Marxism and Leninism in American Colleges...NOT!

My professor of Russian history sent this response to a hysterical e-mail announcing the paranoid nonsense that American colleges are full of instructors teaching Marx-Leninism. She has been teaching at WSU for about 20 years. I took Imperial Russian History from Peter the Great through Nicholas II last semester and am studying the Russian Revolution this semester. Laurel

From my professor:

Hi...I was baffled myself by your friend's email. Where is Marx-Leninism taught as "just another form of government?" As you point out, anyone alive and/or conscious over the past few years knows just exactly where that social experiment-gone-awry led humanity. It sounds like he's subscribed to the usual canard about American academia, i.e. that it's been infested with lefties who are inflicting moral equivalency on everyone and hate America/blame America first. I have a friend whom I've told a hundred million times that I have never witnessed one single conscious instance of bias on the part of a colleague...the people i know teach dispassionately, without fear or favor. Nonetheless, she keeps sending me articles about the hard-core liberal bias in higher ed. If people want to ask my opinion, I will always give it, but I will also give the other side of whatever the argument is. it's just nonsense that we're teaching anti-Americanism, or pro-communism, or whatever. it's craaaaaaazy. On the other hand, I AM biased against people-- inside or outside the academy-- who don't even believe in science. I don't think I'd be hiring any "intelligent design" advocates!"I remember when Yeltsin's people were changing all the street names without anyone's permission... Someone wrote to the paper demanding that all the misdeeds and bad leaders of the past be immortalized on street names, e.g. Brezhnevskii Tupik...Brezhnev Dead End, or Avenue of 70 years on the Road to Nowhere. I'd have gone for those..."

Response to an astounding email from someone who forwarded it to me: Laurel replies:

Marxism and Leninism popular on so many American college campuses??? Are you crazy? Paranoid? Delusional? I am enrolled in my fifth history class at WSU Tri-Cities, currently taking classes in the Russian Revolution and American Roots: Immigrarion, Migration and Ethnic Identity. I already have two college degrees and 20 years' experience as a teacher of English, which doesn't exactly make me Miss Naive and Gullible.

Between the 1940s and 1970s I've attended classes at U. W., extension classes through Eastern U., San Francisco State College, many summer schools at CWSU, American University, U. of South Dakota, and haven't found any such cults, classes, professors, curriculum, attitude, philosophy as you imply is rampant in the country today.

When was the last time you enrolled in a college course?

How about the person who sent you the idiotic email about American colleges?

Believe me, it doesn't take an-depth study of Marx, Lenin, Stalin to become totally horrified by what Communism has done to any country unfortunate enough to be ruled by such a system.

Visits to numerous countries dominated by the Soviet system is enough to make any observant person reject the Marx, Lenin, Stalin government by death: -- Mao's China, Cambodia (the worst), Russia, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, both before and after July 1991.