The Professors

By David Horowitz --FrontPageMag.com--04/21/05My campaign for academic freedom has roused up a storm of unprincipled opposition from the academic left. Although the campaign is based on the academic freedom tradition of the American Association of University Professors extending back to 1915 it has been compared by its opponents – including the current leadership of the AAUP and the American Federation of Teachers -- to the “red scare” and the “ McCarthy witch-hunt ” and even Mao Zedong's purge of Communist Party officials during the “ Cultural Revolution .”
The hysterical nature of these accusations should be sufficient in themselves to demonstrate the bad faith of the opposition. The “red scare” was, in fact, a police roundup of terrorist suspects after American anarchists sent 100 mail bombs to targets earmarked for assassination, including the attorney general of the United States . The McCarthy “witch-hunt” targeted members of a conspiratorial Communist Party which is now known through the opening of the Soviet archives to have been conducting extensive espionage against the United States. Mao's cultural revolution resulted in the disappearances and deaths of Communist Party officials and intellectuals who failed to follow his political diktats.
Likening the campaign for academic freedom to such historical events is to employ precisely the political tactics its opponents claim to deplore. The academic freedom campaign is in fact an effort to end blacklists and the imposition of intellectual orthodoxies and does not target any party or political persuasion. The Academic Bill of Rights is not about Republicans and Democrats or liberals and conservatives. It is about restoring the integrity of the academic process, and about determining what is and is not appropriate to an academic classroom.
The campaign for an Academic Bill of Rights is not even about legislative measures to address these problems. Legislation became a last resort only when faculty organizations like the AAUP refused to discuss protecting students against these abuses and set itself against university reform. The AAUP took this position despite the fact that these provisions were drawn from the AAUP's own academic freedom guidelines.
On the other hand, when university administrators have shown a readiness to step forward to discuss the provisions of the Academic Bill of Rights in good faith, as happened in Colorado , legislators withdrew the Bill in favor of a “ Memorandum of Understanding ” under which all provisions are implemented by the university without legislative intervention. This was a victory of the academic freedom campaign, but it has been cynically reported as a “defeat” by its opponents.
Another dishonest tactic of the opposition has been to seize the slightest ambiguity in the information we have been gathering in order to discredit the idea that there is any problem at all. The most prominent example of this strategy involved a final exam question in a criminology course given at the University of Northern Colorado . We had drawn attention to this case to show that a fundamental principle of academic freedom – the distinction between education and indoctrination – had been ignored. Among the vigilantes who pounced on our story to discredit it were writers for The Cleveland Plain Dealer, Media Matters.com the Associated Press and the Greeley Tribune , a local Colorado paper whose readership includes the University of Northern Colorado community.
This incident called into question a final exam in a criminology course taken by a University of Northern Colorado sophomore . It was one of hundreds of stories we had gathered and one of dozens that I regularly referred to in my speeches and articles. The merited attention because it was dramatic and easily understood. The student reported to us in late 2003 that she had been required to answer a “question” on her final exam that instructed students to “Explain why George Bush is a war criminal.” The test was administered approximately three weeks after the fall of Baghdad in early May 2003. In responding to the instruction, the student explained instead why she thought Saddam Hussein was a war criminal and was given an “F.”
When we initially reported this story, and throughout the academic year 2003-2004, we did not disclose the name of the student, since she was too frightened to come forward and asked us to protect her anonymity. (We did not know the name of the professor, and would not have reported it at the time in any case. Our purpose was not to indict individuals but to show the existence of a problem.) After receiving her failing grade on the exam, the student had submitted her case to a university appeals process, and – according to her testimony -- her grade was subsequently raised. The university will not make any statement about the result of the process, except to say that the student's final grade was a “B.”
For almost a year, the Colorado exam case was one of a number of examples I used in speeches and articles to deplore the tendency of faculty ideologues use their classroom authority to indoctrinate students, betraying their academic responsibilities in the process. Then two incidents occurred to draw attention to this case. The first was the surfacing of Ward Churchill who put a face on the faculty members I was alluding to, as it happened at a Colorado University . Churchill was an academic so extreme in his viewpoints, and so unscholarly in his temperament that no one would have been surprised if he had actually imposed on his own classes an exam like the one in question. The second development was the sponsoring of an Academic Freedom Bill by a member of the Senate in Ohio .
