Archives for December 2021

An Academic Tragedy*

To appreciate the radical changes that have taken place in Amer­ica’s universities over the past few decades, one could do worse than start with the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Academic courses at Santa Cruz and other California campuses are ostensibly governed by the “Standing Orders” of the university Re­gents. These state that each school must “remain aloof from politics and never function as an instrument for the advance of partisan inter­ests,” and that professors must never allow the classroom “to be used for political indoctrination.” In the words of the Regents, such indoc­trination “constitutes misuse of the University as an institution.”¹

Unfortunately, this rule and rules like it at academic institutions across the country are increasingly ignored by university professors, and almost never enforced by university administrations. The UC Santa Cruz catalog is itself littered with course descriptions that promise indoctrination, almost invariably in radical politics. The clear goal of such courses is not to educate students in the methods of crit­ical thinking but to instill ideologies that are hostile to American so­ciety and its values. Contrary to the Standing Orders of the university Regents, these courses teach students what to think, not how to think.

The Santa Cruz catalog, for example, describes a seminar offered by its “Community Studies Department” as follows: “The goal of this seminar is to learn how to organize a revolution. We will learn what communities past and present have done and are doing to resist, challenge, and overcome systems of power including (but not limited to) global capitalism, state oppression, and racism.”²

This is the outline of a political agenda, not the description of a scholarly inquiry. Moreover, the sectarian character of this course re­flects far more than the misguided pedagogy of an aberrant instructor. University faculty are credentialed, hired, and promoted by com­mittees composed of faculty peers.

To create an academic course requires the approval of the tenured leaders of an academic department who have been hired and then pro­moted by other senior faculty. For a department to survive and flour­ish, its curriculum must be recognized and approved by professional associations that are national in scope. Consequently, the fact that a course in how to organize a revolution is offered at one of the nation’s distinguished academic institutions speaks volumes about the contem­porary university and what it has come to regard as an appropriate ac­ademic course of study.

The Community Studies Department at UC Santa Cruz is by no means alone in its departures from scholarly principle. The school also boasts a “Department of the History of Consciousness,” which was cre­ated in the 1960s as a platform for political radicals. Communist Party stalwart Angela Davis—a onetime federal fugitive featured on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list—has been a faculty icon for decades.³ Black Panther felon Huey Newton received a Ph.D. from the depart­ment by submitting a dissertation that was little more than a political tract justifying his organization’s criminal activities. Another promi­nent radical credentialed in the program and then hired to its faculty is Bettina Aptheker, creator of UCSC’s Department of Feminist Studies.

The daughter of a famous leader of the Communist Party, Profes­sor Aptheker was herself on the party’s central committee for many years. Aptheker finally left the party in 1981 after her superiors re­jected a political tract she had submitted for publication to the party publishing house. Her manuscript was considered unacceptable be­cause it argued that women were oppressed due to their gender and not merely their class position.⁴ In a recent memoir, Aptheker ex­plained that she agreed to pursue an academic career only after another professor and long-time Communist Party member told her, “It’s your revolutionary duty.”⁵

In pursuit of her revolutionary goals, Aptheker devoted herself to revamping the curriculum of the newly created “Introduction to Women’s Studies” course, “making it more overtly political” and turn­ing it into a training program in radical feminism and an adjunct of the women’s movement.⁶ “Teaching became a form of political activism for me, replacing the years of dogged meetings and intrepid organizing with the immediacy of a liberatory practice.”⁷

Aptheker was appointed the first professor of Women’s Studies at Santa Cruz and went on to build an entire academic department based on her political agendas, shaping its course offerings for a quarter of a century. At her instigation, the department was eventually renamed the Department of Feminist Studies, which finally captured her achievement: the embedding of a political program in an academic curriculum, despite the explicit warning by the UC Regents that this “constitutes a misuse of the university.”

Bettina Aptheker’s academic career is a metaphor for the political trends that have reshaped America’s liberal arts classrooms over the past generation. A lifelong political activist, Aptheker regarded the university first and foremost as a fulcrum for revolutionary change. In furthering her political goals, she received extensive support from cru­cial elements of the university system. This support included, first of all, the academic department that awarded her a Ph.D. for non-scholarly work. Like Newton’s, her doctoral thesis was not a scholarly dissertation but the political tract she had previously submitted to the Communist Party publishing house. Once credentialed by the History of Consciousness program as a “scholar,” she was hired to the faculty and then promoted by committees dominated by other faculty radi­cals. These committees then approved the creation of a politically de­signed Women’s Studies program through which she could spread her doctrines. The central university administration then agreed to the ex­pansion of the program into a full-fledged academic department and to its transformation into the Department of Feminist Studies.

Throughout the entire process, Aptheker’s ideological curriculum received the imprimatur of the National Women’s Studies Associa­tion (NWSA), which sets standards of discourse, research, and hir­ing in the field. Its support was entirely predictable, since the NWSA is itself a political organization whose formal constitution lays out its agendas in blunt fashion:

Women’s Studies owes its existence to the movement for the lib­eration of women; the feminist movement exists because women are oppressed. Women’s Studies, diverse as its components are, has at its best a shared a vision of a world free not only from sexism but also from racism, class-bias, ageism, heterosexual bias—from all the ideologies and institutions that have con­sciously or unconsciously oppressed and exploited some for the advantage of others. . . . Women’s Studies, then, is equipping women not only to enter the society as whole, as productive human beings, but to transform the world to one that will be free of all oppression.⁸

In sum, Professor Aptheker’s academic career and her politicized De­partment of Feminist Studies are made possible by a national move­ment of academics who share her broad ideological agendas. Over the course of several decades, this movement has instituted massive changes in the structure of higher education, creating new courses, new departments, and new fields that violate the professional standards of the modern research university and undermine its foundations.

These disturbing developments are the subject matter of One-Party Classroom. Recent decades have witnessed widespread com­plaints about the political abuse of university classrooms. But never before has anyone undertaken a comprehensive investigation of what America’s college instructors actually say they are teaching their students.

One-Party Classroom fills in those blanks. It documents the results of an in-depth, multiyear study of twelve representative schools— public and private, and ranging from large state universities to elite Ivy League institutions. Our investigation has systematically scruti­nized course catalogs, syllabi, reading lists, professors’ biographies, scholarly records, and testimonies.

The outcome of our research leaves no doubt that the failure to enforce academic standards is a problem that is endemic to institu­tions of higher learning. An alarming number of university courses violate existing academic regulations that have been designed to en­sure that students receive professional instruction. Curricula are designed not to educate students in critical thinking[1] but to instill doctrines that are “politically correct.” This is not a claim that profes­sors are “biased.” Bias is another term for “point of view,” which every professor naturally possesses and has a right to express. For the purposes of this study, professors whose courses follow tradi­tional academic standards do not pose a problem regardless of their individual point of view. What concerns us is whether their courses adhere to the academic standards of the modern research university and the principles of a professional education.⁹ And the fact is that a growing number of activist instructors routinely present their stu­dents with only one side of controversial issues in an effort to convert them to a sectarian perspective.

Once the widespread nature of the abuses is appreciated, it becomes impossible to argue that the problem is limited to a few aberrant in­structors, or to offhand professorial comments, or to an occasional as­signment of materials designed to sway students’ judgments on controversial matters.

The more than 150 college courses documented in these pages do not exhaust the political offerings at the twelve institutions studied; they are merely the most obvious cases at these schools. The ideolo­gies presented in these courses often reflect prominent and even dominant schools of thought in their respective academic fields. More importantly, these ideological doctrines often shape the core curriculum most undergraduates are required to take to earn their degrees in liberal arts.

If we were to extrapolate from the materials examined here, tak­ing into account the total number of institutions offering advanced degrees, the result would be as many as 10,000 college classes na­tionwide whose primary purpose is not to educate students but to train them in left-wing ideologies and political agendas. The stu­dents who pass through these courses annually are numbered in the millions. In other words, One-Party Classroom demonstrates beyond a reasonable doubt that the attempt to indoctrinate American college students is more pervasive and extreme than even the harshest critics of academia have previously suggested.

“No Tipping of the Scales”

Although the courses examined in this text reflect, without exception, a left-wing view of the world, the problems exposed would be just as serious if instructors were instilling conservative or right-wing doc­trines. The reason for the absence of such courses in this study was our inability to locate them at the schools examined. This is not sur­prising. As recent surveys have shown, conservatives are an extraor­dinarily rare presence in contemporary liberal arts faculties. At several of the schools examined, we could not locate a single conservative professor on the social science faculty. A 2007 investigation by two liberal academics, Neil Gross and Solon Simmons, reported that liberal professors generally outnumber conservatives in the social sciences and humanities by a factor of 9 to 1.¹⁰ In fields such as an­thropology and sociology, the ratio approaches 30 to 1, Conse­quently, in the mainstream university system, which is the focus of our inquiry, conservative professors lack the institutional means to create ideological departments or to design courses for the purpose of training students in right-wing doctrines.¹¹

The roots of the present situation lie in the political history of the 1960s and its aftermath. The cultural upheavals of that era saw the ac­cession to academic tenure of a generation of activists who regarded the university as a platform from which to advance their political mission. Drawing on the works of European Marxists such as Antonio Gramsci and Herbert Marcuse, and the educational theorist Paulo Freire, the radicals viewed universities as “means of cultural production” analo­gous to the “means of production” in Marx’s revolutionary schema. To these professorial activists, the academic classroom offered a potential fulcrum for revolutionary change. Because the university trained jour­nalists and editors, lawyers and judges, future political candidates and operatives, it provided a path to cultural “hegemony” and an opportu­nity to promote a radical transformation of the society at large.

The efforts of this radical generation soon led to a dramatic shift in educational attitudes. When the modern research university was cre­ated a century ago, it signaled an end to the dominance of religious institutions in the field of higher education. Under the new dispensa­tion, teachers were expected to refrain from imposing their religious or ideological prejudices on students in their charge, to teach according to the precepts of scientific method and not according to what the philos­opher Charles Peirce referred to as the “method of authority.”

The most important and influential statement associated with this emergence of the modern research university was the “Declara­tion on the Principles of Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure,” a document issued by the American Association of University Pro­fessors (AAUP). The Declaration stipulated that a university instruc­tor should “set forth justly, without suppression or innuendo, the divergent opinions of other investigators . . . and he should, above all, remember that his business is not to provide his srudents with ready-made conclusions, but to train them to think for themselves, and to provide them access to those materials which they need if they are to think intelligently.”¹² This statement, issued in 1915, has provided the template for the academic freedom policies of most American universities ever since.

Equally explicit on these matters was a 1934 statement by Robert Gordon Sproul, the president of the University of California and the architect of its rise to academic prominence as an exemplar of the values to which a research university should aspire. In the 1934 statement, Sproul defined the mission of the university as incompati­ble with the agendas of sectarian political movements: “The function of the university is to seek and to transmit knowledge and to train students in the processes whereby truth is to be made known. To con­vert, or to make converts, is alien and hostile to this dispassionate duty. Where it becomes necessary in performing this function of a university, to consider political, social, or sectarian movements, they are dissected and examined, not taught, and the conclusion left, with no tipping of the scales, to the logic of the facts.”¹³

The Sproul statement was integral to the academic freedom poli­cies of the University of California until 2003, when academic radicals succeeded in suppressing it. In that year, the academic senate voted to remove the Sproul statement from its academic freedom template by a majority of 43—3- This removal was engineered by Professor Robert Post, who is currently the principal authority on academic freedom for the AAUP.¹⁴

The activist mentality behind these moves was aggressively pro­moted in an article titled “Impassioned Teaching,” which was featured in the Summer 2007 issue of the AAUP’s official journal, Academe. It was timed to coincide with a new statement on academic freedom and was written by Pamela Caughie, a regional president of the AAUP and also a professor of English at Loyola University, Chicago, and its director of Women’s Studies.

“Don’t be afraid of classroom advocacy; it’s not the same as indoc­trination,” Caughie advised other academics. But her text demon­strated that this was a distinction without a difference: “Feminism is a mode of analysis, a set of values, and a political movement. In teaching students its history, its forms, and its impact, I am teaching them to think and write as feminists. I want to convince my stu­dents of the value of feminist analysis and the importance of feminist praxis.” In other words, Caughie understands her educational mis­sion as one of persuading students to adopt her point of view, not teaching them how to conduct an intellectual examination of femi­nism and think for themselves. Caughie is even ready to concede the point in a backhanded way: “In twenty years of teaching I have never gone into the classroom hoping to make converts that day. Still, I feel I am doing my job well when students become practitioners of feminist analysis and committed to feminist politics.”¹⁵

Caughie’s defense of the “praxis” of indoctrination in the official journal of the AAUP underscores the predicament in which Ameri­can liberal arts programs find themselves. The radical cohort to which Caughie and Aptheker belong is now a large and influential presence and in some cases an imposing majority on liberal arts fac­ulties and the governing bodies of national academic organizations. As a result, it has been able to transform significant parts of the academy into agencies of political and social change.

