Malcolm A. Kline: Cold War on Campus

The latest survey on academic bias has sent academics into their usual state of denial despite evidence of same that frequently stares them right in the face.

“Taken together, 40 percent of the Americans in the survey said professors often use their classrooms as political platforms,” Robin Wilson of the Chronicle of Higher Education reported on April 4th of a Gallup poll.

“When that many Americans think this happens often, higher ed has a problem,” says S. Robert Lichter, director of its Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University. Higher ed doesn’t feel that way:

• “The more you have less real experience on a campus, the more likely you might be to buy this ambient background belief,” Jeremy D. Mayer, director of the master's program in public policy at George Mason says.

• “The farther away you are from academe, the more worried you are about what goes on,” Harvard sociologist Neil R. Gross says. Actually, proximity may prove correct a maxim of author M. Stanton Evans. He outlines what he calls “Evans’ law of inadequate paranoia”: “No matter how bad you think things are, they’re worse.” “In America, particularly on college campuses, memorials to Communists have appeared with alarming frequency every few years,” my predecessor, Dan Flynn wrote in The American Spectator on April 4. “San Francisco is not alone in its veneration of people who deserve scorn and not applause.”

“The University of Washington, which also memorializes American veterans of the Spanish Civil War, boasts a Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies and accompanying Harry Bridges Chair of Labor Studies.” As it happens, I bonded with a couple of Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (VALB) in the early 1980s.

The urban legend on the VALB is that they gallantly fought a proxy war against one of Hitler’s protégés in Spain when it wasn’t cool to do so. The actual government files on the VALB— American and Russian—show that they didn’t make a move that wasn’t directed by communist dictator Josef Stalin’s Soviet government. I met one of the veterans—Steve Nelson—when the VALB was raising money to provide ambulances to the Marxist Sandinista government in Nicaragua which was then fending off a challenge from the anti-communist Contra rebels there. Incidentally, the FBI kept tabs on Nelson during World War II....