Former-Trotskyite David Horowitz was dismissed for years by academics for being a lunatic. His writing fails any objective test of scholarship, so we assumed he was irrelevant to us. But slowly he's built up funding from the usual right-wing funders, thereby institutionalizing his lunacy.
More below the fold...
Horowitz' "Center for the Study of Popular Culture" (
http://www.cspc.org) was started in January 1989 with small grants from the Olin, Bradley, and Scaife Foundations. Since then, he has raised $13 million in steady contributions: $4.5 million from Scaife, $2 million from Olin, and $4.9 million from Bradley (and $1 million from others -- Carthage, etc.). Unlike funding from "liberal" sources like MacArthur, Ford, Carnegie, etc. which sought truth or policy changes, these right-wing funders have deliberately sought political power and
partisan gains within the US. The spin-off group targetting academia is "Students for Academic Freedom" (
http://www.StudentsForAcademicFreedom.org), with another spin-off for K-12 parents (
http://www.psaf.org -- did you wonder why that story about the "Teacher accused of giving 'liberal' quiz" got national coverage, was linked on DrudgeReport, and remained on CNN.com's website for 3 days?)
SfAF has over 135 chapters, including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Duke, Brown, U Penn (see http://saf.pennfreedom.com with its online student complaint form), UCLA, Berkeley, U. Wisconsin-Madison, Missouri, Emory, Georgia Tech, Michigan and American University.
Horowitz' "Academic Bill of Rights" is better named the "Partisan Bill of Ideology." He faithfully follows Leninist strategies, co-opting the language used by progressives ("pluralism, diversity, opportunity, critical intelligence, openness and fairness") to achieve his radical conservative goals. This allows him to claim, in Orwellian Big Lie fashion, that: "any charge that there is an ideological basis for this proposed policy change is absurd and slanderous." The bill insidiously asserts: "Exposing students to the spectrum of significant scholarly viewpoints [including those funded by Scaife et al., one presumes?] on the subjects examined in their courses is a major responsibility of faculty. Faculty will not use their courses for the purpose of political, ideological, religious or anti-religious indoctrination." This campaign is the means by which he is trying to insert conservative ideology into the classroom: Scaife/Bradly/Olin/Koch fund the research, Heritage (et al.) publishes it, and Horowitz forces it into curricula.
Many elected officials, parents, and students are fooled by this Orwellian abuse of language masking an ideological and partisan agenda (or they support it). None of you are, I'm sure. Even a cursory glance at the SfAF website reveals the flagrant ideological mission. E.g.: "By the time you complete reading the contents of this page, you will be shocked. HundredPercenter has taken an in depth look into New York State's regents examinations for Global history, U.S. history & Government, for the years 2000-04. Within the contents of the examinations, you will find incontrovertible evidence of a scary liberal bias, with many questions being anti-capitalist, anti-government, anti-chrisitan [sic], and outright anti-american. The regent exams, which are publicly funded, are part and parcel of an attempt by the left in America to indoctrinate our youth."
http://www.StudentsForAcademicFreedom.org/...
(Elsewhere on their site: "We are challenging the political harrassment of conservative and religious students in the classroom, and the general abuse of the university for political agendas including professorial 'teach-ins' that provide one-sided lessons about war and peace. We are demanding that diverse texts be included in the curriculum and that speakers programs include conservatives as well as leftists and liberals. In a word we are working to democratize our university campuses and produce a regime change in the academic one-party state." Y'see, all the poor victimized radical-right wants is diversity. Through 'regime change'. Yeah, right, that's why they oppose affirmative action. For a longer example, mass-emailed to me through Republican circles, see the letter from SfAF, posted as a comment below.)
Republicans have already introduced Horowitz' "Academic Bill of Rights" in the US House of Representatives and state legislatures in California, Colorado, Georgia, Indiana, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, Oklahoma, Florida, Oklahoma, Texas, Utah, and Washington (not my home state?!). Horowitz uses the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), started in 1973 by Paul Weyrich (Heritage founder), to push the bill forward. ALEC was behind more than 1,100 bills proposed in legislatures across the United States in 2004, 178 of which were enacted into law.
