Professor's Post: Todd Gitlin on Horowitz' "dangerous professors"

Todd Gitlin writes, Old Whine in New Bottle:

A number of people have asked me to respond to the signal honor of being included in David Horowitz's latest self-promotional scrapbook, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America.

I could think of perhaps a thousand more interesting ways of whiling away the hours, but for the record, as they say:

Aside from wild guffaws--as in this tour de force by my fellow danger Michael Berube, and, if you're really a glutton for Horowitziana, these entries on Michael's splendid blog, posted delightfully enough on Valentine's Day--here are a few observations on Horowitz's slovenly methods at work in his little blast at me, which, along with his other laughable errors and distortions, should get him laughed out of any hall except "The Daily Show" as a serious researcher, let alone an expert in what universities do and should do.

1. Horowitz has absolutely no idea what I do in the classroom. Probably he is assuming that I do what he would do had he the chance: indoctrinate innocents. So he claims that I "immerse" students in the "obscurantist texts of leftist icons like Jurgen Habermas." In fact, I have indeed assigned a book of Habermas'--along with many others--to a graduate seminar. I have also, to take only the last few years, "immersed" students in texts by Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Hobbes, Locke, Burke, Adam Smith, and, for that matter, the Gospels. Horowitz might benefit from any or all such immersions.

2. And by the way, if Habermas is in fact "obscurantist," how is he supposed to compel students to "understand the oppressive nature of capitalist media"? Habermas is, in fact, difficult, but the book I assign is not obscurantist. There, Habermas takes on the important question of the conditions under which communications are and are not conducive to democratic debate. To explore such questions is one reason why we have universities.

3. Horowitz notes that I participated in a March 2003 antiwar teach-in at Columbia. I did indeed. With his usual logic, he proceeds to link me with Professor Nicholas De Genova of Columbia's Anthropology Department, who at another session of the teach-in "idiotically" (to quote my fellow dangerous colleague Eric Foner) called for "a million Mogadishus." But I was not present when De Genova said this. Nor have I ever knowingly laid eyes or ears on Professor De Genova. Had I been present when Professor De Genova made his remark, or heard that he had done so, I would have expressed my disgust.

4. Any reasonable person may read my essay, "Varieties of Patriotic Experience" (mislabeled by Horowitz), 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 and even allegiance" is an accurate description of my position. In fact, the burden of these essays is exactly the contrary. In both essays, I distinguish between the country that is worthy of respect and allegiance and the government policies that are not.

Horowitz's idea of research is cherry-picking-- and he can't even be trusted to find cherries. He comes up with prunes.

The many state legislatures that have uniformly rejected his "Academic Bill of Rights" have already figured out that Horowitz gives sloppiness a bad name.

Which of course doesn't stop him from crying "censorship" and "ugly McCarthyite tactics" in his fund-raising hue and cry.

The amazing thing about Horowitz' list is that even by his standards of "danger" (which apparently does not include Holocaust deniers, white supremecists, or advocates of torture like John Yoo or Alan Dershowitz) I can think of eight or nine more dangerous NYU professors than the lone one cited in his book -- the genteel and erudite law professor, Derek Bell. And, of course, if you think Todd Gitlin is among the most troubling professors at Columbia, you have not been paying much attention.

The key to this feud goes back to the late 1960s, when Horowitz and Gitlin were both major players in the New Left in the Bay Area. One of them went crazy and started consorting with the Black Panthers and Maoist-informed groups like the SLA. The other decided that democracy and the American way had the best potential to maximize freedom and dignity.

Guess which one of these is considered "dangerous" by the radical right in America.

Article: WWU professor on author’s list of ‘dangerous’ academics

Ed: The following article on Professor Larry Estrada shows the extraordinary lengths to which the local press will go to provide a platform for academic extremists. This is not an article;It is a press release. Nonetheless it shows how accurate the profiles in The Professor are. MeCHA is a separatist organization and Estrada is a supporter of Ward Churchill, and that's basically what the profile says..

By john stark
the bellingham herald

Western Washington University’s Larry Estrada pleads guilty to most of the things David Horowitz says about him in his new book “The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America.”

Among the facts Horowitz musters in a four-page report on Estrada:
u Estrada is president of the National Association for Ethnic Studies.
u He takes students to the Mexican state of Oaxaca every summer where, among other things, they study “Mexican sustainable agriculture” and “environmental justice issues.”
u He advocates “the expansion of ethnic, and specifically Chicano, studies on campus.”
u He advocates affirmative action.
u He has lamented ethnic segregation in the public schools that stems from segregation of neighborhoods.
But Estrada takes sharp issue with one statement in Horowitz’s book labeling Estrada “a radical ethnic separatist who believes that ‘Aztlan’ (the American Southwest) should secede from the United States.”
Estrada doesn’t see how his opposition to segregation squares with the charge that he’s a separatist, which he considers “libelous.”
“There’s a little bit of a contradiction there,” Estrada said.
Horowitz apparently bases the separatist charge on Estrada’s ties to MEChA, the Chicano Student Movement of Aztlan, a student group with roots in 1960s campus radicalism.
Estrada is the organization’s adviser at WWU. He also acknowledges he was one of hundreds of student participants in the 1969 conference where MEChA originated, although he does not claim the “founder” honor that Horowitz’s book bestows on him.
MEChA’s official documents contain statements that could be interpreted as separatist. For example, its “Plan Espiritual de Aztlan” states: “Once we are committed to the idea and philosophy of El Plan de Aztlán, we can only conclude that social, economic, cultural, and political independence is the only road to total liberation from oppression, exploitation, and racism.”
But elsewhere in the same document, the plan seems to define political independence as the development of a separate political party, not a separate country.
Estrada says it’s wrong to characterize MEChA by rhetoric taken out of context.
“MEChA has never stood for secession from the United States,” he said. “It stands for involvement and inclusion.”
The group emphasizes the long history of Latino peoples in North America and their ties to ancestors who lived here before the arrival of the Spanish, Estrada said. The point is that the Latino or Chicano people should be proud of who they are and don’t have to justify their presence here.
“We’re not interlopers in our own land,” Estrada said.
Estrada also acknowledges making public statements in support of Ward Churchill, a University of Colorado professor who wrote an essay after the 2001 terror attacks suggesting that World Trade Center tenants brought Islamic vengeance down on their own heads because their business activities benefited from American policies that caused the deaths of thousands of Iraqi children after the Gulf War.
Estrada said he was defending Churchill’s right to express his views — not the views themselves.
“I would not have made the analogy Ward Churchill made, and I would not condone his actual remarks,” Estrada said.
Estrada said he doesn’t think anything in Horowitz’s book will damage his standing at WWU. As he sees it, the damage is to free speech.
“I think he’s trying to chill free speech on campuses,” Estrada said. “That does a disservice to all universities and all faculties.”

