On Monday, students, faculty and supporters at the University of California, Davis, attempted a mass general strike to protest tuition hikes and to demand the resignation of Chancellor Linda Katehi after police pepper-sprayed eleven protesters who blocked a public access way at an #OccupyUCDavis event on November 18th. Students maintain it was Chancellor Katehi who requested the police remove the Occupy encampment and clear access to the facility.  The incident sparked a firestorm of media all across the world and has become a viral phenomenon, and now even an Internet meme.

We stand behind those calling for Chancellor Katehi’s resignation.  But not for the reasons they might think.

The events of UC Davis and the way in which the pepper-spray was handled has set a number of dangerous precedents.  In the setting of academia, the rights of the majority of students are being trampled on to appease the tyranny of a minority.  Further, the very system of law and order and its public servants instituted to protect the rights of the public at large have been undermined by incompetent leaders, unable to withstand the growing pressure of a noisy minority and the corrupt media that supports it.  Most importantly, propaganda has established a foothold that is now stronger than ever, and far more dangerous than the short-term effects of pepper spray.

Over the last week, we have seen the media pick up the UC Davis story and run with it, always highlighting the same twenty seconds of one Officer Pike, methodically pepper-spraying eleven “peaceful protesters,” as onlookers gasp and scream in horror and dismay.  The public was almost undivided in its immediate condemnation of the act.

But just as Winston Churchill once said, “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.” Perhaps in this case, it’s not so much a lie, but a lot of omissions.

We know now that the Davis 11 locked arms to block the public access way, creating both a safety hazard and barring other students and the public from gaining access to facilities beyond that point.  What the media has never explained is that the protesters were repeatedly warned to clear the path.  Video shows officer Pike, the one with the pepper spray, informing each protester one last time that they would be “subject to the use of force” if they did not voluntarily move.  The protesters acknowledge the warning and hunker down for the consequences.

The media also never provides an accurate portrayal of why the students were protesting in the first place, and what prompted them to block the access way.  In an interview with Democracy Now, UC Davis Sustainable Agriculture student Elli Pearson, one of the protesters in the blockade who was pepper sprayed, reveals the truth.

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Columbia Journalism “Professor of Professional Practice” Sree Sreenivasan, still smarting from an encounter with James O’Keefe, seems to have declared himself the ultimate arbiter of what is, or is not, citizen journalism:

PEOPLE LIKE O’KEEFE THINK THEY ARE ACTING LIKE JOURNALISTS. They think having a camera makes them a journalist. Instead, this is a cheap caricature of journalism…

No, Prof. Sreenivasan, scribes who hide behind the varnish of objectivity to sell a political agenda are what pass for cheap caricatures of journalism.

The erosion of faith in media began before O’Keefe was born, and “professors of professionalism” like Sreenivasan enable it. There is no such thing as journalistic objectivity–accuracy, yes, but objectivity, no. Objectivity is a fairy tale told to idealistic activists who want to enter journalism so they can “change things”; they already know there’s no glory in the role of an “objective observer.”

Granted, there are a few who strive for objectivity as an ideal–but they are rare, and they won’t be found under the tutelage of Sreenivasan or fellow Columbia professor Dale Maharidge.

Prof. Sreenivasan has the audacity to lecture citizen journalists–who report facts that the mainstream media leaves out for the sake of “objectivity”–simply because they have, rightfully, reclaimed journalism? Please. Go troll on Facebook and whine about it some more, “professional journalists.”

Perhaps Prof. Sreenivasan believes that citizen journalists are responsible for polling such as this:

Pew: Public opinion of media never worse

Americans See Liberal Media Bias on TV News

Distrust in U.S. Media Edges Up to Record High

The Hill Poll: Most voters see media as biased and unethical

Americans View Media Bias As Big Problem, Poll Shows

Public trust in US media eroding: Pew study – Yahoo! News

Shall I continue?

The continual decline of public trust in media is not the fault of James O’Keefe or other citizen journalists–citizen journalists were created in response to it.

People like O’Keefe have it in for professional journalists.

Could Prof. Sreenivasan be more self-exalting and misleading? Do “professional journalists” send out profanity-laden emails to people with whom they disagree? Is this what Sreenivasan calls “journalism?”

