I am deeply grateful for Jessica Grozdanich's letter in support of me as a Cinema instructor (Golden Gater, April 20).
However, I also feel compelled to distance myself from the letter's overall mean-spirited, inflammatory tone, and especially its hysterically paranoid fantasy about some "politically correct agenda that... smacks of Nazi propaganda tactics" in our department.
Aside from how it pains me to see my colleagues derided, I must express my exasperation with the letter's ill-informed, mythical notion that liberals are to blame for all our social ills, in this case the decay of education. Another sensationalistic distortion occurs in the letter's rather irresponsible use of "Nazi." This not only shows disrespect for those who died in the camps; it also is a dangerous inversion of history, not unlike those claiming the Holocaust never occurred: any mildly vigorous history student knows the Nazis despised and falsely demonized liberals (more harshly than today's vocal right-wing conservatives do.)
To all the students who may have signed the letter without reading it, or without agreeing with all of its content -- again, I am sincerely grateful. Perhaps next time consider writing your own letter.