Grover Furr's RateMyProfessors.com reviews

guy who learns about abu ghraib and thinks it's good

"my professor made me learn about my own country's barbarism!"
"He was anti American during the class about the time we tried to exterminate the brutes in Vietnam!"
" He said we could read Hansel and Gretel and have warm milk and cookies but tricked us and forced us to read Heart of Darkness!"
these are deeply unserious people and I wish the bottom left one in particular a very join the Marines and drown in the red sea
Edit :just saw that one was in 2007 but my sentiments still stand.
- I agree. They are deeply unserious

if it's not "plain text" he will send your essay back
Anti-Formatting Aktion
- based
- you can format .txt files pretty nicely if you're not a dweeb, skill issue imo
  
  Sending my prof raw .tex files like
  
  sending my prof .NFO files with ascii art headers and signing with my warez scene handle.
- Yet your comment is formatted. Curious! :very-intelligent:
  
  I just want Furr-sensei to notice me

There are genuine academic critiques to be made of some of Furr's work. "He made me learn America bad" and "he made me learn about pirates and communism" aren't them.
- Yes. J Arch Getty - a legit Soviet historian who is a lib but is still very fair to Stalin IMO and generally very USSR-friendly - once said that Furr understands the material in the archives, but he just comes to really weird conclusions.
  I think Furr is fine as long as you know you’re getting an apologist more than a historian. There’s a place for that. Furr himself admittedly (on the Proles pod) he thinks Stalin did nothing wrong. If you approach history from that angle you’re going to have blind spots. IMO skip Furr and go to Losurdo.

He actually does go off topic quite a bit. But it's 100% worth going down whatever rabbithole he goes on an adventure on.
10/10, if you get a chance to talk with him and pick his brain on random early soviet history topics, you should.
- I had an Anatomy and Physiology teacher for a night class many years ago. He'd go off on tangents talking about demonic possesion, his homophobic tendencies, and adrenochrome, It made his lectures like reading through Pale Fire on drugs. He was one of the the best teachers I ever had, his shaky manic rants basically ensuring that I was transfixed and able to write down every single (relevant) word despite my severe unmedicated ADHD and chronic sleep deprivation.
  
  He sounds certainly like a real character one would find interesting to listen to. Sadly Furr's a bit more on the pedantic side in his speaking since he's spent quite literally years putting up with anti-communist a-historical 'historian' bullshit, so if you're not exactly a stick-in-the-mud you may end up bored and tallying up how many times he says "Anti-Stalin paradigm" during one of his lectures.
- you speak as if you know
  
  Because I do

Even a college student, I remember RMP being absolutely dogshit. You really gotta sift through all the reviews and hope for nuggets of gold. It suffers from the same problem as any opt-in review system. Angry people leave more reviews than satisfied or otherwise neutral/moved on immediately people. I just tried to find people who got As and read their cons section. Not to say the Ds and Fs aren't legitimate grievances sometimes. On the contrary, the pros the low-grade students report are more meaningful. I guess I'm looking for like "why would an A student talk shit?" And "why would a failing student leave kind reviews?" I did try to remember to leave reviews for teachers I liked, but if the next person used my system, which is certainly not unique or special, my review, as a nerd-ass A-getter, would be promptly ignored.

Furr's Natopedia page is wild. The very first line:

Grover Carr Furr III (born April 3, 1944) is an American professor of Medieval English literature at Montclair State University who is best known for his revisionist views regarding the Soviet Union and Joseph Stalin.

And the edit history is a war zone. The 2 most recent changes are someone rewording a sentence to make it less biased:

before	after
Furr has written books, papers, and articles about Soviet history, especially the Stalin era, in which he has stated that the Holodomor, the 1932–33 ~~government-created~~ famine in Soviet Ukraine, was not deliberate, describing it as a fiction created by pro-Nazi Ukrainian nationalists	Furr has written books, papers, and articles about Soviet history, especially the Stalin era, in which he has stated that the Holodomor, the 1932–33 famine in Soviet Ukraine, was not deliberate, describing the story of it being deliberate as a fiction created by pro-Nazi Ukrainian nationalists

with edit summary Word correction - could have previously be interpreted as famine denial, made the language less biased.. Within 4 minutes, it was undone, with edit summary Previous version appeared more neutral.

I do these edits all the time all over socialist articles. I just write in "does not conform to wikipedia NPOV rules, biased language removed".
I use the abbreviation to sound all official wikipedian legalese and make people think twice about reverting lmao
Of course fucking Mzajac/Michael Z is on that page. He defends pro-Western narratives about Ukraine all over Wikipedia.
- Mzajac is such a fucking asshole to every editor he interacts with. He's been pulled into ANI so many times, and people are like "why is he still an admin". I do think that the war in Ukraine broke his brain tho, since he's been so much more unhinged and aggressive since then.

