Since 1960, the racist identity politics of the left has politicized and degraded American history in academia and the news media. One of the problems with academia is that, in a metaphorical sense, it is inbred.
It is so liberal, the 33 wealthiest colleges in the last election gave Hillary Clinton $1,560,000. They gave Donald Trump $3,000.[1]
Over 90% of professors in the humanities and social sciences, which include history, are liberals, and it has been this way for decades.[2]
Those with differing opinions, if they even get hired, do not dare speak up. If they do, they will not get tenure and will often lose their jobs. There is no real debate on many topics, no challenge to liberal dogma.
The hypocrites in academia scream about diversity but have none themselves, yet diversity of thought is the most important kind of diversity.
When the views of half of the country are not represented, and, indeed, are deplored by most in academia (remember Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables”), then what comes out of academia and their accomplices in the news media ¾ especially with regard to history ¾ is the liberal party line: political propaganda preached by liberals without fear of criticism or examination.
There is also rampant discrimination in hiring in academia.
People are discriminated against because of their political views. How could it be any other way when academia is overwhelmingly liberal ¾ in some fields 30 to 1 ¾ as stated by Horowitz and Laksin in Footnote 2.
It has been this way for the past 50 years. Liberals discriminate against non-liberals in hiring. Liberals hire only other liberals.
It is obvious that academia is a hostile work environment for everybody but liberals, and increasingly hard left liberals, because of diversity departments that demean white people, speech codes that treat conservative views as hate, anti-Christian rhetoric, etcetera, ad nauseam.
This also makes much of academia extremely hypocritical ¾ again ¾ because in addition to screaming about diversity, which is non-existent in academia, they also scream about discrimination, yet they discriminate openly against the views of over half the country.
Conservatives and other non-liberals need not apply to academia, though much of academia is funded by taxpayer money from conservatives and non-liberals.
I know from personal experience that some liberals in academia are fine people who, despite their liberal bias, try to be fair. But many others are rigidly doctrinaire and definitely not fair, and they have the power structure and majority to impose their will with impunity.
These doctrinaire liberals preach their views constantly by weaving them into their classes ¾ comments, smirks, rolls of the eyes here and there ¾ which intimidate young students and coerce them into writing things they don’t believe in order to pass.
As every honest scholar knows, to understand the past, one must view the past the way the people who lived in the past viewed it. The world of the past was not today’s middle class America but that is the standard ignorant liberals want you to judge it by.
David Harlan in his book, The Degradation of American History, says that, starting in the 1960s with the Civil Rights Movement, leftist historians began criticizing American history as elitist.
They said it “focused our attention on great white men at the expense of women and minorities, that it ignored the racial and ethnic diversity of national life, that it obscured the reality of class conflict.”
They wanted to expose the complicity of white men “in the violence and brutality that now seemed to be the most important truth about American history.” They “feel no need to say what is good in American history.”[3]
It’s worse for Southern history.
Eugene D. Genovese,[4] one of America’s greatest historians before his death in 2012, wrote this is 1994:
Rarely, these days, even on Southern campuses, is it possible to acknowledge the achievements of the white people of the South. The history of the Old South is now often taught at leading universities, when it is taught at all, as a prolonged guilt-trip, not to say a prologue to the history of Nazi Germany. . . . To speak positively about any part of this Southern tradition is to invite charges of being a racist and an apologist for slavery and segregation. We are witnessing a cultural and political atrocity.[5]
Dr. Genovese goes on to say that this cultural and political atrocity is being forced on us by “the media and an academic elite.”[6]
In the 2016 presidential campaign, 96% of money donated by journalists went to liberal Democrat Hillary Clinton.
Most of the news media are so biased[7] it makes them untrustworthy and even more dishonest than academia.
In campaign coverage, the fraudulent media colluded with Clinton and gave her debate questions in advance, allowed her campaign to edit stories, asked her campaign for advice and quotations they could use to attack Donald Trump, and made no effort to hide their contempt for objectivity.
Too bad it backfired and greatly damaged the credibility of the media ¾ perhaps beyond repair ¾ just as political correctness has made academia shallow, ignorant, authoritarian, hypocritical and nothing deserving of respect.
This ain’t your grandfather’s academia. It’s more like a leftist indoctrination center, a reeducation camp in Russia or China, than a place of learning and light where open debate and the First Amendment are sacrosanct.
Today’s academia, at least with respect to history, is a silly caricature to laugh at. It is not the least bit interested in historical truth.
It is interested in America-hate and liberal activism. It hires activists and not historians, but if you disagree with that, you are a racist.
Our current mayhem started after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis May 25, 2020 by some bad cops who are not typical of the vast majority of good, decent, hard-working police officers nationwide. There have been calls by violent leftists to defund the police.
Can you imagine what that would lead to?
Instead of defunding the police, let me suggest defunding academia, then taxing fake-news. The one would promote historical truth, and the other would erase the federal budget deficit in no time.
[1] The 33 wealthiest colleges in the United States also gave Bernie Sanders $648,382, so, adding Hillary Clinton’s $1,560,000 to Bernie’s $648,382 gives a wopping $2,208,382 that academia gave to two extremely liberal Democrat candidates (99.9%) while giving $3,000 to Donald J. Trump (.136%), who won the presidency. See “Donald Trump Campaign Lacking In Support From Academic Donors” by Carter Coudriet, August 16, 2016, http://www.forbes.com/
sites/cartercoudriet/2016/06/16/donald-trump-campaign-lacking-in-support-from-academic-donors, accessed January 25, 2017.
[2] See Horowitz, David and Jacob Laksin, One-Party Classroom: How Radical Professors at America’s Top Colleges Indoctrinate Students and Undermine Our Democracy (New York: Crown Forum, 2009). From the Introduction: “A 2007 study by Neil Gross and Solon Simmons, two liberal academics, reported a ratio of liberal to conservative professors in social science and humanities of 9-1. In fields such as Anthropology and Sociology, these figures approach 30-1.” http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/Articles/onepartydhjl.html, accessed January 26, 2017.
[3] David Harlan, The Degradation of American History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), xv.
[4] Genovese was a brilliant historian as the following paragraph illustrates. It is the opening paragraph of an essay in The Journal of Southern History, Volume LXXX, No. 2, May, 2014 entitled “Eugene Genovese’s Old South: A Review Essay” by J. William Harris: “The death of Eugene D. Genovese in September 2012 brought to a close a remarkable career. In the decades following his first published essay on Southern history, Genovese produced an outstanding body of scholarship, based on a rare combination of deep research in primary sources; a mastery of the historical literature, not only in Southern history but also in many complementary fields; a sophisticated command of methodological issues; and often sparkling prose. And Genovese’s reputation reached far beyond specialists in Southern history, and even beyond the academy. In 2005 a reviewer in one magazine for a general readership called Genovese the ‘Country’s greatest living historian’ and his Roll, Jordan, Roll ‘the most lasting work of American historical scholarship since the Second World War.'”
[5] Eugene D. Genovese, The Southern Tradition, The Achievement and Limitations of an American Conservatism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), Preface, xi-xii.
[6] Ibid.
[7] In numbers of journalists giving, 50 gave to Republican Donald J. Trump, while 430 gave to Clinton. That means 10% of journalists donated to Republican Trump, and 90% to Democrat Clinton. See David Levinthal and Michael Beckel article, October 27, 2016, “Journalists shower Hillary Clinton with campaign cash”, https://www.publicintegrity.org/2016/10/17/20330/
journalists-shower-hillary-clinton-campaign-cash, accessed January 25, 2017.
