University

Of Rights and Character Assassination: A Review of Indoctrination U

From Magic City Morning Star

By Bernard Chapin

Should Conservadom, in the spirit of positive reinforcement, ever decide to create awards for its most valuable commentators, it is quite likely that David Horowitz will be summoned to the podium each and every year until the time of his death. Few other figures have so resolutely, and creatively, battled the left over the course of the past two decades. His ingenuity, zeal and sense of humor are apparent in the titles of his works, such as How to Beat the Democrats and Other Subversive Ideas, The Art of Political War and Other Radical Pursuits, and Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes. His careful and inflammatory choice of wording is again discernible in his latest release, Indoctrination U: The Left’s War Against Academic Freedom. The book is essentially a postscript to last year’s The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America as it provides an antidote to the toxins disseminated by the 101 pseudo-scholars detailed within.

[Read more…]

A Review of Indoctrination U

by admin

No Shock, Just Facts: Liberal Indoctrination on Campus

By C. Chumley
May 01, 2007
Originally published at HumanEvents.com

“Cream pie,” writes David Horowitz, in his latest exposé of malfeasance in higher education, is “deeply … sexual.”

Well, not really.

Not all in one place, anyway. “Cream pie” comes from page 20, “deeply,” from page 41, and “sexual,” page 37.

But the book isn’t titled “Indoctrination U: The Left’s War Against Academic Freedom” for nothing. And if the standards set by the nation’s intellectual elite might be stretched outside the classroom — and their guiding principle of “no higher principle, except for that which furthers personal political bias and politically charged correctness” might be applied in these outer arenas — then most certainly, to some, David Horowitz believes in the aphrodisiac powers of cream pie.

[Read more…]

One Party Classroom Reviews

by admin

By David Horowitz and Jacob Laksin
REVIEWED BY J. PETER FREIRE

The Washington Times – Sunday, March 15, 2009

The university has become an easy rhetorical target for any right-of-center journalist eager to write a column about outrageous behavior at universities. But few are able to draw the link between the partisanship of higher education and the decline of American intellectual culture. Few, that is, aside from David Horowitz and Jacob Laksin, whose “One Party Classroom” has just arrived in bookstores.

Compiling a veritable enemies list of the top 150 most radical classes in American course catalogs, the book is broken down into 12 chapters, each focusing on a particular school. The range is telling. Some are large state schools such as Penn State, while some are elite private schools, such as Columbia University. Every chapter begins with the history of the school’s radical curricula, then presents an annotated course catalogue. In this way, the authors show that these are not the consequence of administrative oversight, but rather the result of an effort to explicitly use the classroom as a platform for political advocacy.

“One Party Classroom” doesn’t focus so much on the individual classroom, but rather the environmental factors that make these radical classes possible. Mr. Horowitz and Mr. Laksin’s first chapter is the most damning, describing at length the Duke lacrosse rape case in which a group of Duke lacrosse players was found guilty of raping an exotic dancer, not in court, but by 88 university professors in a highly publicized statement. The only evidence the professors needed was the students’ own white skin.

This may seem like hyperbole, until you read the statements of professors like Houston Baker, professor of English, and African and African-American studies, who found this an example of “abhorrent sexual assault, verbal racial violence, and drunken white male privilege loosed against us.” English professor Karla Halloway actually published an academic paper in which she explained that justice “has an attendant social construction,” that is, the authors note, a “bias toward white male privilege.” Joined by professor Mark Anthony Neal from the Department of African and African-American Studies, among others, she moves on to make the case that the courtroom is hardly the right place to seek justice for white students’ trespasses.

Compiling these statements from the faculty is only the first step. The authors point out that the flawed logic of these professors has only been rewarded and deemed authoritative by universities all too willing to sponsor these views in classes. A professor who signed the statement damning the lacrosse players is the professor of “Attacking ‘White Supremacy’ and Global Capitalism.” Another seminar, “To Be a Problem,” includes a self-description of the professor as a “queer black trouble-maker” who asks students to consider the black community as an “outcast community.” In another program titled “Marxism and Society,” no critiques of Marxism are offered.

It is on this point where Mr. Horowitz and Mr. Laksin make their strongest case. The problem in schools isn’t simply the propaganda on offer in assigned readings. The real problem is that the radical ideologies that govern these courses also prohibits dissent. Students taking a class on Marxism will complete their requirements without ever having to think critically about it. Indeed, professors seem only to have been encouraged by their employers to teach classes that fail to draw upon a variety of opinions. The threat is not that students will find themselves converted into active Marxists as a result of a course (even if that is the stated goal). The problem is that students will leave a classroom professing to know something about which they really know nothing.

It turns out that the professors don’t know much either, thanks to the blurred line that divides academia and advocacy. As Mr. Horowitz and Mr. Laksin examine the credentials of professors, they notice a trend of underqualified political activists making their way into prominent universities.

