Campus Report: Conservative Activist Targets 'Racists,' 'Communists' in Recently Released Book

Venuri Siriwardane

Posted: 3/14/06

At the academic freedom hearings held in January on Main Campus, academic reform activist David Horowitz said during his testimony before a panel of state legislators that current professional standards were "violated every single day, on every campus in this state, especially at Temple."

Horowitz, a conservative author known to be instrumental in introducing academic legislation in several states, recently detailed the violations he alleged at the hearings in a controversial new book titled The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America.

Eliciting strong reactions from Horowitz's opponents, the phrase "Terrorists, racists and communists - you know them as The Professors," is printed on the book's dust jacket. "Facts are facts," Horowitz said in defense of the statement during a recent interview.

Released on Feb. 13, the book criticizes professors at both public and private colleges and universities across the country. Two of these professors are from Temple.

Melissa Gilbert, an associate professor of geography and urban studies, and Lewis Gordon, a professor of philosophy, are both accused of introducing leftist political agendas into the classroom. The charges made in the book drew sharp responses from university administrators and faculty alike.

Gilbert is assailed for favoring "a teaching approach that puts political 'social action at the center of academic projects.'" In an e-mail statement, Gilbert said she prefers not to "engage in a point-by-point argument with the book, in order to not provide the appearance of substance where there is none."

Gordon is accused of structuring Temple's philosophy department "around 'genuinely radical' thinking." He did not respond to a request to comment for this article.

In a letter printed in the March 2 issue of the Temple Times, president David Adamany denounced Horowitz's book, calling it a "black list" reminiscent of Sen. Joseph McCarthy's tactics. He asserted that the faculty's excellent record is its best defense.

Adamany also wrote that he welcomed the visit from the Select Committee of legislators who are investigating academic climates on public campuses across the state, adding that the hearings during winter break reaffirmed the effectiveness of Temple's academic freedom policies.

The Select Committee's rules for the hearings required witnesses not to identify Temple teachers by name unless they were notified 24 hours in advance. "David Horowitz does not play by such rules in his new book, … " Adamany said in the letter.

Horowitz countered Adamany's statements, saying they are absurd. "I am not a committee; I am a writer," he said. "…What he [Adamany] doesn't like is that I show that he's got some people who are unqualified to be professors on his faculty and that he hasn't done anything about it."

Horowitz said much of the evidence against the professors chronicled in the book was gathered through online research. He added that some interviews were also conducted.

He said book sales are currently doing well, estimating that 50,000 copies in hardback will be sold. "I've started a dicussion," Horowitz said. "That's not an easy thing to do. It's a big country."

Other area professors profiled in the book include three from the University of Pennsylvania and two from Pennsylvania State University.

Michael Bérubé, a professor of English literature at Penn State, is described in the book as "a leftist and self-proclaimed 'progressive educator.'" Bérubé, who has debated Horowitz via online blogging, dismissed the book's allegation that he is politically indoctrinating his students as "nonsense, nonsense and more nonsense."

Berube specified several inaccuracies in the book's account of his academic career, saying several quotes from his published work were taken out of context. "I leave most of my political convictions at the door when I go into the classroom," he said. "I'm still waiting to see evidence of these indoctrinations."

The Free Exchange on Campus, a coalition of student, faculty and civil liberty groups, is also challenging the evidence behind the book's accusations. Megan Fitzgerald, director of the Center for Campus Free Speech, an organization that is part of the coalition, said she believes the book is politically motivated. " … It's pretty clear that this is coming from a place where people have an axe to grind," Fitzgerald said. "It's not attacking professors for the way that they teach. It's more attacking them for their personal views."

Horowitz denied the existence of a partisan agenda and said he didn't include any radically conservative professors in the book because he could not find any. "I say very clearly in my book that it's not about liberal bias," he said. "It's about an intellectual corruption in the university."

Although the majority of students who were interviewed oppose the book's allegations, senior law and business major Logan Fisher said he enjoyed reading it.

Fisher is the chairman of Temple College Republicans and vice president of Students for Academic Freedom, an organization founded by Horowitz.

Fisher testified at the hearings, saying that he and several others had felt alienated in the classroom by professors because of their political beliefs. " … At the hearing they [legislators] kept saying, well 'tell us how, give us examples,' Fisher said in an interview. "

They got what they asked for, they wanted to know specific instances and that's what [Horowitz] produced in his book."

