Professor Post: Re-educating Comrade Horowitz

Tuesday, March 21, 2006

David Horowitz, author of "The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America," makes misleading statements about me in his interview with Bill Steigerwald ("Invasion of the mind snatchers" Q&A, March 18 and TribLIVE.com). I'd like to reply.

Horowitz says that I "think Stalin was a democrat." That's what the best evidence and research, including my own, demonstrate ("Stalin and the Struggle for Democratic Reform"). Horowitz disagrees? Where is his evidence?

He says I think "the collapse of the Soviet Union was a moral catastrophe," but omits my reason for thinking so: It led to a catastrophic plunge in the standard of living for most of its people.
He says that I have "managed to get a course ... in which he can teach his ridiculous opinions." This is a lie, and Horowitz knows it. His researcher read all my course Web pages and homework assignments, and knows that I do not even mention the Soviet Union in any of them.

In my courses I teach not "opinions," but what the best research demonstrates. Scholarship, research, evidence, logic -- this is the only way to approximate the truth.
If he were honest, he would have said: "Professor Furr disagrees with me, David Horowitz!" To which my answer would be: "Sure I do! So what?"

Grover FurrMontclair, N.J.
The writer is an English professor at Montclair State University

Reply to Critic: Den of Thieves

By David Horowitz
FrontPageMagazine.com

March 24, 2006As I have proceeded with the tedious and unrewarding project of replying to the critical reviews of professors profiled in the pages of my book, I find myself wondering whether there has ever been a cohort of intellectuals so socially privileged and occupationally secure and so utterly dishonest. Why not respond, for example, to a portrait you don’t like by showing in the conduct of your critique that the image in the book does not reflect you at all? Why not manifest the disposition of a scholar, for example, when you are accused of being a political shill? Why not show regard for the evidence when you are called to task for making it up? Why not display respect for the intellectual and philosophical differences of others when you are demanding the same for yourself?

Columbia professor Manning Marable’s dishonesty begins with the self-aggrandizing title of his response to my book: "The Most Dangerous Black Professor in America."

Who said he was? Not I. Certainly not in my book, which profiles several black professors more prominent than Marable, whose name in any case would be a cypher to most. This is something Marable himself acknowledges further on in his text, where he prefers to associate himself with the group I have profiled rather than standing out from it. But just as the attempt to crown himself "the most dangerous black professor in America" is a bid for unwarranted distinction, so this is a gambit to share in the glory of more famous (or notorious) others.

My university (Columbia), boasts the star-struck Marable, has nine of the most dangerous professors included in Horowitz’s book. Better yet: "Several of the ‘dangerous’ intellectuals are editorial board members of a journal I edit at Columbia." I wish I’d known that when I wrote my book.

Someone less self-enamored might hesitate before embracing (as Marable immediately does) the company of:

*a convicted kidnapper and torturer of women, Professor Maulana Karenga;
*an embittered faculty racist, Derrick Bell (whom he describes as a "legendary legal theorist");
*an unrepentant Sixties gangster now on the staff of Emory Law, Kathleen Cleaver;
a world class bloviator Michael Eric Dyson, whose upper division seminar in "Great Religious Thinkers" reserves an entire semester to the religious prose of gansta rapper, gang rapist, and ill-fated street thug Tupac Shakur;

*Marxist political hack and "University Professor" Angela Davis, who is a member of the same Central Committee of the same Communist Party as Marable himself; and
*last but not least, the Jew-hating sometime poet laureate of New Jersey, Professor Amiri Baraka – all profiled in my book.

To Manning Marable, these academic knaves are a veritable "Who’s Who of America’s most prominent public intellectuals and university scholars." Unfortunately, he’s a little more right than wrong about that, which is the central point of my book.

The Professors is a collective portrait of intellectual corruption on a scale bigger than the Enron scandal. But Marable is too self-absorbed, too busy comparing himself to an authentic legend, civil rights hero A. Philip Randolph, to notice the cognitive dissonance: "Randolph immediately came to mind when I learned recently that I was listed among ‘The 101 Most Dangerous Professors [sic]’ in America’s colleges and universities." And why would that be? Because A. Philip Randolph was once described by President Wilson in a less decent age as "The Most Dangerous Negro in America." But it is only Marable who calls himself that now.

In any case, Randolph was called dangerous because he was a civil rights activist, not because he was an academic charlatan. A fine distinction no doubt for someone like Marable, but a distinction nonetheless. The academics profiled in my book are dangerous not because they are "subversives," a word Marable encases in quotes as though it were actually mine. The word "subversive" is never used even once by me in my 112,000 word text. On the other hand, why should this stop Marable when the word is available to create useful associations with anti-Communist "witch-hunts"? And what better way to win an argument, than to stage a debate with oneself?

