`Securing' Our Schools
From the `Appeasers'

by Aaron Yule, LaRouche Youth Movement

The Bush Administration said that those in Congress who didn't help the "War on Terror" by passing the bill to end the Geneva Accords and the Habeas Corpus provision of the Constitution were "appeasers of the Nazis."

Ever since 9/11, the policy of the Bush Administration has been one of terror, not just abroad, in other countries, but also amongst our own citizens. The most horrifying propaganda has been used to keep the U.S. population in a state of complete fear of speaking out against the policies of the Bush Administration. Yet, despite all the efforts to scare the population through the use of the media, this wasn't enough to keep the youth on campus and elsewhere from coming out against the insanity of the Administration in the post 9/11 period. It was the enthusiasm of college-aged students, to end the insanity of the Bush Administration and create economic development, as called for by Lyndon LaRouche, that gave the margin of victory that probably made John Kerry the President (although, due to the lack of courage from the Baby-Boomer generation, Kerry caved in, and turned the results over to the right-wing nuts who still occupy the White House today).

But what happened to my generation after the election? Was it merely being depressed, knowing that insanity would run our country for another four years? Or was it something else? Many who fought to bring a victory for Kerry in my generation said that they never thought they would get involved in politics. Others dropped out of school to spend a year campaigning on the hustings with Democratic candidates like LaRouche. And some organized large gatherings on their campuses, as at Boston University, where hundreds of people watched John Edwards debate the sociopathic President of Vice.

Where are these young people today? Why didn't they help organize the impeachment of the Administration over the past couple of years? And are they going to allow the vote to go to the Bush Administration this November?

Well, to determine this we must look at what has been happening to our campuses, so that we can know why people have adopted the pre-Hitler phrase in Nazi Germany: "I'm not political," or the version known in Boston as "I'm all set."

Since the end of 2002, there has been a Nazi-Gestapo operation on campuses across America, which has been run by neo-conservatives like Lynne Cheney, Dave Horowitz, Stanley Kurtz, Martin Kramer, David French, and others. They say they want to ensure that there are no "political idealists" turning campuses into a place for attacking the "War on Terror," and thereby destroying our security. The first major attempt to create legislation to ensure this was launched in early 2003, when Title VI of the 1965 Higher Education Act, which provides funding for area study centers and programs at universities in the United States, came up for renewal.

Education for Empire?

The Act itself has been a very important part of keeping our schools running, but HR 3077 (the International Studies in Higher Education Act) was introduced to the Subcommittee on Select Education of the Committee on Education and the Workforce in September, in order to change the function of Title VI. The resolution itself was introduced by Rep. Pete Hoekstra, who is a Republican from the second district of Michigan. He was not the originator of the content of the resolution, though. That came from a leading Fellow at the Hoover Institution and co-creator of Campus Watch, Stanley Kurtz. Kurtz spoke of what he thought needed to be changed in Title VI at a subcommittee hearing on June 19, 2003:

I do not argue that only material that praises American foreign policy should be assigned in programs sponsored by Title VI. I do argue, however, that our Title VI centers, as currently constituted, purvey an extreme and one-sided perspective which almost invariably criticizes American foreign policy.

One change Kurtz called for in order to stop "political discrimination" was for Congress "to create a supervisory board to manage Title VI,"[1] and determine who gets funds from Title VI. This supervisory board came to be known in Hoekstra's resolution 3077 as the International Education Advisory Board. When asked if Stanley Kurtz had any influence on him, Hoekstra said:

I do think that there may be some validity in some of his comments. I don't believe these studies should be used to promote an ideological point of view. I'm about getting students educated in international affairs, not having students get into a classroom and have them be indoctrinated into a political philosophy. But did we put anything into the bill that puts in some kind of screening process? For those who believe it's there, ask them to point out where it is.[2]

The resolution passed the Committee on Education, and then passed the House of Representatives unanimously on Oct. 21, 2003 with Stanley Kurtz's advisory board still attached.

