Penn State Peace Studies Program
By DiscoverTheNetworks.org
March 2005

·         Peace Studies program that pushes an environmentalist agenda

·         Encourages students to embrace “green” causes like “sustainability” 

While the modus operandi of most Peace Studies programs is to encourage students in the tendentious view that all conflicts are ultimately soluble through non-violent means, the Peace and Conflict Studies Minor program at Penn State University takes a different tack. Viewing the college curriculum through a “green” prism, the Penn State program is primarily concerned with environmentalist advocacy. 

Courses offered through the program are consistent with this agenda. For instance, a course called “Environment and Public Policy” is taught by Jon Plaut, a Penn State professor who was named by President Clinton to head the NAFTA Environmental Commission. Plaut’s class features only two required textbooks: One is Earth in the Balance, a 1992 screed by former Vice President Al Gore that argues for a “Global Marshal Plan”— that is, a massive government intervention to enact a radical environmentalist agenda; the other is Silent Spring, a discredited polemic decrying the agricultural use of pesticides, authored by the late environmentalist writer Rachel Carson. Issues explored in “Environment and Public Policy” similarly adhere to a narrow and extreme ideological agenda. A particular premium is placed on leftwing identity politics, with the result that topics such as “Women and Environmental Issues” and “Equity and Environmental Justice” are deemed central to the study of environmental and public policy.

Related classes in the Penn State program place an emphasis on “the role of women and gender in science, technology, and engineering.” The Peace and Conflict Studies department regularly plays host to speakers who toe the leftwing line. For instance, in 2002 the department invited two feminist speakers to address Penn State students. One of them, Linda Layne, a feminist cultural anthropologist, accordingly delivered a lecture called “A Feminist, Anthropological Account of Pregnancy Loss in America.”

To gauge the effect of such an ideology-infused climate on Penn State students, it is sufficient to consider the fruits of their labors. In 2001, for instance, Sandy Ross, a Penn State undergraduate enrolled in the Peace and Conflict Studies program, authored, as part of her coursework, a study entitled, “Gender, Power and the Feminist Discourse: A Cross-Cultural Analysis.” Directing Ross’ research was faculty advisor Dr. Clemente Abrokwaa, professor of African studies in the Peace and Conflict Studies program and an outspoken advocate for such “multicultural” studies.

Further evidence that the Penn State program subordinates education to leftwing environmental advocacy can be seen in classes like “Radiation, Reactors and Society,” which urges students to investigate the “societal problems” of nuclear power. The Peace Studies program’s environmentalist agenda finds yet starker expression in the emphasis that it places on “sustainability.” This alarmist school of thought, which enjoys wide currency among the epigones of the environmentalist movement, holds that the earth’s resources are under assault. Courses in the Peace Studies program are clearly meant to bolster this view. A class called The Politics of the Ecological Crisis, for instance, compels students to confront “the political implications of the increasing scarcity of many of the world's resources.”

Students in the Peace Studies program are expected do more than merely immerse themselves in the environmentalist tracts that pass for textbooks inside the department. They are also obliged to adapt their lives to the prescriptions put forth by their environmentalist professors. Students interested in taking a class called “Projects in Sustainable Living,” for instance, are informed that they will be required to carpool to class. Says the Fall 2004 course catalog: “The course is peppered with field trips for which it will be necessary to carpool, so it is not possible to cater to those who wish to attend for less than the scheduled 3 class hours each on Tuesday and Thursday.” Similarly, a class called Integrated Systems and LEED Certification, which was offered through the Peace Studies Program in 2003, required students studying design to work in collaboration with the U.S. Green Building Council, an organization whose approach to architectural design rests on the framework of a leftwing “green” agenda. In keeping with this agenda, students underwent training in so-called “Environmental Design,” a course that plainly evoked the building council activist ambitions.

The tenets of radical environmentalism are further reinforced through course readings. For instance, the main readings for a class called “The Ascent of Humanity,” required for all students in the Peace and Studies program, are, The Axemaker’s Gift: Technology’s Capture and Control of Our Minds and Culture,” an indictment of technological progress in the Western world; and The Life of Galileo, a play by the Communist Bertold Brecht.

The locus of the radical environmentalism that makes up the leitmotif of Penn State’s Peace and Studies courses is the university’s research facility, the Center for Sustainability (CFS). Founded in 1995 by a grant from Heinz Endowments, an leftwing philanthropy chaired by Teresa Heinz Kerry, the CFS, which serves as an “outdoor classroom” for students, acts as both factory and clearing house for environmentalist aims. As a description of the CFS’s mission makes clear, no item on the “green” agenda escapes the Center’s attention: “The [Center’s] site highlights green design principles and building techniques, alternative energy and alternative materials, sustainable agriculture, and ecosystem restoration.”

Among the CFS’s projects are “green design,” an initiative through which a “Green Design Team” of Penn State faculty and Peace Studies students brings its environmentalist perspectives to bear on issues as disparate as food production, environmentally-friendly construction materials, transportation and energy issues, and population growth. In keeping with the environmentalist movement’s hostility to industrial agriculture, the center features a solar greenhouse designed to promote “healthy food production and ecosystem management.” That healthy food production is actually another name for an all-vegetarian diet, the preferred diet of environmentalist activists, is underscored by another program administered by the CFS. Called the Healthy Foods Initiative, this project teaches students to prepare “non-mainstream foods” such as amaranth, quinoa, and licorice root. The goal of the initiative is to “reintroduce diversity into the mainstream diet.”

Although primarily focused on pushing an environmentalist platform, the Peace and Studies program does not altogether depart from the unswervingly anti-military ideals found at other Peace Studies programs. For instance, a Peace Studies course called “Personal Peace and Peace Building” adopts a decidedly New-Age approach. Rather than exploring a wide array of techniques for conflict resolution, the class urges students to take up “the study of inner peace.”