Review: Notes of a Rebel Professor
The Harvard Salient
20 March 2006
A Salient faculty adviser offers his reflections on David Horowitz'snewest work, and his own experience in the radical academy.
By Prof. James R. Russell,
Faculty Adviser
In March 2003, I gave a lecture in the Department of Middle Eastern andAsian Languages and Cultures (MEALAC) at Columbia University. It was a jobtalk: my partner of a quarter century lives in New York, my home town, andI figured I might as well apply for the long-vacant chair in ArmenianStudies that was once more being advertised. My lecture presented a smallphilological discovery-that a pig-herder and rapist named Argawan whodebuted in an Armenian epic poem dating to the time of Christ reappearedin a much later Ossetic epic, Nartae.An interesting, if not earth-shattering, study- but I was not prepared for the passions of a few members of the audience. One professor declared that such scholarship, with its implication that one culture might influence another, was adeplorable relic of imperialism, hegemonistic in essence. I replied thatthe comparative method, though susceptible to misuse, is indispensable tophilology and is not intrinsically conspiratorial. As we were leaving,another professor came up to ask me whether I was a Dumezilian-that is, afollower of Georges Dumezil, who thought there was broad continuity insocial structures between Indo-European cultures- and expressed her reliefat my assurance that I was not. ("Senator, I am not, nor have I ever been,a Dumezilian.") For that would be, she said, hegemonistic. Now, how many times, gentle reader, do you hear the word "hegemonistic" in a day? I'djust heard it twice in an hour. The rest of the day passed pleasantly enough, as one strolled down corridors festooned with posters depicting amap of Israel dripping blood or inviting one to celebrate the legacy ofEdward Said; I conversed with postgraduates in a student lounge decoratedwith a poster of a kaffiyeh-swathed Hamas terrorist (sorry, I mean,"militant"). Only two members of the search committee came to lunch; andon the way back to Kent Hall from the Faculty Club one wondered aloud tome why I'd bothered to apply for a job in a place where anti-Semitism hadbecome "mediaeval." In the end, MEALAC nominated for the job a juniorfaculty member who had been refused tenure by an ad hoc committee severalyears earlier. The search had been a charade. The nomination was rejectedagain, no appointment was made, and to this date no applicant has heardfrom Columbia. In the year that followed one's lecture in thethrough-the-looking-glass world of Columbia's Stalinism without Stalin,MEALAC made the headlines.One professor told a girl she couldn't be a Semite because she had green eyes.He later denied saying anything, but it sounds true to form: years before,he'd told me after the assassination ofAnwar Sadat that the Egyptian presidenthad met the fate of a traitor; and through the Gulf War, he had harangued hiscolleagues on how Israel shouldnot exist. Another professor made an Israelistudent stand up in class tobe verbally abused. The press reported one suchincident- a student whose boyfriend was in the class has told me thatthere were in fact several.Yet another professor in the department made violently inflammatoryremarks about Jews in Al Ahram. Columbia's administration eventually wasforced to take note of the scandal. It placed the MEALAC department inreceivership, but under the tutelage of professors in other departmentswho were close to the faculty members accused of these offenses and sharedtheir views. An investigatory committee, likewise weighted with left-wingand anti-Israel extremists, exonerated the accused: A New York Timeseditorial condemned the committee's work as a whitewash.My associationwith Columbia goes far back. My father is a graduate of the College and Law School; my mother, a Columbia Ph.D. in Chemistry. I was Salutatorianof the Class of '74 and a Kellett Fellow; and I taught for twelve years inMEALAC as Lecturer, then Assistant Professor, then Associate Professor.Two of my courses were listed among the top ten for 1991 in the Columbia-Barnard Course Guide. In 1992 I was denied tenure: since I wasoffered the Harvard chair in Armenian Studies a year later, I do not thinkmy scholarship or teaching