Replies to Critics: Willful Misunderstandings
Willful Misunderstandings
In choosing 101 academics for The Professors I tried to draw them from as many schools as possible and make the selection as representative as possible. But when it came to my alma mater, Columbia, I departed from the plan and included nine faculty members, more than twice that of any other school. One factor influencing my decision was a recent administrative investigation at Columbia triggered by complaints from Jewish students who had been harassed in class by anti-Israel, Muslim ideologues.
When The Professors appeared, student newspapers at various schools typically ran articles defending their professors. The Columbia Spectator was no exception, providing a platform for three of the more moderate subjects I had chosen to make their task easier. [1] Among the Columbia faculty profiled they did not discuss were the notorious anti-Semite, Hamid Dabashi, whom I had singled out for describing Jews as “physically repulsive oppressors,” and anthropology professor Nicholas DeGenova, who had wished for “a million Mogadishus” at a faculty rally against the war in Iraq and for America’s defeat in the war on terror.[2]
The Columbia professors featured in the Spectator article included Nation editor Victor Navasky and history professor Eric Foner, whose moderation consisted mostly in the dispassionate veneers they adopted to cover life-long commitments to Communist causes.[3] A third was Todd Gitlin, a professor of journalism and a former president of Students for a Democratic Society, whom I had included for his complicity in the ideological corruption I set out to describe: “Gitlin explained the achievements of faculty radicals in an essay that appeared in 2004. After the Sixties, wrote Gitlin, ‘all that was left to the Left was to unearth righteous traditions and cultivate them in universities. The much-mocked ‘political correctness’ of the next academic generations was a consolation prize. We lost – we squandered the politics – but won the textbooks.’”
Gitlin’s statement that “we won the textbooks” and established a political base on university campuses, expressed his complacency about the political abuse of academic institutions. In twenty years on university faculties Gitlin had shown no discomfort with a status quo that excluded conservatives from the academic debate. There were no conservatives on the journalism faculty at Columbia, or at the NYU School of Journalism or in the sociology department at Berkeley, where Gitlin had previously taught. But these vacancies did not seem to bother him. Nor has he called for the enforcement of traditional standards of scholarship to rein in the abuses of Columbia peers like Dabashi and Genova, or history professor Manning Marable – another colleague profiled in my book who has organized a research project to prove that Malcolm X was murdered by the U.S. Government. Politically motivated research projects with pre-determined results are apparently not Professor Gitlin’s concern.
In the Spectator interview, Gitlin ignored the issues I had raised and resorted directly to personal attacks: “There’s a lot of history here — he’s been going after me for twenty years. Horowitz hasn’t a clue as to how I function in the classroom. ... He’s bonkers.” In fact, bonkers or no, I had not focused on how Gitlin functioned in the classroom. The only evidence of such a focus Gitlin could pinpoint was a sentence describing him as having “immersed” students in “obscurantist texts of leftist icons like Jurgen Habermas.”[4] While conceding that he did assign Habermas, Gitlin quarreled with the verb “immersed.” So sorry.
Gitlin alleged that I had committed “distortions” and “willful misunderstandings,” but specified only three. In addition to the “immersed” faux pas, I had referred to an article he wrote as “Varieties of Patriotism,” when the correct citation was “Varieties of Patriotic Experience.” Sorry again. I also placed Gitlin at the Columbia anti-war teach-in where his fellow faculty member Nicholas DeGenova called for “a million Mogadishus.” Though Gitlin had spoken at the rally, he had already left the platform when Professor DeGenova’s turn came, or perhaps hadn’t arrived yet.
Gitlin complained that I had obscured the fact that he didn’t share DeGenova’s views about the war on terror. But The Professors was actually careful about making clear to readers that Gitlin’s anti-war position distanced itself from the leftist extreme: “After 9/11 Professor Gitlin wrote an article critical of leftists who opposed the war in Afghanistan and unfurled an American flag and hung it from his apartment window…”[5] So who is willfully misunderstanding whom?
