The Communist Infiltration of American Universities

An Exposé

Introduction

Discussions over critical race theory, BLM, and increasing government control and censorship have become commonplace in America. It’s obvious to many that America’s institutions have been overrun by neo-Marxist ideology. Take my experience, for example. As an English major at a public college in the US in the late 2010’s, I was required to study almost exclusively Marxist and neo-Marxist literary theorists. I was horrified by the experience of reading critic after critic who, vampire-like, sucked the life out of the enjoyment of literature in order to feed the monstrosity of their political program.

This experience led me to research what brough our country to a state where public colleges and universities teach, for the most part, pure neo-Marxism—which represents a serious danger to our civilization. The results were illuminating. And I believe that in this critical moment for our nation, it is helpful to trace out and identify at least one cog in the machine that brought us to where we are today.

The goal of communism has always been a World Communist Revolution, which will place the whole earth under the yoke of communism. Proof that the communists have always desired and worked toward a “liberated” world is so readily available that it hardly requires evidence, but I would direct the reader to the words of communists and ex-communists, such as one of the most famous of all, Vladimir Lenin himself, who spoke often of the “world proletarian revolution.” “I don't care what becomes of Russia,” he wrote. “To hell with it. All this is only the road to a World Revolution.”[1] And again, “As an ultimate objective, ‘peace’ simply means communist world control.”[2]

Douglas Hyde, a former Communist, wrote in his 1966 book Dedication and Leadership, “[The Communists’] aim is quite clear. They have never concealed it and it is something that is immensely meaningful to every Communist. It is a Communist world.”[3]

These words from the Communists themselves demonstrate that they have always sought to increase their influence throughout the world, until one day the entire globe will succumb to communism.

The Communists sought to achieve their prized goal of communist world control through the infiltration of forces and entities opposed to communism, including the Catholic Church[4] and the United States of America, with the aim of turning these enemies into allies from the inside out.

In their plan of attack, the Communists were very organized, disciplined, and patient. They knew that in order to change the thinking and policies of a whole nation, the United States, from an enemy of communism to a promoter of it, they would need to influence the intellectual formation of its citizens. They would, therefore, need to target the young, from toddlers to young adults, and form their minds in a manner favorable to socialism, communism, and Marxism. Lenin has been quoted as saying, “Give me four years to teach the children, and the seed I have sown shall never be uprooted.” To that end, they planned and implemented an infiltration of American education, including American universities.

The Plan

Evidence exists that the infiltration of American education was an explicit goal of the communists. “In undermining a nation such as the United States, the infiltration of the educational process is of prime importance. The Communists have accordingly made the invasion of schools and colleges one of the major considerations in their psychological warfare designed to control the American mind.”[6] These words, penned in 1954, come not from some uninformed conspiracy theorist but from Louis Francis Budenz, a former Soviet espionage agent and member of the Communist Party, USA, who later renounced communism and became an adamant opponent of it.

According to Budenz, as early as 1924, Stalin had identified educational organizations as powerful allies in the promoting of world communism.[7]

Budenz wasn’t the only one who said that the Communists were targeting education. Former FBI agent W. Cleon Skousen was an expert on communist strategy, and his work was deemed reliable enough that Congressman Albert S. Herlong Jr. read Skousen’s list of 45 communist goals into the Congressional Record on Jan. 10, 1963. Skousen reported that one of the communists’ goals for conquering America was to “[g]et control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for Socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers associations. Put the party line in textbooks” and “Gain control of all student newspapers.”[8]

Skousen claims, “If the student [of communist strategy] will read the reports of Congressional hearings together with available books by ex-communists, he will find all of these Communist objectives described in detail.”[9]

The communist plan of educational infiltration was put into action at least as far back as the 1930’s. Budenz places it precisely in 1933, saying that the invasion was encouraged by the American recognition of Soviet Russia and the Open Letter to the Party. In 1935, the notorious Marxist Frankfurt School, progenitor of Critical Theory, came to the shores of the US and joined Columbia University. In May 1937, an article appearing in The Communist titled “The School’s and the People’s Front” ordered that “Marxist-Leninist analysis must be injected into every class,” and “the Party must take careful steps to see that all teacher comrades are given thorough education in the teachings of Marxism-Leninism.” They must influence their students “without exposing themselves.”[10]

