[Mb-civic] David Horowitz and the Attack on Independent Thought

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

Published on Tuesday, February 28, 2006 by CommonDreams.org
David Horowitz and the Attack on Independent 
Thought
by Robert W. McChesney
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0228-21.htm 

David Horowitz’s new book, "The Professors: The 101 Most 
Dangerous Academics in America," was published in early February to 
considerable fanfare encouraged by a tidal wave of promotion from the 
right-wing echo chamber. This is the same echo chamber that made 
“swift boat” a household word in September 2004. The book itself is 
sloppy and unimpressive, an apparent rush job.

The criticism of me, for example, consisted of two out-of-context 
quotes from articles where I criticize the news media and the Bush 
Administration. This is presented as prima facie evidence that I am a 
dreadful teacher who uses the classroom to harass students to adopt 
my political views, my campus-wide, student-elected teaching award 
notwithstanding. By the same “logic,” quotations could be taken from 
many professors in America, and nearly all conservatives, to establish 
that they propagandize in the classroom. By Horowitz’s evidentiary 
standards, Harvard’s Stephan Thernstrom, who endorses The 
Professors on its cover, should be ridden out of academia as a narrow-
minded bigot who abuses students who disagree with his pointed 
views.

In short, the book is clueless about how classroom teaching actually 
works; it would astound him to learn that many professors with strong 
political views – of whatever stripe – go to great lengths to provide an 
open classroom. The people Horowitz vilifies in his book know exactly 
what it is like to hold unpopular positions – to be attacked as 
“dangerous” for going against the dominant interests of society -- and 
we tend to have considerable empathy for those who disagree with our 
political views in our own classrooms. In fact, that explains why 
Horowitz’s lengthy and much-publicized campaign to locate 
conservative students who have been harassed in the classroom by 
left-wing professors has produced few, if any, credible witnesses. But, 
as I will argue, this is a ruse, so that lack of evidence means no more 
to Horowitz than the lack of WMD did to Bush and Cheney as they 
planned the invasion of Iraq.

The entire premise of the book is flawed. If Horowitz believes, for 
example, that publicly supported universities have an obligation to 
have faculties that represent the range of U.S. political opinion, and 
that it currently tilts too far to the left, he should follow the logic to its 
obvious resting place. Generals and military officers are far more 
important to the functioning of a government – and, as history shows in 
depressingly frequent detail, a much greater threat to democratic 
governance -- than anthropology professors. In the United States the 
military is enormous, it is entirely funded by taxpayers, and the officer 
corps is significantly right-wing Republican. There is hardly a liberal 
Democrat in the bunch, and I dare say probably not a single soul to the 
left of the Clinton-Kerry center of the Democracy party. That means 
tens of millions of Americans have no political allies directing the most 
powerful military in human history, while the hard right feels like it has 
died and gone to heaven when it visits the officers’ quarters on 
Election Day. If Horowitz is going on some sort of rampage about 
getting political balance in important publicly funded professions, he 
can only be taken seriously if he starts at the Pentagon. When he has 
established how to do it there we can proceed to the campuses.

But the point of Horowitz’s book is not to make a coherent principled 
critique of academia and suggest reforms to solve the problem. Were 
that the case, Horowitz would be obsessed with the rabidly pro-market 
bias in most economics and business schools – and more than a few 
political science departments. In these classes and departments, 
students who are pro-labor union, critical of so-called “free trade” deals 
like NAFTA, and in favor of progressive taxation, living wage 
ordinances, strict environmental regulations and aggressive social 
spending are made to feel like their positions have little intellectual 
merit. They are ostracized. Yet Horowitz has no concern for these 
students, or for their rights. Screw them.

Horowitz’s mission is clear: to attack critical work in the academy, 
especially critical work that does not restrict itself to the classroom, but 
sees intellectuals as having a necessary public role. Visible public 
outreach is A-OK for Milton Friedman, Stephan Thernstrom, the neo-
conservative crowd, and denizens of the right, but strictly off-limits for 
liberals and the left.

For these reasons I would imagine that principled conservatives will 
run from this book faster than they would run away from a line-up for a 
voluntary IRS audit. But the book is important and requires a response 
that goes beyond pointing out its sloppiness and incoherence; we need 
to put what Horowitz is doing in a broader context. In my view, the best 
way to make sense of the book and what it represents is to see it as 
part of the broad attack on the autonomy and integrity of institutions 
and individuals who conduct independent and critical thought. It is this 
type of independent and uncorrupted inquiry – work that is not under 
the thumb of powerful political or commercial interests -- that is 
mandatory if viable self-government is to succeed. The space for this 
type of inquiry has to be fought for and preserved, and it is always 
considered with a certain amount of suspicion by those in power, who 
prefer minimal public interference with their exercise of power.

