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Friday, April 7, 2006, 4:00 p.m.
First National Academic Freedom Conference

Chair: Stephen Balch
Participants: Ian Maitland, Alan Levy, Don Downs, Stephan Thermstrom

Don Downs; University of Wisconsin; Professor of Political Science
Alan Levy; Slippery Rock College; Professor of History
Ian Maitland; University of Minnesota; Professor of Business, Government & Society
Daniel Pipes; Campus Watch;
Stephen Thermstrom; Harvard University; Professor of History

STEPHEN BALCH: We shall commence our concluding panel. We have reached–we have reached that poignant moment, so common in academic conferences, when the number of people on the panel begins to outnumber the number of people in the audience. So we [indiscernible] our way, as academics do that – and everybody on this panel is an academic – that we will proceed nonetheless.

Some of you–I’m Steve Balch, by the way, President of the National Association of Scholars. And I want to thank David and the Center for inviting me here and inviting me to do the moderating of this panel. Some of you may remember from the panel just before last that I was standing at the end of a too long line, as it turned out, waiting to ask a question, cut short, as it finally was, by Father Time. And that question would have actually begun [inaudible] I’d say with an anecdote. It would have been directed at Mr. Hartle because well, I’ve met Mr. Hartle on several occasions.

My first meeting with him occurred about eight or nine years ago at a conference in Kansas City on diversity. It was an American Council on Education-sponsored conference that brought diversity officers together from all over the country. It’s a special conference they have every two years. They bring hundreds of hundreds and hundreds of diversity folk from around the country to ponder the challenges of making our campuses more diverse.

And he thought it was a good idea to have me there. And he thought–I told him a little bit–what I would say and what in fact I did say to this audience – and I think I delivered in sort of modest and moderate tones – was that whatever the virtues of diversity there was also a very great virtue in higher education, in liberal education, in talking about those things that were more universal. For example, like the common cultural, political, and intellectual foundations of American life and Western civilization and things like that.

And in general, I can’t say that my presentation was terribly well received. There were some nice polite questions. I mean, there were people who did want to engage me in discourse. But there were many, many more hostile questions, numerous anecdotes in and of themselves, I suppose. And there was one question that I really will never forget. And that was the fellow who got up and said, “Who invited you here?” A diversity conference. I was the one diverse member of the diversity conference, and yet this fellow was troubled by the fact that someone had invited me.

Well, it was Terry Hartle who had invited me. And I’m sure, in fact, I mentioned it to him on the way out since I hadn’t taken the opportunity to ask him about it publicly. And he sort of put his arm around me and said, you know, that was really a terrible moment. I felt just so embarrassed. I know he did. I know he did. He really felt embarrassed. And you would think he might have learned something from that–from that great gathering of diverse types, some of whom–many of whom were offended by my diverse presence there.

It’s not that–I thought there was another interesting feature. I’m just sort of taking advantage of my moderator’s role here to go on a bit as I might have had I been a mere [indiscernible]. There was an interesting feature of his answer. He was responding at one point, if you recall, to the question raised about social work programs and social work course. And how they have a very clear political agenda.

I gave testimony at those Pennsylvania hearings that you’ve heard about. And what I basically did was go through website after website of the university programming and other types of university documents, for example, job notices. And just count–recount to the committee all the times in which they said something like, for example, a school of education in the Penn State system was advertising for a director of a big program and a professor. Same position. The person would wear two hats. And one of the qualifications that was listed in the advertisement was a willingness to advocate for social justice.

The social work programs all around the state always say–they usually say social and economic justice. And then, when you look further they spell out what that means. And among other things, it means, for example, standing up for or fighting against the oppressions of class, race, gender, sexual orientation, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. That sort of–those–the premises that one should do all those things. It’s kind of just built in to the foundations of the program. Not something that’s debated, but something that is presumed to be part of mission. Education programs–many of them say the same thing. The cultural studies program at Pitt says on its website talking about cultural studies in general, the field is left-inflected and seeks progressive social change, or something pretty much to that effect.

You can see summer reading programs. They have these joint reading programs that all freshmen are supposed to undertake. I looked at one at Temple and every last reading for the last four years, which is as long as the subject–as long as the summer reading program had been in existence, every one had a diversity theme. And three out of the four readings were pretty rabidly anti-American–traditional American values and institutions. Those were the books that were chosen.

Well, they were presented with all this evidence. I’m sure that Mr. Hartle is familiar with the evidence. And what do they do? In general, they just ignore it. What Mr. Hartle said though was particularly interesting, because what he said was, well, you know, that’s what the faculty does. That’s a faculty decision after all. I mean, you should argue–don’t argue with me about that. Argue with the faculty. Yes, and he’s absolutely right. That’s what the faculty does.

And no one on the faculty, apparently, gets up to complain or complain with enough force when decisions like that to put politics right in the very grain of a program are made. No one in the administration, apparently, gets up and says this is wrong. We’re supposed to have an open marketplace of ideas. We’re supposed to debate questions rather than settle them in advance, just as Terry Hartle was saying. As far as the faculty is concerned, as far as the administration is concerned, all these politicized programs seem to be just their cup of tea, or at least nothing that they’re going to do anything about.

Well, if that’s your position, I can’t see how you can object when folks outside, like legislatures, start taking an interest. Because after all, if you’re not willing to do anything about manifest abuses, if the people on the inside are in fact the perpetrators of such abuses, and there are none there who are to call them to account, what do you expect to happen? What do you expect to happen? Isn’t that in the last analysis the ultimate reason that legislatures are taking an interest?

It seems to me that there is such an obvious paradox, such an obvious conundrum, such an obvious unwillingness to trace the clear logic of a problem to its end. If faculties begin to respond, if administrations begin to respond, then legislatures will ride off into the sunset and leave them alone. They have the solution to the problem in their own hands if they’re willing to take it up. But as Terry Hartle says, they’re not. That’s what, in fact, they do.

If you look at our universities today, [indiscernible], a great figure in American higher education at mid-century, once said that American universities are a multiversity. Not a university, but a multiversity, having so many different parts, each with its own culture. And if you’re a multiversity that kind of suggests in turn that within the university one may find many different personalities. Now, if that were within an individual rather than within a big institution, we would regard it as a psychological disorder. And in a sense it is a kind of psychological disorder or it leads to one within our universities.

How so? Well, I mean, if you look at these personalities, very often each of the particular personalities manifests a different kind of problem, particularly if you’re talking about those difficulties that are at the very root of the intellectual life of our university, which have been discussed here today. You have, for example, in one great walk of university life, the sciences and the applied sciences, the problem of catatonia. That is to say, they never address themselves to the [rock] that’s going on just next door.

Those are the parts of the university that we can be most proud of. Those are the parts of the university that are doing things right. Those are the parts of the university that really have rigorous standards. Those are the parts of the university that believe there is such a thing as truth and pursue it. Those are the parts of the university in which there are checks and balances built into the very structure, so that when abuses occur they don’t go uncorrected. Those are the parts of the university that are in good shape.

But what do they do when they see the festering sores right next store? They do nothing. They turn their back on it and just go about their own business. They are silent. They are catatonic. That is their personality pathology.

What about other parts of the university? Well, you look at boards of trustees. They have an overarching responsibility to make things proceed correctly. What sort of personality problem do they have? Well, they’re [hepaphretic]. And that’s not a term much used in psychology anymore. But way back when, it indicated people who were constantly unreasonably happy, giddy, laughing.

What are our boards nowadays? They’re nothing but cheerleaders and fund raisers. They’re people who should know better. They’re people who are very successful. I’m repeating what others have said. But all they can do is say nice things about their institution and help circle the wagons on those occasions when things go badly. They seem to be incapable in most cases of being jolted out of their very happy frame of mind.

And what about administrations? Where are they? Your senior administrators. They do very tough jobs. They work very hard. But nonetheless, they have a problem, too. Senior university–you ask one of them, for example, do you have diversity in your institution? They’ll always say, yes we do. After all, we have deconstructionists, we have critical race theorists, we have [Laconians], we have query theorists, we have all sorts of diversity. And what they suffer from is what was once called–what was it called? Munchausen’s Syndrome. The inability to kind of separate truth from tall tales. The desire to kind of exaggerate.

So we have a university with all kinds of problems. But it’s biggest problem is the bipolar problem. And that’s the problem that you encounter in the humanities and the social sciences. And that problem, essentially, is this. People say tenure protects academic freedom. But I think what tenure has mainly done is create a kind of work environment in which there has been a selective recruitment of very, by and large, timid people. People who go into academic life because they want to lay low and avoid the pitfalls and uncertainties of people out in the real world. They may be very good scholars. That appeals to them, too. But they are people who like safety. In the old days, they might have gotten jobs in the post office.

On the other hand, you have people going into academic life, the other side of the bipolar experience, who are there because they want to have a platform for zealotry. And, of course, they recognize tenure as you saw in that respect as well. And so you have the zealous and you have the timid. You have people like Ward Churchill, who want to change the world in strange ways and are willing to go out and do what they–whatever they need to do in order to make those changes, use their power as they see fit. And you have a lot of other people who should know better even if they don’t–even if they do ideologically sympathize, but who lie low, who say nothing.

And if there’s one grave malady from which the central heartland of the university suffers, it’s that. It’s the inability of the timid to confront the zealous.

Well, we have on the panel today a group of unusual stand-up guys, people who have made no bones about what they believe in and who have confronted zealotry and confronted the forces of suppression and kind of political restriction whenever they have encountered it. Some of them are people that you know well. Others are heroes recently come to the fore. Let me briefly introduce them and then I will call upon them in alphabetical order.

We have Don Downs, Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin, the author of a great book called Restoring Free Speech and Liberty on Campus, but a man who has fought for that as well. And together with another–with a small group of brave colleagues and others, actually repealed the oppressive speech code at the University of Wisconsin through a purely internal effort, a great example to everybody else.

We have Alan Levy, a man who came forward, testified against his own institution, Professor of History at Slippery Rock College in Pennsylvania. Did a magnificent job. In fact, his testimony was so gripping that at one point, and I’m sure he’ll tell you about it, one of the Democratic legislators responded by saying, well, if that’s true, Professor Levy, we have to shut your institution down. He’ll let you know in a little while exactly what it was that elicited that.

We have Ian Maitland, a man of great vision, a Professor of Government–Business, Government, and Society in the Carlson School of Business at the University of Minnesota. A [indiscernible]. I say that unmetaphorically. He ran for Congress some years ago and spent five or six days perched on top of a billboard. He was running in a–he’s a Republican running in a Democratic district. And he felt he had to attract attention some way. But during that time, he had a grand view of the landscape of Central Minnesota and he understands the academic landscape very well, too.

We have a man who needs no introduction, I’m sure, Daniel Pipes. Daniel Pipes, who runs the–it’s called the Center for–let me–what is it called–Campus Watch–okay–which tracks down the incredibly biased and fanatical doings of the folks in Middle East studies.

And we have Steve Thermstrom, a distinguished American historian, [Winthrop] Professor of History at Harvard University. And he has not only watched for sometime the swirl of recent events at Harvard, but he is one of the great dissenting voices standing up for academic values on that campus.

So I have taken up too much time. Let me first turn the floor over to Donald Downs.

DON DOWNS: Thank you very much, Steve. And thank you for having me here in Washington. It’s always interesting to come to Washington, D.C. and talk about the First Amendment because usually all anyone cares about here is the Fifth Amendment. So that’s gratifying.

As you’ve heard, I’m from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Tomorrow we’re playing for the national championship in hockey. I call that Canadian ice skating. And just last week, we won another national championship. You may have heard about it – Playboy’s designation as the Top Party School in the country. And our third claim to fame, as you’ve heard already today, described as the place where the liberals or the left gets Madison, and then the conservatives get IBM.

So I’ll leave it to your choice as to which is the better tradeoff in that regard. So you probably figure that since I represent Madison, it represents–Madison stands for the first circle of hell for conservatives. And after all, we pioneered the speech codes, which is the main focus of my talk. But back in the early–late 1980s, early 1990s, when Donna Shalala and the person that went after her, David Ward, who is now the head of the American Council of Education, and all the baggage that went along with speech codes came to Madison.

And I have a confession. I was a faculty Senate member back in 1988, and I voted for both codes. I thought there could be a principle balance between–and I think normatively speaking, I still feel that way–between strong free speech and civility and I trusted administrations to enforce that distinction in a principled way.

Well, to make a long story short, I lost that faith. And in 1992, I started changing my thinking. And since that time–and I’ll be talking a little bit later about some of the things we’ve done at Madison, despite David French talking about a couple of cases coming out of there. I think one of them has already been resolved and the other one I think we might have a disagreement on. We have come a long way. I’ll give you an example. About a month ago, the Badger Herald, one of four student papers at Madison -we have a tremendous diversity of student papers – published one of the more offensive of those infamous cartoons of Muhammad.

And the Chancellor at Madison instantly called the Badger Herald. He said, you have nothing to worry about from me. I’m not going to come out and say I agree with what you did, but I’ll support you. And the next day, an editorial appeared, an op ed appeared in the local papers and in the student papers, in which John Wiley, the new Chancellor who has been there about three or four years now, said, I don’t agree necessarily with what the Herald did, but they had a right to do it. And the proper place to work any problems you have with this out is the marketplace of ideas.

And that’s exactly what happened. They had a big forum. The Editor-in-Chief of the Badger Herald, who is one of my students – they all have been for several years – stood his ground and very articulately and very carefully defended his right to do it and gave arguments as to why that was a good thing. Well, why did the Chancellor do this? Probably a lot of reasons. But one was he actually believed that this was the best way to resolve it. He’s a very liberal guy, but he also believes ROTC should be on campus, partly for reasons of diversity. I’ve seen him stand down the anti-war students on campus who wanted ROTC off. And I’ve seen him defend free speech before.

And also, Wiley knew that if he didn’t do something like that, that there would be–my group and others on campus would be at him, saying you’re not doing your job as the Chancellor protecting the school. So I think it was a combination of environment, plus his own belief in this area.

So Madison, of all places, has become largely-speaking very free speech friendly. Now, I want to talk a little bit later about why that’s the case and recommend what we did there as perhaps at least the ideal way or the best way to go about dealing with the campuses’ problems when it comes to speech.

Well, what are the problems? I’m not going to go through that. I don’t have all that much time. And we’ve talked about them a lot today. So let me mention four major areas that I see problems. I think first of all there’s the speech code issue, which we’ve talked about. And it’s indisputably true that speech codes have been, as [Alan Cores] said, unequally applied. I know of hardly any cases where people on the left have become the victims of speech codes, except in very strange kinds of situations.

The second issue is a lack of checks and balances. And this sort of speaks to the broader issue of intellectual diversity on campus, which I indeed believe is a problem, and I’ve spoken out about it many times. There just isn’t any–at many campuses when these policies have been enforced they way they’ve been enforced, there hasn’t been the kind of resistance structurally or institutionally.

Administrations are sort of like corporations. For the national government, we’ve got checks and balances. Right? And the whole idea behind checks and balances is to preserve freedom. At universities we don’t have checks and balances. Everybody is on the same page. And if you don’t sort of accept some of the basic tenets of the administration, you’re not going to have a job.

A third problem, and this is sort of related to the checks and balances issues – and this has been pointed out by other speakers – is a lack of opposition on campus to enforcement of these policies and of the policies themselves for whatever reasons – fear of sticking out, a sense of conformity, a lack of intellectual diversity. So you–someone once wrote that a fish doesn’t know that it’s in water because water is everywhere. And if everyone is sort of behind these policies, it’s hard for a lot of people to really ascertain that there’s a problem. In some ways, that’s a problem with knowledge and information.

And so, the bottom line, the result, as has been talked about by many speakers, is a pall of orthodoxy, which has too often prevailed in many situations across the country. And that’s a term I borrow from the United States Supreme Court. Several examples. I’ll just give you a couple of examples. You’ve–I’m sure you’ve read the Water Buffalo case at Penn, where a student was railroaded through the students’ usual process for calling some African American students who were loud one night water buffalos, a term that had no racial meaning whatsoever. And even the President of Penn conceded that if this guy ends up getting convicted it will be a travesty of justice. But nothing was done to stop it until Alan Cores got involved in the case.

And in Wisconsin, a case that sort of turned my mind on all this stuff occurred in the art department. A guy named Richard Long. Now, Richard Long is a conservative Catholic and a very articulate, brilliant guy, and also rather irritating. Sometimes those go together. And Richard had been badgered for several weeks by some students because of his conservative views stemming from a dispute in the art department over standards. And at one point, Richard finally got fed up with it. And he told the two students, he said, just why don’t we bury the hatchet. You go your way. I’ll go my way. And we’ll just ignore each other.

And the students persisted to badger him even further. Richard had a friend who was visiting him and he was embarrassed by this. So Richard turned to the two students and said, sieg heil comrades. Now, Richard, he was very careful. He didn’t just say sieg heil. He didn’t just say comrades. He was sort of ideologically diverse or even-handed. And then he walked away.

Now, I assume everyone in this room has said something like that to someone. My children used to say that to me like every three or four days. And the students filed a complaint under the faculty speech code at Madison. And so far, it’s sort of like a Saturday Night Live skit, isn’t it? Or maybe National Lampoon or something like that. The students walked up Baskin Hill and they went into the administrator’s office and they filed a claim.

And the administrator said, well, what did they do–or what did you do? And they told him. And rather than–my term for this is that it doesn’t really pass the laugh test. The administrator took it seriously–took it seriously and they started a thorough investigation of various forms of isms within the Art Department at Wisconsin. And this wasn’t known for quite a while. Eventually, Richard was vindicated because he had to be. I mean, come on. But only after his reputation had been dragged through the mud and rumors had flown all over the campus about him. And his career advancement was effectively ruined.

That was the first case. And there were a few others I won’t get into because of time constraints. And we all know cases–the one case at Brooklyn College was Casey Johnson, which really did have a kind of closed community tyranny of not just the majority, it seemed like a tyranny of everyone except Casey Johnson. These cases go on and on.

The question that arises is what do we do about it? And here’s where I have some disagreements with the Student Bill of Rights that I will express. The first way to deal with it is to go external to the institution, especially if it’s like Brooklyn College. What else are you going to do? We’ve heard that several times today. And this is a classic strategy for liberty. Span the scope of a conflict. Broaden the constituency. Get more people involved so the local tyranny is going to be alleviated. The Civil Rights Movement did that. It made it a national movement, which helped counterbalance the tyranny in the South. The Abolition Movement did the same thing.

And I think the more that we do make this a national issue, that’s better, that’s good. It should be something that we discuss and take very seriously. Madison–James Madison also recommended a strategy in [Fed Rules] 10. Expanding the scope of the national–of the constituency of citizenship to the nation was a way of promoting justice.

The next question though in terms of that is what kind of expansion of the scope is recommended? And here, I agree with some of the other speakers starting with Lamar Hunt. I am very wary of turning this over to politicians. And I say that in all due respect to politicians. And, as David pointed out, taxpayers pay huge sums of money to universities that are often very questionable in their practices. But do we really want to politicize the issue that way?

I’ll just be blunt. I don’t trust politicians to have too big a say about what goes on in academia, be they from the left or from the right. [Hannah Arrent] in a neglected essay, which I talk about in the beginning my book, Truth and Politics, makes a claim and I think there’s truth in it. This would actually be a point that many people have raised in contradiction to Ward Churchill – that truth and politics at some point are fundamentally at odds. Politicians have agendas. Maybe they have their own truths. As Machiavelli taught, there’s political truth and there’s other kinds of truths. Whereas, the pursuit of truth itself is often politically highly inconvenient.

And you look at the history of academic freedom in this country, it came about when we were able to establish sufficient – I’m not saying total, I’m not saying absolute. But sufficient independence from political pressure. And I feel that way even more so when I see some of the right–the right-wing or what have you, conservatives, adopting some of these strategic ideas and logic of the left. I pointed that out earlier when I made that–asked that question about our conservative students are running to the nanny state to be supported and they feel offended in the classroom.

So I think there is a distinction fundamentally between truth and politics. And we need to be sufficiently independent. Now granted, what I’ve heard today, I haven’t heard anyone say that politicians should take over universities. And I’m very happy to hear that. But it’s something that I want to be very, very careful about.

Second of all, I’m sorry, I don’t like the idea of secret tape recorders in my classroom. There’s a whole series of–not a whole series, but there are some court decisions–there’s one in California. White v. Davis, back in the early 70s, where students were coming in and undercover agents were coming in and taking notes in classes. And the California Supreme Court said this is a violation of academic freedom. It doesn’t matter to me whether that’s coming from the left or from the right. Come into my class, if you have a tape recorder, you should ask permission. Because a classroom can’t do its business correctly unless there is sufficient trust.

So maybe the problem here is that we have some bad apples and the only remedy is to do these kinds of things. But isn’t there a spillover effect? How about those of us who are conscientious, but nonetheless, same controversial things -students are going to bring in tape recorders to our classes? Are they going to start recording us? You have a problem of accuracy outside of a tape recorder and you have the problem of trust. So I’m somewhat skeptical of those ways to proceed.

At Wisconsin–I have two more minutes. If I finish in two minutes, it will be a record. At Wisconsin, we were able to achieve meaningful change in terms of the status of liberty on campus through a political movement that was based on the mobilization of a critical core of faculty members with student allies in student newspapers and in student politics, both from the left and from the right. I make a major distinction between the illiberal left and the liberal left. The liberal left is not the problem. It’s the illiberal left I think that’s the major problem.

