Indoctrination U: The Lefts War Against Academic Freedom [Hardcover]

Should Conservadom, in the spirit of positive reinforcement, ever decide to create awards for its most valuable commentators, it is quite likely that David Horowitz will be summoned to the podium each and every year until the time of his death. Few other figures have so resolutely, and creatively, battled the left over the course of the past two decades.

The cure Horowitz offers to the propagandizing of the bottom10 percent of the professorate is called The Academic Bill of Rights. The context and story behind Indoctrination U is the author's attempt to gain publicity for the proposition. Having it enacted by state legislatures was never his primary goal. What he sincerely desired was for universities to preemptively adopt its essence into their own bylaws.

The Bill itself is reproduced in an appendix. Its language is well-crafted and rather innocuous, yet one would never know this from the reaction it received from its critics. They dubbed it "crazy, Orwellian, a witch hunt," and totalitarian in nature. Their disparagement is perhaps a ruse to better enable them to protect their own privilege as tenets like, "No faculty shall be hired or fired or denied promotion or tenure on the basis of their political or religious beliefs" is not the stuff of McCarthyism. Although, should it be rigidly interpreted, a clause like, "Faculty will not use their courses for the purpose of political, ideological, religious or anti-religious indoctrination" would completely threaten the activists' way of life. Commandments like that are far more threatening than having their beloved Fairness Doctrine applied to network news broadcasts or NPR.

Those who actually discussed the initiative were generally dismissive. One proclaimed it a "solution in search of a problem." How much better off the country would be if such a view was correct. The liberal arts programs within our universities have become leftist bastions whose purpose is no longer to pursue truth. Unlike with the sciences, whose colleges are the finest in the world, numerous liberal arts departments have become completely politicized and are little more than ad hoc centers of agitprop.

Many of our tenured luminaries even question whether there is such a thing as truth or objectivity at all. Their skepticism makes for all kinds of classroom mischief as they idolatrously worship the troika of race, class, and gender. What "social justice" should mean is that the citizenry has the right to keep what they've earned, but, in the mouths of radicals, it is morphed into a description of government's attempt to pit one social group against another via an arbitrary, and authoritarian, redistribution of wealth scheme. Political correctness functions as the academy's Cerberus. It tyrannizes the marketplace of ideas and uses wonderland logic to turn its critics into peddlers of hate speech.

Northwestern University is just down the road from me. I see evidence of the political tilt of the academy all around me. In the seemingly endless numbers of posters espousing an endless variety of left-wing causes, including protecting terrorists who murder innocent civilians. I see it in the daily university newspaper which is distributed in town. I see and hear in the academics I encounter in daily life.

Why parents pay to send their children to a political indoctrination machine which will ultimately destroy the United States is beyond my comprehension.

David Horowitz was once a leftist. He came to his senses and has been combatting left-wing ideology since. In 2002 he "drew up an Academic Bill Of Rights whose purpose was to promote intellectual diversity on college campuses and restore academic values to university classrooms."

Any reasonable person who follows the news knows of Ward Churchill and dozens of other college professors and even high school and middle school teachers who are blatantly anti-American and use their classrooms to influence their student's thinking if not force them to regurgitate left-wing political views.

In this book, Horowitz relies heavily on his personal experiences in campaigning for his proposal to illuminate how the left-wing suppresses any poltical thought that doesn't agree its notions.

Unwittingly, though, Horowitz demonstrated the dangers of left-wing academics. In 2006, Horowitz appeared on the Duke campus. There a small group of demonstrators led by a tenured left-wing academic named Diane Nelson disrupted his address, clearly violating faculty rules of conduct. Shortly thereafter the same Diane Nelson literally signed on as one of the infamous Group of 88. The Group of 88 are a collection of mostly tenured academics at Duke who simply ignored any concept of judicial innocence and condemned three Duke lacrosse players who had been accused of sexually assaulting a black exotic dancer. The Group of 88 made it clear that race and gender trumped judicial process. In their eyes, the accused were guilty until proven innocent, a complete reversal of American Constitutional precepts.

The Group of 88 for months maintained an offensive against anyone who disagreed with them.

Even after the North Carolina Attorney General took the highly unusual step of declaring the three accused completely innocent and that no crime of any kind had occurred and even after the prosecuting attorney was disbarred for witholding evidence, Diane Nelson and the rest of the Group of 88 maintain their left-wing position.

Therein is the danger of allowing political demgogues to hold America's children hostage to their poltiical views. (It should be remembered as well that one of the Group of 88 members flunked two lacrosse players in her class, forcing Duke to settle a lawsuit with one of them.)

Horowitz succeeds in making his point - and he was helped along by circumstances. The hegemeony of the left-wing in academia is a dangerous thing and something similar to Horowitz's Academic Bill Of Rights is required to bring independence back to American academia.

Jerry

As someone who spent a good chunk of my academic life fighting the leftist obsession with stamping out any view that challenged the dominant leftist mindset, Horowitz has been an academic godsend.

It's almost impossible to imagine that the academy, of all places, does not welcome diversity of opinion if that opinion doesn't toe the left-of-center line. Once upon a time, you might be able to argue against it and not have to pay a grade penalty. That simply doesn't exist anymore.

There aren't enough centrists and conservatives in universities where you actually have an alternative. The point isn't to AGREE; the point is to encourage open debate and scrutiny.

All well and good, but as Horowitz says, there's only one train of thought running through the American academy, and it's the Totalitarian Express. If you aren't a leftist, if you don't agree with leftism, if you dissent from the leftist line, you will, sooner rather than later, pay an academic penalty for it.

That's why so much of this book focuses on an Academic Bill of Rights. It's a bullwark against a single student being steamrolled by the leftwing juggernaut that rules and runs modern academia. I can see it being of use to open debate, rather than stifle it, and the dissenting student, with it.

I just thank God that the left didn't have its act together as it does now when I went to school (back in antediluvian 1990). Yeah, the left ran the joint, but there was still a chance to have a healthy debate. From what I see now, my college years apparently really ARE the "good old days"!