were at fault. Two senior colleagues told methat I simply belonged to the wrong race.David Horowitz's The ProfessorsI also thought my experience was unusual; but as we learn from DavidHorowitz's superb book, the inmates have taken control of the lunaticasylum that is academia today. Misery loves company: if you're a sanescholar in this business, the book will at least cheer you up, at least atfirst, until you remember this is a book, not about Heidelberg in 1934 orMoscow State University in 1937, but about America in 2006. The bookbegins with an account of Hamilton College's invitation to Ward Churchillto deliver a lecture (for $3,500 plus expenses). Churchill is a tenuredprofessor at the University of Colorado and was chairman of hisdepartment. He does not hold a doctorate. He claimed to be an AmericanIndian-that was a lie. The Rocky Mountain News maintains he hasplagiarized the work of others. In the 1970's he trained the WeatherUnderground in the use of weapons and explosives. He regards the 9/11terrorist attack as a just penalty visited upon "the little Eichmannsinhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers". Hamilton, afterimmense pressure, including the protests of one student whose father diedin the World Trade Center, withdrew its invitation. The AAUP has declaredits official support for Churchill, and he has since toured many campuses,receiving everywhere a hero's welcome from large crowds. This is not anextreme example. Horowitz demonstrates that it is routine for Americanuniversities to grant tenure to people who are under-qualified orunqualified, provided they meet an ideological standard imposed uponvarious disciplines in the humanities. It is de rigueur to decry Americaas the fons et origo of every evil, from the oppression of Blacks, women, gays, and Native Americans to the fouling of the planet and the fomenting war and misery around the globe.Israel, too, must be derided as the sole villain in the Middle East conflict:as the Israel-bashers havegained confidence, their imagery and rhetorichave assumed the features of old-fashioned anti-Semitism. Correspondingly,one may not criticize Islam or the Arabs for offenses inexcusable in others: I recall a poster of theArab students' society at Columbia around 1990 depicting a hook-nosed Israeli soldier bayoneting a crucified Palestinian. It hung in the MEALAC office for some days before I removed it, to the consternation of thestaff-and, doubtless, to the detriment of my future career on MorningsideHeights. (It did not matter that some years before I had asked myLiterature Humanities students not to use an assigned edition of theInferno that contained a crude modern drawing of Muhammad dismemberinghimself. I did not want to hurt the feelings of a Muslim pupil and friend.But Islam was not the cause of the day then. You can't win.)It also harms one's chances of employment if one is an overtly devout Christian, or a political conservative. How things have changed! A teacher of mine recallsthat in the early 1960s, candidates for positions at Smith wereinterviewed on Friday and served pork at lunch, to weed out Jews andCatholics. I wonder which foods are verboten to Hegemonists. And academicwriting itself has come to reify these political positions: theimpenetrable jargon of "gendered" studies decrying "patriarchal" phenomenaand so on. The purpose of such "cultural studies" is to make what isdisputable opinion look like the hard technical data of exact andindisputable scientific research. It is a way of imposing orthodoxy andstifling dissent. That is not really new, in a roundabout sort of way: inthe early 1950's, the Soviets decided "Western" genetics (scil. science)wasn't Marxist, so Trofim Lysenko obligingly cooked up a set ofirreproducible experimental results showing that genetic traits could beacquired during one's life and passed on. The Russian mistake was to dressup bad science in political jargon. Nowadays it is fake scholarship in theservice of a vicious political agenda that is gussied up with the borrowedterminology of science.The body of Horowitz's book is a kind of rogues' gallery. As a professor of Armenian studies, I've met over my lifetime hundreds of survivors of the Armenian Genocide and have read scores of testimonies in Armenian and other languages. I've