These include traditional professional groups such as the Ameri­can Historical Association (AHA), which now routinely pass formal resolutions on public controversies that have nothing to do with scholarship, and which take positions on issues that only a handful of their thousands of members would be professionally qualified to judge. In 2007, for example, a tiny but determined minority of AHA members passed a resolution condemning the Iraq war. In doing so they exploited the scholarly prestige of AHA members gained in historical fields far removed from the Middle East in order to prom­ulgate a fashionable left-wing position on current events.

The political subordination of scholarship to political agendas is most evident in fields such as Women’s Studies. Almost universally, Women’s Studies programs base their courses of study on the ideo­logical (and unproven) claim that gender is “socially constructed”— that behavioral differences between men and women are socially, rather than biologically, determined. According to these Women’s Studies programs, gender differences between men and women are artifi­cially created by an entrenched patriarchy for the express purpose of oppressing women. This perspective is presented by Women’s Stud­ies faculties as a settled doctrine even though it is a controversial opinion. Recent advances in modern neuroscience, for example, have identified significant differences in the biological makeup of men and women that affect their relative abilities and behaviors.¹⁶ Yet for Women’s Studies faculties the issue is settled in favor of social deter­minants.

Ideological developments in the university have also led to the prevalent phenomenon of professors academically trained in one discipline teaching courses and posing as experts in others. Since radical ideologies require their adherents to make global pronounce­ments, it is not uncommon to find instructors with degrees in Eng­lish or Comparative Literature teaching courses that focus on the historical development of economic empires or the complexities of gender and race. This is analogous to a situation where botanists and microbiologists would teach big bang physics or macroeconomics. It is a serious problem for academic professions, which are defined by their specialized knowledge. Entry into these professions is barred to individuals not credentialed as experts in their disciplines, while students pay tens of thousands of dollars for the privilege of being taught by specialists in their fields. Why go through the arduous and expensive process of credentialing experts if anyone is qualified to teach anything?

What we are witnessing in the liberal arts programs of American universities is the collapse of standards on an alarming scale. To de­scribe this problem as one of “liberal bias” or a “lack of balance” is to misrepresent and trivialize it. All faculty, whatever their point of view, have intellectual biases and a right to express them. But the same right comes with an important and long recognized caveat: Pro­fessors have an obligation to be professional in their instruction. They are expected to refrain from imposing their personal views on stu­dents through the authority they exercise in the classroom, or through the design of the course, or through their power over student grades; they should not represent mere opinion as scientific fact.

The problem posed by the incorporation of ideological agendas into the academic curriculum is not the opinions of a particular in­structor or a particular idea introduced in the course of instruction. The problem arises when the course of instruction is not guided by scientific method; when it is not constructed as a scholarly inquiry within a scholarly discipline; when the instructor fails to present students with divergent views on controversial matters or with ac­cess to materials that will enable them to think intelligently and for themselves. The problem facing the university today is that many academic courses are designed to train students in sectarian ideolo­gies and recruit them to sectarian causes.

Even as the abuses of university classrooms documented in this study have reached epidemic proportions, faculty unions and profes­sional associations have become increasingly averse to any accountabil­ity for the design of academic instruction. Roger Bowen, who until recently served as general secretary of the AAUP, has said in so many words that academics should not have to answer to anyone but them­selves: “It should be evident that the sufficient condition for securing the academic freedom of our profession is the profession itself.”¹⁷

But the pages that follow show that left to their own devices, fac­ulty and administrators have consistently failed to defend academic freedom or maintain reasonable academic standards. Routine abuses of the university are also made possible by the passivity of other actors— instructors in the hard sciences who observe traditional professional standards in their own work but choose to remain silent when these standards are traduced by others, non-ideological scholars in the lib­eral arts who do likewise, education-oriented trustees and alumni, and students abused by the practices described. These academic bystanders constitute a majority of any university community and a majority of faculty as well. But their refusal to speak up has allowed their less scrupulous colleagues to engineer a decline of professional standards, and a consequent debasement of the academic product.

If this passivity continues and the university community does not respond to the assault on academic standards, the credibility and au­thority of the university will continue to decline and the future of liberal arts education in America will then become bleak indeed.

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This book tells the story of a campaign I began in September 2003 with the goal of restoring academic standards to liberal arts programs in America’s universities. The idea was to persuade universities to adopt an “Academic Bill of Rights” for students, which was based on academic traditions that had been allowed to atrophy and fall into disuse. It was designed to ensure that instructors 1) provide students with materi­als reflecting both sides of controversial issues; 2) do not present opinions as facts; and 3) allow students to think for themselves. These are not only educational rights; they are rights basic to a republic created by dissenters, whose political system is founded on respect for the pluralism of ideas.

In terms of resources available, our campaign was relatively modest. I never employed more than three full-time staff people to assist me, and for several years there was only one, my National Campus Director, Sara Dogan. By contrast, our opposition—mainly teachers unions and aca­demic guilds constituted an immensely powerful political lobby. They were able to draw on hundred million dollar treasuries and rely on operatives based in every college and located in every congressional dis­trict. In addition, they could count on the support of the Democratic Party, the education media, and the local press in every university locale.

Despite the odds, my assistants and I were able to recruit hundreds of student volunteers and organize them in chapters on 135 college cam­puses. Together we managed in a relatively short time to achieve tangible results, bringing our issues to the attention of the public and effecting actual institutional reforms. An early assessment of our efforts by Professor Stephen Aby, a member of the American Association of University Professors and an unfriendly critic, provides a reasonable summary of our accomplishments. His account appeared in the preface to a 2007 book devoted to our campaign and titled The Academic Bill of Rights Debate. “In just three short years,” he wrote, “the debate over the Academic Bill of Rights has become one of the most controversial issues in America’s col­leges and universities. By November of 2006, it had already generated over 74 articles in major newspapers, at least 143 articles in all newspa­pers nationwide, 54 television and radio broadcasts, 47 news wire articles, 20 articles in the Chronicle of Higher Education, 73 articles in Inside-HigherEd.com, dozens of articles in major magazines, and some 150,000 hits in the obligatory Google search.”

There were other accomplishments as well. Within the first five years of its creation, the Academic Bill of Rights or some version of its princi­ples were 1) written into the federal “authorization act” for higher educa­tion and passed through the House of Representatives; 2) unanimously endorsed by both houses of the Colorado legislature; and 3) incorporated in a formal statement by the American Council on Education, an organi­zation that represents more than 1,800 colleges and universities. Pres­sured by our legislative efforts in Ohio, all of that state’s public universities, acting through the “Inter-University Council,” agreed to implement the Council’s statement and to provide students with formal grievance procedures to protect their academic freedom rights. This included seventeen universities, including Ohio and Ohio State. In 2005, the Academic Bill of Rights inspired legislation in the Pennsylvania House leading to formal academic freedom hearings—the first such on record. These hearings resulted in the adoption of academic freedom provisions for students at Penn State and Temple universities. Along with the Ohio schools, these are the only universities in the United States today with academic freedom rights for students.

The campaign we launched can only be understood in the context of previous developments in higher education. The modern research uni­versity was created in the second half of the nineteenth century during the era of America’s great industrial expansion. Its curriculum was shaped by two innovations: the adoption of scientific method as the professional standard for knowledge, and the extension of educational opportunity to a democratic public. Before these developments, America’s institutions of higher learning were primarily religious and moral schools of instruction. In the words of James Duderstadt, president of the University of Michigan, “Colleges trained the ministers of each generation, passing on ‘high culture’ to a very small elite.” The explicit mission of these early collegiate institu­tions was to instill the doctrines of a particular religious denomination. The teaching of non-religious liberal arts subjects was not designed to foster the analytic skepticism associated with modern science but to pass on the lit­erary and philosophical culture that supported a specific faith.

By contrast, “the core mission of the research university,” as recently summarized by one of its leaders, “is… expanding and deepening what we know.” In pursuit of this goal, “the research university relies on various attributes, the most important of which are the processes of rigorous inquiry and reasoned skepticism, which in turn are based on articulated norms that are not fixed and given, but are themselves subject to re­examination and revision. In the best of our universities faculty characteristically subject their own claims and the norms that govern their research to this process of critical reflection.” This open-minded approach has been the credo of American higher education throughout the modern era and is still the norm in the physical and biological sciences and most professional schools throughout the contemporary university.

Liberal arts colleges are the divisions of the university through which all undergraduates pass, and have been traditionally viewed as corner­stones of a democratic society, where students are taught how to think rather than told what to think. The curricula of liberal arts colleges within the modern research university supported these objectives. They were designed to inculcate pragmatic respect for the pluralism of ideas and the test of empirical evidence, and thus support a society dependent on an informed citizenry.

All this began to change when a radical generation of university instructors were hired onto liberal arts faculties in the 1970s and began altering curricula by creating new inter-disciplinary fields whose inspira­tions were ideological and closely linked to political activism. Women’s Studies was one of the earliest of the new disciplines and remains the most influential, providing an academic model emulated by others. The cur­ricula of Women’s Studies programs are not governed by the principles of disinterested inquiry about a subject but rather by a political mission: to teach students to be radical feminists. The formal Constitution of the Women’s Studies Association makes this political agenda clear:

Women’s Studies owes its existence to the movement for the lib­eration of women; the feminist movement exists because women are oppressed. Women’s studies, diverse as its components are, has at its best shared a vision of a world free not only from sex­ism but also from racism, class-bias, ageism, heterosexual bias— from all the ideologies and institutions that have consciously or unconsciously oppressed and exploited some for the advantage of others… .Women’s Studies, then, is equipping women not only to enter the society as whole, as productive human beings, but to transform the world to one that will be free of all oppression.

As a result of the political pressures from feminists, ethnic nationalists, and “anti-war” activists, and the curricular innovations they were able to institute, the academic landscape was transformed. In 2006, state legis­lators in Pennsylvania gathered at Philadelphia’s Temple University to hold hearings on academic freedom. Among the witnesses to appear before them was Stephen Zelnick, a former Vice Provost for Undergrad­uate Studies and a member of the Temple faculty for thirty-six years. Zel­nick told the legislators of his concern that Temple faculty had grown increasingly monolithic and politically partisan in the years he had been there. “The one-sidedness of the faculty,” he said, “in their ideological commitments and a growing intolerance of competing views [has] resulted in abuse of students, occasionally overt and reported, but most often hidden and normalized, and the degrading of the strong traditions of intellectual inquiry and free expression.”

Zelnick then spelled out what this meant in terms of the instruction he had personally reviewed. “As director of two undergraduate programs, I have had many opportunities to sit in and watch instructors. I have sat in on more than a hundred different teachers’ classes and seen excellent, indifferent, and miserable teaching__ In these visits, I have rarely heard a kind word for the United States, for the riches of our marketplace, for the vast economic and creative opportunities made available for energetic and creative people (that is, for our students); for family life, for marriage, for love, or for religion.”

Zelnick’s experience reflected a shift in the academic practices of lib­eral arts schools that was national in scope and a transformation as dra­matic as the changes that took place at the end of the nineteenth century. If those changes have been rightly perceived as an educational revolution, the current academic turn represents a counter-revolution—the resur­rection of a curriculum that is doctrinal rather than analytic, and the return to a method of instruction in which knowledge proceeds from authority and is designed to instill sectarian truths rather than pursue skeptical inquiries into the facts.

While the new academic orthodoxies are secular, they are no less intol­erant of opposing views than their religious predecessors. Their faculty adherents also assign texts to reinforce orthodoxies, while treating dis­senters as unbelievers and dismissing their views as not requiring serious consideration. The new academic orthodoxies teach that America is an oppressive society governed by hierarchies that are “racist,” “sexist,” and “classist.” Far from being academic in the dictionary sense of “theoretical” and “not leading to a decision or practice,” the new curriculum is designed to provide cultural support for doctrines that are sectarian and political and that have immediate practical implications. Engagement in political activism is often incorporated directly into the lesson plan.

For example, a course description at the University of California Santa Cruz explains, “The goal of this seminar is to learn how to organize a rev­olution.” The character of the revolution is then specified as “anti-capital­ist” and “anti-racist,” and the only texts provided are those that articulate and support these specific revolutionary agendas. No skeptical examina­tion of revolution or of the critics of capitalism or of the left-wing perspec­tives on racism presented in the course is incorporated into its syllabus.

