David Horowitz, culture warrior, is a living demonstration that the only thing more damaging to academia than left-wing postmodernism is its right-wing opposition. In his most recent attack on leftist bias in universities, Horowitz illustrates precisely why he should be excluded from the process of balancing the scales.
Consider this:
My opponents have also consistently aimed their intellectual arrows at the wrong targets, allowing me to proceed with my agenda without any substantive opposition. In a September 17 article in The New York Times, for example, Michael Bérubé, a professor of literature at Pennsylvania State University, expressed concern about a legislative committee that I inspired, the Pennsylvania Committee on Academic Freedom, which held hearings in the state. He noted that during the hearings Penn State “revealed that it had received all of 13 student complaints about political ‘bias’ over the past five years on a campus with a student population of 40,000.”
My response to that point? If there are just 13 abuses per campus at the top 100 universities, that would add up to 1,300 over five years. A study by the historian Lionel Lewis of academic persecutions during the McCarthy era (which, according to Lewis, lasted nine years) found only 126 faculty members involved in academic-freedom cases at 58 institutions nationally. Those cases led to an estimated 69 terminations, of which 31 were resignations at a single institution after it established a loyalty oath. Yet small as that number may appear among the thousands of universities and hundreds of thousands of professors, the author concluded, “It is apparent that their chilling effect on the expression of all ideas by both faculty and students was significant, although in fact there is no way to measure adequately their full impact.”
I think most people would concur: The chilling effect is the issue, not the absolute number, although each case is cause for concern. The real question is whether universities are set up to deal with such problems through established and well-publicized procedures.
When Horowitz decides to multiply up the number of complaints from 13 to 1300, he assumes that the number of students is the same at all of the 100 top universities and that the complaint rate is the same. In fact, using Horowitz’s logic, we could point out that if we include the top 1000 universities and follow them for the next twenty years and we’d have 52,000 complaints. Heck, we can make the number as big as we like. Follow 1000 universities for the next million years, and there would be 2.6 billion complaints!
Michael Bérubé gave the figures correctly: number of complaints over length of time against the size of the student population. That comes to 0.65 complaints per 10,000 students per year, which is clearly a very low rate of complaint. Of course, Horowitz doesn’t like that figure so he has to inflate it.
But the worst thing Horowitz has done is to equate student complaints with academic persecutions in the McCarthy era. A complaint by itself means very little. It may be reasonable or it may be vexatious. Even if the complaint is warranted, it may be resolved to everyone’s satisfaction by an apology. On the other hand, persecutions in the McCarthy era meant that academics could lose their jobs or end up in prison. And while there may have been relatively few official persecutions in academia, there was a society-wide pursuit of communists that resulted in hundreds of prison sentences and over ten thousand dismissals. In this situation, it is eminently reasonable to talk of a climate of fear.
Furthermore, Horowitz doesn’t seem to understand that his complaints about bias in academia run in the same political direction as McCarthyist accusations. Right against left. So when Horowitz equates the two, the message that comes through is that the small number of complaints against leftist professors can be inflated to have the same fearful impact as the McCarthy persecutions. On the superficial level, Horowitz is arguing that a small number of complaints may be evidence of a culture of fear, but he fails to expand on the fact that both the McCarthy hearings and Horowitz’s Academic Bill of Rights are aimed at generating a culture of fear amongst leftists. While referring to the evils of the McCarthy era for rhetorical purposes, Horowitz is agitating to have similar processes put in place.
To understand what is wrong with Horowitz’s superficially innocuous Academic Bill of Rights, wonder why it is opposed by the American Association of University Professors, the American Library Association, the American Federation of Teachers, the National Association of Scholars, and the National Coalition Against Censorship, and then read this insightful Reason article by Jesse Walker and this on the Temple University hearings by Bill Berkowitz. A useful lesson from history: motherhood statements are the hand-crafted tools of intimidation.