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Phil Christofanelli’s odyssey in Introduction to Labor Studies at the University of Missouri bobbed back to the surface Thursday when Big Government reported on internal emails among administrators. Those emails demonstrate that Christofanelli was targeted because of his conservative political views and imply collusion with the Soros funded Media Matters:

[UMSL Senior Associate Vice President Ron] Gossen added: “Media Matters did our work for us in showing how [the video’s] edited.” Indeed, the emails suggest that UMSL may have relied on left-wing blogs rather than conducting its own research.

A couple months ago, with turmoil swirling around the University of Missouri’s Labor, Politics, and Society course, the Ivory Tower’s official fishwrap, Inside Higher Ed, came to the defense of the course’s lecturers: Judy Ancel and Don Giljum:

Videos posted by the conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart appear to have ended the teaching career of an adjunct at the University of Missouri — even as university officials issued a statement backing the contention of the two instructors of the labor studies course that their comments in the class had been edited to present an “inaccurate and distorted” picture of what was said.

It is specious to complain that video is edited since nearly all video is edited before being released. However, if editing is a concern, then why doesn’t the University make all of the video from the course available? Their claim that existing videos are “inaccurate and distorted” could be dismissed with just such a release. The fact that neither the University nor the media companies that were given the full videos have produced a video exonerating Ancel and Giljum suggests that exculpatory evidence does not exist. Again, release the video.

Gail Hackett, the provost of UMKC, hid behind the protection of “academic freedom” (from Inside Higher Ed):

Hackett’s statement went on to “underscore our commitment to the importance of academic freedom, freedom of speech and the free-flowing discussion of challenging topics in our courses,” as well as “the serious responsibilities this places on us to ensure a balanced perspective is offered to our students within our curriculum.”

Hackett’s suggestion that she is committed to “a balanced perspective” is unsupported by the evidence in the classroom. It’s laughable in light of the way that her fellow administrators targeted Christofanelli because of his conservative political views. But her pontification about ”academic freedom, freedom of speech, and the free-flowing discussion of challenging topics” give away the game. Hackett is defending her own academic fiefdom without serious regard to either free speech or free-flowing discussion.

She asserts that the inclusion of students in the video “without their permission is a violation of [the student's] privacy rights.” Is Hackett really arguing that students on her campus have a right to call for the violent overthrow of the US government? Big Government reported on this comment from one student:

…Ancel introduced the idea that “violence is a tactic.” . . .

The very next statement was by a student following up Ancel’s point: “I don’t necessarily want to be a part of capitalist society. I want to take over the state with a revolutionary movement, which doesn’t exist.” Ancel did not comment on his call to overthrow the government.

The comments of students are relevant for another reason: they are a testament to the efficacy of Ancel and Giljum’s teaching. The student’s words above and willingness to voice them openly show that the professors view violence as an effective union tactic and that the professors fostered an academic atmosphere that is hostile to political dissent. That contradicts Hackett’s stated goals of balance and free-flowing discussion and demonstrates the extent of the Gramscian damage at Mizzou.

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Tim Barker at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch falsely claimed that the exculpatory portion of Shirley Sherrod’s remarks were not included in the original posting or video originally posted on Big Government. Barker writes:

This isn’t the first controversy created by Breitbart’s heavy editing of videos. In another recent incident, a U.S. Agriculture Department employee was fired over what appeared to be a racist remark made in a speech. It was later revealed that the edited video left out a part of her speech that explained her comment as being part of a lesson on racial healing.

The story appeared in both the print and online version of the paper.

… Sherrod describes how she racially discriminates against a white farmer. She describes how she is torn over how much she will choose to help him. And, she admits that she doesn’t do everything she can for him, because he is white. Eventually, her basic humanity informs that this white man is poor and needs help.

Much of the class time was dedicated to political organizing. They brought in an organizer with the Communist Party who was in his early 20s, didn’t have any academic credentials and who took up two hours of class time talking about his problems with the Missouri legislature, and offering his phone number and telling people how they can join the Communist Party, so essentially recruiting …

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Yesterday I interviewed Phil Christofanelli, a student from the UMSL labor relations class taught by Don Giljum. Christofanelli discusses his experience in the class, how the video series came to be, and corrects the fabrications surrounding Giljum’s scuffle with a citizen journalist.

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“Texas Budget Could Cost 600,000 Jobs.”

Wow! Red Alert! Red Alert! If you pull up CNN you will be treated to this sky-is-falling bullet point headline of doom regarding the $83.8 billion budget that will go before the Lone Star State’s legislature next week. The article goes on to describe the spending cuts in the budget as “harsh” and bases this decidedly partial adjective on the estimates released by the bi-partisan Legislative Budget Board. Finally, it deems the projected “loss” of 263,500 private sector jobs and 343,000 government positions by 2013 as counter to the pro-jobs platform of Republican governor Rick Perry.

