This is an abridged version of the introduction to David Horowitz’s new book, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, which will be officially released on Monday, February 13.
Trials of the Intellect in the Post-Modern Academy
In January 2005, Professor Ward Churchill became a figure of national revulsion when his impending visit to Hamilton College was linked to an article claiming that the victims of 9/11 were “little Eichmanns” who deserved their fate. Churchill’s article produced an outcry of such force that it led to the removal of the faculty head of the host committee at Hamilton and the resignation of the president of the University of Colorado where he was Professor of Ethnic Studies and Department Chair. As a result of the uproar, Churchill himself was removed as head of the Ethnic Studies Department and university authorities began an investigation into how he had acquired his faculty position in the first place.
Far from being a marginal crank, Ward Churchill was (and at this writing a year later still is) a prominent personage at the University of Colorado and in the academic world at large. A leading figure in his the field of Ethnic Studies and widely published, his appearance at Hamilton in January 2005 would have been the 40th campus that had invited him to speak in the three years since 9/11. The opinions expressed in his infamous article were themselves far from obscure to his academic colleagues. They had first been published on the Internet in October 2001 and reflected views that were part of the intellectual core of his academic work, familiar both to university authorities in Colorado and to his faculty hosts at Hamilton. These facts made the scandal an event whose significances extended far beyond the fate of one individual to implicate the academic culture itself.
In course of these events, several facts about Churchill’s academic career were brought to light to provide other grounds for questioning his university position. Although Churchill was a department head who received an annual salary of $120,000, he had no doctorate, which was a standard requirement for tenured positions, not to mention chairs. Moreover, his academic training had been in Communications as a graphic artist rather than an academic field related to Ethnic Studies. The Masters degree he held was from a third-rate experimental college, which did not even give grades in the 1970s when he attended. He had lied to qualify for his affirmative action hire, when he claimed on his application that he was a member of the Keetoowah Band of the Cherokee tribe. In fact, his ancestors were Anglo-Saxon and the Keetoowah Band had publicly rejected him. An investigative series by the Rocky Mountain News also maintained that he had plagiarized other professors’ academic work and had made demonstrably false claims about American history in his own writing, literally making up American atrocities that never happened.
Despite these revelations, hundreds of professors and thousands of students across the country sprang to Churchill’s defense, signing petitions in his behalf and protesting the “witch-hunt” of academic “liberals.” At the Indiana University Law School, Professor Florence Roisman took around a petition in Churchill’s behalf. When law professor William Bradford, a Chiricahua Apache with a stellar academic resume refused to sign the petition, Professor Roisman retorted “What kind of a native American are you?” and launched a campaign to have Bradford fired. The American Association of University Professors ignored the Bradford case, but issued an official declaration of support for Churchill, invoking “the right to free speech and the nationally recognized standard of academic freedom in support of quality instruction and scholarship.” Churchill made a public appearance in his own defense to a cheering University of Colorado audience of 1,500, and went on to tour other campuses where he received a similar hero’s welcome from large university crowds. These events further revealed to a troubled public the extent to which radicalism at the very edges of the American political spectrum had established a central place in the curriculum of American universities.
How could the university have hired and then raised to such heights an individual of such questionable character and preposterous views as Ward Churchill? How many professors with similar resumes had managed to acquire tenured positions at Colorado University and at other institutions of higher learning? How pervasive was the conflation of political interests and academic pursuits on university campuses or in college classrooms? Why were the administrations seemingly unable to assert and enforce standards of academic excellence? Such were the issues the Churchill scandal raised.
The present volume examines a hundred university and college professors and attempts to provide a factual basis for answering these questions. The method used is similar to the scholarly discipline known in the historical profession as “prosopography,” which was defined by one of its creators and best-known practitioners, Lawrence Stone, as “the study of biographical details of individuals in the aggregate.” The purpose of this exercise, as Stone explains is “to establish a universe to be studied,” in this case a universe of representative academics who use their academic positions to promote political agendas. A further purpose of prosopography is to establish both patterns of conduct and patterns in careers through a study of the assembled profiles.
