“We decided on a name change for two reasons,” said Board Chairman Jess Morgan. “First, when the Center began, just as the Cold War was ending, we thought that the significant issue of our time would be the political radicalization of popular culture. The culture is still a battleground, but after 9/11, it is clear that freedom itself is under assault from the new totalitarianism: Islamic fascism. Secondly, David Horowitz, the Center’s founder, has become increasingly identified with issues of freedom at home and abroad. We wanted to honor him and also support the efforts he has undertaken. The name change does this and rededicates us to the mission at hand.”

David Horowitz, an important American writer and thinker since the 1960s, has been called “the Left’s most brilliant and articulate nemesis.” He is the author of several books, most recently The Professors, which describes the corruption of American universities by political ideologues. He founded the Center for the Study of Popular Culture in 1988 with the intention of establishing a conservative presence in Hollywood and showing how popular culture had become a political battleground. Under his leadership during the next 18 years, the Center attracted 70,000 contributing supporters and established programs such as:

• The Wednesday Morning Club, a lunch forum that provides a platform in the entertainment and media industry for conservative speakers and ideas;
• Restoration Weekend, an annual event which has featured national leaders of the conservative movement;
• The Individual Rights Foundation, an organization that litigates high-profile conservative and libertarian public interest cases; 
• Students for Academic Freedom, a national coalition of student organizations with chapters on 160 campuses, whose goal is to end the political abuse of the university and restore its academic integrity.
• FrontPage Magazine, the Center’s online journal, features “news of the war at home and abroad.” FPM receives 1.5 million visitors and 620,000 unique visitors a month (with 65 million hits) and is linked to more than 2,000 other websites.
• DiscoverTheNetworks.com, launched in 2005, is the largest publicly accessible database, defining the chief groups and individuals of the Left and their organizational interlocks. DTN has had more than 8 million visitors in its first 18 months of operation.

Since 2003, the Center has promoted an Academic Bill of Rights to support students’ academic freedom, free the American university from political indoctrination, and renew its commitment to intellectual diversity. The movement it has inspired has already changed the educational policies of Colorado and Ohio, and its principles have been incorporated into the new higher education authorization act at the federal level. In 2006, the Center established a sister organization, Students and Parents for Academic Freedom in K-12 schools, modeled on the campaign on college campuses and with the same agenda: to take politics out of the public school classroom.

“As The David Horowitz Freedom Center, we will continue to expand these programs,” says Morgan. “We are changing the name, but not what we do. We will continue to defend the cultural foundations of free institutions and defend freedom at home and abroad, a task that has become a matter of survival now that America is at war with an enemy determined to destroy us.”

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