A bit too close to home...

I went to DC last semester through the Fund for American Studies "Capitol Semester Program." Thinking it wouldn't be much different than the University of California's UCDC program, and excited about interning and taking classes at Georgetown, I went for it. I was accepted right after I applied, and received a scholarship. It was almost too easy.

When I got to DC in September and arrived at my cushy apartment near Union Station about a block from Capitol Hill, this is what I found:

Your friendly neighborhood Heritage Foundation.

A bell rang when I was reading George Lakoff's Don't Think of an Elephant:

"One of the think tanks is putting up a new building. It is going to be an eight-story building with a state-of-the-art media auditorium, and one hundred apartments for interns who cannot afford apartments in Washington."

Bingo. Johnson building.

My apartment was conjoined with the Heritage Foundation (for those of you who don't know it, it's the premier right wing think tank guiding Bush administration policy). I was in the belly of the beast, and I'm sure they snickered when they read my entrance essay on U.S. dependence on oil--"we'll show her" (the Fund had actually set aside scholarship money specifically for Californians).

To my surprise, the classes were not taught by Georgetown professors, but a free market economist from George Mason, a strict constuctionalist director of Constitutional studies from libertarian CATO, and a former professor who rejected the use of the word "pollution" (because that wouldn't be Orwellian enough). None of us in the program could figure that guy out (he's subsequently been replaced).

Needless to say, the classes had a distinct ideological stance, and I quickly became an expert on conservative, more specifically libertarian philosophy. Outside of my internship with Talk Radio News (which was the most rewarding part of the experience for me, and which kept me sane), I heard barely a peep about the left. I'm inclined to agree with this guy--though it was enlightening to get such a thorough introduction to the right, and the classes ultimately helped to strengthen my own arguments (not their intention, I'm sure) "the academic program espoused conservative ideas almost to the point of propagandistic indoctrination."

The classes were so far to the right because the Fund felt as though "liberal education" was getting too liberal, and they had to fight fire with fire.

This is precisely what's going on with the the Leadership Institute and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a couple of the groups the Fund for American Studies is affiliated with. But there is little evidence to back up the claim that campuses are overly liberal. Here, like in "faith-based" public policy (which would seem like an oxymoron given the separation of church and state) and in the media, conservatives are in power, but they talk as though they are a marginalized group, and they try to play the victim card. It's an interesting strategy that they often employ, one that progressives need to combat much more effectively.

So naturally David Horowitz (my favorite--interviewed him at Talk Radio on his book Unholy Alliance; he actually said "the left hates America" and I had to turn off the mic and laugh. Filed the interview under "douchebag") is leading a crusade against the liberal campus invasion with Students for Academic Freedom and its Academic Freedom Abuse Center which was populated with complaints by students who said their teachers were anti-American. There were a number from Santa Barbara.

In contrasting my experience here with my experience in DC, I hear both sides of an issue a lot more in my global studies courses than I did from the DC libertarians. Left to the lectures and our course readings (Ayn Rand, Calhoun, Bovard) I would have not even known there was another side. The material was not presented as opinion, but indisputable fact. You wouldn't have known there was such thing as Keynesian economics unless you did outside research (which I did eventually, and discovered that ::gasp:: minimum wage and unions actually help not only low wage workers but the economy as well by funneling more capital into it!). I ultimately ended up doing well in the courses just by (regretfully) pandering to the professor's ideology while I watched as friends tried to argue the other side to no avail, receiving mediocre grades for more effort.

Interesting that these guys are guilty of the very same offenses they accuse the left of committing. If there is any justice, they won't make headway with their bill in the Ohio state senate.