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Horowitz at Penn State and Princeton

As a Princeton alumnus, I was very interested to read about the recent referendum held there about the student bill of rights, “loosely” based on David Horowitz’s academic bill of rights. I note, with some relief, that at least the Princeton Republicans repudiated Horowitz’s tactics, and that in his reference to the absence of a Marxist viewpoint in an introductory economics course, one student cuts to the core of the inconsistency at work here. Here is what I wrote to the local newspaper after Horowitz’s recent appearance at Penn State:

David Horowitz, who visited Penn State on April 13 on his tour of college campuses to promote his new book and rid higher education of the scourge of political bias, is a meddlesome character. His main goal seems to be to have his ego stroked, as he caters to his partisan supporters with a steady stream of invective aimed at anybody on the left of him. But how sad that those supporters, like the College Republicans, can’t see through his rhetoric to realize that, on his own shallow and flimsy evidence, there is no serious problem here-certainly nothing meriting the time and attention of state legislators (especially at the elevated salaries they are now being paid!).

I was once the victim of a verbal assault by Horowitz myself, back in 1973, when he attacked me and Princeton University Press where I was then an editor for publishing The New Left and the Origins of the Cold War by Penn State history professor Robert Maddox. The widely reviewed book was a withering critique of seven prominent New Left writers including Horowitz (at that time an editor for the left-wing magazine Ramparts) for shoddy scholarship. Having no very good response to make in defense of their scholarship, Horowitz and some of the others instead engaged in an ad hominem counterattack by alleging a right-wing conspiracy led by such Establishment figures as George Kennan and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., behind publication of the book presumably to discredit the New Left politically. How far Horowitz has come ideologically since then-and how little changed are his methods of operating against his perceived political enemies (which really didn’t include me, since my sympathies were on the left and my own father, a history professor at Wilkes College, had himself penned a revisionist New Left history of the origins of the Cold War).

For those who are still dazzled by Horowitz’s rhetorical skills and can’t yet see him as the Don Quixote he is, tilting at windmills, consider this major inconsistency in his position. On the one hand, Horowitz professes to be a champion of academic freedom in the classroom and only interested in sanctioning teachers for “persistently intruding material which has no relation to their subject,” as a 1971 statement from the American Association of University Professors that he is fond of quoting reads. On the other hand, as he frequently did during Thursday night’s speech, Horowitz lambasts and dismisses entire fields like black studies and women’s studies even though he can have no argument that what professors in these fields teach that he finds ideologically objectionable is unrelated to their subject.

This inconsistency revealed itself most starkly in the interview with Horowitz printed in the CDT (April 10) where he said: “You can tell from my book that you don’t want your students going into any cultural anthropology course or department. Stay out of them. Economics departments are the best in the liberal arts schools, without question-except for the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. It’s a Marxist department.” There can be no clearer demonstration that what Horowitz is really seeking to do is undermine his ideological enemies, not support academic freedom. For, otherwise, how can he object to professors teaching cultural anthropology, or economists teaching their subject using a Marxist approach, if they do not proselytize overtly for the Democratic Party or, worse, some radical leftist cause? And why wouldn’t he be worried equally about the ideological imbalance implicit in the teaching of economics in a department where the methodology used is the mainstream neoclassical approach? I’m sorry, Mr. Horowitz, you can’t have it both ways!

Sandy Thatcher, at 9:45 am EDT on April 28, 2006