The Professors

A Tale of Two Reports

2006-12-10T12:10:00.000-08:00

The following links below are to 1) the draft report of the select committee on academic freedom and to 2) the final report. The original report drafted under the supervision of Representative Gibson Armstrong, sponsor of the authorizing legislation (HR 177) for the Pennsylvania Select Committee on Academic Freedom in Higher Education of the Pennsylvania House. The Committee held four sets of hearings between September 2005 and June 2006 at locations throughout the state. It differs from the final report in several crucial respects. The final report was the product of an eleventh hour coup by the Democratic minority on the committee and two Republicans. In the final report, the entire “Summary of Testimony” – in other words the actual report of what transpired – was deleted. This made possible the insertion of a new “finding” to the effect that abuses of students’ academic freedom in Pennsylvania were “rare.” This was duly reported by the press as the central finding of the Committee. But the deleted “Summary of Testimony” (preserved in the draft) explained exactly why claims of such abuses were rare: Prior to the Pennsylvania hearings, students had no rights that would allow them to complain about such abuses and there was no grievance machinery available to them to air complaints about violations of their academic freedom. The recommendations in the final Committee report were also watered down. Every reference to the need to create “student-specific” rights, for example, was removed. This was an attempt to protect university administrators from embarrassment. But it did not prevent them from recognizing that a serious gap in university regulations did exist, which Temple and Penn State proceeded to rectify. The new student-specific academic freedom policies adopted by Temple and Penn State are contained in the Appendix to this report, and are included in the Appendix to the official report as well.

1) Draft Report

2) Final Report

Article: Two Horowitz protesters arrested

2006-11-09T16:17:00.000-08:00

Media Credit: MPD
Grace Mitchell was arrested Wedensday night on suspicion of resisting law enforcement

Media Credit: MPD
Ball State University junior Cassandra Reed was arrested on suspicion of resisting law enforcement and three counts of battery of a police officer.

Prank pizza call, 50-foot projection, attempted pie-throwing greet speaker at Ball State
From Staff Reports

From: Ball State Daily News on Line

UPDATE: NewsLink Indiana reports that both Cassandra Reed and Grace Mitchell have been released on bond.

Look for updates at DNOnline and in tomorrow's Daily News. See more coverage on NewsWatch at 9 p.m., on CardinalVision 57 and Muncie Comcast channel 61.

Conservative activist David Horowitz got a 50-foot "not welcome" sign, 15 cheese pizzas and nearly a cream pie in the face before speaking at Ball State University about political agendas of professors Wednesday night.

Two women were arrested by university police near the Teachers College in connection with the pie-throwing incident, but the identity of the pizza pranksters remains a mystery.

Sgt. John Foster said one woman, Ball State junior Cassandra Reed, ran at Horowitz with a cream pie in her hand. Director of Public Safety Gene Burton stood between the two, and he and other officers were hit with the pie, Foster said."Gene saw it coming and got in the middle," he said.The police pursued Reed and Grace Mitchell, Columbia City, who was with Reed at the time of the attack, Foster said.

Reed was arrested on suspicion of resisting law enforcement and three counts of battery of a police officer, and Mitchell was arrested on suspicion of resisting law enforcement, Delaware County Jail officials said. Reed remained in jail on $17,500 bail, but Mitchell was released Wednesday night on a $2,500 bond, officials said.

Horowitz, whose speech was sponsored by the College Republicans, Young America's Foundation and Student Government, said he hoped the people involved in the pie incident would be punished.

Horowitz received a similar welcome during stops at other Indiana colleges. During a speech at Butler University in 2005, he was struck in the face with a pie. A few days later while speaking at Purdue, a streaker interrupted his speech.

Horowitz has a history with Ball State. In 2006, he wrote "The ProFessors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America" about how universities teach students what, not how, to think. He criticized George Wolfe, professor of music and coordinator of outreach programs for the Center for Peace and Conflict Studies, claiming he had no qualifications to teach peace studies.

SGA President Asher Lisec said the organization was not aware Horowitz was a controversial speaker when it decided to co-sponsor him and did not think he would be speaking across party lines. However, she said she supports activities that encourage students to be more politically active and aware.

"Political conversation is something that is lacking at the university level," she said. "I'm happy people are taking an interest in politics, but I don't think it should have been taken to the level it was taken to."

To protest Horowitz's speech, students projected a sign saying "Horowitz not Welcome" on the south side of Teachers College. In addition, someone placed a fake order for 15 pizzas and had them sent under Horowitz's name to the site of the speech.B

en Heighway, assistant manager of the Pizza Hut on Wheeling Ave., said an order for about $230 worth of pizzas and breadsticks was placed around 4 p.m. or 5 p.m. to be delivered to Horowitz at Teachers College at 7 p.m. All the food had to be thrown away.

"I went with the driver because we had a lot of food and when we got there a lady was like we can't come in," he said. "A teacher came out and asked if we needed help, but soon another girl came out and said we needed to leave because I guess other stuff was happening."

Despite the problems, Horowitz's speech began about five minutes behind schedule.

"You can't get a good education if teachers are only telling you half of the truth," Horowitz told the audience of more than 100 people. "If you're getting an instruction that excludes other points of view you won't come out smarter."

When Horowitz attended college, he said his professors graded assignments based on how he made and assembled arguments. Now, universities are less academic and scholarly, but more political, he said.

"You don't go to a doctor expecting to get a speech about the war in Iraq and you shouldn't get one from your teachers," he said.

During the speech, some audience members yelled at Horowitz that he was only controversial because he was a liar.

Horowitz said he did not lie, and such accusations were simply misinformed character attacks.

He also said feminism was a leftist ideal and Ball State's Women's Studies program taught only one side of the issue.

Betsy Mills, SGA president pro-tempore, told Horowitz that she had been taught in her women's studies classes to ask why things happen and look at both sides of the issue. Horowitz replied by saying feminism is not equality, and Mills was not receiving information on both sides.

When he talked about Wolfe, Horowitz said a professor who teaches saxophone does not have the qualifications to teach peace studies. For the same reason, he said it was also unethical for Wolfe to recruit students for the Center for Peace and Conflict Studies.

While Wolfe did not attend the event, he said he did not condone the mistreatment Horowitz faced on campus Wednesday. The provocative acts, which he said were probably designed to intimidate Horowitz, actually sent a bad message.

"Horowitz has put himself in a situation where he speaks about highly politically charged issues and uses language that's offensive and raises people's emotions," Wolfe said in a phone interview after the event. "When people act on these negative emotions and feelings in a bad way they strengthen his position which is counter-productive to what they intended to do."

Article: OUR VIEW: Protesting protocol

2006-11-09T15:39:00.000-08:00

AT ISSUE: Intelligent discussion, debate would have greater effect than food
Ball State Daily News

David Horowitz is no stranger to flying pies.

Wednesday night, the controversial speaker was also subject to another type of pie - the delivery pizza pie variety.

Regardless of humor, the plethora of pies were not appropriate or effective methods of protesting Horowitz's presence on campus.

It's a common occurrence for people to protest against Horowitz wherever he speaks. In terms of maturity and legality, some methods are simply more appropriate than others.

A fake phone order for 15 cheese pizzas was called in to the Wheeling Avenue Pizza Hut under Horowitz's name. When the food arrived, event organizers were confronted with $230 worth of food and confused Pizza Hut employees were left without due payment.

The protestors who think Horowitz's ideals are absurd should know that acts like pie-throwing and ordering $230 of food under false pretenses are no better.

These childish acts are the equivalent of throwing spitballs at your middle school science teacher. It might seem fun, but it's far from productive.

The pizza prank also cost an unaffiliated business labor and supplies, taking focus away from legitimate business elsewhere.

This is not to say that all of Wednesday night's protestors handled things inappropriately. Other objectors took more mature and legal roads to get their point across, including handing out flyers and attending Horowitz's lecture to ask questions.

Even if Horowitz does not have the most popular opinions, legal means of expression are going to have the most effective results. Foolish games involving third parties and felony assault charges are far from effective dialogue.

Horowitz needs a rock-solid challenge, and an fluffy airborne dessert is not the solution. Opponents must enter and dominate an intelligent debate with a logical argument.Only then will Horowitz's critics savor the sweet taste of victory.

Article: Stuart Middle School teacher burns U.S. flags in class

2006-08-22T17:19:00.000-07:00

Lesson causes uproar in Jefferson

By Chris Kenning
ckenning@courier-journal.com
The Courier-Journal

Stuart Middle School teacher has been removed from the classroom after he burned two American flags in class during a lesson on freedom of speech, Jefferson County Public Schools officials said.

Dan Holden, who teaches seventh-grade social studies, burned small flags in two different classes Friday and asked students to write an opinion paper about it, district spokeswoman Lauren Roberts said.

A teacher in the school district since 1979, Holden has been temporarily reassigned to non-instructional duties pending a district investigation. The district also alerted city fire officials, who are conducting their own investigation.

"Certainly we're concerned about the safety aspect," Roberts said, along with "the judgment of using that type of demonstration in a class."

Pat Summers, whose daughter was in Holden's class, said he was among more than 20 parents upset about the incident at school yesterday. Holden apparently told the students to ask their parents what they thought about the lesson, he said.

"She said, 'Our teacher burned a flag.' I'm like, 'What?' " Summers said. "When I was (at the school) at 8 a.m., the lobby was filled with probably 25 or 30 parents" who were upset, he said.

Holden could not be reached yesterday for comment.

Roberts said the flag burning did not appear to be politically motivated, based on an interview with Holden.

Summers said no advance notice had been given to parents, nor were school administrators aware of Holden's plans, Roberts said.

Stuart sixth-grader Kelsey Adwell, 11, said students were abuzz about the incident yesterday.

"They just can't believe that a teacher would do that -- burn two American flags in front of the class," she said. "A teacher shouldn't do that, even though it was an example."

Kentucky has a statute last amended in 1992 making desecration of a national or state flag in a public place a misdemeanor, but the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that flag desecration is protected speech.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky said the federal ruling would trump the state statute.

Congress has tried unsuccessfully to prohibit flag burning with a constitutional amendment. The latest attempt failed in the Senate this year.

Beth Wilson, director of Kentucky's ACLU, said the district is allowed to decide what's instructionally appropriate.

But "if a school is masking their objections to flag burning under the guise of safety, it raises questions about freedom of speech and academic freedom," she said. She said her group would monitor the case but did not plan to get involved at this point.

Regardless, school board member Pat O'Leary said the flag burning was unnecessary and could have offended some students, including those in military families.

"A teacher doesn't do that," he said. "It's just disrespectful."

Rebecca Creech, a Stuart sixth-grader, said she also thought it was "wrong."

Ginny Adwell, Kelsey's mother and the school's PTA president, said some parents who called for Holden to be fired were "going a little bit overboard" and should remember that the teacher was trying to provoke thought.

Brent McKim, president of the Jefferson County Teachers Association, said Holden has "been teaching for many years, and has by all accounts a good teaching record. It was not a political statement and was meant to illustrate a controversial issue. To fire someone because of that would be inappropriate," he said. "It wasn't like he was taking one side or another."

McKim said he was gathering facts that would determine whether the district was justified in removing Holden from the classroom.

In 2001, a teacher in Sacramento, Calif., faced suspension for using a lighter to singe a corner of an American flag in class.

The teacher later was fired, but district officials cited numerous acts of poor judgment and disregard for superiors.

Reporter Chris Kenning can be reached at (502) 582-4697.

Replies to Critics: He's Got A Little List

2006-08-19T16:44:00.000-07:00

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

2006-08-19T16:42:00.000-07:00

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

2006-08-19T16:07:00.000-07:00

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.

Article: Conspiracy Theories 101

2006-07-25T13:03:00.000-07:00

By Stanley Fish
The New York Times
Sunday July, 23, 2006

KEVIN BARRETT, a lecturer at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, has now taken his place alongside Ward Churchill of the University of Colorado as a college teacher whose views on 9/11 have led politicians and ordinary citizens to demand that he be fired.

Mr. Barrett, who has a one-semester contract to teach a course titled ''Islam: Religion and Culture,'' acknowledged on a radio talk show that he has shared with students his strong conviction that the destruction of the World Trade Center was an inside job perpetrated by the American government. The predictable uproar ensued, and the equally predictable battle lines were drawn between those who disagree about what the doctrine of academic freedom does and does not allow.

Mr. Barrett's critics argue that academic freedom has limits and should not be invoked to justify the dissemination of lies and fantasies. Mr. Barrett's supporters (most of whom are not partisans of his conspiracy theory) insist that it is the very point of an academic institution to entertain all points of view, however unpopular. (This was the position taken by the university's provost, Patrick Farrell, when he ruled on July 10 that Mr. Barrett would be retained: ''We cannot allow political pressure from critics of unpopular ideas to inhibit the free exchange of ideas.'')

Both sides get it wrong. The problem is that each assumes that academic freedom is about protecting the content of a professor's speech; one side thinks that no content should be ruled out in advance; while the other would draw the line at propositions (like the denial of the Holocaust or the flatness of the world) considered by almost everyone to be crazy or dangerous.

But in fact, academic freedom has nothing to do with content. It is not a subset of the general freedom of Americans to say anything they like (so long as it is not an incitement to violence or is treasonous or libelous). Rather, academic freedom is the freedom of academics to study anything they like; the freedom, that is, to subject any body of material, however unpromising it might seem, to academic interrogation and analysis.

Academic freedom means that if I think that there may be an intellectual payoff to be had by turning an academic lens on material others consider trivial -- golf tees, gourmet coffee, lingerie ads, convenience stores, street names, whatever -- I should get a chance to try. If I manage to demonstrate to my peers and students that studying this material yields insights into matters of general intellectual interest, there is a new topic under the academic sun and a new subject for classroom discussion.

In short, whether something is an appropriate object of academic study is a matter not of its content -- a crackpot theory may have had a history of influence that well rewards scholarly scrutiny -- but of its availability to serious analysis. This point was missed by the author of a comment posted to the blog of a University of Wisconsin law professor, Ann Althouse: ''When is the University of Wisconsin hiring a professor of astrology?'' The question is obviously sarcastic; its intention is to equate the 9/11-inside-job theory with believing in the predictive power of astrology, and to imply that since the university wouldn't think of hiring someone to teach the one, it should have known better than to hire someone to teach the other.

But the truth is that it would not be at all outlandish for a university to hire someone to teach astrology -- not to profess astrology and recommend it as the basis of decision-making (shades of Nancy Reagan), but to teach the history of its very long career. There is, after all, a good argument for saying that Shakespeare, Chaucer and Dante, among others, cannot be fully understood unless one understands astrology.

The distinction I am making -- between studying astrology and proselytizing for it -- is crucial and can be generalized; it shows us where the line between the responsible and irresponsible practice of academic freedom should always be drawn. Any idea can be brought into the classroom if the point is to inquire into its structure, history, influence and so forth. But no idea belongs in the classroom if the point of introducing it is to recruit your students for the political agenda it may be thought to imply.

And this is where we come back to Mr. Barrett, who, in addition to being a college lecturer, is a member of a group calling itself Scholars for 9/11 Truth, an organization with the decidedly political agenda of persuading Americans that the Bush administration ''not only permitted 9/11 to happen but may even have orchestrated these events.''

Is the fact of this group's growing presence on the Internet a reason for studying it in a course on 9/11? Sure. Is the instructor who discusses the group's arguments thereby endorsing them? Not at all. It is perfectly possible to teach a viewpoint without embracing it and urging it. But the moment a professor does embrace and urge it, academic study has ceased and been replaced by partisan advocacy. And that is a moment no college administration should allow to occur.

Provost Farrell doesn't quite see it that way, because he is too hung up on questions of content and balance. He thinks that the important thing is to assure a diversity of views in the classroom, and so he is reassured when Mr. Barrett promises to surround his ''unconventional'' ideas and ''personal opinions'' with readings ''representing a variety of viewpoints.''

But the number of viewpoints Mr. Barrett presents to his students is not the measure of his responsibility. There is, in fact, no academic requirement to include more than one view of an academic issue, although it is usually pedagogically useful to do so. The true requirement is that no matter how many (or few) views are presented to the students, they should be offered as objects of analysis rather than as candidates for allegiance.

There is a world of difference, for example, between surveying the pro and con arguments about the Iraq war, a perfectly appropriate academic assignment, and pressing students to come down on your side. Of course the instructor who presides over such a survey is likely to be a partisan of one position or the other -- after all, who doesn't have an opinion on the Iraq war? -- but it is part of a teacher's job to set personal conviction aside for the hour or two when a class is in session and allow the techniques and protocols of academic research full sway.

This restraint should not be too difficult to exercise. After all, we require and expect it of judges, referees and reporters. And while its exercise may not always be total, it is both important and possible to make the effort.

Thus the question Provost Farrell should put to Mr. Barrett is not ''Do you hold these views?'' (he can hold any views he likes) or ''Do you proclaim them in public?'' (he has that right no less that the rest of us) or even ''Do you surround them with the views of others?''

Rather, the question should be: ''Do you separate yourself from your partisan identity when you are in the employ of the citizens of Wisconsin and teach subject matter -- whatever it is -- rather than urge political action?'' If the answer is yes, allowing Mr. Barrett to remain in the classroom is warranted. If the answer is no, (or if a yes answer is followed by classroom behavior that contradicts it) he should be shown the door. Not because he would be teaching the ''wrong'' things, but because he would have abandoned teaching for indoctrination.

The advantage of this way of thinking about the issue is that it outflanks the sloganeering and posturing both sides indulge in: on the one hand, faculty members who shout ''academic freedom'' and mean by it an instructor's right to say or advocate anything at all with impunity; on the other hand, state legislators who shout ''not on our dime'' and mean by it that they can tell academics what ideas they can and cannot bring into the classroom.

All you have to do is remember that academic freedom is just that: the freedom to do an academic job without external interference. It is not the freedom to do other jobs, jobs you are neither trained for nor paid to perform. While there should be no restrictions on what can be taught -- no list of interdicted ideas or topics -- there should be an absolute restriction on appropriating the scene of teaching for partisan political ideals. Teachers who use the classroom to indoctrinate make the enterprise of higher education vulnerable to its critics and shortchange students in the guise of showing them the true way.

Article: Defending Academic Values

2006-07-12T08:59:00.000-07:00

The next 3 articles are from The Presidency magzine, a publication of the American Council on Education. It is written by and for college and university presidents, chancellors, vice presidents, and other campus decision makers.

By David Horowitz

The Presidency is to be commended for publishing Kermit Hall's "A Cautionary Tale of Academic Rights and Responsibilities" (fall 2005), which addresses the issues raised in the Academic Bill of Rights, of which I am the author. President Hall is right that the legislative success of this bill is the result of a growing movement among conservatives generally, and Republican legislators in particular, for reform in the administration of our university system.

He also is right that it is important for administrators to address the various issues fueling this movement in order to protect the credibility of the academic community and insulate institutions of higher learning from irresponsible public attack. Those issues—which I define as a lack of intellectual diversity on faculties and in curricula, abusive use of the classroom for nonacademic agendas, and lack of equity in the distribution of student activities funds—are driving my call for reform.

An important step toward accomplishing these ends would be to stop treating the reform movement as adversarial to the core interests of the university, and to open a dialogue on the issues themselves. As a leader of this movement, let me assure the readers of this magazine that I share their interest in protecting the integrity of the academic enterprise. I think that any fair-minded reader of the Academic Bill of Rights will acknowledge that great care has been taken to preserve the independence of the university and respect its academic freedom traditions. My reform efforts are about restoring to the university the liberal values and professional standards that I believe have been eroded by political activists in the academy over the last several decades. One of my concerns is that this be accomplished without endangering the independence of the university, which is a cornerstone of what we all mean by academic freedom.

The opponents of my Academic Bill of Rights have misrepresented my agendas and thus misled many in the academic community into the position of defending an indefensible status quo. For example, the academic freedom guidelines of many universities all over the country include a memorable sentence taken from the American Association of University Professors' (AAUP) 1940 Statement of Principles on Tenure and Academic Freedom: "Teachers are entitled to freedom in the classroom in discussing their subject, but they should be careful not to introduce into their teaching controversial matter which has no relation to their subject." The purpose is to prevent activist faculty from using the classroom to promote overtly political agendas. Yet when this very statement was incorporated into Ohio Senate Bill 24 (a legislative version of the Academic Bill of Rights), it was attacked by AAUP, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the teacher unions as an attempt by legislators "to restrict professors' speech."

The issue, of course, is not free speech; it is professionalism. It is a question of what is appropriate discourse for a professional instructor in a class-room. There is a reason why tenure and academic freedom are linked in the original AAUP statements. The privilege of tenure is given to academics because they are professionals, bound to respect the tenets of academic freedom. The privilege derives from the fact that they are experts in certain fields of knowledge and that society recognizes that, in order to pursue knowledge in their professional fields, they must have the freedom and independence to do so. But when an English prefessor declares in a classroom that the war in Iraq is immoral, this professor is not expressing a professional judgment based on his or her field of expertise. Such a professor is merely venting a personal opinion not grounded in any professional expertise.

Professors' opinions about the war in Iraq may be correct (or incorrect) but that is irrelevant to the fact that they are not speaking in the classroom as knowledgeable professionals, which is what they were hired to do. Instead, they are adopting partisan positions that distance them from the students who disagree with their opinions, and damage their ability to teach those students. This is an abuse of the classroom. It is an attempt to influence the students over whom they have significant institutional authority, including grading power, in a way that existing academic freedom guidelines specifically prohibit. Unfortunately, incidents like this occur frequently in contemporary college classrooms. Such abuses more often than not pass without notice or comment from university officials. The remedy is to reassert and enforce academic freedom guidelines that would prevent such abuses.

It is true that I myself can fairly be described as a "neo-conservative" in politics—though I am not enamored of the label. But that does not mean that the Academic Bill of Rights has some hidden neo-conservative agenda. In matters of academic reform, I am a pragmatist and a liberal. My model for academic freedom is the Columbia University I attended in the late 1950s (class of '59)—at the tail end of the McCarthy era. My parents were Communists and I wrote my Columbia papers from a Marxist perspective. Yet, my professors treated me no differently from how they treated other students and never once that I can remember expressed a political point of view in the classroom. I am grateful to my teachers for their professionalism and would like to see their level of professionalism restored to university classrooms. That is the true agenda of my campaign.

No fair-minded reader of my Academic Bill of Rights (text available at http://www.studentsfor/academicfreedom.org) will miss the fact that every one of its sentences reflects the principles and perspectives of the academic freedom tradition that was established with AAUP's 1915 General Report on the Principles of Tenure and Academic Freedom.

Before publishing the Academic Bill of Rights, I vetted it with Stanley Fish, the former dean of the University of Illinois at Chicago and he approved ever)' word of it. What Professor Fish did not approve was my decision to take the bill to legislatures. I share many of his concerns about legislatures, but the reality of university politics is that without the leverage of legislation, no university administration would have considered the issues I am trying to raise. The opposition from radical faculty members would be too strong. If I had not made the decision to go to legislatures, no one would be talking about these issues now. There would not be an article about the Academic Bill of Rights in a magazine like The Presidency.

That said, I do not believe legislatures are suited to fixing the academic problems that need to be addressed. Only the university itself can do this. That is why when the American Council on Education issued its June 2005 statement on academic-freedom, I was the first person to endorse it. I endorsed it because even though it did not include everything I would have wanted, I am a pragmatist in this reform effort and understand that without the goodwill and cooperation of university administrations, nothing positive can be achieved.

Last October, the Inter-University Council of Ohio, representing 15 of the state's largest public universities, agreed to embrace the ACE statement if the state's legislators would agree to withdraw their legislation, which they did. The legislature in Colorado and the Colorado state university system reached similar agreement, as have educators and legislators in Tennessee; another agreement is pending with one of the largest university systems in the country. These agreements represent the steps toward solutions that I would like to see.

This is easier said than done. The inertia in any university system is bound to be great. However, the dangers of not doing anything, of not moving forward, are even greater. I can assure you that the movement I have begun is not going to be satisfied with the status quo. Republican legislators have been through the educational system and have experienced the harassment that faculty radicals frequently mete out to their conservative students. They are becoming increasingly familiar with the Ward Churchills who inhabit every faculty in this country and who constitute a public relations disaster in waiting if these issues are not addressed. They will not be satisfied by rhetoric alone. The positive side of this is that the concrete actions they are asking for are entirely within the guidelines of academic freedom that universities already embrace.

