by Ben Shapiro
Professors hate pesticides. They believe that all the gains in productivity due to pesticides are of no value, and that pesticides only cause environmental degradation.
The saint of the anti-pesticide movement is Rachel Carson, who, as Professor Paul Licht of UC Berkeley put it, “shocked us, scared us and galvanized a generation into a new kind of environmental activism.”54 Carson’s book, Silent Spring, proposed banning DDT, a pesticide that kills mosquitoes, because of its alleged harmful effects on humans, and because it thinned the egg shells of bald eagles.
The Environmental Protection Agency went along with Carson and dramatically restricted the production and use of DDT on US soil. Because of Carson, between thirty and sixty million people have died from malaria.55 As the Wall Street Journal editorial board put it, “proponents of a ban on DDT should be forced to answer the question about which is more important: the life of a bird that might be harmed by DDT, or the life of a Third World child who might be saved.”56
Professors’ answer: the life of a bird. Professor Muldavin touted a worldwide ban on DDT in his Geography 5 class at UCLA, citing Silent Spring.57 Professor Ehrlich suggested that US life expectancy would be diminished by ten years if DDT were used on American soil.58 Dr. Mark Hermanson of the University of Pennsylvania teaches a class called “Searching for Rachel Carson: DDT and the Comeback of the American Eagle.” The course description reads: “Students will learn about the biology of tertiary and quartenary [sic] bird species, the effects of DDT and other pesticides on the food chain, and learn about Rachel Carson’s research concerning the effects of DDT in the environment.”59
Biotechnology is also under attack, from human genetics to genetically modified foods. I vividly recall one teacher’s assistant who couldn’t stand biotechnology. He derided all the success stories of biotechnology as “due to media bias” in favor of biotechnology.60 Of biotechnology’s advances, he stated, “So you extend your life five or ten years, but you’ll die anyway. Other diseases will come.”61 It’s easy to shrug off five or ten years when it’s not your life on the line.
REVOLUTION AGAINST THE GREEN REVOLUTION
The Green Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s revolutionized food production, creating new types of high-yielding crops and increasing use of pesticides and fertilizers. These new strategies increased crop yields so much that food supplies were able to keep pace with skyrocketing world population. But if it’s good for the populace, the professors must hate it.
And they do. “There’s a lot of uneasy feelings about the Green Revolution,” says Professor C.F. Brunk of UCLA. “In just over a decade, population growth overcame the gains of the Green Revolution,” he told the class.62 Only one problem: it didn’t. No one said that the Green Revolution would feed everyone; proponents only said that the Green Revolution would revitalize the agricultural sector. In fact, food production has kept pace with population—there is more than enough food on earth to feed everyone.
Professor Muldavin lectured that the Green Revolution “ignored distribution of food,” and that the main effects of the Green Revolution were soil erosion, water degradation, chemical inputs, genetic erosion, and social calamity.63 He skipped right by the part where the Green Revolution fed millions of people. But maybe it’s asking too much for him to teach that. Soil erosion takes priority.
Professor Ravi Batra of Southern Methodist University rips the Green Revolution. “[F]ar from alleviating poverty, the Green Revolution has actually increased it,” writes Batra, “and instead of bridging the gap between the rural rich and poor, it has widened it.”64 Unfortunately for him, Batra is wrong. Due to the Green Revolution, absolute poverty in the Indian region was cut by half.65
Professors who hate the Green Revolution also hate genetically modified (GM) crops, which have higher yields than ordinary crops. And though they can’t prove that GM crops actually have negative effects, speculation is good enough.
“There is no evidence at all of deleterious effects of genetically modified (GM) foods on human health,” admitted Professor Brunk. “But the step from potential problems to actual problems is a very short step.”66 That’s rather paranoid. If there’s no evidence that something is a problem, why worry about it? Unless you’re an alarmist college professor, that is.
