http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i35/35a00801.htm
CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION
FACULTY
From the issue dated May 6, 2005
What Makes David Run
David Horowitz demands attention for the idea that conservatives deserve a place in
academe
By JENNIFER JACOBSON
Columbus, Ohio
David Horowitz, one of the country's most famous converts to conservatism, is waging a one-man
war against the academy. Liberal college students, he says, see their views reflected in
textbooks. His kids, as he calls conservative students, have to subscribe to The National Review
to get a balanced view of the world. So nearly every day, he is on the road, promoting his
"academic bill of rights" -- a set of principles that he says will make universities more intellectually
diverse and tolerant of conservatives.
If he is lucky, maybe the next generation will read his name in its textbooks.
Mr. Horowitz stands at a podium in the Ohio Statehouse, hoping to persuade the State Senate's
education committee to support his academic bill of rights. A compact man dressed sharply in a
brown suit and green shirt, he sports a goatee and longish hair, the only vestiges of his days as a
left-wing radical. First a Republican senator lobs him softball questions. Then the hearing, held in
March, takes a surprising turn. Sen. Teresa Fedor, a Democrat, says she has a list of questions.
Her tone, direct, clipped, and not at all friendly, suggests she means business. "Mr. Horowitz,"
she asks, "what is your current occupation?"
"Writer," he answers.
If only it were that simple. David Horowitz is a former leftist turned conservative activist. At 66, he
has indeed written more than 20 books, nearly all of which denounce the faulty logic of the left. A
popular campus speaker among college Republicans, he is a deeply polarizing figure. In April a
student threw a pie in his face as he gave a speech in Indiana.
Nearly 20 years ago he co-founded the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, a nonprofit
organization based in Los Angeles that promotes conservatism. The center runs an online
advocacy journal, Frontpagemag.com, where Mr. Horowitz writes a blog.
He is also the founder of Students for Academic Freedom, a national watchdog group that helps
college students document when professors introduce their politics in the classroom. And he is
the creator of Discoverthenetworks.org, an online database that purports to catalog all the
organizations and individuals that make up what he calls "the left."
But his major focus now is his academic bill of rights, which calls on public universities to expose
students to a greater diversity of views in curricula, reading lists, and campus speakers. The
document, which Mr. Horowitz wrote to stop what he sees as the rampant abuse of conservative
students by liberal professors, also prohibits the grading of students and the hiring or firing of
professors based on their political or religious beliefs.
Universities have balked at adopting it, saying they already have such principles and procedures
in place. Mr. Horowitz insists they do not follow them, and that the government should step in and
force them to do so.
Critics -- including many prominent professors and traditional faculty groups -- say the bill seeks
to purge liberals from the academy and to create quotas for hiring conservative professors.
"It's Orwellian," says Roger W. Bowen, general secretary of the American Association of
University Professors. "He's trying to create an atmosphere in the classroom where faculty are
not treated like the professionals that they are."
Although it's called an academic bill of rights, "it's really an academic bill of wrongs," Mr. Bowen
continues. "The intent is to take away academic freedom."
The document itself strikes a decidedly nonpartisan tone. The problem many people have with it
is the partisanship of the man who wrote it.
Republicans, not Democrats, have sponsored Mr. Horowitz's bill. Conservative students, not
liberal ones, have testified in support of it. And right-wing foundations, not left-leaning ones,
contribute to his center, and in turn, his campaign.
Mr. Horowitz is no Karl Rove. He does not have a large and powerful operation, nor does he rally
to the Republican cause of the day, whether it's Terri Schiavo or Tom DeLay. He describes
himself as moderate on abortion, libertarian on censorship, and "the most prominent conservative
defender of gays" that he knows of.
For Mr. Horowitz, this battle is personal. He is feisty, single-minded, and like many a professor,
loves to lecture. He is a man of contradictions. An ideologue with feelings, he is sensitive to how
he appears in press accounts and admits he sometimes overreacts. While he wants desperately
to be included in the academy -- for professors to assign his books and invite him to speak in
classes -- he seems eager to punish it, in part, for turning a cold shoulder to his work. And
although he contends his bill of rights is not a political document, it is large conservative
foundations that make sure he, and the handful of people helping him, have plenty of cash for the
fight.
Mr. Horowitz acknowledges that his Republican credentials might not make him the best person
to lead this charge against the academy. But then again, no one else could do the job, he says. It
is perfectly suited to a former radical. "Conservatives don't have this mentality of changing
institutions," he says. "I have an instinct of how to fight this battle."
A Republican senator objects when Senator Fedor asks Mr. Horowitz how much money he
makes. The hearing room buzzes. The committee chairwoman bangs her gavel, and the senators
confer. Ms. Fedor withdraws the question. A former fourth-grade teacher, who will later say Mr.
Horowitz is no different from a bully in her classroom, she remains unfazed. She peers down at
her list and asks him another question: "Where do you get the majority of your funding for this
campaign?"
"My motivation has to do with a young man whose parents were Communists in the McCarthy era
... ," Mr. Horowitz says before the committee chairwoman suddenly interrupts him. She tells him
to answer the question.
"I'm not going to answer the question," he says.
If the senator had not cut him off, here is what Mr. Horowitz would have said: Back in the 1950s,
even though he was a Marxist, his professors at Columbia University never treated him poorly
because of his politics. He would have told the senators that in all his years in school -- from
kindergarten to graduate school -- he never heard a teacher or professor express a political
prejudice in class. Things are different now, he would have said.
The academic bill of rights may have its genesis back in Mr. Horowitz's grade school, but it really
started to take shape after a December 2002 meeting with some fellow Republicans in New York.
He met with Thomas F. Egan, chairman of the Board of Trustees of the State University of New
York System; Peter D. Salins, the system's provost; and Candace de Russy, a member of the
board, to discuss the problem of leftist indoctrination in college classrooms and how to solve it.
"I was among sort of friends," Mr. Horowitz says. "It allowed me to think aloud."
Based on their conversations, Mr. Horowitz drafted the bill, which he modeled on the AAUP's own
academic-freedom statement, written in 1940. The AAUP statement says professors "are entitled
to full freedom in research and in the publication of the results," as well as in classroom
discussions of their subject, "but they should be careful not to introduce into their teaching
controversial matter which has no relation to their subject."
Mr. Horowitz says the academy has failed to enforce that guideline for years, allowing liberalism
to dominate college campuses and suppress dissenting views.
His campaign stems from "the desire to have a pluralism of ideas," he says. "I don't want the
universities to be conservative. I want them to be academic, scholarly."
Mr. Horowitz has always wanted to be a scholar himself.
After earning a bachelor's degree in English from Columbia, he attended the University of
California at Berkeley. He says he got bored with his graduate program and left with a master's
degree in English. "Everything had been mined," he explains. There was "nothing to research that
was interesting anymore."
Instead he wrote a book on American foreign policy in the cold war, a book on Marxist theory, and
one on Shakespeare. In 1969, at the pinnacle of his career as a radical, he became editor of
Ramparts, a leading magazine of the New Left, the 1960s political movement that was for civil
rights and against the war in Vietnam. He also counted as friends such prominent figures in the
movement as Tom Hayden and Todd Gitlin.
But in the 1970s, Mr. Horowitz abandoned the left. He says the murder of his friend Betty Van
Patter, a bookkeeper for the Black Panthers, along with his conclusion that the antiwar movement
was wrong about Vietnam, led him to embrace conservative politics.
When his politics changed, liberal intellectuals shunned him. "For 20 years, when I have written
books on the left, the left has ignored me," he says. "It's just what Stalin did to Trotsky."
Prone to hyperbole, Mr. Horowitz does not mean to suggest that leftist professors are trying to kill
him. He simply believes he has been blacklisted by academe. Although he says he was a
"leading figure in the New Left," professors do not assign his books, nor do they refer to his work
in the hundreds of courses taught on the 1960s, he says. They don't invite him to speak in those
courses, either.
