Wake Up America: My Visit To Vanderbilt

VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY is a venerable institution in Nashville and the premier seat of higher learning in the state of Tennessee. Like every one of the nearly 200 colleges I have visited in the last ten years, Vanderbilt has long ceased to be a liberal institution in the meaningful sense of that term. In the hiring of its faculty and in the design of its curriculum, in the conduct of its communal dialogue and in the shape of its public square, like most American universities, Vanderbilt is for all intents and purposes an intellectual monolith -- an ideological subsidiary of the Democratic Party and the far side of the political left.

No aspect of the university system exposes this bias so readily as the process by which tribunes of the nation’s culture wars are invited to speak at college forums. Only authorized student groups with faculty sponsors can extend such invitations. Moreover, they must come up with funds to underwrite travel and lodging arrangements, along with an honorarium that can range from $1,000 to $20,000 depending on the speaker’s celebrity. If the speaker is a political activist, these appearances can provide a substantial supplement to personal income and a significant subsidy to the speaker’s political cause.

I spoke at 23 universities this spring and appeared at Vanderbilt on April 8. The invitation had come from a conservative student group called Wake Up America, which was formed three years earlier for the purpose of bringing speakers to campus. Despite its dedicated agenda, however, Wake Up America has only managed to put on four events in the three years of its existence. This is not because of a scarcity of conservative speakers ready to speak on college campuses. It is because Vanderbilt refuses to provide funds to Wake Up America to underwrite its aspirations. Vanderbilt’s attitude towards Wake Up America is in fact anything but supportive. Vanderbilt officials have treated the group like an alien presence from the moment of its conception.

Thus, when Wake Up America’s founder, Dan Eberhart, approached the Assistant Vice Chancellor and head of Student Life, Michelle Rosen, to gain approval for his group, she told him, "there is no need for your organization because a student group already exists, namely the Speakers Committee." This was an Orwellian subterfuge. The Assistant Vice Chancellor knew that the Speakers Committee was a partisan student group dedicated to bringing left-wing speakers to the Vanderbilt campus. James Carville, Ralph Nader, Kweisi Mfume and Gloria Steinem, for example, are recent visitors, courtesy of the Committee. These are pricey celebrities and the Vanderbilt student activities fund has granted the Speakers Committee $50,000 a year in the past to make their wish list real. This year the Student Finance Committee, which administers the fund, has increased the Speakers Committee grant to $63,000. By contrast, in its entire three-year existence Wake Up America has never been granted a single cent to bring conservatives to the Vanderbilt campus.

The Speakers Committee is actually only one of an array of left-wing groups that are the beneficiaries of Vanderbilt funds. In a recent press release announcing the disbursement $1,143,963 to student groups, the Student Finance Committee defined its purpose in these noble words: "to fund activities that will have broad campus appeal and that will guarantee a diversity of activities within our community." A glance at the roster of funded groups reveals, however, that this diversity principle does not extend to the realm of ideas.

While Wake Up America, receives no funds, the Vanderbilt Feminists receive $10,620; the Vanderbilt Lambda Association (a group of gay leftists) receives $12,000; the (left-wing) Middle Eastern Student Association receives $4,700; the (left-wing) Black Students Alliance receives $12,400; the (left-wing) Organization of Black Graduate & Professional Students receives $13,120; the (left-wing) Vanderbilt African Student Association receives $1,500; the Vanderbilt Association of (left-wing) Hispanic Students receives $14,200; and the (left-wing) Vanderbilt Asian American Student Association gets $15,000.

How do I know that these ostensibly ethnic associations are "left-wing?" I know it as a result of my inquiries at Vanderbilt and by my own broad range of experience with similar groups on campuses across the country. They are not only political and to the left, but they are more often than not at the extreme end of that spectrum as well. For example, when I spoke at Denison College in Ohio a few weeks before my Vanderbilt appearance, I had been preceded by Angela Davis, Denison’s official Martin Luther King Day speaker the month before. Davis is a lifelong Communist apparatchik who received a "Lenin Prize" from the East German police state during the Cold War, and remained a party member after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The official Denison website, on the other hand, describes her as "known internationally for her ongoing work to combat all forms of oppression in the United States and abroad." The university closed its offices during her speech so that the entire campus could hear her reconstructed anti-America, Marxist views.