Naturally, liberal Democrats who never met a government program they didn’t deem absolutely essential (or under-funded) pounced on this story. “The voters did not elect us to eliminate hundreds of thousands of jobs,” said Rep. Mike Villarreal (D). “We can’t grow the Texas economy with a budget that destroys jobs, hurts neighborhood schools and makes college more expensive,” he howled, once again personifying tea partier frustration over politicians who are more about scoring political points to protect their power and positions than taking an honest approach to governing and finding solutions to the problems that plague this nation.

I say this because, well, let me ask you, dear readers–who by virtue of your being on this site demonstrate a higher IQ than most–a common sense question.  If you were a governor trying to make a name for yourself on the national stage by using your own state as a jobs-creation model would you seriously propose a budget that kills over a half million jobs in two years? Of course not.  In fact, I’ve met governor Perry and trust me, this is a sharp man who understands economics.

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Newsweek has published another one of those aren’t-Americans-Stupid articles wherein we find that few Americans know anything about either our history or our political system. People have no idea who our current vice president is, they don’t know when the Declaration of Independence was adopted, and they haven’t a clue who takes the office of president if the prez and the VP are incapacitated. But what is more interesting in Newsweek’s article is the reason the news magazine thinks that we are so stupid. Absurdly Newsweek thinks it’s because government doesn’t spend enough money on education.

First of all, I have to agree that Americans are as ignorant as can be on our history and our system of government. You can see it just about everywhere. In fact, you can see it in voting patterns. Illinois is a perfect example. The corruption has been endemic in the Democrat Party in Illinois for decades, yet voters repeatedly pull that donkey lever. It is clear they are ignorant of why things are so bad in the Land of Lincoln and they send the same crooks back to the state house over and over again.

Certainly it is impossible to dispute Newsweek’s central claim that Americans display an appallingly high level of civic ignorance. But Newsweek doesn’t just report its findings, it goes on to opine on just why we as a nation are so ignorant of our civics and history.

Newsweek thinks it’s because we don’t spend enough money on education: (my bold)

It doesn’t help that the United States has one of the highest levels of income inequality in the developed world, with the top 400 households raking in more money than the bottom 60 percent combined. As Dalton Conley, an NYU sociologist, explains, “it’s like comparing apples and oranges. Unlike Denmark, we have a lot of very poor people without access to good education, and a huge immigrant population that doesn’t even speak English.” When surveys focus on well-off, native-born respondents, the U.S. actually holds its own against Europe.

Newsweek’s claim here is as appallingly ignorant of the facts as someone who doesn’t know that the law of the land is the Constitution of the United States!

Even the left-wing New York Times realizes that the U.S. spends more on education that almost every other nation on earth. For instance, recently the Times published a piece that contained the following:

In an interview, Mr. Schleicher said the point was not that the United States spends too little on public education — only Luxembourg among the O.E.C.D. countries spends more per elementary student — but rather that American schools spend disproportionately on other areas, like bus transportation and sports facilities.

Spending isn’t the problem. The problem is that Democrats and left-wingers have taken over our education and devastated its effectiveness. The left has dumbed down our education from the lowest grades to the halls of our institutes of higher learning until what passes for education is merely a joke.

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On the heels of news that the government is engaging in some sketchy social media networking. (Related: ABC’s “Obama Media Machine: State Run Media 2.0?)

From 24thstate:

On my Facebook page, a well-meaning connection dropped this little nugget into his comment stream.

Only 5 states do not have collective bargaining for educators and have deemed it illegal. Their ranking on ACT/SAT scores:

South Carolina – 50th
North Carolina – 49th
Georgia – 48th
Texas – 47th
Virginia – 44th

Wisconsin is currently ranked 2nd. Welcome to the race to the bottom.

It’s an interesting piece, because it’s all over the internet in a Google Search.  There is no citation for the piece, and the comments are left mostly by anonymous users at hundreds of news sites and comment sections covering the union strike in Wisconsin.

This is astroturf at its finest.  A low-paid intern or first year employee cutting and pasting a talking point into comment sections as they register, too lazy to change it up, and too rushed to bother creating real profiles to post from.

The tipoff for me was the use of educators.  The use of the word “educators” instead of teachers is a code word meant to make you think of the word educate, which is so much sexier than teaching.

