David Horowitz

The Left in the University

Table of Contents

This is the eighth themed volume in the series of my writings collected under the general title, The Black Book of the American Left. Like the previous installments, it has been edited to stand on its own, in this case as a book about one of the underappreciated tragedies of our times: the successful campaign of the left to subvert the curricula of collegiate institutions and transform entire academic departments and schools—including Schools of Education—into doctrinal training centers for their social and political causes. This transformation of the educational system in turn has underpinned the steady dismantling of America’s social contract, which has been the ongoing project of the left since the 1960s.

The present volume is actually the sixth book I have written on the subject of the transformation and its destructive consequences. In addition to whatever analytic contributions are made in these pages, they provide a compendium of anecdotal evidence about the manner in which progressive activists have taken control of liberal arts curricula and reverted them to their 19th-century origins as instruments of religious indoctrination. The new doctrines differ from their 19th-century predecessors in that the are political and secular, having been shaped by Marxism and its derivatives. These “progressive” doctrines, however, share with traditional religions the same impulse to redeem a fallen world and to suppress what they regard as hostile—therefore heretical—ideas in the name of human progress.

One can measure the current corruption of the academic profession through a summary observation about the views of academic historians that was published in the peer-reviewed Journal

of the Historical Society. The summary appears in an article written by Jennifer Delton, a tenured history professor at Skidmore College—a top-tier liberal arts school. It describes a purported orthodoxy in historians’ views of Cold War anti-communism.

According to Delton, this historical consensus regards Cold War anti-communism as an irrational phenomenon and a species of political persecution. Equally as striking as this problematic characterization is Delton’s assumption that an orthodoxy about so controversial an issue can and should be a normal condition of academic scholarship. Here are her words: “However fiercely historians disagree about the merits of American communism [sic!], they almost universally agree that the post-World War II red scare signaled a rightward turn in American politics. The consensus is that an exaggerated, irrational fear of communism, bolstered by a few spectacular spy cases, created an atmosphere of persecution and hysteria that was exploited and fanned by conservative opportunists such as Richard Nixon and Joseph McCarthy. . . . We may add detail and nuance to this story, but this, basically, is what we tell our students about post-World II anti-communism, also known as McCarthyism.” (emphasis added)

In other words, it is the professional opinion of this tenured professor, the editors of the Journal of the Historical Society and, apparently, academic historians generally that concern about a domestic communist threat during the Cold War was equivalent to “McCarthyism”—a witch-hunting mania about imaginary demons. This, according to Delton, is what academic historians “tell our students,” and not as mere opinion but as a historical consensus, and thus an academic fact. This consensus exists, apparently, in the face of easily established, indisputable facts that refute it: the fact that McCarthy was censured by an anti-communist Senate, including senators who sat on his committee; the fact that he was opposed by an anti-communist president, Dwight Eisenhower, and by anti-communist liberals such as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who wrote one of the seminal anti-communist books of the period, The Vital Center; or the proven fact that the federal government had been penetrated by communist agents at the time, and at the highest levels.

It goes without saying that no conservative scholar could agree with the conclusion of Professor Delton and her colleagues, and thus no conservative scholar could be readily regarded by the consensus she describes as a reasonable member of her profession. To ideologues like Delton, the contents of this volume will seem an extreme view of what has taken place in American liberal arts colleges and graduate institutions. But to recognize the intellectual corruption of the contemporary academy is hardly what is extreme; what is extreme is the politicized state of academic discourse, the confusion of scholarship with propaganda, and therefore the widespread debasement of the academic enterprise. What is extreme is the general comfort level of the academic community with this travesty of scholarship and, worse, with the practice of indoctrinating students in the classroom.

The ramifications of this reversion to doctrinal instruction and pre-scientific standards of scholarship have been destructive not only to higher education but to society at large. Since collegiate institutions are the training grounds for all professions, this corruption has adversely affected a widespread array of policies, both foreign and domestic; it has warped cultural attitudes towards race and gender (see volumes 5 and 6 in this series); and it has intruded political biases into such civically crucial professions as the law, journalism and secondary school education.

The contents of this volume were immediately inspired by a campaign I conducted to counter these trends and promote a restoration of the academic values associated with the modern research university, in particular the identification of scientific standards of inquiry with academic professionalism. The goal of the campaign, which lasted for roughly seven years and ultimately failed, could also be viewed as an attempt to restore a professional standard appropriate to education in a democratic society—that teachers should teach students how to think and not tell them what to think. This standard was established in a famous “Declaration on the Principles of Academic Tenure and Academic Freedom” issued by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) in 1915, and until recently verbally embraced by all reputable academic institutions.

