Mr. Ambrose nearly hit the nail on the head with his recent commentary on right-wing fanatics trying to eliminate free speech on college campuses
(Leftists have become the big men and women on campus 3/19), but it's a shame that he chose to use a maul and not a finishing hammer. In fact, we should all be concerned and deeply disturbed about this critical education issue. Unlike the 1950s under Joe McCarthy, when you knew who the enemy was and they didn't mince words, we are seeing a new generation of neo-fascists hide behind the language of "Academic Bill of Rights" and who have resorted to letting large news media conglomerates like
Brown Publishing, who owns The Athens Messenger, to do their dirty work of social proselytizing and deception, of which the Ambrose piece is a jewel.
The reason that David Horowitz and his neoconservative ilk are so bitter about the so-called "liberal" American college campuses is because, by and large, they aren't running them, and their
10 Point Program for global capitalist domination isn't a required 101 class for all incoming freshman.
The reality is that we live in a socially moderate and religiously conservative country that wants to have its cake and eat it too, and that just isn't possible. The fact that college campuses are today, and have historically been, a place for more enlightened and critical thinking is exactly what bothers the neocons. Deep critiquing and the questioning of currently held social norms tend to undermine and weaken, rather than support the racist, militaristic, sexist and capitalist snake-oil types who like Armani suits, government bloat and social repression more than life itself. And it is these very right-wing pundits like Horowitz, Coulter and O'Reily who fear the colleges the most, because they know that their archaic ideas and support for soft fascism are not well received there, and so they fear the colleges and their open questioning of societal norms, especially the repressive structures which maintain inequality and injustice both here and abroad. The thought of a new generation of young intellectuals who have no use for their outdated, Newtonian views scares them, and it is this fear that is driving them so hard to fight to limit and repress those very academic settings that pose the greatest threat to their scaffolding of power and elitism.
Lawrence Summers, who Ambrose tries to paint as some poor victim of politically correct liberal faculty witch-hunt, was released by the Board of Regents at Harvard due to his failure to perform as a competent CEO. This included continual complaints from staff, students and workers, continued favoritism to select departments like mathematics, and his inability to see that he was not the best thing since sliced bread. Harvard should be glad they got rid of Summers, and the straw-man argument against Summers than Mr. Ambrose so easily blows over was built with his own flimsy construction, not that of reality.
As far as
Thomas Klocek goes, it seems there are two different versions of the story, and Ambrose not surprisingly picked the one that supported his argument. Other reports on the event, which was sparked by an incident in the Loop Campus Involvement Fair at DePaul in 2004 where Klocek got into an argument with students from Palestinian and Muslim students association and, according to
witnesses and DePaulia press reports, insulted the students, claimed that there is no Palestine and made comments such as "there is no such thing as a moderate Muslim, you are all fanatics," and 'not all Muslims are terrorists but all terrorists are Muslims.' It seems reasonable that DePaul chose to censor a professor for such action at an official university event, and a court threw out his court claim of a breach of contract in January of this year. While Ambrose suggests that Klocek was fired because he was not "politically correct," it appears he was actually fired due to his unwillingness to admit improper judgment and acknowledge his racist and xenophobic comments were not acceptable. While I support Mr. Klocek's right to respectfully exercise free speech, surely Mr. Ambrose isn't suggesting that we should be encouraging racist and prejudice actions like these in American faculty as a remedy to what he sees as too much political correctness?
Finally, and to set the record straight once again, Ambrose suggests that the Horowitz-drafted "Academic Bill of Rights"--introduced as
Senate Bill 24 in Ohio last year--is not about "political criteria" but "academic criteria," which is as he states, 100 percent wrong. It is absolutely about shoving right-wing political ideology into the classroom under the guise of appropriate discussions and self-censorship, and would undermine the entire principle of a free and open debate, the very thing that Mr. Ambrose is decrying in his essay. It's sad to see a neocon crying about how the poor conservatives are always being suppressed when they run the levers of the very machine they claim to be oppressed by, while at the same time they subtly work to turn the screws down tighter on any oppositional dissent.