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Discounting the Facts

May 24, 2020 by admin Leave a Comment

By Jacob Laksin—FrontPageMag.com–06/12/06

On May 9, 2006, a group calling itself the coalition for Free Exchange on Campus released a 50-page “report” on David Horowitz’s book, The Professors titled “Facts Count.” As described by InsideHighered.com, “In ‘Facts Count,’ the debunking document being released today, Horowitz’s book is slammed as ‘sloppy in the extreme.’ The analysis also says that the details included in the book suggest that Horowitz is not concerned with the students he says he is trying to protect, but is actually trying to punish professors whose views he doesn’t like.”

If the authors of “Facts Count” are to be believed, they represent a group of disinterested observers whose only concern is to defend the marketplace of ideas. In their own words, their mission is “advocating for the rights of students and faculty to hear and express a full range of ideas unencumbered by political or ideological interference.” But this self-serving boilerplate is not supported by the facts.

Free Exchange is an organization created and financed by professorial unions solely to oppose the efforts of one individual, David Horowitz, and his campaign to have universities adopt an “Academic Bill of Rights” and to denounce his book, The Professors.

The groups comprising the Free Exchange coalition are chiefly distinguished by their partisan commitment to left-wing political causes and their support for the politicized and one-sided academic status quo documented and critiqued in The Professors. Campus Progress, for example, which is the primary “student” organization belonging to the Free Exchange coalition, is the ideological subsidiary of a Democratic brain trust, the Center for American progress, headed by former Clinton chief of staff John Podesta. Like the Center, Campus Progress and funded by George Soros and other billionaire activists. Campus Progress is itself headed by David Halperin whose father, Morton Halperin, is the “Director of U.S. Advocacy” for Soros’s main base of operation, the Open Society Institute. Far from being a public interest operation, Campus Progress’ declared aim is to “strengthen progressive voices on college and university campuses nationwide” and “empower new generations of progressive leaders.”

Another Free Exchange member, the Center for Campus Free Speech, is a scarcely concealed front for the U.S. Public Interest Research Group (US PIRG), a network of left-wing student groups committed to advancing the agendas of its founder, Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader. Together with the pro-Castro United States Student Association, a member of both Free Exchange and the radical anti-war coalition United for Peace and Justice, these partisan student groups would naturally regard a book like The Professors, which examines the abuses of political activists masquerading as academics, as a threat to their common agenda: recruiting students into the left-wing political fold. This is a goal they share with many of the tenured radicals profiled in the book.

Even more central to the coalition are its union members, in particular the American Federation of Teachers, two of whose operatives are listed as contacts for press inquiries about “Facts Count.” Joining the AFT is the American Association of University Professors, which has taken a leading role in opposing the academic freedom campaign launched by Horowitz by distorting its mission, and in organizing protests against Horowitz’s “Academic Bill of Rights.” Other members of the Free Exchange Coalition include such leftwing organizations as the American Civil Liberties Union and People for the American Way.

With this partisan pedigree, it should surprise no one to discover that the Free Exchange report, “Facts Count” is a tendentious document that misrepresents and distorts the arguments of The Professors in order to attack the book and its author, and is not above fabricating evidence to make its case. Time and again the report insists that The Professors cites no evidence for a given claim when even a cursory reading of the text and its sources would confirm the opposite. Time and again, the report rebuts arguments that appear nowhere in The Professors, but are the inventions of the Free Exchange authors themselves. The overall impression created by these methods is that either these authors have not read the book or else they are unwilling honestly to engage with its arguments.

Every now and then, to be sure, the Free Exchange authors identify an actual error — hardly surprising in a text of 112,000 words dealing with 101 different individuals. On examination, however, these errors turn out to be trivial and in no way affect the substantive arguments of the book or the conclusions drawn in the individual profiles of the professors included.

Much of the Free Exchange report is based on grievances voiced by these same professors, whose charges against the book the Free Exchange authors accept uncritically. Every one of these charges is answered in the present response. Some of the individuals, like Richard Falk, Larry Estrada, and Gordon Fellman misrepresent their past statements and writings. Others, like Matthew Evangelista, Mari Matsuda and Elizabeth Brumfiel offer disingenuous accounts of their past (and ongoing) role in the continued politicization of American universities. Two professors, Marc Becker and Sam Richards, even attempt to disguise their expressed support for politics in the classroom by posing as champions of intellectual diversity and – in Becker’s case – non-ideological teaching. Not one of the professors mentioned in the Free Exchange report appears willing to openly defend the partisan politics and political extremism that flourish in the university curriculum or to frankly acknowledge their role in promoting these developments. This bad faith permeates the report “Facts Count” and renders its title ironic indeed.

In their executive summary the authors of “Facts Count” claim that The Professors is “characterized by inaccuracies, distortions, and manipulations of fact-including false statements, mischaracterizations of professors’ views, broad claims unsupported by facts and selective omissions of information that does not fit his argument.” This turns out to be a fair description of their own report. Facts do count — but evidently not for the Free Exchange authors or the professors they are determined, in the face of all evidence, to defend.

In all, the “critique” contained in the report “Facts Count” is ethically disturbing and intellectually vapid, and should be an embarrassment to all concerned in its construction.

What follows is a point-by-point refutation of the report that justifies this judgment.

Executive Summary:

1. “Mr. Horowitz’s book condemns professors for actions that are entirely within their rights and entirely appropriate in an atmosphere that promotes the free exchange of ideas. Mr. Horowitz chiefly condemns professors for expressing their personal political views outside of the classroom. He provides scant evidence of professors’ in-class behavior and fails to substantiate his charge that the professors in his book indoctrinate their students. What in-class evidence he does provide largely demonstrates nothing other than that the professors in his book emphasize critical, minority, or historically underrepresented viewpoints in their teaching.”

Like many other claims in “Facts Count,” this accusation is without basis. The Professors is formally divided into two sections – a 15,000 word analysis which explains the contents of the study, and then the study itself which consists of one hundred formal profiles of professors (Another profile, that of Ward Churchill, is contained in the introduction.) The publisher has split this analysis into three chapters book-ending the profiles. In the introduction, the author explains that his book is about the systemic “intellectual corruption” of the university and that the sample profiles represent a much larger cohort of professors who confuse political activism with academic scholarship.

The author identifies four conclusions that can be drawn from his study of the individual professors profiled. These conclusions are stated in the Introduction, which the authors evidently have not read or – more likely – have not understood. None of them refers to the “personal political views” of the professors involved, whether these views are expressed inside the classroom or out:

“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).” [1]

In other words, The Professors does not “condemn” anyone for actions that express a point of view or ideas that do the same. It is a collective profile of a 101 professors designed to show a systemic corruption in the university – promotions without merit, teaching outside a professor’s expertise, conflating political activism with scholarship, and ethnic bigotry. The objection raised by the authors of “Facts Count” – the very first in their “Executive Summary” is based on a distortion of the contents of The Professors and is designed to evade the argument the book makes by substituting another it does not.

The Free Exchange claim that The Professors condemns minority viewpoints is without foundation. The in-class evidence provided in The Professors concerns sectarian approaches to subjects and does not in the least implicate views that are “critical, minority, or historically under-represented” on the premise that such views are illegitimate. The author of The Professors is also the author of the Academic Bill of Rights whose explicit goal just the opposite: to foster “intellectual diversity,” in other words the promotion of views that are critical, minority and/or historically under-represented.

2. “Mr. Horowitz chiefly condemns professors for expressing their personal political views outside of the classroom.”

This is false. The Professors in fact says exactly the opposite, and in so many words: “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.” [2] Since these sentences appear in the introduction to the text and have been repeated by the author many times since publication, it is clear that this is not an honest error but a calculated distortion of the intentions of both author and book.

The second claim – that the book provides “scant evidence of professors in-class behavior” — is easily explained. The book makes almost no claims about the in-class discourse of the particular professors profiled — which is why it provides “scant evidence” of such discourse.

The Professors is critical of programs of indoctrination which have become institutionalized in university departments like Women’s Studies. When academic programs define their mission as “social justice” or as the training of students in feminist doctrines, they are violating professional academic standards and academic freedom guidelines. If a course is described as instilling feminist doctrines rather than conducting an academic – and therefore skeptical – review of feminist doctrines, it is not necessary to sit in the class to understand that this is a course in indoctrination. If the sole text for a course is an extreme and sectarian text like Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, an in-class examination of the professor’s lectures is also superfluous. If the syllabus for the course lays out a clear program of indoctrination in a particular world-view, it is unnecessary to analyze the professor’s explication of the syllabus in order to draw the conclusion that something is wrong.