Similarly, a sociology course in “Collective Behavior and Social Move­ments” at the University of Arizona offers students credit for political activity and provides them with a menu of left-wing organizations to serve. In the words of the official syllabus, “Here it is, activism for credit. Give four hours to a social movement organization and I’ll give you 200 points.” The instructor elaborates,

Tucson has a bunch of great organizations that could use your help. For example, Wingspan has loads of things you can do for lesbians, gay men, transgendered and bisexual people right here in the Old Pueblo. Maybe you’re more interested in endangered species and ecosystem protection—check out the Center for Bio­logical Diversity, an important and influential organization that just happens to be based in Tucson. Consider the Brewster Cen­ter, Society of Friends (Quakers), Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, Border Action Network, Humane Borders, or Food Not Bombs.

The political corruption of the academic enterprise is hardly confined to a single university, or to one academic field. Three articles in a recent issue of PMLA, the official journal of the Modern Languages Association, give an indication of the scope of the problem. With forty thousand members, the Modern Languages Association is the largest academic professional organization and is ostensibly concerned with literary scholarship. One of the articles in this issue, however, is titled “Get Up, Stand Up: Teaching Civil Disobedience in the Literature Classroom.” A second is titled, “Using the Civil Rights Movement to Practice Activism in the Classroom.” The third, a dissent from these two, is by Gerald Graff, the outgoing pres­ident of the Association. Graff notes mournfully that “it is no longer con­troversial that a goal of teaching should be to ‘challenge oppressions and advance social justice.’ The only pertinent questions now are technical ones about how to achieve this goal.” In short, according to the testimony of the president of the largest organization of literary scholars, classroom indoctrination in left-wing political ideologies by professors of literature is now an accepted educational practice.

Graff is himself a political progressive but is distinguished by his pro­fessional dissent from progressive orthodoxy, in particular his view that teachers should not preach one side of the ideological argument in the classroom but “teach the conflicts,” allowing students to draw their own conclusions. This was the norm in the recent academic past, so it is not surprising that someone like Graff, who belongs to an older academic gen­eration, should defend it. I myself am a contemporary of Graff, and it was my own collegiate experience that prompted me to begin the academic freedom campaign, the goal of which is to provide institutional support for a student’s right to receive a modern scientific education and not be indoctrinated in any orthodoxy, whether it reflects the political prejudices of the Right or the Left.

Because the campaign I organized was about process, it was viewpoint neutral. Consequently, I began it under the assumption that I would be joined by others, liberals such as Gerald Graff among them, and not just conservatives. But for reasons that will become clear in the ensuing nar­rative, I received almost no support from those quarters, and Graff him­self never endorsed my campaign, but only suggested that the concerns it raised were important and deserved consideration.

I was disappointed by this response, but not surprised. What I was not prepared for was the reluctance of many conservatives to support our campaign. While conservatives had long been precise and insightful in recognizing the problematic developments in the university culture, they remained determinedly passive in their response to it.

More than fifty years earlier, William F. Buckley had published God and Man at Yale, a jeremiad lamenting the transformation of Yale from a college whose founders intended it to instill Christian values into a mod­ern research university, the attitudes of which were secular and increas­ingly liberal. Buckley’s book was the first in a series of critiques of the university that conservatives were to write. These eventually included Alan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind, Dinesh D’Souza’s Illib­eral Education, Richard Bernstein’s Dictatorship of Virtue, Neil Hamil­ton’s Zealotry and Academic Freedom, Roger Kimball’s Tenured Radicals, and Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge’s Professing Feminism: Education and Indoctrination in Women’s Studies, which was an analysis of Women’s Studies as an ideological rather than an academic discipline.

But among these knowledgeable and perceptive texts, there were none that formed the basis for an effort towards institutional reform. Conser­vatives were content to argue against the educational status quo in the hope that others would be persuaded to do something about it—or not. Perhaps this reflected a fatalism inherent in the conservative outlook, leaving many of its adherents content to describe and then regret a cul­tural fall, but not to support a movement to correct it. Conservatives ably made their case, but little action seemed to follow.

Three years after the appearance of God and Man at Yale, Buckley became the first president of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, an organization founded by Frank Chodorov. The Institute was designed to teach the curriculum that Yale and schools like it were in the process of abandoning. Its target audience consisted of conservative students whom it intended to reach during after-school hours. It was a plan of action typi­cal of the conservative campus organizations that followed—the Young America’s Foundation, the Leadership Institute, Accuracy in Academia, the Eagle Forum Collegians, the Clare Booth Luce Institute, College Republicans, and various conservative Christian groups. All of these spon­sored conservative speakers on campus and recruited on-site representa­tives to distribute conservative literature. But with exception of the College Republicans, whose principal focus is electoral politics, they did not cre­ate student activist organizations or conduct efforts to alter campus struc­tures. Their intent was to develop alternative institutions, not reform existing ones; to foster a traditional culture among conservative college students and develop future conservative leaders. The agenda was to edu­cate individuals, not change the existing educational system.

This was also true of the adult organizations involved in higher educa­tion. The National Association of Scholars focused on legitimizing dis­senting voices in the academy rather than altering the structures of university governance, although this attitude began to change under the impact of our campaign. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni was organized to uphold academic standards and support a quality edu­cation, but did not promote system-wide reform, although it too began to propose institutional changes under the influence of our efforts.

While I was influenced by Buckley’s work, my concern in organizing our campaign was different. Since Yale was a private institution which had been specifically created to transmit a Christian heritage, I was sympa­thetic to Buckley’s distress over its transformation into a secular univer­sity at odds with the values of its founders. Moreover, Buckley was justified in his claim that Yale had severed its religious ties without a for­mal divorce. But unlike Buckley’s efforts, the campaign I organized was not at odds with the research university itself, nor with its secular foun­dations or intellectual pluralism. The research university was now an established institution. More than 85 percent of American college stu­dents attended publicly funded schools which, unlike Yale, had been cre­ated as secular institutions. These schools were not dedicated to the transmission of religious doctrines but to the pursuit of knowledge through disinterested inquiry. My goal in launching the academic freedom campaign was to stop the erosion of these academic standards and the steady transformation of liberal arts departments into sectarian indoctri­nation centers for ideological causes.

The intellectual foundations of the modern research university were enshrined in a famous document called the “Declaration of the Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure,” which was issued in 1915 by the American Association of University Professors. In the words of an authoritative account by two law professors, “The draftsmen of the 1915 Declaration sought to establish principles of academic freedom capable of ensuring that colleges and universities would remain accountable to professional standards…. ” In other words, the cornerstones of both aca­demic freedom and the modern research university were one and the same—the commitment to professional standards, based on scientific method, which were above party and faction.

The system created was self-policing, with faculty in charge of enforc­ing the standards. The two law professors warned that academic freedom “will collapse if faculty lose faith in the professional norms necessary to define and generate knowledge,” and could only be sustained if academic peers “interpret disciplinary standards in a way that maintains the… legit­imacy of these standards.”¹⁷ Thus, the academic freedom protections in the Declaration were limited only to professors “who carry on their work in the temper of the scientific method,” and thus only to professors who practice theoretical skepticism and encourage respect for empirical evi­dence. The Declaration denied academic standing (and academic free­dom) to those who use it “for intemperate and uncritical partisanship.”

The impetus for our reform campaign was the erosion of these time-honored standards and consequent development of academic faculties whose political agendas were made possible by the failure of universities to enforce the principles in the Declaration. These faculties were con­centrated in the newly created inter-disciplinary fields, which were based on the social critiques of the political Left. In place of the traditional dis­ciplines—history, economics, philosophy—whose standards had evolved in the course of more than a century of scholarship, the new fields were inspired by ideologies such as feminism, whose intellectual scope was all-encompassing and whose methodologies were newly invented. An imme­diate consequence of this academic revolution was an epidemic of amateurism in academic classrooms.

Newly minted courses on “global feminism”—to take one example— now focused on the workings (and evils) of the international capitalist economic system, but were taught by professors whose academic creden­tials were not in economics or even sociology or political science, but in Comparative Literature, Education, and Women’s Studies. The primary credential for teaching such courses was not an academic expertise, but familiarity with left-wing ideologies.

This academic amateurism in the service of ideology wasn’t confined to new fields like Women’s Studies, moreover. The course “Marxism and Society” at Duke University, for example, is offered (and overseen) not by the Department of Economics or Sociology, but by the Department of Lit­erature and—jointly—by the Education Program, which trains teachers for K-12 schools.²⁰ The course is taught by Michael Hardt, co-author of the book Empire. This is a text popular among academic radicals and has been described by other Marxists as “a Communist Manifesto for the 21^st Century.”²¹ (Hardt’s co-author, also a Marxist, is Antonio Negri, a con­victed Italian terrorist.) According to the official Duke catalogue descrip­tion written by Hardt, “The course considers the basic concepts of historical materialism, as they have developed in historical contexts. Top­ics include sexual and social inequality, alienation, class formation, impe­rialism, and revolution.” Hardt is a professor of comparative literature and has no peer-reviewed academic credential that would qualify him as an expert in history, sociology, economics, political science, or human sex­uality.

The campaign I undertook in 2003 was an attempt to address these abuses by restoring the academic principles of the modern research uni­versity to liberal arts faculties. Its basic premise was that professors were obligated to behave professionally in the classroom, and that students had a right to expect them to do so. These were simple propositions that I spelled out in the “Academic Bill of Rights,” which was based squarely on the 1915 Declaration. Where Buckley wanted to preserve the religious character of Yale, my concern was to defend and restore the professional standards of the modern research university that had been abandoned in its liberal arts divisions. In that sense, the reform I was proposing was con­servative as well.

What follows is the history of the campaign—the obstacles we encoun­tered along the way, the successes we achieved, and the prospects for mak­ing further progress. It is in some ways a personal story, because the campaign arose out of my concerns, and I have been its spokesman and the chief target of those who oppose it. But it is also a narrative that describes a disturbing development in America’s liberal arts colleges and provides a guide for those interested in reversing it. This is a narrative, in other words, about the fate of higher education in America.

The possibility that this history might be of service to other reform efforts is the most important reason for publishing it. I am convinced that our campaign would have been able to achieve far more if liberals and con­servatives interested in the health of our universities (and our democracy) had joined our cause. Of course, I was aware that the political climate would make the recruitment of liberal allies difficult, even though our cam­paign was based on well-established liberal principles. For liberalism had undergone significant changes since radicals had mounted a systematic assault on the academic culture in the 1960s, seeking to make its curricula “relevant” and to politicize its educational programs. In the decades since, many self-identified “liberals” ceased to be committed to institutional process, or even to fairness. Many came to regard standards themselves as oppressive. So it was not difficult to understand why recruiting liberal support for the academic freedom campaign should be problematic.

On the other hand, I did not expect the lack of support we received from conservatives and libertarians, particularly since they had the most to gain from the restoration of these academic principles. Conservative texts and the viewpoints that inspired them were excluded from the newly politicized academic curriculum, and conservative and libertarian pro­fessors had become a vanishing presence on university faculties as a direct result of the newly politicized approach.

Opponents of our campaign, however, were quick to portray me as a “pawn” of larger forces and to characterize our effort to restore liberal principles as “a well -funded project of the far Right.”²⁵ This accusation served their political interests, but in the real world, the campaign we waged never became part of any conservative agenda. While Republican elected officials supported our efforts to pass legislative resolutions in more than a dozen states, they retreated quickly after the initial engage­ments, and only one such resolution in Colorado—passed both houses of the legislature. Only one Republican Party (Maine) actually incorpo­rated the Academic Bill of Rights into its platform, and only one Repub­lican candidate (also in Maine) ran a campaign on our issue.

More inexplicable was the failure of conservative policy organiza­tions the Heritage Foundation, the CATO Institute, the American Enterprise Institute—to embrace or promote our cause. For example, when the American Enterprise Institute held a conference on “academic freedom” well into our campaign, and later published a book, I was point­edly not included. Although once a speaker at annual meetings of the National Scholars Association, the invitations stopped once our campaign was launched in 2003, despite the personal support of two of its leaders, Stephen Balch and Peter Wood. Even the California Association of Schol­ars, a branch of the NAS operating in a state where my offices are located, declined to invite me to its convention.

In the seven years of our campaign, not a single report on our efforts appeared in National Review or the Weekly Standard, the two most widely read intellectual journals of the Right, despite direct appeals to their edi­tors. Imprimus, a publication of Hillsdale College with a million-and-a half conservative subscribers interested in higher education, ignored us while the president of Hillsdale publicly criticized our efforts. Only one of the four books I wrote on universities, documenting the abuses addressed by our campaign, was reviewed by Commentary or National Review, and none were reviewed by the Claremont Conservative Review of Books, the Weekly Standard, or the Wall Street Journal. The Journal did, however, publish an editorial attacking the Academic Bill of Rights on the libertarian grounds that we appealed to legislatures for endorse­ments, which the writer regarded as a bad idea. The libertarian journal, Reason, printed several similar attacks on our campaign, but no report on the abuses we had uncovered or the progress we had made.

