On April FoolÂ’s Day, Stalinist supporters will be speaking at NYU. Seriously, IÂ’m not joking.
The six-hour conference “Academic Freedom in the 1960s” is set to take place at 1 Washington Mews from 12 to 6 p.m. The theme of the event will focus on education, yet a quick background check on the venue’s stars is quite revealing.
For starters, Ellen Schrecker, a Yeshiva University Professor and author of “The Lost Souls of Higher Education,” will deliver the keynote address. Ms. Schrecker has written that guilty Soviet spies in the 1950s should have been excused for their crimes because they “did not subscribe to traditional forms of patriotism.”
In addition, Paul Robeson biographer Martin Duberman will be speaking on a panel. Through his retelling of Robeson’s life, Duberman has a strange fascination with the actor’s support of the “Beloved Comrade,” a.k.a. Joseph Stalin.
But perhaps the most radical of the participatory “academics” is Rutgers University-Newark Professor and author H. Bruce Franklin, who will be serving on the Vietnam War panel. Franklin has called Stalin “one of the greatest heroes of modern history.” In addition, Franklin wrote in an introductory essay for the book “The Essential Stalin,” “I used to think of Joseph Stalin as a tyrant and a butcher … but, to about a billion people today, Stalin is the opposite of what we in the capitalist world have been programmed to believe.”
And NYU is giving this guy a podium? Wow. |