and uniform “standards.” Most in the politically informed Tea Party Manatee audience before whom I spoke on the evening of January 8 were not aware of this federal takeover of education.

Among the points I made are those from my recent report for Accuracy in Media. National tests (being written by close, like-minded colleagues of terrorist-turned-education-professor Bill Ayers, like Stanford education professor Linda Darling-Hammond) will eventually nullify the idea of private schools and even home schools. Some Catholic and other religious schools are already beginning to adopt Common Core standards as they see college entrance exams being written to CC specifications. The 45 participating states are also required to keep data bases of students from “cradle to career”--to use Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s favorite phrase--and submit them to the federal government, in effect making a national database.

Some conservative organizations have protested this unconstitutional power grab by the Department of Education.

But the mandate to replace literature in English classes with “informational texts”—with only half the time allotted to literature, and reduced to only 30 percent by the last two years of high school—caught the attention of even the liberal media. They became alarmed that favorites like To Kill a Mockingbird and Catcher in the Rye are to be replaced by such things as EPA directives.

Spokesmen tried to alleviate fears. They directed skeptics to the standards: “the Standards require a certain critical content for all students including classic myths and stories from around the world, America’s Founding Documents, foundational American literature, and Shakespeare.” Plus, they “intentionally do not offer a reading list.” David Coleman the well-connected new president of the College Board, which writes and administers college entrance exams, has pointed to these caveats, and repeated the claim that the standards call for evidence-based writing instead of writing based on personal experience and feelings. (See the very funny takedown by the Pioneer Institute’s James Stergios of how the advocate of “close reading,” David Coleman, mixed up Federalist 51 and 10 in an instructional video.)

Animal Farm would seem to fall into the category of classical literature that the bureaucrats and educrats refer to in attempts to mollify critics. Those who wrote the ninth and tenth-grade lesson plans for CPALMS (Collaborate, Plan, Align, Learn, Motivate, Share) seemed to have this in mind. First, the novel is put into the broad category of “fables” from Aesop, with a list of those usually taught to young children like “The Tortoise and the Hare.” In typical Common Core fashion, students are to search out “elements” of a fable and then mechanically fill in a chart that is provided as a hand-out in the lesson plan.

Did anyone consider, though, that the comparison to a fable for preschoolers might be insulting to teenagers? The teacher’s version of the chart has the blanks filled in, with the element of the “problem” described as “Power can make the animals corrupt; they struggle to take care of the farm and with leadership.” The “resolution” is “The farm ends up being worse with the animals in control because of too much power and corruptness by the pigs.” The “moral/lesson” is “Power Corrupts, and Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely.” (The source for this quotation, the conservative historian Lord Acton, is not mentioned, however.)

All this is very general. And when one compares it to other sample lessons in Common Core and its standards, one sees that it is deliberately so. While one small mention is made in a sheet on the “elements of a fable” that Animal Farm is “satirized Stalinist Communism, in particular, and totalitarianism, in general” it is clear that the novel is to be taught in a historic vacuum. The pointed criticisms of communism are generalized to an indictment of a vague sense of too much “power.”

This exercise recalls one that gave consternation to teachers when they were instructed to read Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address without emotion and without providing any historical context. Common Core reduces all “texts” to one level: the Gettysburg Address to the EPA’s Recommended Levels of Insulation. This leveling is demonstrated in another lesson plan at CPALMS that involves the historical young adult novel Kidnapped in Key West, where teachers are told to “avoid giving any background context or instructional guidance at the outset of the lesson while students are reading the text chorally.” This kind of “close reading” presumably “forces students to rely exclusively on the text instead of privileging background knowledge and levels the playing field for all students as they seek to comprehend the text.”

Leveling the playing field is a primary objective of the Obama Department of Education, and Common Core presents a means to do so by encouraging such “close” or “deep” reading. Reading the “text” “chorally,” which Merriam-Webster defines as "sung," implies reading aloud in unison. It ensures that all students, including struggling readers, are brought along with the group. Such objectives are in line with Darling-Hammond’s educational agenda. The former Obama education transition team director is in charge of using $176 in Race-to-the-Top funds to develop tests for one of two consortia and is implementing her “five-dimensional grading rubric” of personal responsibility, social responsibility, communication skills, application of knowledge, and critical and creative thinking. This assessment philosophy had the dubious distinction of placing her Stanford New Schools on California’s list of the lowest-achieving five percent. Now about half of American students will be required to take her tests.

The sample test questions released by her consortia give no indication that acquisition of knowledge is important. As I noted in my other reports, social responsibility is the aim of the new curriculum materials being developed. They follow Arne Duncan’s stated purpose for schools: to be part of the “battle for social justice.”

Many have been fooled by rhetoric that simply repeats the talking points of the Department of Education and the well-connected leftists in the education field who will profit from our tax dollars by selling teacher training, software and hardware, and Common Core-aligned curricula. Bernie Reeves even called David Coleman an “education hero” in American Thinker. I thought it might be a satire, or Newspeak.