And we established an independent faculty group called the Committee for Academic Freedom and Rights. We’re funded with outside funding. And we’ve taken several individual cases over the years and protected individuals who’ve been persecuted in their classrooms and on campus. And we’ve spearheaded several major victories on this free speech civil liberty front. We abolished the faculty speech code in 1999. There is a system of anonymous complaint boxes that were set up in 2000, 2001. Thirty-five anonymous complaint boxes all around campus in strategic locations. They happen to be right across from bathrooms. Yes, I guess they figured there would be more traffic there. And inside the bathrooms they had all these forms you could fill out and forms recommending–encouraging anonymous complaints.

Anonymous complaints are always part of law enforcement or whatever. But to go out of your way to encourage it is [indiscernible] in nature. Those boxes were set up in the summer of 2000. We came back in the fall of 2000, and within two weeks we had almost campus-wide faculty mobilization directed against them. And had they not been taken down, there would have been a faculty revolt. And within a month, those boxes were all taken down.

There have been several cases involving student newspapers when they’ve gotten in trouble in the past and we’ve supported them. And they’ve always ended up prevailing.

The best thing about doing it internally, outside of the fact that it’s a lot of fun and a challenge–I heard people talking earlier–the conservative student saying what it’s like to sort of stand up there and express your beliefs and take on the opposition. That’s an ennobling kind of thing. The experience itself is great. And it requires you, if you’re going to change legislatively, rather than coercively or through a court, you have to persuade people that certain policies are wrong. And that’s sort of doing it the old-fashioned way.

But when you persuade people, two important things result. First of all, you develop an infrastructure yourself, a mobilization infrastructure that has to be necessary in order to carry that out, and then, it’s in place when another crisis comes up a couple of years later or even a month later. So you develop an institutional and political capacity.

The second thing that it does is that it actually changes people’s minds. A famous legal philosopher, HLA Hart, makes a distinction between being obligated and being obliged. To be obliged is a gunman puts a gun to your head and says, give me your money. And you’re obliged to give him your money. You’re not obligated. If someone says to me–says to you, please give me some money and you think about it and you give them, you have felt obligated to do so. That has more of a moral dimension to it and you’ve done it of your own freewill and consent.

Reforming universities from within can lead to that kind of change. And it has happened to a significant extent at Madison as witnessed last month with those cartoons that I talked about. I vastly prefer that way of going.

Now, what do you do in a case like Brooklyn College when there’s really no hope? Well, going outside to get publicity. Developing allies outside. That’s important. We did that at Madison. We enlisted all sorts of national press, including the Chronicle of Higher Education, as part of our political strategy. But we didn’t use the coercive power of the state. And I think that’s–in my concluding remark, that would be the preferable way to go.

Thank you.

ALAN LEVY: Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Alan Levy. I’m a Professor at Slippery Rock University. As Mr. Balch said, I did give testimony on March 22, just a couple of weeks ago, at the hearings that were held at Millersville University as part of the State of Pennsylvania’s Assembly Inquiry into the way that the state system of Pennsylvania is operating. And I’m not going to go into the details. I will cite a couple of examples to amplify some points as I look back over the matter and what’s happened since.

But I just wanted to mention, for anybody who wants to see the text of what I said in Millersville, for some reason it seemed to cause some controversy. To tell the truth, I guess, will do that. Anyway–but I–the website, HistoryNewsNetwork, HNN, has the entire text on the web. And I just made a whole bunch of copies of their URL. And so it will be here and if you want to tear off from that sheet, I’ll just leave it here and you can look it up on the web yourself.

Anyway, that said, indeed, after I was finished, one of the state representatives, [Frankel], did ask me–he said, well, maybe we should shut the University down. I didn’t say to him, but I just sat there and looked at him and I was trying to imply to him – I don’t know whether I was successful – Mr. Assemblyman, I’m not blinking. If you want to do that, go ahead. It’s sort of like in Plato’s Republic it says over and over again, the greatest justice is engendered in a world in which each person does his or her own job, meaning don’t do the job of somebody else.

I’m the professor. I’m telling you what’s going on. You’re the legislator. If you want to react by shutting it down, go ahead, because you’re the one then who has to face the possibility of reelection. And if that works, that’s fine, because that’s how the marketplace of voting operates, as well as the marketplace of ideas. I think he was somehow asking me to blink or somehow expecting a professor sitting before the committee to say, oh, my gosh, if that’s your idea, please, I withdraw everything I said. It just–that wasn’t the point. I was there to tell what happened and gave some examples. And he apparently didn’t like it and thought he could intimidate me. At least that was my interpretation.

Since that time, I’ve gotten a whole bunch of emails from people, all generally flattering. A number of people saying, I appreciate what you said. I wish I’d said it myself. And in many cases it was students who said, I appreciate what you said, and it resonates very deeply within me because I’ve experienced much of the same thing. And each time I got an email from somebody like that, I wrote them back and said, please, please, here’s an address to write someone like Gibson Armstrong at the State Capitol. Please write him. Tell him what’s going on as well. I’m not going to expose your identity, but I’ll use these in redacted form in ways that I respond, for example, to the student newspaper and show them what the response has been to my talk.

So all of this has been growing. The frustration, of course, as I’ll talk about in a minute, is trying to get a lot of people really to be active. And a lot of students I can appreciate they are timid, they don’t want to expose themselves to the possibility if they think it can be the power of a professor to write a bad recommendation. One of the things I talked about in the talk, indeed, was the fact that when there was the possibility of a strike at the state system in the year 2004, a number of education professors did tell their students that if they crossed picket lines, they, the education professors, are going to see to it that those students who crossed picket lines were never going to get jobs at elementary or secondary schools where they were applying because they would be blackballed, if they as education professors had any influence. That happened.

And so, these kinds of intimidations are real. When faculty tell me, on the other hand, that they agreed with what I said, and if they have–if they don’t have tenure I can appreciate their timidity. But if they have tenure and they’re not willing to speak up, then I get a little bit impatient because this thing can change if the critical mass of faculty will get their act together and do something.

But what I’ve gotten beyond the complimentary emails and passing comments from colleagues and students is a whole lot of reactions to the effect of how dare you, or you didn’t use proper discretion, or there are ways–better ways to deal with this than the way you did it. These are all matters of point of view. It’s like why isn’t your personality like mine? I would’ve done it differently. Well, you do it–you act in accordance with your personality, I’ll act in accordance with mine was the reaction I gave to a lot of people.

But what I noted over and over again, and said this to people when they told me I didn’t act with proper discretion or I should’ve acted more within the confines of the campus, et cetera, et cetera. What I noted to them verbally and note to you as well is that nobody ever took to task any of the specifics that I raised, stories that I raised in my talk. Nobody said that’s wrong and here’s why. That’s wrong, here’s why. Here’s some facts that you didn’t consider. I never got anything like that.

It was all at the how dare you level or at the ad homonym level. One person even asked me, do you think because you are largely a vegetarian, maybe you, like a lot of vegetarians, you have a more high blown sense of yourself? I don’t know whether vegetarianism leads to a greater ego or not. I probably had a big enough ego to begin with. But that’s not the reason. And again, are the facts that I am saying right regardless of issues of ego? But they’re going to any lengths to try to come up with some explanation as to why I was somehow out of line in doing what I did.

I also noted the fact that on the Monday after I testified on a Wednesday, the Monday after I passed the President of my campus on the sidewalk, he didn’t speak to me, but he was attempting to give me this extreme glare of anger. And I said, good afternoon, Mr. Smith, and continued to walk. His name is Smith. I’m not being generic about it. He didn’t say anything. He did say, according to several colleagues who told me, he did say at the lunchroom to a number of faculty that he was very upset with me, especially because he received a very lengthy phone call from the state system Chancellor who was very upset. And in both cases, it was a matter that seemed more to the effect of why does this have to come across my desk, as opposed to maybe there are some problems here we ought to deal with.

It’s a matter of–and as one person said, it’s exposing dirty laundry. And I said, well, no, it’s not dirty laundry. You can wash dirty laundry. This is not dirty laundry. It’s dirt. And what do you do with dirt? You throw it away.

And in this context, some of this material that’s been talked about here today–and before I go into that, let me just tell you a couple of brief stories also. But some–one student since then who had been very involved in the women’s studies program was involved in a class where they’re supposed to bring a professor and with that professor perform some kind of creative play. And this student went to her class – she’d had me in a couple of classes – and went to this women’s studies class and said, well, I’m going to bring Professor Levy to mine. And the professor in charge of the class said, no, not Professor Levy. And she said, well, you said you could bring a professor. [She] said, but not him.

And at that point–Jessica was her name. Jessica said, in that case, I’m definitely bringing Professor Levy. And I said, you got it. I’m going. It hasn’t happened yet. But if any of you are interested, email me and I’ll let you know what’s happening.

Two minutes. Okay.

No other specific stories. But one issue that I will bring up that’s slightly more negative. I’ve heard discussion about how we need to have processes. There is a process that we have in place. And an example, when I wrote negatively about The Vagina Monologues once on my campus. And a person who co-signed a letter in the state–in the Slippery Rock campus newspaper found that the night of the Monologues’ performance, a student came to his home after the performance was over, dumped a load of trash on his lawn and hurled a stone through the rear window of one of his cars. And in response to that, also, the feminists, in their campus newsletter, wrote some critical comments about me and my colleague.

And I asked them, since it was a campus-funded newsletter, may I please have response time? And they said, no. And I went to the Provost, now the President, and he said nothing and waited six months and he finally told me, go back to them – meaning he was playing me like a ping-pong ball. He never explicitly told the feminist newsletter to give equal time, even though it’s state funded.

And so, I filed a grievance, which we have through our union. But the grievance procedure is handled in such a way, and this is the point I would raise, if you have grievance procedures, make sure they are well created and well executed. Because the grievant in the Pennsylvania system is not allowed to speak for him or herself. It’s all handled behind the scenes by union and management bureaucrats. And the same people in the union that run the bureaucracy of the union are among the leaders of the women’s studies program who staged The Vagina Monologues. Guess what happened to my grievance? And I never got a chance to speak on behalf of it.

So if you construct a grievance process, make sure you do it in a way that gives open possibilities to the grievant.

More generally, then, I would say–I would argue that what’s needed beyond the construction of good processes is somewhat what we’re doing here. That there are three things that seem to anger people at places like Slippery Rock. And I think there are thousands of schools like it. Not first cut institutions, but second and third tier schools, where John and Mary Q. Public generally send their children to school, which is what makes the experience at a place like Slippery Rock significant.

They tend to control the power from within. I don’t personally see it as much as a right-wing or a left-wing conspiracy. What I see it as a conspiracy of mediocrities that control the bureaucratic posts within the administration and the union, and who use politically correct language as a way to act out their needs for petty power to pretend to be intellectually active, but not really to engage in much in the way of real academic work in teaching or scholarship. And that’s what tends to dominate.

What–the way to deal with these people, then, are really on three levels similar to which we are doing here. One is publicity. One is through state legislatures. And the other that’s also going on on my campus, not by me, but by others, concerns the law – using lawsuits, if you have to do it. You have to have particular cases.

Why are these ways important? Because that’s what the bureaucracy of the administration, and if it’s a union-based institutions, the bureaucracy of the union, can’t control. They like to be in control, so much so that I think they are choking the educational process badly. Education is succeeding at places like Slippery Rock, not because of the administration and the union, not regardless of the administration and the union, but in spite of them. And we’ve got to turn that around.

Thank you.

IAN MAITLAND: I wanted to address the thesis that you heard advanced earlier today that our academic freedoms are safe in the hands of the traditional university governance system. And I want to begin with a quotation from the AAUP’s response to David Horowitz’s Academic Bill of Rights. The AAUP says the Academic Bill of Rights undermines the very academic freedom that it claims to support. It threatens to impose administrative and legislative oversight on the professional judgment of faculty. Please keep that in mind.

The AAUP is officially opposed to political encroachment on professors’, and I hope, students’ though it doesn’t say so, academic freedoms. It opposes indoctrination. It also comes out against the politicization of the Academy. And it says that professional competence should be the sole criterion for–in university decision-making. I think it systematically misstates David–the Bill of Rights–the Academic Bill of Rights, but that’s neither here nor there.

These statements are familiar to you and they undoubtedly would be made by many other lobbies for the academic establishment and professoriate. And from some of the flacks, their flacks that we heard from at lunch, they certainly talk the talk. And on paper, I didn’t find much to disagree with in the AAUP’s response.

I want to talk about some events at the University of Minnesota. But I want to take some aim at the AAUP really as a proxy for the academic establishment, both in–or on campus and off campus. And maybe, if I have the time, I’ll say something about the Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights. That’s the organization that brought the lawsuit against Donald Rumsfeld with respect to Pentagon recruiters, which the Supreme Court rejected just in the past few months.

My point–my question is this. The AAUP is in favor of academic freedom, but in all of the battles over academic freedom in the past decades, I have not seen the AAUP. I’ve been in the trenches and I’ve seen many of you in the trenches, but I don’t remember seeing them. Let me say that the University of Minnesota campus is a very liberal place, as you would expect. It–an interesting indicator is a study by the Center for Responsive Politics just before the 2004 Presidential Election that found that faculty had contributed–I think this was counting only donations above $300–$63,500-odd to John Kerry, and I think it was some $3,000 to George Bush.

But the liberalism doesn’t quite–I think the fever has subsided somewhat and it’s more of a sort of sullen form of liberalism now. Now, my own campus was one of the first I believe to start a women’s studies department, and also an African American studies department. And [Naomi Shemond], who later became the Chair of the Women’s Studies Department, otherwise in the Philosophy Department, was quoted before an NAS Conference on campus – the National Association of Scholars – as saying about a friend of mine, [Catherine Kirsten], now a columnist at The Star Tribune and a self-described conservative feminist, that she would never be hired by the Women’s Studies Department at the University, even if she had the requisite credentials because she didn’t share the view, which was axiomatic in the department, that women are an oppressed class.

Where was the University administration? Where was the AAUP, who–which maintains that it opposes the politicizing of the curriculum in hiring when this happened? Of course, they were nowhere to be seen. This is representative. I don’t want them–I don’t say they should necessarily intervene in all of the specific cases. But they were absent here and they were absent at other times.

Another example is the confiscation of some satirical materials about Hillary Clinton from a stand operated by the campus Republicans, college Republicans at an orientation affair. Did the administration respond? No, it didn’t, until there was a human cry. And ultimately, it took David and the Individual Rights Foundation, I think, their intervention to get a settlement, which led to, among other things, the University Cabinet, the President’s Cabinet, and the President himself undergoing some five hours I think of First Amendment sensitivity training. Wonderful, isn’t it?

The University of Minnesota also instituted a sort of informing system, which it called, if I recall, the Classroom Climate Monitoring, which has encouraged students to inform on one another if they overheard remarks that were politically correct, appeared to be racist, sexist, or homophobic. That has since withered on the vine, thank goodness.

Just the other day, the Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights, doubtless with the support of an amicus brief from the AAUP, though I can’t verify that, argued that law schools should be permitted to exclude Pentagon recruiters from campus. These law schools and professors complained and in their complaint cited their commitment to the core value of judging people solely by their merits. What imposters. Where were they when the universities weakly agreed to racialize their hiring and admissions policies over decades?

By the way, only one law professor at the University of Minnesota voted against the University of Minnesota Law School’s affiliation with FAIR. The Supreme Court, I believe, unanimously rejected FAIR’s arguments, and I think that’s a measure of how isolated law schools have become from the rest of us, considering the–thank you–the distance between the Supreme Court and the public. And then, there’s still greater distance between the Supreme Court itself and the law school.

Justice Frankfurter said that there were four pillars of academic freedom. Let me give you two of them. One is faculty control of hiring. And the second is faculty control of admissions. FAIR argued that the Solomon Amendment represented an unprecedented tying of massive amounts of federal grants to the renunciation of a dissenting stance by academic institutions. I couldn’t have said it better, except that there was nothing unprecedented about it. It happens every day. Just ask Grove City College and Hillsdale College.

Law professors still–law professors supported and still support tying massive amounts of federal aid to compliance with federal government policies of racial and other preference. You may remember that Grove City did not discriminate, it just didn’t want to agree to submit–to become entangled with the federal government. And it tried its very best to stay away from detailed federal regulation of its hiring procedures.

AAUP, remember, I quoted at the beginning, opposes the academic bill of rights because it threatens to impose political oversights over the judgment of faculty members. So where was the AAUP, where were faculty members and administrators when the federal government asserted the right to supervise universities’ hiring and admissions processes?

Let me just try to skip to the end. There are, of course, many other examples. But basically, in all of these cases, the AAUP was AW–was AWOL. If it wasn’t AWOL, it was probably a cheerleader for these policies. Plainly, in my view, academic freedom is too important to be left to professors, but that leaves us with a dilemma because that’s been our traditional answer. Is the Academic Bill of Rights the answer? I admit some ambivalence. I initially thought that this was a legislative solution, but I realize – and David’s made clear – it’s not meant to be a legislative solution, at least an imposed one. And I think it can be–provide a useful leverage.

But ultimately, I think the faculty have to clean house. And ultimately, the problems are much more deeply structural. Ward Connelly recently visited our campus. And he nicely said he–several–many years ago, he’d found that he was sentenced to a–I think it was a nine or 12-year term on the University of California Board of Regents. And I think it was on his first day that he was listening to some mindless blabber about diversity when he realized that he was being lied to. And that initiated his campaign to eliminate racial preferences at the University of California at Berkeley.

I think he and David have proved one of the most important propositions that we should take note of. And that is that these people are allergic to the sunlight. And that will–that is the way I think, ultimately, if we don’t get satisfaction on campus, we have to extend the circle, bring in others, who will truly be shocked by what’s going on. A heartfelt thanks to David for doing just that.

DANIEL PIPES: Well, I bring greetings to you from Grove City College. I was there this morning. I gave a talk last night. And they’re flourishing. They are doing very nicely. I specifically asked, what is it that you are doing that you could not do, or what are you not doing that you would have to do? And basically, it’s not much. It’s pretty much the principle that it is–they have–in fact, I was told the key issue was women’s sports. Title IX, I believe it is. And they have–they’ve found that they have 10 women’s programs in sports and nine men’s programs. So it’s not that they didn’t want to have women’s programs, just they didn’t want to be told to have women’s programs.

I’m not on the schedule, but it’s a glitch in communication. Email is not always perfect. I didn’t get the notice about practicalities, and so I didn’t answer it. And therefore, my name was dropped. But I was supposed to be here all along. And, as far as I knew, I was always going to be here. Just nobody knew that I was actually going to be here. So here I am.

I am Daniel Pipes and I’m not at a university. But I come from an academic background. My father is a professor. I grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a very intellectual place. I have a Ph.D. in the medieval history of Islam and I taught at three institutions. But more basically, I intended to spend my life at academic institutions. I never imagined I wouldn’t be. And I think it’s fair to say, though I really am not the one to say it, that I was excluded because of my views. And I went out into the world and did other things. I served in the Departments of State and Defense. I have now headed two think tanks, and the second of which I founded in 1994. I write weekly columns. I have an active website. I work with politicians, and so forth.

But over the years since I left the university, I’ve been increasingly frustrated about developments in my field. Indeed, it is safe to say that my field of Middle East studies has been transformed. And the easy way of summarizing that is to mention the name of Edward Said, whose 1978 book on Orientalism had this profound effect on both the Middle East studies and far beyond it.

But perhaps the best way to put it is by saying that I entered the field in 1969. And I was given a classic Orientalist training. I studied epigraphy. I studied–in my very first class I used a 19th Century historical studies translated from German. Very hard going. Very traditional. The things I learned were in the context–were in the tradition of the great Orientalist inquiry going back several centuries. And it never occurred to me as I was in school until 1978 that there was any other way. I read these books, I did this research, and it was in a tradition.

And then, now, some 30 years later, since the 1978 publication of my grad–my finishing my Ph.D. and Orientalism coming out, the field has fundamentally transformed in the sense that the books I read and cherish still are gone, disappeared. And the subjects of the inquiry have changed and more than that, the understanding. And perhaps the best way of illustrating that is by giving you the understanding of the word jihad.

There was never any question as I was studying Islam and Islamic history that jihad could be translated in simple terms as Holy War, but more accurately, as the effort to increase the realm ruled by Muslims at the expense of non-Muslims. It’s an aggressive military and other effort to expand the–it’s not to convert people, but to expand the rule of territory. There’s never any doubt. And there is no other way of understanding this word. There are libraries full of books whether [indiscernible] about this–primary sources or secondary sources about this concept. And there was never any doubt.

And now, if you look at what historians of Islam, specialists on Islamic religion, and others are saying about jihad, you won’t recognize it. It is about internal self-improvement. It is about becoming a better colleague. It is about working on behalf of feminism and against apartheid. This very fundamental and rather straightforward term has been transmogrified into something entirely different. And one could say that about many aspects of the field. It’s a very different inquiry than what it was when I was a student.

