From the 1960s to the present, leftist educational theorists in English have followed a persistent pattern of argument on a variety of current issues. Although I am myself a leftist and agree with much of the left analysis and position on these issues, I want to air some long-brewing critical questions about arguments expressed by leftists including James Sledd, Andrew Sledd, Richard Ohmann, Wayne O'Neil, and American followers of Paulo Freire. These critics have at various times opposed conventional college admission and course requirements; grading and notions of compensatory education; cultural or linguistic deficits; bidialectalism; the alleged crisis; Hirschian cultural literacy; BennettBloomian Eurocentric core curricula; and other manifestations of the back to basics movement on the grounds that these forces have intentionally or inadvertently served conservative hegemonic interests against aspirations to equality by minorities, women, and the working class. For similar reasons they have supported open admissions, the open classroom and Freirean liberatory literacy, Students' Right to Their Own Language (the controversial 1974 CCCC monograph), and particularly black and other nonstandard dialects versus the imposition of standard English. (I will not go at length into the recent disputes over multiculturalism, canon revision, and political correctness here, but I hope the applicability of my arguments to them is evident, as is my intense opposition to the current wave of malicious and often ill-informed right-wing attacks on the academic left, against which I have published many articles.) In sum, leftists have for the most part claimed that, as Ohmann puts it, decline in literacy is a fiction, if not a hoax (Politics 231). O'Neil identifies the devious motives behind this fabricated crisis: It has become important for the ruling class to exclude the potentially radicalizing elements of higher education from the colleges. Thus everywhere along the scale of education there is a relentless march toward the basics (15). In a more recent expression of the same idea, Readin' not Riotin': The Politics of Literacy, Andrew Sledd wrote: