Speech and Panel Transcripts

Friday, April 7, 2006, 1:00 p.m.
First National Academic Freedom Conference

Scott Jaschik; Inside Higher Ed; Editor (Chair)
David Horowitz; Center for the Study of Popular Culture; President
Candace de Russy; SUNY Board of Trustees; Member
Terry Hartle; American Council on Education; SVP, Government Affairs
Bill Scheuerman; United University Professions; President
Tom Lucero; University of Colorado Board of Regents; Member

SCOTT JASCHIK: Good afternoon, everybody. While you’re finishing your lunch, we want to start the program because we have an excellent panel here and want to them time to talk and also time–spend a lot of the time engaged in discussion with the audience.

My name is Scott Jaschik, and I’m the Editor of Inside Higher Ed. And however you answer the question we are going to consider here today, about whether national–whether legislation is needed on this issue of politics in the classroom, I can tell you from a journalist’s perspective, it has been a very interesting issue to cover.

But we’re going to hear from a panel of people who come at this from different angles, and I’m going to briefly tell you a little bit about each of them right now. There are detailed biographies in your program materials.

Starting–and this is the order we are going to go in–we will hear from David Horowitz, who is President of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture. He is a prolific author, most recently of The Professors – The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, and he is known as the father of the Academic Bill of Rights.

Then we’ll hear from Terry Hartle, who is Senior Vice President for Government Affairs at the American Council on Education. The American Council on Education represents just about all sectors of higher education, public and private, large and small, and so he can provide a broad perspective on the views of colleges.

Then we will hear from two New Yorkers, first from Candace de Russy, who is a member of the Board of Trustees of the State University of New York System and is also on the Board of Ave Maria University and is on the Trustee Council of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni.

Then we’ll hear from Bill Scheuerman, who is President of United University Professions, which represents faculty members and other professionals in the State University of New York System. He is also a professor of political science at SUNY’s Oswego campus, and is Vice President of the American Federation of Teachers.

And then we will hear from Thomas Lucero, who is a businessman and who is also an elected member of the University of Colorado Board of Regents.

Each of these people will speak for five to seven minutes, and I have warned them in advance that I’m going to be ruthless about cutting them off. And then we will have Q&A with the audience. So why don’t you hold your questions for now. I’d like to get through the panel first.

And so we’ll start with David Horowitz.

DAVID HOROWITZ: I’m going to try to be about two minutes because I’ve spoken a lot today. And it’s just–I wouldn’t even do this except that the Academic Bill of Rights and its legislative campaign have been so misrepresented and willfully misrepresented since I have testimony before several legislative committees that makes very clear what our agenda is.

I advised the Academic Bill of Rights for the SUNY system in New York. I did it for the Chairman of the Board of Regents, who told me he would put it through and endorsed it. He was paralyzed by his fear of the opposition of a radical minority on his faculty, the same kind of radical minority that toppled Larry Summers, a much more powerful university president than he was a chairman of regents. And that’s why I went to legislators, and that was mainly to get the attention of administrators and to put a weight into the balance so that an administrator could say, “The legislator is threatening legislation. Therefore, we need to restore the guidelines that have been established for nearly 100 years by the AAUP.” That’s the whole rationale for the campaign.

I have never sponsored – to this point, I have never – and I have never sponsored and don’t have any plans to sponsor legislative control of universities. All the legislation is resolutions and Sense of the Congress, and it has actually worked admirably. It has gotten the attention of everybody.

Terry Hartle, who is the Vice President of the American Council of Education, represents an organization that includes 1,800 or 2,000 higher education institutions, including all universities known to man, who–his organization was inspired by this to create a position that universities felt they could live with, which I have endorsed and which we have used as a compromised solution wherever universities have approached us, most particularly in the state of Ohio, where the inter-university council asked us if we would withdraw our legislation, if they would embrace the American Council’s resolution, and we said we would.

The one thing that I have reserved because I’ve found, thanks to Gib Armstrong, who sponsored this in Pennsylvania, is legislative hearings to see what the situation is, and basically, to bring information both about what’s happening on campuses, what’s actually happening in practice, and then what the university policies are, and then to ask university administrators hwy they aren’t enforcing them and what they could do, for example, to make students aware of their rights. Students have no idea what their rights are under the existing academic freedom policies.

I want to say one thing about the panel.

William Scheuerman is the Vice President of the AFT, has been publicly a very harsh critic of mine, but we met at Temple University and got along very well, and I’m happy to have him here.

And Scott Jaschik, who was kind enough to moderate this and runs an excellent Web magazine called InsideHigherEd.com on higher education issues has also published a lot of criticism of me. But, again, the fact that we get into a room and that we can discuss these issues is the only way, it seems to me, forward that’s not going to be highly destructive. And so I hope this panel is a portent of a future in which there is more discussion among people who reasonably disagree on these matters. Thank you.

SCOTT JASCHIK: Thank you. Terry?

TERRY HARTLE: Thank you very much. Let me begin by saying David’s–picking up on David’s comments that ACU is inspired as a result of his efforts to draft a proposal on academic rights and responsibility, I wouldn’t use the word inspired. We did it, but I wouldn’t use the word inspired.

The issue on the table, the politicalization of the university, particularly an assertion that it’s tilting to the left, is hardly new in our society. A common joke in Republican circles during the Depression was in a form of a question, “How do you get to Washington, D.C.?” Well, the answer, “It’s easy. You go to Harvard and turn left.”

In the 1950s, there was a great deal of concern about liberal tilting and communist tilting at American colleges and universities. At one point, Senator Joe McCarthy said that 28% of all top collaborators with the deceitful communist front movement have been college and university professors.

In the ’60s, colleges and universities were the subject of controversy from a huge variety of issues. Looking back on it, today’s observer’s likely to be struck by the level of anger, the incendiary rhetoric, and the broad based nature of the charges. What’s interesting is that in the ’60s, colleges and universities were opposed by both the left and the right. Indeed, at one point, opinion polls said that campus unrest was the nation’s second-most pressing problems, secondly only to the war in Vietnam.

But it was this idea that both the left and the right were very unhappy with colleges and universities. That’s so interesting today. As we were thinking about this talk, we found several articles that emphasized the extent to which both the right wing and the left wing wanted to attack colleges and universities.

In the 1980s, we heard this charge again. Joe Queenan, in his book, Imperial Caddy, The Life and Times of Dan Quayle, tackled this subject directly but in a somewhat humorous vein. He wrote, “The way society works is this. Leftist intellectuals with harebrained Marxist ideas get to control Stanford, MIT, Yale and the American Studies Department at the University of Vermont. In return, the right gets IBM, Honeywell, Disney World, and the New York Stock Exchange.

Leftist academics get to try out their stupid ideas on impressionable youth between 17 and 21, who don’t have any money or power. The right gets to try out its ideas on North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Australia, parts of Africa, most of which take MasterCard. The left gets Harvard, [Obil], and Twila Tharp’s dance company in Madison, Wisconsin. The right gets NASDAQ, Boeing, General Motors, Apple, McDonnell Douglas, Washington, D.C., Citicorp, Texas, Coca-Cola, General Electric, Japan, and outer space. This seems like a fair arrangement.

The question before us today, however, is a very specific one – is legislation needed? And I’ll confine my thoughts on this to talking about it from the perspective of federal legislation, though most of my points would also apply to state legislation as well.

First, I don’t think legislation is necessary or desirable for five reasons.

One, there is little evidence of a widespread national problem. There are assertions of a problem, and there are anecdotes, some of which may not be true. But there is very little data that one can point to. This is not to say that there are not professors or problems that need to be addressed. Rather, it is to say that there is no evidence to suggest a large widespread systematic problem.

Second, almost all colleges and universities have grievance policies to handle inappropriate academic behavior. Ironically, schools that have those procedures will tell you that they are rarely used. Where there is a problem, they should be used.

Third, government efforts to regulate speech on a general issue involving so many people in so many different ways will not succeed. Attempt to regulate speech may work if you’re dealing with a very specific issue and a very clearly defined problem. For example, you don’t joke about weapons when you go through security at the airport.

By contrast, efforts to impose speech codes at colleges and universities in the 1990s almost never worked because they were overly broad and poorly defined. Operationalizing such codes turned out to be nearly impossible, even when the unit under consideration, college or university campus, was fairly specific and defined.

Fourth, using government as an enforcement vehicle is always colored by the will of the majority at the time. The majority will change, and so will the discussion. We use government to establish boundaries of discussion on campus. Those boundaries will not be fixed and immutable.

Having said all of this, I must note that the House of Representatives recently passed HR-609 to reauthorize the Higher Education Act. The House Republicans wanted to include language in the bill to deal with this issue, and they did so. The higher education community, myself included, worked with the House Republicans and David Horowitz to find language that would address the concerns that had been raised while not generating unexpected side effects. What is in the legislation is put forward as a set of principles that address the idea of what a university should be. It is a good statement, and we can live with it.

One reason we could do this was because there was widespread agreement about the basic principles of what universities ought to be. Doesn’t mean there will always be agreement on the details. In fact, in the long history of higher education, it’s pretty clear that there will always be a vigorous debate about how to make those basic principles work in practice. That’s not a bad thing; it’s a good thing. And I suspect that the language in the House bill, which will eventually be included into a final bill, is likely to stimulate a lot of discussion on college and university campuses.

Please note that this is a Sense of the House resolution. Eventually, it will become a Sense of the Congress resolution. Congress is saying, “We think.” This is very different than Congress passing a law that says, “You must.” Sense of Congress resolutions are very useful for calling attention to an issue and establishing a viewpoint, and that is what this does.

Individual institutions will look at the language and decide how to address it on their campuses. In some cases, it will probably spark a campus-wide debate on the issue. But what Congress is doing is not self-executing. I think that what we’ll see is a lot of discussions about this on campuses, and I think that that is a good and healthy thing.

Thanks very much.

Candace De Russy: Good afternoon, colleagues and friends. As you here know well, higher education historically safeguarded the Socratic method of openly questioning all truths. But anyone who claims that this is still the case is either ignorant or dishonest. [Pache], Mr. Hartle, and back to the evidence question later.

Honest observers know that our campuses no longer protect intellectual pluralism and academic freedom for all. And indeed, they are a breeding ground for leftist curricular bias, repression, and a dangerous extremism. In short, today’s campuses have become modern incarnations of the Athenian jury, which executed Socrates for thought crimes. Yet, for the most part, our educational leaders, faculties and their representative organizations, administrators, governing boards, and political officials refuse adamantly to face up to this scandal.

Pliant trustees in lockstep with the timid and politically motivated governors who have appointed them continue to pander to interest groups, groups which manipulate the dysfunctional shared governance system in their own selfish – not the public’s – behalf. With a straight face, these clacks declare in unison that on campuses there is no abuse of students’ and professors’ rights, that policies exist, as you just heard, and are invoked to protect against such abuse, that hiring promotion procedures have not been corrupted, and that, therefore, there is no need to restore the Academy’s own noble first principles via the Academic Bill of Rights, the ACE, supported by [ACTA] statements – I’ll speak about that – or some version thereof.

In addition, without irony or shame, the status quo actively stifles open and even-handed debate about intellectual diversity, all the while proclaiming their stalwart commitment to academic freedom. This hypocritical ritual recently played out at the State University of New York. After a long period of stonewalling, a trustee committee finally took up the issue of intellectual diversity mounting an elaborate and mostly one-sided theories of presentations by SUNY insiders, which one observer likened to Kabuki theater.

And thereafter, having stacked the deck and circled the wagons, the committee washed its hands of any such problem at SUNY and of the need to endorse a statement on academic freedom. Moreover, in failing to fulfill their responsibility to lead campuses in healing themselves, these trustees have unfortunately opened the way for growing numbers of our concerned lawmakers to impose legislative solutions, a course of action which should be avoided.

It is the silence of higher education leaders in other words in face of campus injustice that is goading legislators into taking action. And what of this spectacle? What of this spectacle of higher education elites eschewing both rational dialogue in the logical defense of their opinions? This in my view is eerie stuff. It calls to mind philosopher Ortega y Gasset’s description of the “reason of unreason,” which characterized the rising fascist mindset in the 1930s. And I quote, “There appears a type of man who does not want to give reasons or to be right, but simply shows himself resolved to impose his opinions. This is the new thing, the right not to be reasonable, the detestation of objective standards.”

This means a renunciation of the common life based on culture which is subject to standards, and a return to the common life of barbarism. For these reasons, there is no alternative to summoning our courage, our strength, and opposing the rise of this mentality in the Academy. The ideas on our campuses – be they good, be they bad – they take hold in the minds of countless millions within this country and planet-wide. As in the time of Socrates, they profoundly, perhaps definitively alter civic institutions and they bear heavily on the survival of civilization itself.

Be bold, my friends, therefore, and join the fray. And if I can take two minutes, because I have time, The American Council of Trustees and Alumni was not able to participate–the leadership was not able to participate. I have been affiliated for some time with it. And I’d like to note, after Mr. Hartle’s presentation about the ACE statement that ACTA is backing the ACE statement and it is asking for a certain specific–asking–specifying certain requirements that it would like to have fulfilled. Let me just run through these as fast as possible.

ACTA is recommending adoption by the boards of trustees of the statement by ACE. It is advocating completion of a self-study to assess the current state of intellectual diversity on campuses; incorporation of intellectual diversity into institutional statements, grievance procedures, program development, and activities on diversity; encouragement of balanced panels and speaker series; establishment of clear campus policies ensuring that hecklers of threats of violence do not prevent speakers from speaking; inclusion of intellectual diversity concerns in university guidelines on teaching; inclusion of intellectual diversity issues in student course evaluations; development of language in hiring, tenure, and promotion guidelines to protect individuals against political viewpoint discrimination; establishment of clear campus policies to guarantee student press freedom; establishment of clear campus policies to prohibit political bias in the distribution of student-funded fees; and finally, elimination of any speech codes that restrict or may have a chilling effect on free speech rights and creation of a university ombudsman on intellectual diversity.

Thank you.

BILL SCHEUERMAN: Let me start by thanking the organizers for inviting me, and Sara, in particular, because I had to make so many changes to get here and you were patient. So thanks. And David. David gave me a special gift. I’ve got to mention this. A special gift is something I wouldn’t buy. And David sent me a copy of his book, saved me some trips to the library, and I thought that was gracious. And I say this as a joke, but I’m serious. I really appreciate that. Thanks, Dave. Because I did enjoy the conversations we had. Even though we disagree we have to keep our civility and focus on the larger questions. And I’m here to do that today. And I want to talk about the truth that we’re discussing today.

And I’ll begin. First of all, do we need legislation to protect academic freedom? I guess it’s unanimous so far. Everybody is saying no. I certainly say we don’t. And I want to tell you why. And I’m an academic and I want to begin my search for the truth by raising larger questions. And a larger question I want to look at is what is the Academic Bill of Rights all about? And here are questions that come in my mind. I looked at David’s book. I read a lot of stuff in the Academic Bill of Rights. And by the way, I don’t believe in proselytizing in the classroom. I mean, I don’t think anybody, hopefully, anybody in this room does.

But when you take a look at what the goal and whether it’s the book or in all of the writings you’ve seen, it’s to get more conservative faculty members it seems to me in the classroom. There’s a left-wing bias Get rid of the lefties and bring in more conservatives. The question is how do you do this? And what I see is the mechanism to do this, the tool to do this is the Academic Bill of Rights. Because if we have the Academic Bill of Rights, you can say now look what we can do. We have a problem. We can move the problem and begin to move left-wing faculty members out and bring right-wing faculty members in.

