FP: Well ok.

All I can say is that my years in university were filled with professors standing in front of the class demonizing capitalism and America day after day, year after year, and every reading I was ever given told me the same thing. My eyes were always glazed over.

Mr. Wise, let’s go to twenty universities. We’ll just pick them indiscriminately. And we’ll go to the History and Poli Sci Departments, and we’ll check out the curricula of the courses on American foreign policy, and then in Peace Studies, and courses on the Vietnam War and the Russian, Cuban and Nicaraguan Revolutions etc. And we’ll see what the majority of profs are teaching and what readings they are assigning.

I’ll be very interested to see if Armando Valladaras’ memoir Against All Hope is being taught in any course on the Cuban Revolution. I’ll be interested to see if the Gulag Archipelago is given as an essential reading for Cold War History. I remember all my American history and foreign policy courses. It was as if Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky were the teachers. The Cold War was taught as if the Soviet Union never even existed.

I’ll also be interested to see if The Anti-Chomsky Reader will be on any assigned readings, or perhaps some works by David Horowitz in the contexts where they would apply. This is truly funny. The day that a leftist professor will at least allow one article by David Horowitz to be read (in a relevant context) as an alternative point of view to the 20 books he drowns his students with. . .that will be the day.

In any case, let me just touch for a moment on this thing about David Horowitz. And it regards the Jared Taylor business. And I just put the two names in different sentences for a reason. These two people don’t belong in the same sentence, in the same room or in the same anything.

Just for the record, Jared Taylor has never been “praised” by David Horowitz. To use the word “praised” implies that somewhere Horowitz has promoted Taylor’s views, and to infer such a thing is so outlandish and crude that one hesitates to even dignify it with a correction -- but in these circumstances, just to make sure there is no misunderstanding, I’d like to set the record straight for a moment.

Thank you Mr. Wise for at least putting things into context a bit and not calling names, for this is much fairer than what the Left has practised on this issue. But it is the potential implications you leave that need a counter.

Yes, as you point out, in one piece of writing David Horowitz says a nice word or two about Jared Taylor’s character (i.e. “smart” and “gutsy” etc). But, as you note in passing, “Horowitz criticizes Taylor's white nationalism.” That you note this in passing is the key here. You appear to be far more interested in the few compliments David gives Taylor’s character than in the main theme of the piece itself: David’s OPPOSITION to Taylor’s agenda (white identity and community etc). That is why David stresses: “We do not share these agendas.”

I personally know that David does not share these agendas because I work for this magazine and I am also his friend. He has an allergic reaction to anything even close to Taylor’s philosophy -- and for fifty years he has been on the front lines fighting it in all of its manifestations and mutations.

One of Horowitz’s points in this piece is to simply suggest that Taylor can more accurately be described as “racialist,” which, once again, Horowitz stresses that Frontpagemag.com IS NOT. He points out that Taylor is, on some levels, no more "racist" than any other Afro-centrist or Black-power pundit of the Left etc. He adds that Taylor “is not even racist in the sense that Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are racist.” In other words, on some realms, the likes of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton can actually be seen as worse, since they are actually not even racialist, but racist.

My question is: why is there more demonization of the Jared Taylors in our society than of the Jacksons and the Sharptons? Mr. Wise, are you ready to denounce Jackson and Sharpton in the same way you would denounce Taylor? Would you get really offended and upset by anyone actually saying one or two nice things about Jackson’s and Sharpton’s characters and not even their views?

In any case, when this matter of race comes up in connection to David, I just want to nip it in the bud, as the Left has waged a nasty defamation campaign against David on this issue and I want to confront it when it pops up. I am not saying you are doing this Mr. Wise or that you are a part of this leftist assault, but I just want to set the record straight since the issue has been raised. David is an individual who marched in his first civil rights protest in 1948 -- before anyone on this panel, I think, was even around. He has supported minorities and been a civil rights champion his entire life. Aside from his battle against the Left, there hasn’t been another issue -- like racial equality -- that has taken so much of his time, passion and devotion. He has done a tremendous amount of work to help inner city minorities and has raised millions of dollars on their behalf. I could go on if need be.