At the University of Colorado at Boulder, for instance, Ward Churchill’s plagiarism was definitely proved by a faculty committee in a 125-page report, yet he wasn’t dismissed until two years after his statement that the victims of the World Trade Center bombing were “little Eichmanns.” Other professors claim to have published works “pending,” but these items have held that status for several years. Still others have only published rants scribbled in gibberish, or edited a volume of essays including none or little of their own work.

These examples betray an academic unseriousness, a conscious decision to pursue a reputation not for scholarly work but scintillating political insights. This theme runs through the book, as many more professors who claim they can’t help but view their scholarship as a means to advocate their politics. The departments they’ve created, or at least the ones they’ve come to dominate, are ones not trying to properly enlighten, but to politically embolden.

By focusing on the coursework, the authors provide a handy reference that represents the activist drift of college faculty. What is left to the imagination, and thankfully so, is the impact on students. Actually, it’s not left entirely to the imagination: Every chapter heading is accompanied by the cost of tuition.

The only shortcoming of the book is that Mr. Horowitz and Mr. Laksin find too much of a villain in the truly wacky American Association of University Professors. The organization, which sets standards for professorial conduct, has consistently lowered those standards from a time where professors were expected to consistently provide multiple viewpoints. The authors argue that their failure to do so has led to similarly lax standards among department heads and university administrators. But the AAUP doesn’t set wages or determine funding. The organizations through which professors come to stand at the lectern are universities, ones that have been allowed to go for far too long without enforcing standards that can only raise the bar.

It should be assumed that the reason the authors don’t pursue this point is probably for the sake of brevity. Making such a case means suggesting revamping the entire university system. But when confronted with such egregious examples as those offered by Mr. Horowitz and Mr. Laksin, one can’t help but wonder whether radical change is the only thing that can truly do away with the radical (and grossly unqualified) professors.

• J. Peter Freire is managing editor of The American Spectator.

Reforming Our Universities Reviews

by admin

Dec 20, 2010 | By Peter Wood

This review was originally published here by FrontPage Magazine.

Why doesn’t David Horowitz give up? That question will occur to most readers well before they reach the end of his new book. Reforming Our Universities: The Campaign for an Academic Bill of Rights (Regnery, 2010) is a narrative of frustration, disappointment, resurgent optimism, further defeat, and finally the rescuing of small consolation from the wreckage of high hope. For his trouble, Horowitz endures vilification piled on calumny; gets to see his olive branches to the academic Left treated as though they were curare-tipped arrows; and secures the support of allies that range from faint-hearted Chihuahuas to politically clueless puppies.

So why doesn’t Horowitz give up? For the publication of this volume is ample proof that he hasn’t. And though Horowitz has much to complain about, Reforming Our Universities seems untouched by self-pity. He has indignation to spare, but the spirit of this narrative of his six-year campaign to persuade American universities to embrace fair-minded intellectual inquiry is the spirit of undaunted determination.

The “Academic Bill of Rights” itself is a 400-word eight-point list that is so blandly wholesome it could also be printed on the side of a grass-fed organic milk carton. Who would really object to universities hiring faculty members “on the basis of their competence and appropriate knowledge in the field of their expertise,” (article one) committing themselves not to exclude people on the basis of their “political or religious beliefs” from tenure and search committees (article two)? Who would think it seriously amiss to declare, as article three declares, that students “be graded solely on the basis of their reasoned answers and appropriate knowledge of the subjects and disciplines they study, not on the basis of their political or religious beliefs”?

Those aren’t rhetorical questions. The American Historical Association adopted a unanimous resolution, January 9, 2006, condemning the “so-called” Academic Bill of Rights on the grounds that it would transfer important academic decisions to “government authorities and other agencies,” “violate academic freedom,” and “undermine professional standards.” That is a highly imaginative reading of the document that Horowitz was promoting. The Academic Bill of Rights says nothing about changing the locus of decision-making authority; and it leaves traditional notions of academic freedom and professional standards intact.

The AHA condemnation was but one cobble in the fusillade. The Modern Languages Association and the American Library Association made similar pronouncements. Other organizations engaged in even greater belligerence. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) undertook what can only be called campaigns of systematic calumny against both Horowitz and the Academic Bill of Rights. At the center of these campaigns was the attempt to depict Horowitz as a fabulist and a liar who had simply invented the stories he used to illustrate why students need to have some recourse when their professors substitute ideological indoctrination for disciplined inquiry.

Horowitz became vulnerable to this charge because he sought the testimony of students who had had first-hand experience with thuggishly ideological professors. An honors student at Georgia Tech, Ruth Malhotra, for example, suddenly started receiving Fs and was forced to withdraw from a public policy class after she revealed to the professor that she was attending the Conservative Political Action Conference. With Horowitz’s help, Malhotra brought her case to the public, and the University, which had initially sided with the professor, backed down. The course was reassigned to anther instructor and Malhotra finished it with an A.

That incident stands out because all the people involved were publicly identified; but in other cases, students spoke only on condition that their names and identifying circumstances be kept confidential. A student at the University of Northern Colorado came forward with an account of a criminology professor who gave her a failing grade in 2003 on a final exam because she refused to answer a question that demanded that she “Explain why George Bush is a war criminal.” She explained instead why Saddam Hussein was a war criminal. As it happens, the name of the professor, Robert Dunkley, eventually came out and, though had destroyed the exams in question, he recalled that he did ask a question along the lines of, “Make the argument that the military action of the US attacking Iraq was criminal.”

The details are worth repeating because the incident became the opening wedge in the AAUP’s effort to discredit Horowitz. An AAUP professor wrote a column in the Cleveland Plain Dealer asserting that neither the student nor the professor existed. He characterized the student as “the poster child” for Horowitz’s movement, and the claim was quickly echoed by Media Matters and Inside Higher Ed where the editor Scott Jaschik opined on “The Poster Child Who Can’t Be Found.” Jaschik’s commentary was particularly galling to Horowitz, who reports that the editor “had already investigated the story and knew very well that the student and the professor existed, and that I was the target of a campaign whose sole purpose was to discredit our efforts.”

Reforming Our Universities is chock-a-block with this kind of detail and Horowitz has the wisdom to report it without much in the way of expostulation. This is a story about the petty lies and misrepresentations on the part of partisans of the academic left adding up to an Appalachian Trail of Deception. Eventually the attack on the Academic Bill of Rights was probably better known to most academics than the bill itself. It got the rap of being some kind of trick whereby state legislatures would muscle aside faculties to impose “affirmative action for conservatives.” If this were indeed Horowitz’s intended trick, he ought to have changed his name to Houdini. There really is no plausible reading of the Academic Bill of Rights that bears this interpretation. A document that begins by declaring that no faculty member should be hired, fired, promoted, or granted tenure on the basis of “his or her political or religious beliefs” is simply not a mandate for hiring conservatives to the faculty or displacing liberals.

This does, however, leave a residue of questions. What is so threatening about the Academic Bill of Rights to left-leaning American academics that they would pursue such bitter opposition to a document that mostly just recapitulates the abiding principles of the secular research university? Even if they were disposed to attack it out of spite towards its author, why the exceptional vehemence of this campaign? Horowitz ventures his own answers in a concluding chapter: “The scorched earth campaign against us would be understood only if our opponents felt it necessary to defend the practices—indoctrination and political proselytizing in the classroom—that the Academic Bill of Rights and our campaign were designed to prevent.”

In other words, bad faith. Horowitz’s opponents never defend those practices openly. Rather, they deny such practices exist and characterize the Academic Bill of Rights as “a solution in search of a problem.” The AAUP under its current president Cary Nelson has been exceptionally duplicitous in this fashion. Nelson is candid about his Marxist orthodoxy, including his belief that everything is fundamentally political and that there is no reason why the classroom shouldn’t enjoy the benefits of being a stage for progressive activists attempting to win converts to their cause. But this isn’t the AAUP’s argument when it puts on its Sunday clothes and goes over to the state house to lobby. In that setting, it is a Puritanical upholder of the divine law of academic freedom. “Academic freedom,” of course, can mean many things, and the AAUP has been busy in the last few years turning it into a “head-I-win-tails-you-lose” doctrine. Heads, it is my intellectual freedom to bring politics into the classroom; tails, don’t you dare try to bring your politics into my classroom.

Horowitz surely has the right answer here, or at least a large part of the right answer. Academic freedom is about searching for the truth and requires disciplined even-handedness when dealing with matters that “reflect the uncertainty and the unsettledness of all human knowledge” in the humanities and social sciences. We achieve that by “providing students with dissenting sources and viewpoints where appropriate.” That’s an eloquent summary of the disinterestedness required of fair-minded teachers—and it is from article four of the Academic Bill of Rights.

Horowitz did, of course, find friends and allies along the way. Legislators in Colorado, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Georgia took an interest. Some introduced bills that encouraged colleges and universities to adopt Horowitz’s proposal. He also got support from a handful of university officials and trustees around the country, and some support from the leadership of organizations that promote reform in higher education, including the National Association of Scholars. Steve Balch, the chairman of NAS testified to the Pennsylvania legislature in favor of The Academic Bill of Rights. But Horowitz understandably registers disappointment with conservatives, libertarians, Republicans, and higher ed reformers of all stripes. In his view they have made the case many times over that American higher education is sunk in a mire of political correctness. But the reformers seem to do little beyond complain and try to fix things at the margins. Why did they make themselves so scarce when a forthright and powerful instrument of reform was put on the table? And for the few who came forward, why were their efforts so faint?

