Review: Rise of the Tenured Radicals

By Kelly Jane Torrance

About a year ago, a relatively obscure professor of “ethnic studies” was to give a lecture at a small liberal arts college in upstate New York. Talks like this are given across the country every day. This one, however, never took place. So why is Ward Churchill now practically a household name?

Because someone decided to find out just who Ward Churchill was. A government professor at Hamilton College researched the upcoming speaker on the Internet and was disturbed at what he found. In an article written just after the September 11 attacks, University of Colorado professor Churchill declared, “True enough, [the 9/11 victims] were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Give me a break. If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I’d really be interested in hearing about it.” In other words, those killed in the Twin Towers deserved what they got, as participants in the American capitalist system.

Once word got out of the sort of views Hamilton College was paying for its students to hear, an uproar ensued that eventually made national headlines. There may be few taboos left in our culture, but blaming the victims of the worst terrorist attack on American soil for their own murders is certainly one of them. The school’s president very reluctantly cancelled the lecture. And the University of Colorado investigated why a man trained as a graphic artist and without a doctorate was given a $120,000-a-year position as the chair of a department in the humanities.

David Horowitz wants us to know that Ward Churchill is not an isolated case. In his new book, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, Horowitz warns that radical men and women like Churchill have taken over the ivory tower. They’re in departments like black studies and women’s studies, but also English and law, and in campuses across the country, from UCLA to Princeton. These are not marginal figures, either. They’re academics at the top of their fields, almost all tenured. Together, they teach millions of students each year. Lock up your daughters (and sons).

It wasn’t always this way, of course. Horowitz does an admirable job of tracing the rise of what Roger Kimball called “tenured radicals”— activist students during the 1960s who grew up to become the teachers. They questioned authority as youngsters, and when they took over, they still found the system wanting. “They created new institutional frameworks and fields of study, casting old standards and disciplines aside,” Horowitz writes. “New departments began to appear with objectives that were frankly political and maintained no pretense of including intellectually diverse viewpoints or in pursuing academic inquiries unconnected to the conclusions they might reach.” The politicization of the university may have started with such ideology-driven departments as black studies and women’s studies. But it soon spread throughout the campus, with not even a department like geography safe in its wake.

The University of California at Berkeley recently showed how much things have changed. The U of C Academic Personnel Manual, written in 1934, states, “The function of a university is to seek and to transmit knowledge and to train students in the processes whereby truth is to be made known. To convert, or to make converts, is alien and hostile to this dispassionate duty.... In order to protect this freedom, the University assumed the right to prevent exploitation of its prestige by unqualified persons or by those who would use it as a platform for propaganda.”

In 2003, Berkeley’s Faculty Senate voted 43-4 to strike this passage. No longer did the pursuit of truth trump politics at the university.

Horowitz profiles 101 professors who all share in common, well, radical politics. It’s difficult to group them in any way beyond this, because their cases are all so different. Some of these professors have brought their politics to the classroom, with troubling results. There’s the law professor who encourages “pilfering employees [to] spread their contraband around the neighborhood.” There’s the criminology professor whose final exam urged students, “Make the case that George Bush is a war criminal.” And there’s the political science professor who tells his students that various features of Osama bin Laden “are not much different from those of individuals whom we in the United States have long identified and honored as religious, political, or military heroes, men such as John Brown, John Bunyan, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, and Thomas Paine.”

But many of the academics seem to have made the list because of their activities outside the classroom, rather than anything they’ve done inside it. Columbia journalism professor Victor Navasky may dislike anti-Communists and publish the hard-left journal The Nation. DePaul University political science professor Norman Finkelstein may be an odd bird—his parents are Holocaust survivors but he questions whether the Nazis really killed six million Jews. And celebrity academic Noam Chomsky may seem like he hates America. But Horowitz doesn’t mention anything these men have done inside their classrooms. Surely a dangerous professor is one who endangers his students.

There may be an argument that men with dangerous views outside the classroom should be carefully examined before being allowed inside it. But Horowitz hasn’t made it.

Profiles of men like this—and those Horowitz accuses of even worse outside activities—still move books, though. A subtitle of “The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America” is certainly striking. But it reeks of sensationalism that’s put there to sell. Jacket copy like “Coming to a Campus Near You: Terrorists, racists, and communists—you know them as The Professors” simply seems over the top, and belies the serious issues that Horowitz raises before and after his profiles.

“This book is not intended as a text about left-wing bias in the university and does not propose that this bias is necessarily a problem. Every individual, whether conservative or liberal, has a perspective and therefore a bias,” Horowitz writes. “Professors have every right to interpret the subjects they teach according to their individual points of view. This is the essence of academic freedom.” But the sensationalism of the book’s marketing strategy—and even its profiles—undercuts this very sensible claim.

“The professorial task is to teach students how to think, not to tell them what to think,” Horowitz declares. “In short, it is the responsibility of professors to be professional—and therefore ‘academic’—in their classrooms, and therefore not to require students to agree with them on matters which are controversial.” Hear, hear! Perhaps next time Horowitz won’t water down his very important point without so much nonsense about what some academics do in their spare time.

Kelly Jane Torrance is a book columnist for The American Enterprise Online.