“Their sword shall enter into their own heart.” – Psalms 37:15.

However the Left continues to dominate modern academia, one its more egregious personalities will not receive the chairmanship he had anticipated – thanks in part to Students for Academic Freedom and this magazine. On Wednesday, anti-Christian and anti-capitalist Brooklyn College professor Timothy Shortell withdrew his bid to become chair of the Sociology Department at that CUNY school.

The action came shortly after college president Christoph Kimmich called an investigation into Shortell’s fitness for the job (and before Kimmich could release its final results). Shortell supplemented his meager academic resumé – which consists of zero books and just a few published articles in his field – with incendiary political tracts, in which he smeared religious believers (such as Mother Teresa) as “moral retards,” demonstrating both his perception and his concern for the mentally challenged. Shortell asserted, “Christians claim that theirs is a faith based on love, but they'll just as soon kill you.” He also compared the Bush administration to Nazi Germany and deemed modern America more racist than during the antebellum period. Although he assured a dubious administration last Sunday  that he believed “the [political] manifesto is not an appropriate form of speech in…the classroom,” he used his classroom as a pulpit to rail again “inequality” rooted in illicit “corporate power.”

If Shortell’s dearth of published scholarship were not enough, CUNY also had to worry about the negative publicity and diminished financial contributions inevitable upon his appointment. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Jeffries v. Harleston that employment and promotion decisions could take these matters into consideration. Although President Kimmich will receive much flack for his decision, he acted in exemplary fashion, following his university’s by-laws to the letter.

The CUNY investigation took place only because of national outrage at the professor’s rabid sentiments, documented by numerous sources, including this magazine. In addition to publishing Lisa Makson’s exposé, FrontPage Magazine Editor-in-Chief David Horowitz has been an outspoken critic of Shortell’s bigotry and polemical style. CUNY trustee Jeffrey Wiesenfeld also supported President Kimmich’s investigation.

However, much credit must go to the Brooklyn College chapter of Students for Academic Freedom. Embattled CUNY professor Robert “K.C.” Johnson (no relation) has cited SAF in general and chapter president Eldad Yaron in particular as “remarkably effective in gaining student support.” Yaron became an indefatigable opponent of Shortell’s impending promotion, telling the media, “For a man who says religious people are inherently violent and incapable of moral action, to actually hire, promote, or evaluate a religious professor in good faith would be an impossible thing to do.”

Not everyone saw the simple logic in this young man’s declaration. Shortell’s colleague Steve London said the professor “was subjected to a witch hunt and intimidation.” London is vice president of the Professional Staff Congress, CUNY’s faculty union and a Brooklyn College associate professor of – what else? – political science. On Tuesday, he rallied 70 CUNY faculty members to denounce the Kimmich administration’s “inadequate response” to this “attack on academic freedom.”

London and his brethren’s approach could not more vividly illustrate the problem of endemic bias on American campuses. The PSC is the same union that refused to represent the aforementioned professor Robert Johnson when he was denied tenture on transparently political grounds, although it supported both left-wing domestic terrorist Susan Rosenberg and convicted Islamist terrorist Mohammed Yousry. (Johnson eventually received the status he deserved, no thanks to his faculty union.) The PSC’s selective outrage in defending Shortell’s hate speech stems from its increasingly radical politicization, carried out in part by a Green Party Marxist who helped guide its opposition to the War on Terror and its hosting of campus “teach-ins.” 

These academic radicals found a fellow traveler in Shortell. Seeking to defend his views once they became public, he congratulated himself that such views put him “in the company of such esteemed social theorists as Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Guy Debord – company I will gladly keep.” After casting his lot with the theoretical architects of both of the previous century’s totalitarian systems (and elsewhere with Voltaire, an inspiration for the bloody French Revolution), Shortell hissed that it is “the faithful” who “want to make religion a taboo subject. Just like in totalitarian regimes.” His private website displays an even fuller range of his mania. In one breath, he praises Karl Marx, the progenitor of the worst system of political oppression in human history; in the next, he raves about “Stalinists in Washington” before boasting he and his fellow radicals “are becoming Übermenschen.”

His webpage also records his depression at this country’s right-turn since 9/11 (really since the Great Society), and the hope for a utopian future engendered by his heartening realization that “old people die.” The PSC likley cheered this sentiment, too, as it expresses the recurring leftist motif of celebrating or calling for their opponents’ deaths. However, it is the leftists who are fading into extinction.

Academic hippies who came of age during Vietnam have been replaced by a new generation of patriotic students whose defining moment was 9/11. Their professors’ brittle, yellowed newspaper clippings of their stands against the “fascist” Nixon administration and scrapbook memories of the Summer of Love seem as archaic to them as 78’s of The Andrews Sisters. The ideologies that so innerved the graying ponytail set have disappeared from public consciousness like fog at noontime, eclipsed by the unfolding of a subsequent history still unnoticed by those left behind. The revolution has failed and is faltering even in its last fortress stronghold: the American univerity.

The average student body has long proven more conservative than its faculty. The rising generation of students holds the promise of producing a more centrist brand of instructor, one worthy of the term “scholar.” Until these seeds blossom, we welcome Shortell’s defeat as a step in the right direction.