Campus Report: Prof takes issue with 'dangerous' label

He has been at Purdue 38 years
By Tanya Browntbrown@journalandcourier.com February 22, 2006

A Purdue University professor says he is disturbed by allegations recently made against him on national television during a segment of the Fox News show Hannity and Colmes.
Conservative author and lecturer David Horowitz criticized political science professor Harry Targ on the show on Feb. 15 while promoting his book, The ProFessors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America.
Targ, who has taught at Purdue University for 38 years, said Horowitz's comments amount to "an attack on the free flow of ideas at the university and on peace studies as a program."
Horowitz stood by his statements on Tuesday, saying Targ is a communist who hopes to indoctrinate his students rather than teaching them a legitimate course of study.
"I don't have off the top of my head the academic guidelines at Purdue," Horowitz said in a telephone interview. "But they should look at those guidelines and see if a course which takes students to a communist, terrorist state -- Cuba -- is ... an academic course about war and peace, or is it designed to convert students to a particular point of view?"
He admitted he never attended a class taught by Targ, but chose most of the professors based on their writings and the curricula of their classes.
He also said peace studies, women's studies and African-American studies, all of which are taught at Purdue, are not legitimate disciplines because they sprang from a political movements.
Provost stands behind Targ
Purdue's provost, Sally Mason, defended Targ and the programs offered at Purdue, saying, "I have all the confidence in the world that Harry is not trying to convert students to communism, and I believe our students are smart enough to evaluate all the sources presented to them.
"If you know Harry, you know he is a thoughtful, caring teacher, who has done his very best to present a class that delivers a variety of viewpoints, including I'm sure his own, in a very reasonable fashion."
While admitting that many of the disciplines Horowitz criticizes developed from political movements, she said that a great amount of scholarship surrounding the programs has been created as each has evolved.
Purdue, she said, does not question professors about their political beliefs, in accordance with federal law.
"I'm not sure what upsets David Horowitz so much. He seems a zealous convert from the radical he was in the '60s to the conservative he is now," Mason said.
"I suspect he's anxious to sell lots of copies of his book."
Students differ on allegations
Targ's students differ on whether or not the professor actually favors communist ideals.
"It's propaganda," said Dwaine Jengelley, 24, a political science graduate student at Purdue. "I don't agree with anything (Horowitz) said. I've only taken one class with professor Targ, but I got no indication that he would be anti-American."
James G. King, 31, who graduated with a political science major and peace studies minor from Purdue last year, said he believes Targ to be a communist.
"He's a revisionist when it comes to the Cold War. He thinks the U.S. was more to blame for it than the Soviet Union," King said of Targ.
"But he admits that it's revisionist and he teaches you the traditional view," King said. "He lets students debate him in class in front of other students. He doesn't silence other opinions and he doesn't ridicule other students for stating their views, so there I take objection to what Horowitz said."
McCarthyism or academic fairness?
Targ said Horowitz's comments serve as a reminder of American history.
"After World War II, social scientists and some mathematicians said we ought to devote some of our skills to a rigorous study of war and peace, because of the threat of nuclear warfare, and that is what peace studies is about," he said. "Basically everything Horowitz said about me was incorrect.
"Some of us older folks remember McCarthyism. What Horowitz wants to do is get state legislatures to pass laws requiring employers to do ideological litmus tests. I think that would have a chilling effect."
Horowitz denies a connection to McCarthyism.
"What my academic bill of rights does is take existing academic freedom provisions, which say professors should not introduce controversial matter which is irrelevant to the subject, and enforce them," Horowitz said.
Targ hopes the debate will remind people to express themselves.
"We do need to be vigilant," he said. "There is a threat of silencing people. The most vitally important aspect of a working democracy is the free exchange of ideas."

Campus Report: 101 dangerous book ideas

David Horowitz is his own worst enemy. Last week, the right-wing author released his most recent book, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America. Horowitz charges the 101 -- including three Penn professors -- with either injecting politics into inherently non-political classes or forcing students to accept one side of the story in classes that are political.
The book is part of Horowitz's quest for academic freedom, for classrooms in which students can study and express multiple viewpoints without fear of report-card retribution. But he has shot himself in the foot once again because the very format of his new book stymies the discussion we should be having.
The 101 Most Dangerous Academics? Please. The idea of such a list is so sensational that it can provoke only sensational responses instead of honest discourse. Look at what happened at Penn. Ann Matter, chairwoman of the Religious Studies Department, basically called the list racist because the only Penn professors included are black.
Law professor Regina Austin -- who is included on the list -- said, "You can't let your enemies set your agenda." Apparently, Austin views Horowitz's book as some sort of salvo in a partisan war of enemies.
Interestingly enough, that's a natural response. A recent Emory University study suggests that people with strongly held political beliefs unconsciously think in partisan terms when confronted with information that runs contrary to their beliefs. Obviously, the 101 professors don't believe they're dangerous, and they've responded in a partisan way.
But if anyone has an enemy in David Horowitz, it's the conservative himself.
He has created a list reminiscent of McCarthy's in form. That likeness will preclude liberals from taking his cause seriously, even if the list contains several deserving nuts (think Ward Churchill).
It's all such a shame, as Horowitz's overall point in the book -- that professors must not indoctrinate -- is both valid and pressing. No student should have to write an essay on a criminology midterm explaining "Why George Bush is a War Criminal," as students had to in a 2003 University of Northern Colorado class.
And no student should have to deal with the pro-life ethics professor at Foothill College in California who compared abortions to first-degree murder and gave Ds and Fs to his pro-choice students in 2004.
Such abuse may not be widespread, but its very existence here and there is troubling enough. Horowitz acknowledges this in the new book, but buries the point beneath unconstructive name-calling and finger-pointing. So let's go beyond these book-selling tactics and begin a dialogue now on the real issue: protecting students and professors from political mistreatment.
In previous writings, Horowitz has urged state governments to prevent such mistreatment by enacting his Academic Bill of Rights. Pennsylvania held hearings last month about the bill, which states that universities should hire professors for their merits, not politics; students should be allowed to disagree with their professors' politics without having their grades lowered; and professors should acknowledge both sides of a debate.
On a simple level, the bill is pretty fair. But upon closer examination of its language, the bill frightens: The state would ensure Penn's "curricula and reading lists in the humanities and social sciences ... reflect the uncertainty and unsettled character of all human knowledge."
Given that some in this state still believe evolution is unsettled, I'd rather Penn control its own curricula. Unfortunately, the bill of rights wouldn't merely cover public schools but would also cover "private universities that present themselves as bound by the canons of academic freedom."
Obviously that includes Penn. And while Horowitz's bill doesn't contain consequences for violators, he has said it should. Imagine a world in which the state withheld Penn's yearly appropriation (of about $45 million) because it disagreed with our reading lists.
Common sense calls that censorship, not academic freedom.
But there is an alternative to government oversight; Ohio professors figured that out last year when their state senate considered adopting the bill of rights. The professors used a local umbrella group, the Inter-University Council, to bring together Ohioan universities and discuss academic freedom among themselves.
The council has since used those discussions to write resolutions affirming students' and professors' rights, and the pacified state senate hasn't seen the need to adopt Horowitz's bill.
All of which demonstrates the power of civil conversation. 'Enemies' or not.Gabriel Oppenheim is a College freshman from Scarsdale, N.Y. Opp-Ed appears on Fridays.

