Grover Furr: Worse than Ward Churchill
Antiprotestor Journal
Posted by Rocco DiPippo
Wednesday, March 16, 2005
Grover C. Furr is this little-known professor, and if you think that American college students should be educated and not indoctrinated then you should know what he's been up to.
For more than twenty years, Furr has been an English professor at Montclair State University in Montclair, New Jersey where he drenches his classes in Marxism and advocates the destruction of America's existing government and social structures.
Professor Furr employs a simple ploy in ramming Marxism, glowing accounts of communism and anti-U.S. propaganda down his student's throats-- he packs his courses' required reading lists with books and papers reflecting Marxist viewpoints. The majority of these books are written by authors who are or were themselves Marxists, or Communists. Most of the remaining books on his course reading lists relate to violent revolution, or glowing accounts of lower classes overthrowing ruling classes.
A "General Humanities" course Furr teaches provides a good example of his method of cloaking political indoctrination as legitimate teaching. On his Montclair-provided website, Furr describes his General Humanities course as being "an introduction to Western European culture and society from the Ancient World through the Middle Ages." But it is actually a vehicle which he uses to spread his fringe leftist ideas and beliefs. A sampling of the course's reading list provides overwhelming evidence to support this contention. Required reading for students taking Professor Furr's General Humanities course includes the following authors:
James Axtell, whose "The White Indians of Colonial America" (required course reading) implies that Native American culture was better than European culture in colonial America; Ronald Takaki, a prominent multicultural advocate whose works take a hard anti-Anglo slant; Alan D. Winspear, whose "Who was Socrates?" is a Marxist analysis of the great thinker; Moses I. Finley, a Marxist and member of communist Karl Polanyi's leftist think-tank at Rutgers University; Rodney Hilton, a British Marxist, G.E.M. de Ste Croix, whose "The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World" is often praised for its contributions to Marxist theory and I.F. Stone, a fellow traveler if not Soviet agent and life-long hater of Israel, a communist apologist who once commended the Soviet Union for "steadily expanding democracy in every sphere."
After completing Furr's skewed course on Western European culture, students are assured of viewing the West with disdain while gaining no true understanding of greater Western culture.
Another of Furr's courses, titled "The Great Books and Ideas," offers radical-left fare disguised as an introduction to great works of Western literature. Required reading for it includes works by Karl Marx, a Marxist analysis of Shakespeare by Richard Wilson, a book by Communist Party member Ted Allen, one by Marxist feminist Silvia Federici, a book by Paul Brown that offers a Marxist approach to Shakespeare, one by Marxist historicist Page Dubois and one by radical-left activist Marcus Rediker, who has worked to win a new trial for convicted cop killer and leftist icon Mumia Abu-Jamal.
There is not a trace of intellectual diversity in Furr's so-called "Great Books" course, nor are there any truly great books or ideas in it, just unadulterated Marxist pap that casts the West in a bad light.
Professor Furr has no credentials as a history teacher yet his duties at Montclair occasionally include teaching a course on the Vietnam War. Not an accurate scholarly presentation of Vietnam War history, the main objective of Furr's course is to paint America as an oppressive, terrorist state. His Vietnam war page, and his Politics and Social Issues web page, which he recommends as study resources to his students, contain virulently anti-U.S. material, some of it penned by him. Many of Professor Furr's personal conclusions concerning the Vietnam War published on these web pages reek of hatred for the U.S. A quick sampling of them reveals as much:
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"'The western imperialists, the U.S. among them, are the biggest mass murderers in history'...'The U.S. is even more guilty [of genocide] than Pol Pot.'...''t was a good thing that the U.S. lost in Vietnam.... If the US and their South Vietnamese stooges had won, South Vietnam would have been yet another place for American companies to move to. Hundreds of thousands more American workers would have lost their jobs.'...'Under no circumstances, therefore, should we ever support the US government or believe what it says.'"