The indictment of the mainstream conservative movement and the Republicans is clear-cut. They both essentially ceded higher education to the political left and the teachers unions a generation ago and rarely can work up interest on anything other than the cost of tuition and the mismatch between college credentials and the needs of industry. To be sure, those are important matters in their own right, but by focusing exclusively on them, the Right has given enormous power to the Left to shape the worldview, the attitudes, the dispositions, and even the ignorance of generations of Americans. Horowitz is an alarm clock trying to rouse the Right from its cultural torpor.

He is an alarm clock that will not be heard by some, however, simply because he is so alarming. Horowitz talents for sharp-eyed observation, pithy pronouncement, and provocative framing make him awkward company. Even people who agree with his ideas shy from being his battle companion, partly for fear of errant missiles but also out of need to draw their own distinctions and plan their own moves. Horowitz more or less understands this and there are some rather sad moments in the book when he acknowledges that he is most successful when he can erase himself from his own projects.

On reading Reforming Our Universities, I am persuaded that The Academic Bill of Rights didn’t get a fair hearing, but I am less certain about what comes next. I know a good many members of the National Association of Scholars were queasy about it, probably on the mistaken grounds, promoted by the incessant AAUP propaganda, that it was a call for government control and a demand for politically-motivated hiring of conservative scholars. Even if those misimpressions were cleared away, however, Horowitz and other proponents of the Academic Bill of Rights would have to find a new point of departure. I don’t doubt that he has one in mind.

Review of David Horowitz’s The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America

by admin

By Joshua A. Matz

David Horowitz’s campaign against ‘the insularity of a predominantly left-wing academic environment’ achieves its most specific manifestation yet in his latest book, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America. Individually targeting 101 faculty, whom Horowitz characterizes as representative of the American academic-intellectual establishment, the book devotes 364 pages to an alphabetical progression through those radicals who “spew violent Anti-Americanism, preach Anti-Semitism, and cheer on the killing of American soldiers and civilians – all the while collecting tax dollars and tuition fees to indoctrinate our children,” as a blurb for the book states.

These “alleged ex-terrorists, racists, murderers, sexual deviants, anti-Semites, and al-Qaeda supporters” have managed to earn tenure and win the respect of their academic colleagues through a deeply flawed and prejudiced system of higher education. Horowitz devotes most of his book to criticizing individual professors, reserving 55 of 377 pages to explain his motivation and methodology. Relying upon a series of case-studies – of Ward Churchill and Lawrence Summers, among others – Horowitz refers to his critique as “a chilling indictment of an entire system.”

Claiming use of a method similar to prosopography, Horowitz reveals four troublesome patterns in modern institutions of higher education: (1) faculty are promoted far beyond their level of academic achievement on the basis of politically correct scholarship; (2) professors engage in political propaganda while teaching subjects outside their areas of professional or experiential qualification; (3) professors are permitted to make racist and ethnically insulting remarks publicly without any substantial response from administrators, so long as those remarks target unprotected groups (“i.e. Armenians, whites, Christians, and Jews”; (4) Academic discipline and agenda-neutral scholarly inquiry are now subordinated to indoctrinational efforts by professors with overtly political agendas.

His analysis notes that “the radical left has colonized a significant part of the university system and transformed it to serve its political ends.” This takeover of the university was accomplished in the 1970s, he says, when a wave of political activists achieved faculty-level positions at universities across the nation and enlisted the academic institution itself as a weapon in their advocacy for sociopolitical positions. As group-polarization reinforced this left-wing “echo-chamber of approbation,” the university system emerged as a safe-haven for extremists on the radical sociopolitical left. Horowitz notes that liberal and democratic majorities have increased dramatically in recent years relative to the academic advancement of conservatives or republicans, and explicitly argues that these disparities are the result of institutionally-rooted political and ideological discrimination.

Interdisciplinary fields devoted to the study of women, African-Americans, gender and sexuality, social justice, peace, and whiteness occupy a significant role in this historical analysis. These departments were shaped by “narrow, one-sided political agendas” and “attacked American foreign policy and the American military, others America’s self-image and national identity. Taken together, these new realms of academic inquiry provided open forums for political indoctrination, the “recruitment of students to radical causes,” and exploration of radical theories. Unsurprisingly, Horowitz devotes the majority of his individual critiques to faculty well-known in these or related fields.

According to Horowitz, the number of faculty that regularly violate guidelines of academic integrity and freedom is approximately 25,00-30,000. This analysis, which assumes that five percent of all college and university faculty (of whom there are 617,000 in the United States) are “radical,” suggests that literally millions of students face the indoctrination each year of dangerous and anti-intellectual ideas. These professors have abandoned a ‘liberal philosophy of education, where the professional responsibility of educators is to elevate students’ ability to think, not hand them the correct opinions.”