When viewed as a whole, the hundred or more portraits in this volume reveal several disturbing patterns of university life, which are reflected career’s like Ward Churchill’s, but are neither limited to him or his specific university or his particular academic discipline. These include (1) promotion far beyond academic achievement (Professors Anderson, Aptheker, Berry, Churchill, Davis, Kirstein, Navarro, West, Williams and others in this volume); (2) teaching subjects outside one’s professional qualifications and expertise for the purpose of political propaganda (Professors Barash, Becker, Churchill, Ensalaco, Furr, Holstun, Wolfe and many others); (3) making racist and ethnically disparaging remarks in public without eliciting reaction by university administrations, as long as those remarks are directed at unprotected groups, e.g., Armenians, whites, Christians and Jews (Professors Algar, Armitage, Baraka, Dabashi, hooks, Massad and others); (4) the overt introduction of political agendas into the classroom and the abandonment of any pretense of academic discipline or scholarly inquiry (Professors Aptheker, Dunkley, Eckstein, Gilbert, Higgins, Marable, Richards, Williams and many others).
Not all of the professors depicted in this volume hold views as extreme as Ward Churchill’s, but a disturbing number do. All of them appear to believe that an institution of higher learning is an extension of the political arena, and that scholarly standards can be sacrificed for political ends; others are frank apologists for terrorist agendas, and still others are classroom bigots. The dangers such individuals pose to the academic enterprise extend far beyond their own classrooms. The damage a faculty minority can inflict on an entire academic institution, even in the absence of a scandalous figure like Ward Churchill, was recently demonstrated at Harvard, when President Lawrence Summers was censured – the first such censure in the history of the modern research university in America -- because Summers had had the temerity to suggest in a faculty setting an idea that was politically incorrect.
The influence of radical attitudes is not confined to the radical community on an academic faculty, but has a tendency to spread throughout an institution. Robert Reich, a former cabinet secretary in the Clinton Administration and now a Professor of Economics and Social Policy at Brandeis University is not a political radical. But in the present academic environment Reich is a member of the Faculty Committee of the “Social Justice and Policy Program” in the undergraduate school. The Social and Justice Policy Program, as the name implies, is little more than a training course for students to become advocates for expanding the welfare state. In other words, it is a program of indoctrination in the strictest lexigraphical sense -- “to imbue with a partisan or ideological point of view” – and thus inappropriate for an academic curriculum. The proper setting for such a course would be a training institute maintained by the Democratic Party.
One of the professors profiled in this text, Columbia University’s Todd Gitlin, explained the achievements of faculty radicals in an essay that appeared in 2004. After the Sixties, Gitlin wrote, “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.” Professor Richard Rorty, a renowned professor of philosophy and ardent leftwnger described this development with equally refreshing candor: “The power base of the left in America is now in the universities, since the trade unions have largely been killed off. The universities have done a lot of good work by setting up, for example, African-American studies programs, Women’s Studies programs, Gay and Lesbian Studies programs. They have created power bases for these movements.” That a distinguished philosopher like Richard Rorty would find in this political debasement of the university a development to praise, speaks volumes about the changes that have taken place in academic culture since the war in Vietnam.
Because activists ensconced in programmatic fields like Black Studies and Women’s Studies also teach in traditional departments like History and English ,and influence them as well, the statements by Rorty and Gitlin may actually understate the ways in which a radical left has colonized a significant part of the university system and transformed it to serve its political ends. In September 2005, the American Political Science Association’s annual meeting, for example, featured a panel devoted to the question, “Is It Time To Call It Fascism?” meaning the Bush Administration. Given the vibrant reality of American democracy in the year 2005, this was obviously a political rather than a scholarly agenda.
To identify one hundred radical professors for this volume, it was not necessary to scour university faculties. This sample is but the tip of an academic iceberg, and it would have been no problem to provide a thousand such profiles or even ten times the number. The faculty members of the entire Ethnic Studies Department which Churchill chairs, for example, share views similar to Churchill’s and have declared their solidarity with him throughout the crisis. Yet only the new chair of Churchill’s department, Elizabeth Perez, has been selected for inclusion in these profiles. None of the nine professors participating on the just described Political Science Association panel – or many others like it – are included. Out of the more than 250 “Peace Studies” programs whose agendas are overtly political rather than scholarly, this collection includes only half a dozen professors. The same is true for other ideological fields like Women’s Studies, African American Studies, Gay and Lesbian Studies Post-Colonial Studies, Queer Studies, Whiteness Studies and Cultural Studies.
