I have always felt that, although there is a certain amount of absurd censorship in the United States, it was caused by a group of people who cared little for the freedom on which this nation is supposedly based. Times have changed. Apparently, our friends at the American Council of Trustees, founded by Lynne Cheney, wife of our Vice President Dick, have decided what America stands for. Freedom? No. Democracy? Maybe. Economic censorship? Yes.
The Council has released a report, titled \How Our Universities are Failing America and What Can Be Done About It."" Apparently, in the wake of Sept. 11, students and faculty around the nation are failing America in epidemic proportions. One has only to read the report to find out in what sense we are failing.
The report contains many instances of professors and students at universities, one a student here at Madison, speaking out about terrorism. The report lists these statements as though they should be outrageous to any ""good American."" The disturbing irony of the report lies in the fact that most of them are statements that the United States should put a modicum of thought into our response to terrorism. Some of the quotes even go so far as to suggest that the United States has antagonized other nations in the past. The Council uses the rest of the report to suggest that the people responsible for the statements are uneducated about history, and this lack of knowledge fuels their criticism. I think if the members of the Council were educated properly on the history of the United States, they might realize how far off they are about what America stands for. Lynne Cheney says it is ""freedom."" The conclusion of the report proves how incredibly wrong she may be.
The end of the report states that universities should adopt ""strong core curricula"" aimed at teaching ""American history."" I thought our curriculum was sufficiently based on things that Americans, usually white men, say about America. The report goes on to say that if universities do not change to this new curriculum, ""alumni should protest, donors should fund new programs and trustees should demand action."" The suggestion that donors fund new programs amounts to little more then the economic sanctioning of ideas. These donors are presumably people who agree with the report. People who fund universities obviously have money and currently have some power over what gets learned in America. They are the same people who have spent the months since the attack making love to the capitalist democracy that makes them rich while downplaying the brutality of the United States' less loving penetration of Afghanistan.
This report is little more than a grab by supposedly patriotic Americans at the thoughts of a population educated enough to question a government whose top leadership is a president who visibly struggles to construct unscripted grammatically correct sentences and a vice president who served in a Nixon administration that founded the very mistrust the Council deplores.
This Council of ""good Americans"" wants to control how we think. They already do, to an extent, but I for one do not intend to lose my sense of rational thought for the sake of patriotism. I hope that enough people see the report to foster a sense that this is where nationalism has to end, where censorship, wrapped in a thick layer of dollar bills, is jammed into the mouth of reason. Finally, I hope that I am ""unpatriotic"" enough to have a sound bite in the next report filed by this sad organization that dedicates itself to the destruction of reasonable thought in our places of escape from the misinformation that pervades this increasingly nationalist machine.