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What Grover Furr doesn't tell students who take his Vietnam course, is that many of his observations and conclusions are taken directly from "Challenge," the Revolutionary Communist Progressive Labor Party's [RCPLP] newspaper, a radical anti-capitalist rag that advocates for the violent overthrow of the U.S. and the killing of its "ruling" class. Furr has himself written for "Challenge." An article he wrote in defense of Josef Stalin's role in the Soviet Holocaust remains on the RCPLP's website.
"Challenge" isn't the only teaching resource of Professor Furr's that contains radical-left views. Opinion pieces by the good professor himself published in the school newspaper "The Montclarion" and also posted on his Montclair-provided website reveal that he celebrates the violence that occurred in response to the Rodney King beating, falsely accuses the U.S. of being behind the 1981 assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II and in sickening echo of the views of Ward Churchill and Noam Chomsky implies that on Sept.11, 2001 the U.S. got what it deserved when radical Islamists slammed jetliners into the Twin Towers, killing thousands of innocents.
Given his extreme views and lack of credentials as a history teacher, why is Grover Furr being allowed to teach a college class on the Vietnam War?
Furr takes his radical act off campus and into mainstream academia through his involvement in the Modern Languages Association, [MLA] an organization peppered with leftist educators who apply Marxism and radical views to their teaching methods. MLA teaching methods and recommendations are implemented down to the elementary school level.
Professor Furr heads the MLA's radical caucus. Radical Caucus positions have received enthusiastic support in the communist "Challenge" newspaper. How much influence does he have in shaping the MLA's agendas? Quite a bit, it appears. During the run-up to its 2003 national conference in San Diego, the MLA put out a call for papers to be read and discussed at the conference. Out of the five papers submitted, four of them came from Furr's radical caucus. They had much more to do with radical-left activism than literature or language. One asked the MLA to work towards "the repeal of the U.S.A. Patriot Act." A second wanted the MLA to deplore "government war-making projects" and urge "the withdrawal of troops and reallocation of funds to reverse inattention to, and grave deficits in, funding of education and other human services." A third was concerned with pay for graduate students and faculty members. The last proposal, delivered during the MLA's Delegate Assembly is worth quoting, since it appears to have been penned by Furr himself:
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Whereas in wartime, governments commonly shape language to legitimate aggression, misrepresent policies, conceal aims, stigmatize dissent, and block critical thought; and
Whereas distortions of this sort proliferate now, as in the use of the phrase 'war on terrorism,' to underwrite military action anywhere in the world, against whomever our government sees as opponents; and
Whereas we are professionals committed to scrupulous inquiry into language and culture;
Be it resolved that the Modern Language Association supports its members in conducting critical analysis of war talk, in public forums and, as appropriate, in classrooms. "
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Not much Shakespeare there.
What do Professor Furr's students think of him? An exhaustive survey of his students is beyond the means of this writer but a sampling of reviews posted by forty of them on Rate My Professors, a website which allows students to rate teachers on a scale from 1-5, (Furr averaged 2.4) gives insight into how Furr is perceived by many of them:
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'I can't believe this man is teaching!'... 'He sends you radical left wing propaganda almost every day through email'... 'Pretend to be a communist and he'll think you're the greatest thing ever'...'He uses the classroom as a platform to teach his radical political views'...'Leans so far to the left he's horizontal'...'Hates the USA'...'Keeps on talking about his life and nothing relating to the work'...'If he spent more time concentrating on teaching his students than spewing hate in the discussion threads, maybe he would be a happier person!'...'What a bitter, hateful man!'"
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Furr's hate extends to those with whom he ideologically disagrees. What does he think of conservatives and conservative academics? Not much. Says Furr:
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What they [American universities] do need, and would much benefit from, is more Marxists, radicals, leftists -all terms conventionally applied to those who fight against exploitation, racism, sexism, and capitalism. We can never have too many of these, just as we can never have too few 'conservatives.'"
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It is obvious that the concept of campus political diversity is one that Professor Furr holds in contempt. Given this animosity, his politically moderate and conservative students would be wise to hide their political views from him.
When not spreading disinformation in the classroom, Grover Furr spends time doing so elsewhere by defending the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin in print, on academic internet forums and during speaking engagements. Furr has penned pro-Stalin screeds, which appear on his website; the same site used by his students as a study resource.