And there are other obvious symptoms as well. The radicalization, which I would define ultimately as anti-American and anti those who are sympathetic to the United States or allies of the United States. Intolerance in the sense that there is a church–and Steve put it very well. I can’t quite quote it, but the university is more like a church. You have to be a believer. And Middle East studies is very much in that context. The poor quality of the work–it’s very interesting to see, to look retrospectively at the expectations of the leading Middle East specialists and how they analyze things and what they expected and how wrong they get it time and time again, and the imposition of view on students.

As a result of this growing frustration of mine, in September of 2002, I founded something called Campus Watch. And it was intellectually premised on a book written by Martin Kramer called Ivory Towers on Sand, subtitled The Failure of Middle East Studies in America. And it was also somewhat premised on the agitation that was affecting the campuses.

Now, Middle East studies are not worse than other areas of the university. I think Latin American studies are probably worse than Middle East studies. But Middle East studies is both my field and has the prominence. The Middle East is at the center of American public debate today. Iraq, Iran, Israeli conflicts, Saudi Arabia, but even more importantly, Islam. Because countries and conflicts are traditional topics that say congressional staff has a pretty good understanding of, or foreign service officers have a pretty good understanding of.

But Islam is something quite different. And ever since Islam came on the scene with Ayatollah Khomeini, again, in 1978, there has been a certain mystery about it and it’s much more complex than trying to understand, say, what’s going on in Iraq. And so academics have been turned to in this regard. And the understanding, say, of a term like jihad has more importance than, say, the academic analysis of the Ambazari Conflict, which is not terribly important.

Campus Watch activities have been posting information on Middle East studies, what others are writing, doing our own research on this topic, going to campuses, organizing students in six campuses, going and giving talks – I’ve done a lot of that – training students, having them as interns and in other capacities.

Well, we began in September 2002 as a very thin website and nothing else. We spent something like $800 on publicity. And all we had was what others had written. We had not written anything ourselves. But the response we got was quite extraordinary. Unthinkingly and [untactically], our friends in Middle East studies at the university were outraged and infuriated and engaged in name-calling. And they took this really minor website and turned it into a major presence. And they gave it a national, and even international, platform.

We had major articles, for example, on us in the most important papers. We were on the front page–since we are in Washington, we were on the front page of The Washington Post. We were on TV, national TV. Four articles in major [indiscernible] media on us. Now, mind you, almost all critical, almost all getting it wrong what we were about . But nonetheless, as P.T. Barnum said, they spelled our name correctly. So we got a real presence.

Our goals are two-fold. They are many-fold. But to give you the two most important. In the short-term, to let the specialists on the Middle East, by which I mean historians and political scientists and economists and literary specialists and anthropologists, you name it, everyone who has a specialty in Middle East studies, to let them know that if they do things, say things that are outrageous, that we–there’s a chance, maybe even a good chance, that this will become known. And we use clever tactics. If you go to our website, which is basically what this project is, is a website, campus-watch.org, you’ll see most prominently Quote of the Month. And we find the most absurd things that one of our constituents has said this month. And there’s some real wing-dingers there.

We–so we hope to convey that there’s a need to be more cautious. But long-term, our goal is a balance in hiring, to see–not to have anyone fired, but to have people hired who are now not being hired. And this we hope to do by bringing the attention of the outside world to our field, in particular, but more broadly, to the problems of the university.

Now we have suddenly got the attention of the academics. And to give you two interesting quotes, John Scott of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, said that what we’re doing is an intrusion, which I find interesting. Because it’s comparable to saying that the work of the theater critic is intrusion, or a political analyst is intruding on the politicians, or Consumer Reports is intruding on the manufacturers. We’re not intruding; we’re assessing. And I think that’s a rather important distinction.

Others, such as a professor at Duke by the name of [Marion Cook], has said that not only are we offending Middle East studies, we’re offending the underpinnings of the entire university system. But I don’t think so, as you might expect. And I do think that in addition to the two ideas we’ve had offered here, the legislative idea that David Horowitz is proposing, and the internal process that Don Downs has proposed, what we are doing is in a sense what Professor Maitland has suggested, is be external.

We are not legislative. We are not internal, but we are external. And we are bringing attention. We are pointing out the timidity that Steve Balch mentioned earlier. We are hoping that the stakeholders in university, the parents, the alumni, the state legislators, the DOE here in Washington, and others will wake up to the problems. And we hope that these efforts will redeem a vital and glorious institution and bring it back to being a more healthy institution. We hope to be a small part of this effort.

Our assumption is that as people get to know the travesties in this field they will be appalled and will take some steps. And we have the advantage that Middle East studies is so prominent at this time. It is an optimistic assumption. We are optimists. We see this as a period of tribulation and a period that eventually, not soon, but eventually we will go through and be done with.

Thank you.

STEPHAN THERMSTROM: Well, it’s a pleasure to be here. It’s been a quite enjoyable meeting, particularly because when I come to discussions of this topic, I invariably feel rather depressed. I do think things in higher education are bad and generally getting worse. But this morning’s student panel, in particular, I found filled with infuriating testimony about what’s going on, but very heartening that quite a number of students at a wide variety of places are striking back, are getting mobilized to try to do something about this.

Now, in a couple of minutes, I’m going to talk a bit about Harvard and the demise of Larry Summers. Now, I do want to make plain that I do not take up that topic out of the common delusion of Harvard faculty members that Harvard is at the very center of the universe and everyone, of course, must be oh so interested in what’s going on there. When I was–before I had a chance to think about what I would talk about, Steve Balch contacted me and suggested that some comments on this might be of interest.

But first, I did want to take up an issue raised in an earlier panel – Candace de Russy taking the lead, arguing one position, and Terry Hartle and Mr. Scheuerman rejecting her views. The question of whether there’s anything new in recent years or whether, in fact, universities and colleges have always been the source of some political controversy. And they were in the age of McCarthy, they were in the New Deal, and so on.

I would very strongly side with Candace. I think it is totally preposterous to deny that the university of today is a radically different place from the one I first entered or began my graduate training in just 50 years ago this year. Anecdotal evidence, but after all, I not only have had these experiences, I did attend professional meetings, I’ve been active in the profession, so I think it is more than a quixotic or purely personal experience.

When I came to the Harvard History Department in the late 1950s as a beginning graduate student, it is true that the department was not politically balanced in the sense that there were probably as many Republicans as Democrats, which is a point that some of these earlier speakers pointed to. But it’s true, but irrelevant. Of my teachers, I would say only Arthur Schlezinger, Jr. ever betrayed any distinct partisan feeling, and it was fairly minor. But all of his quips were about the evils of Republicans, but that was very minor.

But for the most part, although I learned later that [Oscar Hanlin], [Bernard Baylin], [Louis Hartz], Perry Miller were all Democrats for a time, the important point is I had no idea what their politics were while I was their student. Their politics did not enter into the process of instruction. It was just as irrelevant as was their religion or other personal tastes and preferences. They were great scholars and I aspired to follow their example and become a great scholar.

And I would say that attending the American Historical Association and the meetings of the Organization of American Historians, which was then actually called the Mississippi Valley Historical Association, likewise. Those were not political encounters. Those were professional meetings and you listened to papers in those aspects of your discipline that particularly interested you. There was spirited controversy, but they were conspicuously lacking in politics or ideology.

Well, we certainly live in a different world today. Certainly, any–if you ever look in at a meeting of the American Historical Association or the Organization of American Historians, you find nothing but trendy leftist politics. And I would say at Harvard itself we–I would say we have fewer great scholars than we once did. And we certainly have a great many more faculty members who feel completely free to indulge themselves by making blatantly political comments and quips in the classroom. And I think that is deplorable.

Now that, in my view, does not reflect or at least is not entirely the result of the fact that Jane Fonda got tenure as it were. That is, it’s a much broader phenomenon than the hard left–the growth of the hard left taking over an institution, though there is a real element of truth in that. But it is also part of broader intellectual currents, post-modernism, the denial that objectivity is attainable or even worthy of pursuit. You know the old feminist slogan, the personal is the political, I think has become this kind of license. You get closer to your students by wearing your politics on your sleeve on the assumption most of your students share those views and you can intimidate the rest into silence.

And it’s very difficult to know what to do about this. I mean, there are two separable issues. The first is nicely captured in the banner behind me – the notion that politics should be kept out of the classroom. The second quite different notion related to that is that we need a better ideological balance on the faculties of our colleges and universities, which would seem to tacitly suggest you can’t keep politics out of the classroom really, but at least you can make sure there are a fair number of Republicans who counter the Democratic and far leftist Democratic ideologs on the campus.

And in terms of the desire of finding a more ideologically balanced faculty, I have to confess great pessimism. There are fields in which it’s possible. And anticipating what I will say about Harvard, the Harvard Law School under a Dean appointed by Larry Summers, Elena Kagan, has made a number of appointments of brilliant, quite conservative scholars. And I am told by members of the faculty the whole place has been transformed. The Federalist Society membership among the students is the largest in the country. Of course, it is one of the larger law schools, but still. And the atmosphere is radically different.

And I might say as a footnote, since there has been a good deal of speculation that Elena Kagan might be Larry Summers’ replacement after a year in which Derek Bok is sitting in as a temporary president. I don’t know whether there’s any truth to that. What would worry me a little is that I’m not sure this new balancing of the Harvard Law School faculty ideologically has anything to do with Kagan–with what Kagan really believes, or if it is simply that Larry Summers told her that’s what she’d better do, that it’s necessary for the health of the Law School.

Well, let me now turn to the Summers affair. I do think that his demise is certainly a calamity for my institution, without any question. I’m not at all sure that it has dire broader implications for American higher education, particularly because there are no other–it’s sometimes suggested, well, no other college president will henceforth take public stands that clash with political correctness. Well, there are no other college presidents of any major institutions who are doing that now. I think it’s a fluke that Larry Summers was appointed and proceeded to do those things. And I certainly shutter at the prospect of who his successor will be, but I don’t think that’s terribly significant. But nonetheless, it is an important tale.

It is certainly true that this represents a victory of the left on the Harvard faculty – the far left of the Harvard faculty. It was a well organized, carefully orchestrated campaign. This didn’t just happen. These people were waiting for a good issue around which to mobilize and his remarks about women in science provided the tinder–the tinder, or the match. They already had the tinder stacked up and ready to go.

However, I think it’s also important, and some of the writing about this has downplayed the significant of this. The accidents of the personality of Larry Summers played a very important role. And it’s quite possible that someone who didn’t have the same personality defects could have weathered this storm. This guy’s got to be in the top tenth of 1% on any scale measuring abrasiveness, arrogance, overbearingness, if there is such a word.

And a number of my colleagues, who are quite moderate, basically apolitical people, eventually were delighted to get rid of Larry Summers because they thought he was such a [expletive] and he treated them with such contempt. When he would meet with the chairmen of the departments of the various–about 40 departments in the faculty of Arts and Sciences, apparently almost to a person those chairs came away feeling infuriated at how they had been treated.

And I think it’s this peculiarity of his personality that also explains what many of us found so puzzling and depressing – that when he finally backed down on the issue of women in science, he did it in such a craven way. He groveled so ridiculously. I mean, he didn’t modify his position slightly and say, I’ve been misunderstood and so on, but basically stick to his–stuck to his guns. He didn’t just move away a little; he prostrated himself. And I think that does have to do with the fact that he is somebody who has always found it difficult to admit that he’s wrong. And when he was finally persuaded, apparently all of the insiders, his inner circle, all said you’ve got to back away from this. You’re going to lose your job if you’re not careful. He went all the way towards prostrating himself and that greatly distressed me.

The final point I want to make here – the hour is getting late – is one of the most depressing aspects of this affair to me. I hadn’t been to a Harvard faculty meeting before this thing blew up. And one of the things that most astonished me was the discussion of what kind of place is this, what is Harvard for, how do we conduct ourselves. Now today, I’ve heard the phrase “marketplace of ideas” probably a dozen times. It’s the first one that would spring to my mind.

But what was astonishing, that faculty members from quite a range of disciplines, namely women, to be sure, spoke of the university in totally different terms. This is a community. This is a polis, said some of the more classically educated. A professor of music said, some defenders of Larry Summers say that what–his remarks were provocative and that it’s good to have provocative things at a university. But if you think about the word “provocative,” people who are provoked can become angry. Provocation can even lead to war. And we don’t want that. We want a warm loving community. And he had violated the bonds of community, as Socrates did, after all, and should drink the hemlock for it.

So it really was the case that their conception of the free marketplace of ideas, but a church of some kind. And, of course, if you don’t follow the doctrine of your church, you can be expelled. And that’s what happened to Larry Summers.

So that’s a crude way of summing it up, but that represents a kind of feminization, or at least feministization of Harvard that I find the most depressing thing about this whole affair.

STEPHEN BALCH: Well, I see the people coming in to pile the chairs on the table, so if there are any questions, we can entertain them. Oh–some comments on the–.

UNIDENTIFIED PANELIST: [Inaudible.] The point you just raised about the two approaches – getting politics out of the classroom versus balancing the classroom – I think is a very interesting one. And I’d be interested in other comments. I mean, I realize in retrospect that I implicitly am saying it’s impossible. What we need to do is balance it. We can’t go back to my house in days as a graduate student, so let’s fight the fight and change it. But do others believe that one can do this? I mean what–I think it’s a critical–what are we trying to achieve, balance or a depoliticization?

STEPHEN BALCH: Is that a question the other members of the panel would like to briefly review before we throw it out to the audience? Don?

DON DOWNS: Well, obviously, that’s an incredibly interesting question. And (a) probably a skeptical argument is it’s difficult to get the politics out. It also depends on what we mean by politics. I don’t–I know this is somewhat controversial and it’s kind of a delicate balance, I suppose. But I don’t think we should be simply neutral arbiters, neutral conveyers of information or truth. We’re called professors. Professing means more than simply conveying information.

Now, it can–you can–the way you structure debate, the way you encourage viewpoints, et cetera. That’s sort of a sophisticated kind of traffic cop in class and that can work. But sometimes students want to know where you stand. And I will do that. I take stands in the classroom. Not political stands. I am totally apolitical in terms of partisan politics. If I make a joke about Clinton, I’ll be sure to make a joke about Bush. That’s–conscientiously.

But I’m political maybe in another kind of way, in that I do take certain kind of normative stands. We do the death penalty. I let them know why I believe in it, partly because most of them don’t. Most of them believe it in a moral sense, not necessarily in a procedural sense. And they like that. Then it’s a question of how you do that. And if you do it in a way which is designed–if you’re open to them coming back at you, you can take a stand in class. And I think that actually can energize the class and increase the intellectual experience. But you’ve got to be careful with how you do it.

ALAN LEVY: Can I give a quick response? Speaking from the standpoint of a second, third, fourth tier institution and many others like it, again, where the typical American family sends their children. The issue–I wish we could play with these issues. The issue there is quality. Just to amplify with one story in my English Department that has a lot of its–a lot of troubles. One good faculty member there, a Ph.D. from Yale, nevertheless, he’s good. But he was advocating on behalf of a particular candidate as opposed to another. And one member of the search committee said about the opposing candidate who she liked, “Look, she may be incompetent, but she’s not a threat.” That was said.

This is–and the politics of what we’re dealing with in the–on the campus is very much tied to that – to fit in. So that’s the bigger issue that’s at work. I wish we were dealing with yours.

QUESTION: I think I might be honored to have the last question of the conference. My name is [Robert Morrow]. I’m from New York Young Republicans. I think the conference should be called Profiles in Courage because that’s the impression I got the most, whether it be from academics or from elected representatives or from authors or from high school students. I really admire your courage and tenacity of all of you gentlemen, especially in your field.

I lived in London for five years. And my question is centered to Mr. Pipes. There really is–and David points this out in his book, Unholy Alliance. There is a real combination between the far left and Islamic fascism. It’s not the first time in history that’s happened, but I think we’re witnessing it right now. And there–there’s a very good columnist named Melanie Phillips who writes for The Daily Mail. And she points out the effort now of divestment from Israel. And also, a lot of effort of a group called the International Solidarity Movement which is recruiting students to go act as basically human shields in places like West Bank and Gaza.

I think that’s very strong in Britain right now. And I’ve been out of the country a while. Is there any such effort in the United States? And if so, how powerful is it?

DANIEL PIPES: I think the situation in the U.K. is far worse than it is in the United States. In fact, my general impression would be that however bad it is in this country, it’s probably no better anyplace else. Anyone would differ with that? Is there another country where the Academy is in better shape than here? I don’t think so.

Specifically, on the issue that David wrote the book on about the leftist Islamist Unholy Alliance is of great importance. Let me note that–what happened just a couple of weeks ago. The incident with Abdul Rahman, the Afghan who converted to Christianity and was on his way to be executed until pressure was put on the government to deem him insane and he got to leave the country. Everybody aware of the incident?

What’s so interesting about that incident is that nobody, but nobody, but nobody who is not a Muslim would agree with that process–agree that someone leaving Islam should be executed. There is no leftist–maybe somewhere, some kook–but no significant–no leftist body would ever endorse that. In other words, the left is divided from the Islamists on that. The Islamists are all alone. And therefore, they had to backtrack. And it’s been very interesting to watch the last couple of weeks.

The academic, for example, a man by the name of [Sharif Basuni], a professor of law at DePaul University in Chicago, had a piece in the Chicago Tribune denying that this is Islam at all. And organizations in this city and others all backtracked away from this because there was no leftist support whatsoever. However, that’s unusual. If you take the cartoon controversy, you’ll see leftists were by and large cool to the Muslim position, but there were some who endorsed it.

And then, if you go to more central issues, like issues of discrimination and civil liberties and the like, you see leftists totally on the Islamist side and they have a very high standard. So that alliance, which is in large part driven by the universities, though not exclusively, is very important to giving the Islamist a standing. Take away the leftist support, and you have a situation like the apostasy question where they just have to fold because they can’t sustain it.

If the leftists are there, then the Islamist position is confident and goes forward and pushes. And the U.K. is–the title of Melanie Phillips’ book is Londonistan, and that’s a term of art that we use for this U.K. [vimitude], if anyone knows that terms – capitulation of the British to Islamic [scriptures].

QUESTION: [Would you take] a follow-up? Not to pick on the U.K. too much, but in the United States, of course, you have the spokesman for the Taliban now a bright-eyed student at Yale, I believe, which I don’t know if it would be a bad comparison, but it’s like having a Nazi come to Harvard in the late 1940s. You don’t get more misogynistic or racist or religious extremist than the Taliban under–in Afghanistan.

How does the left [indiscernible]? How do they [inaudible]–?

DANIEL PIPES: –Because the details–of course, you’re right. The details of the program are less important than a shared antagonism against the United States, be it the capitalist United States or the infidel United States, however you see it. But the shared antagonism outweighs that. The mention of that student brings a smile to my face because another student at Yale was quoted in the New York Sun as saying, bring Daniel Pipes to campus and it’s World War III. Bring the Taliban and nobody notices.

QUESTION: Thank you, gentlemen, for your presentations. I don’t know about drinking the hemlock, but at the University of Colorado I see a lot of drinking from the Kool-Aid. Speaking of taking politics out of the classroom and looking at this from a public policy perspective, if I could get your input on the idea of the core curriculum. At the University of Colorado, for example, how much the core curriculum contributes to this idea of politics in the classroom. The University of Colorado, Boulder, for example, there are over 400 classes that comprise the core curriculum. And how much we’ve seen with the expansion of the core curriculum in just addressing that issue alone might lead to this idea of removing politics from the classroom?

STEPHEN THERMSTROM: Well, I’ll say a word on that. I strongly favor core requirements of some kind. I don’t see that they have anything to do with politicization in that it’s even if you had a core requirement in Western Civilization or Democratic Traditions or whatever, it all depends on who teaches them. And any subject can be taught from an anti-American, anti-capitalist point of view. So I don’t think it would solve the problem unless you hired–you can imagine situations where the departments don’t want–their existing faculty don’t want to teach courses of that sort, and so you hire some new people who would be sympathetic to Western Civilization.

QUESTION: And I guess a follow-up would be to that–the way I look at that, take ethnic studies, for example. Part of the core curriculum, and speaking of the marketplace of ideas, is that the only way ethnic studies is allowed to survive at the University of Colorado is because they have worked themselves into the core curriculum. And it’s like a guaranteed annuity every single year for the ethnic studies department because they are guaranteed a certain number of students who must filter through their program, and therefore, contributes to the revenue that they are able to generate.

Otherwise, if you force a department like ethnic studies and women’s studies to exist on their own, would students take those classes? So whether or not 400 classes is contributing to this idea of a cafeteria-style core curriculum that doesn’t allow students by the time they graduate as undergraduates to have any set of knowledge to effectively say that their diploma is worth anything from the University of Colorado when they finish as it relates to the core curriculum. So–.

STEPHEN BALCH: Two more. Judy, and then [Sol]. First, Judy.

QUESTION: Now–I’ve listened to so many interesting ideas. A couple of points. I have a–I tend to agree with Don Downs about politics in everyone’s everyday life and not just in the university. I would say I take the politics of the lover of wisdom, Socrates. [John Stuart Mills] – that I will agree to. And that would satisfy I think David Horowitz’s concerns and my concerns as well.

I have also a simple proposal, which won’t be accepted. I would require any college graduate to pass a proficiency exam in Latin and Greek. And that includes get into the point of reading people like Cicero and Aristotle in the original.

