Right Wing Fascists in Higher Education

by Angelo Mike 

Exclusive to STR

December 7, 2006

Yes, they do exist.  

Much has been said about the failure of universities and colleges in producing first rate teachers and students, especially in regards to the fields of politics, history, and economics. Throughout the last century, colleges have become increasingly dominated by politicized statists, worshippers of democracy, and leftists. And while liberals dominate universities today, we ought to give a fair and balanced portrait of power tripping conservatives in similar vein.  

Instead of a limp wristed, relativist liberal, I’ve been under the instruction of an overbearing, ill-tempered, bad mannered right-winger. For him, Abraham Lincoln is a hero. He’s a supporter of Stalinist purges in Iraq in order to get rid of insurgents who have infiltrated Iraq ’s government as well as the war on “radical Islam” (as opposed to terror). He’s even said that in Bush’s capacity as a propagandist he is failing, and if lying works, he should do it.  

I’m not merely paraphrasing to serve my own beliefs, by the way. He actually said that.  

Of course, that’s not exactly a heartening picture for an undergraduate praxeologist.  

Professor Charles Roger Smith of Marymount University is now teaching his twentieth year at Marymount and has tenure. I’ve been in his Civil War class, International Relations, and now Honors American Foreign Policy.  

Normally in debating professors with whom I disagree, we develop a respect for each other in debating civilly, and understand this when we greet each other outside of class. I’ve had a socialist and right wingers teach history and politics, a follower of Peter Singer teach ethics, as well as a neoclassical teach economics, among others. With each teacher (if they allowed it), I would have extensive debate. They were always conducted in good taste and an understanding that we must respect each other’s position by trying to hold it up to reason and let the class participate in the discussion.  

That’s how education should work. “You can’t stay sharp without friction,” to quote filmmaker David Fincher. And you can’t expect people to get an education by trying to cast them all into one mold, memorize a bunch of facts they could have learned on their own if they were so inclined, and punish them for providing thoughtful or analytical insights into these facts as having gone above and beyond the bounds of the curriculum.  

Not so for neocon Professor Smith. All that means is I have to sit down, shut up, and I had better tow his line if I want to avoid getting yelled at about how much I irritate him and how narrow minded I am. And how quick are right wingers to try and silence those who don’t espouse the peer reviewed wisdom!  

As an American Foreign Policy teacher, we are frequently told by Professor Smith that we must understand the authors as they understood themselves. Fair enough. Since we are studying statism in the class from fellow statists such as Carnes Lord and Leo Strauss, it is necessary to learn what a perfect machine evil is from the insides out. As Mises asks in Human Action, in attempting to analyze any social system or state program, we must ask, “What does it do?”  

For Professor Smith, one example of this meant spending 80 minutes literally yelling at students (in a classroom of only twelve people) on how to better understand the problems American democracy faces, and what it has and must overcome to succeed.  

And again, fair enough. That’s a natural consequence of his views, which alone should be attacked through reason. To criticize the fact that these views lead him to waste class time trying to uphold anti-social policies of imperialism is beside the point, since to do so would be to not address and systematically refute the doctrine of imperialism and American hegemony he espouses. I only wish Professor Smith would have given me the same courtesy and understanding.  

Given that Smith and I both have the texts to analyze the historical facts of American foreign policy, any insights we as a class gain from them necessitates looking at the causal forces at work in what it has done and the ideas involved. But this is not the case for Smith, who openly eschews reason and theory in favor of “realism,” a funny euphemism for telling anyone whose theoretical analysis he cannot refute that you’re being too ideological and political, but he is not.  

While going over the Federalist Papers one day, the subject in the essays was that defense is such a necessity that it must be provided by the state. I asked a question for discussion, as we are assigned to bring such questions to class. The question was, “If defense is so important, why didn’t Madison advocate free entry into the provisions of defense?”  

With classmates demanding that I explain, I briefly went over how a monopoly that prevents entry into the production of defense inevitably provides worse and more invasive services at higher costs, and I started to explain how a private insurance firm would provide defense.  

I used a simple example: That of George W. Bush. I began to explain how, if on a free market he owned an insurance company that insured people along the East coast and was really worried about an Iraq threat—when I was cut off by Professor Smith claiming that people, being what they are, need states, and that in a Lockean state of nature, people will always be at war with each other.  

OK, I shouldn’t have expected to get away with explaining my point there. Professor Smith has interrupted students and myself in class no less than several dozen times in the last year, and I knew that. Still, it’s a little frustrating not being able to have a legitimate way of getting your point across. And I can expect him not to want me to make economic arguments about how states manage wars, since that’s not fair to him. By his own admission, “I don’t profess to be an economist.”  

No one said that every professor must be one. But, to as Murray Rothbard once stated, “It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a ‘dismal science.’ But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance.”  

A week or two later, on the day of the mid-term elections, he began class as if with a prayer, quoting from the good book . . . Plato’s Republic. Additionally, the first 20 minutes or so were devoted to how great democracy is and how good it is that we all voted.  

At the end of his ministry, he asked for any questions. I raised my hand. He turned away from me while ignoring my raised hand, so I said, “Professor Smith, I have a question. Why is it that, by your own measure, the very people who can’t be trusted to govern themselves should be trusted to vote for political candidates, thus externalizing the costs of making war onto everyone?”  