Duncan, who worked with Bill Ayers in Chicago on education issues, is on the same page, as is Darling-Hammond. Obama’s signature education initiative has been dubbed “Obama Core” for good reason. It is an Orwellian re-education campaign.

Florida’s sample lesson for teaching, among all things, Animal Farm, provides an illustration of how this is being done.

Mary Grabar

Mary Grabar is a writer and college English teacher, whose parents escaped from Slovenia in 1959 and spent a year in a refugee camp in Austria. They immigrated to Rochester, New York, when she was two.

Her views have been formed by experiences as an immigrant during the racial violence in Rochester in the 1960s and then at her alma mater, Benjamin Franklin Junior-Senior High School.

She tried to be a liberal, but then quickly realized that it was an exclusive club. Her conversion to conservatism was cinched when she returned to school in the master's program in English in the 1990's.

In spite of the hostility of most of the faculty and the torture of having to wade through postmodern nonsense, she earned her Ph.D. from the University of Georgia in 2002.

Mary Grabar is a frequent Columnist at Town Hall.com and writes articles for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution Newspaper.

Visit Mary's Website and her other Website: The Literate Citizen

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Mary Grabar - Story and Politics

Republicans, especially those within the ranks of the establishment, have insisted that during this general presidential election, it is upon the policies—not the person—of Barack Obama that they will set their sights.

This judgment is understandable enough.

For one, Obama is a Democrat. As such, he has the juggernaut of the so-called mainstream press behind him. Republicans, that is, are at a considerable disadvantage in the public relations war.

Also, and at least as importantly, the Democratic occupant of the White House has been universally hailed as America’s “first black president.”

Considering that decades worth of leftist propaganda courtesy of the media and the Democratic Party has succeeded in creating the popular perception that Republicans don’t like blacks, it would be all too easy for Mitt Romney and company to be portrayed as “racist.”

Of course, Romney and his supporters are already depicted as “racist.” And as time draws nearer to Election Day, charges of “racism” promise to accelerate in both frequency and intensity.

There is another reason why Republicans may want to reconsider playing things too close to the vest.

Simply put, the voter does not live by policy alone.

The economy is the most important issue for the electorate, so talk of debts and deficits is imperative. However, most of us don’t get too terribly excited about numbers, and when those numbers are in the billions and trillions, the average person will not relate to such abstractions.

But if economic (and other issues) are situated within the context of a story, then otherwise dead facts can be brought to life.

Actually, even this is an understatement of the power of narrative in politics. Obama, for instance, spoke scarcely of facts at all in the election of 2008. Rather, he espoused glittering (yet entirely vapid) rhetorical generalities and scored a decisive victory over his opponent.

What Obama knows is what all great orators and rhetoricians have always known: the heart is much easier to move than the head.

It seems that if they didn’t know it before, Republicans are now beginning to discover this as well. This, at any rate, is what can reasonably be taken away from two recent developments: Ann Romney’s speech at the Republican National Convention and Dinesh D’Souza’s documentary, 2016: Obama’s America. Together, these two phenomena may very well have swung the election decidedly in Mitt Romney’s favor.

Ann Romney’s speech at the Republican National Convention on Tuesday night situated her husband’s campaign within a larger narrative context of his life. That is, while we have known about Mitt Romney the politician, we now know about Romney the person. D’Souza’s film, on the other hand, serves the invaluable function of doing for Obama what Mrs. Romney’s speech did for her husband.

Mrs. Romney took a wrecking ball to the story of Romney “the vulture capitalist,” the “tax cheat,” the cool, merciless gazillionaire that the Obama campaign has labored long and hard to craft. She humanized her husband by recounting the tribulations and joys of their long life together. Ann introduced to the world Mitt the loving father of five wholesome boys and grandfather to ten children; the devoted husband of a wife to whom he has been faithful for 43 years, through good times and bad; the grateful son who recognized his parents’ gifts for the divine blessings that they were by working tirelessly—and successfully—to bring them to fruition.

Contrary to what Obama and his allies in Washington and the media would have us believe, the Mitt Romney of whom Ann Romney spoke most definitely does not put profits before people.

While Ann Romney is telling her husband’s story, Dinesh D’Souza continues to tell Obama’s in an ever increasing number of cinema theaters around the country. And the two stories couldn’t be more different.

D’Souza does not dispute Obama’s claim that he was born in Hawaii. However, he tries to show that although the President was born in America, he is not of it. Rather, Obama views the country with the same kind of skepticism, even indignation, with which the Third World subjects of colonial rule—like his African family—view America. Obama’s utterances and deeds since taking office, D’Souza contends, make perfect sense when considered against the backdrop of his “anti-colonial” vision. We learn that these policies are not the products of Obama’s incompetence. They aren’t even the fruits (or poisons) of conventional Democratic politics. They reflect Obama’s obsession to rectify the injustices to which formerly colonized peoples in the Third World had been subjected by Westerners.

