Life in the Academy

Tatiana Menaker reveals My Second Marxist Indoctrination:

After arriving in the United States with a diploma from Leningrad University (a university with such alumni as Vladimir Lenin, Ayn Rand and President Vladimir Putin), I realized that I had the extremely unmarketable skills of a Marxist-Leninist philosophy professor. Moreover, English was not my strong suit. So I became a staff writer for a Russian newspaper in San Francisco and free-lanced for émigré publications in New York and Los Angeles. Eventually, I decided “To bring my English to the level of my Russian" (as the Russian-born American novelist Vladimir Nabokov quipped) and enrolled at San Francisco State University. I majored in creative writing.

I couldn’t believe what I found.

I'm sure she found the flowers of freedom blooming, right?

Imagine the utter amazement of a refugee from a Communist country, where Marxism was forced on all students, now having to sink in a puddle of socialist propaganda again -- but this time in the middle of an American university!

Imagine the astonishment of a person who, after fighting the KGB and being a refusenik, finally comes so close to her dream of receiving a real education instead of indoctrination, only to find herself, once again, in the middle of a socialist brainwashing machine -- but this time in San Francisco.

Welcome to America, Tatiana!

Lots of heartwarming vignettes by following the link. Here's one:

I was especially fascinated by one middle-aged guy who had alcoholism written all over his face, in bathhouse flip-flops revealing dirty overgrown toenails, and with his belongings stuffed in a plastic grocery bag. If I hadn't seen him behind the teacher's desk, I would have mistaken him for one of San Francisco's deranged homeless, lost on the campus having wandered from the neighboring shower program. Instead of his subject, African Studies, he was teaching that America was rich only because it dishonestly made money on rebuilding Europe after WWII. If not for that lucky strike, he argued, this country would be even more terrible than it is now. He never had notes or a clear structure for his lectures; he just improvised on his well-worn, beloved topic of anti-Americanism.
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This pointed out the major difference between my education in the Soviet Union and my education at SFSU. When I wanted to transfer credits from my Leningrad University degree to SFSU, I was told by the International Admissions Office that it couldn't be done, because as a professor of Marxist-Leninist philosophy, I had only gone through "indoctrination." I find this fascinating, because the difference between Leningrad University and SFSU is that my professors in Leningrad were forced to teach socialist propaganda for fear of brutal punishment; here a bunch of aged hippies, who put students through forced indoctrination instead of academic work, were materially rewarded for their radical activism.

They're probably just scared that the old Soviet Union pros would put the American amateurs to shame.