Harvard History Course for Activists is Pretty Much What You’d Expect
Nothing to see here folks, just another Ivy League history course rife with left wing indoctrination.
Malcolm A. Kline of Accuracy in Academia reports.
Activist Training @ Harvard
When a course is entitled “History of the U. S. for Policymakers, Activists, and Citizens,” you can bet that the target audience is the second group of constituents.
According to the Kennedy School at Harvard, “This is a course intended for policy students, both from the U.S. and from abroad, who would like to enlarge or shore up their knowledge of U.S. history. The course will deal with the major themes, issues, and turning points in the evolution of the modern U.S. (largely post-1900) with an eye towards developments that are likely to be relevant to understanding current and future problems and policy issues.
Among the topics to be considered historically are: the constitution and institutions of governance; parties and political institutions; the relationship between business and government; immigration; race; labor and social welfare provisions; regional differences; imperialism; and the Cold War. Some attention will also be devoted to the ways in which historical understanding can fruitfully serve policymakers.” Note the small “c” in Constitution and the primacy of “imperialism” over the Cold War with no mention of communism or the Soviet Union.
The class is taught by Alexander Keyssar, whose one review on Rate My Professors.com is an unqualified rave: “Keyssar is fantastic. While the course has many readings, they are quite interesting. Discussions are well-managed and fascinating. Can’t say enough good about this professor and class.” Keyssar himself seems to take a rather jaundiced view of U. S. history, although he might call it nuanced.
“The targets of exclusionary laws have tended to be similar for more than two centuries: the poor, immigrants, African-Americans, people perceived to be something other than ‘mainstream’ Americans,” Keyssar wrote in The New York Times. “No state has ever attempted to disenfranchise upper-middle-class or wealthy white male citizens.”