He again turned away from me and began his regular spiel: People, being what they are, need—  

And I interrupted him, fearing that I would not be allowed to respond to this inane point. I said, “So we should make a monopoly of this war making power because we’re afraid of war? That makes no sense. ‘If you’re afraid of war, make war. If you’re afraid of death, commit suicide.’”  

At this point, he told me how he had not rudely interrupted me, and finished reiterating what was bound to give me a lot to think about: People, being what they are . . . .  

Of course, to maintain this line of argument, you would have to explain how vesting the war making and police power into a monopoly, against which we may have no legal recourse, is actually a method of reducing the war making power. You would have to explain that what we don’t need is law, but actually an aggressive monopoly which is immune from law, and which alone decides what the laws are, who can vote for laws and when, when war can be made, and who will fight it. And, of course, who will responsibly wield such power, since people cannot be trusted to wield it in a voluntary society.  

I’ve explained to Professor Smith several times that we share similar ends, those of desiring peace, law, prosperity, and justice; that there is no need to reiterate the ends he believes, as if those are sufficient to object to my school of economic thought. I have told him that he must provide a means consistent with acquiring them, to which he mumbled something about how we don’t share ends all that similar.  

Sure, Professor Smith. People, being what they are, need laws. By the same measure, people, being what they are, will abuse power when they get it, and cannot avoid abusing power when it’s their sworn duty to as part of their job. Being what they are, we need recourse against those criminal gangs called states. Yes, they need laws--because we need protection from states!  

This is totally immaterial for His Shatterer of Ear Drums. See, he insightfully told me that my theory is narrow minded. So now I know that--for a reason which I have never been told--I must go outside this narrow box I’m in in which I examine the causal forces at work with states. I must regurgitate, for instance, what Leo Strauss says in the introduction of Natural Right and History, as I was assigned for an essay.  

I answered the questions for the assignment, fulfilling all the requirements. The questions were, “To what does Strauss attribute this change in regime [in which Americans don’t believe in natural right]? Is natural right necessary for the American regime to endure? What role should American moral principles play in the formulation of its foreign policy?”  

Strauss says very plainly that political scientists are to blame in the introduction of his book, so that answer came easily enough. As for the second two, Strauss doesn’t address them in the introduction, so I discussed them for the ten page assignment (which, Smith later told me that I exceeded the limit and was actually supposed to write less than ten pages. The instructions he handed out explaining the assignment says it is to be a length of six to ten pages, but whatever. Foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.)  

It’s funny how consistently he claims that he can’t argue with me because I’m an ideologue about theory, a system of thought from which he openly abstains. He resents my “political warfare” with him, yet he most assuredly is not engaged in such warfare with me.  

He also assured me that despite whatever the class should be about, it’s about what he says it’s about, dammit!  

He’s a realist, he tells me. In one of his rants against me along these lines, I immediately asked him if, by his own measure, doesn’t that mean that he, too, refuses to meet me halfway in argumentation? That I alone am labeled the ideologue only by virtue of the fact that he is not me? A simple “No” sufficed for a response.  

Oh. Thanks for clearing that up.  

Since the question was about how natural right should be attributed specifically to the American regime, I avoided discussing the nature of governments in general and focused on the Constitution, our democratic welfare-warfare state, which disrupts society (since Strauss explained that the loss of respect for natural right is detrimental to society), and how moral principles ought to outlaw American foreign policy.  

In Smith’s view, he doesn’t know how to grade the paper. According to him, I didn’t answer the questions. After I brought out the instructions he gave and quoted his questions, he amended his statement so as to mean, “You answered the questions poorly.”  

He took about 15 minutes alone with me in the classroom to yell at me for this (I did my best to remember that it was I who refused to engage in reasonable discussion). He even drew an illustration on the board showing how stupid I am, with my beliefs in a neat little box, and reality being outside it.  

As satisfying as it must have been to get that off his chest for the umpteenth time, there’s a problem with constantly iterating this point. I told him that, while I’ve heard his objection that I’m a dogmatic, narrow minded, ideologue several times in the past year, it remains for him to prove it. Those are the ends he believes in, but he must show me the means to understand that.  

He barked back, “I DON’T HAVE TO PROVE ANYTHING!”  

This smug and self-serving pattern didn’t stop there. I requested that, if he doesn’t want to discuss this in class, we should have a forum in which we won’t monopolize class time arguing--a forum in which other students may participate. I asked that my paper be posted on the class’s online discussion forum, blackboard.  

I was denied recourse again. He explained, “I’m not putting my grading rationale on blackboard.”  

What he did tell me was that my paper was just a ranting polemic against the Constitution which had nothing to do with, er . . . the American regime (I’m not making this up). He didn’t tell me what I should have written about, other than to say that I should have answered the assignment’s questions. But I got the gist.  

Tough break for me, I guess. And he wonders why I can’t be educated.  

With each professor I mentioned at the beginning of this column, I’ve never had a problem of not having some terms on which to debate and have a discussion with class, whatever the class subject may have been. If it is the case that these narrow, ideological beliefs are uniquely problematic for me, then Marymount University has a bigger problem than Professor Smith thinks, since all the other teachers I’ve successfully and peacefully debated must not be realists, but politicized ideologues as well!