To gain the recognition he believed he deserved, Mr. Horowitz established the center, which
features conservative programs such as catered lunches with right-leaning luminaries who
discuss their latest books. "I don't have a platform in The New York Times," he says.
If he were liberal, he contends, he could be an editor at the Times or a department chairman at
Harvard University. And his life story would have already been told on the big screen. Radical
Son: A Generational Odyssey, his autobiography, has been out for eight years. "Someone would
have made a film out of it if I was a leftist," he says bitterly.
He claims he would make more money as a liberal, too, "at least three times," what he earns
now. According to the center's most recent available tax form, Mr. Horowitz received an annual
salary of $310,167 in 2003. He declines to give his current income, but in addition to his salary,
Mr. Horowitz receives about $5,000 for each of the 30 to 40 campus speeches he gives each
year.
College Republicans always invite him. Other student groups never do. "My kids have to
scrounge up the money off campus," he says, complaining that student governments pay liberal
speakers more than conservative ones.
Mr. Horowitz accuses the academy of trying to keep him away from students. He still reaches
some of them through the activities of his center, but one senses he would prefer the classroom.
"I enjoy the contact with students," he says. "I'd enjoy teaching."
Senator Fedor asks Mr. Horowitz another question about the financing for his campaign.
"Do I get to ask a question?" he says.
"No, you do not," the committee chairwoman says.
The senator tries a different tack: "How many states are addressing a campaign?"
"About 20 states," Mr. Horowitz says. "Most of the state legislators contacted me. Rhode Island,
Tennessee, Minnesota, Missouri. The one state I went to was Colorado, where I made a
concerted effort."
Ms. Fedor then questions him about Students for Academic Freedom.
"I have 150 student organizations," he says. "These are not a lobby. These organizations are to
defend student rights. I have three people who work for me."
Sara Dogan is one of the three. As the national campus director of Students for Academic
Freedom, she helps students push for the academic bill of rights on their campuses. "We're trying
to promote academic freedom and intellectual diversity," says Ms. Dogan, seated in her office in
Washington.
The sign for Suite 1100, just steps from her office door, says National Hispanic Medical
Association. A piece of paper taped beneath says Students for Academic Freedom. The group
sublets space from the association, and Ms. Dogan has a corner office, where she works alone.
From her window, the 26-year-old has a nice view of K Street.
"Most people my age are in these tiny cubicles," she says. A bookshelf filled with Mr. Horowitz's
books lines one wall. A fax and copy machine sit against another.
Ms. Dogan oversees the nearly 150 student chapters of the group that have sprung up since Mr.
Horowitz founded it two years ago. She runs the organization's Web site, and monitors its
complaint center, where students post incidents of liberal professors harassing conservative
students in the classroom. She also writes scathing responses to articles that Mr. Horowitz
believes misrepresent what he has proposed.
If students have problems with a professor -- seeing their grades drop after wearing a George
Bush T-shirt to class, for instance -- Ms. Dogan is often the first person they call. Some days,
students call incessantly. On an afternoon in March, when many of them are on spring break, the
phone rings only once.
A graduate of Yale University, Ms. Dogan worked at Accuracy in Academia, a conservative,
nonprofit organization that documents cases of political bias on college campuses, before joining
Students for Academic Freedom in 2003.
College Republicans have so successfully spread the word about the organization that she no
longer has to do much recruiting. "Students really come to us," she says.
To start a campus chapter, students fill out a form posted on the group's Web site. Some
students tell her they have 30 members, while others may have only two. "We don't really
measure membership," Ms. Dogan says.
Once students have started a chapter, Ms. Dogan suggests they get others to fill out complaint
forms on professors they believe are indoctrinating students, to help publicize the cause. She
also suggests they see if student fees support a diverse range of campus speakers. And she
recommends they meet with administrators to see if they're interested in adopting the bill.
While Ms. Dogan links Mr. Horowitz to students, Bradley Shipp connects him to state legislators.
Mr. Shipp, 32, lives in Raleigh, N.C., and works out of his home. (The center itself is located on
the fourth floor of an office building in downtown Los Angeles, but Mr. Horowitz prefers to work
from home.) A former political consultant with Rotterman & Associates, a North Carolina-based,
Republican media-consulting firm that once worked for Mr. Horowitz, Mr. Shipp has helped run
campaigns for Jesse Helms, the former Republican senator. He now serves as national field
director for Students for Academic Freedom and helps students start chapters of their own.
But his main job is scheduling. He arranges Mr. Horowitz's campus visits and meetings with
Republican legislators who want to sponsor the bill.
Mr. Horowitz insists that he does not pick the states -- 16 so far -- where legislators introduce the
legislation. (The bill has also been introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives as a
resolution, and similar language is also in the proposed extension of the Higher Education Act.)
State politicians contact him, he says. For instance, Sen. Larry A. Mumper, an Ohio Republican,
called Mr. Shipp. "I don't know how he knew to call Brad," Mr. Horowitz says.
The only state where Mr. Horowitz chose to launch his campaign was Colorado, which he says
he picked for the wrong reasons. After the SUNY officials he met with in 2002 told him that
professors there would never support his bill, Mr. Horowitz set his sights west a year later. He
hired a University of Denver law student to help him coordinate the battle in Colorado.
In the end, Colorado's legislature did not pass the bill. But the hearings and the testimony were
enough to pressure public universities in the state to sign a "memorandum of understanding" last
spring in which they promised to do more to follow the spirit of the document.
Mr. Horowitz has declared victory in Colorado. The government should intervene in academe only
as a last resort, he says, and he hopes to see more such memoranda of understanding.
Ultimately, he would prefer that universities adopt the bill themselves, he says, but that is unlikely.
"I called the AAUP," he says. "My goal was 'Let's look at this. Can we try to compromise?'"
But the association was hostile from the beginning, he asserts. "If they had supported it, the
universities would have supported it," he says. "There would be no battle." (Jonathan Knight, an
associate secretary of the AAUP, says it is possible that Mr. Horowitz e-mailed the association a
couple of years ago, but he doesn't remember.)
For the AAUP's Mr. Bowen, Mr. Horowitz is less of a concern than the legislators who are taking
his bill of rights seriously. "David Horowitz himself has little power," he says, "but state legislators
do."
Mr. Bowen fears that if those legislators do pass the bill, it will "put a monitor in classrooms,"
increase the role of government, and make litigation at the college and university level more
frequent and more prevalent.
Todd Gitlin, now a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia, also has a problem with the
bill as legislation. The actual text of it is fine, he says. "If it came across my desk as a petition, I'd
probably sign it." But "the attempt to rope legislatures into enforcing rules of fairness and
decorum on university campuses is misguided and perverse."
"Who funds your center?" Senator Fedor asks Mr. Horowitz. She has asked this question three
times in three different ways.
"Ten foundations," Mr. Horowitz says. "Thirty-five thousand people. I am less well funded than the
American Association of University Professors, far less well funded than the ACLU. This is a
bizarre line of questioning, if I may say so."
The committee chairwoman reminds him to stick to answering the questions.
"Well, this is an ad hominem attack that has nothing to do with the bill of rights," Mr. Horowitz
says. "What are you trying to show? Do I represent the oil-and-gas lobby? Is that what this is
about?"
In addition to the 35,000 individuals that contribute to Mr. Horowitz's center, several conservative
foundations regularly send large checks. The most well known among them include the Sarah
Scaife Foundation, which the conservative billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife runs, and the Lynde
and Harry Bradley Foundation, which, according to its Web site, is "devoted to strengthening
American democratic capitalism" and supports "limited, competent government."