And if I look at the Academic Bill of Rights much in the way you look at a research project when you start with the conclusion and then you look for the facts to fit in because you know where you want to go. You’ve chosen your destination. Now you’ve got to look at the road. And now we take a look at the facts. And this is where we run into problems. And this is where at times I look at the Academic Bill of Rights – and believe me, I’m trying to keep an open mind on this – as a house of cards.

As we look at the facts what we find is a lot of allegations, a lot of innuendos, a lot of mischaracterizations. And I could spend five or ten minutes and cite them from publications. I was at hearings in Pennsylvania. People would make allegations. They’d say back them. And often times it was a disagreement rather than an abuse. If there are abuses out there, let’s bring them forward and act on them. But let’s not make policy on the base of unsubstantiated allegations. Just a study in Florida that basically–a study in Florida by Florida government said there is no bias inside higher education.

Scott’s publication just last week, University of Nevada Study, said not only is there no bias, but they actually found that when liberal students took conservative classes their grades were lower than conservatives. Does that mean there’s a bias against liberals? I wouldn’t go that far. Maybe they’re just not interested in the work. I mean, the issues are far more complicated and complex that we’re–than we’re looking at.

Despite the lack of data though, hearing after hearing, the Academic Bill of Rights movement moves on. Well, what’s the purpose? Well, maybe–this convinces–what convinced me that the purpose is to hire more right-wing faculty and move out the left-wing faculty and the Academic Bill of Rights becomes a tool to do that. And once you disregard the facts – and David has been quoted several times as saying–I’m going to paraphrase it. And if I get it wrong, it’s a paraphrase. Well, maybe that particular fact was wrong, but we know it happens anyway. Well, if you know it happens anyway, let’s see it and let’s test it. And let’s see how serious it is and let’s hear both sides. Let’s bring it to the standard of due process and then act. And if it’s a real problem we know what to do. And we know we can use the processes that are already in place.

And another speaker mentioned the processes. But if your goal is to shift the balance from left-wing faculty to right-wing faculty, you’re going to say the process–you’re going to discredit the processes that are in place. And that’s basically what’s done. Well, people don’t use them for whatever reasons. And I can understand why students would be reluctant to use them. But if the problem is very severe, that’s what you have and they generally do work.

So once you say, I’m not going to use the process, and once you say, I’m not going to look at the facts, but they’re still a problem, your next step is some kind of government intervention, whether it’s a resolution or worse yet, a legislative solution. I don’t think anybody in this room would want a legislative solution. First of all, it violates the principles of limited government by which this country–upon which this country is based.

Can you imagine some government agency having–stepping in the classroom and having a lot to say about grading, curricula, what happens in any particular class? And there’s the whole question of how would you implement it? Would you create another Soviet-like bureaucracy? And how would you know when the law was violated? I mean, the whole thing gets so mushy and crazy, it just wouldn’t work.

So I look at this whole process, where it’s leading. If we ever go in a direction of a legislative solution, I look at that as a process of a kind of Soviet-type solution to a problem that isn’t backed by the data. And that leads me to say the problem isn’t–it probably doesn’t even exist. I’d like to see more–tougher data that can be defended by the standards of due process. If that’s there, let’s take a look at it. I haven’t seen it yet.

Thanks.

TOM LUCERO: Thank you all very much for the opportunity to be here with you today. I am actually going to talk on a number of very provocative issues. And just as a disclaimer, I’m going to skim the surface on them, not get into a lot of detail. And hopefully, save that for question and answer.

But at this point, I want to take a minute to thank David for organizing and hosting today’s event. More importantly, I want to thank David for his dedication and hard work to the issue of education. Because now more than ever, thanks to his hard work and dedication, the American public is beginning to take notice of what’s occurring in the Academy. Soon enough, we’re going to hit critical mass with that awareness with the American public. And David, as much as any person in this country, is going to be responsible when that day comes.

The question before us today is, is legislation necessary. Having coincidentally enough spent the last four days earlier in the week at the National Conference for Governing Boards for Higher Education, I’d like to share with you my assessment of the state of governing boards for American universities.

Let me first start with a positive reflection. There was an overwhelming sense and belief that governing boards are the voice for American public universities. And more importantly, they believe that they are the guardians for American higher education. That part seems pretty straightforward, but from there it quickly becomes murky. And if there is a theme that runs through that conference and through governing boards across this country, that theme would be confusion.

And that confusion, in my mind, is the result of two major factors that have led to the emasculation of governing boards for universities around this country. Governing boards are struggling with this basic concept of how to govern. And number two, even if they figure out that first part of how they’re going to govern, they can’t find consensus on what their priorities and responsibilities should be.

If we look at that first piece, what’s this notion of higher ed governance, we begin to–if you look at a governing board–let me take a step back for a second and interject here. Because on governing boards the majority of them are appointed by governors around the country, these are all very successful people. Very intelligent, many of whom serve on corporate boards, many of whom have done tremendous things in their life. But when they come to a governing board for higher education, they’re completely at a loss for how to govern.

And therefore, you have boards with no model for governance and no ability to implement public policy on behalf of students and citizens around this country. And just as importantly, they have no way to measure the successes and failures of their universities. Now when we look at that second piece, we ask ourselves, even if we figure out the former, do boards have the skills and the information necessary in order to ask the right questions in setting the priorities for their universities? What a lack of organized and clearly defined public governance has led to is a system whereby all critical decisions have been delegated, and some of us might even suggest usurped by the presidents and the administrations of universities.

So where are the opportunities and the hope for the future of higher education? Governing boards needs to write blueprint for governance as well as for priority setting. Right now at the University of Colorado, we are making tremendous progress on both fronts. We’re clearly articulating how the legislative relationship between the board and the president is going to work. The board will be responsible for setting major public policy for the university and the president will be held accountable for those successes and/or failures.

In addition, the board is simultaneously defining what those priorities are going to be. As a conservative, I am hopeful we can be successful in defining what this blueprint and this governance for higher education should be. Because I believe that government should be handled at the local level. However, in order for this model to be successful, governing boards have got to begin to assert themselves and be willing to reclaim what is their rightful authority. But if we’re not able to be successful, then frankly, I believe the only solution at that point is to turn to state legislators for assistance.

In addition to the Academic Bill of Rights, I have the perspective of sitting on a governing board. I would add two pieces into public policy legislation. Mary? Sam? If I were sitting in the legislature, one, I would cut funding, and number two, I would define standards for civic literacy. By cutting budgets, what you would ultimately do is force universities to prioritize what defines their excellence. Universities would have to stop trying to be all things to all people.

The current model is excel at a few things, have those departments of excellence subsidize the poor performers. Ultimately, all you succeed in creating is mediocrity. Simultaneously, you must demand that universities begin to teach civic literacy. It is time for universities to understand that they are responsible for educating the next generation of leaders in this country and that most Americans want their leaders to have a foundation in Western history, philosophy, and the American founding.

Americans want their leaders to embody a value system that is reflective of their values, a set of values rooted in what it means to be uniquely American.

Thank you all.

SCOTT JASCHIK: Before we go to questions from the audience, I wanted to give each of the panels, and I thought we could again go in order, just a minute, literally one minute of anything that was said that you wanted to respond to.

David?

DAVID HOROWITZ: If I may just take the privilege since I only spoke for two minutes and since the bill has been attacked here. There are two responses to this bill. One is to misrepresent it and the other is to say there’s no problem. I–Bill came in late, so maybe he didn’t see the sign that says Take Politics Out of the Classroom. It doesn’t say take leftist politics out. And it doesn’t say put conservative politics in. I made the first tenet of the Academic Bill of Rights professors can’t be hired or fired on the basis of their political views, yet I am consistently represented in all the education media and by all the unions and all the opponents as somebody who’s plotting – this is a right-wing plot – to fire leftists and hire conservatives. That is a myth.

On the evidence issue. The Florida study is a spurious study. Unless students know their rights, which they don’t–no student knows what is appropriate in a classroom because they are not told. They can’t complain about being abused. They’re not going to come forward with that. They only come forward when we have gone in and told them, and put in their hands the Academic Freedom Provisions of the AUP and advise them of it, ignores and opposes these days.

No wait. Wait a minute. I want to–

SCOTT JASCHIK: –I want to make sure we get everybody.

DAVID HOROWITZ: We’ll get everybody.

SCOTT JASCHIK: Thirty seconds here.

DAVID HOROWITZ: The Academic Freedom Hearings the University of Pittsburgh said they conducted, they went into their computers and over–it took them three months. And I have to be careful. I don’t know it was exactly three months, because if I misspell a word it appears on the union-sponsored website of David Horowitz’s looseness with the facts. And they came up with 13 cases over five years and they said this is nothing. Now that’s 13 cases where students do not know what their rights are, but they did go in and complain about Academic Freedom abuses.

Now there are three big state universities, so that would be 39 in five years for the state. Then there are 15 or 17 in the state system. So say there’s about 60 complaints over five years. Seems like nothing, doesn’t it? That’s one state. If you–I forget the book–what the title of the book is, but I’ve written about it, so it’s easy to find. There is a book that was written on the McCarthy–and the Cold War period. Actually, more than the McCarthy period. From 1947 to 1954 in the AUP files, the total number of cases of Academic Freedom abuses in the McCarthy era and beyond is 59 nationally. This is 59 in Pennsylvania. That’s 59 over 50 states over 7 years. Yet, the major horror in American life is the McCarthy era. So we have a much bigger problem in our universities–.

SCOTT JASCHIK: –Okay–.

DAVID HOROWITZ: –Than they had in the McCarthy era.

SCOTT JASCHIK: Thank you. Terry, anything? Candace?

CANDACE DE RUSSY: Three points. First of all, Terry, you have stated that you have espoused this statement, the presidents–university presidents, global colloquium, they too espoused an admirable statement. And ACTA, the organization I referred to earlier, backed all this. What I want to know from you at some point is what are you going to do to implement this? How are you going to get results? Your president, David Ward, has said there is a need for campuses to take real action, a need for grievance procedures to be in place, and so forth. We need action on this. Point one.

Mr. Hartle and also Bill, here, again we get this refrain no evidence of abuse and so forth. ACTA has sponsored a survey of students which showed that they indeed are very deeply concerned. A shocking 49% of the students at the country’s top 50 colleges and universities say their professors frequently injected political comments into their courses even if they had nothing to do with the subject, and other things. See for that GoACTA.org and you will get the full range of data on this.

And finally, to Tom over here, he says that trustees are struggling with confusion about how to govern. Well, others have described what the governance system right now is a duopoly. A dysfunctional duopoly of management of shared governments that’s not working anymore. Yes, trustees have to stand up and be counted, but governors first of all have to have vision. The governors in many ways animate and motivate the trustees. We need governors, pressure on governors, and also administrators, whose salaries are going up year-by-year with the status quo as it is. They don’t want public problems. And the faculty likes the status quo. As one of them said, we like it just the way it is. So they support the status quo.

We’re going to have to have governors with courage who then motivate the boards.

Thank you.

SCOTT JASCHIK: Well, I thought for sure Candace was going to say that not all trustees are timid. But I guess [inaudible].

BILL SCHEUERMAN: I know one trustee who is not in the least bit timid.

CANDACE DE RUSSY: Governors.

BILL SCHEUERMAN:: And that’s interesting you said governors because we’re here today to talk about how to keep politics out of the classroom and the speech we’re getting is governors have to take a more proactive role in promoting our agenda. That’s not what we should be doing That’s what I heard you say. And that to me is the underlying theme of everything that’s going on when we take a look at the mushy facts.

And there’s a difference between–you know, I was a student, too. I often didn’t disagree with the–didn’t agree with the professor. I was offended. But that doesn’t mean the professor has crossed a line somewhere. We want facts that will take the test of due process because there are careers at stake and there are institutional reputations at stake. If you don’t have that, why proceed? Well, if you proceed without the data it makes me think the motive has something to do other than the interest of students. Maybe it’s the interest of bringing in right-wing faculty.

SCOTT JASCHIK: Tom?

TOM LUCERO: So, of course, the response to Bill becomes–and this is a wonderful argument he places himself in because he says we need the facts. But if you go out and suggest that we’re going to hold hearings, we’re going to bring professors forward, we’re going to go analyze syllabi, he’s already shaking his head over here. How do you go about getting these facts without being called the next Joe McCarthy? And that, then, becomes the issue. Because nobody in this room, David, including myself, is suggesting that we want to go into the classroom and begin to meddle in what teachers are teaching in the classroom by looking at their syllabi and by bringing the government into the classroom.

The reality of it is that at some point it’s anecdotal. At some point, the pattern begins to repeat itself and it’s demonstrated over and over and over again. And David has been wonderful at demonstrating that pattern repeatedly at universities around the country. I’ve heard the stories at the University of Colorado. All we’re looking for is this intellectual balance on campuses.

And I would ask Bill this question. If there were a study to come out – a scientific study – that said civil literacy at major universities around this country was woeful and pathetic, would you support a curriculum that would help address that issue?

SCOTT JASCHIK: Bill? Since you were just asked a direct question.

BILL SCHEUERMAN: Yes, providing the faculty participated in the process of shared governance. We don’t want it imposed by people who think they know a lot about what we do, but haven’t been inside a campus classroom for 10, 15, or 20 years. We’re the professionals. We put all those years in school. We work with students. Not all of us are perfect. In fact, none of us is perfect. And there’s some that probably screw up. We’re all human. But you don’t want outsiders imposing academic standards and replacing your professional training.

SCOTT JASCHIK: If I could now use my prerogative as moderator to pose a question before we open this. I wanted to follow up on something–.

BILL SCHEUERMAN: –Can I just say the answer is yes.

SCOTT JASCHIK: Okay.

BILL SCHEUERMAN: It really depends who does it, is the short version.

SCOTT JASCHIK: I wanted to follow-up on something David said because–something he said before about how students don’t know how to complain. And I was thinking there’s a website that professors hate called RateMyProfessors.com. And I spent some time on it this morning. And if you look at it and the hundreds and hundreds–thousands of students use it. Do students here use it? Okay. And you can see what they complain about. They complain all the time about classes that are too large. They don’t like it if the professors are too tough. They complain that there are woefully few professors who earn the chili pepper for being hotties. You don’t see a lot of complaints about these issues.

And so, isn’t that evidence that in fact students do know how to complain, do know how to share information, but maybe this isn’t their top issue?

DAVID HOROWITZ: Well, look, we have produced hundreds of complaints from RateMyProfessors. When we testified in Pennsylvania we produced hundreds of complaints. These are just lists of anecdoctals. This is the way the game is played. Now [Steve Baltz] testified before Gib Armstrong’s committee and I testified. And this is hours of testimony. Entire programs are ideological and violate the stated Academic Freedom policies at Penn State, at the University of Pittsburgh at Temple University.

At the end of an hour and a half of my testimony and questioning, a Democrat on the committee–actually, the co-chair of the committee, who was a featured speaker at two union-sponsored rallies against the committee – this is what we were dealing with – denouncing it as a McCarthy committee. And this is the co-chair of the committee. Asked me two–a planted question really about a claim that I didn’t make in my testimony, that wasn’t made in the 19 hours or whatever it was of previous testimony. It had nothing to do with the case–which I was not making because it had been–it was a claim about showing 9/11 with–Fahrenheit 9/11 in a biology class. Fahrenheit 9/11 had been shown in classes across the country right before the election.

Anyway, the–when that was challenged and we couldn’t confirm it, we withdrew it. That’s months before these committee hearings. Scott’s Inside Higher Education and it’s story on the–whatever it was, nine hours of committee hearings at Temple, was headlined that all he interviewed me was about this one claim that I didn’t make and that is what Bill Scheuerman is referring to. And that becomes part of the Horowitz fact checking. This is just–this is–look, we have a very serious problem here. And it will be in the end, I can see, it’s forming up to be–to get to be–could be destructive to our educational institutions.

If you’re going to play this game of polemical warfare and blood fest by seizing irrelevant points that have nothing to do with the massive evidence we’ve produced–I’ve also testified in Kansas. I talked earlier today. Bill wasn’t here. We had six or seven students describe classes which they entered like in women’s studies where the beginning of the class is a chant, no [on Arnolds] and no on recall, which what does that have to do with women’s studies, and so forth.

Whole courses devoted to ideological indoctrination, no question about it. We never get an answer. There is no response from the other side. There is just–find a word misspelled, find some claim that is completely irrelevant and challenge that. So–.

SCOTT JASCHIK: Okay. Candace and then Terry wanted to–and then, we’re going to get Bill.

CANDACE DE RUSSY: –I have to say one thing–.

SCOTT JASCHIK: –Very quickly, please.

CANDACE DE RUSSY: One thing to my friend, Bill, here. I never asked that governors set this agenda. Governors not so much define the agenda as put in trustees who have vision and who are appointed–that they appoint in forum and independent trustees who are committed to academic freedom for all.

Scott, with respect to the point that you raised, you suggested students are really just not particularly interested in this problem. It’s explained to student ad nauseum what their complaints could be about race and gender, but not about viewpoint discrimination. That’s the one thing. So the education on this subject is not there.

Secondly, the grievance procedures on this particular issue are not well-publicized on campuses, as I said earlier. For example, in student orientation this is the case. In addition, many students are simply too intimidated to put in their grievance–to file their grievances. And this is extremely common and I’ve heard many, many cases over the year.

Fourth, the process is when grievances are filed are strung out forever and ever and students leave the campuses before in fact their grievances are resolved.

And finally, the records don’t exist or the records maybe do exist, but even the trustee can’t get her or his hands on them. So those are the problems. That’s my answer to you.

SCOTT JASCHIK: Okay. Terry, did you want to jump in here? And then, we’ll get the audience’s–.

TERRY HARTLE: Well, I almost don’t know where to start. It will come as a great surprise to many college and university presidents that students don’t know how to complain. I must say, the Internet has made complaining very, very easy on college and university campuses. It ought to be quite a surprise. I also hear this – that students are too intimidated to complain. I really don’t think students are too intimidated to complain. Sometimes in our society we have to do things that are difficult Sometimes we have to confront people who are–have positions of superiority in terms of rank, in terms of age, in terms of position and bring something to their attention that might be difficult.

This is in some ways a good lesson of citizenship, which Tom would like to have more of. On anecdotes. Look, if your data are anecdotes and some of your anecdotes turn out to be of questionable validity, your data is of questionable validity. This should not surprise anyone. Anecdotes and anecdotes. The plural form of the word anecdote is not data. It is anecdotes. And they really don’t add up to very much. So, again, I say, we have a lot of anecdotes, some of which may or may not be true. That doesn’t constitute data that would pass any sort of a test on any college or university.

So I think that we need to ask ourselves whether or not we’re serious about this and can come up with data or whether we’re going to continue to rely on anecdotes that can be attacked as anecdotes when they’re valid.

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

SCOTT JASCHIK: Okay. I’d like to get a question here. And before you ask a question, if you could introduce yourself, please. Yes, here.

QUESTION: Hi. I’m [inaudible-no microphone].

SCOTT JASCHIK: Okay. Thank you. Yes?

QUESTION: Concerning anecdotal–?

SCOTT JASCHIK: –Okay. Could you introduce yourself and–?

QUESTION: [Inaudible]. I’m a professor and I just wanted to say that what you’re calling anecdotal, we call qualitative research in the post-modern paradigm in particular. [Inaudible.] We call that data. If you don’t believe that, just go to the ARA Conference next week in San Francisco, and you will see that probably out of 10,000 people, maybe 500 or less do believe in the type of data you are talking about, which is quantitative data. This is completely validated education. This is actually the reigning paradigm in educational research at the moment. It’s qualitative research. Those are not anecdotes. That is data.

SCOTT JASCHIK: Terry, would you like to respond to that?

TERRY HARTLE: Are you a professor?

QUESTION: Yes, I am.

TERRY HARTLE: Good God.

SCOTT JASCHIK: Yes, you. No, there is someone first in the back. Yes.

QUESTION: [Tom Preger], Legislative Director, UUP. One real quick comment. The Academic Bill of Rights that was introduced in New York was not a resolution. There were enforcement mechanisms in the bill. The enforcement mechanism was to take the grievance procedure off the campus where it exists now and I believe bring it up to the system level and put it in the hands of the trustees. So that was much more than a resolution.

A question for Mr. Horowitz. The mantra today seems to be intellectual diversity. But I sat through a student panel and it was great. And the students were very well spoken, bright, articulate, belied the notion that students were slackers and not politically involved today. But all of them seemed to identify themselves as either conservatives or Republican activists every one. If that’s your notion of intellectual diversity, couldn’t you find anybody else for that [pin]?

The second question for Trustee de Russy. I attended the meeting that you referenced, the March 16 meeting of the Academic Standards Committee, State University Board of Trustees. It was a committee that you used to chair. At that meeting, there were four campus presidents who gave testimony, all of whom said they looked through all of the campus grievance procedures. The president of Plattsburgh said he went back to 1978 and there were no grievances filed of students being trampled because of their political or religious views.

The president at Albany, same thing. The president at Cobleskill, Tom Haas, same thing. The elective student representatives read resolutions that were passed that most of the–at the SUNY’s 64 campuses in opposition to the Academic Bill of Rights. The elected representative of the faculty governance organization at the community college is the faculty council read resolutions from most of their campuses in opposition to the Academic Bill of Rights. The chair of the faculty senate -these are university-funded bodies – say things. Resolution from the general statewide organization, all the state chapters against it.

So if there’s this groundswell of problems out there, I mean, these are data. The presidents, the faculty, the students said this is unnecessary. Are you listening to someone [inaudible]?

SCOTT JASCHIK: Okay. Candace? David? Who wants to go first? You’ve each got questions.

DAVID HOROWITZ: Could you identify yourself?

SCOTT JASCHIK: He did.

DAVID HOROWITZ: Who is–what is he? What’s his–?

SCOTT JASCHIK: Could you identify yourself again?

QUESTION: I’m Tom Preger. I’m Legislative Director for UUB.

CANDACE DE RUSSY: I’ll go first.

SCOTT JASCHIK: Okay, Candace.

CANDACE DE RUSSY: I tuned in by phone to that meeting. And again, I agree with the assessment that it was–it resembled Kabuki theater. You had this lineup of SUNY insiders. I had asked that David be included or Anne Neal of ACTA be allowed to speak or somebody from the outside. But there was this element–oh no, we can’t have this as a SUNY problem. This is all about us internally.

So, number one, that was refused. And in my mind, that’s a sign of closed mindedness. Second of all, they all lined up in a row and said their piece, their policies on campus, and of course, that’s true. The glossy material says we have academic freedom on this campus. That’s what they mean by their policies. But they do not have specific wording when it comes to grievances about viewpoint discrimination. It’s race and gender, yes.

And we’ve made the point that you could easily put in this language of viewpoint discrimination in the current machinery they have. They make the point this would be very expensive. No, it wouldn’t be. Not at all. So these things were not address there. Everyone got up, said their little piece about the fact that there’s no problems. How about the speakers that they had? Do you know that there was not one student invited. There was not one effort made system-wide to find one student who would come up with a complaint. Nor was there anybody there to speak to any complaints. For example, a Rockport case–speech code case that in fact has been resolved.

There was no mention of these things. On the speaker front, when it came to faculty, there was an intention to–originally on this agenda to include one untenured professor who had the courage to come forward and describes himself as a Democrat moderate. A moderate Democrat. I was at [indiscernible] and said I disagreed with this terribly. I said you invite these other couple of people I suggested. The day before the event they invited one of these people and three days before that the other. So I’m telling you what I say is that was a very trumped-up affair. And not at all a fair hearing on this issue. And shameful when it comes to really taking a look–an open-minded look at academic freedom.

SCOTT JASCHIK: Okay. David, do you want to respond to the part of the question that was to you?

DAVID HOROWITZ: Of course. I get this feeling often that I’m behind the old Iron Curtain when I’m dealing with these university people. It is so dispiriting to have to prove the obvious when you have people in denial of reality. Look, the SUNY system has got 69 campuses, it has 400,000 students. There’s not a single university president, not an administration, who will respond to the chairman of the regions who asked university presidents to invite me to a campus.

There might be 30 leftists for every one conservative, although we could hardly find a handful of conservatives in the entire SUNY system to–who we could appeal to on the Academic Bill of Rights. And you can’t get a liberal to do it because–if they’re not intimidated they’re just part of the party wide.

If–I mean, you sat through them. And to ask for diversity. There is more diversity in this room than there is in the whole SUNY system. Well, you can protest that. The dead faith here is monumental. How many cases of sexual harassment were brought up before the universities instituted speech codes. How many cases of actual discrimination? How much was not anecdotal? Nobody cared about this. Nobody.

SCOTT JASCHIK: Okay. I want to–.

DAVID HOROWITZ: –So–.

SCOTT JASCHIK: –Hold on. I want to get more people involved. But there was a question on this side.

DAVID HOROWITZ: And you all–one thing is you all avoid the fact that the case that we have made is based on curricular statements I gave this morning and in my Kansas testimony. You have a social welfare chorus which is a reading of a leftist tract on American history going back to Columbus in a social work program. There is not a single official in the entire Kansas system who will raise an objection to this chorus even though it’s an explicit policy of the Kansas Board of Regents that this violates their regulations. And you won’t–you in the AUP, you won’t speak up for it. You’re too busy defending Sammy Al-Arian and Terry Karamadan and other terrorists on university faculties.

SCOTT JASCHIK: Okay. I think what I’d like to do to be fair is sort of go back and forth between the two mikes. So if people want to get in line. And here’s somebody.

QUESTION: Okay. Don Downs from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, which was referred to earlier as one of the redoubts of the left in America. Some of you know, and I’ll tell you later, I am a die-hard anti-speech code person. I defended David Horowitz’s right to publish his cartoon on racial reparations in the Badger Herald. And a group I represent at Madison and you’ll hear about later today rose to the Herald’s defense.

But–sort of–and we agreed very much with the–David and others’ diagnoses of the problem. The question is one of means. Now let me just pose a quick question for the panel. One of the complaints or criticisms we made during our crusade at Madison, which was successful, against the speech codes after they were passed in the early 1990s and late 1980s, was that there are more informal ways of dealing with ideological oppression or intellectual oppression on campus.

And one thing was for–very similar to what Terry Hartle said–was for students to stand up and speak for themselves, defend themselves, find allies. If they don’t–like one of the professors said, if a professor offends them in class, stand up and speak as an American citizen. Don’t run to the [indiscernible] state to enforce a speech code.

But now, I’m hearing the same arguments that we were criticizing in our anti-speech code drive made by defenders of the Student Bill of Rights, who also hate speech codes. Tell me why there’s not a problem there.

SCOTT JASCHIK: Okay. I’d like to have two respondents. Maybe a–somebody in favor of the Academic Bill of Rights and somebody opposed. And maybe, Tom do you want to speak to that and then–?

TOM LUCERO: Well, I’d love to address it from a governance issue, in particular, and going back to Bill’s comment earlier because you asked what’s the problem. And I think this is endemic of what the problem is because Bill mentioned earlier about how the faculty know. The faculty are responsible for curriculum. Well, let me through out a little analogy.

Can you imagine the chief of police going to a major–or to a mayor of a major city and saying, oh, by the way, we know crime’s a problem. You’re neighbor just got shot, but by the way, we’re the experts in how to deal with crime and punishment. Stay out of our business. And when governing boards try and address this issue of intellectual diversity, intellectual balance, and as far as core curriculum, we are told by the faculty that this is our domain. You–.

QUESTION: –You didn’t answer my question. We [aren’t] treating the students as helpless victims that need outside support.

TOM LUCERO: Well–but the issue is, is legislation necessary. Let me. I understand that. Let me finish.

QUESTION: Tom, I’m curious. Do you support speech codes?

TOM LUCERO: Absolutely not. Absolutely not. But to get to his question, what is the difference between a speech code that would say if you say something I consider racist and offends me, you can be brought up on charges versus the Academic Bill of Rights?

I’m going a long ways to answer his question, but let me finish this up. I say the individuals who should be responsible tying this into the theme is legislation necessary is the governing board. The governing board should be responsible for making certain that speech codes don’t exist, that intellectual diversity–and a student should not have the responsibility of dealing with the power center on a university, which is in the faculty and the administrative hands. Because you were saying that the faculty and administration can do what they want. As Bill has said, this is our domain – curriculum, what is taught in the classroom. And so, we’re arming 18, 19, 20-year-old students with the responsibility of needing to defend themselves.

And I’m talking about this from a legislative governance perspective. And until you empower governing boards to set the policy and take that responsibility out of the students’ hands, you’re not going to achieve that [indiscernible].

SCOTT JASCHIK: Okay. I want to give Bill a chance, but I want to really appeal to everybody given all the questions for very short answers.

BILL SCHEUERMAN: Your basic question is–essentially, you are saying we are being paternalistic. The students don’t know their own interests. That’s what I find offensive about the Academic Bill of Rights. And I saw the same thing from the left in the 1960s when people were saying in the 1960s you don’t really know what’s good for you, but we will help you. I rejected that crap then, and I don’t like this now.

We’re smart enough to make our own decisions. We’re educated, we’re bright, we’re human. We are not sponges that just absorb everything that’s thrown at us.

DAVID HOROWITZ: We have a case in the room which shows why students are not helpless. They need help. And let me just say the government did not institute speech codes. No government in this country would institute speech codes because they’re unconstitutional. And the lawyers on the staff committees would tell them that. And we have a situation where, for example, in Pennsylvania there are 15, as [David Franks testified], out of 17 Penn State universities that violate the constitution today. And the Democrat on the committee, right after he said this, said this committee is a waste of time.

That’s the reality that we’re dealing with. Now, [Ruth Bell Haltra] is an A-student in public policy taking a course required for the major. When she went and told her professor she was going to be gone today because she had to–wanted to attend a conservative conference and was told that she would be failed. And then, was failed as an A-student–nobody gets an F in college anymore anyway. And F on paper after paper. And had to decide–this is her major. This is a professor in her field. What to do about it. And when it was revealed even, they let her withdraw from the course. Nothing happened to this professor. Nothing was done in this situation until I went there and met with the governor’s education advisor and say the governor has to make a call to the president of the school.

That is the situation. These people are the problem. And Bill and the AAUP will not do anything about this. And therefore, it is necessary to go to legislative bodies to ring the governor’s–ring the president’s office. He will listen. Something will be done. You tell me another way do it, I’ll do it.

SCOTT JASCHIK: Before–I want to go to Jamie first, but by any chance, is there any–are there any Penn State administrators here? Okay. Jamie?

QUESTION: My name is Jamie Horowitz. No relation to the other Horowitz. And probably the reason for that is I work for the American Federation of Teachers. Last night at the debate, I feel like I had to–I know I’ve been criticized and the AFT has been criticized for calling the other Mr. Horowitz on inaccuracies. But one of the ones, and I’m sure he’ll say it’s a minor one, is he implied that faculty all across the country are tenured. When the reality is that 43% of the faculty of the United States are part-time who have no tenure rights, 11% are full-time non-tenure track faculty. Only about a third of the faculty in the United States right now are tenured faculty and that number is shrinking all the time.

And this conference is about academic freedom for students. But the reality of it is, for this group of faculty that now make up the majority of the faculty in the United States, many of them, if there’s a complaint by a student, their contract is not renewed. There’s been cases that have gone all the way through federal court because like in English classes, there was one instance, for example, where there was a course where the professor was talking about–words that are used to offend. And some students found that offensive and the faculty member was removed.