This book is not intended as a text about leftwing bias in the university and does not propose that a leftwing perspective on academic faculties is a problem in itself. Every individual, whether conservative or liberal, has a perspective and therefore a bias. Professors have every right to interpret the subjects they teach according to their individual points of view. That is the essence of academic freedom. But they also have professional obligations as teachers, whose purpose is the instruction and education of students, not to impose their biases on their students as though they were scientific facts. The professorial task is to teach students how to think not to tell them what to think. In short, it is the responsibility of professors to be professional – and therefore “academic” -- in their classrooms. This includes the duty not to present their opinions and prejudices as fact, and not to require students to agree with them on matters which are controversial.
The privileges of tenure and academic freedom are specifically granted in exchange for this professionalism. Society does not provide tenure to politicians – and for good reason. To merit their privileges – and specifically their tenure privileges -- professors are expected to adhere to professional standards and avoid political attitudinizing. As professionals, their interepretations should be tempered by the understanding that all human knowledge is uncertain and only imperfectly grasped; that such knowledge must be based on the collection of evidence, evaluated according to professionally agreed on methodologies and standards. As teachers they are expected to make their students aware of the controversies surrounding the evidence, including the significant challenges to their own interpretations. Hired as experts in scholarly disciplines and fields of knowledge, professors are granted tenure in order to protect the integrity of their academic inquiry, not their right to leak into the classroom their uninformed prejudices on subjects which are outside their fields of expertise.
Therefore, professors must be careful to distinguish between matters of opinion and matters of fact, between what is in the end a subjective reading of the data and the data itself. Professors have a responsibility in their classrooms to respect both the standards of research and inquiry of their profession and the still unformed intellects of their students, who are their charges. Their teaching must not seek the arbitrary imposition of personal opinions and prejudices on students, enforced through the power of the grading process and the authority of the institution they represent.
Although such a judgment is beyond the scope of this inquiry, it is a reasonable assumption that the majority of university professors remain professionals and are devoted to traditional academic methods and pursuits. But these scholars are often a silent majority intimidated from expressing their views on subjects like the Susan Rosenberg and Ward Churchill affairs because of their concern not to be labeled “racist” or “sexist” or “reactionary” by their more aggressive radical peers. Still, they are not always so intimidated, and can sometimes be seen standing up to defend academic standards under assault.
At the University of Colorado, for example, Paul Campos, a liberal member of the University of Colorado law faculty and a columnist for the Denver Rocky Mountain News, issued one of the strongest statements on Churchill’s tenured position: “To compare the victims of the 9/11 massacre to one of the chief architects of the Holocaust is both intellectually bankrupt and morally depraved. To do so in a published essay, and to repeat this opinion to the media, after being asked whether he wishes to consider it, calls into question the author’s fitness to continue as a member of this university’s faculty. Members of our faculty should keep in mind that a grant of tenure is not a guarantee of perpetual employment. Tenure protects against dismissal without cause; but professional incompetence and moral depravity are both sufficient grounds for firing tenured faculty.”
Two years earlier, a prominent member of the academic left and a distinguished Milton scholar, Stanley Fish, wrote an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education in which he stressed the importance of the drawing the line between political attitudinizing and scholarly discourse. His article was titled, “Save The World On Your Own Time,” and in it, he cautioned academics about getting involved as academics in moral and political issues such as the war on terror. In a paradoxical summary statement he warned: “It is immoral for academics or academic institutions to proclaim moral views.” The reason, according to Fish, was provided long ago in a faculty report to the president of the University of Chicago. “The report declares that the university exists ‘only for the limited…purposes of teaching and research,’” Fish wrote. “Since the university is a community only for those limited and distinctive purposes, it is a community which cannot take collective action on the issues of the day without endangering the conditions for its existence and effectiveness.”
