Replies to Critics: He's Got A Little List

He’s Got A Little List


The publication of The Professors in February 2006 had the effect of flushing out the ideological opponents of the academic freedom campaign. It both frightened and enraged them to be profiled collectively so that the world outside the academy could view their agendas and assess them. This paralleled their reaction to websites like Campus Watch, whose purpose was to document the radical views of Middle Eastern Studies professors and was denounced as a “blacklist” by the academic left. The issue Campus Watch raised was not whether these professors should be blacklisted – no one was calling for that -- but whether they should be accountable for holding such views, given that they had driven peers who might be critical from university faculties, which was quite different.

Of course, the text I had written that aroused such passions was not without its provocations, in particular the notion its subtitle floated that the professors profiled were the “most dangerous” in America. Even though this was not a claim actually made in the text of my book, I am willing to accept responsibility for a provocation appended to the title page and cover by its publisher. When the subtitle was proposed, I had already completed the text under the title of The Professors – a collective profile of political activists masquerading as scholars. In selecting individuals for inclusion, the idea that they were “dangerous” had played no part in my choices.

There was an element of truth in the description, however. The academics were all ideologues of the left, which meant that their growing influence in the academy would undoubtedly influence, in a negative way, America’s war on terror. The claim that these professors might be the “most dangerous,” on the other hand, was hard to justify. Because my intention was not necessarily to show extremes, but to reveal a pattern of professorial behavior that affected a larger group than I had included, there were obscure academics such as Marc Becker of Truman State, and moderate leftists like Michael Berube and Todd Gitlin. The inclusion of these three (and a few others) under the rubric “most dangerous” was sure to raise eyebrows, and legitimately so. This was of particular concern to me because I knew that my critics would jump on the word “dangerous” to avoid engagement with the issues raised in the book and to charge that it was a “witch-hunt.”

I opposed the addition. “If we give it this subtitle” I told the publisher, “academics will regard it as a witch-hunt and no one in the academy will read it.” My publisher’s reply was this: “Who in the academy is going to read it anyway? They’ll hate this book no matter what you call it and only ten of them will buy it, whatever its title. We need to market it to a large audience, and this subtitle will do the trick, and that’s what we’re going to do.”
Journalists don’t write the headlines of their articles, and most book authors don’t have authority over their book-titles. The campaign to taint me with the McCarthy brush was already extensive. If two hundred tenured radicals at Harvard could censure its liberal president and force him to resign, why would I think they could not discredit me, while discouraging academics generally from reading my book? Both the Academic Bill of Rights and I had been denounced by the major professional associations in formal statements.[1] As both a writer and an academic reformer I had little support from the media which academics respected as authorities – public radio and television, the New York Times, the Chronicle of Higher Education, InsiderHighered.com or publications like them. This was entirely a reflection of my political views, since books the books I had written before becoming a conservative were regularly and respectfully reviewed in the same venues. For example, the last book of mine reviewed by the New York Review of Books was published in 1985, just prior to my becoming a conservative. These facts disposed me to be somewhat fatalistic. If my political opponents could twist the details of the Academic Bill of Rights and turn them into their opposite, why should I think they would have any difficulty doing the same with this book, whatever its title?
So I went along with the marketing strategy, which seemed to work. In its first six months of publication, The Professors sold forty thousand copies and stimulated a national dialogue on the issues it was attempting to raise. But the strategy also facilitated the predictable attacks. Its opponents were able to draw on the image of professors as absent-minded and ineffectual to feign incredulity at its thesis: What me dangerous?[2] Of course the main attack was the ludicrous idea that the book was a “witch-hunt.”

“He’s Got A Little List” was the not-so-subtle tag appended to a piece in The Nation. It was written by a longtime editor, Richard Lingeman, who was not fazed by the fact that I didn’t have a list, or that the professors included were not profiled because they belonged to a suspect party. Of course, The Nation is not a congressional committee or a state with a firing squad. It is only a durable propaganda mill whose efforts to promote socialism in America and abroad have everywhere failed. Consequently my prospects are far better than Stalin’s victims, whom The Nation editors cheered to their graves during the Nineteen Thirties.