I have a particular question because I’m just puzzled by it. It’s related–for Daniel Pipes. I only read bits and pieces of Edward Said’s Orientalism, and I really should. But what I’ve heard of it, it sounds to me like a bunch of malarkey by a man who’s an ignoramus. What did he know about oriental studies? What languages did he know? What did he know about the history of Islam? What scripts was he able to read? Could he read old Turkish, for example, which used to be written in the Persian script. So that’s just a question that I have. And I am quite prejudiced against Edward Said, as you can hear.

DANIEL PIPES: Well, I won’t dispute your characterization of the book. I would add to it that it’s turgid and of–derives some theory. And, for example, it has been noted many times because the German example didn’t fit his thesis – Germany not having an empire – he just excluded Germany, and for that matter, others in Europe who didn’t have empires, from his schema as he only looked at British and French. He did know Arabic, to his credit.

No. It is a–you hit the nail on the head. I’d just make one other point in terms of this debate that you raised about the pro and con of bringing politics out or not. The Madison project under [Robbie George] is certainly implicitly also saying that you can’t beat it so–you can’t pull it back, so you’ve got to balance it.

DON DOWNS: If I could add quickly, we’re in the process of setting up a center at Madison, Wisconsin called the Center for the Study of Liberal Democracy. And it’s similar in some ways to the center at Princeton. I mean, we don’t have the same resources yet. But it’s more focused on the question of liberal democracy, probably a little less of a political conservative edge to it. But [indiscernible] diversity on campus. And we used in our statement of–our mission statement a comment about Socrates – the question, how should one live. And then, we wrote in the context of this center, the question then is how should one live in freedom. So it’s really a center that’s devoted in talking about freedom. And politics is certainly a part of that.

And we quote from the ACE’s statement on intellectual diversity as part of our mission statement. It’s another example of fighting the fight from within, but also drawing on sources from the outside as well. But not running to any kind of coercive presence.

IAN MAITLAND: Can I quickly say that if politics were excluded from the classroom, I–that would cramp my style very considerably. I believe they–I believe you should be straightforward with your students about where you stand. Though I have to say that many of them, even halfway through the semester, seem to be confused about my opinions or even say, well, of course, you’re a liberal.

But what I think is unpardonable is insisting that the students parrot opinions back at you, that you coerce them or bludgeon them or bully them in any way. And I think that’s–but the idea of affirmative action for conservatives leaves me cold. I think it’s as bad as affirmative action is for anyone.

STEPHEN BALCH: Last question.

QUESTION: [Inaudible-no microphone.] Is that a reasonable–what would be the reaction of some of your colleagues who are so afraid of this outside [inaudible]?

STEPHEN BALCH: Why don’t you go first.

DON DOWNS: I don’t have any problem with posting syllabi. I think a lot–most of my colleagues probably do post their syllabi. I don’t probably out of laziness. But I have no objection to it in principle.

QUESTION: [Inaudible.]

DON DOWNS: I think it might. Certainly, it could make a difference because if you distort the reading material, then that’s going to be evident right there in the syllabus. It’s not going to tell students about how you teach the course, but it’s a nice start. I don’t have any objection to that at all. Students–as was pointed out earlier today, I forget who it was. You know, they have all these websites now. There’s a national teacher evaluation thing. My daughter told me about it two weeks ago. And she looked me up on it. I haven’t looked at it.

But you get that feedback and [indiscernible]. And there’s two or three student groups that have their own websites that evaluate courses. I don’t know what it’s like elsewhere, but in Madison they talk about this stuff all the time. It’s really well known how we–how good we are, how bad we are, what we teach, are we [indiscernible] are we not. A lot of student information. And I think the more of that, absolutely the better. I have no objection to it.

ALAN LEVY: Again, difference–different kind of university. Yes, I personally agree with that. There’s nothing wrong with posting everything and particularly at a public university. It should be public information. When you mentioned–I chuckled, not at you, but when you said articles. And one of the issues that I brought up and that I took some flack for saying it at the state hearing was the fact that I found out that a number of professors have faked articles in books. And so, that the idea of having to put them out on–for inspection was something–is something that I would favor completely because people with the proper political credentials have done this and yet gotten tenured and promoted.

So, yes, the more open air, the better.

STEPHEN BALCH: Well, thank you very much.

SARA DOGAN: Hi. I just wanted to thank everyone for coming again to the conference and to especially thank all of our speakers who gave such wonderful and interesting and fascinating perspectives on the Academic Freedom Movement. I hope for the students in the audience that when you go back to your campuses you’ll take some of these ideas with you. And for all of those who work in other fields, in the legislatures and other organizations that work on these issues, that we can continue to dialogue and work to make the Academic Freedom Movement even better.

We have a reception that is just upstairs in the Atrium Ballroom where we had it yesterday. So there’s food and drink up there. Please come and let’s have a great end to the day. Thank you.

Friday, April 7, 2006, 8:30 a.m.
First National Academic Freedom Conference

Presentation

David Horowitz: Good morning. We have to begin now. The Senator has other appointments.

This is, as I said, most of the evening, this is to my knowledge the first national academic freedom conference that’s been held. We have a mighty task in front of us. Our universities and our high schools, K-12 schools, are being rapidly converted into a political base and diverted from their educational mission. In a democracy, we are — the purpose of education is to create citizens who can think for themselves, and therefore, teachers must teach how to think, not what to think. They should teach and not preach. Unfortunately, that is being changed rapidly in our society, and this conference and the movement that it represents is the beginning of an effort to restore educational values to our institutions.

And I’m going to turn over the platform in a second for the introduction for Senator Alexander, but I want to thank him personally for coming out early this morning and showing that we have support for this movement from people like the Senator, who was once Secretary of Education, who has spent his life, really, working on educational issues. This is — he is one of the leaders in our country on these issues, and there are others with him who would be here today but are obviously busy doing other things.

But I just want to send a message. This sends a very important message to the forces that are reigned against us, which include the teacher unions, the Aljazeera website, and other forces in our culture that are hostile to the democratic idea.

I’m going to turn over the platform now to [Fred Franson][ph], who is a Director of the Higher Education Division, as it were, of the Philanthropy Roundtable to introduce Senator Alexander.

Fred Franson: Thank you very much, David.

Lamar Alexander is the only Tennesseean ever to be popularly elected both Governor and United States Senator. He chairs the Subcommittee on Energy and is a member of the Foreign Relations and Budget Committee, but I doubt very much that’s the reason why he’s here this morning.

But, rather, perhaps more than any other politician or person in Washington, he has dedicated his life to improving education, and that dedication goes back to a very, very early time. He is the son of a kindergarten and elementary school principal. His mother operated a nursery school and a kindergarten program in the converted garage of their back yard 27 years before kindergarten became public in Tennessee.

As governor of Tennessee, he helped the volunteer state to become the first to pay teachers more for teaching well, something revolutionary; imagine, results-based performance for teachers.

He served as the President of the University of Tennessee from 1988 to 1991 when George H. W. Bush asked him to serve as Secretary of Education. He was involved in many initiatives as the Secretary of Education, including pushing for higher academic standards and developing the GI bill for kids, which created federal scholarships, giving children more choices in schools.

He then became the Goodman professor at Harvard School of Government from January 2001 to May 2002, where he taught a course on the American character.

After joining the Senate in November of 2002, he’s now on the Senate Health Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee and Chairman of the Subcommittee on Education and Early Childhood Development, where he continues to be involved in numerous initiatives to improve education, both at the higher education level and at K-12.

I give to you Senator Alexander.

Lamar Alexander: Good morning. Thank you. Thank you very much, and, David, thank you for your kind words. I’m sorry I missed the debate last night. I’ll bet that was good. I would’ve enjoyed it, and I salute all of you for being part of this movement, which is exactly what it is and which I hope it comes out to be. With David Horowitz, you’ve got a genuine, dedicated, experienced, and usually successful movement leader. So thank you for letting me come here for the purpose of saluting you.

Today in Nashville, Tennessee — sometimes when I get up in the morning, I go to my computer, and I figured out how to read the morning newspaper at home — here is the — there’s an article about Belmont University, a very good university with a Baptist tradition. And the headline says, “Belmont’s Board Should Reflect Campus Diversity.” Currently, all of the Belmont trustees must be Baptists. But in November, the Board approved a resolution saying that 60% could be Baptists, and 40% could be other kinds of Christians. So they’re having a big debate about that, and the local newspaper says the Baptists don’t want more diversity. The local newspaper does, and local newspaper says, “Belmont’s first priority should be to create a dynamic, welcoming educational environment. That mission would be best accomplished with a board that is multi-dimensional and multi-denominational and with a partnership with the Tennessee Baptist Convention that respects the past but prepares the future.” In other words, a university is best if it’s a place with a lot of diversity.

When I was the United States Education Secretary in the early ’90s, the Middle States Accreditation Association refused to accredit Westminster College, which only ordains women to be ministers — I mean which only ordains men to be ministers because there were no women on the board. I thought that was going a little too far for an accreditation organization and told them so, but their point was that there’s a great tradition in American and in the American university of diversity. And any time that doesn’t exist, a lot of yellow and red flags start to wave.

Free speech, real diversity of thought, and especially the absence of political one-sidedness have always thought to have been at the core of the American university. And defenders of academic freedom have always been quick to oppose — and let me quote an example — to oppose “systematic, persistent, and continuous attempts by a politically dominant group to impose its social and educational views on the university.” That’s a bad thing — “systematic, persistent and continuous attempts by a politically dominant group to impose its social and educational views on the university.” That is what the American Association of University Presidents, the AAUP, called it in its censure of Texas Governor “Pappy” O’Daniel’s Board of Regents when the Board of Regents of the University of Texas fired the University of Texas President in the 1940s. There really was a Pappy O’Daniel. He didn’t just exist and, oh, brother, where art thou, and this was a big brawl in Texas in the 1940s. It’s all reported in Willie Morris’s book North Toward Home. The AAUP was incensed about the political one-sidedness imposed by the right.

Today, there’s a growing political one-sidedness from the left and an absence of true diversity on too many university campuses, and I am glad that Students for Academic Freedom are putting the spotlight on this because I believe this is the greatest threat to broad public support for and funding for higher education in the United States. I was invited not long ago to go to Vanderbilt University and speak to President Bush’s Commission on Higher Education, and I made four or five points, and this was one of them.

Political one-sidedness from the left is as obnoxious as political one-sidedness from the right. Political one-sidedness is political one-sidedness no matter from what direction it comes. So, as my grandmother used to say, what is good for the goose is good for the gander, and the Students for Academic Freedom have a real important mission on their hands.

The idea of intellectual or academic freedom was first enshrined in the United States by Professor John Dewey, who co-founded the American Association of University Presidents, and here’s what he wrote in that association’s statement on academic freedom, not a bad one for the Students for Academic Freedom today. The purpose of this statement is to promote public understanding and support of academic freedom and tenure, an agreement upon procedures to assure them in colleges and universities, institutions of higher education are conducted for the common good. The common good depends upon the free speech for truth, and it’s free exposition. Academic freedom is essential to these purposes. Yet, today, we find that such freedom, that Dewey said was essential to the common good, is sorely lacking on many university campuses.

Some just dismiss this charge, say this is just anecdotal, not really true. But there’s a lot more to this charge of political one-sidedness than the academic community would like to admit.

How many conservative speakers are invited to deliver commencement addresses? You could count them on one hand. How many colleges even require courses in United States history today? How many even teach Western civilization? How many bright young faculty members at colleges of education are encouraged to earn dissertations in the failure of bilingual education or on the virtue of vouchers for poor kids or of charter schools to improve teaching or the importance of paying teachers more for teaching well to improve the quality of education?

So let me outline very quickly today what I believe are five examples of political one-sidedness and five things you can do about them.

One example, liberal professors outnumber conservative ones. Now, I’m going to assume that I’m not the main speaker at this conference. We’ll need to prove the case for political one-sidedness. You’re going to have a lot of other people here today who can do that. So I’m going to go pretty quickly over these. But liberal conservatives far outnumber conservative professors.

Now, the Washington Post reported on a study for the Political Journal Forum, which had surveyed university faculty and political beliefs, and they found 72% of professors self-identify as liberal, 15% as conservative, 50% as Democrats, and 11 as Republicans.

In elite institutions in the Ivy League, it is more lopsided — 80% liberal, 13% conservative. I’m glad to say at the University of Tennessee it was more Republican than Democrat, but that was a rare exception.

Two, textbooks and reading lists are often biased. You can come up with your own examples of that, but a good place to start is Diane Ravitch’s book, The Language Police. She points out that K-12 textbook companies hire sensitivity committees to sanitize their textbooks so nobody will be offended. And the result is that a word like American is removed for fear of offending those who might think that South Americans are American, too. Now, imagine a school that couldn’t use the word American in its teachings and textbooks. Words like firemen are considered to be gender-biased, so firefighter is the accepted alternative.

Number three, speech codes are stifling legitimate debate. This is according to the Freedom Forum First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University. More than 300 colleges and universities, it says, impose speech codes on students. The sentiment is laudable, but the effect is dangerous, and the courts have fairly consistently ruled against such codes.

Now, one recent example, sitting in this dorm room at the University of Pennsylvania, a college student looked out the window and saw two students engaged in what he described as — what might be described as provocative extracurricular activities. So he took a picture of the students, put it on his website, and were the students disciplined? No, the photographer was charged by the Office of Student Conduct with sexual harassment. One wonders who was harassing whom.

A fourth problem today, an example of one-sidedness, is that conservative campuses do not welcome Republican or conservative speakers, and when they do show up, they’re not very well treated, whether it’s custard crème pies for Ann Coulter at the University of Arizona or salad dressing thrown on Pat Buchanan at Western Michigan University or Bill Kristol’s crème pie in his face at Earlham College or David Horowitz at Butler University, this is also an indication of intellectual laziness. Rather than ask a difficult question, write an article in opposition, host an opposing speaker, liberal students are simply relying on stunts. But the point is the speakers aren’t invited.

Bill Bennett is a friend of mine. He was my predecessor — one of my predecessors as Education Secretary. He’s a respectable academic, head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, professor at the University of Texas, taught in their program for [Plan Two], which is their most outstanding students, when he was there. He almost never has been invited to speak at a commencement ceremony.

And, finally, another example, some degree programs won’t even pass you if you hold liberal views. The examples of that — Lemoyne College was ordered to readmit a student in the college of education because in a paper, he advocated corporal punishment in the classroom, and they wouldn’t graduate him because of those views.

Now, those and other examples are enough to form a sound basis for a movement to get your dander up and to cause you to want to change that immediately. But before I suggest a few things I think the Students for Academic Freedom could do, let me suggest what I suggest you should not do.

Don’t try to get the Congress to pass a law about academic freedom. Now, some advocate that. It’s tempting to do it. People are mad enough for it to happen. But what do you want writing the law? Ted Kennedy? Or someone from the far right? Or Barney Frank? I mean there are a lot of us up here, and we all have our ideas.

And you have to be careful what you ask for when you ask the United States Congress to govern your conduct.

Remember the example of the Puritans, who, when they came here, had been persecuted, and so the first thing they did was persecuted the people they found here. Do unto others what was done unto you.

Or the Republicans, we Republicans who were elected in 1994, promising that we’d go to Washington and stop unfunded mandates, stop telling people what to do from Washington, and as soon as we got here, many Republicans started telling people what to do from Washington, D.C.

In other words, my suggestion is stick to your principles in fighting to uphold your principles, and the principles of conservatives are autonomy, decentralism, a free market. And my view of our great university system in America is that 6,000 autonomous institutions have free marketplace of ideas, a place where free expression of diversity ought to be — it ought not to be over-regulated from Washington. So then what do you do about that? Well, here are some — five things to do.

One, engage in real debate. Bring in speakers with differing points of view. If you can’t get the faculty committee to invite a conservative speaker to your commencement, sponsor your own forum, and sponsor it on topics that usually aren’t well presented. A typical trick is to invite a so-called conservative who’s not very good to be against a liberal speaker who is pretty good. So you have the forum. You invite the speakers. And have good speakers from both sides. And have it on subjects that might not be the subject. If, for example, you’re the College of Education, sponsor a forum on bilingual education. Let both sides be heard. Sponsor a forum on charter schools or on vouchers or on paying teachers more for teaching well. That would be a real service to the school.

Number two, use the student newspaper. When I was at Vanderbilt University, I was editor of the student newspaper. The problem then wasn’t intellectual diversity; it was racial diversity. Vanderbilt was segregated. So I said making the admissions decisions based on race was wrong. That was an unpopular point of view. They had a referendum in the student body, and they voted, “We’ll continue to do that.”

Well, today, making decisions based on race is still wrong, and it’s still unpopular. In other words, try having a discussion about whether race-based scholarships are a good idea. But campuses ought to hear that from that point of view, and you could sponsor that forum, and many of you — or many of the people in your movement should be deeply involved with the campus newspaper or starting their own newspaper.

Number three, encourage conservatives and Republicans to become teachers and professors. Now, you may say, how can we do that? Not as hard as you might think. I was at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard for a year, just before I went into the Senate. Now, that’s not a bastion of conservatism or Republicanism. However, I did find that the dean of the school was pretty receptive to the argument, how are you going to be a leading or the leading school of government in a country where the Republican is government if you only produce Democrats? And Dean Nye, who was there when I was there, got busy recruiting Republican students and conservative students to apply for admission to the school.

Just a few months ago, the Kennedy School held a recruitment night at the Capitol Hill Club, a Republican-affiliated club here in Washington, and invited conservative, young Hill staffers who might want to pursue graduate studies. That’s the way big schools recruit athletes. That’s the way schools could recruit conservatives and Republicans to institutions where they are not. I don’t believe the George Bush School at the Texas A&M ought to be only for conservatives. I don’t think the Kennedy School ought to be just a refugee for — or just a place for refugees from the Clinton administration. And if you’re on that campus, you can approach the administration and ask them to do that.

Here’s an idea that I think has some real promise — evaluate professors and schools based on academic freedom. More and more schools today have students fill out a form at the end of the semester evaluating a course of the professor. That was my case when I was teaching my class at Harvard, and I tell you, I paid a lot of attention to that. I didn’t want to be poorly rated, and I wasn’t. But professors will pay attention to that, and I would suggest that part of any evaluation ought to be the balance or bias of the classroom when it comes to academic freedom. Was the professor open to different points of view? Were the readings balanced? What is the student’s opinion?

And if the school’s evaluation form doesn’t allow for this, I would suggest writing it in the margin and going to the academic dean and saying, “Why isn’t this part of the regular evaluation?” Maybe no one’s asked them about that. Maybe they’ll do it if you suggest it.

And for those in this audience, you might consider a U.S. News and World Report type of evaluation of different schools on the issue of academic freedom. You might call it a political balanced index. Don’t make it too political, make it one-side; make it balanced, make it respected, but rate the schools based on the real diversity of thought that exists in the classroom in those institutions. You might be surprised how many institutions would pay attention to that.

Finally, find the conservatives on your campus and learn from them. I saw a report that said that at Cambridge, where Harvard is, that 6% of the people who live in Cambridge call themselves Republicans. There’s probably not a place in the United States where there are so few Republicans and conservatives than Cambridge, Massachusetts. And most of the professors would call themselves liberal, and most of them would vote Democratic and give money to Democratic candidates. However, if you are a student at that institution, you can find plenty of strong conservative professors if you’ll just look for them.

There is, for example, Harvey Mansfield, one of the most important constitutional law professors anywhere in the world today. He has the best book [indiscernible], and he’s just produced a new book on manliness. You will find once a week at Harvard, in Mansfield’s class, Bill Kristol, the editor of the Weekly Standard.

You will find Samuel Huntington, who was President of the American Political Science Association, now sort of reviled by some of his fellows in academe because of two books he wrote about the clash of civilizations and a new book called Who Are We?

You can find the leading advocate of school choice, Paul Pederson. Now, they’re in the minority, but they’re there. And they can be found, and they can be invited to classes, and they can be featured in forums, and their printings and their work can be spread among students who might not know about them.

And here’s a bonus idea. Designate your contributions. Invite people with money who are conservative and who are concerned about this to give to the alternative student newspaper, to designate their contribution to a balanced series of forums, to create chairs for United States history in Western civilization.

Lots of money is given to higher education by lots of people who would like to see a diverse academic freedom on campus, and that’s one way to do it.

So let me conclude on a little more of an upbeat note. For conservatives who might be students, I wouldn’t fret too much because you’re getting a better education at most campuses than your liberal friends. Why would that be? Because if you’re a conservative on most American campuses, your views are constantly challenged, and you have to be sharp to succeed. The moderates get the next-best education, and the liberals get the worst because they’re constantly having said back to them what they already think. That’s not much of an education.

I’m not surprised that most university campuses and faculties express liberal views, vote Democratic, and give to Democratic campaigns. Campuses all around the world have historically been left-wing. That’s the nature of the communities. In fact, it is said that one reason why Japanese doesn’t have more distinguished universities is the government, after Japan opened to the world, considered universities to be inherently subversive and that it’s best to keep them down.

So I’m not surprised that there is a left-wing bent on most campuses, but I am surprised and I’m very disappointed that true diversity of thought is discouraged in the name of a preferred brand of diversity. This one-sidedness is not good for students. It’s not good for the pursuit of truth. It undermines broad public support for higher education.

