Rooting out progressives in US academia

The Guardian tracks the rise of progressive-hunting in American academia, from Fox's Sean Hannity, who urged students to record "leftwing propaganda" by professors to air on his show and righwinger David Horowitz's book/blacklist The Professors: the 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America to efforts in Pennsylvania and elsewhere to remove the International Baccalaureate (IB) program from high schools because, among other reasons, it's deemed "un-American," marxist, anti-Christian, part of an international communist conspiracy, and suspicious simply because it was "developed in a foreign country" (Switzerland).

"There is a cunning behind the battyness," says Todd Gitlin of Columbia, one of Horowitz's most dangerous academics. "It's not just the self-aggrandisement. It's an assault on one of the few social enclaves that the right doesn't control. There is a scattershot bellicosity whether the fortunes of the political right are up or down. They find it useful for fundraising if nothing else."