Universities can insulate themselves from adverse public-reaction to these programs by-taking steps to (1) strengthen the academic professionalism of their faculties and courses; and (2) promote the values of intellectual diversity. The public understands that the university should be a marketplace of ideas. It will understand and make allowances for individuals who go off the deep end on either side of the spectrum. It will have less patience for institutions that are entirely one-sided and do not reflect the intellectual pluralism that Americans expect of their institutions, particularly institu-tions of learning. If universities enforce professional standards and foster intellectual diversity in the liberal arts, humanities, and social sciences, they will find public- support on both Sides of the political and cultural divides. The Academic Bill of Rights is designed to make that happen. ■

Article: It's Time to Move the Academic Freedom Debate Along

2006-07-12T07:23:00.000-07:00

From The Presidency Magazine
By John C. Cavanaugh

Freedom of expression is arguably the most important right we enjoy. On that point, I believe Kermit Hall, David Horowitz, and I would wholeheartedly agree. I also applaud their conviction that colleges and universities are places that must do everything they can to open students' and the public's minds to all sides of issues. Indeed, colleges and universities globally have historically been the birthplace or catalysts of intellectual movements such as the belief that the world is not flat (Thomas Friedman notwithstanding), democracy is worth establishing and defending, and wars are sometimes morally indefensible

I firmly believe that discussions about academic freedom are essential to reminding us what really matters in intellectual pursuits. As Hall so effectively stated in his article, we in academia must be on our guard against bias from any direction. I am gratified that Horowitz believes that the ACE statement and others like it, which firmly reiterate the core principles of academic freedom and the need to avoid bias, are sufficient and make legislative action unnecessary. That has been my position in discussions regarding academic freedom and the academic bill of rights in Florida, and the basis for the reasoning that legislation was unnecessary to achieve our aims.

So, my primary problem with Horowitz's argument is not whether academic freedom should be supported and protected in all of its facets. Rather, it is the manner in which he frames the argument in terms of "professionalism." On the one hand, it is a brilliant deflection of the issue. What "fair-minded reader" (to use his phrase) of his article would disagree with the premise that faculty should act professionally in the classroom? But to then imply that any expression of personal opinion by an instructor in the classroom on a "controversial matter" that cannot be firmly grounded in the faculty member's "field of expertise" (however that might be done) invariably constitutes unprofessional behavior and therefore has no place in the classroom is wrong. (I wonder if Horowitz would have applied this logic and chastised George Wythe had he, in his law classes, expressed an opinion to Thomas Jefferson about the oppressive nature of the policies of the British king. Would Horowitz have considered Wythe's opinion to be outside his "field of expertise"?) In my view, it is the context in which the topic is introduced and the intent of the comment that matter, not the mere fact that the topic is introduced. Only after a careful review of these aspects should a determination of "professionalism" be made.

A second problem is that his argument regarding "intellectual diversity," in which he emphasizes politically controversial statements, is limited in scope. Intellectual diversity is much broader. For example, Horowitz conspicuously avoids the fact that at certain colleges and universities across the country, some topics and entire disciplines are omitted from the curriculum, thereby denying students the "intellectual diversity" about which he so passionately (and correctly) writes. Where is the call for the "leverage of legislation" when colleges or universities refuse to teach evolution, or psychology, or another topic or discipline? Where is the call for the "leverage of legislation" when boards require faculty to sign statements that restrict what can be taught and discussed?

That having been said, Horowitz has done higher education a great service by reinforcing our collective commitment to opening people's minds to the full gamut of ideas. He has spurred the dusting off of grievance policies, and created a renewed vigor for enforcing them. Intellectual diversity is a concept fundamental to higher education. But the general lack of evidence regarding bias he and others allege occurs in grading or other matters, as cited in an official study by Florida's Office of Program Policy Analysis and Government Accountability,2 argues that it is time to move this conversation along. ■

John c. Cavanaugh is president of the University of West Florida.

Notes:
1. Hall, K. (2005), A cautionary tale of academic rights and responsibilities. The Presidency, 8(3), 22-27.

2. Office of Program Policy Analysis and Government Accountability. (2006). Community colleges and universities have academic freedom policies; relatively few grievances filed. Tallahassee, FL: Author. Available at www.oppaga.state.fl.us/reports/educ/r06-22s. html.

Article: At the Heart of the Academy Lies Balance

2006-07-12T06:47:00.000-07:00

The presidency Magazine
By Robert A. Corrigan

It is inevitable—and, I would say, necessary—that universities will push free expression close to its limits. As Kermit Hall wrote in the fall 2005 issue of The Presidency, the core value of American higher education "is a commitment to robust academic debate."1 Robust debate extends beyond the classroom, of course, and students regularly challenge the institution and one another as they speak and act out on major issues of our day: the war in Iraq, national politics, military recruiters on campus, and immigration policy, to name only a few.

All this is, for the most part, as it should be. But free expression is a matter of balancing rights with responsibilities. And higher education understands both very well. The right to take intellectual exploration wherever it leads and to disagree—even vehemently—without
fear of intimidation or reprisal can be sustained only when we fulfill our responsibility to maintain, in the classroom and outside it, a climate that is not only hospitable to civil exploration of diverse views, but also recognizes that the venue helps determine the appropriateness of certain kinds of speech.

I think it is worth repeating some thoughts I shared with my faculty last fall, not prompted by any current issue on our campus, but by a desire to set the tone for the coming year. 1 said, "Today, I urge us all to look carefully at ourselves. . . . I suggest this morning that we think freshly about our responsibilities, one of which is surely to provide an environment for our students in which they feel able to express, challenge, and test their views. If they censor themselves out of concern that their views are not tf of the majority in the classroom, or those of the professor, then we may be in some measure responsible We can never achieve the educational aims we seek we are unwilling to admit that, at times, we may fall short of them."

Moments of intense controversy often provide the best opportunities to demonstrate and strengthen our commitment to free yet civil discourse. The most dramatic instance of this in my experience came several years ago, when a noisy but nonviolent shouting match between pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian students on our campus turned into an international news story Thousands of individuals e-mailed us to protest the called pogom, or anti-Semitic riot. We received intense pressure from both sides to take action against the offending "others." In that highly charged atmosphere the university demonstrated its capacity to look objectively not only at the incident itself, but also at its implications for the campus. Over the course of several months, we developed and then carried out a comprehensive response that has led to curricular enrichment, strengthened relations with two community groups, new regulations for student events, faculty-created classes and programming under the rubic "The Year of Civil Discourse," and an articulated, heightened sense of how we must treat one another. This is how a university draws upon its strengths of intellectual rigor, analysis objectivity, and high moral standards. This is a university learning and teaching—educating in some way everyone on campus.

Far more than our critics may realize, institutions of higher education are working hard and actively to maintain the necessary balance—inside and outside the classroom—of open, civil, and appropriate speech. We do this not because we are being scrutinized, but because that balance lies at the heart of the academy. ■

ROBERT A. CORRIGAN is president of San Francisco State University.

Note:
1. Hall, K. (2005). A cautionary tale of academic and responsibilities. The Presidency, 8(3), 22-7

Article: The Selective Critique

2006-07-10T16:50:00.000-07:00

InsideHigherEd
By Mark Bauerlein

One of the first things a graduate student in the humanities and “softer” social sciences learns is that communication is rarely simple. Words carry latent values and vestigial biases, they are told, and over time the consequences of a word’s usage exceed its ostensible meaning. Post-bac training begins with that distinction, and students advance by attuning themselves to the tacit and the subtextual. “Language is not transparent,” announces the favorite T-shirt of a colleague, and to interpret statements accordingly isn’t just common wisdom. It’s a professional duty.

I’ve felt its pull many times, once while watching a debate on television around 1991 when the campus had become a central theater of the culture wars. Catharine Stimpson, Stanley Fish, and two others took on John Silber, William Buckley, Dinesh D’Souza, and Glenn Loury, with the canon, speech codes, and political correctness the topics. At one point, when Silber asserted the silliness of substituting the title “chair” for “chairman” — women “calling themselves furniture,” he put it — Fish replied with a point about the “deep culture of the language.” Often, he argued, “linguistic assumptions can be so deeply assumed that the society that uses them is not aware of them,” and when scholars and teachers unveil them, people feel threatened and confused. It’s a common premise, and it makes it easy to cast the academics as tenured meddlers going against common sense. The academics, in turn, feel that the more figures such as D’Souza resist, the more they know they’re on to something. That some of these expressions carry discriminatory baggage sharpens the analytic radar and adds a moral imperative to the labor. Indeed, no mandate has granted literary scholars so strong sense of mission in the last 25 years.

It certainly touched me, and I recall judging Buckley et al as obtuse anti-intellectuals and cheap-shot artists pitiably ignorant of advanced arguments. With a fresh Ph.D. in hand, and infused with Heidegger and Derrida, I believed fervently in the interpretative calling, disdaining what phenomenologists called the “natural attitude,” the outlook that takes things at face value. Added to that, I claimed language and literature as a professional subject, which meant that my livelihood depended upon the under- or other side of words, and that it took a special acumen to access it.

Fifteen years later, though, after countless written and spoken readings that lifted the political sediment out of ordinary and extraordinary language, the practice sounds pedestrian and predictable. In some cases, the search for “linguistic assumptions” exposed sexist and racist attitudes underlying different discourses, invisible but operative — for instance, Gilbert and Gubar’s analysis in The Madwoman in the Attic of patriarchal motifs in critical discussions of creativity — and it also reflected handily upon the institutional circumstances of them. But when it ascended into a theoretical premise, and soon after settled into a professional habit, the conclusions it drew lapsed into routine. Indeed, much queer theory has involved the extraction of queer subtexts from canonical texts and popular culture, influentially enough that assertions such as that of a lesbian undercurrent in “Laverne and Shirley,” as one book offered several years ago, produces the effect of either whimsical curiosity or a rolling of the eyes.

The theory provided no guidelines as to where it did and did not apply, and so it was stretched too thin. It provided no means for distinguishing between content that was invisible from content that actually wasn’t there. The professors saw implicit meaning everywhere, much of it political or identity-oriented. Persons outside the academy looked at the whole of their exchanges and found most of them uncomplicated and transitory. The surface was all. To that audience, conservatives such as Silber had a better grasp of the nature of “linguistic assumptions” than the professors did. And it didn’t help that so many professors shared Theodor Adorno’s belief in “the stupidity of common sense.” That, indeed, may explain why conservative intellectuals routed the professors in public settings over the years — not because they lacked nuance, played on irrational fears, or traded in simplistic, but telegenic gibes. Rather, they understood better when to analyze and when to assert, when to dismantle and when to affirm.

Both camps would agree, however, that the disclosure of assumptions and biases in language does apply to certain contexts, especially those in which an institution weighs heavily upon the utterances. When the protocols of communication are strict, when a statement reflects a speaker’s knowledge and legitimacy, when misstatements violate a group’s sense of mission, when entry into the discourse requires a long and regulated preparation by the entrant — such settings are “overdetermined,” and they need detailed analysis and thick description. The terms are loaded and the topics authorized. Statements impart norms as well as ideas, mores as well as referents. The expressions licensed there reinforce the institution and echo its rationale. The subtext is dynamic, and if we don’t analyze it, then we do, indeed, break our promise to critique.

For this reason, it has been astonishing to watch the professors respond to indictments leveled recently by conservative, libertarian, and First Amendment figures against academic practice and politics. These figures cited voter registrations, campaign contributions, and occasional acts of oppression, but most of the time the first exhibit of bias and illiberalism was a sample of institutional language. Scholarly articles such as a 2003 study of the “conservative personality” that found fear and aggression at the heart of conservatism (“Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition,” Psychological Bulletin. May 2003); course descriptions such as those gathered by American Council of Alumni and Trustees in a report issued last month; speech codes targeted by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education; paper titles culled by Frederick Hess and Laura LoGerfo from the last meeting of the American Educational Research Association ... these formed the evidence. They served well because of their patent absurdity, or because of their offense to public taste, or their adversarial dogma (anti-American, anti-capitalist, etc.).

But while the manifest content had an immediate impact, sometimes entering national circulation as a reviled token (e.g., “little Eichmanns”), many claimed a deeper meaning for them. In a word, they were offered as symptomatic expressions, an index of the values, norms, biases, and interests of academics. Conservatives and others presented them as precisely the kind of language packed with “linguistic assumptions,” performing subtextual feats, and ripe for socio-political analysis.

And yet, how have the professors responded? Not by taking up the critical challenge and carrying out the analysis. Not by bouncing the samples off of the institution in which they appeared. Instead, they shot the messenger. They declared the samples isolated and un-representative, or they denied to them the symptoms alleged by the critics. The course description wasn’t a fair stand-in for the course itself, they protested. Ward Churchill’s post-9/11 rant was an aberration. The conference paper title was just a way to garner an audience, so let’s not confuse it with the real substance of the paper. In sum, they put the most benign construction on the samples. That turned the allegations back upon the people who cited them, David Horowitz, Anne Neal, and the rest, who were cast as sinister crazies pushing a vile political agenda.

One can understand the professors’ defensiveness, but to let it squelch the exercise of a practice that they have at other times wielded so boldly is a breach of their own ideals. Have they lived so long and so closely to “social justice,” “social change,” “queer,” “whiteness,” and “gender equality” that they do not recognize them as loaded terms? Have they imbibed the political currents of the campus so thoroughly that they regard a polemical phrasing in a course description as merely a lively description? By their own instruction, we should regard the widespread attention to race, gender, and their social construction as emanating from a world view and signaling an ideological commitment. When Ward Churchill’s notorious speech made headlines, the professors were correct to cite his First Amendment rights and reprove those calling for his job. But as more information came to light, and his political attitudes seemed to bear a closer relation to his scholarship, academic doctrine demanded that the institution that rewarded him be reviewed. Roger Bowen, general secretary of the American Association of University Professors, has assured the Commission on the Future of Higher Education that “Faculty members are accountable for their work in many ways,” including peer review of scholarship and grant applications and annual departmental review for salary and promotion. What, then, is the relationship between Churchill’s high ascent in the profession and his discredited writings? Humanities and social science professors work backward from institutional statements to the culture of the institution itself all the time. Why exempt academic language from the process?

The academic defense comes down to this: conservatives and libertarians read too much into bits and pieces of language — an ironic turnabout, given that they used to make the same charge against literary theorists 20 years ago. Tim Burke, responding to the ACTA report, chooses the term “Eurocentric” as a case in point. While ACTA’s report selected a course description containing the term as an instance of bias, Burke replied, “I’ll let them in on a little secret: it can also be just a plain-old technical term for historiographical models that argue that modern world history has primarily been determined by factors that are endogamous to Europe itself.” So it can, but even if we accept that as one meaning of Eurocentric, it doesn’t erase the occasions when, as Burke concedes, “the term is also used as a fairly dumb epithet by nitwitted activists.” That is precisely one of the dangers of loaded terms. They can function neutrally or tendentiously, and when pressed the users can always fall back upon claims of innocence.

The question rests upon the frequency of biased meanings, “the existence of telling linguistic patterns,” as Erin O’Connor puts it while commenting on the issue. When a call for papers foregrounds anti-union corporatist practices, is that a tendentious usage, or are the libertarian commentators who cite it being oversensitive? The answer largely depends upon one’s relation to the institutional setting. When a libertarian delivers a talk at a symposium sponsored by Reason Magazine, the mention of government will have over- and undertones different from those issuing from government at a meeting of social justice advocates. From my perspective in 1991, I regarded Eurocentric, theory, patriarchy, and even the blank terms race and gender as descriptive ones. Yes, they had a political thrust, but essentially they were justified because they were accurate names for real phenomena in history and society. Indeed, it was the other discourse that was politicized, the one from which race etc. were absent. Now, having watched those terms in action, I see them as more often tendentious than not. In the majority of cases, their “institutional meaning” overshadows their denotative meaning.

That’s my experience, and maybe it’s too partial to count. But we can’t know for certain so long as leading academics remain as quick to deny the possibility that a narrow political agenda underlies academic discourse. Apart from the wall it erects against further inquiry, the reflex draws them into a vulnerable position. First of all, it results in overt intellectual blunders. For example, in the article cited above on the conservative personality, the authors define “conservatism” as, at heart, “opposition to change,” a simplistic and sweeping characterization that allows them to conclude, “One is justified in referring to Hitler, Mussolini, Reagan, and Limbaugh as right-wing conservatives ... because they all preached a return to an idealized past.” (They also add Stalin, Khrushchev, and Castro to the list of political conservatives.)

A second and more damaging problem in neutralizing their own terminology is the double standard it represents. Academics recognize the tension in terms such as race and sexuality, but they attribute its source to the resistances of others, persons who can’t give up their own biases and anxieties. That tactic will only work behind the campus walls. Try it in an outside setting and the arrogance comes across immediately. The hypocrisy shows, too, as academics fail their own standard. They present themselves as hard-headed, clear-sighted analysts, but in this case they prove selective in their labor. People outside the campus recognize that academia is just the kind of Establishment that calls out for ideological and social criticism, and its language is one place to begin. Academics already have a credibility problem when discussing their own practices, and if they wish to face down their many critics, they need to start extending those criticisms by themselves. Public observers realize, however reluctantly, that the best people to conduct that examination are the professors themselves, if only they will stop acting so proprietary. If academics don’t assume the lead, then they will find their credibility falling still further, having revised one of their favorite dicta to their own advantage — “a ruthless criticism of everything existing,” everything, that is, but their own.

Mark Bauerlein is professor of English at Emory University.

article: Debating the Academic Bill of Rights

2006-06-27T16:55:00.000-07:00

By David Horowitz
FrontPageMagazine.com
June 23, 2006

Introductory note: On November 5, 2005, I debated Peter Steinberger, Dean of the Faculty and Professor of Political Science at Reed University about the Academic Bill of Rights. The Dean used the occasion to attack me personally, causing such an adverse reaction from the Reed community that both he and Reed’s president apologized. I emailed Steinberger afterwards and asked him to re-cast his critique of the Academic Bill of Rights in a manner that would allow to us to confront the intellectual issues without being distracted by personal asides. He did so, and the result is the most elaborate and intellectually substantial critique of the Academic Bill of Rights as I have proposed it. Professor Steinberger’s comments are printed first below; my reply follows.

Peter Steinberger, Professor of Political Science and Dean of the Faculty, Reed University:
There are three primary reasons to oppose the Academic Bill of Rights. But before I get to those, there are also three reasons to be skeptical about the motivation behind the Bill of Rights. Generally, I don’t like to question motives. But in this case, I’m afraid it’s impossible not to:

First, the evidence for widespread bias in the classroom is very poor. The evidence you present in your various writings is basically of two kinds: (1) anecdotes – presented as horror stories – about the gross politicization of teaching, and (2) opinion surveys showing that large numbers of college professors are liberal. As to the first kind of evidence, in the one case that I myself took the time to work through – the case of the Bates class – your account grossly mischaracterized that situation. However much you may protest, any fair reading of your presentation (in Hating Whitey) would agree that you placed great emphasis on the choice of texts; and the fact that the text itself (“Modernity,” edited by Stuart Hall and others) bears virtually no relationship to your description of it – it is about as far from being “an ideological Marxist tome” as one could imagine – renders the whole account unbelievable.

How many of your other anecdotes could survive that kind of close scrutiny? I have no idea. But surely you can see how the credibility of the entire project was compromised in my own mind when the very first case that I examined in detail turned out to be so misleading. As for data showing that college professors are liberal, those data say absolutely nothing about whether the classroom is biased. I repeat, absolutely nothing. For 30 years I myself have insisted on a depoliticized classroom – even thought I am teaching political philosophy! – and my students have no idea what my views are. From an analysis of my own political opinions, one could draw absolutely no conclusions about what I say and do in my classroom. The point is generalizable: to infer from data about the personal political beliefs of professors conclusions about their in-class behavior is simply a fallacy.

Second, as I indicated at the Reed event, the exemption you provide for “creed-based” institutions really sabotages the whole project.[1] With this exemption, you are saying, in effect, that academic freedom is really, really important and absolutely necessary – a fundamental value – unless one doesn’t care at all about academic freedom, in which case it’s perfectly okay for an institution to trash to academic freedom, as long as it says that it’s doing so. Academic freedom is absolutely crucial, but also easily dispensed with. Notice, moreover, the practical political implications. Virtually all religiously-affiliated colleges and universities are creed based, hence are, in principle, exempt from the Academic Bill of Rights. Notice also that the overwhelming majority of such colleges and universities – perhaps nearly all – are formally associated with creeds that are undeniably identified with conservative political positions. Notice finally that we’re talking about a very substantial part of the American academic community, the literally hundreds of colleges and universities, some of the quite large and prestigious, associated closely with one or another church. So basically we have a defense of academic freedom that would make the world safe for conservatives to ignore entirely any considerations of academic freedom. It’s hard to take this seriously.

Third, in your larger views about American politics – the many claims that explicitly connect liberals, the Left, and the Democratic Party to sedition, treason, fellow traveling, subversion, etc. – you clearly identify the American liberal professoriate as having been deeply infiltrated and even dominated by the treasonous “Shadow Party.” I can provide citations from your work, if you like. But if you really believe this, then surely you must be interested not in guaranteeing academic freedom but in actively fighting the enemies of America. If, that is, we are to take your claims seriously about the treasonous influences in American higher education, then it is very difficult not to suspect that the Academic Bill of Rights is simply part of a larger right-wing political agenda that really has nothing to do with academic freedom.

But if these present strong reasons to be skeptical about the motivation behind the Academic Bill of Rights, there are three other reasons to oppose it vehemently on its own grounds. Specifically, the Academic Bill of Rights is (1) utterly self-contradictory, (2) dangerous in its practical implications and (3) conceptually wrong-headed:

You say your primary concern is with the politicization of higher education: professors should not use the classroom to espouse their own political views. As I think you know by now, I strongly agree. Again, this is a principle to which I have devoted my own professional life. However, the central provision of the Academic Bill of Rights – really the only provision that distinguishes it in important ways from academic freedom statements already in place at most institutions – is the insistence that personnel decisions involving hiring, promoting and tenuring be adjusted to ensure that the professoriate reflects a wider range of views – a greater “plurality of methodologies and perspectives” – than is currently case. Now, since you think “currently the case” means too many liberals, the clear implication of the Academic Bill of Rights is that colleges and universities should, as a matter of policy, hire more conservatives. This, however, raises the question: exactly why would they do this? What good would it do to hire more conservatives unless those conservatives were allowed – indeed, encouraged or even required – to politicize their classrooms by espousing conservative views? In other words, hiring conservatives would provide some degree of balance only if those conservatives advocate conservatism in the classroom. Thus, the entire logic and thrust of the Academic Bill of Rights would be to authorize, valorize, and celebrate precisely what you claim to be the problem, namely, the politicization of the classroom. Faculty who are hired (in part) because they are conservative could not but understand that an important part of their job would be to espouse conservativism. Of course, when that happens, then all of those liberal faculty out there who currently strive to maintain a clear boundary between their political views and their pedagogy would be told officially and in no uncertain terms that such a boundary is no longer important, at least as a matter of institutional policy. If, in other words, you think the problem is overly politicized classrooms, then you have proposed a solution that, as anyone can see, would exacerbate that problem many, many times over.

1. The Academic Bill of Rights is self-contradictory; it undermines – indeed, it utterly destroys – its own avowed goal. Stated otherwise, when you say that no one should be hired or fired on the basis of political or religious belief, but only on the basis of competence and expertise, you’ve said all that you need to say; there’s nothing more to be said, IF you’re interesting in academic freedom. But when you go on to say, as the document does, that a college or university should foster a plurality of views – when it says that a faculty should reflect a wide spectrum of political opinion – then this in fact contradicts the first principle, since it insists that, at some point, there is and should be a political litmus test. In other words, it’s not enough that we base decisions on intellectual quality; rather, decisions should be deeply informed by political considerations, so as to achieve plurality. In some circumstances, then, considerations of quality and competence should be trumped by considerations of balance, that is, by political considerations; and that directly contradicts the view – which I endorse – that faculty decisions should not be based on political considerations.

2. But the actual practical results of the Academic Bill of Rights would be even worse than this. For while it would encourage the politicization of the classroom, it would also discourage sound pedagogy. In many cases, sound pedagogy requires making outrageous or controversial statements. I myself teach through a kind of devil’s advocacy. I discover what the students believe, then argue the opposing point of view; and if I argue so well that they begin to believe the opposing point of view, then I turn around and defend the original point of view. The purpose is teach the students to think, to introduce them to the conceptual, theoretical and methodological tools of the discipline by getting them to use those tools everyday in class. The effect of the Academic Bill of Rights, however, would be to make this dangerous, since any outrageous statement, any exercise in devil’s advocacy, any attempt at heterodoxy could be taken out of context and used as evidence of the wrong kind of political bias. In one your articles, you say that a professor at (as I recall) the University of Colorado made an unflattering, gratuitous remark about President Bush. As you presented it, the remark sounded biased indeed, and disturbingly so. But was it? In your article, you took one sentence out of an entire semester’s worth of sentences – how many thousands and thousands of sentences did that professor utter during that term -- and used it to characterize an entire academic experience. How do you know that the sentence was an accurate reflection of what the professor said in general? How do you know that he or she wasn’t devil’s advocating? How do you that he or she didn’t say such things about politicians on the left as well as the right? The point is not to defend the particular professor in question, or to deny that some classrooms are overly politicized. The point, rather, is to reveal the inevitable result of the Academic Bill of Rights. To require that colleges and universities to recruit profs because of their political views is to encourage and institutionalize a kind of ideological score-keeping. We would tend to – or be required to – add and subtract the number of liberal and conservative profs, and this would mean adding and subtracting how many liberal and conservative things are said in the classroom, which could not but have, in turn, a numbing and paralytic impact on teaching. There’s a phrase for this. It’s called a “chilling effect.” And the result would be deeply dangerous to the idea of serious teaching – and real academic freedom – in American higher education.

