March 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW: ‘The Professors’ Says Ideologues, Racists, Felons,
Anti-Semites, Marxists Have Poisoned the Well of American Higher Education
Reviewed By David M. Kinchen
Huntington News Network Book Critic
Hinton, WV (HNN) – You’re a top-flight jazz saxophone instructor in that
great academic powerhouse known as Ball State University – the Muncie,
Indiana alma mater of David Letterman. Step right up, George Wolfe, it’s
2002 and we’re making you director of BSU’s Center for Peace and Conflict
Studies, despite your lack of any academic credentials and your virulent
hatred of Israel.
Wolfe is just one of 101 academics – and I use the word in its broadest
definition – profiled by David Horowitz, with the help of 30 researchers, in
“The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America” (Regnery,
$27.95, 450 pages, indexed.).
At the very beginning of the book, former radical turned conservative
Horowitz asserts that the 101 toxic academics are just a sample of the
ideologues inhabiting the liberal arts and social science departments of
colleges and universities in the U.S., from not particularly distinguished
state universities like Ball State or the University of Colorado at Boulder
all the way up to once prestigious institutions like Columbia, Duke, UCLA,
University of California-Berkeley, Northwestern University, Princeton, City
University of New York, Brandeis. Horowitz also thanks the non-ideologue
professors he studied under at Columbia in the 1950s.
I say “once prestigious” because these institutions have – to a startling
extent – replaced education with indoctrination – especially at Columbia,
Duke and UC Berkeley, Horowitz and his researchers document in this powerful
book. Particularly egregious examples are the so-called Middle East Studies
Departments at Columbia, Duke and most other colleges and universities.
They’re packed with expatriate Arabs and other Muslims and notably lacking
in anyone who wants to co-exist with the only democratic nation in the
Middle East – Israel. An outspoken supporter of Israel simply need not apply
at these departments.
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| David Horowitz
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Dohrn and Ayers are profiled in “The Professors.” Dohrn, who earned a law degree at the University of Chicago, escaped prison in 1981 for her involvement with crimes committed by the Weatherman organization because of a legal technicality. For those who were not even born then – or for those who’ve forgotten, including the people who hired Dohrn and Ayres – this was an era of violence conducted largely by affluent white kids acting in the name of revolution.
In his preface, Los Angeles-based Horowitz provides his readers with a document from Berkeley that was rescinded in 2003. I wasn’t aware of the document, so it was no surprise that the so-called mainstream media didn’t report its axing. It’s called the “Sproul Clause” and was written for the university’s personnel manual in 1934 by University of California President Robert Gordon Sproul (his name is all over the campus) and is worth quoting at length:
“The function of the university is to seek and to transmit knowledge and to train students in the processes whereby truth is to be made known. To convert, or to make converts, is alien and hostile to this dispassionate duty. Where it becomes necessary, in performing this function of a university, to consider political, social, or sectarian movements, they are dissected and examined, not taught, and the conclusion left, with no tipping of the scales, to the logic of the facts….Essentially the freedom of a university is the freedom of competent persons in the classroom. In order to protect this freedom, the University assumed the right to prevent exploitation of its prestige by unqualified persons or by those who would use it as a platform for propaganda.”
Truer words were never written! To quote Genesis: “There were giants in the earth in those days.” The people who today run the once-great University of California system – the biggest state university in the nation – have a lot to answer for. What replaced this magnificent statement of academic freedom and its concomitant responsibilities was a typically situational ethics “academic freedom is whatever we say it is” one-size-fits-all mission statement.
Speaking of the state that someone once called “too small to be a country and too big to be an insane asylum,” how about Bettina Aptheker and Angela Davis at UC Santa Cruz? Both are tenured professors and both are extreme left-wing ideologues by any standard.
Or UC Irvine in Orange County, home of anti-Israel, anti-Semitic Mark LeVine, a hippie-dippy guitar playing guy who has renounced his Judaism – without being threatened with death as he would be if he were a Muslim doing the same thing. Aptheker, Davis, LeVine are all profiled in this valuable guide of whom to avoid when seeking out professors and universities.
When I mentioned to several friends that I was planning to review Horowitz’s book, I heard cries of horror and statements like “there are no Marxist professors or maybe just a few and you can avoid them.” One friend who works in a professional level, non-teaching capacity at a university in Virginia says that even schools that are considered relatively conservative are packed with ultra-leftists in the liberal arts faculties.
Horowitz says there are more than 600,000 college and university teachers in the U.S. Surely the 101 cited by Horowitz don’t represent all 600,000, do they? In fact, he says they account for about 10 percent of the 600,000 or about 60,000. He reinforced this view in a Feb. 28 telephone interview from his Southern California home. The problem is this 60,000 or so represents tenured faculty, department heads, deans and others responsible for hiring new professors.
That’s why I decided to read and review the book, to signal to parents and high school students what to look for in professors – assuming you won’t end up in a class taught by graduate assistants or teaching assistants. It’s relatively easy to spot the worst of the worst: They wear their ideologies like a sheriff wears a badge on his or her chest. Most tenured professors don’t work all that hard – especially those at “prestigious” universities. One cited by Horowitz has one two-hour class a week – that’s all, folks!