Professor Jane Rissler, head of the Union of Concerned Scientists, which represents hundreds of university faculty members, opposes GM foods. “Our point of view is that we’re skeptical of many of the benefits. We’re worried about the uncertainties and the risks. This leads us to believe that for the most part these products will not be useful in a sustainable agriculture,” she states.67
Professors decry the Green Revolution because it saved human lives and gave man the ability to increase population. At root, the fight of the radical environmentalists is a fight against human progress, and the fight against human progress is a fight against the existence of humanity itself.
BIODIVERSITY, EXCEPT FOR HUMANS
The university faculty constantly preaches “biodiversity” —the preservation of all species—even at the expense of human endeavors. They ignore that man is part of his environment, and that extinction of various species has been an ongoing process for millions of years. They drastically exaggerate the damage being done to biodiversity by humanity; their goal is to stop humanity from progressing in new and more efficient ways.
“The driving force in this extinction period is human activity, pure and simple,” averred Professor Brunk. “Whenever humans are introduced to the environment, you can usually expect biodiversity to go down.”68 The implication? Stop human expansion, by any means necessary. Why? Because we love moths.
“Species are disappearing at an accelerating rate through human action,” reiterates Professor Edward O. Wilson of Harvard, “primarily habitat destruction but also pollution and the introduction of exotic species into residual natural environments.”69 Wilson and Professor Paul Ehrlich of Stanford actually asked President Clinton to sign legislation “to reduce the scale of human activities . . . every new shopping center built in the California chaparral . . . every swamp converted into a rice paddy or shrimp farm means less biodiversity.”70
The agenda-driven professors quote astronomical extinction rates in order to alarm the students. “The numbers are grim. . . . half of all living bird and mammal species will be gone within two hundred or three hundred years,” Professor Donald A. Levine of the University of Texas solemnly warned. Even Levine admitted, though, that these statistics were “crude.”71 Such overblown estimates are not uncommon. “[A]ccording to our data,” says Professor Ehrlich, “the loss of mammal populations actually may be much more severe [than current estimates], perhaps 10 percent or higher.”72 Professor Wilson puts the extinction rate at “crisis proportions— perhaps one hundred to one thousand times higher than it was before humanity came along.”73
All of this is false. Professor Julian Simon of the University of Maryland, one of the most widely known and respected scientists of the last century, explains, “A fair reading of the available data suggests a rate of extinction not even one-thousandth as great as doomsayers claim. If the rate were any lower, evolution itself would need to be questioned.” In his writings, Simon shows where the exaggerated figure originated, and he demonstrates that the figure was “pure guesswork.”74
Professor Bjorn Lomborg of the University of Aarhus in Denmark, author of the controversial book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, agrees with Simon. He estimates the extinction rate at “0.7 percent over the next 50 years,” or 0.014 percent per year, one hundred times smaller than the rate suggested by environmental alarmists.75
Lomborg is hardly a right-winger: he admits that he has the same basic goals as the environmentalists, but he sees that environmental problems aren’t as severe as the Greens say they are. But standing up against the mean, green, lying machine in any way means coming under heavy fire. Professor Wilson of Harvard leads the anti-Lomborg crowd. He refers to the publicity surro
unding Lomborg as “the Lomborg scam,” calls Lomborg a “contrarian” and a “parasite,” and rips Lomborg’s research ability as “characterized by willful ignorance, selective quotations, disregard for communication with genuine experts, and destructive campaigning.”76 Is that what passes for a scholarly critique of a fellow scientist these days?
BOW TO MOTHER NATURE
In the end, all of the environmental alarmism at universities is really a cover for a nihilistic anti-human tilt. Without man, the world would be a glorious Garden of Eden, they think. There would be no global warming. No automobiles. No oil. What a wonderful place!