The roots of this problem run deep, but one of the primary causes identified by Horowitz is the so-called “Revolution by Search Committee.” Noting that department chairs and other tenured faculty play a dominant role in the university hiring process, and observing a fortiori that these individuals are rarely answerable to any higher administrative authority, Horowitz decries the subversion of this review process for partisan ends. Quoting a number of conservative faculty who claim to have witnessed discrimination on the basis of sociopolitical beliefs in the course of such tenure-review or hiring processes, Horowitz asserts more broadly that the entire institutional structure is flawed. In further support of this claim, Horowitz observes that more than 90% of the faculty targeted in his book hold tenure-level professorships at colleges and universities around the country.

Horowitz singles out fourteen history professors for criticism (this number is somewhat subjective, as many of these faculty hold interdisciplinary positions). See below for a list of these individuals and their home institutions. A number of these faculty refused to comment on the book; they indicated they did not want to give his claims legitimacy by responding to them. As noted by Edward Peters, a professor of medieval history at the University of Pennsylvania, “The historical profession … has its own professional standards which include peer review. I don’t think the profession has much noted the concerns of David Horowitz.” Along a similar vein, Regina Austin — a Penn Law professor criticized by Horowitz – responded by affirming that “I have better things to do than worry about this … You can’t let your enemies set your agenda.”

It seems increasingly unlikely, however, that the critiques leveled by Horowitz will simply go away. The book is endorsed by Rep. Jerry Lewis (chairman of the House Appropriations Committee), Stephen and Abigail Thernstrom (Professors at Harvard University), Laura Ingraham (host of the Laura Ingraham Show), and a slew of state senators and representatives. With such politically and intellectually powerful backers, and a public increasingly aware of issues relating to academic freedom (a number of court cases and legislative acts have recently captured media attention), it appears possible that academia may soon be forced to take David Horowitz as seriously as he would like.

Three Responses to Horowitz from Targeted History Faculty

Emma Pérez: Associate Professor, University of Colorado, Boulder (p. 300 of The Professors)

Accusation by Horowitz : Expressing “full and unconditional support of Ward Churchill and his first amendment rights,” and of ideological bias in regard to her scholarship of feminist and Chicana history.

Response: “I’m honored to be on a list with scholars whom I respect for their scholarship as well as their commitment to making the academy a place where divergent opinions can be expressed and debated. Clearly, I’m on the list because I supported my colleague’s first amendment rights; however, my subject position, as a Chicana historian, a feminist and a lesbian, makes me an easy target for those who prefer to silence those whose histories are finally being uncovered. The post-1960s presented a dramatic change in historical research when social history offered a method to “do history from the bottom-up.” The working classes, women and men of wide-ranging races, ethnicities and sexualities could be excavated from documents. Concurrently, college campuses were also changing as diverse racial groups of students and faculty were finally admitted in higher numbers and while those numbers plummet on my own campus, the change is already here. Women’s history, along with other burgeoning fields of study, will continue to mature on college campuses despite the current drive to censure those whom Mr. Horowitz and his supporters find unworthy of constitutional rights.”

Joel Beinin: Professor of Middle Eastern History, Stanford University (p. 52 of The Professors)

Accusation by Horowitz: Supported Saddam Hussein’s aggression against Kuwait, refers to suicide bombers as “martyrs,” and appeared on Al-Jazeera to denounce American “imperialism”

Response : “Mark LeVine has already published a refutation and correction in his History News Network blog in response to the original article by Alyssa Lappen on which this material is based. . I wonder whether, in your review of The Professors, you will comment on the charges made on the book’s dust jacket that the “101 academics … happen to be alleged ex-terrorists, racists, murderers, sexual deviants, anti-Semites, and al-Qaeda supporters.” Of course, I am none of these. Perhaps you should ask Horowitz to explain whether these statements represent his views and whether these are supposed to be facts or merely slurs he feels free to throw around.”

Juan Cole: Professor of History, University of Michigan (p. 100 of The Professors)

Accusation by Horowitz: “Believes that a “pro-Likud” cabal controls the American government from a small number of key positions within the executive branch (p.100)”

Response: “David who?”