When I spoke at Michigan State, I had been preceded by columnist Julianne Malveaux, who was also the official Martin Luther King Day speaker and who had received $15,000 from student funds some of which were supplied by the black student association. As in the case of Davis, Malveaux’s views are antithetic to King’s. She is a crudely racial Marxist who once asserted that there were "200 million white racists in America" and on another occasion expressed her wish that Clarence Thomas would have a heart attack. Her speech was called "Economic Justice: The Struggle Continues," and included attacks on Ward Connerly, Laura Bush, the idea of a colorblind society and of King as its prophet.

I had been preceded at Duke by Aaron Magruder, a black cartoonist who had gained fame through his strip "Boondocks" and notoriety for attacking America after the World Trade Center was bombed. Magruder was also the university’s official Martin Luther King Day speaker. In his speech, Magruder noted that 90% of the American people supported the war and said, "I would like to believe the 10% leftover is black." He then told the students, "your vote means nothing; you can protest if you want, they’ll throw you in jail." Davis, Malveaux and Magruder reflected the extremist sentiments of the black student groups on campus without whose imprimatur no Martin Luther King Day speaker could be selected.

At Vanderbilt, the university annually provides roughly $130,000 for left-wing agitations, including the visits of left-wing speakers. This is balanced by $0 for conservative groups and speakers. Ironically, the faculties of these schools are strong proponents of campaign finance reform in the political world they don’t control.

In the academic world, the situation at Vanderbilt is completely normal, with the exception of a handful of small conservative and religious schools like Hillsdale and Bob Jones University. At the University of Wisconsin, the Multicultural Students Association attacked the reparations ad I placed in the Badger-Herald last spring by attacking the paper as "a racist propaganda machine" – an absolutely unfounded smear – and attempting to shut the paper down. The MSA was rewarded for its bad behavior the following fall with a grant of $1 million to fund its radical activities. On the same campus, the Students for Objectivism receive a mere $500 in student program funds. At Duke University, in the wake of my reparations ad and the demonstrations that attended it, president Nan Keohane announced a grant of $100,000 in additional funds for student groups. When I spoke at Duke, which was a day after my visit to Vanderbilt, $50,000 of Keohane’s grant had been disbursed -- $500 to the Duke Conservative Union and $49,500 to left-wing groups.

Because university funds were unavailable, my Wake Up America hosts had to raise the money from outside contributions, not an easy task for students. They managed to secure funding from three individuals and from two conservative organizations -- Young America’s Foundation, which underwrites the lion’s share of my tours and the Leadership Institute. The money they raised allowed them to bring me to campus, house me and provide about one-fifth the honorarium I would have received if I were a leftwing ideologue like Julianne Malveaux. If I were Malveaux, or Cornel West, or Gloria Steinem, in other words, I could have collected more than $200,000 this spring for attacking America and posing as a champion of economic justice to college students. There is probably not a single left-wing activist working the campus circuit who is not making a six-figure income.

A frustrating but typical trait of college conservatives is that they don’t -- as a rule -- complain about the inequities that are routinely inflicted on them. Because they do not make trouble for abusive and illiberal campus administrators, nothing is done to correct these problems.

Funding inequities are actually only a small part of the injustices that conservative students suffer and that seem like normalcy to them. They also adjust, for example, to the rampant political bias in their expensive curricula, which is the result of a faculty hiring process that bars conservatives and limits the education of all students to a relentlessly one-sided view of the world they live in. Obtaining a faculty sponsor for Wake Up America was thus even more difficult than getting the Vice Chancellor to approve its formation.

The founder of Wake Up America, Dan Eberhart, scoured the campus for a professor that would sponsor his club. He put letters of request in professors’ mailboxes. He approached them directly. In the end, out of approximately one thousand faculty members at Vanderbilt, he was able to come up with only one who would sponsor a group whose intention was to bring conservative speakers to a college campus. Vanderbilt is not only an old and traditional institution, but it is hosted by a state with a Republican governor and two Republican senators, and a citizenry whose majority voted Republican in the last presidential election. The successful purge of conservatives from the faculty of Vanderbilt is thus a sobering commentary on the politically debased condition of the American university, which has fallen victim to an academic McCarthyism more insidious (because incomparably more effective) than the academic witch-hunts of the past.