I don’t think you’ll find anyone in the Congress who’s a bigger supporter of the American university than I am, at least I try to be. Right now, I’m leading an effort to try to help make sure we keep our advantage in science and technology in the United States by properly funding our colleges and universities and research institutes and graduates. I’ve been president of a major university. I respect and value our higher education institutions. I think they’re the best in the world, and they’re an important source of our high standard of living.

But I do believe, as I said to the President’s Commission on Higher Education, that the greatest threat to the American university today — to broad public support for the American university today is political one-sidedness from the left, and that’s a serious threat because if you look at the funding trends for higher education, federal funding is up, but state funding is flat, and tuition is up as a result of that. And constantly inferior funding by the states of higher education will produce substandard universities, and that will produce substandard incomes for the rest of us. So for the strength of the university, for the expression of free thought, your movement needs to succeed.

So I would say to the Students for Academic Freedom — evaluate your professors; sponsor your own forums; designate your contributions; search out conservative teachers and professors; edit your own newspapers, or start one if it’s necessary; create a respected political balance index and distribute it around the country; have some fun; do some good; restore real diversity of opinion; and remind the liberals that political one-sidedness is bad for truth, undermines support for American universities; and then when it comes to academic freedom, what my grandmother would say at this conference if she’d put it all together would be this — what is good for the left-wing goose is good for the right-wing gander. Thank you very much.

Friday, April 7, 2006, 11:00am
First National Academic Freedom Conference

Participants: David Horowitz, Rep. Sam Rohrer (PA), Sol Stern, Colorado High School Student Sean Allen

DAVID HOROWITZ: Okay, I want to begin by pointing to this sign, which is the theme of our conference and the theme of our campaign. And since people seem to have a hard time reading the English language these days, I want to point out that it says, “Take politics out of the classroom.” Not “Take liberal politics out of the classroom.” Not “Take malice politics out of the classroom.” And it doesn’t say “Put conservative politics in the classroom.” It doesn’t say take Democratic politics out of the classroom, and it doesn’t say put Republican politics in. It says, “Take politics out of the classroom.” This is not a left, right, or oughtn’t to be a left against right battle. This is not a battle about replacing a Democratic Party indoctrination program with a Republican Party indoctrination program.

This is about what’s appropriate in the classroom. And politics, political advocacy by teachers and by professors, violates fundamental principals of academic freedom, which were first articulated and devised by the American Association of University Professors and have since been abandoned, apparently, by the AAUP. The AAUP should be supporting this campaign, but from day one, before the campaign was actually publicly launched, the AAUP has not only turned its back on the campaign but has also turned against it.

And I have to read the simple English and repeat it because there’s been a malicious campaign of distortion and lies, mainly sponsored by the ACLU and the teacher unions, to present — to misrepresent — this campaign as an attempt to fire left-wing professors. I defended Ward Churchill in the Denver press two weeks after my friend Governor Bill Owens called for his firing. I defended his free-speech rights.

I have filed an amicus brief for the racist and anti-Semitic professor Leonard Jeffries of the CUNY system because having made the predictable but incredible mistake of hiring Professor Jeffries in the first place, the university attempted to escape from its embarrassment by firing him over a speech he gave in Albany, which was a disgusting attack on American Jews and white people.

But we do have a First Amendment in this country, and I am a First Amendment liberal. I am the liberal in this battle, and so I defended his free speech rights. You cannot fire a professor for uttering reprehensible comments in public without violating the fundamental rights of this country.

I want to welcome the teachers union representatives who are here, even though they have maligned me and distorted what I have done and actually have a whole website that they’ve devoted to malicious lies about this campaign.

I do not have legislation. I’ve not sponsored legislation which would create a political oversight of universities and do not intend to have such legislation. In fact, at present, the only legislation that has ever been presented in any state or in the federal government is not law; it’s resolutions.

This is a perfectly liberal doctrine — and I mean that in the classic sense, liberal as the AAUP used to be in the 1940s, when I forecasted the right-wing domination of that university, which Senator Alexander mentioned. It is that there should be two sides to an issue presented in a class, that a student shouldn’t be harassed for their political views — really simple things, that if you get any person in this room, including the representatives from the unions who are here, they will agree with this as well. I think that some of the examples that were brought up this morning — I don’t think that anybody in this room would disagree — were abuses of the classroom.

Yet, the little clause in the Higher Education Act was declared by the unions a casus belli. They would go to war against this clause. They wanted it out. There were four in there. Hundreds of pages of the education bill, and there were four items they wanted out, and this was one of them. And I urged members of the unions who are here to reconsider a position that they’ve taken, which is self-destructive to their own interests.

You heard Senator Alexander. Senator Alexander is not a right-wing extremist in the Senate. Senator Alexander has a long record of supporting higher education and education generally, and he’s the Chair of the Subcommittee on K-12 Education, and his words were really simple — “The greatest threat to school funding is the one-sided dominance of the political left.” And that is not the same as saying that it is the presence of left-wing teachers and professors. To repeat, I have defended left-wing teachers and professors, and I have never called for the firing of any one of them. The issue is what is taught in the classroom, not what the teacher’s political views are. Every teacher has a right as a citizen to their views and has a right, actually, to express them in public. It’s what goes on in the classroom.

If the unions are going to take the position of defending outrageous violations of academic standards, of academic procedure, of academic principles, they will expose the entire educational system to the gale of political dispute and forces in this country. You will make — you are already making — the schools political.

It is disgraceful that high school teachers across this country have encouraged their students to go out and demonstrate during school hours on a political issue that divides the country, and within which they are in a small minority. Probably 70% of the American public would like to see something done about our borders. Every country in the world defends its borders — Mexico, most of all.

But whatever your position is on the borders issue, if you engaged the public schools in political battles the way you are doing now, and the unions are behind these moves, you will destroy the role that protects the school, and it’s the role that is across the funding lines. You cannot expect taxpayers to pay for their children to go to schools in order to be politically recruited by people who don’t share their politics.

So, just in the pure self-interest of the teachers of this country and of the schools of this country, you need to reacquaint yourselves with the Principles of Academic Freedom as defined by the American Association of University Professors in 1915, 1940, and 1970 statements. Re-read them, re-examine them, and change your attitudes towards the Academic Bill of Rights and this Academic Freedom Movement, which is not directed at your politics. But it is directed at the abuses of your members in universities and in our K-12 schools today.

Let me just point out, again, that in the interest of ecumenical tolerance and the goals for liberalism, I welcome the unions who are here today, and I’m going to present the next panel.

We’ll have William Scheuerman on it, who is a union leader, who has defamed and abused me, but I met him at the Temple hearings, and asked him if he would invite me, and I said I would invite him. I have invited him to speak.

And Terry Hartle, who is the Executive Director of the American Council on Education. I’ve been doing this campaign for two years. I have never had an invitation from any teachers’ body, from any union, from any academic department, from any school just to discuss these issues.

It is the unions that have made this into a war, a war destructive most of all to their interests. Anyway, this is an invitation to the civilized among you to come to the table and discuss issues that should be of common interest to all of us. I’d like to say that I want to exempt from this Illinois Academe John Wilson, who is here, who has done the kind of debate in a fair-minded manner.

This panel and this conference is about K-12 education, where the abuses are even more serious than they are in the university, and this is kind of day one of an academic freedom movement in the K-12 schools.

I want to introduce, first, Sol Stern, who has written a book called Free Schools?

SOL STERN: Breaking Free.

DAVID HOROWITZ: Breaking Free. Breaking Free.

SOL STERN: Public School Lessons and the Imperative of School Choice.

DAVID HOROWITZ: Thank you. Public School Lessons and the Imperative of School Choice. He’s a expert, a fellow of the Manhattan Institute and a very, very old friend, and he will just give you a picture of the tip of the iceberg in the K-12 area.

SOL STERN: This is K-12. I’m going to do a little show-and-tell. Original documents. Can everyone hear me? Yeah?

Well, thanks, David, for inviting me and thanks for being on the ramparts. It’s great that we’re on the ramparts again together. The last time we were was at Ramparts magazine a long time ago up until the late ’60s, 1970.

But, actually, I go back with David even further than that, sort of admitting to our advanced years. We were graduate students together in Berkeley in the early ’60s. We started a new left magazine together called Root and Branch. David then went off to travel around the world. I stayed in Berkeley and got involved in the free speech movement. Remember that? FSM, 1964.

Basically, that was the last time that the left stood for free speech. We did a great thing, you know. We opened up a university system to diversity, free speech. Students weren’t allowed to organize for political activities on the campus. The people in that movement did it for very good motives — namely the basic idea of academic freedom for everyone on the campus — and it was a victorious battle through rationality, through convincing the faculties, through convincing the administration that the university should be a free marketplace for all points of view in the classroom and outside of the classroom, in the community as well.

And the victorious new left, unfortunately — it’s one of the reasons why I’m no longer on the left — then went off on the long march through the institutions, and what did they create? They created an academic gulag in which there is no free speech for certain groups, and that’s kind of a tragedy.

But I’m not here to talk about higher education. My assignment is to talk about K-12 education. And to quote a famous American, “Houston, we have a problem.” And in some ways, it’s a bigger problem than the situation on the campuses. And one of the reasons it’s a bigger problem is that at least you have some traction on the campuses because the culture of the universities pays lip service to the idea of open debate, of diversity, intellectual diversity, of scholarship, objective scholarship determining what the truth is on various questions.

There are some exceptions, like Ward Churchill, and he’s such a perfect foil because he’s someone who shows that, despite the lip service, what goes on is, in fact, indoctrination.

But the problem in K-12 education is that there is no lip service or openness and no academic diversity. In fact, most of the professional institutions involved in professional development, training of teachers, the professional teacher organizations, and the education schools, the organizations like the National Council of Teachers in English, National Council of Social Studies, have a doctrine of favoring indoctrination in the elementary and high schools. I call it indoctrination. They probably wouldn’t.

But there’s no question that there is a curriculum fostered in the education schools and the training of teachers, which trains teachers to advocate in the classroom for “social justice” and “peace” and “multiculturalism.”

As I say, there’s not even a question about New York State standards for certification involving social studies. You read down the list: a reflective paper on social justice, exit requirements, social justice action projects.

Now, some people would say, “Well, what’s wrong with that? Aren’t we all for peace? Aren’t we all for social justice? When we talk about Martin Luther King and all the great people in history who fought for wonderful causes, for peace, Gandhi’s king, what’s wrong with telling kids about that?”

Well, there’s nothing wrong with that except that there’s a specific definition of social justice. And to show it, let’s do a thought experiment. Suppose some of the kids — some of the college students that are here today decided to go to an education school, and they took a class in advocacy for social justice, and they said, “Yeah, we’re for social justice. For example, I think I’m going to write a paper on, and I think I want to go into my classroom and tell the kids or get a discussion going with the kids on the idea that democratic capitalism is the most just system ever developed in human history. It’s produced the greatest equity, the greatest affluence.”

How far do you think that student would go? I doubt that under these standards and at a place like Teachers College, the most prestigious teacher college in the country, or one of them, that they would go very far. Yeah, we’re in favor of peace. Everyone’s in favor of peace. But suppose that student, that same student, stood up in the class on peace studies or on peace in the curriculum and suggested that they will do a paper and then, in their classroom practice, tell the students that the best way to keep the peace is to keep America militarily superior and keep the peace and to deter aggression. And, therefore, why don’t we bring some military heroes into the classroom to tell those kids about how we keep the peace through military strength? Do you think that that student would go very far at Teachers College? I don’t think so. And if you do, you want to go and put a bet on it and carry out this experiment, let’s do it.

So I don’t think this is innocent and neutral, but how did we get there? This has not been around forever in the education schools. It’s something that happened around the same time that the new left made its famous march through the institutions. Some people on the left went into education.

I want to just illustrate a few of the sort of major figures in this. And I would say the founding father of the social justice indoctrination or the social justice movement in K-12 education is Jonathan Kozol, who is very influential. Most people know him because he’s written a number of best-selling books charging that there’s racism in American education because kids in urban schools don’t get as much money as white kids in the suburbs. That could easily be refuted. It’s amazing, though, that his books, which state the same thing over and over again, sell — they all become bestsellers. They’re absolute “must reading” in the education schools.

But most people don’t realize that Kozol is also somewhat of a pedagogue, and it started in, of all places, Castro’s Cuba. In the mid-’70s, the Castro government invited Jonathan Kozol to come and look at their education system, and he wrote a book when he came out called Children of the Revolution, which was a tribute to the indoctrination system of Fidel Castro and how the communist government educated the kids in that system. He just went wild about these wonderful schools, one of them the Lenin School, which trains most of the future leaders of the country, and thought it was wonderful and compared it to the terrible alienating public schools in the United States. Here, everyone was on the same page.

And he came away from that experience with this idea that all education is really indoctrination. In a socialist country, it’s socialist indoctrination. And in a capitalist country, it’s indoctrination for the capitalist system for those who dominate the system.

Then he wrote a pedagogical book called On Being a Teacher in the late ’70s (a new edition came out in ’93), and it’s widely used in education schools. A typical chapter is titled, “Disobedience Instruction.” And he recommends that a teacher might line in opposite columns on a ditto sheet certain statements published in their textbooks praising the virtues of acquiescence, of obedience, and of positive ideas. And on the other side, the courtroom testimony of those ordinary but pathetic figures who went into Watergate to steal and to kill, among other reasons, because they lacked the power to say no. This, according to Kozol, is what teachers should do.

Or they could use Adolf Eichmann and quote Eichmann and then point out that Eichmann’s own preparation for obedient behavior was received in German public schools. Teachers might point out as well that our own schools were modeled on the German system more than a century ago and that both systems have quite similar objectives, the education of “good Germans” or “good citizens,” as we in the United States would say. So it’s all the same, Eichmann and American education.

And just about the time that Kozol was writing this, and as I said, it’s required reading in many graduate schools, someone came up from the underground — literally, the underground. A fellow named Billy Ayers, who was a leader of the Weatherman Underground, spent the entire 1970s doing things like putting bombs, or trying to, in the bathroom of the Pentagon, not very far from here. I don’t remember the exact details. Dave is more of an expert on that.

And in wonderful America, you could have a second life. So he appeared — he came out of the underground. He got some fancy lawyer whose father is a very wealthy industrialist in Chicago, a pillar of the capitalist system, and he didn’t serve a day in jail. The guy was a terrorist, an unrepentant terrorist.

So what do you do in your second act? Well, he enrolled in Teachers College, and he got his doctorate at Teachers College in early childhood education. And what has he done since? He’s become quite a figure, a major figure in American teacher preparation. He is now the distinguished — I don’t remember which capitalist donated money to the education school to endow his chair — but he’s a distinguished professor of early childhood education at the University of Illinois in Chicago.

But he also has tremendous influence. He’s written several books. Dreadfully boring, terrible, tedious books but which extol the idea of teaching for social justice. And he’s had tremendous influence in his alma mater.

He inspired Teachers College. If you read Teachers College bulletins, you’ll see constant encomiums to ex-Weatherman Billy Ayers and his teaching for social justice ideas. And he inspired Teachers College Press to do an entire series on teaching. Now, again, Teachers College Press is the major publishing house in American teacher education. So there’s this whole series of books on teaching for social justice in different fields. One of the volumes in this series is called Teaching Science for Social Justice — How might Science Education Reflect the Values of a Socially Just and Democratic Society? Let me read you a typical paragraph from Teaching Science for Social Justice:

“Science education for social justice is transformative for all participants. Science pedagogy framed around social justice concerns can become a medium to transform individuals, schools, communities, the environment, and science itself in ways that promote equity and social justice. Creating a science education that is transformative” — it’s a wonderful word. It’s always used by K-12 educators — “implies not only how science is a political activity” — let me repeat, “how science is a political activity” — I repeat it because this is in italics in the text — “but also the ways in which students might see and use science and science education in ways transformative of the institutional and interpersonal power structures that play a role in their life.”

Now, you might say, oh, come on. This is so unbelievably stupid that it will fall of its own weight. Nobody can take this seriously, right? It’s crazy. Maybe Ward Churchill would, but I doubt that even Ward Churchill would. Not even he is that stupid. So how could it be significant?

Well, one of the authors — this was authored by two people — one of them is an Associate Professor of Science Education, Department of Mathematics, Science and Technology at Teachers College. And the other author is the Director of Region One Science Education for the New York City Department of Education. There are 10 regions in this biggest district in the country, biggest school district in the country. And she supervises science education for over 100 schools.

Let me tell you a few more things about this wonderful big school system that we have in New York City and how institutionalized this is. If you’re a parent in Harlem — in the middle of Harlem on 133rd Street and Amsterdam Avenue, you can send your child to an elementary school, a K-5 elementary school called the Don Pedro Albizu Campos School. Now, on the website, you will read Don Pedro Albizu Campos was the heroic Puerto Rican nationalist who fought for his people, fought for social justice. Let me — for the young ones in the audience, let me remind you that Don Pedro Albizu Campos was a Puerto Rican terrorist who dispatched two assassins to try to kill President Harry Truman in 1950. And they got up the steps of Blair House — what is it, a few blocks from here? — and President Truman heard the commotion and stuck his head out the window. Those were the days before we had a lot of secret service guys around the president. One terrorist was killed. One police officer was killed.

Well, after the child graduates from the Albizu Campos School, he can go a few blocks down the street to a junior high school, the local junior high school. That’s called the Powell School for Law and Social Justice. Now, it’s not Colin Powell the school is named after. I doubt that any New York City school will ever be named after Colin Powell. It’s Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., whose commitment to law was that he was censured by the U.S. Congress overwhelmingly for stealing and appropriating funds, and he evaded the law for a few years.

And there are many schools like this, social justice schools. In Brooklyn, there are two Paul Robeson schools, named for the winner of the Stalin Peace Prize. Not all schools are named after communists or winners of the Stalin Peace Prize. That’s a little bit of hyperbole to use that, I admit.

I mean most of the schools are named after perfectly reasonable and wonderful leaders, like there are three John F. Kennedy schools, two Robert F. Kennedy schools, two Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis schools, but there’s no Eisenhower School. There’s no Ronald Reagan School. The last Republican president that had a school named after him was Teddy Roosevelt. The last military leader to have a school named after him was William Tecumseh Sherman.

What does that tell us? I think it tells us that institutionally, this whole idea, this bias towards the left, the social justice indoctrination is very much alive. It’s intuitional.

Now, let me finish up. I know I’ve overstayed my limits. But the point is that ideas have consequences. At the present time, there are a lot of bad ideas about classroom teaching percolating around the nation’s education schools. And the distinction between education and indoctrination between teaching students how to think, not what to think, is being lost in our K-12 education system. And it’s those bad ideas that produce someone like Jay Bennish, the Colorado high school teacher whose political rant in the classroom was taped by our friend Sean Allen here.

As David pointed out, this is going to lead to a disaster for public education. And while we discuss and debate with our friends from the teacher unions about whether we ought to have legislation, I want to propose something. I can’t believe that the AFT, for example, would defend any of this, this teaching for social justice by an ex-terrorist who probably wants to relive his youth again vicariously through some of the kids he educates. Al Shanker certainly wouldn’t stand for this.

So I put out a challenge to you. We don’t need legislation. Why don’t the two teacher unions, the National Council of Social Studies, and the National Council of Teachers of English, go to NCATE, the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education, and say to them, “No more.” It’s not a question of whether you’re in favor of teaching for social justice; you should not make it a requirement. And you should say that you will not accredit an education school that makes it a requirement for teachers to teach for social justice in the schools.

Don’t forget: We are all part of this public school system. It’s our system. Public schools are owned by the American people, and we don’t have a situation like Ward Churchill said the other night, “Well, okay, maybe I indoctrinate in my classroom, but you students have a choice. No one is compelled to take my class,” which is true, but our children are compelled to go to school. And if we are forced to send our children — if I was forced to send my child to Ward Churchill, Jr., or Jay Bennish, I would consider that to be tyranny. It’s tyranny. And it’s unnecessary.

And I think the tension over that is going to affect the very institution that the defenders of the public schools who say, for example, that we shouldn’t have vouchers because, God forbid, it’s going to undermine this great institution that is bringing us all together, that’s inculcating our youth in the fundamentals of American democracy. Why don’t you stand for that if, in fact, you’re in favor of the public schools as an institution? Make them really an institution that inculcates our common values, not the values of an elite group of pretend revolutionaries. Thank you.

DAVID HOROWITZ: Alan Coors made what’s probably the profoundest remark about this issue that we’re confronting here and this battle. And that is that the schools — he said it of universities, but it’s true of public schools too — “They do in private what they cannot defend in public.” That’s why we’re going to win this campaign because, right now, unless the teacher unions and the radical professors they represent and they change heart and mind on this issue, they have an entirely indefensible position that gets presented to the American public. And that is why the next speaker has had such a huge impact already on the whole conflict over our school systems.

Sean Allen has had more of an influence than he probably realizes.
Just to show you how far-reaching this phenomenon is. I have a niece who goes to St. Lucy’s Junior High School. Maybe it’s a high school — St. Lucy’s High School — in the inland empire in Glendora, California. And one of the students took a tape recorder to class after Sean’s experience, and parents discovered that the teacher in a religious studies class in a catholic high school had gone into a rant on the Iraq War and George Bush, and parents were exercised about it. So what was the school’s response? Not to discipline the teacher but to institute a search of every student going into every class in that school, search their knapsacks, search them.