also traveled to Eastern Anatolia and spoken with Turkish and Kurdish farmers who spoke freely of the massacres. Often the ruins of Armenian villages and even quarters of whole cities are untouched. So I note with appreciation the inclusion of Hamid Algar, a professor of Persian and Islamic studies (and, for the record, a superb scholar) who in 1998 spat on members of the Armenian Student Association at UC Berkeley. He is quoted as having said to them: It was not a genocide, but I wish it were, you lying pigs... You stupidArmenians, you deserve to be massacred!" Juan Cole of the University ofMichigan is criticized for his anti-Zionist conspiracy theories, but thatscarcely exhausts Ann Arbor's charms: a colleague who applied for a job inArmenian studies there recalled to me being told they would not hireanyone planning to talk about the Armenian Genocide. Rejecting a number offine young scholars with training in Armenian language, literature, andhistory, they hired a scholar of anthropology whose Ph.D. dealt with UFOsightings in the Soviet Armenian republic.If the little green men land inMichigan, though, they'll either have a lot of funor, more likely, run or their flying saucers and leave this galaxy at warp speed: Professor Rubin (p. 307), 1988 Woman of the Year of the National LeatherAssociation, has written thoughtfully about "boy-love" and "fistf**king",and has deplored women's lack of phallic power (a problem easily remedied,I should imagine, by a visit to Hubba Hubba on Mass Ave.). And then,there is Prof. Amiri Baraka, poet laureate of New Jersey (the bard ofCamden must be spinning in his grave like a top), Professor at Rutgers andStony Brook and author of such immortal musings as these: "Most Americanwhite men are trained to be fags." "Rape the white girls. Rape theirfathers. Cut the mothers' throats." Columbia's Middle East Studies programheld a gala for Baraka's 70th birthday- presumably in recognition of suchstrophes as "I got the extermination blues, jewboys. I got the Hitlersyndrome figured."The relatively long section on Hamid Dabashi, Professorof Iranian Studies at Columbia's MEALAC, with its catena of violentlyracist rants against the Jews, Israel, and America, is horrifying enough.What makes it worse is the background Horowitz does not provide: Columbiawas once a great center of Iranian studies. Professors A.V. WilliamsJackson and Louis Gray taught the Zoroastrian high-priests, Ervadji Pavryand Dhalla. Dale Bishop, Chris Brunner, Ehsan Yarshater, Prods OktorSkjaervo, your obsedient servant- we were Columbia's Iranists. Dabashi wasa respectable scholar once, too, and I thought him a friend. But It wouldbe unfair to single out MEALAC: Horowitz devotes an entry to Columbia'sfeisty anthropologist Nicholas De Genova, who has called for "a millionMogadishus" and explained that "the only true heroes are those who findways that help defeat the U.S. military" (p. 123). At Syracuse, whereonce Delmore Schwartz held court to Lou Reed, you can now take anaccredited course on Lil' Kim and parse such texts as "Niggas... bettagrab a seatgrab on ya dick as this bitch gets deep,/ Deeper than a pussyof a bitch 6 feet stiff dicks feel sweet in this little petite." NathanielNelson reports that the instructor announced on the first day of thecourse "Political Philosophy: Plato to Machiavelli", "My name is MichaelVocino and I like dick" (p. 346). The candid Mr. Vocino, a tenured fullprofessor in his fifties, is writing a Ph.D. dissertation on the TV seriesSouth Park. Ann Arbor, we've got a phallic power problem. On page 365,Horowitz reaches Chapter 2, which deals with background to theno-confidence vote against President Larry Summers of Harvard in March2005. He reviews the case of Cornel West and African-American Studies andthe controversy over women in science and concludes: "the entire purposeof the censure was to suppress a politically objectionable (butscientifically grounded) idea." The affair "demonstrated the chillingpower of a radical minority on the university's faculty." The chapter doesnot consider Summers' condemnation as anti-Semitic in result if not intentof a petition for Harvard to divest from Israel; but I think thisstatement galvanized radical faculty opinion against him. The book waspublished before Summers' resignation: it records only his attempts aftercensure to rectify the errors of which he had been accused. But it is nowplain that nothing he could have done would have saved his presidency. AsI understand it, liberalism has to do with freedom. As a boy I marched forcivil rights: that meant equal opportunity and integration, notaffirmative action, Black separatism, and the licentious advocacy ofviolence. When as a college student I fought for gay rights, I wantedhomosexuals to be able to express the love we naturally feel without fearof violence, ridicule, or condemnation; I did not have in mind theimposition of "queer theory" on the study of literature, or theaccreditation of college courses on, well, on the stuff you have justread. It has been distressing to witness the Left's misguided take onforeign affairs morph into full-blown, murderous anti-Semitism, coupledwith an utterly illogical worship of political Islam, which isanti-homosexual and misogynist just for starters. But the Left has alwaysflirted with totalitarian violence and has indulged in an easydemonization of America that relieves one of the need to think withgreater complexity and depth about the problems of our world.Most of the101 academic rogues of Horowitz's list would probablydescribe themselves as liberals, but nothing could be more illiberal thattheir censoriousintolerance. They abuse their position of authority and the captive audience of the classroom to impose their views on students, oftenneglecting at the same time to teach the subjects for which they are paid.They abuse academic standards to hire and promote those who think as theydo: as Horowitz shows, professors with little or no scholarly merit areoften at the top of their departments, even of professional associations.And God help those of us who do not think as they do- or who do not meetother criteria.I once applied for a job at CCNY. My application was neveracknowledged. When my mother, who worked there, inquired, a colleaguereplied "Why did he even bother? He's the wrong color." Of course one ofCCNY's stars at the time was the estimable Prof. Leonard Jeffries: "Jewsare a race of skunks and animals that stole Africa from the Black Man"Horowitz, p. 234). A problem we face is that of terminology. Words like"liberal" and "Left" actually mean today the opposite of what they oncedid; while "conservatives" on American campuses are a dissenting, oftendisenfranchised minority who believe in freedom of speech, freedom ofconscience, fair hiring practices, and so on. They tend to oppose themurder of Jews, the practice of slavery, female circumcision, and, ofcourse, destroying office buildings full of working people with airplanesfull of more working people. (Among the "little Eichmanns" working at theWTC when "the chickens came home to roost" were men and women from my oldneighborhood, Washington Heights: Dominican immigrants who worked asjanitors, as cooks at Windows on the World.) Let's start by calling thingsby their right names: Horowitz's 101 professors are bigots, racists,apologists for murder, fascists, traitors to this country. And what is tobe done about them, once the public is informed about them? Do America'slawmakers want public money (that is, our income taxes) to go to pay thelikes of Ward Churchill or Amiri Baraka? Do parents and alumni want tofund private universities that hire people like Hamid Dabashi and JosephMassad? There are students who are sick and tired of relentlessindoctrination, of bogus scholarship and silly courses that take the placeof real learning. Their voices should be heard. After my lecture atColumbia in 2003, I returned to Cambridge. I am fortunate to have anacademic job: I know a number of people who, because they were Jews, orwhite men, or conservatives, failed to secure professorships and theircareers were truncated or destroyed. Horowitz in his final chapterdescribes how he collected his data, and avers he could have written abook about a myriad, rather than a hundred. But what disturbed me most,and what convinced me New York was no longer my home, was not the derisionwithin the gates of Columbia University, but the banality of indifferenceoutside.
20 March 2006
A Salient faculty adviser offers his reflections on David Horowitz'snewest work, and his own experience in the radical academy.