Republicans should continue with their talk of policies. Yet they must be equally ready to tell good stories.

Mary Grabar

Mary Grabar is a writer and college English teacher, whose parents escaped from Slovenia in 1959 and spent a year in a refugee camp in Austria. They immigrated to Rochester, New York, when she was two.

Her views have been formed by experiences as an immigrant during the racial violence in Rochester in the 1960s and then at her alma mater, Benjamin Franklin Junior-Senior High School.

She tried to be a liberal, but then quickly realized that it was an exclusive club. Her conversion to conservatism was cinched when she returned to school in the master's program in English in the 1990's.

In spite of the hostility of most of the faculty and the torture of having to wade through postmodern nonsense, she earned her Ph.D. from the University of Georgia in 2002.

Mary Grabar is a frequent Columnist at Town Hall.com and writes articles for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution Newspaper.

Visit Mary's Website and her other Website: The Literate Citizen

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Mary Grabar - The Historically Incorrect Smear of Paul Ryan

Recently announced Vice Presidential pick Paul Ryan is being called a radical by the left for his fiscal policies. But no one would expect that anyone would imply that the Roman Catholic family man would be a Black Panther. Yet, the New York Times ran the headline "Paul Ryan, Black Panther?" on the day after the announcement was made. This was in a series called “Historically Corrected.”

(So when will the New York Times allow me to blog in a series titled “Why You Should Read George Orwell and Other Novelists”?)

This of course was false advertising, for anyone reading it could see that the three (three!) authors were stretching to make a connection between what Paul Ryan's father had often told him and a possible membership in the Black Panthers.

These three authors took a phrase that has over the decades become part of our everyday parlance--"If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem"--traced its use back to Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver, and speculated that Ryan had made the "Republicans' big tent a little bigger." Is it a joke, or do they really want to imply that the Republican Party welcomes the Black Panthers who did more than serve breakfast to poor children, like rape and murder, including their own members?

And the three authors are not the proverbial Tea Partiers sitting around in their pajamas blogging about various conspiracies--as the left so often characterizes conservative bloggers.

No, these three individuals are professors at Washington College, where they are affiliated with the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience.

The regularly featured New York Times blog post, "Historically Corrected," under which this post ran, is a project of the Center's faculty and students. These three authors of the 680-word blog post were assisted by two student researchers.

The eminent scholars are:

The Center Director, Adam Goodheart, a Civil War historian, who blogs regularly for the New York Times "Opinionator" series, as well as for such publications as the Atlantic and American Scholar.

Peter Manseau, Scholar in Residence, also a lecturer in English, who is working on his doctorate in religious studies. Most of his writing is in fiction and memoir. His scholarship seems to veer toward the creative and religous--and not to "historical correction."

Ted Widmer is described as "former presidential speechwriter" and founding director of the Center. What is not stated in the byline is that Widmer was a speechwriter for Bill Clinton. I did not need a student assistant to soon find that Widmer is an Affiliated Scholar at the Center for American Progress. CAP, of course, is heavily funded by billionaire George Soros who was convicted for insider trading and who bankrolled Barack Obama's election. According to the website, Widmer "designed the prototype for the American Studies Institute, a collaborative project with the State Department that brings young Muslims to the United States for summer programs." We are told that his research "concentrates on U.S. history particularly presidential history, the colonial period, and the 19th and the 20th centuries." He is also "doing scholarly work on how U.S. history shapes electoral politics." Methinks it might be the other way around, especially given this latest account of Black Panther history.

We can expect smearing and innuendo during campaign season. We can expect it from the liberal media. We know about the campaign of personal attack begun in 1964 when it was honed so well by Daniel Schorr and Bill Moyers who went on to fame and fortune at the government media outlet NPR. But when supposed scholars engage in the smearing of a candidate through a stretch that would not meet the standards of the supermarket tabloid and under the pretense of correcting history that is a new low. These three scholars, instead, are acting like members of the Ministry of Truth, er, I mean Obama's "Truth Team."

Mary Grabar

Mary Grabar is a writer and college English teacher, whose parents escaped from Slovenia in 1959 and spent a year in a refugee camp in Austria. They immigrated to Rochester, New York, when she was two.

Her views have been formed by experiences as an immigrant during the racial violence in Rochester in the 1960s and then at her alma mater, Benjamin Franklin Junior-Senior High School.

She tried to be a liberal, but then quickly realized that it was an exclusive club. Her conversion to conservatism was cinched when she returned to school in the master's program in English in the 1990's.

In spite of the hostility of most of the faculty and the torture of having to wade through postmodern nonsense, she earned her Ph.D. from the University of Georgia in 2002.

Mary Grabar is a frequent Columnist at Town Hall.com and writes articles for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution Newspaper.

Visit Mary's Website and her other Website: The Literate Citizen

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Mary Grabar - Georgia Professors Bribe Students to Lobby Legislators

Why would GALEO (Georgia Association of Latino Elected Officials), which lobbies against enforcement of immigration laws, thank “students” and “educators” (among others) for defeating Georgia bills restricting illegal aliens? Their April 9 newsletter joyfully announces in a headline “ZERO anti-immigrant [sic] legislation from GA passed.”