Course descriptions, text assignments and syllabi notwithstanding, The Professors makes no claims about how individual professors teach their courses except in instances where the professors themselves acknowledge their agenda as one of indoctrination. For example Dr. Sam Richards, a lecturer in sociology at Penn State prefaces his lecture notes with the following statement: “It is not possible to keep our ideologies out of the classroom or any other place where ideas are shared. SO I’M OPEN ABOUT BRINGING MY IDEOLOGY INTO THIS CLASSROOM BECAUSE I SEE THAT ALL EDUCATIONAL SYSTEMS ARE IDEOLOGICAL TO THE CORE.” [3] [emphasis in original] This is a frank admission that Dr. Richards’ agenda is to indoctrinate students, not educate them. Other professors, like Eric Foner of Columbia, make claims that political activism is integral to their scholarship: “scholarship and activism are not mutually exclusive pursuits, but are, at their best, symbiotically related.” Is it necessary after a pronouncement like this to audit one of Foner’s classes to know that his scholarship is corrupted by political agendas?

Since in-class comments are not the exclusive subject of The Professors, and since there is no claim made in the book about a professor’s in-class discourse that is not based on statements by the individual professors about their in-class discourse (or in three cases by students who have taken the course), there is no need for the kind of evidence the authors of the report claim is missing. This criticism amounts to the invention of an argument the book does not make and then a complaint that no evidence is produced to substantiate the argument which was not made in the first place.

3. In our view, Mr. Horowitz’s conclusions are based on faulty premises. Mr. Horowitz’s conclusions are based on the premises that America’s colleges and universities are failing to ensure students’ academic freedom, and that students lack the critical thinking skills they need to engage with controversial ideas and decide what they believe for themselves. We believe both premises are false.

The first premise can indeed be found in The Professors, where it is substantiated with numerous examples of professors who abuse their positions and, through tendentious curriculums and one-sided text assignments, inject transparently political agendas into the classroom in defiance of academic freedom guidelines. The second premise is made up by Free Exchange. The Professors makes no assumptions about students’ “critical thinking skills.” Violating academic standards and flouting the principles of academic freedom would be wrong regardless of how adept students are in engaging controversial ideas. Despite the impression given by Free Exchange, moreover, the book specifically calls for an engagement with “controversial” ideas. In contrast to the Free Exchange authors, however, it distinguishes between teaching about controversial ideas in a neutral manner appropriate to a university and having the professor “urge them as commitments” after the fashion of a political activist – which is an abuse of academic standards far too common as the evidence adduced in The Professors demonstrates.

4. “There are other troubling aspects of Mr. Horowitz’s book. For example, in our view, the tone and format of The Professors strongly evokes a blacklist. While Mr. Horowitz does not call for the professors in his book to be fired, he does list them by their full names and places of business, he does condemn them for their political beliefs, he does (as this report will show) distort evidence in the service of leveling unsubstantiated allegations, and he does exclude any opposing points of view-all as part of a well-publicized and well-funded media campaign. In tactics we found to be eerily reminiscent of a bygone era, Mr. Horowitz’s book also speaks approvingly of students who started a “Watch List,” condemns professors for their associations with political organizations, and issues an apologia for Senator Joseph McCarthy.

The tone of The Professors is actually quite academic and dispassionate, hardly the evocation of a “blacklist.” No example is given of the tone the authors detect – and for good reason. How the “format” of this book could evoke a blacklist is beyond comprehension. If this were indeed the case, then every biographical dictionary or attempt to assemble individuals by category would “evoke a blacklist.” The Professors is not a blacklist of any kind and the attempt to link its amply documented and non-political assertions to the demagoguery of Senator McCarthy indicates a certain desperation on the part of the authors and ulterior agendas they refuse to state. This is the kind of ominous innuendo, in fact, that the authors claim to deplore.

It is somewhat disingenuous for the authors of this report to portray The Professors as part of a “well-funded media campaign.” Free Exchange, after all, enjoys the backing of some of the most moneyed interests on the American political landscape, including the American Federation of Teachers (net assets: $65 million); the ACLU ($60 million); People for the American Way ($21 million); the American Association of University Professors ($5 million); and Campus Progress ($1.25 million). If being “well-funded” makes one’s conclusions suspect, the authors of “Facts Count” cannot escape scrutiny.

5. “Getting a handle on Mr. Horowitz’s definition of ‘indoctrination’ is difficult, since he defines it in a number of ways throughout his book. ‘In the strictest lexigraphical sense,’ he writes in the introduction, indoctrination means ‘to imbue with a partisan or ideological point of view.’ Elsewhere in his book, he portrays it as when professors ‘impose their biases on students as if they were scientific fact;’ ‘use the authority of the classroom to force students to adopt their positions;’ or engage in ‘the arbitrary imposition of personal opinions and prejudices on students, enforced through the power of the grading process and the authority of the institutions they represent.'”

There is no inconsistency in these examples. Each accurately describes indoctrination.

6. “Not once in Mr. Horowitz’s book do we see proof that a single professor teaches his or her own political views to the exclusion of all others, and nowhere does Mr. Horowitz provide a single example of a student whose grade was lowered because of his or her political beliefs.

In fact, the book includes many examples of professors who teach their courses that are merely explications of their own political views, while making no effort to inform their students that there are other valid scholarly perspectives. Examples would include most professors of “Peace Studies” (David Barash, Harry Targ, George Wolfe) as well as those with a declared commitment to promoting “social change” (e.g., Melissa Gilbert, Dana Cloud). In the introduction, David Horowitz also points to the notorious case, by no means isolated, of a University of California lecturer named Snehal Shingavi who turned his section of a freshman writing course into a propaganda exercise called “The Politics and Poetics of Palestinian Resistance” and discouraged “conservative thinkers” from enrolling.

Equally untrue is the claim that The Professors provides no examples of students who were penalized with lowered grades for their political views. The profile of Professor Robert Dunkley of the University of Northern Colorado recounts a failing grade he awarded a student who answered a final exam question in a manner that was politically incorrect. The grade was changed on appeal. Still another case is provided in the profile of Professor George Wolfe of Ball State University who, according to a former student, Brett Mock, lowered or elevated his grades based on whether he agreed or disagreed with Wolfe’s dogmatic certitudes.

That the authors prefer to deny the existence of such examples presents two possibilities, neither encouraging for the credibility of their study. Either they have not taken the time thoroughly to read the book and are therefore unfamiliar with its arguments; or else they would rather misrepresent its content rather than challenge it on its merits. Neither provides any reason to think that their report should be taken seriously.

7. “Indeed, for a book that is ostensibly about students’ rights, student voices are pointedly absent. Our analysis finds that student testimonials are absent from 87 of the 100 profiles (not 101, as the title and chapter heading indicate) in Mr. Horowitz’s book.”

This complaint evidences yet again the authors’ inclination to set up straw men rather than engage the arguments the book actually makes. The Professors is not about “students’ rights.” It is about the widespread corruption of professional standards in the university. The introduction of “student voices” helps to bolster this theme, but is by no means essential to it. Further, The Professors actually contains 102 profiles not 100 as the Free Exchange critics claim. The profiles of Ward Churchill and Cornel West are more thorough than the 100 listed in alphabetical order, but they are to be found in chapters one and three, which the critics evidently did not read or – more likely – did not understand. The figures are meaningless in any case, since The Professors argues that there are tens of thousands of professors who fit the pattern that emerges from the collected profiles in the book.

8. “Overall, the majority of the profiles in Mr. Horowitz’s book contain no evidence of professors’ in-class conduct whatsoever. As an analysis by Media Matters shows, 52 of the 100 profiles in Mr. Horowitz’s book are based exclusively on things professors have said or written outside of their classrooms. Our own count of Mr. Horowitz’s footnotes reveals that overall, approximately 80 percent of the evidence he presents relates to things professors have said or written outside of the classroom.”

Media Matters is a self-described “progressive” organization that routinely attacks conservatives, including David Horowitz, and misrepresents their ideas, treating differences of opinion as differences of fact. But even if the findings are accurate, they undermine their own critique, since they concede that nearly half the professors do in fact use their classrooms for political agendas. As previously indicated, moreover, The Professors is not merely about in-classroom indoctrination, nor is it always about individual styles of teaching. A professor in the Department of Feminist Studies at the University of California Santa Cruz is indoctrinating students as a part of her departmental responsibility quite apart from any individual commitment she may have to using the classroom for political agendas. To repeat: The Professors makes four distinct critiques, two of which focus on in-class conduct and two of which do not. In other words, half the critique is about activities that violate academic standards that are not confined to in-class presentations. These include the promotion of professors beyond their qualifications and the teaching of courses beyond their expertise. Professor Hamid Algar, to take another example, told Armenian students at the University of California, Berkeley, “You deserve to be massacred.” [4] This happened on campus but not in the classroom. Researchers who cannot detect these nuances can hardly be trusted to know whether 80 percent of the evidence presented in The Professors relates to one thing or another.