3. The Academic Bill of Rights also misconceives the very nature of academic freedom. We know that legislation endorsing the Academic Bill of Rights has been introduced in the U. S. Congress and in state legislatures. Why is this a problem? Well, let me draw an analogy between an institution of higher education and a religious institution. Both such institutions are dedicated to pursuing what each conceives of as the truth, to developing doctrines, to formulating and contemplating and promulgating ideas. They do so in radically different ways. But as truth-seeking or idea-promoting entities, they are both protected – religious institutions by religious freedom, academic institutions by academic freedom. In each case, that freedom presupposes that each institution pursues its ideas on terms that it prescribes to itself. It uses its own standards, its own procedures, its own methods, its own values. Religious freedom is nothing other than respecting, protecting, and not interfering with religious institutions as they adopt and implement their own standards, procedures, methods and values. That’s just what religious freedom is. So consider, for example, the Catholic church. There are certainly thousands and thousands of serious, devoted, devout practicing Catholics who dearly wish that official church policy would change with respect to such issues as contraception, abortion, homosexuality and the ordination of women. They wish that their priests would present a more pluralistic and diverse account of Catholic doctrine. They wish that the Church would embody and present a greater diversity of views. But imagine what it would like be if the US Congress passed a resolution requiring or even urging, as a matter of principle, the Catholic church to do this, to change its teachings, to change its practices. This would be, by definition, a violation of religious freedom. For what goes on internal to the Catholic church is none of Congress’s business. Again, that’s what religious freedom means – the freedom of a religion to make religious decisions on its own religious grounds as it interprets those grounds. I should add, by the way, that I myself happen to have views about orthodox Catholic teaching. I happen to think the priesthood should be more diverse, and that Catholic teachings should be more diverse. But I’m not a Catholic, I’m not part of the church, I’m a complete outsider, and what this means is that my views are literally irrelevant. I’m entitled to have my opinions, but what goes on in the Catholic church is none of my business. If I were a Catholic, that would be another story; but I’m not, and that makes all the difference. The analogy applies precisely to colleges and universities. For Congress or a state legislature to require or even officially to urge colleges and universities to be more or less pluralistic, to teach this or that, to insist, for example, that we offer a certain range of conservative views, that we should teach, say, creationism, or intelligent design, or the social scientific and humanistic equivalent of such doctrines – and there are such things – would, by definition, be a violation of academic freedom. To repeat, I myself hate the idea of a politicized classroom, hate the idea of colleges taking controversial political stands, hate the idea of one-sided, biased, ideologically based education. But academic freedom requires that those are issues to be decided internal to the academic institution. They are issues for academics to decide on academic terms. That’s what academic freedom means. They are none of Congress’s business, they are none of the state legislature’s business; and with all due respect, they’re none of your business either.

Let me put this a different way. Politicizing the classroom is not a matter of academic freedom. It’s a matter of lousy teaching. Now there are all kinds of lousy teaching. If a teacher is unprepared, or doesn’t show up on time, or fails to evaluate student work carefully, or sucks the life out of the material, or is intellectually shallow – all of this can be bad teaching. But the question of good versus bad teaching is a professional question; it is a matter of professional judgment; and as such, it is something to be evaluated and adjudicated according to one or another system of peer of review. In this respect, political bias in the classroom is no different. To the degree that it reflects or embodies bad teaching, to the degree that it compromises pedagogical effectiveness, it is to be treated like any other case of substandard professional performance, namely, through a regular process of professional evaluation and peer review. But none of this has anything at all to do with academic freedom – except insofar as the Academic Bill of Rights would compromise the peer review process, in which case it is, in this respect as in so many others, a direct attack on academic freedom.

With all of this in mind, I would urge you to reaffirm your interest in and commitment to academic freedom by renouncing the Academic Bill of Rights.

David Horowitz, response to Steinberger’s Critique of the Academic Bill of Rights:

Thank you Peter, for providing a thoughtful and interesting challenge. I will deal first with the issue of motives. By describing the basis of your suspicions you have allowed me to understand the ferocity of your response to my presentation at Reed. Although stung at the time, I have never held any ill-feelings towards you in the aftermath of that event. Nonetheless it is very helpful to me to see what led you to regard me as such a sinister presence on that stage.

The first of your suspicions is that my political agendas and a difference between us in our assessment of a textbook serve to make me an unreliable reporter of the problems that the Academic Bill of Rights proposes to address. First allow me to address the intolerance on your part that the minor matter of the textbook reveals. Stuart Hall is a Marxist, however you splice it, and the text Modernity reflects an unrelenting ideological view of the “late capitalist societies” it chooses to analyze (its term of choice -- “late capitalist” -- is itself revealing). You and I may disagree about this, but it would be more appropriate to this kind of discussion if you were able to show respect for those who disagree with you.

You describe the evidence I have assembled as either anecdotal and therefore suspect, or deriving from surveys which don’t convey anything about what actually goes on in the classroom. Why is anecdotal evidence suspect? Evidently, because it comes from me. Of course if you don’t respect the fact that reasonable people can disagree in their interpretation of texts and other matters, and therefore begin by treating people who disagree with you as untrustworthy, anecdotes will be suspicious. But this is not the anecdotes fault. As it happens, these anecdotes as you call them – testimonies as I would call them – come from a wide variety of sources and have been presented before legislative committees.

On the second point – that surveys of professorial politics don’t in themselves prove anything about what goes on in the classroom -- I agree. However, I have never claimed that because a teacher has a point of view he or she cannot be a good or fair-minded teacher. I recall having praised you at Reed for comments you made to the effect that you do not let politics intrude into your lectures. I could also point you to a review I wrote of Kenyon College whose faculty is 90% liberal but which offers what I regard as – admittedly on the basis of a brief visit – an excellent traditional curriculum and a staff that treats its conservative students with the respect they are owed. I praised Reed for its own traditional curriculum after my interviews with students during my visit.

So let’s put our disagreement about Bates and the student testimonies behind us, and I will try to persuade you that a problem exists in our universities, which is not a small problem, by referring to a few departmental self-descriptions taken from university websites. In my view these indicate on their face a systematic bias in the curricula described, and reflect non-scholarly, non-academic approaches to their fields.

At the University of California Santa Cruz, faculty radicals have changed the very name of the Department of Women’s Studies to reflect the overtly ideological nature of its courses. It is now called the Department of Feminist Studies,[2] and is self-evidently a program of indoctrination in the theory and practice of radical feminism, whose agenda is the recruitment of students to radical causes. This is quite openly stated on the official departmental website where under “Career Opportunities” and the heading “What Can I Do With A Major in Feminist Studies?” the answer provided is as follows:

"Employment Opportunities for Feminist Studies Majors:

“With a background in women’s and minorities’ histories and an understanding of racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, and other forms of oppression, graduates have a good background for work with policy-making and lobbying organizations, research centers, trade and international associations, and unions. Graduates’ knowledge about power relationships and injustice often leads them to choose careers in government and politics, because they are determined to use their skills to change the world,…”[3]

This is not the goal of an academic curriculum. It is the goal of an indoctrination and recruitment program, which violates the most fundamental professional standards, as well as the existing academic freedom guidelines of the American Association of University Professors. Yet not a single administrator or faculty body in the University of California system appears to be the slightest concerned.

At Kansas State University, the Women’s Studies Department describes its program in the catalogue this way (I am quoting only two points out of many presented by the Women’s Studies Department):

“To qualify for a B.S. or B.A. degree in Women’s Studies, students will have demonstrated:

Their understanding that Women's Studies is an academic discipline that generates new knowledge about women and gender, reconsiders other disciplines through feminist perspectives, and is committed to social action and social change. [emphasis added]

Their familiarity with key Women's Studies concepts such as the social construction of gender, oppression of and violence against women, heterosexism, racism, classism, and global inequality. This statement takes a non-academic and partisan view of issues that are controversial – whether women are in fact “oppressed” in the United States, whether there is “gender inequality” in our society, or whether “heterosexism” and “classism” are meaningful let alone valuable categories of analysis.

I am sure you will agree that this statement of the qualifications for a degree in Women’s Studies does not reflect an academic conception of Women’s Studies, and are not the requirements of a program of scholarly inquiry into the history and sociology of women. These are the requirements of an ideological program frankly designed to indoctrinate students in a radical feminist view of the world, and to recruit them to feminist causes.

Finally let me introduce you to the curriculum for Social Work 510 at Kansas State (forgive the Kansas-oriented examples but I have just testified in behalf of an Academic Bill of Rights resolution before a committee of the Kansas House). In its course description Social Work 510 explains its agendas: “An understanding of the development of social injustice is a necessary first step toward working for social justice.” Again, this is the statement of an advocacy program not an academic inquiry.

And what does the course syllabus for Social Work 510 teach students are the origins of social injustice? The principal required text for the Social Welfare course, which answers this question, is not a text that presents several points of view, nor is it even a text with social welfare as its subject. Instead, it is a well-known political indictment of American history by the Marxist writer Howard Zinn. In fact, virtually the entire “Social Welfare” course in the Social Work program at Kansas State is a chapter by chapter, class by class reading of Zinn’s book, A People’s History of the United States. One chapter of this book and one entire class of this course are devoted to “The Impossible Victory – Vietnam,” in other words to celebrating the Communist imposition of a totalitarian state in Vietnam. What on earth does this have to with the education of future social workers in “social welfare?”

At this moment, I think you are probably appreciating more than ever the academically privileged environment you inhabit at Reed. And I am willing to bet there is no course or department at Reed like the ones I have just described. Yet 80% of American college students (I believe that is the figure) go to state schools like the University of California and Kansas State. So we do not have a small problem here.

I assure you that I could find more many more such departments and courses at these two schools and at schools all over the country that are both private and public, secular and religious.

Which brings me to the problem of religious schools, and the second objection you raise about my motivations, though I am not totally clear why it belongs in such a category. I guess you think my agenda as a conservative is to empower the religious right. Perhaps you are unfamiliar with my confrontations with the religious right over their attitudes towards gays, or my observations that Intelligent Design Theory is not scientific and has no place in a biology curriculum.

The problem you see in the exemption we have made for private and religious institutions is a problem of our pluralistic society not something that originates with me. If you have a solution for it that does not involve the same contradiction you impute to me, I’m all ears. However, I would not even be able to get a resolution passed through a legislature without making this exemption. Second you don’t give me credit for attempting to end the hypocrisy whereby religious institutions restrict the principles of academic freedom but claim to observe them. The contradiction that irks you is something you might speak to the American Association of University Professors – the chief opponent of my Academic Bill of Rights -- about, since it has not to my knowledge challenged religious colleges and universities which do in fact hire and fire professors according to a religious litmus.

Compelling religious institutions to concede that they restrict professorial attitudes seems as though it would produce a much better situation than the present one where they pretend to observe the canons of academic freedom but actually don’t. I am a practical man not a dreamer, so this small step appears like a gain to me. And I don’t really think it’s fair for you to say that it shows I don’t value academic freedom, just because I can’t move a mountain like this. Nor do I think it “sabotages [my] whole project” as you claim. I am not a miracle worker and my ambition is not to transform the face of American higher education including American religious education. I just want to improve the education of as many American students as possible and particularly those who have been the victims of ideological programs such as the ones described above. Seventy-five percent of college students attended public schools. If I were able to improve the education of that group it would be achievement enough. If that many Americans became educated in the principles of academic freedom as a result of my efforts that in itself would have an impact on the religious holdouts.

By the way, I don’t agree with your view that religious schools are predominantly conservative (or that they represent such a significant proportion of the student population). Some are – Liberty University, Bob Jones and Grove City would be an obvious three. But denominational schools like DePaul, Notre Dame, Georgetown, Villanova etc. are most decidedly not. DePaul is one of the most ideologically left schools in the country. We had the Dean of Faculty at St. Joseph’s testify at our hearings in Philadelphia and if my memory serves me (I can look it up if you care) he said that a student who did not believe in “social justice” would not qualify for a degree at his school.

The third basis of your mistrust is your impression that I associate liberal academia with the treasonous left: “You clearly identify the American liberal professoriate as having been deeply infiltrated and even dominated by the treasonous ‘Shadow Party.’” I’m sure you have reasons for thinking this, but your impression is wrong.

Here is my view of the American professoriate as expressed in my now notorious book, The Professors: “Although such a judgment is beyond the scope of this inquiry, it is a reasonable assumption that the majority of university professors remain professionals and are devoted to traditional academic methods and pursuits. But these scholars are often a silent majority intimidated from expressing their views on subjects like the Susan Rosenberg and Ward Churchill affairs because of their concern not to be labeled ‘racist’ or ‘sexist’ or ‘reactionary’ by their more aggressive radical peers. Still, they are not always so intimidated, and can sometimes be seen standing up to defend academic standards under assault.”

Allow me to indulge myself with one other quote from the same text: “This book is not intended as a text about leftwing bias in the university and does not propose that a leftwing perspective on academic faculties is a problem in itself. Every individual, whether conservative or liberal, has a perspective and therefore a bias. Professors have every right to interpret the subjects they teach according to their individual points of view. That is the essence of academic freedom.”

In other words, I appreciate the scholarly integrity and disposition of professors on the left like yourself, and have absolutely no quarrel with your presence on university faculties or influence on the university curriculum; nor is it my agenda to produce on the right what radicals on the left have indeed achieved in fields like Women’s Studies, Black Studies and the like.

Nor have I ever called for academic “balance” either in writing or in speeches; nor do I think “devil’s advocacy” as a pedagogic method should be avoided or chilled; nor have I ever criticized a Colorado professor for a single remark about Bush or anyone else. I think it’s inappropriate for professors to inject passionate political attitudes into their lectures or make irrelevant derisory comments about conservative or liberal figures in a classroom. One Colorado professor whom I criticized had delivered a rant in a class which was ostensibly about property law to the effect that all Republicans were racists and then called a student who objected a Nazi. The other professor gave a final criminology exam in an undergraduate course that offered students a choice between two essay topics: Make the case for gay marriage or make the case that the United States invasion of Iraq was criminal. Since the only other essay questions (both required) were designed to make students display their knowledge of feminist theory and power structure theory I don’t think you could construe these as devil’s advocacy points.

Yes I feel that large parts of universities which are not institutionally conservative like Reed have been colonized by political activists with malicious agendas towards the United States. And yes they are leftists. But I certainly draw a sharp line between them and scholars like yourself and Larry Summers, even though we have many points of disagreement. I wish liberals would show the same respect to conservatives.

Now to your substantive criticisms of the Academic Bill of Rights. Let me say first that I think you raise very interesting intellectual questions about the actual content of the bill. Only a libertarian here or there has provided me with a comparable challenge. And let me say at the outset, that I don’t know all the answers. But I also don’t believe that all of the problems you present are peculiar to my Academic Bill of Rights or to your impressions of it.

At least one is a problem inherent in the very idea of academic freedom. This is the idea of faculty self-governance. What happens if a faculty becomes politicized and no longer maintains academic standards? This is what I believe has happened in entire departments and academic fields. When this does happen, the combination of tenure and the autonomy of the faculty merely ensure that the destruction of academic values and standards will be permanent. What are the means for redress in this case? Are faculties unique in our society in being accountable to no one? Of course not. They are accountable to university governing boards and trustees and to legislatures in the case of universities created by the state. How this authority is used is another matter.

Which brings us to the Academic Bill of Rights. I think you would be the first to agree that a proper academic inquiry should proceed from many angles not just one, and therefore that the exclusion of conservatives from a faculty such as Reed presents a problem for anyone who takes academic scholarship and inquiry seriously. The difference between the conservative viewpoint and the liberal viewpoint, between Adam Smith and Karl Marx, between Hayek and Foucault, between Locke and Rousseau is as profound as a difference can be, and pervades their entire perspectives, including their understanding of social institutions and historical events. And I am sure you agree that these differences are philosophically based and create a chasm that no argument can bridge.

Consequently, the absence of faculty members who hold conservative views at an institution like Reed haunts virtually every question that arises in its classrooms. This does not mean that a professor with leftwing views cannot represent the conservative view on a given question. But because he is not a conservative, and is not thinking like a conservative, there are whole dimensions to any given problem that he will not see. If this were not the case, the differences between leftists and conservatives would hardly be as profound as they are or have lasted as long as they have.

So the real question is what to do when confronted with this absence. You are right that any attempt to insert a conservative viewpoint into a faculty that has no conservatives might pose an immediate contradiction. How can you hire a conservative without hiring a candidate on the basis of his perspective? Well, you can’t. But why does this problem have to be reduced to its political dimension? Why does it have to be a political perspective one is looking for when these issues are fundamentally philosophical? And since they are philosophical, what we are looking for is a scholar who holds these views, not a politician who wants to implement them. Let’s take a hypothetical case. Let’s say that a university, noticing that whole departments are devoted to “critical” thought about “late capitalism” and the development of the radical critique of the West, decides to create an interdisciplinary program – a curriculum – around the idea of examining the historical/social, moral/legal, economic foundations of free societies – that is, of free market societies and political democracies based on philosophical individualism. Why in developing such a curriculum and staffing such a program would a faculty not seek to hire a Hayekian social theorist? a Burkean political theorist? an economist of the Austrian school, a follower of Oakeshott? I can’t think of a reason why this would violate the canons of academic freedom, can you? By the way, I don’t think this means that the “conservatives” so selected would be Republicans. I have actually attempted to promote such a curriculum at a major institution and the faculty member I asked to design the curriculum and organize the program is a Lieberman Democrat who is a professor at its law school.

If you look again at the language you object to in the Academic Bill of Rights -- “plurality of methodologies and perspectives” – you will see that it was carefully chosen to conform to existing standards of intellectual diversity in the academy. It is a standard practice in academic hires to seek a plurality of methodologies and perspectives – a historicist, a deconstructionist, a post-modernist, a Marxist, a feminist etc. So why not a traditionalist, an Arnoldian, a Hayekian, a scholar who resists current dominant intellectual fashions – i.e., a “conservative?”

I think it is unfortunate for the movement for intellectual diversity that it has fallen to my lot to be its mover, or at least the catalyst who gets it off the ground. And that’s because my profile is too political and my political temper too hot. But I didn’t seek this role so much as it sought me. Efforts to resist the creeping politicization of the curriculum (again, Reed and Kenyon appear to be academic islands resisting this trend) failed to gain traction and also lacked allies outside the politically conservative ranks. That’s when I stepped in. I may not succeed. But I assure you that what I am trying to do is to revive in the academy the kind of traditionalist curriculum you already seem to have at Reed, only with a more inclusive (and diverse) faculty representation. And just to make this as clear as it can be: the purpose of such diversity would not be to introduce conservative political viewpoints into the curriculum. I would expect conservative faculty to behave as professionally in the classroom as you and leave their politics at the door.

And therefore I hope you will first of all correct your impression of what I mean by academic freedom – which is exactly what the AAUP has meant by academic freedom in all its major pronouncements on the subject until recently. Unfortunately, the leadership of the AAUP has steadily drifted left, and is now composed of political activists who have no real interest in the principles of academic freedom. Just to underscore this point, the head of Committee “A” of the AAUP (until June 2005), Joan Wallach Scott has condemned supporters of the Academic Bill of Rights as “the pro-Sharon lobby” while focusing AAUP concerns on the defense of terrorist professors Sami al-Arian and Tariq Ramadan.

You say politicized teaching is bad teaching and unprofessional teaching; we agree. You say bad teaching can only be corrected by the assertion of academic and professional standards and these can only be imposed by the university community itself; we agree. You say good academic behavior cannot be required and/or imposed by legislatures without destroying the very institutions it would be proposing to reform; we agree.

So why have I turned to legislatures, and how have I turned to legislatures? To answer the second question first, I have not asked a single legislature to pass an actual law with an enforcement mechanism. Every legislative measure has been a resolution. Why are these resolutions necessary and what is their agenda? They are necessary because universities have shown little inclination to enforce their own academic standards. Look what happened to Larry Summers at Harvard when he asked Cornel West to do some scholarly – as opposed to political – work. Where Summers couldn’t succeed, why would any other university president think they could?

When the faculty is the problem, there is only the administration to bring it to its senses. But administrations live in fear of the radical minorities on their faculties. That is the lesson of Summers’ fall. What university president would not be impressed by the termination of the career of the most powerful president in the history of the modern research university because he proposed a scientifically proven fact – that women and men have different aptitudes for mathematics. This is Galilelo vs. the Church all over again, only the church is a secular faculty possessed by a religious idea (feminism).

In any case, in launching my academic freedom campaign I went first to a university administrator with my Academic Bill of Rights. I wrote the Bill of Rights for Tom Egan, who is the chairman of the board of regents of the State University of New York system. He told me not only that he would adopt the Academic Bill of Rights as a university policy (to be implemented and enforced by the university community) but exactly how he would do it. And then he didn’t. As months went by and he asked me over and over if I could get faculty support for the Bill I realized that he was paralyzed by the realization that the faculty would never approve it. And he lacked the nerve to put it through as an administrative measure. So I decided to look for another alternative, for a point of leverage with which to move this immovable object. That’s how I came to legislatures.

My legislation is designed to do one thing: provide university administrators with an incentive to confront their faculties and enforce the existing academic standards that have fallen into disuse in the last decades. In Ohio and Colorado, as soon as my legislation began to go through the process, the presidents of the state universities approached our legislators and asked if they would withdraw the legislation if the universities would institute the policies themselves, or policies like them. In the case of Ohio, they asked if they could implement the June 23, 2005 statement on academic freedom of the American Council on Education. We said yes. Why? Because that was my intent in going to the legislature in the first place. To get the universities to move in the right direction themselves.

In Pennsylvania we have created a Committee of the Pennsylvania House on Academic Freedom in Higher Education. I can send you a pamphlet I put together on the Hearings. You will see that what we asked is: What are your academic freedom policies and professional standards? Why aren’t you enforcing them? What steps could you take to enforce them? This was no imposition. It was just a call to them to do the right thing – i.e., the thing they themselves agree is right.

Of course there is always an implicit threat that once engaged in issues like this, legislatures might be tempted to do more, and might transgress the boundaries that you and I feel are appropriate. But is this a reason not to do anything at all? Here I have a real problem with liberal and leftwing critics of my approach. Why have you not raised a similar hue and cry against affirmative action and sexual harassment policies imposed on universities by governments both federal and local? These legislative measures directly interfere with university governance, dictate who can be hired, what is appropriate behavior inside classroom and out, and what students may be admitted. Not only have the faculty opponents of my Academic Bill of Rights not opposed such intrusion by the state, they have actively supported it. So it is somewhat difficult for me to take objections to the extraordinarily mild measures I have proposed at face value when my opponents are willing to make a concessions like these.

To sum up: In every case, our approach to academic freedom has been to have the universities themselves do whatever needs to be done, in the way that they see fit to do it. And we have never asked them to do anything beyond enforcing policies they already endorse. This is a pretty cautious program of reform, which has been blown way out of proportion and grossly misrepresented by the AAUP and the faculty unions.
Strip away the political noise and my agenda for the university and yours are quite close. The difference between us is that you enjoy a privileged environment at Reed where you do not see problems such as the ones in California and Kansas I have referred to in this letter, which are actually quite typical. Consequently, you regard my methods as unwarranted and drastic and even dangerous. I hope my letter has persuaded you to some extent that your fears are possibly exaggerated. I have enjoyed this exchange, which has been far more pleasurable and informative than our ill-fated encounter last year.
[1] The Academic Bill of Rights exempts private institutions and creed-based institutions from its provisions providing – and this is an important caveat – they make explicit to prospective students what restrictions they intend to place on academic freedom.
[2] http://feministstudies.ucsc.edu/resCareers.html
[3] http://feministstudies.ucsc.edu/resMajor.html

Article: Steinberger vs. Horowitz, Part II

2006-06-27T16:10:00.000-07:00

By David Horowitz
FrontPageMagazine.com
June 26, 2006

What follows is the second part of the debate between Peter Steinberger, professor of political science and Dean of Faculty at Reed University, and myself. (A third part will follow.)

In my view, this second part of our exchange is particularly revealing about the opposition to the academic freedom campaign and the intolerance of academic liberals towards conservative thought. As I see it, the attitudes reflected in Steinberger’s comments go a long way towards explaining how an academic blacklist, which has virtually eliminated conservatives from university faculties, could have taken place. This is because Steinberger would himself play no conscious part in any blacklist, but as this exchange shows would not recognize such a blacklist against conservatives unless it manifested itself in a very crude form. Moreover, as the exchange proceeds it becomes more and more difficult to imagine that Steinberger would hire a conservative himself.