Lingeman’s indictment began with the article’s opening sentence, which linked me to yet another stigmatizing ghost: “David Horowitz, the right-wing Savonarola, takes an unholy interest in higher education.”

Savanarola: an Italian Dominican priest, and briefly ruler of Florence, who was known for…anti-Renaissance preaching, book burning, and destruction of art.[3]

In other words, by asking professors to adhere to standards of professional conduct, I am guilty not only of McCarthyism, but of emulating a fanatic priest of the Inquisition.

The book-burning charge was especially ripe, considering what the Academic Bill of Rights actually said: “Curricula and reading lists in the humanities and social sciences should reflect the uncertainty and unsettled character of all human knowledge in these areas by providing students with dissenting sources and viewpoints where appropriate.” This isn’t Savonarola; it’s anti-Savanarola. But projection seems to be the standard reflex of radicals like Lingemann. The only Savanarolas suppressing books on campus were the faculty ideologues I was merely asking to include alternative texts on their reading lists.

On the other hand, temptation was not lacking. Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, is the most widely used American history text in universities today. It is certainly disgraceful that so crude an intellect as Zinn, who still thinks America started the Korean War and who has rallied to every Communist cause from Stalin to Castro, should be an icon of professional historians. (Among his many accolades, Zinn was recently honored by the Organization of American Historians.) Or that he should be cited as a classroom authority in universities and high schools across the country. But the fact remains that I have never asked – let alone demanded – that a single book by Zinn (or his many academic clones) be removed from a single curriculum or from any classroom in which a text on American history was appropriate.

I did object to the use of the Zinn book in a single case, noted earlier, which had nothing to do with his discredited ideas. My objection was in regard to the Social Work Program at Kansas State University where Zinn’s book was the principal assigned text in a class on “Social Welfare.”[4] But the reason I objected was that Zinn’s text was irrelevant to the subject matter. I objected because it was being taught by a faculty member not trained in history or in any field that would provide the necessary expertise to evaluate its claims. In the course of the academic freedom campaign, I have asked only that students be made aware of sources representing more than one point of view, that faculty be trained in the subjects they teach, and that their teaching conform to the standards of the profession. These are traditionally consensus positions. But one would never know this from reading Leninist critics, like Lingeman, for whom crushing a political opponent counts for everything and facts for nothing.

The false comparison to Savanarola is then followed with this claim: “[Horowitz’s] avowed aim is to muzzle lefty professors….” The word “avowed,” it should be noted, has an unambiguous meaning: sworn; declared; stated. In fact, I have never made a statement to the effect that “lefty professors” should be muzzled – sworn or otherwise. Quite the opposite. I have defended the rights of leftwing academics, including Ward Churchill and Leonard Jeffries to hold their extreme points of view without fear of reprisal. Thus the only “muzzling” that faculty leftists can be said to fear from me is my insistence on professional conduct in the classroom – an end to the use of their classes for political indoctrination, for irrelevant political speech-making and for recruitment to radical organizations and causes.

But these facts are no problem for Lingeman, who is busily stalking a heretic: “In February Horowitz tossed another log on the auto-da-fé, publishing a book called The Professors….”

Auto-da-fe – n. 1. Public announcement of the sentences imposed by the Inquisition; 2. The public execution of those sentences by secular authorities, especially by burning at the stake.

In short, not only am I accused of burning books – but my own book is said to be a log on the fire that burns people, which makes me a really bad person, worthy perhaps of being immolated myself.

Having tossed his own log on the fire, Lingeman revisits the McCarthy list to have some fun (it does not seem to occur to him that McCarthy’s witch-hunt was not fun for its victims): “A couple of our contributors reported (rather boastfully, we thought) they’d made the list. That caused us to wonder who else among our regulars made the cut. So we put intern Dean Powers on the case, and after combing the data bank he came up with twenty-seven Nation names in the Horowitz book… What a star-studded roster of names we could boast of, from Aptheker (Bettina) to Zinn (Howard).”