I raise all this because there is a growing–what is a fact is that there is a growing percentage of faculty in the United States who do not have academic freedom protections. We can talk about how this affects students, but the fact of the matter is the majority of faculty don’t have the kind of academic freedom protections they once had. And so, I’m curious. With your strong interest in academic freedom, would the people on the panel support added academic freedom protections for non-tenure track and part-time faculty across the country?

SCOTT JASCHIK: Okay. How about 30 seconds from each person?

QUESTION: And I would also–if I could just–one last point, too, just to clarify another error from last night. The average state university professor does not make anywhere near $100,000 a year, Mr. Horowitz. And it’s really about half that. And I think maybe Mr. Hartle could back me on that. Thank you.

DAVID HOROWITZ: Every single statement by the AUP on academic freedom is–or every–is a declaration of or statement of principles on academic freedom and tenure. And therefore, I address the issue. Academic freedom is extricably bound to tenure. It is not about individual rights. And therefore, I said tenured professors–and as you can see, this is the kind of opposition I have to deal with. This becomes a factual error by David Horowitz or some kind of deception. A misrepresentation–thank you. This makes conversation absolutely impossible.

And I didn’t say that–the figures in the Chronicle of Higher Education are that professors can make $100,000 to $170,000. I believe the average professor, full professor at Harvard makes that. When I testified in Kansas, I looked up the figures. Okay. The average full professor in Kansas state universities makes $93,000 a year. Close enough.

TERRY HARTLE: But to answer–just quickly on Jamie’s question. A lot of–.

DAVID HOROWITZ: –I would be–.

TERRY HARTLE: –Non-tenured professors [indiscernible]. Do you support that?

DAVID HOROWITZ: The problem with academic freedom is, it is the principles–academic standards are not enforced. You have professors mouthing off on their ignorance. You haven’t addressed that. When the AAUP sits down and says we are going to impose on our members and we are going to demand from the universities that professors act professionally in the classroom, that they don’t indoctrinate, that they don’t attack George Bush in English classes, I will consider extending academic freedom protections to adjuncts and to lecturers.

It happens that the worst abusers in the entire university system of students are untenured, the lecturers that you’re talking about. Why do I want to protect political ideologs who have come into the universities to recruit people for their ridiculous and destructive causes under the pretense of being academic?

SCOTT JASCHIK: Okay. I think you’ve now answered. Terry, do you support having academic freedom? Candace?

CANDACE DE RUSSY: I think something actually must be done to protect the speech rights, if you will, of the untenured adjuncts and so forth. I had a somewhat different experience of them in these past years. It’s that they are under–they appear to be under particular pressure to be politically correct in all things because they are moving toward tenure and so they keep their mouths shut a great deal. They–their opinions appear to be severely suppressed in this regard. So that does–that’s a matter of concern to me.

Secondly, I happen to support some new tenure system, reform of tenure, call it attenuated tenure, so that there will be in fact greater review, more performance-based review of even tenured professors on a regular basis. And that there will in fact be more opportunities for the adjuncts and the younger professors coming through. So that’s my answer.

SCOTT JASCHIK: Okay. Bill? Academic freedom for a non-tenured professor?

BILL SCHEUERMAN: Yes, I’d like to see more of that. I don’t know exactly how you would do it. My question to David. You just made what I think is an outrageous statement. The worst violators of academic freedom are the people who are most vulnerable. Where’s your data? Where did that come from? I mean, it makes no sense logically. If you have data, I’ll be convinced. But where does it come from?

DAVID HOROWITZ: It comes from the complaints that I receive. The students will say–first of all, some of the courses among the indoctrination courses that we’ve dealt with–and it comes from actually people on your side defending it because they say well, it’s only lecturers. Writing courses. The writing courses–when I went to Columbia centuries ago, the writing courses still are about students don’t get the proper writing education in high schools and so they can’t write papers. That’s what it’s about. It’s about training people in writing papers.

So when I went to Columbia, we read writers. We knew how to write. Today, they have these theme freshman writing courses and environmentalism and feminism and racism taught be English instructors. So these are people who have no qualifications to talk about race–no academic qualifications to talk about race, to talk about the environment. All they’re doing is spreading their prejudices and ignorance. And they are–that’s where I guess the worst abuse is. So that was what that statement meant.

Now, Bill–.

SCOTT JASCHIK: –Just hold on for one second. We are officially at the end of the time. But I am quite content to continue for some more questions if the panel–I know Bill is–.

BILL SCHEUERMAN: –I have a plane to make.

SCOTT JASCHIK: You’re unable to stay.

BILL SCHEUERMAN: I’m staying here because I want–.

DAVID HOROWITZ: –I missed my lunch so you could get your point–.

BILL SCHEUERMAN: –I’ll buy your lunch next time I see you. Okay?

SCOTT JASCHIK: So, thank you, Bill. But now, Tom, I didn’t give you a chance on that last question. Did you want to address the academic freedom for adjuncts, Tom?

TOM LUCERO: Yes. And I’ll address it from this perspective. And given the fact that I only have 30 seconds, I’ll do it quickly. I serve on the only committee in the history of the United States who exhaustively review tenure in all hiring policy practices related to adjuncts, everything. University of Colorado, thanks in part to our famous professor, have been looking at this issue for 14 months. And one of the biggest concerns on that committee is how do you define standards. Once we define those standards, absolutely. Once you can measure and define what accountability is, then absolutely, you need to provide and defend for academic freedom in the classroom.

SCOTT JASCHIK: Yes, sir?

QUESTION: My name is [indiscernible-accented]. I’m a professor at the University of Minnesota. And most of my questions are for Bill and for Terry. Terry, maybe you can deputize for Bill. If I am to understand you right, I shouldn’t worry. I should be happy. The existing procedures are taking care of what problems there are. But are there not some serious problems with, for example, the hounding off campus of conservative speakers true? Mercifully, rarer now than it used to be, but is very common and greeted with total [indiscernible] anonymity by administrations? Isn’t there a problem with overreaching speech codes? And isn’t there a problem with overtly political departments like women’s studies, and [indiscernible] studies and the like? Isn’t there a problem with professional societies taking stands on current political issues on which they have no special expertise? And finally–.

SCOTT JASCHIK: –That’s a bunch of problems. So maybe, let’s let Terry answer.

BILL SCHEUERMAN: Good luck.

TERRY HARTLE: I’m just interested–the Academic Bill of Rights deals essentially with the issue I guess of professors trying to impose their views on other students and students being discriminated against in their–in the classroom because of views that they might hold involving personal political preferences and what not. But much of what we’ve been talking about on this panel are speech codes, civic literacy, course readings, and profession–now, professional societies. We seem to be all over the map with the problems here. I think speech codes were very much an issue and I think institutions instituted those thinking they were doing the right thing.

And I think over time it became clear that that was not the right thing and that institutions have significantly moved away from them. I think speakers on campus often have different receptions. Certainly, David has found a hostile reaction on more than one campus when he has spoken. And my view is that that is wrong and unacceptable. Campuses are supposed to be places for free and open debate and discussion and all speakers ought to be welcome there.

There was a time when some radical speakers were not welcomed on the other side We seem to go through cycles in those. Gosh, professional societies. I don’t know about professional societies. That’s really not something I have much to deal with. And fields of studies like–what was that one–core studies–women’s studies.

You know, look, the institutions approve those. Usually, it’s my impression that faculty usually has some say in the creation of new academic departments on campus. So it seems to me that if the faculty are unhappy with this, the faculty ought to intervene in it. Personally, I think if you take courses in those fields you probably have some idea what you’re getting into when you enroll in them. If you don’t, you probably ought to do a little bit better job of preparing for the classes.

SCOTT JASCHIK: Okay. One minute from Candace.

CANDACE DE RUSSY: Just one little comment here. Yes, well, maybe we are moving away from speech codes. But it is not to the credit of the status quo. The status quo has been forced to start moving away from speech codes. For example, by the efforts of this organization and also, thanks to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Education, and that is FIRE.

QUESTION: The big–one big difference on the panel is the question of whether this is an extensive problem or whether this is a trivial problem. Could members of the panel suggest how we could empirically test these two competing planes? And however extensive this problem is, what should be the consequence for a professor who does abuse their position?

SCOTT JASCHIK: Who wants to go first? David?

DAVID HOROWITZ: Yes. It’s really relatively easy. I mean, there are two big issues. I think we have this pamphlet–there’s a pamphlet with a Liberty Bell, which is the Pennsylvania hearings. If you go to the back of that you will see the questions addressed to university presidents. Universities have policies. You can put the policies against the courses and you will see that entire programs at the university–Steve Walters’ testimony is in there as well, which you should read–violate the existing regulations. And the question to the presidents is how they can justify this statement in their policies with this program. That’s one.

The second is the university could provide each incoming freshman what they can expect professionally from their professor, and particularly how it accords with the academic freedom provisions that they already have in place. And then, it could provide each student with an–each student actually does have a professor evaluation. Unfortunately, these evaluations have to go through the professor. They need to go through the central administration. Evaluate them according to was this professor respectful of different political perspectives in the class. Did this professor intrude into the classroom irrelevant rants on Hurricane Katrina or the war in Iraq and so forth. That would be done like that. Why isn’t it done? Because they know there is a monstrous problem and it’s a huge embarrassment to them and they want to suppress it.

And they are trying to stonewall. This is all about stonewalling now. And I exempt Terry from this. He’s not a university administrator and he’s not a union representative. But he representatives all of these organizations. He’s got a difficult job there. But that’s–it’s stonewalling is all this is about. And we would break down the stone wall. As soon as we can get it, we will find some legislature which will be able to provide us with a budget to do this. We try–we’ve been trying to survey ourselves the university–the Pennsylvania State system is a big problem, like you can’t get the email addresses. All things the university could do like that. But they don’t want to do it. When they do it, you’ll see the problem. Or, hey, I’ll meet that test. If there’s no problem, there’s no problem.

SCOTT JASCHIK: Terry?

TERRY HARTLE: Well, it doesn’t–thank you for exempting me. Please don’t. It doesn’t help me with the people who pay my salary. Yes. Thanks. Appreciate that.

If it were easy to document this, it would have been done. And I think the challenge of figuring out some way to gather information on this problem in a reliable and valid fashion is–probably explains why somebody hasn’t done it. Indeed, my suspicion is there are faculty all around the country that would be all too happy to do it if they could figure out an easy way to do it because it would obviously be something that would be of widespread public interest.

I think it’s just very hard to get a handle on this outside of the anecdotal realm, particularly when you’ve got so many things going on around here like speech codes, and Kansas State social work classes and professional societies. There–the Academic Bill of Rights as drafted in HR-609 to a large extent unpacks that and deals with just two of those issues.

So I think–I don’t think it’s easy and I think there are multiple things going on that people are worried about. And until we–but until we figure out a way to do this, there will be a great deal of–
[End Disc 4]

[Disc 5]
Terry Hartle: [cont’d] –controversy about whether it is anecdotal and therefore silly, or anecdotal and therefore valid. And when the incidents and the anecdotes turn out to be not exactly right, there will be people who will say the whole edifice is a house of cards. And I think that that is fundamentally the problem we’re going to have until we can have a discussion on this.

SCOTT JASCHIK: Okay. I’d like to get another question in. Yes?

QUESTION: I’m Sean Allen, a right-wing mole. My question to you, Mr. Hartle, obviously, it’s been some years since you’ve been in school. Number one, how are you–.

Terry Hartle: –I’ve been in school more recently than David, so are you going to–?

QUESTION: –But not me. How are you qualified to speak for high schools and college students around the country saying that they can’t be intimidated by the teachers who hold their grade and inevitably their future in their hands? And also, you keep talking about anecdotes and speak of things like anecdotes. I have a couple of recordings that I would like to show you that obviously are not anecdotes and are actual data proving this.

TOM LUCERO: Sean, I wasn’t–and I’m not sure if Terry was at the earlier session. Could you just say where you’re a student?

QUESTION: I was previously a student at Oberlin High School. I recorded my teacher, [Jay Benisch].

Terry Hartle: Look, there are 2.3 million college professors in America. What one or two do are anecdotes. What a dozen do are anecdotes. It does not prove a pattern . This is this continual thinking. We’ve heard one professor say something, therefore, 2.3 million faculty members are wrong. It’s simply unacceptable. You can’t simply make that leap and have anybody treat you with any seriousness. Nobody is making–can I finish or are you going to interrupt? I mean–.

QUESTION: –[Inaudible.]

Terry Hartle: You–this tendency to say we’ve got a couple of examples and therefore the whole thing is wrong, is rotten, we need legislation, we need to interfere, simply does not follow.

QUESTION: Nobody is making that leap, however. What we are saying is that indoctrination is–in any section in the school system, whether it be at the college level or whether it be at the high school level. I would propose a counter question. Would you like to pay college tuition, tens of thousands of dollars a year, to send your son or daughter to a school where she would be trying to major in history and learning about how George Bush is the worst president or the best president? Would you like to pay that money to hear that from a history teacher?

Terry Hartle: What makes you think I’m not paying money right now to send my daughter to college?

QUESTION: But there–you–.

Terry Hartle: –No. What makes you think I’m not paying money right now to send my daughter to college? What makes you think I don’t have experience doing this right now as a professor with one of the schools to get singled out in David’s speeches? What makes you think that?

QUESTION: I’m not saying that. I’m saying that–oh. I’m saying that–.

SCOTT JASCHIK: –Tom and then, Candace, why don’t you get in on this?

TOM LUCERO: Sean, thank you very much. Trying to address this issue from a public policy perspective, yes, I hear what Terry is saying. I’m going to concede his anecdotal for the purpose of this argument. Therefore, as someone who is responsible for setting public policy, I have to look for facts.

We do have a survey out there. And I’m not going to define this as the individual indoctrination. I’m going to go back to a point Terry referenced earlier, and that’s about civic literacy. ACTA in 2001 conducted a survey. Help me out here, Candace. Was it 20, 22 universities, majorly Ivy–50–50 universities around the country, major Ivy League schools, top private, top public, research one universities. What did we find out? Found of 99% of the kids who were surveyed could identify Beavis and Butthead. Only 27% could identify the fact that George Washington was the General who led the American Army during the revolution.

We’re not doing our job educating our students. And these are the students who are going to graduate and become the next generation of leaders in this country. It’s time to address this issue. And trying to step back and look at it from major public policy, it’s time we began to define what civic literacy is, what the standards are. At the University of Colorado, we have over 400 classes on the Boulder campus that comprise the core curriculum.

How you can allow an 18, 19, 20-year-old student to go out there and put a core curriculum together that is going to educate them that they are going to have a foundation in what they need to know? Until you begin to address these issues from a significant public policy perspective, you’re going to continue to hear what you hear from Terry and from those individuals on the left. And until you define what the standards are and should be for graduates at the undergraduate level, we’re going to continue to have this discussion.

SCOTT JASCHIK: Okay. I am receiving advice from an intellectually diverse group that we are late and have run too long. So my apologies to the questions we couldn’t get to. And please join me in thanking the panel.

Friday, April 7, 2006, 9:30 a.m.
First National Academic Freedom Conference

Chair: Ron Robinson
Participants: Mason Harrison, Marlene Kowal, Ruth Malhotra, Steve Miller, Brett Mock, Daniel Schuberth, Nate Walton

RON ROBINSON: Good morning. My name is Ron Robinson. I’m President of Young America’s Foundation. I have the privilege this morning of moderating this panel, which is something I was very much looking forward to.

