David Horowitz, the former Marxist radical turned right-wing crusader against liberal academia, has been on a roll lately.
First, he helped turn a local flap over University of Colorado at Boulder professor Ward Churchill into a national scandal that ended in the resignation of CU President Hoffman on Monday. Now, he is parlaying the fear and angst over the ethnic studies professor into support for his "Academic Bill of Rights," which the Colorado Legislature and governor recently endorsed. Other state governments, including Ohio and Georgia, have made moves to advance Horowitz's new pet project.
The bill sounds innocent enough: It aims to promote "pluralism, diversity, opportunity, critical intelligence, openness and fairness ... the cornerstones of American democracy" and protect against political or religious indoctrination by professors.
But, for all the lofty ideals espoused in the Academic Bill of Rights, it is essentially a political wedge for Horowitz's far-right political agenda.
Horowitz and his proxy organization, Students for Academic Freedom, have been revving up their campaign against the supposed liberal hegemony on campus through mass e-mails to "news" organizations like GOPUSA.com - the same outfit that backed faux journalist Jeff Gannon.
In a recent e-mail from GOPUSA, Horowitz described a frightening scenario of leftist orthodoxy shoved down the throat of a patriotic student at an unnamed university in Colorado:
Our nation is facing a prolonged and perilous war with international terrorists bent on our destruction. Yet, a class of university students in Colorado - a conservative state - was given a mid-term exam with an essay question that told them to "Explain Why George Bush Is A War Criminal."
When a student taking this exam wrote an essay on "Why Saddam Hussein Is A War Criminal" instead, she was given an "F."
When a response to a question is intended to divert attention from the real issue at hand, that response is classified as a red herring - a logical fallacy in anybody's book.
Imagine you are in an American history class and asked to comment on the causes that led to the Civil War, but instead decide to analyze the causes of the Franco-Prussian War. Would you expect an "A"?
Conservatives will yelp that the exam question itself is ideologically loaded and unfair. This is a serious charge, and one I attempted resolve by calling Horowitz's office.
Given that Horowitz is leading a major campaign to makeover college campuses based on anecdotes like the one described above, I assumed that his office would have ample documentary evidence of the exam, the student and the offending professor.
Yet when I called the Students for Academic Freedom National Coordinator, Sara Dugan, to ask for more information about this case, she told me she could not give me the professor's name, the student's name, or any more information about the exam because, "the student didn't want to come forward." Dugan would only say that the incident took place at the University of Northern Colorado.
Lexis-Nexis queries about the controversy turned up nothing, so I called Ian St.Clair, news editor at The Mirror, the University of Northern Colorado student newspaper and asked him about the story.
"I haven't heard anything about it," St. Clair said.
Any reasonable person would conclude that the mid-term story is apocryphal - an urban myth. But that hasn't stopped conservative intellectuals such as Reed Browning from citing it in the Chronicle of Higher Education as further evidence of the left's preponderance on campus.
Horowitz's self-appointed mission in life is to expose and deconstruct the left in higher education.
"One has to stigmatize the left and isolate it," he said in 1989. He once bought ad space in six college papers to denounce the Guatemalan Rigoberta Menchú, a Nobel Laureate for Peace and Mayan activist, as a hoax and a Marxist radical.
As is often the case with the overzealous, Horowitz now appears to be guilty of the same intellectual shabbiness he finds in others. Buzzwords such as "intellectual diversity" should not be used as subterfuges for political agendas on the right or the left. If conservatives feel marginalized on campuses, they should present empirically verifiable evidence to back up their claims. Until then, let's keep enjoying our "liberal" education.
Cobb is a comparative literature graduate student.
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