Daniel J. Flynn
Monday, Sept. 27, 2004

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  College students have such choices as Amherst College’s “Taking Marx Seriously” and UC-Santa Barbara’s “Black Marxism.” Such classes don’t just represent the views of lone, eccentric academics longing to expand their diminishing base of fellow believers. Entire institutions of higher learning seek to mainstream Marxism by endowing academic chairs, establishing scholarship funds, and dedicating buildings in honor of long-dead communists — in some instances, with taxpayer dollars.

Fifty years ago, Alger Hiss was serving the final months of a prison sentence for perjuring himself about his life as a communist spy. Today, Bard College honors the disgraced State Department official with an Alger Hiss Professor of Social Studies.

An institute at Harvard, a dormitory at the University of Hartford, and UMass-Amherst’s skyscraper library are among the things named for W.E.B. Du Bois on American campuses. Du Bois eulogized Stalin as a “great” and “courageous” man and called the Soviet Union’s intolerance of religion its “greatest gift” to humanity. The propagandist, who is currently doted upon by scores of colleges and universities, won the Lenin Peace Prize in 1959, shortly thereafter joined the Communist Party, and then renounced his American citizenship.

Singer, actor, and athlete Paul Robeson proudly accepted the Stalin Peace Prize in 1952. Penn State and Rutgers now proudly feature campus cultural centers bearing the name of the fervent communist. Columbia University has a civil liberties chair that strangely honors Corliss Lamont, an apologist for Stalin, Mao, and their B-list impersonators.

Harry Bridges, leader of the West Coast International Longshoreman’s and Warehouseman’s Union, was an underground communist. This was strongly suspected for the 40 years that Bridges ran the union until his retirement in 1977. It is known definitively today. He perjured himself repeatedly about involvement in the party, excused Stalin’s atrocities, and subordinated the interests of union members to the dictates of the Soviet Union. No matter — the University of Washington houses a Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies, as well as an academic chair named for the Australian Stalinist.

In the 1990s, UMass-Amherst gave the Communist Party’s official historian Herb Aptheker an honorary degree, the University of California awarded three-time Communist Party vice-presidential candidate Angela Davis $90,000 and its highest academic honor, and a branch of the City University of New York even doled out Ho Chi Minh scholarships until an uproar put a stop to it.

Just as the massive class time dedicated to Marxism isn’t matched by any discernable professorial interest in offering courses on the teachings of Ludwig von Mises, F.A. Hayek, or Milton Friedman, the number of communists institutionally honored on campuses is predictably unmatched by tributes to Whittaker Chambers, Ronald Reagan, J. Edgar Hoover, or other prominent anti-Communists. Too many faculty and administrators want students (most of whom have no memory of the struggle between the West and communism) to believe the bad guys were the good guys in the Cold War.

After the show trials, the killing fields, and the Berlin Wall, the present-day defenders of communism are the consummate intellectual morons. Tethered to ideology, they ignore any “smaller” truths that prove inconvenient to their larger “truth.” Slavish devotion to their theoretical system thereby makes smart people fall for stupid, and in this case also evil, ideas.

Marxists lost the Cold War, but they have won many battles in academia. It’s perhaps fitting that one of the only places communism retains notable support in the West is the college campus, where an idea’s popularity often has an inverse relationship to its practicality.

Daniel J. Flynn is the author of the newly released, Intellectual Morons: How Ideology Makes Smart People Fall for Stupid Ideas (Crown Forum, 2004).