According to the most recent tax forms available, the two foundations gave a total of $620,000 to
the center in 2003. Since 1998, the two groups have contributed about $3.5-million. The center
received about $3.26-million in donations in 2003, and Michael Finch, the center's executive
director, says about 40 percent of that comes from foundations.
Mr. Bowen of the AAUP says that none of the foundations that contribute to Mr. Horowitz's center
give to his association. "If they really were supporting academic freedom, they should be sending
money our way," he says.
The board of Mr. Horowitz's center is similarly conservative. David Keene, chairman of the
American Conservative Union; Wayne LaPierre Jr., executive vice president and chief executive
officer of the National Rifle Association; and John O'Neill, spokesman for the Swift Boat Veterans
for Truth, are members, as are Bruce H. Hooper, president of the Elizabeth S. Hooper
Foundation, and Norman Hapke, a member of the board of the Jacobs Family Foundation, both
of which contribute to the center.
Despite his ties to the Republican Party, Mr. Horowitz says his biggest disappointment is that he
doesn't have liberal and nonpartisan support. "I have to take responsibility," he says. "It's just me.
I'm a hot-button political partisan."
But in the next breath, Mr. Horowitz concedes that he seeks people for his board for whom he
has an "affinity," and that he has never invited liberals to join. "I've tried to keep on the board
people who will raise money for me," he says. "The center is a personal campaign of my
agendas."
Mr. Horowitz says he made an attempt (he admits not a "tremendous" one) to ask academics on
the left, such as Stanley Fish, to support his bill of rights. But when Mr. Fish, dean emeritus of the
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said no, he concluded
that other university administrators would similarly decline. "They wouldn't survive being
associated with David Horowitz," he says.
Fellow conservatives don't expect the bill to win liberal support anytime soon. "It's a slow process,
overturning those that stand in the university's doors, guarding leftist ideology," says Joe R.
Hicks, a friend of Mr. Horowitz's who served as the center's executive director a few years ago.
"Hopefully, others will join him." But Mr. Hicks says he is not naïve enough to think liberals would
want to change the academy or embrace Mr. Horowitz's difficult personality. "Certainly, he's a
prickly individual."
He is also an obstinate one. During the hearing in Ohio, Mr. Horowitz would not name the
foundations that contribute to his center, promising to mail Senator Fedor the complete list when
he returned to his office.
Just after the hearing, Mr. Horowitz admits that he does, in fact, remember who gives him money.
"She wanted me to say Richard Mellon Scaife," he says, standing in his hotel lobby. "I like Dick
Scaife. He's been utterly demonized."
He also complains that the senator asked him about his income. "Teresa Heinz Kerry didn't give
her income," he says. "It's like the sacred cow in American life. It was too personal. [The senator]
said right away, 'I want to know what your motive is,' as though I'm proposing to legalize
prostitution or something."
Weeks after the hearing, with the list of conservative foundations that contribute to his center in
hand, Ms. Fedor calls Mr. Horowitz a political hack. "His whole organization is one big political
propaganda tool for Republicans," she says.
He bristles at the accusation. "No one, not Dick Scaife, not the Bradley Foundation, told me to do
this," he says. "The idea that it's a plot cooked up in their boardrooms is idiotic." He finds the
notion that this campaign is his revenge on the academy similarly absurd. He says he wants a
place at the table for conservatives like Dinesh D'Souza and Victor Davis Hanson, not just for
himself.
"Of course it rankles," he says of the books never assigned, the invitations to speak never sent.
"But it would be a complete distortion to say that this is about one man."
DAVID HOROWITZ
Born
January 10, 1939, Queens, N.Y. (Forest Hills)
Raised
Queens, N.Y. (Long Island City)
Education


A.B. in English, Columbia University, 1959
M.A. in English, University of California at Berkeley, 1961
A few of the more than 20 books he has written



Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey (Free Press, 1997)
How to Beat the Democrats, and Other Subversive Ideas (Spence Publishing Company,
2002)
Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left (Regnery Publishing, 2004)
On his nightstand
The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky; Quarantine, by Jim Crace; and Restoring Free
Speech and Liberty on Campus, by Donald Alexander Downs
In his stereo
"I go for baroque," he says.
What he drives
Lincoln Town Car, 2004
Pets
Chihuahuas Jake and Lucy, and Winnie, a Burmese mountain dog. He also has two canaries and
two finches.
Personal
Married to April Mullvain Horowitz, a photographer, for seven years. They live in Los Angeles
County. "I love my work space," he says. "I sit at my desk with my laptop. I listen to music. I take
the dogs for a walk. Like most writers, I live in my head." He has four children from his first
marriage, four grandchildren, and a stepson.
DAVID HOROWITZ'S NETWORK
David Horowitz recently started Discoverthenetworks.org, an online database of left-wing
organizations and individuals. The site includes pictures and profiles of organizations like the
American Association of University Professors and professors like Cornel West. It names George
Soros and Teresa Heinz Kerry among the liberal establishment's major contributors. Mr.
Horowitz, of course, has contributors of his own. Here's a glimpse of his network of friends and
financial supporters, and some of his projects:
Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation
The Milwaukee-based charitable organization is devoted to democratic capitalism and limited
government.


Between 1998 and 2003, it contributed $2.2-million to Mr. Horowitz's center, according to
Form 990 tax filings for those years.
Among the winners this year of the foundation's annual $250,000 Bradley Prizes were
George F. Will, the conservative columnist, and Ward Connerly, founder of the American
Civil Rights Institute.
***
Sarah Scaife Foundation
Richard Mellon Scaife, the scion of the Mellon oil and banking empire, is chairman of this
Pittsburgh-based charitable organization.


Between 1998 and 2003, it contributed $1.3-million to the center.
The foundation is also a major contributor to conservative organizations like the American
Enterprise Institute, the Manhattan Institute for Policy Studies, and the Heritage
Foundation.
***
John M. Olin Foundation
The New York-based philanthropic organization, started in 1953 by the late inventor and
industrialist, encouraged research on public policy in social and economic fields.


***
Between 1998 and 2003, it contributed $1.265 million to the center.
The foundation has been a major contributor to American colleges and universities, as
well as a supporter of conservative intellectuals like Allan Bloom, Linda Chavez, and
Dinesh D'Souza. The foundation, which has spent essentially all of its assets, plans to
close this year.
Other large donors to the Center for the Study of Popular Culture:





The Randolph Foundation: $245,000 between 1998 and 2001
The Vernon K. Krieble Foundation: $125,000 between 1999 and 2003
Castle Rock Foundation: $150,000 between 1998 and 2001
Elizabeth S. Hooper Foundation: $56,000 between 2001 and 2004
Jacobs Family Foundation (San Diego): $52,200 between 1997 and 2004
***
Students for Academic Freedom
A national organization that helps students track cases of professors who introduce their political
views in the classroom. The group has more than 150 campus chapters in 43 states and
Washington, D.C. (States without chapters are Alaska, Arkansas, Hawaii, Idaho, Mississippi,
North Dakota, and Vermont.)


The center's executive director says the project has a $500,000 annual budget.
Just three people work on the project: Sara Dogan, national campus director, based in
Washington; Bradley Shipp, Mr. Horowitz's chief scheduler and legislative liaison, based
in Raleigh, N.C.; and Ryan Call, regional coordinator, based in Denver.
***
Center for the Study of Popular Culture
A Los Angeles-based, conservative, nonprofit organization. Mr. Horowitz founded it in 1988 with
Peter Collier, publisher of Encounter Books, based in San Francisco. Mr. Collier and Mr. Horowitz
edited Ramparts, a leftist political magazine from 1969 to 1973 and wrote several books together.


The center brought in about $3.26-million dollars in donations in 2003, according to its tax
forms. That year Mr. Horowitz earned $310,167.
