Here’s the latest outbreak of academic insanity, at Manhattan Community College: Protest Over ‘Homeland Security U’. (Hat tip: struan al kufr.)

Furious students and faculty members at the Borough of Manhattan Community College are demanding that the school abandon plans for a certificate program on security management. They view it as an endorsement of the Bush administration’s Department of Homeland Security.

Like hundreds of other community colleges across the nation since the September 11 attacks, the two-year CUNY school in Lower Manhattan is hoping to take advantage of the surging demand for security training. The school’s faculty proposed a program in May that would teach students about threats to homeland security and how to counter them.

At a school where the student government headquarters is decorated with a poster of a tortured Abu Ghraib prisoner and another that calls President Bush a “madman,” some students and faculty members have reacted to the proposed program with intense suspicion.

While those who proposed the program argue that it will offer BMCC students sought-after skills to help them find jobs in the security industry, critics say the program is an oppressive outgrowth of the Department of Homeland Security.

At a meeting Wednesday of the faculty council, tempers flared, according to those who were present, as faculty members shouted questions at the designer of the proposed program, Elinor Garely, a professor in the business management department.

The student government is handing out a “fact sheet” on the program with the header: “Stop BMCC ‘Homeland’ Repression Program Now!”

“Faculty members point out that if BMCC becomes known as ‘Homeland Security U,’ this will intimidate and drive away many present and potential students, especially immigrants,” the leaflet states.

The president of the student government at BMCC, Jason Negron, said the proposal is “a very scary issue that students are very, very against.”

He said if the program were to be instituted, students would be exposed to “a lot of right-wing views” and about “a lot of things that other countries have done to America without giving the other side of the story.” He said it was the “progressive” faculty members who voiced opposition to the proposal at Wednesday’s meeting.

In the city that suffered the worst terror attack ever on American soil, these enlightened students and faculty members not only want to remain suicidally ignorant about how to defend themselves, they want everyone else to be ignorant too.