Indeed, it is revealing that Horowitz uses the term “dangerous” as a 
pejorative in his book’s subtitle. Dangerous professors are those with 
ideas with which Horowitz disagrees. This is a ludicrously opportunistic 
and undemocratic framing. The entire premise of a viable democratic 
public sphere is that what some perceive as “dangerous” ideas be 
protected, even encouraged, and permitted to be thrown into debate. 
Especially, above all else, in universities.

In our society the two institutions commissioned to provide the 
substance of a democratic public sphere, as a place for critical inquiry, 
are the news media and academia.

Hence, to get a better sense of what is happening today with the attack 
on universities, consider what has happened with U.S. journalism. 
Back in the early 1970s professional journalism was at its peak. 
Journalists had relative autonomy from the demands of owners and 
advertisers and relatively lavish budgets. I do not wish to exaggerate 
the quality of professional journalism even at its peak; local news 
media tended to ignore the foibles of powerful local bigshots and all 
news media relied far too much on official sources, especially in 
coverage of foreign policy. Indeed much of my career has been spent 
documenting the limitations of professional journalism, even at its best. 
But on balance what it provided in the 1960s and 1970s looks awfully 
good through 2006 eyes.

Since the 1970s the autonomy, resources and critical wiggle room of 
professional journalism has come under attack on two fronts. First, as 
media ownership consolidated corporate owners began to think the 
idea of professional journalism made a lot less sense. After all, 
corporations aren’t charities, and why should their shareholders 
bankroll a public service? So newsrooms have faced serious cutbacks 
in resources for investigative, political and international coverage. In its 
stead far less expensive and politically trivial celebrity coverage has 
risen in prominence. Commercial values play an increasingly visible 
role in what passes for journalism today.

The second front in the war on journalism came from the political right. 
To the political right, it was mandatory to make journalism more 
sympathetic to right-wing politics if the right was going to win political 
power. A very high percentage of right-wing funding went to various 
means of pushing the news media to the right. The overarching theme 
was that the media had a strident liberal bias that required journalist to 
be softer on Republicans and tougher on Democrats if they wished to 
be fair. The campaign has been a rousing success. One need only 
look at the weak-kneed press coverage of Bush’s scandals and 
foibles, and imagine how a President Clinton or Gore or Kerry would 
have fared if he had done similar deeds, to see the effect.

While these two attacks on journalism were independent of each other 
for the most part, they had the same effect: reduce the power and 
autonomy of journalists and make journalism more fearful of 
antagonizing the political right.

Universities and news media share a certain ideological importance as 
I have already noted. But as institutions they have quite different 
traditions. News media have been the province of profit-driven firms for 
the most part, whereas universities are non-profit, often public, 
institutions. Yet the attack on universities has followed the same 
pattern as the attack on journalism. The dominant issue on campuses 
for the past two decades has been the incessant commercialization of 
universities, from marketing of classes to corporate funding for 
research and activities. Increasingly our major universities are linked to 
commercial institutions and commercial values, which work to 
undermine, even eliminate, much of the public service ethos of these 
institutions. Now the distance is further to travel with universities than 
with media, because they begin as non-profit institutions, but the 
direction is unmistakable. And the destination is nowhere anyone 
should want universities to be. It is the great crisis facing universities 
today, and about this crisis people like David Horowitz have nothing to 
say.

This brings us to Horowitz’s attack on “dangerous” professors, those 
faculty like myself who dare to hold political opinions Horowitz 
disagrees with and which he would like to see banished. This is taken 
directly from the playbook for the right-wing attack on “liberal” 
journalists. The point is to intimidate dissident voices, to make them 
temper their words in their classrooms, and be very careful about what 
they do when they venture off-campus. Right-wing faculty are free to 
shout their views from the mountaintop – after all, they are the 
oppressed minority merely trying to balance the dominant left, much 
like the blowhards at Fox News – while left-wing faculty are supposed 
to shut up and go with the flow if they wish to be regarded as legitimate 
professionals and keep their jobs. As I discussed at the outset, it is a 
thoroughly unprincipled exercise with a crude political agenda. 
Combined with the commercial restructuring of universities the goal is 
to make intellectual life as ineffectual as our journalism has become.

It is a prospect that is unacceptable and must be opposed, in both 
media and higher education. It is a battle for the soul of our nation, and 
the future of our polity.

Robert W. McChesney is the co-author, with John Nichols, of Tragedy 
& Farce: How the American Media Sell Wars, Spin Elections, and 
Destroy Democracy (New Press). He is the founder of Free Press, 
www.freepress.net. 


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"A war of aggression is the supreme international crime." -- Robert Jackson,
 former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor

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