The center's board includes John O'Neill, spokesman for the Swift Boat Veterans for
Truth; David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union; Wayne LaPierre Jr.,
chief executive of the National Rifle Association; and Marlene Mieske, who is also a
member of the board of directors for the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.
***
Frontpagemag.com
The Center for the Study of Popular Culture's online journal features Mr. Horowitz's blog and
articles by conservative college students and by well-known conservative writers like Ann Coulter
and Daniel Pipes.
***
Wednesday Morning Club
One of the center's regular programs: a speaker series that has included the writer Christopher
Hitchens; William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard; and U.S. House Majority Leader Tom
DeLay.
***
States whose legislatures have introduced the "academic bill of rights," a list of principles that Mr.
Horowitz says colleges should follow to make their campuses more politically diverse: California,
Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota,
Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Washington
***
David Horowitz is a former left-wing radical who converted to political conservatism. A one-time
supporter of the Black Panther Party, he has canvassed the country this year to make college
campuses more tolerant of conservatives like himself. He is now president of the Center for the
Study of Popular Culture, a conservative, nonprofit organization "dedicated to defending the
cultural foundations of a free society," according to its Web site.
http://chronicle.com
Section: The Faculty
Volume 51, Issue 35, Page A9
THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i35/35b00501.htm
THE CHRONICLE REVIEW
from the issue dated May 6, 2005
OBSERVER
The Right to Tell the Truth
By ANN MARIE B. BAHR
I did not know about David Horowitz's "academic bill of rights" when I began teaching
my courses last fall, but even if I had, I would not have thought that I had anything to fear
from it.
I teach religious studies at a public university in a conservative part of the nation -- not
too different from the traditionally Republican state where I grew up. When I arrived here
16 years ago, I had no trouble adapting to the conservative religious background of many
of my students. In graduate school I was more religiously and socially conservative than
most of my fellow students. But although I have had my differences with liberals, I never
felt that they forbade me to express an informed professional opinion. The chilling effect
of today's conservative watchdogs is a much more serious matter.
Last semester I had my first significant falling-out with students, inspired -- I have no
doubt -- by David Horowitz and his crusade against liberal bias in academe. Some of the
students in my course on "Religion in American Culture" were upset that George M.
Marsden's Religion and American Culture (2nd ed., Harcourt, 2001) and Randall
Balmer's Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey Into the Evangelical Subculture in
America (3rd ed., Oxford University Press, 2000) were on the reading list. They felt that
those two books were biased against evangelicals.
Marsden is a highly respected evangelical scholar, and Balmer's work on evangelicals has
also been highly acclaimed. Although his religious affiliation is not as clear as Marsden's,
I had never before heard complaints that he has been unfair to the evangelicals about
whom he writes. I would have thought that the two scholars had impeccable credentials
for inclusion in my course, but I now suspect that the objective, scholarly tone of the
books upset my students.
I had also assigned some online readings about Christian Identity, a white-supremacist
movement that considers Jews and anyone who is not white to belong to inferior races;
believes that anything -- e.g., feminism and homosexuality -- not in accordance with
traditional gender roles is sinful; and claims to be based on the Bible. Those readings
were part of a series of items about Protestant, Catholic, Nation of Islam, American
Indian, and other visions of America.
In the session that I had set aside for discussion of the Christian Identity readings, a
student asked me if I would have included them had I known how many students
believed in the movement. I had not expected many, if any, of my students to be affiliated
with Christian Identity, so I had not prepared a response to that question. I think I said
something to the effect that I did not fear for my life from the group because I was a
white person who was neither a feminist nor a lesbian. (There have been reports of
violence associated with Christian Identity.)
About two-thirds of my students did not return to class after that day, which was around
the midpoint of the semester, except to take exams. Because I never had an opportunity to
discuss the matter with the students who left, I don't know if they were members of
Christian Identity, or if they simply believed that a movement that claimed to be based on
the Bible could not be wrong. I had never had a large-scale problem with attendance
before.
I had another problem with my course on the New Testament in the fall, also
unprecedented in my teaching career. I had not included any discussion of homosexuality
and the Bible in the syllabus, which was already crowded thanks to the requirements
placed on general-education courses by the state Board of Regents, piled on top of the
disciplinary imperative of explaining academic methods of studying the Bible and
applying them to the New Testament. But when students requested that we take up
homosexuality, I did what I normally do when students show a particular interest in
something: I modified the syllabus to include it.
We read a Jewish scholar's interpretation of several passages in the Bible for a Jewish
view on the subject. I invited a Reformed Church minister to speak to the students, and he
explained why there is plenty of room for debate on the question of how Christians
should respond to their homosexual brethren. It turned out, however, that at least one
student had a specific book in mind for us to discuss: The Bible and Homosexual Practice
(Abingdon Press, 2001), by Robert A.J. Gagnon.
Although the students realized they were not academically advanced enough to read the
book on their own, they wanted to know what I thought about it. The semester was
rapidly drawing to a close. Not having time to read the entire book, I promised to take a
look at Gagnon's discussion of Romans 1:24-27, the most explicit and substantial
discussion of homosexual behavior in the New Testament.
After I read that part of the book, I told the students that I thought the linguistic work was
excellent, and that the linkage of Paul's views on homosexual behavior to his remarks on
idolatry was brilliant. However, I did not think that Gagnon's argument would stand up
for long.
I was about to explain why when I saw anger flash across several of the students' faces,
and I realized that they thought my explanation was going to echo the beliefs of the
minister they had already heard, whom they considered a liberal. So I simply said that
anyone who wanted to know what flaws I saw in Gagnon's argument would have to come
talk to me about that outside of class. No one did.
For the first time in my life, I felt as if I had to leave my commitment to the truth (which
is what scholarship is all about!) at the door of the classroom. I didn't feel that I could tell
my students they were wrong to avoid hearing my explanation -- in the current political
climate, that would have been considered both anti-Republican and insulting to their
conservative religious beliefs.
I have to believe that my students' behavior is a direct result of the new political climate
on the campus that has been nurtured by the Horowitz "academic bill of rights," in
cooperation with conservative media. I do not think that Horowitz intended those results.
The problem is that students do not have the academic maturity to know how to use his
document.
Nor do I see how they could have that maturity before completing a liberal-arts program
of studies. Taking a smattering of liberal-arts courses, which is all that most students are
required to do, does not give students the ability to detect bias in their professors or in
what they read. Furthermore, many students take their definition of bias from
conservative talk-radio shows and Fox News -- even people considered to be moderates
from a liberal viewpoint seem biased from such conservative perspectives.
It seems that I must now bow to political or popular pressure because the ultimate judges
of my professional expertise will not be my scholarly peers, but the public. And while
members of the public and students may be able to judge many aspects of my teaching
(that is why we have student evaluations of professors), they cannot judge whether I am
teaching according to the best standards of the discipline.
Politics has always played a role on our campuses, but we are now experiencing a new
form of political intrusion in academic life, and it is extremely dangerous. It has a direct
impact on academic freedom because it threatens professors -- with the loss of the usual
presumption that they are experts in their subject matter, or even with the loss of
employment, if they do not agree with popular opinions.
That is too high a price for me to pay to keep my job, and I have resolved never again to
bow to religious or political pressure in the classroom. In the future I will send students to
the Internet to view authors' credentials. When I next teach the New Testament, I will use
the disagreement between Gagnon and myself to demonstrate that scholarly debate -unlike political debate, in which each side is expected to be partisan -- is a way of
systematically testing the beliefs of both sides, and that my job is to critically assess all
the arguments, from within my area of expertise.
Like many other academics, I have dedicated my life to the faithful transmission of the
truth as best I can discern it. It makes me sick to my stomach to think of falsifying the
truth, or even sacrificing my right to have an informed professional opinion.