Well, this depends on one’s conception of stardom. Here, for example, is what I wrote about Nation writer and University of California professor Bettina Aptheker, a lifelong member of the Communist Party and its totalitarian splinters:

Although a fulltime professor of feminist studies and history at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Aptheker does not have a single work of reputable scholarship to her name. Most of her books, including Intimate Politics: Autobiography As Witness and The Morning Breaks: The Trial of Angela Davis, and If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance (co-authored with Angela Davis) are frankly political. As for Aptheker’s ostensibly scholarly effort, Woman’s Legacy: Essays on Race, Sex, and Class in American History (1982), this amounts to little more than a review of Aptheker’s politics.

Aptheker, in other words, is a political ideologue with no scholarly contribution to her credit. If this is an association Lingeman and the Nation are proud of, it does not say much for them.

Lingeman cannot resist amplifying the charge of McCarthyism with the ritual claim that the witch-hunter plays loose with the facts: “We thought about suggesting to our advertising people that they take out a series of ads bragging, ‘The Nation—America’s Most Dangerous Magazine, says David Horowitz.’ But we had second thoughts. First, he never actually said that. And second, we would be basing the claim on the word of a writer we’ve always regarded as a man of questionable accuracy.”

Horowitz-fact checker! Coming from a man whose disregard for accuracy has been on reckless display, such an accusation seems imprudent at best. Coming from a magazine that described Stalin’s victims as guilty, declared there were no secret police in postwar Communist Vietnam, and published an editorial a week after 9/11 saying, “The [American] flag stands for jingoism and vengeance and war,” one could probably expect anything else.

Fact: The Nation has not always regarded me as “man of questionable accuracy,” – and how could it, since I used to write for it. (How quickly we forget.) The Nation did once target my credibility in the past, but its motivation then as now was clearly political, while its regard for the evidence was equally shabby. Six years ago, Nation writer Scott Sherman took aim at errors he claimed I had made in one of my books. Sherman’s comments occurred in the course of a 6,000-word Nation cover feature, titled “David Horowitz’s Long March,” which was devoted to my life and work. Considering Lingeman’s charge that I had “an accuracy problem,” it is perhaps worth noting that these were the only comments Sherman made about the veracity of my work, although he mentioned many texts that I had written. Not surprisingly, the text he singled out was one the left had found most outrageous and politically incorrect: Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes:

The book is littered with inaccuracies large and small. Writing about the annual Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, Horowitz says he saw Nation columnist Christopher Hitchens, who was “showing his parents around the event.” (Hitchens’s parents are deceased.)[5]

Again, it is worth nothing that while Sherman dropped a fairly expansive charge, (“littered with inaccuracies”) he Sherman managed to actually identify only two, the second of which I will get to in a moment. This was the first -- that I had misidentified an elderly couple accompanying Christopher Hitchens at a Los Angeles Times Book Fair. In preparing a reply to Lingeman, I emailed Christopher to ask him about the episode, and received this answer:
March 30, 2006

dear david,

i can’t believe that this has come up again. i thought i had nailed it ages ago, and that [Nation writer scott] sherman understood.

it’s been my custom for years to call [my wife] carol’s parents by paternal and maternal names, since that is the way i feel about them, and since i have no living parents of my own, and since that is also how they (especially my father-in-law) refer to me. i can distinctly remember introducing you to them in that manner at the LA Times event.

please feel free to show this to anyone.

