Dr. David A. Noebel, president of Summit Ministries in Manitou Springs, Colorado, has been involved in training students in Christian apologetics for more than 30 years. This article is taken from his book Understanding the Times.

Today, Marxism is the dominant view in some African and Latin American countries (under the guise of Liberation Theology) and, incredibly, on many American university campuses. U.S. News and World Report reported that there are ten thousand Marxist professors on America’s campuses. Georgie Anne Geyer says that “the percentage of Marxist faculty numbers can range up to an estimated 90 percent in some Midwestern universities.” Arnold Beichman says that “Marxist academics are today’s power elite in the universities.”

“The strides made by Marxism at American universities in the last two decades are breathtaking,” says New York University’s Herbert London. “Every discipline has been affected by its preachment, and almost every faculty now counts among its members a resident Marxist scholar.”(1) Duke University Slavic Languages professor Magnus Krynski described increasing Marxist presence on his campus—a presence actively encouraged by the university administration, which, he says, is “faddishly” luring Marxist literary critics to Duke with large salaries.

In March 1987 Duke University hosted the Southeast Marxist Scholars Conference. Dr. Malcolm Gillis, former vice provost of Duke University, thanked some one hundred Marxist professors, graduate students, and activists for gathering at Duke and said, “When I left this campus twenty years ago, there were very few Marxists here. When I returned in 1984, I saw Marxists in many parts of the social science faculty.”(2) The conference was sponsored by the Marxist Educational Press (based at the University of Minnesota) and Duke’s own Program on Perspectives in Marxism and Society.

The Marxist influence (or, as it is now preferred: the “Politically Correct”) has reached its most alarming heights in American universities’ humanities departments. “With a few notable exceptions,” says former Yale professor Roger Kimball, “our most prestigious liberal arts colleges and universities have installed the entire radical menu at the center of their humanities curriculum at both the undergraduate and the graduate level.”(3) Kimball provides more evidence that Duke University is in the forefront of academia’s move toward Marxism, noting that it has “recently conducted a tireless—and successful—campaign to arm its humanities department with the likes of the Marxist literary critic Frederic Jameson, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Frank Lentricchia, Stanley Fish (and his pedagogically like-minded wife, Jane Tompkins), and other less well known souls of kindred intellectual orientation.”(4)

The Marxist worldview is alive and well in the American classroom. As Dr. Fred Schwarz says, “The colleges and universities are the nurseries of communism.”(5) Christian students must not get caught up in these nurseries.