The campaign I organized to defend those principles was ferociously opposed by the tenured left, most strikingly by the very organization that had devised the original standard: the American Association of University Professors, whose governance had fallen into radical hands. Although my campaign failed, it revealed the extent of the AAUP’s defection from its original purposes and its determination to protect a new professorial “right”—the “right” of faculty to indoctrinate their students. This was made indisputably clear in the AAUP’s opposition to a crucial passage of the Declaration that I regularly cited in my campaign, and which had been adopted verbatim by Penn State University as its academic freedom policy. There can be no better introduction to the present volume than to recount the fate of this policy at the hands of the AAUP and its academic agents.

Known as HR 64, the Penn State policy read: “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 be of a fair and judicial mind, and to set forth justly, without supersession or innuendo, the divergent opinions of other investigators.”

The AAUP’s attack on this specific policy was launched in the winter of 2010, just after events in Pennsylvania convinced me of the futility of my reform efforts. Legislative hearings to inquire into the state of academic freedom in Pennsylvania—hearings in which I played a seminal role—were effectively subverted by the AAUP and the teacher unions, while the Republican Party and conservative groups that should have supported the reform effort sat on the sidelines. Without their active involvement there was little more that I could do.

The AAUP’s attack was led by its leftist president, Cary Nelson, whose book No University Is an Island, was published that December. In his book Nelson assaulted me personally and followed his assault with an attack on the Penn State policy I had championed. Nelson described the Penn State policy on academic freedom as an attempt to restrict faculty speech and curtail academic freedom. This was the same Orwellian position the AAUP had advanced throughout the controversy; but it was the first time anyone had made that argument specifically against the Penn State policy I had praised. Nelson and I had debated each other on several occasions, so he was thoroughly familiar with my campaign and the fact that I had made HR 64 and the 1915 Declaration its cornerstones. His attack also targeted the “Academic Bill of Rights” I had attempted to persuade universities to adopt, which was an attempt to codify the principles of the 1915 Declaration.

Nelson did not merely criticize the Penn State policy but condemned it as “especially bad” and an example of “McCarthy era rhetoric.” His objection to the policy was that it denied professors the right to advance their political agendas in the classroom.

According to Nelson: “Like Horowitz, Penn State failed at the time to conceptualize the sense in which all teaching and research is fundamentally and deeply political.” This was a candid admission of the anti-academic agendas of both Nelson and the AAUP. To them, “academic freedom” meant a license for professors to use their classrooms as political platforms to indoctrinate their students.

Political agendas aside, Nelson’s smear of the Penn State academic freedom policy and my efforts made no logical sense. Far from seeking to suppress dissenting ideas, the 1915 Declaration, the Penn State policy and my Academic Bill of Rights stipulated that faculty were obligated to present conflicting opinions on controversial matters in a fair-minded manner. In other words, they were statements in behalf of intellectual diversity. Neither document denied professors the right to express their views, or to freely draw conclusions from their research. They did require them to observe a professional standard in the classroom; in particular, to be mindful that students were in the process of forming their opinions and should be allowed to do so. It was only in this sense that it restricted professors’ “freedom of speech”—specifically the “right” to use their classrooms for political attitudinizing. But this was no more restrictive than the codes governing doctors or lawyers in their professional settings. And it was in accord with the views of the leading academic authority on academic freedom: Robert C. Post, dean of the Yale Law School.

In dismissing Penn State’s policy, Nelson suggested that the AAUP had “more nuanced” methods of determining such matters than the Penn State officials, and that “what Penn State ended up with is nothing less than thought control.” The absurdity of this was transparent. To require professors to present divergent views to their students, and to do so in a fair-minded manner, was hardly “thought control.”

Shortly after Nelson’s book appeared, the Faculty Senate at Penn State went into action to implement his agenda, voting to formally eviscerate policy HR 64 and rewrite it to permit the abuses it was designed to prevent. Specifically, the Penn State Faculty Senate removed the following sentence: “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 Senate then rewrote the policy, restricting professorial fairness to those controversial viewpoints that were part of the discourse of the academic professions—professions that had effectively purged themselves of non-leftist viewpoints. The revised version read: “Faculty members are expected to present

information fairly, and to set forth justly, divergent opinions that arise out of scholarly methodology and professionalism.” (emphasis added) In other words, practically speaking, only the divergent opinions of left-wing academics need be presented fairly and justly. Other opinions—notably conservative opinions—which were not part of existing “scholarly methodology and professionalism,” would not be covered by this fairness requirement. The instigator of these changes, Cary Nelson, applauded the revision in a statement that made no sense at all: “Penn State had one of the most restrictive and troubling policies limiting intellectual freedom in the classroom that I know of. It undermined the normal human capacity to make comparisons and contrasts between different fields and between different cultures and historical periods.”