9. “To the extent that Mr. Horowitz cites anything at all about what goes on in the classrooms of the professors he profiles, his evidence usually amounts to materials that can be found on the internet, such as syllabi or short course descriptions-not accounts from people who have taken courses with the professors, or who have sat in on their lectures, or who have participated in class discussions. In short, eyewitness accounts of any kind are altogether absent from the overwhelming majority of the profiles in Mr. Horowitz’s book.”

This is another tendentious claim. If The Professors quoted students, the Free Exchange critics would say students have axes to grind and their reports are unreliable. In fact, that is what professors like George Wolfe, who are cited in the Free Exchange report, actually do claim. Given that syllabi present an objective guide to the content of courses it is odd that the authors, who elsewhere complain about the book’s subjective judgments, should object to their use as evidence.

10. Furthermore, most of the syllabi, course descriptions and the few other teaching materials that Mr. Horowitz does present tend to show nothing other than that the professors teach what they claim to teach: courses in fields that Mr. Horowitz categorizes as “ideological,” such as ethnic studies, feminism, or peace studies; viewpoints that represent the perspectives of minority, oppressed, or historically underrepresented groups; or perspectives that are critical of certain policies of the United States government.

This claim is misleading in the extreme. In the first place, the problem with these assorted disciplines is not merely that they are “ideological” in nature but that they are typically marked by a one-sided political agenda and taught by committed activists rather than scholars for whom skepticism and intellectual balance are cardinal virtues. Insofar as many of these fields are overwhelmingly critical of American foreign policy, the American military, and free-market economics, it is an understatement to describe these fields as merely “critical of certain policies of the United States government.” Further, the proliferation of these pseudo-academic fields buttresses one of the central critiques of The Professors, specifically that universities have made a “dramatic departure from the academic interests of the past, providing institutional settings for political indoctrination: the exposition and development of radical theory, the education and training of radical cadre, and the recruitment of students to radical causes.” [5]

11. In our view, Mr. Horowitz’s book strongly suggests that emphasizing alternative perspectives, discussing peace movements, or presenting perspectives critical of certain policies of the United States government are grounds for inclusion on his list of the one hundred and one most dangerous academics in America.

Not only does the book make no such suggestion but it advocates the exact opposite: a greater inclusion of different intellectual perspectives. By contrast, the fields critiqued in the book are distinguished by their undisguised hostility to opposing views, their preference for political attitudinizing over objective scholarship, and their one-sided political agendas, which include an aggressive antagonism towards the United States as a society – and not just to specific policies.

12. Our analysis shows that throughout his book, Mr. Horowitz manipulates facts to make them fit his arguments. The pages that follow detail dozens of the inaccuracies that characterize Mr. Horowitz’s research. As readers can see for themselves, Mr. Horowitz: Misstates professors’ intended meanings. For example, Mr. Horowitz bases this claim: “Professor Ensalaco regards the United States as responsible for the 9/11 attacks on itself,” on this quote: “I’d like our students to understand the historical context of the attitudes that caused the attacks. If the students understand the complexities involved, perhaps they’ll avoid the conception that all people of Islam or all Arabs are terrorists.”

We shall see in a moment whether the general claims made here are valid, and whether there are “dozens of inaccuracies” in the text. As to the claim about Ensalaco, his comment about 911 could seem unobjectionable, and had it been the sole basis for his inclusion in the book the authors would have a strong case that Horowitz “misstates professors’ intended meanings,” or rather, misstated one professor’s intended meaning. However, Ensalaco’s 9/11 comments were but one piece of evidence in a more detailed profile that also underscored the fact that Professor Ensalaco teaches a course on Western imperialism despite lacking academic qualifications; propagates unfounded claims about America’s collusion with Saddam Hussein’s genocidal campaigns; and assigns polemical screeds in lieu of scholarly textbooks, which liken Osama bin Laden to American abolitionists. [6] Examined against this background, the inference that Professor Ensalaco intended to blame the United States for the attacks of 9-11 was scarcely illogical.

13. Omits important facts that counter his arguments. For example, Mr. Horowitz states that Professor Sam Richards’ class lessons “are reinforced with ‘out-of-class’ assignments that include the viewing of left-wing propaganda films.” Mr. Horowitz fails to mention that Professor Richards’ students also receive credit for attending conservative events, including a speech by Mr. Horowitz himself.

David Horowitz replies: “It’s admirable of Sam Richards to give credit to students who attend events with conservative visitors to campus. But a film is quite different from a speech in that it is a construction of reality which represents itself as something more than the opinions of one individual. Moreover, the assigning of propaganda films is itself inappropriate unless they are analyzed as propaganda. Since Richards does not teach a course in propaganda, and since the propaganda films he assigns reinforce his ideological perspective, it is unlikely that the purpose of assigning such films is anything but indoctrination.”

14. Takes quotes wildly out of context and mischaracterizes their meaning. For example, Mr. Horowitz states that “Professor [Michael] Bérubé described the university as ‘the final resting place of the New Left,’ and the ‘progressives’ only bulwark against the New Right.'”18 In fact, these quotes are lifted from a sentence in which Professor Bérubé lists 11 ways that authors other than himself have described the modern university. Mr. Horowitz selects two and omits the other nine-including descriptions of the university as “the research wing of the corporate economy” and “the conservatives’ strongest bastion of antifeminist education.”

There is a little truth and a great deal of falsehood in this charge. It is true that Professor Berube does not claim the quoted statements as his own. But the idea that their attribution to him is “wildly out of context and mischaracterizes his meaning” is wildly inaccurate. In the same article, Berube chides an author for failing to see the “pedagogical/political character of the contemporary curriculum.” [7] Elsewhere he says that “it is unequivocally wrong to create an [academic] environment in which feminism … is devalued.” [8] Finally he says that a university must be a place where “dissensus remains not only thinkable but practicable.” [9] He borrows the term dissensus from Bill Readings, who describes dissensus as special attention by scholars to the “heteronomous instance of the Other.” In other words, Berube clearly subscribes to the “progressive” idea that the university should be a place where scholarship and political activism are combined rather than sequestered, which is the prevailing conviction in modern universities and a legacy of their conquest by the New Left. Professor Berube has previously been held to task for his attitude towards in class activism by Stanley Fish, a noted liberal academic, in Fish’s polemic against ideology in the classroom, Professional Correctness.

15. Mr. Horowitz makes his cases against individual professors within the context of a larger argument about the representative nature of the professors in his book-an argument that we believe to be based on distorted facts as well. Mr. Horowitz claims that the professors in his book are a representative sample of the 5 to 10 percent of all faculty teaching in America’s colleges and universities who are “radical.” Mr. Horowitz derives this estimate from a single incident that occurred at Harvard University, using a method we consider to be questionable at best. He starts by assuming that all 218 of the Harvard faculty who voted to censure Harvard President Larry Summers are radicals. He then calculates that since there are approximately 2,100 faculty members at Harvard, and since 218 is approximately 10 percent of all faculties at every college in America are radical. To “control for the possibility that Harvard may be a relatively radical institution,” Mr. Horowitz cuts that number in half, leaving him with a figure of 5 percent-although in writings and speeches, he usually cites the figure at 10 percent. Quite simply, we consider a method of calculation that draws a sweeping conclusion about every college and university in America on the basis of a single incident at Harvard to be extremely suspect.

The notion that The Professors bases its critique on a single episode of radical intimidation is a misreading of the book so extreme as to border on caricature. Apart from the 101 professors featured in its title, and whose continued occupation of academic positions is itself an affront to academic standards, the book anatomizes entire fields of study whose signal characteristic is their commitment to political activism over disinterested scholarship.

16. If anything, we believe Mr. Horowitz’s book is an unintentional testament to the fact that policies that are already in place to protect students’ academic freedom are working well. In his 300-plus page book, Mr. Horowitz and his team of 30 researchers do not provide a single example of a student who tried and failed to address an academic freedom-related grievance through existing university channels.

Students are generally unaware of the academic freedom guidelines of their university since they are contained in the Faculty Handbook and treated as the “rights and responsibilities of faculty.” This is only one explanation for the lack of student academic freedom grievances. A second is that there is no grievance machinery designated or designed for academic freedom complaints. But this is beside the point, since The Professors does not base its claims about the erosion of academic standards on student grievances, nor does it make any claim to. This is simply yet another attempt by the authors to erect a straw man argument and avoid any thoughtful engagement with the actual arguments the book makes.

