Excellent article from the American Federation of Teachers’ website about the attacks on critical thought and dissent led by self described “right-wing battering ram” David Horowitz.
Truth is a casualty in a conservative campaign to wedge politics into the classroom
By Barbara McKenna
Supporters of faculty’s right to free speech savored the moment Jan. 10, when the outspoken author of the Academic Bill of Rights got called to task for one of his more notorious misrepresentations.
The Pennsylvania Select Committee on Academic Freedom in Higher Education was wrapping up its questioning of David Horowitz on the second of two days of hearings at Temple University. The committee, created last July under House Resolution 177, is charged with examining the academic atmosphere in Pennsylvania’s public colleges and universities.
At the hearing, Rep. Larry Curry, Democratic co-chair of the bipartisan committee, asked Horowitz about a story he has been repeating in speeches and interviews for over a year, that a Pennsylvania State University biology professor showed his class Michael Moore’s documentary “Fahrenheit 9/11” in the days before the 2004 election. Horowitz’s source, apparently, was a posting on one of his spinoffs, the studentsforacademic
freedom.com Web site.
THE TRUTH? SO WHAT!
Trouble is, Horowitz has never provided any evidence that the screening occurred, and no other independent source has been able to verify it.
“The concern I have,” said Rep. Curry, “is over the lack of good evidence(the vagueness being presented in both the resolution [H.R. 177] and the statements we’re hearing. In one instance on your Web site, you have a long story about the showing of âFahrenheit 9/11.’ Now we know that it didn’t happen. Will you retract the story?”
“We took it off the Web site days ago,” Horowitz answered, adding, “Michael Moore has been shown to be a liar.”
“But you asserted it as true and didn’t correct it,” Curry persisted.
“So what!” Horowitz barked, exclaiming that he couldn’t be expected to fact-check Web postings.
In an interview the next day in the online newspaper Inside Higher Ed, Horowitz dismissed critics’ exposure of his lie as nitpicking and irrelevant. “Everybody who is familiar with universities knows that there is a widespread practice of professors venting about foreign policy even when their classes aren’t about foreign policy,” he said, adding that the lack of evidence on Penn State doesn’t mean there isn’t a problem.
That’s what the investigation is trying to figure out. Horowitz has been on a one-man crusade for the past few years, claiming to expose what he asserts is a liberal bias in higher education. Based on anecdotes and secondhand information, Horowitz paints a picture of professors bringing their politics into the classroom, indoctrinating their students and engaging in other unprofessional activities such as awarding lower grades to those who do not agree with them. At College Horowitz, campus is a traumatic place for students these days.
To rectify this alleged problem, Horowitz has drafted model legislation, the so-called Academic Bill of Rights (ABOR), which would impose external guarantees that institutions are practicing intellectual pluralism in hiring and promotion, grading practices, curriculum and course design, and in invitations to outside speakers. This would be the Fox News “fair and balanced” approach to the academic business of higher education.
On the surface, ABOR sounds tame. But it is not, for two reasons: It presumes that faculty are crackpots on a mission to subvert today’s youth, and it invites state legislatures to come in and provide protection.
Backed by over $14 million in support from right-wing foundations over the past few years (see May-June 2005 AFT On Campus), Horowitz has been working to get ABOR on state legislative dockets. It has proven an easy sell to convince a few conservative legislators in each state that college faculty (who, surveys show, tend to be registered Democrats) pose a threat that can be addressed by a simple piece of legislation.
The first state legislature where ABOR surfaced was Colorado, at the end of 2003. Public college presidents were able to disarm that bill by signing an agreement that they would report to the legislature about their efforts to protect academic freedom on their campuses.
In the two years since then, Horowitz has gotten the legislation introduced in 23 other states (see map below). Pennsylvania was the second state, after Georgia, to pass a resolution calling for action. H.R. 177 creates a select committee to investigate whether, at public institutions, faculty are hired, fired, promoted or gain tenure based on professional competence; whether students have access to course materials that create an environment conducive to learning; and whether students are graded based on academic merit, not ideology. In short, the committee is examining whether there is a problem with bias in Pennsylvania’s public colleges and universities.