J.B. Matthews, a former “fellow-traveler” of the Communist Party, USA, testified before the House Special Committee on Un-American Activities regarding communist activities in the U.S. and became a foremost anti-communist expert. He later became a staff director for a Senate investigations subcommittee. In 1953, he wrote an article called “Communism and the Colleges,” appearing in The American Mercury, that details how American higher education had already in his time become laced with communist agents and collaborators. Matthews wrote, “For more than seventeen years, the Communist Party of the United States has put forth every effort to infiltrate the teaching profession of this country…In these few years, the Communist Party has enlisted the support of at least thirty-five hundred professors.”[11]

At first blush, this number may seem insignificant, but we have to remember that the communists strategically placed these individuals into position of power and influence. Another high-ranking communist defector, Bella Dodd, put the number of dyed-in-the-wool Communists even lower, at 1,500, but she explained in her testimony before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee in 1952 how powerful those 1,500 could be:

As a matter of fact, you have over a million teachers in America, and, by and large, your schools are not manned by Communists. The Communist influence is important only where it is strategically placed, and no Communist is ever satisfied with remaining in a position of inferiority. He seeks a strategic position. If you had Communists in these schools of education, that is a very strategic position because not only are they affecting the philosophy of education but they are also teaching other teachers, who, in turn, are teaching the pupils. If you have one Communist teacher in the school of education, and he teaches, let's say, 300 teachers, who then go out all over the United States, that is a strategic position.[12]

Bella Dodd said this in 1952, and the numbers have been growing ever since then. It doesn’t require any great knowledge of mathematics to realize how quickly the number of communists, or at least communist-sympathizers, must have multiplied in the American education system if the original infiltrators did their job correctly. 1,500 influential professors may easily have trained one hundred times that number of new professors by the end of their career, who in turn trained yet another generation. And perhaps more infiltrators were placed after Dodd’s testimony. It also worth noting that many professors working on behalf of communism were directed not to become party members or to associate directly with the party, in order to avoid detection and incrimination.[13]

These agents did not work alone, as Budenz describes: “Two or three Communists on any faculty are normally enough to dominate the school or campus. They do not act alone, but have aid from the outside…It is not unusual that certain men of wealth on the board of trustees give protection to the subversives on the faculty, to the detriment of those who are genuinely patriotic.” They also may have received support from local community organizations previously infiltrated.[14]

We know who at least some of the communist members and allies were during the latter half of the twentieth century. Budenz and Matthews provide many names (Mathews compiles a list of the top 100 educators associated with Communist front organizations), but here we will include only a few by way of demonstration. Budenz writes,

Robert Morss Lovett, long with the University of Chicago and former American Governor of the Virgin Islands, is there cited as being a member of at least eighty-five Communist fronts. Dr. Harry F. Ward, Professor Emeritus of Christian Ethics at Union Theological Seminary, is reported to be a member of sixty Communist fronts. The late Dr. Walter Rautenstrauch, well-known professor of engineering at Columbia University, is reported to be affiliated with fifty Communist fronts. Dr. Henry Pratt Fairchild of New York University has been associated with forty of such organizations; Colston E. Warne of Amherst and Frederick L. Schuman of Williams College, with thirty, and that is the record also of Dr. Robert S. Lynd of Columbia.[15] 

In part because of the influence of these men, Marxist indoctrination was already a powerful force in American education by the 1980s. In a 1984 interview, Yuri Bezmenov, a KGB defector and son of a high-ranking Soviet officer, described the process of ideological subversion, indicating that it was already in full swing in America.

It takes from fifteen to twenty years to demoralize a nation. Why that many years? Because this is the minimum number of years which requires to educate one generation of students in the country of your enemy exposed to the ideology of the enemy. In other words, Marxism-Leninism ideology is being pumped into the soft heads of at least three generations of American students without being challenged or counter-balanced by the basic values of Americanism, American patriotism. The result? The result you can see. Most of the people who graduated in sixties…are now occupying the positions of power in the Government, civil service, business, mass media, educational system. You are stuck with them.[16]

The brilliance of the communist plan begins to reveal itself. By targeting the young, the communists ensured a generation of future allies, already deeply enmeshed in American society.

So if there were 1,500-3,500 communist professors in the 50’s and 60’s, how many institutions did they operate at? Back in her 1952 testimony, Dodd stated that many prominent American universities had active communist cells operating in them: Columbia University, Long Island University, New York University, Vassar College, Wellesley, Smith, Harvard, MIT, University of Michigan, Chicago, Northwestern University, University of California, University of Minnesota, and Howard University.[17]

J.B. Matthews compiled an even larger list of universities whose faculty associated with or supported communist front organizations,[18] including Chicago, University of Miami, California, Pennsylvania, Morehouse, Lincoln (Missouri), Illinois, Colorado, Temple, Yale, Columbia, Howard, Western Reserve, Pacific School of Religion, Harvard, Oberlin, Smith, New York, Roosevelt, Princeton Theological, Hunter, Institute for Advanced Study, Wellesley, Mt. Holyoke, Michigan, and Houston.[19] By Bezmenov’s 1984 interview, we can be sure that these lists were even more extensive.