The conclusion Professor Fish drew was straightforward: “Teachers should teach their subjects. They should not teach peace or war or freedom or diversity or uniformity or nationalism or anti-nationalism or any other agenda that might properly be taught by a political leader or a talk-show host. Of course they should teach about such subjects, something very different from urging them as commitments – when they are part of the history or philosophy or literature or sociology that is being studied. The only advocacy that should go on in the classroom is the advocacy of what James Murphy has identified as the intellectual virtues, ‘thoroughness, perseverance, intellectual honesty,’ all components of the cardinal academic virtue of being ‘conscientious in the pursuit of truth.’” (emphasis added)
This was once the prevailing view among academic professionals. But now it is under significant challenge by radicals firmly entrenched in departments in the liberal arts fields. Organizations like “Historians Against The War” or the “Radical Philosophical Association” directly challenge the idea of academic neutrality on controversial political issues. In 2002, Columbia University hosted a conference of academic radicals called, “Taking Back The Academy: History of Activism, History As Activism.” The published text of the conference papers was provided with a Foreword by Professor Eric Foner, who is a past president of both the Organization of American Historians and the American Historical Association, and a leading academic figure. Far from sharing Professor Fish’s view that a sharp distinction should be drawn between political advocacy and the scholarly disciplines, Professor Foner embraced the proposition that political activism is essential to the academic mission: “The chapters in this excellent volume,” wrote Foner, “derive from a path-breaking conference held at Columbia University in 2002 to explore the links between historical scholarship and political activism….As the chapters that follow demonstrate, scholarship and activism are not mutually exclusive pursuits, but are, at their best, symbiotically related.”
Notes:
Far from being marginal, Lemisch’s endorsement of activist scholarship is shared by leaders of the academic profession. Jacquelyn Hall is a Professor of History at the University of North Carolina and, like Eric Foner, a former president of the Organization of American Historians. Like Foner and Lemisch, she is also a member of Historians Against The War and had this to say about Taking Back the Academy: “In considering the broad social and political responsibilities of intellectuals in society, this book calls for a revitalized definition of what it means to be a scholar-citizen in the Twenty-first Century. For scholars in the humanities, that call could not be more timely. Alternatively maligned as politically irrelevant or dangerously subversive, historians and other stewards of society’s subjective truths increasingly must be prepared to articulate – and defend – their function in today’s marketplace of ideas and corporatized universities.” These are the words of an activist rather than a scholar. But at the Columbia University conference the distinction was no longer recognized.
The Law of Group Polarization
The professors profiled in this volume are drawn from public and private universities, from small institutions and large ones, and from schools that are both secular and religious. Among them are individuals prominent in their institutions and at the forefront of their professions. They are the authors of books widely used as texts in their fields. They have been funded by the prestigious foundations that support academic work and have been awarded the highest professional honors in their fields. They are department chairmen and directors of academic institutes and programs, and the heads of large professional associations. Among them are presdents and former presidents of the American Historical Association, the American Anthropological Association, the National Ethnic Studies Association, the American Philosophical Association, the Modern Language Association, the American Sociological Association and the Middle East Studies Association. As tenured faculty they have a prominent role in the hiring and promotion of future generations of university professors. In a word they are representative figures, widely influential in the academic world.
At the same time and notwithstanding their impressive credentials, these professors (as their profiles demonstrate) are capable of making disturbingly shallow intellectual judgments and expressing alarmingly crude political opinions. Like Ward Churchill, their excesses implicate not only themselves but an academic culture.
Critics of the university have long complained that the system of tenure, which provides lifetime job security, also serves to protect mediocrity and encourage incompetence. The efforts to politicize the curriculum over the last three decades have predictably created new opportunities for both tendencies to flourish.
One factor contributing to the debasement of intellectual standards in the university is the politicized environment of the university itself. It is relatively easy for politically like-minded individuals to mistake adherence to partisan formulas for substantive thought and even intellectual achievement. Some years ago, the power of this phenomenon was demonstrated to devastating effect by a physicist named Alan Sokal. Sokal was himself a political leftist, concerned about the debasement of intellectual standards by his political allies in the university. In a famous thought experiment Sokal submitted a paper to Social Text -- a “peer-reviewed” academic journal, whose articles were viewed by many as on the “cutting edge of radical theory.” By design, the substance of the paper Sokal wrote and submitted was pure nonsense, but its content – also by design – was “politically correct.” Sokal wanted to see if the distinguished academic editors at Social Text would accept a worthless article for publication if they shared its political conclusions.
“To test prevailing intellectual standards,” Sokal explained, “I decided to try a modest (though admittedly uncontrolled) experiment: Would a leading North American journal of Cultural Studies – whose editorial collective includes such luminaries as [Duke Professor] Frederic Jameson and [Princeton Professor] Andrew Ross – publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions.” The article Sokal submitted to Social Text was called, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.” Its thesis was that gravity was merely a social construct, an instrument of phallocentric hegemony. “In the second paragraph I declare, without the slightest evidence or argument, that ‘physical “reality” [note the scare quotes] …is at bottom a social and linguistic construct.’ Not our theories of physical reality, mind you, but the reality itself. Fair enough: anyone who believes that the laws of physics are mere social conventions is invited to try transgressing those conventions from the windows of my apartment. (I live on the 23rd floor.)”
