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.