The Anti-Freedom
of Speech Mission to Destroy Public Education in America: A Counter-Essay
Thought &
Action (the National Education Association’s Higher Education Journal) published (Fall 2012) “The Anti-Egalitarian Mission to Destroy Public
Education in America,” written by an educational bureaucrat, Jon E. Travis,
Professor of Educational Leadership at Texas A&M University-Commerce. In that essay, Travis decried so-called “anti-egalitarians” as “individuals hostile to the
tenets of American liberty.” Furthermore, he labeled those faceless
individuals as “oligarchs” seeking to restrict “educational access to the rich
and white.” They remain faceless because
Travis lacked the courage to name any of them.
As a white, more
or less unemployed professor, I’ve always dared “go upright and vital, and
speak the rude truth in all ways” (Emerson), especially regarding institutions
of higher education employing me. Travis
blindly, if not religiously, praises those institutions as “revered.” Likely, he has never mustered the courage or
dared think as an independent citizen to actually question and challenge
them.
Travis and the
bulk of educrats seem purposefully ignorant of the damage left-wing ideological
political correctness has been doing to higher education, especially in the
form of restricting (often unconstitutionally!) democracy’s cornerstones, vigorous
debate and freedom of speech. Why the egregious ignorance?
Evidently, it is self-serving.
As a white
citizen, I take offense at the anti-white racist programs educrats have
institutionalized in those so-called “revered”
establishments of higher education. Affirmative
Action and the Un-Fair Campaign (see http://unfaircampaign.org)
are several examples. Institutionalized
multiculturalism has served to diminish the very “tenets of American Liberty”
(the words are Travis’) more than anything else on
college campuses across the nation.
Yet why the silence with that regard? Why do our so-called
“revered” institutions of higher learning evidently prefer diversity over
democracy? Why have most, if not all, of them established Departments of
Diversity, as opposed to Departments of Democracy? Could educrats like Travis possibly be unaware
of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and the annual statistics it compiles with regards campus speech codes?
“Public
education faculty, staff, and administrators need to believe they are in a
war,” notes Travis, but I note in a war not with the nebulous “anti-egalitarians,”
but rather with freedom-of-speech libertarians. In fact, the politically-correct institutions of
higher education praised across the board by Travis tend to be
anything but egalitarian in nature. Conservative white students, for example,
are surely not considered on an equal footing with minority students. The
professorate is anything but egalitarian.
Finally,
how can independent-minded citizens, as opposed to politically-correct indoctrinated college
graduates and professors, possibly agree with Travis’ overall assessment of
America’s institutions of higher learning as “revered,” especially when the majority of
those institutions willingly and often illegally suppress freedom of thought,
freedom of expression, and freedom of speech?
Neither Travis nor Thought & Action
deigned to respond to this counter-essay. Perhaps both he and editor Mary Ellen
Flannery are examples of those anti-egalitarians.
