- Head of program is a committed Marxist
- Prevalent strain of Marxism runs through courses
- Encourages reflexively anti-war views among student body
The longtime refrain of Dr. Marvin Berlowitz holds that “Privatization must be resisted.” In his role as Director of the Urban Center for Peace Education and Research at the University of Cincinnati (UC), Berlowitz, a committed Marxist, has made such resistance the rule. The Center is in effect a collective of leftwing professors who are inhospitable to ideological viewpoints that are out-of-step with theirs.
The course offerings of the Peace Education Certificate program, available to both graduate and undergraduate students, are a testament to Berlowitz’s success: all eschew academic rigor for de rigueur leftwing pedagogy. A perusal of the course descriptions confirms the point: They span the gamut from Marxist dialectics (“Liberation Philosophy”), to environmentalism (“Community and Environmental Influences on the Schools”), to feminist theory (“Women, Culture, and Education”), to identity-politics multiculturalism (“Multicultural Education”). Another course administered through the Peace Education program, “Educational Sociology,” is a veritable hodgepodge of radicalism. A description of the course states: “Courses in Educational Sociology concentrate on Marxist, feminist and other classic and social transformation theories in education as well as on research on social issues related to schooling and educational inequities.”
Nor does UC’s peace education department want for professors of these leftwing talking points. Besides boasting an ideologically homogeneous faculty, the department regularly invites visiting professors whose academic records are distinguished only in their enthusiasm for the department’s politics. In 2001, for example, the peace education program played host to Yaacov Iram, an Israeli professor and chairman of the peace education program at Israel’s Bar-Ilan University, a similar course in radical politics. Continuing in that tradition, in the summer of 2005 UC intends to offer a special course titled “Cultural Diversity.” It will be taught by Belinda Boyd, a feminist visiting professor of “cultural diversity” theater at the University of Southern Florida. In that class, Boyd plans to teach the works of August Wilson, a leftwing African American playwright who has advocated reparations for slavery to be paid 140 years after the fact. Boyd also plans to explore “ethnicity and gender in U.S. society,” “feminist ideology and Hispanic culture,” and methods by which to “overcome internalized homophobia.”
Marxist themes pervade the UC peace education department. This owes much to Marvin Berlowitz’s leadership and guidance. Summing up Berlowitz’s scholarly interests, a faculty biography states: “His most recent publications have been in the area of educational reform including a broad based critique as well as specific works on the expansion of JROTC and also magnet schools as examples of neo-liberal ideology in educational reform.” To describe Berlowitz’s views as a critique is to understate matters considerably. In fact, his “scholarship” is generally indistinguishable from political polemic.
Among the objects of Berlowitz’s disdain are:
- American pop culture (“We must…keep in mind that the U.S. pop culture industry saturates the world market with its toxins to an even greater extent than Mc Death sows metabolic destruction by extending its arches to every hemisphere.”)
- Republicans and Democrats (“We’re limited to a choice between the party of the rich and a party of the wealthy. We have the only major industrial capitalist country in the world that does not have a labor party.”)
- Globalization (“Structural changes because of globalization have led to increasing economic disparities between the wealthy and the poor. As a result, the highest concentration of poverty is found among urban school children and racially oppressed groups.”).
Asked in an interview whether his personal distaste for globalization colors the way he broaches the subject with his students, Berlowitz demurred. “‘Globalization’ is a terribly imprecise term,” he said, explaining that the word could refer to everything from “neo-liberal ideology” to “neo-colonialism,” and stressing that a “consideration of all of these formulations is central to any survey of global issues.” A critical observer might wonder whether casting globalization as “neo-colonialism” does not distort the advantages of a global free market in fostering peace. However, Berlowitz insists that he attempts to provide balance. “Obviously, our treatment of neo-liberal ideology is grounded in the economics of Milton Friedman who discusses the merits of the ‘free market,’” he said. He declined to offer an example.
If Berlowitz harbors an unambiguous disdain for free-market capitalism, he reserves his most strident contempt for the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC). Berlowitz claims that the program is part of a pernicious Pentagon plan to convert underachieving schools into boot camps. “The Defense Department seeks ‘at risk’ schools to transform into military academies for the purpose of future recruitment,” he has said. On other occasions, Berlowitz has theorized that students who decide to enlist in the JROTC have been “pushed by poverty and the economics of racism” and wind up “trapped by economic conscription.” Taking no account of the fact that the program is voluntary, Berlowitz remonstrates: “The strict and time-consuming requirements of the JROTC program deprive students of opportunities to enroll in college preparatory courses.”