By contrast the Chronicle of Higher Education, a liberal publication unsympathetic to our cause, published a lengthy and reasonably balanced cover story on our efforts, as did USA Today. Both assigned reporters to follow me on campuses and report what they saw. Both the New York Times and the Washington Post published substantial and fair-minded articles as well, although the Times’ “Education” supplement studiously ignored our efforts. In October 2005, an issue of the Weekly Standard did focus on higher education reform with a 10,000-word cover feature titled “The Left University: How It Was Born, How It Grew, How to Overcome It.” The Standard even used our campaign logo featuring the three hear-no-evil, see-no-evil, speak-no-evil monkeys dressed in cap and gown for its cover design. But the story failed to mention our campaign or the Aca­demic Bill of Rights, while the Standard’s editors did not even bother to request permission to use our image.

The calculated distance which the conservative establishment took towards our efforts reflected the same disposition that lay behind Buck­ley’s failure to organize a campaign for reforming the university system, despite his prescient critique of its curriculum at Yale. While precise in their diagnosis of what is wrong with the university curriculum, conservatives have remained reluctant to pursue a course of action to correct the abuses. Conservatives are uncomfortable with organized movements gen­erally and institutional reform efforts in particular. They are especially uneasy with conflicts that might bring them into collision with the intel­lectual establishment, or that would invite unscrupulous ad hominem attacks from the opposition. Ours involved all three.

There were significant exceptions. I did receive generous and impor­tant support for my campus appearances from the Young America’s Foun­dation and the Leadership Institute, while the conservative publication Human Events gave attention to our efforts. The talk radio network and FOX News Channel did feature our cases and played an important role in raising the visibility of scandals such as the one involving Professor Ward Churchill, which greatly helped our cause. Sean Hannity, co-anchor of the Hannity & Colmes show, devoted an unprecedented five segments to my book The Professors, helping to put our concerns before the general pub­lic and induce our opponents to take us more seriously. But these media outlets were also viewed at a distance by the conservative intellectual establishment, and were regarded with ill-concealed contempt by the uni­versity audience we were attempting to reach.

The forces ranged against our university reforms were formidable, and regularly—even relentlessly—resorted to gross misrepresentations of the facts and personal smears to prevent a reasonable consideration of our proposals. Chapter nine, describing the academic freedom hearings in Pennsylvania, is particularly instructive in documenting the determina­tion of teacher unions and the Democratic Party to block even an inquiry into whether academic freedom protections for students existed at any of the seventeen public universities in the state and then to obscure the com­mittee’s findings that at fifteen of those schools they did not. Chapter ten describes the faculty resistance to one student’s efforts to use these pro­tections at Penn State University.

While the facts presented in this narrative may seem discouraging, the campaign’s successes suggest that if conservatives had embraced the Aca­demic Bill of Rights and made curricular reform an integral part of their agendas, we would have been able to secure academic freedom protec­tions for students not at two or ten universities, but throughout the higher education system. We would then have been able to proceed with the more difficult task of seeing that these protections were implemented as well.

I am convinced more than ever of the feasibility of the measures we have proposed as I am of the imperative of restoring integrity to the aca­demic curriculum. This book is an effort to persuade Americans in gen­eral and conservatives in particular that the reforms described here can be achieved, to explain the difficulties involved, and to show how they can be overcome.

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Trials of the Intellect in the Post-Modern Academy

In January 2005, Professor Ward Churchill became a figure of national revulsion when his impending visit to Hamilton Col­lege was linked to an article claiming that the victims of 9/11 were “little Eichmanns” who deserved their fate. Churchill’s arti­cle produced an outcry of such force that it led to the removal of the faculty head of the host committee at Hamilton and the resignation of the president of the University of Colorado, where Churchill was professor of ethnic studies. As a result of the uproar, Churchill was removed as department chair, and univer­sity authorities began an investigation into how he had acquired his faculty position in the first place.

Far from being a marginal crank, Ward Churchill was (and still is) prominent at the University of Colorado and in the aca­demic world at large. A leading figure in his field and widely published, his appearance at Hamilton in January 2005 would have been the fortieth campus to which he had been invited to speak in the three years after 9/11. The opinions expressed in his infamous article were themselves far from obscure to his academic colleagues. First published on the Internet in October 2001, they reflected views that were part of the intellectual core of his academic work, familiar both to university authorities in Colorado and to his faculty hosts at Hamilton. These facts made the scandal an event whose significances extended far beyond the fate of one individual to implicate the academic culture itself.

The Churchill spectacle was not an isolated incident at Hamilton. In the fall of 2004, a convicted terrorist named Susan Rosenberg was invited to join the faculty as a “visiting professor,” to teach a course on “Resistance Memoirs.” As the course title suggested, far from repudiating her political past, Susan Rosen­berg embraced it. She was an active member of a network of veteran radicals, many still in jail, who remained loyal to the causes they had violently served. Rosenberg herself had been apprehended in 1984 as she was moving more than six hundred pounds of explosives into a Cherry Hill, New Jersey, warehouse. She had been sentenced to fifty-eight years in prison for her crime, but was released as one of President Clinton’s last-minute pardons after serving only fourteen years of her term.

Rosenberg had been hired by Nancy Rabinowitz, a professor of comparative literature and head of the Kirkland Project on Gender, Society and Culture at Hamilton. The Kirkland Project, a self-described “social justice organization,” was run by faculty and funded by a university endowment. Although the nation at large was engaged in a “War on Terror” in Iraq and only three years earlier had been the target of a massive terrorist attack, Professor Rabinowitz was oblivious to the public reaction her decision might provoke. Even when the outcries caused Rosen­berg to withdraw, Rabinowitz remained adamant. Apparently unconscious of the damage she was about to inflict on herself, two schools, and the university culture, Rabinowitz followed her first misstep with a second when she decided to honor an invi­tation to Churchill to speak at Hamilton a month after the Rosenberg affair.

The behavior of Rabinowitz and her Kirkland colleagues reflected the insularity of a predominately left-wing academic environment that had become an echo chamber for ever more radical ideas. It was this environment that prevented the direc­tors of the Kirkland Project from perceiving any impropriety in conferring academic legitimacy on an individual who had been sentenced to prison for terrorist acts.

Hamilton College is a small liberal arts college in rural upstate New York. Named after a conservative American Founder, its colonial architecture and sylvan views provide a setting well-suited to the contemplative life. Along with sister schools like Williams and Colgate, Hamilton aspires to be a “second-tier Ivy” and generations of graduates have sent their children there to carry on a family legacy and reap the intellec­tual benefits of the school they remember. It is this loyalty to tradition that maintains the flow of donations, which sustains Hamilton and attracts students who pay a yearly tuition of $30,000 to attend.

Along with other American universities, in the last several decades Hamilton has undergone a sea change. Significant departments of the school have ceased to be part of the ivory tower that its alumni recall. Many faculty members are no longer devoted to pursuits that are purely “academic,” and the curriculum has been expanded to include agendas about “social change” that are overtly political and make an invitation to a convicted terrorist seem appropriate rather than merely appalling.

This transformation has been the work of an academic gen­eration that came of age as anti-war radicals in the Vietnam era. Many of these activists stayed in school to avoid the military draft and earned PhDs, taking their political activism with them when they became tenured-track professors in the 1970s. As tenured radicals, they were determined to do away with the concept of the ivory tower and scorned the contemplative life that liberal arts colleges like Hamilton created. They rejected the concept of the university as a temple of the intellect, in which the term “academic” described a curriculum insulated from the political passions of the times. Instead, these radicals were intent on making the university “relevant” to current events, and to their own partisan agendas. Accordingly, they set about re-shaping the university curriculum to support their political interests, which appeared in their own minds as grandiose crusades for “social justice.”

They created new institutional frameworks and fields of study, casting old standards and disciplines aside. New depart­ments began to appear with objectives that were frankly politi­cal and maintained no pretense of including intellectually diverse viewpoints or in pursuing academic inquiries uncon­nected to the conclusions they might reach. Names like “Black Studies” and “Women’s Studies” had political subtexts and were really devoted to Black Nationalism, feminism, and similar ide­ological programs. Many had been created through political protests—some violent. One of the first Black Studies programs was established at Cornell University as a concession to black radicals who occupied the administration building with loaded shotguns and refused to leave until their demands were met. Among the demands the university administration agreed to was the “right” of the radicals to appoint their own professors.

At first the new departments were presented as part of a broader social movement to “serve” minority groups previously neglected. But as the cohort of activists on academic faculties grew, the new disciplines proved insufficient to encompass the social and intellectual agendas the radicals favored. Cultural studies, peace studies, whiteness studies, post-colonial studies, and global studies—even social justice studies—came into being as interdisciplinary fields shaped by narrow, one-sided political agendas. Some of these programs attacked American foreign pol­icy and the American military, others America’s self-image and national identity. Collectively, they marked a dramatic departure from the academic interests of the past, providing institutional settings for political indoctrination: the exposition and develop­ment of radical theory, the education and training of radical cadre, and the recruitment of students to radical causes.

Because the new activist departments were “interdiscipli­nary,” they were able to spread their influence through the tra­ditional fields until virtually every English Department, History Department, and law school now draws on Women’s Studies and African American Studies Departments for courses and fac­ulty. The intellectual movement created has been so powerful in shaping the university curriculum that it has affected the edu­cational philosophy of the institutions themselves. Modern research universities once defined their purposes in official tem­plates as institutions “dedicated to the disinterested pursuit of knowledge.” Under the new dispensation, they embrace the mis­sion brought to them by radical academics and now often refer to themselves as institutions dedicated to “social change.”

Nancy Rabinowitz was one of the tenured radicals who had come to Hamilton to promote the new dispensation. Though formally a professor of comparative literature, she was unable to leave her activist passions at the campus gates and became the guiding influence and head of the Kirkland Project for Gender, Society and Culture, where she implemented her extra-academic agendas by inviting radicals like Susan Rosenberg to teach.

Professor Rabinowitz’s connection to Rosenberg was also something more than academic. Rabinowitz had married into a famous radical family, which was linked to Rosenberg through her infamous crime. Rabinowitz’s father-in-law was the cele­brated Communist lawyer Victor Rabinowitz, whose clients included Fidel Castro and other violent radicals, including the political terrorists of the Puerto Rican FALN. Victor Rabi­nowitz’s lifelong friend and law partner was Leonard Boudin, also a Communist, and the father of Kathy Boudin, one of the leaders of the Weather Underground, a terrorist cult that had declared a formal “war” on “Amerikkka’ in the 1970s, and carried out bombings of the Pentagon, the U.S. Capitol, and other offi­cial buildings. The principal leaders of the Weather Under­ground later became professors (and are profiled in this book).⁶ When the terrorist cult dissolved in 1976, Kathy Boudin joined the “May 19 Communist Movement,” a Weather Underground network splinter group, which in 1981 robbed a Brinks armored car in Nyack, New York, murdering two guards and a policeman, and leaving nine children fatherless. Susan Rosenberg was part of the Weather Underground network and was indicted for the Nyack crime.

Kathy Boudin was convicted for her role in the Nyack robbery-murders, but Susan Rosenberg, though indicted, was never tried. Prosecutors in the Nyack case saw no reason to pur­sue her after she received her fifty-eight-year sentence for other crimes. This was the sentence from which President Clinton— petitioned by New York Democratic congressman Jerrold Nadler—finally released her.

Susan Rosenberg was only one of several Weather Under­ground terrorists who had recently surfaced and begun touring college campuses. Still committed radicals, they had formed a “political prisoners” network⁷ and were looking to rehabilitate themselves and their political agendas. Uncontrite about the rev­olutionary politics that had led to their crimes, they made appearances at colleges across the country, where they were invited to lecture and give seminars by radical professors who presented them to students as advocates for “human rights.” When convicted bomber and Weather Underground member Laura Whitehorn was invited as an official guest of the African American Studies Department at Duke University, she was pre­sented as a human rights activist by Duke faculty. It was left to Duke students to research her history on the Internet and reveal her terrorist past and criminal conviction, and to protest the fac­ulty deception.⁸

The professors running the Kirkland Project had presented Susan Rosenberg in equally misleading terms as “an award-winning writer, an activist, and a teacher who offers a unique perspective as a writer.” She was further described as a victim of government persecution, imprisoned because of her “political activities” with the Black Liberation Army. No mention was made of her crimes or theirs, which included several murders.

Schools like Hamilton had become so exclusively politicized towards the Left that decisions like the one Nancy Rabinowitz made had come to seem normal by university standards. While some Hamilton faculty voiced moral outrage at the Rabinowitz invitation, the concerns of those involved were mainly focused on the possibility of negative public reaction. Not that the fac­ulty sympathized with the public. Most regarded any negative response to the Rosenberg invitation as a reflection of public ignorance and attitudes that were “reactionary.” In their minds, the problem raised by the hiring of a convicted terrorist was whether the free speech rights of the terrorist could be pro­tected, not the implications of such an appointment for aca­demic values.

