Campus Report: Professors Deny Claims

Horowitz Book Labels Foner, Navasky, Gitlin “Dangerous”

By Lisa Hirschmann
Spectator Senior Writer

March 03, 2006

Three Columbia professors accused by David Horowitz of indoctrinating their students with left-wing propaganda have dismissed the claims as factually incorrect and ludicrous.

In his latest book, The Professors: the 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, Horowitz, CC ’59 and conservative activist, provides profiles of ostensibly left-wing professors whom he alleges are indoctrinating students with politically-charged rhetoric in the guise of academic instruction. Nine of 101 academics selected by Horowitz for study are Columbia professors, the most Horowitz profiled from any single school.

“Columbia is a national scandal. That a serious, top-tier university ... is an ideological fortress is an emblem of the utter debasement of the academic endeavor,” Horowitz told the New York Sun in February.

Dewitt Clinton Professor of History Eric Foner, one of the Columbia faculty members included in The Professors, has brushed Horowitz’s charges aside. “Life is too short to get into a discussion about Horowitz, who hardly merits the attention of any serious person,” he said in an email.

Foner pointed to Horowitz’s misattribution of a comment by late author Paul Foot regarding the 9-11 attacks to him as “a rather egregious error.”

The Foner misquote is the only mistake that Horowitz has acknowledged publicly on his Internet blog.

“The 101 profiles were the work of thirty researchers. In these circumstances, juxtaposing a quote—which is clearly what happened—is not too difficult a possibility to imagine. The Foner quote and the Foot quote appeared in sequence on a page in the London Review of Books which was referenced in The Professors, and during the many revisions of the manuscript that’s how the error was made,” he wrote.

For his part, Horowitz maintains that the “honest” mistake is inconsequential to his conclusion regarding Foner’s scholarship.

“It is not meant as an evaluation of the life work of any of these people. I’m not saying anything about Eric Foner’s work on Reconstruction,” Horowitz said.

Instead, Horowitz said he profiled Foner because the professor’s alleged endorsement of the intermixture of political activism and teaching. Horowitz based this claim on Foner’s contribution to a published text of papers from a 2002 conference called Taking Back the Academy: History of Activism, History as Activism.

In the volume’s forward, Foner writes that, “As the following chapters demonstrate, scholarship and activism are not mutually exclusive pursuits, but are, at their best, symbiotically related.”

Journalism professor Todd Gitlin, another profiled Columbia faculty member, agreed with Foner’s conclusions regarding the accuracy of the book. He cited “willful misunderstandings and distortions” in the chapter about him.

“There’s a lot of history here—he’s been going after me for twenty years,” Gitlin said. “Horowitz hasn’t a clue as to how I function in the classroom. ... He’s bonkers.”

Delacorte Professor of Magazine Journalism Victor Navasky, chairman of the Columbia Journalism Review, claims Horowitz printed misinformation about him as well. Navasky denies that he ever “bankrolled” the Review as Horowitz alleges in The Professors.

“For months his control and his bankrolling of the Review were kept quiet by the magazine, which commonly cited Professor Navasky on its pages as if he were an independent commentator whose views it had solicited,” Horowitz writes in the profile.

“I am flattered by the accusation, but it is false,” Navasky told Spectator in an e-mail. “If I had a dollar for every factual error in this book, I probably could bankroll CJR.”

Though he noted the book is doing well in sales, Horowitz said he believes the book’s argument, developed in its introduction and conclusion, may be slipping through the cracks as a result of its marketing as a list of the “101 Most Dangerous Academics in America” by publisher Regnery, Inc.

Horowitz is president of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, which serves as a vehicle for his campaigns and his online newsmagazine, frontpagemag.com. He has received considerable attention lately for the Academic Bill of Rights, an eight-point document that seeks to diminish politically liberal bias in university settings. The document was published by his organization, Students for Academic Freedom, a coalition of student organizations that works “to end the political abuse of the university and to restore integrity to the academic mission as a disinterested pursuit of knowledge.”

Horowitz attended Columbia as an undergraduate and received his Masters degree from the University of California at Berkeley in English literature.

He was raised in a family with Marxist views and was a widely-known supporter of the left throughout the 1960s and 1970s, until becoming disillusioned with the movement and becoming one of America’s most famous neo-conservatives.