Yet it is not even a very effective straw man considering that, in point of fact, the book does provide several examples of students who attempted to resolve their concerns about the abuse of academic freedom “through existing university channels” only to meet with unsympathetic faculty. In part this was because the existing university channels are not set up to handle academic freedom complaints. A profile of Columbia University professor Joseph Massad, in The Professors, points out that complaints by pro-Israeli students, outraged by Massad’s abusive verbal attacks on students who took issue with his in-class harangues against the Jewish state, prompted a university-mandated investigation of Massad. A subsequent investigatory committee vindicated the substance of their complaints, confirming that the incidents alleged by the students had indeed taken place — a fact Massad had strenuously denied. But, as The Professors notes, “It is instructive that nevertheless no action was taken against Massad for dissembling to the university committee.” [10] Similarly, a profile of Brooklyn College professor Priya Parmar notes that disaffected students wrote letters to the college’s Dean of Education objecting to Professor Parmar’s preference for introducing politics into the classroom and her unwillingness to countenance disagreement. The college ignored their concerns.

For the Free Exchange report to claim that the book does “not provide a single example of a student who tried and failed to address an academic freedom-related grievance through existing university channels” is therefore false, and a telling demonstration of the kind of “error” that its authors are determined to attribute to others. It is also relevant in this context that, as David Horowitz writes in the book’s introduction, some universities have recently loosened the guidelines for academic freedom (and have done so with the active collusion of the professorial unions) in the service of making political activism a legitimate part of the university curriculum.

17. In our view, the arguments in Mr. Horowitz’s book are premised upon an unreasonably low assessment of students’ intelligence, and suggest that students risk indoctrination simply by being exposed to new and controversial ideas.

The book makes no assumption about “students’ intelligence” and the assertion that it does is but another invention of the authors of “Facts Count.” What the book does charge — and supports with evidence — is that professors often conduct their classes not as objective scholars but as political activists and attempt to school their students in a partisan and ideological point of view without making them aware of other valid perspectives. Whether or not they are successful does nothing to detract from the fact that it is the dictionary definition of indoctrination. That the authors of the report prefer to euphemize such one-sided political instruction as “new and controversial ideas” suggests that even they cannot defend such practices on their merits.

18. In his book, Mr. Horowitz describes students as “hapless,” and student points of view are absent from 87 of the 100 profiles in his book.

The word “hapless” is used only once in the book to describe students and refers to the those students at the City University of New York who have the misfortune of sitting through a course by the radical feminist “bell hooks,” who sees her classroom instruction as “an expression of political activism.” It implies no judgment about students’ intelligence.

19. At a recent speech at Penn State, Mr. Horowitz “verbally assailed students who posed critical or repeated questions,” according to the Pennsylvania Centre Daily. “‘You do not have the mental capacity to understand,’ he told one. To another, he said: ‘You are deaf and brain-dead.'”27 In short, we consider Mr. Horowitz’s claim to represent students’ interests to be highly suspect.

It is eminently ironic that the same authors who (erroneously) fault David Horowitz for failing to focus solely on the in-class activities of professors should adduce remarks he made at a public event in order to condemn the arguments of his book. In addition, the authors’ version of the story conveniently omits the context of his remark. As David Horowitz recalls the incident: “Unbeknownst to me, six or seven of Dr. Sam Richards’ students had lined up to ask the same question, which they had all written down. The question was how could I comment on Dr. Richards in-class teaching when I had not attended his course. The answer was that Dr. Richards posted the following declaration on his official university website: ‘It is not possible to keep our ideologies out of the classroom or any other place where ideas are shared. SO I’M OPEN ABOUT BRINGING MY IDEOLOGY INTO THIS CLASSROOM BECAUSE I SEE THAT ALL EDUCATIONAL SYSTEMS ARE IDEOLOGICAL TO THE CORE.’ (emphasis in original) Dr. Richards’ students, who had lined up to ask questions, either didn’t listen to my answer or were unable to depart from the written question they had agreed to ask, or were conducting some kind of obscure protest by repeating the same challenge. I, on the other hand, was unaware that they were all working from the same pre-agreed script and as I repeated the same answer over and over could not figure out how college students could be so obtuse. By the fifth student I had lost all patience and vented my exasperation. Sorry.”

To continue reading this article, click here .

Jacob Laksin is a senior editor for FrontPage Magazine and a writer at the Center for the Study of Popular Culture.

The Ward Churchill Verdict

May 24, 2020 by admin Leave a Comment

By David Horowitz–Blog Post–05/18/06

A panel of five professors has concluded that the former chairman of Colorado University’s Ethnic Studies Department and current full professor in that department, Ward Churchill, “plagiarized, fabricated and falsified material and was disrespectful of American Indian tradictions” in the words of the Denver Post.

Here is the Report’s summary in its own words:

WardChurchillReport Download

“The Committee’s investigation of the seven allegations before us has unanimously found, by a preponderance of the evidence, that Professor Churchill committed several forms of academic misconduct as defined in the policy statements of the University of Colorado at Boulder and the University of Colorado system:

1. Falsification, as discussed in Allegations A, B, C, and D.

2. Fabrication, as discussed in Allegations C and D.

3. Plagiarism, as discussed in Allegations E and G.

4. Failure to comply with established standards regarding author names on publications, as discussed most fully in Allegation F but also in Allegations A, B, and D.

5. Serious deviation from accepted practices in reporting results from research, as discussed in Allegation D.”

Among the report’s observations is this:

“Although many of his writings, including nearly all those discussed in this report, address historical and/or legal issues, he does not have formal training at the graduate level in those fields. Professors writing on the topics he addresses would typically have a Ph.D. in history or a law degree; Professor Churchill’s graduate degree is an M.A. in Communications Theory.”

This is obviously something that did not take a report to divulge. It was known by the entire Ethnic Studies department which hired him, voted him tenure, voted him a full professorship and then voted him its chairman.

As one professor commented on InsideHighered.com:

“The wider implications of the Ward Churchill verdict are stunning. Given the egregious findings here by a distinguished panel of professors, the question is not merely Ward Churchill’s writings alone. The question is: how was it that this charlatan was promoted three times, first to tenure and associate professor, then to full professor-and finally to CHAIR of the Department of Ethnic Studies at Colorado?

“The first two promotions could ONLY have happened via the receipt of approval letters from prominent people in the Ethnic Studies field. This process must have been carried out twice, first for tenure then for full professor, and must have involved at least six and probably as many as ten prominent professors of Ethnic Studies. Yet they noticed no problems. What does that say about them as scholars? What does it say about Ethnic Studies as a valid intellectual field? In fact, the Report appears to indicate (p. 5) that Ethnic Studies is not held to the same scholarly standards as other, more traditional fields of intellectual endeavor in the humanities and social sciences. I cannot figure out whether the Report also means to imply that Ethnic Studies SHOULD not be held to those same standards. I hope that is not what the authors of the Report mean.

“Furthermore,-but this would be the most difficult thing to do-those administrators at Colorado who approved Ward Churchill’s tenure and associate professorship, who then approved Ward Churchill’s promotion to full professor, and who then and finally approved Ward Churchill’s elevation to Departmental Chair all deserved to be disciplined. THEY are as culpable as the politically corrupt or incompetent scholars who approved Churchill’s career all along the line via the writing of positive external-review letters at the time of his promotions. But these adminisrtators will be the most protected by the system. I know someone who, when interviewing for a job at Colorado in 1997, was told that Churchill was a fraud, and that everyone knew it. The university, according to the Report, was in receipt of major complaints against Churchill as early as 1996.

“So-who DIDN’T know Churchill was a fraud? Yet he was promotied to full professor AFTER 1997, and then eventually to Chair of his Department. One needs to investigate why. Were they physically afraid of him? Were they afraid of the criticism they would receive from his supporters if they objected? Were they so supportive (or afraid) of his politics that this trumped any doubts about his worth as a scholar?”

This is precisely what The Professors was about, and the verdict on Churchill vindicates its argument and claims.

Truth-Free Exchange on Campus

May 24, 2020 by admin Leave a Comment

By Jacob Laksin —FrontPageMag.com–04/14/06

What do you call a cadre of partisan groups determined to muzzle debate about the ills of modern academia? If you’re the ACLU, a leading teachers union, and eight other well-financed groups allied with the political left, you call it the coalition for “Free Exchange on Campus.”