Professor Steinberger is a liberal academic trained in the university before it was politicized by Sixties radicals. He has spent his academic career at Reed University, a school with a traditional academic curriculum which has no departments of Women’s Studies or Black Studies, or any of the other the new fields that have transformed important parts of modern universities into political parties of the left. Professor Steinberger, whose field is political science, does not politicize his own classroom. His work – at least from its bibliographical descriptions -- is academic in the old sense, and does not display the tell-tale signs that one associates with political ideologues.

Steinberger has communicated to me in emails that, as a political scientist, he is an admirer of conservative thinkers like Burke, Oakeshott and Strauss. However, these thinkers are obviously all dead and their ideas are no part of any contemporary political debate. (Strauss is not an exception because the word “Straussian” as used by the left does not refer to Strauss’s ideas or his intellectual influence, but is a term employed to establish guilt by association among his former students). Consequently, Steinberger’s intolerant attitude towards contemporary conservative ideas is all the more striking, as is his attitude that the radical ideas of the hard left – e.g., that “classism” is a feature of “social injustice” – are “centrist” and “mainstream.” This is one hugely important reason that, as the ensuing dialogue will show, he does not believe there is a serious problem of political repression on university campuses and in university curricula and regards the Academic Bill of Rights – which is a liberal document based on a liberal academic freedom tradition that has been in place for nearly a hundred years – as a “bad idea.” --- David Horowitz.

Steinberger: I am now prepared to respond to your response of a couple of months ago to my original criticism of the Academic Bill of Rights. Once again I find it necessary to apologize for taking so long to do this. Clearly my work habits or rhythms are very different from yours.
Let me say at the outset that I have considered your response with an open mind. Though certainly skeptical, I can honestly say that I was truly and fully prepared to be persuaded. However, I am not persuaded. Indeed, after reading your response, I’m more convinced than ever that the Academic Bill of Rights is a terrible idea and that you should bag it.

Horowitz: First let me thank you again for taking the time to consider these views and for composing an articulate and intellectually responsible reply. To date, virtually all of the responses to the academic freedom movement, particularly those as uncompromising as yours, have been so much political noise, relying on gross distortions of our positions and ad hominem attacks on its proponents. Yours by contrast is focused on the intellectual issues and makes possible a discussion that can illuminate not only the issue itself, but also the gulf between the opposing sides.

Since your response is quite long I have broken it up into five sections and am responding to each one ad seriatim.

1. Academic Professionalism

Steinberger: It may be useful as a prefatory matter to set out briefly some of my own professional commitments, which will help contextualize the remarks that follow. To begin with: my strong preference is for an undergraduate education that primarily teaches students how to think. I believe that teaching students how to think requires a disciplinary-based education; that this means introducing them to, and teaching them to use, at least some of the disciplines of which the liberal arts are composed; that a discipline is a more or less well defined structure of thought constituted largely by a distinctive conceptual apparatus that has proven to be useful in imposing an intelligible order on what would otherwise be a chaos of impressions and experiences; that an education in the disciplines literally creates a disciplined mind, a mind capable of orderly, systematic analysis; and that one best learns a particular discipline by seeing how it is similar to and different from other particular disciplines.

That’s my view. I think it’s the right view, and I think that other views are wrong. But a view that is wrong is not the same as a view that violates academic freedom. Thus, as you already know, I think that a highly politicized view of undergraduate education is especially wrong, egregiously so. But academic freedom absolutely demands that those who disagree with me about this be allowed to pursue their approach. Academic freedom means that I can and should try to convince them otherwise, using arguments and analysis, but also that neither I nor anyone else should be allowed to impose upon them any sanction because of the approach they’ve taken. Academic freedom means that sanctions should be imposed only for work that is unprofessional or that fails to meet standards of excellence established by the particular institution in question; and those standards should be neutral with respect to the full range of reputable political, scholarly, and pedagogical opinion, generously interpreted.

Horowitz: We agree one hundred percent on the matter of what academic standards ought to be, and that they ought to include political neutrality in the classroom, and a strict self-discipline on the part of the teacher not to impose his or her prejudices on controversial issues on students. In other words, the purpose of undergraduate instruction is to teach students how to think, not what to think.

We disagree one hundred percent on whether this violates the tenets of academic freedom as they have existed in this country since 1915 when the American Association of University Professors published its “Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure.” These principles, as you know, have been incorporated into the academic freedom policies of most universities and define academic freedom as it is generally understood. The clear meaning of these principles is that professors will observe the distinction between indoctrination and education and will not use the authority of their position to impose their doctrinal prejudices on their students.

The “Declaration” is quite clear in stating that a teacher should avoid “taking unfair advantage of the student’s immaturity by indoctrinating him with the teacher’s own opinions before the student has had an opportunity fairly to examine other opinions upon the matters in question, and before he has sufficient knowledge and ripeness of judgment to be entitled to form any definitive opinion of his own.”[1] In 1940, the AAUP amplified its original position stating that professors should not introduce controversial material into their classrooms that has no relation to the subject.

The Kansas Board of Regents, a typical school authority, has expressed these views in the following academic freedom guidelines: “Thus, it is improper for an instructor persistently to intrude material that has no relation to the subject or to fail to present the subject matter of the course as announced to the students and as approved by the faculty in their collective responsibility for the curriculum.” And again: “Students should not be forced by the authority inherent in the instructional role to make particular personal choices as to political action or their own social behavior.”

Your position that “academic freedom absolutely demands that those who disagree with me about this [meaning political neutrality in the classroom] be allowed to pursue their approach,” is simply wrong. It is a fundamental retreat from the academic freedom policies that have been in place in American universities since 1915. The fact that someone like yourself, who agrees with the basic philosophy of education expressed in the original AAUP statements – and in all the statements of our academic freedom movement – should take such a position on the matter of enforcing these standards is in itself sufficient evidence of the scope of the transformation that political radicals have achieved in the governance of our universities and the magnitude of the degradation in academic standards that they have caused.

2. Evidence that a Problem Really Exists in our Univeristies

Steinberger: In my original criticism, I took you to task for relying primarily on survey data and anecdotes – presumed “horror stories” – in defending the need for an Academic Bill of Rights. I noted that the survey data say nothing about what professors actually do in the classroom and that a few anecdotes hardly constitute good evidence. But now look at what you’ve done in response. First, you’ve jettisoned the survey data, in effect agreeing that it provides no evidence in support of your view. Second, you’ve provided instead nothing but a few more anecdotes, or anecdotal-type cases. I criticize you for relying on a few anecdotes, and you respond by offering a few anecdotes! This is not truly responsive.

Moreover, the anecdotal cases themselves – three in all, one from UC Santa Cruz and two from Kansas State – provide very poor evidence for your point of view. Consider the statement from the Santa Cruz website regarding a major in Feminist Studies. There is nothing in the statement itself that supports your criticism. The statement does indeed describe a focus on racism, sexism, homophobia, classicism, and you take this to be evidence that the program is committed to indoctrination and advocacy. But the conclusion simply doesn’t follow from the premise.

To begin with, no one could possibly deny the existence of racism, sexism, homophobia, and classism. Similarly, no one could possibly deny the existence of “power relationships and injustice.” I repeat: no one. To assert that there is racism in the world is no more controversial than to assert that there is nitrogen in the world. Of course, people disagree about what racism exactly is, how pervasive it is, what its causes are, whether it’s ever justified, how serious a problem it is, whether the bad effects of a form of racism could ever be outweighed by putative benefits, and the like. Here is where conservatives and liberals part company. These are important and difficult issues, but they have nothing to do with whether or not racism exists. I have never met a (serious) conservative who thought there is no racism; such a thought would be ludicrous. I have, of course, met many conservatives who think that racism is far less important today than it used to be, or that focusing on racism distracts us from more serious problems, or that we have no idea how to combat racism and therefore the effort to do so is apt to do more harm than good, or that what is sometimes taken to be racism is not racism at all, and so on. But the Santa Cruz statement takes absolutely no position on any of those issues. I repeat: no position. To read the statement as claiming, say, that ours is a fundamentally racist society, or that sexism is so deeply pervasive as to require some kind of “radical” (your word) social upheaval, is to find something that is simply not there. Thus, “understanding” racism, sexism, etc. commits one to nothing, and certainly not to any kind of partisan position. Similarly, being prepared to work with “policy-making and lobbying organizations, research centers,” etc. is no crime; indeed, this is something that could well be said by any good political science program or, for that matter, any traditional liberal program of the kind that I favor. Having a “knowledge about power relationships and injustice” says nothing, in itself, about what those relationships are, how pervasive they are, or what injustice consists of. Providing “skills to change the world” is not a phrase that I would prefer to use, but it’s hard to imagine a serious program of academic inquiry that doesn’t in some sense contemplate producing educated people who might, if they so chose, make the world a better place; and of course, this says absolutely nothing about what is meant by “a better place.”

And so too for the Kansas State blurb on Women’s Studies. You say that the blurb shows that the program is non-academic and partisan. In fact, it shows no such thing. It requires that students be “familiar” with the key Women’s Studies concepts; but surely to be familiar with a concept is, in and of itself, to make no empirical claim about the degree to which, or the way in which, that concept applies to reality. The statement requires students to demonstrate an “understanding” that Women’s Studies is an academic discipline committed to “social action and social change;” but to understand this is not the same as being committed to social action and social change.

The case of the Kansas State course devoted to Howard Zinn’s book is also problematic. Now I myself doubt that a course in which the sole reading is Zinn’s A People’s History could be a good course. But it’s possible. Thus, you don’t say if the course treats Zinn’s book critically. You don’t say if students are encouraged to find both strengths and weaknesses in Zinn’s arguments. You don’t consider the possibility that Zinn’s book is being used not as a kind of biblical text to be believed but merely as an example of a certain genre of thought and literature, hence something to be analyzed and criticized as a rhetorical artifact. But even if none of these things were true, that would only show that it’s a bad course; it wouldn’t show that academic freedom is being compromised. Relatedly, you don’t say if students in the class are required to adopt Zinn’s views. You don’t say if they are punished for advocating different views. You don’t say if students are prevented, through coercion or intimidation, from expressing dissent or if they are pressured into endorsing Zinn’s approach. You don’t say if student grades reflect a kind of doctrinal orthodoxy. These would be serious problems. But you present not one scrap of any evidence about any of this. Again, a bad course is not the same as a course that violates academic freedom.

To be clear: I’m not denying that the Santa Cruz and Kansas State programs are as you describe them. Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t. Rather, my point here is about evidence. I want to be very clear about this: it’s a question of evidence. You have made very harsh, deeply accusatory claims about what’s going on at Santa Cruz and Kansas State. You have attacked the very professionalism of those involved. You have, by insinuation, ridiculed the competence and credentials of the relevant faculties and administrators. But you have presented – in your response to me, at any rate – exactly zero evidence in support those claims. Literally no evidence. This is a real problem. One should never make hard accusations – essentially accusations of gross malfeasance – in the absence of clear and compelling evidence. Rather than a clear and compelling case, you’ve provided no case at all.

I should add that there are other elements of your presentation of these anecdotes that are deeply troubling. You say that 80% of American college students go to schools like UC and K State. Why is that relevant? Why would you say this, other than to suggest rhetorically that 80% of American college students are being subjected to unprofessional indoctrination? But what percentage of all American college students on all American college campuses are taking Feminist Studies courses at UC Santa Cruz or Women’s Studies courses at Kansas State? One-thousandth of one percent? Indeed, what percentage of students on those two campuses alone are taking those courses? You don’t say. You do say that “I assure you that I could find more such departments at these two schools….” Well, could you? I’m not so sure. I’ve now looked at the UC Santa Cruz and Kansas State catalogs. The overwhelming majority of what I see there is meat-and-potatoes stuff. My guess is that the vast majority of Kansas State students – perhaps 95%?, perhaps more? – are taking things like biochemistry or economics or geology or, yes, military science, all of which are taught in the College of Arts and Sciences at K State; and of course, this doesn’t include the great many students who are in K State’s colleges of Business Administration, Agriculture, Education, Engineering, etc.

The notion that the Academic Bill of Rights is designed to deal with an important and widespread problem rather than an isolated and trivial problem – if it is a problem at all – is, at least in your communications to me, based on nothing that could plausibly be called real evidence. Your presentation also uses the word “radical” or “radicals” on four occasions to characterize the programs at UC Santa Cruz and Kansas State. Where on earth does that come from? Even if you’re correct in saying that these programs have a clear partisan bent – and again, you’ve presented to me no evidence in support of that – what makes that bent “radical?” To say, for example, that sexism is so deeply pervasive as to require some kind of serious political action or political reform is, indeed, to take a political position; but in and of itself, it’s hardly a radical position. A deep concern with issues of gender inequality is very much a mainstream position, well within the normal scope of ordinary, even centrist, political discourse. With all due respect: when you employ this kind of rhetorical excess, e.g., when you make fast and loose use of the word “radical,” it’s just hard to take your presentation seriously. My eyes begin to glaze over.

Horowitz: This is a pretty revealing response because it reveals the depth of the chasm between “liberals” and conservatives not only on the academic freedom issue but on every issue that divides our culture. I put quotes around the word liberal because the position I have taken in this entire dispute is liberal – it is what liberalism stood for in 1915 when the academic freedom principles that I am defending were first articulated, and the liberalism that persisted until the last quarter of the 20th Century. What you are defending – and what “liberals” generally are defending in this debate is a species of leftism or radicalism, not liberalism. And this speaks directly to your first responsive point.

I did not jettison the survey data that show conservatives and libertarians – intellectuals not on the left – are a vanishing breed on university faculties. I said it wasn’t directly related to classroom abuses. You are a perfect example. You are on the left but your professional standards, which embrace political neutrality in the classroom, make you unproblematic in terms of students’ rights to be educated rather than indoctrinated. However, as your response to this question shows, the exclusion of conservatives from university faculties – and thus the absence of conservative perspective from the university curriculum – has profoundly negative consequences for the quality of the education students are getting. Your responses to the curricula from the Department of Feminist Studies at Santa Cruz and the Women’s Studies Department at Kansas State and the Social Work course that uses a Stalinist history book as its primary text shows that you equate the leftist worldview (or liberal worldview if you prefer) with rationality itself. This is a profoundly ideological attitude and demonstrates why the absence of conservative professors as revealed in the surveys is indeed evidence of a profound problem in our universities.

The descriptions of the two department and the Social Work are not “anecdotes” as you claim in your preliminary attempt to dismiss them as evidence. An anecdote is an account by a witness, who may or may not be reliable. What we are discussing here is the evidence provided by the subjects themselves. It is evidence of their purposes in designing their courses of instruction. It is your reaction to these descriptions that is so revealing.

I am sure that if we were discussing the University of California’s Department of Religious Fundamentalist Studies, you would have no trouble in identifying it as a problem. Because it is called Feminist Studies you see no problem. Surely you cannot believe for a moment that this department, headed by Communists (card-carrying) like Professor Bettina Aptheker is teaching students to have critical attitudes towards feminism and to question whether in fact women are “oppressed” by a capitalist patriarchy. If you are naïve enough to think this, surely you would agree that some oversight authority should be looking at the reading lists and examination questions and perhaps auditing the courses to see that an appropriately professional – non-ideological – course is being offered. But in the absence of such authorities interested in preserving academic standards, I have provided you with evidence in the Department’s own words.

In answer to the question, “What Can I Do With A Major in Feminist Studies” the Department answers “With a background in women’s and minorities’ histories and an understanding of racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, and other forms of oppression, graduates have a good background for work with policy-making and lobbying organizations, research centers, trade and international associations, and unions. Graduates’ knowledge about power relationships and injustice often leads them to choose careers in government and politics, because they are determined to use their skills to change the world,…”[2]

Your response to this is like that of a good defense attorney who constructs a case based on surface plausibilities whom no one really believes once they look at the defendant in the dock. Does it not even occur to you that the assumption that the graduates of the Feminist Studies programs having understood classism will be “determined to use their skills to change the world” is also an assumption that they are political leftists? Conservatives, as I’m sure you have not forgotten are philosophically disposed to thinking that that is precisely what you cannot do, i.e., “change the world.” (And do think the phrase “change the world” is accidental and not related a radical tradition which proposes not merely to interpret the world, but to change it?)

Do you think there is a a conservative in the universe could write a paragraph linking, oppression, classism and changing the world? Does it occur to you that the use of the suffix “ism” is a reflection of ideological thinking, that referring to racial prejudice as racism, gender differences as “sexism,” class differences as “classim,” and the status of homosexuals under the heading “homophobia” is itself ideological? How about a course in Bushophobia? Why is homophobia a category in a departmental description of Feminist Studies, unless what we are really talking about is world-explaining ideology, not an academic discipline? Is classim or sexism a “form of oppression?” Only a leftist would think so, and only a leftist would think that understanding the nature of these isms would lead to a determination to change the world.

You, on the other hand, evidently think that these views are actually scientific, the equivalent of believing that there is nitrogen in the world, which is another way of saying that to believe them is to be a sane human being. No wonder you have no problem with the exclusion of conservatives from university faculties. It is no more problematic for you than the exclusion alchemists, astrologers and flat-earthists.

Look at the way you have constructed this argument, which is as uncompromising in its agendas as it is absolutist in tone: “To begin with, no one could possibly deny the existence of racism, sexism, homophobia, and classism. Similarly, no one could possibly deny the existence of ‘power relationships and injustice.’ I repeat: no one. To assert that there is racism in the world is no more controversial than to assert that there is nitrogen in the world.”

Well, I for one, deny that anyone is “oppressed” in America – which is the clear meaning of the terms “injustice” “racism,” “sexism” and “classism” as they are used in this paragraph. Yes there is racial prejudice and gender prejudice, but such prejudices are endemic to minorities and not just to alleged oppressor classes. Are women actually a minority by the way? Only in the ideological sense. As a Jew I am a minority, as white, a majority, as a male a what? How does my being white trump the fact that as a Jew I belong to the world’s most overtly hated group? Yet here is a department dedicated to treating me as white, male, heterosexual, ruling class oppressor. Since minorities are just as racist in their attitudes as so-called majorities the terms “oppression” and “injustice” used in this sociological form are useless. On the other hand, if we are talking about individual cases of injustice as opposed to group categories of oppression, what need is there for “feminism” or for a department dedicated to training students in feminist ideology, which is an offense both to the idea of a liberal education and to academic professionalism. It is a course of study defined by radical categories of analysis not by the concepts of an empirically established and commonly accepted science.

We are not talking about degrees of racism, sexism, classim or homophobia as you suggest. It is not a question as to whether there is more classism in America or less. It is matter of conception. What does the term “classism” mean, for example, and why would anyone even use such an ugly neo-logism. What it means is that workers are oppressed the way blacks are oppressed, just as the vulgar coinage “sexism” was invented by radicals to appropriate the moral gravitas of the civil rights movement for the “women’s movement.” Classism is just a gussied up version of Marxism for the modern era. Talking about the exploitation of the working class dates you; so let’s call it “classism.” It’s the same claptrap by another name. If homophobia isn’t an ideological agenda in disguise how come there is no reference in this departmental boilerplate to heterophobia? That’s my point of view, which you have casually dismissed (and I’m sure without intending any personal insult) as a form of insanity in your presentation. If I were at student at Santa Cruz, on other hand, my conservative views would disqualify me for a degree in Feminist Studies. This is a violation of my academic freedom as a student, and is a form of injustice to tens of thousands of conservative students in our taxpayer supported educational system which has ostensibly been created to provide educational opportunities for all citizens.

You say I am wrong in suggesting that the “blurb” on the Department of Women’s Studies website at Kansas State shows that is non-academic and partisan. “In fact, it shows no such thing. It requires that students be “familiar” with the key Women’s Studies concepts; but surely to be familiar with a concept is, in and of itself, to make no empirical claim about the degree to which, or the way in which, that concept applies to reality. The statement requires students to demonstrate an “understanding” that Women’s Studies is an academic discipline committed to “social action and social change;” but to understand this is not the same as being committed to social action and social change.” This is the defense attorney again. Look at the defendant. Indeed look at what the defendant actually says.

First, it is wrong to suggest that the statement itself is a “blurb.” It is a statement of the A for a Women’s Studies degree.

To qualify for a B.S. or B.A. degree in Women’s Studies, students will have demonstrated:

1. Their understanding that Women’s Studies is an academic discipline that generates new knowledge about women and gender, reconsiders other disciplines through feminist perspectives, and is committed to social action and social change.

2. Their familiarity with key Women’s Studies concepts such as the social construction of gender, oppression of and violence against women, heterosexism, racism, classism, and global inequality.

I will confine myself to the first two requirements plus a fragment of the third, because they are really self-explanatory. To qualify for a degree in Women’s Studies, a student has to demonstrate an understanding that feminism “reconsiders all other disciplines through feminist perspectives,” that its concepts include “heterosexism” but not (“homosexism” or “heterophobia”) and also “Their understanding of how and why gender inequality developed and is maintained in the United States…” Is gender inequality “maintained” in the United States today? Isn’t this a conclusion rather than, as it should be, an academic question? Finally, according to the degree requirements, Women’s Studies is “committed to social action and social change” and students need to understand that. How can you get a degree in Women’s Studies at Kansas State, then, if you are not committed to that, even though the defense attorney suggests you can? This is not a course about Women’s Studies programs; it is a course in Women’s Studies.

Kansas State’s Social Work course 510 in Social Welfare purports to be a history of social welfare in the United States and features as its principal text Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United State, including an entire class session devoted to “The Impossible Victory: Vietnam,” which is based on the chapter in Zinn’s book with the same title. In addressing this, you become the attorney for the defense again instead of looking at this with a juror’s eye. Your objection? “You don’t say if students in the class are required to adopt Zinn’s views.” Now who’s kidding whom here? The course description warns students: “An understanding of the development of social injustice is a necessary first step toward working for social justice.” Social justice is a term of art for the political left. Zinn’s book is a Stalinist cartoon. The students in this course have signed up in a program designed to credential them as social workers. They have no background in history and their teacher is not credentialed to teach history. If the text for this course was The New World Order by Pat Robertson, along with several like-minded texts, would you understand the issue? Zinn’s book, pathetic as it is, is not even an academic text and is irrelevant to the subject of social welfare institutions -- unless of course you are a Marxist ideologue and you see everything as inter-connected. From the course description: “We will approach history using an ‘ecological systems perspective’ in which everything is connected to everything else, thus there are understandable reasons why things are the way they are.”

You claim that your concern is that I haven’t produced evidence that there is a problem. In my view, you have revealed your own credibility problem. How can one even address problems like this if academics like you insist on turning a blind eye to what is going on? The academic system is set up so that no one can go into a classroom with a concealed video camera and tape the proceedings. And even if they could, they would not be able to present them as evidence – first because no one is going to sit through a term of video tapes, and second because even one did, the method of acquiring the evidence would become the central issue and displace all other questions. Yet short of this method, nothing for you is evidence.

Each of the two departments we have discussed and this tendentious course in Howard’s perverse view of American history – taught by a professor not credentialed in history to students not taking a course in history – is patently problematic. Yet not for you. I have never insisted that you or anyone else accept my judgments on these courses. What I have asked is that universities and academics show some interest in what appear to be problems. Here is a red flag, take a look. Re-assert the academic standards that some courses and teachers appear to be violating; establish some procedures to look into these questions. What I have met from you and others is a stone wall instead. The suspicion is, you know that there are such problems, but you don’t want to do anything about them.

As if to confirm this suspicion you now fall back on the hoary argument that because most of the courses in modern research universities are in subjects like physics and engineering or business or health, this would be a minor problem in any case. But as you well know, all students are required to take liberal arts division courses, and the academic left has seen to it that their ideological programs, usually under rubric of a multicultural requirement are included. And why is that? Because multiculturalism is seen – thanks to the agitation of academic leftists and the munificence of the Ford, Rockefeller and other foundations which pioneered these programs – as part of a civic training. The liberal arts schools of our universities provide the civic educations of our country’s future leaders. That’s what makes them – and the Academic Bill of Rights important – and you know it as well as I do. Yet you insist that my claim that this is so is based on no evidence. It’s my eyes that are glazing over.

Another rhetorical trope that you use and that makes my eyes glaze over is your incessant assertion that your political bias is universal enough that anyone else’s is so extreme that it’s hard to take seriously. “Your presentation also uses the word ‘radical’ or ‘radicals’ on four occasions to characterize the programs at UC Santa Cruz and Kansas State. Where on earth does that come from?” To take one of these cases: Howard Zinn is an old-time Stalinist, and unreconstructed, not to say vulgar Marxist. You want me to call him a liberal? It’s your view which becomes increasingly hard to take seriously when you make assertions like this.