Ann Marie B. Bahr is a professor of philosophy and religion at South Dakota State
University. She is editor of Chelsea House's "Religions of the World" series and author of
two books in the series, Christianity (2004) and Indigenous Religions (2005).
http://chronicle.com
Section: The Chronicle Review
Volume 51, Issue 35, Page B5
------------------------------------http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i35/35a00801.htm
April 25, 2005
David Horowitz’s War on Rational
Discourse
By Graham Larkin
It has been heartening to witness the recent runaway success of Princeton emeritus Harry
G. Frankfurt’s latest book, On Bullshit. First published as an essay in 1988, Frankfurt’s
splendid study is largely an effort to distinguish between lies and bullshit. A liar,
Frankfurt notes, acknowledges truth-systems yet tries to pass off information that is not
true. “Someone who lies and someone who tells the truth,” he tells us, “are playing on
opposite sides, so to speak, in the same game.” The bullshitter, by contrast, fails to really
acknowledge the validity of any truth-claims or truth-systems.
The author concludes that “the fact about himself that the liar hides is that he is
attempting to lead us away from a correct apprehension of reality; we are not to know
that he wants us to believe something he supposes to be false. The fact about himself that
the bullshitter hides, on the other hand, is that the truth-values of his statements are of no
central interest to him; what we are not to understand is that his intention is neither to
report the truth nor to conceal it.”
When applying Frankfurt’s useful distinction, we need, at the very least, to recognize that
if something about a particular piece of bullshit happens to be true this does not make it
any less bullshit, and that lies and bullshit are by no means mutually exclusive.
Enter L.A. tabloid editor David Horowitz, liar extraordinaire and author of the
incomparable bullshitting manual The Art of Political War and Other Radical Pursuits
(Spence Publishing, 2000). This book, much applauded by Karl Rove, promulgates a
political endgame in which brute force triumphs over any notions of intelligence, truth or
fair play. The author contends that “[y]ou cannot cripple an opponent by outwitting him
in a political debate. You can only do it by following Lenin’s injunction: ‘In political
conflicts, the goal is not to refute your opponent’s argument, but to wipe him from the
face of the earth.’”
What, exactly, is he getting at in this passage? Since, on the home front, it would be
illegal to actually liquidate the enemy, Horowitz does not want us to take Lenin’s
apocalyptic injunction too literally. Instead, he believes you should drown your political
opponents in a steady stream of bullshit, emanating every day from newspapers, TV and
radio programs, as well as lavishly funded smear sites and blogs. He also thinks you
should go on college lecture circuits where you can use incendiary rhetoric to turn
civilized venues into the Jerry Springer show, and then descend into fits of indignant selfpity when someone responds with a pie to your face.
The only honorable way to combat Horowitz’s bullshit is by fully repudiating his modus
operandi, and depending instead on the very wits, arguments and refutations that the
Leninists repudiate. Indeed, these methods prove optimal for exposing any number of
Horowitzian techniques, ranging from cooked statistics, race-baiting and guilt by
association to editorial foul play and baffling logorrhea. But refuting Horowitz is not
simply a matter of observing the tide and eddies in an unending stream of bullshit. It also
means trawling through that same discharge in order to extract any number of dangerous
lies.
Earlier this year, I spent a good deal of time refuting Horowitz’s so-called Academic Bill
of Rights, and explicating the twists and turns of his instrumentalist version of “truth.” In
the course of our exchange, Horowitz spewed a lot of the usual BS, but he also floated
some audacious lies. For instance he tried to convince readers that his conservativefunded bill — basically just a guileful attempt to sanction the Fox News agenda in the
nation’s universities — was actually a non-partisan document with intelligent academic
backing. To bolster his case, he tried to make us believe that three “left wing” professors
(Todd Gitlin, Michael Bérubé, and Stanley Fish) and one avowed libertarian (Eugene
Volokh) actually told him that they didn’t mind the bill.
After I debunked that lie (simply by asking the four professors what they thought about
the bill), Horowitz went on to claim that neither Gitlin, Bérubé nor Fish “had any
objection to the Academic Bill of Rights” even though I had quoted their extensive
objections. (Who but a consummate bullshit artist could hope to construe the phrases “a
bad idea,” “a nonstarter” and “a disaster” as endorsements?)
Last Friday, in a lame provocation following a debate with me on PBS’s Uncommon
Knowledge (a show destined to air, in a trimmed version, around June), Horowitz
actually told the moderator Peter Robinson, in my presence, that the Academic Bill of
Rights had met with the approval of Fish, Gitlin, Bérubé and Volokh. (Really? Robinson
asked incredulously. No, not really, I said; I’ll send you a web link. Horowitz settled into
his customary rage.)
During the filming of that segment, my rabid opponent recycled a much bigger and more
dangerous lie about the American Association of University Professors — one already
published in the same smear in which he flaunted his imaginary supporters. There he
states that “[t]he AAUP ... was silent or collusive in the face of the most brutal abrogation
of First Amendment Rights in 50 years, when university administrations in the 1980s and
1990s instituted ’speech codes’ to punish students for politically incorrect remarks. The
AAUP has been silent on all ... infringements of free speech, or it has lent its support to
the political thought police.”
This is classic Horowitziana — a complete lie mired in a mighty river of bullshit.
Although the AAUP did take a few critical years to develop its policy against speech
codes, for Horowitz to say that it supports these codes is no better than calling him a
leading exponent of kitsch Marxism because he happened to be one for a decade or two.
By lying about the AAUP, Horowitz hopes to divert readers from the fact that this fine
organization came out categorically against all university speech codes in a resolution
approved in 1992. That document, reprinted in AAUP’s fully-indexed Redbook,
unambiguously asserts that “[o]n a campus that is free and open, no idea can be banned
or forbidden,” and that “rules that ban or punish speech based upon its content cannot be
justified.”
Why is Horowitz so eager to make us think that the AAUP actually supports speech
codes and “political thought police"? Mainly so he can then construe their reasoned
resistance to his efforts to police knowledge and relativize truth as an unreasonable
affront to student liberty. This rhetorical inversion of the truth is part of the larger
strategy of doublespeak that leads him to couch his coercive speech legislation in the
language of freedom and diversity, as if it were some kind of newly fortified version of
the First Amendment. Like the line about his professorial support group — a fiction
designed to make a partisan power-grab look like a movement with mainstream academic
backing — these twistings of the truth are part of the same campaign of Horowitizian
bullshit, lies and doublespeak. It’s a dirty job all right, but we need to keep exposing this
fraudulent talk for what it is.
Graham Larkin is a humanities fellow at Stanford University, where he teaches in the
Department of Art and Art History.
“Refutation”
By Graham Larkin, Humanities Fellow
Stanford University
September 22, 2004
Locking up my bike on the way to the office on May 3, 2004, I noticed that events
were underway in the large pavilion pitched in front of the Hoover Center, the rightwing think tank overshadowing my office in the Nathan Cummings Art Building at
Stanford University. The voice on the microphone was introducing prominent ultraconservative intellectual David Horowitz. As the representative for private
universities on the steering committee of the California Conference of the American
Association of University Professors (CA-AAUP), I had recently taken a pressing
interest in Mr. Horowitz's activities. He is, after all, the brains behind the
mischievously-named-and-crafted Academic Bill of Rights--a document which co-opts
post-modern ideas on the situated nature of truth and knowledge, along with
politically inclusive language, to counteract what Horowitz depicts as the stranglehold
of progressive politics on university campuses. 1
Thanks in part, perhaps, to the protestations of the CA-AAUP, a version of this bill
(CA Senate Bill 1335) died in committee, with only one vote cast in its favor. And
yet, prior to this, another version had actually been passed as law in Georgia with a
41-5 vote, and it is making the rounds elsewhere. Clearly the battle is only
beginning. I wanted to see this guy.