From the first, the coalition left little doubt about its aims. Its primary concern was not the well-documented abuse of academic standards in the name of politics but the fact there were those–like David Horowitz and FrontPageMag.com–who were willing to call attention to that uncomfortable reality and proposals–like the Academic Bill of Rights–to do something about it. Thus the coalition launched its first campaign on March 16, to coincide with the publication of David Horowitz’s The Professors, a systematic critique of the post-modern academy and its more unhinged and unprofessional denizens. The book had to be stopped.

Free Exchange For Me But Not For Thee

Challenging the book’s central arguments, however, was not what the Free Exchangers had in mind. Instead, they opted for the victory-by-persistent-distortion school of intellectual argument. In their hands The Professors was no mere critique by a concerned outsider, but an academic “blacklist” that placed untold professors’ jobs in peril. (How it actually did this, since the academic job market was controlled by people like themselves and the author of The Professors remained simply that, an author, the Free Exchangers never explained.) Free Exchange press releases contradictorily denounced The Professors for being at once partially “misleading” and wholly “fictitious,” for seeking both to establish conservative dominion over the nation’s universities and, in the words of Roger Bowen of the American Association of University Professors, to “undermine the well-placed confidence of this nation its exemplary higher education system.” Adam Jentleson of Campus Progress, a member of the coalition, accused the book of being “damaging to the idea that professors should be able to exchange ideas freely.” And its power to do so was apparently without limit, casting a dark “pall on the campus.”

For all their indignation, Free Exchangers betray little evidence that they’ve actually read the book. For instance, in an interview with FrontPageMag.com, Adam Jentleson insisted that the book was utterly without merit. “The claim that a cherry-picked list of 101 people is a representative sample of the 2 million faculty members currently teaching in the United States is absurd from any statistical or methodological standpoint,” Jentleson said. Informed that the book made no such claim –that, in fact, it argued that a ten percent minority of radical professors, who did not reflect the academic disposition of vast majority of faculty had exerted a disproportionate influence on university curricula and hiring practices — Jentleson became defensive. “Free Exchange is not conceding anything against even the one three-thousandth of the faculty in America against whom you, Mr. Horowitz and your colleagues have made specific allegations,” protested Jentleson, thus declaring his loyalty to a position without any basis in fact. And despite his revealed ignorance, Jentleson stubbornly insisted that he had “indeed read the book” and, even if the evidence argued otherwise, “understood its argument.”

If their familiarity with The Professors’ argument leaves something to be desired, Free Exchangers nevertheless feel no compunction about impugning its author’s motives. Megan Fitzgerald, a paid operative at the Center for Campus Free Speech, a coalition group, has denounced David Horowitz as an “anti-free speech” activist. Since Horowitz has been a leading opponent of campus speech codes, FontPageMag.com asked her whether she had any evidence to support the charge. She responded by citing The Professors – a book — which, she claimed, attacked professors “for their personal political beliefs” and Students for Academic Freedom, which she accused of publishing “unsubstantiated and anonymous claims of classroom bias for administrators, students and legislators to see.”

In fact, The Professors specifically defends the right of all professors to hold and express political beliefs, as does Students for Academic Freedom and its Academic Bill of Rights. The Professors is a wide-ranging catalogue of academic decline that highlights the predilection of radical professors to use their classrooms as political soapboxes – a violation of the academic freedom guidelines of the American Association of University Professors and the Faculty Handbooks of most universities themselves.

As for Students for Academic Freedom, it does indeed bolster its findings with evidence, in stark contrast to the Free Exchangers themselves. And indeed, under pressure Fitzgerald moderated her earlier remarks, telling FrontPageMag.com that the major flaw of The Professors and SAF was that neither encouraged “faculty to express views that disagree with Mr. Horowitz’s.” That claim, too, is demonstrably false. Here is what The Professors actually says: “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.” (p. xxvi)

Yet, even as the Free Exchange coalition will oppose any criticism of academic misconduct, tar critics as enemies of free speech and their work as undeserving of a serious hearing, it describes its own mission, without a trace of irony, as a “campaign for free speech.”

Diagram of a Distortion

A claim that figures prominently in the Free Exchangers campaign is that critics of academic radicalism rely on “distortions” to make their case. Most recently, the Free Exchange Web site – which is a website dedicated to assailing David Horowitz and the Academic Bill of Rights – featured the case of Larry Estrada, one of the professors who appears in Horowitz’s book. Estrada is an associate professor at Western Washington University and a self-proclaimed supporter of the Chicano supremacist group MEChA. Estrada complained that his profile in The Professors was filled with “distortions, damaging inferences and out-and-out fabrications.” His claims did not withstand scrutiny. There were in fact no fabrications in the profile and the only distortions were furnished by Estrada himself in order to mask MEChA’s racist core principles and obscure his defense of the substance of Colorado professor Ward Churchill’s Internet apologia of anti-American terrorism.

On the other hand, “distortions, damaging inferences and out-and-out fabrications” would reasonably describe the Free Exchange coalition’s tactics. Consider, to cite but one instance, the Free Exchangers allegation that the Academic Bill of Rights has made academic scientists reluctant to research controversial subjects like global warming for fear of administrative repercussions.

The charge can be traced to the remarks of Lisa Klein, a tenured professor of material science at Rutgers University and a member of the AAUP, a leading opponent of the Academic Bill of Rights and a Free Exchange coalition partner. In a March 17 Free Exchange press release devoted entirely to deploring the Academic Bill of Rights, Klein said that because of the bill, “we have already seen challenges to academic freedom in the sciences.” In particular, she cited the area of global warming where, as paraphrased in the press release, she saw that “hard data is often challenged and professors personally attacked for their research.”

That there was no basis for Klein’s claim — the Academic Bill of Rights expressly endorses “exposing students to the spectrum of significant scholarly viewpoints” — was no obstacle to Free Exchange activists, who seized on Klein’s spurious linkage as proof of its adverse effect on academic freedom. In an interview with a student newspaper at James Madison University, Free Exchange spokesman Jamie Horwitz (an Associate Director of Public Affairs at the American Federation of Teachers, another coalition member) asserted that the Academic Bill of Rights would take “away rights from faculty and students and the ability to exchange ideas.” As evidence, he repeated Klein’s charge about global warming. “Many professors are scared to speak freely on issues like global warming for fear some people may say they have a political agenda,” Horwitz warned. The fact that the Academic Bill of Rights would support professors who research global warming did not give Horwitz the slightest pause in defaming it.

The student newspaper at James Madison did not, of course, challenge Horwitz’s claim. But when FrontPageMag.com contacted Lisa Klein, she conceded that her earlier comments about global warming – publicly used by Horwitz and Free Exchange press release to create out-and-out fabrications about the Academic Bill of Rights — had nothing at all to do with the bill. In fact, Klein’s comments had nothing to do with any real professor: “In my comments, I gave a general example where science is being politicized. I was not referring to a specific professor who was attacked for conducting research into global warming,” Klein acknowledged. Jamie Horwitz, who has a record of mis-stating and mis-representing the Academic Bill of Rights, did not respond to FrontPageMag.com’s request for an interview, and has yet to issue a correction.

The Non-Partisan Partisan Agenda

In the Free Exchange coalition’s self-serving description, it is a non-partisan group “committed to advocating for the rights of students and faculty to hear and express a full range of ideas unencumbered by political or ideological interference.” By contrast, critics of the modern university, especially David Horowitz, are engaging in a “politically motivated attempt to curb learning on campus by forcing an ideological agenda and curbing the free exchange of ideas.” There’s only one problem with the coalition’s account. It gets things exactly backward.

Whereas the critics seek to restore traditional standards to the universities, Campus Progress, the project of the Center for American Progress–a Washington D.C.-based pro-Democratic “research and educational institute” run by President Clinton’s former chief of staff, John Podesta and staffed by former Clinton operatives – has clearly partisan goals. Campus Progress’s mission is to advance left-wing political agendas, or as it puts it, to “strengthen progressive voices on college and university campuses nationwide” and “empower new generations of progressive leaders.”

Essential to this mission is Campus Progress’s claim that university campuses are dominated by conservatives — so much so that groups like the Center are required to “counter the growing influence of right-wing groups on campus.” Correspondingly, the group’s Web site states that “While the media perceives U.S. campuses as bastions of liberalism, the right wing has spent 30 years organizing to gain the upper hand.” Campus Progress’s leaders repeat this mantra as if it were unassailable fact. Asked by FrontPageMag.com whether the charges that university faculties are dominated by the political Left and hostile to contrary perspectives was accurate, the Center’s Adam Jentleson dismissed the claims offhand. “No, of course I don’t think either one is fair or accurate,” he said.

