The world of education has become progressively heavy in the constant liberal rhetoric that is discussed between students and their professors in the difficult world of college life. From their first day on campus as young teenagers all the way towards their time as young adults still looking to find their place among the millions of others in their generation they are showered with workloads that force them up late at night and now it is becoming ever so clear that they are also being fed subtle manifestos towards political viewpoints.
Former Arizona representative Adam Kwasman found out just how bad it is for conservative students these days during Criminal Law class at Arizona State University. In Professor Joshua Dressler’s this week, Kwasman challenged the professor’s outlandish remark about presidential candidate Ted Cruz and the true meaning of “New York values.”
A student in Dressler’ assumed that Cruz’s comment had something to do liberal type values, Dressler claimed that the Cruz’s comments were a dog whistle for Jewish values.” He made the claim in a noticeably hushed tone compared to the rest of his address to the class as heard on an audio recording that is now going viral.
Kwasman immediately jumped on the issue and questioned what damage his comments were doing to students. Later he told popular radio talk show host James T. Harris, “Many universities use his textbook. He just came to the University of Arizona and he should have been ashamed of himself. I have to say that I don’t care about the grade, I don’t care about, I have to be honest with you. I have to be very honest and very clear that I don’t wanna say that I am a complete martyr because the grades at law school are anonymous. I do have to say that I didn’t really think about my grade in this situation,”
Kwasman told Harris, “…I would have never said anything had the professor said “there are people on the right, there are people on the left. They make inferences,” or even if he makes a potshot toward Republicans or Conservatives because we are used to that. As conservatives we are used to liberal academics making these comments. But when he said what he said which was openly inferring the fact that Ted Cruz was anti-Semitic I saw the crowd just start nodding and I was done. I could not hold my tongue.”
Kwasman later went on to say that Arizona State University officials should consider themselves very lucky he no longer holds his seat on the Appropriations Committee. He stated that if he were, he would have started immediately finding every way he could to cut the University’s budget. However, while Kwasman was very vocal in the class to stand against the statements made by Dressler, the reaction by the sixty or so other students that were in the class taking the course was mixed. Kwasman said that it was mostly the older students who approached him to offer their gratitude, while some of the younger students did not openly challenge his stance. Instead he reported they told him that they would not get anything done in the course if he continued to have outbursts like had just performed.
Dressler and Kwasman spoke after the class was over in the hallway outside of their room and according to the description by the former representative, the professor tried to out-politician the politician.
“We were both very civil in the hallway and he acknowledged the fact that, well actually at first he was saying ‘I wasn’t saying that I thought that, I was saying that other people thought that,’ and I gave him one of those looks of I’m calling BS on that. I told him you cannot out lawyer a politician. I know you don’t know who I am but I formally represented over 200,000 people in the Arizona state legislature and I ran for the United States Congress. I know how to affect people through language.”
It remains to be seen what exactly will happen to Professor Dressler in the coming days in the aftermath of this incident but it will it is likely that Dressler will be watching what comes out of his mouth from now on now that he knows that “Captain Arizona” sits among the young minds he is trying to mold.
Having just completed my degree, I can tell you that Dressler’s comments in NAU classrooms. Certain professors I knew would have us “friend” them on Facebook and actively start sharing gun control stories and talk about the issues to forward their ideology. As far as I can recall I never saw the NAU College Republicans’ group on campus, but the school did allow for the Young Democrats group to send out mass emails to every student on campus. I eventually marked them as spam.
So yeah, that Kwasman stuff is the tip of the iceberg. Sit in a class in Flagstaff and I’m sure you’ll get one professor spouting off political views and insulting those who disagree.