But here we go again. We have a symposium on a deranged psychopath who teaches in academia and cheerfully celebrates the murder of 3,000 innocent people on 9/11. And you would think the Left would come on the panel and say “mea culpa, there is something really wrong with the Left today and we distance ourselves from this guy and things need to change in academia.” But instead, the symposium ends up with me defending David Horowitz’s reputation from subtle accusations that come twisted in meaning and can imply total untruths.

But that’s the way it is I guess.

Ok, back to Ward Churchill and academia. Mr. Shapiro?

Shapiro: Before I move to a point completely untouched as of yet, I’d like to point out that it’s somewhat unfair for Prof. Brown to first invalidate every survey taken of professors throughout the higher education system, and then claim that anecdotal evidence can be found for every view.  By doing so, Prof. Brown has made it absolutely impossible to make a persuasive claim one way or another. 

But perhaps the perceptions of the students tells us better than political persuasion polls the kind of bias they experience in the classroom.  Let’s look at some of these polls.  In a 2002 National Association of Scholars/Zogby Poll of 401 randomly selected college seniors across the country, 73 percent said that when their professors talked about ethics in the classroom, the message they delivered was “What is right and wrong depends on differences in individual values and cultural diversity.”  A recent survey commissioned by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni showed that 49 percent of the students at the top 50 colleges and universities in the country say professors often inject political comments into their courses.  Even if these students are incorrect in their perceptions, which seems unlikely to me, the universities should take a closer look at politics in the classroom – something is creating these perceptions.

If Mr. Wise could keep this conversation in the realm of reality, I’d appreciate it.  His snide statements about conservatives believing they are oppressed “worse than black or brown folks ever were” is simply insulting.  I know of no conservative who claims that he’s been sold into slavery while in college.  Mr. Wise’s consistent strategy seems to be overstating the case in order to create a straw man.  Intellectual honesty is appreciated here, Mr. Wise!

I should say here that I don’t believe discrimination against conservative students in terms of grades is quite as severe as some other conservatives believe it is.  I was certainly vocal at UCLA, and I never felt that I was graded down.  This doesn’t mean that grading down doesn’t happen: that ACTA poll revealed that 29 percent of students felt they had to agree with their professors in order to get good grades. 

There were certainly many professors (not all, unfortunately) willing to debate the issues in the classroom.  It’s important to note, however, that a single student cannot balance a professor.  Professors have far more legitimacy than conservative students in the eye of their classmates, and with good reason: parents aren’t paying thousands of dollars per year to have their kids listen to other students spout.  Open classroom debate is wonderful, but professorial balance is better, for the simple reason that often, a well-informed conservative student isn’t available to provide the other side.  Apathetic students, not conservatives, are most susceptible to classroom bias. 

But back to Ward Churchill.  I think it’s interesting to contrast the treatment of Ward Churchill with Harvard President Lawrence Summers.  Summers is by all accounts a mainstream, center-left guy.  But when Summers asked some controversial questions about women in the hard sciences, he was forced to apologize.  All this despite the fact that, according to the New York Times, “Over and over in the transcript, he made clear that he might be wrong in his theories, and he challenged researchers to study his propositions.”  Summers is still under fire from Harvard professors, and it is quite possible that he might even lose his job. 

Churchill, on the other hand, has made several incredibly offensive statements that should by any standard get him fired, and yet he’s being championed as a free speech icon.  Why the difference?  Churchill is a radical leftist who made comments reflecting the opinions of many on the far left; Summers is a somewhat liberal fellow who made comments that reflect more of a conservative opinion.  This sure says something about the composition of America’s university elite, and the intolerance for certain opinions on campus.   

FP: Prof. Brown?

Brown: When I read that Mr. Shapiro was sequestered and violated by a coven of liberals during his undergraduate experience at UCLA, I was shocked. Whoever would have expected to find liberals in West LA, of all places? Come on down here to Texas if you want to meet conservatives.

