Access Research NetworkDavid Horowitz, the conservative critic of academia who enraged students with his 2001 newspaper advertisement denouncing slavery reparations, is back on the trail, campaigning against liberal bias in American colleges.
Horowitz wants universities and state legislatures to adopt his Academic Bill of Rights, which states that all faculty hiring should be nonpolitical and that teaching should cover a spectrum of viewpoints. A version of the bill has passed the Georgia Senate.
Globe reporter Marcella Bombardieri recently sat down with Horowitz when he visited Boston to appear at Brandeis University's "conservative coming-out week." This is an edited transcript.
Q. What are you trying to accomplish with the Academic Bill of Rights?
A. If you want to know what's motivating me, I was a Marxist and my parents were communists. I went to Columbia in the McCarthy '50s, and I'm sure I had no idea what my professors' political views were. I wrote Marxist papers. I'm sure I irritated the hell out of some of my professors, but I was an A student.
What offends me is when professors see the classroom as a political soapbox - or the campus, for that matter. You have this captive audience - a young, vulnerable audience to indoctrinate. These students fear being graded politically. It's a terrible thing to make young people misrepresent their views so they can get the grade. So I would like to see students not be graded politically. I would like to see professors not be partisan in the classroom.
They've got a whole [program at Brandeis] called "Social Justice," a course in how to be a socialist, led by Robert Reich. It's clearly a course in enthusiasts of the welfare state. Peace studies [also a Brandeis program] is an ideological subject - you can tell because there's no professor of military science. If it's just an antimilitary course, they should say that.
Q. Stanley Fish , the literary theorist and University of Illinois dean, has called your Academic Bill of Rights a Trojan horse, and the American Association of University Professors condemned it. How do you respond to your critics?
A. Most of the attacks are misrepresentations of what the Academic Bill of Rights is about. Our politics is more based on who's the messenger. If the messenger is from the other side, the message has to be wrong. As a former leftist, obviously people don't like it when you leave the fold.
The Academic Bill of Rights says that professors "should consider and make their students aware of other viewpoints." How far do you take that? Does that mean that a course on evolution should teach creationism?
Q. This doesn't say that a professor has to teach anything. It says "make aware of . . ."
A. There are several books by anti-evolutionists who are well-recognized scientists. One is named [Michael J.] Behe. His argument is that the cell, something he knows a lot about, is so complex that it had to be a design. Under the Academic Bill of Rights, you probably could make a case for that on the reading list. Should they make students aware that there are reputable scientists, published in peer-reviewed journals, who think the theory of evolution has serious holes? Yeah. Should they teach astrology in the astronomy department? No. [Horowitz begins reading from the Academic Bill of Rights.] . . . It just says "curricula and reading lists in the humanities and social sciences." The answer is, it's irrelevant because we made it humanities and social sciences.
File Date: 4.18.04
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