Support from Amazon: In defense of David Horowitz, public intellectual

By John Williamson

The enjoyment of the publication of a new David Horowitz book would not be complete without the attendant sharp-knived warfare conducted on the Amazon review pages. The pattern of the stars tends to resemble an inversion of the standard bell curve: either five stars, or one, with not much in between: Some gave all, but all gave some…thanks to Amazon’s mandatory one-star minimum. While modesty prohibits me from including myself in any such praise, one can scarcely help but notice that the five-star reviews tend to be much better written, more often than not by those who have actually read the book, and are more articulate and lucid. This as opposed to the one-stars which tend to claim – often incoherently – that the book lacks factual support or logical consistency, very often without bothering to support those claims. (For space considerations, I would like to make a few comments here, and I will have more notes on this book posted on my new Anti-Chomsky blog, currently under construction.)

The Anti-Horowitzers tend to dismiss the author as an anti-intellectual fascist crank, which he most certainly is not; but even if he were, you’d have to give him even more credit for his obvious effectiveness. The much-derided Anti-Chomsky Reader was published a year and a half ago, to the same sort of gleeful derision that we see here; published only six months after Professor Chomsky – one of the 101 – was enjoying a renascence of his sordid career, the Reader unleashed a blizzard of written attacks from a number of sources – sources who were blinded not in the slightest by Chomsky’s "brilliance" – to the extent that Chomsky’s reputation can now fairly be described as "but a shadow of (its) former self".

Of course, the publication by a non-academic of The Professors raises the subtextual question: What does it mean to be an intellectual? There are two tests that one might apply in order to answer this question. The first test is to discover how a Chomsky (or a Horowitz) approaches the assertion of truth. To Chomsky, truth is whatever Chomsky says it is. Horowitz would answer: That’s what we’re trying to find out.

The second test has to do with the most important indicator of intellectual integrity: the willingness to correct the record, and to retract. One of the one-star reviewers noted that Horowitz was "forced to retract" certain claims. "Forced?" Forced by what – a reassessment of the facts and his own good conscience? Hallelujah! That makes him a rarity, doesn’t it? In fact, I can attest to that: When the Anti-Chomsky Reader came out, someone did bring to the fore a factual error – a very minor point, but an error nonetheless – and Horowitz ran a very extensive and very public retraction of the error on his website.

Compare that to Chomsky’s propensities, which include, when presented with an error or contradiction of his own: denying that he made the statement, claiming that he was misunderstood, ignoring the charge, or using any of a variety of mechanisms in order to mislead. Interestingly, Chomsky will go after someone who so much as appears to quote him out of context, as he did last year in the case of the Guardian article, even if the miscontextualization was trivial. Chomsky doesn’t retract his own errors, which are plentiful and egregious, but if he ever does, I hope someone will notify me immediately, as I will take it as a sign that the Rapture has arrived and I don’t want to miss my flight

Review: Horowitz: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America

by Henry Mark Holzer

THE ACADEMY: AMERICA'S SIXTH COLUMN - In 1936, Spain was ravaged by a civil war, pitting Franco's “Nationalists” against the international Left's “Republicans.” In a radio speech, Nationalist general Emilio Mola, while speaking of his four armed columns of regulars advancing on Madrid, referred to other supporters already inside the capital whose task was to gnaw at the government from within. They were, Mola said, his “fifth column”-a description that aptly describes the cohort of lawyers and others who today are undermining this country's attempt to protect its citizens from the scourge of terrorism. Until now, this Fifth Column was the most recognizable internal threat to America, thanks to considerable exposure by this author and others, especially on the Internet in Front Page Magazine. Now, with the publication of David Horowitz's new book The Professors, he (with the help of a team of researchers) has made the irrefutable case that there exists in virtually every college and graduate school in the United States what I call a “Sixth Column”-a cohort of America-hating academics who are poisoning the minds of their students by filling them with lies about, and hatred for, western civilization in general and American values in particular.

Lest any of Horowitz's critics or enemies attempt to denigrate the case he makes in The Professors-as did a shallow, partisan TV talking-head recently-suffice to say that the book contains nearly one thousand footnotes and a broad and deep range of sources. Indeed, the book is unimpeachable in its proof of Horowitz's thesis that the academics spotlighted in The Professors are dangerous people-dangerous to the young adults in their charge, and dangerous to the safety of the United States.

In his Introduction to The Professors, Horowitz begins making his case by describing in some detail the now-familiar circus of which Ward Churchill has been ringmaster. Churchill, among other things, is a self-aggrandizing America hater, a fake Indian, a plagiarizing writer, a second-hand artist, and an academic fraud who lied and schemed his way to a professorship and department chairmanship at the University of Colorado-all qualities that apparently endeared him to the far Left, whose patronage Churchill has long enjoyed.

The theme of Churchill's entire academic career, Horowitz writes, is that:
America was like Hitler Germany, a nation dedicated to the extermination of minorities; its capitalistic economic machine starving poor people all over the world all the time. Therefore, the “civilians” who comprised what Churchill referred to as its “technical core”-the inhabitants of the World Trade Center-were little Eichmanns, cogs in a machine that churned out mass murder. (Adolf Eichmann was the Nazi bureaucrat who organized the shipment of Jews to the gas chambers). In Churchill's view, there was no “better way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation” in the workings of America's global economy (and thus global genocide) than incinerating Americans in their place of work.

Worse even than this, much worse in fact, according to Horowitz, is [t]hat such views could earn an individual like Churchill a full professorship at a major state university and the responsibility and power of a department chair . . . .

And to take the point one more step forward and focus on the major theme of The Professors, Horowitz writes that Churchill's success spoke volumes about academic corruption not only in Colorado but in the ethnic studies field. That Churchill was a sought-after speaker by universities across the country was a chilling indictment of an entire system.

That system is far worse than even most well informed Americans can begin to grasp. I spent over twenty years on one law faculty, and taught at another as a visiting professor. I had been generally cognizant of how civility and scholarship eroded in the academy during those two decades and since. None of that knowledge, however, prepared me for the revelations contained in The Professors. As Horowitz has written, When viewed as a whole, the 101 portraits in this volume reveal several disturbing patterns of university life, which are reflected in careers like Ward Churchill's. These include (1) promotion far beyond academic schievement . . . (2) teaching subjects outside one's professional qualifications and expertise for the purpose of political propaganda . . . (3) making racist and ethnically disparaging remarks in public without eliciting reactions by university administrations, so long as those remarks are directed at unprotected groups, e.g., Armenians, whites, Christians, and Jews . . . (4) the overt introduction of political agendas into the classroom and the abandonment of any pretense of academic discipline or scholarly inquiry.