List of History Faculty in David Horowitz’s New Book, “The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America”

Marc Becker : Associate Professor of Latin American History, Truman State University

Joel Beinin : Middle Eastern History Professor, Stanford University

Mary Frances Berry : Professor of American Social Thought and History, University of Pennsylvania

Juan Cole : Professor of History, University of Michigan

Angela Davis : Professor of the History of Conscious, UC Santa Cruz

Eric Foner : Profess of History, Columbia University

Yvonne Haddad : Professor the History of Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations, Georgetown University

Caroline Higgins : Professor of Peace, Global Studies, and History, Earlham College

Peter Kirstein : Professor of History, Saint Xavier University

Vinay Lal : Associate Professor of History, UC Los Angeles

Mark Levine: Associate Professor of History, UC Irvine

Manning Marable : Professor of History and Political Science, Columbia University

Joseph Massad : Assistant Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History, Columbia University

Emma Perez : Associate Professor of History, University of Colorado, Boulder

Review of Uncivil Wars

by Jamie Glazov

Uncivil Wars That Can’t Maim a Warrior

A review of Uncivil Wars, which chronicles David Horowitz’ attempts to initiate genuine debate on the dangers of the slavery reparations movement and the U.S. academia’s hostility to any such debate.
THE CONTEMPORARY CONTROVERSY over reparations for slavery lies at the heart of the culture war in America today. David Horowitz, the former Leftwing radical-turned Conservative, has just struck another stunning blow against the Left in his new book, Uncivil Wars. The Controversy Over Reparations For Slavery. He effectively dismantles the arguments for reparations, exposes the totalitarian mindset of the politically correct university campus that bolsters them, and provides a robust defense of American society and institutions.

Today, nowhere is support for reparations stronger than in American institutions of higher learning, where tenured radical academic elites literally control free thought and expression. Indeed, the campus thought police has shut down debate on the reparations issue, demonizing and marginalizing those who dare to trespass the correct political line.

Enter David Horowitz.

In Uncivil Wars, the Conservative intellectual exposes the pitiful state of tolerance in American academia. The book provides a detailed account of how the fascist Left has attempted – unsuccessfully — to prevent Horowitz’s cunning presentation of anti-reparations ideas to university students.

Because Horowitz’s ideas are anti-Left — and therefore not permitted on American campuses or in the curricula of academic courses –- the author realized that he had to try a different tactic (other than writing scholarly work) to get his ideas into American universities. In the winter and spring of 2001, he tried to initiate a dialogue by airing his anti-reparations arguments in an advertisement, titled “Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Blacks Is a Bad Idea for Blacks — and Racist Too,” in college newspapers. This effort resulted in a violent attack on Horowitz and his character, as storm trooper and character assassination tactics were inflicted against him, as well as against the newspapers that carried his ad.

Uncivil Wars provides an account of how many student newspapers refused to carry Horowitz’s ad, while others that did run it quickly caved into the Left’s intimidation tactics, pulled the ad and even denounced themselves Maoist-style. At Berkeley, students stormed the offices of The Daily Californian to demand an apology after the newspaper ran the ad. They got one. At Brown, student protesters threw away thousands of free copies of The Brown Daily Herald, after the paper printed the ad.

In light of this madness, Horowitz decided to go on what he termed his “Freedom Tour,” in which he risked his personal safety by going to college campuses (who would dare have him) to defend his ad. “It was a way,” he writes, “of going `in your face’ to my accusers and emphasizing the issue, free speech, which had now become the heart of the debate.”

Horowitz’s visit to Berkeley epitomized best the Stalinization of the American university campus. He describes his eerie experience:

“I was whisked in through a back entrance to a `holding room’ where I was to stay until my speech. All hallways were secured by uniformed officers so that no stray students might stumble across my path. When I had to leave the holding room briefly to go to the bathroom, I was accompanied by six armed guards who checked the stalls before I was allowed to enter. The experience was surreal. The bracing Berkeley campus of my youth had been replaced in the forty years since I studied there by an atmosphere lacking only bomb-sniffing dogs to complete the sense of menace conveyed to `the Other.’ The only comparison that came to mind was that of a neighborhood once habitable and inviting for evening strollers, which had become occupied by roving thugs.”

The Left’s objective was not just to censor Horowitz’s ideas, but, in the tradition of totalitarians, to erase the individual behind them. Horowitz notes,“My opponents’ agenda in this controversy was not to refute the ideas the ad contained, but to obliterate the individual who was responsible for them. This had been a classic tactic of twentieth-century totalitarians.”This explains why opponents spent no time addressing the ad on an intellectual level and concentrated only on slandering its author’s character. Horowitz writes,“Despite the ruckus that that the ad had caused, its `Ten Reasons’ had not really been answered, or even addressed. Instead, its opponents had launched a vitriolic attack on the character of those who stood in their path.”The vitriolic attack, which included the typical Leftist accusations of Horowitz being a “racist” and a “fascist”, was made against an individual who had a long public history as an activist for civil rights. He marched in his first civil rights protest before many of his slanderers were even born — more than fifty years ago on behalf of President Truman’s Fair Employment Practices Commission, which outlawed discrimination against blacks in the civil service. He also spent much of his adult life in similar battles for black Americans. Today, he has family that is black, which includes his grandchildren. And yet, because he believes that reparations for slavery will divide America and harm black Americans rather than help them, he is censored and vilified by his political opponents.