In an earlier article, Gitlin also expressed distress about my characterization of his patriotic feelings or lack of them: “Any reasonable person,” he wrote, “may read my essay ‘Varieties of Patriotic Experience,’ and the successor in my later book The Intellectuals and the Flag, and decide for him– or herself -- whether ‘harboring the belief that his country is ultimately unworthy of his respect or even allegiance,’ is an accurate description of my position. In fact the burden of both these essays is exactly the contrary.”[6]
Gitlin returned to this subject in a one-sentence “review” of The Professors in the Chronicle of Higher Education: “Horowitz’s slapdash charges [sic] include the claim that in my recent writing, I consider my country ‘ultimately unworthy of [my] respect even allegiance,’ when as any reader with a brain will discern, I distinguish between the country that is worthy of respect and allegiance and the government policies that are not.”[7]
Readers may decide for themselves whether these charges are “slapdash” or accurate by looking at the actual passage in The Professors:
In an article titled, “Varieties of Patriotism[sic],” Professor Gitlin recently reflected upon the decades he has spent harboring the belief that his country is ultimately unworthy of his respect and even allegiance. He traced the roots of that sentiment back to the fires of Vietnam. “For a large bloc of Americans my age and younger,” he writes, “too young to remember World War II – the generation for whom ‘the war’ meant Vietnam and possibly always would, to the end of our days – the case against patriotism was not an abstraction. There was a powerful experience underlying it, as powerful an eruption of our feelings as the experience of patriotism is supposed to be for patriots. Indeed, it could be said that in the course of our political history we experienced a very odd turn about: The most powerful public emotion in our lives was rejecting patriotism.”[8]
By his own account, then, “rejecting patriotism” was Gitlin’s view of patriotism pre-9/11. And post-9/11? Gitlin wrote: “By the time George W. Bush declared war without end against an ‘axis of evil’ that no other nation on earth was willing to recognize as such – indeed, against whomever the president might determine we were at war against,…and declared further the unproblematic virtue of pre-emptive attacks, and made it clear that the United States regarded itself as a one-nation tribunal of ‘regime change,’ I felt again the old estrangement, the old shame and anger at being attached to a nation – my nation – ruled by runaway bullies, indifferent to principle, their lives manifesting supreme loyalty to private (though government slathered) interests, quick to lecture dissenters about the merits of patriotism.”[9] (emphasis added)
That is what Todd Gitlin said in 2004. This was not just an attack on George W. Bush and his policies. It was, as Gitlin himself says, an expression of “the old estrangement, the old shame and anger at being attached to a nation” -- at being an American. So, again, who is willfully misunderstanding whom?
Gitlin’s accusation that I have been “going after” him “for twenty years” is equally unfounded. In the 1990s, Gitlin wrote a popular book about the Sixties. When Peter Collier and I came to write our own book on the subject, Destructive Generation, we naturally took issue with Gitlin’s celebration of what we had come to regard as a “low and dishonest” political decade. We took issue with the fact that he had transformed Sixties radicals into innocents at home and, specifically, that he had failed to mention their malice, aggressions and criminal deeds. Apparently Gitlin was chastened by the critique because in the next edition of his book, he made a small concession to the effect that the left “knew sin” in the killing of a math researcher at the University of Wisconsin who was working in a lab targeted as a cog in the war machine. I would not call our justified critique of Gitlin in Destructive Generation “going after him.” It was merely an attempt to make him an honest reporter of historical events.
On the other hand, Gitlin certainly had his eye on me. A few years later, in a similar effort to restore a historical truth, I organized a silent vigil at the premier of Mario Van Peebles’ film Panther, a piece of cinematic agitprop promoting myths about the Black Panthers. The Panthers were an iconic Sixties gang who had murdered many innocent people and who were worshipped by the New Left and by many academic radicals since. Among their victims was Betty Van Patter, who worked for me at Ramparts magazine. I organized a demonstration at the Panther premier as a vigil for Betty and the other victims of Panther mayhem. The film had portrayed these gangsters as boy scouts, persecuted by America’s racist law enforcement agencies. The film alleged that the FBI had flooded America’s ghettos with heroin in a genocidal campaign the on-screen J. Edgar Hoover referred to as “the final solution.”