In defending Stalin, Furr plays the apologist's and Holocaust denier's classic game: ignoring overwhelming evidence that a particular event occurred while attacking small discrepancies in that same evidence in order to discredit it.
What is English Professor and communist sympathizer Grover C. Furr doing participating in "Historians of American Communism," [HOAC] a serious academic forum frequented by the likes of Robert Conquest (whom Furr calls a liar) John Earl Haynes and Robert W. Cherny, all experts on the subject? He's defending communism, denying the true depth of Josef Stalin's part in Soviet genocide and glossing over Stalin's depravities.
An entry, by him, on the HOAC forum, sums up his basic position concerning the large body of evidence pointing towards the reality of the Soviet Holocaust against the Jews:
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As for 'Holocaust denial'...The mass murder of Jews, but not only of Jews, by the Nazis is very well documented. In the case of the Cold-War horror stories demonizing Stalin, the shoe is on the other foot -- all the evidence points in the opposite direction."
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Another of Furr's HOAC entries illustrates an attempt by him at glossing over the genocidal actions of Stalin:
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"Of the hoary horror tales virtually taken for granted as true concerning Stalin, I have researched many at this point in my life, and have yet to find a single one that is true, or anywhere near it."
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More of Furr's absurd apologist contortions in the HOAC forum can be viewed here, here, here, and here. (all links found at original article lined blow)
Never mind that legitimate journalists and historians like Robert Conquest, Anne Appelbaum, John Earl Haynes and Robert W. Cherny have shown beyond reasonable doubt that Josef Stalin and his minions were responsible for the torture and death of millions of Russians, never mind that in 1956 Nikita Khrushchev admitted as much, never mind the gulags, the re-education camps, the torture chambers, the killing fields, the people of all stripes whisked into the night by Stalin's dreaded secret police, never to be seen again. Never mind the eyewitnesses to these horrors. Never mind that during the 1980s archaeologist Zianon Pazniak exhumed killing fields in Russia's Kurapaty woods proving, through an extensive forensic analysis, that between 1935 and 1941, Stalin's secret police, the NKVD, murdered as many as 250,000 people there--farmers, peasants, teachers and doctors-- men and women who had been arbitrarily pronounced "enemies of the people" and then without trial executed-- most at point-blank, all by Soviet bullets to their brains, English Professor Grover C. Furr not only scoffs at the conclusions of serious scholars and the conclusions of the Soviets themselves concerning Stalin's directing of the Soviet Holocaust, he's so deluded that he views Josef Stalin as a heroic figure, and thinks the United States, and the rest of the world, could benefit from a leader like him:
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"That's why I feel some kinship with Stalin and the communist movement of his day. What the majority of humanity needs today is an international movement like that one, to co-ordinate the fight against exploitation -- just as the IMF and the World Bank, Exxon and Reebok, the US and French and the other governments, coordinate the fight FOR exploitation."
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The Soviets under Stalin destroyed much of their regime's documentation in a calculated effort to erase evidence of their economic failures, rewrite their history and hide genocide. Grover Furr carries on with that shameful tradition by trying to reinvent Josef Stalin as a tragic figure who once lead a still worthy cause: the fight to bring communism to the world.
By now, the reader might have concluded that Professor Furr, by spreading disinformation, pushing Marxism and communism on his students, and advocating for one of mankind's greatest mass murderers, behaves exactly as a professor of English literature and professional educator shouldn't.
Unfortunately, I doubt that many of his colleagues would be so affected. During extensive research of Furr I found not one example of a university professor, teacher or administrator questioning his in-class behavior or his teaching methods.
What I did find was quite the opposite--a network of high school and college teachers and administrators who actually support his methods, views and goals and recommend his web pages as both a teaching resource and as a guide in developing curricula -- sad commentary on Humanities departments nationwide, which as you read this, sink deeper and deeper into a miasma of pseudo-intellectualism, fatuous scholarship and anti-Western Marxist propagandizing.
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