The lone professor willing to sponsor a non-left student group at Vanderbilt was a business school professor from outside the Vanderbilt community. Because his primary occupation is actually business rather than teaching, this professor flies from his home in San Francisco to Nashville twice a week to teach his course. In other words, there are really no conservative professors in residence at Vanderbilt University who are willing to publicly sponsor a group whose purpose is to bring an under-represented viewpoint to the Vanderbilt community -- even though it is a viewpoint shared by a majority of Tennessee voters and half the American public.

My Vanderbilt talk was scheduled for Monday, April 8, and Wake Up America had reserved the room where it would be given on January 12. But on Thursday, April 4, the Vanderbilt Administration informed Dan Eberhart that a professor now needed the room he had reserved for a review class and that my speech would have to be cancelled. Vanderbilt is a very large university and even the building I gave my speech in seemed virtually deserted that night. Coincidentally, this happened to me on at least three other occasions on this spring tour alone. The University of Oregon cancelled my appearance the day I arrived in state on the grounds that a request for security for the event made two weeks earlier was one day too late and the room had been given to another event, although my sponsors were not informed until one day before my announced appearance. NYU cancelled the room for my talk there the day I arrived in New York, also because of an alleged room-scheduling problem, and James Madison University cancelled, as I was about to depart for Florida, for the same reason.

In other circumstances, a young and well-mannered conservative like Eberhart might have capitulated to this petty harassment and terminated the event. Fortunately, held his ground in this case, strengthened in his resolve perhaps by the fact that my office had been able to arrange a C-Span taping of the event. His resistance bore fruit and permission was given to proceed, but not until Eberhart agreed to pay "for the wear and tear to the foyer" of the hall where the speech took place. A $100 clean-up fee was also tacked on, even though no food and beverages were served and there was no refuse to clean up.

Despite a downpour, about 250 people showed up for the speech in Wilson Hall and listened civilly while I described "How The Left Undermined America’s Security." The attendance was even more gratifying than usual because the Vanderbilt Hustler, which was the student paper, did not inform the campus community of the speech (or report on it after I gave it). This was not surprising, since the left-wing editors of the Hustler had refused to run my reparations ad the year before.

Afterwards I signed books and answered questions of those who stayed to ask them. One of my interlocutors was a professor of philosophy who handed me a yellowing copy of my very first book, Student, published exactly forty years earlier. In it, I described the first student demonstrations of the 1960s at Berkeley, where I was pursuing a graduate degree. I didn’t realize at the time that we were going to transform American universities into politicized institutions where only approved ideas would be welcome. I hope I would have had second thoughts about demonstrating then if I had realized this would be the outcome.

When I asked the professor what kind of philosophy he taught at Vanderbilt, he said with a smirk, "Marxist philosophy," then asked me to write the following in his book: "To my political enemy from a foaming at the mouth rightwing ideologue." Humor seems not to be a radical asset. I signed the book, but with a different inscription (perhaps "second thoughts are best"), and he left. I was then approached by a group of undergraduates who by their appearance and questions were not politically conservative. A young woman with a diffident demeanor asked, in an earnest tone, what I thought of racial profiling.

Her question was inspired by a portion of my talk that addressed the problem of airport security. I had pointed out that nine of the World Trade Center terrorists were actually stopped by airport security on 9-11 because they had faulty I.D.s. But they had been allowed to board the planes anyway. I said that the Clinton Administration’s failure to institute adequate security measures prior to the attack was due in part to an ideological aversion to profiling Muslim terrorists.

I tried to explain to the student the difference between factoring race into a profile and using race as the profile itself. I referred her to Heather MacDonald’s article in the conservative magazine City Journal, "The Myth of Racial Profiling," fully realizing as I did so that this undergraduate would never have heard of Heather MacDonald or the City Journal. Nor would she be familiar with the writings of virtually any living conservative writer including myself. I gave her the name of the website where MacDonald’s article was posted and could be located. But I did so with a heavy heart, because I knew that the student had many questions not one; that her parents were paying $30,000 a year to give her a good education, but that at Vanderbilt she would only be getting one side of the story and only one perspective on the ideological conflicts that would affect her life.

I had met students like this throughout my campus sojourns. The encounters were the saddest memories I took away with me. Millions like this young woman would pass through universities like Vanderbilt, which would routinely betray their trust. They would be given decks that were stacked, instruction that was partisan and partial, and there was nothing I, or a small contingent of conservatives could do in one hour or during one event to alter these facts.