Rutgers University ecologist David Ehrenfeld believes the smallpox virus should not be destroyed since it kills only human beings.77 “[T]he ending of the human epoch on Earth would most likely be greeted with a hearty ‘Good Riddance,’” spits Professor Paul Taylor of City University of New York.78
The deep Greens desire the destruction of mankind as we know it. These extremists are not rare or hard to find. All you have to do is check your local university.
7
THE WAR ON GOD
In Genesis, Chapter Eleven, the Bible tells of a time when the entire earth was of one language and one common purpose. All of mankind settled in a place called Shinar. And the people said, “Come, let us build a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves.” So they began to build a tower that would reach into the heavens, hoping to challenge God Himself.
And God looked at the city, and at the tower, and He said, “Behold, they are one people with one language for all, and this they begin to do?” And God dispersed them from there over the face of the whole earth; and they stopped building the city. The name of the city and of the tower was Babel.
The university system is the new city of Babel. Professors hope to build an intellectual tower that reaches into the heavens, to challenge God. They drag organized religion through the mud and then shoot arrows at its dirtied carcass. And once they’ve done that, they make moral judgments for all of mankind, as if obtaining a PhD conferred upon them some sort of supernatural moral wisdom.
They wish to tear down biblical morality and place in its stead a morality of their own choosing. It is a degraded morality they seek to promote. Without God, there is no right and wrong, no good and bad. Anything goes. Life itself loses value, and with that loss of value comes a loss of societal strength. In short, America becomes France.
What these professors want is a jihad against God, a crusade against traditional morality. And their battlefields are lecture halls full of innocent civilians.
A DARK AND GODLESS PLACE
It’s terrific to have professors around to enlighten students to the purposelessness of their own existence. God doesn’t exist, they say. Or if He does, He is uninvolved in the world. Life has no meaning, and there are no rules. Man takes the place of God.
Spouts Professor Peter Singer of Princeton University: “If we don’t play God, who will? There seem to me to be three possibilities: there is a God, but He doesn’t care about evil and suffering; there is a God who cares, but He or She is a bit of an underachiever; or there is no God. Personally, I believe the latter.”1Someone’s going to Hell.
Professor John McCarthy of Stanford University, one of the nation’s leading experts on artificial intelligence, feels that “the evidence on the god question is in a similar state to the evidence on the werewolf question. So I am an atheist.”2 The evidence on Professor McCarthy’s arrogance is in, and it’s definitive.
“I think in many respects religion is a dream—a beautiful dream often. Often a nightmare,” says Professor Steven Weinberg of the University of Texas. “But it’s a dream from which I think it’s about time we awoke. Just as a child learns about the tooth fairy and is incited by that to leave a tooth under the pillow—and you’re glad that the child believes in the tooth fairy. But eventually you want the child to grow up.”3 That’s rather high and mighty of him.
Professor James Wright of Hunter College calls Jesus a “half-crazed logician,” and states “I don’t believe in God. He hurts too much.”4 Professor Corey Washington of the University of Maryland agrees: “I am simply saying that it is more probable that God does not exist.”5
Then there are the professors who foul the waters with New-Age garbage. “If God is understood from monotheistic traditions, it could be problematical for me,” explains Professor Tu Weiming of Harvard University. “If God is understood as creativity itself, as a generative force, as a transformative power, as the source of all values, all our truths, all our ideas of human self-realization, then I certainly have faith in God.”6 Whatever happened to plain old monotheism? Too boring?
Professor Camille Paglia, who lectures at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, believes that society should return to pagan worship. “The public realm is not owned by Judeo-Christianity. It is shared by people of all cultural and religious backgrounds. Therefore, I’m arguing for the Greco-Roman or pagan line, which is very tolerant of homosexuality and even of man-boy love.” Paglia also says she’s for “the abolition of all sodomy laws. I’m for abortion rights. I’m for the legalization of drugs—consistent with alcohol regulations. I’m for not just the decriminalization but the legalization of prostitution.”7 Does she want to legalize prostitution because professors are underpaid?
