How our Marxist faculties got that way
By Edward Bernard Glick
June 17, 2008
American Thinker
Edward Bernard Glick is a professor emeritus of political science at Temple University and the author of “Soldiers, Scholars, and Society: The Social Impact of the American Military.”
It’s August 1968. Anti-Vietnam War demonstrators have just wrecked the Democratic national convention in Chicago and ruined Hubert Humphrey’s chances to become President. So what did these Marxist demonstrators and their cohorts elsewhere do next?
They stayed in college. They sought out the easiest professors and the easiest courses. And they stayed in the top half of their class. This effectively deferred them from the military draft, a draft that discriminated against young men who didn’t have the brains or the money to go to college. That draft also sparked the wave of grade inflation that still swamps our colleges. Vietnam-era faculty members lowered standards in order to help the “Hell No, We Won’t Go” crowd.
In the 1970s, President Richard Nixon ended the war and Congress ended military conscription. So the Marxist anti-war activists — activism is now a full-time profession — had to do something else. Most of them went to work in the real world. But a meaningful number remained in school and opted for academia, especially the humanities and the social sciences. If they got a Ph.D., they might even become university teachers, and many of them did. They then climbed academia’s ladder, rising from instructor to assistant professor, from assistant professor to associate professor, and from associate professor to full professor. These last two ranks usually carry tenure, which means a guaranteed job until one decides to retire or is fired for raping little children in the streets.