Not only are these talking points disclaiming leftwing dominance unsupported by the evidence — studies of political affiliation consistently show that faculty members overwhelmingly tilt to the left — but they are disbelieved by Jentleson’s staffers. Writing on the CP’s in-house blog on March 24, for instance, Ben Adler, the associate editor of its Web site, Campusprogress.org, made a striking confession: “Academia has plenty of academic diversity,” Adler noted, “it’s just that the spectrum is often from center-left to far-left (which is actually a much wider, and, to my mind, more interesting, gap than center-left to center-right).”

It’s not easy to reconcile such statements with the Free Exchanger’s professed commitment to intellectual pluralism, or their insistence that campuses are models of intellectual diversity, but the coalition is determined to try. Hence the Free Exchange website informs readers that “By every reasonable measure, America’s colleges and universities are considered the most diverse, challenging and successful higher education institutions in the world.” That’s not exactly honest, but it is precisely the kind of rhetoric that the strategists of Free Exchange hope will convince the next generation of “progressive ” campus leaders that conservatives are lurking under every dorm-room bed.

Other coalition members are no more candid about their politics. Take the Center for Campus Free Speech which assures students that it aspires only “to protect and to promote free speech on campuses.” But a review of the Center’s activities tells a different story.

When not condemning the Academic Bill of Rights and David Horowitz, the Center for Campus Free Speech focuses on its main cause: aggressively defending the “right” of left-wing groups to solicit compulsory student fees, made possible by students’ ignorance about where the funds are going. According to the Center, such “civic engagement,” especially when it concerns “groups dedicated to social and political education and advocacy,” is an “integral part of the higher education experience.” (The fact that conservative student groups are regularly denied funds to bring their speakers to campus is of no concern to these champions of free speech.)

To see the “civic engagement” referred to by the Center in action, one need only look to the 2004 controversy Utah Valley State College. Led by its radical vice president, the school’s student government availed itself of student funds — as much as $50,000 worth according to some reports — in order to bring dimwitted documentarian Michael Moore to campus to promote the presidential campaign of John Kerry. One outraged UVSC student sued the group for misuse of student fees, withdrawing it only after the student resigned his position. Yet the Center for Free Speech considers such challenges to one-sided partisanship from students and their supporters to be the real problem. Accordingly, its website is full spleen against “extremely conservative legal foundations, industry lobby groups, and right-wing religious organizations” who have the temerity to insist that the students who are taxed to provide capitation fees should decide how their fees are spent.

In this, CCFS resembles nothing so much as a the U.S. Public Interest Research Group (U.S. PIRG), the supposedly “non-partisan” network of student groups founded by anti-capitalist crusader Ralph Nader to promote “apolitical” causes (like environmentalism and opposition to Social Security reform), and which is notorious for skimming funds from the tuition of unknowing students to support its lobbying initiatives and other causes consistent with its decidedly left-wing priorities.

The similarities are hardly coincidental. The Center for Campus Free Speech is little more than a front for the U.S. PIRG. Not only does it promote an identical agenda, but it is staffed by current and former U.S. PIRG operatives. Center for Free Speech director Megan Fitzgerald, for instance, is a veteran of several U.S. PIRG state chapters, where she has functioned as a paid staffer. The Center’s five-member advisory board includes Jess Tweedy, the Vice Chair US PIRG, as well as a former organizing director of the Massachusetts PIRG and a onetime employee of the PIRG’s Oregon branch. Still another advisory board member, David Vladeck, is the director of the Public Citizen Litigation Group, the self-styled “citizen advocacy organization” founded by Ralph Nader in 1971.

Despite its clearly political character, the Center’s Fitzgerald insists that it has only the interest of students in mind. “The Center’s mission is to preserve the marketplace of ideas on college campuses,” Fitzgerald told FrontPageMag.com. What seems clear, however, is that the spectrum of ideas the Center for Free Speech is concerned to preserve is a spectrum that includes only the left. And nowhere is that spectrum narrower that within the Free Exchange coalition itself. Not only is the PIRG front group – the Center for Campus Free Speech – a member of the Free Exchange coalition, but the National Association of State PIRGs is a coalition member, too.

The American Association of University Professors, yet another coalition member, has long portrayed itself as “the voice of the profession,” even as it almost never uses that voice to defend conservative professors. (Conversely, the AAUP wasted little time fashioning Palestinian terrorist operative cum University of South Florida professor Sami Al-Arian into a martyr for “academic freedom.”) The American Federation of Teachers, an affiliate of the AFL-CIO, campaigns against anything that might offend left-wing union interests. Similarly, the United States Student Association lobbies against any efforts to promote intellectual pluralism on campus — a potential threat to the USSA’s unabashed cheerleading for racial preferences in academia and its staunch opposition to U.S. military efforts. That the ACLU and the People for the American Way — two more coalition members and pillars of the “legal left” – are political formations is something only they and their coalition partners continue to deny.

Follow the Money

If the Free Exchange coalition’s pretensions to non-partisanship strain credulity, its claim to be combating deep-pocketed partisan interests is even more disingenuous. Presenting itself as a valiant David vying against moneyed, right-wing Goliaths, the Free Exchangers accuse their targets of running a “well-funded campaign.” Yet the charge is more accurately employed as a self-description.

Although the group’s press releases are not eager to divulge the fact, Free Exchange draws its strength from some of the most powerful funders on the political left. For instance, the American Federation of Teachers, which has long cast itself as the victim of “well-funded” “far-right” groups, has a budget that could cover the expenses of all right-wing campus groups combined. In 2005, the AFT laid claim to net assets of over $65 million. And few groups are better financed than the ACLU, whose annual budget exceeds $60 million and which counts on generous support from leftist billionaire George Soros, as well as the billion-dollar Ford Foundation. The same holds true for the ACLU’s ideological cousin, People for the American Way, created by centi-millionaire Norman Lear. In 2004, the group’s lobbying arm, the People for the American Way Foundation, reported total revenues of over $21 million. The National Association of State PIRGs operate under the aegis of the US PIRG, which reported total revenues of approximately $5.6 million in 2004. That makes it by far the poorest of the aforementioned groups. Not far behind is the American Association of University Professors. Thanks to the steady patronage of the Ford Foundation and other leftwing sponsors, the AAUP boasted a $5 million budget in 2005.

What it is true for the grownups applies equally well to their young compatriots. Campus Progress, fond of portraying itself as an embattled island of “progressive” politics in a sea of campus conservatism, actually has a $1.25 million budget, while its parent organization, the Center for American Progress enjoys the backing of George Soros and the New York Community Trust, a foundation with assets of over $1.8 billion. As for the United States Student Association, it may self-righteously style itself the “voice for students,” but a glance at its financial backers — who include the Ford Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and other left-wing money banks – reveals that it also answers to the left’s leading shareholders.

Unsurprisingly, Free Exchange member groups are tight-lipped about their financial resources. When pressed about his organization’s budget, Adam Jentleson of Campus Progress downplayed its importance. “Campus Progress’ budget is irrelevant,” he told FrontPageMag.com, but then failed to explain why the funding of right-wing group is. Jentleson also insisted that whatever the individual assets of its member groups, Free Exchange’s budget was negligible. Considering that it’s entire focus is one individual, David Horowitz, and his Academic Bill of Rights, just how big would it’s budget have to be? Jentleson declined to cite an exact figure.

The Alliance for Inaccuracy in Academia

Thus far, the success of the Free Exchange campaign has not matched the stridency of its claims. With the exception of a fawning profile of Campus Progress in The Nation — just about the only publication willing to lend credence to the group’s surreal depiction of universities as citadels of conservative power — the coalition has met with collective indifference from the media.

It does not understate matters to say the list of those who place any stock in its claims can be reduced to politically innocent campus newspapers and, of course, the radical academics profiled in The Professors, who have taken advantage of the Free Exchange website to ventilate their complaints about David Horowitz and other critics of academic degeneracy. Besides the coalition of eager censors, those professors are the only ones who see a critical discussion of the state of modern universities as a threat, and who view campaigns of distortion and name-calling, and self-refuting calls for a “free exchange on campus” as a useful means for suppressing just that.

Intellectual Thuggery

May 24, 2020 by admin Leave a Comment

By D avid Horowitz—FrontPageMag.com–04/12/06

Michael Berube is a professor of literature at Penn State University who can’t take no for an answer. Like many other opponents of the academic freedom campaign Berube is in the habit of repeating falsehoods about me and the campaign that have already been refuted – many times. In fact they have been refuted on his own website, michaelberube.com.

