Reply to Critic: Powerline-My Two Cents Worth

I read with interest the discussion yesterday among Paul, Scott and David Horowitz of David's new book, The Professors. The discussion was triggered by Paul's observation that he didn't find the book very persuasive. The presence of 100 extreme cases on the faculties of America's many colleges and universities says little, Paul argued, about whether liberal bias infiltrates the classroom in a more systematic and important way. A few cranks here and there, Paul suggested, are no big deal, and while liberalism may indeed be pervasive on America's campuses, David's book doesn't prove it.

Here are two thoughts, which are not informed by having yet read The Professors. First, liberal bias in academia is closely analogous to liberal bias in the media. It is possible to demonstrate that an overwhelming majority of professors on certain faculties are registered Democrats, or to show that the overwhelming majority of political contributions by certain faculties go to Democrats (or worse). This has, indeed, been done, by David and others, much as it has been demonstrated that, for example, the Washington press corps consists almosts entirely of Democrats.

But most professors, like reporters, will argue that their political affiliations are irrelevant because they don't influence their classroom teaching. That is something that, by its nature, cannot be measured objectively. Information on whether political bias seeps into the classroom must necessarily be anecdotal; the closest we can come to systematic proof is by compiling and tabulating the anecdotes.

There is at least one way, however, to get at the question of how representative these 100 professors are of academia in general (recognizing, once again, that they were chosen precisely because they are among the worst cases). That is by observing how well these extreme leftists fare in the academic world. You could write a book about the 100 most crooked lawyers in America, and there would be some appalling stories of greed and dishonesty. But such a book would also be filled with unhappy endings: disbarment and incarceration. From this you could infer that, while there are some crooked lawyers, that crookedness is not tolerated by, or typical of, the profession as a whole.

It seems to me that to the extent crackpot professors are hired, are granted tenure, are invited to speak at conferences and student events, publish their articles in leading professional journals, are given academic awards and honors, and so on, it is fair to infer that they are not anomalies, but rather that the academic world in general is a congenial pond in which they swim comfortably.

My second observation is that David is a polemicist--one of the very few true, effective polemicists on the right. There are different forms of evidence and different styles of argument. Exposing the worst abuses of one's opponents is an effective and time-honored technique. Most people are neither as rigorously logical nor as well-informed about academia as Paul. My guess is that The Professors will tell a lot of people many things they didn't already know about the academic world and, by stimulating outrage, motivate them to want to do something about it. If that's right, the book will be a valuable contribution.

I'll let you know if I change my mind after reading it!

Reply to Critic: Powerline-The Professors: Horowitz's look

I invited my friend David Horowitz to comment on the exchange between Paul and me here today regarding David's new book. David writes:

I appreciate Power Line's second thoughts about my book The Professors, including Scott Johnson's defense of my text and Paul Mirengoff's defense of my integrity and honesty. The attack on my credibility by academic Stalinists and union thugs is the least appetizing aspect of the campaign against my book, and is an expression of their inability to deal with its arguments.

Mirengoff's claim if I can simplify is that the sample of professors chosen in the book is too eccentric and small to reflect the reality on college campuses. Since there are 617,000 professors and more than six thousand campuses, any readable collective profile is bound to be small by comparison. So the question is really not how small the sample is but whether the task can be accomplished by the collective profile method. I have actually devoted an entire chapter of my book to this question. It's called "The Representative Nature of the Professors Profiled In This Volume."

If I may, I would like to quote the first paragraph of this chapter:

The modern university is a decentralized unit, consisting of quasi-independent faculties that create their own intellectual standards. Thus the hard sciences have remained relatively free from ideological intrusions; the traditional humanities and social science fields – history, philosophy, literature -- much less so; and the various inter-disciplinary "Studies" departments generally not at all. The university is also by nature and structure a conformist institution regardless of who controls it. It is hierarchical in organization and the apprenticeship required for admission to its ascending levels of privilege is long in duration and closely observed. The committees that manage its hiring and promotion processes are collegial and secretive, and its ruling establishment is accountable only to itself. Because the performance on which advancement is based is ultimately the production of ideas, the pressure to share common assumptions and common attitudes is far greater in universities than in other social institutions, whether governmental or corporate. In these circumstances university and departmental elites create faculties in their own image. Consequently, far from being eccentric or peripheral figures the professors in this volume are integral to the intellectual life of the institutions they inhabit and thus to the course of higher education in America.

