Our left-leaning culture elites have been quite adverse to teaching people about the many bloody crimes of communism. Here in Austin, that may be changing, as the University of Texas is (however reluctantly) preparing to hold a teaching seminar on Communism.
The University of Texas at Austin is preparing to host a teaching seminar that will train faculty members to instruct students on the horrors of communism.
UT-Austin’s School for Civic Leadership partnered with the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation to host “Teaching the Twentieth Century: Communism and Dissent.” The event is scheduled for October 16 through October 18.
You may remember them from my previous posts on Victims of Communism Day.
Attendees will participate in four sample class sessions from a senior professor. They will also attend four sessions on potential syllabi and pedagogy.
Examples of sessions include a discussion of communism and literature with Gary Saul Morson of Northwestern University, who has taught on Russian literature and intellectual history. The Claremont Institute’s Daniel J. Mahoney, who has defended “conservative-minded liberalism informed by classical and Christian wisdom,” will examine communism and revolution.
Historian Sean McMeekin, who has argued against whitewashing communist history, will deliver the keynote address.
Scott Yenor, a Heritage Foundation scholar who has previously criticized UT-Austin, told Texas Scorecard that the conference looks “great” and “inspired.”
Yenor called the speakers “some of the heaviest hitters among conservative intellectuals” and welcomed it as a counterbalance to “the woke garbage that usually spews from the [s]chools of education.”
The seminar is open to faculty members at “4-year or higher institutions.”
Leaves me out, alas.
To participate, faculty members must commit to teach a course on this subject within three semesters and “acquire express and written approval from their department chair or dean” that they will be allowed to teach the course within that timeframe.
Participants receive a $2000 stipend, paid out in two $1000 tranches.
Too bad. In the immortal words of Frito Pendejo from Idiocracy, “I like money.”
Whether UT and other institutions of higher learning can really shed their soft-spot for communism and socialism, two of the most disasterous failures of any political-economic theories in history, remains to be seen. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, and state government should continue holding UT’s feet to the fire to continue teaching the evils of communism.
Tags: Adam Cahn, Claremont Institute, Communism, Daniel J. Mahoney, education, Gary Saul Morson, Heritage Foundation, Scott Yenor, Sean McMeekin, Texas, Texas Scorecard, University of Texas, Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation
These courses/lectures should be recorded and packaged and marketed through Audible/Amazon. The audience is much bigger and that format is easier and less time consuming to buy and listen to. Plus money can be made with very little extra cost.
The seminar would do well to start with readings from Professor Sean Meekin’s two books, “To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism” and “Stalin’s War: A New History of World War II.”
When I attended UT [city omitted] one of the department’s history professors was a rah-rah communist and another a refugee beaten and broken (literally) by communism.
When The Wall fell, I was an Air Force officer assigned to NATO. I had the opportunity to visit some of my former enemies, officers, at an East German airbase.
They were (past tense) card-carrying commies. One of them showed me his party card. It was a driver-license-sized piece of cheap white paper produced on a typewriter. No doubt manual typewriter.
They had a few months to absorb the new reality and learn English, which was handy. They were now ready to be capitalists. I think they were not entirely sure what being a capitalist was, but it beat the hell out of being what they had been. They repeated over and over “My eyes have been opened.” They had no desire to go back, even thought their situations were pretty rocky compared to before the regime fell.
When I told one of them there was a Communist Party in the US, he was shocked, and then angry. He almost shouted, “You must round them all up and kill them!”
Was good advice from one who knows.
It was amazing to see and hear them describe how they had lived. Tiny tiny dorm room apartments. They said they didn’t really need room to have friends over, because if they met in groups of more than four the Stasi would get suspicious and start watching them. And these were Party Members in the ArmedForces, flying their jets.
This kind of stuff should be in any course on communism. REAL communism,not the academic handjob that universities teach.