By the time I had dropped off my bag and returned to the doorway of the climatecontrolled pavilion, Horowitz was already speaking, to a packed audience consisting
mainly of white-haired men with Hoover Center tote bags. To my disappointment,
the parts of the speech that I stayed for were not about the university at all. Instead
they amounted to a generalized rant about the war in Iraq. What's Not To Like About
This War? the speaker intoned repeatedly, with shrill voice and sweeping gestures.
With each re-utterance he would offer more proof of how great the invasion has been
in every respect. Looking smaller and angrier every minute, Horowitz went on to lash
out at the portrayal of the war in the major American media, which he characterized
as nothing more than a "megaphone" for "neo-communist" viewpoints.
It is disheartening to see such an intelligent man resort to such reckless
overstatement, even when he's preaching to a choir in need of a little martial uplift.
(Nor did his audience seem especially receptive; I was impressed by their somber
lack of reaction to his more strenuously "funny" digs at the war's detractors.)
Realizing that I had not garnered a single piece of substantive knowledge after ten
minutes of attentive listening, I returned to my office to check the online news, and
to prepare for my afternoon class.
The news was more of the same--the siege of Falluja, the Bush government's efforts
to suppress any mention of the embarrassing tide of American casualties, and
revelations of the Abu Ghraib brutalities. I thought about how Horowitz, whose words
were still echoing outside my window, would view these demonstrations of What's
Not To Like About This War. More evidence of the same old neo-communist, antiAmerican media conspiracy, no doubt. It also struck me that the readings for my
afternoon art history seminar, Towards the Modern Museum, could easily be
marshaled to support his image of left-dominated American university campuses.
The more overtly political of these readings (written in 1980 by two leftists) proposes
that the Louvre's ultimate aspirations to an even-handed inclusiveness belie an
inescapable ritual 'script' of Western triumphalism. The second reading was not
unsympathetic to this view. 2
In the class I openly critiqued the hyperbole of the first article, while applauding its
attention to the fact that the museum is, indeed, an ideological space. (With
Horowitz's lurid performance fresh in my mind, I even compared the article's
overstated thesis to the conviction--equally widespread among left- and right-wing
extremists--that the mainstream American media is simply the mouthpiece of the
enemy within.) According to the way of thinking promoted by Horowitz and the
Students for Academic Freedom, however, my forbearing critique would hardly have
been enough to absolve the stain of the readings. Their embattled, politicized
conception of intellectual diversity would require that any such left-wing content be
balanced out by readings fostering a divergent ideological agenda. 3
In other words, I would be required to find readings that were openly anti-leftist, and
which espoused conservative ideas about the neutrality of the great western
museums, the sanctity of nationhood, the superiority of classic Western art, and so
on. Even if I could find readings intelligently defending such notions, I doubt that
they would profitably advance the thinking in the seminar, given that the leftist
critique was explicitly dissecting these received ideas. Although I love museums, I
designed the class in order to subject ideas and institutions to critical scrutiny--not to
perpetuate their uncritical celebration.
Another Horowitz-approved corrective would be to ensure that for every art historian
inclined to assign 'leftist' material, the department hire a person who tends toward
right-wing thinking. And reading lists are only one of the places in which Horowitz
and his followers think university or government administrators should "protect" such
ideological "diversity." His Academic Bill of Rights also tries to ensure a greater
spectrum of opinions (by which he invariably means left-to-right political positions)
in matters of grading, curriculum development, selection of invited speakers,
allocation of university funds, hiring, firing, promotion and tenure review.
Such legislation would be a very dangerous incursion on academic freedom, for all
kinds of reasons. To begin in the broadest terms, I don't think anyone should ever be
forced to conform to the kind of simplistic, two-sided worldview that Horowitz is, in
effect, trying to pass into law. Such Manicheanism famously led George W. Bush, in
an address to a joint session of Congress and the nation on September 20, 2001, to
declare that "either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists." Although
nominally a defense of freedom, these words are really just a heavy-handed effort to
force every American citizen (if not the whole world) to acquiesce to the terms of a
perilously reductive world-picture.
Faced with such radically restrictive alternatives, any free-thinking person should, at
the very least, resent the lack of a third radio-button that would allow her to opt out
of both choices. In a free country, the decision not to consent to the conditions of
either Button A or Button B--the decision to actively abstain from any directives to
declare one's loyalties, or categorize one's self, according to such limited terms-should always be available. This freedom to resist anyone else's ideological
categorization is a fundamental democratic principle. It makes no difference whether
the purported opposites are Bush Loyalists and Terrorists, Good and Evil, Freedom
Lovers and Freedom Haters, Christians and Non-Christians, Pro-Family Values Folks
and Anti-Family Values Folks, or People Who Liked Kill Bill and People Who Didn't.
The two kinds of people in David Horowitz's world-picture are alternatively described
as members of the Left and the Right, or as Democrats and Republicans. This view of
an ideological yin and yang works just fine for Horowitz, who has enjoyed
remarkable political and financial success at being first a left-wing radical, and then a
professional hard-line Republican. 4
But what about those of use who feel we have little to gain--intellectually,
professionally, or financially--by accommodating ourselves to either of Horowitz's
two stifling compartments? The real issue here is not how two people happen to feel
about one method of carving up the world. It is, rather, the fact that I am working to
preserve (and Horowitz is working to undermine) the liberty of belief and speech
implicit in the Constitution and the First Amendment. As justices Roberts and Reed
marvelously put it in 1943, "[i]f there is any fixed star in our constitutional
constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox
in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to
confess by word or act their faith therein." (West Virginia State Bd. of Educ. v.
Barnette, 319 U.S. 624, 642 (1943)).
Despite his claim to be a defender of freedom, David Horowitz reveals an unnerving
lack of regard for the kind of ideological abstention that the Virginian judges were
working to defend. This disregard is glaringly evident in the way he arrives at the
"statistics" which he regularly evokes as the very reason for implementing the
Academic Bill of Rights. In a recent response to the AAUP's condemnation of the Bill
and the thinking behind it, Horowitz baldly asserts that
a series of recent studies by independent researchers has shown that
on any given university faculty in America, professors to the left of the
political center outnumber professors to the right of the political center
by a factor of 10-1 and more. At some elite schools like Brown and
Wesleyan the ratio rises to 28-1 and 30-1.
He goes on to contend that this "huge correlation between political categories and
academic standing" amounts to a "corruption of academic integrity."
Because he doesn't resort to his opponents' tactic of supplying footnotes, I cannot be
certain which "independent studies" produced the "10-1" left-right ratio, but all the
circumstantial evidence points to two studies. These are the loopy 2001 "survey" by
the Frank Luntz Research Center and the Horowitz-run Center for the Study of
Popular Culture, and the complementary study, co-authored by Horowitz and Eli
Lehrer, titled Political Bias in the Administrations and Faculties of 32 Elite Colleges
and Universities. In a declaration very similar to the one in his retort to the AAUP,
Horowitz contends in the latter study that "[t]he overall ratio of Democrats to
Republicans we were able to identify at the 32 schools was more than 10 to 1." This
also seems to be the source of the more extreme "statistics" for Brown and
Wesleyan.
If these are indeed the "independent" studies Horowitz has in mind, then the
"Democrats" and "Republicans" mentioned in Horowitz's AAUP retort are the 1,431
professors of Economics, English, History, Philosophy, Political Science and Sociology
in various subjectively-selected "elite colleges and universities," mostly in the
Northeast, whose names seem to match up with those of registered party members
in voter records. Even if one were able to reasonably extend the resulting findings to
represent the ratio of Democrats to Republicans "on any given university faculty in
America," the question remains of how one could possibly use the exact same
statistics to "show" just how much "professors to the left of the political center
outnumber professors to the right." Easy! All you need to do is ignore the existence
of the 1,891 professors in the same departments who you estimate to be
"unaffiliated" in their party loyalty.