After the vigil, while I was occupied outfitting my offices with security cameras to protect my young staff from possible reprisals, Gitlin took time out from his busy schedule as a visiting professor at the Sorbonne to comment to a USA Today reporter that the protest was just another case of “Panther-bashing” by Horowitz.
In interviews, Gitlin has regularly attempted to dismiss my views as the expressions of psychological disorder (“bonkers”) resulting from unresolved dramas involving my father, who has been dead for twenty years. By contrast, I have managed to write respectfully – apparently too respectfully – about Gitlin’s own intellectual output, without invoking his psychological instabilities as a means of avoiding engagement with his ideas.
In a recent book, Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left, I discussed Gitlin’s views at length, a courtesy he has not returned. In my commentary I did not engage in ad hominem attacks, nor conceal his conflicts with those further to his left. On the contrary, I analyzed his work as a case study in how a radical who has criticized the coarse anti-Americanism of many on the left can be consumed nonetheless by such fierce hostility towards his own country (or, as he would prefer it, his “government”) as to reinforce its image as a “Great Satan.”[10]
I did not merely assert this, which is Gitlin’s own preferred mode of argument, but cited a specific passage from his post-9/11 essay “Varieties of Patriotic Experience” to support the claim: “Worst of all, from this point of view, patriotism means obscuring the whole grisly truth of America under a polyurethane mask. It means covering over the Indians in their mass graves. It means covering over slavery. It means overlooking America’s many imperial adventures—the Philippine, Cuban and Nicaraguan occupations, among others, as well as abuses of power by corporations, international banks, and so on. It means disguising American privilege, even when America’s good fortune was not directly purchased at the cost of the bad fortune of others, a debatable point. So from this point of view, patriotism betrays the truth.”
Again, I leave it to the reader to judge whether in this paragraph Gitlin makes a clear distinction between a “country that is worthy of respect and allegiance and … government policies that are not.” My experiences with Todd Gitlin and other critics with easy access to pillars of the culture like the Chronicle of Higher Education and the New York Times are not entirely unexpected. But they do raise the question as to whether there are still intellectuals on the left capable of engaging in a civil exchange of ideas with their conservative critics, or defending their positions by reasoned argument and not simply ad hominem attacks.
[1] Although to be fair, they subsequently printed my response to their article.
[2] Horowitz, The Professors.
[3] Navasky has written a particular dishonest memoir, A Matter of Opinion, 2005, which elides his political commitments so that even the informed reader will have trouble placing his beliefs and allegiances at various stages of his career. For an editor of opinion journals this is amounts to a fairly elaborate smokescreen and for a writer a troubling lack of intellectual integrity.
[4] http://www.nyu.edu/classes/siva/archives/002808.html
[5] Op. cit. p. 195
[6] http://www.nyu.edu/classes/siva/archives/002808.html
[7] Todd Giltin, “The Self-Inflicted Wounds of the Academic Left,” Chronicle of Higher Education, May 5, 2006. The review was ostensibly about three books, but as the title showed, the one-sentence shot at mine was thrown in merely to serve Gitlin’s vanity.
[8] Op. cit., p. 195
[9] Op. cit. p. 196
[10]
In choosing 101 academics for The Professors I tried to draw them from as many schools as possible and make the selection as representative as possible. But when it came to my alma mater, Columbia, I departed from the plan and included nine faculty members, more than twice that of any other school. One factor influencing my decision was a recent administrative investigation at Columbia triggered by complaints from Jewish students who had been harassed in class by anti-Israel, Muslim ideologues.