While members of the Hamilton community worried about the public reaction, a sophomore named Ian Mandel stepped forward to spark the outrage that would eventually thwart Pro­fessor Rabinowitz’s political agendas. As Jacob Laksin reported for FrontPagemag.com, “Ian Mandel had personal reasons to oppose Rosenberg’s appointment. A Nyack native, he grew up with the names Waverly Brown and Edward O’Grady etched into his mind. They were the two Nyack police officers killed in the 1981 robbery [for which Rosenberg was indicted]. ‘Every day of my life until I left for Hamilton, I drove by the memorial to officers Brown and O’Grady located about one mile from my house,’ he recalled. Mandel explained that Nyack’s tight-knit community was profoundly shaped by the murders of the two officers. ‘To this day it is a tough subject for many to speak about,’ he wrote. It was a measure of the anger and disgust he felt about Rosenberg’s hiring that Mandel, a member of the Hamilton College Democrats, agreed to speak about it. Like many Nyack residents, Mandel had thoroughly studied the rob­bery. He concluded that Rosenberg was indeed involved. ‘To me, and I’d assume to most members of the Nyack community and of the larger law-enforcement community, that makes Susan Rosenberg a cop-killer,’ he said. Haunted by Rosenberg’s grim legacy at Nyack, Mandel was determined not to let it follow him to Hamilton. ‘I think that bringing Susan Rosenberg to teach a class at Hamilton is a disgrace and a black-eye to the college,’ he said.”

Mandel was invited to appear on TV and radio talk shows. Simultaneously, police officers staged a demonstration to protest the Rosenberg outrage at a New York fundraiser for Hamilton. This, in turn, led to an alumni revolt. As the media events unfolded, donors began to withdraw their pledges from the col­lege while irate phone calls from alumni and citizens flooded the president’s office. This public pressure eventually overwhelmed the institution’s resistance and led to a resolution of the crisis with Rosenberg’s withdrawal from the program. The faculty rad­icals led by Professor Rabinowitz remained defiant, however, referring to the public’s reaction as a witch-hunt.

This defiance led directly to the second incident, whose ram­ifications were to prove even greater than the first. Well before the Rosenberg fiasco, the Kirkland Project had scheduled Ward Churchill to speak. Despite the damage they had already inflicted on their college, the Kirkland directors made no move to reconsider or postpone the Churchill appearance.

Like Rosenberg, Churchill’s link to Rabinowitz was political rather than academic. One of the items he listed in his curricu­lum vitae was that during the 1970s he had trained members of the Weather Underground in the use of weapons and explosives. Churchill was already well-known in academic circles for his views that America was a genocidal nation, led by international criminals—views shared by the Weather Underground and many radical professors. This was why Rabinowitz and the fac­ulty advisors to the Kirkland Project invited him in the first place, and why they did not want to cancel the invitation. Going ahead with his scheduled appearance would be an “in-your-face” gesture to a public that in their eyes had persecuted Susan Rosenberg for her political views, and to a Hamilton adminis­tration that had failed to defend her. Professor Rabinowitz and her radical faculty allies were determined to demonstrate to the unenlightened just what free speech meant.

During the crisis, several moderate faculty voices challenged this view. “If the administration cannot see the contradiction between this hire and the clearly stated mission of the college to foster scholarship and academic excellence, then God help us all,” commented Robert Paquette, one of Hamilton’s handful of conservative professors. Economics professor James Bradfield was similarly disturbed that the Hamilton administration had adopted the radicals’ view of the issue as Rosenberg’s free speech. “I disagree with the administration’s presenting this as a matter of free speech, which it is not,” he said. “It is a matter of standards… Even if Susan Rosenberg possessed the intellect or had achieved the scholarly or artistic preeminence of people such as Albert Einstein, Milton Friedman, Lionel Trilling, or Leonard Bernstein, I would argue that her character, as manifestly demonstrated by the choices that she made as an adult over a sustained period of years, would preclude her appointment to the faculty of Hamilton College.”

Though in recent years Hamilton had invited a greater per­centage of conservative speakers to campus than was the prac­tice at most colleges (the numbers were still pitifully small), and though several faculty were visibly troubled by the Rosenberg invitation, opposition to the faculty radicals remained confined to a minority bold enough to express an opinion publicly. The hand of this minority was greatly strengthened by the damage the Rosenberg debacle had inflicted on the college. The revenue loss from withdrawn donations had already prompted a rumor that there might be no faculty salary increases in the coming year.¹² Consequently, Rabinowitz’s determination to use the col­lege as a platform for her political agendas became a practical matter as well.

When the spring schedule of events for the Kirkland Project was published, a government professor named Theodore Eis-meier noticed Ward Churchill’s name among the invited speak­ers. Eismeier immediately logged on to the Internet and came up with an article Churchill had written three years before, which in his eyes was a smoking gun. Written just after the attacks of 9/11, Churchill’s article was called, “Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens.”

Churchill’s imperfect sense of English syntax made his title seem more obscure than its inflammatory message warranted. What he meant was that the heinous terrorist attacks of 9/11 were a case of the chickens coming home to roost; that the horrors of 9/11 were Americans’ just desserts. “Let’s get a grip here, shall we?” Churchill wrote. “True enough, [the victims of 9/11] were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Give me a break. If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I’d really be interested in hearing about it.”

In this mangled prose Churchill was merely articulating the theme of his entire academic career: America was like Hitler Germany, a nation dedicated to the extermination of minorities; its capitalist economic machine starving poor people all over the world all the time. Therefore, the “civilians” who comprised what Churchill referred to as its “technical core”—the inhabi­tants of the World Trade Center—were little Eichmanns, cogs in a machine that churned out mass murder. (Adolf Eichmann was the Nazi bureaucrat who organized the shipment of Jews to the gas chambers). In Churchill’s view, there was no “better way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation” in the work­ings of America’s global economy (and thus global genocide) than incinerating Americans in their place of work.

That such views could earn an individual like Churchill a full professorship at a major state university and the responsibility and power of a department chair spoke volumes about academic corruption not only in Colorado but in the ethnic studies field. That Churchill was a sought-after speaker by universities across the country was a chilling indictment of an entire system.

Theodore Eismeier was convinced that the invitation to Churchill spelled disaster for Hamilton. He sent the essay along with “other troubling writings” of Churchill’s to school adminis­trators. The result was a series of meetings with Rabinowitz and the executive committee of the Kirkland Project. According to Rabinowitz’s account of these meetings, there was dissension among the Kirkland board of advisors. The administration thought the event “was going to be as bad as Susan Rosenberg” and wanted the Kirkland board to defuse it by converting Churchill’s speech into a panel, which would include anti-Churchill faculty like government professor (now dean of stu­dents) Phil Klinkner. Rabinowitz protested. “Let’s take a strong stand for freedom of speech,” she said.

Churchill’s speech was hardly “free.” The Kirkland Project was paying him $3,500 plus expenses to come to Hamilton, which was probably twice the cost of bringing a nationally renowned scholar in the humanities or social sciences to cam­pus. Rabinowitz and the directors of the Kirkland Project hadn’t offered Churchill this kind of money to provide students with an example of free speech. They had invited him because, like Rabinowitz, they shared his extreme views or found him aca­demically interesting. Promoting views like Churchill’s was the purpose of the Kirkland Project. This was their standard, and this standard—not free speech—was the issue.

As the date of Churchill’s visit approached, the Syracuse Post-Standard published a report on the event that included inter­views with the growing campus opposition. Professor Eismeier was quoted as saying that the proposed panel was “akin to invit­ing a representative of the KKK to speak and then asking a member of the NAACP to respond.” Other media began to report the controversy. Through Internet postings, talk radio chatter, and further press coverage, the controversy picked up momentum until a Hamilton student appeared on FOX News Channel’s The O’Reilly Factor and blew the affair wide open.

Like Ian Mandel before him, Matthew Coppo was a sopho­more at Hamilton, but his relationship to the political events that provided a subtext for the occasion was more intimate. Matthew’s father had been killed in the World Trade Center on 9/11 and was thus one of the innocent victims Ward Churchill had described as “little Eichmanns” who deserved to die. Matthew Coppo appeared on two consecutive segments of The O’Reilly Factor, the first with his mother. In the show’s opening editorial segment, O’Reilly declared that Hamilton was morally wrong to have provided Churchill with an academic template and said that his hateful comments “should not be rewarded by any sane person,” which was a perfectly reasonable view. As a result of the broadcast, an avalanche of angry emails (more than 8,000 according to college officials) descended on Hamilton president Joan Hinde Stewart, leading her to cancel the event.

Explaining the cancellation, Stewart presented herself and Hamilton not as the embarrassed authors of bad decisions and abysmal standards but as failed defenders of free speech. She thus accepted, for a second time, the self-serving view of Hamil­ton’s faculty radicals that the real problem was not the behavior of the faculty Left but the public’s reaction. To this claim she added an administrative concern for campus security: “We have done our best to protect what we hold most dear-—the right to speak, think, and study freely—but there is a higher responsibil­ity that this institution carries, and that is the safety of our stu­dents.” Stewart alleged that threats of violence had been made, and that these had prompted her decision to cancel the event. Such threats probably were made (though it is also possible that Churchill and others exaggerated them). Threats of violence occur quite regularly, however, in regard to campus speeches and they are normally dealt with by ample campus security, including armed guards and an occasional German shepherd.

Stewart made no mention of academic standards as they per­tained to extending an official university invitation to someone with Churchill’s views. But behind the scenes Stewart under­stood that the crisis was about the standards. Nancy Rabinowitz was forced to resign as chair of the Kirkland Project and a fac­ulty committee was appointed to conduct an inquiry and offer recommendations for reform. When the inquiry was completed, Stewart announced that the Kirkland budget would be signifi­cantly cut and its missions and programs reviewed. In future all campus speakers would be paid for in part through a central fund reported to the administration, giving Stewart control over the decisions that her professors had abused.

Immediately, one member of the faculty committee stepped forward to make it known that Stewart’s solution was not one the committee had recommended. Margaret Thickstun, a pro­fessor of English and the chair of Hamilton’s faculty, told reporters that the president’s decision was “more restrictive” than what the committee had recommended. The Hamilton fac­ulty, in Professor Thickstun’s view, didn’t think there was any­thing wrong with the invitations to Rosenberg and Churchill or with Kirkland Project standards. “I think that the faculty as a whole felt that the Kirkland Project wasn’t the issue,” she said; “the media coverage was the issue.”

At the University of Colorado an even larger drama was unfolding. Churchill’s extreme views had been known to uni­versity authorities for a long time, but they had done nothing about them. Since Churchill was a full professor and chair of an academic department, there was nothing they really could do. He was protected by tenure rules and academic freedom con­siderations that left university officials few options.

The University of Colorado did have a tenure review process, which was supposed to be administered annually. But the policy had not been observed in years. Nor was it conceivable, even if the procedures were observed, that Churchill’s tenure would be put in jeopardy simply because he had abhorrent views. A cele­brated attempt by the City University of New York to fire Leonard Jeffries, a racist professor of black studies, for making a flagrantly anti-Semitic speech had failed in the courts, some years earlier, because it was based on his public speech, not his classroom performance. Even his racism in the classroom, which was indisputable, was not considered by the university as possi­ble grounds for his dismissal. The tenure protections of profes­sors were that strong.

The national publicity generated by the Hamilton crisis dra­matically altered this situation by bringing Churchill’s views to the attention of the public at large, who regarded them as the incomprehensible ravings of a fringe radical. The fact that the nation was at war with a ruthless enemy with whom Churchill clearly identified caused an uproar in the Colorado media, and led the governor and other officials to demand that he be fired.

In the weeks that followed, several facts about Churchill’s academic career were brought to light and provided other grounds for questioning his university position. Although Churchill was a department head who received an annual salary of $120,000, he had no doctorate, which was a standard require­ment for tenured positions, not to mention chairs. Moreover, his academic training had been in communications as a graphic artist rather than an academic field related to ethnic studies. The master’s degree he held was from a third-rate experimental col­lege, which did not even award grades when he attended in the 1970s. He had lied to qualify for his affirmative action hire, when he claimed on his application that he was a member of the Keetoowah Band of the Cherokee tribe. In fact, his ancestors were Anglo-Saxon and the Keetoowah Band had publicly rejected him. An investigative series by the Rocky Mountain News also maintained that he had plagiarized other professors’ academic work and had made demonstrably false claims about American history in his own writing, literally making up Amer­ican atrocities that never happened.

