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The
Daily Princetonian has an
opinion piece by Sanford G. Thatcher discussing the "Student Bill of Rights" campaign of David Horowitz against "leftists" in American universities. Except it isn't just about leftists, as this
interview by Horowitz in the friendly confines of the
National Review reveals:
There are several professors -- Michael Berube, Todd Gitlin, and Victor Navasky to name four --- who are there [in his book, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America] because they have been collusive in the efforts of political activists to purge the university of conservatives and subvert its academic mission in the service of radical agendas. I point out that Berube and Gitlin supported the war against the Taliban; and that they have been critical of the pro-Saddam left in the anti-Iraq war movement. But if they have been critical of the terrorists, communists, and leftwing racists on university faculties, I missed it.
So the standard for inclusion in Horowitz's little hatchet job is not that you are, in fact, a "leftist" by whatever definition Horowitz is using, but that you are insufficiently critical of leftists by Horowitz's standards. Why does the phrase "fellow travelers" keep echoing through my head?
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But wait, that isn't quite right. You get included on the list that Horowitz is holding in his hand if he misses your being sufficiently critical of the people he defines as leftists. It seems that if anyone accidentally gets tarred by Horowitz's stadium-sized brush, it is their own fault for not keeping Horowitz up to speed on their political piety.
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And speaking of piety, Horowitz certainly displays it in spades in the interview when he was asked "Do you know all the professors you name are dangerous inside the classroom?" and he replied:
The dangerous idea is a marketing strategy which my publisher attached to the book after it was written. The only appearance of the word "dangerous" in the text is in the coupling of the words "dangerous sophistry" to describe some writing by Professor Juan Cole. Nonetheless, I think "dangerous" can fairly be applied to the collectivity, not least in terms of what they have done to the academic enterprise.
In other words, it ain't really him, folks, who is out crying "wolf" about individual professors; it's them nasty . . . um . . . capitalist publishers of his! He is above the fray and looking at the "big picture" . . . well, maybe except for that one time he went on the
700 Club and practically gave ol' Pat a
heart attack about 'communists, radicals, killers, and propagandists of the first order' in front of several million potential book buyers, but you know how that goes. Bérubé (with accents) has further details on the unconscionably sloppy Mr. Horowitz in this
article.
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Buffoonery alone (as in being unable to count when it comes to naming professors) doesn't make Horowitz dangerous but, as "Tailgunner Joe"
showed, it is no preventative either.
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Anyway, back to the point of Thatcher's piece, which is that the notion that "balance" is being fostered by Horowitz's "Student Bill of Rights" is spurious:
To the extent that there is real substance to the claim that academic freedom is endangered, it comes from the efforts of those like advocates of intelligent design (ID), who want to foist their "theory" on unsuspecting undergraduates who haven't learned enough about science to see through its pretensions of being real science rather than merely being disguised theology. If some Princeton students believe that it is important to have ID represented in the classroom to achieve "balance," then listen to what the American Association of University Professors has to say about this in a new statement: "Balance refers to the obligation of instructors to convey to students the state of knowledge ... There is no obligation to present ideas about intelligent design in a biology course, for example, because those ideas have no standing in the professional community of biologists."
In short, balance doesn't come from drivel. Sounds about right.
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Link - Posted by John Pieret @ 9:39 AM