These “disturbing patterns” jump from the page in Chapter 1, which contains the 101 portraits of “the most dangerous academics in America.” There are those who liken the 9/11 terrorists to America's Founding Fathers, fighting for a just cause, and those who accuse the United States of aggressive war against Islam.

There are those who support terrorists like Ayatollah Khomeni, who revere Communists like Fidel Castro, who call for an Intifada in the United States, and who supported Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait There are former street criminals, bomb-makers and throwers, ex-Weathermen, former Black Panthers, Fifth Column lawyers, even a recipient of the Lenin Peace Prize There are members of Islamic Jihad, Islamic fundamentalists, avowed Marxists, and self-proclaimed Leninists. There are those who believe that the United States, indeed the world, is run by a secret conspiracy of Jews. There are anti-Semites, and those who lionize Palestinian killers, and demonize Israel. There are those who view Israelis as Nazis, who consider suicide bombers martyrs, and who blame 9/11 on the United States and/or Israel.

There are those who attack the United States on the rabidly anti-American TV station Al-Jazeera, and those who believe that Cuba and Communist China are political and economic democracies.

There is one who called for a “'million Mogadishus'-the 1993 military ambush in Somalia that killed 18 Americans” and caused Clinton to cut and run, sending a message to Osama bin Laden that America would not stand and fight.

There is one whose final exam asks to “explain why the United States liberation of Iraq is 'criminal'.” There is one who wants an independent Hispanic state in the American Southwest, and another who regards America as a “proto-fascist” state.

There are lecturers, assistant professors, associate professors, full professors, the untenured and tenured, holders of distinguished endowed chairs, and prestigious University Scholars.

And dozens and dozens more in Horowitz's rogues gallery of academics who rant and rave in their classes to captive students, spewing hate-filled, pro-Marxist, anti-American, openly nihilistic radical Islamic propaganda.

As shocking as this is, worse yet is that it's a mere microcosm of the academy in today's United States. Horowitz asks:

How many radical professors are there on American faculties of higher education? According to the federal government, the total number of college and university professors in the United States is 617,000. If we were to take the Harvard case reviewed at the end of this volume as a yardstick [the recent PC-driven troubles, and now resignation, of president Lawrence Summers], and assume a figure of 10 percent per university faculty, and then cut that figure in half to control for the possibility that Harvard may be a relatively radical institution, the total number of such professors at American universities with views similar to the spectrum represented in this volume would still be in the neighborhood of 25,000 - . 30,000. The number of students annually passing through their classrooms would be of the order of a hundred times that, or three million. This is a figure that ought to trouble every educator who is concerned about the quality of higher education and every American who cares about the country's future.

And every parent.

Unbeknownst to many parents who pack their children off to college and write hefty checks that are supposed to purchase education, what they are getting for their money is not only just the opposite, it is even worse: their kids, most probably intellectually and politically tabula rasa as they enter the academy, are being brainwashed into believing that monstrous evil is the good. And they are being taught to hate the most noble nation ever to grace this earth.

For his devastating exposure of the Sixth Column's desecrating inversion of values, and its deadly long range consequences for the United States-a nation said to be “the last, best hope of mankind”-all Americans should be profoundly grateful, once again, to David Horowitz.

Henry Mark Holzer, professor emeritus at Brooklyn Law School, is author most recently of The Keeper of the Flame: The Supreme Court Opinions of Justice Clarence Thomas. The book may be purchased in two weeks through a link at www.henrymarkholzer.com .

Campus Report: Book lists professor among 'dangerous'

Ian Vickers
Posted: 3/2/06
Author David Horowitz claims that a Truman faculty member is "poisoning the minds of today's college students," according to a review of Horowitz's new book posted on Amazon.com.Horowitz included Marc Becker, associate professor of history, in "The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America," which explains his criticisms of various professors and their political stances. Horowitz said he included Becker in the book because of his involvement with Historians Against the War, an organization of historians that opposes U.S. involvement in Iraq. "The professor is taking advantage of students as captive audiences to sell a political agenda," he said.Political opinions do not belong in a classroom setting, he said."I went through 20 years of schooling," he said. "I never heard one professor ... express a political opinion in class ever. I think that's appropriate."Horowitz said Becker himself is not a war expert because he lacks expertise with military science, strategic deployment of troops or strategic issues involved."He's an expert on Latin America," he said. "He's not an expert on Iraq. He has no academic or scholarly background for making judgments on the war." Becker said his involvement in Historians Against the War has little bearing on his classroom activity. "Most of what I do with Historians Against the War has very little to do with what I do in the classroom," he said. "I teach Latin American history, I don't teach Iraqi history."Horowitz said he does not know exactly how Becker came to be included in the book."I have no idea," Horowitz said. "One of my researchers came up with him, and I looked at him and said, 'Yep, this guy will do.'"Horowitz said he employs about 30 writers and researchers. Horowitz said he has not talked to any students of Becker, but he thinks it isn't necessary because Becker makes his views and questions very clear on his Web site."I don't have to be in his class or interview somebody from his class to know that there's something wrong here," Horowitz said.The book includes a plethora of scholars."I looked at the list, and I'm really in the presence of giants," Becker said.Becker said he has not read the full book but has read his profile. Becker said he learned about his inclusion in the book when the national office of the American Association of University Professors notified him through e-mail, he said.Before becoming incorporated into the book, Becker said a more detailed profile of himself was included on Horowitz's Web site, http://www.discoverthenetworks.org. Horowitz removed it, however, once someone pointed out it could be read online for free, Becker said.Becker said he thinks he was included in the book because of his Web site. Much of what is in his profile in "The Professors" has been taken from his site, he said.Becker said he does not focus his lectures on what the book includes. "I haven't had any students complain to me about any of the things that Horowitz implies that I do here," he said.Becker said he thinks Horowitz's arguments are weak."After thinking about it more, my reaction is if that's the best he can come up with on 'dangerous professors,' he has absolutely no argument," he said.Becker said he thinks the book is sloppy work."It's the type of essay I wouldn't find acceptable from a Truman student," he said. "I could've written something much stronger."One of Becker's colleagues, Steven Reschly, associate professor of history, said Becker's profile helps one see where Truman fits into the wider world. "It's impressive that Marc [Becker] is put in a national scale like this," he said. "I think it's great for Truman's visibility."Senior Sarah McDuff, a student in Becker's Latin American Revolutions course, said the way the book is presented on Amazon.com does not seem to fit Becker."Dr. Becker's very open-minded," she said. "He encourages critical thinking and questioning of things." Junior Chris Peterson, another student in Becker's Latin American Revolutions course, said he did not think Becker's inclusion in the book was fair."To include him in saying that these are teachers spewing propaganda and turning our little kids into communists is ... ridiculous," Peterson said. Becker said if certain ideals were important to Horowitz, he would support political discussions."If Horowitz valued freedom, if he valued citizenship, if he valued democracy, if he valued political discourse, he would be encouraging this type of civic engagement and political exchanges even if he disagreed with it," he said.