Word had gotten out into the public that this advisory board resolution was on the floor of the Senate, and many professors and other well-honored individuals sent in letters in opposition to the resolution. David Brodsky, a writer and consultant who holds advanced degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Yale University, called resolution 3077 "the Education for Empire Act."[3] Many other scholars chimed in, writing papers about the onslaught of the new McCarthy era. Because of the overwhelming opposition to the resolution, the Senate voted it down in late 2003. During the next Congress (109th) it was reintroduced as resolution 509, but never made it out of the subcommittee.

Not to worry though. Opportunities for Nazi-style control come in many forms. As this resolution lost all favor, as a result of a major political front that started with LaRouche's initiative to save Social Security in 2005, David French from FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Education), David Horowitz (creator of Students for Academic Freedom), and many other neo-cons were organizing to establish an oversight committee on the state level. In February of 2005, the intent of this crowd was published in Pittsburghlive.com. I quote:

The Academic Bill of Rights is a declaration of independence from the tyranny of intellectual oppressors on college campuses. David Horowitz, president of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, is its founding father.

Colleges and universities ruled by imperious leftists allow like-minded tenured professors to perform intolerable acts of intellectual coercion on those not accepting their extremist orthodoxy.

The American Association of University Professors stated at its inception in 1915 that faculty must avoid taking unfair advantage of the students' immaturity to indoctrinate them with the teachers' personal opinions.

Yes, professors once had such ethics.

This revolutionary document, which nine states are on the verge of adopting for their respective schools, is Mr. Horowitz's attempt at correcting the grievances of those who have been silenced.

The Academic Bill of Rights states that all decisions relating to faculty or students should not be based on political or religious beliefs.[4]

Declaring War on the Constitution

This Academic Bill of Rights, a declaration of war against the Constitution, was first established in colleges like Penn State University, where Vicky Cangelosi, a member of the Students for Academic Freedom (SAF), fought to have it established as university law in hopes that it would eventually become state law. A movement of support was thus created on campuses throughout Pennsylvania to battle the state legislators, to adopt this Gestapo police-state measure.[5]

This support was mainly created by SAF and Horowitz, who were able to recruit Congressman Gib Armstrong to introduce a resolution to the House Education Committee on June 30, 2005. The resolution is HR 177, otherwise known as the "students' academic freedom resolution." HR 177 set up the Pennsylvania House Select Committee on Student Academic Freedom to oversee, take testimony, and create legislation for the Horowitz crowd. Horowitz commented on the resolution the next day:

It is crucial now that the full Pennsylvania Assembly pass this bill. Just last week, the American Council on Education in conjunction with 27 other higher education organizations issued a statement supporting key principles of this legislation including the ideas that "neither students nor faculty should be disadvantaged or evaluated on the basis of their political opinions" and that students and faculty members whose academic freedom has been violated must have access to redress through official and well-publicized grievance procedures on campus. The Students' Academic Freedom Resolution would support putting these principles into practice on Pennsylvania's campuses.

With full Republican support, HR 177 passed the Pennsylvania House 108-90 on July 5, 2005. Journalist Bill Toland commented in an article:

One of the driving forces behind the movement is the Students for Academic Freedom, a Washington-based group founded by activist David Horowitz. In an interview with The Christian Science Monitor, he said the past six months have been a "watershed in the academic-freedom movement" and hopes the movement to monitor teachers for bias will eventually trickle down to public elementary and high schools.[6]

Horowitz himself said:

This victory would not have been possible without the political courage and steadfastness of Representative Gib Armstrong, a former Marine who was the principal sponsor and driving force behind the legislation, and Speaker of the Pennsylvania House John Perzel, an astute and savvy political leader who managed the bill's passage through turbulent legislative seas.... As Stanley Fish, himself a liberal academic, has written: "Teachers should teach their subjects. They should not teach peace or war or freedom or diversity or uniformity or nationalism or anti-nationalism or any other agenda that might properly be taught by a political leader or a talk-show host."[7]

Another key organizer in this affair was David French, who gave testimony before the Pennsylvania Select Committee on Student Academic Freedom on Sept. 19, 2005. In the Committee questioning, the idea of no political discrimination was brought up when French defended the rights of the Ku Klux Klan to organize on campuses:

[State] Representative Grucella: Could Penn State or any other state institutions prohibit the Ku Klux Klan?