Incoherent as this explanation was, Nelson had successfully engineered a policy that formally permitted professors to indoctrinate their students. This remains the policy of the AAUP and faculty throughout the liberal arts academy today. In short, I had to face the reality that my seven year campaign to restore the concept of academic freedom as defined by the AAUP in its 1915 Declaration had led to the formal repudiation of its principles by the same organization.

Part I of the present volume is an essay selected because it frames the subject, a practice I have adopted in previous volumes. It is an edited version of the introduction to The Professors, a book I wrote in 2005 about the unprofessional classroom attitudes of over 100 prominent professors. In the controversy generated by the book, the substance of this introduction was completely ignored. Not a single response from my academic opponents addressed the substantive critiques contained in its text.

Part II recounts my experiences on college campuses in the five years preceding the creation of the Academic Bill of Rights, along with my observations regarding the decline of academic discourse under pressures from the academic left.

Part III describes my campaign for an Academic Bill of Rights. This document was a codification of the principles set forth in the 1915 Declaration. It was inspired by the idea that if professors have an obligation to act professionally in the classroom, then students have a right to expect a professional instruction; in particular, to hear fair-minded presentations of divergent views on controversial issues, along with the freedom to draw their own conclusions.

Part IV continues the account of the campaign for an Academic Bill of Rights and describes the attacks against it by the American Association of University Professors, the American Federation of Teachers, and faculty senates like the one at Penn State.

Part V recounts the controversies surrounding two of the books I wrote, The Professors and Indoctrination U., and more of my failed attempts to persuade the academic community of their obligation to present contested issues as controversial and to observe a professional decorum in the classroom.

I have concluded the text with an epilogue containing a proposal for reforming universities and re-establishing standards of instruction in the classroom. I wrote this proposal in 2010, before the AAUP eviscerated the Penn State academic freedom policy. I did not publish it then because I knew that any proposal associated with me would be dead in the water because of the war the AAUP had declared on all my efforts, however modest and reasonable. I publish it now because I have given up any hope that universities can institute such a reform. The faculty opposition is too devious and too strong; and even more importantly there is no conservative will to see such reforms enacted. Therefore there seems to be no harm in publishing the document now, and it does serve to clarify my goals in undertaking my campaign.

As in all these volumes, the texts have been edited for clarity and readability, and are printed—with the exception of the opening essay—in chronological order, so as to provide insight into the progress of the campaign.

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Table of Contents

When I began the project of describing this movement in the 1980s, the emergence of the left as a mainstream force in Amer­ica’s political life was fairly recent and inadequately understood. Conservatives in particular often failed to appreciate the anti-American animus of the left and its apocalyptic goals. At the same time, conservatives imprudently accepted the left’s deceptive claims to be “liberal” and “progressive,” ascribing to it idealistic intentions that masked its malignant designs. The contents of these volumes were conceived as a corrective to these false and disarming impressions. This is the ninth and final volume of my writings about progressivism, a movement whose goals are the destruc­tion of America’s social contract at home and the defeat of American power abroad.

The primary source of this confusion is the fact that left-wing politics are based on expectations of an imaginary future rather than assessments of a usable past. The left’s primary focus is not on practical improvements based on an analysis of previous prac­tices, or a conception of the limits imposed by human nature, but on changes designed to satisfy the moral prejudices that make up the leftist faith.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the left’s quest for “equality,” which is the organizing principle of its “transformative” propos­als. Equality before the law is a foundational principle of American democracy and its pluralistic community. But this is not the equality proposed by the left, which demands instead an unrealiz­able and destructive equality of outcomes. In the real world human inequalities of talent, intelligence, physical attributes and application are immutable facts of life, which result in inequalities of wealth and power. The seeds of social inequality are planted in the human genome and are nourished by disparate cultures, which include circumstances of birth and upbringing that governments cannot control. Attempts to establish such control have invariably resulted in the most repressive regimes in human history, and in the end have failed to produce either equality or wealth.

The ideal of an egalitarian future is doomed to failure because it is unanchored in any human reality. It is sustained as an ideal because it allows advocates to regard themselves as revolutionary pioneers of a “better world.” It further prompts believers to devalue the present and dismiss the past, which allows them to distance themselves from the destructive results of their social experiments. Thus progressives habitually dismiss the disasters they have engineered, however epic in scope, by attributing the monstrous results to inadvertent “mistakes,” when they were in fact the logical consequences of their Utopian ideas.