The problem is the “statistic,” no matter where it came from, is bunk.  Focusing on the students who took the ACT/SAT doesn’t cover the whole educational picture.  It covers those most likely to graduate across a state (knowing full well that school districts within a state, and even a city, vary wildly).  It doesn’t touch on dropout rates at all.

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Media Matters owes its readers an apology.

In my previous column, “Teachers Unions Gone Wild: The Director’s Commentary (Part 1),” I challenged Media Matters — who pompously mocked Trenton Tea Party Leader Daryl Brooks for believing in the authenticity of our videos because “[James] told [him]” they were — to hold Alissa Ploshnick and her spokesman Steve Wolmer to the same standard as Brooks.

Steve Wolmer spoke on behalf of Alissa Ploshnick, who is now “in seclusion,” claiming that when editing “Teachers Unions Gone Wild,” I maliciously grouped two soundbites of hers together that were allegedly uttered in totally separate contexts. Wolmer claims that Ploshnick’s comment about a teacher calling a student the N word was actually an anecdote about a student-to-student confrontation in her high school days, and “had nothing to do with tenure.” Wolmer explains that we “edited that out and put it in the tenure conversation to make it look like that was the context.”

While I was admittedly tempted to sit back and hear more of their creative fairy tales, I had to set the record straight and release the unedited raw audio of Ploshnick’s dialogue, pulling the rug out from under her and Wolmer’s lies.

What is even more amusing is that Media Matters, after snobbishly chastising Brooks for trusting James’ word that the videos were authentic, flipped a 180 and took at face value Ploshnick’s and Wolmer’s alibis which I have now proven to be undeniable lies. (more…)

If James O’Keefe and I were to release a video catching disguised al-Qaeda members casually joking about blowing up the Brooklyn Bridge, the mainstream media would likely be most interested to know who pays our salaries.

Upon the release of our ACORN videos which featured federally-funded ACORN employees aiding a “pimp” and a “prostitute” in setting up a brothel for 14-year-old El Salvadoran sex slaves, the MSM shifted the narrative towards James and Hannah, whether they were lying about their budgets, if Fox News hired them, and whether they were actually dressed as pimps and prostitute while entering the ACORN offices.

Predictably, the MSM has sounded the same recycled narrative in the midst of our more recent release of “Teachers Unions Gone Wild,” evidencing tenured teachers calling black students the “N” word without proper reprimand, teachers using a taxpayer-funded New Jersey Education Association (NJEA) conference to rally for “slander” against New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, and union leaders sharing anecdotes about rigged elections and voter fraud, among other things. Rather than investigate the findings of our investigation, the media has found it more pressing to investigate us.

It’s embarrassing enough that we mere twenty-somethings manage to scoop seasoned, established mainstream journalists on outing corruption, fraud, and waste in government. So it is ironic that mainstream journalists feel compelled to embarrass themselves further by dismissing the juicy meat of our exposés to cover our material with awkwardly petty and irrelevant lines of questioning. They are like high school cheerleaders envious over the new girl who just started dating the captain of the football team. Like, do you have a rich family? Are you like, just a poseur or something? (more…)

President Obama will give a speech to American schoolchildren today. In that speech, he will exhort them to study hard and get an education. Then, according to the White House, he will add a bit of personal biography:

When I was your age, I was wrestling with questions about who I was; about what it meant to be the son of a white mother and a black father, and not having that father in my life.

Fair enough. Most people go through a period in their life when they must come to terms with their identity. President Obama has spoken and written about his struggle to come to terms with his mixed-race ancestry and his father’s abandonment of his wife and young son. It hardly comes as a surprise to anyone that abandonment by a parent would leave a lasting scar. Neither does it come as a surprise that a young boy might be confused about where he belongs when his parents belong to different racial groups and different countries.

Unfortunately, when someone who isn’t Barack Obama comments on his heritage, the press seizes on it as evidence as racism. This expected fate befell former House Speaker and favorite media punching bag Newt Gingrich, who is now pilloried as a racist by none other than Jonathan Capehart of the Washington Post. Capehart declares: (more…)

And so we begin to hear some feedback from the liberal side, including direct comments from one prominent member of the “Cry Wolf” project.  On the Inside Higher Ed website Friday, founder and editor Scott Jaschik addresses Big Journalism’s Academia-Gate series in his post, “Who Is Crying Wolf?”