The fact that Manning Marable is a political hack does not make him dangerous in my book. The fact that there are 60,000 political hacks just like him busily turning our academic classrooms into ideological recruitment programs does.

The novelist Mary McCarthy once said of Lillian Hellman that everything she wrote was a lie, "including the ‘ands’ and the ‘the’s’." Marable is at least as proficient. He writes about me: "Horowitz crashed the headlines several years ago when he circulated the provocative advertisement denouncing black American reparations for slavery and Jim Crow segregation as ‘racist.’" An accurate statement of what I wrote would read: Horowitz published an argument describing slavery reparations 137 years after the fact paid to individuals who were never slaves by individuals who were never slave owners as racist. My argument was about reparations for slavery, not segregation.

Marable writes: "[Horowitz’s] latest political maneuver is the demand for an ‘Academic Bill of Rights,’ calling for state legislatures to restrict academic freedom on campuses." An accurate version would read: "Horowitz has called on state legislatures to pass resolutions supporting long-established academic freedom principles (established by the American Association of University Professors, among others) that universities no longer have the will to enforce." Just so we are straight on these matters.

Getting things straight is not so easy when you are a tenured professor. "Horowitz’s objective is to discredit, isolate and stigmatize prominent scholars of the left by eliminating them from universities entirely." But how do you eliminate scholars of the Left by writing an Academic Bill of Rights that says (in its very first principle no less): "No faculty shall be hired or fired or denied promotion or tenure on the basis of his or her political or religious beliefs"? I am ready to wager that not even a Columbia professor can explain that one.

Having misrepresented everything I have written, Marable now complains that I have misrepresented him – specifically his radical indictment of American society. "Nowhere in my own writing," he responds "can one find the claim that I ‘[maintain] that the American criminal justice system is irredeemably racist.’" Really? Marable's claim that American society is "organized around structural racism" certainly suggests that removing the racism would require more than reform. This becomes an inevitable conclusion when Marable explains that a racial solution "must involve…the deconstruction of the legitimacy of white racial identity, and the uncovering and examination of massive crimes against humanity that have been routinely sanctioned and carried out by corporate and state power." Massive crimes against humanity are routine in America? And "carried out by state power"? That certainly sounds like an indictment of the criminal justice system. The legitimacy of the white race must be deconstructed to achieve racial equality. Try substituting black for white in that sentence and see what you come up with. Perhaps Marable is working with a different dictionary definition of "racist" than the rest of us.

I gave fair warning at the outset that this was a tedious exercise, and I’m not going to bore readers by continuing this deconstruction of Marable’s inept attempt to provide a coherent response to what I have written about him any longer.

People ask me why Columbia University is a school with more professors than any other university in my book. As I’ve observed many times, my book is not comprehensive; it is indicative. The 101 professors profiled in it are the tip of an iceberg I estimate to be 500 times that number. So a few extra professors from the Columbia faculty means nothing at all. But it does mean something to me, since Columbia is my alma mater, and I attended it in what looks now like the golden age of the modern research university.

In those halcyon days, Columbia’s halls were graced by Moses Hadas and Mark Van Doren, F.W. Dupee and Meyer Schapiro, and their like. In one generation, Manning Marable, Eric Foner, the late Edward Said, Hamid Dabashi, and their comrades have turned this paragon of academic virtues and civilized conversations into an intellectual pigsty. I’m mad about that. And that’s why Professor Marable is accompanied by so many Columbia colleagues in this book. Not because he has especially earned it.

ABOR: Free Exchange on Campus Coalition Aims to Silence Dialogue on Academic Freedom

“Free Exchange on Campus” Coalition Aims to Silence Dialogue on Academic Freedom

A radical coalition sponsored by the teacher unions and other left-wing groups and calling itself “Free Exchange on Campus” has launched a campaign of lies and distortions to oppose the Academic Bill of Rights and the Academic Freedom Movement. These are the same special interest organizations who have been attacking the Academic Bill of Rights for the past three years using the same misrepresentations and blatant falsehoods that we have exposed to countless times.

The FAQ on their website merely repeats the same tired and previously refuted accusations. We are therefore answering this latest version of the same by referring interested parties to our previous responses.

For explanations of why the Academic Bill of Rights is not a partisan campaign, why it does not restrict free speech, and how it is actually designed to promote the free exchange of ideas, see David Horowitz’s response to the AAUP.

For a rebuttal to the claim that the ABOR requires professors to “represent all views in their teaching” please see numerous letters in our Replies to Critics section.

For a rebuttal to the claim that David Horowitz’s book The Professors constitutes an “enemies list” see our press release responding to these falsehoods.

And David Horowitz’s Article, “press release.

Review: Notes of a Rebel Professor

The Harvard Salient
20 March 2006

A Salient faculty adviser offers his reflections on David Horowitz'snewest work, and his own experience in the radical academy.
By Prof. James R. Russell,
Faculty Adviser

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