Or let’s take sexism. I happen, as an old leftist, to hate the term itself, because of its provenance which was to steal the moral authority of the civil rights movement for feminism – a movement that was not about social or political oppression. I not only deny that “sexism is so deeply pervasive as to require some kind of serious political action or political reform,” but I assert that anyone who believes this is himself (or herself) a radical, and a radical ideologue at that. You have lived and worked in a university environment that is so insulated from the real world that you are unaware of how peculiar these assertions sound to anyone who is not under its ideological disciplines. What kind of political reform is required by sexism in American society today? The only discriminatory gender laws to my knowledge favor women. If that’s what you’re referring to (and I doubt it) I am certain that that is not what the Women’s Studies departments at American universities have in mind.

“Radical” in my usage refers to people who conceive American democracy as a hierarchical system of oppression. Inequalities are not the same as hierarchies. Hierarchies refer to status; inequalities can result from unequal talents or unequal applications of talent or unequal opportunities based on contingencies like birth into illiterate, poverty-stricken and/or dysfunctional families. Hierarchies are oppressive because they cannot be overcome. Inequalities are not because they can be. There are no hierarchies in America that political reforms can affect. The claim that there are – which is the claim of every Women’s Studies Department in America known to me – is an ideological claim by people who are radicals. They are radicals because they think they change inequalities of talent and application and random circumstance by political means.

3. The Provision of the Academic Bill of Rights that Exempts Religious Schools

Steinberger: Three brief points here. First, the fact that “there’s nothing much [you] can do about the problem” is honest but unhelpful. In effect, it entirely concedes my criticism. Second, the claim that religious schools are not predominantly conservative is deeply unpersuasive. You cite, as counterexamples, DePaul, Notre Dame, Georgetown and Villanova. These are all Catholic schools. As such, they are complex institutions that do indeed have diverse faculties and student bodies. (As a graduate of Fordham – B.A. and M.A. – I know something about this.) However, they also all operate in close connection with Catholic religious orders, which themselves operate under the aegis of the Vatican; and the Vatican has, especially of late, been crystal clear in explicitly requiring that Catholic institutions of higher education support Catholic doctrine, including doctrine pertaining to abortion, homosexuality, church-state issues, etc. The alumni mailings that I receive from Fordham – an institution for which I do harbor great fondness in many respects – make no bones about the institution’s strong commitment to Catholic teaching. Third, if some religious institutions are in fact more careful than others in protecting freedom of thought, the Academic Bill of Rights nonetheless would create a specific license for such institutions not to do so; and again, the overwhelming majority of these institutions would be interested in promulgating doctrines that, in a contemporary context, are decidedly on the right wing – often on the extreme right wing – of the political spectrum. I will, thus, be brutally honest : it’s hard not to see this provision of the Academic Bill of Rights as having a very strong political bias.

Horowitz: Three brief replies. To concede that the Academic Bill of Rights is not about religious schools that make clear in what ways they restrict academic freedom is not to concede your argument at all. If students know in advance that they are surrendering aspects of a free education to get a religious training, that is their privilege, and I have no problem with it. This is hardly the same as providing a state training in the religion of leftism and claiming at the same time that this is not indoctrination and observes the principles of academic freedom.

Second. The claim that universities are big places and thus complex has already been answered. The concern is the liberal arts programs at e.g., Catholic institutions that provide a civic education in the humanities and social sciences for all students.

Third. The Academic Bill of Rights provides no special license to religious institutions. It is the First Amendment to the Constitution that does that, and I do not need to defend it here. The claim that because the Academic Bill of Rights does not propose to amend the Constitution it exhibits a political bias is based on the assumption that religious colleges like DePaul and Georgetown are conservative. They are not. Even if they were, this claim makes no sense.

Notes:

[1] http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/566
[2] http://feministstudies.ucsc.edu/resMajor.html

Article: Is There An Academic Blacklist?

2006-06-26T10:34:00.001-07:00

By David Horowitz
FrontPageMagazine.com
June 30, 2006

In this final part of the debate, I have broken Steinberger’s commentary on “The Idea of Academic Freedom” into several sections to make it easier for the reader to follow the arguments. The exchange is particularly illuminating, in my view, in the way it reveals Professor Steinberger’s instinctive bias against conservative thought. I think the existence of this attitude on the part of a serious and seasoned academic liberal makes it easier to understand the exclusion of conservatives from university faculties --DH.

For those just joining the debate, Peter Steinberger is Professor of Political Science and Dean of Faculty at Reed University.

4. The Idea of Academic Freedom

Steinberger: The main part of your response concerns the concept of academic freedom. Again, I find your comments to be – in some combination – unresponsive, confused, and self-contradictory.

To begin with some preliminaries: you say that faculties must, in the end, be accountable to some authority, e.g., governing boards, trustees or legislatures. Yes indeed; but that utterly begs the question. You yourself acknowledge that “how this authority is used is another matter.” But in fact, that’s the matter that counts; and it’s a matter that you dodge completely.

Faculties are indeed accountable in the sense that they must demonstrate that their actions are professional, responsible, conscientious. But when you slip from this into suggesting that governing boards, trustees or legislatures should be involved in the process of exercising academic judgment – who gets hired and why, what gets taught, what faculty can and cannot say in the classroom – then you are violating academic freedom, pure and simple. Governing boards, trustees and legislatures may not like how faculties exercise their academic judgment. But the whole idea of academic freedom is that academic judgment must be respected even if people aren’t crazy about the results. Without this, academic freedom would mean absolutely nothing.

If boards, trustees and legislatures were happy with – or were indifferent to – everything that faculties do, then academic freedom would never come into play. There would be no need for such a notion; it would be a meaningless idea. The conclusion is plain: respecting academic freedom means that authorities should intervene only when basic levels of professionalism are not met. And however much you may protest, the fact is that you have presented no evidence of which I’m aware to show widespread unprofessionalism. You’ve presented plenty of evidence to show that you don’t like some of the things that are going on in academia, some of which I don’t much like either; but again, that’s a completely and entirely different question.

Horowitz: These comments are based on a misunderstanding of the Academic Bill of Rights. I have never proposed that legislatures, trustees or governing boards manage university curricula or hiring policies. This misrepresentation of the Academic Bill of Rights originates with the American Association of University Professors and has been repeated ad nauseam despite the many occasions on which I have pointed it out. Similarly, I deliberately did not specify any authority to oversee these matters not in order to “beg the question” as you suggest, but to leave the designation and design of such authorities to the university community. In other words, the Academic Bill of Rights has been designed specifically to protect the independence of the university and the academic freedom of its faculties.

The real question is this: If professors do not observe academic standards, who will hold them to account? The best solution to the current situation in which disregard for professional standards and student rights is widespread would be for faculty bodies to step forward and propose a solution. Such a solution might be the enforcement of existing standards by expanding the mandate of existing grievance machinery. So far no faculty group or individual has proposed such a solution.

On the contrary. The American Association of University Professors and other academic organizations have simply denied that any problem exists. And you are all too typical in joining this denial. In your previous responses you have even stated – and in no uncertain terms -- that if professors imposed their political agendas on their classrooms (a clear violation of professional standards) you had no problem with that. It is this general faculty denial and abdication of responsibility for maintaining professional standards and protecting students’ academic freedom that has created the problem that needs to be fixed. In promoting the Academic Bill of Rights, I have confined my proposals to remedy this situation 1) focusing attention on the fact that a problem exists; 2) reviving the principles of academic freedom that should guide a solution; and 3) asking legislatures to pressure the university community to come up with a solution. This all seems pretty mild and uncontroversial but it has elicited a veritable storm of faculty opposition.

Steinberger: You worry about “the exclusion of conservatives” from faculties. But where does that notion come from? You’ve presented no evidence about that. Remember: a relative absence of conservatives does not show that conservatives have been “excluded.” Indeed, to the best of my knowledge, there has been no such exclusion. The large number of non-conservatives in (especially) elite institutions is almost certainly attributable not to any conscious or even unconscious regime of exclusion but to the simple fact that trained academics – strongly committed to notions of evidence and rational argument, hence innately hostile to claims based primarily on mere faith – are simply less likely to adopt conservative, especially socially conservative, viewpoints. Now I might be wrong about this; but to repeat, you haven’t shown otherwise. So when you blithely talk about the “exclusion” of conservatives, you once more make a severe accusation – indeed, a wild and sweeping broadside – without any evidence that I can see. Intellectually, this is unacceptable.

Horowitz: Where to begin? Here is a link to a dozen studies that demonstrate not only that conservatives are a preposterously small minority on university faculties but that their numbers have been steadily dwindling over years in which the number of conservatives in the general culture have been steadily increasing. One study, in particular, by Professor Daniel Klein and Andrew Western, shows that while registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans overall on the faculties of Stanford and Berkeley by factors of 8- and 10-1, the ratio rises to 30-1 among junior professors.(http://www.studentsforacademicfreedom.org/reports/FacultyStudies.htm.) In other words the problem is getting dramatically worse, while the numbers “suggest that the selection mechanisms work in ways that eliminate Republicans.”

Your response that this does not constitute evidence and is “intellectually unacceptable” is a show-stopper. How does one proceed when one party to an argument refuses to even look at the evidence (and this not personal to you, since it has been the general response by the academic left to these studies). This is actually stronger evidence than has ever been provided to justify affirmative action programs for women and blacks where no argument other than a statistical disparity has even been attempted to my knowledge. No case had to be made that women and blacks were systematically excluded from university faculties, for the university world to be turned upside down to include more of them. The disparities alone justify an effort which has upended principles and structures of university governance and cost hundreds of millions of dollars. There is is good reason why no evidence was presented of actual racial or sexual discrimination in the hiring process, since search and hiring committees are secretive bodies whose deliberations are hidden even to the departmental faculties themselves. Nonetheless, there is a considerable literature on the intrusion of political factors in faculty hiring, and the ease with which a political blacklist could be implemented including my book The Professors and a seminal article by Professor Mark Bauerlein that appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education, http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=t1eexv08oc0e5san12cit3ctkr1xkf8c.

Your own attitudes, moreover, which I have learned from my debates on this issues are widely shared, would explain the academic blacklist of conservatives all by themselves. You have stated that leftwing views – e.g., on sexism, classism, etc. – are unarguable; they are just the conventional wisdom of reasonable people. This displays such a disrespect for the conservative viewpoint that it is hard to imagine that you yourself would agree to the hiring of a conservative, at least one whose field involved the expression of conservative views on contemporary issues.

If leftwing views are indistinguishable from reason itself, then someone with conservative views would hardly be suited for an academic hire. In fact, this is exactly what you claim: “The large number of non-conservatives in (especially) elite institutions is almost certainly attributable not to any conscious or even unconscious regime of exclusion but to the simple fact that trained academics – strongly committed to notions of evidence and rational argument, hence innately hostile to claims based primarily on mere faith – are simply less likely to adopt conservative, especially socially conservative, viewpoints.”

This is an expression of extreme prejudice against conservatives and their views. It is also absurd. And it is also widespread. In fact there is an academic study by four (leftwing) Pitt professors that explain the relative scarcity of conservatives on university faculties in precisely these terms. (An astute analysis of the Pitt study by University of Maryland professor Art Eckstein, can be found here:

http://www.studentsforacademicfreedom.org/archive/2006/January2006/ArtEcksteinPittofAcadBias011206.htm

The existence of such academic attitudes towards conservatives, coupled with the statistical evidence of the pathetically small and rapidly dwindling conservative minority on university faculties, is prima facie evidence that there is systematic exclusion – i.e., a blacklist – of conservatives from those faculties.

Steinberger:
I also do not agree that philosophically-based differences – e.g., between Adam Smith and Karl Marx, or between Hayek and Foucault – “create a chasm that no argument can bridge.” Thus, your claim that liberals and conservatives are so different that “there are whole dimensions to any given problem” that one or the other “will not see,” and that this explains why differences between leftists and conservatives are “as profound as they are,” seems to me just wrong. Certainly the last claim is fallacious. It is utterly plain and obvious that liberals and conservatives can understand one another very well indeed and still disagree vehemently. Your entire approach here – involving what might be called “psychological blinkers” – suggests a kind of extreme epistemological skepticism or relativism that seems both dubious and dangerous, and that also puts you, ironically, inth close company with some of the very same post-structuralists whose work you often ridicule.

Horowitz:

I think this discussion is conclusive evidence that such a chasm exists and that is very for liberals like yourself to see the problems that confront conservatives. You have just identified commitment “to notions of evidence and rational thought” with the liberal point of view, and also with academic thinking. Yet you deny that conservatives are discriminated against in academic hiring. How can you say there is no chasm? Let alone that there is no exclusionary process which keeps conservatives from being represented on university faculties in reasonable numbers?

You have described academics as “innately hostile to claims based primarily on mere faith,” which you identify with conservatism. Does it not occur to you assomeone disposed to look at the evidence, and as an expert in political theory that conservatives regard Marxists and feminists as essentially religious types, whose ideologies are matters not of evidence but of faith? Are you unaware that entire academic fields are based on mythical ideas that only leftists believe – for example, the existence of race, gender and class hierarchies in market democracies, which outlaw discrimination based on race, gender and social class? Do you not think the mere existence of academic studies of “institutional racism” (e.g., the text Racism Without Racists – which is required in many sociology courses) in a society which has a constitutionally-based equal protections clause is evidence of faith-based thinking in the present leftwing academy?

What you have demonstrated unwittingly is the impossibility of conservatives receiving a fair hearing from academics like yourself and -- since you are among the more reasonable academics who have argued these issues -- the professoriate as it is currently constituted.

Steinberger:

The most basic problem with your account of academic freedom concerns the alleged distinction that you propose between “political” and “philosophical” diversity. I just don’t see that this gets you anywhere at all. There are three points to be made in this respect. First, I don’t see why the idea of, say, an interdisciplinary program on “free societies” based on “philosophical individualism” would be any more or less objectionable than the Feminist Studies program at Santa Cruz or the Women’s Studies program at Kansas State. You say that you can’t think of a reason why such a program would violate the canons of academic freedom. Neither can I. But in that respect, it’s exactly and precisely the same as the very programs that you criticize. You profess to endorse – as I do – a traditionalist curriculum; but if a feminist program departs from such a curriculum, then so does your proposed freedom curriculum, and in exactly and precisely the same way. Why is the one okay and the other not? I’m afraid that in your eagerness to justify an Academic Bill of Rights that speaks not at all to academic freedom but to what you happen to like and dislike, you’ve tied yourself up in a tangle of self-contradiction.

Horowitz:

The difference between the program I am proposing, which would study the moral, economic and political foundations of free societies and the program of Feminist Studies at Santa Cruz, lies not in the subject matter but in the academic approach to the subject matter. My point about philosophical individualism wasn’t that a program to study free societies and institutions would be based on it, but that free market societies are. The program I am proposing would examine market societies in an academic way;, i.e., it would necessarily include critiques of free market societies as well. Feminist Studies is ideological and insists on a feminist viewpoint. It is not the study of feminism but a schooling in feminism. There is no contradiction in what I am proposing. You have just misunderstood it.

Steinberger:

Second, from the perspective of academic freedom, there is nothing inherently problematic about programs – e.g., academic departments – that have strong ideological or theoretical or other one-sided tendencies or identities. Historically, I think of the economics department at the University of Chicago; or at one time, the English department at Duke, as a center of post-structuralist thought; or the rational choice emphasis for which the political science department at Rochester has been justly famous; or certain other political science departments presumed to have strong Straussian orientations. I myself don’t much like this way of organizing academic programs. But it’s a legitimate way of doing so, it has certain putative advantages – creating critical masses dedicated to the pursuit of a particular line of inquiry – and it certainly doesn’t violate anyone’s academic freedom. If this works for Chicago economists or Rochester political scientists, why not for Santa Cruz feminist theorists? Again, not my cup of tea; but again, certainly not something for you or a governing board or a legislature to get involved with.

Horowitz:

First, there are no Straussian departments that I am aware of. Second, Rational Choice theory is a methodology not an ideology. Feminism, on the other hand, is an ideology. There’s a big difference. Feminism is incorporates a political agenda. This makes it impervious to empirical evidence that would refute its assumptions. In fact, most academic departments do promote methodological diversity. But these days it is mainly of the left. Thus most English Departments will try to have a post-modernist, a Marxist, a feminist, a deconstructionist, etc. I would just like to see this diversity include, say, a traditionalist, a Thomist, an Arnoldian.

As for your refusal to see a problem in the Santa Cruz department of feminism, would you see one in the creation of a Department of Christian Fundamentalism or a Department of Neo-conservatism? And if not, how do you explain that none exist?

Steinberger:

Third, your attempt to resist “creeping politicization” is in fact directly undermined by your own position. Indeed, your presentation completely concedes a major argument of my original criticism, namely, that the Academic Bill of Rights would actually increase the politicization of the classroom, exactly what you claim to oppose. In this respect, the distinction between the “philosophical” and the “political” is just specious.

As someone who opposes the politicization of undergraduate education, I myself don’t think a one-sidedly “Marxist” classroom is any better than a one-sidedly “Democratic” classroom, or that a one-sidedly “Hayekian” classroom is any better than a one-sidedly “Republican” classroom. In all such cases, I believe the quality of teaching is likely to be less good, simply because one-sidedness is pedagogically less effective than multi-sidedness. Of course, it should also now be abundantly clear that this has nothing to do with academic freedom, and that the decision to pursue one-sided teaching is a professionally legitimate decision that I think must be protected, even if I myself don’t much like it.

But as I argued in my original criticism, the basic thrust of the Academic Bill of Rights would be to encourage – indeed require – the ever increasing politicization and one-sidedness of classroom teaching; it would make one-sidedness of one kind or another a virtual necessity; and it would communicate to those academics who, like me, abjure one-sidedness that we are doing something very, very wrong. If you are really opposed to the politicization of the classroom, then you should be fighting tooth and nail to put an end to the Academic Bill of Rights, since it would produce exactly the opposite of what you purport to want.

In sum, I’m afraid that you have not at all corrected my impression of what you mean by academic freedom. To the contrary: I think that the Academic Bill of Rights – and your response to my criticism – reveal a wholesale lack of understanding of academic freedom. Indeed, it is a misunderstanding of the very worst kind. It involves – wittingly or otherwise – an effort recklessly to invoke a venerable, distinguished and honorable concept in the interest of pursuing a wholly extrinsic goal, and doing so in a way that directly subverts and sullies the very meaning of that concept.

Horowitz:

Inventing concessions for me understandably makes it easier for you to argue your case, but it does little to advance the discussion. The Academic Bill of Rights does not politicize the university; it does not propose any political intrusion into the curriculum or hiring process. It does not propose setting up ideological departments committed to sectarian political activism. The distinction I made between the philosophical and political is just that – a distinction.

In my day philosophy departments were careful to hire professors with a diversity of views – idealist, materialist, Aristotelian, pragmatist, analytic, continental etc. I see no problem with this. Exposing students to different viewpoints is basic to a liberal education. What I wrote in connection with my hypothetical department was: “Why in developing such a curriculum and staffing such a program would a faculty not seek to hire a Hayekian social theorist? a Burkean political theorist? an economist of the Austrian school, a follower of Oakeshott?” The point I was making was that iif a department is not committed to a political agenda, it is possible to hire professors with particularist viewpoints without making this an affirmative action program for those viewpoints. I could have added, that one could hire for such a program in the study of free societies a follower of Durkheim, or Weber or John Rawls. This is not the same as the Department of Feminist Studies which is designed create a platform for feminist ideologues and to exclude their critics.

5. The Tactics of the Academic Freedom Campaign

Steinberger:

I’m no tactician, but here again much of what you say seems to me dubious at best. I have no idea who Tom Egan is [chairman of the regents of the State University of New York], and I have very little knowledge about Lawrence Summers [former president of Harvard]. I must say, though, that I’m strongly inclined to think that your gloss on the Summers situation must be grossly simplistic to the point of caricature. I myself have witnessed up close what many would regard as an unsuccessful and aborted presidency; based on that experience, I’m pretty confident that any such circumstance is apt to be far, far more complex, indeed by many orders of magnitude, than your account – “look what happened to Larry Summers at Harvard when he asked Cornel West to do some scholarly… work” – would suggest. I also wonder about your description of Mr. Egan. Did he “lack the nerve,” or did he come to realize, after reflection or perhaps consultation with faculty, that the Academic Bill of Rights is a lousy idea? Since it is, in my view, a lousy idea, it’s hard simply to rule out such a possibility.

Horowitz:

My point about Summers was not that he was fired because he attempted to make Cornel West accountable for his failure to perform his professional duties, but that when he asked Cornel West to do some scholarly work – as opposed to serving in political campaigns and performing rap music – he was accused of racism, forced to make a public apology to the Harvard community and then humiliated by rival Princeton who rewarded West for his academic absenteeism by offering him a hugely prestigious position (“University Professor”) and picking up his equally bountiful check. This incident in my view showed the difficulties that even the most powerful university presidents encounter when they try to enforce academic standards.

I do know Tom Egan, and I can assure you the issue for him in not implementing the Academic Bill of Rights was entirely the political opposition of a radical faculty. William Scheuerman, a political science professor and the head of a faculty union representing 30,000 SUNY employees denounced the Academic Bill of Rights once it became public as “crazy,” “Orwellian,” and “our witch-hunt.” So much for academic rationality and respect for the facts.

Steinberger:

Similarly, why did the college presidents in Ohio and Colorado ask “your” legislators – do you really “have” legislators? interesting notion, that – to withdraw the legislation? Perhaps they too understood that the Academic Bill of Rights is, in substance if not intent, an attack on rather than a defense of academic freedom. In Pennsylvania, your committee asks “why aren’t you enforcing” academic freedom policies and professional standards? But such a question presumes a fact. Is it fact?

Again, what’s the evidence? If the evidence is of a sort that you’ve presented in your response to my original criticism, then I’m afraid it’s no evidence at all. You acknowledge that legislatures might be tempted “to do more” than pass a resolution, then ask if that’s a reason not to do anything at all? Well yes, it certainly is a reason, and a pretty darn good one! In general, if you know that X, which may not be so bad, will very possibly lead to Y, which is awful, then this fact certainly counts against X. It may not be decisive, but surely it has to be taken into consideration.

Horowitz:

You are beginning to employ pretty low methods of debate. “My” legislators obviously referred to the legislators I asked to sponsor the bill, not legislators I claim to have in my pocket. The university presidents in Ohio and Colorado asked legislative sponsors of the bill -- Larry Mumpers and Shawn Mitchell -- if they would withdraw their resolutions on condition that the university presidents would institute the policy themselves. In other words, the proposed legislation was the inducement to the university administrators to do what they should have done in the first place. The fact is that I went to them in the first place with the proposed bill of rights and they blew me off. This incident demonstrates why legislation is necessary. Radical faculties intimidate university administrators a la Professor West and dissuade them from addressing the problems that do exist (whether you want to acknowledge them or not).

The episode also proves that I have no desire to impose legislative solutions. I am using the legislation to get university administrators to do the right thing themselves. When they agree to act, I am ready and willing to have them do it under their own authority, and according to their own prescriptions, not the dictates of legislatures. This refutes your entire critique of the Academic Bill of Rights as an attempt on my part to politicize universities. My goal is to de-politicize them.

Steinberger:

I must say, finally, that your argument about legislative interference with respect to affirmative action and sexual harassment is really hard to take seriously. There is simply no analogy with the Academic Bill of Rights.

Race and gender are protected categories, and are so for the very good reason that people should not be discriminated against because of characteristics that are (1) entirely irrelevant to the enterprise in question, e.g., being black or white or female has no connection with being a good student or good scholar, and (2) inherent features of individuals, i.e., features that individuals do not choose but simply have in virtue of who they are. To protect such individuals does absolutely no violence to the academic enterprise; it is to uphold very basic notions of decency. Of course, one can certainly disagree about whether, say, affirmative action is the correct way to do this. That, however, is a question not about the legitimacy of governmental interference but, rather, about the particular form of interference. Academic freedom, on the other hand, is completely and entirely unconnected with any of that. One protects academic freedom by not interfering with the professional judgment of scholars and teachers. To be sure, and as indicated above, there is nothing wrong with holding faculties accountable in the sense of ensuring basic standards of professionalism; but again, that’s utterly different from attempting to determine or influence who gets hired, who gets fired, what gets taught, how it gets taught, and so on.

Horowitz:

These comments about affirmative action avoid looking at the point I was making. The point was that no objection was raised by academics like yourself to the massive intrusion of the state into hiring and admissions policies and university governance by sexual harassment and affirmative action laws. Your answer is that the justification for the policies are different. This concedes that massive political interference hiring practices and university governance is all right with you if the cause is just. Since we’re apparently degree in that case and not principle, why the near hysterical objection to legislative resolutions – with no statutory teeth – which merely ask universities to do the right thing?

Let’s pass now to your objection that discrimination on the basis of creed is qualitatively different from discrimination on the basis of gender or race. When the two of us were young men this country had a mantra to the effect that all citizens were equal “regardless of race, color or creed.” The left has added gender to this list, but dropped creed. Why do you think that is? Do you suppose it might have any connection to the innate totalitarianism of the left’s agendas?

Your first point is that being female or black has no connection to being a good student or scholar. Are you arguing that being conservative or religious does? Your intolerance is showing again. When I think of the religious men of science from Newton and Pascal to Einstein and Descartes I wonder on what you base this prejudice.