When I made /r/groverfurr the reddit admins banned it in under 24 hours with the excuse that it was a copy of a banned subreddit (chapotraphouse) intended for subreddit ban evasion.
- It kind of looks like reddit has permanently marked all accounts and variously fingerprinted users that once posted often in r/cth and now they just ban any new subreddit where they start to congregate regardless of whether it's an actual attempt to revive the sub or not. It's like a soft shadow ban where we can still comment on most posts in most subreddits, but if we start talking politics with like minded people, it alerts the admins.
  
  Bit idea: make a bot that makes new subreddits on these marked accounts so there are no free subreddits left on
  
  they're doin COINTELPRO for posters. they know we can never be allowed to reunite.
  
  How is r/thedeprogram still up then?
- it's really funny that a socdem podcast community became a pretext for reddit to remove any and all marxist discussion.
  
  Anything left of liberal is a breeding ground for critical thinking, and that opens the door for reds.
  If you have just 1 single red in a space that people are listening to, more reds are made, because we are correct. Give it long enough and things get spicey.
  This is why no matter how many times they exterminate us. No matter how many times they commit unspeakable crimes to set back the left, it will always come back, until it eventually wins.
  You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep spring from coming.

Funniest way to use their tenure.

What do you mean the US isn't the god sent saviour of all civilization that can do no wrong

i too had a history teacher who went on wild tangents with the smallest provocation
he was a stinking lib though
- I had a class with what was the stereotype of a college professor chuds complain about.
  Was some gen Ed credit like "culture language and hummanity" that was basically him being a reddit atheist lib about every current topic.
  We were supposed to "keep a journal" for the whole course for our final grade.
  Finals week I went through all his power points and paraphrased them as my "journal"
  He had me come I to his office to congratulate me and tell me I had thenoutlinenof a book lol.
  Libs love hearing their own thoughts quoted back at them.
- I had a history prof go on a class long tangent about how communists were evil because Marx said religion is the opiate of the masses. I, being a cringe atheist at the time thought "damn that's cool af, this Marx guy is spitting" and I think that was the general consensus of the class.
  Geography professor however started day one with a lecture on why Mercator, and most other map projections are racist, and told us that he wasn't listening to any complaints about saying that from anyone white.

"Very political views"

Sounds like a good professor with interesting lectures.

Who’s Grover Furr?
- He's literally the right wing boogeyman Stalinist college professor in the actual existing flesh. He's written books defending Stalin from the perspective that Stalin could basically do no wrong.
  
  stalin shouldn't have stopped at berlin
  
  "After my death, a lot of garbage will be put on my grave, but the wind of history will mercilessly dispel it."
  
  He's written books defending Stalin from the perspective that Stalin could basically do no wrong.
  
  also he rules
  
  Is his stuff worth reading or is he more of a quack with an occasionally good take?
- A Soviet archive enthusiast

Gonna cry? Gonna shit your pants?
I guess they should have put “WARNING: NO SAFE SPACES FOR IMPERIALISTS AND GENOCIDE APOLOGISTS” in red on the course catalog.

Damn that's some grade A dystopian capitalism right there, professors needing to get good reviews from their students? Sounds like a fantastic system that won't result in professors just teaching what the class wants to hear in order to keep their jobs and raising a generation of students who know nothing but complaining when they don't get their way.
- RateMyProf is an independent website that centralizes students' opinions of their teachers. Has nothing to do with job performance, just a handy way to learn if a prof is worth taking
  One of my favorite professors ever had fairly mid reviews because his class involved an extensive political analysis essay on some topic and he told everyone that while his job was purely to grade the quality of the arguments, he hated having to defend chud politics to the administration. This on the back of gamergate of course
  
  They removed my review of a prof for saying he's racist. A year later he got suspended for going ass out on twitter. Its "independent" in the same way google reviews are.
  
  Oh, that's less worrying, but "independent" only remains that way as long as the administration decides not to use it. Sounds like a way to save time on performance reviews, so I would be worried it could turn into what I thought it was in the future.

Isn't Furr's official field like, Medieval literature? Why are his students studying US foreign policy?
- If his field was political theory he would be a massive neoliberal. From my own experience, the way anglo-american academia seems to work is that if your field is related to that, it's very hard to get a job in academia without reproducing US empire propaganda. For instance, their philosophers don't read Marx, and a lot of the political philosophy they study exists to basically justify liberal democracy as the most ethical system that exists.
  If you come from a different field though, like English literature, there is more leeway to study Marx and critical theory. Grover Furr is also a massive ML and hobbyist historian of Soviet history, and it probably bleeds into his classes quite a lot.
- Because he has tenure

Going to be honest, the bottom right comment would probably be half of us lol. Finding the lectures cool, but struggling to pay attention and desperately wanting to move on to the main part of the course.

admittedly if i signed up to learn about historical literature and instead of reading the books themselves i had to read about the books and about communist pirates i would feel a little lied to
- The novel is a pretty recent Western invention
  Not true. Chinese were printing 1000+ page novels when Euros still thought putting up few rhymes is height of literature.
  
  oh i know, but you expect to be mostly reading stories when you sign up for a class like that, maybe spend a week on some other stuff but mostly novels or short stories
- What are these books on communist pirates
  
  i don't know, ask grover furr