Behind the Iron Curtain in Michigan

FrontPageMagazine.com | March 21, 2002

ALTHOUGH my appearance at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor on Tuesday night, was picketed by the members of the “Defend Affirmative Action Party,” a thousand students – 600 in the hall and 400 in the overflow outside the hall -- showed up to hear me speak. About 300 of them were black. (One in fact was the leader of DAAP, Agnes Angebou, who stood up during the question and answer period, oblivious to the fact that she had called for a boycott of the event. She attempted to give an election speech for her candidacy for student body president until I shut her up.) The Black Student Union had evidently decided in a late bout of second thoughts to come in force and be a presence at the proceedings. Another thousand or so people “attended” via the Internet.

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Three vice presidents of the University sat in the balcony. None deigned to introduce themselves to me, or to appear on the platform with me and suggest to their students that spouting hate and calling for pickets of academic speakers might be incompatible with the spirit of learning that an institution like the University of Michigan is supposed to foster. There were also twelve armed police with dogs in attendance who had been assigned to keep things in order and protect me from physical harm. Welcome to the American university campus, circa 2002.

I talked for a little over an hour. My speeches always begin with a little autobiography since I am the target of a national smear campaign by leftwing hate groups who are ubiquitous on college campuses across the country. Indeed I have encountered only a very few campuses where they are not a visible and intimidating force. At Michigan they regularly steal the newspapers and the newsstands of my conservative hosts, tear down their posters and at times physically attack them. University administrations look the other way – a telling contrast to the way they will leap on the slightest incident that offends the sensitivities of the left. This collusion is essential to the survival of what can only be described as a kind of campus fascism.

I began, as I always do, by reminding my student audiences that I was fighting for civil rights before they were born, and that I am still doing so. Because of the circumstances of my appearance and the makeup of the audience I altered my subject (“How the Left Undermined America’s Security”) and spoke a lot about reparations, about the bankruptcy of the so-called civil rights movement and about the oppression of America’s inner cities by Democrats and progressives who run all the political institutions that govern and affect them. This threw my numerous opponents in the audience so thoroughly off guard that I was able to get through my remarks without incident.

I did manage to talk briefly about the left’s role in undermining America’s security by pointing out that the reparations campaign is really a campaign of the hate America left whose intention is to paint America as a slave-owning, segregationist and racist nation and thus to alienate black Americans from their own country, while making other Americans ashamed to defend it. In the midst of a war that is taking place on American soil and that may soon involve biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction, the rest of us can no longer afford to take such a complacent and tolerant attitude towards this kind of internal ideological attack.

During the question and answer period at Michigan the discussion got somewhat heated as one would expect. Issues came up – like affirmative action or whether American business investments “destroyed the economies” of African countries – which showed the success of the Marxist indoctrination process at this once great university. Ideas that the 20^th century has shown to have dangerous consequences and which are tantamount to flat-earthism are obviously flourishing in a university environment which provides no competition from conservative viewpoints.

During the Q&A, my most frequent responses were those starting with, “Look, I can’t remedy four years of mis-education in one hour, but …” And then I would attempt to provide a verbal reading list of conservative authors they had never heard of like Thomas Sowell and Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom, who have provided the irrefutable evidence that could have succeeded – and did -- without affirmative action). The rank ignorance of questioners who argued that “the Constitution said blacks were only 3/5ths of a human being,” fueled the righteous rage of the Black Student Union members in attendance and for a moment I thought it was time to end the evening. But the boiling point wasn’t reached and the evening ended if not amicably then at least without a total breakdown. Two cheers for what remains of the learning environment. The hundreds of students who were either neutral, curious, or conservative enjoyed the evening immensely and some of them undoubtedly took away new thoughts. (Check out the accompanying article from the very liberal Michigan Daily for example.)

In my discussions with my conservative hosts before the speech I learned among other things, that the Black Studies Department had previously paid $10,000 to Randall Robinson – the pro-Castro, America-hating, race-baiting proponent of reparations to come to Michigan to speak, but had refused to invite me (or pay me a dime), even though reparations would appear to lie within the field of black studies and I am the author of the only book on the other side of the issue. The immense subsidies to destructive leftwing ideologues like Robinson and the lack of resources to bring conservative views to the campus only add to the already colossal intellectual imbalance and the ongoing perversion of the academic process.

I also learned that out of a faculty of perhaps 2,000 professors, there is not a single professor available to sponsor the conservative students’ newspaper (The Michigan Review) and club. This does not mean there are no conservatives on the faculty at Michigan, a taxpayer-funded school in a state with a Republican governor; my hosts actually thought there might be as many as six, albeit four in the engineering department. What it does mean is that conservatives are such an endangered species on the Michigan faculty that they are afraid to let anyone know that they are conservative lest their lives be made miserable by leftists who masquerade as liberals. (I was told by one conservative professor at a previous school I had spoken at, that because he had “made the mistake” of letting his views be known he had not been given a raise in 15 years, and by another -- a scientist -- that he was punished in petty (or not so petty) ways as for example by denying him lab space he needed for his work.

It is things like this that leave me with an aura of sadness even when an evening at a university goes as well as this one did. It is as though when I leave the campus I am leaving students behind an Iron Curtain where they will have no adult to stand up for them or educate them in histories and ideas that would make them proud of their country, that would help the blacks among them to march towards a positive future, or that would give them a reasonable understanding of the world around them. The students I leave behind have no access to professors, books, or ideas associated with the conservative viewpoint – which is to say a viewpoint that celebrates the progressive aspects of this country and progressive role it has played as a “beacon of freedom and opportunity to the rest of the world.” What they have instead are the prejudices, rancors and delusions of a discredited past.