Leftist Conservative-Baiters Attack CUNY Trustees

The Chancellor of the City University of New York, Matt Goldstein, and the Chairman of the Board of Trustees, Benno Schmidt, have done a stellar job of improving standards at this once-great and now reviving university. In the 1930s CUNY challenged Harvard for national eminence. In the 1970s, left wing progressive educationists, in an effort to destroy the career prospects of minority and working class students, aimed to turn CUNY into a laughing stock by ending admissions requirements and introducing elementary school-level "remedial" classes. Schmidt and Goldstein, together with CUNY's stellar board of trustees, have raised standards, improved quality and made CUNY an attractive educational "buy" for many New Yorkers. In response to the improvement of standards, the introduction of a nationally competitive honors college and increasing SAT scores, a leftist bigot, hiding behind the Ku Klux Klan-like cowl, mask and robe of anonymity, wrote a conservative-baiting and anti-Semitic article in an obscure website called "the CUNY Graduate Center Advocate". The article is here. My response on their site is as follows:

This article is an embarrassment. I am concerned that CUNY has admitted students who are so ignorant of history that they confuse JP Morgan with his son, Jack Morgan. The author states that JP Morgan, the "robber baron", made his fortune selling World War I bonds, but, as any schoolchild knows, JP Morgan died in 1913 and World War I started in 1914. This article exemplies the ill-bred conservative-baiting that passes for academic work in education, social science, history and humanities departments around the country, where conservative-baiting and insulting those who disagree with sociopathic, left-wing ideology passes for academic work. For instance, the writer quotes Lenin, a mass killer whose Soviet Union ended up killing between 25 and 60 million human beings, a mass killer of the stature of Adolf Hitler. Quoting Lenin is morally equivalent to quoting Hitler, but apparently much of this goes on. Official Soviet reports admitted that fully 30 million Soviet citizens were in danger of death by starvation by 1921, and Lenin's forces murdered at least several hundred thousand peasants in the Bread War. With a record of murder equivalent to Hitler's, Lenin's appeal to this writer is understandable. It is much worse to work for JP Morgan Bank or Colgate Palmolive than to kill hundreds of thousands of people. The author goes on to make a number of ill-informed, conservative-baiting and anti-Semitic comments. Personally, I am offended by the bigoted equation of Jeff Wiesenfeld's Zionism with racism. This anti-Semitic remark is a disgrace, and this website is racist. The author's conservative baiting begins with his discussion of our excellent and honorable trustee, Peter Pantaleo. There are two sides to labor relations in this country (unlike in the former Soviet Union for which this author pines) and these are labor and management. If Mr. Pantaleo represents management interests, that makes him no more a criminal than Victor Gotbaum's representing labor's interests. I met Mr. Gotbaum, former head of DC 37, in 1988 when he occupied a teaching position at the CUNY Graduate Center to which he had been appointed despite a lack of qualifications. He did not have a Ph.D. and had studied international relations, not labor, at Columbia. Yet, he was given a position in a research capacity teaching doctoral students. Did the author or his or her professor argue against that appointment? If not, why is appointing a pro-management lawyer problematic? The author's incompetence follows through almost every paragraph. The author objects to William E. Macaulay's $30 million donation. Is the writer aware of how universities work in this country, or is he or she so dedicated to the Soviet model that he is completely ignorant of practical reality? Similarly, the insipid complaint about Philip Alfonso Berry's having worked for Colgate Palmolive. Better he should have worked for Gosplan or the KGB, or better yet managed a prison camp in the Gulag Archipelago and murdered 6,000 Jews. That would have been much more pleasing to this conservative-baiting bigot.