After failing to return multiple requests for comment Monday, USC spokesman Wes Hickman told TheBlaze in a statement Tuesday that the school is “committed to academic freedom and a vigorous public discourse.”
“Our faculty are free to select texts for their courses and our students are encouraged to raise questions, challenge convention and develop their own ideas,” he added.
A university-assigned textbook that appears to suggest former President Ronald Reagan was a sexist and says conservatives view individuals as lazy and corrupt is under fire from at least one student.
“This is really outrageous,” Anna Chapman, a University of South Carolina student in the class, told Campus Reform. “[I]t’s so in your face, people need to know about it.”
The textbook, authored by Karen K. Kirst-Ashman, was allegedly assigned reading for the school’s three-credit course titled, “Introduction to Social Work Profession and Social Welfare.”
The university did not return multiple requests for comment from TheBlaze, but Chapman told Campus Reform no other readings that provided a counter political viewpoint were assigned.
Instead, students in the class were forced to read about “conservative extremes in the 1980s and early 1990s.”
not just anti-conservative but anti-american, pro-communist.
It is clear that Satan is getting a stronger hold on the world each day. So many are choosing the wrong path. They will
only enjoy their evil ways for a season, then they will pay the price.
Schools had better start teaching the US constitution and their Bill of Rights. The history of the United States should begin in K and go through High School. Banking, financing, investment, and the stock market needs to be taught starting with saving in K and the markets in high school. Replace algebra and calculus if necessary! Add career and professional type courses. Teachers can usually tell when a student is great in certain subjects or areas of interest, and direct them in those areas. Companies may need to take students who are adept in their field of business and start "apprentice" training in high school.
Retired teacher's sentiments…
Text books that outright lie , distort the truth , indoctrinate for or against ANY creed or that are any way anti-American should be banned by every parent in the country , and only those parents with children and unfettered access to these books BEFORE purchasing should have this authority and right .
Take Dr. North's advice: get a BA from an online accredited university for a fraction of the cost of the brick-and-mortar dinosaurs that USC is a poster child for. Oh, and Anna Chapman for Senate!
Why is this a news story? My sociology textbook was worse than that.
It had a neat little chart labeled from ‘liberal’ to ‘bigot’, psychoanalyzing all the different kinds of neanderthals in between (‘timid bigots’, ‘active bigots’); it actively championed Liberal research and attempted to explain away Conservative research; it called virtually everyone and everything that didn’t line up with liberal social and political views racist (including ‘race-neutral rhetoric’, ‘thoughts and feelings’ about race, Margaret Thatcher, cultural preference, universal affirmative action, ‘laissez-faire racism’); it conflated ‘Right-wing’ with the KKK; it demeaned homemaking as a ‘cult’; it presented a list of states, crossing out the names of states without gay marriage as ‘discriminatory’; it concluded in passing that Conservatism is a ‘kinder, gentler antiblack ideology’.
What you are espousing is censorship. Better to promote, or at least introduce, alternate viewpoints in a reading list or to the child as a parent. And, publicly chastise any instructor that does not do so…teach students the thinking process versus laying blame or assigning some false truth. History should be taught as fact-based, not as a corollary to an instructor's opinions.
The communists have to teach the young, so they won't protest as an adult. They've had ahold of our schools for more than 20 years. That's why we're having such a hard time convincing the young what America is SUPPOSED to be about.
Make that 50+ years.
Doc, I hit the wrong button–meant to give your comment a thumbs-up. Good thoughtful response.
Frankly, I'm not surprised at the tone of either this textbook or the one Jeers1215 describes. The whole field of sociology IMO is founded upon bogus concepts. The "-ology" (science of) ending is inappropriate for this subject field and it should be relegated to esoteric bookshops selling arcane material rather than university classrooms.
What would you expect? As public education becomes more and more controlled by the State, the State is going to do everything it can to promote and strengthen itself. Conservatives and Individualists are their enemy.
These "professors" would have done swimmingly in the former Soviet Union or Nazi Germany, where mind control was part of daily life. Of course, mostt of the people in the Soviet Union knew it was all a joke, enforced by the communist leadership. It will backfire on the American left the way it backfiredc on the commies.
Yep. Liberal Arts = Bullshit. You’d be better off wiping your butt with your tuition money.