Your second point is that race and gender are inherent features of human beings while politics and religion are not. Are you aware that there are entire academic fields – including in particular Women’s Studies – that are based on the presumption that gender and race are not innate or inherent but “socially constructed?” What kind of argument is this anyway? Should we discriminate against students who like chess or are vegetarians? Alternatively, do you think that religious belief or political commitments, or fundamental social values, are not integral to human identity and can just be discarded at will? So why is discrimination by one political faction, which happens to have gained control over search and hiring committees and classroom lecterns, not problematic? And what do you think it portends for a democracy like ours if one party has control of the publicly financed educational system and is given license to discriminate against students who disagree with its views?

Steinberger:

Let me conclude by noting that your response to my original criticism is especially disappointing in being silent on some very fundamental points. Among other things, I proposed a certain analogy between academic freedom and religious freedom; I suggested, in effect, that a legislative resolution instructing or even encouraging, say, the Catholic Church to adopt certain doctrines and to reject others, or a resolution requiring or even advising Catholic priests to preach one way rather than another, would be a gross violation of religious freedom; and I suggested that this is strongly similar to what you are proposing with the Academic Bill of Rights. I still believe such an analysis to be correct. To my mind, it clearly illustrates why the Academic Bill of Rights is wrongheaded. Once again, you have every right to criticize what you don’t like. But when your criticisms and accusations are based on nothing that could be called plausible evidence, and when you use the notion of academic freedom in such a way as to undermine real academic freedom, then surely I have right to point that out as well. (I should add, as a kind of addendum, that the claim that many colleges and universities are state institutions and, as such, are fully eligible for the kind of legislative interference that you have proposed is surely a red-herring. If a state wants to establish and support a college or university, it should do so properly, and this means providing the same kinds of academic freedom protections that all other institutions of higher education enjoy.)

I hope you do not find the tone of this letter strident, offensive or uncollegial. If you do, I’m sorry, and I want to assure you that that wasn’t my intent. As always, my goal has been to provide an honest and frank analysis, presented respectfully but without sugar-coating. Again, I believe the analysis shows the Academic Bill of Rights to be a very bad idea, something that should be profoundly unattractive to serious observers from all sides of the political spectrum, liberal and conservative alike. I imagine that you have invested a great deal of time and energy in your proposal. In such circumstances, it’s always particularly hard to do a one-eighty. But if you are, as you claim, truly interested in academic freedom, then I would urge you to scrap the whole thing. When you use the rhetoric of academic freedom to undermine – intentionally or otherwise – academic freedom, you have a chance to do some real harm.

Horowitz:

What is substantive in these final comments is based on a misunderstanding of the Academic Bill of Rights, which is not an attempt to impose political strictures on university faculties and curricula. Since I have I have already responded to these objections, I will refrain from doing so again.

I’d like now to make a summary statement about three points that came up in these exchanges.

First, when faced with evidence from the Kansas State Social Work and Santa Cruz Women’s Studies Department websites, whose obvious import is that these are not academic courses but political training programs you simply denied the obvious. You even proposed that the students in the Kansas course might have been expected by their professor to criticize the main text assigned for the course, which was itself not an academic text but a political diatribe written by Howard Zinn. Having denied the obvious you then put to me the question “How do you know?” (i.e., that the professor did not intend the students to simply absorb the Zinn lesson, or that the professors of feminism were not actual addressing the subject of feminism in a skeptical, scientific manner. This evasive response (evasive of the obvious) is unfortunately typical of the defenses that liberals have made when presented with the evidence that there are ideologues in university classrooms – which is actually something they already know. How many professors at the University of Colorado and in the Ethnic Studies field validated Ward Churchill’s academic credentials even though he had none? By my estimate thirty or forty – his entire department voted to hire, promote him to tenure and elect him chairman knowing he had no PhD and his MA degree was in a field unrelated to Ethnic Studies. Twelve experts in the field outside his department wrote letters of recommendation after reviewing his work which an academic panel has found rife with “falsification,” “fabrication” and “plagiarism.” The panel noted by the way, that these charges against Churchill’s scholarship were made by other academics for ten years. In fact, the only apparent credential Ward Churchill had to be elected to his academic positions was his leftwing politics.

Yet, the attempt to state the obvious in these matters is met, almost invariably, by the retort “How do you know?” Does the fact that conservatives are outnumbered thirty to one in politicized fields like anthropology an indication that they are actually being excluded? How do you know? Are the hundreds – perhaps even thousands -- of students who have complained about inappropriate political comments by professors in the classroom telling the truth? How do you know? How do you know that they’re not all lying? This was the principal theme sounded by representatives of the professor unions and professional associations and by Democrats on the committee at the Pennsylvania hearings on academic freedom. They and you both rationalize your skepticism of the obvious as a demand for “intellectual rigor” on my part. In fact this charge is little more than special pleading in defense of the indefensible.

Secondly, I am puzzled by your failure to take personal responsibility for upholding the academic standards which you know to be proper. You believe that it is bad pedagogy to engage in overt politicizing of the classroom, and it is something you would never do. But you are willing to allow it to take place on the grounds of “academic freedom.” But you know that this is actually a violation of academic freedom, which is not the license to say anything in the classroom, but is clearly defined as freedom within a professional discipline, and only under its strictures. Otherwise professors would be licensed to lie to their students and their lies would be protected by “academic freedom.” Your refusal, as a “dean of faculty” to see that professional discipline is maintained by your faculty is the reason that some outside authority – trustees in the case of Reed – should step in to see that professional discipline, and therefore the academic mission of the university is maintained. The alternative is declining public support for the university itself.

Third, I am dismayed by the intellectual bias you display against conservatives for being conservative. Your explanation of why there are so few conservatives on university faculties is that conservatives by nature don’t qualify for the job. You equate left-thinking with reason itself. In your view, to be conservative is in itself to fail the test of respect for evidence and scientific method which is the presumed basis of all academic disciplines (I say “presumed” because quite obviously the Santa Cruz feminists and the Social Work disciples of Howard Zinn are ideologues who exclude critical texts and sources from the courses they teach and thus don’t respect academic methods.) Doesn’t it occur to you that the bias you exhibit is a sufficient explanation for the exclusion of conservatives from university faculties like Reed’s? How can a conservative qualify if his very disposition is judged to be inappropriate for the academic calling? And, as I have observed before, your attitude on these matters is not idiosyncratic, but is typical of the attitude of liberal academics like yourself.

In closing let me say that I did not find the tone of your letter strident or intentionally offensive or uncollegial. What I did find it is an unwitting proof that a very deep chasm exists between liberals like yourself and conservatives like me. Arguments – as our exchange shows -- don’t seem able to bridge this gap. I think this is unfortunate for ourselves, for our educational system and for our country. I have made a modest suggestion of steps that might be made to help close it. Include more diverse viewpoints on university faculties and in university curricula. That will open a dialogue that needs to be opened. If you have a better solution, I would like to hear it. But don’t tell me there’s no problem.

Article: Is There An Academic Blacklist?

2006-06-26T10:34:00.000-07:00

Article: Discounting the Facts

2006-06-12T09:55:00.000-07:00

By Jacob Laksin
FrontPageMagazine.com
June 12, 2006

On May 9, 2006, a group calling itself the coalition for Free Exchange on Campus released a 50-page "report" on David Horowitz’s book, The Professors titled "Facts Count." As described by InsideHighered.com, "In ‘Facts Count,’ the debunking document being released today, Horowitz’s book is slammed as ‘sloppy in the extreme.’ The analysis also says that the details included in the book suggest that Horowitz is not concerned with the students he says he is trying to protect, but is actually trying to punish professors whose views he doesn’t like."

If the authors of "Facts Count" are to be believed, they represent a group of disinterested observers whose only concern is to defend the marketplace of ideas. In their own words, their mission is "advocating for the rights of students and faculty to hear and express a full range of ideas unencumbered by political or ideological interference." But this self-serving boilerplate is not supported by the facts.

Free Exchange is an organization created and financed by professorial unions solely to oppose the efforts of one individual, David Horowitz, and his campaign to have universities adopt an "Academic Bill of Rights" and to denounce his book, The Professors.

The groups comprising the Free Exchange coalition are chiefly distinguished by their partisan commitment to left-wing political causes and their support for the politicized and one-sided academic status quo documented and critiqued in The Professors. Campus Progress, for example, which is the primary "student" organization belonging to the Free Exchange coalition, is the ideological subsidiary of a Democratic brain trust, the Center for American progress, headed by former Clinton chief of staff John Podesta. Like the Center, Campus Progress and funded by George Soros and other billionaire activists. Campus Progress is itself headed by David Halperin whose father, Morton Halperin, is the "Director of U.S. Advocacy" for Soros’s main base of operation, the Open Society Institute. Far from being a public interest operation, Campus Progress’ declared aim is to "strengthen progressive voices on college and university campuses nationwide" and "empower new generations of progressive leaders."

Another Free Exchange member, the Center for Campus Free Speech, is a scarcely concealed front for the U.S. Public Interest Research Group (US PIRG), a network of left-wing student groups committed to advancing the agendas of its founder, Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader. Together with the pro-Castro United States Student Association, a member of both Free Exchange and the radical anti-war coalition United for Peace and Justice, these partisan student groups would naturally regard a book like The Professors, which examines the abuses of political activists masquerading as academics, as a threat to their common agenda: recruiting students into the left-wing political fold. This is a goal they share with many of the tenured radicals profiled in the book.

Even more central to the coalition are its union members, in particular the American Federation of Teachers, two of whose operatives are listed as contacts for press inquiries about "Facts Count." Joining the AFT is the American Association of University Professors, which has taken a leading role in opposing the academic freedom campaign launched by Horowitz by distorting its mission, and in organizing protests against Horowitz’s "Academic Bill of Rights." Other members of the Free Exchange Coalition include such leftwing organizations as the American Civil Liberties Union and People for the American Way.

With this partisan pedigree, it should surprise no one to discover that the Free Exchange report, "Facts Count" is a tendentious document that misrepresents and distorts the arguments of The Professors in order to attack the book and its author, and is not above fabricating evidence to make its case. Time and again the report insists that The Professors cites no evidence for a given claim when even a cursory reading of the text and its sources would confirm the opposite. Time and again, the report rebuts arguments that appear nowhere in The Professors, but are the inventions of the Free Exchange authors themselves. The overall impression created by these methods is that either these authors have not read the book or else they are unwilling honestly to engage with its arguments.

Every now and then, to be sure, the Free Exchange authors identify an actual error -- hardly surprising in a text of 112,000 words dealing with 101 different individuals. On examination, however, these errors turn out to be trivial and in no way affect the substantive arguments of the book or the conclusions drawn in the individual profiles of the professors included.

Much of the Free Exchange report is based on grievances voiced by these same professors, whose charges against the book the Free Exchange authors accept uncritically. Every one of these charges is answered in the present response. Some of the individuals, like Richard Falk, Larry Estrada, and Gordon Fellman misrepresent their past statements and writings. Others, like Matthew Evangelista, Mari Matsuda and Elizabeth Brumfiel offer disingenuous accounts of their past (and ongoing) role in the continued politicization of American universities. Two professors, Marc Becker and Sam Richards, even attempt to disguise their expressed support for politics in the classroom by posing as champions of intellectual diversity and – in Becker’s case – non-ideological teaching. Not one of the professors mentioned in the Free Exchange report appears willing to openly defend the partisan politics and political extremism that flourish in the university curriculum or to frankly acknowledge their role in promoting these developments. This bad faith permeates the report "Facts Count" and renders its title ironic indeed.

In their executive summary the authors of "Facts Count" claim that The Professors is "characterized by inaccuracies, distortions, and manipulations of fact—including false statements, mischaracterizations of professors’ views, broad claims unsupported by facts and selective omissions of information that does not fit his argument." This turns out to be a fair description of their own report. Facts do count -- but evidently not for the Free Exchange authors or the professors they are determined, in the face of all evidence, to defend.

In all, the "critique" contained in the report "Facts Count" is ethically disturbing and intellectually vapid, and should be an embarrassment to all concerned in its construction.

What follows is a point-by-point refutation of the report that justifies this judgment.

Executive Summary:

1. "Mr. Horowitz's book condemns professors for actions that are entirely within their rights and entirely appropriate in an atmosphere that promotes the free exchange of ideas. Mr. Horowitz chiefly condemns professors for expressing their personal political views outside of the classroom. He provides scant evidence of professors' in-class behavior and fails to substantiate his charge that the professors in his book indoctrinate their students. What in-class evidence he does provide largely demonstrates nothing other than that the professors in his book emphasize critical, minority, or historically underrepresented viewpoints in their teaching."

Like many other claims in "Facts Count," this accusation is without basis. The Professors is formally divided into two sections – a 15,000 word analysis which explains the contents of the study, and then the study itself which consists of one hundred formal profiles of professors (Another profile, that of Ward Churchill, is contained in the introduction.) The publisher has split this analysis into three chapters book-ending the profiles. In the introduction, the author explains that his book is about the systemic "intellectual corruption" of the university and that the sample profiles represent a much larger cohort of professors who confuse political activism with academic scholarship.

The author identifies four conclusions that can be drawn from his study of the individual professors profiled. These conclusions are stated in the Introduction, which the authors evidently have not read or – more likely – have not understood. None of them refers to the "personal political views" of the professors involved, whether these views are expressed inside the classroom or out:

"When viewed as a whole, the hundred or more portraits in this volume reveal several disturbing patterns of university life, which are reflected career’s like Ward Churchill’s, but are neither limited to him or his specific university or his particular academic discipline. These include (1) promotion far beyond academic achievement (Professors Anderson, Aptheker, Berry, Churchill, Davis, Kirstein, Navarro, West, Williams and others in this volume); (2) teaching subjects outside one’s professional qualifications and expertise for the purpose of political propaganda (Professors Barash, Becker, Churchill, Ensalaco, Furr, Holstun, Wolfe and many others); (3) making racist and ethnically disparaging remarks in public without eliciting reaction by university administrations, as long as those remarks are directed at unprotected groups, e.g., Armenians, whites, Christians and Jews (Professors Algar, Armitage, Baraka, Dabashi, hooks, Massad and others); (4) the overt introduction of political agendas into the classroom and the abandonment of any pretense of academic discipline or scholarly inquiry (Professors Aptheker, Dunkley, Eckstein, Gilbert, Higgins, Marable, Richards, Williams and many others)." [1]

In other words, The Professors does not "condemn" anyone for actions that express a point of view or ideas that do the same. It is a collective profile of a 101 professors designed to show a systemic corruption in the university – promotions without merit, teaching outside a professor’s expertise, conflating political activism with scholarship, and ethnic bigotry. The objection raised by the authors of "Facts Count" – the very first in their "Executive Summary" is based on a distortion of the contents of The Professors and is designed to evade the argument the book makes by substituting another it does not.

The Free Exchange claim that The Professors condemns minority viewpoints is without foundation. The in-class evidence provided in The Professors concerns sectarian approaches to subjects and does not in the least implicate views that are "critical, minority, or historically under-represented" on the premise that such views are illegitimate. The author of The Professors is also the author of the Academic Bill of Rights whose explicit goal just the opposite: to foster "intellectual diversity," in other words the promotion of views that are critical, minority and/or historically under-represented.

2. "Mr. Horowitz chiefly condemns professors for expressing their personal political views outside of the classroom."

This is false. The Professors in fact says exactly the opposite, and in so many words: "This book is not intended as a text about leftwing bias in the university and does not propose that a leftwing perspective on academic faculties is a problem in itself. Every individual, whether conservative or liberal, has a perspective and therefore a bias. Professors have every right to interpret the subjects they teach according to their individual points of view. That is the essence of academic freedom." [2] Since these sentences appear in the introduction to the text and have been repeated by the author many times since publication, it is clear that this is not an honest error but a calculated distortion of the intentions of both author and book.

The second claim – that the book provides "scant evidence of professors in-class behavior" -- is easily explained. The book makes almost no claims about the in-class discourse of the particular professors profiled -- which is why it provides "scant evidence" of such discourse.

The Professors is critical of programs of indoctrination which have become institutionalized in university departments like Women’s Studies. When academic programs define their mission as "social justice" or as the training of students in feminist doctrines, they are violating professional academic standards and academic freedom guidelines. If a course is described as instilling feminist doctrines rather than conducting an academic – and therefore skeptical – review of feminist doctrines, it is not necessary to sit in the class to understand that this is a course in indoctrination. If the sole text for a course is an extreme and sectarian text like Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, an in-class examination of the professor’s lectures is also superfluous. If the syllabus for the course lays out a clear program of indoctrination in a particular world-view, it is unnecessary to analyze the professor’s explication of the syllabus in order to draw the conclusion that something is wrong.

Course descriptions, text assignments and syllabi notwithstanding, The Professors makes no claims about how individual professors teach their courses except in instances where the professors themselves acknowledge their agenda as one of indoctrination. For example Dr. Sam Richards, a lecturer in sociology at Penn State prefaces his lecture notes with the following statement: "It is not possible to keep our ideologies out of the classroom or any other place where ideas are shared. SO I’M OPEN ABOUT BRINGING MY IDEOLOGY INTO THIS CLASSROOM BECAUSE I SEE THAT ALL EDUCATIONAL SYSTEMS ARE IDEOLOGICAL TO THE CORE." [3] [emphasis in original] This is a frank admission that Dr. Richards’ agenda is to indoctrinate students, not educate them. Other professors, like Eric Foner of Columbia, make claims that political activism is integral to their scholarship: "scholarship and activism are not mutually exclusive pursuits, but are, at their best, symbiotically related." Is it necessary after a pronouncement like this to audit one of Foner’s classes to know that his scholarship is corrupted by political agendas?

Since in-class comments are not the exclusive subject of The Professors, and since there is no claim made in the book about a professor’s in-class discourse that is not based on statements by the individual professors about their in-class discourse (or in three cases by students who have taken the course), there is no need for the kind of evidence the authors of the report claim is missing. This criticism amounts to the invention of an argument the book does not make and then a complaint that no evidence is produced to substantiate the argument which was not made in the first place.

3. In our view, Mr. Horowitz’s conclusions are based on faulty premises. Mr. Horowitz’s conclusions are based on the premises that America’s colleges and universities are failing to ensure students’ academic freedom, and that students lack the critical thinking skills they need to engage with controversial ideas and decide what they believe for themselves. We believe both premises are false.

The first premise can indeed be found in The Professors, where it is substantiated with numerous examples of professors who abuse their positions and, through tendentious curriculums and one-sided text assignments, inject transparently political agendas into the classroom in defiance of academic freedom guidelines. The second premise is made up by Free Exchange. The Professors makes no assumptions about students’ "critical thinking skills." Violating academic standards and flouting the principles of academic freedom would be wrong regardless of how adept students are in engaging controversial ideas. Despite the impression given by Free Exchange, moreover, the book specifically calls for an engagement with "controversial" ideas. In contrast to the Free Exchange authors, however, it distinguishes between teaching about controversial ideas in a neutral manner appropriate to a university and having the professor "urge them as commitments" after the fashion of a political activist – which is an abuse of academic standards far too common as the evidence adduced in The Professors demonstrates.

4. "There are other troubling aspects of Mr. Horowitz’s book. For example, in our view, the tone and format of The Professors strongly evokes a blacklist. While Mr. Horowitz does not call for the professors in his book to be fired, he does list them by their full names and places of business, he does condemn them for their political beliefs, he does (as this report will show) distort evidence in the service of leveling unsubstantiated allegations, and he does exclude any opposing points of view—all as part of a well-publicized and well-funded media campaign. In tactics we found to be eerily reminiscent of a bygone era, Mr. Horowitz’s book also speaks approvingly of students who started a "Watch List," condemns professors for their associations with political organizations, and issues an apologia for Senator Joseph McCarthy.

The tone of The Professors is actually quite academic and dispassionate, hardly the evocation of a "blacklist." No example is given of the tone the authors detect – and for good reason. How the "format" of this book could evoke a blacklist is beyond comprehension. If this were indeed the case, then every biographical dictionary or attempt to assemble individuals by category would "evoke a blacklist." The Professors is not a blacklist of any kind and the attempt to link its amply documented and non-political assertions to the demagoguery of Senator McCarthy indicates a certain desperation on the part of the authors and ulterior agendas they refuse to state. This is the kind of ominous innuendo, in fact, that the authors claim to deplore.

It is somewhat disingenuous for the authors of this report to portray The Professors as part of a "well-funded media campaign." Free Exchange, after all, enjoys the backing of some of the most moneyed interests on the American political landscape, including the American Federation of Teachers (net assets: $65 million); the ACLU ($60 million); People for the American Way ($21 million); the American Association of University Professors ($5 million); and Campus Progress ($1.25 million). If being "well-funded" makes one’s conclusions suspect, the authors of "Facts Count" cannot escape scrutiny.

5. "Getting a handle on Mr. Horowitz’s definition of ‘indoctrination’ is difficult, since he defines it in a number of ways throughout his book. ‘In the strictest lexigraphical sense,’ he writes in the introduction, indoctrination means ‘to imbue with a partisan or ideological point of view.’ Elsewhere in his book, he portrays it as when professors ‘impose their biases on students as if they were scientific fact;’ ‘use the authority of the classroom to force students to adopt their positions;’ or engage in ‘the arbitrary imposition of personal opinions and prejudices on students, enforced through the power of the grading process and the authority of the institutions they represent.’"

There is no inconsistency in these examples. Each accurately describes indoctrination.

6. "Not once in Mr. Horowitz’s book do we see proof that a single professor teaches his or her own political views to the exclusion of all others, and nowhere does Mr. Horowitz provide a single example of a student whose grade was lowered because of his or her political beliefs.

In fact, the book includes many examples of professors who teach their courses that are merely explications of their own political views, while making no effort to inform their students that there are other valid scholarly perspectives. Examples would include most professors of "Peace Studies" (David Barash, Harry Targ, George Wolfe) as well as those with a declared commitment to promoting "social change" (e.g., Melissa Gilbert, Dana Cloud). In the introduction, David Horowitz also points to the notorious case, by no means isolated, of a University of California lecturer named Snehal Shingavi who turned his section of a freshman writing course into a propaganda exercise called "The Politics and Poetics of Palestinian Resistance" and discouraged "conservative thinkers" from enrolling.

Equally untrue is the claim that The Professors provides no examples of students who were penalized with lowered grades for their political views. The profile of Professor Robert Dunkley of the University of Northern Colorado recounts a failing grade he awarded a student who answered a final exam question in a manner that was politically incorrect. The grade was changed on appeal. Still another case is provided in the profile of Professor George Wolfe of Ball State University who, according to a former student, Brett Mock, lowered or elevated his grades based on whether he agreed or disagreed with Wolfe’s dogmatic certitudes.

That the authors prefer to deny the existence of such examples presents two possibilities, neither encouraging for the credibility of their study. Either they have not taken the time thoroughly to read the book and are therefore unfamiliar with its arguments; or else they would rather misrepresent its content rather than challenge it on its merits. Neither provides any reason to think that their report should be taken seriously.

7. "Indeed, for a book that is ostensibly about students’ rights, student voices are pointedly absent. Our analysis finds that student testimonials are absent from 87 of the 100 profiles (not 101, as the title and chapter heading indicate) in Mr. Horowitz’s book."

This complaint evidences yet again the authors’ inclination to set up straw men rather than engage the arguments the book actually makes. The Professors is not about "students’ rights." It is about the widespread corruption of professional standards in the university. The introduction of "student voices" helps to bolster this theme, but is by no means essential to it. Further, The Professors actually contains 102 profiles not 100 as the Free Exchange critics claim. The profiles of Ward Churchill and Cornel West are more thorough than the 100 listed in alphabetical order, but they are to be found in chapters one and three, which the critics evidently did not read or – more likely – did not understand. The figures are meaningless in any case, since The Professors argues that there are tens of thousands of professors who fit the pattern that emerges from the collected profiles in the book.

8. "Overall, the majority of the profiles in Mr. Horowitz’s book contain no evidence of professors’ in-class conduct whatsoever. As an analysis by Media Matters shows, 52 of the 100 profiles in Mr. Horowitz’s book are based exclusively on things professors have said or written outside of their classrooms. Our own count of Mr. Horowitz’s footnotes reveals that overall, approximately 80 percent of the evidence he presents relates to things professors have said or written outside of the classroom."

Media Matters is a self-described "progressive" organization that routinely attacks conservatives, including David Horowitz, and misrepresents their ideas, treating differences of opinion as differences of fact. But even if the findings are accurate, they undermine their own critique, since they concede that nearly half the professors do in fact use their classrooms for political agendas. As previously indicated, moreover, The Professors is not merely about in-classroom indoctrination, nor is it always about individual styles of teaching. A professor in the Department of Feminist Studies at the University of California Santa Cruz is indoctrinating students as a part of her departmental responsibility quite apart from any individual commitment she may have to using the classroom for political agendas. To repeat: The Professors makes four distinct critiques, two of which focus on in-class conduct and two of which do not. In other words, half the critique is about activities that violate academic standards that are not confined to in-class presentations. These include the promotion of professors beyond their qualifications and the teaching of courses beyond their expertise. Professor Hamid Algar, to take another example, told Armenian students at the University of California, Berkeley, "You deserve to be massacred." [4] This happened on campus but not in the classroom. Researchers who cannot detect these nuances can hardly be trusted to know whether 80 percent of the evidence presented in The Professors relates to one thing or another.

