Professors like Becker shouldn't be intimidated by the far right

Latin American TSU historian friend of mine, Marc Becker, has justly fired back at his inclusion in turncoat-radical D. Horowitz's book on sale at our local Hastings bookstore for we local residents, as one of over 100 identified arrogantly by this awful man as the most "dangerous" professors, in all of these United States, who should "not" be permitted teaching you!

Good for Marc, and more power to you, from me, whose only ever been more innocuously listed in Who's Who in America and safely in the past sense in their more truly honorable "conservative" editorial wisdom! However, apart from levity at Horowitz, poor man's version of McCarthyism incarnated by this fundamentally silly book, there are more issues raised than even the eloquent Becker perceives which should be urgently discussed. Indeed, I know not mere TSU but other U.S. professor friends, who call me with almost petrified glances behind themselves in hopes of not being overheard how they "fear" that Sartre's existentialism or his bisexual girlfriend de Beauvior's "feminism" might soon be "unteachable" in this country if the Bush administration's orchestration of the likes of Horowitz's "ban 'em" book campaign is allowed to continue unchallenged in relevant newspapers like your own.

You see, concerned parents and brighter-type students who realize Americans must have highest standards of full knowledge that we educators abroad have, look at what is afoot! If Becker, et al., lose this battle, and only yet more "safe" scholars with their wearisomely, monotonously uniform stars-and-stripes flags are continued to be overwhelmingly, and boringly hired for you, in classrooms of mind-boggling predictability in non-outcome and instant sleepdom!

Finally, I am not saying alumni, or any other conservative parent, Index readers, that Becker, et al., are unsoundly above all student or even criticism! Far from it, as of three people who were my own trainers as a history radical writer, only one was a U.K. socialist Labour MP/MEP, whilst the other two, one of whom still is in U.K. parliament, were more openly conservative liberals or even Thatcher's former U.S. speechwriter here on trips to her U.S. doting former colonists, supposedly! So diversity is vital.

But even if thereby, I go way beyond what Becker and his radicals dare hope for in real socialism, I do still say in a campus paper we should all now, more defensively, 2006 be defending liberal arts' right to uncensored, unmuzzled U.S. professors' hirings and to their classroom retentions from Horowitz's thinly disguised naming books! One of the worst crimes, indeed, about that book is that it serves up, as if "new knowledge", attacks on "feminist" and "socialist" professorial couples, as if it's all previously unknown to parents!

Yet the tragedy unfolding here, inside the States, may be that defenses against such censorious right-wingers at a time of damaging cuts in finances may be coming far too late, unless you print such letters now! In which case we will all, too tardily, have but to lament with former World War II U-boat pastor and anti-Hitlerian German Lutheran Rev. Niemoeller: "When they came for the communists, the gays, etc., I did nothing because I wasn't those. When they then came for me, no one also did anything because they weren't me, or were they!?" Larry Iles Kirksville Resident