I cannot go over the entire argument, but I encourage those interested to read my book and decide for themselves. The reason that Eve Sedgwick is profiled in my book is not that she is a lesbian but that she is an ideologue who insists on imposing her ideological agendas on the students in her classrooms. By her own account she is not just emphasing lesbian and gay aspects of literature, she is using the texts to illustrate her ideological view of the world. Ideologues are not suited to the academic calling and its particular professional discipline, which is to be skeptical, open-minded, and reticent about closing the book on controversial issues. Hers is not an acceptable academic discourse according to the existing principles of academic freedom which universities like hers purport to uphold. It is indoctrination not education, and it violates the academic standards that have been around for nearly 100 years and that political activists in the university are working to subvert.

I'm grateful to be able to add David's response to our discussion today

Reply to Critic: Powerline Blog

Yesterday Paul referred to The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, David Horowitz's new book on the contemporary university. Paul cited the critical review of David's book in the current issue of the Dartmouth Review and found the review plausible based on a partial reading of the book. I think the review is immature, inaccurate and uncomprehending.

At one point, the reviewer refers to Horowitz's "clever lies, typical of his work." How precisely are clever lies typical of Horowitz's work? The reviewer doesn't bother to explain. He offers an alleged example of a "lie," but the reviewer doesn't show either the falsity involved or how the falsity is typical of Horowitz's work. I think the fault here obviously lies with the reviewer rather than Horowitiz's book, and that the book represents an important contribution. I want to add a few words about it in the interest of doing it justice.

The contemporary university is a subject about which Horowitz knows a lot; it is the institutional base of the radical left with which Horowitz has intimately familiar. He has spent a lifetime involved with the left, first as a protagonist in the movement and then as a hated antagonist to it. His campaign for intellectual diversity and exposure of academic abuses on campus strikes the left at its base. David has done a lot to earn the left's hatred; The Professors is a product of his efforts to crack the leftist monolith in the contemporary university.

When William F. Buckley founded National Review in 1955 at the age of 29, he lit the fire that sparked the modern conservative movement. Buckley had already achieved notoriety -- if not celebrity -- with the publication of God and Man at Yale in 1951. He attacked the undergraduate education on offer at Yale for its hostility to Christianity and its adulation of collectivism and sought to dispel the indifference of Yale alumni to their supervisory responsibility, calling on them to grasp the nettle of university governance.

Yale was of course only the example that laid closest to Buckley's hand. Buckley could undoubtedly could have written the same book about any of America's most prestigious universities. In the ensuing decades the conservative movement as a whole has experienced successes that must exceed even Buckley's visionary imagination. Yet the university remains untouched by Buckley's call to action. In fact, it understates matters considerably to say that circumstances on campus have not improved since 1951. Horowitz's book walks in Buckley's footsteps and provides important evidence on this point.

University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill and Harvard president Lawrence Summers have recently served to illustrate the absurd conditions that prevail in the university. Churchill is the tenured professor of "ethnic studies" producing bogus scholarship and anti-American vitriol in roughly equal measure. He appears to have qualified for his post on the basis of a claim to Indian lineage that turns out to have been of the cigar-store variety. In the meantime, as Horowitz observes, Churchill has become a campus celebrity who speaks before enthusiastic student audiences.

Is the case of Ward Churchill an isolated outrage? It is Horowitz's contention in The Professors that the case of Ward Churchill is representative of a powerful campus minority rather than an aberration:

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 achievement; (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 reaction by university administrators, as long as those remarks are directed at unprotected groups, e.g., Armenians, whites, Christians, and Jews; (4) the overt introduction of political agendas in to the classroom and the abandonment of any pretense of academic discipline or scholarly inquiry.

(Names of professors illustrating each of the four points in the book and accompanying footnotes omitted.) For his 101 professors, Horowitz draws from colleges and universities across the country, from elite private colleges and universities such as Columbia (Columbia contributes nine of the 101 professors in Horowitz's rogues' gallery) and Duke to large public universities such as the campuses in the University of California system.

The University of California, Santa Cruz, for example, is the perch of Angela Davis (professor of the history of consciousness) and Bettina Aptheker (professor of women's studies). This week the Santa Cruz campus was coincidentally in the news for what Professor Aptheker refers to in another context as "revolutionary praxis" -- the antiwar left's new "counter recruitment" tactics. (Yesterday's Washington Times condemned the episode as "mob rule.")

The professors examined in Horowitz's book may not be the most "dangerous" academics in America -- the subtitle of Horowitz's book was supplied by the publisher -- but they are certainly among the most radical. Horowitz focuses on their politics and how they use their perches to advance their politics. And a few of the professors profiled in the book are indeed dangerous. Example: former University of South Florida Professsor Sami Al-Arian. The AP reports that Al-Arian has reached an agreement with prosecutors to plead guilty to a lesser charge of the remaining terrorism charges against him and be deported.

