No Indoctrination, No Chronicle of Higher Education

A hit piece from the Chronicle for Higher Education on the website NoIndoctrination.org (which I reported about earlier) has drawn the attention of Stanley Kurtz at NRO. The attack comes from the last paragraph of the Chronicle article, which reads:

One posting accuses Cecilia Rao, who is listed as a professor at Barnard College, of putting too much emphasis on "the plight of the low-income family" in a course called "Poverty and Income Distribution." But according to a college spokeswoman, no one by that name teaches at Barnard and the course does not exist.

But this turns out to be misleading. According to NoIndoctrination, they asked the department in which Rao worked and Rao once did teach at Barnard, but is no longer. There is no indication that the author of the Chronicle article researched whether Rao had taught there other than asking a "spokeswoman". Someone here is not telling the truth.

Kurtz makes a very telling point.

To put it in terms that the radicals might understand, the web has allowed oppressed mainstream students on our campuses to develop a form of "class consciousness." Marx thought that by piling up workers in factories, capitalism would bring them to awareness of their shared oppression. You might think that students would gain awareness of their collective oppression by PC professors at the campuses where they're piled up, but our campuses aren't ordinary factories. They are factories of consciousness, so to speak, run by leftist overseers. It was the advent of the Internet that gave grumbling students a place to go for an alternative to the closed intellectual shop of the universities. And with sites like CampusNonsense.com, David Horowitz's frontpagemag.com, and others, it has given them a place to gain awareness of their shared oppression. Now, NoIndoctrination.org points the way to revolutionary action in defense of student intellectual freedom. So students on the web unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains.

We hope our little offering here can be part of that mix.