Well, it’s because educators, public school teachers, and professors at Georgia public colleges and universities used their positions to influence students and engaged in lobbying efforts. At the Georgia State University College of Education, during a February 4 “Teach-In,” ostensibly to discuss curricula banned in Arizona, one of those professors pledged to give her students “extra points” for bringing in letters to legislators opposing bills that would enforce immigration laws—therefore bribing students with grades.

You can see the video of Jennifer Esposito, Associate Professor of Education at Georgia State University, making this pledge on my website Dissident Prof here.

On March 19, I testified about this at a House committee hearing on SB 458, a bill that “would have streamlined the process by which public benefits are administered and ended the official acceptance of undocumented foreign passports from illegal aliens as useable ID in Georgia,” according to D.A. King, president of the Georgia-based Dustin Inman Society, a group that advocates for enforcement of immigration laws. At the hearing, one of the many members of the illegal alien lobby present yelled out that she had been at the Teach-In and that I was lying. Chairman Rich Golick replied to her, “We’re not engaging in a dialogue here. . . . We’re not shouting out. That’s not the way the system works here.” It happens towards the end of the eight-minute testimony here.

You can also hear Golick call this information an “extremely disturbing reality” and promise to “explore that on a different track.”

GALEO focused on education benefits and cast SB 458, as “Georgia's Anti-DREAM Act,” because it “would have placed Georgia in the extreme position of being one of three states in the nation that deny access to higher education to undocumented students.” That’s the way the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported it too.

Sponsor Barry Loudermilk’s explanation—made with exceeding logic and patience during debate—however, was all but ignored. The bill was really about public benefits for illegal aliens and the type of documentation needed. PUBLIC education—at public universities—is a public benefit; under the bill, Georgia would enforce federal law and deny illegal aliens access to public universities. One of the points Loudermilk kept repeating, as opponent after opponent played the “children just wanting education” pity card, was that SB 458 did not prohibit access to PRIVATE colleges. But for GALEO higher education is synonymous with public higher education, one that they believe illegal aliens have a right to enjoy.

By the fortieth and last day of the session the by then toxic provision about higher education benefits would have been struck out had the bill been allowed to go to the House floor.

The Speaker of the House, David Ralston, however, did not call the bill up for a vote. There was a “skyrocket high majority” of votes in both houses to pass the bill, according to King. In his latest newsletter, King blames Governor Nathan Deal as the “root cause” for defeat.

But the negative cast on the bill, as affecting innocent children, was promoted by employees of the University System of Georgia, in the classroom and at the “Teach-In,” where the dean of the College of Education opened the day’s events with remarks in Spanish. D.A. King is used to seeing students and educators pack hearing rooms and dominate testimony. He calls most American universities “de facto training camps for future anti-enforcement radicals.”

The Board of Regents has been on the side of admitting illegal aliens to Georgia public universities. Chancellor Hank Huckaby testified AGAINST SB 458 on March 19, 2012. But in 2011, before he was appointed to the position by Governor Nathan Deal--when he was REPRESENTATIVE Huckaby--he voted FOR a similar bill, HB 59. One of the activists at the Teach-In bragged that legislators had “listened” to the many students and educators and tabled HB 59. According to King, at that earlier hearing opponents of HB 59 were allowed to take up far more than their allotted three minutes to speak; the chair, Carl Rogers, would not allow a vote, when it was clear that the bill had the votes to pass out of committee.

Why SB 458 failed in the GOP-controlled Georgia Capitol is somewhat of a mystery, although King said he has some theories about why the bill was refused a House vote.

What is not a mystery is that professors and administrators are using public facilities and using students for their own political lobbying purposes.

In addition to revisiting this immigration bill during the next session, legislators need to examine the corruption in education. The balance of power needs to be restored, back to the people who pay for the public institutions.

Mary Grabar

Mary Grabar is a writer and college English teacher, whose parents escaped from Slovenia in 1959 and spent a year in a refugee camp in Austria. They immigrated to Rochester, New York, when she was two.

Her views have been formed by experiences as an immigrant during the racial violence in Rochester in the 1960s and then at her alma mater, Benjamin Franklin Junior-Senior High School.

She tried to be a liberal, but then quickly realized that it was an exclusive club. Her conversion to conservatism was cinched when she returned to school in the master's program in English in the 1990's.

In spite of the hostility of most of the faculty and the torture of having to wade through postmodern nonsense, she earned her Ph.D. from the University of Georgia in 2002.

Mary Grabar is a frequent Columnist at Town Hall.com and writes articles for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution Newspaper.

Visit Mary's Website and her other Website: The Literate Citizen

NOTE: To share or email this 'Specific' article, you must click on the Title of the article.