Despite these revelations, hundreds of professors and thou­sands of students across the country sprang to Churchill’s defense, signing petitions and protesting the “witch-hunt” of aca­demic “liberals.” At the Indiana University Law School, Profes­sor Florence Roisman took around a petition in Churchill’s behalf. When law professor William Bradford, a Chiricahua Apache with a stellar academic resume, refused to sign the petition, Professor Roisman retorted, “What kind of a native American are you?” and launched a campaign to have Bradford fired. The Ameri­can Association of University Professors ignored the Bradford case, but issued an official declaration of support for Churchill, invoking “the right to free speech and the nationally recognized standard of academic freedom in support of quality instruction and scholarship.” Churchill made a public appearance in his own defense to a cheering University of Colorado audience of fifteen hundred and went on to tour other campuses where he received a similar hero’s welcome, also from large crowds. These events further revealed to a troubled public the extent to which radicalism at the very edges of the American political spectrum had established a central place in the curriculum of American universities.

How could the university have hired and then raised to these heights an individual of such questionable character and pre­posterous views as Ward Churchill? How many professors with similar resumes had managed to acquire tenured positions at the University of Colorado and other institutions of higher learning? How pervasive was the conflation of political interests and aca­demic pursuits on university campuses or in college classrooms? Why were the administrations seemingly unable to assert and enforce standards of academic excellence? Such were the issues the Churchill scandal raised.

The Changed University

The present volume examines 101 college professors and attempts to provide a factual basis for answering these ques­tions. The method used is similar to the scholarly historical dis­cipline known as “prosopography,” which was defined by one of its creators and best-known practitioners, Lawrence Stone, as “the study of biographical details of individuals in the aggre­gate.” The purpose of this exercise, as Stone explains is “to establish a universe to be studied,” in this case a universe of rep­resentative academics who use their positions to promote polit­ical agendas. A further purpose of prosopography is to establish patterns of conduct and patterns in careers through a study of the assembled profiles.

When viewed as a whole, the 101 portraits in this volume reveal several disturbing patterns of university life, which are reflected in careers like Ward Churchill’s. These include (1) promotion far beyond academic achievement (Professors Anderson, Aptheker, Berry, Churchill, Davis, Kirstein, Navarro, West, Williams, and others in this volume); (2) teaching subjects out­side one’s professional qualifications and expertise for the pur­pose of political propaganda (Professors Barash, Becker, Churchill, Ensalaco, Furr, Holstun, Wolfe, and many others); (3) making racist and ethnically disparaging remarks in public with­out eliciting reaction by university administrations, as long as those remarks are directed at unprotected groups, e.g., Armeni­ans, whites, Christians, and Jews (Professors Algar, Armitage, Baraka, Dabashi, hooks, Massad, and others); (4) the overt introduction of political agendas into the classroom and the abandonment of any pretense of academic discipline or schol­arly inquiry (Professors Aptheker, Dunkley, Eckstein, Gilbert, Higgins, Marable, Richards, Williams, and many others).

Not all of the professors depicted in this volume hold views as extreme as Ward Churchill’s, but a disturbing number do. All of them appear to believe that an institution of higher learning is an extension of the political arena, and that scholarly stan­dards can be sacrificed for political ends; others are frank apolo­gists for terrorist agendas, and still others are classroom bigots. The dangers such individuals pose to the academic enterprise extend far beyond their own classrooms. The damage a faculty minority can inflict on an entire academic institution, even in the absence of a scandalous figure like Ward Churchill, was recently demonstrated at Harvard, when President Lawrence Summers was censured—the first such censure in the history of the modern research university in America—because Summers had the temerity to suggest in a faculty setting an idea that was politically incorrect.

The influence of radical attitudes is not confined to radicals on a given faculty, but has a tendency to spread throughout an institution. Robert Reich, a former cabinet secretary in the Clin­ton administration and now a professor of economics and social policy at Brandeis University, is not a political radical. But in the present academic environment Reich is a member of the faculty committee of the “Social Justice and Policy Program” in the undergraduate school. The Social and Justice Policy Program, as the name implies, is little more than a training course for stu­dents to become advocates for expanding the welfare state. It is a program of indoctrination in the strictest lexigraphical sense— “to imbue with a partisan or ideological point of view”—and thus inappropriate for an academic curriculum. The proper set­ting for such a course would be a training institute maintained by the Democratic Party.

One of the professors profiled in this volume, Columbia Uni­versity’s Todd Gitlin, explained in a 2004 essay that after the 1960s, “all that was left to the Left was to unearth righteous tra­ditions and cultivate them in universities. The much-mocked ‘political correctness’ of the next academic generations was a consolation prize. We lost—we squandered the politics—but won the textbooks.” Professor Richard Rorty, a renowned pro­fessor of philosophy and ardent left-winger, described this devel­opment with equally refreshing candor: “The power base of the left in America is now in the universities, since the trade unions have largely been killed off. The universities have done a lot of good work by setting up, for example, African-American studies programs, Women’s Studies programs, Gay and Lesbian Studies programs. They have created power bases for these move­ments.” That a distinguished philosopher like Rorty would find the political debasement of the university a development to praise speaks volumes about the changes that have taken place in the academic culture since the war in Vietnam.

Because activists ensconced in programmatic fields like black studies and women’s studies also teach in traditional depart­ments like history and English, the statements by Rorty and Gitlin actually understate the ways in which the radical Left has colonized a significant part of the university system and trans­formed it to serve its political ends. In September 2005, the American Political Science Association’s annual meeting fea­tured a panel devoted to the question, “Is It Time to Call It Fas­cism?” meaning the Bush administration. Given the vibrant reality of American democracy in the year 2005, this was obvi­ously a political rather than a scholarly agenda.

To identify 101 radical professors for this volume, it was not necessary to scour university faculties. This sample is but the tip of an academic iceberg, and it would have been no problem to provide a thousand such profiles or even ten times the number. The faculty members of the entire Ethnic Studies Department, which Churchill chaired, share views similar to Churchill’s and have declared their solidarity with him. Yet only the new chair of Churchill’s department, Elizabeth Perez, has been selected for inclusion in these profiles. None of the nine professors par­ticipating on the Political Science Association panel—or many others like it—are included. Out of the more than 250 “Peace Studies” programs whose agendas are overtly political rather than scholarly, this collection includes only half a dozen profes­sors. The same is true for other ideological fields like women’s studies, African American studies, gay and lesbian studies, post-colonial studies, queer studies, whiteness studies, and cultural studies.

This book is not intended as a text about left-wing bias in the university and does not propose that this bias is necessarily a problem. Every individual, whether conservative or liberal, has a perspective and therefore a bias. Professors have every right to interpret the subjects they teach according to their individual points of view. This is the essence of academic freedom. But they also have professional obligations as teachers, whose purpose is the instruction and education of students, not to impose their biases on students as though they were scientific facts. The pro­fessorial task is to teach students how to think, not to tell them what to think. In short, it is the responsibility of professors to be professional—and therefore “academic”—in their classrooms, and therefore not to require students to agree with them on matters which are controversial.

The privileges of tenure and academic freedom are specifically granted in exchange for this professionalism. Society does not pro­vide tenure to politicians—and for good reason. To merit their privileges—and specifically their tenure privileges—professors are expected to adhere to professional standards and avoid political attitudinizing. As professionals, their interpretations should be tempered by the understanding that all human knowledge is uncertain and only imperfectly grasped, that such knowledge must be based on the collection of evidence and evaluated accord­ing to professionally agreed on methodologies and standards. As teachers they are expected to make their students aware of the controversies surrounding the evidence, including the significant challenges to their own interpretations. Hired as experts in schol­arly disciplines and fields of knowledge, professors are granted tenure in order to protect the integrity of their academic inquiry, not their right to leak into the classroom their uninformed preju­dices on subjects which are outside their fields of expertise.

Professors also have a responsibility in their classrooms to respect not only the professional standards of research and inquiry but the unformed intellects of their students, who are their charges. Their teaching must not seek the arbitrary imposition of personal opinions and prejudices on students, enforced through the power of the grading process and the authority of the institutions they represent.

Although beyond the scope of this inquiry, it is a reasonable assumption that a majority of faculty members are professionals and devoted to traditional academic methods and pursuits. But these scholars are often a silent majority, intimidated from expressing their views on subjects like the Susan Rosenberg and Ward Churchill affairs because of their concern not to be labeled “racist” or “sexist” or “reactionary” by their more aggres­sive radical peers. Still, they are not always so intimidated, and can sometimes be seen standing up to defend academic standards under assault.

At the University of Colorado, Paul Campos, a liberal mem­ber of the law faculty and a columnist for the Denver Rocky Mountain News, issued one of the strongest statements on Churchill’s tenured position: “To compare the victims of the 9/11 massacre to one of the chief architects of the Holocaust is both intellectually bankrupt and morally depraved. To do so in a published essay, and to repeat this opinion to the media, after being asked whether he wishes to consider it, calls into question the author’s fitness to continue as a member of this university’s faculty. Members of our faculty should keep in mind that a grant of tenure is not a guarantee of perpetual employment. Tenure protects against dismissal without cause; but professional incompetence and moral depravity are both sufficient grounds for firing tenured faculty.”

Two years earlier, a prominent member of the academic Left and a distinguished Milton scholar, Stanley Fish, wrote an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education in which he stressed the importance of drawing the line between political attitudinizing and scholarly discourse. His article was titled “Save the World on Your Own Time,” and in it, he cautioned academics about get­ting involved as academics in moral and political issues such as the war on terror. In a paradoxical summary he warned: “It is immoral for academics or academic institutions to proclaim moral views.” The reason, according to Fish, was provided long ago in a faculty report to the president of the University of Chicago. “The report declares that the university exists ‘only for the limited.. .purposes of teaching and research,’” Fish wrote. “Since the university is a community only for those limited and distinctive purposes, it is a community which cannot take col­lective action on the issues of the day without endangering the conditions for its existence and effectiveness.”

The conclusion Professor Fish drew was straightforward: “Teachers should teach their subjects. They should not teach peace or war or freedom or diversity or uniformity or national­ism or anti-nationalism or any other agenda that might properly be taught by a political leader or a talk-show host. Of course they should teach about such subjects, something very different from urging them as commitments—when they are part of the his­tory or philosophy or literature or sociology that is being stud­ied. The only advocacy that should go on in the classroom is the advocacy of what James Murphy has identified as the intellec­tual virtues, ‘thoroughness, perseverance, intellectual honesty,’ all components of the cardinal academic virtue of being ‘consci­entious in the pursuit of truth.’” (emphasis added)

Once the prevailing view among academic professionals, this perspective is now under significant challenge by radicals firmly entrenched in liberal arts departments. Organizations like “His­torians Against the War” or the “Radical Philosophical Associa­tion” directly challenge the idea of academic neutrality on controversial political issues. In 2002, Columbia University hosted a conference of academic radicals called “Taking Back the Academy: History of Activism, History as Activism.” The pub­lished text of the conference papers was provided with a foreword by Professor Eric Foner, who is a past president of both the Organization of American Historians and the American His­torical Association, and a leading academic figure. Far from shar­ing Professor Fish’s view that a sharp distinction should be drawn between political advocacy and the scholarly disciplines, Professor Foner embraced the idea that political activism is essential to the academic mission: “The chapters in this excellent volume,” wrote Foner, “derive from a path-breaking conference held at Columbia University in 2002 to explore the links between historical scholarship and political activism…. As the chapters that follow demonstrate, scholarship and activism are not mutually exclusive pursuits, but are, at their best, symbioti-cally related.”

The implications of this symbiosis were drawn by the confer­ence panels, which are listed in the table of contents as follows: “Student Movements” “Student Unions” “Historians for Social Justice” and “Bridging the Gap between Academia and Activism.” This symbiosis of activism and scholarship reflected a self-conception in which radical professors would function as the mentors and protectors of student activists, deploying their intellectual skills in behalf of “progressive” political causes. His­tory professor Jesse Lemisch, a founding member of “Historians Against the War,” began his presentation with these words: “As historians, teachers and scholars, we oppose the expansion of American empire…” Speaking on the final conference panel, Professor Lemisch spelled out the connection that academic radicals like himself made between their roles as scholars and their political goals: “Being an activist is a necessary prerequisite for historians who want to see through the reigning lies, and I take it as a given that we must be activists. Writing history is about challenging received authority. Activist experience gives the historian experiential understanding of the power of the state, repression, social change… the depth of commitment of those with power to maintaining the standing order through their journalists, historians, police and law firms. …You can’t begin to understand how history happens unless you have this basic training as a historian/activist. A good dose of tear gas makes us think more clearly as historians.”

