Regarding Breitbart's experience at Tulane:
"After high school, Breitbart attended Tulane, where he joined the Delta Tau Delta fraternity and drank and gambled away his parents’ money. In the Big Easy, Breitbart concentrated on partying and avoided what he now disparages as Marxist academia. He now believes that his boorish immaturity was a blessing in that it prevented him from being co-opted by what he calls the “cultural fascisti.”
Breitbart complains that he was exposed to a raft of deeply anti-American ideas. As an American Studies major, he writes, he was subjected to the evil thoughts of émigré Critical Theorists like Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse, who he blames for destroying everything good in postwar America. It is impossible to overstate Breitbart’s hatred for these “boring and bleating philosophers” who escaped the Nazis and “exploit[ed]” America’s openness and liberty by deploying “ideological Anthrax.”
At one point, Breitbart fantasizes about choking the life out of these mid-century refugee philosophers. “If I could go back in a time machine, I would go back to strangle these malcontents,” he writes.
Not read them. Strangle them.
Or at least that’s what it says in a review copy of Breitbart's book provided to Media Matters. Someone apparently sanitized this line at the last moment, because in the final, published version, it now reads, “If I could go back in a time machine, I would go back to kick these malcontents in their shins.”
Strangulation aside, not everyone remembers Tulane as the Marxist nightmare that Breitbart describes. “The required courses in American Studies included two semesters each of American Literature and History,” says a former director of Tulane’s American Studies Department who taught and remembers Breitbart. “We used the Norton Anthology—very middle-of-the-road, canonical stuff.” Among the “cultural Marxists” the young Breitbart was supposed to study but didn’t were the Puritans, Franklin, Edwards, Emerson, Thoreau, Twain, Hawthorne, Melville, and Stowe. According to this professor, not even the more advanced interdisciplinary seminars at Tulane offered much critical theory.
So perhaps it isn’t surprising that Breitbart would not have graduated at all but for his pleading with a professor for mercy. “I need to graduate,” he remembers begging. “I have family and friends coming in from out of town tomorrow. We have reservations at Commander's Palace.”
http://www.alternet.org/story/150901...t_in_hollywood