According to Matthews, it wasn’t only faculty at these universities who were involved in communist activities in his day. Staff played a role too. In fact, Matthews identifies seven presidents of universities among the sponsors for the 1949 Waldorf-Astoria conference. The Waldorf-Astoria conference, officially labelled The Scientific and Cultural Conference for World Peace, was a blatantly communist meeting organized by a communist front organization called the National Council of the Arts, Sciences and Professions. The American Committee on Un-American Activities called the conference “[a] supermobilization of the inveterate wheelhorses and supporters of the Communist Party and its auxiliary organizations.”[20] The seven presidents who were among the sponsors for this conference were Rufus Clement of Atlanta University, Abraham Cronbach of Hebrew Union College, Herbert John Davis of Smith College, Cecil Hinshaw of William Penn College, Charles Johnson of Fisk University, David D. Jones of Bennet College, and Arthur Upham Pope of the Asia Institute.[21]

Many other educators were involved with this conference as well.

The Fruits of their Labor: By the Numbers

We still see the effects of the Communist infiltration of higher education today. The universities are full of socialists, Marxists, neo-Marxists, and far-left-leaning professors. In a 2007 study conducted by Neil Gross of Harvard and Solon Simmons of George Mason University, fully 25.5% of sociology professors identified themselves as Marxist, while the social sciences in general contain 18%.[22]

Gross and Simmons conclude that self-identified Marxists are rare in higher education (and that was back in 2007), but we have to understand that for every professor who self-identifies as a Marxist, there are several more who are at least sympathetic to or influenced by Marxist or neo-Marxist ideas. Identity politics, the sacred cow of higher education, is a child of Marxism. It is simply the application of economic conflict and dialectical materialism to social groups rather than economic groups. Journalist Christopher Rufo has recently done excellent work on Critical Race Theory—a form of identity politics—and its connection to Marxism.

The overall leftward tendency of higher education—even if most professors don’t label themselves Marxist—is undeniable and pervasive. A recent study published in The American Sociologist surveyed 479 sociology professors and found that 21 percent consider themselves “radical” while a mere 2 percent consider themselves “conservative.”[23]

Being a Democrat is not, of course, the same as being a Communist, but as the Democratic party spirals further and further to the left (just look at the response to the recent Black Lives Matter protests), they align more and more with communist ideology. In 2018, Mitchell Langbert of Brooklyn College conducted a study in which he found that among top liberal arts colleges, 39 percent had zero registered Republican professors in the entire college.[24] At other universities, the ratio of Democrats to Republicans is extremely lopsided: engineering departments have 1.6 Democrats for every Republican. Chemistry and economics departments have about 5.5 Democrats for every Republican. Humanities see the most difference. Democrat-to-Republican faculty ratio is 133-to-1 in anthropology departments, and in communications departments the ratio is 108-to-zero. Langbert says, “I could not find a single Republican with an exclusive appointment to fields like gender studies, Africana studies, and peace studies.”[25]

Commenting on these findings, economics professor Walter E. Williams writes, “Many professors spend class time indoctrinating students with their views. For faculty members who are Democrats, those views can be described as leftist, socialist or communist.”[26]

The statistics back up Williams’ claim and show that the political positions of professors do influence students. A 2012 report from the journal Higher Education indicated that the percentage of liberal arts students identifying as liberal or far-left increased from 45 to 52.5% over their four years at school.[27]

Not only what we teach, but also how we teach, has been influenced by Communism. Contemporary teaching methods are derived in part from the Marxists. The popular educational theory of Reconstructionism, for example, is basically the pedagogical embodiment of Marx’s famous maxim, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.”[28] And group discussion—the most-utilized and most-cherished method of instruction in modern higher education—is a communist pedagogical technique.[29]

All of this squares with my personal experience in college and graduate school. It explains in part why, in 2016-2020, an English student in an American university studies almost exclusively Marxist, neo-Marxist, or Marxist-influenced thinkers in his literary theory courses (and other literature courses), such as Marx, Foucault, Derrida, Gramsci, Spivak, Althusser, Sartre, Lukacs, de Beauvoir, Lacan, and members of the Frankfurt School.