Mary Grabar - Editors Collude With "Distinguished" Professors to Silence Education Reform Debate

What happens when an education editor wants to advance her own liberal agenda, even as her newspaper, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, brags about “Bringing Balance to Opinions”?

She publishes an op-ed by a “Distinguished Professor” demolishing a bill she dislikes. She denies the same opportunity to a supporter of such legislation, who does not have tenure because of her conservative views. The education editor acts like she has done her duty by bringing on the scene an “expert,” before whom too many legislators bow down in obeisance. So the public is kept in the dark, and the bill, Georgia SB 426, the “Teach Freedom” act, never gets out of subcommittee.

This is what happened after this writer proposed a column to Maureen Downey at the AJC, on Tuesday, March 6. The email was not answered. Two days later, a column by James C. Cobb, the Spalding Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Georgia, appeared in Downey’s “Get Schooled” blog. The column was then published the following Monday on the Opinion pages with the title “Taking an Ideological Ax to U.S. History.” The following Friday it was featured as #1 among the “top 10” on the History News Network and then on the following Monday with the title, “Georgia Senate Tries to Whitewash the Founding Fathers.”

To my second email inquiry, Downey replied, “I might be interested for online if your piece speaks to this bill specifically.” In other words, the Distinguished Professor will have a prominent place on the printed pages that Georgia legislators read, but I “might” get a shot at a post on her blog—if I stay within the lines.

Professor Cobb begins his op-ed by presenting himself as taking the high moral ground: “In the 43 years that I have taught United States history in both state universities and the public schools, I have done my best to resist the temptation to turn my lectern into a ‘bully pulpit’ for proselytizing my personal political gospel” (but his university web page reveals a focus on race, class, and gender.)

He continues, “Not surprisingly, I also get my back up when others, with no particular preparation in the field but a truckload of ideological axes to grind, attempt to prescribe both the content of historical curricula and the lessons that are to be drawn from them.”

In other words, citizens and their representatives (“with no particular preparation in the field”) should just shut up.

Professor Cobb, however, does not address the kind of “field preparation” our teachers do receive.

Back in 2010, in the wake of a test-cheating scandal in Georgia, I discussed at the John William Pope Center for Higher Education the pathetic preparation teachers do receive. I noted that a Clayton State University Assistant Professor of Education, Mari Ann Roberts, in her AJC op-ed on the scandal wondered why students should even have to know the dates of the Civil War.

I also noted Clayton State’s weak requirements in subject areas for education majors, especially those teaching middle school social studies; they spend only 12 credit hours out of a total of 122 in upper-division classes in their primary subject area, with another 12 in the secondary subject area. Only three of the four required upper-division social science classes are from the history department, and they include the watered-versions geared toward education majors.

Indeed, a scan of web pages of education professors across the state shows an emphasis on far-left ideological concerns rather than on the subject matter, like history or math. For example, Jennifer Esposito, Associate Professor of Research, Measurement, and Statistics in the College of Education at Georgia State University, lists her areas of interest as, “Urban education, popular culture, race, gender, class.” At Georgia Southern University, Michelle Reidel’s teaching and research areas include not only social studies, but “Teaching for Social Justice.” William Reynolds’ interests are “Post-structural analysis of curriculum issues, curriculum theory, film studies, cultural curriculum studies, critical teaching, critical thinking, Freirian approaches to pedagogy”--the last a reference to the Marxist theorist Paulo Freire.

But Professor Cobb accuses reformers of ideological bias: “A textbook example of such an effort to control the textbooks is Georgia Senate Bill 426...‘The Teach Freedom Act’ seeks to ‘modify requirements for instruction’ in U.S. history and other related social studies disciplines. In keeping with the spirit of a similar initiative launched with Tea Party backing in Tennessee, this legislation is premised on the belief that ‘a positive understanding of American history and government is essential to good citizenship.’”

The mention of the “Tea Party backing” invites sophisticates onto the bandwagon. (To learn how professors talk about the Tea Party at their conferences, see my article here.) Professor Cobb continues, “The problem from the get-go here is that the bill seeks a positive understanding rather than an informed one.”

But is it all right that students have an entirely negative understanding of this country’s history? Future teachers are being taught by America-hating ideologues. In 2009, I wrote about social studies teachers sharing subversive teaching strategies. Last month, education professors and activists helped themselves to the facilities and education funds of Georgia State University to hold a teach-in, where in addition to strategizing on making their students lobbyists against bills restricting illegal immigration, they strategized on incorporating curricula banned in Arizona that advocate the overthrow of the U.S. government and inspire hatred toward certain ethnic groups. How to use Rethinking Columbus (one of the banned books) was the topic of a workshop I attended with professors, education students, and teachers there. (Read my account on my site, Dissident Prof.)

Professor Cobb, referring to an old version of the bill, then calls the sponsors “poorly informed on the history of their own state.”

He focuses on a single, tangential issue about slavery in Georgia, a point about which historians might debate. But the point serves as diversion. He disregards the legislation’s intent: to address the problem of inadequate attention to teaching about America’s founding era and the founding principles of our government in public K-12 education. Instead, Professor Cobb seeks to safeguard the type of revisionist history that infuses our classrooms.