If professors inject political comments into their courses, so what? You cannot teach in the social sciences without addressing politics, and it is unfair to students to hide your biases. This only represents a problem when professors use their personal politics to abuse their students. I suspect that students are overstating their fear of having to agree with professors. I would guess that most professors would love to have students bring up counterarguments. That kind of intellectual discussion is why most of us went into the profession. I constantly invite students to criticize the material I present, but few are willing to take up the challenge. Those that do, get an education. The rest are treading water until they receive the credential. That’s their choice.

A central goal of liberal arts education is to expose you to alien ideas, in the hopes of encouraging you to develop critical thinking skills. If anyone is being abused by a liberal professoriate, it is not the conservative students—it is the liberal students who are not being challenged to think. Complaints emerging from the right smack more of frustration at not having more opportunities to recruit on campus, rather than any sincere concern over the education of liberal teens.

Back to Churchill, and the issue of tenured radicals in general:

I agree that left-wing radicals are today probably more likely to be found at elite schools. This is the result of baby boomers getting tenured in the 1980s, and indulging themselves in radical chic. It’s a temporary and fading phenomenon.

Right-wing radicals, meanwhile--neo-Confederates in particular--have been sighted at Emory University, University of South Carolina, UA-Tuscaloosa, UNC-Chapel Hill, and elsewhere. So it’s not exactly a bottom of the barrel phenomenon. And the neos would seem to be increasing in number, or at least becoming more visible, whereas the leftist tenured radicals now look like dinosaurs. Worse, the neo-Confederates are actively organizing, which is of far greater concern than blowhard impostors such as Churchill, or retired bomb-throwers such as Dorhn and Ayers. Let’s focus on the active revolutionaries, not the fading revolutionaries living on past glories.

Fortunately, many of the early professorial entrants into neo-Confederate political activism appear recently to be pulling back and disassociating themselves from the movement, as it gets more and more radical. So I am not terribly frightened of tenured revolutionaries, whether right or left.

Doesn’t Horowitz’s “Bill of Rights” call for all viewpoints to be heard? Doesn’t “all” include the crazies too? If not, then he’s got some splainin’ to do. I think we’re getting way too exercised over a tiny minority within the profession. We’ve never had an Abimael Guzman in the US, and I don’t expect that to happen in the near future. Churchill wants people to think he’s a potential Guzman, but for him it’s all an act. If you don’t like his act, don’t buy a ticket.

I ask for the second time—why not let the Invisible Hand regulate the marketplace of ideas?

FP: The “Invisible Hand” that we need to regulate the marketplace of ideas with is a Bill of Rights that guarantees intellectual diversity in an environment where leftist professors dominate, monopolize the curricula, and discriminate against those who share dissident views.

Prof. Brown, for you to suggest that “we’re getting way too exercised over a tiny minority within the profession” is quite confusing.

I have been analyzing university curricula for ages. Prof. Brown, you are in a sociology department. I encourage you to go take a look, indiscriminately, at 10 courses taught by your colleagues. Take a look at the assigned readings and the assigned essay questions. Then tell me about “the tiny minority” you are referring to. If there is, by any chance, even one book or article assigned that is written by a Horowitz or Sowell-type individual who argues for the legitimization of America and capitalism, then your department deserves a medal. I assure you, almost no sociology department I know inhabits such an alien force.

You state that “I would guess that most professors would love to have students bring up counterarguments.” If you are projecting who you are here, then you are a noble and great individual and I would have loved to have had you as a teacher. But I assure you, you are an exception. No one I know who wasn’t indoctrinated in university could even take these words seriously. Their experience, like mine, is that of being overwhelmed by a mass of angry losers who got their Ph.D.s. (and who couldn’t run a hot dog stand successfully if they tried to) and then spent their lives hiding out on campus indoctrinating their students as a compensation for their miserable and pathetic failure in achieving their revolutionary goals in the outside world.

I am not saying that I did not have some good profs. Of course I did. But I am talking about the political ideology that was force-fed in most cases.

Mr. Douthat, go ahead.