French: Almost certainly they could not prohibit any particular organization on the basis of its perceived ideology. They could prohibit an organization that was engaged in otherwise unlawful activity. So if the Ku Klux Klan was engaged in terrorism or violating existing state and federal laws, certainly it could exclude them; but they could not exclude the Klan on the basis that it has a point of view that is horrific.[8]

What about the Nazis? Should they be able to organize on campuses too? Would David French defend the right of "terrorists" to organize on campuses? French et al. would most likely defend the Nazis, but when it comes to those that they consider "terrorists," it's a completely different ball game.

One case of Campus Watch's hatred was when an innocent Palestinian professor, Sami Al-Arian, was thrown in jail a few years ago for being what Campus Watch and its friends called a "terrorist professor." Another case is that of Juan Cole, a professor in Middle Eastern Studies who has been very outspoken against the policies of the Bush Administration. Cole has even been equated to Lyndon LaRouche by Campus Watch, which lies that LaRouche is an "anti-Semitic racist-cult leader." Currently Campus Watch has made Juan Cole the center of its attacks, and along with other Buckleyite organizations such as Frontpage.com (owned by Horowitz) and Middle East Forum (owned by the Campus Watch creators), has launched a slander campaign through their different "independent" newspapers and Web blogs to discredit Cole, thus preventing him from becoming a professor at Yale.[9]

The testimony of French and others continued at hearings throughout this year, and the Pennsylvania House Select Committee on Academic Freedom will be putting out a report in November. Horowitz himself testified before the Select Committee on Jan. 10, 2006, along with Anne Neal, the president of ACTA (American Council of Trustees and Alumni), Logan Fisher (vice chairman of the Temple College Republicans and vice president of the Temple Chapter of SAF), and other right-wing fanatics. Horowitz commented the day before his testimony at Temple University,

Temple University has in place an academic freedom policy [created by the Temple chapter of the SAF] that prohibits professors from using their classrooms as political soap boxes. But it is not enforced by the present Temple administration and consequently the academic rights of students at Temple are widely abused. Temple has required courses like the Freshman Year Writing Program which are designed to indoctrinate students in left-wing political and social fads and are taught by instructors—mainly graduate students—whose only professional expertise is in English. Most sections of this "writing course," for example, are explicitly devoted to instructing students in "gender theory" using textbooks that are almost entirely one-sided. Having unqualified teachers attempt to impose an orthodoxy in the name of education is a form of consumer fraud practiced on Temple students and the taxpayers of Pennsylvania.[10]

The Campus Gestapo

Horowitz, French, Anne Neal, and all of their fellow fascists are still moving in on campuses across the country today, organizing for Nazi-Gestapo police state measures. Their tactics are mainly huge slander campaigns, such as what is happening to Juan Cole; or they get Homeland Security to go after people like Sami Al-Arian.

Another case of this continuing gestapo onslaught is against their most feared adversary, LaRouche and his youth movement. For example, the so-called "independent" campus newspaper at UCLA, the Bruin Standard (owned by the Buckleyite Collegiate Network), has run increasingly scurrilous slanders by its chief editor, Garin Hovannisian (the SAF president for UCLA), attacking the LaRouche Youth Movement as a "cult" that wants to "brainwash" students.

Other magazines like The Stranger in Seattle, Washington (run by the Village Voice Media Group), have promoted the use of physical force to attack the LaRouche Youth Movement. Such papers are increasing their slander campaign against LaRouche to prevent students from becoming political and organizing a major vote this November to oust the Bush Administration.