Here are some – admittedly far out – examples of prominent badge-wearing academics profiled in the book:
* Professor Leonard Jeffries, a tenured professor at the City University of New York, who misses no opportunity in the city with the largest percentage of Jews in the nation to display his anti-Semitism. His virulent anti-Semitism led to his dismissal from the post as chairman of the Black Studies Department at the university, with one colleague calling him a “maniac.” He attacked Houston native Diane Ravitch, an accomplished academic and former U.S. cabinet official and a gracious woman whose books I’ve enjoyed – and reviewed – calling her a “Texas Jew…the ultimate, supreme, sophisticated, debonair racist.”
* Professor Greg Thomas, a tenured professor of rhetoric at Syracuse University, who gained national headlines when he invited rapper Kimberly Jones, better known as Lil’ Kim, to speak to his class, which had morphed into a semester-long examination of rap music. When I was an English major in the Ice Age, we studied the canon of literature of all kinds and all nations. At Northern Illinois University I was blessed with outstanding teachers like poet and creative writing teacher Lucien Stryk, English professor Anne Green and Sorbonne-educated French teacher Martha Schreiner, who thought my French accent wasn’t all that bad: She gave me straight A’s for four semesters of college French. Not a politicized, badge-wearing academic in a carload – and all my classes were taught by instructors or professors – none by teaching or graduate assistants.
* Professor Michael Vocino, chief librarian of the University of Rhode Island and professor of film studies at URI, who, according to one student, entered the classroom on the first day, announcing: “My name is Michael Vocino and I like dick.” He wasn’t referring to our current vice president. He has been accused of sexually harassing male students and using the university email system to announce to female faculty members his library’s latest acquisition of pornographic materials. Because he’s gay, he’ll never lose his job.
* Professor Ron Karenga, chair of the Black Studies Department at California State University – Long Beach. He was convicted in 1971 of the false imprisonment and torture of two female members of his radical black organization. He served four years for torturing – with an accomplice – Deborah Jones and Gail Davis, who survived the ordeal. Despite this felony conviction, he subsequently was granted faculty status at San Diego State University and later at Cal State Long Beach. And, yes, he’s the man who invented the holiday Kwanzaa as a black nationalist alternative to Christian, Jewish and Islamic celebrations.
Yes, glad you asked: Ward Churchill, the ersatz Native American who teaches at the University of Colorado-Boulder is in the book. Professor Churchill called the victims of the World Trade Center attacks on Sept. 11, 2001 “little Eichmanns” who deserved what they got. For those who are history challenged, Adolf Eichmann was the Austrian countryman of the other Adolf and was a major architect of the Holocaust.
Where are the administrators while all this is going on? Horowitz caught the wave at just the right time, to use a surfing metaphor: Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers, a liberal and former Clinton Treasury Secretary, has just (Feb. 21, 2006) announced his resignation, effective this June, after five years as president of the nation’s most prestigious university. By all accounts, Larry Summers, 51, is not the most diplomatic guy in the world – he’s not a glad-handing smooth operator and ruffled a lot of leftist feathers during his stay in Cambridge.
Despite his impeccable liberal credentials and outstanding popularity with the students at Harvard, he enraged the ultra-leftists at Harvard by opposing disinvestment in the stocks of companies that do business with Israel. This issue also rages in so-called mainline U.S. protestant churches like the Disciples of Christ, United Methodists, Evangelical Lutherans and Presbyterians. Summers also criticized the work habits of Professor Cornel West, a prominent black faculty member who spent most of his time making a rap record. Summers miffed the supersensitive West so much that West pulled up stakes and moved over to Princeton.
The bottom line as seen by Horowitz – who has the perspective of being a recovering radical himself -- is that these balding, paunchy, over-aged hippies on the faculties of America’s universities aren’t harmless relics from the era of bell bottoms and long hair; they’re legion, they’re on search committees and tenure committees and they preach anti-Semitism, anti-Christian belief and hatred for the nation that provides them with a comfortable living surrounded by nubile young men and women. A pretty good deal for people of limited ability.
I would guess that 90 percent of America’s higher education faculty members are hard-working, decent people who love their specialty and want to take back their English Departments, especially, from the ideologues Horowitz profiles. I think the students are smarter than the professors; they’ve abandoned English, journalism, and social studies majors for less propaganda-driven majors. It’s the 10 percent we have to worry about. I don’t think Horowitz expects a sudden switch to conservative views among the professoriate: he just wants them to follow the precepts of the Sprouse Clause and teach the subject, not indoctrinate young minds.
In his phone conversation with me, Horowitz called my attention to a passage in the introduction – which I had underlined a few weeks ago—quoting leftist Stanley Fish, a distinguished John Milton scholar. Fish had written an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education – a publication read by virtually every academic – urging professors to “Save the World on Your Own Time” – the title of the article.
Echoing the Sproul Clause, Fish wrote: “It is immoral for academics or academic institutions to proclaim moral views.” Here’s the passage from Fish that I had underlined before talking to Horowitz: “Teachers should teach their subjects. They should not teach peace or war or freedom or diversity or uniformity or nationalism or anti-nationalism or any other agenda that might properly be taught by a political leader or a talk-show host.”
Publisher’s web site: www.regnery.com