Professor's Post: Robert Jensen: Right-wing Distortions About Leftist Professors

I’m constantly attacked by people who have no knowledge of - and as far as I can tell, no interest in learning about - how I teach.

By Robert Jensen PalestineChronicle.com

In an “urgent” email last week, right-wing activist David Horowitz hyped his latest book about threats to America’s youth from leftist professors. The ad for “The Professors -- The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America” describes me as: “Texas Journalism Professor Robert Jensen, who rabidly hates the United States, and recently told his students, ‘The United States has lost the war in Iraq and that’s a good thing.’” I’m glad Horowitz got my name right (people often misspell it “Jenson”). But everything else is distortion, and that one sentence teaches much about the reactionary right’s disingenuous rhetorical strategy. First, I’m not rabid, in personal or political style. I’m a sedate, non-descript middle-aged academic who tries to approach political and moral questions rationally. I articulate principles, provide evidence about how those principles are often undermined by powerful institutions, and offer logical conclusions about how citizens should respond. I encourage people to disagree with my principles, contest my evidence, and question my logic -- all appropriate activities in a university where students are being trained to think for themselves, and in a nominally democratic society where citizens should to do the same. Second, I offer such critiques without hate. Sometimes my assessments are harsh, such as in evaluating George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq and concluding the attack was unlawful and, therefore, our president is guilty of crimes against peace and should be prosecuted. Similarly harsh was the judgment that Bill Clinton’s insistence on maintaining the harsh economic embargo on Iraq in the 1990s resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocents and, therefore, Clinton was a moral monster who was unfit to govern. None of this has to do with hating either man, but instead with assessments and judgments we should be making. Third, these critiques are not of the United States, but of specific policies and policymakers. No nation is a monolith with a single set of interests or political positions, and it’s nonsensical to claim that harsh critique constitutes rejection of an entire nation. Why would anyone suggest that I rabidly hate the United States? It’s easier to defame opponents using emotionally charged language than engage on real issues. Accuse them of being irrational and hateful. Ignore the substance of the claims and just sling mud. By even minimal standards of intellectual or political discourse it’s not terribly honorable, but it often works. Beyond these junkyard dog tactics, Horowitz’s email also makes one crucial factual error. I did write that the U.S. losing the Iraq war was a good thing -- not in celebration of death and destruction, of course, but because the defeat temporarily restrains policymakers in their dangerous attempts to extend the U.S. empire. But that was the first sentence of an opinion piece I published in various newspapers in 2004, not a statement to students. The distinction is important. Horowitz and similar critics argue that professors like me inappropriately politicize the classroom, forcing captive student audiences to listen to radical rants. No doubt there are professors who rant -- from the left, right and center; there’s a lot of bad teaching in universities. But I’m constantly attacked by people who have no knowledge of -- and as far as I can tell, no interest in learning about -- how I teach. Because they hear me express strong opinions at political rallies or read my newspaper opinion pieces, they assume I treat my classroom like a pulpit and students as targets for conversion. I teach journalism, and in the course of that teaching I regularly discuss how journalists cover controversial topics; it’s hard to imagine teaching responsibly without doing that. When appropriate, I have talked in class about how journalists cover war -- explaining that many people around the world believe the U.S. invasion of Iraq violated international law, observing that U.S. journalists in the corporate commercial media rarely write about that, and suggesting reasons for the omission. There’s always a politics to teaching; the choices professors make about what readings to assign and how to approach a subject are influenced by their politics -- left, right, or center. But that does not meaning teaching is nothing but politics. No one knows that better than professors who hold views challenging the conventional wisdom, those of us who don’t rabidly hate the United States but do passionately love learning and the promise of an open, independent university. -The author is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and a member of the board of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center. He is the author of "The Heart of Whiteness: Race, Racism, and White Privilege" and "Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity" (both from City Lights Books). Email to: rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu Copyright © 2003 palestinechronicle.com. All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners.

Professor's Post: Horowitz and Me: Thank You, David!

I received a notice from Frank Annunziato congratulating me for making David Horowitz's latest book: "The Professors: the 101 Most Dangerous Academics." Here is the list of academics included in the book. Note that Frederic Jameson and Howard Zinn (two of my personal heroes...the former for film studies, the latter, one of my great former professors at BU), Noam Chomsky, Eric Foner, Bernadine Dohrn, Tom Hayden, Angela Davis, and bell hooks are among some of the more recognizable names....and among them as leftist, pro-gay activist is this obscure little man, michael vocino. People have been calling me for two days, congratulating me.... and for someone like me, to be included among the great names on the Left, well, to have one's academic record distorted and lied about by the omissions of truth by David Horowitz, it's like winning the Nobel. My department chair was among those offering congratulations and another of the many emails I've received from colleagues suggests that I include the book mention by Horowitz under "Awards and Honors" on the University's dossier forms. The infamous list:

The ProfessorsÂ’ Colleges and Universities:

Arcadia University: Warren Haffar

Ball State University: George Wolfe

Baylor University: Marc Ellis

Boston University: Howard Zinn

Brandeis University: Gordon Fellman, Dessima Williams

Brooklyn College: Priya Parmar, Timothy Shortell

Cal State University, Fresno: Sasan Fayazmanesh

California State University, Long Beach: Ron (Maulana) Karenga

City University of New York: Stanley Aronowitz, Bell Hooks, Leonard
Jeffries, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Columbia University: Lisa Anderson, Gil Anidjar, Hamid Dabashi, Nicholas De
Genova, Eric Foner, Todd Gitlin, Manning Marable, Joseph Massad, Victor
Navasky