There isn’t, according to AFT higher ed leaders.
“The first thing I want to see when a student or anyone makes a claim like that is the evidence to back it up,” said AFT vice president William Scheuerman, who testified before Horowitz. At the State University of New York where he is president of the United University Professions/AFT, a similar accusation on the part of conservative trustee Candace de Russy caused the board to canvass every campus leader in the system. “Of 400,000 students on 64 campuses,” says Scheuerman, “there were zero complaints.”
The president and faculty leaders of Temple University echoed that report. Temple president David Adamany and Robert O’Neill, a former president of three universities and founder of the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression, detailed the protections in place on college campuses that have longstanding policies governing expression and mechanisms for filing complaints.
Temple faculty, including Temple Association of University Professionals/AFT president William Cutler, described what happens in a typical classroom. Cutler, a historian, explained that professional academics do not trade in beliefs or opinions; rather, they make arguments and raise questions based on fact and reason.
Another witness that day was Anne Neal, president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, a conservative organization founded by Lynne Cheney, wife of the U.S. vice president, and others. The council’s view is that boards of trustees, not state governments, should be the ones to crack down on college faculty. “The lack of intellectual diversity on our college campuses is clearly a problem,” she told Pennsylvania legislators. “We believe boards of trustees have the responsibility to ensure that students are exposed to a free and open exchange of ideas and are encouraged to think for themselves.”
HOW DO YOU DEFINE ‘WITCH-HUNT’?
Committee members were sensitive to charges that the hearings and the resolution itself are McCarthyesque. To protect faculty, the resolution stipulates that if an individual testifying makes an allegation against a faculty member claiming bias, the faculty member must be given 48 hours notice of the specifics of the allegation prior to testimony and an opportunity to respond.
Still, state Rep. Gil Armstrong, a Republican from Lancaster County who sponsored the resolution, asked each witness if he or she felt the investigation was a witch-hunt. Each politely responded that the topic of academic freedom is important, but Armstrong’s colleagues were not so kind.
“This is a colossal waste of time,” complained state Rep. Dan Surra, a Democrat, who along with several others wondered why the committee’s resources couldn’t be spent on more serious challenges facing higher education. The committee has two more hearings scheduled and must make a report by November.
“Students are smarter than he gives them credit for,” says Kim Teplitzky, a senior journalism major at Temple University who is a fellow this year in Young People For (YP4), a leadership program offered by People for the American Way, a civil liberties group. “Horowitz is trying to pull the wool over our eyes and make us feel victimized. But the students at Temple aren’t buying it.”
Many in higher education were appalled in January, when a 23-year-old protégé of David Horowitz named Andrew Jones, who has started an organization of conservative UCLA alumni called the Bruin Alumni Association, offered money to UCLA students to tape their professors and turn in evidence of bias. Even Horowitz tried to disassociate from that idea. Jones withdrew the offer when the university’s lawyer warned that it violated policy and state law, but Jones still is inviting students to turn in abusive professors anonymously.
If there were a problem with constraints on academic freedom, says Elena Cross, a sophomore political science and international studies major at Penn State, students would file more complaints. “They know how to do it,” she says. The information “is on the Web site, easily accessible.”
Recently, Penn State released a study on the question of bias there. “At Penn State in five years, there have been only 13 bias complaints,” says Cross. “That is from a student body that has 40,000 students on the main campus and an additional 40,000 on the other campuses, 8,000 faculty and 177,457 course sections.
“That there were only 13 complaints speaks volumes. And those complaints went through the university system set up to deal with them. Most of them were found to be unsubstantial. The interesting part is that in the college that received the most complaints(the college of Health and Human Development(they were directed against professors with conservative views toward family.”
