Not a day goes by without hearing about university professors espousing Marxist doctrine or anti-American positions in their classrooms. At the same time, these same professors work feverishly to silence moderate or conservative voices on campus in the name of freedom of speech. At times their tactics include the destruction of reputations and the marginalization of opposing viewpoints.One such victim of this left-wing neo-Stalinism is Southern Illinois University history professor Jonathan Bean.
Professor Bean describes himself as a libertarian, but his colleagues characterize him as a conservative or right-winger. Bean was the faculty adviser to the Republican and Libertarian student groups at the university. A prize-winning author, Bean was named the College of Liberal Arts Teacher of the Year in 2004.
On April 11, 2005, six professors at Southern Illinois University published a letter in the school paper condemning him for handing out ”racist propaganda” in his American history classes.
The offending tract, which Bean had in a class that dealt with the civil rights movement and racial tensions in that era, was an article from the conservative publication FrontPageMagazine.com about ”the Zebra Killings” — racially-motivated murders of whites in the San Francisco Bay area in 1972-74 by several black extremists linked to the Nation of Islam. The James Lubinskas article argued that black-on-white hate crimes deserve more recognition.
A university dean canceled Bean’s classroom discussion sections for the week. Two of the three teaching assistants resigned, leaving the course in a shambles, according to the Globe.
Unfortunately, the aforementioned incident is quite commonplace on American university campuses, with the bias usually aimed at conservatives and conservative positions. It is, we believe, a crying shame.
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