David Horowitz - Indoctrination U.: The Lefts War Against Academic Freedom

Table of Contents

Praise for Indoctrination U.

Much has been written about the politicization of college education by selfish radicals who preach rather than teach.This book describes the only sustained national effort to correct the problem. Horowitz gives us a careful, analytical account of key episodes in the campaign for an Academic Bill of Rights that will surprise many whose impression has been formed by distorted and deceitful accounts from its opponents. Though Horowitzs campaign is solidly based on venerable policy statements of the American Association of University Professors, todays radicalized AAUP leadership has bitterly attacked the Academic Bill of Rights, thereby disowning the AAUPs own core principles. Everyone who cares about a genuinely liberal college educationregardless of political perspectivewill be grateful for David Horowitzs tireless, relentless, and above all well-judged efforts to rescue it from the intellectual trivialization and monotony of radical politics. Nobody else has done so much or been so effective.

John M. Ellis, Professor Emeritus of German literature, University of California at Santa Cruz; Founding Secretary of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics; and President of the California Association of Scholars

Horowitzs modus operandi has been to expose some of the academys zaniest enclaves. He has compiled a veritable encyclopedia of anecdotes revealing betrayal upon betrayal of the notion of the disinterested, scholarly classroom setting. Many of these are retold in this well-sourced book, which reads as a blend of political tract and personal memoir.

Travis Kavulla, Gates Scholar in African history, Cambridge University; and former associate editor of National Review

A valuable contribution from one of Americas foremost defenders of free speech and free thought.

Robert L. Pollock, Wall Street Journal, Editorial Board

Horowitz has to be credited with a rare and important achievement. He has not only documented important problems with our educational system, but has also set out to make needed changes.

Herb Denenberg, The Bulletin

To April
Who provides me with the life
that makes the work possible.

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

Rule APM 0-10, University of California,
Berkeley, Academic Personnel Manual.
Inserted by UC President Robert Gordon
Sproul, 1934. Removed by a 433 vote of the
UC Academic Senate, July 30, 2003.

Academic freedom is the freedom of academics to study anything they like; the freedom, that is, to subject any body of material, however unpromising it might seem, to academic interrogation and analysis.... Any idea can be brought into the classroom if the point is to inquire into its structure, history, influence and so forth. But no idea belongs in the classroom if the point of introducing it is to recruit your students for the political agenda it may be thought to imply.

Professor Stanley Fish,
New York Times, July 23, 2006

Preface to the Paperback Edition

I had three goals in writing this book.The first was to describe the campaign for an Academic Bill of Rights I launched in the fall of 2003; the second was to provide case studies of the abuses the Academic Bill of Rights was designed to correct; the third was to document the bare-knuckle tactics of the opponents of the bill, who have conducted themselves in a manner more appropriate to a political brawl than to a discussion of academic issues.

From its inception, the proposal for an Academic Bill of Rights inspired fierce controversy. A recently published book, The Academic Bill of Rights Debate, describes its impact:Few academic topics have created such a furor in so short a time.... By November of 2006, it had already generated 74 articles in major newspapers, at least 143 articles in all newspapers nationwide, 54 television and radio broadcasts, 47 newswire articles, 20 articles in The Chronicle of Higher Education, 73 articles in Inside-HigherEd. com, dozens of articles in major magazines, and some 154,000 hits in the obligatory Google search.

Edited by a professor of education at the University of Akron, The Academic Bill of Rights Debate sets out to present the controversy in an academic manner but instead joins it. Every contributor to the volume but one manifests extreme hostility to the reform which is a liberal measure based on long-standing academic tradition. (The exception is the author of the Academic Bill of Rights.) The flavor of some of the attacks is reflected in a contribution by Princeton professor Joan Wallach Scott who describes the reform in these words: It recalls the kind of government intervention in the academy practiced by totalitarian governments (historical examples are Japan, Nazi Germany, China, Fascist Italy and the Soviet Union) who seek to control thought rather than permit a free marketplace of ideas. In point of fact, the Academic Bill of Rights calls for no government intervention in the academy and is an effort to protect students from thought control. It was specifically designed to thwart faculty attempts to indoctrinate students by presenting professorial opinion as scientific fact and by failing to assign texts critical of faculty orthodoxy.

Even the editor of The Academic Bill of Rights Debate joins the assault. Instead of providing an introduction summarizing the discussion in a dispassionate manner, the editor indulges in tendentious attacks on the Academic Bill of Rights and its author. Although the Academic Bill of Rights is explicitly designed to articulate long-established principles of academic freedom, the editor introduces his text with the following statement:...The Academic Bill of Rights is a recent and controversial attack on traditional notions of academic freedom... which is the very opposite of the truth.

Another text largely devoted to attacking the academic freedom campaign has been written by John K.Wilson, publisher of the webzine Illinois Academe and long associated with the academic left . According to Wilson, The Academic Bill of Rights is the story of how David Horowitz, pretending to stand up for student rights and moral conduct by professors, led a crusade to have legislators force every college in the country to adopt the most coercive system of grievance procedures and investigations of liberal professors ever proposed in America.

This statement is false on every account. Despite Wilsons claim, the Academic Bill of Rights contains no provision for grievance machinery. In crafting my proposals for academic reform I have been careful to respect the independence of academic institutions. I have consequently regarded the problem of enforcement better left to university faculty and administrators to devise. I have not proposed a single piece of legislation to force colleges to adopt any reforms, and have never proposed legislation to create academic grievance procedures. Nor have I ever called for investigations of liberal professors. In fact, I have opposed making the point of view of professors a subject for remedial measures. I have said publicly (and repeatedly) that bias is not an issue, that every individual has a bias and professors have a right to express theirs in their classrooms so long as they do so in a professional manner, and in accordance with the principles of academic freedom.What faculty may not do is to impose their bias on students through coercive grading, or by failing to provide them with critical reading materials, or by presenting their personal prejudices as established wisdom.