SmallGovTimes.com

By: News Bites | Published on 07/10/08    

Are professors in American colleges and universities interested in the truth? That sounds like a strange question, but in an extremely revealing new book, Mary Lefkowitz shows that there are some who won’t let the truth get in the way of their efforts at indoctrinating students. Worse yet, administrators often cave in to these academic bullies rather than standing up for faculty members with the nerve to question them.

Lefkowitz is an emeritus professor at Wellesley College, where she taught courses on classical culture for many years. Ancient Greece is her specialty. It is hard to imagine that such a quiet scholar would become the center of a vehement controversy that would rock the campus and descend (on one side) to the level of vicious personal attacks. History Lesson (Yale University Press, 202 pages) is the story of her bitter experience after challenging the accuracy of material a professor in Wellesley’s Africana Studies Department used in his classes.

In her introduction Lefkowitz writes, “Telling the truth, instead of being our first responsibility, has suddenly become less important than achieving social goals. These goals were to be reached not by means of the usual scholarly tools of reflection and reasoned persuasion. They were to be imposed by assertion and fiat.”

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