When The Professors appeared, student newspapers at various schools typically ran articles defending their professors. The Columbia Spectator was no exception, providing a platform for three of the more moderate subjects I had chosen to make their task easier. [1] Among the Columbia faculty profiled they did not discuss were the notorious anti-Semite, Hamid Dabashi, whom I had singled out for describing Jews as “physically repulsive oppressors,” and anthropology professor Nicholas DeGenova, who had wished for “a million Mogadishus” at a faculty rally against the war in Iraq and for America’s defeat in the war on terror.[2]
The Columbia professors featured in the Spectator article included Nation editor Victor Navasky and history professor Eric Foner, whose moderation consisted mostly in the dispassionate veneers they adopted to cover life-long commitments to Communist causes.[3] A third was Todd Gitlin, a professor of journalism and a former president of Students for a Democratic Society, whom I had included for his complicity in the ideological corruption I set out to describe: “Gitlin explained the achievements of faculty radicals in an essay that appeared in 2004. After the Sixties, wrote Gitlin, ‘all that was left to the Left was to unearth righteous traditions and cultivate them in universities. The much-mocked ‘political correctness’ of the next academic generations was a consolation prize. We lost – we squandered the politics – but won the textbooks.’”
Gitlin’s statement that “we won the textbooks” and established a political base on university campuses, expressed his complacency about the political abuse of academic institutions. In twenty years on university faculties Gitlin had shown no discomfort with a status quo that excluded conservatives from the academic debate. There were no conservatives on the journalism faculty at Columbia, or at the NYU School of Journalism or in the sociology department at Berkeley, where Gitlin had previously taught. But these vacancies did not seem to bother him. Nor has he called for the enforcement of traditional standards of scholarship to rein in the abuses of Columbia peers like Dabashi and Genova, or history professor Manning Marable – another colleague profiled in my book who has organized a research project to prove that Malcolm X was murdered by the U.S. Government. Politically motivated research projects with pre-determined results are apparently not Professor Gitlin’s concern.
In the Spectator interview, Gitlin ignored the issues I had raised and resorted directly to personal attacks: “There’s a lot of history here — he’s been going after me for twenty years. Horowitz hasn’t a clue as to how I function in the classroom. ... He’s bonkers.” In fact, bonkers or no, I had not focused on how Gitlin functioned in the classroom. The only evidence of such a focus Gitlin could pinpoint was a sentence describing him as having “immersed” students in “obscurantist texts of leftist icons like Jurgen Habermas.”[4] While conceding that he did assign Habermas, Gitlin quarreled with the verb “immersed.” So sorry.
Gitlin alleged that I had committed “distortions” and “willful misunderstandings,” but specified only three. In addition to the “immersed” faux pas, I had referred to an article he wrote as “Varieties of Patriotism,” when the correct citation was “Varieties of Patriotic Experience.” Sorry again. I also placed Gitlin at the Columbia anti-war teach-in where his fellow faculty member Nicholas DeGenova called for “a million Mogadishus.” Though Gitlin had spoken at the rally, he had already left the platform when Professor DeGenova’s turn came, or perhaps hadn’t arrived yet.
Gitlin complained that I had obscured the fact that he didn’t share DeGenova’s views about the war on terror. But The Professors was actually careful about making clear to readers that Gitlin’s anti-war position distanced itself from the leftist extreme: “After 9/11 Professor Gitlin wrote an article critical of leftists who opposed the war in Afghanistan and unfurled an American flag and hung it from his apartment window…”[5] So who is willfully misunderstanding whom?