Dismayed by the bill’s provision that history be taught “chronologically,” he continues, “History is more than a mere succession of events. . . . Students may like the idea of simply memorizing the main events of each year from 1776 to 1787, but such an approach promises little in the way of a comprehensive understanding of developments such as ‘growing dissatisfaction with the Articles of Confederation,’ a mandated point of emphasis in SB 426.”

In this, he misrepresents the bill, which addresses the inadequacies of the current standards, now with thematic units based on minor figures, arranged haphazardly. The bill does not call for “simply memorizing the main events.” Knowing key dates in context will prevent ignorance, like that of our current generation of graduates who often cannot even place key events--like the Civil War--within the correct half century. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) showed that only 24% of high school seniors achieved a level of proficiency or above on the 2010 test on civics, a decline from 2006.

Nevertheless, Professor Cobb concludes, “Regardless of whether it best serves the agenda of Glenn Beck or Jesse Jackson, to institutionalize such a narrowly constructed narrative of the past based on such a heavily ideologized [sic] assessment of the needs of the present is to encumber future generations with a version of history that they may hardly recognize, much less find instructive.”

Unfortunately, too few of our professors object to the Jesse Jackson version of history, which is “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western civilization’s got to go,” to quote the chant he led on the campus of Stanford University in the 1980s.

“Distinguished professors,” whose credentials are usually conferred by a mutual admiration society of radicals, shouldn’t have the final word on legislation proposed by the people’s representatives.

Mary Grabar

Mary Grabar is a writer and college English teacher, whose parents escaped from Slovenia in 1959 and spent a year in a refugee camp in Austria. They immigrated to Rochester, New York, when she was two.

Her views have been formed by experiences as an immigrant during the racial violence in Rochester in the 1960s and then at her alma mater, Benjamin Franklin Junior-Senior High School.

She tried to be a liberal, but then quickly realized that it was an exclusive club. Her conversion to conservatism was cinched when she returned to school in the master's program in English in the 1990's.

In spite of the hostility of most of the faculty and the torture of having to wade through postmodern nonsense, she earned her Ph.D. from the University of Georgia in 2002.

Mary Grabar is a frequent Columnist at Town Hall.com and writes articles for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution Newspaper.

Visit Mary's Website and her other Website: The Literate Citizen

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Mary Grabar - Deconstructing Newt Gingrich's Dissertation

It was right around the same time that Marc Lamont Hill (“Professor, Author, Speaker, Public Intellectual,” according to his website) claimed to Bill O’Reilly that conservatives and Republicans are incapable of “performing intellectuality” that I noticed the dissection of Newt Gingrich’s 1971 dissertation, first in the riposte by another public intellectual, Maureen Dowd.

As someone with a Ph.D., I know the travails of writing a dissertation, especially when one needs to replace committee members after the sixth rewrite does not satisfy them. My dissertation defense was filled with motion-picture ready high drama, with a showdown between a dean who expressed his reservations because of my unwillingness to note the fascistic nature of the U.S. government in the 1960s and a comp lit professor who had left Ceausescu’s Romania. I dread the day when my own dissertation comes under scrutiny from the Modern Language Association (I confess to incompletely formatted citations) or from Maureen Dowd.

For Maureen Dowd is able to leap over four decades to do a Toynbee-esque assessment of what the 1971 work by a graduate student can tell us about a 68-year-old presidential candidate. She traces Gingrich’s proposals for reforming Social Security to his "confusion of views on colonialism.” The dissertation, titled “Belgian Education Policy in the Congo: 1945-1960,” to her “reveals a mind that "is in love with itself."

She did not disappoint her New York Times fans, for her column popped right up to #1 place in the online poll last Sunday. (I hope not too many I-Pads were ruined by the spilled double mocha lattes as a result of the knee-slapping by the normally even-keeled occupiers of lofts and other gentrified spaces.) Guffaws surely came in waves, as Ms. Dowd then let out a howler: "[Gingrich's brain] has persuaded itself that it is brilliant when it is merely promiscuous. This is not a serious mind. Gingrich is not, to put it mildly, a systematic thinker."

One assumes that Ms. Dowd was reading the work alongside Critique of Pure Reason as she made this assessment.

Indeed, it seems that Gingrich is incapable of any logic, much less following Kantian syllogisms: “His mind is a jumble,” Ms. Dowd proclaims, “an amateurish mess lacking impulse control. He plays air guitar with ideas, producing air ideas. He ejaculates concepts, notions and theories that are as inconsistent as his behavior."

The sign of a true intellectual is the willingness to consult an expert on areas outside of one’s own expertise. Ms. Dowd turned to Morehouse political science professor Laura Seay, who assesses Gingrich's dissertation as a "'kind of glorified white man's burden take on colonial policy that was almost certainly out of vogue in the early 1970s."

