Students who believe they’ve had some radical professors at NIU or other universities might want to ask themselves if they were “brainwashed” through education.

Alan Gribben taught at the University of Texas for 17 years until he was suddenly ostracized from his department for expressing a different view than other professors.

Gribben, a tenured English professor, will be speaking in the Holmes Student Center’s Sandburg Auditorium tonight at 7:30 p.m.

The speaker will tell the tale of an English professor who tried to resist the tide of compulsory political correctness in public university.

“It’s important to draw the line between education and indoctrination,” Mike Roberts, coordinator of the speakers’ committee. “We have so many courses that exist just to primarily change people’s impressions.

“At what point do you cross the line into out-and-out brainwashing?” he asked. “It’s a question that a lot of students and faculty have to ask themselves.”

Gribben voted against a proposal at UT that would have made black and Third World literature a focus of study at the master’s level, Roberts said.

Gribben said he supported the proposed focus at the Ph.D. level but believed graduate students should study a tighter curriculum.

“A third of the faculty in liberal arts at UT are more radical than the students,” Gribben said. “They feel it is their task to radicalize the students using required courses if necessary.”

Gribben said he was a part of this left-wing movement during his career. He received his doctorate at University of California at Berkeley and was a strong supporter of mass-minority hiring.

Gribben said PC activists want students to become critics of America. They want them to know America has failed its mission for women and minorities, he said.

“I believe these things are exaggerated for political reasons,” Gribben said. “It fixates on the present moment, and it refuses to look at any issue historically or with a world-view.”

The American society has gotten more open, whereas campuses are going just the opposite way, Roberts said.

“My experiences at the University of Texas opened my mind to this political movement,” Gribben said. “I taught from 1974-91 at UT but knew I had to leave this summer.

“My case shows how far an English department can go. Speech and first amendment rights are rather intertwined,” Gribben said. “A faculty that can entertain obliterating certain words or phrases from a language could find itself expecting complete intellectual conformity from its students and faculty.”

Gribben’s department began making a number of curriculum changes in 1987 that he said he felt were hasty.

The political correctness movement became much more “doctrinaire” between 1984-86, Gribben said.

“PC seemed to be a number of sub-movements, such as adherence of marxist-feminism, deconstructionism, extreme emphasis on Third World studies,” he said.

“But in 1985, these groups bonded into a single lethal movement … They saw traditionalism as their opponents,” he said.

These things had been there before, but they were distant, Gribben said. More people began to call themselves marxist-feminists and opposed people who maintained bonds with traditionalism.

UT was planning to add core-curriculum rhetoric and composition courses with the textbook “Racism and Sexism.”

“In English, you can just make an assertion,” Gribben said. “Here’s a book that goes on to imply that unless you adopt a marxist methodology, you’re in the wrong.”

“It was assumed everyone should go along with this structure, and I did,” he said.

However, Gribben felt some curriculum changes were being made too hastily. He was the soul vote against the Ph.D. proposal. Gribben was refuted 41 to 1 to implement a Third World concentration in “Ethnics and Third World Literatures.”

“I voted for it at the Ph.D. level but not at the master’s,” Gribben said. “Friends told me I was probably finished here from talk in the hallways.

“They painted me with features I had never entertained,” he said. “I’ve always found any signs of real racism to be abhorrent.

“I thought I was a liberal, but when I called on my liberal friends, they all shrank back into the shadows,” he said. “If it involved race, class or gender, they did not want to get involved.”

Gribben said he feels he was the example of PC activists that UT was looking for.

“They made me out to be a racist for trying to slow things down,” Gribben said.

“The ostracism was so severe I realized I had to leave after voting that way,” he said.

Gribben said he went to his department a year later and appealed on the basis of his life-time commitment on civil rights.

“In December of 1988, I realized I had to leave,” he said. “I had tenure teaching awards, but I couldn’t get anywhere at UT.”

Gribben sent twelve communications to various members of his department and college asking that the ostracism be stopped. All were ignored, except two, which came back as refusals.

Gribben said a typical student evaluation of his class would read “Gee, you’re a good teacher … You’re not at all like I heard.”

Gribben recalled an instance of a Texas flag burning as it was paraded up and down the street by PC activists. This kind of hostile attitude toward the values of a people finally led him to speak to the press, he said.

The rhetoric course was finally thrown out by the college after relentless media attention.

“What I’m bringing to NIU is a story of political correctness run amok,” Gribben said.

Faculty members go along with these programs because they mistakenly interpret them as “liberal policies.” Others become intimidated in following this party line, he said.

“You don’t leave a university lightly,” Gribben said. “It was a nightmare to me, my family and friends.”

There is an atmosphere of intimidation on campuses, Roberts said. Professors will talk to you off the record but will back off if you ask to quote them, he said.