The Right Wing Onslaught on the University?

By Peter Wilson

An email from Amazon arrived this morning:

As someone who has purchased or rated Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky, you might like to know that Counter-Narrative: How Progressive Academics Can Challenge Extremists and Promote Social Justice is now available.

Amazon describes the book:

Goodall portrays a world caught up in the middle of a narrative arms race, where the message of the political right has outflanked the message of the political left. It is a world where narratives used by the far right inch ever closer to those employed by right-wing extremists in the Muslim world. Rather than dismiss the use of political narratives as a shallow tactic of the opposition, Goodall promotes their usefulness and outlines a number of ways that liberal academics can retake the public discourse from the extremist opposition. This is an essential text for the aspiring public intellectual and will appeal to students and scholars of qualitative methods, communications and media, and political science alike.

At first I was confused by the juxtaposition of "academic" and "extremist" - thinking he must be talking about leftists like Ward Churchill or Noam Chomsky. I then realized that Goodall thinks that the university is under siege by the "far right." Even more amusing is the phrase "right-wing extremists in the Muslim world." Is there a Muslim Tea Party movement I'm unaware of, or does he think al Qaeda is a libertarian organization?

Sadly Professor Goodall is on the public payroll, in the Communication department at Arizona State University, where he disseminates this mush to uninformed young minds.