“In my book, I explore the case for conspiracy and conclude that either the Bush administration knew the (9/11) attacks were coming and exploited them to push through their rightwing domestic and foreign policy or they were utterly incompetent, failing to see all of the obvious signs of the coming Al Qaeda attack.”

- UCLA Professor Douglas Kellner

This is just one nugget from a profile of Professor Kellner written up at UCLA Profs, a new site …

… dedicated to exposing UCLA’s most radical professors. The extensively researched profiles you will find here are proof of an increasingly radical faculty. As a large number of the profiles also demonstrate, these professors are actively proselytizing their extreme views in the classroom, whether or not the commentary is relevant to the class topic.

The profiles are impressive. Kellner is by no means unrepresentative — superstar Education Professor Peter McLaren is worse. UCLA Profs writes:

McLaren also offers … a naughty intellectual thrill, romancing someone who unabashedly argues that education should come in the form of indoctrination. Modern, educated radicals had always wanted to politicize the classroom; it was McLaren who put an intellectual veneer on this desire.

This is what happens in a graduate-level education class, according to McLaren himself:

“We begin by examining the intrinsically exploitative nature of capitalist society … We look at this issue from the perspective from a number of Marxist orientations and I try to present the case that capitalism can’t be reformed and still remain capitalism. This provokes lively debates, as you can well imagine. Students also anguish about the fact that, as future professors of education, they will be co-opted by the system. Some want tangible evidence that critical pedagogy can be effective in transforming the system. And it does happen that some opt out of the doctoral program to engage in grassroots political activism. Others resign themselves to a left liberalism that works on the basis of making slow, step-by-step, incremental changes. Still others approach their work from the perspective of the dialectic between reformism and revolution: they work in the arena of policy, curriculum and pedagogical reform, while keeping in mind the wider goal of revolutionary social change which stipulates an eventual transition to socialism.”

You can find other fascinating tidbits at the site, such as a partial list of lefty petitions UCLA faculty have signed, a list of “the worst of the worst” faculty, and a survey of certain department’s political affiliations (136 registered Democrats vs 11 Republicans).

Great stuff. Depressing, but great.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 11th, 2006 at 1:44 am by A Senior Administration Official and is filed under California Schemin', (Un)education, Your Tax Dollars In Action. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.