Steve Farrell
Friday, Dec. 24, 2004

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  And so I assume there are more who feel the same way.

And I wonder, did they sleepwalk through their education? Or is it that they’ve been sleepwalking though life since the day they burst forth out of the womb, bottom first?

Or maybe they are just part of that naive ‘my country can do no wrong’ crowd, or that naive ‘there is no evil in the world’ crowd, or that naive ‘communism isn’t being taught’ crowd, unless the profs come out as open Marxists.

And the latter is so easy to do when one doesn’t read, when one doesn’t think, and when one trusts so many plaid-suited Honest Johns to take them to Heaven when they already have one foot in hell.

But as for everyone else – students, parents of students, and fellow educators who regularly write me about their concerns – they know how hostile things are out there. I’ve known it since I attended my first university class at UNLV in 1976, a 101 class on the Constitution.

It was supposed to be a lecture on the U.S. Constitution. It turned into a scathing attack against Senator Joseph McCarthy and anyone else who was anti-communist, pro-conservative and pro-American, given by a long-haired, slovenly dressed professor.

The only thing good he said about anyone was said about the North Vietnamese leadership, whom you would have thought were the George Washingtons of Southeast Asia instead of the mass murderers they truly were – and the former was precisely the position he took, and the latter, his description of our troops.

His closing remarks consisted of a sexual joke aimed at proving that Christians and conservatives were sex maniacs like everyone else, and thus hypocrites of the first order.

I still remember the line. I tend to believe that your kids have a few memorized also.

It drew the response he wanted from the auditorium-size audience. A loud roar, plenty of laughter, and the lecture ended.

I learned nothing about the Constitution, but a lot about public education.

My next class at UNLV was a Speech 101 class. You know, that dreaded class where you are assigned, perhaps for the first time in your life, to address your classmates with three speeches, one to inform, another to persuade, and another to convince.

By far the best presentation of the semester was given by a bright young man, the student body president, on what should have been a boring subject: food storage. It wasn’t. It was informative, persuasive and even funny. He received, of all things, a standing ovation from his classmates and a unanimous 4.0 vote for his grade.

The teacher, a young radical blonde, for the first and only time in the semester overruled the unanimous sentiment of her students and assigned the young man an “F.”

Her rationale? He had dared to mention the word “LDS” in his presentation. I had no idea what it meant, being new to the West. They were the initials for his Church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

And so he had committed the unforgivable sin, he had said something akin to the “G” word, or the “C” word in a public setting.

Face it, the pro choice left has a sign hanging in every public classroom that says “Christians need not apply!”

My final ‘first class 101’ experience occurred in a more conservative setting, at Southern Utah University in Cedar City, Utah.

Cedar City is a wonderful community, where old-time values still are believed and practiced.

But like so many other public universities, regardless of the moral outlook of the communities they are situated in, they succumbed to the direction of federal strings attached to federal grant monies.

With the aid of the ACLU, the university was ‘persuaded,’ once upon a time, at the threat of losing all federal monies, to fire nearly all of its social science professors, who looked like the community, and hire those who ‘looked more like America.’

My first class from one of those so-called Americans was a History 101 class on the Founding Era of our country.

The prof began his first lecture by quoting the Communist North Vietnamese constitution. He next informed these kids, who did look like the community, “You’ve heard it all your lives that the Founding Fathers came here seeking religious liberty.” And then, with fire in his eyes and fist pounding the podium, he roared, “IT’S A LIE!”

By the end of the semester, every single key Founding Father had his reputation scarred by this man, Washington being the only exception. “He was a good man,” he told us, “but he was an ignoramus. But that’s OK, that’s what we needed, we needed an ignoramus as our first president.”

The truth is everyone was shocked, at the beginning of the semester, by his approach. By semester’s end, he had them eating out of his hand.

Last I checked, this communist ‘look more like America’ ignoramus was still teaching at SUU. And no doubt, if the letters I received this week are indicative of the “all is well” attitude of some parents, there are plenty of PARENTS out there who are equally ignorant as to what’s REALLY going on.

Contact Steve

NewsMax pundit Steve Farrell is associate professor of political economy at George Wythe College, press agent for Defend Marriage (a project of United Families International), and the author of the highly praised, inspirational novel “Dark Rose” (available at amazon.com).

For you West Coast night owls, every Monday you can catch Steve on Mark Edwards’ “Wake up America!” talk radio show on 50,000-Watt KDWN, 720 AM, 10 p.m. to midnight; or on the Internet at AmericanVoiceRadio.com

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