as always
Christopher
In other words: Christopher Hitchens had personally informed The Nation six years earlier that Scott Sherman had made an error—not me. (Or to be technically accurate, my error was innocent and out of my control.) The book I had written, Hating Whitey, was completely accurate in recounting what Christopher had told me at the time. Yet, six years later, Lingeman and The Nation were repeating the charge they knew to be false, and using the falsehood to claim that I was a writer “of questionable accuracy.” Unfortunately this casual disregard for evidence and reputation, when dealing with opponents, is not unusual in the regions of the left.
Sherman’s second, charge (the large one apparently) is this:
More troubling is the way Horowitz wields statistics. “In 1994,” he writes, “there were twenty thousand rapes of white women by black men, but only one hundred rapes of black women by white men” – a statistic he lifted from Dinesh D’Souza’s book The End of Racism. D’Souza's assertion, however, is based on a gross misreading of Justice Department figures.”
By Sherman’s own account this not even an error for which I am culpable in the first instance. Perhaps I should have checked the D’Sousa statistic – and would have had it been an important element of an argument I was making. In fact it was merely one of half a dozen similar examples of black on white crimes I was using to refute the absurd claim of academic radical bell hooks that there were “few reported incidents of black rage against racism leading us to target white folks.”[6] This is the grand total of inaccuracies which two Nation writers were able to locate in my work. That’s a record I can live with. Of course, leftists misreading this chapter will accuse me of employing the same tactics I criticize in Lingeman – using guilt by association to link him with Stalin and other purveyors of slander. The difference is this: the views I attribute to Lingeman and The Nation, that establish those links, are not made up.
[1] Including the American Historical Association, the Modern Language Association, the American Anthropological Association, the American Philosophical Association, the American Library Association and of course the American Association of University Professors.
[2] For samples, see the articles on, and responses of, professors Caroline Higgins and David Barash posted at http://www.dangerousprofessors.com/
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girolamo_Savonarola
[4] See chapter two, above.
[5] Scott Sherman, “David Horowitz’s Long March,” The Nation, June 15, 2000
[6] David Horowitz, Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes, 2000 p. 41

Replies to Critics: Willful Misunderstandings

Willful Misunderstandings

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

Reply to Critic: Attack of An Academic Zero

Michael Vocino is an academic profiled in The Professors who exemplifies both the problems of the academy the books addresses and the tactics used by tenured leftists in their attempts to discredit it. Vocino is a full Professor of Media and Film Studies, and simultaneously of Political Science, at the University of Rhode Island. He was asked to respond to the book by the editor of Academe, which is a newsletter published by the Illinois Association of University Professors.[1] Vocino wrote: “What Horowitz has said about me that is correct is that I am an out and proud queer who wants to see the U.S. economy based on Marxist principles and an end to that shameless imperialist war in Iraq. Everything else David Horowitz has said about me is a not so creative mix of fiction, lies, and distortions. He is a man without ethics, morality, and is the Master of the Big Lie.”

Horowitz is Hitler. Vocino probably has similar feelings about President Bush. Not surprisingly, Vocino’s views are not entirely stable. When The Professors was first released, Vocino was in a more playful mood, posting a mash note on his website titled, “Horowitz and Me: Thank You, David!” Vocino explained: “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…it’s like winning the Nobel. My department chair was among those offering congratulations and another of the many e-mails I’ve received from colleagues suggests that I include the book mention by Horowitz under ‘Awards and Honors’ on the University’s dossier forms.”

In between these flights of sauciness, Vocino referred to his profile in the book as tantamount to having “one’s academic record distorted and lied about by the omissions of truth.” In several subsequent outbursts posted on his blog which he artfully located at “Vocino69.blogspot.com,” the venting continued. In his reply to Academe, he charged that I had “lied, misrepresented, and distorted [his] classroom activities, [his] academic record, and [his] professional standing at the University of Rhode Island.”
The classroom activity to which Vocino referred was his sexual harassment of male students in his class: “David Horowitz’s first charges against me were that I am a homosexual who pushes for gay rights, sexually harasses students for doing so, and that I treat Christian students unfairly….” In fact, I didn’t accuse Vocino of being a homosexual or supporting gay rights. (How can one accuse a person of something he trumpets so loudly, even in inappropriate settings?) I did point out that, according to one of his students, Vocino opened his first day of class in “political theory” by poking his head in the door and announcing: “My name is Michael Vocino and I like dick!”