Douthat: Let me try to shift the discussion a tiny bit, since we all seem to be talking across each other.  Professor Brown remarks that "If anyone is being abused by a liberal professoriate, it is not the conservative students—it is the liberal students who are not being challenged to think."  I completely agree with this point: the conservatives I knew at Harvard tended to be the most curious and rigorous kids out there, because they constantly had to be ready to defend their contrarian views, and could never give in to intellectual laziness.  But I would go even further -- it's not just liberal students who are hurt by the liberal bias of academia, but liberals everywhere, because it takes the Left's intellectuals and segregates them from an environment where they would have to engage with contrarian views.

I don't want to get into the question of whether people at places like the American Enterprise Institute ended up outside academia because they didn't want to spend their lives in a heavily liberal environment, or because of actual discrimination -- though I'm sure it's a little of both, a mix of political self-segregation and anti-conservative hostility in tenure committees. But whatever the reason, we have a situation in this country where the liberal intellectuals hang out in elite universities, and the conservative intellectuals hang out in think tanks and smaller, less prestigious universities, and never the twain shall meet.

This is a problem for both sides, and contributes to a lot of our present polarization, I think -- but I think it's more of a problem for the left, because even smart folks on the right (like our moderator) usually have passed through the more liberal precincts of academia on their way to whatever conservative outlet or institution they end up working for, so they have a strong familiarity with what liberals believe and why. Such familiarity may only breed contempt, but at least there's some familiarity there. Whereas top-tier liberal academics can go their entire career and hardly ever spend time in a largely conservative environment -- so instead of being familiar with the right, they tend to regard it as this mysterious, alien force, this Other (to use a Saidism) onto which they project their political fears.

You can see this most recently in the reaction to the Bush Presidency among America's academic elite. Clearly there are many, many reasons for liberals to be hostile to George W. Bush, and I'm not saying that I expect Harvard professors to be eagerly signing up for the invasion of Iraq or Social Security reform. But the kind of fear, and unreasoning anger, and outright paranoia that you see directed toward Bush from otherwise level-headed people -- and then the bizarrely over-the-top reaction to his re-election, in which prominent intellectuals insisted that we were headed into another "Dark Age" -- well, these suggest to me that something has gone very wrong with academia, and that it's become entirely detached from the real world in which, well, about half the American people are basically right-of-center, and some of those people are even intelligent. I'm not saying that liberal academics ought to become Republicans, but I'm saying that they'd be better off (and liberalism as a whole would be better off) if they made more of an effort to *understand* Republicans. And that won't happen as long elite faculties are as overwhelmingly liberal as they are.

So my question for the panel would be this: Leaving aside whether professors brainwash their students, or whether conservatives are discriminated against in hiring, or what-have-you, does anyone think it's good for colleges, or for this country as a whole, to have this kind of polarization among our intellectuals?  Forget questions of tenure and peer review and all the rest -- wouldn't liberals, and liberalism, be better off if smart liberal college students and liberal intellectuals had to spend more time with conservatives?

FP: Mr. Wise, feel free to comment on whatever you wish but please be so kind as to touch on Mr. Douthat’s question.

Wise: Well, I find it fascinating that my critique of the practicality of the Academic Bill of Rights went completely unremarked upon, especially given the argument, which was to ask, who decides what amounts to "scholarly opinion" in a particular field?

The traditional method for this determination is whether one has submitted material for PEER review, in PEER reviewed journals, and yet, to hear Mr. Glazov tell it, and presumably Mr. Shapiro, sociology departments should be teaching people like David Horowitz, whose publications in scholarly, peer-reviewed journals, even within his own academic discipline, amount to almost none, if any. Certainly David's writing on race has not been submitted for peer-review, and so, by TRADITIONAL STANDARDS that even conservatives used to agree with, his work is not scholarly, so he should be ignored, in favor of those who have actually done primary research, and have done detailed statistical analyses to determine the persistence of racial discrimination. Meanwhile, David has done none of this. He hasn't even published a book on race with a scholarly publishing house, as with most conservatives (I know, I know, they're all run by commies!)

