Department of Educational
Foundations
406 Teachers College (M.L.#2)
Cincinnati, OH 45221
Phone: 513-556-3608
The longtime refrain of Dr.
Marvin Berlowitz holds that “Privatization must be resisted.” In his role as
Director of the Urban Center for Peace Education and Research at the University
of Cincinnati (UC), Berlowitz, a committed Marxist, has made such resistance
the rule. The Center is in effect a collective of leftwing professors who are
inhospitable to ideological viewpoints that are out-of-step with
theirs.
The course offerings of the Peace Education
Certificate program, available to
both graduate and undergraduate students, are a testament to Berlowitz’s
success: all eschew academic rigor for de
rigueur leftwing pedagogy. A perusal of the course descriptions confirms the point: They span the gamut
from Marxist dialectics (“Liberation Philosophy”), to environmentalism
(“Community and Environmental Influences on the Schools”), to feminist theory
(“Women, Culture, and Education”), to identity-politics multiculturalism
(“Multicultural Education”). Another course administered through the Peace
Education program, “Educational Sociology,” is a veritable hodgepodge of radicalism. A description of the
course states: “Courses in Educational Sociology concentrate on Marxist,
feminist and other classic and social transformation theories in education as
well as on research on social issues related to schooling and educational
inequities.”
Nor does UC’s peace education
department want for professors of these leftwing talking points. Besides
boasting an ideologically homogeneous faculty, the
department regularly invites visiting professors whose academic
records are distinguished only in their enthusiasm for the department’s
politics. In 2001, for example, the peace education program played host to
Yaacov Iram, an Israeli professor and chairman of the peace education program
at Israel’s Bar-Ilan University, a similar course in radical politics.
Continuing in that tradition, in the summer of 2005 UC intends to offer a
special course titled “Cultural Diversity.”
It will be taught by Belinda Boyd, a feminist visiting professor of
“cultural diversity” theater at the University of Southern Florida. In that
class, Boyd plans to teach the works of August Wilson, a leftwing African
American playwright who has advocated reparations for slavery to be paid 140
years after the fact. Boyd also plans to explore “ethnicity and gender in U.S.
society,” “feminist ideology and Hispanic culture,” and methods by which to
“overcome internalized homophobia.”
Marxist themes pervade the UC
peace education department. This owes much to Marvin Berlowitz’s leadership and
guidance. Summing up Berlowitz’s scholarly interests, a faculty biography
states: “His most recent publications have been in the area of educational
reform including a broad based critique as well as specific works on the
expansion of JROTC and also magnet schools as examples of neo-liberal ideology
in educational reform.” To describe Berlowitz’s views as a critique is to
understate matters considerably. In fact, his “scholarship” is generally
indistinguishable from political polemic.
Among the objects of Berlowitz’s
disdain are:
Asked in an interview whether his
personal distaste for globalization colors the way he broaches the subject with
his students, Berlowitz demurred. “‘Globalization’ is a terribly imprecise
term,” he said, explaining that the word could refer to everything from
“neo-liberal ideology” to “neo-colonialism,” and stressing that a
“consideration of all of these formulations is central to any survey
of global issues.” A critical observer might wonder whether casting globalization
as “neo-colonialism” does not distort the advantages of a global free market in
fostering peace. However, Berlowitz insists that he attempts to provide
balance. “Obviously, our treatment of neo-liberal ideology is grounded in the
economics of Milton Friedman who discusses the merits of the ‘free market,’” he
said. He declined to offer an example.
If Berlowitz harbors an
unambiguous disdain for free-market capitalism, he reserves his most strident
contempt for the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC). Berlowitz
claims that the program is part of a pernicious Pentagon plan to convert
underachieving schools into boot camps. “The Defense Department seeks ‘at risk’
schools to transform into military academies for the purpose of future
recruitment,” he has said. On other occasions, Berlowitz has theorized that
students who decide to enlist in the JROTC have been “pushed by poverty and the
economics of racism” and wind up “trapped by economic conscription.” Taking no
account of the fact that the program is voluntary, Berlowitz remonstrates: “The strict and time-consuming requirements of the JROTC
program deprive students of opportunities to enroll in college preparatory courses.”