By Prof. James R. Russell,
Faculty Adviser
In March 2003, I gave a lecture in the Department of Middle Eastern andAsian Languages and Cultures (MEALAC) at Columbia University. It was a jobtalk: my partner of a quarter century lives in New York, my home town, andI figured I might as well apply for the long-vacant chair in ArmenianStudies that was once more being advertised. My lecture presented a smallphilological discovery-that a pig-herder and rapist named Argawan whodebuted in an Armenian epic poem dating to the time of Christ reappearedin a much later Ossetic epic, Nartae.An interesting, if not earth-shattering, study- but I was not prepared for the passions of a few members of the audience. One professor declared that such scholarship, with its implication that one culture might influence another, was adeplorable relic of imperialism, hegemonistic in essence. I replied thatthe comparative method, though susceptible to misuse, is indispensable tophilology and is not intrinsically conspiratorial. As we were leaving,another professor came up to ask me whether I was a Dumezilian-that is, afollower of Georges Dumezil, who thought there was broad continuity insocial structures between Indo-European cultures- and expressed her reliefat my assurance that I was not. ("Senator, I am not, nor have I ever been,a Dumezilian.") For that would be, she said, hegemonistic. Now, how many times, gentle reader, do you hear the word "hegemonistic" in a day? I'djust heard it twice in an hour. The rest of the day passed pleasantly enough, as one strolled down corridors festooned with posters depicting amap of Israel dripping blood or inviting one to celebrate the legacy ofEdward Said; I conversed with postgraduates in a student lounge decoratedwith a poster of a kaffiyeh-swathed Hamas terrorist (sorry, I mean,"militant"). Only two members of the search committee came to lunch; andon the way back to Kent Hall from the Faculty Club one wondered aloud tome why I'd bothered to apply for a job in a place where anti-Semitism hadbecome "mediaeval." In the end, MEALAC nominated for the job a juniorfaculty member who had been refused tenure by an ad hoc committee severalyears earlier. The search had been a charade. The nomination was rejectedagain, no appointment was made, and to this date no applicant has heardfrom Columbia. In the year that followed one's lecture in thethrough-the-looking-glass world of Columbia's Stalinism without Stalin,MEALAC made the headlines.One professor told a girl she couldn't be a Semite because she had green eyes.He later denied saying anything, but it sounds true to form: years before,he'd told me after the assassination ofAnwar Sadat that the Egyptian presidenthad met the fate of a traitor; and through the Gulf War, he had harangued hiscolleagues on how Israel shouldnot exist. Another professor made an Israelistudent stand up in class tobe verbally abused. The press reported one suchincident- a student whose boyfriend was in the class has told me thatthere were in fact several.Yet another professor in the department made violently inflammatoryremarks about Jews in Al Ahram. Columbia's administration eventually wasforced to take note of the scandal. It placed the MEALAC department inreceivership, but under the tutelage of professors in other departmentswho were close to the faculty members accused of these offenses and sharedtheir views. An investigatory committee, likewise weighted with left-wingand anti-Israel extremists, exonerated the accused: A New York Timeseditorial condemned the committee's work as a whitewash.My associationwith Columbia goes far back. My father is a graduate of the College and Law School; my mother, a Columbia Ph.D. in Chemistry. I was Salutatorianof the Class of '74 and a Kellett Fellow; and I taught for twelve years inMEALAC as Lecturer, then Assistant Professor, then Associate Professor.Two of my courses were listed among the top ten for 1991 in the Columbia-Barnard Course Guide. In 1992 I was denied tenure: since I wasoffered the Harvard chair in Armenian Studies a year later, I do not thinkmy scholarship or teaching were at fault. Two senior colleagues told methat I simply belonged to the wrong race.David Horowitz's The ProfessorsI also thought my experience was unusual; but as we learn from DavidHorowitz's superb book, the inmates have taken control of the lunaticasylum that is academia today. Misery loves company: if you're a sanescholar in this business, the book will at least cheer you up, at least atfirst, until you remember this is a book, not about Heidelberg in 1934 orMoscow State University in 1937, but about America in 2006. The bookbegins with an account of Hamilton College's invitation to Ward Churchillto deliver a lecture (for $3,500 plus expenses). Churchill is a tenuredprofessor