Vocino has never challenged this claim. Considering the slanders he accuses me of publishing, readers may wonder why Vocino has never threatened a libel suit or demanded a formal retraction of my comments on the harassment incident. After all, to lie about a man’s professional credentials in a way that discredits him, and to accuse him falsely of sexual harassment (not to mention religious bigotry), would seem to invite legal measures. Vocino is not a public figure and consequently the threshold for a libel suit is significantly lower for him than for those in the public eye. In short, Vocino does not have to suffer the slanders of carloads of character assassins, as I do, without the availability of legal remedies. Yet he has sought no such help; no attorney’s letter has been sent; nor has any protest been lodged with Frontpagemagzine.com (which printed the student’s story) demanding a retraction. Nor has he contacted the publisher of my book.

And why is that? A litigation remedy is available only in the event that the statements made about him are false. As it happens, they are true. This is why in a half dozen attacks on me posted on Vocino69, he has failed to specify one actual sentence or phrase from what I have written that is not true.

According to Vocino, I maintain that he “treat[s] Christian students unfairly.” But I don’t actually make this claim (just as I don’t “accuse” him of being gay). I have simply cited the account written by one of his students, Nathaniel Nelson, that Vocino asked him in front of his class, “Nathaniel, Why do Christians hate fags?” Vocino has never denied making this statement. Nor could he, since the statement was witnessed by his class. I leave it to the reader to judge whether this is unfair treatment of a Christian student.

Vocino warns readers: “Remember we are talking about a man who made up a department at Wellesley College and then attacked it because it was ‘too liberal’ at the beginning of his career as a right-wing operative.” Vocino’s source for this claim is Michael Berube, another professor profiled in my book and a member of the National Council of the American Association of University Professors. It is false.

To begin with, I have never accused an individual or institution of being “too liberal.” Anyone familiar with my work would know that I deplore the usage of the term “liberal,” because it functions as a fig leaf behind which frenzied leftists like Vocino often hide their radical agendas. I regard myself as “liberal” in the pristine sense of the word, which is why I am promoting an Academic Bill of Rights that supports intellectual diversity and inclusion. People like Vocino, who deny the existence of the problem are not liberals. They are leftists who are comfortable with the exclusion of conservatives from university faculties and are happy with the failure of administrators to enforce academic standards.

Vocino’s claim that I invented an academic department in order to attack it actually repeats – and embellishes -- a charge made in the Chronicle of Higher Education fourteen years ago, which was dredged up Berube for his blog. The charge referred to an item in the magazine Heterodoxy, which Peter Collier and I published in the 1990s. The one-hundred word Heterodoxy squib had claimed that the Women’s Studies Department at Wellesley sent e-mails to students who were planning to major in Modern European History, accusing them of “perpetuating the ‘dominant white male’ attitudes and behaviors that have been oppressing women for generations.”

Contrary to Vocino, the Wellesley Women’s Studies Department did (and does) exist. It was not invented so that Heterodoxy could attack it. The error the squib made was in claiming that there was a Modern European History major that students were planning to take (and who knows, this may have been just a confusion about names). Considering that the Heterodoxy squib was written at the height of the obsession with “Eurocentrism,” such an e-mail was entirely plausible. The story was reported to Heterodoxy by a student at Wellesley.

Whatever the truth of the claim, I myself had nothing to it. The reference appeared in a regular column written by Heterodoxy’s editor, Peter Collier, and was not reviewed by me before it was published. All these facts were made clear before Vocino’s post in a reader’s comment on Berube’s website correcting the false charge that Berube had made.[2] This has not prevented Vocino and Berube from continuing to make as much as they can of the fallacious story, despite the fact that it has been refuted. So there are really no excuses for either.

Berube retrieved this trivial episode about Wellesley from a book he had written a dozen years before, called Public Access. In it, he described Peter Collier and me, and our magazine Heterodoxy this way: “Combining the right’s financial clout with the aging Hitler Youth hi-jinx of Peter Collier and David Horowitz, Heterodoxy ….” Perhaps that was where Vocino picked up the idea that I was Hitler reincarnate. I mention this only as a way of providing insight into the state of academic discourse in some university quarters.

