Marx Madness: College Blocks Students From Hearing Criticism of Marx

P. Gardner Goldsmith | August 7, 2020
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The leftist tradition of closing many American minds to the facts and thought processes required to sustain the human norm of individual liberty continues.

In fact, while justified concern rages over Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter scrubbing videos of doctors offering testimonials and data about the powerful use of hydroxychloroquine (HCq) against the COVID19 Wuhan Coronavirus (something Anthony Fauci’s NIH already should have known, since it funded a multi-million-dollar study in 2005 confirming HCq’s ability to treat the SARS Coronavirus, yet he appears mum on that matter), The College Fix’s Jennifer Kabbany reports that Evan Osborne, a Wright State University economics professor, is being silenced because he wants to let more students hear the truth about Marxism.

‘That my department is full of extremists who probably don’t belong in a business-college economics department, to be sure, is a manifestation of academic freedom,’ Osborne told The College Fix via email. ‘And I do not want to change how economics is taught at WSU, broadly speaking. I just want my academic freedom to offer a different view to also be respected.’

Osborne is an award-winning teacher who has worked at the Ohio-based university since 1994. In 2014, he taught an honors course on Marxism, and he has fought to be able to teach it again, this year winning a Pyrrhic victory in being given the okay to offer the class to honors students once more. But, he explains, the university administrators steadfastly have refused his request to open the class to all as an elective.

"Clearly, it's all just censorship," Osborne told Fox News. "I have proposed several electives. All have been approved, not going against the sacred beliefs of the radical wing of our department."

Could the administrators dislike his critical view of Marxism/collectivism?

Not only does it assign works written by Karl Marx, but it also looks at the ramifications of the communist political system in places such as Russia and China, as well as how some Western academics have romanticized its bloody, brutal history. It ends with a brief but positive look at capitalism.

It certainly seems as if the larger student body is being blocked because, as Osborne suspects, they do not approve of a large audience hearing the information. As Kabbany notes:

Despite the refusal to open this course to the student body, the economics department currently allows students to take a course every spring called Socialist and Radical Economics, ‘to learn the rich history of critical analyses of the dominant form of capitalism (i.e., historical evolution of capitalist ownerships, capitalist labor process, and its socioeconomic outcomes) and to engage in a critical debate on the prospect of socioeconomic reform,’ according to its syllabus.

And anyone familiar with Postmodernism, Cultural Marxism, and Identity Politics can tell that the “Socialist and Radical Economics” class is not only not realistic about Marxism and its destructive legacy, as those leftist tactics always do, the class pushes an incorrect view of capitalism as a lever for “evil inequality”, rather than as a moral and peace-centered lever for helping people better their lives through voluntary exchange.

And many of his department peers seem averse to discussing reality.

When the economics department’s undergraduate curriculum committee first considered the course in December 2015, his peers sent in anonymous complaints to the department chair at the time that amounted to the assertion that he was ‘teaching Marxism incorrectly.’

Which, again, sounds familiar.

As has been the case with the orthodox Dinosaur Media, Google Overlords, and Delphic university Thought-Police on the topics of “Climate Change” and, now, HCq, the answer to those who would present information not conforming to the leftist orthodoxy is not to engage in debate and prove one’s point. The leftist answer is to shut down debate, silence the unorthodox speaker, and “memory-hole” the unorthodox information or idea.

All, while continuing to promote a criminally unrealistic picture of collectivism as some kind of meritorious success, when, in fact, it has wrought death and deprivation every time the ideology has been inflicted on people. Osborne knows the truth. He knows the millions who have been slaughtered in the name of collectivism, and he knows the unworkable nature of collectivist economics, which destroys incentives, eliminates information collection, wipes out the price mechanism, and attacks liberty and self-ownership.

If faculty want to preach that Marxism is a triumph of human thought, so be it. If other faculty want to argue that actually it was a disaster, and a crime against humanity, this view should no longer be fanatically censored.

The professor’s call is a noble one. The leftist university establishment walks hand in hand beside the pop media, many members of which actually have praised or overlooked the terror wrought by Fidel Castro, even as they crush dissent and label as “racist” or “exploitative” those who would like open debate.

It has been the modus operandi of the left since the days of Jean Jacque Rousseau prior to the bloody French Revolution: demonize and gin-up unwarranted hatred of those with realistic information and those who promote individualist ethics (the only ethics there can be, since all ethics is an expression of moral individual action), and overlook the obvious crimes of collectivism.

But, perhaps, by spreading the word about this, we are creating our own network of people who can teach and learn, outside of the universities and separate from the pop media.

And perhaps our numbers continue to grow.

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