Far from being marginal, Lemisch’s endorsement of activist scholarship is shared by leaders of the academic profession. Jacquelyn Hall is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina and, like Eric Foner, a former president of the Organization of American Historians; and like Foner and Lemisch, she is also a member of “Historians Against the War.” She had this to say about Taking Back the Academy: “In consid­ering the broad social and political responsibilities of intellectu­als in society, this book calls for a revitalized definition of what it means to be a scholar-citizen in the twenty-first century. For scholars in the humanities, that call could not be more timely. Alternatively maligned as politically irrelevant or dangerously subversive, historians and other stewards of society’s subjective truths increasingly must be prepared to articulate—and defend—their function in today’s marketplace of ideas and cor-poratized universities.” These are the words of an activist rather than a scholar. But at the Columbia University conference the distinction was no longer recognized.

The Law of Group Polarization

The professors profiled in this volume are drawn from public and private universities, from small institutions and large ones, and from schools that are both secular and religious. Among them are individuals prominent in their institutions and at the forefront of their professions. They are the authors of books widely used as texts in their fields. They have been funded by prestigious foundations and awarded the highest professional honors in their fields. They are department chairs and directors of academic institutes and programs and heads of large profes­sional associations. Among them are presidents and former pres­idents of the American Historical Association, the American Anthropological Association, the National Ethnic Studies Asso­ciation, the American Philosophical Association, the Modern Language Association, the American Sociological Association, and the Middle East Studies Association. As tenured faculty they have a prominent role in the hiring and promotion of future generations of university professors. They are representative fig­ures, widely influential in the academic world.

At the same time and notwithstanding their impressive cre­dentials, these professors (as their profiles demonstrate) are capable of making disturbingly shallow intellectual judgments and expressing alarmingly crude political opinions. Like Ward Churchill, their excesses implicate not only themselves but the academic culture itself.

Critics of the university have long complained that the sys­tem of tenure, which provides lifetime job security, also serves to protect mediocrity and encourage incompetence. The efforts to politicize the curriculum over the last three decades have pre­dictably created new opportunities for both tendencies to flour­ish.

One factor contributing to the debasement of intellectual standards in the university is the politicized environment of the university itself. It is relatively easy for politically like-minded individuals to mistake adherence to partisan formulas for sub­stantive thought and even intellectual achievement. Some years ago, the power of this phenomenon was demonstrated to devas­tating effect by a physicist named Alan Sokal. Sokal was a political leftist, concerned about the debasement of intellectual standards by his political allies in the university. In a famous thought experiment, Sokal submitted a paper to Social Text—a “peer-reviewed” academic journal, whose articles were viewed by many as on the “cutting edge of radical theory.” By design, the substance of the paper Sokal wrote and submitted was pure nonsense, but its content—also by design—was “politically cor­rect.” Sokal wanted to see if the distinguished academic editors at Social Text would accept a worthless article for publication if they shared its political conclusions.

“To test prevailing intellectual standards,” Sokal explained, “I decided to try a modest (though admittedly uncontrolled) experiment: Would a leading North American journal of cultural studies—whose editorial collective includes such luminaries as [Duke professor] Frederic Jameson and [Princeton professor] Andrew Ross—publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions.” The article Sokal submitted to Social Text was called “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.” Its thesis was that gravity was merely a social construct, an instrument of phallocentric hegemony. “In the second paragraph I declare, without the slightest evidence or argument, that ‘physical “reality” [note the scare quotes] … is at bottom a social and linguistic construct.’ Not our theories of physical reality, mind you, but the reality itself. Fair enough: anyone who believes that the laws of physics are mere social conventions is invited to try transgressing those conventions from the windows of my apartment. (I live on the 23^rd floor.)”

Social Text published the article, exposing the editors to national embarrassment when Sokal revealed the hoax. “The editors of Social Text liked my article,” he explained afterwards, “because they liked its conclusion: that ‘the content and method­ology of post-modern science provide powerful intellectual sup­port for the progressive political project.” One could not hope for a clearer example of why initiating inquiries with politically correct conclusions already in mind is essentially anti-intellectual. Yet conformity to the parameters of the “progressive political project” has become a widespread standard of academic judg­ment in universities not only for the selection and design of its curricula, but for the hiring and promotion of faculty.

While mediocrity and incompetence have always had a place in the academic world, it is also the case that never before in the history of the modern research university have entire depart­ments and fields been devoted to purely ideological pursuits. Nor has overt propagandizing had such a respected and promi­nent place in university classrooms. Even more disturbingly, the last few decades mark the first time in their history that Amer­ica’s institutions of higher learning have become a haven for extremists.

A primary cause of this development is the overwhelming prevalence of leftists (and “liberals”) on academic faculties along with the corresponding absence of other, critical, perspectives. A well-known principle of group dynamics is the “law of group polarization,” which holds that if a room is filled with like-minded people, the center of the room will move towards the extreme. The room becomes an echo-chamber of approbation, while the natural clamor for attention among individuals pro­vides an incentive to push the envelope of approved opinions to their natural limit.

In many fields the academic community has become such an echo-chamber. Numerous surveys of political attitudes among university professors have established that the ratio of faculty members holding views to the left of the political spectrum over those holding conservative views ranges from 5-1 to 9-1 and is steadily increasing. At Ward Churchill’s university in Boulder, the figure is 30-1. This reflects the academic future at schools as disparate as Stanford and Berkeley, where a 30-1 ratio already exists among junior faculty (assistant and associate professors). The atmosphere created by such a one-sided dialogue is what makes possible university support for an intellectual rogue like Ward Churchill by academic organizations like the Kirkland Project, the American Association of University Professors, and thousands of professors nationwide. The law of group polariza­tion that produces extremists like Churchill would operate even if the room of like-minded faculty were not the product of sys­tematic exclusion. But the evidence strongly suggests that it is.

Some academics, like Paul Krugman, have challenged this claim and argue that the vast disparity in the representation of different intellectual perspectives is a matter of self-selection: “It’s a fact, documented by two recent studies, that registered Republicans and self-proclaimed conservatives make up only a small minority of professors at elite universities. But what should we conclude from that? One answer is self-selection— the same sort of self-selection that leads Republicans to out­number Democrats four to one in the military. The sort of person who prefers an academic career to the private sector is likely to be somewhat more liberal than average, even in engi­neering.”

Professor Krugman’s argument about self-selection could eas­ily have been used to explain the absence of women or African Americans on university faculties forty years ago, when they were as rare as Republicans are today. Would Professor Krugman’s attitude be the same if he were called on to explain those disparities? It is not obvious that the military and the academy can be compared in the way that Professor Krugman proposes, since there is no intellectual apprenticeship required for inclu­sion in the military, and its recruitment process hardly entails the kind of pervasive inquiry into a candidate’s opinions and judgments as does an academic hire. There are many Republican lawyers, to pick only one obvious profession that has an aca­demic analogue, but the percentage of Republican law profes­sors at academic institutions is no greater than the percentage of Republicans on other faculties.

As a political columnist, Krugman must also be aware that not all Republicans—not even most Republicans—are business­men, or employed in business professions. The Republican Party is competitive with Democrats in virtually all social sectors, while the most reliable indicator of a Democratic vote is not class but proximity to and length of membership in academic communities where there is a restricted marketplace of ideas. As a professor at Princeton, which is governed by the trustees of the “Princeton Corporation,” Krugman must be aware that a signifi­cant segment of the university community is actually part of the private sector, and a lucrative part at that for academic entre­preneurs like himself. If Republicans are motivated by a desire to succeed in the private sector, why would they deny themelves the opportunities provided by private corporations like Prince­ton and Harvard?

Krugman’s self-selection hypothesis cannot explain the results of the study by Professor Daniel Klein and Andrew Westem showing that the ratio of Republicans to Democrats among junior faculty at Berkeley and Stanford is a third of what it is among senior faculty. Nor can it explain why the percentage of faculty conservatives should have dramatically declined in the last twenty years, as a recent study by Rothman, Nevitte, and Lichter shows. In a survey of 1,643 faculty members drawn from 183 colleges and universities, the authors concluded that “over the course of fifteen years, self-described liberals grew from a slight plurality to a five to one majority on college facul­ties, while the ratio of liberals to conservatives in the general population remained relatively constant. These statistics are perfectly compatible with the view that the exclusion of con­servatives began roughly thirty years ago when a generation of political activists started to acquire power over faculty hiring and promotion committees.

Are these disparities the result of political discrimination? There is considerable reason to believe that they are. Certainly the rationale for such an agenda has long been a staple of radi­cal thought. The political activists who flooded university facul­ties in the early 1970s were encouraged by their own theories to regard the university as an instrument for social change whose levers of power it was important for “progressives” to manipulate and control.

Academic radicals self-consciously drew their social strategies from the writings of the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci, around whom an academic cult formed in the 1970s, just as they were ascending the tenure ladder. Gramsci was an innovator in Marxist theory, whose ideas focused on the importance of acquiring cultural “hegemony” as the fulcrum of revolutionary change. Gramsci explicitly urged radicals to gain control of the “means of cultural production” to further their ends. Foremost among these means were the universities and the media. The considerations that led Gramsci to these conclusions would cer­tainly have also encouraged faculty activists to seek institutional power within the university by acquiring control of its hiring and tenure committees.

Herbert Marcuse, a professor at Brandeis and a veteran of the famed “Frankfurt School” of European Marxism, was another figure whose writings flourished with the new radical presence on university faculties. His famous essay on “Repressive Toler­ance,” written in 1965, is a justification for the suppression of conservative speech and access to cultural platforms on the grounds that the views of right-wing intellectuals reflect the rule of an oppressive and already dominant social class. Marcuse identified “revolutionary tolerance” as “tolerance that enlarged the range and content of freedom.” Revolutionary tolerance could not be neutral towards rival viewpoints. It had to be “par­tisan” on behalf of a radical cause and “intolerant towards the protagonists of the repressive status quo.” This was a transparent prescription for not hiring academic candidates with conserva­tive views. In this view, a blacklist was a potential tool of “liber­ation.”

According to Marcuse, normal tolerance “granted to the Right as well as the Left, to movements of aggression as well as to movements of peace, to the party of hate as well as to that of humanity… actually protects the machinery of discrimination.” By this logic, repression of conservative viewpoints was a pro­gressive duty. Evaluating conservative academic candidates on their merits, without regard to their political and social opinions, was to support discrimination and oppression in the society at large. Marcuse’s “dialectical argument” exerted a seminal influ­ence in academic circles in the 1970s and provided a powerful justification for blacklisting conservatives in the name of equal­ity and freedom. The same argument would also justify the exclusion of conservative texts from academic reading lists, which is an all too common practice on liberal arts campuses.

Today senior conservative professors (and most conservative professors are now senior) find themselves regularly excluded from search and hiring committees, and a dwindling presence on university faculties. A typical case was reported to a visitor to the University of Delaware in November 2001, who asked a sen­ior member of the history department, and its lone conservative, how a system worked that had made him such a solitary figure. The professor answered, “Well, they haven’t allowed me to sit on a search committee since 1985. In that year I was its chair and we hired a Marxist. This year [2001 ] we had an opening for a scholar of Asian history. We had several candidates among whom the best qualified was from Stanford. Yet he didn’t get the job. So I went to the chair of the search committee and asked him what had happened. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘you’re absolutely right. He was far and away the most qualified candidate and we had a terrific interview about his area of expertise. But then we went to lunch and he let out that he was for school vouchers. And that killed it.” Apparently, a politically incorrect view on K-12 school voucher proposals implied incorrect views about the Ming Dynasty or the Meiji Restoration, disqualifying the bearer for academic employment. Or perhaps the radical faculty in the history department did not want to hire a loose cannon who might eventually jeopardize their control.

The bitterly intolerant attitude of the current academic cul­ture towards conservatives is inevitably a factor in the exclusion process. In the spring of 2005, the Skidmore College News pub­lished an article called “Politics in the Classroom,” which quoted anthropology professor Gerry Erchak to this effect: “In the hir­ing process you’d probably be wise not to mention your politi­cal views. If you say, ‘Oh, hey, I really think Reagan was great,’ or, ‘I’m a Bush guy,’ I can’t say a person wouldn’t be hired, but it’s like your pants falling down. It’s just horrible. It’s like you cut a big fart. I just don’t think you’ll be called back.”

Faculty prejudices reflected in Erchak’s comment are a per­vasive fact of academic life. In the same spring, Professor Timo­thy Shortell was elected by his peers to the chair of the sociology department at Brooklyn College. His election became a news item when it was discovered that he had written an arti­cle referring to religious people as “moral retards” and was on record describing senior members of the Bush administration as “Nazis.” The recent eruption of the Churchill controversy had made Shortell’s extreme attitudes newsworthy, but apparently had not impressed his department peers as the least bit unusual when they elected him.