at the University of Colorado and was chairman of hisdepartment. He does not hold a doctorate. He claimed to be an AmericanIndian-that was a lie. The Rocky Mountain News maintains he hasplagiarized the work of others. In the 1970's he trained the WeatherUnderground in the use of weapons and explosives. He regards the 9/11terrorist attack as a just penalty visited upon "the little Eichmannsinhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers". Hamilton, afterimmense pressure, including the protests of one student whose father diedin the World Trade Center, withdrew its invitation. The AAUP has declaredits official support for Churchill, and he has since toured many campuses,receiving everywhere a hero's welcome from large crowds. This is not anextreme example. Horowitz demonstrates that it is routine for Americanuniversities to grant tenure to people who are under-qualified orunqualified, provided they meet an ideological standard imposed uponvarious disciplines in the humanities. It is de rigueur to decry Americaas the fons et origo of every evil, from the oppression of Blacks, women, gays, and Native Americans to the fouling of the planet and the fomenting war and misery around the globe.Israel, too, must be derided as the sole villain in the Middle East conflict:as the Israel-bashers havegained confidence, their imagery and rhetorichave assumed the features of old-fashioned anti-Semitism. Correspondingly,one may not criticize Islam or the Arabs for offenses inexcusable in others: I recall a poster of theArab students' society at Columbia around 1990 depicting a hook-nosed Israeli soldier bayoneting a crucified Palestinian. It hung in the MEALAC office for some days before I removed it, to the consternation of thestaff-and, doubtless, to the detriment of my future career on MorningsideHeights. (It did not matter that some years before I had asked myLiterature Humanities students not to use an assigned edition of theInferno that contained a crude modern drawing of Muhammad dismemberinghimself. I did not want to hurt the feelings of a Muslim pupil and friend.But Islam was not the cause of the day then. You can't win.)It also harms one's chances of employment if one is an overtly devout Christian, or a political conservative. How things have changed! A teacher of mine recallsthat in the early 1960s, candidates for positions at Smith wereinterviewed on Friday and served pork at lunch, to weed out Jews andCatholics. I wonder which foods are verboten to Hegemonists. And academicwriting itself has come to reify these political positions: theimpenetrable jargon of "gendered" studies decrying "patriarchal" phenomenaand so on. The purpose of such "cultural studies" is to make what isdisputable opinion look like the hard technical data of exact andindisputable scientific research. It is a way of imposing orthodoxy andstifling dissent. That is not really new, in a roundabout sort of way: inthe early 1950's, the Soviets decided "Western" genetics (scil. science)wasn't Marxist, so Trofim Lysenko obligingly cooked up a set ofirreproducible experimental results showing that genetic traits could beacquired during one's life and passed on. The Russian mistake was to dressup bad science in political jargon. Nowadays it is fake scholarship in theservice of a vicious political agenda that is gussied up with the borrowedterminology of science.The body of Horowitz's book is a kind of rogues' gallery. As a professor of Armenian studies, I've met over my lifetime hundreds of survivors of the Armenian Genocide and have read scores of testimonies in Armenian and other languages. I've also traveled to Eastern Anatolia and spoken with Turkish and Kurdish farmers who spoke freely of the massacres. Often the ruins of Armenian villages and even quarters of whole cities are untouched. So I note with appreciation the inclusion of Hamid Algar, a professor of Persian and Islamic studies (and, for the record, a superb scholar) who in 1998 spat on members of the Armenian Student Association at UC Berkeley. He is quoted as having said to them: It was not a genocide, but I wish it were, you lying pigs... You stupidArmenians, you deserve to be massacred!" Juan Cole of the University ofMichigan is criticized for his anti-Zionist conspiracy theories, but thatscarcely exhausts Ann Arbor's charms: a colleague who applied for a job inArmenian studies there recalled to me being told they would not hireanyone planning to talk about the Armenian Genocide. Rejecting a number offine young scholars with training in Armenian language, literature, andhistory, they hired a scholar of anthropology whose Ph.D. dealt with UFOsightings in the Soviet Armenian republic.If the little green men land inMichigan, though, they'll either have a lot of funor, more likely, run