To respond to the increasing attacks on free speech in higher education, a new coalition of student, faculty and civil liberty groups, including the American Federation of Teachers, has formed a grass-roots organization, “Free Exchange on Campus.” The coalition is ensuring that students and campus-based academics can set the record straight on the campus environment and protect faculty from malicious attacks (see sidebar).
In addition, the AFT higher education department has created an ABOR tool kit with extensive background information on ABOR and suggested responses. This can be found at www.aft.org/topics/academic-freedom.cfm.
TERRORISTS, COMMUNISTS AND RACISTS
Recently, the Horowitz campaign to restrict faculty speech took an even more negative turn with the publication of The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America (Regnery Publishing Inc., 2006). The promotional blurb reads:
“Coming to a Campus Near You: Terrorists, racists, and communists(you know them as The Professors.
“Horowitz exposes 101 academics(representative of thousands of radicals who teach our young people(who also happen to be alleged ex-terrorists, racists, murderers, sexual deviants, anti-Semites, and al-Qaida supporters. Horowitz blows the cover on academics who: ( Say they want to kill white people. ( Promote the views of the Iranian mullahs. ( Support Osama bin Laden. ( Lament the demise of the Soviet Union. ( Defend pedophilia. ( Advocate the killing of ordinary Americans.”
The book is a compilation of three- to five-page profiles of professors, many of which have been recycled verbatim from Web postings made in the last year or so. The top disciplines represented are ethnic studies, women’s studies and Islamic studies, but history, economics, English and political science are well-represented, too. The portraits seem to be based on published writings by the subjects, unproven accusations about them, portions of statements taken out of context and information drawn from Google searches. Frequently, the depictions summarize the academics’ well-established scholarly bona fides in ethnic studies or women’s studies or peace studies, for example, as self-evident proof that the scholars are out of control in their classrooms. Very few profiles mention anything that actually goes on in a classroom.
Horowitz describes his research method as prosopography, which relies upon genealogical or biographical data to draw conclusions about an entire cohort or class.
It is a technique also known as collective biography, explains Temple’s Cutler, a historian. It is commonly used by historians delving into ancient periods where there is a dearth of data. “His use of it really is an attempt to misuse it. He is trying to generalize to a population that is in the hundreds of thousands from a sample of a hundred and one.” Using this approach, Horowitz claims that these 101 are “only the tip of the iceberg.” By his mathematical accounting, he says, “assuming a figure of 10 percent per university faculty, the total number of such professors at American universities with views similar to the spectrum represented in this volume would be in the neighborhood of 25,000 to 30,000.”
In The Professors, Horowitz attacks professors for having communist relatives and finds Marxists under every bush. (Horowitz himself is the son of communist parents and was a member of the party until his politics turned reactionary.) He condemns Eric Foner, for example, the distinguished Columbia University history professor, for quoting African-American actor and Cold War-era communist Paul Robeson saying, “The patriot is the person who is never satisfied with his country.” He charges that sociology professor Michael Schwartz of SUNY Stony Brook is an obsessed Marxist whose views have permeated the department because it offers a course called “Stratification.” The course “purports to investigate the âcauses and consequences of the unequal distribution of wealth, power, prestige and other social values in different societies’,” the copy reads.
“I never even teach that class,” says Schwartz, “but can you find anyone in the U.S. who doesn’t think that society is stratified?”
“What is disturbing is the use of âmost dangerous’,” says AFT vice president Barbara Bowen, president of the Professional Staff Congress representing faculty at the City University of New York, home to six faculty on the list of 101. “It’s not an innocent subtitle, especially in this time of tremendous focus on terrorism. These so-called portraits are supposed to be examples of poor researchers, but Horowitz’s own research is poor, shoddy and secondhand.”
One person he goes after is a junior faculty member at the Brooklyn College School of Education named Priya Parmar. Her description is a recycling of an article that appeared May 31, 2005, in the New York Sun, which was based on the unsubstantiated claims of two former students and a Brooklyn College history professor, K.C. Johnson, whom Parmar has never met nor seen. The article claims that Parmar politicized a class she teaches, “Language Literacy in Secondary Education.” It cites the objections of three students who accused her of bigotry toward white students and a bias against standard English because she uses hip-hop as a tool to address literacy.