I have to say that I was looking forward to this whole conference, working with David Horowitz. I want to compliment David not only for this particular conference but for all that he has done — the books that he’s written, the insight that he has offered. Over a period of years, it’s been — I’ve learned a lot working with David. I think most of the people that come to Young America’s Foundation, while they may have dabbled a little bit in liberal thought, I think you can become today on high school and college campuses a liberal by osmosis. Few have gone as deep into that particular ideology as David had, and so David brings to the table some fresh approaches that otherwise wouldn’t be available. I know there are times he struggles in trying to figure out why the conservative movement as a whole does certain things and takes certain approaches, and I would have to caution David that that’s true even among those of us that have operated there from our very first days, or our very earliest days.

But I mentioned David, in part, to thank him for the work he has done but also to underscore that we can learn ideas and insights even from those who don’t share, at least immediately or even ultimately, the same place that we do on the ideological spectrum.

And one of the individuals who I’m not normally noted for quoting but I did find had a particularly strong or insightful sentence anyway was Sidney Blumenthal because Blumenthal criticized the conservative movement basically as operating in a self-imposed intellectual ghetto. And I think he captured, in essence, a weakness that the conservative movement has, which is not reaching out for the broadest possible audience, not constantly recalibrating its message to say, are we looking to bring in the widest possible audience? Are we looking to frame the issues in a way that will reach every student on a college campus?

And I think that David has done that with the Academic Bill of Rights, and I compliment him for doing that. And I think that there are a lot of important lessons to be learned by the work that David has done and also by the tremendous group of student leaders that he has accumulated here today. So as I said, I’ve looked forward to this for some time.

There is a disconnect in America today on the college campuses, and that is the tremendous gulf between where the students are today and where the university professors are.

It was no accident, I think, in last night’s debate at George Washington University that it was between a tenured college professor, who has chaired his department at the University of Colorado, versus a free-thinking non-leftist professor — I don’t know precisely how David would categorize his own viewpoints at this particular point, but it was not surprising that it was very easy to find a leftist professor to stand up and identify with almost any leftist position. To do that on the conservative side or on the right, whatever terminology you’re most comfortable with, is very difficult in the country today. And we see this split in many ways on our college campuses.

One good example is the ROTC issue at Columbia University. Going into last school year, there was a poll taking — professional poll, a scientific poll taken at Columbia of the college students, and over 60% wanted a return of ROTC on campus at Columbia. And, yet, at the very end of the school year, the faculty senate voted on it, and they voted 50 to 13 against allowing students at Columbia to attend ROTC.

We see it in Young America’s Foundation in the campus lecturers that crisscross this country. The audiences that these speakers pull — and I’m talking about speakers including Ann Coulter, John Stossel, Ben Stein, David Horowitz, John Ashcroft, Michelle Malkin, to use six prominent ones currently on the lecture circuit — the audiences they draw are tremendous in size. And it’s clear across the country students are very interested in hearing what these speakers have to say. And, yet, campus after campus, there is usually one or more, a combination, of leftist efforts to try to immunize or prevent students from hearing this message. It may include a teach-in that the faculty has before the speaker arrives or after the speaker leaves, usually distorting what the speaker has to say, oftentimes, trying to keep it under the radar so that those sponsoring the event aren’t participants at the teach-in in the first place. That’s often done by the faculty.

Administrators oftentimes will put administrative restrictions. Frequently, we, at Young America’s Foundation, teach about the dirty tricks college administrators use, oftentimes, changing the room at the very last minute where the activity is going to be held. Sometimes saying that your speaker is “controversial” and that we’re going to put basically a tax or a surcharge under a security argument. The left is causing the problems with security, not any of the conservative students. But the conservative organizations sponsoring the conservative speaker, which should’ve been brought by university in the first place, is — has a security tax imposed on them.

And then oftentimes, there are outright disruptions. Senator Alexander referenced four of them in the past year-and-a-half, but they range from being pied and being attacked physically to people pulling fire alarms, to shouting down speakers.

We just had Ann Coulter within the past two weeks at Loyola University in Chicago, and there were 50 disrupters there that had to be taken out, or approximately 50. Now, Floyd’s shaking his head yes here. I’m sure he was familiar with it. But they had to be taken out individually. This was not an effort to engage in intellectual dialog to any extent whatsoever. Everyone at that college would have had an opportunity to ask Ann Coulter any question they wanted and anyone had an opportunity before and after she left to express different viewpoints. It was merely an attempt to prevent those students from hearing firsthand what Ann Coulter had to say in her own words.

And so this, along with mandatory sensitivity training and along with speech codes, is not a cause that’s leading students to where they want to go. It’s an ideology that is afraid to defend its position. It’s an ideology that’s afraid to allow students to make up their own mind. To echo words that David said last night, it’s an ideology that’s trying to teach students what to think rather than how to think. And I think that that should give you great encouragement on the students that are coming along as compared to the faculties and the administrators on the campuses today.

At Young Americas Foundation, we ask the question constantly, how do you expect your fellow students to hear conservative ideas or to consider conservative ideas? And oftentimes, that has to be done through direct action. And this panel today is a great example of student leaders doing exactly that.

Senator Alexander, just a few moments ago, cited the study that on the cross-section of American campuses, 72% of the faculty identified themselves as liberal — those are the terms he used — and 15% as conservative. And he cited the Ivy League campuses as being more unbalanced, where the ratio was 80% versus 13%. And I think that if you actually looked at these college campuses, you will find that those — that 13% or that 15% oftentimes is concentrated in the hard sciences or in math, places that their particular ideas in terms of the debates that we’re having this weekend are actually often not even mentioned the whole semester long, and as David would’ve pointed out last night, rightly so.

But it’s shocking to me, even talking to conservative students, that they — and my own experience reflects this, having gone through four years undergraduate school, graduate school, and then actually four years at law school at night, that I very seldom, if ever, had a conservative text assigned to me. I went through those layers of education, as do most students today. My sons — I have three sons that have attended five colleges, and essentially, it’s reflected in all but one. One goes to Hillsdale. But they’ve never been assigned Nobel Laureates, like Milton Friedman, Fredrich Hayek, or Alexandr Solzhenitsyn. They’ve never been given the opportunity to, in their classroom, to delve into the great writings of Thomas Sowell, or Senator Alexander also mentioned Harvey Mansfield.

And so it’s important for us to look at what is going on on the college campuses, not just at the faculty level but by the students themselves, the consumers, if you will. Someone said — I think it was perhaps Ward Churchill last night — who said, if I can use that coarse term, I don’t think being a consumer is a coarse term. I think being a consumer is, in fact, the ideal term to use because these, in fact, are the people that keep the colleges going by attending there. Their parents may support that, but they, in fact, are the ones that are ultimately to be embraced as the ultimate receivers of the education at those schools. And schools are not there for the faculty members. They are not there for the administrators. Hopefully, they’re there for the students.

I began by saying the left has some insights. David, having abandoned his editorial position at Ramparts and shifting to elsewhere in the ideological spectrum, has had tremendous insights that I’ve enjoyed for a series of years and have tried to be a good student to David.

I mentioned Sydney Blumenthal, but I want to, before I introduce each panel member, wrap up by citing a February 13 cover issue of Nation magazine. From those colleagues of mine that are here from Young America’s Foundation, you’ve probably never heard me quote so many leftist sources in one morning, but forgive me for that. Maybe it’s being in David’s presence that I was motivated.

But here are some insights that the Nation offered two months ago in a cover story, and it’s — the cover story was the new face of the campus left, and basically, the nation was lamenting that conservative students, these conservative students, are out organizing those on the left.

I’m going to jump around a bit. I would commend the whole article to you, February 13, 2006, The Nation, but quoting a few passages —

“Today’s campus right is unified, on message, passionate. In other words, part of a genuine movement. Student conservatives have managed to balance organization and ideological discipline with rag-tag rebelliousness, positioning themselves as the perpetual underdogs on oppressively liberal campuses,” positioning yourselves.

Goes on to quote Matt Singer, a junior at the University of Montana, “The Conservative activism is fun, and it rings with students in the same way the left did in the 1960s and early 1970s.”

They quote a student from the University of Texas. “The right actually ends up looking cooler than the left.” I wasn’t surprised at that, but apparently, the Nation was.

A number of other points, but in their conclusion, they say, “The right has created a student movement not simply by providing the infrastructure but by promoting hardcore conservative ideology,” as they would put it, “on the college campuses.”

Well, I mentioned that because even the Nation recognizes the outstanding work that these students and other students across the country are doing despite the hostile environment to share with their fellow students ideas that no one should graduate from college without entertaining.

You know, both the Center for the Study of Popular Culture and the activities they do, reaching college students, and David Horowitz’s lectures across the country, this conference, Young America’s Foundation’s conferences, none of these should be held or need to be held.

If the colleges and universities were doing their jobs, everything we have to say would be superfluous. But, of course, they need to be held, and students need to be organized, and we need to learn from the insights of college students today.

And we have an outstanding panel. I’m going to introduce them going down, and they’re going to speak individually, but let me tell you who they are. There are more detailed write-ups in your program, but it is an outstanding collection of young men and young women who are standing up and have already taken leadership roles in their respective campuses.

Mason Harrison is at University of California at Davis. That should tell you a lot but is leader of the College Republicans there, and that is a very tough campus to be on, the college’s campus today.

Marlene Kowal is at Temple. She’s a senior there. She’s the CR leader, but she’s also the President of Students for Academic Freedom.

Ruth Malhotra — I’m sorry, Ruth — Ruth is a superstar for the conservative movement. I think every organization, Young America’s Foundation, ISI, the College Republicans, Students for Academic Freedom — all of us have benefited by Ruth’s great leadership, and we appreciate all that Ruth has done. She’s currently the Executive Director of the College Republicans in Georgia, and she’s at Georgia — she’s a senior at Georgia Institute of Technology.

Steve Miller has been one of the superstars that started working with David in his high school days at Santa Monica. I had an opportunity to be with Steve over the weekend and heard how David greatly influenced his life when he was at Santa Monica. But today he’s a junior at Duke University, where he’s the leader of the Students for Academic Freedom.

Brett Mock is at Ball State University. He’s graduated from there, but there, he learned really the ideological nature of the peace studies and is currently helping a Congressional candidate in Colorado.

Now, I really feel embarrassed in introducing Dan Schuberth this way because a year ago, I had the great pleasure of speaking to the Maine College Republicans, and I came back to the Foundation staff and said, “You’ve got to take a look at what Dan’s doing,” because he had a series of speakers, some rather dull, like myself, to some that were actually quite exciting, but he pumped up the audience before every single speaker with this very upbeat music. And I was ready to get up there and speak, and the audience was ready to listen, at least for a while, so I felt that if Dan — I ever had an opportunity to control an event even for a minute where Dan was going to speak, before he got to the microphone, I was going to arrange to play Hail to the Chief. But I’m not getting that opportunity today, Dan, but appreciate the great work that you have done in Maine. He’s currently the Vice Chairman of the Maine Republican Party, but prior to that, he was the Chairman of the College Republicans. He’s a leader at Bowden College, and we’re delighted to have him with us as well.

The final participant is in the air right now. We hope he will join us before this panel is over. Nate Walton is at Bates, so I assume he’s also coming in from Maine, and hopefully, he will join us in progress.

But it’s a great line-up of students. I know they have a lot to offer. We’ve asked them to keep the remarks to five to eight minutes, and we will begin with Mason.

MASON HARRISON: Thanks a lot, Ron, and first off, I just really want to thank David for having me out. David’s just been extremely supportive of our state federation in California, and we do a lot with academic freedom, and we couldn’t do without him, frankly. And, also, it’s a pleasure to be among this panel with other student leaders of academic freedom, and also to be on a panel with Ron Robinson, who does so much for Young America’s Foundation, who, in turn, just empowers the student to be able to combat liberalism at its campus and engage in Republican Party politics at such a young age. So, thank you, Ron. I really appreciate that introduction.

First off, I sort of want to give you a little background as to my story entering college. I entered college not very political, actually. One of the reasons is that I actually didn’t really know I was a conservative until I went to UC-Davis and saw how mainstream I was, especially at that campus.

I entered college at a time when we were going to the California recall, which were extremely tumultuous times in Republican Party politics in California, and it took the whole state by force, and literally the whole world was looking at us. And it was under a period when our state federation of California College Republicans was undergoing change.

Of course, I hadn’t been introduced yet when the recall had started, but I did enter in 2003 in the fall during the election season and really had no intention of getting involved until a couple of events, which I’ll share with you right now.

I took a class — was actually dared to by one of my female friends to take a women’s studies class. And normally I would never have signed for it, but there was $50 in it if I did. So I enrolled. And the first day, I went in and the professor, who was a woman, obviously, goes up to the front and begins her lecture not by introducing herself but by leading a chant, “No on Arnold, no on recall.” This lasted for about a minute, and I’d had enough. I left. Lost on the $50, but you know what? I think it was probably for the best.

My second class, I’d actually enrolled — this was not — this was by choice. I had enrolled in a class on counterterrorism. I was really interested in learning about terrorism and the War on Terror and was expecting to get a very balanced debate as to where America stood, where other countries stood, who were terrorists, what constitutes a terrorist, and terrorism in its current state today.

The professor started off his talk by talking about the number-one terrorist, and I’ll leave it up to you to kind of guess who that was. But just of close your mind and think about who would be listed as the number-one terrorist in a university talking about — in a class on terrorism. I’ll give you a clue. He was Middle Eastern, if that helps. Most of you are probably thinking Osama bin Laden, Al Zarqawi. No. The first terrorist that professor, that expert, on counterterrorism talked about was Jesus Christ. Still not sure how he did that because I also dropped that class.

By this point, I’d sort of had enough, and like I said, realized that I was a conservative on a liberal campus. I joined the California College Republicans, where every week, I joined dozens of other colleagues who felt the same way, and we did crazy stuff. You know, during the recall election, we went around. We had people signing petitions. We had people registering to vote. We had people, you know, energizing the youth movement for Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has revolutionized youth Republican politics in California, and it’s a privilege to be a part of his reelection campaign right now.

We actually staged a sit-in at the administration building at University of California-Davis and delivered a list of grievances to the administration, one of which was the fact that they had not brought a conservative speaker for an extremely long time when they had brought names like Clinton, Michael Moore, some of the other token liberals who speak at a lot of college campuses, to which they responded — or a lady sitting behind the desk told us frankly that they did, in fact, invite Republican speakers and did pay for Republican speakers, last one being Gerald R. Ford in 18 — or, sorry, 1982. I said, “It’s 2003!” And we still haven’t seen one in a long time.

So these things go on throughout California, as I’m sure you’ve heard. There are several cases that have come across national news, one of which was Steve Hinkle at Cal Poly, who was arrested and kicked out of school for inviting conservative author Mason Weaver to a school, who had recently authored a book called It’s Time to Leave the Plantation. He’s a black speaker. The school took offense to it, kicked him out of school. Steve Hinkle responded by suing the school, ended up winning. The school has yet to issue an apology, although they’ve been asked repeatedly by donors and by other students at the school.

This gained widespread attention, and Sean Hannity covered it a lot. And I think it was really one of the modern case studies that we have that reminds people that there is an academic freedom movement and there is something that we need to get behind.

Another one was a student from a school in Northern California who was told by a psychology professor that he needed to have his head examined because he was a conservative.

This was just one of several cases that I talk about when I go on the radio and I talk about academic freedom because, like David said, it is a winning issue. And it’s something that we use to garner financial support for our organization, to energize people, to energize fellow students into joining the cause — is the fact that we’re all entitled to an education that presents both sides. And we’re entitled to an education that takes politics out of the classroom.

So later that year, I was actually in charge of our statewide convention, and because we have off seasons with elections we decided to have an academic freedom themes conference. We called it Operation Academic Freedom. And this is when I first met David, and I called up David’s assistant, Brad Shipp, and Brad helped me organize a huge rally, which was actually the largest youth rally, Republican youth rally specifically, that the state capitol in California has seen in decades, I’m told, actually, since the ’30s. So it was a very, very impressive turnout, and we had conservative speakers come — David Horowitz being one of them — and we were really able to garner a lot of media attention for that issue, and I would consider that a big success for our organization.

