Zwei

I wanted to write something a little longer and more coherent than the stuff lately. And I’ve been good today, and didn’t skip out to see OutFoxed, the new documentary about the Fox News Channel. Instead, I stayed home and completed a large amount of reading for my Understanding Islam class.

So I just get up, to check my mail, and get a very warm e-mail from the professor of the class, responding to an e-mail of mine. So here’s what makes my blood boil.

The Right’s New Wing

A new expose by Time magazine, which details the GOP’s new campaign among venues of higher education (traditionally, of course, a liberal stronghold).

Read the last two pages.

“… Despite their victim routine, conservatives are making quick advances on even the most liberal campuses — and YAF’s millions are no small reason. Take Ithaca College. When foundation officials described it to me, it sounded like a suffocating gulag. I was told that a Bay Buchanan speech had been reported to the college’s Orwellian-sounding bias-related-incidents committee and that professors in the politics department openly sniggered at Republican kids in class.

You don’t have to spend much time at the college to see that liberals run the place. It posted a website after 9/11 devoted almost exclusively to critiques of the U.S. The site includes the text of a talk by Professor Asma Barlas, who chaired the politics department last year, in which she blames “Jewish groups” for “introducing modern forms of terrorism into the Middle East” and suggests that capitalism “provided the breeding grounds for much of modern day extremism.”

When I spoke with her in March, Barlas told me it was her department’s role to challenge students with perspectives they won’t get elsewhere. “If they are coming from a group who has a President in power, can they really claim to be oppressed and marginalized?” she asked. “Our strength is our ability to offer our students alternative perspectives.” Alternative in this case means liberal: with help from the local Republican Party, some conservative students surveyed the college’s professors and found 113 Democrats and seven Republicans, none of whom taught politics. When I asked Assistant Professor Charles Venator Santiago, who teaches an introductory politics course called Ideas and Ideologies, whether he assigned conservative thinkers, he responded, completely without irony, “I am teaching Hitler.”

But outside the radical pocket of that department, the Ithaca College Republicans — with YAF help — have begun to change the campus in the four years since Roger Custer founded the G.O.P. organization. “They are the most visible group on campus now,” says Braeden Sullivan, a former co-president of one of the college’s gay groups, BIGAYLA. “They don’t have the biggest group of people”–in fact, only about 15 students regularly go to Ithaca College Republican meetings–”but they are definitely the most visible group, and that’s a big change from a couple years ago…”

OMFG. Ithaca College sounds like a suffocating gulag? A FUCKING GULAG?

wait.. Let me look it up..

…

3 entries found for gulag.
gu·lag also Gu·lag Audio pronunciation of “gulag” ( P ) Pronunciation Key (gläg)
n.

1. A network of forced labor camps in the former Soviet Union.
2. A forced labor camp or prison, especially for political dissidents.
3. A place or situation of great suffering and hardship, likened to the atmosphere in a prison system or a forced labor camp.

What the fuck?

The portrait that this article paints of IC would be hilarious if it wasn’t so vicious. It paints Asma Barlas as an anti-semite, and takes a single quote from Charles Santiago, totally out of context.

The article was originally suppose to center around Ithaca College, and our Republicans. The reporter for Time talked to almost a dozen different politics professors, the Dean, and assorted members of the student body. In the end, he distilled it down to two pages, with a few random quotes mixed together with incendiary fodder.

If this is the caliber of Time magazine, then it is pathetic indeed.