or their flying saucers and leave this galaxy at warp speed: Professor Rubin (p. 307), 1988 Woman of the Year of the National LeatherAssociation, has written thoughtfully about "boy-love" and "fistf**king",and has deplored women's lack of phallic power (a problem easily remedied,I should imagine, by a visit to Hubba Hubba on Mass Ave.). And then,there is Prof. Amiri Baraka, poet laureate of New Jersey (the bard ofCamden must be spinning in his grave like a top), Professor at Rutgers andStony Brook and author of such immortal musings as these: "Most Americanwhite men are trained to be fags." "Rape the white girls. Rape theirfathers. Cut the mothers' throats." Columbia's Middle East Studies programheld a gala for Baraka's 70th birthday- presumably in recognition of suchstrophes as "I got the extermination blues, jewboys. I got the Hitlersyndrome figured."The relatively long section on Hamid Dabashi, Professorof Iranian Studies at Columbia's MEALAC, with its catena of violentlyracist rants against the Jews, Israel, and America, is horrifying enough.What makes it worse is the background Horowitz does not provide: Columbiawas once a great center of Iranian studies. Professors A.V. WilliamsJackson and Louis Gray taught the Zoroastrian high-priests, Ervadji Pavryand Dhalla. Dale Bishop, Chris Brunner, Ehsan Yarshater, Prods OktorSkjaervo, your obsedient servant- we were Columbia's Iranists. Dabashi wasa respectable scholar once, too, and I thought him a friend. But It wouldbe unfair to single out MEALAC: Horowitz devotes an entry to Columbia'sfeisty anthropologist Nicholas De Genova, who has called for "a millionMogadishus" and explained that "the only true heroes are those who findways that help defeat the U.S. military" (p. 123). At Syracuse, whereonce Delmore Schwartz held court to Lou Reed, you can now take anaccredited course on Lil' Kim and parse such texts as "Niggas... bettagrab a seatgrab on ya dick as this bitch gets deep,/ Deeper than a pussyof a bitch 6 feet stiff dicks feel sweet in this little petite." NathanielNelson reports that the instructor announced on the first day of thecourse "Political Philosophy: Plato to Machiavelli", "My name is MichaelVocino and I like dick" (p. 346). The candid Mr. Vocino, a tenured fullprofessor in his fifties, is writing a Ph.D. dissertation on the TV seriesSouth Park. Ann Arbor, we've got a phallic power problem. On page 365,Horowitz reaches Chapter 2, which deals with background to theno-confidence vote against President Larry Summers of Harvard in March2005. He reviews the case of Cornel West and African-American Studies andthe controversy over women in science and concludes: "the entire purposeof the censure was to suppress a politically objectionable (butscientifically grounded) idea." The affair "demonstrated the chillingpower of a radical minority on the university's faculty." The chapter doesnot consider Summers' condemnation as anti-Semitic in result if not intentof a petition for Harvard to divest from Israel; but I think thisstatement galvanized radical faculty opinion against him. The book waspublished before Summers' resignation: it records only his attempts aftercensure to rectify the errors of which he had been accused. But it is nowplain that nothing he could have done would have saved his presidency. AsI understand it, liberalism has to do with freedom. As a boy I marched forcivil rights: that meant equal opportunity and integration, notaffirmative action, Black separatism, and the licentious advocacy ofviolence. When as a college student I fought for gay rights, I wantedhomosexuals to be able to express the love we naturally feel without fearof violence, ridicule, or condemnation; I did not have in mind theimposition of "queer theory" on the study of literature, or theaccreditation of college courses on, well, on the stuff you have justread. It has been distressing to witness the Left's misguided take onforeign affairs morph into full-blown, murderous anti-Semitism, coupledwith an utterly illogical worship of political Islam, which isanti-homosexual and misogynist just for starters. But the Left has alwaysflirted with totalitarian violence and has indulged in an easydemonization of America that relieves one of the need to think withgreater complexity and depth about the problems of our world.Most of the101 academic rogues of Horowitz's list would probablydescribe themselves as liberals, but nothing could be more illiberal thattheir censoriousintolerance. They abuse their position of authority and the captive audience of the classroom to impose their views on students, oftenneglecting at the same time to teach the subjects for which they are paid.They abuse academic standards to hire and promote those who think as theydo: as Horowitz shows, professors with little