Acceptable Bounds of Academic Discourse

Robert Shaffer

	Greenspan

One of the most striking statements in Alan Greenspan's recently published memoirs is that he is "saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil" (1). The passage is significant for historians and other scholars, of course, in legitimating a discussion of the economic motives of U.S. interactions with the world; after all, if the longtime chair of the Federal Reserve admits that control over resources is a key motive of the present war, we might certainly pursue such an analysis in our research and teaching, on this and other conflicts, past and present.

One person who probably did not welcome Greenspan's frank statement, however, is David Horowitz, the erstwhile radical turned conservative critic of the academy. In his 2006 book, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, Horowitz unleashes a raft of criticisms against a wide range of scholars, but one of his recurring themes is that an attempt to ascribe economic motives to U.S. actions in Iraq, or to suggest an interpretation of history based on greed or the needs of capitalism, is simply out of bounds for a scholar. Thus, Horowitz finds unacceptable Joel Beinin, a former president of the Middle East Studies Association, in part for insisting that the U.S. went to war in Iraq "to make and unmake regimes and guarantee access to oil." More broadly, Horowitz excoriates Howard Zinn for his widely circulated book, A People's History of the United States, in which "greed is the explanation for every major historical event" (2).

Aside from attacking professors for specific arguments in their research, public statements, and, in some cases, their classes, Horowitz asserts that left-wing professors have taken over the universities and use their positions to indoctrinate students and to prevent moderate or conservative scholars from being hired. Horowitz further argues that these leftwing ideas are not based on legitimate scholarly research, so such professors do not deserve "academic freedom." Given the efforts of Horowitz and his followers to enlist the public, and state legislatures, in their campaign against the alleged radical takeover of the academy, historians and other academics must be familiar with Horowitz's line of reasoning (3). For example, in my state of Pennsylvania, a legislator who provided a dust jacket blurb for Horowitz's book was the driving force behind a committee which held hearings around the state for almost a year, searching for professors who abused their classrooms for political purposes (4).

What the careful reader of Horowitz's The Professors finds, however, is a book filled with inconsistencies, falsehoods, unverifiable claims, and innuendo. While Horowitz accuses the radicals whose work he profiles of ignoring scholarly standards, his own research, despite the 900 plus footnotes, is quite shoddy. The 101 individual portraits which make up the bulk of the book are bracketed by an introduction which explores the case of Ward Churchill and a brief chapter on Harvard president Lawrence Summers's conflicts with his faculty. Churchill, of course, is the University of Colorado Native American Studies professor whose inflammatory comments on 9/11 led eventually to an investigation of plagiarism, and whose tenure status has since been revoked; his case is one of the few for which Horowitz seems to have legitimate grounds for complaint. Too often Horowitz is simply denouncing professors for judgments that he does not like, regardless of the evidence that might be gathered on their behalf.

So, if Beinin and Zinn are "dangerous" to their students and to the U.S. because of their views—and Horowitz's briefs against biologist Paul Ehrlich, historian Mark LeVine, communications professor Robert McChesney, Islamic Studies professor Hamid Dabashi, and literature professor Gregory Dawes, among others, are based largely on similar criticisms—then Greenspan's comments are, if not "an inconvenient truth," at least an inconvenient hypothesis (5).

Other events, too, have overtaken Horowitz's analysis in The Professors. He ridicules Miriam Cooke of Duke, who has been the president of the Association for Middle East Women's Studies, for having predicted in 2003 that war in Iraq would lead to a surge (my phrasing) of refugees fleeing that country, and for her skepticism that the U.S. war would bring liberation to Iraqi women. "[T]he numbers of asylum seekers from Iraq and Afghanistan have been drastically reduced from pre-war levels," claims Horowitz, presumably writing in late 2005, but current estimates are that at least two million Iraqis have left the country since 2003. Moreover, women's experiences in the "new Iraq" are, at best, mixed (6).

A brief review can only hint at the levels of distortion in Horowitz's work. Journalism professor Todd Gitlin "can hardly bring himself to acknowledge the actual crimes committed by sixties radicals" in his account of that decade, writes Horowitz. But even a casual reader of The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage will see that the critique of the Black Panthers and of the Weather Underground is central to Gitlin's thesis (7). Suzanne Toton, who teaches theology at Villanova, a Catholic university, is castigated for teaching a class on poverty and liberation theology, which to Horowitz is somehow an illegitimate endeavor. Moreover, Horowitz first describes liberation theology as "a form of Marxised Christianity," which has validity despite the awkward phrasing, but then he calls it a form of "Marxist-Leninist ideology," which is simply not true for most liberation theology, and for which no footnotes are provided (8). Cornell West engages in anti-Semitic bigotry, according to Horowitz, although one of West's most visible projects is his collaboration in the Network of Spiritual Progressives with Rabbi Michael Lerner of Tikkun (9). In his critique of Berkeley School of Journalism dean Orville Schell, Horowitz all but states that China is a "democratic capitalist" country, and that Schell's negative characterization of China today as practicing "Leninist capitalism" is somehow both wrong and beyond the boundaries of legitimate analysis (10).

