David Horowitz’s latest book
chronicles the Left’s transformation of academic institutions into doctrinal
training centers.
Below is Barbara Kay's review of David
Horowitz’s new book, “The Left in the Universities" which is volume 8 of The
Black Book of the American Left, a multi-volume collection of
David Horowitz's conservative writings that will, when completed, be the most
ambitious effort ever undertaken to define the Left and its agenda.
(Order HERE.) We encourage our readers to
visit BlackBookOfTheAmericanLeft.com – which
features Horowitz’s introductions to Volumes 1-8 of this 10-volume series,
along with their tables of contents, reviews and interviews with the author.
In November, an incident regarding freedom of speech on campus
took place at Ontario’s Wilfrid Laurier University that galvanized the
attention of Canadians and of those with an interest in this subject beyond our
borders.
A graduate student in the field of Communications, Lindsay
Shepherd, used a short segment in class from a debate on TVOntario’s nightly issues show, The Agenda,
to illustrate to her students how linguistic terminology can become contested
terrain in the realm of ideas. The presenting issue was freedom of speech; the
vehicle for debate was the use of transgender pronouns. The segment Shepherd
showed – without either approval or condemnation - included forceful pushback
against “compelled speech” by Jordan Peterson, a University of Toronto
professor whose publicly avowed refusal to use constructed gender pronouns has
in the past 18 months rocketed him, via a tsunami of vlogs and public
appearances, from virtual obscurity outside the academy to continental
celebrity.
In short order Shepherd was summoned to a meeting with her
supervisor, her department head and the director of WLU’s Gendered and Sexual
Violence and Support program. What happened at that meeting – more like a Star
Chamber interrogation – would have fallen into the historical oubliette, except
for the fact that Shepherd recorded it and shared it with the media.
Ordinary Canadians who listened to this recording were stupefied at the
overt intimidation and condemnation Shepherd was subjected to, including
accusations of “transphobia,” a comparison of Peterson to Hitler and for good
measure a sprinkling of demonizing “racism” and “ “white supremacist” to ensure
the message took hold. All because she adopted a perspective of neutrality in
presenting conflicting opinions to her class so that they could freely discuss
the issue without her influence. This was an intolerable stance for her
left-wing superiors.
The repercussions of this incident are still unfolding, and you
can read a detailed account of it here. The most-used word by commentators
writing about that fateful was “Orwellian.” And it was. In my own commentary on the affair, I
ended with the suggestion that Canada establish “the Lindsay Shepherd Students’
Bill of Academic Rights.” I would like to say that the idea of such a bill was
my own, but of course it isn’t. The timely reason it sprang to mind was that I
had just finished reading Book VIII of David Horowitz’s Black Book of the American Left: The Left in the
University,the
newest release in Horowitz’s ten-book series of collected conservative
writings. In this instalment, Horowitz chronicles his crusade to establish such
a bill in law.
The common denominator of all the articles in this volume is the
appalling comfort of the academic community with the travesty of scholarship
exemplified in the Shepherd affair, where an attempt by a young and
intellectually uncorrupted colleague to embody the spirit of actual scholarly
research by presenting both sides of an argument on a question of principle was
attacked as an evil impulse.
In my own commentary, thanks once again to Horowitz, who
references it frequently in Volume VIII, I adduced the 1915 American
Association of University Professors’ “Declaration on the Principles of
Academic Tenure and Academic Freedom.” It included this statement: “Faculty
members are expected to present information fairly, and to set forth justly,
divergent opinions that arise out of scholarly methodology and
professionalism.” This is a tenet that was observed by my own university
professors in the 1960s, but which has been honoured almost completely in the
breach thenceforth.
Today the AAUT seems more concerned with protecting the rights of
teachers to indoctrinate students in their social justice shibboleths than to
offer “divergent opinions” or to train them in the critical reasoning skills
that will allow them to arrive at their own conclusions. As former AAUT head,
Cary Nelson, put it, “all teaching and research is fundamentally and deeply
political.” Given that understanding, academic freedom is not about a student’s
right to a balanced education; it is about an academic’s right to promote his
or version of social justice. In fact, academic freedom in the eyes of the AAUT
has become what Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcus called “repressive
tolerance,” the freedom to ignore and suppress the student’s right to learn in
the service of political correctness.
Here is but one example Horowitz offers of a leftist academic’s
view of her own right to academic freedom and her own privilege to teach
students what, versus how to think: In his article “My Visit to Bates”
(originally published as “Enemy of the People” in Salon.com in
April, 1999), Horowitz describes his experience, while making the rounds of
universities on a speaking tour to promote his Academic Bill of Rights, of
auditing a political science course at Bates University in Maine.
The course, taught by an Indian woman educated in England, was
based on a single 600-page anthology, Modernity, which,
Horowitz discovered when he bought it, included viewpoints ranging “from
classical Marxism to feminist Marxism to post-modernist Marxism.” When Horowitz
admonished the professor after class for the one-sidedness of her teaching, she
complacently replied, “Well, they get the other side from the newspapers.” (As
an aside, Horowitz notes that Bates students’ parents pay $30,000 a year in
tuition for their children’s indoctrination.) The book offers many more such
outrageous transgressions of academic integrity, gleaned from personal
observation and direct reports from students, and well repays the curiosity of
anyone who wonders if concern over political correctness in the universities is
exaggerated.