Underlying his radical politics is
Berlowitz’s decades-long allegiance to Marxism. Berlowitz has long sought ways
to inject Marxist theory into the university curriculum. In 1978, for instance,
he took part in the “Fourth Midwest Marxist Scholars Conference,” a symposium
seeking to find new ways to incorporate “Marxist approaches” into the American
educational system. In November 2001, Berlowitz conducted a symposium on the
field of peace studies, during which he advanced the argument that the greatest
“barrier” to the proliferation of the program in the Western world was “Eurocentricity.” The term—a
shorthand for the supposedly excessive scholarly focus on the thought of
Americans of European origin—was readily embraced by Berlowitz’s colleagues.
After adapting his polemical idea into a journal article, Berlowitz had them
approved by a peer review in March of 2002.
More
recently, Berlowitz has sought to sow the notion of “Eurocentricity” into the
academic fiber of the Peace Education Program. Working in partnership with
professors Nathan Long of UC and Eric
R. Jackson of Northern Kentucky University, Berlowitz has authored a
still-unpublished (as of April 2005) 17-page paper arguing for peace education
courses to take up the concept of “Eurocentricity.” Accordingly, the paper
states that “the dominance of Eurocentricity in peace education leads to the
exclusion and distortion of African American perspectives and this restricted
focus undermines the status and viability of peace education as a component of
educational reform.” As the authors see it, the current peace education
programs are marred by a number of “distortions,” which include: (1) a failure
to accurately represent the African American emphasis on positive peace, the
role of trade unions, anti-imperialism, solidarity with socialist nations, and
internationalism in general; (2) the vanguard role of African Americans in the
struggle against nuclear proliferation and conscription; (3) a tendency to
minimize the role of African Americans in the development of non-violent
philosophy as merely being eclectic; and (4) to underrepresent the leadership
role of African Americans in anti-war movements and white peace organizations.
With an eye toward overcoming
potential academic opposition to their proposed focus on “Eurocentricity,” the
authors point to the success of leftwing feminists in making the university
receptive to their radical agendas. “Peace educators can learn from the
successes of feminists in overcoming the contradictions of sexism and
patriarchy in the field,” they note. Thus the professors conclude that the
surest way of adding yet another dose of leftwing politics into the curriculum
is to portray it as a fight for racial equality. The paper even includes a
strikingly disingenuous slogan to this effect: “Peace cannot be achieved in a
white skin while the black is branded.”
Berlowitz’s radical evangelizing
is not confined to UC’s Peace and Education program.
As the director of the
university’s in-house research institution – the Center for Peace Research,
Implementation, Development and Education (UC PRIDE) – Berlowitz has designed
several “educational” initiatives aimed at transporting his politics into
classrooms beyond the campus. In 2001, for instance, under the direction of
Berlowitz and several students and former students at UC’s peace education
department,
UC PRIDE unveiled an online course, offering credit at the university, and targeting elementary
school teachers in Ohio. At the core of the course, which has been offered
since the fall of 2001, was Berlowitz’s distinctly radical approach to
education. As Berlowitz himself explained in March 2001, “This [course] is an
alternative to school metal detectors and the software that is aimed at
profiling students at risk for violence.” Berlowitz’s alternative, in keeping
with his Marxism-inspired contempt for the white middle class, was to alert
teachers to the role of suburban whites, allegedly biased against minority
students, in driving these students to violence. “The bias awareness component
of the course is especially significant to those who are working with youth who
have grown up in historically homogenous white suburbs, which are now experiencing
conflicts associated with an influx of ethnically and racially diverse
populations,” Berlowitz explained. The course offered teachers no solution for
alleviating violence among troubled students in urban schools. Instead, it
urged them to be “more culturally sensitive to the needs of urban
schoolchildren.”
Berlowitz has also initiated an
after-school program for urban students called “Be A Star,” which features workshops on such subjects as “bias
awareness” and “peace education.”
Such efforts are complemented by
the peace education department’s attempts to instill anti-war views in the UC
student body. For instance, a running “Peace News” feature on the department’s
website reads like a one-stop directory for anti-war protests in the Cincinnati
area. The department also makes regular financial contributions to
on-campus anti-war groups. In promoting a reflexive opposition to all wars, the
peace education department takes its cues not only from professors like Martin
Berlowitz, but also from an advisory committee. Among the committee’s members
are Father Ben Urmston, a far-leftist director of the Peace Studies program at Xavier
University. Though Berlowitz seems untroubled by the unwaveringly anti-war
slant of the peace education program, he does admit to one concern: “I remain
bewildered by the fact that peace education, which merely endeavors to include
the teaching of non-violent alternatives to conflict resolution remains
marginalized,” he says.