9. "To the extent that Mr. Horowitz cites anything at all about what goes on in the classrooms of the professors he profiles, his evidence usually amounts to materials that can be found on the internet, such as syllabi or short course descriptions—not accounts from people who have taken courses with the professors, or who have sat in on their lectures, or who have participated in class discussions. In short, eyewitness accounts of any kind are altogether absent from the overwhelming majority of the profiles in Mr. Horowitz’s book."

This is another tendentious claim. If The Professors quoted students, the Free Exchange critics would say students have axes to grind and their reports are unreliable. In fact, that is what professors like George Wolfe, who are cited in the Free Exchange report, actually do claim. Given that syllabi present an objective guide to the content of courses it is odd that the authors, who elsewhere complain about the book’s subjective judgments, should object to their use as evidence.

10. Furthermore, most of the syllabi, course descriptions and the few other teaching materials that Mr. Horowitz does present tend to show nothing other than that the professors teach what they claim to teach: courses in fields that Mr. Horowitz categorizes as "ideological," such as ethnic studies, feminism, or peace studies; viewpoints that represent the perspectives of minority, oppressed, or historically underrepresented groups; or perspectives that are critical of certain policies of the United States government.

This claim is misleading in the extreme. In the first place, the problem with these assorted disciplines is not merely that they are "ideological" in nature but that they are typically marked by a one-sided political agenda and taught by committed activists rather than scholars for whom skepticism and intellectual balance are cardinal virtues. Insofar as many of these fields are overwhelmingly critical of American foreign policy, the American military, and free-market economics, it is an understatement to describe these fields as merely "critical of certain policies of the United States government." Further, the proliferation of these pseudo-academic fields buttresses one of the central critiques of The Professors, specifically that universities have made a "dramatic departure from the academic interests of the past, providing institutional settings for political indoctrination: the exposition and development of radical theory, the education and training of radical cadre, and the recruitment of students to radical causes." [5]

11. In our view, Mr. Horowitz’s book strongly suggests that emphasizing alternative perspectives, discussing peace movements, or presenting perspectives critical of certain policies of the United States government are grounds for inclusion on his list of the one hundred and one most dangerous academics in America.

Not only does the book make no such suggestion but it advocates the exact opposite: a greater inclusion of different intellectual perspectives. By contrast, the fields critiqued in the book are distinguished by their undisguised hostility to opposing views, their preference for political attitudinizing over objective scholarship, and their one-sided political agendas, which include an aggressive antagonism towards the United States as a society – and not just to specific policies.

12. Our analysis shows that throughout his book, Mr. Horowitz manipulates facts to make them fit his arguments. The pages that follow detail dozens of the inaccuracies that characterize Mr. Horowitz’s research. As readers can see for themselves, Mr. Horowitz: Misstates professors’ intended meanings. For example, Mr. Horowitz bases this claim: "Professor Ensalaco regards the United States as responsible for the 9/11 attacks on itself," on this quote: "I’d like our students to understand the historical context of the attitudes that caused the attacks. If the students understand the complexities involved, perhaps they’ll avoid the conception that all people of Islam or all Arabs are terrorists."

We shall see in a moment whether the general claims made here are valid, and whether there are "dozens of inaccuracies" in the text. As to the claim about Ensalaco, his comment about 911 could seem unobjectionable, and had it been the sole basis for his inclusion in the book the authors would have a strong case that Horowitz "misstates professors’ intended meanings," or rather, misstated one professor’s intended meaning. However, Ensalaco’s 9/11 comments were but one piece of evidence in a more detailed profile that also underscored the fact that Professor Ensalaco teaches a course on Western imperialism despite lacking academic qualifications; propagates unfounded claims about America’s collusion with Saddam Hussein’s genocidal campaigns; and assigns polemical screeds in lieu of scholarly textbooks, which liken Osama bin Laden to American abolitionists. [6] Examined against this background, the inference that Professor Ensalaco intended to blame the United States for the attacks of 9-11 was scarcely illogical.

13. Omits important facts that counter his arguments. For example, Mr. Horowitz states that Professor Sam Richards’ class lessons "are reinforced with ‘out-of-class’ assignments that include the viewing of left-wing propaganda films." Mr. Horowitz fails to mention that Professor Richards’ students also receive credit for attending conservative events, including a speech by Mr. Horowitz himself.

David Horowitz replies: "It’s admirable of Sam Richards to give credit to students who attend events with conservative visitors to campus. But a film is quite different from a speech in that it is a construction of reality which represents itself as something more than the opinions of one individual. Moreover, the assigning of propaganda films is itself inappropriate unless they are analyzed as propaganda. Since Richards does not teach a course in propaganda, and since the propaganda films he assigns reinforce his ideological perspective, it is unlikely that the purpose of assigning such films is anything but indoctrination."

14. Takes quotes wildly out of context and mischaracterizes their meaning. For example, Mr. Horowitz states that "Professor [Michael] Bérubé described the university as ‘the final resting place of the New Left,’ and the ‘progressives’ only bulwark against the New Right.’"18 In fact, these quotes are lifted from a sentence in which Professor Bérubé lists 11 ways that authors other than himself have described the modern university. Mr. Horowitz selects two and omits the other nine—including descriptions of the university as "the research wing of the corporate economy" and "the conservatives’ strongest bastion of antifeminist education."

There is a little truth and a great deal of falsehood in this charge. It is true that Professor Berube does not claim the quoted statements as his own. But the idea that their attribution to him is "wildly out of context and mischaracterizes his meaning" is wildly inaccurate. In the same article, Berube chides an author for failing to see the "pedagogical/political character of the contemporary curriculum." [7] Elsewhere he says that "it is unequivocally wrong to create an [academic] environment in which feminism … is devalued." [8] Finally he says that a university must be a place where "dissensus remains not only thinkable but practicable." [9] He borrows the term dissensus from Bill Readings, who describes dissensus as special attention by scholars to the "heteronomous instance of the Other." In other words, Berube clearly subscribes to the "progressive" idea that the university should be a place where scholarship and political activism are combined rather than sequestered, which is the prevailing conviction in modern universities and a legacy of their conquest by the New Left. Professor Berube has previously been held to task for his attitude towards in class activism by Stanley Fish, a noted liberal academic, in Fish’s polemic against ideology in the classroom, Professional Correctness.

15. Mr. Horowitz makes his cases against individual professors within the context of a larger argument about the representative nature of the professors in his book—an argument that we believe to be based on distorted facts as well. Mr. Horowitz claims that the professors in his book are a representative sample of the 5 to 10 percent of all faculty teaching in America’s colleges and universities who are "radical." Mr. Horowitz derives this estimate from a single incident that occurred at Harvard University, using a method we consider to be questionable at best. He starts by assuming that all 218 of the Harvard faculty who voted to censure Harvard President Larry Summers are radicals. He then calculates that since there are approximately 2,100 faculty members at Harvard, and since 218 is approximately 10 percent of all faculties at every college in America are radical. To "control for the possibility that Harvard may be a relatively radical institution," Mr. Horowitz cuts that number in half, leaving him with a figure of 5 percent—although in writings and speeches, he usually cites the figure at 10 percent. Quite simply, we consider a method of calculation that draws a sweeping conclusion about every college and university in America on the basis of a single incident at Harvard to be extremely suspect.

The notion that The Professors bases its critique on a single episode of radical intimidation is a misreading of the book so extreme as to border on caricature. Apart from the 101 professors featured in its title, and whose continued occupation of academic positions is itself an affront to academic standards, the book anatomizes entire fields of study whose signal characteristic is their commitment to political activism over disinterested scholarship.

16. If anything, we believe Mr. Horowitz’s book is an unintentional testament to the fact that policies that are already in place to protect students’ academic freedom are working well. In his 300-plus page book, Mr. Horowitz and his team of 30 researchers do not provide a single example of a student who tried and failed to address an academic freedom-related grievance through existing university channels.

Students are generally unaware of the academic freedom guidelines of their university since they are contained in the Faculty Handbook and treated as the "rights and responsibilities of faculty." This is only one explanation for the lack of student academic freedom grievances. A second is that there is no grievance machinery designated or designed for academic freedom complaints. But this is beside the point, since The Professors does not base its claims about the erosion of academic standards on student grievances, nor does it make any claim to. This is simply yet another attempt by the authors to erect a straw man argument and avoid any thoughtful engagement with the actual arguments the book makes.

Yet it is not even a very effective straw man considering that, in point of fact, the book does provide several examples of students who attempted to resolve their concerns about the abuse of academic freedom "through existing university channels" only to meet with unsympathetic faculty. In part this was because the existing university channels are not set up to handle academic freedom complaints. A profile of Columbia University professor Joseph Massad, in The Professors, points out that complaints by pro-Israeli students, outraged by Massad’s abusive verbal attacks on students who took issue with his in-class harangues against the Jewish state, prompted a university-mandated investigation of Massad. A subsequent investigatory committee vindicated the substance of their complaints, confirming that the incidents alleged by the students had indeed taken place -- a fact Massad had strenuously denied. But, as The Professors notes, "It is instructive that nevertheless no action was taken against Massad for dissembling to the university committee." [10] Similarly, a profile of Brooklyn College professor Priya Parmar notes that disaffected students wrote letters to the college’s Dean of Education objecting to Professor Parmar’s preference for introducing politics into the classroom and her unwillingness to countenance disagreement. The college ignored their concerns.

For the Free Exchange report to claim that the book does "not provide a single example of a student who tried and failed to address an academic freedom-related grievance through existing university channels" is therefore false, and a telling demonstration of the kind of "error" that its authors are determined to attribute to others. It is also relevant in this context that, as David Horowitz writes in the book’s introduction, some universities have recently loosened the guidelines for academic freedom (and have done so with the active collusion of the professorial unions) in the service of making political activism a legitimate part of the university curriculum.

17. In our view, the arguments in Mr. Horowitz’s book are premised upon an unreasonably low assessment of students’ intelligence, and suggest that students risk indoctrination simply by being exposed to new and controversial ideas.

The book makes no assumption about "students’ intelligence" and the assertion that it does is but another invention of the authors of "Facts Count." What the book does charge -- and supports with evidence -- is that professors often conduct their classes not as objective scholars but as political activists and attempt to school their students in a partisan and ideological point of view without making them aware of other valid perspectives. Whether or not they are successful does nothing to detract from the fact that it is the dictionary definition of indoctrination. That the authors of the report prefer to euphemize such one-sided political instruction as "new and controversial ideas" suggests that even they cannot defend such practices on their merits.

18. In his book, Mr. Horowitz describes students as "hapless," and student points of view are absent from 87 of the 100 profiles in his book.

The word "hapless" is used only once in the book to describe students and refers to the those students at the City University of New York who have the misfortune of sitting through a course by the radical feminist "bell hooks," who sees her classroom instruction as "an expression of political activism." It implies no judgment about students’ intelligence.

19. At a recent speech at Penn State, Mr. Horowitz "verbally assailed students who posed critical or repeated questions," according to the Pennsylvania Centre Daily. "‘You do not have the mental capacity to understand,’ he told one. To another, he said: ‘You are deaf and brain-dead.’"27 In short, we consider Mr. Horowitz’s claim to represent students’ interests to be highly suspect.

It is eminently ironic that the same authors who (erroneously) fault David Horowitz for failing to focus solely on the in-class activities of professors should adduce remarks he made at a public event in order to condemn the arguments of his book. In addition, the authors’ version of the story conveniently omits the context of his remark. As David Horowitz recalls the incident: "Unbeknownst to me, six or seven of Dr. Sam Richards' students had lined up to ask the same question, which they had all written down. The question was how could I comment on Dr. Richards in-class teaching when I had not attended his course. The answer was that Dr. Richards posted the following declaration on his official university website: ‘It is not possible to keep our ideologies out of the classroom or any other place where ideas are shared. SO I’M OPEN ABOUT BRINGING MY IDEOLOGY INTO THIS CLASSROOM BECAUSE I SEE THAT ALL EDUCATIONAL SYSTEMS ARE IDEOLOGICAL TO THE CORE.’ (emphasis in original) Dr. Richards’ students, who had lined up to ask questions, either didn’t listen to my answer or were unable to depart from the written question they had agreed to ask, or were conducting some kind of obscure protest by repeating the same challenge. I, on the other hand, was unaware that they were all working from the same pre-agreed script and as I repeated the same answer over and over could not figure out how college students could be so obtuse. By the fifth student I had lost all patience and vented my exasperation. Sorry."

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Article: Cornel West's Favorite Communist

2006-06-12T09:50:00.000-07:00

By David Horowitz
FrontPageMagazine.com
June 12, 2006

Some people think I am unfair to Cornel West when I refer to him as an over-praised, over-paid academic airhead. I always try to see the other side in disagreements like this, but I have a real problem with this one. Here it is.

Back in the Sixties, I knew a Berkeley radical named Bob Avakian. Avakian was the son of an Eisenhower Republican judge named Spurgeon Avakian until one day he made a name for himself, while embarrassing his dad, by climbing a flagpole during the Vietnam protests and pulling down an American flag. He was given thirty days for flag desecration. This was radical stuff in those days and, as I have recently learned, somewhat embellished. Avakian concedes in his recent autobiography that someone else actually pulled the flag from the flagpole at the Oakland County Courthouse where Black Panther leader, murderer and rapist, Huey Newton was on trial, and Avakian merely was the one caught holding it.

Avakian was a Maoist and I had the displeasure of confronting him once, in the days when I was still a radical. Our encounter took place in the Black Panther Party headquarters on Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley and was over an editorial he had written in the Black Panther paper about an island in the Ussuri River that both China and Russia were claiming. His editorial demanded that the left support Communist China’s “righteous claim” to Chen Pao Island (the Russians had given it a Russian name. It was my opinion that supporting these squalid territorial claims was actually a disservice to the left. I would have had the same attitude if Avakian had supported the Russians.) What I discovered in the course of our discussion was that Avakian had in effect copied the editorial from Peking Review and was himself ignorant of the historical background to the Sino-Soviet dispute and uninterested in its political ramifications. I left the conversation thoroughly depressed about the shallowness of the movement of which I was still unhappily a part.

Avakian went on to greater things, specifically to found the “Revolutionary Communist Party, USA” and become a Mao impersonator himself, requiring his minions refer to him as "Chairman Bob." He also got himself an arrest warrant in 1979 by leading a violent demonstration against a visit by Mao's successor Deng Xiapoing whom Chairman Bob regarded as a revolutionary sell-out. Avakian’s protesters chanted “Mao Zedong did not fail, revolution will prevail.” Rather than serve a sentence, Avakian fled the country and for the last three decades (less a few years) has lived in what he self-adoringly calls "political exile" in France.

During that time, Chairman Bob has produced an impressive array of books with equally impressive titles:

The Loss In China and the Revolutionary Legacy of Mao Tse-Tung

Mao Tse-Tung’s Immortal Contributions

Conquer the World? The International Proletariat Must and Will

For a Harvest of Dragons: On the ‘Crisis of Marxism’ and the Power of Marxism, Now More Than Ever

A Horrible End, or an End to the Horror?

Democracy, Can’t We Do Better Than That?

The End of Stage, the Beginning of a New Stage

Radical Ruptures, or Yes, Mao More Than Ever

Phony Communism is Dead…Long Live Real Revolution!

But the title that caught my eye and brings me to my problem with Cornel West, was From Ike to Mao and Beyond, Avakian’s autobiography published in 2005. The autobiography comes with a Preface by one Lenny Wolff, who explains that he “helped to interview Bob for this work,” and also that he is himself “a communist revolutionary…who considers Bob Avakian’s insights and body of work to be on the level of a Lenin or Mao.” Wolff also explains the origins of the book: “A short time back, Cornel West, speaking to the important role of Bob Avakian has played in the fight against white supremacy and in relation to the quest for a radically different world, suggested to Bob that he think about a memoir of his life so far.” Of course this is only Lenny Wolff talking, but there on the cover is the Class of 1943 University Professor of Religion at Princeton University’s very own testimony: “Bob Avakian is a long distance runner in the freedom struggle against imperialism, racism and capitalism. His voice and witness are indispensable in our efforts to enhance the wretched of the earth. And his powerful story of commitment is timely.” Yes, and Cornel West is not a bloviating pea brain?

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Article: Committee: Fire Churchill

2006-06-12T03:47:00.000-07:00

By Sara Burnett
Rocky Mountain News

June 13, 2006
A majority of the University of Colorado committee leading an inquiry into Ward Churchill recommended today that the ethnic studies professor be fired.

Of the 10 voting members, six said he should be fired. One said he should be suspended without pay for two years, while two others recommended a five-year suspension without pay. Another member of the committee was absent, and the panel's chairman is a non-voting member.

In a 22-page report, the committee — made up of nine CU faculty, a staff member and a graduate student — agreed with the findings of an investigation released last month. That investigation concluded Churchill "committed serious, repeated and deliberate research misconduct," including plagiarism and fabrication of material.

Churchill and his attorney could not immediately be reached for comment, but the professor has said in the past that the allegations are politically motivated and without merit.

Churchill angered many in the public with an essay he wrote about the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. In it, he compared some victims in the World Trade Center to Nazi Adolf Eichmann.

CU officials launched an investigation into his work within weeks of the essay being widely publicized.

The recommendation from the Standing Committee on Research Misconduct will now be sent to interim provost Susan Avery and Todd Gleeson, dean of the college of arts and sciences.

Avery and Gleeson then will make separate recommendations to interim Chancellor Phil DiStefano, who will have the final say on whether Churchill should be fired.

An exact timeline for that decision has not been determined, but could come within weeks.

Article: Ex-liberal navigates right

2006-06-02T08:59:00.000-07:00

By Mary Beth Marklein
USA TODAY

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — David Horowitz pays no heed to the hecklers. He responds politely to challenges during the question-and-answer period. Only when his talk devolves into a sort of free-for-all does he lose his temper.

"This is a demonstration of what brainwashing will do," he bellows into the crowd of about 300, mostly students, gathered on a recent spring evening in a cavernous hall at Pennsylvania State University. "You have sat through (the entire) talk and can't even engage the argument."
Horowitz later says he felt badly about yelling at students. He usually reserves his vitriol for faculty and administrators. But to some, it was quintessential Horowitz.

"Sometimes he gets a little bit over the top," says just-graduated Vicky Cangelosi, 20, who sat up front, in a section reserved for Penn State's College Republicans, the group that sponsored Horowitz's appearance. "I think that indicates that he's very passionate."

Other critics of higher education may argue that today's college campuses are being overrun by leftist professors bent on indoctrinating their students. But nobody is quite as in-your-face about it as Horowitz, 67, a '60s-radical-turned-conservative-activist who has spent the last few years crisscrossing the country to warn students: "You can't get a good education if they're only telling you half the story."

To Horowitz, an overwhelming majority of hardline liberal professors on campuses have left conservative students complaining that their views aren't welcome. His job, he says, is to see that those students aren't treated as second-class citizens.

He is not a professor; he is a writer, co-founder of the Los Angeles-based Center for the Study of Popular Culture and founder of the 2½-year-old Washington-based Students for Academic Freedom, a national organization that allows conservative students to vent.

All Horowitz wants, he says, is a return to the kind of liberal arts education he got at Columbia University in the 1950s, when he still embraced communism, where professors "taught me what the intellectual life should be like, where you focus on the ideas. It's not a political food fight like so much of our culture has become."

Trouble is, his critics, including a recently created coalition of student, faculty and civil liberties groups, say he doesn't know what he's talking about. In May, the coalition called Free Exchange on Campus released a report aimed at dis- crediting claims made in Horowitz's new book, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America (Regnery).

The book profiles faculty who Horowitz says represent the kind of disorder going on in college classrooms today. But professor by professor, the report cites errors, fab- rications and misleading statements, and concludes that Horowitz's research is "manipulated to fit his arguments."

Two examples at Penn State:

• Sociology senior lecturer Sam Richards reinforces class lessons "with 'out-of-class' assignments that include the viewing of left-wing propaganda films, such as The Oil Factor, from which students learn that the 'war in Afghanistan has turned into a bloody quagmire,' ... and Occupation 101, about the horrors of Israel's 'occupation' of Palestinian terrorists,' " Horowitz writes. In the report, Richards responds: Horowitz "disingenuously fails to note that students also receive credit for attending 'conserva- tive' events, including a talk by none other than David Horowitz!"

• Literature professor Michael Berube acknowledges "his classes often have little to do with literature," and he believes "religious people were to be regarded as simply irrational," Horowitz says. In addition to noting that Horowitz "knows nothing about my classroom demeanor or my record as a faculty member," Berube says: "If he were a college student and tried to get away with this garbage, he would indeed be flunked — not for his conservatism, but for his mendacity."

His critics have said the book is akin to a McCarthy-like smear campaign. But Horowitz calls it "a difference of interpretation of what my book is about.

"Long ago, when I came out of the left, I said, 'I need to talk to the left the way the left talks to other people,' " he says during an interview on campus tucked between a book-signing and radio show. "So I have been a very aggressive conservative, and I pull no punches."

Politicians are listening

And Horowitz is having an impact. He has had success in Congress pushing his Academic Bill of Rights, a statement of principles that he says reflects his goal to both remove political agendas from campus life and ensure that no students are discriminated against because of political or ideological leanings.

It basically says professors should stick to their area of scholarly expertise in the classroom and welcome a diversity of approaches "to unsettled questions," and students should be graded on academic merit, not on the basis of their political or religious beliefs. The bill borrows heavily from standards followed by the American Association of University Professors, an organization that Horowitz sees as part of the problem. Horowitz says his goal is to force universities, through legislation or voluntarily, to extend the same rights to students that faculty have.

Some of Horowitz's language is included in a House-passed bill to renew the federal Higher Education Act. And a similar proposal is pending in the Senate, which makes it likely some form of the provision will be included in any bill sent to President Bush.

Meanwhile, the concept also has captured the attention of lawmakers in about 20 states (depends who's counting), including Pennsylvania, where a House committee today wraps up a series of hearings on the topic.

Horowitz insists what he's asking for is fairly tame. But in Pennsylvania, faculty, who traditionally have been free from government interference, fear a slippery slope. Once a bill becomes a law, "you have no idea where it's going to go," Berube says during a walk across campus. And adopting such a code raises new dilemmas, he and others suggest. If a biology professor discusses global warming, for example, is that science or political science — Who would decide?

State lawmakers have been slow to jump aboard. But even in those states where legislation has failed or stalled, the issue hasn't gone away.

Public university systems in Colorado, Ohio and Tennessee, for example, have said they'll adopt some form of protection for students in lieu of legislation, and Horowitz says that's good enough for him.

What's the problem?

At Penn State, situated in the geographic and conservative center of the state, university officials insist Horowitz is attacking a problem that doesn't exist.

"The kinds of broad strokes he's using don't characterize Penn State, and I don't think most of higher education," says spokesman Bill Mahon. In the last five years, he says, Penn State has received just 13 complaints regarding classroom bias. (Many are not from conservatives.)
Among students who see no problem is engineering major Kyle Metzgar, 19. He says he is no liberal and has "not had a real stalwart conservative professor." But "I have also never felt discriminated against or that I was in an atmosphere that was not conducive to getting the most out of my education. ... My biology teacher made fun of the fact that President Bush says 'nu-cu-lar' instead of 'nu-cle-ar.' Who cares?"

College Republicans, though, say many conservative students won't complain for fear of repercussions. That's where Horowitz comes in.

"He's the voice of a movement that needs to be heard," says political science and business major Seth Bender, 20, who escorted Horowitz during his visit here. "I have to sit through lectures every single week listening to someone bash different ideologies and that sort of thing, and (being) called an idiot for what I believed."

Other incidents last semester suggest he has plenty of company. In February, then-sophomore Alfred "A.J." Fleuhr sued the university, saying he feared he would be punished if he expressed his conservative beliefs because the university might view them as intolerant under campus policies. On May 19, the university updated those policies to the satisfaction of Fleuhr's attorneys at the Alliance Defense Fund, a conservative Christian legal advocacy non-profit in Arizona. And the day before Horowitz arrived on campus, administrators in a statement urged the College Republicans to rethink their approach to an event they planned about illegal immigration, saying many would find it offensive. (At one point, they were going to call it "Catch an Illegal Immigrant Day.")

"So my case is made before I even get here," Horowitz told his audience.
Loose with facts

Horowitz says he became involved in the issue after hearing similar stories from students on campuses nationwide. But even before Free Exchange on Campus came along, his foes have delighted in debunking his claims.