Horowitz’s tour occurred in the late 90s and early naughts. The
situation is worse today. Rooting out incorrectness is carried on more
aggressively. For example, it was established in an inquiry that Shepherd’s
supervisor lied to her about there having been a
complaint about her teaching method. There was none. But he clearly felt a lie
was a small price to pay for an official opportunity to correct her thought
crime. Such attitudes do not arise in a vacuum. They are internalized through
cultural osmosis.
Indeed, sparked by increasingly emboldened leftist agitators, 2017
in general has been a year of extreme unrest on university
campuses all over North America. Physical aggression in the name of social
justice has become rampant. Guest lecturers who dare to express opinions that
in any way contradict privileged leftist narratives have had their talks
cancelled or violently protested, while even mildly dissenting professors have,
aided and abetted by their pusillanimous administrations, been subjected to
threats of violence. Some have even had to quit their jobs to retain their
principles and ensure their physical safety, as in the case of Bret Weinsteinof Evergreen
State.
Here is a summary of what the Academic Bill of Rights would
ensure:
- Faculty
would be hired for their competence and knowledge and granted tenure “with
a view toward fostering a plurality of methodologies and perspectives.
- No
faculty would be hired or fired or denied tenure “on the basis of his or
her political beliefs”;
- Students
would be graded on the basis of “reasoned answers and appropriate
knowledge,” not on the basis of political or religious beliefs;
- Curricula
and reading lists in the humanities and social sciences would “reflect the
uncertainty and unsettled character of all human knowledge in these areas
by providing students with dissenting sources and viewpoints where
appropriate.” Teachers are free to pursue to their own interests and
perspectives, but “they should consider and make their students aware of
other viewpoints”;
- Faculty
should not use their courses “for the purpose of political, ideological,
religious or anti-religious indoctrination”;
- Selection
of speakers and allocation of funds for speakers programs should “promote
intellectual pluralism”;
- Given
that an environment of civil exchange is essential to a university, “the
obstruction of invited campus speakers, destruction of campus literature
or other effort to obstruct this exchange will not be tolerated”;
- Integrity
of the research process and the professional societies formed to advance
such research must be maintained. Thus, “academic institutions and
professional societies should maintain a posture of organizational
neutrality with respect to the substantive disagreements that divide
researchers on questions within, or outside, their fields of inquiry.”
There is nothing in this proposed bill that should scandalize or
alarm any reasonable observer. It is fair to say that no conservative would
take issue with any of these statements, which allow for the free exploration
of views conservatives find repugnant. All conservatives ask is that students
be exposed as well to views that leftists find repugnant so that students may
weigh both and assess them without undue influence. That is not the case today,
and has not been the case for a very long time.
Horowitz is precise in defining what academic freedom is, and what
it is not. Academic freedom is not ‘free speech.’ An academic is free to pursue
his scholarship according to his profession’s standards, and she is therefore
not free from constraints in sharing his opinions. If she were, history
professors could deny the Holocaust ever happened. Horowitz writes, “If mere
opinion qualified someone to be a professor, professors could be hired for much
lower salaries than is presently the case. Opinion is freely available on talk
radio and local street corners.” Horowitz wrote these words before the advent
of Twitter, which of course is the local street corner exponentially magnified.
“Academic freedom,” Horowitz declares, is “freedom within a professional
discipline.”
There’s the rub, of course. Professionalism implies knowledge
based in evidence, not in authority. Such lines are blurred in the era of
identity politics and the normalization of pseudo-disciplines such as Gender
Studies, Black Studies, Queer Studies, Fat Studies, Disability Studies, Chicano
Studies and White Studies and Indigenous Studies, all of which are taught based
on the “authority” of Marxism, and all of whose primary purpose is to demonize
“oppressors” – the “patriarchy,” white “colonialists” and the U.S. in general –
and to recruit activists for organized perpetuation of the identity grievance
industry.
“Professionalism” is not a word that springs to mind when one
thinks of these pseudo-disciplines and their promulgators, a perfect case in
point being conspiracy theorist, cultural appropriator and bogus academic Ward Churchill, whose shameless academic
trajectory is chronicled anew in this volume. Students today have been so
conditioned to accept academy-laundered political activism as bona fide
“disciplines” that most of them wouldn’t be able to articulate the
quintessential difference between the science of astronomy and the belief
system of astrology.
It is fortunate that Horowitz does not succumb to the kind of
cynicism I have just voiced, for it is thanks to his refusal to concede
anything to the zeitgeist in standing up for the principles that should be
guiding academics that so many of us find the motivation to keep resisting it,
even when it seems hopeless. Horowitz’s Academic Bill of Rights was obstructed
and failed to pass in his first campaign, but who is to say that it will never
pass? Perhaps the Lindsay Shepherd affair and the Brett Weinstein affair were tipping
points in the eyes of the silent majority, who are disgusted at the excesses of
the progressive movement and who have finally understood that the issue –
whether it is framed as racism, sexism or classism – is never the issue; the
issue is always the Marxist revolution.
We won’t know if we have reached that tipping point until we try
again. The Left in the University is a perfect companion
volume to the events of today, and moreover an inspiration to taking up anew
the battle to entrench an Academic Bill of Rights for students in law.
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ABOUT BARBARA
KAY
Barbara Kay is a columnist for the Canadian newspaper National
Post and a member of the Board of Governors of the conservative student
newspaper,