As in the case of Ward Churchill, the public airing of Short­ell’s prejudices generated a reaction strong enough to persuade the president of Brooklyn College to block his appointment to the departmental chair and avoid further embarrassment to the college. But left to itself, the university process would have placed Shortell in a position to determine the composition of faculty for a generation to come. Departmental chairs at Brook­lyn College exercise veto powers over faculty hiring decisions. Is it reasonable to think that someone with views like Shortell’s would approve the hiring of a sociology candidate with religious views or Republican leanings? According to the survey of seven­teen hundred academics by Professor Daniel Klein and Andrew Western, the ratio of Democrats to Republicans in sociology departments nationwide is 28-1.

Criminology professor Michael Adams of the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, has reported an incident reflecting similar prejudice. A colleague on a search committee for the Criminology Department remarked to him that a candidate they were reviewing should not be hired because he was “too religious.” Too religious to study crime? Among his search committee colleagues, only Adams thought this peculiar.

The prejudice against conservatives is so ingrained and com­monplace that academics do not see it as a problem at all. To them it is just the order of things. When an anthropology pro­fessor at Rollins University, an elite private school in Florida, was asked whether he was concerned that there were no conserva­tives in his department, he explained: “Anthropology is the study of other cultures and requires individuals who are compassion­ate and tolerant.” Even when it was brought to his attention, the professor was completely oblivious to the intolerance of his own statement. David French, the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and a graduate of Harvard Law School, spent two years as a lecturer at Cornell Law School: “During my second interview with the director of the program I was applying to join, she asked the following question: ‘I note from your curriculum vita that you seem to be involved in reli­gious right issues. Do you think you can teach gay students?’ How many gay applicants at Cornell have been asked: ‘Do you think you can teach Christian students?’” When a conservative student publication at Duke University published an article showing that conservatives were a rarity on the Duke faculty, the chairman of the Duke philosophy department, Professor Robert Brandon, said: “We try to hire the best, smartest people available… If, as John Stuart Mill said, stupid people are gener­ally conservative, then there are lots of conservatives we will hire.”

During a recent conflict over diversity at the Harvard Law School, a candid acknowledgment of the hiring bias against con­servative candidates was made by Professor Alan Dershowitz, a faculty liberal. When the conflict came to a head the adminis­tration created a “Committee on Healthy Diversity” to assuage left-wing students who wanted more women and racial minori­ties hired. While there were already a considerable number of women and minority professors at Harvard Law, there were only a handful of identifiable Republicans out of a faculty of 200. Seizing the opportunity the Left had seemingly provided, con­servative students appealed to the Committee on Healthy Diversity to hire more conservatives, but their pleas went unan­swered.

Professor Dershowitz explained why their request fell on deaf ears: “The true test for diversity for me is would people on the left vote for a really bright evangelical Christian, who was a brilliant and articulate spokesperson for the right to life, the right to own guns… anti-gay approaches to life, anti-feminist views? Would there be a push to get such a person on the fac­ulty? Now, such a person would really diversify this place. Of course not. I think blacks want more blacks, women want more women, and leftists want more leftists. Everybody thinks diver­sification comes by getting more of themselves. And that’s not true diversity.” Of course, thanks to the relative scarcity of fac­ulty conservatives there is no significant constituency for hiring more of them.

Academic Freedom

The activist agendas of today’s academics are not only a depar­ture from academic tradition; they are violations of established principles of academic freedom dating back to 1915. These prin­ciples, which were developed by the American Association of University Professors, have been universally embraced by Amer­ican colleges and universities and are elaborated in official fac­ulty guidelines, while remaining unenforced. Rule APM 0-10 of the University of California’s Academic Personnel Manual, writ­ten in 1934 by its president, Robert Gordon Sproul, states:

The function of the university is to seek and to transmit knowledge and to train students in the processes whereby truth is to be made known. To convert, or to make converts, is alien and hostile to this dispassionate duty. Where it becomes necessary, in performing this function of a university, to con­sider political, social, or sectarian movements, they are dis­sected and examined, not taught, and the conclusion left, with no tipping of the scales, to the logic of the facts…. Essentially the freedom of a university is the freedom of competent per­sons in the classroom. In order to protect this freedom, the University assumed the right to prevent exploitation of its prestige by unqualified persons or by those who would use it as a platform for propaganda.

On July 30, 2003—sixty-nine years after this statement was written—the passage was removed from the Berkeley personnel manual by a 43-3 vote of the Faculty Senate. This was an eloquent and disturbing expression of the new academic culture, which had accommodated itself to the intrusion of partisan agendas into the curriculum. The Sproul clause was replaced by one that omitted any distinction between indoctrination and education and which made faculty the arbiter of the standard: “Academic freedom requires that teaching and scholarship be assessed only by reference to the professional standards that sus­tain the University’s pursuit and achievement of knowledge,” the new passage stated. “The substance and nature of these stan­dards properly lie within the expertise and authority of the faculty as a body…. Academic freedom requires that the Academic Senate be given primary responsibility for applying academic standards….” In other words, academic freedom is whatever the faculty says it is. Gone is the injunction against making con­verts to political, social, or sectarian agendas; gone, too, the admonition not to exploit the prestige of the university as a plat­form for political propaganda.

With this rewriting of university guidelines, the principle of academic freedom, which had been created to protect scholar­ship, had now become a license for professors to do what they liked. This was an ominous event in the life of American uni­versities and passed virtually unnoticed; an indication of how completely this core principle of university governance had fallen into disregard, and how profoundly the university culture had changed.

The removal of the Sproul clause was the Faculty Senate’s response to a dilemma created the previous year when a radical lecturer named Snehal Shingavi announced that his section of a freshman writing course would be titled “The Politics and Poet­ics of Palestinian Resistance.” In describing the course, which was required of all freshman whose writing skills did not meet the university’s standard, Shingavi wrote: “The brutal Israeli military occupation of Palestine, [ongoing] since 1948, has systematically displaced, killed, and maimed millions of Palestinian people… This class will examine the history of the [resistance] and the way that it is narrated by Palestinians in order to produce an understanding of the Intifada.” The course description Shingavi had placed in the official university catalogue ended with a warning: “Conservative thinkers are encouraged to seek other sections.” When FOX News Channel hosts jumped on this attempt to exclude conservative students, the public reaction prompted university officials to remove the warning from the catalogue. But they allowed the course—a blatant exercise in political propaganda—to continue as announced.

The only academic rationale for the freshman English course was to teach incoming students the elements of style—the gram­matical construction of topic sentences and paragraphs and the like. This was why the course was offered by the English Depart­ment and not the Departments of Political Science or Middle Eastern Studies. But instead of confronting an egregious abuse of the classroom for political purposes, the Berkeley Faculty Senate chose instead to conceal its hypocrisy by eliminating the section of its academic freedom code specifically designed to draw the distinction between education and indoctrination.

The misuse of freshman writing courses is common at many universities, where sections are regularly built around themes like feminism, radical environmentalism, and radical perspec­tives on race. At the same time, there are academic freedom guidelines still nominally in force at these schools which were written to prevent such practices.

The faculty handbook of Ohio State University (to take a fairly typical example) instructs professors as follows: “Academic freedom carries with it correlative academic responsibilities. The principal elements include the responsibility of teachers to… differentiate carefully between official activities as teachers and personal activities as citizens, and to act accordingly.” Policy HR 64 in the Penn State policy manual is even more explicit: “No faculty member may claim as a right the privilege of discussing in the classroom controversial topics outside his/her own field of study. The faculty member is normally bound not to take advan­tage of his/her position by introducing into the classroom provocative discussions of irrelevant subjects not within the field of his/her study.” The Penn State policy manual explains the rationale behind its restriction of professorial speech in these words:

The faculty member is entitled to freedom in the classroom in discussing his/her subject. The faculty member is, however, responsible for the maintenance of appropriate standards of scholarship and teaching ability. It is not the function of a fac­ulty member in a democracy to indoctrinate his/her students with ready-made conclusions on controversial subjects. The faculty member is expected to train students to think for themselves, and to provide them access to those materials, which they need if they are to think intelligently. Hence, in giving instruction upon controversial matters the faculty mem­ber is expected to be of a fair and judicial mind, and to set forth justly, without supercession or innuendo, the divergent opinions of other investigators.

Behind these guidelines lies a liberal philosophy of education, where the professional responsibility of educators is to elevate students’ ability to think, not hand them the correct opinions. This is what distinguishes democratic systems of education from their totalitarian counterparts. Under academic freedom guide­lines, teachers are expected to instruct students how to assem­ble data from the evidential record, evaluate it, and construct an argument. They are expected to refrain from using the author­ity of the classroom to impose on students their personal con­clusions about questions to which the answers are not verifiable or are beyond their professional expertise. It is the difference, as Stanley Fish wrote, between teaching about controversial issues and “urging them as commitments.”

There are no “correct” answers to controversial issues, which is why they are controversial: scholars cannot agree. Answers to such questions are inherently subjective and opinion-based and teachers should not use the authority of the classroom to force students to adopt their positions. To do so is not education but indoctrination.

These principles are still enshrined in the academic freedom guidelines of the American Association of University Professors and of many large university systems, like the ones in Pennsyl­vania and Ohio, and until recently California. But as the pro­files in this book reveal, they are widely disregarded by activist professors in liberal arts programs.

Many professors featured in this volume are icons of the con­temporary academy—Michael Eric Dyson, John Esposito, Eric Foner, Frederic Jameson, bell hooks, Mari Matsuda, among oth­ers. Others are more obscure and known only locally. But even the more obscure faculty in this book will be important enough figures to those students who come under their tutelage. The lack of professionalism displayed by these professors will have an impact on their education, and it would be naive to suppose it will be a good one.

How many radical professors are there on American faculties of higher education? According to the federal government, the total number of college and university professors in the United States is 617,000. If we were to take the Harvard case reviewed at the end of this volume as a yardstick, and assume a figure of 10 percent per university faculty, and then cut that figure in half to control for the possibility that Harvard may be a relatively rad­ical institution, the total number of such professors at American universities with views similar to the spectrum represented in this volume would still be in the neighborhood of 25,000-30,000. The number of students annually passing through their classrooms would be of the order of a hundred times that, or three million. This is a figure that ought to trouble every educator who is concerned about the quality of higher education and every American who cares about the country’s future.

The professorial profiles that follow have been printed in alphabetical order and can be read advantageously in that sequence. The very randomness of the selection is an instruction in itself. Many hands went into making this text possible. More than thirty researchers were involved in drafting the profiles. John Perazzo managed the research, wrote some of the texts, and reviewed them all. John is the managing editor of www.DiscoverTheNetworks.org, a database on the political Left, which provided the idea for this book. Jacob Laksin and Thomas Ryan are researchers and writers for the same website and for www.FrontPagemag.com. Mike Bauer, another DiscoverTheNetworks staffer, went over the text and footnotes with a fine-toothed comb. Elizabeth Ruiz tracked down sources and generally assisted in the technical aspects of putting the text in order. I could not have completed this book without them.

I have revised and edited all of the profiles contained in this text and rewritten many, so that I no longer know where my edits begin and the original drafts end. These profiles should be treated as a collective effort, but I am ultimately responsible for their judgments and accuracy.

This book was inspired by my own educational experience at Columbia University in the 1950s. I was a Marxist at the time and wrote my classroom papers, as a seventeen-year-old, from that perspective. Even though this was the height of the Cold War and my professors were anti-Communist liberals, they never singled me out for comment the way many conservative students I have encountered are singled out today. No professor of mine ever said in the course of a classroom lecture, “Horowitz, why do Communists kill so many people?” Yet, last year, a Christian student at the University of Rhode Island named Nathaniel Nelson was singled out by his political science professor, who interrupted a class discussion in a course on “Political Philosophy from Plato to Machiavelli” to ask, “Nathaniel, why do Christians hate fags?” I do not know how my education would have been affected if my professors had become my adversaries in the classroom, but I am sure the effect would not have been positive. If my professors had made me an object of their partisan passions, the trust between teacher and student would have been irreparably ruptured and with it the ability of my teachers to provide me with the full benefits of their experience and expertise.

I am grateful to my Columbia professors for not becoming my adversaries in the classroom in the way that has become common in the classrooms of activist professors today. I am grateful to them for treating me as a seventeen-year-old, who was their student and to whom they had the same professional obligation they had to students who might agree with them on contemporary issues. I am grateful for their professionalism and for the respect they showed to their academic calling; and I am grateful for their concern for my vulnerability as a young man. In twenty years of schooling up through the graduate level, I never heard one teacher or professor, on one occasion in one classroom ever express a political opinion. Not one. It is my hope that the integrity exhibited by my teachers in that politi­cally troubled era will be restored one day to American institu­tions of learning so that future generations of students can receive as full a benefit from their educational experience as I did.

My most difficult task in writing this book was living daily with the knowledge it provides of the enormous damage that several generations of tenured radicals have inflicted on our edu­cational system; and of being cognizant of the unrelenting mal­ice that so many of them hold in their hearts for a country that has given them the great privileges and freedoms they enjoy as a birthright.

December 2005