By: Jessica Warner
Meet Dr. Philipp Roser–a professor at Western Washington University who teaches introductory physics. His style of influence is quite common; however, due to the nature of our online courses, we can see just how biased professors like him genuinely are in the comfort of our homes.
One day, for smirks, I mentioned to him that I liked his “Revolution!” flag. He responded, “Oh yeah, thanks. I feel like I needed to make a statement somehow.”
Last week I took a midterm for Roser’s class—question 10, in particular, was extra spicy:
“The year is 1850. It’s the gold rush! Having left your family behind in the east, you have made your way west and have finally arrived in the frontier land of California. And you got lucky and found heaps of gold (unlike almost everyone else who ended up in debt or working for a daily wage digging gold for exploitative capitalist overlords).
To get your heaps of gold downriver, you want to put it on a raft, but you’re worried that the raft might sink. What equation correctly gives the maximum amount of gold that you can put on top of your raft?”
Yes, you read that correctly. All students need to know is that we have gold in our raft and want to make sure we don’t sink. Yet our professor decided it was necessary to take a swipe at those darn “exploitative capitalistic overlords.”
Am I salty because I probably got the question wrong? Maybe. But this was too weird of a question to let slide. Leftist bias like this is rampant in higher education, and it’s time professors realize they can’t get away with it.
Dr. Rosser is only one of the many socialist professors at WWU. Last quarter, leftist students removed my YAF chapter’s free speech chalking display. A professor rolled up on his bike to read the chalk. I was in the middle of taking a picture of the Young Democratic Socialists of America members trying, without water, to scrub off and vandalize our free speech demonstration.
“Silly. People are afraid of things they don’t understand,” the professor said as he biked around me, stopping to look at the words, “Socialism sucks” on the fountain in the quad. My ears perked! Finally, a person who agrees with us! Or so I thought.
To make sure, I was going to ask him what he meant, naively thinking he was referring to how students senselessly support this murderous ideology. But before I could, he said, “Actually, I was just listening to the Communist Manifesto.”
I couldn’t help but laugh. Of course he was. “Don’t you know? Socialism has killed millions of innocent people,” I told him. He smugly replied, “Capitalism has killed millions of people.”
How is it that conservative professors are almost non-existent on college campuses? How did so many extreme leftist professors get their foot in the door? I couldn’t help but ask what this unknown professor taught. He had no straightforward answer for me. Dodging the question, he responded, “Well, I teach a lot of things.” To this day, I am still confused and wonder what the heck that dude teaches. I wish I knew, so I could warn people to avoid him and his class at all costs.
Even the TAs at my school push leftist lunacy. One such TA, Jess, lists they/she pronouns on zoom calls. I’m still wondering how I use the pronouns (She/They)? Is it 50% of the time she and 50% of the time they?
Jess never got back to me on that, although she did teach me how to update my pronouns on Zoom, where I promptly added my @yafwwu handle. Thanks, Jess! Got a couple more followers!
Jessica Warner is the founding chairman of Young Americans for Freedom at Western Washington University.