Yet, how many college students have heard of David Horowitz, as opposed to Devah Pager, or perhaps Bertrand and Mullanaithan--economists at MIT and the University of Chicago--whose research demonstrating the ongoing salience of racial discrimination in the job market has been largely ignored in the mainstream media? In other words, real scholars, who know how to run statistical analyses, and whose conclusions prove racism is a real and persistent problem are obscure, despite their work, while non-scholars are quite well-known.

As for Horowitz and Jared Taylor, to claim that Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are worse than Taylor, is evidence of how deranged the right is, and anyone who believes this is beyond reason. Taylor is not merely a racialist--which is the silly term David Duke uses for himself too--but a racist, and he has said things far more offensive than anything that Jackson, Sharpton or any member of the NAACP (which Horowitz also compared to Taylor, unfavorably I should note) has ever said.

Taylor has openly praised South African apartheid as "democratic," and says that conditions in Africa are due to the genetic inferiority of African peoples; he published an article in 1996 which claimed that  Indo-Aryan whites were the only race to create or develop advanced civilizations, and celebrated the Indo-European "economic, political and cultural conquest of the Earth."  In 2000 he published an article praising skinhead musical bands for teaching whites "pride in their race," and serves on the board of an organization (the aforementioned CCC) which calls immigrants a "slimy mass of brown glop," and says blacks are a retrograde species of humanity. He himself has said the following:

"...in some important traits--intelligence, law-abidingness, sexual restraint, resistance to disease--whites can be considered 'superior' to blacks."

"Without constant urging from liberal whites, virtually all Africans would be content to put their fate in the hands of a white race they recognize as smarter and more fair-minded than their own."

Or this:

"The possibility of black inferiority is the goblin that lurks in the background of every attempt to explain black failure."

If David Horowitz isn't willing to call that racism, and that man racist, then he doesn't understand the word, I don't give a flying flip how many marches his parents took him to as a kid, or how much civil rights work he claims to have done (and hanging out with Huey and Bobby at cocktail parties doesn't count). And if David, or anyone else thinks Jackson, or the NAACP or whatever, can be even remotely compared to that kind of drivel, then your ability to discern difference between clearly distinguishable human beings is so beyond repair as to be laughable...but that would make sense. It explains why the right wants to paint everything to the left of Joe Lieberman as a terrorist-sympathizing fifth column.

Back to Ward. For Mr. Shapiro to claim, as he did, that Ward should be fired for his views, is ipso facto evidence that you don't believe in academic freedom. Views that you deem anti-American, or some such crap, must be eliminated. But if I were to say that I am offended by business schools that flak for capitalism--a system which it's not hard to demonstrate has resulted in much misery around the world, as with statist socialism of course--and thus, business profs who praise the destructive tendencies of capitalism (based on MY interpretation of morality) should be fired, you would say I was nuts, merely because you disagree. But that's no recipe for free speech and debate.

As for the value of liberals and the left being around more conservatives, I won't disagree. I learned a lot by reading Nozick and Friedman, and others like that: mostly I learned how utterly absurd most libertarian, market-worshipping economic theory is, and unlike lefties who've never read that stuff, I know why it's wrong. So sure. Likewise, the cloistered conservatives at Christian colleges could certainly use a dose of something other than what they get in church and boy scouts, but I doubt the right is going to push for BYU or Utah, or Bob Jones, or David Lipscomb, or Hillsdale to hire lefties; same with business schools in general, or econ departments--a point I made earlier which, naturally, went completely ignored.

Bottom line: the right wants to purge leftists from campus, or at least to institute quotas of sorts it seems for conservatives, thus the call for "balance." How do you obtain that without affirmative action for conservatives, or at least conservative theories in the curricula--something you disdain for the truly marginalized, but which now you would demand for yourselves? Mr. Shapiro can lambast my claim that the right seems to be playing the victim game as if they were more oppressed than folks of color, but it was true. Y'all (my southern thing is coming out now), bitch and moan about folks of color developing a victim mentality, while poor-mouthing your own horrible victimization on a daily basis.

Tell it to the Bradley Foundation. I'm not buying it.

To continue reading this symposium, click here.