We got crazy. We had a big cardboard tank where a student put a backpack on and stood in front of it, hoping to allude to Tiananmen Square. I mean you would’ve thought we were liberals by how crazy we were getting at this rally.

And I would say that I’m getting extremely excited about where this movement is headed because I think there’s a clear difference in the youth of the conservative movement versus the youth of the liberal movement and that, one, I think, taps into a segment of the population that is very angry, that is very dissatisfied with the country, that is very — that expresses hate towards America, and hate motivates these people.

But I think that our side, the conservative side, I think that it taps into a segment of the population that loves their country, that loves what they have, that want to hold on to it. And that’s where I think that we’ll win because I think the people see that, and it’s demonstrative of what our intentions really are.

And so I want to thank you again, David, for having me out here and also thank our other student panelists, and thank you very much for having me up here.

MARLENE KOWAL: Good morning, everyone. I want to thank David Horowitz, Ron Robinson for chairing the panel, and for being invited to discuss academic freedoms today.

Just recently, I read an article that quoted Pennsylvania State Representative Dan Frankel stating, “I’ve seen classes in colleges about Marxism, but I can’t imagine that there’s a class at Temple University indoctrinating students about Marxist ideology. I’d like to see evidence that all these classes are being taught — or any of these classes being taught in this manner.”

Well, in response to Mr. Frankel’s comment, I would like to take the next minute to quote to you some of the statements that happened in a class that I’m taking this semester that would prove quite the contrary.

On the first day of class, this professor had stated, “The only reason why Mao Zedong is given the bad reputation he has is because of the Bourgeoisie press and their racism towards the Chinese. I am a Maoist, and my intention in teaching this class is to teach you why Mao was an important figure and a great figure.”

On March 21, this professor also stated, “The only way to get rid of sweatshop labor is to boycott capitalism.”

It gets better. “During the Maoist period, China was the most equal country in the world, and after the post-Socialist turn, China is among the most unequal. The rural farmers are now the [indiscernible] despite the World Bank figures because those figures are just exactly untrue.”

Another day this professor did nothing but laugh when a student explained during class, “I hate white people.” The student rambled on and spoke about how the American government is purposely giving people AIDS. The professor did nothing to attempt to interrupt the student.

And although she didn’t have [indiscernible] problems with cutting students off who had an opposing viewpoint from hers, the professor also remained silent another day when a student during class time accused Teach for America to be an excuse to subvert criticism of what the states should be doing. “After all,” the student asks, “why fund the schools if there is volunteerism?” The professor responded with a head nod.

Bear in mind, this is the history class called Contemporary China.

There are also a number of professors who are teaching at Temple who conduct their classes in a very similar fashion. Of the 43 students we have registered at the Temple University Students for Academic Freedom Chapter, three of them joined, in part, because of the conduct in this class. Although there were a total of six students who privately expressed their grievances to me about the political biases in our class lectures, only three had actually joined this group. Only two filed complaints, one with SAF, Students for Academic Freedom, and one in a private letter to the department. That means actually only one-third of the students who even expressed their frustrations took action.

Intimidation and fear is what tends to be the reason for such underreporting and lack of activism. Even the student who had handed me the one complaint form made a specific request to remain anonymous for fear of repercussion.

One of the private comments that were made to me by one of the students who had not filed a report was that she had never encountered this problem in the classroom before this semester. I had this student as a classmate in the last class I had in the fall, where the Iraq war was explained by the professor to be a criminal event and [Chakoverra][ph] was plugged as being a role model. Once I brought this point up, the student, she replied, “Well, then I guess I never really realized it before.”

And this is our main problem. Students do not even realize that they are being indoctrinated. Another student who was listening in our conversation interjected, “The professors get to you when you are vulnerable, ignorant freshmen. They start all this junk when you’re right out of high school and you don’t know any better.”

Perhaps this is why the abuses to academic freedom go underreported, leading Pennsylvania Subcommittee Chairman on Higher Education Representative Lawrence Curry to believe that there isn’t a crisis on this campus. Nevertheless, I want to direct your attention to the two main speaking engagements at Temple University main campus last week.

On Wednesday night, Sarah Weddington, the attorney who successfully argued Roe versus Wade, was sponsored by the main campus program board.

Thursday night, the Temple University Pan-African Studies’ Community Education Department brought in Professor Griff of Public Enemy, and he spoke on behalf of [Mumia Abul Jamar][ph].

What I learned from attending the latter events is that the problem is not that these people have secured speaking engagements at the university. I strongly believe in the First Amendment and would never argue to selectively revoke this right from anyone. The problem is that the moderates and the conservatives are not successfully fighting through the bureaucratic loopholes to make sure these speakers are representing the fruits of our demographic.

Sadly to say to the campus today is that we must now jump through more hoops and fight a harder fight to get the speakers, professors, and programs that represent the moderate and conservative constituents in the university. We need to fight to keep that door to the universities that the conservatives opened to the liberals in the 1960s from being shut on us. In some instances, we might even have to pry it open again.

In the last three years I spent at Temple University, I have come by countless professors that have built in leftist interpretations to their course lectures. I have regularly encountered professors that have not — have been nonpartisan in their pursuit to facilitate a dialog in the broad range of serious intellectual perspectives.

We are the writers of our own history, and those who are not from the radical left cannot hide behind being a cliché as being the silent majority. If we remain silent, we will become the minority and further silence will only leave us a memory. Moderates, conservatives, Democrats, and Republicans, the radical left is dominating the universities. If we allow this trend to continue, they will indoctrinate our youth.

The last two examples I want to bring into discussion are the most pertinent to the discussion of Academic Bill of Rights.

History professor Ralph Young conducts a weekly “Dissent in America” teach-in. There’s [was a new] one in November called Speak Easy or Easy Speak — Higher education and the Politics in Pennsylvania. Yet, the speakers who were brought in were Lawrence Curry, Ellen Shrecker, and Joyce Lindorff. All were in denial of this issue and/or strongly opposed to the concept of protecting student rights.

Although there is clearly a problem on campus, no one who is in support of the bill has yet to present our side. No wonder why the students who have not found comfort in our student organization are not speaking up. No wonder why the administration is in denial of this problem, and no wonder why the professor is still being hired on the basis of their politics, teaching their classes as partisan politicians, and are getting away with it.

And, finally, no wonder why the supporters of the Academic Bill of Rights have been characterized into this anti-scholastic, angry, right-winged attempt to selectively eradicate liberal professors to stop free speech.

Most alarmingly, Megan Fitzgerald from the Center for Campus Free Speech, who does the Academic Bill of Rights as the Academic Bill of Restriction, made her way into a number of classrooms throughout the College of Liberal Arts. She had confirmed she had been in both Anderson and Glatfelter Halls.

She sent an e-mail out to all the professors asking them to invite her into the class lectures so she may give a speech plugging her organization’s goal of stopping the Academic Bill of Rights that would hold the universities accountable to promote intellectual fairness, inclusion of all aspects in the curriculum, and including the faculty hiring process, inspections of courses available, and the reading materials assigned. There was no real attempt for a dialog regarding this issue.

When professors hold faculty conferences or teach-ins of one side unchallengeable, partisan or sectarian in nature, these are not academic exercises and are considered breaches of professional responsibility. This also goes for the use of departmental funds and faculty facilities for politically partisan or ideologically one-sided events.

Unfortunately, this has been routine at Temple University. And, yes, Karl Marx is given a colossal time and consideration in the classroom in comparison to the almost unmentionable Adam Smith, his counterpart in economic theory.

Students must be aware of a broad range of serious intellectual perspectives and not just the perspectives that correspond to the beliefs of their professors. Although the road to true intellectual diversity is and will be an uphill battle for some time, the future is not grim.

Currently, the Temple University chapter for Students for Academic Freedom is 43 members strong — a very, very liberal campus — and this is double the numbers that we had during our January hearing. Just two weeks ago, Logan Fisher, the Vice President organized the Support the Troops rally to dissent the English Department’s sponsored anti-war protest. Our rally made the five o’clock news because we outnumbered those who believed they had monopoly on this thought on campus.

Each day, our organization is growing stronger, and I’m in possession of at least 20 written complaints from this year.

Regarding an English class, one student wrote, “My professor used a class to spread her own Marxist socialist ideology. She often demonized President Bush and Republicans in general, calling capitalism evil.”

In an accounting class, the student reported, “The professor found a way to manipulate his political ideas into every lesson. Every day, he not only disrespected the President but also anyone in favor of conservative views or the Republican Party.”

An ESL student, English as a Second Language, reported having to read the controversial anti-American book, The Eagle’s Shadow, and stated she has gotten the impression that the professor has been taking advantage of the student’s poor linguistic skills to preach his politics from the vantage point he had as head of the classroom.

This is also not counting the private letters that have gone to the department chairs and the president of the university. I do have knowledge of three instances or such.

Student [indiscernible] who are in denial of this issue will be forced to see the real picture regarding the fate of the campus.

Thank you all for listening to my experiences with partisan teaching at Temple University and how academic freedom is relevant to the state of the campus in which I’m attending.

RUTH MALHOTRA: Thank you so much. I’m really excited to be here, and it’s so heartening to have a conference that’s exclusively dedicated to this issue of academic freedom and just to see so many people that recognize the fact that it is a priority, and so I’m really encouraged.

And I do have to apologize. I do come from Cynthia McKinney’s state, so we’re not too proud to claim her as our Congresswoman, but I’m also from Jack Kingston’s state, the Congressman from Georgia. I know he spoke yesterday, and he’s been leading this fight as well. And so we are proud to claim him and really encouraged to have leaders like him from where I’m from.

I was thinking about what to share with y’all today and just thinking back to my experiences over the past three years and this fight for academic freedom. And I was reflecting back to where my journey in this fight began. And in many ways, it really began the day I stepped on to campus as a college freshman at Georgia Tech even though I didn’t really realize it at the time.

But I entered college, you know, excited about the free exchange of ideas and expecting vigorous debate. I’ve always enjoyed talking about public policy and government and issues like that, and I was really excited about what I hoped would be an open environment, and I expected to have my ideas challenged. But what I didn’t expect was to have them run over.

And when I got to college from day one, I realized that the free exchange in the marketplace that we talk about simply didn’t exist on campus and that as a conservative student, the administration and professors in almost every facet of campus, I was not only stifled and not allowed to express myself, but I was also bombarded with a very unbalanced agenda from those in authority, and that’s something that I tried to fight from day one.

And I think where my passion for this issue and where it really started was I attended a Conservative Political Action Conference, CPAC, in 2004, and prior to attending that, on the first day of my public policy class, I enrolled in a required Foundations of Public Policy course.

And I told the professor, I said — I approached her and told her, “I’m going to miss one day of class to go to Washington, DC. Is there anything I need to do ahead of time?” And she said, “What are you going to Washington, D.C. for?” And I said, “The Conservative Political Action Conference.” And she said, “Well, you’re just going to fail my class.” And at that point, it was, you know, the first day of class lecture, and I didn’t take her seriously. I was a little bit — I was very confused and a little bit intimidated, but I said, well, maybe it’s a joke, you know, and moved on from there.

I did attend CPAC, and I actually heard Mr. Horowitz speak at a Young America’s Foundation luncheon. He was being honored that year. And so I told him what happened, and he said, “Well, keep in touch and let me know. Let me know how things progress.” And it turns out throughout the course of this class, it was a very hostile atmosphere. The professor repeatedly made statements, very derogatory statements about religion, about Christians and the religious right, and she would constantly refer to that. She would bring in race into almost every lecture.

And it turns out I did receive a failing grade in the course, and she did keep her promise and fail me, and we confronted it from there. I worked with Students for Academic Freedom, and Mr. Horowitz came down to Georgia Tech. We confronted these issues. We met with several deans and administrators and really tried to — really fought that very successfully, and this professor is now barred from teaching this public policy course again. So that was definitely some progress there.

Also, in that semester, in the spring of 2004, the Academic Bill of Rights was brought up in the Georgia Senate, and I had the opportunity to testify at the Senate hearing, along with David Horowitz and Jack Kingston and a couple of other people, and it was really encouraging. It really gave us a chance to share our personal situation and raise awareness of this bias that’s prevalent against so many conservatives.

And it was encouraging. The bill passed the Senate almost unanimously by a vote of 41 to 5, and even more encouraging is that this resolution generated immediate changes and really led to significant action, both at Georgia Tech and across the state. And so I’d really encourage all, as I know you’ve heard — you will hear this morning, to definitely pursue these avenues, both within and beyond the campus because it is very effective.

Just even in a few years’ time, I think the progress that we’ve seen has been incredible, and it’s very heartening, and just the fact that academic freedom is recognized as such an important issue, I think, is in and of itself a huge step in the right direction.

[Disc 2]
Georgia Tech has held — they recently held the diversity forum on the issue of academic freedom and the Academic Bill of Rights, which we found very interesting, that they did recognize the issue.

And the little red book — I didn’t bring my copy up here with me, but Students for Academic Freedom has a little red book where they talk about the salient principles in the Academic Bill of Rights and in the movement, and that’s actually become required reading for my political philosophies class at Georgia Tech, and the professor now spends a whole section of the class talking about these issues and assigning sections in Mr. Horowitz’s work, which again, I think is very encouraging and would’ve been unheard of a couple of years ago.

Another thing, even though there has been so much progress, both at Georgia Tech and beyond, the fight continues, and there’s still such a long way to go. And I know you’ve heard some pretty outrageous examples already from the first two panelists. I’d like to share a couple of my favorites. I have a whole arsenal since I’ve been at Georgia Tech almost four years, but I’ll pick the top few.

We — I know Maoism came up. We were studying communism in one of my classes, and as I would expect, the communist manifesto is at the top of our reading list. What I didn’t expect was for the professor to make a passionate defense of Karl Marx and condemn the American system as ineffective. And she stated, “In my humble opinion, communism has gotten a really bad rap in this country.” And she said, “We’re not living in a society that brings out the best in us, but we can do so much better.” And not only that, the professor proceeded to tell us about how even Jesus was a communist. And I was not aware of that and I said, you know, I’m so glad I go to Georgia Tech so I can learn such valuable insights that I missed in Sunday School for the past several years. That was very interesting.

Another thing, we had a discussion on economic policy in one of my classes, and I made a statement in defense of the Bush tax cuts, and the professor told me, “You don’t know what you’re talking about. George Bush hasn’t done anything for you. He’s too busy pimping for the Christian Coalition.”

Again, I fail to see how such statements contribute to a scholarly debate on economic policy, but, unfortunately, statements like that are pretty routine.

Of course, with Katrina, which was obviously a very significant national tragedy and presented many challenges that we need to look at from a scholarly view, you know, I think there are many opportunities there to look at that incident and learn from that. But, unfortunately, many professors are really taking that and using that. In one of my classes, a class on leadership failure and Katrina, we learned about how President Bush is a Neanderthal and Condoleeza Rice has sold her soul. And there, again, I fail to see how that contributes to any progress when looking at such challenges.

So there is a long way to go, and I think, just like I said, raising awareness of these things — they’re not isolated incidents. That’s the biggest question I get. People say, isn’t it an isolated incident or an isolated statement taken out of context? And it’s not. And I think by even hearing a few of our stories today, it’s very evident that this is a widespread problem and really needs to be addressed.

Like I said, it’s heartening, the progress that’s been made, but there’s still a long way to go. And I’m approaching — you know, been at Tech almost four years, as I mentioned, and I started thinking a few months ago about the progress that we had made and how far there was to go, and I really felt that my fight in this battle was not over, and I felt like there were still things that I could do at Georgia Tech to hold the institute accountable and to right some of these wrongs that were still prevalent.