In an earlier article, Gitlin also expressed distress about my characterization of his patriotic feelings or lack of them: “Any reasonable person,” he wrote, “may read my essay ‘Varieties of Patriotic Experience,’ and the successor in my later book The Intellectuals and the Flag, and decide for him– or herself -- whether ‘harboring the belief that his country is ultimately unworthy of his respect or even allegiance,’ is an accurate description of my position. In fact the burden of both these essays is exactly the contrary.”[6]
Gitlin returned to this subject in a one-sentence “review” of The Professors in the Chronicle of Higher Education: “Horowitz’s slapdash charges [sic] include the claim that in my recent writing, I consider my country ‘ultimately unworthy of [my] respect even allegiance,’ when as any reader with a brain will discern, I distinguish between the country that is worthy of respect and allegiance and the government policies that are not.”[7]
Readers may decide for themselves whether these charges are “slapdash” or accurate by looking at the actual passage in The Professors:
In an article titled, “Varieties of Patriotism[sic],” Professor Gitlin recently reflected upon the decades he has spent harboring the belief that his country is ultimately unworthy of his respect and even allegiance. He traced the roots of that sentiment back to the fires of Vietnam. “For a large bloc of Americans my age and younger,” he writes, “too young to remember World War II – the generation for whom ‘the war’ meant Vietnam and possibly always would, to the end of our days – the case against patriotism was not an abstraction. There was a powerful experience underlying it, as powerful an eruption of our feelings as the experience of patriotism is supposed to be for patriots. Indeed, it could be said that in the course of our political history we experienced a very odd turn about: The most powerful public emotion in our lives was rejecting patriotism.”[8]
By his own account, then, “rejecting patriotism” was Gitlin’s view of patriotism pre-9/11. And post-9/11? Gitlin wrote: “By the time George W. Bush declared war without end against an ‘axis of evil’ that no other nation on earth was willing to recognize as such – indeed, against whomever the president might determine we were at war against,…and declared further the unproblematic virtue of pre-emptive attacks, and made it clear that the United States regarded itself as a one-nation tribunal of ‘regime change,’ I felt again the old estrangement, the old shame and anger at being attached to a nation – my nation – ruled by runaway bullies, indifferent to principle, their lives manifesting supreme loyalty to private (though government slathered) interests, quick to lecture dissenters about the merits of patriotism.”[9] (emphasis added)
That is what Todd Gitlin said in 2004. This was not just an attack on George W. Bush and his policies. It was, as Gitlin himself says, an expression of “the old estrangement, the old shame and anger at being attached to a nation” -- at being an American. So, again, who is willfully misunderstanding whom?
Gitlin’s accusation that I have been “going after” him “for twenty years” is equally unfounded. In the 1990s, Gitlin wrote a popular book about the Sixties. When Peter Collier and I came to write our own book on the subject, Destructive Generation, we naturally took issue with Gitlin’s celebration of what we had come to regard as a “low and dishonest” political decade. We took issue with the fact that he had transformed Sixties radicals into innocents at home and, specifically, that he had failed to mention their malice, aggressions and criminal deeds. Apparently Gitlin was chastened by the critique because in the next edition of his book, he made a small concession to the effect that the left “knew sin” in the killing of a math researcher at the University of Wisconsin who was working in a lab targeted as a cog in the war machine. I would not call our justified critique of Gitlin in Destructive Generation “going after him.” It was merely an attempt to make him an honest reporter of historical events.
On the other hand, Gitlin certainly had his eye on me. A few years later, in a similar effort to restore a historical truth, I organized a silent vigil at the premier of Mario Van Peebles’ film Panther, a piece of cinematic agitprop promoting myths about the Black Panthers. The Panthers were an iconic Sixties gang who had murdered many innocent people and who were worshipped by the New Left and by many academic radicals since. Among their victims was Betty Van Patter, who worked for me at Ramparts magazine. I organized a demonstration at the Panther premier as a vigil for Betty and the other victims of Panther mayhem. The film had portrayed these gangsters as boy scouts, persecuted by America’s racist law enforcement agencies. The film alleged that the FBI had flooded America’s ghettos with heroin in a genocidal campaign the on-screen J. Edgar Hoover referred to as “the final solution.”