Now, you might say, where’s the ACLU? If you’ll recall, when people tried to institute metal detectors to protect inner city, mainly poor black and Hispanic children, from violent gang attacks in their schools, the ACLU thought that this was a violation of the Constitution and went right up to the Supreme Court to stop the search of students. I have yet to hear from the ACLU on this issue.

And let me tell you again. The response, of course, of the defenders of the status quo is that this is some kind of snitching. What this is is holding teachers accountable. Teachers want to do in private what they cannot defend in public when they’ve got an audience of 14-year-olds, who if the 14-year-olds go out to the media, the media will jump on the 14-year-olds — or 16-year-olds — and question their reliability. The brilliance of the tape recorder. Of course, the left likes to use a tape recorder when it’s Rodney King or, you know, so forth.

Why is what goes on in the classroom, a lecture by a teacher in the classroom, private? It isn’t. It’s a matter of holding teachers accountable for what they do and school systems accountable for what they do. And, again, you will lose this battle if you insist on presenting this as what it’s not and not respecting students who don’t maybe agree with you politically but who have a right, as students, to their point of view. That’s the American way.

I want to introduce now Sean Allen to tell you his story.

SEAN ALLEN: Good morning. I’d like to start off by giving a couple thank-yous. First, to Mr. David Horowitz and the Academic Freedom Board, for just giving me the honor of coming here and being able to speak. That’s amazing; doctor Walter Williams, who really gave the first light to this dire and pressing issue; and the rest of my friends and family, who have given me the strength to carry on in this situation.

I truly believe it has been a life-changing and amazing experience. It’s hard for me to believe that just two months ago, I was a normal high school student attending classes at a school that I thought I would spend the rest of my high school career in. When I really realized the impact of what I had done, I could pinpoint a certain time when I was meeting on a day during the whole controversy with my youth group leader at a restaurant, and I had walked up to the restaurant, and something had caught my eye that was written on a car. And I look over, and written on a car in paint is “Shawn Allen sucks. Let Jay stay.” And I felt weird about that, and I went in, and I talked to my youth group leader, who is also a conservative, and I said, “This is amazing that people are doing stuff like this.” He said, “Welcome to being a conservative.”

But, you know, throughout all the hardships, I still keep the same mindset that deep in my heart, I still feel that exposing Jay Bennish was the right thing to do. My conscience would not allow me to go on with listening to a high school teacher give politically charged rants to students without question. And after contacting the school about what my family and I believed to be a pressing and timely situation, we received little or no response back.

We then contacted Mr. Mike Rosen, who upon acquiring the tape also contacted the school. After two weeks, we had received close to zero word from the school and felt that the next step had to be taken. And on the following Wednesday, when I went on The Mike Rosen Show for the first time, my life was spun into a new world.

But through all the hardships and the situation, I’ve come out of the situation with a greatly positive outlook on the future, not only the future of myself but the future of the Academic Bill of Rights and things like this.

Since the controversy, I began attending the Cherry Creek High School in Colorado. The students and staff of the school have treated me incredibly well and made me feel more at home than I ever thought possible. My education in my new world geography class has been, as you can imagine, completely different from the teachings of Jay Bennish.

But I mean as so many high school teachers do in modern education, Bennish pushed his idealistic political views on impressionable high school students. As I understand from students currently in the class, Bennish has ceased in indoctrinating students. I believe this is a great stride in ridding a teacher’s political politics from a class. However, a long road lies ahead with many obstacles in the path.

With the help of Mr. Horowitz and others who sit before us today, a national debate has been sparked concerning content taught in high school and college classrooms. After my situation received national light, I was flooded with e-mails, letters, and phone calls from my peers and parents of my peers concerning similar situations with their teachers. With these, it is becoming increasingly evident that there is a growing problem in classrooms all across the country.

I’ve advised those who have contacted me to take action concerning their teachers by contacting the school first concerning the situation, and if appropriate action is not taken, contacting myself or the local news. However, in order to solve this problem, we can’t simply deal with this on a case-by-case basis. Instead, we must get to the root of the problem, which will take time and mean a long and hard struggle. Every year, American citizens pay taxes for the education of their children. They should not be fearful of what teachers tell their children. They should not have to worry about students being exposed to one-sided political rants that are not only inappropriate subject matter that is not fit for class, but also most of the time, it’s actually incorrect. Every second spent talking about subject matter not fit for the class is a second spent not giving students proper education necessary at the collegiate level and levels beyond that and is also an American tax dollar wasted.

Indoctrination of myself and my peers is an infection inside the public schools and is a great disservice to the future leaders of America.

I would like to close with a quote from a personal hero of mine, Winston Churchill, not to be confused with Ward Churchill. W. Churchill, everybody thinks it’s Ward. He said, “Never give in, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to the convictions of honor and good sense. Never yield the force, and never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.”

I stand before you today asking for your help and the help of everybody to end this, to end teachers’ one-sided political rants in classrooms, and not only that, to end politics in classrooms in general because it is not appropriate when you’re giving a one-sided political rant, especially when you have to take a mandatory class. It is indoctrination as a whole, and it should be stopped. Thank you.

DAVID HOROWITZ: Sean Allen has begun and launched a national movement by his act to restore educational integrity to our school system and to liberate the schools from political ideologues who want to pervert its democratic mission. Therefore, since we are launching a movement, I am going to present an award every year to a student like Sean Allen who is leading this fight. And the first award is going to Sean. And Sean knows that. What he doesn’t know is that I have named this award the Sean Allen Award.

DAVID HOROWITZ: Do you want to read it, Sean?

SEAN ALLEN: To Sean Allen — it’s hard to read — Sean Allen, the first recipient of the Sean Allen Award for exemplary courage in defending academic values and opposing political indoctrination in our schools presented by Students for Academic Freedom.

DAVID HOROWITZ: They do in private what they can’t defend in public. That is really the gist of whatever legislative moves we’ve made.

Gib Armstrong is a former marine who served on Mogadishu and who was approached at a Republican Party picnic by a constituent who is an Air Force veteran, who told him that she had gone back to a state university to complete her education and had to sit in a physics course and listen to her professor rant against the military and against America and America’s war in Iraq, and she felt that was inappropriate. Not that she wanted some left-wing loon to be fired; she just felt it was inappropriate in a physics class. Surely, all sides of this issue can agree that that is inappropriate.

But, unfortunately, at this point, that is not the case. And so Representative Armstrong wrote and got passed legislation creating an Academic Freedom Committee — Subcommittee of the Pennsylvania House on Academic Freedom to hold hearings on what exactly is going on on our campuses.

And Representative Armstrong introduced me to our next speaker, Representative Sam Rohrer, who is the Chairman of the Subcommittee on K-12 education, and is here today to make an announcement of what he intends to do about the situation in the K-12 schools.

SAM ROHRER: Thank you, David. It is a privilege for me to be a part of this new initiative in the K-12. And, Sol, I want to thank you for your work, and Sean, for playing a big part in bringing things to light in this area.

I’ve been in the legislature for 14 years, on our Education Committee for that length of time, and have been involved in a wide range of educational issues since the early ’90s.

Back when I went into office, in 1992 in Pennsylvania, there was the leading grassroots educational issue afoot. We engaged in much debate within the legislature and caused some changes to be made in an area of change in curriculum in Pennsylvania education, and, in fact, it went beyond into other states, and it was a thing that now is distant in the past, but it was called outcomes-based education, if you remember that.

The major concern of folks then — I was included in that — was that there was a shift underway that took and put the emphasis on effective aspect of education, not focusing on how a child should think but more clearly indoctrinating. That was the issue. It was a whole part of outcomes-based education — I mean Goals 2000 and then all the way through.

So this has some roots that go way back. I don’t go back nearly as far as David and Saul do, and I have profited significantly from their knowledge of looking into the past, but everything we deal with in education has a history and has roots.

In my tenure in office, I have toured and been in dozens and dozens and dozens of schools across the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. I have interviewed dozens of young people, and from time to time, in fact, yes, do hear and am aware of things, not quite as egregious and as notable, perhaps, as what Sean engaged, and which certainly didn’t become as public.

But are these things occurring? There is no question that they’re occurring. I don’t know to what extent, though. That is one thing we now need to find out in Pennsylvania, and I think, somewhat capitalizing on the endeavors of the hearings that Representative Armstrong, to which David referred, has been holding across the Commonwealth, that endeavor has already borne great fruit. There are many within our legislature who really opposed, to some extent, forming a committee to investigate the kind of things that are occurring in our college classroom, feeling, in fact, that things were not occurring, that it was an unnecessary waste of time, and all of that.

However, I can say that due to some of the testimony that has been given and some of the opposition letters that have been written by certain faculty from institutions across the Commonwealth, it has caused a great many members to weigh in in defense and say, “Well, if that is what you say and that is how you think, then whereas I was on the fence, I am no longer on the fence. We have a problem in Pennsylvania.” That’s a good thing.

And from that extent, we believe, and what I intend to do is to shine some light and for us to hold in the K-12 area similar-type hearings across our Commonwealth to see, in fact, to what extent, where, and how.

Now, we know things are occurring in curriculum. Are these things infused within curriculum? Yes, they are. Do we know and have we identified in the past that certain things are infused even within testing standards? Yes, they are. It is now time to look into this.

We believe as a legislature that we have a fiduciary, if none other, responsibility in Pennsylvania to put a frame of reference on it, and we spend about $18 billion a year on K-12 public education. That is no small piece of change. And the cost of education is doubling in our state every 10 years, increasing at twice the rate of inflation, and it is breaking the back of our system. And when David observes that we need the help of some who perhaps have historically withstood, and by that, I mean some of our union friends, of which I have many in Pennsylvania, I have reached out, and I said, “You folks need to help because what you will see is a collapse of the entire system of public education, if nothing else, from the financial perspective.” We cannot afford to put more money into it from the Commonwealth perspective, and the taxpayers are broke in our state.

And there are numerous reasons for that, but involved within all of this is really the standpoint of when you spend so much money and your kids are still graduating very low on the totem pole, there is, in fact, something not right, and we do need to look. So within that fiduciary responsibility and within the aspect of now picking up off of what we’ve learned through the hearings on the college level, and obviously hearing what Sean has brought to light, it helps to bring this thing into perspective and say, you know what? We can no longer hope. We can no longer just wish. We have a responsibility.

And from a legislative perspective, that is how we intend to go about looking at this issue. And over the next period of months, we hope to be dealing with a wide range of folks in schools and teachers and students and parents to get a real handle and say, all right, really, what’s happening here, because I doubt seriously that what we find in Pennsylvania will be any different than what is occurring in most other states.

So with that, we look forward to working with many of you as we go forward and building up on what has been done really for the sake of our students and what they learn and for the sake of the next generation of young people who are going to be called upon to lead this country. Thank you, David.

DAVID HOROWITZ: Before we take questions to the panel, I want to introduce two other legislators who are here. There may be three of them. Is Larry Mumper still here? Senator Mumper from Ohio was here last night.

Representative Mary Pilcher Cook from the state of Kansas is a leader of our academic freedom movement there.

And Senator Dennis Baxley from Florida is a leader of our academic freedom movement there.

I want to say something about these legislators. These are very, very courageous people. I have learned in this campaign, first of all, of the viciousness of the opposition. People who supported Stalin when he was killing millions of people have compared me to Stalin, Mao Zedong, of course, Joe McCarthy, Adolf Hitler. They have misrepresented the movement.

This movement has never called for the restriction of free speech and instead has defended free speech. This is a movement which is based on the AAUP’s own principles, and yet, the AAUP and the ACLU have denounced the very principles that are still enshrined. You can see them on the AAUP website, and they’re in every university’s academic freedom principles. But while it’s never pleasant to be slandered, I don’t have to get elected, and these fine people do. And I can tell you this is a very deep and broad movement. If I had twice the staff, I could be in twice the states. But there is no state in the union where I will not find any — is John Perry here? Well, we also had a representative from Massachusetts last night, although the odds are pretty great in Massachusetts, where there are 127 legislators and 16 — or is it 21 Republicans. I mean they increased five seats since the last time I saw him.

But this is a sleeping giant, this movement. This is a huge grassroots movement in formation, and while I’ve said some harsh things, not nearly as harsh as the unions have said about me in this campaign, I urged them when they leave here to rethink their positions. If you have a maximalist position that’s indefensible on scrutiny, you could say all you like, that David Horowitz and Academic Bill of Rights is going to drive liberals out of the school system and hire conservatives and impose state controls on education. But if people actually read the Bill of Rights, if they read the statements that I and others have made before these legislative committees, and if they look at what the legislative committees are actually doing, which is their simple responsibility as representatives of the taxpaying public to find out what’s happening, if people read those, they will know who the liars are, and the opposition campaign will be discredited.

And our problem at this point has just been a media blockage. Last night on his program Alan Colmes asked me, “Aren’t you imposing legislative controls on universities in Ohio?” The reality is that the legislation that we propose had the verbatim language of the AAUP about not having controversial speech in the classroom that’s irrelevant to the subject, verbatim from the AAUP. That was the legislation. It was actually just a resolution. It was never passed because the universities — the presidents of universities who are fundraisers, first and last and always — understand their position as indefensible, so they approached Senator Mumper and asked him if he would withdraw the legislation if they put in place the American Council on Education’s statement, which was a response to what we have done, and we fully support what it asks for.

And so the universities are now putting in place the policies. They’re enforcing policies they should have been enforcing before, that students shall not be discriminated against on the basis of their politics and that diversity, intellectual diversity, is essential to a higher education.

And Senator Mumper and the legislators are just watching to see that they do what they say they will do. There is nobody who understands that who will object to it.

But Alan Colmes and members of the press don’t understand it. There was a vicious AP story in the state of Pennsylvania, and all these little local papers, comparing the committee to the McCarthy hearings, which is idiotic and, in its way, a bigger lie than McCarthy himself ever told.

Right now, we haven’t gotten through this press screen, but we will sooner or later. And this press conference is one attempt to do that.

All right. Questions?

11:00 PRESS CONFERENCE Q&A

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: [Inaudible] Sean to bring tape recorders to class?

DAVID HOROWITZ: Absolutely. Look, the issue here is accountability. It’s like saying, “Do you encourage Senators to hold public hearings? Do you want the accountants at Enron to be looked at? Do you want them to uphold their principles? Do you want the light of day to be shown on public institutions? Schools are public institutions, so the answer is since members of the media insist on attacking 16-year-olds and questioning their veracity and won’t take their words at face value, tape recorders seem to be the only way to establish a record that the press, if it pays attention to it, can’t avoid quoting accurately, the only thing they ever quote accurately.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: [Inaudible]. Has stuff like this brought to your attention — feel the need to bring this inquiry along that [inaudible]?

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Well, honestly, from my perspective, I cannot recount, or I do not know, of specific instances that would rise to the type of occasion that — sitting here with Sean.

Have there been many accounts of things in the past relative to techniques in curriculum, things of that nature that have been used and are used that specifically go a particular political and/or persuasion? Those things have been well established for a long period of time, and that’s why when I referenced earlier that a lot of those things are infused within curriculum. And to some extent, you could have a teacher just in teaching many curricula, could, by so doing, be presenting a very directional biased approach and not necessarily stand up and take a verbal rant, as such happened here in Colorado.

So that’s what I’m saying. This is a little bit broader than that, and so it has some history, and so, basically, from the standpoint of accountability, we think a fiduciary one will be looking at the whole thing.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: I’d like to respond as well. I don’t know if you’re a reporter, but if you are, you ought to go out and start interviewing parents. And you could also start by reading my book — it’s a great plug for my book — because I recount at least a half a dozen incidents, exactly the kinds that you asked for, involving my two children in the New York City public schools. And if you want to take the time, I can regale you with them. A lot of them are quite funny. If you want to talk to me afterwards, I’d be glad to tell you. You don’t even have to buy the book.

DAVID HOROWITZ: I mean just to emphasize, also, why aren’t the school administrations trying to find out what’s going on in the classrooms? You know, no matter what we get at the hearings, the opposition always says there’s no evidence.

Well, first of all, as you heard the students say — I think it was Ruth on the student panel — students don’t know what they can or cannot expect in a classroom. I mean, they’re students. When students come to a college — I don’t know what the situation is in elementary schools or in high schools — they get orientation. And they say, “This is what racial discrimination is. This is what sexual harassment is. This is where you can go to complain. And, please, complain.” That’s what they get. And they get it in lectures, and they get it in brochures.

Not a word about the academic freedom policies of the school, not a word. Not a word as to where they could go. Most schools don’t have grievance — that’s one of our issues is to create grievance machineries. The universities pay no attention to this problem, and the high schools obviously don’t either.

You know, they could do it. Then we wouldn’t need tape recorders. If we had decency in the school system, just decent respect for difference — and they all preach it. Diversity is the big mantra in the universities. Respect for the other. Respect for difference. Then there’s an asterisk, and it says, except white people, males, Jews, Armenians, and other non-designated groups. Them, you can have contempt for.

In my book The Professors, I highlight a professor at the University of California-Berkeley who told Armenian students who were memorializing the Turkish genocide of Armenians that they “deserved to be massacred.” Direct quote. And the students complained to the administration and got nothing. That’s because they’re only Armenians. This is what’s going on in our schools. If the schools will do the right thing, this is over; I go on to other things, and this movement is over. All we want is for the school administrators to do what they say they do, which they don’t. It’s that simple.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: [Inaudible].

DAVID HOROWITZ: I’m sorry, this is Senator — John Andrews was the Senate Majority Leader in the Colorado legislature, who introduced the first Academic Freedom Legislation.

JOHN ANDREWS: And we’ll talk about that later this afternoon, but I think relative to Sean’s history at high school. I live in the same school district as cherry Creek School. After Sean found no satisfaction from school authorities, he went to Walter Williams, for the print or electronic media and Mike Rosen for talk radio and to Scarborough.

The Cherry Creek School Board did nothing. They claimed to have privately reprimanded Jay Bennish. I don’t believe it. The State Board of Education was blocked by Democrats from even issuing a resolution of disapproval of Bennish as an example of the political hijacking of the classroom. The state legislature was blocked by Democrats from even doing a resolution.

And then when Bennish was reinstated to teach at Overland High School, which was in the process of driving Sean Allen from its corridors, as you heard, with the type of abuse that he took with the graffiti on that car, multiplied by 1,000 times, Bennish was received back by the principal of Overland High School in a public celebration in the person of being a persecuted and vindicated hero. She said, “Our whole school has been under attack. We welcome back Jay Bennish to the Overland High School family,” a family which, although she didn’t say it, no longer had room in it for student Sean Allen.

That is the breakdown of the system in Colorado. And that is why what Representative Rohrer is seeking to do is so needed.

DAVID HOROWITZ: Let me introduce Candace de Russy, a trustee of the State University System of New York, and a great supporter of academic freedom.

CANDACE DE RUSSY: Thank you. To add to the discussion of grievances on campuses, first of all, I have been approached for years and years by students who have grievances but who feel too intimidated for specific reasons to come forward. For example, they were afraid that their grades would be lowered or that they won’t get letters of recommendation when they ask for them later in the interest of their careers.

Secondly, when the grievances are filed, the actual process often gets strung out and strung out and buried. The response is always, “We’ll get to it next year,” and, “We’ll get to it next year,” and so forth. And what happens then? The student graduates. So that’s what’s happening with these magnificent processes that presumably are in place.

And, third, concerning the records of actual grievance processes, and the filing of grievances, these records are not readily accessible. Maybe they exist somewhere in space out there on the campuses, but they’re not readily collectible, accessible. The system administrations of large systems do not collect them systematically and report on them to boards of trustees.

And if you go to the campuses, you would find that these grievances that have been filed are sprinkled hither and yon, maybe in a department somewhere, maybe at the central level. In other words, it’s really, really hard to get information. It’s deliberately been made hard to get information about this very important question.

DAVID HOROWITZ: Yes. I spoke myself at Duke University on March 15, and the Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Anthropology Department organized an obstruction of my speech, a continual collective heckling, and attempted in an e-mail that was sent throughout the university system to get her male and female students to strip naked in my speech to obstruct it. This is direct violation of explicit university policy. I was invited by the provost and by the political science department. A complaint was filed on March 15. We have yet to hear from President Brodhead on this issue, and this was done on C-SPAN. The e-mails are out there, but, in the end, no action will be taken. This is the problem. If the system were working, we wouldn’t be here.

Yes, Chris?

[CHRIS]: [Inaudible].

SEAN ALLEN: [Inaudible]. I was planning on going in-state before this happened, but, you know, with CU, I don’t think Ward’s going to be welcoming me there any time soon. So I don’t know. The future’s pretty open for me. What I want to do with my life, I want to be a writer. I write a lot of fiction, short stories, and things like that. In light of the situation, what I write about has definitely changed. So I’ll continue probably being a writer and probably writing about things like this and being a political writer.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: [Inaudible].

DAVID HOROWITZ: Are colleges and universities exempt from truth in advertising laws? Interesting.

I actually attempted to get the Attorney General of the State of Indiana to investigate Indiana University for consumer fraud because we were contacted by a student that was in a course — it was called something like the physical education, recreation, and health department — and the course was described in the catalog as being about the OSHA rules, you know, work safety. And the lecturer devoted the entire curriculum, according to the student, to the Middle East conflict, taught from a one-sided political point of view, of course.