She detects other errors in scholarship. At the time, "'Black Consciousness and Black Power movements were approaching their pinnacles,'" so it was "'most decidedly not the time to be arguing that white European masters did a swell job ruling black Africans. . . ."

Professor Seay writes for that highly esteemed journal, Aljazeera.

In the same learned journal that Ms. Dowd writes for, journalism professor Adam Hochschild, presented a more nuanced view on the following day: "Footnotes, statistics and quotes from eminent authorities abound. . . .The writer who emerges from the text is not the fire-breathing, slash-and-burn partisan attacker Mr. Gingrich’s critics portrayed from his time as House speaker, nor the profound, big-picture thinker Mr. Gingrich the candidate presents himself as. It’s the desk-bound policy wonk."

Hochschild complains, Gingrich "surveys his subject in a highly pedantic way. . . . Footnotes, statistics and quotes from eminent authorities abound."

Hochschild’s model Ph.D. president is Woodrow Wilson, whose dissertation “boldly asserted that the founding fathers had gotten many things wrong, and advocated for this country something like the British parliamentary system."

This bold claim led to Wilson's dissertation being "argued over for decades” and garnering respect from scholars.

Professor Hochschild, like the counter-culture dean on my committee who blogged about me, seems to regret the fact that a doctorate was ever granted to such a dufus. "Mr. Gingrich may succeed in being elected president," Hochschild concludes; "but it is hard to imagine him, like Wilson after he left the White House, being elected president of the American Historical Association."

True, it would be a letdown, but perhaps such a fall would instill the humility these public intellectuals claim Gingrich lacks.

The intellectual inspiration for Dowd and Hochschild may have come from retired professor Robert Paul Wolff, a public intellectual at the blog, “The Philosopher’s Stone.” Wolff believes that Gingrich simultaneously needs to be taken down a notch, while making a bold turn in his thinking. Although admitting to be “no kind of expert on Belgian colonialism,” Wolff felt compelled to get the dissertation and write about it because “the topic was too hot to ignore.” Wolff’s November 22nd post evaluated “this bit of juvenilia, as it were”; he concluded, it showed “signs of the mature Newt in full bellow, bombastic, pleased to the point of ecstasy by the sound of his own voice, a Larry Summers without the becoming modesty. . . .”

At a later date, Wolff recommended readers read the article by his friend and “scholar of South African matters,” Professor Hochschild.

As for his own educated opinion: “What caught my attention in the Ginfrich [sic] dissertation was its pedestrian quality, its lack of intellectual curiosity or imagination. I ploughed through many doctoral dissertations over the course of an academic career that lasted just exactly half a century, and I think I can spot a piece of solid mediocrity when I see one.”

What Gingrich lacks is “a sparkling intellect, a genuinely curious mind, a penetrating imagination.”

Alas, “the dissertation is written in a pedantic, serviceable prose, giving no evidence of the Newt that was to emerge as a fully formed Toad.”

Our current president’s writings did not draw such vigorous scrutiny. All on the left were agreed that Obama had the desired “sparkling intellect” and “big-picture” thinking that would “fundamentally transform” the nation.

According to Ann Coulter, more transformation (for the ill) would come with a president Gingrich. This assessment is based on Gingrich’s own history from the 1990s when he was following really “big-picture” thinkers and “futurists” Heidi and Alvin Toffler.

I don’t think Coulter is just performing intellectuality.

Mary Grabar

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Mary Grabar is a writer and college English teacher, whose parents escaped from Slovenia in 1959 and spent a year in a refugee camp in Austria. They immigrated to Rochester, New York, when she was two.

Her views have been formed by experiences as an immigrant during the racial violence in Rochester in the 1960s and then at her alma mater, Benjamin Franklin Junior-Senior High School.

She tried to be a liberal, but then quickly realized that it was an exclusive club. Her conversion to conservatism was cinched when she returned to school in the master's program in English in the 1990's.

In spite of the hostility of most of the faculty and the torture of having to wade through postmodern nonsense, she earned her Ph.D. from the University of Georgia in 2002.

---

Mary Grabar is a frequent Columnist at Town Hall.com and writes articles for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution Newspaper.

---

Visit Mary's Website and her other Website: The Literate Citizen

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Mary Grabar - Dissident Prof Rants: The Media Bias against Occupy Wall Street!

Dissident Prof is getting whiplash every time she visits the website for the Center for American Progress.

Eric Alterman, Senior Fellow and “distinguished professor of English” at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, asks in his most recent article, “Why Do the Mainstream Media Like the Tea Party More than Occupy Wall Street?”

The professor cites that highly esteemed academic journal, The New Yorker, where “Ben McGrath described the Tea Party as a motley collection of ‘goldbugs, evangelicals, Atlas Shruggers, militia-men, strict Constitutionalists, swine-flu skeptics, scattered 9/11 “truthers,” neo-“Birchers,” and, of course, “birthers”—those who remained convinced that [President Barack Obama] was a Muslim double agent born in Kenya,’ intent on turning the United States into an Islamic Republic.”