After the vigil, while I was occupied outfitting my offices with security cameras to protect my young staff from possible reprisals, Gitlin took time out from his busy schedule as a visiting professor at the Sorbonne to comment to a USA Today reporter that the protest was just another case of “Panther-bashing” by Horowitz.
In interviews, Gitlin has regularly attempted to dismiss my views as the expressions of psychological disorder (“bonkers”) resulting from unresolved dramas involving my father, who has been dead for twenty years. By contrast, I have managed to write respectfully – apparently too respectfully – about Gitlin’s own intellectual output, without invoking his psychological instabilities as a means of avoiding engagement with his ideas.
In a recent book, Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left, I discussed Gitlin’s views at length, a courtesy he has not returned. In my commentary I did not engage in ad hominem attacks, nor conceal his conflicts with those further to his left. On the contrary, I analyzed his work as a case study in how a radical who has criticized the coarse anti-Americanism of many on the left can be consumed nonetheless by such fierce hostility towards his own country (or, as he would prefer it, his “government”) as to reinforce its image as a “Great Satan.”[10]
I did not merely assert this, which is Gitlin’s own preferred mode of argument, but cited a specific passage from his post-9/11 essay “Varieties of Patriotic Experience” to support the claim: “Worst of all, from this point of view, patriotism means obscuring the whole grisly truth of America under a polyurethane mask. It means covering over the Indians in their mass graves. It means covering over slavery. It means overlooking America’s many imperial adventures—the Philippine, Cuban and Nicaraguan occupations, among others, as well as abuses of power by corporations, international banks, and so on. It means disguising American privilege, even when America’s good fortune was not directly purchased at the cost of the bad fortune of others, a debatable point. So from this point of view, patriotism betrays the truth.”
Again, I leave it to the reader to judge whether in this paragraph Gitlin makes a clear distinction between a “country that is worthy of respect and allegiance and … government policies that are not.” My experiences with Todd Gitlin and other critics with easy access to pillars of the culture like the Chronicle of Higher Education and the New York Times are not entirely unexpected. But they do raise the question as to whether there are still intellectuals on the left capable of engaging in a civil exchange of ideas with their conservative critics, or defending their positions by reasoned argument and not simply ad hominem attacks.
[1] Although to be fair, they subsequently printed my response to their article.
[2] Horowitz, The Professors.
[3] Navasky has written a particular dishonest memoir, A Matter of Opinion, 2005, which elides his political commitments so that even the informed reader will have trouble placing his beliefs and allegiances at various stages of his career. For an editor of opinion journals this is amounts to a fairly elaborate smokescreen and for a writer a troubling lack of intellectual integrity.
[4] http://www.nyu.edu/classes/siva/archives/002808.html
[5] Op. cit. p. 195
[6] http://www.nyu.edu/classes/siva/archives/002808.html
[7] Todd Giltin, “The Self-Inflicted Wounds of the Academic Left,” Chronicle of Higher Education, May 5, 2006. The review was ostensibly about three books, but as the title showed, the one-sentence shot at mine was thrown in merely to serve Gitlin’s vanity.
[8] Op. cit., p. 195
[9] Op. cit. p. 196
[10]
posted by admin at 4:42 PM
4 Comments:
"defending...positions by reasoned argument and not simply ad hominem attacks."
what great advice! what's the title of your book again?
What kind of an ignorant can say that Habermas is a leftist icon?
horowitz, you are a dishonest piece of tripe.
No conservatives in NYU journalism department ? you are kidding. In 2006, Prof. Mary Quigley told me to "stay away" from writing about Vietnam, Iraq, Palestine and Israel. She rejected my idea to write about America through the eye of a daughter of a North Vietnamese veteran without any legitimate academic and professional reason. Prof. Craig Wolff refused to grade my story about a conversation between a North Vietnamese journalist with Henry Kissinger, again, without any legitimate academic reason.
You think it's not conservative enough?
Cannot buy your hypocrisy American freedom of expression and learning...
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