DAMNING ORGANIZED RELIGION
As early as 1951, William F. Buckley was pointing out in his landmark work, God and Man at Yale, that “if the atmosphere of a college is overwhelmingly secular, if the influential members of the faculty tend to discourage religious inclinations, or to persuade the student that Christianity is nothing more than ‘ghost-fear,’ or ‘twentieth-century witchcraft,’ university policy quite properly becomes a matter of concern to those parents and alumni who deem active Christian faith a powerful force for good and for personal happiness.”8
If fears of anti-religious universities were well-founded then, those fears are a thousand-fold more legitimate now. Professors hate God, and they hate organized religion even more. They see it as outdated, a danger to modern society, and the cause of thousands of pointless deaths. Religion is a childish plaything that man uses to blind himself to his own mortality, they say. Only one out of every five professors attends religious services once a week,9 as opposed to about 40 percent in the general public.10 Forty-eight percent of professors say they rarely or never attend a religious service.11
Professor Thomas Sugrue of the University of Pennsylvania states that among academics, religion is “the subject of distrust and even derision . . . much of the academic skepticism about organized religion is warranted.”12
Diana Chapman Walsh, president of Wellesley College, made the same distinction between spirituality and religion to a group of UCLA students. “Religion is something we can perhaps do without,” she told the students. She defined spirituality as love, compassion, and forgiveness—and she said that spirituality does not involve faith.13 Thank you, flower-child.
Professor Peter Singer is at it again, calling Judeo-Christian values the biggest obstacle to animal rights: “One of the things that causes a problem for the animal movement is the strong strain of fundamentalist Christianity that makes a huge gulf between humans and animals.”14 This is hardly a surprise coming from the famous lecturer who backs bestiality and the murder of severely disfigured infants.
So how does fellow leftist Professor Paul Ehrlich, who sometimes morphs into a religious expert, explain religion’s role in the world? “Religion . . . continues to play a role in maintaining the status of elites today, for instance in justifying poverty and wealth as expressions of God’s will.”15 Actually, I use religion to justify mental acuity as an expression of God’s will. I’m sure God must have a reason for making Ehrlich such a babbling idiot.
UCLA Professor Joshua Muldavin made a similarly anti-religious remark in his Geography 5 class, where he labeled Christianity as a “harmful policy” because it
said the earth was to be used.16 Perhaps he’s right: We shouldn’t use the earth; we should worship it and nourish it with human sacrifice.
Professor Brunk of UCLA stated in our biology class that Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species was the most influential book ever written by one author. When a student asked him about the Bible, he responded: “Religious texts don’t count, because they are invariably by multiple authors.”17 Last time I checked, God is not “multiple authors.”
Biola University Professor Richard Flory and University of Southern California Professor Donald Miller cooperated to create an exhibition about the future of Christianity. Flory and Miller came to the conclusion that focusing on biblical truths would lead Christianity down the path to doom. “The idea is, you need to reinvent the church to be adaptable to contemporary culture,” Miller says. The section of the exhibit concerning conversion attempts through Biblical teachings is characterized by marked disdain. Even the far-left Los Angeles Times, which mocks Christianity at every turn, calls the section of the exhibit concerning biblical teachings “judgmental.”18 If the L.A. Times calls an anti-Biblical exhibit “judgmental,” you can bet your life the exhibit is a wildly anti-Christian screed.
“RELIGION OF PEACE”
Unlike the Judeo-Christian tradition, Islam is tolerant and peaceful, professors say. Islam means peace, after all, right? Actually, not really—the literal translation is “submission.” But professors like to think so.
“Islam means peace,” explains Professor Aly Farag of the University of Louisville.19 Islam means peace, agree Professors Mustafa Suwani of Truman State University,20 Nadira K. Charaniya of Springfield College,21 Zeki Saritoprak of Berry College,22 G.A. Shareef, formerly of the Bellarmine College.23 Scores of others concur.
