Sucking wind for an idea of what to write for Newswithviews this week, I got a tip from Susan. We were talking about our college experiences, and this little memory bubbled to the surface.
“They did a pretty good job of indoctrinating us,” I said, “except for the biology course I took in my sophomore year. It was taught by Nazis, and nobody was buying what they were selling.”
By “Nazis” I did not mean goose-stepping, armband-wearing, “Sieg Heil!” shouting followers of Adolf Hitler. I meant American scientists in 1969 who had ideas about re-engineering society along lines first suggested by Heinrich Himmler. They spent the last two weeks of the semester trying to convince us that the way to have paradise on earth was to refashion human society into a kind of ant-hill ruled absolutely by themselves.
They seemed surprised that the students weren’t happy. The instructor could hardly believe her ears when one student asked, “Well, what about freedom and identity?”
Oh, okay, she was prepared for that one!
“Those,” she replied, “are outmoded concepts that will have to be engineered out of the system.” The quote is verbatim, etched into my memory.
Lesson 2: Every student in the class would have been ashamed to pass such a course, so when they gave us our final exams, we all flunked.
But it looks really bad for the faculty when a whole class flunks, so the next thing we knew, we had all been upgraded to a passing grade and they washed us out of their hair.
Lesson 3: College, schmollege.
I think there’s a common thread. Totalitarian governments seem to be a new face grafted onto an ancient concept. It just come around again, over and over, throughout time.
I remember signing up for a Psychology class my sophomore year in college. The first day the long-hair beaded teacher said if anyone in the class believed in God and didn’t believe that the human brain was all there is to reality they needed to drop the class. I got up, went to the Admissions Office and dropped the class – what a jerk that teacher was.
My aunt encountered this very thing in a computer course she had to take–a “professor” who went far out of his way to insult Christians.
Lord, would it really be a sin to punch him in the nose?
I mean, really, what could be a more pathetic notion than that the universe, Creation, is in any way dependent upon such a wretched little thing as the human brain? How sophomoric! I hope that college wasn’t charging high tuition.