With few exceptions the Ohio press was hostile to the Academic Bill of Rights, treating it as a threat to professorial speech, even though it was a perfectly liberal document drawn from the very canons of academic freedom devised by the American Association of University Professors. In every state, editorial writers and reporters mostly followed the talking points of AAUP spokesmen opposing the bill. In its headline describing the Bill, for example, the Cleveland Plain Dealer , typically misrepresented the academic freedom legislation as introducing new restrictions into professorial speech, even though its purpose was quite the opposite -- to introduce intellectual diversity into the curriculum and to encourage open and respectful dialogue in the classroom.
In addition to its slanted headline and story, the Plain Dealer also published an op-ed piece by a leftwing professor. Mano Singham , who suggested that I had made the whole Colorado incident up -- the student, the exam and the professor. To be fair I had made this line of attack possible by mistakenly referring to the case as one that had come up at legislative hearings held in Colorado in December 2003. It had actually been referred to in a second round of legislative hearings in September 2004, when Kay Norton, the President of the University of Northern Colorado mentioned it.
In his Plain Dealer column, Professor Singham claimed to have contacted the provost of the University and the political science department (even though it was a criminology exam in the Sociology Department). “They had never heard of this story,” he wrote in his column, “and were all surprised to hear that they were supposedly harboring this fiend. To jump to his conclusion, Singham simply ignored the testimony by president Norton and failed to contact the appropriate department.
A leftwing smear site, called MediaMatters, jumped on the case and alleged that inventing the facts was a pattern of mine and of the campaign for academic freedom. A leftwing education site, InsideHigherEd.com, then reported these malicious speculations under the headline, “The Poster Child Who Can’t Be Found,” which was two misleading insinuations in one. First, the student had never been a “poster child” for our campaign, but was only one of the many cases we had posted on our website at www.studentsforacademicfreedom.org. Second, the only reason the student couldn’t be found was that no one had really looked for her (or asked us to find her). To be fair, InsideHigherEd.com did report my objections to the thrust of its story, and my offer to locate the student and retract the story should it prove wrong. But this did not deter MediaMatters hundreds of leftwing blogsites hostile to the academic freedom campaign from spreading the “story” of our invented incident across the Internet. Nor did it prompt InsideHigherEd to correct its own story when further information proved it fundamentally wrong.Meanwhile reports of our allegedly invented incident spread like wildfire across the web on leftwing blogsites hostile to the academic freedom campaign itself.
With our story under siege, I had my staff contact the student who was on spring break and ask her for the name of the professor, which turned out to be Robert Dunkley, as well as additional information about the criminology class in question. I published the new information, and demanded an apology. In doing so I misjudged the bad faith of the opposition, which ignored the evidence that validated our story and selectively used other information we provided – in particular the name of the professor -- to escalate the attacks.
Scott Jaschik, editor of InsideHigherEd.com called both the university and Professor Dunkley, and wrote a story without checking his claims with us. The result was the most damaging report yet.
Titled, “ Tattered Poster Child ” (thus repeating the false claim that this was a singular case) the Jaschik story reported first that Dunkely, was not a “wild-eyed liberal” (implying that we had said he was) but a Republican. In fact our academic freedom campaign was never about leftwing abuses as opposed to right wing abuses. It was about academic abuses without regard for viewpoint. I had never identified Dunkley as a liberal and I have in fact defended liberal students against conservative professors who have targeted them for indoctrination. For the record we have scoured the election roles and Republican Party contribution records and can find no evidence that Dunkley is telling the truth even in this trivial matter. But even if Dunkely were a Republican I would still have defended this student against him.
Jaschik's article further reported that the famous exam question was not “required,” as the student had claimed, and that the student got a “B” grade not an “F” as we reported. Finally, he reported that according to Dunkley and the university spokeswoman, the text of question itself was different from what we had said it was.
These were serious charges. The only bright lining for us was that the new exam question that Dunkely provided to Jaschik was very close to the one we had reported and thus was also a clear case of indoctrination. This prompted me to make a serious tactical mistake.