From Ballotpedia:
Who are you? Tell us about yourself.
Dr. DeNardis spent her career in higher education. Before embarking on her run for Congress, she taught Political Science at Sacred Heart University where she also directed the Institute for Public Policy and the Sacred Heart University Poll. As a professor, she instilled tried to indoctrinate in her students an appreciation for the constitutional principles upon which our great country was founded: limited government, freedom, individual responsibility, and opportunity.
https://ballotpedia.org/Lesley_DeNardis
Republicans claimed to be against indoctrinating students before being for it.
I teach social sciences at a university, and it is literally an impossible subject to teach without passing on your political biases. For instance, Marxism is highly politicized in the US, meaning if you teach Marx you will be perceived as a leftist ideologue no matter what you do. However, his ideas are commonplace and even canonical in sociology and increasingly even economics, so within most top departments not teaching Marx would be perceived as weird and ideological. But ultimately, teaching is an act of curation and your choices will have ideological effects. Ime the solution therefore is to stop accusing others or “the other side” of bias and focus on foregrounding yours with students and keeping an open dialogue with them about them
I teach history and economics at the high school level.
On Marx (or more accurately Marx/Engels since most of Kapital was based on Engels' notes, in contrast to the later volumes of Kapital that were written by Engels based on Marx' notes), there were criticisms of free enterprise and private corporations before Marx/Engels and, while ideas in Kapital form the structure of criticism of capitalist economics, modern economics focuses more on the market failures caused by negative externalities.
It's also interesting that since Marx/Engels were European, that their criticism of the tendency of capitalists to exploit labor is mostly an American thing in advanced western economies, allowed in the U.S due to 'capitalists' capturing the government (and the media) to engage in this rent seeking. Even in the U.S, prior to the passge of Taft/Hartley, private sector unions held corporate rent seeking in check. So, the ideas in Kapital aren't necessary inherent in a free market system.
Marx/Engels theory that market sectors tend towards oligopoly over time was a brilliant insight that does seem more and more accurate as the countervailing theory of 'creative destruction' doesn't seem to be showing up as much except when forced by governments (developing alternatives to fossil fuels for instance.)
These ideas expressed by Marx/Engels of rent seeking are much more precise and fact/evidence based, than these vague concepts of 'limited government, freedom, individual responsibility and opportunity' as indoctrinated by DeNardis.
Her views come right out of the Republican Freedumb caucus.
From her website:
Individual Liberty
From the mandating of masks and vaccines to media censorship, Americans are feeling a sense of coercion whether from government mandates, big tech or media dictating choices that are best left to individuals. We need to restore trust in people’s ability to make the best decisions for themselves, their children, and their communities.'
Leaves out, for instance, that under the U.S constitution, 'big tech and media' also have their freedom of expression rights to not promote ideas they don't agree with.
An intellectually honest professor would discuss in her class the inherent tension between individual rights and collective responsibility and not seek to indoctrinate in her students simplistic notions of absolutist 'freedumb.'