The entire discipline of literary criticism and cultural studies is dominated by atheistic, relativist, dialectical-materialist, egalitarian, Marxist, neo-Marxist, social justice, and identity politics philosophies. Proof of this can be attained by simply picking up any standard undergraduate textbook for literary criticism or theory, such as Robert Parker’s How To Interpret Literature: Critical Theory for Literary and Cultural Studies, and examining the table of contents (or attending a course in which it is taught, though this cannot be recommended).

As mortal beings, we live in one brief moment of time. The trouble with our limited perspective is that we are tempted to believe that what is has always been, and must be. Today, as a result of a coordinated takeover conducted in part by communist forces, our universities are atheist, neo-Marxist, secularist, radical, and very liberal. Let us remember: it was not always so.

Let’s work to free America from this plague.

Happy Independence Day.

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[1] “Communists: The Battle over the Tomb.” The Time, content.time.com. April 24, 1964.

[2] “Third All-Russia Congress Of Soviets Of Workers’, Soldiers’ And Peasants’ Deputies”. Pravda Nos. 9, 10 and 15, January 26-27 and February 02, 1918. Collected Works, Volume 26, pp. 459-461.

[3] Douglas Hyde, Dedication and Leadership, (University of Notre Dame Press: 1966), 11.

[4] See AA-1025: The Memoirs of a Communist's infiltration into the Church by Marie Carre (1972), Infiltration by Dr. Taylor Marshall (2019), and the testimony of Bella Dodd.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Louis Budenz, The Techniques of Communism, Chapter X, 1954, https://books.google.com/books?id=zImbDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=the+techniques+of+communism&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwip8uGLpvTjAhVWGs0KHVLaCtQQ6AEwAHoECAUQAg#v=onepage&q=in%20undermining&f=false.

[7] Ibid.

[8]  Skousen, W. Cleon. The Naked Communist, (The Ensign Publishing Company: 1958), 260.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Budenz, Techniques of Communism, Chapter X.

[11] Matthews, J.B. “Communism and the Colleges,” The American Mercury, May 1953, pg. 111.

[12] Bella Dodd. “Senate Internal Security Subcommittee: Monday, September 8, 1952 Testimony Of Bella V. Dodd, New York, N. Y., Accompanied By Her Attorney, Godfrey P. Schmidt.” Brooklyn College, http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/bc/senate_1952/dodd1.html, 17.

[13] Budenz, Techniques of Communism, Chapter X.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Budenz, Techniques of Communism, Chapter X.

[16] “Yuri Bezmenov: Deception Was My Job,“ GBPPR2, YouTube,

[17] Dodd, pg. 16.

[18] Such as the American Committee for Protection of Foreign Born, American Peace Crusade, China Welfare Appeal, Civil Rights Congress, Committee for a Democratic Far Eastern Policy, Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, National Committee to Repeal the McCarran Act, National Council of American-Soviet Friendship, and National Council of the Arts, Sciences and Professions (Matthews pg. 118).

[19] Matthews, pg. 124.

[20] “Review of the Scientific and Cultural Conference for World Peace,” the Committee on Un-American Activities, U.S. House of Representatives, Washington, D.C., April 19, 1949, https://keywiki.org/files/sccwp-cuaa-1949.pdf.

[21] Matthews,119.

[22] “The Social and Political Views of American Professors,” Neil Gross and Solon Simmons, https://studylib.net/doc/8718840/the-social-and-political-views-of-american-professors.

[23] Horowitz, M., Haynor, A. & Kickham, K. “Sociology’s Sacred Victims and the Politics of Knowledge: Moral Foundations Theory and Disciplinary Controversies,” The American Sociologist, December 2018, Volume 49, Issue 4, pp. 459–495, https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-018-9381-5.

[24]Mitchell Langbert, “Homogenous: The Political Affiliations of Elite Liberal Arts College Faculty,” Academic Questions, 31(2):1-12 · April 2018, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/324606873_Homogenous_The_Political_Affiliations_of_Elite_Liberal_Arts_College_Faculty.

[25] Ibid.

[26] Walter Williams, “Colleges: Anti-Diversity and Pro-Exclusion,” May 2, 2018, https://www.creators.com/read/walter-williams/05/18/colleges-anti-diversity-and-pro-exclusion.

[27] Higher Education, Vol. 64, No. 3 (September 2012), pp. 355-369.

[28] Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, Foreign Languages Press, Peking, 1976 First Edition, pp. 61-65.

[29] Hyde, Dedication and Leadership, 73-86.