The Professors isn't the last word on the degradation of the contemporary university, but it shines a light that illuminates the phenomenon. Please check it out if you have any interest in the subject.

JOHN adds: Coincidentally, it was reported this morning that Sami al-Arian has agreed to plead guilty to conspiracy and to be deported, in exchange for dismissal of whatever other charges are still pending against him. If correct, this sounds like a reasonable deal for the prosecutors, given al-Arian's acquittal last December.
Posted by Scott at 06:08 AM

Reply to Critic: Powerline- The Professors: A third look

A disagreement has broken out within the Power Line ranks as a result of my comment on a review critical of David Horowitz's book, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America. Here's the review. Here's my post. Here's Scott's response.

Let me begin by making a few points that I should have included in my original post. First, the tone of the review is far too harsh towards Horowitz's book. As I said, I admire Horowitz and (as I should have said) I reject any claim that he is dishonest. Second, although I did not read Horowitz's profiles of all 101 professors (kudos to anyone who does), I read enough of them (probably about a third) to participate in the discussion, I hope.

I stand by my view that focusing on these 101 professors results in a critique of academia that misses the most important point. The first problem is that Horowitz's sample of profs is a mish-mash that doesn't readily lend itself to common treatment. There are nut-jobs with phony credentials, nut-jobs with decent credentials, radicals with past criminal records, radicals without criminal records who have expressed sympathy for criminals, and radicals with good credentials and no apparent criminal connection who hold extreme but not (in my view) nutty political views. Then there are scholars like Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (full disclosure, a childhood friend of our family) who are political in the classroom only in the sense that, for example, it can be considered political to read old literature with an emphasis on things gay and lesbian.

This diversity gives rise to many distinctions. For example, universities clearly shouldn't employ nuts with phony credentials. But I see no problem with an English department that includes "queer theorists" as long as students who don't find this type of literary criticism illuminating can pursue an English major without suffering through much from this "school."

But let's assume that all 101 of Horowitz's professors are deplorable and let's further assume that there are another 1,001 who are just as bad. The effect on students would still be minimal because students could easily avoid these professors.

Horowitz addresses this issue in the passage quoted by Scott:

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 achievement; (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 reaction by university administrators, as long as those remarks are directed at unprotected groups, e.g., Armenians, whites, Christians, and Jews; (4) the overt introduction of political agendas in to the classroom and the abandonment of any pretense of academic discipline or scholarly inquiry.

The problem is that discussing 101 professors cannot persuasively demonstrate a pattern of any of these four phenomena. And even a much larger sample (say a sample that produced an average of one professor per college/university) would not be very persuasive as to most of the four. If all colleges thought that they should have one nutty leftist or 1960s period piece on campus, I wouldn't applaud, but neither would I see much danger. As a parent who (like Scott) is about to send a kid to college, I'm more concerned about liberal bias dominating whole departments than I am about a few spectacularly disgusting professors.

Thus, while Horowitz's book should generate justifiable outrage against the universities that employ some of the 101 professors, it does not effectively make a more telling potential case against academia -- that left-wing bias heavily influences the way the humanities are taught at many if not most elite universities to the detriment of the student body as a whole.

Reply to Critic: Reply to Mark LeVine

by David Horowitz


Mark LeVine's rambling one-sided and deceptive account of our radio debate (http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/23963.html) is yet another lame attempt to discredit my work without paying the slightest attention to what I have actually written. LeVine's book (the one I didn't read) was published in August 2005 after I submitted my manuscript. It wouldn't have mattered anyway. Here is the first paragraph from the LeVine profile:

"Mark LeVine is a radical activist and guitar-playing Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine. His academic website explains: 'My scholarship, activism and music are all tied to my commitment to struggles for social justice in the United States and around the world.' He is an advisory board member to Occupation Watch, an organization set up by radicals to incite American soldiers in Iraq to request 'conscientious objector' status and leave their posts. Professor LeVine is an academic known for his steady stream of anti-American and anti-Israel diatribes that depict Washington and Jerusalem as aggressors in a war against Islam."

In other words, by his own account LeVine is an activist whose scholarship is subordinated to his political agendas. That is the reason he is in my book, and unless he wants to repudiate his own declaration I see no reason to revise anything I said about him in my text.

LeVine's comments on Cornel West reflect his unscholarly approach to intellectual discussions. Has Cornel West produced scholarly papers in the last decade or more that have appeared in peer-reviewed journals? LeVine says he has but offers not one citation to prove it. Why would Larry Summers ask West to devote himself to producing a scholarly work if his resume was not deficient? Why does LeVine think he can dismiss what I have written without referring to the actual text?

I hope the next professor to step up to the plate with an attack on my book will do his homework first.