Social Text published the article and were nationally embarrassed when Sokal revealed the hoax. “The editors of Social Text liked my article,” he explained afterwards, “because they liked its conclusion: that ‘the content and methodology of postmodern science provide powerful intellectual support for the progressive political project.” This is as a clear an example as one might wish of why initiating inquiries with the politically correct conclusions already in hand is antithetical to the intellectual enterprise and why activism in the university is in its essence an anti-intellectual project, even though entire academic deparments are now organized on these bases. In fact, conformity to the parameters of the “progressive political project” has become a widespread standard of academic judgment in the contemporary university not only for the selection and design of its curricula, but for the hiring and promotion of faculty as well.
While mediocrity and incompetence have always had a place in the academic world, it is also the case that never before in the history of the modern research university have entire departments and fields been devoted to purely ideological pursuits. Nor has overt propagandizing had such a respected and prominent place in university classrooms. Even more disturbingly, the last few decades mark the first time in their history that America’s institutions of higher learning have become a haven for extremists.
A primary cause of this development is the overwhelming prevalence of leftists (and “liberals”) on academic faculties along with the corresponding absence of alternative – or critical -- perspectives. A well-known principle of group dynamics is the “law of group polarization,” which holds that if a room is filled with like-minded people, the center of the room will move towards the extreme. This is because the room has become an echo-chamber of approbation, while the natural clamor for attention among individuals provides an incentive to push the envelope of approved opinions to their natural limit.
In many fields the academic community has become such an echo-chamber. Numerous surveys of political attitudes among university professors have established that the ratio of faculty members holding views to the left of the political spectrum over those holding conservative views ranges from 5-1 to 9-1 and is steadily increasing. At Ward Churchill’s university in Boulder, the figure is 30-1. This, in fact, reflects the academic future at schools as disparate as Stanford and Berkeley, where a 30-1 ratio already exists among junior faculty (assistant and associate professors).
The atmosphere created by such a one-sided dialogue is what makes possible university support for an intellectual rogue like Ward Churchill by academic organizations like the Kirkland project, the American Association of University Professors and thousands of professors nationwide. The law of group polarization that produces oddities like Churchill would operate even if the room of like-minded faculty were not the product of systematic exclusion. But the evidence strongly suggests that it is.
Some academics, like Paul Krugman have challenged this claim to argue that the vast disparity in the representation of different intellectual perspectives is a matter of self-selection: “It’s a fact, documented by two recent studies, that registered Republicans and self-proclaimed conservatives make up only a small minority of professors at elite universities. But what should we conclude from that? One answer is self-selection – the same sort of self-selection that leads Republicans to outnumber Democrats four to one in the military. The sort of person who prefers an academic career to the private sector is likely to be somewhat more liberal than average, even in engineering.”
Professor Krugman’s argument about self-selection could easily have been used to explain the absence of women or African Americans on university faculties forty years ago when they were as rare as Republicans are today. Would Professor Krugman’s attitude be the same if he were called on to explain those disparities? It is not obvious that the military and the the academy can be compared in the way that Professor Krugman proposes, since there is no intellectual apprenticeship required for inclusion in the military, and its recruitment process hardly entails the kind of pervasive inquiry into a candidate’s opinions and judgments as does an academic hire. There are many Republican lawyers, to pick only one obvious profession that has an academic analogue, but the percentage of Republican law professors at academic institutions is no greater than the percentage of Republicans on other faculties.
As a political columnist, Krugman must also be aware that not all Republicans – not even most Republicans – are businessmen, or employed in business professions. The Republican Party is competitive with Democrats in virtually all social sectors, while the most reliable indicator of a Democratic vote is not class but proximity to and length of membership in academic communities where there is a restricted marketplace of ideas. Moreover, as a professor at Princeton, which is governed by the trustees of the “Princeton Corporation,” Krugman must be aware that a significant segment of the university community is actually part of the private sector, and a lucrative part at that for academic entrepreneurs like himself. If Republicans are motivated by a desire to succeed in the private sector, why would they deny themelves the opportunities provided by private corporations like Princeton and Harvard?