And first, we called the Dean, you know, the head of the department, the authority there, whose name was Mohammad something, and he didn’t see anything wrong with this course. And getting no satisfaction there, I did attempt to get the Attorney General, who is a Republican, but Republicans are kind of slow, and didn’t respond. So then we went to the press. And the minute there was a story, this course was terminated and restored to its academic integrity.

I don’t want to be doing this. This is not what I want to do with my life. But this is what needs to be done right now until we get a change. And Sean Allen, by tape recording his teacher and not getting response out of his school and going to the media, has begun — has done more — than I can do with 50 people or 100 people placed across the country making these little calls. This is what it’s about, as everybody knows.

Why is this different from the Rodney King incident? Sean Allen wasn’t a felon resisting arrest, but if you’re a liberal and you have a different attitude towards that incident than I do, you know that when the system breaks down, if you have a hard evidence and a videotape or an audiotape of it, that will cause the changes that will then reinstitute a system where people will be protected.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: I’d like to suggest to the reporter who asked if we’re — support Sean Allen or any student carrying a tape recorder into a class to — another inquisitive question that should be directed at the National Education Association. And maybe you ought to go to a convention this summer. I had the pleasure of doing that one.

You’ll find that they have probably hundreds of resolutions that they vote on on every subject under the sky. I mean the year I was there, they had a resolution on discrimination — I’m not kidding — on discrimination against left-handed students and the difficulties they have because of the way they sit at their desks, and all that. They have resolutions on social security, on saving water, on saving the trees.

Ask them if they might possibly pass a resolution this summer commenting on the fact that a teacher that violated every principle of professional ethics and integrity is back in that high school, and Sean Allen, the 16-year-old student who exposed this fraud, is not. And why don’t they pass the resolution on it?

DAVID HOROWITZ: One more question. [Indiscernible]?

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: [Inaudible] at the grade-school level. Is love of country or patriotism considered a political item, or is it neutral? Can you be a patriot and not be identified as a political ideologue of some kind? And if so, is there any place for patriotism in the school system of America?

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: There used to be.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Well, there used to be, and frankly, in Pennsylvania law, one of the few things required is that the students are taught the Constitution, free enterprise, and a range of things that we would view to be very patriotic and inherently American. So we — history — history of founding fathers and the basis of the capitalistic system is a part of what is law today is a part of what’s required in teaching.

Is it taught? I wonder. And we have wondered for a long time exactly whether or not the law is even being followed. But that would be the best way to answer that — yeah, it’s in law.

DAVID HOROWITZ: All right. Thank you very much.

Friday, April 7, 2006, 2:30 p.m.
First National Academic Freedom Conference

Panelists:

Former State Sen. John Andrews (CO); Chair
Rep. Dennis Baxley (FL);
Rep. Gib Armstrong (PA);
Rep. Mary Pilcher Cook (KS);
Rep. Jeff Perry (MA);
David French; Center for Academic Freedom;

[Disc 5]
SEN. JOHN ANDREWS: This is the one-minute warning for the next panel. It’s the panel you’ve all been waiting for. The dull stuff is over. You might want to tell folks out in the hall that the real fireworks are about to begin.

UNIDENTIFIED PARTICIPANT: You need to get [inaudible] to come up there to do the music.

SEN. JOHN ANDREWS: Anything but Michael Jackson. Welcome back, everybody. If you’ll take your seats, we will get started with the Legislative Issues Panel. Clearly, I am not Brad Shipp, the National Field Director of Students for Academic Freedom. I could only wish to be as young, talented, and energetic as Brad Shipp is. I’m John Andrews, Former President of the Colorado Senate. And I’ve been asked to stand in for Brad who had to leave to deal with a family situation.

We’re fans of the work that Brad and Sara do in the field for Students for Academic Freedom. But our responsibility on this panel, having discussed in the previous session the question, “Is Legislation Needed,” five of the six of us up here have been elected as legislators and have had the experience of battling over legislative statutory or resolution proposals in our respective states relating to the issue of academic freedom.

We’ll try to keep each presentation to five minutes in order to have time for interaction among the panelists and dialogue with all of you and still be back on schedule since we’re getting this started a little later than it was booked to start.

I’ll give you some thoughts of our experience in Colorado where we were the first state to move legislation at the suggestion of David Horowitz and Students for Academic Freedom. We will then hear from State Representative Dennis Baxley, a third-term House member in Florida, State Representative Gib Armstrong, former Marine officer, a third-term House member in Pennsylvania, State Representative Mary Pilcher Cook of Kansas, serving her second term there, State Representative Jeff Perry. Now, Gib, I know that you Marines like to think of yourselves as the few, the proud. But, Representative Perry, if there’s just 21 of you against how many Democrats in the Massachusetts House?

REP. JEFF PERRY: 139.

SEN. JOHN ANDREWS: So you are the few, the proud in another way. And then, we’ll ask for some concluding thoughts as far as recommendations about legislative approaches from the only non-legislator up here, but someone very well experienced in the battles, and this is David French, formerly of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, FIRE. You’ve heard them commended by Candace de Russy on the previous panel. And David is now with that other outstanding organization that Ruth Malhotra mentioned this morning, the Center for Academic Freedom newly established at the Estimable Alliance Defense Fund.

Before we start, and I wish David were here to properly receive this, I have to say that after we argued between anecdotes or data in the previous session, and what we call in politics, whenever you can get a person to describe his or her experience, we call it putting a human face on the problem. I would say that the most humanizing moment, the most vivid image that I received at the entire conference so far came in that situation that was described to us by Steve Miller when David Horowitz came to Duke a month ago. David then referenced it himself. And that was the protest that some professor organized where everyone was supposed to get naked to disrupt David’s speech.

If he were here, I’d tell him in person, but, David, we’ve admired you for unmasking the left. We never knew that you could undress them totally and, indeed, convince them it was their own idea. I’d say that if David keeps it up this way, he may be in fact a good contender next year for the coveted Sean Allen Award.

Our premise in Colorado beginning in June 2003 when, as Senate President. I hosted a private working breakfast meeting with David Horowitz and a number of House and Senate members, some members of the Governor’s staff, our premise was one that I don’t know has been articulated just this explicitly in our discussions as yet last evening and today. It is this – that education in a free society conducted by government-chartered organizations with tax dollars is not only permitted to, but indeed obligated to be carried on in a way which protects the essential conditions of a free society.

Liberty and order, as David Horowitz mentioned in passing at last night’s debate with Ward Churchill, tend to be taken for granted by the utopians among us. They can be taken for granted. The conditions of liberty and order, as America has learned to its sorrow in the last several years in our well intended, but unexpectedly difficult endeavor in Iraq, the conditions of liberty and order are not easily established or easily maintained. And they can come unraveled, tragically, rapidly.

It’s been said we’re only one generation from barbarism. And I think there’s some validity to that as we talk about how a free society conducts education under the mandate of government and with tax dollars coercively collected from all of the population.

Our approach in Colorado was to boil down the lengthy provisions of the Academic Bill of Rights simply to the thought that students ought not be penalized in the classroom for their beliefs, and that institutions ought to have grievance procedures. In June 2003, I set my staff to work on this at the Colorado Senate without going public because we wanted a bill drafted.

In September 2003, a disaffected staffer, who had attended our planning meeting seeking to settle a score with his boss, took the story to the Rocky Mountain News and we were set up in a wife-beating accusation situation where, without warning to me, the story broke that the Senate President and the Republicans controlling both Houses of our General Assembly wanted thought control and censorship and to clamp an iron hand of conservative dominance on all of our state-funded universities and colleges.

So we were playing from our own five-yard line from the very beginning of that effort in late 2003. I surveyed the university presidents, asked them what were their existing policies. They gave me a big pile of paper that looked good on paper. We then held hearings in December 2003 and we found that the implementation of those policies at the universities and the testimony of a number of students – call it anecdotal, if you like – was very weak. The implementation was weak.

A bill was filed in the House. I thought the House would be the best place to start the bill. We began to see – and it’s a general lesson I would leave with you about this process – that Republicans have a hard time getting this issue. Despite easy Republican control of the Colorado House of Representatives, an informal caucus of 10 moderates approached the sponsor of our Academic Freedom Bill and said, we will kill your bill. The university presidents didn’t know that.

And so, this House sponsor of the bill holding weak cards bluffed down the university presidents. And Colorado State, University of Colorado, University of Northern Colorado, which is our teacher college, and Metropolitan State, a huge urban institution–those four institutions signed a voluntary compliance memorandum in March 2004 to get the bill withdrawn, not realizing that the bill was unlikely to pass because, again, I repeat, a lot of Republicans don’t get it on this issue.

In the fall of 2004, again, still the Senate President, I held monitoring hearings. I asked the presidents of the four universities to come and report on the progress of their compliance. We again heard from students with horror stories. One was referenced by David Horowitz last night – the law student who was told in his opening day class, any of you Republicans, we know that “R” stands for racist. This happened to be a black tenured law professor. And when Mario Nicholas objected after class, the professor said, oh, yes, I know there are a lot of you little Nazis on this campus. And the administration did nothing about it. And we all have heard those stories.

We brought those forward in hearings in the Colorado Senate, joint hearings with our House of Representatives, in the fall of 2004. Republicans then lost majority control of both houses in November 2004, and one of the first bills filed by the new Democrat majority was a bill that would have done exactly what David–what Ward Churchill asked for in the debate last night. It would’ve said that neither administrators nor legislators can have any say-so whatsoever about the way faculty conduct themselves at a state-sponsored institution. It was that hermetically-sealed claim of expertise, that guild mentality that Tom Lucero, my friend, our Elected Regent from Colorado, referenced on the previous panel.

Here’s the significant thing about that bill from Democrat Senator Bob Hagedorn. And that was January 2005. On the first of February 2005, the world began to hear about Ward Churchill and the Hagedorn bill to provide hermetically-sealed discretion, or one might say license, and a total lack of accountability to professors at state institutions in Colorado. That bill was withdrawn.

We find ourselves now in 2006, and I again surveyed in preparation for this conference, the four university presidents. And although I’m no longer the Senate President, no longer in the Senate because of term limits, I was respectfully answered. And each of the university presidents gave me soothing words about their compliance. I’m still tending to doubt it. But we’re beginning to hear from governing boards that they would be interested in adopting as policy statements the terms of the Memorandum of Understanding, which so far, has only the strength of the signature of the president of each of those four institutions.

I think you’ll hear parallel experiences from some of my colleagues about the way that legislation becomes, if not an end in itself, at least a lever to move this forward in the direction we would all like to see it go.

Representative Baxley?

REP. DENNIS BAXLEY: Thank you very much. And I apologize for a little bit of laryngitis here. I’m going to try to hold this up close because I am weak-voiced. Okay? Are you all right?

What a pleasure a year and a half ago to be in a position to be at a conference where I heard David Horowitz share the whole idea of academic freedom and the bill that he proposed. And when I heard that, it struck a chord. I was immediately back as a sociology major at Florida State University sitting in a class where an archeology professor who on the very first day says, evolution is a fact. I don’t want to hear anything about creation in here. And if you don’t like any of that, there’s the door.

Now, unfortunately, when that connection came and I shared that in testimony, my opponents grabbed that and we were redoing the Scopes Monkey Trial. And I said, I don’t care what they teach. It was the dogmatism. It was the force. And I did what every college student does. I slid down in my seat, kept my head down, spit back whatever they wanted, and I got out of there.

And the more I thought about that history, and as I looked at the history of my sons and the many stories that they brought home, I could see this insidious parallel to almost racism, and that no–everybody knows it’s going on, but everybody’s just come to accept it. And I said, I’m going to do something about this. And I came home and filed this bill.

Now what happened to our bill is we got it through. We have a committee structure that has four committees and then a council over that, and then it can go to the floor. And I passed this bill through the first Committee of Choice and Innovation and then we passed it out of council. Well then, everybody got nervous because they knew it could go to the floor. And when I did this I thought, you know, if I’m just a right-wing wacko, overly sensitive, then nobody’s really going to pay me any mind. But I said, if I’m on to something, I’m going to set off a grass fire that will go across this country with an explosion.

Folks, you don’t have a movement like this if it’s not connecting to anything. If there’s no substance to it, people would just look funny at you. The reason it’s a movement is because people connect to it. They know it’s true. I don’t care what your data is. And I’ll tell you, that OPPAGA study, that Office of Program Analysis study, was very misrepresented here. What it said is people aren’t filing complaints. Well, why would they have any confidence in a system that’s all designed to protect their abusers? That’s like interviewing the person who abuses the child and saying, well, there’s nothing wrong. And of course they are not going to risk what they have.

You know what an F does when a kid’s trying to get into medical school, like my first son, like Matt over here? You think he wants to take that risk? He’s going to do what I did. He’s going to slide down in the seat and let it go. And he’s going to spit back whatever they want to hear.

And also, the parallel to racism, this–what David Horowitz has done is he’s held up the mirror. He says you cannot believe what you believe and do what you’re doing. And that was how racism–that’s–with the Civil Rights Movement. We couldn’t believe what we believe about equality. We could not believe what we have in our founding documents and continue to allow to happen what was happening.

And folks, this academic freedom issue is just as real as the 1950s. And one of my reporters in the area wrote–I’ve got a very good understanding of this. He says, “If you’re not in the fish tank, is it wet?” It’s just where you live. It’s just the way it is. You don’t feel it. You don’t see it. You don’t sense it. And that’s why I don’t think it’s just denial. I really think they’re just in the fish tank and they don’t feel it. And then, there is the embarrassment factor once you are confronted with that image.

The good part – what I learned out of this deal – is there’s many purposes for filing a bill. And it’s our way of starting a discussion. Out of that, and because it passed two committees, do you think I would have had a serious meeting with all the presidents of the universities in Florida before cameras with them agreeing that we need to–what kind of environment we need to have? Some difference with me about whether they were making an effort to see that that happened. And yes, some things changed between that time and when the OPPAGA study was done. When the test is coming, guess what? People study and get ready.

And that’s why some of the answers were a little more favorable in the OPPAGA study. Because they knew they were being examined. But I learned that if you touch the hearts of people, get on your desk and touch the hearts of people, you can change the world. And we did have things happen – we could have some more things happen – because we were willing to engage.

Thank you.

SEN. JOHN ANDREWS: Thank you, Representative Baxley. Representative Armstrong?

REP. GIB ARMSTRONG: Thank you, Senator. And thank you, David Horowitz and the Students for Academic Freedom for hosting this wonderful forum. This is an important issue. It affects our nation and it affects the future of our country. And I applaud David for having the vision to spearhead this issue, not just in helping us out in Pennsylvania, but across the country.

Sam Rohrer, my colleague and good friend, is also here. And it’s been a pleasure working with him, with David French, and many others, to make the progress that we have made in Pennsylvania, and we’ll continue to make. We’ve got a couple of other folks here – Alan Levy, Steve Balch, who have also been very helpful in providing testimony at some of our hearings.

You know, we heard a little earlier that there is no data. Well, if that’s the case, if we’re just off looking for an ideological tooth fairy, then why not humor us? Just let us go look for the tooth fairy. If there’s nothing there for us to find, why does it matter? The reason it matters is because there’s something there and they know it. All of us in this room know it. And there is data. They just choose to ignore it.

ACTA did a survey of the top schools as reported by U.S. News and World Report and found that over 50% of all college students report that their professors, and at least one professor, would regularly indoctrinate from the lectern. And you have a student like Sean Allen stand up and talk about his experience and they say, well, you know, that’s only one. That’s just anecdotal. That’s not real data. It’s not real evidence.

Well, let’s talk about some of that evidence. In Pennsylvania, at a Pennsylvania state school, there was one racially email charge–there was one racially charged email sent to a student. That created a $10 million diversity program on that campus for one email, which was later discovered to have come not from that university, but from off-campus. So we spent $10 million to teach kids to be more racially sensitive to correct a problem that was not caused by a member of that college or a student at that college.

So I think they’re a little duplicitous when those on the left say, well, there’s just not enough evidence, or the evidence that you have doesn’t matter. If the evidence that we were showing was related to gender discrimination or diversity, or racial discrimination or diversity, it would be at the forefront of their attention.

Let me just talk a little bit about what we’re doing in Pennsylvania, what House Resolution 177 is not, and then what it is. It is not about imposing speech codes. We’re not interested in replacing left-wing speech codes with conservative speech codes. Nor are we interested in having the government in the classroom. I have no interest in reviewing textbooks. I have no interest in reviewing transcripts from a professor’s class. That is outside the purview of the legislature.

This is also not about getting more conservative professors hired. I don’t care what your ideology is, it ought not to come into the classroom or a public university. This is also not about advancing innuendo. Sean Allen is a real student with a real story. And we’ve got plenty others like him in Pennsylvania at the college level.

I have one minute.

Problems. Students don’t know that they can complain. Even some of my colleagues on the left have admitted that. Another problem we have is that higher education is a self-accounting institution. Name one other institution in the world that is self-accounting. I think therein lies a lot of the problem. What this is about is very simple. It’s getting universities to enforce their own policies.

What we have in higher education today are elements of a fear society, much like what we had in Eastern Europe in the last century. The way you confront a fear society is by having the courage to stand up and speak the truth. And when you do, the house of cards will fall and that’s what this is all about.

Thank you.

SEN. JOHN ANDREWS: Thank you very much, Gib. Representative Cook?

REP. MARY PILCHER COOK: Thank you. Thank all of you for being here today. Thank you, David Horowitz and Students for Academic Freedom, a very efficient and effective organization. I’ve been very impressed with the professional way that you have handled things and have communicated.

I was really struck by that debate last night. And one of the things that really hit me was when Ward Churchill said there is no truth. And then, he went on to say why he could then stress his own political ideology. I wonder if he believes that’s true. And that is what the debate is all about. Because our country is based on self-evident truths. That is the heart of America, that we hold these truths to be self-evident. That means they’re obvious. That means they don’t have to be debated. That means there are some things that we just know.

And one of those things that we know to be self-evident is that all men are created equal. And everyone should have the right to talk about their own views as students and professors should not take a position. They need to encourage the dialogue. They should not take a position in the debate. And that is part of what the AAUP talks about. One of the things that I was very excited about with the Academic Bill of Rights is that it repeats what the AAUP says. So I am very confused as to why they don’t support it.

Now, let me tell you how–a little bit about how I got into this debate because I’m fairly new at it. And I really didn’t think we had a problem in Kansas. But there was an email that came out by Professor Paul Mirecki. And he announced some courses that were going to take place at our campus university that were intended to ridicule the right-wing religious. So he–as the investigation went along, there was one email that kind of fleshed this out. As it went along, more discovery was taking place, that there is–actually he was a member on a KU email program, Society of Open-Minded Agnostics and Atheists.

When his email came out–oh, and I should tell you who Paul Mirecki is. He is the Chairman – the Chairman – of religious studies at Kansas University. So that raised a red flag. I called the Chancellor. The Chancellor says, well, this is academic freedom. I’m sorry this happened, but there is really nothing we can do about it. So I informed him that I was very concerned. Because this is something that I didn’t hear earlier on the panel.

There are people I represent who spend a lot of money, who send a lot of money into the state government. And they want a good college education for their kids. They don’t want a Chairman of Religious Studies to–in his further email he denigrated Jesus Christ, he denigrated the Bible with profanity, which is why I’m not quoting him. And there is indication that there were several other professors working on this with him and that the Chancellor would probably be supportive of it based on past communication.

So to me, that is what raised a red flag. And I said–I listened to David speak at UMKC a couple months before. I thought Kansas didn’t have a problem. Well, that was no longer the case. So I looked at the Academic Bill of Rights. Very impressed with it. It was just a resolution. It was not forcing anything on the universities other than what they already espoused. So I was very supportive. We had a hearing that went very well. It was very well received. I could see that those on the left and the right could see the problem.

Now, will we have the courage to act on it? Because I do believe that the survival of freedom in our United States depends on the survival of a basic understanding of the principles embraced in our Declaration of Independence. And if we have that academic freedom, we can make sure that our kids learn about it.

Thank you.

SEN. JOHN ANDREWS: That was from Kansas, the first battleground of the Civil War. And now, Massachusetts, the birthplace of the Revolution. Representative Perry?

REP. JEFF PERRY: Thank you. Well, greetings from Massachusetts, the home state of gay marriage, high taxes, soon to be universal health care, Ted Kennedy, John Kerry, Barney Frank, and yours truly. There’s hope. There’s hope. God, I hope there’s hope.

Well, thank you, David, for organizing this. Thank you all for coming. This is important. This is important stuff. And as Representative Armstrong said earlier, the speakers who were before us were talking about anecdotes versus evidence. And I think they’re a little naïve how politics works in America. When they say, we need evidence, well, that’s not the world that I live in that government only responds to situations when there is evidence. I see a government – and I think my colleagues might share with me – that responds when anything happens.

We just passed a bill that requires everyone in Massachusetts to have a carbon monoxide detector in their house – a law with penalties. Probably a good idea that we all have one on our own. But now, it’s a law. And that was a result of one death. One death because of a defective chimney. And we passed this law. So to think that government only reacts and the legislatures only react when we get this big tractor trailer truck driving into the State House with all this empirical evidence proving beyond any reasonable doubt that we have to do it is a bit naïve and, well, those folks who were saying it are academics. And perhaps they are a bit naïve to think about what’s really going on in our university systems.

