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.