Krugman’s self-selection hypothesis cannot explain the results of the study by Professor Daniel Klein and Andrew Western showing that the ratio of Republicans to Democrats among junior faculty at Berkeley and Stanford is a third of what it is among senior faculty. Nor can it explain why the percentage of faculty conservatives should have dramatically declined in the last twenty years as a recent study by Rothman, Nevitte and Lichter shows. In a survey of 1643 faculty members drawn from 183 colleges and universities, the authors concluded that “over the course of 15 years, self-described liberals grew from a slight plurality to a 5 to 1 majority on college faculties, while the ratio of liberals to conservatives in the general population remained relatively constant. These statistics, on the other hand, are perfectly compatible with the view that the exclusion of conservatives began roughly thirty years ago when a generation of political activists started to acquire power over faculty hiring and promotion committees.
Are these disparities the result of political discrimination? There is considerable reason to believe that they are, and that the active exclusion of conservatives has been an important factor in creating them. Certainly the rationale for such an agenda has long been a staple of radical thought. The political activists who flooded university faculties in the early Seventies were encouraged by their own theories to regard the university as an instrument for social change whose levers of power it was important for “progressives” to manipulate and control.
Academic radicals self-consciously drew their social strategies, for example, from the writings of the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci around whom an academic cult formed in the 1970s, just as they were ascending the tenure ladder. Gramsci was an innovator in Marxist theory whose ideas focused on the importance of acquiring cultural “hegemony” as the fulcrum of revolutionary change. Gramsci explicitly urged radicals to gain control of the “means of cultural production” to further their ends. Foremost among these means were the universities and the media. The considerations that led Gramsci to these conclusions would certainly have also encouraged faculty activists to seek institutional power within the university by acquiring control of its hiring and tenure committees.
Herbert Marcuse, a professor at Brandeis and a veteran of the famed “Frankfurt School” of European Marxism, was another figure whose writings flourished with the new radical presence on university faculties. His famous essay on “Repressive Tolerance,” written in 1965, is a justification for the suppression of conservative speech and conservative access to cultural platforms on the grounds that the views of right-wing intellectuals reflected the rule of an oppressive and already dominant social class. Marcise identified “revolutionary tolerance” as “tolerance that enlarged the range and content of freedom.” Revolutionary tolerance, therefore, could not be neutral towards rival viewpoints, but had to be “partisan” in behalf of the radical cause. In other words, it had to be “intolerant towards the protagonists of the repressive status quo.” In other words, dialectically speaking, revolutionary tolerance required the suppression of conservative voices. This was a transparent prescription for not hiring academic candidates with conservative views: A blacklist was a tool of “liberation.”
According to Marcuse normal tolerance, which is “granted to the Right as well as the Left, to movements of aggression as well as to movements of peace, to the party of hate as well as to that of humanity … actually protects the machinery of discrimination.” By this logic, repression of conservative viewpoints was a progressive duty. Evaluating conservative academic candidates on their merits, without regard to their political and social opinions, was to actively support discrimination and oppression in the society at large. Marcuse’s “dialectical argument” exerted a seminal influence in academic circles in the 1970s and provided a powerful justification for blacklisting conservatives in the name of equality and freedom. (The same argument would also justify the exclusion of conservative texts from academic reading lists, which is an all too common practice on liberal arts campuses today.)
Whatever the cause, senior conservative professors (and most conservative professors are now senior) find themselves regularly excluded from search and hiring committees, and a dwindling presence on university faculties. The bitterly intolerant attitude of the current academic culture towards conservatives is also inevitably a factor in the blacklisting process. In the spring of 2005, the Skidmore College News published an article called, “Politics in the Classroom,” which quoted anthropology professor Gerry Erchak to this effect: “In the hiring process you’d probably be wise not to mention your political views. If you say, ‘Oh, hey, I really think Reagan was great,’ or, ‘I’m a Bush guy,’ I can’t say a person wouldn’t be hired, but it’s like your pants falling down. It’s just horrible. It’s like you cut a big fart. I just don’t think you’ll be called back.” The faculty prejudices reflected in Erchak’s comment are a pervasive fact of academic life.