Other students, such as senior journalism major Kim Teplitzsky and senior political science major Kristen Asher, strongly condemned the book. "

The book is a scare tactic," said Teplitsky, who is working with The Free Exchange on Campus against Horowitz's campaign. "But I don't think it's going to work because I think we're smarter than that as a society."

After thumbing through the book and scanning the contents of its pages, Asher, a former student of Gordon's, said " … I think Horowitz twists information and lies about professors."

Venuri Siriwardane can be reached at venuri.siriwardane@temple.edu.

Attack: Ellen Schrecker's McCarthyite Crusade

By Jacob LaksinFrontPageMagazine.com
February 16, 2006

Among the odder charges advanced by bien pensant defenders of the political homogeneity in American higher education is the claim that advocates of greater intellectual pluralism are really revivalists of Cold-War era "McCarthyism." Its leading academic exponent is Ellen Schrecker, a professor of history at Yeshiva University. But Schrecker goes further. In the current issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, she asserts that the campaign to promote academic freedom--and particularly the Academic Bill of Rights--is actually "worse than McCarthyism."
According to Schrecker, this campaign intends "to impose outside political controls over core educational functions like personnel decisions, curricula, and teaching methods," and warns that this "not only endangers the faculty autonomy that traditionally protects academic freedom, but it also threatens the integrity of American higher education." McCarthyism, she is convinced, is on the march.
Schrecker’s indictment is fantasy. "Political controls" have not been proposed nor is there a credible threat to "faculty autonomy" And far from assailing the integrity of university faculties, the campaign for academic freedom aspires to restore it, not only by reviving the unfashionable ideal of a marketplace of ideas, but also by curbing the abuses of professor-activists who see in-class political speechifying, rather than education, as their primary mission.
Why Schrecker would tendentiously equate such efforts with McCarthyism is no mystery, however. A self-described radical, Schrecker has long labored to keep the American university as a preserve of "progressive" values. That this has meant the near-total exclusion of perspectives at variance with regnant left-wing orthodoxy is a price that Schrecker, along with many of her likeminded colleagues, was all too happy to pay. Now she is determined to depict a formidable challenge to the institutional status quo as the second coming of what she regards as the single greatest injustice in American history: the political persecution of American Communists during the Cold War.
Yet Schrecker’s account of what she broadly terms "McCarthyism" has never been convincing. Her academic work is less a serious survey of the political tensions of the Cold War than an accretion of apologetics for the American Communist Party, liberally salted with denunciations of anti-Communists, who Schrecker indiscriminately labels McCarthyites. Yet what makes Senator McCarthy a symbol of evil for Schrecker is not his demagogic excess but his opposition to Communism, a point she forthrightly puts forth in her 1986 book No Ivory Tower : McCarthyism and the Universities, in which she writes that "what made McCarthy a McCarthyite was not his bluster but his anti-Communist mission…"
Full of passionate intensity against Communism’s foes--Schrecker’s 1994 work The Age of McCarthyism is devoted principally to raging against what she repeatedly calls the "anti-Communist crusade"--Schrecker has been conspicuously more reluctant to grapple with the crimes committed in the name of Communism at the behest of its Soviet sponsors. Executed spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, far from traitors to their country, were possessed of a "non-traditional patriotism," according to Schrecker, and had a "grotesquely disproportionate punishment inflicted on them." The same applies to other Communist spies, who "were internationalists whose political allegiances transcended national borders." About the worst Schrecker can bring herself to say about the Rosenbergs and Alger Hiss--with respect to whose confirmed guilt she affects a dismissive agnosticism--is that they "reinforced the image of Communists as Russian spies."
By contrast, Schrecker is unsparing in her attacks on anti-Communists. Reading The Age of McCarthyism one might conclude that the ultimate tragedy of the Cold War was the defeat of the American Communist Party as a viable political force. "With their demise," Schrecker laments, "the nation lost the institutional network that had created a public space where serious alternatives to the status quo could be presented." Indeed, as she sees it, it was anti-Communism, whether espoused by political opportunists like McCarthy or anti-Communist liberals like Sidney Hook, that was "undermining" American democracy, not the Communist true-believers who eagerly betrayed their country to serve the interests of their Soviet impresarios. In keeping with that analysis, Schrecker regards the Cold War as the "most extensive episode of political repression in American history."
