Excuse Me, Professor: Challenging the Myths of Progressivism

I am relishing Excuse Me, Professor, for its message, purpose, and content. Every prospective college student needs this book, to prepare him or her for campus encounters ahead.The book's message acknowledges and challenges the student-professor relationship, as well as the ivory tower infallibility of professors. The message students receive from many professors and the structure of class is clear: I know, you don't. I lecture, you listen. I teach, you learn. I facilitate the dialog and direct all discussion to my agenda and syllabus. It's predominately one way, and one set of ideas, to one inculcating goal: the professor's mindset and sensibilities. Occasionally the students raise points, and that happens more often among high quality professors. The book's message is clear: students, speak up! Just because your beloved professor is a misguided progressive purveying myths, that doesn't mean you have to silently listen and accept the myths they maintain.The purpose is to equip students with the facts, evidence, and well researched arguments they can eloquently make in defense of cores ideas critical to America's founding principles: limited and small government, individual liberty and choice, the sanctity of private property and contract, and a robust free market economy. Over a span of fourteen years I have spent seven years as a student on three college campuses, having earned three degrees. Also in private industry, I have the opportunity to interact with professors from research universities. Encounters on campus or through industry are at times bewildering and disorienting, as the mythical world of progressivism in academia often differs widely from the commercial world of customer value and satisfaction, product or service innovation at speed in competitive markets, and results orientation. Reading the essays in this book have helped me understand my bewilderment, and will equip students with tools and information they need to prepare themselves for the real world, not the mythical one often envisioned and opined on campus.Fifty-two essays make up the content, each well written, argued, and researched with notes, citations, and additional recommended readings. The essays are oriented to the many myths maintained, such as "Big Government is a Check on Big Business (#19)", "Profit is Evidence of Suspicious Behavior (#45)", "The Great Depression Was a Calamity of Unfettered Capitalism, and FDR Was Elected in 1932 on a Progressive Platform to Plan the Economy (#33 to #32)", "All We Need is the Right People to Run the Government (#17)", and the icing on the cake and my personal favorite, "Progressives Have Good Intentions, So What Else Matters?" (#52). Each essay is three to five pages long, and ends with a quick, hard-hitting summary in a bulleted list. As a convenient trade paperback with a great table of contents and index, it can easily be carried in a student's backpack. Then, an essay or two quickly consumed and argued before the next class with an honorable yet misguided progressive professor who is purveying a myth. For social media savvy readers, posters and tweeters looking for online resources for online discussion, you won't be disappointed. Many of the essays have been published, vetted and improved from an online article series called "Cliches of Progressivism", published by the Foundation for Economic Education in collaboration with the Young America's Foundation (see http://www.yaf.org/IntroductionToClichesOfProgressivismSeries.aspx ).Enjoy and devour this wonderful read, gift it as a gift often to rising college freshmen, and save it as an invaluable resource for your own myth busting whenever you find progressives perpetuating these myths on the public square, whether it be real or cyber.

It seems like just yesterday (although it's been over 20 years) when I was verbally battling with my liberal college professors. By the end of my first semester of college, I realized that many of my profs had political agendas that influenced what they were teaching the students. The economics professors were, by and large, teaching Keynesian economics. As someone who had started his own business at the age of eleven, I knew that much of what they were preaching as gospel didn't really correspond to reality.By my senior year, I had had enough. On my own, I had discovered the writings of Milton Friedman and his best-selling book Free To Choose. I made a point of bringing it to class with me and reading passages from the book to refute the stupid things my professors were stating. At first, they tried to laugh it off, as though Friedman (who had won the Nobel Prize in economics) wasn't to be taken seriously. But I noticed something very interesting: when I would read the passages, many of my fellow students (who had kept silent) started to nod their heads in agreement. It wasn't long before the professors began to tone down the rhetoric.Lawrence Reed has given a new generation of frustrated college students the same type of intellectual ammunition with Excuse Me, Professor. As the title suggests, the book is intended to provide college students with thoughtful answers to the biased opinions of their profs. It isn't hard to imagine hundreds of these books on every college campus in America as groups like Students for Liberty and Young Americans for Liberty continue to grow exponentially.The lesson I learned over twenty years ago is that the progressive myths that many college professors espouse can be easily refuted with the right ideas. Excuse Me, Professor is a book every thinking college student should read -- and have setting atop their desks to reference whenever their liberal professors go off the deep end.I highly recommend this book.

Small bite size essays, useful for orientating yourself with the merits of capitalism. I have never regarded myself as a capitalist, I've just grown weary of hearing vague and reconstituted Guardian reader style polemic. When I finally got round to reading Marx and Engels Communist Manifesto, it was surprising to find that they themselves extolled the virtues and success's of Capitalism. Essentially they thought their way of operating capitalism would be much better.Excuse Me Professor is an easy to digest primer which presents interesting and well constructed arguments for you to muse upon, or perhaps drop in the pub when having a pint with weekend Marxists, whether or not, they have read Marx or the Guardian.

Wanted a broader critique of progressivism but this is just a bunch of repetitive (and old) essays on laissez faire capitalism. I’m sympathetic to the general idea but there are some really callous writers here.

Dozens of short chapters make this book easy to pick up when you only have time for a few pages. Many of the essays were written in the late 1960s and updated. The editor, LW Reed, wrote a big chunk/most of the essays. He writes well.The book could have been subtitled: "Challenging the Economic Myths of Progressivism". Don't buy this book looking for an in-depth look at political philosophy. It's meant to be light, quick and entertaining. Having said that, it's worth reading, even if you happen to be well read in Burke, Babbitt, Kirk, Sowell and Hayek (etc.). Just don't expect this book to read like Kirk or Hayek.

I'm an old student.This book, from the Foundation for Economic Education is aimed at a much younger audience, but my goodness me, echoed all through many thoughts and conclusions I've come to after decades of life.It put into words a lot of things I've observed.Progressive culture harming rather than helping an individual.And for those of us I'm little ole England, a stand-back point of view on some the entrenched ideas about business practices in the US, that explains lack of encouragement to UK business and entrepreneurship through too much control by central and local government.However old you are, give this book a read. Agree or disagree.Give it a go.

Excellent essays that touch on various topics. Larry Reed is a great writer and speaker, one of the most persuasive of the Austrian school adherents in my opinion. There are many others who have contributed to this anthology, they all help clarify the sophism that shrouds many of these progressive cliches.