Although these gangs have been unsuccessful in getting laws passed, as of Sept. 15, 2005, the FBI set up a National Security Higher Education Advisory Board to oversee security measures on campus. In a press release, the FBI stated the purpose of the Advisory Board:

... The Board will seek to establish lines of communication on national priorities pertaining to terrorism, counterintelligence, and homeland security. They will also assist in the development of research, degree programs, course work, internships, opportunities for graduates, and consulting opportunities for faculty relating to national security. Graham Spanier, President of Pennsylvania State University, will chair the Board. Spanier affirmed, "Higher education is one of our nation's greatest assets and it is critical that those entrusted with our national security better understand the valuable contributions our universities make to research discoveries, education of young adults, international collaboration, faculty and student exchanges, and the development of intellectual property."[11]

Although this FBI Board is ambiguous in terms of its purpose, it is known that preceding its creation, Graham Spanier founded the International Center for the Study of Terrorism out of the Center for the Behavioral and Social Science of Terrorism and Counterterrorism, a division of Homeland Security. Conferences are being held on campuses to discuss the threat of terrorism, one of which is to occur Oct. 7-9, 2006, at Pennsylvania State University.

Current Advisory Board members are: Graham Spanier, president, Pennsylvania State University; William Brody, president, Johns Hopkins University; Albert Carnesale, chancellor, University of California, Los Angeles; Jared Cohon, president, Carnegie Mellon University; Marye Ann Fox, chancellor, University of California, San Diego; Robert Gates, president, Texas A&M University; Gregory Geoffroy, president, Iowa State University; Amy Gutmann, president, University of Pennsylvania; David C. Hardesty, Jr., president, West Virginia University; Susan Hockfield, president, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Martin Jischke, president, Purdue University; Bernard Machen, president, University of Florida; James Moeser, chancellor, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; C.D. Mote, president, University of Maryland, College Park; John Wiley, chancellor, University of Wisconsin, Madison; and Mark Emmert, president, University of Washington.

Research for this article was compiled by the LYM War Room Staff of John Stuart, Heather Detwiler, Antoine Stevens, and Bill Roberts. Most of the information can be found at http://www.studentsforacademicfreedom.org/actions(boxattop)
/Pennsylvaniapage/Pennsylvaniaactions.htm.

[1] Statement of Stanley Kurtz at the hearing before the Subcommittee on Select Education of the Committee on Education and the Workforce. Washington, D.C.: House of Representatives. Hearing, June 19, 2003.

[2] Michele Goldberg, "Neoconservatives Seek Congress to Control University International Studies Department."

[3] David Brodsky, "HR 3077—The Education for Empire Act: Right-Wing Takeover of International Education Half-Completed in Congress," The Faculty Advocate, 4(1-2), December 2003.

[4] "Checking Liberal Tyranny," Pittsburghlive.com, Feb. 22, 2005.

[5] Vicky Cangelosi, "Penn State Student Govenment Passes Academic Freedom Bill," March 2, 2005.

[6] Bill Toland, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Harrisburg Bureau.

[7] David Horowitz, "Victory in Pennsylvania," frontpagemag.com, July 6, 2005.

[8] David French, "Pennsylvania Academic Freedom Hearings," frontpagemag.com, Oct. 28, 2005.

[9] Alexander H. Joffe, "Juan Cole and the Decline of Middle Eastern Studies," Middle East Quarterly, Winter 2006.

[10] Peter Collier, "An Historic Moment for Academic Freedom," frontpagemag.com, Jan. 9, 2006. Collier co-authored seven books with CSPC president David Horowitz, including the widely read Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the '60s. He is also the author of other books including biographies of the Fords, Rockefellers, and Kennedys.

[2] FBI press release, Sept. 15, 2005, "FBI Appoints National Security Higher Education Advisory Board."