When the Soviet socialist system collapsed, progressives cre­ated an artificial distinction between the ideal, which they called “real socialism,” and the disaster, which they called “actually existing socialism.” This allowed them to avoid any recognition of their role in the human catastrophe they had supported and served for generations. Consequently, the experience had no lessons for progressives because in their self-absolving view it wasn’t “real socialism.” This delusion has now been passed to the next genera­tions as a result of the left’s infiltration of America’s educational system and its transformation into a training and recruitment cen­ter for collectivist causes and ideas.^[1]

The current term leftists use to describe their Utopian vision of the future is “social justice” rather than communism or socialism.

The new name is part of a familiar process by which the left attempts to shed the disasters of its past. One would be hard-put to distinguish the goals encapsulated by “social justice” from the communist attitudes of previous generations. Like communism, “social justice” is a promise of harmony and redemption. Like communism it describes a future in which inequality, poverty, big­otry and the timeless corruptions of the human spirit are miracu­lously rectified by political parties and the state. Like communism, “social justice” requires for its realization a remake of humanity. Like communism, therefore, it can only be achieved through the destruction of individual freedom, and the thwarting of normal human desires and interests in order to achieve an allegedly greater social good.

The bloody history of progressive experiments during the 20th century should have buried the illusion that human beings can be transformed into creatures radically different from what they have been for the five thousand years in which their actions have been recorded. Human societies are reflections of the human beings who create them, not the other way around. Inequality, bigotry, hypocrisy and greed are elements of a genome that thousands of years of evolution have failed to alter or repair. As a result, progres­sive states dedicated to “social justice” have flooded the earth with the corpses of innocents who stood in their way, and created poverty and misery on an unprecedented scale. Yet the religious fantasy of a liberated future persists to this day among an alarming array of constituencies, and the left’s assault on individual free­dom proceeds as though these historical tragedies had never taken place.

The tenacity of the progressive illusion and its imperviousness to experience are natural effects of its religious nature. The solace provided to believers through hope in a redeemed future is as existentially crucial as a belief in God or in life after death. It makes relinquishing the illusion as devastating as a loss of religious faith. How else explain the persistence of a fantasy that has proven so destructive?

Since the industrial revolution, the progressive illusion has been encouraged by advances in technology that might seem to augur human possibility without limit. Yet to date these advances, however impressive, have not led to dramatic improvements in human behavior—specifically its moral dimensions—let alone the degree of improvement that Utopian visions require. Meanwhile, the same advances have produced new technologies of totalitarian control along with vastly amplified means of destruction that serve to magnify human barbarism and put into question the very survival of civilization.

Half a century ago Friedrich Hayek described “social justice” as a mirage. Hayek observed that there is no entity called “society” to redistribute wealth, or to re-calibrate the social order. There are only individuals belonging to political factions that vie for power and then wield it through their power in the state.^[2] “Social jus­tice,” therefore, is necessarily the work of individuals driven by the same greed, prejudice, and habits of deceit that created the injustices progressives propose to repair. In its real-world practice “social justice” is, and can only be, the self-justifying rationale of a new despotism—worse than the old because its first agenda is a war against freedom, in particular the freedom of individuals to resist the social redeemers and their plans.

This was the conclusion I reached forty years ago under the influence of Hayek and the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski, and why I resolved to devote the second half of my life—and eventually the nine volumes of this work—to analyzing and opposing this destructive cause.

Part One of this concluding volume features three essays on themes which have more or less defined my life’s work. “The Fate of the Marxist Idea” originated as a chapter in The Politics of Bad Faith (1998). It is composed of two letters to former comrades announcing my break with the left, and explaining the reasons why anyone concerned about humanity or justice should do the same. The first letter was written to Carol Pasternak Kaplan, a childhood friend whose father Morris was a cell leader in the local Communist Party. The second was written to Ralph Miliband, my political mentor and friend, as well as father of David Miliband, a future British Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, and of Ed Miliband, a future leader of the British Labour Party.