One word that academics need to clarify is the definition of "liberal." When an academic uses the word, s/he is referring to Enlightenment values of respect for the individual, a belief in progress, rationality, economic freedom, intellectual liberty, the essential goodness of mankind, the protection of political and civil liberties, political reforms designed to secure these objectives, and often the "the spiritual and ethical content of Christianity" (that's from Websters!). The radical-right has twisted it to conjure up fearful images of inter-racial predatory gay couples on welfare and drugs, promoting communism, atheism, abortion, and surrender. That's not what the word means, and when language is abused it corrodes all discourse. (Just which part of the real definition of liberal is the radical-right attacking? The belief in progress? The belief in rationality, respect for the individual, and the essential goodness of mankind? The spiritual and ethical content of Christianity? For ChrINOs like Ralph Reed, Christian In Name Only, it may well be the latter.)
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Horowitz' group is just one. The three largest conservative campus organizations are the Young America's Foundation (YAF, http://www.yaf.org, "offers conservative leadership for college students on Americas campuses"), the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI, http://www.isi.org) and the Leadership Institute (http://www.LeadershipInstitute.org, "Empowering tomorrow's conservative leaders through political training"). In 2004 alone, these three spent $24 million on various campus outreach programs. (Think of the scholarships and dissertations one could fund...) We are just seeing the earliest forays. Radical students are writing letters to the deans (or Provost) complaining that professors are liberal. University Deans have no choice but to take such complaints at least somewhat seriously, and these often informally feed into tenure decisions.
I attend the http://www.CPAC.org annual conference, as a fly-on-the-wall ethnographer. The amount of support Republicans offer students is astonishing: paid internships, free housing in DC, credentials, contacts, training seminars, how to treat media, access to press conferences, resume-writing seminars, public-speaking coaching, etc. Democrats need to do the same, but it costs money. And none of this money shows up in campaign contribution records, it's all slush money. (Beyond soft, it doesn't even enter the RNC's coffers. So it is unrestricted and unreported.)
As just one example, "The Leadership Institute" teaches young conservatives how to do media. E.g., they have a 2-day, $50 "Broadcast Journalism School". It's held in their 35,000 square feet, 5-story office building (!) in Arlington, VA. http://www.LeadershipInstitute.org/...
One of their most infamous alums, a "graduate" of their 2-day "Broadcast Journalism School", is none other than Jim Guckert/Jeff Gannon, the male prostitute cum fake White House reporter who Bush called on when he wanted an easy pitch.
It is sad for everyone who values education that Horowitz' tactics and radical agenda have not been exposed, and that he is being taken seriously by the media and unthinking politicians. The deliberate partisanization and ideologicalization of academia hurts all Americans. Unfortunately, most academics and university administrators do not understand the forces targetting them, and are playing by the old rules. I value and respect those rules, but Horowitz has found ways to assault them. Giving him publicity is not the way forward; it gives him undeserved respect and lets him frame the issues. Instead, the response should be an aggressive defense of America's intellectual capital and an expose of the mechanisms by which it is being attacked.
Universities need to wake up to this threat.
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UPDATE: I left off many examples of similar groups, because of time constraints. By request, here are a few more. Note that all of these are in some way the spawn of their 1980s godfather, Accuracy in Academia
(www.academia.org). But most academics fail to understand that these new groups are much more organized on campus, more sophisticated and aggressive in tactics, more media-savvy, more coordinated with think-tanks and partisan groups, and have no respect for academic traditions. Precisely because "Accuracy in Academia" was not able to destroy university freedoms, university administrators now smugly think their castle walls are thick enough to withstand the new assault. They're mistaken.
http://www.protestwarrior.com This group has roughly *900* chapters across the country. They specialize in violent rhetoric against antiwar protesters; and feed into FreeRepublic.com. One alum is the RNC "kicker" Scott Robinson, who on-camera dragged to the ground and started kicking 26-yo woman, Clare Martin, who was protesting Bush's Africa-AIDS policies inside the RNC convention. Their propaganda includes "Storming the Ivory Towers, our upcoming feature-length documentary chronicling the left's monolithic control over our nation's universities."
http://hq.protestwarrior.com/?page=chapters/list_chapters.php
Here are quotes from similar groups (there are many more):
The FIRE
http://www.thefire.org "The mission of FIRE is to defend and sustain individual rights at America's increasingly repressive and partisan colleges and universities." "the location where the real agendas of the social engineers of political correctness are most easily identified, and where they are most vulnerable to public exposure." "universities need to feel (and to
change their behaviors in response to) the shame and liabilities of public exposure;"
http://academicbias.com "lack of intellectual freedom" "Regrettably, the academic environment at most of our universities is dominated by political correctness, a view of the world that is invariably anti-free market, suspicious of the United States, and reflexively intolerant of opposing views."
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Some of this may be old news to politico-bloggers, but the vast majority of even "librul" academics have no idea this storm has gathered outside their ivory towers.