Some prominent liberal academics are soliciting short essays from faculty members and graduate students to document a pattern in American history of major social advances being opposed by conservatives who “cry wolf” about the impact of proposed reforms. The campaign — known as the “Cry Wolf Project” — hasn’t been officially announced. But conservative bloggers obtained some of the solicitations of essays and published them this week, along with considerable criticism.

A series of posts on Andrew Breitbart’s Big Journalism Web site have called the program “Academia-Gate” and suggested that the effort is inappropriately political. The creators of Cry Wolf, meanwhile, say that what they are doing is awfully similar to the ways that right-leaning scholars have used academic work to advance their causes over the years.

Jaschik acquaints readers with the members of the “Cry Wolf” project coordinators and the details of the request for proposals.  He then goes on to cite from a couple of BigJournalism’s posts in the series:

One post on Big Journalism noted that those involved in the project are sympathetic to organized labor, and that many influential academics are serving on the advisory board. “This is what our higher education system has become – a publicly funded amplifier of progressive ideology,” says the post by Patrick Courrielche. “If this Cry Wolf program were just limited to a few faculty members at a limited number of universities, it would be of little concern. But the project reaches into some of the most prestigious public and private schools of higher learning in the U.S., including MIT, Yale, Harvard, USC, Columbia, Rutgers, UC Santa Barbara, University of Pennsylvania, and President Obama’s alma mater — Occidental College.”

Liberty Chick, the blogger who started calling Cry Wolf “Academia-Gate,” described her concerns this way: “What’s far more dangerous is that the ideological academic, in his capacity as a professor, actually possesses the power to control. The power to influence students’ minds, to mold the students’ way of thinking to embrace their own power-hungry desires and believe in it as ’social justice’ — this is a frightening weapon. Via union solidarity, this weapon is shared with the mobilizers, the janitors and cafeteria workers who agitate the students with various demands against the university after ideologically minded professors have indoctrinated them to hear every grievance as a call for ’social justice.’

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After a week-long series of Big Journalism articles delving into the funding, agenda and dubious academic credentials behind the now-infamous “Cry Wolf Project,” the program’s co-chair, Prof. Peter Dreier has finally emerged from his bunker at Occidental College to respond to the controversy.

After first quoting heavily from the Soros-funded talking points supplied by our pals, the Senior Fellows over at Media Matters, Scott Jaschik at InsideHigherEd.com, quotes Dreier as follows:

Dreier, one of the organizers of Cry Wolf, said in an interview Thursday that the furor over the project was unfair. “This is legitimate work,” he said, and the essays will be scrutinized for accuracy. The end result will simply be better organized resources that might be consulted by the public, op-ed writers or others. He also said that he didn’t view this effort as either replacing traditional scholarship or doing anything that conservative groups don’t already do. He added that the pattern of “the world is going to end” reactions to “progressive efforts” is a legitimate issue for scholars to raise and explore.

Why are the conservatives so critical? Said Dreier: “That’s what they are paid to do.”

Let’s savor the delicious irony of Dreier’s last statement. (more…)

Patrick Courrielche’s kickoff article exposing major university faculty and graduate students’ Cry Wolf Project is alarming. Each installment in the series has only made it more so.

CWP’s solicitation for policy briefs designed to construct politically driven narratives is a confession of academic malpractice. As Kurt Schlichter has pointed out, its participants’ intentions are unethical, insubordinate, and potentially illegal.

The CWP email shows its players to be intolerant of varying viewpoints in the pursuit of their ideological ends. The fact that they are offering colleagues and grad students money to predetermine outcomes proves their intent: to tell partisan political stories:

What are they afraid of? (more…)

ACORN’s radical allies are now attempting to rewrite history to cast the organized crime syndicate as victim instead of as the prolific victimizer that it has been ever since it was created in 1970. ACORN online campaign director Nathan Henderson-James served notice in February that a propaganda effort was about to begin.

“[T]here will be a fight over the narrative of ACORN’s demise,” he wrote to members of Townhouse, a discussion forum run by Matt Stoller, senior policy adviser to Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.). The other side wants “a narrative about the corruption of popular organizations and how they are simply vehicles for the personal enrichment and power fantasies of their top staff members while pushing public policies that destroy middle America.”

Such a narrative must be fought, Henderson-James argued, because it “gives people pushing a pro-corporate agenda a way to tar progressives and even non-progressive Democrats running for office with the ACORN brush.”