And I started to realize that this problem extends beyond the classroom to also campus administration initiatives, where they not only promote a very heavily, unbalanced agenda, but they stifle anyone who disagrees with them. And there are three specific policies right now at Georgia Tech that I’m challenging. And, actually, I’ve just filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the institute. I’m working with the Alliance Defense Fund. One of the members of my legal team is in the audience, so I have to be careful.

But the Alliance Defense Fund has been wonderful, and they just started a Center for Academic Freedom, where they’re taking up these cases of unconstitutional policies at universities across the country and challenging them in the court of law. And I think that when actions fail, you know, within the system — I’ve worked within the system for, you know, the past few years and tried to go through there working with state government, but you know, sometimes when those things are not enough, I think taking it to the court of law is really the last resort and really necessary if we hope to institute permanent change.

And three of the policies that our lawsuit is targeting is — first of all, Georgia Tech has a speech code, which many universities do across the country, and they have an intolerance policy, where they restrict anything that they deem intolerant. And, there again, it’s very selective as to how they carry that out. We have countless examples of things that we’ve done through College Republicans and through other groups.

For example, I helped organize a protest against the Vagina Monologues, which is a play that takes place on campuses throughout Women’s Awareness Month each year, and we simply put up quotes from the actual play. We put up quotes on a display and said, “Do these quotes represent you? Taken from the script of the Vagina Monologues.” The administration found that offensive. Made us white out the quotes from the play that they were holding in the Student Center, which I found absurd, but that was another way of them enforcing this policy.

Another thing we did a couple years ago was we held a diversity bake sale to mirror the affirmative action policies, which I know many cases have been successful — many College Republicans groups have done that. The campus police came and shut us down because they said we were causing confusion, insensitivity, and being offensive.

Another thing we did was promoting traditional marriage, and through College Republicans, we had an amendment that we supported recently in Georgia. You know, after we did our event, I got called into the Dean’s office, and she told me College Republicans is a joke on campus. She said, “Your organization has become a joke.”

And so these types of things are very prevalent, and we’re hoping through this lawsuit to hold them accountable. They de-fund religious and political groups at Georgia Tech. If you’re a social or cultural group, you get funding. If you’re a political or religious, you don’t. Again, they’re very selective in that.

And then the third thing is that the institute is involved in religious indoctrination, where the institute — the student affairs office evaluates different religions and different denominations based on how tolerant they are towards homosexuality. And then they interpret [holy text] on the matter, and it’s very disturbing that they not only stifle students that try to speak out, but they’re engaged in their own active religious education as a taxpayer-funded public institute.

So those are — that’s, I guess, my latest endeavor that I’m working on, and I’m pretty confident that we can be successful there. And I think, just in closing, you know, it is very important. This fight is obviously very important. And when I was young, my mom would always tell me to choose my battles, and I would tell her, “But I’ve chosen all of them.” No stranger to confrontation. But I think this is definitely a battle. The battle for academic freedom is something that’s definitely worth the fight, and it’s crucial. It’s very important, and like I said, I’m very heartened to see all of you here.

And I think our greatest threat is complacent — we can’t become complacent, and we have to motivate students that are maybe apathetic or intimidated, but I think we have a lot of potential, and I’m really excited to see where the future will lead us. I thank you so much.

STEVE MILLER: Thank you all for coming. First, I just want to thank Ron for hosting the panel. He alluded to — last weekend, I attended a seminar that Young America’s Foundation hosted, which is an amazing experience, run by Ron and Pat, and they just give a brilliant game plan for campus activism and all the strategies that we can use to be as effective as we possibly can. So thanks for that, Ron.

Also, of course, I want to thank David, as always, for your tremendous leadership and hospitality. I really sincerely appreciate it.

I first got involved with Academic Freedom when I was in high school. In ninth and tenth grade, as a 14 and 15-year-old, I had noticed that there were tremendous and widespread academic abuses occurring all over campus. But it wasn’t until I became a junior in high school that it reached a point where I didn’t see any other opportunity or any other option than to confront it head-on.

After September 11, there was an announcement given to all the students through the PA system from our co-principal. He wanted to share with the student body his doubts about the morality of our pending air campaign in Afghanistan. Somehow, he felt like as the leader of our school, it was his job to inform the students as to what national policies were and were not appropriate for the United States of America.

Another teacher, a history teacher, in his advanced placement and history class, gave a very advanced lesson when he took an American flag and dragged it across the floor of a classroom, trying to make some sort of political statement in the wake of the 9/11 tragedy.

All over school during the year, we would see celebrations for multi-cultural events from various left-wing pet causes, but anything conservative or patriotic or traditional was nowhere to be seen in any way, shape, or form.

I decided to write a letter to a local talk show host by the name of Larry Elder detailing the horrors that were occurring at my high school. He decided to invite me on to talk about it, and everything kind of snowballed from there and ended up being a huge issue on campus and spread throughout the community. I went back on the radio show many, many times, and I decided to launch just a huge press campaign against the school to try to get them to reform because just in meeting with them, it was clear that if they had any say in it at all, not a single reform that I wanted would take place, and the school would continue to allow its teachers to inject their personal prejudices into every facet of the courses they were teaching. It wouldn’t be uncommon at all, for instance, to hear teachers say that George Bush was evil or George Bush was a Nazi or George Bush was Satan. One English teacher told his class that George Bush was not a Christian because of the way he was waging the war in Iraq.

So this kind of pervasive and disturbing material was common, and many teachers completely shirked their responsibility to their students. And I should add that this was all on the taxpayer’s dollar. So we were all paying for this wonderful education.

I eventually got the idea to invite David Horowitz to speak at the high school. I thought it would be a really wonderful experience for the students there to get to hear another perspective that simply was absent, and, also, he would speak about the very problems occurring at the school, what education is supposed to be versus what, in reality, it was.

When we first invited him, the school was actually pretty happy about it, and they said, “Oh, great. David Horowitz, the consumer advocate. Send him on down.” And they slated it, and it was set to go, and we were, “Oh, that was pretty easy.” And then when they found out which David Horowitz we meant, they said, “You know, actually, we’re going to have to cancel this event because it’s getting kind of close to final exams, and we really don’t want to distract students from their studies.”

They actually ended up canceling it, I believe, just a couple days before he was supposed to come. So, of course, it was incredibly inconvenient for us all, but moreover, it was a grave violation of the academic freedom of all students on that campus that if a school does have a policy of inviting speakers, as they did, and left-wing speakers and communist speakers came all the time, then every student had a right that if a group decided to bring a conservative speaker, then they should get to hear.

So we launched a huge campaign to get David Horowitz to speak at Santa Monica High School. It took nine months to get him cleared. Eventually, he did come, and I’ll never forget what happened when he came on to campus. The co-principal was there, and she — David walks over to her, and she says, “Mr. Horowitz, I just want to let you know how happy we are to have you on campus.” And David said, “No, you’re not. You tried for nine months to keep me from coming here, so don’t tell me you’re happy to have me on campus.”

I think the real watershed moment came when there was an initiative on the ballot in Santa Monica to raise money for the school to hire about 200 new teachers for the district and to update the classrooms and to buy new textbooks and all that sort of thing, and they were really hoping this ballot measure would pass, and they wanted the already very high real estate taxes to go up even more in Santa Monica. And the ballot measure ended up failing. And the superintendent said to me, “I blame you for this.” He said that, “All the attention you’ve given our school and very negative attention you’ve given our school has caused enough people not to want to give us money that now our ballot initiative [has passed], and this is very bad for us.” They’d been spending a lot of money, and they were just assuming they would get more money.

So I said to him, “Well, this is very simple. I can tell you exactly what we can do to get that ballot measure to pass. You just have to address the problem of the rampant political indoctrination occurring at the high school, and I will be glad to report any changes we make on the radio and in the press, and then I’m sure people might feel differently.”

Well, sure enough, that’s what happened, and he ended up issuing a doctrine saying that there must be political neutrality in a high school classroom. The job of the teacher is to teach about a subject. If you’re a history teacher, you teach about history. If you’re an English teacher, you teach about English. You don’t advocate an ideology. You don’t tell your students that, as I learned in my history class, that America was evil, that America was a force of destruction in the world, that capitalism was the cause of humanity’s suffering, all these kinds of horrific things being taught to students, many of whom I’m very sad to say, being young and impressionable, completely absorbed it and ended up mirroring the positions of their professors.

When I went to Duke University, I ended up seeing more of the same. We have at Duke an 18-to-1 ratio in the major humanities departments of Republicans to Democrats, which is just absolutely staggering. If you look at some departments, like history, there’s not a single Republican in the history department or a single Republican in our sociology department or a single Republican in my major, philosophy. And it’s just unthinkable that this could be accidental, that somehow just not a single Republican of quality has ever applied for a job in any of these departments.

We actually found out what the real reason was, if it weren’t already obvious enough, when the chair of the philosophy department said, “Well, you have to understand that, you know, as John Stuart Mill says, “Conservatives are generally stupid,” then there are just lots of conservatives that we’re just not going to be hiring.” And that was the reason he gave, conservatives, just in general, are a stupid class of people, so what would they be doing at a university.

Apparently, he never met anybody — like I meet all the time in my course [indiscernible] and all the brilliant conservatives that you come across, many of whom I know –conservative peers of mine that, in fact, want to go into teaching but are concerned about the state of the environment on campus.

At Duke, I founded a chapter of Students for Academic Freedom, and we’ve dealt with a lot of harrowing issues on campus. Like, for instance, for Martin Luther King Day every year on school dollar, they bring the most radical speaker you could possibly ever think of. We’ve had terrorists. We’ve had communists. This year, we had Harry Belafonte give our Martin Luther King address. The funding for the event, for the Martin Luther King commemoration was $45,000, and year after year after year, they slap diversity in the face by inviting these radical speakers that really have nothing to do with Martin Luther King Day.

This year, in fact, we brought David to speak on campus. It was one of the most successful events we’ve ever had at Duke University. It was run by students. We got about seven or 800 people there, which, for Duke, is huge.

But interesting thing that happened was there was a professor at Duke University that decided to organize a protest to David’s speech. She sent out an e-mail encouraging all of her students or any students to strip off their clothing to disrupt his address. Fortunately, they got cold feet and did not do that, but they did try to disrupt him while he was talking in a very organized fashion. Most of the audience was completely dismayed by this and ended up proving David’s point, which is the professors have violated the tenets of the profession by instead of teaching students about the subjects, they’re engaging in latent political activities in the classroom, using their authority to recruit students to the radical causes, and it’s shameful, no matter what you may feel about these issues, that’s not the job for a professor. And I know that all of us here are horrified by what’s happening.

The Students for Academic Freedom has been a tremendous resource for students like myself and for campuses like Duke University. We’re out there all the time publicizing this information, trying to put pressure on the university, using the media, using the campus resources, getting the information out about — in violations of academic freedom.

And I’m convinced that if we continue to be relentless, that if we adopt a policy that says we will not tolerate, will not condone, will not allow the people we entrust with training the future citizens and leaders of this country to indoctrinate them, to attempt to radicalize them out of their own contempt for the American way of life, if we say, “Not on our watch,” I am convinced this is a fight that we can win, that we can take politics out of the classroom, and that we can restore dignity and decency and honor to an American education.

Thank you so much for coming.

BRETT MOCK: All right. My name is Brett Mock. I graduated last year from Ball State University. I also want to thank, of course, David for having me here, Ron for the introduction.

And one of the things I want to do and, I guess my chance to speak on the issue, is try to take a little bit of the defense, I guess, out of those people who, I guess you would consider either the Academic Bill of Rights or the issue of academic freedom’s opposition or its biggest critics because I think one of the problems is that for anyone that is a critic of academic freedom or the idea of an Academic Bill of Rights, they’re stuck on the fact that there are an awful lot of Republicans or conservatives that are involved in this issue. And so for them, it’s going to be pretty much cast aside because, well, it’s conservatives who don’t like liberals on campus who are saying what they’re saying. They’re complaining, and that’s what the issue is. They just don’t like to hear liberal speech or Democrats speaking and don’t like that the professors are composed of liberals.

So essentially what I want to do is take as much of the politics out of it as possible. I mean if I’m here, yeah, it’s probably right. I’m a conservative. But because I’m a conservative is not the reason I’m here. I’m not here as like a political career or something of that nature. I’m here, and I think what I want to do is try to observe and to look at the issue as — let’s look at education as a product, and the product is advertised one way, and then in classrooms, I believe, the product sometimes does not get delivered in that way. Instead, it’s delivered totally different from what is advertised to the student, to the parents, to the people who are purchasing that product and trying to get their education.

So I’m just going to examine my in-class experiences from that perspective. And then after I do that, I want to consider who enforces or oversees these policies. Who defends or decides what the standards are in education, and what do they do to enforce them and uphold them? And in that, I’m talking about the administrations at the universities. What do they do? How do they react when students come forward and complain about their in-class experiences and basically what I would call consumer fraud in the aspect of taking a course and not getting what the course was advertised to be.

In my experience, I was a part of a peace studies and conflict resolution minor. I chose the minor because as a political science major going into my junior year, I wanted to have a way to supplement that major. I hope to go to law school. I’m not there yet. But I mean it’s a very competitive thing. And that’s one of the things, I think, that a lot of people, as they grow a little bit older and they’re the ones making the policy decisions, seem to forget. To them, well, if a professor just throws out this blatant challenge and says something that’s, you know, opposing to your point of view, well, your job is to get up and defend your perspective, and your job is to get up and debate with the professor and defend your position.

What they seem to forget is we are in a closed environment. As a student, I have to worry about if I say what I really think, is it going to affect my grade? Is it going to affect my future in that way? So it’s easy to keep forming education policy and think, “Well, that’s what students do. They’re supposed to be challenged.” But it’s a lot more difficult to be the student in that shoe, that’s in that classroom, in that closed environment, and say, “Oh, okay, you’re right. I probably should speak out against my professor to his face in front of the class, and I’m sure that that’s not going to reflect at all in my grade. And that law degree that I was hoping for, maybe I can just pass on that because I’m going to show how brave I am speaking up against my professor in the classroom.”

So, obviously, I think that sometimes you’re a little bit removed when you’re forming policy from the classroom and what it’s like to be an 18 to 22-year-old in a college classroom against a professor who’s supposed to know the topic that he’s teaching.

So to get to it, the Introduction to Peace Studies and Conflict Resolution was taught by Professor [George Wolf], and the description of the class is “the interdisciplinary study of the methods of achieving peace within communities and among nations, history of peace movements, and causes of conflict, and analysis of the principles to resolve conflict using case studies.”

Now, this description would seem like you’re going to have a pretty thorough and pretty balanced perspective of the idea of conflict, how to resolve it, and the issues of war and peace, both within communities and among nations. It seems pretty straightforward. Instead, that’s not what we receive in the class.

Now, if you go to the website for this, the professor is the head of the Center for Peace and Conflict Studies, and he happens to be the academic advisor, the teacher that advises the Peace Worker student group. He sends — you know, the peace workers, they promote peaceful and just interaction between individuals, organizations, and nations. This is accomplished through weekly meetings, an annual Washington D.C. lobbying trip, an annual peace fest, volunteering, and guest speakers. If you look at Peace Worker Resources, and this is an academic — this is the University Center for Peace and Conflict Studies, Moveon.org is a link that’s on the Peace Workers Resources. Also, National Youth and Student Peace Coalition, Leftlinks, is a part of that as well. So I mean this is a university-sponsored center that’s taxpayer funded, and this is what you have as the links. This is our support for peace workers.

