The Campus Gestapo's Latest Victim
ource: FrontpageMagazine.com | April 5, 2001
David A. Yeagley — The Campus Gestapo’s
Latest Victim
By Jamie Glazov
THE CAMPUS GESTAPO has struck again.
After making sure that David Horowitz’s Anti-Reparations Ad was censored in most campus newspapers, the Campus Brownshirts saw to it that David A. Yeagley, an adjunct professor of psychology and humanities at Oklahoma State University, was fired from his job. Yeagley’s crime? Having Conservative views.
Yeagley is a Comanche Indian – and also an American patriot. That combination doesn’t fit the Party line that professors must toe on the university campus. But Yeagley spoke his mind anyway. He even initiated a national campaign to have patriotism taught in public schools. As a result, the academic administration buckled under the pressure of protests issued by campus radicals. It sacrificed Yeagley’s job on the altar of political correctness.
As someone who survived six years of doctoral studies in academia, I can empathize with Yeagley. Frankly I am surprised that he lasted as long as he did. Imagine a Cuban denouncing Castro in the streets of Havana and getting away with it. Try to think of one intellectual in Cuba today who is able to criticize the Communist regime openly and freely – and who is still at large. You can’t, because the virus that creates Communist totalitarianism liquidates dissent. And it is the same virus, albeit in mutated form, that runs academic campuses in the West today.
My colleagues never wavered in their attempt to silence me. And while they imposed their totalitarian mindset, they engaged in the most dishonest double standards that I have ever witnessed.
I don’t know how many times I heard my colleagues sneering at Ronald Reagan’s famous reference to the Soviet Union as being an “Evil Empire.” They would repeat this term with great disdain and sarcasm, often howling with derisive laughter about it. As an émigré from the Soviet Union, I continue to fail to understand exactly what is so laughable about Reagan’s reference. We are basically talking about one of the nastiest regimes in world history. It wiped out more than 30 million of its own people. For me, Reagan was a shrewd and courageous President who crystallized the basic theme of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago into one simple sentence. He was the individual who, at a crucial time, announced that the Emperor had no clothes, when everyone else was too afraid to say so.
When I would articulate these views, my colleagues were struck with horror and outright disgust. I was, after all, transgressing the boundaries of debate that had been strictly molded by the campus thought police. My heresy, of course, was obvious: while racial hatred was intolerable, class hatred had to be permitted. How else could the left-leaning academics wage war on democratic capitalism and tear down their own society’s institutions? It was necessary, therefore, for them to deny, and even exonerate, the genocide that occurred in the name of class hatred.
While I was writing my doctoral dissertation on Canadian-Soviet relations during the Khrushchev era, I was warned several times that my chances of getting a good academic job were very small if I continued to nurture my reputation of being an “extremist.” And why was I an “extremist”? Because, as it often got back to me, I was “way too hard on the Soviets.” I always wondered if I would have been labeled an “extremist” if my thesis was “way too hard” on the Nazis.
I remember how my colleagues intoxicated each other with the interpretation that the very term “Evil Empire” violated the “post-modernist paradigm,” since the term “evil” had lost all meaning. Reagan, therefore, was truly an idiot, because he had used a word that simply did not mean anything. One of the “scholars” who vehemently argued this theme with me one day did something quite illuminating a few weeks later: he put up posters around the university which were titled, “Oppose Evil.” The title referred to the necessity of opposing the right-wing policies of Ontario premier Mike Harris, who was launching a bid to cut welfare roles and introduce workfare schemes. So much for the “post-modernist paradigm.”
All of these double standards and efforts at censorship are the symptoms of the totalitarian disease that has infiltrated academia. That is why brave scholars such as David Yeagley remain our greatest hope. Just like dissidents in Communist countries sacrificed themselves for the possibility of freedom in future generations, so too the Yeagleys in the West lose their jobs for the possibility that free speech may, one day, be tolerated on our university campuses.
Jamie Glazov holds a Ph.D. in History with a specialty in Soviet Studies. He is the author of 15 Tips on How to be a Good Leftist. His father, Yuri Glazov, was a Soviet dissident during the Brezhnev era, who signed the Letter of Twelve, denouncing Soviet human rights abuses. His mother, Marina Glazov, also participated in the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, actively typing and circulating Samizdat – the underground political literature. To avoid imprisonment, Yuri Glazov took his family out of the USSR in 1972 and settled in Canada in 1975, when Jamie was 9. Today Jamie battles socialism from his high-tech warroom in Toronto. He writes the Dr. Progressive advice column for angst-ridden leftists at EnterStageRight.com. E-mail him at jglazov@home.com.