When we had the hearing in Massachusetts on House Bill 1234 that I filed, lots of evidence came before us. Evidence in the form of direct testimony from aggrieved students and professors. And within the Massachusetts university system, unrebutted evidence. No one from the left. The teachers’ unions were sitting in the gallery watching it. The press was there reporting it. Well, the press was there. And then, they reported something else. Rather than talking about the stories of the students, they chose to attack me and David and not the substance of the argument.

Now, I’m from Massachusetts. As the Senator from Colorado indicated, it’s 139 to 21. I don’t stand here with any great promise that my resolution is going to pass. But it’s worth filing again and again and again, and telling the story again and again and again so–to get people to listen. To get students to listen.

Hannah talked about–when she asked a question, which I don’t think was addressed, she suggested that there are students who aren’t politically-minded, and they take these classes and they take what the professor says as gospel. And I think that’s true. If you have a student taking a history class that’s really an English major, but they have to take that history class to meet their requirements, they may not be politically interested. They may not be politically-minded. And when they hear comments from professors about a certain political leader or about a political issue, they’re not interested. So it’s just going to pass through and it’s going to get indoctrinated in there. And if they hear it again and again and again for four years or six years or however long they’re in school, it’s going to–it’s going to have an effect.

And I just want to give you one example from Massachusetts and tell you what I’m focusing in my discussion of Massachusetts. This is from a gentlemen who was at UMass Dartmouth. He was in [Professor Lambaugh’s] class, an economics class, and he is an economics major. So when Professor Churchill last night said, well, David exposed Professor Churchill last night when Professor Churchill said to David’s comments that perhaps students should be aware of the free market and when they choose electives like the ones that he teaches, they should know what they’re getting.

That’s a compelling argument. If you sign up for Churchill’s class, you should know what you’re getting. But that’s not the problem that we’re talking about. We’re talking about required classes. We’re talking about high school classes, as we heard here before today. So this is an economics major. He’s a student. His name is [Ben Pansley]. And he had to take this microeconomics class.

And on the first day, it was an introduction to the class and the Professor talked about all of those important economic issues, such as his own drug use, his own experiences with acid, his own failed marriage, his own sexual interests. And so, the student got through the first day and said, well, it can’t be this bad. Day two was better. He started talking about economics. He started talking about price controls. And so, the teacher was giving his point of view, which was one-sided, in this student’s opinion. So he raised a hand and said, could you discuss the free market and cited Milton Friedman’s work.

Well, the Professor asked him if he was a Republican and he said he was. And according to this student’s account, he mocked him, made jokes about him. And so, the student, when he got through with class decided to send some information via email to the teacher about Milton Friedman thinking maybe he didn’t know who he was. It’s hard to believe, but this student thought maybe he didn’t know who he was. And the email that he got back indicated that the Professor demanded that he drop the class. And if he didn’t, he would file a complaint with the Dean for harassment.

Now, this student dropped the class, signed up for a history class, had to take the summer class with a different teacher in economics. This student didn’t know he had due process rights. This student didn’t know if there was a procedure in the University of Massachusetts. The 14th Amendment to the Constitution is due process as it applies to the states. And it is a significant part of the Academic Freedom Bill, a resolution that I filed that David and his people drafted. It talks about notice. What’s the notice of the rights of the student? Opportunity to be heard. What opportunity does the student have to state his case if he feels aggrieved and to have it heard by a fair and impartial arbiter?

This student didn’t know if they existed. And quite frankly, he was so intimidated that if he stayed in that class he would have failed and it would have ruined his application for graduate school, that he saw no choice. He saw no due process. And I asked him, I said, well, how about in the beginning of school? That first day of school, did anyone talk to you about if you had a complaint against a professor or in your handbook? And he said he didn’t know. He said he didn’t remember. And he said, it wouldn’t matter because he was totally intimidated.

Like Candace said earlier, these kids–they are not all going to be debaters. They are not all going to be on the debating team. Some of these kids just are trying to get through school, trying to get to graduate school. And I think we have an obligation to all of the students and all of the professors who are trying to do the right think, to keep up with your work. And I thank you for doing your work across the country. I’m proud to do the work in Massachusetts. I don’t think we’re going to be too successful, but we’re going to keep trying.

Thank you.

SEN. JOHN ANDREWS: Finally, David French. He has never committed politics, unlike the rest of us.

DAVID FRENCH: Well, I thank the other panelists for letting a non-legislator sit on the panel. I have never committed politics. I think I could never win. But I have been involved in this process quite a bit. And there’s one thing that puzzles me about much of the discussion that we had earlier.

Let me start with a few legal propositions. I’m a lawyer. I have this weird, quirky little obsession with something called the law. And there’s a few clear legal propositions here. If you’re–number one, if you’re a professor at a public university, you are a state official. You’re an official of the state. That can’t be argued. In fact, if you do something wrong, if you violate the law in the scope of your employment and you harm someone in a way that a lawsuit results, guess who pays the bill? The state. So these are state officials.

The administrators who oversee colleges are state officials with a slightly higher rank on the state totem pole, but still state officials in the same way that the person who gives you your driver’s license at the Department of Motor Vehicles is a state official.

Now, what’s interesting to me is that the state officials in these state institutions continually tell some of the highest ranking state officials, the legislature that funds these universities, that makes their very existence possible by appropriating hundreds of millions of dollars, they say to them, you have no business looking at us. What other state agency says this to the legislature?

Think about that for a second. If there was systematic abuse discovered in a state agency, whether it’s the Department of Environmental Protection, the Department of Motor Vehicles, you name it, is the answer of that state agency to the state legislature you have no business looking at us? You have no business investigating us. Of course not.

If there is systematic abuse in non-state entities in a state, such as an Enron, such as a disaster with a company, they can’t say to the state legislature you have no business investigating this. This is an amazing phenomenon to me. And to me, it’s the height of arrogance that state officials, that state institutions funded with hundreds of millions of dollars of public money, would say you cannot investigate us – the very existence of investigation is McCarthy-like.

So as a matter of law, these state legislators have a responsibility. It’s a constitutional responsibility. And what is that? Well, they have a responsibility to their constituents to provide for a good education for citizens of this state and citizens of other states who come in and take an advantage of the university system.

They also have another, and it’s a very important responsibility, and that is to defend and protect the basic liberties of the citizens of the state. That’s not just a judicial responsibility. That’s not just an executive responsibility. It’s also a legislative responsibility. And one thing that is astonishing to me during the experience of testifying before the Pennsylvania state legislature, and the experience of advising some members of the committee in the Pennsylvania Legislative Commissions was the total indifference with which many legislators greeted the systematic violation of constitutional rights.

If you want data, I’ve got your data. If you want anecdotes, I’ve got your anecdotes. The only thing is you have to realize that the argument about data and anecdotes is not made in good faith. The anecdotes that matter are their anecdotes. The data that matter is their data. So, for example, you can have one anecdote. A president of a major university gives a speech in which he says there might, heaven forbid, be biological explanations for differences in outcome in a certain field. And from that one anecdote results what? $500 million in diversity initiatives. Well, that anecdote mattered I think.

So what I’m here to suggest is let’s talk about the Academic Bill of Rights as far as bringing attention to these issues on campus. I can’t think of any other single initiative that has done more to bring attention to what’s happening on campus than the Academic Bill of Rights. I can’t think of anything that has more energized and engaged students across the country to approach public officials and their legislators about these issues than the Academic Bill of Rights.

But the Academic Bill of Rights is not the only legislative solution out there. I mean, in about one minute, I’m going to give you some legislative ideas that are simple and easy to enforce, reflect and protect values held by mass–vast majorities in both political parties, are either cost-neutral or would actually result in cost savings to citizens. How about this? A kind of education tax break. And that would over time have a profound effect on the campus culture. These are in the areas of free speech, free association, and forced speech.

Free speech, you can legislatively end the speech code in your state. You can end it. And in Pennsylvania, as David said earlier, about 80% of the colleges in Pennsylvania public universities have an unconstitutional speech code. That’s resulted in two losses so far. Well, actually, three total in the last three years. And will, no doubt, result in more if this is not changed. Ending the speech code. And I can–to anyone who’s interested later, we can talk about the exact language that ends–that does that.

Ending the tyranny of the suppression of the free exercise of religion and free speech by student groups. Did you know that over the last four years 60 major universities in this country sought to throw Christian student groups off campus? Bet you hadn’t heard that. It’s one of the underreported scandals in modern higher education.

And then, forced speech. Forced speech, the student activity fee. Michael Moore, last year or in–that’s not–my, how time flies. 2004 was not last year. But in 2004, went on a barnstorming tour to try to get people to vote for John Kerry against George Bush. To finance that, he received student activity fee money – that’s money that students must pay as a condition of being a student – to the tune of more than $2 million as a last minute allocation from more than 40 universities across the country to campaign against George Bush. You can eliminate the student activity fee and its massive subsidy of leftist indoctrination on campus.

And then, finally, you can seek information through a legislative regime that asks the kinds of questions in teacher evaluations that would provide the kind of hard data that some members of the previous panel claimed to crave.

All of these things are simple. All of these things involve the basic safeguard of constitutional rights. And all of these things would not cost the state much money at all, if any, and in the case of student activity fees, would save citizens hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars.

And to say that this doesn’t matter, to say that this is not a problem that needs to be addressed is to ignore overwhelming evidence. You can say back at your home state that unless we do this there is a high chance we’ll be sued. Here’s a list of the universities that have been sued and lost on the issue of violating the free association rights of their students. I just drafted this off the top of my head a couple of minutes ago. It’s under-inclusive. Penn State, Georgia Tech, the California State system, Penn State, again, Washburn University, Hastings University, Ohio State University–I’m sorry, The Ohio State University, Rutgers, Virginia, Wisconsin-Madison, SUNY Albany, University of Minnesota, Arizona State, and Southern Illinois. That’s just off the top of my head. That’s on the free association issue.

On the free speech issue, Penn State, a popular target, Georgia Tech, Temple, Texas Tech, SUNY Rockport–I thought we just heard recently there were no problems at SUNY. SUNY Albany – wow, SUNY, again – Shippensburg University, Troy University, Northern Kentucky University, Stanford, The University of Wisconsin-Madison, The University of Michigan. Just off the top of my head.

So if you want to avoid the pain and heartache of litigation in your state, one of the ways to do it is to safeguard basic civil liberties legislatively. A basic legislative regime that protects the civil liberties of the students should be passable and should be attainable.

Thanks.

SEN. JOHN ANDREWS: David French and all of the panelists, thank you very much. But I want to go down the panel quickly and see if we have responses to–brief responses to what we’ve heard from one another. And I would start that round simply by reminding you of the profound importance of what Mary Pilcher Cook said about we hold these truths to be self-evident, and contrasting it to there is no truth that you heard last night from Churchill.

What you heard from Churchill was not just sophomoric intellectual moonshine. It is that, but it’s deeper than that. This is classically Marxist dogma, friends. He only referred to Marxism in making a jab at David and the rest of us for thinking that legislation might be necessary. But you heard the articulation of a profound conviction from this man and so many others like him in the Academy today that right and wrong don’t objectively exist. They are socially constructed by power relationships. Truth and falsehood don’t objectively exist. They are socially constructed by power relationships. And that is the revolutionary thrust.

They want–this is a struggle for the soul of America. Or if you think of our Constitution and our Declaration of Independence as the operating system that makes this country work, we have been hacked into. We’ve got viruses, bugs. And we’re headed for a system crash as a country if we don’t defend the fundamental notion that truth is true and right and wrong are right and wrong. That is really the battle that I think we’re fighting here.

Are there further thoughts from panelists before we go to questions and comments from everyone?

REP. DENNIS BAXLEY: One thing that I would like to add is particularly painful to me is the manner in which this debate comes. And I guess it’s we’re messing with them. But I got an email, for example, that says, the prejudice, if it exists, is thoroughly deserved. Now, what kind of tolerance is that? And the attitude–I mean, the–and I’m telling you, I wouldn’t even read a lot of these to you. I get the worst cussing from professors that I ever got. I mean, I–and this is–you would expect intellectual debate about an issue–.

SEN. JOHN ANDREWS: –And you know that was–.

REP. DENNIS BAXLEY: –And it is an example of what these kids suffer when they’re there if they challenge. Because that’s what they do. If they don’t like what you say, they just jump you. And I’m not trying to say all professors. But I’m just saying the people who know they’re doing this and that we’re nailing, they’re screaming. And it is so ugly.

And the other dimension is this elitism that somehow they are wiser and more knowing and above all and can’t be touched. And this whole thing of you’re supposed to send money to the university system and ask no questions. It’s a very irresponsible position that they’re asking us as legislators to take.

Thank you.

SEN. JOHN ANDREWS: And you know, that was all summed up, Dennis, I thought, in the striking moment when [Professor Barbosa] just–I’m glad you came in the room–just nailed Terry Hartle about what is the prevailing methodology and data versus anecdote. And the best he could do was an utterly ungracious petty ad homonym shot at her personally. So you claim to be a professor. God help us.

Others from the panel?

REP. GIB ARMSTRONG: Maybe he did. A couple of quick thoughts. The most gratifying moment for me at our hearings came at Temple University where one of the testifiers spent a good deal of his testimony deriding David personally, as well as his Bill of Rights. And when it came time for me to ask questions, I said, well, first of all, let’s set the record straight. These hearings have nothing whatever to do with his Bill of Rights. These are purely to gather facts, not legislative. But since you raised the issue, please tell this panel what specific language in his resolution you propose we object to. And he said, well, it’s been a while since I’ve read it. And we had him [dead to rights].

David was in the room and I couldn’t resist. I said, well, Mr. Horowitz happens to be here. Perhaps he can provide you a copy. And David very graciously put a copy on his desk. And after a few minutes of stammering, the answer was, well, I just don’t like the tone, which was really no answer at all. What wonders me is these socialist leftist professors. And I respect and have made friends on the other side of the aisle who are sincere liberals, and with them we can have honest debate. But the leftists who are out to destroy America, why don’t they just go to Cuba? If they want a Socialist country to live in, especially if they live in Pennsylvania. You can get a much warmer climate. If things are so much better in a Socialist society, just go to Cuba.

SEN. JOHN ANDREWS: Others from the panel? We can go to the floor. Jeff?

REP. JEFF PERRY: Well, Representative Armstrong, they could come to Massachusetts. [Some folks are] already there. So–.

You know, just one of the hypocrisies of this, at least how I see it in Massachusetts, and I think I saw it here today with some of the previous panel members, is the hypocrisy of the union officials. When we had the hearing in Massachusetts, as I alluded to in my previous opening comments, the union officials were there. And I can’t imagine that union officials would be against something that says all faculty members shall be hired, fired, promoted, or granted tenure on the basis of their competence and appropriate knowledge in their fields of expertise and so on.

It’s–this is a clear example of how the unions – and we saw it here with the gentleman sitting in this place before – who are not really interested in the promotion of good education, who are not interested in promoting their membership to become better teachers, that they’re interested in promoting a political agenda, as long as it’s their own agenda. And we have to be leery of that as we go forward and be cognizant that it’s not a fair fight, that they have a lot of special interest money, they have a lot of support in the mainstream media. And the way that we fight that is to continue to tell the story, to continue to use these anecdotes or evidence, as we may characterize them, and to keep the message going strong.

+++ q-and-a

SEN. JOHN ANDREWS: Let’s go to questions and comments from any of you. Matt?

QUESTION: My question is for Mr. French. I’m a student at Florida State University, and I’m the head of our SAF Chapter there. And the one thing you said that really hit home with us is the student fees on campus. So we’re kind of at a point now where last spring we went back and got the budgets going back to 1989 of our student government. And we went in piece-by-piece using our student government records and we categorized them as conservative and liberal. And we did it standardized for both ways. We did it by the speakers they brought in. We have people coming in that obviously are going to promote conservative values and people coming in that are obviously going to promote liberal values.

So we went back and forth, and categorizing them using the speakers, we have about six to seven liberal organizations that are all funded by student government on campus and we have one conservative group. The range of funds on average is about $80,000 a year to liberal groups to about $10,000 a year to conservative groups. And this is going back, like I said, all the way to 1989. Our student government has a budget of about $8.5 million right now. And every cent of that comes from taxes on our tuition.

So I’m just wondering, from a legal standpoint and from our standpoint, knowing that we have the data that they so–desire so greatly, we have the data, we have the evidence. I can show them graphs and charts and everything else. What do we do with that and how do we cite it?

Well, I think there’s two things that you do. One, if you have–if there is a group that has a liberal counterpart, in other words, there is college Republicans and then there’s college Democrats. The–one of the problems that conservative groups have had traditionally is they’ve not applied for the same amount of funding that the liberal groups have. They’ve applied for much less. And so, if you make a complaint, then they’ll say, well, we gave you what you applied for.

So you seek an equivalent allocation of funds first. If the equivalent allocation of funds is denied, at that point you then would appeal it through the–there is almost always an appeal process. If the equivalent allocation is denied, at that point you may very well have a claim under governing Supreme Court precedent for viewpoint discrimination. And there’s multiple cases along this line. And at that point, I would encourage you to contact our organization, Alliance Defense Fund, and we can take a look at it and see if there’s a legal claim.

But I would also encourage you to contact your state legislator because one of the powerful things that the members of the Pennsylvania Select Committee on–the opposing members of the Pennsylvania Select Committee on Academic Freedom said is, ” I’ve been a state legislator for 25 years and I’ve never received a complaint.” And that was something that resonated in the media. So contacting your state legislator and saying this state entity is appropriating my money for free expression purposes and then funding one side of the spectrum and not the other is–can be a very effective way of combating that. So I would suggest those things.

SEN. JOHN ANDREWS: A question over here.

QUESTION: Yes. My name is [Judy Wolfnig]. I’m from the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. And yes, we have the same kinds of problems. I had two and a half comments. One, you’re the–or you were the President of–?

SEN. JOHN ANDREWS: –I was the President of the Colorado Senate and left last year on a term limit. Yes.

QUESTION: Okay. Because I had a proposal for the citizens of Colorado to save their tax money. If Ward Churchill believes that there is no truth, why don’t you just abolish the whole system of education from K through anything? It would save the taxpayers a great deal of money.

SEN. JOHN ANDREWS: The power in the room right now in Colorado is our Elected Regent, Mr. Lucero, and I’ll send him home with that idea. That’s your half comment, I’m thinking?

QUESTION: Well, no, I have another one. I have been involved in this kind of business since I guess 1969. Sidney Hook founded an organization called the University Centers for Rational Alternatives. And this is when it was students–politically organized students were terrorizing universities and universities just caved in all over the place. I mean, the cowardice was astonishing. Now, we have the NAS and so on.

If you–I have suggested before. I will suggest it again. If someone would put together the documents. We had a newsletter called [Mentor], which came out every month. Put it together because it’s very interesting information. Now, one piece fits in with what our student is talking about – the student activities fee. At my university – and I know it was true at many universities in the United States – there is an organization whose name I have forgotten. But it was founded by Ralph Nader. And it’s one of these–do you know what the name is?

UNIDENTIFIED PARTICIPANT: P-I-R-G?

QUESTION: PIRG. Yes, PIRG. We have WPIRG. And there is a separate fee collected not in the student activities fee I don’t believe or maybe [inaudible] the student activities fee goes to the Federation of Students [inaudible]. This goes to–.

SEN. JOHN ANDREWS: We have fought that in the Colorado legislature. I bet you each of these respective legislatures has fought over whether the students can affirmatively check off to give to the PIRG, at which point it’s a voluntary contribution, or is it negatively checked off against them, as Matt said, at which point it’s a de facto tax.

I’m looking at the clock. Representative Armstrong says he needs to catch a plane. And we all have to get back on schedule here. Let me leave you with this thought that I mentioned before. Why do we as a free society educate through the majesty of the law and with the resources of tax dollars? I submit to you that it is not so that we can subsidize institutions dedicated to the self-hatred, and perhaps, ultimately, the self-termination of our free society. But rather, so that we can foster our self-preservation as a free society, our self-criticism within reasonable bounds, and hopefully, our self-improvement.

And that is the stark contrast I think that is set up between the dominant powers in most universities now and that which we wish to see properly restored. David Horowitz made an interesting remark earlier. He spoke about the way in which he identifies with what liberals once identified with. This is no longer about liberals and conservatives, friends. We can have a civil dialogue, as Gib Armstrong said a moment ago. It’s now about radicals and hard-leftists that wish to see America become something utterly, utterly different.

The five of us who have served in state legislatures, and if I’m not mistaken, our friend on the end who has taken the oath as an officer of the court to be in the Bar, we’ve sworn an oath to the Constitution of the United States. And again, I make the analogy to an operating system or to the central nervous system of your body, the body politic. This is about control of the central nervous system, the soul. The operating system has been hacked into. It has bugs. It has viruses. It’s headed for a system crash if we don’t recognize it.

I take my oath to the Constitution seriously. I know my legislative or Bar Association colleagues do the same. And I trust that all of us have that commitment.

Thank you very much.

[End of disc 5 – 2:30 Legislative Issues Panel]