In the classroom itself, you might ask yourself who is George Wolf? Exactly what credentials does he have? Well, I have with me what I printed off from the university website. George Wolf, Professor of Music Performance, was teaching the Peace Studies and Conflict Resolution minor, the head of the Center of Peace and Conflict Studies, teaching me and my class about issues of war and peace with no credentials. He is an excellent saxophone player. I actually got to hear him play. But that is what he is. He’s a saxophone player. That’s what he studies, and that’s what he was hired to teach. Yet, somehow, he’s teaching me in this classroom about issues of war and peace and has absolutely no academic credential to be able to do so.

In the class, we studied at the very beginning Gandhism, and we wanted to understand Gandhian philosophy. And a part of understanding Gandhian philosophy and being able to apply our knowledge of it was to look at — when raising a child, how is it that you discipline a child? Do you have corporal punishment? You know, did you spank your child? Or do you use Gandhian philosophy? And so he wanted us to look at it from both perspectives and compare and contrast and that sort of thing.

So the first half of my paper I do exactly that. I explain there are principles of the Gandhian philosophy and this might be how would apply Gandhian philosophy to basically disciplining a child.

And in the second half, I gave my experiences. And because, obviously, I’m relatively belligerent and outgoing — I’m an only child, okay, and if my parents would’ve said, “Well, son, I think you need to go to your room,” I don’t think that would be really effective with me. I mean that’s just being honest. Whereas my dad, being more of a disciplinarian, he did spank me as a child, and to be totally honest with you, kind of got my attention.

So I explained that I thought that Gandhian philosophy, in my perspective, when I was being raised as a child, could potentially be manipulated, that, to me, it wouldn’t be effective, that I would look at it as a joke even as a little kid and never take discipline seriously.

I turned in my paper, and he graded the paper. And when he graded it, he did not have a problem with the composition of the paper. It wasn’t poorly written. You know, there was no issue there. But I lost credit on the paper because I just don’t understand Gandhian philosophy. And he explained the reason I don’t is because Gandhian philosophy can’t be manipulated.

Okay, so, “Professor Wolf, are you telling me that it’s totally infallible; I mean Gandhian philosophy, if applied correctly, will work all the time?” “Well, basically, yeah, I mean we explained in class that this is — you know, Gandhi would not back down. I mean this is — you don’t understand.” And I said, “Well, sir, I understand the philosophy, but I think it’s pretty unfair for you to grade me down because I don’t necessarily agree with it.”

Well, after arguing with my professor and putting myself in a relatively compromised position for the rest of the semester, as this was pretty early on, I did get the points back. So I guess there’s a small victory. However, for the rest of the semester, I had to worry about the fact that my professor, who isn’t even qualified to teach the subject anyway, was going to take out the fact that I argued with him by saying, “You’re grading me on my opinion and not on the ability to discuss the ideas,” what effect that was going to have on me.

So the short end of the story is, basically, on papers, and there were more than one, he would put his opinion into the grading and not based on my understanding of the topic.

An example of this is there was one assigned book report for the class, and there were books that he suggested. He brought to class approximately a dozen of them, and he gave us a chance to pick one of those books to use as our book report and give a presentation about it. Every single one of those books had a very liberal perspective to it — anti-war, anti-military. I asked if I could use another book, one that supported military intervention or violent forms of conflict resolution, and I was told no. Well, once I finished the book report on Noam Chomsky’s Hegemony or Survival, I wrote entirely as though I believed everything Noam Chomsky said, and I was the best Noam Chomsky supporter one could ever believe, and I got an A-plus on the paper, 10 points extra credit.

So I suppose it’s possible that I write better and I make better and sound — more sound arguments when I’m supporting those things that my professor believes in but I adamantly oppose and disagree in.

So this is an example of how this academic indoctrination happens. It is real, and I would urge those people who don’t think it’s real to consider what happens in the classroom. So, thank you.

RON ROBINSON: I should be playing Hail to the Chief right now.

DAN SCHUBERTH: Well, good morning from Maine. How about that? Who’s been to Maine here? I don’t know. Eh? All right, reasonable. Usually, the audience is like, “Yeah, Maine, yeah, that state up north somewhere,” right?

Got to address Ron’s point real quick. Ron, I think you came into Michael Jackson at the convention last year, and if I wasn’t mistaken, I think you requested it. So I don’t know about that, but anyway, we’ll clear that one up behind the scenes.

But thanks, Ron, for your leadership and for your friendship in this whole gig. Honored to be on the panel with these folks. You guys are rock stars, and thanks again for David for inviting me down.

Want to clear up a couple often misconceptions about Maine so we don’t have to deal with it in Q&A. Yup, Maine is a big state. It’s actually quite large. We do actually have lobsters there. There are quite a few of them. We have the second-highest gun ownership in the entire country, which is pretty cool, right? Yeah, yeah? And we have one of the most unpopular governors in the country, and it’s like my state party manual to attack the governor at every public forum I’m at, so that’s what I’m doing today. So I can check that one off, and we can talk about academic freedom for a little bit.

But anyway, thanks for having me down today. I want to fill you in. I think Maine has distinguished itself in this whole battle as a battleground state on the issue of academic freedom, and that is something that’s so encouraging to hear. I know Dave was very surprised to say that yesterday at our closed-door session, but that’s something we’re pretty proud of up in Maine. And, more importantly, we’ve discovered on a state party level, working with the Maine GOP and some of our coalition groups that not only is this a battleground issue that we’re dealing with, but it’s a winning issue. It’s an issue that folks find indefensible, though, that try to oppose it, and I’ll give you a little background on sort of what we’ve done and sort of where we’re progressing, where I think we can go, and I’m encouraged to say I think we can go in the very short future, so stay tuned.

Maine — we actually proposed the Academic Bill of Rights in the Maine legislature last March. Think it was the day before my birthday, which was kind of cool. We got to celebrate the Academic Bill of Rights on my birthday. What we did was we had a bill sponsored by Representative Stephen Bowen, now, who is a lifelong educator. He teaches high school up in Rockport, Maine — vacation land, nice area of the state — and he proposed a bill in conjunction with the College Republicans to propose David’s Academic Bill of Rights into the Maine legislation, LV-1194, I believe it was. And Steve’s bill was articulately defended. Steve stood up, in conjunction with 12 College Republicans that came out that day, to testify on behalf of the bill, in addition to a box of other testimony describing incidents of academic bias in the state of Maine. You should’ve seen some of these committee members when we walked in. Slapped a box of testimony, talking about everything from people throwing bibles over their shoulders in classrooms, talking about God not existing, you know, calling President Bush’s wife a moron, you know, things like that. We had a box full of testimony that we slapped on the table at the Educational Hearing Committee about this issue of academic freedom.

We stood there, 12 College Republicans, and testified the entire day. We were there at eight in the morning and think we ended up at eight at night. And it was interesting to see the response of the Committee and who stood up to oppose us. Not one student came to Augusta that day to testify against the Academic Bill of Rights, not one. We paraded 12 students in there to talk about their experience and why they felt this bill was critical to the future of the state of Maine for our educational system. Not one student.

But our opponents, on the other hand, were folks like the Maine Education Association. The Maine ACLU showed up with a team of lawyers to try to tell us that this bill would actually ruin education and destroy academic freedom in the classroom. The Chancellor of the Maine University System came out. The Chancellor of the University of Maine at Farmington came out, the number-one education school in the country. These were our opponents. Wasn’t students. It wasn’t folks that are actually affected by these university policies, but these are the bureaucrats that want to maintain the status quo in the state of Maine.

So we fought gallantly. We were there until the heat of night. The ACLU guys tried to stand up during one of the student’s testimony and say, “We’ve heard enough. It’s all the same things. These guys are Horowitz clones, and they’re coming in to ruin our state.” This is the rhetoric they were spouting out.

So at the end of the day, the bill actually — it went to a full vote, failed by one vote in the Maine legislature. Can you imagine — what do you think the breakdown of partisanship is in the Maine legislature? Now, we have 151 members in the Maine legislature — 74 Democrats, 73 Republicans, a couple independents, and a Green. One vote separated our outcome from passing the Academic Bill of Rights, just like they did in Georgia — that’s our model — back in March. Now, to me, that’s inspiring. That means we’re so close at being the next state to make this thing happen. We’re going to get it done.

So I got kicked upstairs. I was elected to serve as the Vice Chair of the Maine Republican Party in November this past year, youngest person in the country in the position I’m in, which is kind of intimidating but kind of cool at the same time because I get to talk about issues of academic freedom from this pedestal I have now with the Maine GOP symbol on the front of the podium. That’s pretty cool.

So we’ve done a lot of radio. The party has been incredibly supportive of this initiative and given me free reign to traipse across the state of Maine and talk about academic freedom issues, and we’ve gotten traction. We have radio stations like Fox and a TV station, Fox 23, which has us on almost on a weekly basis talking about academic freedom issues, Ray Richardson’s show. That’s incredibly inspiring.

More importantly, legislators see this as a winning issue, and that’s sort of what I want to leave you with today before I pass it along to Nate to talk about some other things in Maine.

Legislators in Maine, and the party in Maine, as a state party, have understood that academic freedom is a winning issue. When you talk about a plurality of ideas in the classroom, when you talk about giving students equal access to the marketplace of ideas, that is pretty hard to argue against. And we find the left in a very difficult position when they try to oppose our initiatives from a state party. So we like to talk about it, and I like to talk about it in every available forum. When I talk about how awful the governor is and all the things I’m supposed to say as vice chair of the party, I always tie in a tie about academic freedom because people agree with it, and it’s very difficult to oppose.

So I’m encouraged about what our party’s going to do on the academic freedom issue. I’m going to keep waving my arms around and all that good stuff at every available opportunity talk about this issue, but I think the most important and lasting impact that I can make — and this is something I’m working on specifically — is to pick up that one seat in the Maine House of Representatives. Literally, we have 8,000 people in the House district. It is so, so winnable. We lose some of these seats by two votes. We lost it by two votes in 2004.

Our majority statewide in the House of Representatives was lost by 104 votes aggregate. That separates 104 votes dealing with issues like the Academic Bill of Rights, dealing with taxpayers’ bill of rights. I see Senator Andrews in the back of the room, champion taxpayers bill of rights. These are issues that will be passed when we take the majority.

Representative Joshua Tardy — and I’ll close on this one — Representative Joshua Tardy will be elected our Speaker, and he told me to share a message with you folks down here when I came down to speak today. And Josh Tardy told us flat out, “Academic Bill of Rights is on the top of our policy agenda when we take this majority.”

Representative Steve Bowen, the gentleman who proposed the Academic Bill of Rights, most likely will be elected our Majority Leader when we take the House. It is so critical that we pick up that one seat. This bill is literally sitting on the line. I want to be able to report to you folks next year and to say that Maine took the step, followed in Georgia’s footsteps, and became the state that passed the Academic Bill of Rights after taking one seat.

So, stay tuned, folks. Love to talk to you more about this stuff. I’m sure we’ll get some questions, but the best way to get me is email [email protected]. Check it out. But we’re doing some exciting stuff. We want to win up there, and we want to pass this bill. So thanks for having me down, Mr. Horowitz, and it’s an honor to be here.

NATE WALTON: My name is Nate Walton. I’m Chairman of the Maine College of Republicans, and it’s been quite a journey to get to you folks here today. Started out this morning, six a.m., Portland, Maine. Got one small airport in the state. I get there. They tell me the flight’s been cancelled. And I say, “What are the other options?” Well, there’s a flight leaving from Boston at 8:20.” And Boston’s about two-and-a-half hours south. I’m originally from the Boston area, so it’s not terribly far.

But I made the drive, got on the flight, and I’m glad to be here with you folks yesterday. It was definitely a priority to tell you about the success we’ve had with Academic Freedom in Maine on the statewide level.

Dan talked a little bit about how we started the movement last year in the state legislature — 13, 12 College Republicans, courageous enough to stand before a House Committee and testify about the examples that they have seen on our college campuses. In a state that is best known for its lobster and moose, we have a serious academic freedom problem. I often describe it in a way that relates very well to a lot of our members in the Maine College Republicans. It’s about the intellectual solvency of the next generation. How can we be productive adults and leaders in society if we don’t have the marketplace of ideas in which to develop ourselves as fully responsible citizens of America today?

A lot of our members in the Maine College of Republicans come from rural schools, like University of Maine at Farmington, University of Maine at Preskile, where they work often one or two jobs just to be able to help their families and to be able to pay for tuition. And the fact that these folks work so hard to be able to get their education and to stay in Maine, which is a big issue among young people because the economic condition brought in by the Democrats is so poor, is a really important issue to them.

And like my colleague mentioned about consumer fraud, it really is just that because when you’re paying so much for school these days, I think we all deserve to have the marketplace of ideas and intellectual pluralism that we’re told to expect.

And I’d like to talk specifically about a few examples that have happened in Maine since I was chairman of the Bates College Republicans and now State Chairman of the Maine College Republicans. At Bates College last year, when I was the Chapter Chair, we were able to pass the Academic Bill of Rights unanimously at our school. And when I took the state chair reigns over from Dan last summer, I made it a priority to motivate our folks during the off year with the Academic Bill of Rights.

The College Republicans are often known as an organization that focuses primarily on election-year politics, on Republican activities at the local, state, and national level. But the Academic Bill of Rights is a fantastic motivator, and academic freedom issues are a fantastic motivator for keeping our members involved. And in 2005 — we recruited 1,000 new members off of our college campuses in the fall of 2005, and the reason we did that was not because there was an exciting election going on, because there wasn’t, but it was because we introduced the Academic Bill of Rights on eight different college campuses across the state. It failed on some, it passed on the others, but the fact of the matter is that each time it was introduced on these college campuses, a media debate ensued. Debate teams got enraged, and faculty professors were protesting left and right, but mainly on the left. And it was really a fantastic rallying issue for our organization.

And leading into 2006, like Dan said, we really have the potential to capitalize on the success we’ve had on academic freedom to keep our folks motivated during the election year to realize that winning the Maine state legislature, winning the Blaine House, which is the Governor’s mansion, ties directly into the success of our academic freedom efforts in Maine because of the fact of the matter is in a state where 20% of the young people are leaving each year, we want to have an incentive to keep them, to get a good education, and to get good jobs to help the future of the state.

I want to specifically thank Mr. Horowitz for his leadership because without his Students for Academic Freedom and the Academic Bill of Rights, there would be no academic freedom in Maine, there would be no discussion of these issues, and I certainly wouldn’t be standing here today.

And I also would like to thank Mr. Ron Robinson. Young America’s Foundation has been an amazing organization personally to me. When I was a leader at Bates, we were able to bring speakers, such as Bill Kristol, Ken Starr, David Horowitz. And bringing speakers like this and having events on campus has been an excellent way to rally our folks on academic freedom issues as well.

And with that, I’m sure we’ll have lots of questions about academic freedoms and how that relates to the College Republicans. I look forward to talking to you all during the course of the conference. Thank you.

RON ROBINSON: Thank you. Thank you, Nate. Appreciate your efforts to be here today. What a great group of students. I think you have a better understanding of what they face in the classroom, but also, I think you have a better understanding of how these issues, once raised, can sweep like a firestorm across the state and have the added attraction of rallying people that are oftentimes difficult to rally with a winning issue, a winning coalition.

Because the next panel is scheduled to begin, I think that — and I have no doubt whatsoever there are probably questions you would have for some of these students. But I believe all of them will be here the rest of the day, and you may have an opportunity to raise your questions with them individually. But on behalf of the conference, let’s give the students one final round of applause.

I apologize. I used sort of Gandhian time clock methods up here, so we didn’t really get a chance to get to Q&A. But thank you. Thank you very much. Appreciate it.
[End of Disc 2, track 5]

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.