Professor Berube launches his most recent attack[1] in this vein with the following choice paragraph: “David Horowitz says he’s campaigning for ‘academic freedom.’ In reality, he’s campaigning for direct legislative oversight of professors, reading lists, and entire fields of research. He wants state legislators to insure that public universities have a certain quantum of ‘intellectual diversity,’ and because he complains so strenuously about the preponderance of registered Democrats on the faculty, it would seem that by ‘diversity’ he means ‘more Republican professors.’ Lately, he has even begun to speak of ‘anti-Christian bias’ on college campuses, with such fervor that my colleagues in the sciences have begun to wonder whether they, too, will be arraigned for ‘liberal bias’ against creationist theories.”

All the statements in the above paragraph are false. They are also malicious, since they have been refuted by myself and others more than once. I am not campaigning against “liberal bias.” In fact, I have never even employed the term “liberal bias” except to disown the phrase itself.[2] Far from planning to arraign scientists “for ‘liberal bias’ against creationist theories,” I have publicly said that creationism and intelligent design are not scientific theories and have no place in a scientific curriculum.[3] Yes, I have singled out Rhode Island professor Michael Vocino for harassing a Christian student in class.[4] But I would have complained about Vocino if he had harassed a student who was Jewish or Muslim or an atheist as well. Harrassing a student for his or her religious beliefs has no place in a classroom – though it does for a charlatan like Vocino. I would have thought that professor Berube would agree, but apparently not.

I am not campaigning for direct legislative oversight of anything, as Berube claims, and have said this on many occasions.[5] Nor would my Academic Bill of Rights[6] in any of its forms require “direct legislative oversight of professors, reading lists, and entire fields of research.” The legislative measures I have supported are resolutions, not laws and they merely urge universities to implement the principles they officially claim to embrace. Again, I have said this more than once.[7]

Finally, my campaign has never called for “balance” of any kind, while my Academic Bill of Rights specifically forbids the hiring of professors on the basis of their political views, a fact that Berube actually acknowledges in the very next paragraph of his text: “The ‘Academic Bill of Rights’ forbids the hiring or firing of faculty on the basis of their political or religious beliefs- and in that respect it is simply unnecessary, since the American Association of University Professors already forbids this.” Berube is right about this; the famous statements of the AAUP written nearly forty years ago do forbid hiring on the basis of political beliefs. The question is whether the AAUP is interested in enforcing the principle when conservative applicants are the victims. Surveys show that faculty with conservative views are a rapidly diminishing[8] presence on university campuses. Why has the AAUP not conducted an inquiry to see if a political litmus is being applied in the hiring processes for university faculties? In other words, the question is not whether the AAUP has the guidelines which Berube claims it has, but whether the AAUP is prepared to implement its words. Another question is whether, as a faculty guild, it is prepared to defend the academic freedom of students as well as professors. Our academic freedom campaign was launched because we believe that the answer is no to both these questions.

From false and alarmist assertions about the Academic Bill of Rights, which Berube must know have been discredited multiple times, Berube proceeds to speculations ungrounded in any fact. Since the Academic Bill of Rights seeks to encourage “intellectual diversity,” Berube suggests this opens the academic door to Holocaust deniers, astrologists and gay-bashers. Of course there already are Holocaust deniers on university faculties who are apparently welcome under present academic rules, and whom the AAUP has taken no steps to remove. Professor Norman Finkelstein at DePaul University in Detroit is an obvious example, but since anti-Semitic and anti-Israel attitudes have become fashionable in “liberal” academia, his crackpot views are actually defended rather than deplored. Professor Berube himself has written that the notorious article by professors Mearsheimer and Walt, which blames the Jews for the war on terror and the Jewish lobby for controlling American foreign policy and the American media – a sort of contemporary version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion – “has many virtues.”[9]

The Academic Bill of Rights would not increase the number of Holocaust deniers, nor would it encourage the hiring of creationists and intelligent designers, malicious charges that I have already dealt with on several occasions.[10] The Academic Bill of Rights says quite clearly that, “Exposing students to the spectrum of significant scholarly viewpoints on the subjects examined in their courses is a major responsibility of faculty.” In other words it says that intellectual diversity consists in making students aware of the spectrum of significant scholarly viewpoints, not crackpot or bigoted opinions.

But Berube will not be deterred by facts or by attempts to apprise him of the facts. “For two years [Horowitz] claimed that a student was flunked for refusing to write an essay on why George Bush is a war criminal, until the claim was debunked- partly by the Republican professor who taught the course.” In fact, the student who went into this final test with an “A” was told that she had flunked the exam; and the professor admitted he had given her a low final grade which she was able to raise to a “B” after a successful university appeal process. In violation of university regulations the professor actually destroyed the original and controversial exam. He was forced to reconstruct it for the appeals procedure.[11] The university released this reconstructed exam to the public (and I have reprinted the essay section in my book).

This section consisted of four exercises, each one requiring students to explain core concepts of leftwing social analysis (e.g., feminist doctrines and power theory). There were two required essay topics and two optional “questions” from which the students had to choose one: 1) make the case for gay marriage; and 2) make the case for why the United States’ “invasion” of Iraq was criminal. The professor did suggest to one reporter that he was a Republican or had voted Republican; my office called the local Republican Party and checked the voter rolls, but found no record to prove that his claim was true. Berube certainly doesn’t know whether it is or is not true. All this information was available to Berube, since it was not only published on my website[12] but also on his[13] by a professor who challenged him when he made the same claim about this case on his blog. Up to that point, the fact that he was making these discredited claims on his blog could be construed as intellectual laziness, the failure to see if they had been refuted. That he continues to make these claims after they have been refuted in a lengthy discussion on his own blog can only be construed as intellectual dishonesty.

“More recently, [Horowitz] has insisted that a Penn State biology professor showed Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 to his class just before the 2004 election; that claim, too, fell apart. Did Horowitz apologize for the ‘mistake,’ or retract his claim? On the contrary: he tried to stay on offense even though he’d dropped the ball. ‘These are nit picking, irrelevant attacks,’ he said.”

In fact, — as I have written in posts available on several easily accessible websites — while I did publicize the claim made by a legislative staffer that the Moore film was shown in a biology class, I ceased doing so the minute the claim was challenged and the source was unable to confirm it. When asked about this during the last two minutes of the question period following my testimony at the Temple hearings on academic freedom, I did concede the claim was mistaken despite Berube’s false charge that I did not.

These facts are easily checked, since Inside HigherEd.com – the leading web journal on university issues — ran a lead story after interviewing me about the testimony I gave at Temple with the headline: “Retractions From David Horowitz.[14]” I was interviewed for the article and wrote a post responding to it,[15] which I also posted on my blog.[16] Berube knows this. His response is to ignore the facts and repeat the charge.[17]

I have no evidence to this day that the claim was false because I lack the staff to check the more than fifteen Penn State campuses where the incident could have taken place and I have myself been informed by students, for example at Columbia, that Farenheit9/11 was shown in inappropriate classes.

The InsideHighered article was particularly unfair in focusing its attention on this trivial correction and ignoring the content of the testimony I actually delivered.[18] At the hearings I testified about academic freedom abuses at Temple University for an hour and a half, never once referring to the alleged showing of Farenheit 9/11 in support of my claims (nor did any other witness in the nine hours of testimony before the committee at Temple or in the previous three days of testimony at Pitt and in Harrisburg). It was only at the end of the question period that a Democratic member of the committee, who was hostile to the very idea of the hearings, asked me if I could substantiate the claim, even though it was not a claim I had made before the committee and was of no significance to the claims I was making about academic freedom in Pennyslvania.

To me this was just a reflection of what has become a national campaign to attack my credibility, orchestrated and financed by the teacher unions.[19] They have even created a national organization called the Coaliton for the Free Exchange of Ideas, with paid operatives and a website for which this is the entire agenda. The same Democratic member of the Pennsylvania committee has appeared as the keynote speaker at two union-sponsored protests against the committee of which he is a co-chair, accusing it of “McCarthyism” – even though the hearings have addressed only policy issues and a committee rule bars the use of faculty names in testimony.

Professor Berube certainly does not lack gall. While busily assembling his laundry list of discredited claims, he accuses me of disregard for the facts: “But few newsmakers are as sloppy and careless as Horowitz.” His evidence? “In [Horowitz’s] recent book, The Professors, he attributes to Eric Foner, a professor of history at Columbia University, a long passage that was actually written by someone else. When Foner called him on the error, Horowitz, true to form, attacked Foner’s ‘honesty,’ and insisted, ‘the error in my book is an inconsequential one’ and ‘it was my intention to cite the authentic quote.'”