But while the Cold War is over, Schrecker has not revised her thesis that political repression remains a mainstay of American academic life. Professors are still being tyrannized for their politics, Schrecker insists in her latest Chronicle of Higher Education article, only today the targets of the witch-hunt are not Communists but academics who are perceived to be "radical, one-sided, and hostile to Israel and the United States." Schrecker’s proof: the 2003 dismissal of Sami Al-Arian from the University of Southern Florida.
Schrecker could have hardly picked a more telling illustration. Al-Arian, after all, is the onetime North American head of the terrorist group Palestinian Islamic Jihad; he has explicitly called for the deaths of Americans and Israelis; he raised funds for terrorist organizations; and he attempted to secure a terrorist leader, Palestinian Islamic Jihad commander Ramadan Abdullah Shallah, a spot on USF’s faculty. He is, in short, a living refutation of Schrecker’s claim that the critics of American universities are inventing biases and spotting extremism where none exist.
Such contradictions, however, have not prevented Schrecker from portraying al-Arian as a victim of political persecution, not unlike the Communist idealists who populate her books. Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2002, Schrecker contended that al-Arian’s firing confirmed that "universities are going back to political correctness…It’s really political repression."
Significantly, Schrecker harbors no illusions about al-Arian’s terrorist past. She nonetheless maintains that, in dismissing him, the USF administration had committed the more execrable crime--a crime that, according to Schrecker, evidenced a larger campaign to crush political dissent on American university campuses. "Whatever the extent of al-Arian’s involvement with Palestinian jihadists, his travails, though they may ultimately lead to an American Association of University Professors censure of USF, could have been predicted," she wrote in the fall 2005 edition of the National Education Association ’s Higher Education Journal. In the same issue, Schrecker wrote disapprovingly of the Bush administration’s prohibition of funding to persons "who commit, threaten to commit or support terrorism" and complained that "[t]he government’s heightened security concerns are affecting research."
More recently, Schrecker has sought to avoid the subject of al-Arian’s terrorist activities. In her latest brief on behalf al-Arian, in the current issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education, Schrecker disingenuously describes him as a "Palestinian nationalist" and reprises her claim that his dismissal from USF was "a classic violation of academic freedom: It involved his off-campus political activities." Schrecker notably declines to elaborate on the nature of those "political activities." Rather, and with characteristic mendacity, Schrecker likens al-Arian to the academics whose supposedly benign "communist sympathies" made them the targets of unforgiving McCarthyites in the 1950s. Sami al-Arian, it would seem, is the latest prophet of the "non-traditional patriotism" Schrecker so admires.
To be sure, Schrecker’s vigorous defense of academic freedom has its limits. While Schrecker has long championed the free speech rights of academics whose views roughly accord with her own professed radical politics, she has not seen it fit to extend the courtesy to other professors. As a member of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), formerly as the editor of its magazine, Academe, and presently as a member of the AAUP National Council, Schrecker stayed silent when DePaul University dispensed altogether with due-process proceedings and suspended adjunct professor Thomas Klocek for engaging a Palestinian student group in an argument. Schrecker and the AAUP similarly declined to take an interest in the case of University Colorado professor and evangelical Christian Phil Mitchell, who was fired for assigning a book on 19th century Protestantism.
Nor could Schrecker muster any sympathy for the troubles of Kansas State University professor Ron Johnson, who was fired from his post as an advisor to the school’s newspaper after administrators capitulated to campus protestors upset at the paper’s supposed inattention to "diversity issues." And while Schrecker and the AAUP ignored several prominent instances of misconduct by radical faculty at the City University of New York, the AAUP did not hesitate to pass a resolution expressing "grave concern" at the state of academic freedom when sociology professor Timothy Shortell voluntarily withdrew his bid to become the department chairman after his attack on religious believers, whom he derided as "moral retards," prompted public outrage.
In these cases and many others besides, Schrecker’s oft-voiced commitment to academic freedom was nowhere in evidence. That’s not particularly surprising. If her career is any indication, Schrecker’s notion of academic freedom mainly entails excusing the extremism of academic radicals while condemning their critics as "right-wing" censors bent on suppressing political dissent. A cynic might call that McCarthyism.