Professor Vocino’s main complaint focuses on the claim in The Professors that he lacks academic credentials to qualify him for the rank of full professor with tenure or to teach courses in politics and political theory: “Now Horowitz moves to my credentials and as he has done with a number of the ‘101 Most Dangerous,’ he charges that we are not qualified to teach those subjects we have been assigned by the University to teach… As an academic professional my record stands for itself in that rigorous review system and I have consistently been promoted and reached the apex of the professorship with a promotion last July to Full Professor.”

The fact that Vocino has been promoted to a full professorship, despite his lack of credentials, merely confirms the charges made in The Professors against a system that is deeply corrupt. Here are the specific facts I presented, which Vocino does not challenge: “Currently in his fifties, Vocino is still merely a Ph.D. candidate in his chosen field of ‘Cultural Studies.’ An enthusiast of the off-color cable series South Park, Vocino has made this cartoon show the subject of his uncompleted dissertation, which at this point is entitled: ‘They’ve Killed Kenny! Popular Culture, Public Ethics and the Televisual.’ Professor Vocino’s scholarly work is most notable for its absence. Aside from a short book on ethics for public administrators (1996), Professor Vocino has practically no original work to his name. Most of Professor Vocino’s publications are simply descriptive bibliographies of journals and newspapers already available in libraries – i.e., they are lists. His work in Film Studies consists of a 1998 conference paper on the film The Titanic. With his glaring paucity of both graduate training and independent scholarly achievement, Professor Vocino does not even qualify for the position of an assistant professor, let alone associate professor with tenure rank, let alone a full professor. That has not prevented Professor Vocino from posturing as an expert in all the many fields he teaches – which run the astounding gamut from ‘Film Theory’ and ‘Film History,’ to ‘Political Ideologies,’ to ‘Political Philosophy: Plato to Machiavelli,’ to ‘The American Presidency,’ to ‘Contemporary Italian Politics.’”

Vocino’s response to this damning summary of his academic resume is the only element of his attack on my book that contains a scintilla of candor. In his rejoinder, he doesn’t claim that these facts are false. There is a reason for this restraint. Previously, in an example of academic dishonesty that usually ends on the pages of Insidehighered.com, he did claim, on his official university website, that he had a Ph.D. When my staff checked with the university and reported that he didn’t, he was forced to remove the claim.[3] Since he has been warned against repeating such claims, all Vocino can muster in his present defense is that he has “three degrees, a certificate in graduate studies” and that he spent three months in a Ph.D. seminar in film studies. He also claims he has a life membership in Phi Beta Kappa, which means he did well as an undergraduate.

It happens that I also have a Phi Beta Kappa membership, which I haven’t thought to publicize in the 47 years since I acquired it; I also spent three months in a Ph.D. seminar when I was a graduate student; and I have two degrees. So what? Would this qualify me for a professorship, lifetime tenure, and academic authority in a classroom devoted to “Political Philosophy: From Plato to Machiavelli?” Obviously not. Vocino does not claim to have written a single scholarly article that is about political theory and not a single academic article about anything that would qualify him to teach a course in “Political Ideologies,” “The American Presidency,” or “Contemporary Italian Politics,” all of which he does. Academically speaking, Vocino is a librarian, his main graduate degree being an M.A. in Library Science.

But in Professor Vocino’s universe my refusal to regard his Phi Beta Kappa B.A., and M.A. in Library Science, and a three month graduate seminar in film as the equivalent of a Ph.D., or to regard an expertise in library lists and bibliographies as a qualification to teach political theory, or to hold a full professorship in the field, amounts to “misrepresentation.” Who is kidding whom?

This is the abysmal state of academic standards and academic discourse at the University of Rhode Island and -- since Vocino could not have achieved his appointment without twelve recommendations from outside experts in his academic field, in the university system at large.
[1] I have created my own website to deal with these attacks at www.dangerousprofessors.com
[2] http://www.michaelberube.com/index.php/weblog/comments/853
[3] For an example of the kind of trouble an academic can get into for lying about his career on an official university website, see Insidehighered.com for May 12, 2006. But even after Vocino’s lying on his website became known at the University of Rhode Island, he was still promoted to the top tier of full professors.