or no scholarly merit areoften at the top of their departments, even of professional associations.And God help those of us who do not think as they do- or who do not meetother criteria.I once applied for a job at CCNY. My application was neveracknowledged. When my mother, who worked there, inquired, a colleaguereplied "Why did he even bother? He's the wrong color." Of course one ofCCNY's stars at the time was the estimable Prof. Leonard Jeffries: "Jewsare a race of skunks and animals that stole Africa from the Black Man"Horowitz, p. 234). A problem we face is that of terminology. Words like"liberal" and "Left" actually mean today the opposite of what they oncedid; while "conservatives" on American campuses are a dissenting, oftendisenfranchised minority who believe in freedom of speech, freedom ofconscience, fair hiring practices, and so on. They tend to oppose themurder of Jews, the practice of slavery, female circumcision, and, ofcourse, destroying office buildings full of working people with airplanesfull of more working people. (Among the "little Eichmanns" working at theWTC when "the chickens came home to roost" were men and women from my oldneighborhood, Washington Heights: Dominican immigrants who worked asjanitors, as cooks at Windows on the World.) Let's start by calling thingsby their right names: Horowitz's 101 professors are bigots, racists,apologists for murder, fascists, traitors to this country. And what is tobe done about them, once the public is informed about them? Do America'slawmakers want public money (that is, our income taxes) to go to pay thelikes of Ward Churchill or Amiri Baraka? Do parents and alumni want tofund private universities that hire people like Hamid Dabashi and JosephMassad? There are students who are sick and tired of relentlessindoctrination, of bogus scholarship and silly courses that take the placeof real learning. Their voices should be heard. After my lecture atColumbia in 2003, I returned to Cambridge. I am fortunate to have anacademic job: I know a number of people who, because they were Jews, orwhite men, or conservatives, failed to secure professorships and theircareers were truncated or destroyed. Horowitz in his final chapterdescribes how he collected his data, and avers he could have written abook about a myriad, rather than a hundred. But what disturbed me most,and what convinced me New York was no longer my home, was not the derisionwithin the gates of Columbia University, but the banality of indifferenceoutside.
6 Comments:
I would feel much more sympathy for you if you knew how to punctuate, spell, and paragraph.
The text got compressed when it was posted, pal. Go over to FrontPage so you can see the original article.
Peggy said: Very interesting and honest comment on this man's experience of what is going on in academia today! Amazing that professors are given an arena to spout their political views instead of being held to the higher standard of actually meriting the position through credentials!... and continuing to add to those credentials with published books or papers. Nice work if you can get it! How absurd to show up for a 5/hour/week job and be paid $100,000/year without proper qualifications but have the political savy to be featured on the newest talk show or in the current pop culture forum. Where is the leadership and commitment to excellence in our universities?
I just watched David Horowitz's speech at Duke University on CSPAN taped earlier this month. I think he makes some valid arguments. Having been a former Reed College student and a humanist, I experienced first hand the power of liberal paradigms in academia. I believe that liberalism is a kind of social, political, and philosophical paradigm. Paradigms are extremely powerful because it affects how we interpret everything in our lives, and ultimately, how we react to it. Perception can be as powerful as reality even when it may not be congruent to it.
DAVID, GREAT WORK ON EXPOSING THE RADICAL LEFT IN OUR UNIVERSITY'S, PLEASE CONTINUE INFORMING THE AMERICAN PUBLIC OF THIS SUBJECT WHICH NEEDS TO BE BROUGHT OUT, MOST ALL AMERICANS WILL SUPORT YOU, BECAUSE IT IS IMPORTANT FOR THE SECURITY OF OUR NATION. THERE ARE SOME LEFTIST ACTIVITIES THAT ARE VERY DANGEROUS AND MUST BE EXPOSED.
I believe that is important to note that the security of the United States does not rest upon the expressions of professors with Liberal viewpoints at so many American universities. To silence these professors is giving the terrorists and so many other people that are envious of the United State's great liberties what they want. So do not silence the professors, but allow professors with conservative views express their views at the college level.
A concerned American...
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