Santa Rosa Junior College in Santa Rosa, California has become the site of a little Red scare with the College Republicans posting flyers on teachers' doors of a California law forbidding the advocacy of violent Communist revolution.
Topped with a large red star, the sheets posted on the doors of ten SRJC faculty members last Friday and signed "Anonymous Students" simply cite California education code section 51530 that forbids instructors from teaching the "advocacy or inculcation or indoctrination into ... a political theory that the presently existing form of the United States or of this state should be changed, by force, violence, or other unconstitutional means, to a totalitarian dictatorship which is based on the principles of communism as expounded by Marx, Lenin, and Stalin."
From reading the law, this isn't about merely teaching Communism as current news reports say, or merely teaching about Communism or mentioning Communists in discussing the history of philosophy and social movements as one might presume. The postings are nothing less than an accusation of treasonous subversion upon the targeted professors.
One of the targeted faculty members was Terry Mulcaire, who I believe was an English professor of mine. As political as his class ever got was to note that in the Vietnam war, the combined number of Vietnamese casualties on both sides was far higher than the number of US casualties, and that American discussions of Vietnam War casualties don't often note this. He also assigned the class to research and write an essay on any aspect of the Vietnam War we chose. This emphasis on Vietnam went along with the course's inclusion of Tim O'Brien's 1990 work The Things They Carried, a fictional work on the life of the soldier which was a finalist for the Pulitzer.
According to the school newspaper the Oak Leaf, Mulcaire "has never taught anything about communism in any of his classes", and is quoted as saying "I never taught Marx and never read Lenin, and I've only talked about Stalin as a killer... although I used a lot of material about the Iraq war last semester, and one of my students was very upset about it." That one student complaint of Mulcaire's is more than the College Republicans had. Despite writing in a letter to the Oak Leaf that "the instructors I 'targeted' were not selected at random", College Republicans head Molly McPherson is cited by the Oak Leaf as saying that there are no specific complaints or accusations against any teachers.
This campus is no stranger to left-wing stupidity, but so far the signs are absent of this being the case here. McPherson claims that the intent of the flyers was merely to open a dialogue with teachers, but what dialogue can be had with an unfounded accusation of treason? I've heard that some people have taken to wearing red stars to stand in solidarity with the slandered teachers, but in walking about campus, I didn't see this. One teacher has called for McPherson and another involved student to be suspended and for the College Republicans group to be placed on probation. The situation has also become troubling in a greater sense as I overheard one teacher tell another that their car had been rammed on the way to campus this morning by a red pickup truck with no license plate.
An additional note: While the Press Democrat says SRJC faculty members called a Monday news conference over the flyers, a faculty member informed me that Channel 50 News had arranged the conference and the Oak Leaf reports that the College Republicans were already there when the teachers arrived.
Final note from some last minute googling: another blog on the events, and the California College Republicans have issued a press release thanking the local media for having "made the correct choice with regards to consulting the Santa Rosa College Republican President and getting the balance story".
Posted by Warrior Tang at March 3, 2005 08:46 PM