Cornell University: Matthew Evangelista

De Paul University: Norman Finkelstein, Aminah Beverly McCloud

Duke University: Miriam Cooke, Frederic Jameson

Earlham College: Caroline Higgins

Emory University: Kathleen Cleaver

Foothill College: Leighton Armitage

Georgetown University: David Cole, John Esposito, Yvonne Haddad, Mari
Matsuda

Holy Cross University: Jerry Lembcke

Kent State University: Patrick Coy

Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Noam Chomsky

Metropolitan State College, Denver: Oneida Meranto

Montclair State University: Grover Furr

New York University: Derrick Bell

North Carolina University: Gregory Dawes

Northeastern University: M. Shahid Alam, Elizabeth M. Brumfiel, Bernardine
Dohrn

Occidental College: Tom Hayden

Penn State University: Michael Berube, Sam Richards

Princeton University: Richard Falk

Purdue University: Harry Targ

Rochester Institute of Technology: Thomas Castellano

Rutgers University: H. Bruce Franklin, Michael Warner

Rutgers University, Stony Brook: Amiri Baraka

San Francisco State University: Anatole Anton

Saint Xavier University: Peter Kirstein

Stanford University: Joel Beinin, Paul Ehrlich

State University of New York, Binghamton: Ali al-Mazrui

State University of New York, Buffalo: James Holstun

State University of New York, Stony Brook: Michael Schwartz

Syracuse University: Greg Thomas

Temple University: Melissa Gilbert, Lewis Gordon

Texas A&M University: Joe Feagin

Truman State University: Marc Becker

University of California, Berkely: Hamid Algar, Hatem Bazian, Orville Schell

University of California, Irvine: Mark Le Vine

University of California, Los Angeles: Vinay Lal

University of California, Riverside: Armando Navarro

University of California, Santa Cruz: Bettina Aptheker, Angela Davis

University of Cincinnati: Marvin Berlowitz

University of Colorado, Boulder: Ward Churchill, Alison Jaggar, Emma Perez

University of Dayton: Mark Ensalaco

University of Denver: Dean Saitta

University of Hawaii, Manoa: Haunani-Kay Trask

University of Illinois, Chicago: Bill Ayers

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign: Robert McChesney

University of Kentucky: Ihsan Bagby

University of Michigan: Juan Cole

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor: Gayle Rubin

University of Northern Colorado: Robert Dunkley

University of Oregon, Eugene: John Bellamy Foster


University of Pennsylvania: Regina Austin, Mary Frances Berry, Michael Eric
Dyson

University of Rhode Island: Michael Vocino

University of South Florida: Sami al-Arian

University of Southern California: Laurie Brand

University of Texas, Arlington: Jose Angel Gutierrez

University of Texas, Austin: Dana Cloud, Robert Jensen

University of Washington: David Barash

Villanova University: Rick Eckstein, Suzanne Toton

Western Washington Unviersity: Larry Estrada
[michael vocino]

BOOK REVIEW: ‘The Professors’ Says Ideologues, Racists, Felons, Anti-Semites, Marxists Have Poisoned the Well of American Higher Education

Reviewed By David M. Kinchen
Huntington News Network Book Critic

Hinton, WV (HNN) – You’re a top-flight jazz saxophone instructor in that great academic powerhouse known as Ball State University – the Muncie, Indiana alma mater of David Letterman. Step right up, George Wolfe, it’s 2002 and we’re making you director of BSU’s Center for Peace and Conflict Studies, despite your lack of any academic credentials and your virulent hatred of Israel.

Wolfe is just one of 101 academics – and I use the word in its broadest definition – profiled by David Horowitz, with the help of 30 researchers, in “The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America” (Regnery, $27.95, 450 pages, indexed.).

At the very beginning of the book, former radical turned conservative Horowitz asserts that the 101 toxic academics are just a sample of the ideologues inhabiting the liberal arts and social science departments of colleges and universities in the U.S., from not particularly distinguished state universities like Ball State or the University of Colorado at Boulder all the way up to once prestigious institutions like Columbia, Duke, UCLA, University of California-Berkeley, Northwestern University, Princeton, City University of New York, Brandeis. Horowitz also thanks the non-ideologue professors he studied under at Columbia in the 1950s.

I say “once prestigious” because these institutions have – to a startling extent – replaced education with indoctrination – especially at Columbia, Duke and UC Berkeley, Horowitz and his researchers document in this powerful book. Particularly egregious examples are the so-called Middle East Studies Departments at Columbia, Duke and most other colleges and universities. They’re packed with expatriate Arabs and other Muslims and notably lacking in anyone who wants to co-exist with the only democratic nation in the Middle East – Israel. An outspoken supporter of Israel simply need not apply at these departments.


David Horowitz

Northwestern in Evanston, in my home state of Illinois, boasts (I use the word ironically) Weatherman terrorist Bernadine Dohrn as a tenured law professor. Her husband, Bill Ayers, another blast from the radical 1960s and ‘70s past, teaches early childhood education and hatred of the U.S. at the University of Illinois - Chicago.

Dohrn and Ayers are profiled in “The Professors.” Dohrn, who earned a law degree at the University of Chicago, escaped prison in 1981 for her involvement with crimes committed by the Weatherman organization because of a legal technicality. For those who were not even born then – or for those who’ve forgotten, including the people who hired Dohrn and Ayres – this was an era of violence conducted largely by affluent white kids acting in the name of revolution.

In his preface, Los Angeles-based Horowitz provides his readers with a document from Berkeley that was rescinded in 2003. I wasn’t aware of the document, so it was no surprise that the so-called mainstream media didn’t report its axing. It’s called the “Sproul Clause” and was written for the university’s personnel manual in 1934 by University of California President Robert Gordon Sproul (his name is all over the campus) and is worth quoting at length:

“The function of the 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. Where it becomes necessary, in performing this function of a university, to consider political, social, or sectarian movements, they are dissected and examined, not taught, and the conclusion left, with no tipping of the scales, to the logic of the facts….Essentially the freedom of a university is the freedom of competent persons in the classroom. 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.”

Truer words were never written! To quote Genesis: “There were giants in the earth in those days.” The people who today run the once-great University of California system – the biggest state university in the nation – have a lot to answer for. What replaced this magnificent statement of academic freedom and its concomitant responsibilities was a typically situational ethics “academic freedom is whatever we say it is” one-size-fits-all mission statement.

Speaking of the state that someone once called “too small to be a country and too big to be an insane asylum,” how about Bettina Aptheker and Angela Davis at UC Santa Cruz? Both are tenured professors and both are extreme left-wing ideologues by any standard.

Or UC Irvine in Orange County, home of anti-Israel, anti-Semitic Mark LeVine, a hippie-dippy guitar playing guy who has renounced his Judaism – without being threatened with death as he would be if he were a Muslim doing the same thing. Aptheker, Davis, LeVine are all profiled in this valuable guide of whom to avoid when seeking out professors and universities.

When I mentioned to several friends that I was planning to review Horowitz’s book, I heard cries of horror and statements like “there are no Marxist professors or maybe just a few and you can avoid them.” One friend who works in a professional level, non-teaching capacity at a university in Virginia says that even schools that are considered relatively conservative are packed with ultra-leftists in the liberal arts faculties.

Horowitz says there are more than 600,000 college and university teachers in the U.S. Surely the 101 cited by Horowitz don’t represent all 600,000, do they? In fact, he says they account for about 10 percent of the 600,000 or about 60,000. He reinforced this view in a Feb. 28 telephone interview from his Southern California home. The problem is this 60,000 or so represents tenured faculty, department heads, deans and others responsible for hiring new professors.

