A Letter From Professor Croatti

By: Patrick Ford

Posted: 3/6/07

Editor’s note: In the November 2006 issue of The Patriot, Patrick Ford wrote: “Professor Mark Croatti, the most liberal professor I had during my freshman year, is a perfect example of how some professors would rather espouse liberal rhetoric than educate students. Among his lecture topics in his Comparative Politics class were the Israeli “occupation of Palestinian lands” and comparisons between America’s treatment of enemy combatants and those in Nazi concentration camps. Despite his rhetoric, I continually tried to raise my hand and offer opinions, even when Professor Croatti didn’t seem interested in listening.”
Go to www.thegwpatriot.com to read the full article, An Open Letter to Conservative Freshman from Nov. 15, 2006.

Mark Croatti responded to Patrick Ford with the following e-mail:

Greetings from the “left”?

Too bad you miss the point, Patrick. Professors try to give all views a proper forum. Each class requires a certain perspective, theme, focus, or simply an approach that will help educate students on the concepts in the book, in the news and in the world. Beliefs presented are not necessarily those we hold as our own--but students have a right to hear them. You’d be surprised where I stand on many issues, as I grew up in the most conservative county in the country, joined the Republican Party straight out of high school and proudly cast my first vote for Ronald Reagan. I earned my degrees from a very conservative private school and spent the last two elections trying to get a former student of mine elected as a Republican to the Maryland legislature (I belong to neither party as I feel the center is the place to be, and both parties seem to have been hijacked by extremism). But if I am going to take students to the Israeli embassy, they should know what is happening in the West Bank. I doubt you’ve been there, or seen the refugee camps, or know the history, or you would understand the importance of the issue. If I am going to take students to Arab embassies, they should know how Arabs feel about being locked up without rights--what they themselves are saying. The course I teach is about more than the Middle East, and my personal opinions against overspending or sending U.S. troops abroad to tackle social problems, traditionally conservative views, have no place being advocated at the expense of an opposite viewpoint if my job as a teacher is to present a balanced debate. I make it a point to call on every hand that is raised, even yours. Don’t interpret a lively discussion as a lack on interest in your particular views. There are 49 other people in the class who want to speak as well. Moving on from person to person is part of the process. You fail to see that teaching is almost like acting—like participating in a debate. Not acting as in misleading, or being fake, but rather doing a job and disseminating information for students to digest, whether I agree with what is said or not.

But you go on provoking people just to get a reaction or name-calling as a means to make a point, and I’ll keep on doing what I think is best. That’s what’s great about our system--the freedom to express a view, even when others will attack you or label you or simply flat-out fail to see the big picture. I am against big government or crimes against the Constitution; I am against deficit spending and federal intervention in local politics. If
that makes me a liberal, then you don’t understand the term. If you are calling me a liberal simply for disagreeing with George W. Bush’s policies, then you don’t want to understand the term. You’d be calling Patrick Buchanan a liberal. And most of the former Reagan administration.

If you like Bush, great. But I would hope that before your time is over at GW that you would wander outside of your self-made protective bubble and try to understand why people suffer in today’s world, both at home and abroad, and then decide if, through the public or private sector, you’d like to help. Being mean simply for the fun of it accomplishes nothing and undeservingly gives conservatism a bad name. Not all conservatives are uncaring, and not all liberals want to save the world. Stereotypes are an unfortunate side effect of a political discourse, but ask yourself: would you prefer both viewpoints, or only your own? Hatred for liberals or conservatives has no place in the classroom. Each side needs the other if a free flow of information to take place. I hope that you at least recognize the usefulness of being able to see any issue from either point of view. And I hope you eventually realize that making people mad is not as productive as expressing a genuine concern for those in need.
-Mark Croatti

To which Patrick Ford responded:

Greetings from the right!

I was delighted to read Professor Croatti’s fan mail. Reading the email brought back many fond memories of Croatti’s class on the Vern, where in one breath he would say, “I would never compare American soldiers to Nazis!” and in the next he would say, “But given the information we have, Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib look like the beginnings of the concentration camps of Nazi Germany.” And it is this intellectual dance that he performed during every class that warranted a mention of him in my last article which advised conservative freshmen not to be intimidated by liberal professors.

I was happy to see that his first presidential vote went to Ronald Reagan, as many in the country did given his two electoral landslides. Professor Croatti writes that I would be “surprised” to learn of some of his conservative political views he articulates in his letter—perhaps that’s because the only views he articulated in class were liberal.

His email resembles less a thought out rebuttal to my assertions and more a political rant more worthy of, well, a Croatti lecture. He correctly contends that I have not physically been to the West Bank, but the notion that his subjective experience gives him unmatched insight into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the kind of typical elitist liberal thinking expounded during his class. I can still reason that there is no moral equivalence between terrorists who blow up busses and disco-techs with the sole intention of killing civilians and Israeli and American soldiers who target enemy combatants.

Professor Croatti writes off what I saw as a deliberate effort to avoid calling on those who would challenge him like myself as an attempt of holding of a “lively class discussion.” I would be willing to give Professor Croatti the benefit of the doubt in this case had such a discussion taken place. Sadly, we have no YouTube videos to prove my point, but hopefully he will use my criticism to reevaluate how his bias affects how he calls on students during class discussion.

Next Croatti lectures me on the complexities of conservatism, presuming that I conflate support for President Bush with conservatism. This could not be further from the truth. I oppose calling people liberals “simply for disagreeing with George W. Bush’s policies,” as I disagree with many of the president’s policies, ranging from his views on illegal immigration to his fiscal incontinence. My conservatism has not resulted from a “self-made protective bubble” but rather careful reading and learning at the hands of Russell Kirk, F.A. Hayek, William F. Buckley Jr., and Edmund Burke—and contrasting their arguments to the left-wing ideas and rhetoric that permeate college life. Professor Croatti’s problem results from something that is fairly common from the left: an affinity to bash conservative policies by cherry picking leaders who call themselves “conservative” (such as Patrick Buchanan or Andrew Sullivan), while advocating positions unmoored in conservative thought.

Professor Croatti presents an interesting challenge to conservative college students. On one hand, the issues and viewpoints he espouses are almost entirely representative of the far left-wing of American and international politics, such as a hatred for Israel, a demonization of the religious right, and an affinity for Islamofascist apologetics. Many a student in his classes will attest to this. What makes his case more difficult than that posed by a typically biased liberal professor is his ability to espouse such ideas while simultaneously disguising the views as moderate, or in some cases even conservative. Students of his classes are fed not just liberal rhetoric, but liberal rhetoric cleverly packaged as moderate common sense. In the end his lectures truly do speak for themselves, as several of my friends and I last semester (none of whom share my political views) all recognized after class just how extreme he truly was. It seems that given this information Professor Croatti may be more suited for a job giving acting lessons than teaching political science.

Professor Croatti writes: “But you go on provoking people just to get a reaction or name-calling as a means to make a point, and I’ll keep on doing what I think is best. That’s what’s great about our system--the freedom to express a view, even when others will attack you or label you or simply flat-out fail to see the big picture.” Ask a conservative college student at a liberal university about his experience trying to combat liberal indoctrination, and he will most likely echo the words of Professor Croatti. Indeed, that is why I wrote the article in question. I wrote it for conservative students who are afraid that they will be attacked or intimidated by their professors and their peers. Respectfully, Professor Croatti, I think in this case you may have missed the point.

Patrick Ford
Senior Editor