As in the other cases, I have already answered this charge.[20] The passage in question is actually fairly short (four sentences to be precise), and I have not denied that it was erroneously transcribed from a symposium on 9/11 in the London Review of Books to which both Foner and the other writer contributed. The Foner statement that should have been quoted was, in fact, one that I had used previously in my book Unholy Alliance, so I was very aware of what he had said in the passage when describing it in my new text. As I have already pointed out in my response to this charge, the wrongly attributed quote does not really differ from Foner’s view that there was probably more to fear in America’s response to the attack than in the attack itself. In The Professors I wrote: “Professor Foner focused not on the atrocity itself but on what he perceived to be the threat of an American response.” What Foner actually said (and I failed to quote) was this: “I’m not sure which is more frightening: the horror that engulfed New York City or the apocalyptic rhetoric emanating daily from the White House.”

That is why I called the error “inconsequential.” All this information, including the two contributions to the symposium as they appeared on the page, was posted on my website and readily available to Berube. And in fact he read my response and simply chooses to ignore the substance of what I said so he could make up yet another paragraph discrediting me.[21]

Berube concludes his attack with a final false claim – that my academic freedom campaign is unnecessary: “Fortunately, Penn State already has a strong policy on academic freedom (HR 64), defending the rights of both professors and students. And we have a chapter of the AAUP, dedicated to maintaining professional standards in and out of the classroom. “

In the first place, Berube’s AAUP is not in the business of defending students and, for example, did not defend the Christian student whom Professor Michael Vocino singled out for attack in his class. Nor has the AAUP shown any concern about fact that Vocino is not qualified to be a full professor or that he lacks the credentials to teach a course in political science, a field in which he has no academic expertise.[22] If the AAUP is even concerned about maintaining professional standards, it is certainly doing a poor job.

In the second place, only a handful of faculty and probably no students would even be aware of Pennsylvania’s policy HR 64 if my academic freedom campaign had not begun making them and the general public aware of it more than two years ago. It was a centerpiece of my testimony to the Pennsylvania legislature in 2005[23] and my testimony to the Ohio legislature[24] the year before that, both available on my website. It was featured in a pamphlet published by my organization called The Campaign for Academic Freedom, also available on my website. In the testimony I gave to the Pennsylvania subcommittee on Academic Freedom in Higher Education, also available on my website,[25] he would know that it is my contention – and that of our campaign – not that the academic freedom policy HR 64 does not exist, but that the academic freedom policy HR 64 is not enforced. In fact he does know this.

Persuading administrators to enforce the existing academic freedom policies of their universities is the center of our campaign in Pennsylvania. The campaign is not about liberal bias, and it is not an attempt to have the legislature impose requirements on universities; nor is it an attempt to get conservatives hired. It is an effort to pressure the administrations of Pennsylvania universities to enforce existing academic freedom policies like HR 64 and – equally important — to make students aware of their rights in regard to these policies. This is the campaign that Michael Berube and the American Association of University Professors fear so much[26] they are willing to distort its agendas and make up lies about its spokesman in order to avoid confronting the issue it is attempting to raise – which is the dereliction of university authorities and themselves.

Notes:[1] http://www.centredaily.com/mld/centredaily/news/opinion/14299369.htm
[2] E.g., in The Professors, p.xxvi.
[3] http://studentsforacademicfreedom.org/reports/RepliestoCritics.htm
[4] The Professors, pp. 345 et seq.
[5] http://studentsforacademicfreedom.org/reports/RepliestoCritics.htm
[6] http://studentsforacademicfreedom.org/abor.html
[7] Ibid.
[8] http://www.ratio.se/pdf/wp/dk_aw_voter.pdf. For other surveys of faculty disparities see: http://studentsforacademicfreedom.org/reports/FacultyStudies.htm
[9] http://insidehighered.com/news/2006/03/27/israel
[10] http://studentsforacademicfreedom.org/reports/RepliestoCritics.htm
[11] All these facts are available here: University of Northern Colorado and here: The Case of the Colorao Exam
[12] Ibid.
[13] http://www.michaelberube.com/index.php/weblog/comments/852/
[14] http://insidehighered.com/news/2006/01/11/retract
[15] Ibid. I also posted my response in my blog
[16] http://www.michaelberube.com/index.php/weblog/2006/02/P8/
[17] http://www.michaelberube.com/index.php/weblog/2006/02/P8/
[18] It was also unfair in referring to its own misreporting of the Colorado exam story as a case where a claim I made had been “debunked.” It had not. My Temple testimony is available here: http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=20855
[19] dangerousprofessors.net/2006/03/attack-teachers-unions-defend-campus.html
[20] http://www.frontpagemag.com/blog/BlogEntry.asp?ID=625
[21] http://www.michaelberube.com/index.php/weblog/2006/02/
[22] http://www.frontpagemag.com/articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=21734
[23] http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=20855
[24] Why an Academic Bill of Rights is Necessary
[25] Pennsylvania Academic Freedom Hearings
[26] CFAF_v23gz.pdf

Open Views

May 24, 2020 by admin Leave a Comment

Editorial from the Patriot News–03/25/06

Rep. Gibson Armstrong, R-Lancaster, isn’t exactly engaged in a witch hunt as he explores the realm of college lectures, looking for those who speak evil of the status quo.

Indeed, it’s hard to conduct a witch hunt when Pennsylvania’s college professors appear to be incredibly, boringly mainstream in their political beliefs and statements. The best Armstrong’s legislative inquisition could come up with is a Bloomsburg University professor criticized by a student for posting an American flag on her door and another who posted a cartoon suggesting dropping a nuclear bomb on Afghanistan.

That’s not much to go on if you’re looking to burn professors at the stake for expressing incendiary views of the left-wing variety.

Actually, what Armstrong has in mind arguably amounts to crueler punishment than the usual means of torture. We’re talking about being sued, the modern version of being hanged, drawn and quartered. While he’s not quite convinced there’s a problem, he does have a solu tion, one offered by conserva tive activist David Horowitz. He’s urging states to pass an “academic bill of rights” to pro tect students from getting only one side of the story in the classroom. And if they don’t deliver, they could be sued by students.

That’s just what America needs: more litigation. It surely needs more conflict and controversy, certainly more people monitoring other people to make sure nothing is said that offends anyone’s preconceptions or sensibilities.

Indeed, why students who are so close-minded and convinced — at their tender age — of the correctness of their views as to be offended by alternative ideas makes one wonder why they would bother going to college in the first place. They already know it all.

Of course, it works both ways, so that neither a student nor a professor should be penalized or rebuked for holding contrary views. Our sense is that Pennsylvania’s colleges and universities are well equipped to address issues of “academic bias” without the long-arm of the government dictating what is appropriate classroom dialogue and what isn’t.

The fact that we actually have people in a position to make laws contemplating compromising academic freedom is scary and should send a chill down the back of everyone who believes in freedom of speech, freedom of thought and vibrant and free-flowing intellectual discussion.

This issue — to the extent one can accurately describe academic bias as a legitimate issue — makes a good case for devolving the Pennsylvania General Assembly into a part-time legislature. “Big Brother” Armstrong should stop wasting the public’s time and taxpayer dollars and get on with addressing real issues that affect real people in their daily lives.

And there are far too many of those issues to enumerate, mostly because our lawmakers are busy doing other things, like minding everyone else’s business.

Response to Patriot News

The Patriot News’ recent editorial on the Academic Bill of Rights shows that its editors aren’t interested in facts-only innuendo.

The editorial describes the academic freedom hearings currently underway in the Pennsylvania legislature as a “witch hunt” and claims that Rep. Gib Armstrong, the sponsor of the bill which initiated the hearings, is “looking to burn professors at the stake for expressing incendiary views of the left-wing variety.” These statements are malicious distortions.

The Penn State Faculty Manual states that “The faculty member is normally bound not to take advantage of his/her position by introducing into the classroom provocative discussions of irrelevant subjects not within the field of his/her study.” Yet a Penn State student (whose experience was recounted by David Horowitz in his testimony before the committee) was made to chant “abortion, abortion, abortion” in her women’s studies class by a professor who exhorted the students that abortion is a good thing and women should be proud of having one.

Such abuses of academic freedom and violations of existing policy are rampant in Pennsylvania’s universities, yet university administrators refuse to acknowledge a problem much less take action to correct it. The select committee is performing an admirable and necessary function by examining the existing state of academic freedom on the state’s public campuses to determine if additional steps need to be taken. It is the opponents of the hearings who are conducting a witch-hunt, attempting to censor free inquiry and discussion about academic freedom before a recommendation can even be reached.

Sincerely,

Sara Dogan
National Campus Director
Students for Academic Freedom