That’s why I decided to read and review the book, to signal to parents and high school students what to look for in professors – assuming you won’t end up in a class taught by graduate assistants or teaching assistants. It’s relatively easy to spot the worst of the worst: They wear their ideologies like a sheriff wears a badge on his or her chest. Most tenured professors don’t work all that hard – especially those at “prestigious” universities. One cited by Horowitz has one two-hour class a week – that’s all, folks!

Here are some – admittedly far out – examples of prominent badge-wearing academics profiled in the book:

* Professor Leonard Jeffries, a tenured professor at the City University of New York, who misses no opportunity in the city with the largest percentage of Jews in the nation to display his anti-Semitism. His virulent anti-Semitism led to his dismissal from the post as chairman of the Black Studies Department at the university, with one colleague calling him a “maniac.” He attacked Houston native Diane Ravitch, an accomplished academic and former U.S. cabinet official and a gracious woman whose books I’ve enjoyed – and reviewed – calling her a “Texas Jew…the ultimate, supreme, sophisticated, debonair racist.”

* Professor Greg Thomas, a tenured professor of rhetoric at Syracuse University, who gained national headlines when he invited rapper Kimberly Jones, better known as Lil’ Kim, to speak to his class, which had morphed into a semester-long examination of rap music. When I was an English major in the Ice Age, we studied the canon of literature of all kinds and all nations. At Northern Illinois University I was blessed with outstanding teachers like poet and creative writing teacher Lucien Stryk, English professor Anne Green and Sorbonne-educated French teacher Martha Schreiner, who thought my French accent wasn’t all that bad: She gave me straight A’s for four semesters of college French. Not a politicized, badge-wearing academic in a carload – and all my classes were taught by instructors or professors – none by teaching or graduate assistants.

* Professor Michael Vocino, chief librarian of the University of Rhode Island and professor of film studies at URI, who, according to one student, entered the classroom on the first day, announcing: “My name is Michael Vocino and I like dick.” He wasn’t referring to our current vice president. He has been accused of sexually harassing male students and using the university email system to announce to female faculty members his library’s latest acquisition of pornographic materials. Because he’s gay, he’ll never lose his job.

* Professor Ron Karenga, chair of the Black Studies Department at California State University – Long Beach. He was convicted in 1971 of the false imprisonment and torture of two female members of his radical black organization. He served four years for torturing – with an accomplice – Deborah Jones and Gail Davis, who survived the ordeal. Despite this felony conviction, he subsequently was granted faculty status at San Diego State University and later at Cal State Long Beach. And, yes, he’s the man who invented the holiday Kwanzaa as a black nationalist alternative to Christian, Jewish and Islamic celebrations.

Yes, glad you asked: Ward Churchill, the ersatz Native American who teaches at the University of Colorado-Boulder is in the book. Professor Churchill called the victims of the World Trade Center attacks on Sept. 11, 2001 “little Eichmanns” who deserved what they got. For those who are history challenged, Adolf Eichmann was the Austrian countryman of the other Adolf and was a major architect of the Holocaust.

Where are the administrators while all this is going on? Horowitz caught the wave at just the right time, to use a surfing metaphor: Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers, a liberal and former Clinton Treasury Secretary, has just (Feb. 21, 2006) announced his resignation, effective this June, after five years as president of the nation’s most prestigious university. By all accounts, Larry Summers, 51, is not the most diplomatic guy in the world – he’s not a glad-handing smooth operator and ruffled a lot of leftist feathers during his stay in Cambridge.

Despite his impeccable liberal credentials and outstanding popularity with the students at Harvard, he enraged the ultra-leftists at Harvard by opposing disinvestment in the stocks of companies that do business with Israel. This issue also rages in so-called mainline U.S. protestant churches like the Disciples of Christ, United Methodists, Evangelical Lutherans and Presbyterians. Summers also criticized the work habits of Professor Cornel West, a prominent black faculty member who spent most of his time making a rap record. Summers miffed the supersensitive West so much that West pulled up stakes and moved over to Princeton.

The bottom line as seen by Horowitz – who has the perspective of being a recovering radical himself -- is that these balding, paunchy, over-aged hippies on the faculties of America’s universities aren’t harmless relics from the era of bell bottoms and long hair; they’re legion, they’re on search committees and tenure committees and they preach anti-Semitism, anti-Christian belief and hatred for the nation that provides them with a comfortable living surrounded by nubile young men and women. A pretty good deal for people of limited ability.

I would guess that 90 percent of America’s higher education faculty members are hard-working, decent people who love their specialty and want to take back their English Departments, especially, from the ideologues Horowitz profiles. I think the students are smarter than the professors; they’ve abandoned English, journalism, and social studies majors for less propaganda-driven majors. It’s the 10 percent we have to worry about. I don’t think Horowitz expects a sudden switch to conservative views among the professoriate: he just wants them to follow the precepts of the Sprouse Clause and teach the subject, not indoctrinate young minds.

In his phone conversation with me, Horowitz called my attention to a passage in the introduction – which I had underlined a few weeks ago—quoting leftist Stanley Fish, a distinguished John Milton scholar. Fish had written an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education – a publication read by virtually every academic – urging professors to “Save the World on Your Own Time” – the title of the article.

Echoing the Sproul Clause, Fish wrote: “It is immoral for academics or academic institutions to proclaim moral views.” Here’s the passage from Fish that I had underlined before talking to Horowitz: “Teachers should teach their subjects. They should not teach peace or war or freedom or diversity or uniformity or nationalism or anti-nationalism or any other agenda that might properly be taught by a political leader or a talk-show host.”

Attack: David Horowitz and the Attack on Independent Thought

by Robert W. McChesney

David Horowitz’s new book, "The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America," was published in early February to considerable fanfare encouraged by a tidal wave of promotion from the right-wing echo chamber. This is the same echo chamber that made “swift boat” a household word in September 2004. The book itself is sloppy and unimpressive, an apparent rush job.

The criticism of me, for example, consisted of two out-of-context quotes from articles where I criticize the news media and the Bush Administration. This is presented as prima facie evidence that I am a dreadful teacher who uses the classroom to harass students to adopt my political views, my campus-wide, student-elected teaching award notwithstanding. By the same “logic,” quotations could be taken from many professors in America, and nearly all conservatives, to establish that they propagandize in the classroom. By Horowitz’s evidentiary standards, Harvard’s Stephan Thernstrom, who endorses The Professors on its cover, should be ridden out of academia as a narrow-minded bigot who abuses students who disagree with his pointed views.

In short, the book is clueless about how classroom teaching actually works; it would astound him to learn that many professors with strong political views – of whatever stripe – go to great lengths to provide an open classroom. The people Horowitz vilifies in his book know exactly what it is like to hold unpopular positions – to be attacked as “dangerous” for going against the dominant interests of society -- and we tend to have considerable empathy for those who disagree with our political views in our own classrooms. In fact, that explains why Horowitz’s lengthy and much-publicized campaign to locate conservative students who have been harassed in the classroom by left-wing professors has produced few, if any, credible witnesses. But, as I will argue, this is a ruse, so that lack of evidence means no more to Horowitz than the lack of WMD did to Bush and Cheney as they planned the invasion of Iraq.