In his analysis of Earlham's Caroline Higgins, a professor of peace studies and history, Horowitz states that she "is entitled to her private political views," and that his quarrel is with her advocacy of these pacifist views in the classroom. Leaving aside the question of whether it is wrong for a Quaker college to have courses which favor pacifism (11), Horowitz is caught here in a double standard, as his criticisms of economist M. Shahid Alam, philosopher Anatole Anton, and political scientist Laurie Brand, among others, are based solely on their published work and their political views, not on anything they have done in the classroom or in university affairs (12). Similarly, the notorious "Dirty Thirty" website attacking radical professors at UCLA makes allegations about indoctrination in the classroom, but many of the biographies, such as that of American historian Ellen Carol DuBois, are only about published scholarly work and public political statements, including listings of internet-based petitions they have signed (13).

Another double standard appears in Horowitz's discussions of two prominent and controversial African American law professors. Seeking to unmask Derrick Bell, who left Harvard in protest in 1991 and has since been at NYU, as lacking the qualifications to teach at a major law school, Horowitz notes that Bell, who attended law school in the 1950s, received his B.A. and J.D. from non-elite schools. But when Horowitz dismisses Kathleen Cleaver, the former Black Panther, as also unqualified to teach law, he somehow neglects to mention her B.A. and J.D. from Yale, and her clerkship with a federal appeals court judge (14).

While purporting to uncover for the general public the supposedly nefarious operations of academia today, Horowitz misstates much about the workings of the university. He belittles the publication record of political scientist Oneida Meranto of Metropolitan State College in Denver as far less than is necessary for tenure, ignoring the fact that many teaching colleges have different rules for tenure than research universities. He asserts that Tom Hayden has no qualifications to teach as an adjunct professor in politics at Occidental College, glossing over Hayden's two decades as a California elected official and his numerous books; these are often precisely the qualifications for an adjunct professor. Horowitz believes it illegitimate for literature professor Frederic Jameson, because he has "no formal training in history," to teach a class whose course description discusses "how novels, in different historical moments, provide views on the social world or ‘visions' for meaningful change," ignoring the centrality of history for many literature classes. In an attack on Mary Frances Berry, a former president of the Organization of American Historians, which seriously distorts her academic publication record, Horowitz dismisses one article as having appeared in "a student-edited law school journal," failing to note that most law journals are edited by students (15).

Perhaps Horowitz's most bizarre attack is on Ron (Maulanga) Karenga, a Black Studies professor and the founder of Kwanzaa, a holiday which would hardly seem to be "dangerous" to U.S. society. Karenga does have a criminal record, which Horowitz recounts, though he ignores Karenga's service as an F.B.I. asset in the late 1960s. Drawing on Ann Coulter as his source, Horowitz sets out to establish "guilt by association" in saying that the seven principles of Kwanzaa are the same as those of the short-lived Symbionese Liberation Army of the early 1970s. But Coulter and others place Kwanzaa's invention in 1966, before the SLA's emergence, while Horowitz states, with no other documentation, that the holiday began in 1977 (16).

Horowitz's most irresponsible single attack involves Eric Foner, another former president of the OAH. Horowitz says sinisterly that at an antiwar teach-in at Columbia in 2003, "Foner had been preceded on the podium by fellow Columbia professor Nicholas De Genova," who called for the defeat of U.S. forces and for "a million Mogadishus." Horowitz neglects to say here, despite coverage at the time in the New York Times and the Columbia Daily Spectator—both easily available online—that Foner explicitly criticized De Genova's comments from the podium and in the press, calling them "idiotic and reprehensible." This attack epitomizes the flaws of the book: guilt by association, poor research, and selective quotation (17).

There are two more arguments in The Professors which simply cannot go unanswered, as they go to the heart of Horowitz's questionable methodology. Horowitz asks, "How many radical professors are there on American faculties of higher education?" He arrives at a figure of 25,000 by taking Harvard as a test case, asking readers to "assume a figure of 10 percent" radical faculty at that university, then cutting that 10 percent figure in half for universities as a whole, and citing government statistics on the total number of professors in the U.S. He offers no basis whatsoever for the 10 percent figure at Harvard; it is taken from thin air (18). Moreover, the "representativeness" of his sample of 101 professors must be questioned, as it includes thirteen who teach Middle Eastern studies, eleven who teach "peace studies," and ten who are in other "ethnic studies" fields. One would be hard-pressed to find a university in the U.S. with three percent of its faculty in these fields, let alone thirty percent.

On September 11, 2007, the American Association of University Professors released "Freedom in the Classroom," a wide-ranging defense of academic freedom in the face of conservative attacks, such as Horowitz's. Drawing on nearly one hundred years of AAUP position papers, and addressing specific recent controversies, "Freedom in the Classroom" argues that indoctrination occurs not when professors give their opinions in class, but "only when instructors dogmatically insist on the truth of such propositions by refusing to accord their students the opportunity to contest them" (19). Some of the professors who Horowitz describes might violate this reasonable definition, but the innumerable misstatements and exaggerations in Horowitz's accounts call into question most of his accusations. This AAUP report should prove useful to professors who find themselves targets of conservative ire, just as Greenspan's comments remind us of the difficulties in setting limits on acceptable scholarly, or political, analysis.

Robert Shaffer is associate professor of history at Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania. He testified before a subcommittee of the Pennsylvania State Assembly in May 2006 in the so-called "academic freedom" hearings.