I can think of only two ways of coherently defending such a move. On the one hand,
one could argue that the unaffiliated majority simply doesn't matter, thereby leaving
Horowitz free to concoct his 10-1 generalizations about all professors on the basis of
less than half his dubious little data sample. On the other hand, one could simply
assume that the unaffiliated majority must 'really' break down into exactly the same
left/right proportions as the card-carrying Democrats and Republicans, leaving us
with a 10-1 statistic that reasonably represents everyone.
Take your pick. Whether Horowitz is declaring the political irrelevancy of the
inconveniently-unaffiliated majority, or whether he is presuming to represent their
unstated affiliations, his fundamental disregard for their abstention from selfdefinition is obvious, and his "10-1" ratio is ludicrous. This is the kind of 'statistic'
you pray your opponents will use. And they do. The Students for Academic Freedom
take their endorsement of Horowitz's tactics to the limit by earnestly disclosing his
patented technique of "How to Research Faculty Bias" as a link on their home page. 5
Using this simple recipe, even the most clueless ideology buffs can now manufacture
impressive-looking facts about professorial politics in no time.
The problem with such quantification goes beyond the deficiency of Horowitz's
particular method of data fabrication. It is hard to think of any method that would
provide us with reliable statistics about such a subtle and complex phenomenon as
personal ideology--not least in environments, such as elite humanities departments,
which actively cultivate ideological subtlety and complexity. The inherent absurdity of
any claim to objective ideological profiling raises the issue of how one could possibly
go about implementing the kind of diversity that the Academic Bill of Rights is aiming
to institute in the university. After all, to successfully foster "a plurality of
methodologies and perspectives" and ensure against "political, ideological, religious
or anti-religious indoctrination," one would first have to develop a sufficiently broad
and clear model onto which to map these differences and deviations, and then keep
very close tabs on the professors.
How does Horowitz think one should go about gauging and administering the desired
spectrum of opinion? He tends to avoid the subject, although when pressed on the
matter in an online forum hosted by the Chronicle of Higher Education, Horowitz
chillingly asserted that such details of implementation are not a problem, or at least
not his problem. 6
Well it should be his problem. It seems to me morally repugnant to promote the
legislation of substantial executive powers--powers which could seriously affect the
careers of countless individuals--without caring about how (or even whether) such
powers could be fairly exercised. Anyone who wants to make professors stick to the
"appropriate knowledge" of their respective fields had better lay down some explicit
guidelines detailing exactly (1) who's doing the fostering, (2) what invests them with
the special knowledge to have this authority, (3) where their standards of
appropriateness are coming from, and (4) how these standards will be implemented.
Horowitz's academic interlocutors in the Chronicle forum were absolutely right to
worry about these details of "appropriateness" assessment and enforcement, and he
was wrong to dismiss them.
Horowitz argues that such worries are misplaced, because these details of
implementation only have a bearing on the enforcement of ideological
appropriateness, which has nothing to do with his own purely negative project of
making sure every professor and student is free to pursue his or her own thing.
Don't believe it. Despite all his mollifying talk of freedom and fostering and diversity,
it is clear that Horowitz would just love to see knowledge policed, and that he knows
how to get it done. Witness the recent Chronicle article in which he takes deep
offense at the UC-Denver political-science department for having "office doors and
bulletin boards ... plastered with cartoons and statements ridiculing Republicans." In
an effort to demonstrate why this material should not be up there, Horowitz asserts
that "[w]e do not go to our doctors' offices and expect to see partisan propaganda
posted on the doors, or go to hospital operating rooms and expect to hear political
lectures from our surgeons. The same should be true of our classrooms and
professors, yet it is not."
Excuse me? Even as someone who's generally bored by propaganda, I would be
delighted for my doctor to post political cartoons on his door. Why not give me
something to look at, besides faded Norman Rockwell reproductions, while I'm
waiting around on a vinyl slab in an over-ventilated smock? I would grant exactly the
same cartoon-posting privileges to anyone--even professors in a political science
department! As for the cartoons' criticism of Republicans, what would you expect in
early 2004, when Republicans are running the country? Nostalgic Clinton-bashing?
It's not as if we're talking about kiddie porn here, Mr. Horowitz, and it's not as if
anyone is trying to make you clear the propaganda out of your office. And what's the
point of the analogy about "political lectures from our surgeons"? Surgeons are not
lecturers, and surgery is not politics, so yes, a political lecture from a surgeon might
be a little weird, at least in the context of an operating room. But professors are
lecturers, and one of the things they habitually lecture about is politics--a deeply
human enterprise with a bearing on many scholarly domains, including my own. So
why do you want to start cleaning off my door and policing my lectures?
The real reason, at least in the examples regularly provided by Horowitz and the
Students for Academic Freedom, is that certain thin-skinned ideologues don't like the
message. This is not a good enough reason to go around rewriting the laws. And in
any case, the whole Academic Bill of Rights project is utopian, or dystopian. In order
to meaningfully "foster" the kinds of "diversity" it purports to defend, one would first
have to come up with objective or reasonable parameters for ideological stock-taking
and policing--or, if one prefers, proactive anti-ideological diversity fostering.
Whatever you want to call it, this monitoring would deprive people of fundamental
liberties of expression, and legislating it would lead to an ethical and administrative
quagmire. Don't believe the doubletalk; Mr. Horowitz and the so-called Students for
Academic Freedom are enemies of free thought and free speech.
From UFF President Tom Auxter:
Here is a link to the website Santa Rosa Junior College (California) faculty have
compiled regarding the "Red Scare" events beginning on that campus in February. It
provides a sense of the chronology. The students' actions were taken, by their own
admission, in support of SB 5 (a California version of the “Baxley Bill,” FL HB 837).
http://www.santarosa.edu/~mdonovan/red_scare/what_was_operatio n_red_scare.html
Fear and Loathing in Indiana | Apr 13, 2005 09:13
GUEST Andrew Wilson from the campus culture wars
David Horowitz came to town last night for a talk sponsored by the College Republicans. He's a
conservative commentator, most recently known as the author of the Academic Bill of Rights. I
went along to hear what could be motivating such a bizarre piece of legislation.
What is the Academic Bill of Rights? A series of statements intended to explicitly prohibit
political ideology from affecting hiring, firing and teaching decisions made at universities. It was
written by Horowitz in 2003, in the belief that because liberals/progressives are over represented
on academic faculties, US schools are becoming centres of indoctrination in liberal politics.
Conservative students, he says, are often made to feel uncomfortable about their ideas and unable
to contribute these ideas to class discussions or assignments.
He also claims there are cases of unfair grading practices, but it's unclear how many of Horowitz's
allegations of unfair treatment are true, or just allegations. Most if not all universities have
policies in place already that cover what the Bill (and a companion Student Bill of Rights) covers,
and it is unclear exactly what the Bill would change or how it would be enforced (as Horowitz
was quick to admit in his lecture). But at least 12 states have versions of the Bill pending in their
legislatures (including my current home, Indiana, although this appears to be dead in committee
for the time being) and there is a bill in the US House of Representatives.
First, I want to mention some things I noted as he spoke, that of course got no coverage in the
press (all the college papers are more concerned with telling off protestors for throwing pies at
him at Ball State University). They're all things that highlighted for me that this Bill of Rights has
nothing to do with fairness in academia and everything to do with an ongoing assault on dissent
and free speech.
First, Horowitz gets a standing ovation at the start by about 75-80% of the crowd (a fact which
became more and more relevant as the lecture went on). As he starts to speak, about 8 protestors
break in with banners calling him a racist (his last excursion onto campuses was to run full page
ads in college newspapers about why slavery reparations are wrong and racist). He DEMANDS
that they be arrested by security and that their names be given to the Dean who should then expel
them. He also accuses them of stifling his right to free speech and talks about why that's ironic
(given what they claim to be about). The crowd told the protesters to get out, shut up, and, as the
protestors were being escorted out one student in the audience yelled out "Bye-bye Commies", to
a titter from the crowd.