David Horowitz is editor-in-chief of FrontPageMagazine.com and president of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture.

how's it go?

Tear Gas Not Needed. We Are Conservatives.

Chancellor Gordon Gee, a legally trained former conservative who won his liberal spurs as Chancellor of Brown University, has the ethics of a lawyer and the guts of a coward. This bow-tied Boobus Americanus deserves to be run out of Tennessee.

There's only one thing that I know works, but it works well - that is for alumni to withhold donations and say publicly and loudly that they are doing it because of institutional political bias. Even those of us whose donations are small are listened to - I have personal experience in that regard. It helps, as a classmate of mine did, to take out an ad in the student paper accusing the faculty of "protecting the hidebound status quo" - not only does that resonate on young ears, but it happens to be true.

If you read the article on the website and go to Comments you'll read how far the liberal Establishment has gone on the campus. One student can't even write his research in reports for fear of losing his "A" average. McCarthyism simply took a much more vicious and far reaching turn on our present day campuses...

I believe this shows the larger issue of why Horowitz went on his Reparations speaking tour. Reparations was, in my view, just a controversial issue present in the larger society. The left has always taken these sorts of issues to the campus first, but only when they were ready and on their timing. Horowitz knew the inherent weaknesses and the wish of the left to let it fester and to let it further legitimize itself, and therefore brought it to the forefront as an example.

Endowments can only be impacted by hard political activism as the left is in entrenched tenured control of these institutions.

...

There's only one thing that I know works, but it works well - that is for alumni to withhold donations and say publicly and loudly that they are doing it because of institutional political bias.

In addition it is time to contact your state legislature and let them know that you want state funded universities to be open to all ideas. Republicans in state government need to pass legislation designed to ensure freedom of thought and expression at tax funded schools.

In GOP-leaning states, state officals and legislators can bring their influence to bear on those in power at these schools to make certain that this sort of legalized harassment doesn't continue. Unfortunately in more Democratic leaning states (i.e., here in Georgia for example), this won't wash.

Many of the schools have become bastions of mind-numbed liberal professors who do nothing but encourage the young "we-know-everything-there-is-to-know" mindset that permeates the youth attending the schools. The youth feel that because they know everything, that we (i.e., conservatives with something novel under our belts: "Life Experience^®") are stupid, close-minded and [gasp] racist! (Although I always laugh at that one - it usually comes from those same ones that call me "Oreo" or "Uncle Tom")

There was an old saying that I heard somewhere (I can't recall where): "I was liberal, until I grew up." These kids haven't grown up yet, and the faculty does their best to make sure that they don't. It's the only way they know how to keep a job.

God bless Horowitz for taking the fight to the ultra-liberal/nihilist higher ed establishment. It takes an unbelievable amount of energy and determination to continue doing that.

After 15 years in higher education I am calling it quits. I have taught for 11 years at Eureka College in the heart of Illinois. It is Ronald Reagan's alma mater. But it is only a little less liberal/nihilist than the typical state university.

One of my former grads, who is currently working on his Ph.D., says "The best way to f(oul) up an 18 year old is to send him/her off for 4 years to an elite university." I agree.

One of the most serous crises Americas faces is the moral/intellectual bankruptcy of its institutions of higher ed. The problem will not be solved by the few conservatives left in academia. If it is solved, which I doubt, it will be solved by parents and alumni who refuse to support such nonsense any longer.

Sad to hear such a veteran Freeper is leaving the profession. Yes, the situation is every bit as bleak as you depict it. As a conservative "gypsy scholar" (you know, untenured itinerant), I disgree only with the adjective "elite" in your observation, since it holds for just about all institutions of "higer" learning these days, not just the "elite" ones.

My next door neighbor and a very nice guy is a research professor in engineering at Vandy. He and his wife are moderate conservatives...not firebreathers like myself and Mrs. Wardaddy but we get on well like good neighbors ought to. He describes the leftist stranglehold on Vandy as Orwellian and stifling. One simply is intimidated into keeping quiet if one wishes to advance.

What is more suprising to me is how some of Nashville's billionaire family dynasties like the Frists or Ingrams who are known to be fairly conservative politically keep on dumping huge sums of money into the place. It can't be just to have another building in their name.

Regards.

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