In the quarter-century since I published these reflections, there have been no attempts by progressives to answer them. This would be explicable if leftists considered my views unworthy of their attention. But that is not the case. I have been the subject of unflattering feature profiles in leftwing magazines such as The Nation and Tablet, and in papers of record (also on the left) such as The New York Times, the Chronicle of Higher Education and The Washington Post. The Internet is a repository of tens of thousands of leftist posts, including entire websites, filled with anti-Horowitz abuse. What is lacking is an intellectual argument to refute my views and specifically my reasons for rejecting the left; or reference to a historical record that would provide a critical response to the case I have made.^[3]

“Slavery and the American Idea” is about the destructive ends to which progressive aspirations lead, in particular the determina­tion to destroy the American social contract and the constitu­tional system that supports it. Race has been a primary weapon in this attack, which is why Volume 6 in this series is devoted to the subject. This essay attempts to retrieve the historical record and celebrate the America Idea, which is responsible for ending slavery and encapsulates the vision that is opposed to all the destructive themes documented in these volumes. “Slavery and the American Idea” first appeared as the concluding chapter of Uncivil Wars, an account of the 2001 controversy I provoked by opposing the demand for reparations more than a century after slavery was abol­ished. It has been edited for inclusion in this volume.^[4]

These two ideas—the American and the Marxist—may be said to constitute an ideological thesis and antithesis of the modern world. The resolution of the conflict between them will shape the course of human freedom for generations to come.

“America’s Second Civil War” locates the source of the deep division of America’s political life in the adoption of “identity pol­itics” as the left’s “progressive” creed. In this extension of Marx’s faulty model of domination and oppression, the left is now com­mitted to a political crusade that is racist and collectivist, and thus the antithesis of the principles that are the cornerstones of Amer­ica’s social contract.

“The Two Christophers” is an effort to define the parameters of the left through an essay on the life and thought of radical contrar­ian Christopher Hitchens, whom I first met in England in the 1960s and befriended in the last years of his life. Some have regarded Christopher’s intellectual path as similar to mine because of his support for America’s war in Iraq, and his belated recogni­tion of the virtues of a country with which he was once at war. This is an unwarranted reading of Christopher’s odyssey. In reflecting on Christopher’s political course, I have attempted to show how utopianism and the romantic idea of a revolutionary transformation continued to shape his political choices and kept him from having consistent (or even coherent) second thoughts. His political trajectory clearly marks the differences between us, and allows me to measure the distance I traveled in leaving the left. It thus provides a way to understand what it means to be the kind of progressive examined in these volumes, so it may function as a useful guide to the great schism of our times.

Part Two of Ruling Ideas provides several aids for readers of my work. The first is an account of my life and work by my friend and colleague, Dr. Jamie Glazov, appropriately the son of a courageous Soviet dissident. Dr. Glazov’s article is an updated version of an essay that first appeared as the introduction to Left Illusions, an earlier collection of my writings published in 2003. Dr. Glazov’s account is both accurate and insightful, and will be a helpful guide to those interested in my work.

The second is a bibliography of my writings compiled by Mike Bauer, who has also provided invaluable help in editing all the texts in this series.

Finally, David Landau, who has copy-edited and indexed the entire series, has also prepared a summary index to all nine volumes.

^[1]See Volume 8 in this series, The Left In The University. Cf. also https://www.nas.org/projects/making_citizens_report/the_report

^[2]Friedrich von Hayek, Law Legislation and Liberty: The Mirage of Social Justice, Univ. of Chicago Press, 1976

^[3]In fact I have on occasion invited academic leftists into the pages of Frontpagemag.com to construct such arguments. But the exercise has merely demonstrated their inability to do so. This was the case with left­ist historian Kevin Mattson, the author of Rebels All!, a book which describes me as a seminal figure of the modern right, an exemplar of “the post-modern conservative intellectual.” Unfortunately, Mattson was incapable of getting the most basic elements of my conservative views straight, and was uninterested in correcting his mistakes when they were pointed out to him. See “Getting This Conservative Wrong,” in Volume 1 of this series, pp. 121 et seq.

^[4]Volume 6 of this series, Progressive Racism, contains an account of my conflict with the left over reparations and the American idea.

Table of Contents

Introduction to Ruling Ideas…………………………………..i

Part I…………………………………………………………………….9

• The Fate of the Marxist Idea…………………………….1
• Slavery and the American Idea……………………….87
• America’s Second Civil War…………………………..129
• The Two Christophers
  (or, The Importance of Second Thoughts)……..139

Part Two…………………………………………………………….187

• The Life and Work of David Horowitz
  (an essay by Jamie Glazov)…………………………..189
• End Note by David Horowitz…………………………229
• The Writings of David Horowitz
  (a bibliography by Mike Bauer)………………………231
• Index for Volume IX, Ruling Ideas…………………..287
• Summary Index for The Black Book of the
• American Left (by David Landau)…………………..303

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