The activist agendas of today’s academics are not only a departure from academic tradition, they are violations of established principles of academic freedom dating back to 1915. These principles, which were developed by the American Association of University Professors, have been universally embraced by American colleges and universities and are elaborated in official faculty guidelines, while remaining unenforced. Rule APM 0-10 of the University of California’s Academic Personnel Manual, written in 1934 by its president Robert Gordon Sproul, states:
The function of the university is to seek and to transmit knowledge and to train students in the processes whereby truth is to be made known. To convert, or to make converts, is alien and hostile to this dispassionate duty. Where it becomes necessary, in performing this function of a university, to consider political, social, or sectarian movements, they are dissected and examined, not taught, and the conclusion left, with no tipping of the scales, to the logic of the facts…. Essentially the freedom of a university is the freedom of competent persons in the classroom. In order to protect this freedom, the University assumed the right to prevent exploitation of its prestige by unqualified persons or by those who would use it as a platform for propaganda.
On July 30, 2003 -- sixty-nine years after this statement was written -- the passage was removed from the Berkeley personnel manual by a 43-3 vote of the Faculty Senate. This was an eloquent and disturbing expression of the new academic culture, which had accommodated itself to the intrusion of partisan agendas into the academic curriculum.
Behind the traiditional guidelines lies a liberal philosophy of education in which it is the professional responsibility of educators to teach students how to think, rather than what to think. This is what distinguishes democratic systems of education from their totalitarian counterparts. Under academic freedom guidelines, teachers are expected to instruct students how to assemble data from the evidential record, how to evaluate the data and how to construct an argument using the data. They are expected to refrain from using the authority of the classroom to impose on students their personal conclusions about questions to which the answers are not verifiable or are beyond their professional expertise. It is the difference, as Stanley Fish wrote, between teaching about controversial issues and “urging them as commitments.”
There are no “correct” answers to controversial issues, which is the very reason they are controversial. There are no factually determined answers to controversial questions that any current expertise can resolve, for the same reason. It is precisely because the answers to such questions are inherently subjective and opinion-based that teachers should not use the authority of the classroom to force students to adopt the position they themselves favor. To do so is not education but indoctrination.
These principles are still enshrined in the academic freedom guidelines of the American Association of University Professors and of many large university systems, like the ones in Pennsylvania and Ohio, and until recently California. But as the profiles in this book reveal, they are widely disregarded by activist professors in university liberal arts programs. That is the problem surveyed in this book.
This book was inspired by my own educational experience at Columbia University in the 1950s. I was a Marxist at the time and wrote my classroom papers, as a seventeen year old, from that perspective. Even though this was the height of the Cold War and my professors were anti-Communist liberals, they never singled me out for comment the way many conservative students I have encountered are singled out today. No professor of mine ever said in the course of a classroom lecture, “Horowitz, why do Communists kill so many people?” Yet, last year, a Christian student at the University of Rhode Island, named Nathaniel Nelson, was singled out by his political science professor who interrupted a class discussion in a course on political philosophy from Plato to Machiavelli to ask, “Nathaniel, why do Christians hate fags?” I do not know how my education would have been affected if my professors had become my adversaries in the classroom, but I am sure the effect would not have been positive. If my professors had made me an object of their partisan passions, the trust between teacher and student would have been irreparably ruptured and with it the ability of the teacher to provide his student with the full benefits of his experience and expertise.
I am grateful to my Columbia professors for not becoming my adversaries in the classroom in the way that has become common in the classrooms of activist professors today. I am grateful to them for treating me as a seventeen-year-old, who was their student and to whom they had the same professional obligation they had to students who might agree with them on contemporary controversies. I am grateful for their professionalism and for the respect they showed to their academic calling; and I am grateful for their concern for my vulnerability as a young man. In twenty years of schooling up through the graduate level, I never heard one teacher or professor, on one occasion in one classroom ever express a political opinion. Not one. It is my hope that the integrity exhibited by my teachers in that politically troubled era will be restored one day to American institutions of learning so that future generations of students can receive as full a benefit from their educational experience as I did.
My most difficult task in writing this book was living daily with the knowledge it provides of the enormous damage that several generations of tenured radicals have inflicted on our educational system and its students; and of being cognizant of the unrelenting malice that so many of them hold in their hearts for a country that has given them the great privileges and freedoms they enjoy as a birthright.
December 2005
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