I thought he was going to talk about evidence for the whole "conservatives can't get heard on
campuses" thing, which would speak to the logical core motivating the Bill of Rights. But he
starts out his 45 min lecture with an accusation that modern day progressives and leftists are
responsible for the crimes of Stalin's communism, and also that liberals are the intellectual
descendants of European fascism, which was driven by identity politics (movements that centre
on a sexual or racial or other identity). The former claim has an interesting history, but the latter
is more tenuous as identity politics is generally considered to have developed in the 1960s (I'm
not an expert but my flatmate is, so I'm taking his word here).
Horowitz continues with his attack on progressive politics: the other thing that defines leftists is
that they are "religious fanatics" who believe they can change the world. They want to eradicate
racism, sexism, homophobia, etc (hence the development of political correctness) but apparently
they are fighting a hopeless cause against human nature - these things have always been around,
and therefore its futile (and, in fact, immoral) to try and change them. Expanding on the religious
aspect, he claims liberals think of themselves as an army of angels and the GOP as the party of
Satan.
There is more; Democrats are the racist party, because all the inner city slums (in LA, DC,
Chicago etc) are all run "100% by democrats and leftists" - Democrats who won't let these poor
families have school vouchers, which would, goes the claim, allow these kids to switch into better
private schools. It's therefore the Democrats who cause (by being in charge) and maintain (by
denying vouchers) the poverty in inner city slums (he says the Democratic Party has "their boot
grinding the faces of these poor kids into the dirt").
So liberals are evil and racist. Now Horowitz finally gets to campuses: there are some studies
(although at least two of them may have been funded by him) that apparently show that liberals
outnumber conservatives on faculties by up to 10 to 1. Liberals are evil. Therefore this hateful
ideology is the dominant show in town, corrupting the educational process.
"Do you think these things happen at random?" he asks the crowd, and then answers himself.
There are so few conservatives because, and I quote, "there is a BLACK LIST [caps to point out
he was shouting at this point] that goes back 35 years designed to stop conservatives from getting
tenure". This isn't an actual list (it finally transpired) but a mindset, sort of reverse affirmative
action in which a liberal always gets picked over an otherwise equal conservative candidates.
Asked for evidence of this black list, he gives two anecdotes, about one guy not getting a job
because he supported vouchers and another about there being a question on a California job
application asking about the person's opinion of a nuclear powerplant down the road. He then
says, and again I quote, "I don't need to find lots of examples of this to prove my point."
He ends to another standing ovation by the same people as before, and took some questions. The
first one was about "why do the Democrats deny us the right to vouchers?" (shades of Jeff
Gannon in the phrasing), which Horowitz answers with a 5 minute diatribe about how all the
Democrats want is power. The rest of the questions (all critical of his claims) get no actual
answers.
Here are some of the stand-out moments that really blew my mind. They're mostly moments of
intense irony or frightening reactions from the crowd:
He went on a rant about how teachers' unions are run by socialists and hence hate America and
are hurting the kids. A teacher in the back piped up and said "I work hard to help the kids I
teach," and then added "and I supported the war in Iraq." Without missing a beat Horowitz said
"You would never support a US-led war because you hate America," to which the crowd
APPLAUDED AND CHEERED while he stood back swigging from his water as if he had just
said "You, sir, are no Jack Kennedy." He simply denied that the man told the truth about his own
opinions and the crowd ate it up.
He talked about the Harvard president story (who came out in a speech saying one of the reasons
why women are under-represented at the top levels of engineering, etc, may be (among other
things) different aptitudes i.e. women can't do maths). The "thought police" (who, it turns out are
the leftists and the feminists) proceeded to force him to apologise, when according to Horowitz
the "different aptitudes" claim is a solid scientific fact. Except that part 4 of his Bill reads
"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."
America is not a racist country, he claimed. There are "one or two racists here and there" but
nothing systemic. How does he know? Because of Oprah and Michael Jackson. They are black,
came from poor, troubled backgrounds and yet amassed huge fortunes. So there can't be racism.
(really, he said this.) There were no genocidal efforts made on the Indians in the 1700s, because
"there are more Indians alive now than there were then."
And Ward Churchill (he of the 'little Eichmanns' quote) is racist because his career is partly about
US wars against minorities and he must therefore believe that all the Mexicans crossing the
border are stupid, running to the arms of a country that will kill them (cue audience titter).
He went on and on about how Churchill using the "little Eichmanns" phrase was such a crime
(and indicative of the general liberal America-hating state of the universities). He then proceeded
to tell a story about how Nazi doctors viewed Jews as a virus to be destroyed (as a way to resolve
the cognitive dissonance of being a doctor who was killing people) and saying that progressives
think this EXACT same way about conservatives.
Someone pointed this contradiction out in the Q&A and asked "What makes you different from
Churchill?" His response to this and EVERY SINGLE OTHER DISSENTING VIEW was to
dismiss it out of hand as irrelevant or incoherent or by making a joke. At no point did he
intellectually engage the question - the act of asking the question apparently made the person part
of the liberal conspiracy and therefore he could be ignored.
To pre-empt claims that his Bill of Rights is Orwellian, he said opposition to the bill is Orwellian.
Why? Because the title of the bill has the words 'academic freedom' in it and anyone who is
against academic freedom is "a communist".
And the crowd ... oh, the crowd. I've never been in a room of people being stirred up by rhetoric
rather than reason. When they applauded the phrase "you hate America" about the teacher, I was
genuinely scared - I think this is a little what it would have been like to be a Jew at a Nazi rally. I
know Nazi analogies are tossed around very easily these days, but it was quite incredible. It was
like watching Pavlov's dogs: he rang the 'you hate America' bell and they all salivated and
applauded him as if they had no choice.
The crowd also told any dissenting people to shut up or to get out, without any sense of irony.
Some friends asked him a question (which of course he refused to answer) and they tried to
follow up. Horowitz said "What department are you in", and they said "Philosophy". Horowitz
and the crowd laughed and jeered and that was the end of their credibility. He moved on without
addressing their question with the crowd muttering things like "Oh, philosophy? Well, of course
they don't know anything about the real world." They were simply no longer allowed to have an
opinion about this lecture.
I've been watching for a long time as Bush stands up and says things like "We need tariffs to
protect free trade" - using a buzzword that people like (like "free trade") to justify something that
was either irrelevant or contradictory. This was it in real life - using the conservative rhetorical
buzzwords triggered a conditioned response from the crowd and they responded "appropriately"
to the buzzword, irrespective of the premise. The most obvious other one was "Arrest those
protesters and have them expelled ... they're interfering my right to free speech."
Well, if you're still reading, then thanks, and I guess let me know if you wanted to know anything
more. This experience has really shaken me - the crowd behaviour, the power of the rhetoric, and
the sheer anti-intellectualism are all astounding. I'm becoming more and more convinced that the
Left is being bludgeoned over the head by a well oiled and carefully crafted conservative machine
40 years in the making, and that this machine has two goals: to swing the pendulum of power to
the right, and then change the rules of the game so it stays there.
The assault on academia and the judiciary is an assault on the democratic mechanisms for checks
and balances (the latter explicitly mandated in the Constitution!). The media is no help (except for
Jon Stewart, for what that's worth). I'm just trying to do the only thing I can do, namely make as
many people as possible hear about events like this. The power Horowitz had over the crowd with
his rhetorical set pieces (and that he didn't have with the non set pieces) was literally like being in
pre-WWII Germany, and if the Republicans ever find a genuine charismatic, there will be trouble.
Thanks for reading this far.
Andrew Wilson
Department of Psychology
Perception/Action Lab
http://www.indiana.edu/~palab