In case you were wondering what you’re paying for when your kids go to Harvard Law
The headline was that Obama’s former law school professor has issued a video urging people not to vote for Obama:
Obama’s Harvard law professor says ‘President MUST be defeated in 2012’ (even though he’s the man Barack used to have on speed dial)
That’s a pretty darn good headline. To me, though, what’s fascinating is the reason the professor gave for turning on Obama. It seems that Obama is insufficiently leftist:
Mr [Roberto] Unger, a prominent Brazilian politician and an adviser to Obama in 2008, said: ‘President Obama must be defeated in the coming election. He has failed to advance the progressive cause in the United States.’
[snip]
He adds: ‘He has spent trillions of dollars to rescue the moneyed interests and left workers and homeowners to their own devices.’
The politician admits that if Republican candidate Mitt Romney wins the election ‘there will be a cost… in judicial and administrative appointments’.
However his most barbed remarks he reserves for the Democrat leader saying that Mr Obama has ‘evoked a politics of handholding, but no one changes the world without a struggle’.
And more of that blah, blah, blah.
Frankly, it’s yesterday’s news that Obama was the Great Hope for Leftists, just as it’s old news that Leftists are tremendously disappointed that, while he never actually reached the political center, he did move in that direction.
What really took me aback about the story is the fact that a hard Leftist is a revered Harvard Law Professor:
Mr Unger is a renowned politician in his native Brazil. He has twice has run for president of Brazil and has served as Minister of Strategic Affairs.
Unger was one of the founding members of the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party and drafted its founding manifesto.
He has also advised on politics throughout Latin America.
The professor is a respected author having published dozens of books on economics, philosophy and politics.
In philosophy, his arguments are said to focus on some the greatest problems of the human existence.
The video, which was posted three weeks ago, has been viewed 22,000 times.
Mr Unger has taught at Harvard Law since 1976.
Obama studied jurisprudence and reinventing democracy with the professor.
Mr. Unger isn’t liberal leaning, which is what most people vaguely assume is going on at America’s educational institutions, he is hard left.
I err when I speak of “most people” in connection with the teachers at America’s Ivy League institutions. The students know better. I was speaking the other day with a man who graduated from Yale in the early 1990s with a degree in History. With a hang-dog, “aw shucks” smile, he explained to me that all of his professors were Communists. He professed to see through the bias, but every one of his political views was filtered through Howard Zinn’s history. He loved Yale, he loved his professors, and he willingly drank the Kool-Aid. I guess I was lucky that I loathed Berkeley as much as I did. Because the teaching was poor quality and the teachers were mindless ideologues, and become an autodidact. It took me too long, but I was eventually able to shake off their shibboleths, because I never really trusted them in the first place.