The effort was already underway when Henderson-James reached out to the leftist community. After ACORN’s national board expelled ACORN founder Wade Rathke for engineering an eight-year cover-up of a million dollar embezzlement, Rathke wrote a combination political memoir/manifesto called Citizen Wealth. More recently, Seeds of Change, an institutional hagiography of ACORN by true believer John Atlas was published.

And now comes the “Cry Wolf” Project, a push to encourage academics to help spread more lies about the corrupt group. (more…)

Over at the website Minding the Campus, Prof. KC Johnson takes a look at the academic astroturf project called “Cry Wolf” that Big Journalism has been breaking all week.  The reviews are not good for Prof. Peter Dreier, E.P Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics and Urban & Environmental Policy Program director at Occidental College:

A newly announced project called “Crying Wolf,” organized out of the Center on Policy Initiatives, seems blithely unconcerned with any requirements associated with academic freedom… project coordinators Peter Dreier (a distinguished professor of politics at Occidental College), Nelson Lichtenstein (a historian of 20th century U.S. history at UC Santa Barbara who directs the university’s Center for the Study of Work, Labor and Democracy), and Donald Cohen, CPI executive director, are recruiting professors and graduate students (in “history, sociology, economics, political science, planning, public health, and public policy”) to perform “paid academic research” that can “serve in the battle with conservative ideas.”

The initiative is open about its biases: it intends to “construct a counter narrative” against what it describes as conservative opinions about taxation and regulation policy.

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The co-chair of the ‘Cry Wolf” project, Professor Peter Dreier, E.P Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics and Urban & Environmental Policy Program director at Occidental College, is a sort of email buddy of mine. If by “email buddy” I mean someone who once sent me a snide one-line missive with a link to an alternative weekly paper political cartoon depicting me in a negative light.

I’ll show you that email shortly but first background on why Professor Dreier is in my life:

In late September of 2009 two weeks into the beginning of the explosive James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles ACORN video scandal, an academic study critical of media coverage of ACORN came out from Peter Dreier and Christopher Martin, professor of journalism, University of Northern Iowa, Department of Communication Studies. The study, “Manipulating the Public Agenda: Why ACORN Was in the News, or,What the News Got Wrong,” was billed as “[a]n independent study by two prominent academics” that purported to have “found repetition of unverified allegations and distortions was the rule in national reporting of a purported ‘voter fraud’ scandal involving the community organizing group ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) during the 2008 presidential campaign.”

Peter Dreier, E.P Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics and Urban & Environmental Policy Program director at Occidental College

When I first saw the study’s press release, I naively reached out to Professor Martin to offer him and Dreier a place at our new website Big Government to act as ongoing ombudsmen of our ACORN story. We were cognizant that a left-leaning media would likely come to ACORN’s defense, so why not provide a platform for two professors claiming the media had wronged ACORN in its previous coverage of the organization to show that we were doing everything in our power to play the story fair? Recall, we proactively offered unedited transcripts and audio of O’Keefe and Giles work to show that the edited videos did not take things out of context.

After conferring with his colleague, Professor Martin declined my offer: (more…)

A fixed fight: The Influence of Labor Unions in Academe. Part One is here.

In the academic world, employees are very often public employees. This means that they are also very often union employees. At all levels. This includes everyone from janitors, to dormitory housekeepers, cafeteria workers, clerical staff, and computer techs, to even the graduate assistants and professors. While the salary gap between a cafeteria worker and a senior professor may be huge, the solidarity of the unions is a powerful magnet that creates an unbreakable bond amongst them.

Unions are fond of bashing capitalism with seething rhetoric, decrying the economic system as irredeemably corrupted by greed and racism and classism. But the ideology they themselves embrace is itself driven by the same ugly characteristics they profess to detest. Except in their case, power is the motivating force, the passion that drives them.

The burning desire for the power to control your life is the tie that binds the union service worker to the academic intellectual. It is this common fabric that connects the union janitor more closely to the ideological academic intellectual than to his working-class counterparts beyond campus.

What’s far more dangerous is that the ideological academic, in his capacity as a professor, actually possesses the power to control. The power to influence students’ minds, to mold the students’ way of thinking to embrace their own power-hungry desires and believe in it as “social justice” – this is a frightening weapon. Via union solidarity, this weapon is shared with the mobilizers, the janitors and cafeteria workers who agitate the students with various demands against the university after ideologically minded professors have indoctrinated them to hear every grievance as a call for “social justice.”

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