After the article appeared, 50 of her students signed a letter in her defense. Her colleagues in the school of education have defended Parmar and her pedagogy, and most signed an open letter to K.C. Johnson condemning his public attacks. She has received written support from her dean and her union, the Professional Staff Congress/AFT.
One of her students who wrote the letter, Elisheva Rison, a senior history major, was infuriated over the Parmar smear “because I know for a fact that it wasn’t true.” She says she confronted the campus president of Students for Academic Freedom, the Horowitz offshoot. “I told them that the claims of Parmar being anti-white and refusing to let students express their opinions in class was a complete falsehood, since I and many others have taken her(and among them were white students as well.” The newspaper never followed up with any of the students and never printed Parmar’s response to the inaccuracies. Still, this serves as the basis for Horowitz’s rant.
Parmar expresses anger and frustration over the situation, in which two students with unsubstantiated claims can get so much exposure and not one of the 50 students who signed their names on her behalf have been contacted. But the attempted blacklisting has made her more determined in her classroom, she says. “I have always worked to create a safe place. All my students get a voice. It has always been my mission to address diversity and to hear multiple perspectives. I haven’t compromised my teaching as far as content or even my approach.”
University of Illinois communications professor Robert McChesney, whose students have recognized him for his work, comes under attack by Horowitz for raising questions about the news media, its corporate ownership and what effect that has on news coverage. “Universities are one of the last institutions not entirely under their [conservatives’] thumb. They want to intimidate professors, want to shrink places where people can do independent work.
“I consciously avoid penalizing students for their political views,” he adds. “I’d be surprised if most of my colleagues aren’t the same way.”
“Horowitz’s screed is essentially a series of lies and misrepresentations,” says Juan Cole, a professor of history at the University of Michigan whose fields are Middle Eastern and South Asian history and religion. “I never have alleged a âJewish’ âconspiracy’ âcontrolling’ the U.S. government, and Horowitz could never find any such quote. I have never, for instance, characterized Israel as a fascist state.”
What is more, Cole adds, “The allegation that humanities scholarship is politicized is a bald-faced lie. And the allegation itself is made as a Trojan horse for the purpose of sneaking in a politicization of the humanities!”
Larry Estrada, associate professor of ethnic studies at Western Washington University, is accused of favoring the creation of an independent Hispanic state in America’s Southwest to be called “Atzlan.” Said Estrada, “I think this attack is libelous. They never contacted me or talked to me about my viewpoints. I’ve never advocated secession.
“I feel he’s trying to discredit anyone who is attempting to bring in fresh viewpoints in academia,” he adds. “It’s the new McCarthyism.”
Schwartz is struck by the complete disjunction between what Horowitz and his supporters say they are trying to do with the Academic Bill of Rights and the information they bring forward to justify the need for it. They have two basic arguments, he says. “One is that professors are coming into the classroom and stuffing radical ideas down students’ throats. The other is that professors are excluding worthy intellectuals who disagree with them politically. If you look at these bios, you’ll see there is virtually never even a claim(much less evidence(that this has been done.”
Instead, he worries that Horowitz and others have a different plan: To bring conservatives onto campus by circumventing the scholarly route.
“Look at what you might call the âscholarship’ that has come out in support of President Bush. The neoconservative treatises, the elaborate justifications for the imperial presidency(they come out of lavishly funded, corporate-sponsored think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and American Enterprise Institute.
“These places do not uphold scholarly standards. Rather than seeking out the truth and submitting it to rigorous peer review, they decide a policy and their writers write something in support of that. These people are not scholars. They are propagandists.
“The basic thrust of ABOR is to force academies to hire these people into their ranks and give them a scholarly imprimatur. It’s a profound attack on the integrity of science. ABOR would fundamentally change how we approach teaching, the contestation of intellectual ideas and scholarship.”