In one example, Horowitz claimed a Penn State biology professor had shown the Michael Moore movie Fahrenheit 9/11 before the 2004 presidential elections. When Pennsylvania House committee co-chair Lawrence Curry pressed him during hearings at Temple University in Philadelphia in January, Horowitz acknowledged that his staff could not confirm it had happened, and that he no longer uses that example.

Months later, he's still furious about it. "These underhanded, devious, malicious, dishonest tactics," he says. "I gave 45 minutes of testimony, a half-hour of questions, and I never once mentioned the incident they're referring to. ... Curry saved it to the very end of the hearings and rammed it to me."

Horowitz similarly has been accused of making up a story about a University of Northern Colorado student who was asked to write an essay on her criminology exam explaining "why President Bush is a war criminal." When the student wrote instead about why Saddam Hussein is a war criminal, Horowitz says, she got a failing grade. Horowitz insists the incident happened: "I located the student and the exam," he says, but "it's a complicated story. ... The student was terrified."

Even so, Horowitz acknowledges his small staff can't confirm every incident it receives, and his fact-checkers can be "very loose with the truth." But he mostly dismisses the criticisms as inconsequential. "I will stake my life that there are professors all over this country in classrooms who are ... venting their prejudices in classes where it has no place."

Should Historians Try to Rank President Bush's Presidency?

2006-05-24T16:49:00.000-07:00

By Larry DeWitt

Mr. DeWitt is a public historian and a doctoral student in public policy history at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

“George W. Bush’s presidency appears headed for colossal historical disgrace. Barring a cataclysmic event . . . there seems to be little the administration can do to avoid being ranked on the lowest tier of U.S. presidents.” So begins Princeton historian Sean Wilentz’s latest foray into political commentary disguised as historical analysis, in the pages of the May issue of Rolling Stone magazine. Complete with a mocking editorial cartoon by Robert Grossman, Wilentz’s essay asks: Is George Bush “The Worst President in History?” The posing of the question suggests the expected answer.

“Many historians are now wondering whether Bush, in fact, will be remembered as the very worst president in all of American history,” Wilentz reports, to no one’s surprise. In early 2004, a poll of 415 historians conducted here on the History News Network found that 81% considered the Bush Administration a “failure.” Wilentz rhetorically asks us to ponder the question of how there could be such a uniformity of judgment among so many scholars.

But one thinks to ask an alternative question: What is an historian doing offering up observations of the form “appears headed for . . .”? What are we doing assessing the Bush presidency in 2006, before that presidency has become part of history? We usually think it is the business of historians to follow along behind the policy parade, sweeping up the stray confetti left by the passing of events. Commenting on present public policies—and predicting their future course—seems more like something we might want to call “politics.” And that is precisely the problem with Wilentz and the kind of historical scholarship he offers us.

The Siren Call of Politics

Wilentz is an old hand at this sort of thing. During the Clinton impeachment a group of eminent historians–led by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Wilentz–took out a full-page ad in the New York Times under the heading “Historians in Defense of the Constitution.” Their ostensible purpose was to help the House Judiciary Committee by informing it about the history of the impeachment process. These historians told the legislative decisionmakers that an understanding of the history of the impeachment process indicated that Bill Clinton’s misconduct did not rise to the level of an impeachable offense.

This exercise in political advocacy was followed by another when the Judiciary Committee itself convened a panel of scholars–including Wilentz–to instruct them directly in the historical and legal context of the impeachment process. Wilentz thought the way to their hearts and minds was to insult them, so he hectored the Republican members of the Committee that if they voted articles of impeachment “your reputations will be darkened for as long as there are Americans who can tell the difference between the rule of law and the rule of politics.” Actually, history will show, if it shows anything on the point, that the reputations of these members of Congress will brighten for those who agreed with their decision and darken for those who did not. Wilentz’s own political judgment was that the impeachment was a stain on the reputation of the House. The problem was he conflated this opinion with the verdict of history.

This group of historians, as learned public intellectuals, certainly had every right to make their political views on the impeachment known, and to try and influence the decisionmakers to what they viewed as the right political outcome. But to suggest that history itself contains the answer to the political question of whether or not to impeach Bill Clinton—or that we can assess the Bush presidency before it is even ended—is a kind of hubris that is an embarrassment to our profession.

Before spending good money for an ad in the Times, Wilentz and company might have done better to reflect more thoughtfully on some of Schlesinger’s own advice about the utility of history: “History . . . can answer questions, after a fashion, at long range. It cannot answer questions with confidence or certainty at short range. Alas, policy makers are rarely interested in the long run–“in the long run,” Keynes used to say, “we are all dead–and the questions they put to history are thus most often questions which history is least qualified to answer.”1
The Nature of History

Like many of us, Schlesinger has trouble taking his own advice. Notwithstanding his genteel skepticism regarding the utility of history, he persists in thinking history contains definitive detailed instructions for present policymakers.2 Although he confides that professional historians “privately regard history as its own reward; they study it for the intellectual and aesthetic fulfillment they find in the disciplined attempt to reconstruct the past and, perhaps, for the ironic aftertaste in the contemplation of man’s heroism and folly, but for no more utilitarian reason,” he also admits that many historians are sorely tempted to “invoke arguments of a statelier sort in justifying themselves in society.”3 Schlesinger and Wilentz are two historians who are perpetually so tempted.

This temptation—to make the study of history somehow about the business of present politics—is perhaps the oldest vanity to which historians have succumbed. Even Thucydides thought generals and statesmen should study history since it would better equip them to cope with future challenges because history repeats itself in a circular pattern, and so the same life-quizzes are bound to come around again, for which the historian can offer the cribbed answers in advance.

The opposite instinct–that too much by way of utility for history may be too much to claim–has also been widely and amply expressed. To take just one example, Henry Steele Commager once put it this way: “History, we can confidently assert, is useful in the sense that art and music, poetry and flowers, religion and philosophy are useful. Without it–as with these–life would be poorer and meaner; without it we should be denied some of those intellectual and moral experiences which give meaning and richness to life.”4

The Historical Discipline

One core methodological restraint on the folly of historians is the idea that there needs to be a significant passage of time before historians weigh in on a topic. There are lots of reasons for this. Lord Acton reminded us of one when he observed “The living do not give up their secrets with the candour of the dead.” Ranke was certainly expressing a fundamental principle of historical scholarship when he wrote, “I would surprise you if I asserted that archival study of periods slightly removed from our times has an advantage over a view of the present. But it allows us to recognize more completely and clearly the relationship of events than we can surrounded by contemporary passions and interests.”5

Historians need to wait and see how the story turns out before we get too far along in our assessments. One possibility here is that the Iraq War might turn around and over the next few years Iraq could conceivably become a stable democracy. I am neither expecting nor predicting this outcome. But if future events take this course, Bush’s stock will rise considerably. He could, against all expectations, come to be seen as an accomplished statesman. Which would make these types of mid-stream instant historical assessments look foolish indeed.

More specifically, the craft plied by historians requires us to do lots of things which require time, and especially, the passage of time. To make an historical assessment we need to search through the unpublished memoranda and internal documents generated by an administration; we need to review the memoirs of insiders; we need to recover the story hidden from casual view—who supported and argued for which policies and who counseled against them; we need to compare documents generated inside the White House with those generated within other government agencies; we need to conduct oral history interviews, etc., etc.

All of these procedures are essential for any real historical assessment. What Wilentz has given us is not an historical assessment of the Bush presidency, even a tentative one. What he has given us is the journalist’s account of the Bush presidency. Wilentz reports on the Bush presidency by reviewing the flow of daily news stories and what we know about the surface view of current political events. What historians contribute to our understanding is a deeper, more thoughtful, more reflective view, from a longer perspective and a remove in time. Absent these attributes, we are not doing history, we are doing journalism or politics, wrapped in learned historical allusions and references to create a spurious scholarship effect.

We cannot honestly evaluate the Bush Presidency, as historians, until that presidency is finished, until it passes into history. Any attempt to do so while that presidency is in motion is both foolish and dishonest. It is dishonest because it misrepresents what are the historian’s political opinions as being the profession’s historical assessments.

Postmodern Decline

The traditional conception of the role of the historian involved an aspiration to objectivity in scholarship. Among other things, this meant that the historian was obligated to separate out his politics from his historical narratives. We have of course come to appreciate how difficult this is to achieve in practice, and we well understand that there is no such thing as a pure narrative, one without any taint of the biases and political agendas of the historian. But there are certainly differences of degree here, and degrees sometimes matter.

Some of us believe that the history profession is suffering from various forms of postmodern decline. One of those forms, is the idea that political advocacy and historical scholarship are indistinguishable parts of the same enterprise. This politicization of historical scholarship is so unreflectively accepted that we no longer expect historians to honor even the effort to aspire to objectivity. The Rolling Stone piece proudly says of Wilentz: “’Sean is one of the best historians of his generation,’ says the dean of American historians, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. ‘His careful and thoughtful analysis of current political events demonstrates that historians can also be good citizens.’” By which Schlesinger of course means that he and Wilentz agree on their politics; and no one seems to question whether this business of commenting on “current political events” really is the business of historians.

Like many scholars in this postmodern era, Wilentz simply cannot resist using his position to try and make the story of history come out as he prefers—he cannot resist trying to influence the course of public policy by suggesting that somehow his readings of the “lessons of history” ought to guide that policy. His essay in fact contains vast amounts of pure political harangue. He warns Bush about presumed plans to bomb Iran; he scoffs at the appointment of Josh Bolten as Bush’s new Chief of Staff, opining that “it represents a rededication to current policies and personnel, not a serious change.” He complains that “The power of Vice President Dick Cheney, meanwhile, remains uncurbed.” He recites a long litany of liberal complaints about the Bush presidency, from tax cuts that benefited the richest Americans to his too-cozy relationship with the Christian Right. “Bush’s faith-based conception of his mission . . . jibes well with his administration’s pro-business dogma on global warming and other environmental issues,” Wilentz informs us. All of which are perfectly legitimate political opinions; but none of which is historical scholarship. That Wilentz so promiscuously intermixes his current political opinions with his representations to be speaking with the voice of historical authority, shows just how corrupted historical practice has become in this era of postmodern declension.

My point is not that Wilentz is a bad historian. Indeed, much of his work—like his masterful new book The Rise of American Democracy—is of the highest caliber. That he won the 2006 Bancroft Prize is not unexpected. But Wilentz seems incapable of resisting the temptation to be more than a mere historian. He wants to be a player in shaping national public policy. But he is unwilling to enter the political arena and slug it out honestly and directly. He prefers the oblique approach of pretending to be giving us merely an historian’s account of recent historical events when in fact he is peddling a political agenda. The self-restraint of the traditional conception of the discipline is no restraint on Wilentz. This is all part of the postmodern diminution of the respect for objectivity in the history profession. We now routinely blur the distinction between politics and historical scholarship—and Wilentz is a serial abuser in this regard.

A Decent Interval

One of the most venerable games in Washington is naming public buildings after one’s political heroes. But the game has a sensible restraint: public buildings cannot be named for living individuals. This is done in order to reduce the amount of politics in this process—not eliminate it entirely, but to reduce it to more seemly levels. The intuition is that with the passage of time the passions of present partisanship will cool somewhat, and something more like an objective assessment can be made of just who merits such an honor.

The history profession needs something like the rule regarding the naming of public buildings. It should be against the canons of professional practice for an historian to offer historical assessments of political figures who are still in office and who are still making policies in the areas about which the historian presumes to comment. There should be a decent interval between the time about which an historian is commenting, and that historian’s own present moment. Without such a decent interval, it is inevitable that the historian’s historical assessments will themselves become part of the political debate. Which is precisely what Wilentz’s essay has become. Those whose politics are antagonistic to the President’s (most academic historians certainly fall into this category) welcome Wilentz’s essay precisely because they believe it helps to undermine Bush’s present political efforts. Which is what Wilentz hopes and expects as well.

Sean Wilentz, like any concerned citizen, has both a right and a duty to try to influence public policy in ways he thinks desirable. As a public intellectual, Wilentz can and should speak out about Bush Administration policies. But he cannot pretend that, qua historian, he is giving us a professional assessment of the presidency of George W. Bush, while that presidency is still in motion. It is a form of intellectual dishonesty to pretend that the discipline of historical analysis currently certifies—as a matter of learned scholarship—that Bush can be judged, even tentatively, as among our worst presidents. Wilentz can say—as a political liberal—that he disagrees with Bush policy in a number of areas, and he expects these policies to turn out badly. But he cannot play the coy game of pretending that this is the objective assessment of the history profession—no matter how many historians are polled in similar gestures of the same arrogance.

We need to adopt The Principle of The Decent Interval between the subjects of historical scholarship and the historians who presume to write about these subjects. Without such a principle, historians just become politicians in disguise.

Article: The Ward Churchill Verdict from InsideHigherEd.com

2006-05-16T15:22:00.000-07:00

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/05/16/churchill

Article: Churchill investigation uncovers academic misconduct

2006-05-16T14:43:00.000-07:00

By SARA BURNETT AND KEVIN VAUGHAN
Scripps Howard News Service
May 16, 2006

BOULDER, Colo. - A University of Colorado investigative committee reported Tuesday that it uncovered serious cases of misconduct in the academic research of Ward Churchill, the professor who caused a national uproar by likening some Sept. 11 victims to a Nazi war criminal.
The committee said the misconduct by Churchill, an ethnic studies professor, included plagiarism, fabrication, and "serious deviation from accepted practices in reporting results from research."

It also noted Churchill was "disrespectful of Indian oral traditions" when he wrote the U.S. government distributed blankets infested with smallpox to Mandan Indians in 1837 on the Upper Missouri River.

Three of the five members of the committee said the transgressions were serious enough that the university could revoke Churchill's tenure and fire him. But two of those three said the most appropriate sanction would be a five-year suspension without pay.

The other two committee members said they were "troubled by the circumstances under which these allegations have been made," and "believe his dismissal would have an adverse effect on other scholars' ability to conduct their research." Those two recommended that Churchill be suspended without pay for two years.

Research misconduct encompasses a spectrum of academic wrongdoing - everything from plagiarism to fabrication to falsification.

The committee also said it was concerned about the timing and motives of the investigation, which was launched amid public outcry over and essay Churchill wrote about the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

The university knew Churchill was a "controversial public intellectual" when he was given tenure in 1991, the committee said in the report.

Last year, as the Churchill inquiry gathered momentum, Joseph Rosse, chairman of the standing committee on research misconduct, explained why the allegations had to be taken seriously.
"Research misconduct is one of the most serious allegations that can be brought against a faculty member," Rosse said, "because it strikes at the very heart of integrity and public trust so crucial to the mission of a university."

The five-member investigative committee was chaired by university law professor Mimi Wesson. It also included two other faculty members, history professor Marjorie McIntosh and sociology professor Michael Radelet, as well as Jose Limon, professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin, and Robert N. Clinton, professor of law at Arizona State University.

The Churchill controversy erupted in January 2005 after the editor of the student newspaper at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., published a front-page article about a little-known essay the professor wrote immediately after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. In it, Churchill - who was scheduled to talk at Hamilton - wrote that the attacks were retaliation for a U.S. foreign policy that had resulted in the death of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi children.
"The most that can honestly be said of those involved on September 11 is that they finally responded in kind to some of what this country has dispensed to their people as a matter of course," Churchill wrote.

He then went on to say the terrorists did not strike "innocent victims," but "military targets, pure and simple."

And, in the phrase most widely repeated in the furor that followed, Churchill described the white-collar employees killed in the World Trade Center as "little Eichmanns" - a reference to the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, responsible for sending millions of Jews to concentration camps.

News of the essay quickly spread, igniting criticism from everyone from cable news host Bill O'Reilly to Gov. Bill Owens and the state Legislature.

The media and some of the more outraged public turned a microscope on Churchill, questioning everything from how he earned tenure and whether he has the American Indian ancestry he has claimed.

They also began picking through Churchill's many books, essays and speeches.
After an initial investigation, Phil DeStefano, interim chancellor of the university's Boulder campus, said he disagreed with Churchill's opinion about those who died on Sept. 11, but that it was protected by the First Amendment. DeStefano said the statements weren't, by themselves, enough reason for university to fire him.

But at the same time, the university launched an investigation into allegations that Churchill fabricated material and may have copied the work of others.

The university's 12-member Standing Committee on Research Misconduct reviewed the case and decided there was enough merit to forward seven charges to an investigative committee for further review.

Article: E-mail interview with Scott Jaschik, editor of InsideHigherEd.com

2006-05-10T16:30:00.000-07:00

From: "Scott Jaschik"
To: dhorowitz
Sent: Monday, May 08, 2006 5:32 AM
Subject: questions for article on report coming out tomorrow

David:

I hope you are doing well.

I'm getting ready for an article on a report coming out tomorrow by Free Exchange on Campus. The report will question the facts in "The Professors" on a number of grounds, and I wanted to get your responses on some points, and generally to the issues being raised by Free Exchange on Campus.
Would you please answer the questions below? Thanks very much.

--Scott

1. How is The Professors selling? Any sense of how many copies sold and/or in print? (This isn't an issue addressed by the new report, but I'm curious as my sense is that you are doing well in sales.)
2. The report says you only have entries on 100 professors, not 101. Is that correct?
3. The report says that you are unable in the book to cite a single example of a student whose grade was lowered for political views. Is this correct? Is this significant?
4. The report says that your book shows your real agenda isn't what happens to students because so few of the profiles are based on students' views. (The report says that student views are absent from 87 of the profiles.) The report says this shows your real agenda is to go after professors whose views you disagree with. Is this true?
5. The report says that 52 of the profiles are based entirely on out-of-class statements or writings, again showing (the report says) that you aren't really motivated by student concerns about the classroom.
6. The report questions numerous statements of fact in the book, and most of these questions are similar to those posed by the Fact Checkers on the Free Exchange on Campus Web site at:
http://www.freeexchangeoncampus.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=blogcategory&id=7&Itemid=34 I don't want to go into each one of these in my article, but wanted to ask if these comments have generally prompted you to view any of the book as incorrect or to have issued any corrections? Is there a general comment you would make on their view that your book is full of mistakes designed to make professors look bad?
7. What do you make of the fact that they are getting ready to issue this report?

Thanks.

--Scott

----- Original Message -----
From: "David Horowitz"
To: scott.jaschik
Sent: Monday, May 08, 2006 9:08 AM
Subject: Re: questions for article on report coming out tomorrow

I'm fine Scott, thanks. On my way to the University of Chicago.
I'll answer the first question last for reasons I'll explain.

2. Actually there are 102 professors profiled in the book. Ward Churchill and Cornel West are profiled in the introduction and third chapters, and you could make a case that Nancy Rabinowitz is also profiled. I didn't include them with the 100 others listed in alphabetical order with bullet point headings because that seemed redundant. This claim by Free Exchange is typical of their dishonesty and malice. Instead of arguing the case (the book is three months old and there is still not a single attempt by my opponents to actually respond to the 15,000 word analysis in the introduction and final two chapters), Free Exchange wants to "criminalize" our differences by attempting to present this as an issue of my accuracy in the hopes that they can persuade people not to read the book at all. They will fail in this. I have been writing books and articles for 40 years and the only time my accuracy has been raised as an issue in this way has been in regard to this book. This is so transparently a political ploy that only people ideologically disposed to disagree with me will be taken in by it.
3. "Unable" is a stretch. While I consider political grading both deplorable and widespread, it is no part of the case made in this book. The principal issues are unprofessional conduct in the classroom, unprofessional instruction (e.g., where the professor is not academically qualified to teach the subject), unprofessional courses (i.e., courses that are ideological and not academic) and bigotry. So the lack of cases of political grading is not only insignificant; it is irrelevant.
4. At this point I'm wondering if my critics have even read my book. The book is not about students' gripes and while in a handful of cases I refer to student complaints, none of these is the basis for the profile or inclusion in the book. I most emphatically do not say that leftwing views are illegitimate as faculty views. In fact I say just the opposite on p. xxvi: "This book is not intended as a text about leftwing bias in the university and does not propose that a leftwing perspective on academic faculties is a problem in itself. Every individual, whether conservative or liberal, has a perspective and therefore a bias. Professors have every right to interpret the subjects they teach according to their individual points of view. That is the essence of academic freedom."
5. This claim is also based on a misunderstanding of what the text is about and what it's claims are. Since I am not presented with the 52 cases that are being questioned it's hard for me to answer them individually. Here are some of the misunderstandings I am familiar with (and have already answered in other venues):
I have never attended a class given by Sam Richards (Penn State), but he says very clearly and forthrightly that he teaches his ideology in the classroom.
Eric Foner (Columbia) endorsed a conference (and made the claim himself) that political activism is integral to scholarship. I think we can take him (and many others in my book) at their word. However, as I've already indicated, the book is about unprofessional courses like Women's Studies which is generally conceived in ideological not scholarly terms, unprofessional instruction as when a professor whose expertise is the sociology of sports stadiums teaches a course in war, imperialism and terror as Rick Eckstein of Villanova does, and religious or racial or ethnic bigotry such as that displayed by Hamid Algar (Berkeley) and Hamid Dabashi (Columbia).
6. I have answered as many of these claims as I have seen in the Replies to Critics and other sections of www.dangerousprofessors.com. Where my book is in error I have acknowledged that. Without exception the claims that I have seen are all trivial and normal to a book of this size and do not affect in the slightest the argument I have made.
7. Free Exchange is an organization created by the teacher unions who are defending their dues paying members by any means necessary, in this case by means that are dishonest and designed to prevent a discussion of the issues.
1. The book is doing very well. It has been in 500-600 zone on Amazon all week, which is nearly three months after publication. I'm not going to give you a specific sales figure because that would be just another fact that my opponents will twist as a means of avoiding engagement with the issues.

Thanks for asking.

David

Article: Conservative Rants Against Colleges

2006-05-08T17:25:00.000-07:00

Conservative author says schools leftist platforms
By KEVIN HOWE
Monterey Herald staff Writer

A university where 90 percent of the professors are leftists probably has a blacklist against conservatives, said leftist-turned-conservative author and commentator David Horowitz.

CSU-Monterey Bay, where Horowitz brought his "campaign for academic freedom" Thursday, is such a campus, he said, a place where not one faculty member would sponsor a politically conservative club and where the president of the university's Republican Club, Christy Cozby, has received death threats.

Horowitz's appearance was sponsored by the university's Associated Students, the Republican Club and Young America's Foundation, and it drew a friendly audience of about 250 to the 500-seat university ballroom.

A student told him that he was "the first conservative speaker on campus in living memory," Horowitz said, adding that the Republican Club "won a big victory in getting the student government to fund a portion of this. There was a huge battle to get the pitiful funding for this event."

That unwillingness to sponsor venues for conservative ideas is "a travesty in a state as politically diverse as this state is," Horowitz said.

"The Taliban might as well be running the university."

The word "liberal" is constantly misused when applied to political debate on college campuses, he said. The proper terms are "leftist, communist, totalitarian." A liberal, Horowitz said, is willing to hear both sides of an argument.

Universities have become political platforms for the left, Horowitz contended, and mixing politics with any institution -- the military, religion or education -- "is a bad idea."

"You can learn a lot about political warfare in a political party, but not about reality," he said. Research that might lead down a path that "you've already decided is politically incorrect" becomes impossible, and professors whose expertise might lie in physics, chemistry, the arts or literature waste classroom time haranguing students with their predominantly leftist political views.

It is, said Horowitz, "indoctrination, not education," and students can get unfounded opinion or indoctrination on any street corner, over the radio and television. "You only have four years to get an education."

Professors, he said, "should be professional," offering expert instruction on the subjects they know about. Anything else "is a form of consumer fraud."

He urged students to seek a "bill of rights" for their university, similar to that adopted at Princeton University. Supporters distributed the "little red book" of Students for Academic Freedom, in conscious parody of "Quotations from Mao Tse Tung," the "little red book" that explained to the people of China the ideology of the Chinese Communist Party.

Horowitz offered a conservative view on a number of current events:

• The war in Iraq: It liberated 50 million Muslims, toppled an evil regime and gave women there the vote "for the first time since the Garden of Eden."

Arguments over the "casus belli" of the war -- weapons of mass destruction -- are no more relevant than the firing on Fort Sumter was on the outcome of the American Civil War.

"We've gotten into a serious place in this country," he said. "The Democratic Party and the left have defected to an enemy in time of war for the first time in our history."

• Immigration: Mexico is poor, not because it lacks resources, but because it is a country where the government and law enforcement can't be trusted, a "rotten culture of corruption and oppression."

Illegal Mexican immigrants are "the poorest of the poor" in the United States, but not only do they live better than they did in Mexico, they are also wealthy enough to send $65 billion a year back to their families. "How great is that?"

The left, he said, is the greatest threat to poor blacks and Latinos. Their politicians "have their bootheels on the necks of the poor" and their policies destroy educational and economic opportunity in America's inner cities.

Kevin Howe can be reached at 646-4416 or khowe@montereyherald.com.