Conservative criticizes "leftist" college faculties

Daniel J. Flynn receives polite response at university.

By: Jeff Milgram
   Conservative author Daniel J. Flynn’s booklets have been burned at the University of California at Berkeley.
   He was banned from Columbia and assaulted on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court.
   He’s even been banned for life from covering Black Panther reunions.
   "Princeton is much too polite," said John Andrews, publisher of The Princeton Tory, the conservative student magazine that invited Mr. Flynn to speak Wednesday evening on one of his favorite subjects, "Why the Left Hates America," the title of his latest book.
   "The Tory is very confident he will be welcome at Princeton," said Duncan Sahner, the magazine’s managing editor.
   And welcomed he was, by about 200 students in Princeton University’s McCosh Hall. The audience was as polite as Mr. Andrews predicted, with nary a murmur, let alone a protest. The audience gave Mr. Flynn a round of polite applause when he finished his lecture and he was not subjected to aggressive questioning afterward.
   An open opponent of the war against Iraq, Mr. Flynn is not a stereotypical, hard-line conservative. His point is that conservatives have little voice in higher education and that leftists, who make up about 10 percent of the population, instinctively hate America and seek its destruction.
   Rhetoric at the large peace rally in New York last weekend was a case in point, he said. "It’s not directed against the war, it’s all directed at the United States," he said. "It’s more of an anti-American rally than a peace rally."
   While colleges and universities have succeeded in diversifying their campuses racially and ethnically, they have failed to diversify their faculties politically, he said.
   "You hear a lot about diversity on campuses today, but college faculties tend to look like the United Nations and think like a San Francisco coffee house," said Mr. Flynn, director of Accuracy in Academia, a nonprofit organization based in Washington, D.C. that monitors university curricula.
   "Conservatives basically have no voice in higher education," he said. "This reflects a degree of hypocrisy since diversity is the watchword on campuses. In fact, universities are the least diverse places in the country."
   To demonstrate the hypocrisy of leftists, Mr. Flynn showed a clipping from the 1979 Monty Python movie "The Life of Brian." The clip shows an anti-Roman group called the People’s Front for Judea. As they rail against Rome, one member reminds them of the roads that Rome built; another brings up the educational system, and so on.
   Then he listed the American inventions that have helped the world — computers, airplanes, lasers, MRIs and CAT scans.
   "It’s not just Americans who benefit," Mr. Flynn said.
   He said America has taken in 60 percent of the world’s immigrants and has given more than $600 billion in foreign aid. "We give more money than any other country," he said.
   But leftists, he said, focus on the negatives and judge America by a double standard.
   "However, while the left urges people to refrain from judging other cultures, it reserves the harshest judgment for America," he said. "If you compare something to an ideal, it is inevitably going to fall short."
   Mr. Flynn, an outspoken critic of convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal, is not too broken up about being banned from the Black Panthers reunions. "Who wants to go to a Black Panthers reunion?" he asked.