Horowitz did, of course, have his many defenders in the reparations controversy. They included the distinguished black scholar Thomas Sowell and the editors of the USA Today, the Boston Globe, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Chicago Tribune, the Arizona Republic, and many other papers. In other words, when it came to the real world outside of academia, sanity and tolerance still prevailed.

After chronicling the Leftist attempt to smother his voice and defame his character, Horowitz goes on to outline meticulously the flaws of the reparations claim. The last chapter, “Reparations and the American Idea,” is a literary masterpiece that belongs in the curriculum of every American History course in the country. In just 32 pages, the author gives a profound and robust defense of America and its institutions. Providing a fresh and shrewd perspective of American history, he de-legitimizes reparations claims for the speciousness and flawed historical perspective on which he shows they are based. He presents us with the facts about the history of world slavery and emphasizes what the reparations proponents consistently ignore: “America’s role in the global tragedy of slave systems involving Africans, while bad enough, was relatively minor compared with the roles of Arabs, Europeans and Africans themselves.”

In making this vital point, Horowitz gets to the core of the matter: the reparations idea is a product of a historical revisionism that seeks to paint America in its most evil light. Thus, the author detects that “The reparations claim is a hostile assault on America and its history.” This is precisely why, as Horowitz shows, reparations advocates always demonize the American Founding Fathers and the framework they created. Horowitz, therefore comes to the defense of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln, protecting them from their slanderers and praising the values and institutions they molded. He reminds us that,“The present government of the United States, which the reparations lawyers propose to hold culpable for the crime of slavery, is lineally descended from the government that fought and bore the costs of the war that ended slavery.”Horowitz follows this point by emphasizing that America has already engaged in massive efforts of compensation to the descendants of slaves. Because of what President Lyndon Johnson initiated in the 1960s, “trillions of dollars were spent in means-tested poverty programs under the Great Society welfare programs. These monies represented a net transfer of more than 1.3 trillion to African-Americans.”

The crucial point to stress here is that these reparations to descendants of slaves, which were designed to compensate African-Americans and to uplift them, ultimately hurt the very people they were designed to help. Horowitz notes,“The welfare programs devised by well-intentioned social reformers not only did not reduce black poverty, but exacerbated and deepened it. This reality poses questions that the reparations claimants do not even begin to address.”The reparations claimants do not address these questions because, unlike some of the social reformers of the previous generation, they are not “well-intentioned.” They are very much aware that reparations will not make things better for the African-Americans for whom they purport to speak. So why do they support reparations? Although Horowitz himself does not specifically say it, his arguments make it clear: because their agenda is ultimately a destructive one that seeks to tear down civil society, not to better it.

It is by no means a surprise, therefore, that Horowitz finds Marxist ideology -– and all the class and racial hatred that comes along with it -– to be the crucial underpinning of the reparations agenda. He writes:“Academic leftists have created a vast corpus of social theory that recasts old Marxist ideas in new `postmodern’ molds and reinterprets the narrative of American freedom as a chronicle of race and class oppression.”In order to dismantle this oppression, therefore, reparations activists work for the destruction of America.

Horowitz looks deep into the reparations argument to isolate and discredit its Marxist lies. He shows that, by trying to blame “discrimination” for the achievement gaps between blacks and other ethnic groups, the Left is spouting only a false ideology — and no kind of science. He reveals that, if anything, the whole Marxist/reparations charade is founded on the belief in the inferiority of the black race, since it robs African-Americans of their own free will. The whole reparations claim, therefore,“Is based on a Marxist race model that divides society into race victimizers and race victims. In this model, the accountable individual disappears into the group, and the members of victim groups are regarded as lacking either the free will or the ability to function as subjects. They are perceived, instead, as the objects of historical forces over which they can have no control. This is a social elitism that denies the equal humanity of those it labels victims. But if three-quarters of all black families in America have managed to raise themselves above the poverty line, then what has prevented the other quarter from doing the same? The answer certainly can’t be racism, because all the parties in question are black.”Horowitz goes on to successfully demonstrate that it is not racial and class oppression that hurts African-Americans, but the breakdown of the black family and the policy of welfare that has encouraged it. This is a truth that instills terror in every Leftist, because it represents a facet of human life that the socialist must stridently deny for the sake of holding on to the progressive faith. By emphasizing the tragedy of the normalization of the single-parent family in the black underclass, the author reveals the crucial importance of individuals making and paying for their own ethical and social decisions. But the Left must run from this basic given about human nature, because otherwise it would have to abandon the fairy tale that holds its vision in place: that social structures, especially those rooted in capitalism, are responsible for all human suffering. The radical utopian dream ultimately cannot accept that humans are incapable of being their own redeemers; it cannot digest the reality that human tragedy, alienation and inequality might be rooted in the human condition –- and in the heart of man.