Underlying his radical politics is Berlowitz’s decades-long allegiance to Marxism. Berlowitz has long sought ways to inject Marxist theory into the university curriculum. In 1978, for instance, he took part in the “Fourth Midwest Marxist Scholars Conference,” a symposium seeking to find new ways to incorporate “Marxist approaches” into the American educational system. In November 2001, Berlowitz conducted a symposium on the field of peace studies, during which he advanced the argument that the greatest “barrier” to the proliferation of the program in the Western world was “Eurocentricity.” The term—a shorthand for the supposedly excessive scholarly focus on the thought of Americans of European origin—was readily embraced by Berlowitz’s colleagues. After adapting his polemical idea into a journal article, Berlowitz had them approved by a peer review in March of 2002.
More recently, Berlowitz has sought to sow the notion of “Eurocentricity” into the academic fiber of the Peace Education Program. Working in partnership with professors Nathan Long of UC and Eric R. Jackson of Northern Kentucky University, Berlowitz has authored a still-unpublished (as of April 2005) 17-page paper arguing for peace education courses to take up the concept of “Eurocentricity.” Accordingly, the paper states that “the dominance of Eurocentricity in peace education leads to the exclusion and distortion of African American perspectives and this restricted focus undermines the status and viability of peace education as a component of educational reform.” As the authors see it, the current peace education programs are marred by a number of “distortions,” which include: (1) a failure to accurately represent the African American emphasis on positive peace, the role of trade unions, anti-imperialism, solidarity with socialist nations, and internationalism in general; (2) the vanguard role of African Americans in the struggle against nuclear proliferation and conscription; (3) a tendency to minimize the role of African Americans in the development of non-violent philosophy as merely being eclectic; and (4) to underrepresent the leadership role of African Americans in anti-war movements and white peace organizations.
With an eye toward overcoming potential academic opposition to their proposed focus on “Eurocentricity,” the authors point to the success of leftwing feminists in making the university receptive to their radical agendas. “Peace educators can learn from the successes of feminists in overcoming the contradictions of sexism and patriarchy in the field,” they note. Thus the professors conclude that the surest way of adding yet another dose of leftwing politics into the curriculum is to portray it as a fight for racial equality. The paper even includes a strikingly disingenuous slogan to this effect: “Peace cannot be achieved in a white skin while the black is branded.”
Berlowitz’s radical evangelizing is not confined to UC’s Peace and Education program.
As the director of the university’s in-house research institution – the Center for Peace Research, Implementation, Development and Education (UC PRIDE) – Berlowitz has designed several “educational” initiatives aimed at transporting his politics into classrooms beyond the campus. In 2001, for instance, under the direction of Berlowitz and several students and former students at UC’s peace education department,
UC PRIDE unveiled an online course, offering credit at the university, and targeting elementary school teachers in Ohio. At the core of the course, which has been offered since the fall of 2001, was Berlowitz’s distinctly radical approach to education. As Berlowitz himself explained in March 2001, “This [course] is an alternative to school metal detectors and the software that is aimed at profiling students at risk for violence.” Berlowitz’s alternative, in keeping with his Marxism-inspired contempt for the white middle class, was to alert teachers to the role of suburban whites, allegedly biased against minority students, in driving these students to violence. “The bias awareness component of the course is especially significant to those who are working with youth who have grown up in historically homogenous white suburbs, which are now experiencing conflicts associated with an influx of ethnically and racially diverse populations,” Berlowitz explained. The course offered teachers no solution for alleviating violence among troubled students in urban schools. Instead, it urged them to be “more culturally sensitive to the needs of urban schoolchildren.”
Berlowitz has also initiated an after-school program for urban students called “Be A Star,” which features workshops on such subjects as “bias awareness” and “peace education.”
Such efforts are complemented by the peace education department’s attempts to instill anti-war views in the UC student body. For instance, a running “Peace News” feature on the department’s website reads like a one-stop directory for anti-war protests in the Cincinnati area. The department also makes regular financial contributions to on-campus anti-war groups. In promoting a reflexive opposition to all wars, the peace education department takes its cues not only from professors like Martin Berlowitz, but also from an advisory committee. Among the committee’s members are Father Ben Urmston, a far-leftist director of the Peace Studies program at Xavier University. Though Berlowitz seems untroubled by the unwaveringly anti-war slant of the peace education program, he does admit to one concern: “I remain bewildered by the fact that peace education, which merely endeavors to include the teaching of non-violent alternatives to conflict resolution remains marginalized,” he says.
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