The entire premise of the book is flawed. If Horowitz believes, for example, that publicly supported universities have an obligation to have faculties that represent the range of U.S. political opinion, and that it currently tilts too far to the left, he should follow the logic to its obvious resting place. Generals and military officers are far more important to the functioning of a government – and, as history shows in depressingly frequent detail, a much greater threat to democratic governance -- than anthropology professors. In the United States the military is enormous, it is entirely funded by taxpayers, and the officer corps is significantly right-wing Republican. There is hardly a liberal Democrat in the bunch, and I dare say probably not a single soul to the left of the Clinton-Kerry center of the Democracy party. That means tens of millions of Americans have no political allies directing the most powerful military in human history, while the hard right feels like it has died and gone to heaven when it visits the officers’ quarters on Election Day. If Horowitz is going on some sort of rampage about getting political balance in important publicly funded professions, he can only be taken seriously if he starts at the Pentagon. When he has established how to do it there we can proceed to the campuses.

But the point of Horowitz’s book is not to make a coherent principled critique of academia and suggest reforms to solve the problem. Were that the case, Horowitz would be obsessed with the rabidly pro-market bias in most economics and business schools – and more than a few political science departments. In these classes and departments, students who are pro-labor union, critical of so-called “free trade” deals like NAFTA, and in favor of progressive taxation, living wage ordinances, strict environmental regulations and aggressive social spending are made to feel like their positions have little intellectual merit. They are ostracized. Yet Horowitz has no concern for these students, or for their rights. Screw them.

Horowitz’s mission is clear: to attack critical work in the academy, especially critical work that does not restrict itself to the classroom, but sees intellectuals as having a necessary public role. Visible public outreach is A-OK for Milton Friedman, Stephan Thernstrom, the neo-conservative crowd, and denizens of the right, but strictly off-limits for liberals and the left.

For these reasons I would imagine that principled conservatives will run from this book faster than they would run away from a line-up for a voluntary IRS audit. But the book is important and requires a response that goes beyond pointing out its sloppiness and incoherence; we need to put what Horowitz is doing in a broader context. In my view, the best way to make sense of the book and what it represents is to see it as part of the broad attack on the autonomy and integrity of institutions and individuals who conduct independent and critical thought. It is this type of independent and uncorrupted inquiry – work that is not under the thumb of powerful political or commercial interests -- that is mandatory if viable self-government is to succeed. The space for this type of inquiry has to be fought for and preserved, and it is always considered with a certain amount of suspicion by those in power, who prefer minimal public interference with their exercise of power.

Indeed, it is revealing that Horowitz uses the term “dangerous” as a pejorative in his book’s subtitle. Dangerous professors are those with ideas with which Horowitz disagrees. This is a ludicrously opportunistic and undemocratic framing. The entire premise of a viable democratic public sphere is that what some perceive as “dangerous” ideas be protected, even encouraged, and permitted to be thrown into debate. Especially, above all else, in universities.

In our society the two institutions commissioned to provide the substance of a democratic public sphere, as a place for critical inquiry, are the news media and academia.

Hence, to get a better sense of what is happening today with the attack on universities, consider what has happened with U.S. journalism. Back in the early 1970s professional journalism was at its peak. Journalists had relative autonomy from the demands of owners and advertisers and relatively lavish budgets. I do not wish to exaggerate the quality of professional journalism even at its peak; local news media tended to ignore the foibles of powerful local bigshots and all news media relied far too much on official sources, especially in coverage of foreign policy. Indeed much of my career has been spent documenting the limitations of professional journalism, even at its best. But on balance what it provided in the 1960s and 1970s looks awfully good through 2006 eyes.

Since the 1970s the autonomy, resources and critical wiggle room of professional journalism has come under attack on two fronts. First, as media ownership consolidated corporate owners began to think the idea of professional journalism made a lot less sense. After all, corporations aren’t charities, and why should their shareholders bankroll a public service? So newsrooms have faced serious cutbacks in resources for investigative, political and international coverage. In its stead far less expensive and politically trivial celebrity coverage has risen in prominence. Commercial values play an increasingly visible role in what passes for journalism today.

The second front in the war on journalism came from the political right. To the political right, it was mandatory to make journalism more sympathetic to right-wing politics if the right was going to win political power. A very high percentage of right-wing funding went to various means of pushing the news media to the right. The overarching theme was that the media had a strident liberal bias that required journalist to be softer on Republicans and tougher on Democrats if they wished to be fair. The campaign has been a rousing success. One need only look at the weak-kneed press coverage of Bush’s scandals and foibles, and imagine how a President Clinton or Gore or Kerry would have fared if he had done similar deeds, to see the effect.

While these two attacks on journalism were independent of each other for the most part, they had the same effect: reduce the power and autonomy of journalists and make journalism more fearful of antagonizing the political right.

Universities and news media share a certain ideological importance as I have already noted. But as institutions they have quite different traditions. News media have been the province of profit-driven firms for the most part, whereas universities are non-profit, often public, institutions. Yet the attack on universities has followed the same pattern as the attack on journalism. The dominant issue on campuses for the past two decades has been the incessant commercialization of universities, from marketing of classes to corporate funding for research and activities. Increasingly our major universities are linked to commercial institutions and commercial values, which work to undermine, even eliminate, much of the public service ethos of these institutions. Now the distance is further to travel with universities than with media, because they begin as non-profit institutions, but the direction is unmistakable. And the destination is nowhere anyone should want universities to be. It is the great crisis facing universities today, and about this crisis people like David Horowitz have nothing to say.

This brings us to Horowitz’s attack on “dangerous” professors, those faculty like myself who dare to hold political opinions Horowitz disagrees with and which he would like to see banished. This is taken directly from the playbook for the right-wing attack on “liberal” journalists. The point is to intimidate dissident voices, to make them temper their words in their classrooms, and be very careful about what they do when they venture off-campus. Right-wing faculty are free to shout their views from the mountaintop – after all, they are the oppressed minority merely trying to balance the dominant left, much like the blowhards at Fox News – while left-wing faculty are supposed to shut up and go with the flow if they wish to be regarded as legitimate professionals and keep their jobs. As I discussed at the outset, it is a thoroughly unprincipled exercise with a crude political agenda. Combined with the commercial restructuring of universities the goal is to make intellectual life as ineffectual as our journalism has become.

It is a prospect that is unacceptable and must be opposed, in both media and higher education. It is a battle for the soul of our nation, and the future of our polity.

Robert W. McChesney is the co-author, with John Nichols, of Tragedy & Farce: How the American Media Sell Wars, Spin Elections, and Destroy Democracy (New Press). He is the founder of Free Press, www.freepress.net.