It becomes understandable, therefore, why the reparations proponents seek to divide and harm America, and intend to do so by instilling class and racial antagonism where it doesn’t exist. Horowitz crystallizes this Leftist objective by demonstrating the incompatibility between pro-reparations arguments and real-life realities. For instance, he shows that only a tiny minority of Americans ever owned slaves and that the majority of Americans today are descended from post-Civil War immigrants who have no relationship to slavery at all. The GNP of black America, meanwhile, is so large that it makes the African-American community the tenth most prosperous “nation” in the world. Thus, he asks the crucial question:“How can you explain to José Martinez, who may have come to this country in the last ten years, and who is struggling to put bread on the table for his family, that he has to pay reparations for an institution that has been dead for more than a hundred years, and which neither he nor his ancestors were ever a part of? How will you tell him that he has to pay those reparations to people like Johnny Cochran and Jesse Jackson who are multimillionaires, or to others who are doing better than he is, simply because they are black?The answer is that you won’t be able to tell José anything of this nature without destroying his faith in America and breeding his resentment against blacks. And that is why Horowitz affirms that, “Anyone should be able to see that the reparations claim is really a prescription for racial division and ethnic strife.”

In the end, Horowitz’s attack on the reparations claim blends with his defense of the American idea and democracy itself. He emphasizes that,“Americans generally do not think of themselves as racists or oppressors, and there is no reason they should. America was a pioneer in the fight against slavery, and in establishing the first multiracial society in human history. During the last half-century, Americans have voted equal rights to African-American citizens and supported massive compensation to African-Americans and others who have lagged behind. To be indicted after such efforts, and in these unrelenting terms, is offensive and insulting. The political logic of the reparations claim itself defies reason.”In presenting these arguments, Uncivil Wars distinguishes itself as a monumentally important work. In coming to the defense of American history and institutions, it crystallizes the urgency of deciphering not only the destructiveness of the reparations campaign, but the nightmarish crisis that exists in American academia. It becomes clear that because the Left is unable to tolerate ideas that are anathema to its own, it has vehemently and ruthlessly worked to dominate and politicize the university campus. In that effort, it has succeeded, and it explains why Conservatives have been virtually driven out of academia. It also explains why, at this present moment, Uncivil Wars will not find itself into the curricula of any academic American history courses in the country.

Uncivil Wars forces all Americans to confront the pathological illness that resides in their institutions of higher learning. While in the 1950s the university saw itself as having the mission of facilitating a diverse pursuit of knowledge, today it serves solely as the Left’s vehicle for political indoctrination and social change. It is here that lies Horowitz’s vital and ominous warning.

Uncivil Wars is also clearly very much a personal story. It is about one man’s decision to become a warrior in a war that, by necessity, exacts a large personal sacrifice. But as an individual who comes from the Left’s former ranks, and who has witnessed the violence and death that the progressive ideology inflicts, Horowitz has clearly discerned that standing on the sidelines in the culture war is a luxury he cannot afford. It is for this reason that, in this work, as in his previous ones, he comes out swinging with the gloves off. The fight for America is on, and, as Uncivil Wars reveals, it is being lost on the university campus. Unlike many of his Conservative contemporaries, the author is ready and willing to go down fighting alone — alongside the American virtues and principles that are now under vicious attack.

Despite its attempt to wipe its arch-rival out of reality, the American Left continues to face its ultimate nightmare: David Horowitz is still standing -– and talking. More troubling to the Left yet: he doesn’t seem like he’s going anywhere anytime soon. On a smaller scale, Horowitz represents to the academic Left what Alexander Solzhenitsyn represented to the Soviet regime; he exemplifies the irritating and threatening reminder to tyranny that human freedom, and the triumph of the human spirit, can ultimately never be suffocated or suppressed.

Uncivil Wars is a remarkable achievement — written by an intellectual heavyweight who has been barred from academia. Tragically, tens of thousands of young minds in American universities will be robbed of the essential necessity of reading this scholarly gem. But the history of totalitarian regimes offers hope. Who could have guessed, after all, during Joseph Stalin’s reign, that, within one generation, for a brief moment in time, Russians would be able to read freely One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich? If that miracle occurred in the midst of the Soviet monstrosity, then who can say that, one day, there may not be a thaw in the Left’s despotic control of thought in American academia? The hope remains that maybe even within a generation, a miracle might occur inside the classrooms of academic indoctrination — and the eyes of university students will, perhaps even for a precious and magical moment, be allowed to fall on the forbidden pages of Uncivil Wars.

Jamie Glazov is Frontpage Magazine’s editor. He holds a Ph.D. in History with a specialty in Russian, U.S. and Canadian foreign policy. He is the author of Canadian Policy Toward Khrushchev’s Soviet Union and is the co-editor (with David Horowitz) of The Hate America Left. He edited and wrote the introduction to David Horowitz’s Left Illusions. His new book is United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny and Terror. To see his previous symposiums, interviews and articles Click Here.