POLITICAL BIAS IN THE CLASSROOM: No Excuses!

Pictured: Metropolitan State University: Denver Colorado. Does its faculty share the left-wing herd mentality?

Intolerance on the College Campus: Students FORCED to Knock Palin

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World Net Daily and Fox News among other news sources have reported today that a Denver area college professor assigned his English students to write an essay to "undermine" Sarah Palin. The professor, Andrew Hallam, at Metropolitan State College, a new instructor at the school, assigned the assignment as a close-ended assignment specifically to criticize the candidate without an option to present an contrary point-of-view.

World Net daily report: http://www.wnd.com/index.php?pageId=75426

This kind of instruction is unacceptable, period, but at a state college supported by taxpayer funds, this conduct is even more distressing. Education, especially at the college level, is not indoctrination, yet the arrogance and condescension of far too many of today's college faculty shows a complete detachment from the mission for which they were hired.

Lively debate on current issues should be encouraged where students are encouraged to examine all sides of an issue, the pros, the cons, the irrelevant, but the insistence on having to conform to one side of the issue as assigned contradicts the very skills and values students should be developing in their academic world, those of analytical reasoning and critical thinking.

In Mr. Hallam's class, the students are simply assigned to be mindless drones, to do their instructor's bidding, to eliminate the consideration of many possibilities in favor of the dogma promoted by the teacher.

The problem is left-wing attitudes and beliefs permeate higher education from the highest levels at Ivy League institutions and trickles down through the whole educational system. Examine how many of the most radical adherents from New York Times columnists to Barack Obama himself hail from Harvard, Princeton, and Yale.

Surveys of college faculty have shown again and again, the vast majority of the population indicates they are registered as Democrats or identify their political thinking as "Liberal."

Gone are the days when a student would have to navigate a series of courses taught by professors whose backgrounds and beliefs came from all over the political spectrum.

Now, even mainstream Liberals like Larry Summers, are in for a fight for survival if their words stray from the orthodoxy of political correctness and left wing dogma.

Time and time again, when colleges invite guest speakers whose views reflect anything other than the true ultra-left perspective, their goon squads are at the ready to shout down or even physically attack such figures.

How can those who practice such shameful behavior call themselves "progressives" when such behavior is right out of the playbook of Facism?

It's interesting that this story should arise so quickly after attempts of the Obama campaign to block Stanley Kurtz from being interviewed on Chicago radio station, WGN-AM. In today's episode, the radical left is putting their left-wing perspective in their students' mouths and compelling their to parrot that viewpoint according. In the WGN scenario, the left attempts to keep its opposition silent.

How ironic it is that left-wing sympathizers constantly talk about the severe oppression of the Bush Administration as if they are actively persecuting and prosecuting those who criticize their activities. If so, where are the emenies' lists or the inappropriately obtained FBI files that Mrs. Hilary Clinton could simply not explain how she got a hold of?

Also look at the ongoing efforts to muzzle and discredit the Fox News Network for they dare to let other perspectives beside that of the extreme left go public with their beliefs.

From the left's perspective, any dissent against their position is just plain wrong but they'll ascribe other labels to those views as well as being "hate speech," reactionary, bigotted, sexist, or just simply ignorant. As such, any assertion against their ideology to them is like someone who might assert the sky is green and the grass is orange. There is no other side to an issue if the other side is nonsense as they would contend. As such, there's no need to mention it.

Further, the left, getting back to the issue of Sarah Palin, stops at nothing to smear and obliterate the standing of good people through vicious personal attacks and scandalous assertions to ruin a person's reputation so thoroughly, anything that person might have to say has no standings.

The Colorado situation must be resolved immediately. The instructor in question must be disciplined and if the behavior is as widespread as as reported, he must be terminated. Further, the hiring practices of Metropolitan State's faculty must be investigated and principles of a fair open-minded approach to instruction must be reinforced.