LEFTIST INDOCTRINATION AT COLLEGE IS COMMON

By now most college-bound high school seniors know which institution they’ll be attending. Those students may not, however, be prepared for the one-sided ideological environment they will almost certainly encounter—a place where objectively presenting various sides of issues often gives way to heavy-handed indoctrination.

An example of professorial browbeating and bias was recently exposed by a student at the University of Southern California. The instructor in this case was Adjunct Assistant Professor of Political Science Darry Sragow, a Democrat operative who was secretly taped spewing partisan venom at his mini "re-education camp."

The tape, available online, shows Sragow attacking Republicans as “really stupid and racist” and their party as “increasingly the last refuge of old, angry white people.” The professor even suggests ways to suppress Republican votes: “You lose their information on voting in the mail,” he said, adding that there are “lots of ways to do it.”

Ironically, Sragow (himself an angry old white guy) indignantly offered a speculative anecdote about GOP voter-registration drives in which, when a person registers as a Democrat, “the allegation is that they throw those forms in the trash.” In a court of law such testimony would be dismissed as hearsay.

The not-so-brilliant Sragow also informed inmates in his class that politics is all about power and employed this example: “Al Gore won the Presidency of the United States. Didn’t get to be President. That’s power.”

Presumably Bush people snookered Gore out of Florida’s electoral votes. Overlooked by (or unknown to) Sragow was that most credible reviews of the 2000 Florida vote (including the New York Times) showed Bush would have won a recount. Sragow’s implication that Gore won because he got more votes nationwide represents an elementary mistake, or a deliberate misrepresentation, by a putative political science professor.

It wouldn’t be so bad if Sragow were a rare exception. Unfortunately, a slew of analyses demonstrate that diversity of thought isn’t prized by most universities whose ideological makeup and political contributions tilt overwhelmingly to the left.

Indeed, the chair of the “Africana” program at Cal State University Long Beach, Dr. Maulana Karenga (inventor of the pseudo-African holiday of Kwanzaa) spent four years in prison for felonious assault. Yet shortly after his release this Marxist felon began teaching at San Diego State University and then at UC Riverside. Only fourteen years passed between prison and heading the Black Studies program at Long Beach.

Unfortunately, the academy is packed with radicals like Karenga, UC Santa Cruz’s retired communist prof, Angela Davis, and Northwestern’s former-terrorist law professor Bernadine Dohrn, wife of former professor and fellow-terrorist Bill Ayers. By comparison, USC’s bad-boy is an ideological piker.