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April 27, 2005
Republicans Need Not Apply
Once again, the leftwing tilt of our universities is out of control:
On April 11, Jonathan Bean, a professor of history at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale (SIUC), received the college’s “Outstanding Teacher Award.” But just two days later, Bean became the scourge of the campus, abandoned by teaching assistants and vilified as a purveyor of “racist propaganda.”
Behind Bean’s sudden fall from admired academic to campus Enemy Number One was a cabal of eight radical academics in the SIUC history department. Bean's offense was to have assigned as optional reading for his history class a 2001 Frontpagemag report titled “Remembering the Zebra Killings” by James Lubinskas. The class topic was “Civil Rights and Civil Disorder.” Bean's required readings for the class included the writings of Malcolm X, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Ella Baker, and Stokely Carmichael.
Hmmm...he spreads racist propaganda at the same time he requires students to read pieces from prominent black activists?
The offending Frontpagemag article which Bean made optional recounts what have come to be known as the Zebra Killings, a series of murders that took place in the San Francisco Bay area between 1972 and 1974, which left 71 people dead. The crimes shared a distinctive pattern: all the victims were white. The article, which contains facts first exposed in the 1979 book Zebra by crime writer Clark Howard, and subsequent reviews of the book in Time Magazine, reveals that five members the “Death Angels,” a sub-group of the Nation of Islam, carried out the majority of the attacks.
His "colleagues," Marxists and Communists, are conducting a vicious smear campaign that would make those who defamed Larry Summers blush.
However, Bean has his defenders, including other professors, the ACLU (I'm surprised!), photographer and former student D. Gorton (a former New York Times employee), and many of his current students:
For instance, in an April 20 letter to the Daily Egyptian, Bethany C. Peters, a SIUC senior and history major, writes:
“I had [Bean] as a professor for History 392 last semester. My class, which was diverse, never had any problems with Dr. Bean being racist or requiring propagandist literature. As my professor and advisor, I have had only positive experiences with him and find that he is a wonderful professor, who went out of his way to help any and all students to succeed at SIUC.”
Peters goes on to write:
“I would also challenge each of those professors [who have defamed Bean] to examine their own literature and see exactly what stances and images are being professed and created. If it is not acceptable for Dr. Bean to push an agenda (which he DOES not), then perhaps they also should refrain from handing out materials that include an agenda, be it racist, liberal, inappropriate in regards to religion.”
It's interesting that the American Association of University Professors, which is against the Academic Bill of Rights because it believes universities can "take care of their own," has been silent on this issue.
The Front Page Magazine article on this subject is lengthy; peruse it when you have time to see what's happening on our college campuses today.
Posted by at April 27, 2005 10:06 AM
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Tracked on April 28, 2005 09:24 AM