While Dissident Prof appreciates the display of creative writing skills in the quoted passage, she hardly thinks it fits in well with the high seriousness of the article as attempted by the passage that follows:

Four academics confirmed this telling portrait. They recently presented a study of the views and attitudes of 2,000 voters sympathetic to the Tea Party at the 2011 annual meeting of the American Sociological Association. The study said that these voters ‘reflect four primary cultural and political beliefs more than other voters do: authoritarianism, libertarianism, fear of change, and negative attitudes toward immigrants and immigration.’”

(Funny, these “four academics” never called on Dissident Prof, herself an immigrant, and a tea party supporter, for her opinion.)

But it must be true because it’s from the esteemed American Sociological Association. (Sometimes those of us consigned to perpetual adjunct-hood get an inferiority complex.)

This thought, however, was interrupted by a little birdie chirping on Dissident’s Prof’s shoulder, “Authoritarian Personality, Authoritarian Personality” (or was it the Aflac duck?)

Finally all the chirping and quacking in her head reminded her of the latest, groundbreaking theory from Theodore Adorno, of the Marxist Frankfurt School. This must be the newest, most cutting-edge theory, inspiration to the barefoot, bomb-throwing, monogamy-smashing, lice-and-flea infested long-hairs of the very recent 1960s. These intellectuals too had serious thoughts about the Constitution, which they displayed through their interpretive dances.

The duck quacked, “But it’s fifty years later, it’s fifty years later!”

So why is “distinguished professor” Alterman using the theories of the 1960s? Is such research really au courant?

This requires some deconstruction, a practice to which Dissident Prof was subjected to in graduate school. Dissident Prof suspects some fear of “change” in professor Alterman. She suspects he does not want to do any research after the 1960s. She wonders if his contention that the “Tea Party was simply the old far right dressed up in funny new clothing” is not a projection.

For example, look at his colleague on the opposite coast at the campus that has become most known for “police brutality,” UC-Davis. In sartorial tribute to his intellectual progenitors, English professor Nathan Brown stands on a stage in front of thousands of adoring, cheering students who in the grand tradition of the Occupy Wall Street “human mic” repeat his words, phrase for phrase.

But notice something different? This rock star professor enjoys all the accoutrements of our Wall Street-supported high-tech society. There is a sound system, and a microphone, which Professor Brown brandishes with loving familiarity.

Of course, there is nothing authoritarian in having thousands of young people repeating your every word, right?

After all, these students are independent thinkers, having been schooled in critical thought by their facilitators, who have also guided them in collaborative learning. They have had music lessons in singing Obama praise songs. (Sorry, video disappeared by YouTube.)

Still, the media coverage of OWS was “sheer mockery,” maintains professor/think tank fellow Alterman. They presented none of the “substantive arguments,” he complains.

The professor might be a little too harsh on the less-well-educated folk for not being able to grasp the complexity of the original Adbusters manifesto that outlines the theory and practice of Occupy Wall Street, and from which I quote:

“The beauty of this new formula, and what makes this novel tactic exciting, is its pragmatic simplicity: we talk to each other in various physical gatherings and virtual people's assemblies … we zero in on what our one demand will be, a demand that awakens the imagination and, if achieved, would propel us toward the radical democracy of the future … and then we go out and seize a square of singular symbolic significance and put our asses on the line to make it happen.

“The time has come to deploy this emerging stratagem against the greatest corrupter of our democracy: Wall Street, the financial Gomorrah of America.”

And this little nugget of profundity:

“The most exciting candidate that we've heard so far is one that gets at the core of why the American political establishment is currently unworthy of being called a democracy: we demand that Barack Obama ordain a Presidential Commission tasked with ending the influence money has over our representatives in Washington. It's time for DEMOCRACY NOT CORPORATOCRACY, we're doomed without it.”

Professor Alterman’s support for the claim of unfair media treatment, evidenced in the lack of their attention to “substantive arguments,” comes from Russia Today, the media arm of Putin’s government. (Mic check! There are no more communists, there are no more communists, there are no more communists. Repeat. Very good. You get an A, and a student loan balance of $80,000.)

Mary Grabar

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Mary Grabar is a writer and college English teacher, whose parents escaped from Slovenia in 1959 and spent a year in a refugee camp in Austria. They immigrated to Rochester, New York, when she was two.

Her views have been formed by experiences as an immigrant during the racial violence in Rochester in the 1960s and then at her alma mater, Benjamin Franklin Junior-Senior High School.

She tried to be a liberal, but then quickly realized that it was an exclusive club. Her conversion to conservatism was cinched when she returned to school in the master's program in English in the 1990's.

In spite of the hostility of most of the faculty and the torture of having to wade through postmodern nonsense, she earned her Ph.D. from the University of Georgia in 2002.

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Mary Grabar is a frequent Columnist at Town Hall.com and writes articles for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution Newspaper.

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Visit Mary's Website and her other Website: The Literate Citizen

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